What the hell are the Home Office playing at - and why are Liberal Democrats letting them get away with it?

So, it seems that officials from the Home Office have been showing up at tube stations in London and demanding to see proof of people's immigration status. That would be non white people's status, by the way. The Independent has more...

Witnesses who saw the operations in London claimed the officers stopped only non-white individuals, and in Kensal Green said that when questioned, the immigration officials became aggressive.

Phil O'Shea told the Kilburn Times: "They appeared to be stopping and questioning every non-white person, many of whom were clearly ordinary Kensal Green residents going to work. When I queried what was going on, I was threatened with arrest for obstruction and was told to 'crack on'."

Another witness, Matthew Kelcher, said: "Even with the confidence of a free-born Englishman who knows he has nothing to hide, I found this whole experience to be extremely intimidating. They said they were doing random checks, but a lot of people who use that station are tourists so I don't know what message that sends out to the world."

This is horrible. The idea that people are being asked for their papers as they go about their business and if they can't provide them, they are bundled up in a van, to be another statistic in a Home Office tweet, is horrible. I strongly suspect many of them will be innocent anyway - I mean, who thinks they have to take their documents with them if they are simply taking a tube ride?  Tube stations are pretty cramped anyway, so being confronted with a dozen burly Border Force types is going to be pretty intimidating.

And what if you are arrested in full public view, maybe in front of your neighbour, or the local shopkeeper, or the woman who does your eyebrows? They aren't going to necessarily know when you've been released, with no action taken, by the Home Office. They may well assume that you have done something wrong.

So why are the Tories doing this? The obvious answer is to say that they are pandering to UKIP, being seen to be doing something about this vast underworld of illegal immigrants the Daily Mail says we have. But I think that there may be more too it. They're not just trolling us, they are trying to toxify us. If they can get our voters thinking that we have abandoned our belief in civil liberties, then that's a job well done for them. They know we'll be guilty by association and the nice liberal minded people who read about it in the Independent in some of our rural England Tory facing held seats might just decide to vote Labour, or Green, or stay at home come 2015. If our voters do that, then the Tories could win some of our seats.

This is where Nick Clegg really needs to kick off. Tim Farron has already said the right things as he usually does:

@caronmlindsay @colingale @markpack I think the BF should police the borders and not our buses and tube stations.
— Tim Farron (@timfarron) August 2, 2013

We need Nick to be obviously fighting the civil liberties corner and being robust about it. The Tories don't care for civil liberties, but they have a vested interest in tarnishing our USP. We can't let them do it.

What bothers me is that there's too much emphasis on what our "electoral market" thinks. Nick's done quite well in the past few days saying what sorts of things need to happen on immigration, like exit checks and spoken out against these god awful vans. However, the language he's using is still a little too "crackdown" rather than "fairness" for me. When things like the vans or the tube station checks happen, every liberal collectively retches. However, you'll get a part of the electorate, and some of them might vote for us, feeling in some way reassured that something is being done. We talk of the importance of policing by consent. What happens if a good proportion of people consent to policing of others by intimidation? For me, it's back to first principles every time. We're liberals, and we don't agree with that sort of thing. Nick,I am very politely asking you to get your arse into gear and get these heavy-handed, authoritarian Tory tactics stopped. Now would be nice. Thanks.

Oh, and if you are fizzing mad about this, and you haven't already, for the love of goodness join Liberal Democrats for Seekers of Sanctuary. They are brilliant. It'll be the best tenner you ever spent.

Brown's bombshell puts Labour back in the game

Wow! With a heavy heart this morning, I was becoming increasingly convinced that the Lib Dem team was going to do some sort of deal with the Tories. Now it all seems to have changed and, literally, anything could happen. It's been funny how all the Labour people on Twitter who've been breathing fire on us for the last couple of days are now being very nice and the acid is now being snorted on us from the blue side.

I was very impressed with the dignified way Gordon Brown stepped aside. It was inevitable but he did it well. I've blogged several times about him - his government has generally been shambolic, but he is very difficult, despite all the glumness and dourness, to dislike. I hated Tony Blair (a word I use advisedly) with a passion unrivalled in its intensity, much more than I ever hated Thatcher but although Gordon exasperates me frequently, personally I think he's a good man at heart.

Now, if I were in a position to choose who I was going to get into bed with, I would want to make sure that they aren't going to snore, or fart, or hog the duvet or eat cheese and onion crisps in bed, or, preferably at all. There might be some circumstances in which I'd choose to sleep alone.

This metaphor transfers rather easily to the situation in which the Liberal Democrats now find themselves. It goes without saying that neither of the prospective partners will have perfect bedroom manners.

Option 1: The Tories

Pros

Likely to be more stable
Not dependent on petty nationalist demands to get every other vote through the Commons
More common ground on things like ID cards and privacy issues
The chemistry between the teams seems better
Our influence could take the sting out of them and save people pain

Cons

They are the Tories and in the past when they have governed alone they have been vile
They are xenophobic, homophobic in part, socially reactionary and too quick to want indiscriminate cuts
They don't give a flying puck about the poor
They do give a flying puck about protecting their rich friends
They hastily offer a referendum on AV which, frankly, isn't enough
The political consequences in Scotland particularly could be pretty dire if we can't show that we have made a difference to people for the better

Option 2: Labour

Pros

More suited economically
Many Lib Dems and voters would feel better about an arrangement with Labour than the Tories
At last, we have a woman on the negotiating teams.


Cons

Where to start?

A fairly significant chunk of the Labour Party really loathe the idea - as I speak John Reid is calling the idea of a coalition between us for everything on the BBC

Even without that, the arrangement is unstable

Every vote could be a real fight - much more stressful on whips and MPs, especially if the nationalist parties decide to pick petty fights on every issue.

We would start out with one retiring Labour leader and in 4 months' time the dynamics could change when the next one is in office. It's a hell of a gamble and Stephen Fry painted a very bleak picture of what could happen if it all falls apart.

Can you see the likes of Tom Harris trooping through the voting lobby to implement electoral reform?

They are instinctively of the sort of authoritarian mindset that thinks it's ok for the police to stop you for taking photographs and allow people who make jokes on Twitter to be prosecuted for it. What would happen to our Freedom Bill?

Option 3 Going it alone, or confidence and supply agremment with the Tories

Pros

It means that our influence in the Parliament will be more easily measured on the issues which arise

Cons

May not last long. The Tories (because it would be David Cameron as PM if we did this) would soon tire of us trying to amend their bills and there could soon be another election in which we are cast as the evil ones.

I sense that we are moving into the endgame and I guess we will know the outcome within the next 48 hours. The Tories are clearly getting frazzled by today's developments. The markets have been quiet today as their Tory friends have been happy in negotiations. What do you bet that they go crazy tomorrow now that their involvement in government seems less likely?

Just as an aside, Adam Boulton took complete leave of his senses on Sky News earlier - I wondered if he was going to land a punch on Alistair Campbell at one point. Are we to understand that the Murdoch media empire is a little displeased with today's developments?

European Results - Lib Dems' reasons to be cheerful

If there's anything worse than going to bed knowing that a Fascist has been elected to a Parliament, it's waking up to see Nick Griffin’s odious little mug over the news,celebrating his win in the north west. I want to write a separate post about those rather sinister developments to explore some ideas about how we could deal with them and whether there is anything that the rest of the UK can learn from the Scottish experience.

My first reaction on seeing our vote was that, well, we'd done ok. Going into this campaign, even before the expensses stuff, I thought there was a real danger of going down to 9 MEPs - we probably wouldn't win the second seat in the north west after Saj Karim's defection, and he has in fact, unfortunately, been re-elected as a Tory and it was by no means certain that we would retain our seats in both Scotland and the East Midlands, given the reductions in the numbers of seats in those places. In fact, George Lyon is on course to win the fifth of the six seats in Scotland and I'm thrilled that Bill Newton Dunn has been elected in the East Midlands. That is the most spectacular results because effectively it is an LD gain - if the 2004 result had been repeated, he would not have got in.

So far, so good. However it is deeply frustrating that only 3.5% would have had us in second place behind the Tories. Over the whole country that's only around 75000 extra votes to have given us that prized position and perhaps elect Jonathan Fryer in London. He only missed out by 8000 votes and had put so much hard work in. That's probably my biggest Lib Dem disappointment of the night. Only 1.5%, or around 30,000 extra votes, would have had us ahead of Labour. In Wales we were not that far away from electing our first MEP there. We need to look at what extra we could have done in the last few days to both on the ground and within our campaign strategy to maybe have bridged those small gaps. It feels so much worse to lose by small margins than to be absolutely whomped so we need to see if there was any fine tuning that would have made a difference.

We can take some comfort in that for the first time in a long time, we have fought the European elections on a very positive, pro European message. We were unashamed to say that we were Stronger Together and Weaker Apart. And it's not as if that message was overshadowed by the expenses stuff because Nick Clegg plugged it at every opportunity he got and he looked entirely comfortable with it, too. We were really the only lone pro-European voice in a pretty sceptical climate so we did well not to be punished for that. I'm reminded of what the Observer was saying last week - that we often took minority stances that were later proved to be right. Perhaps we should have started earlier with those messages, highlighting the dangers of the isolationist stance of the Euro-sceptic parties.

We don't tend to do that well in Euro elections - it wasn't until 1994 that we had our first directly elected MEPs and you can't really extrapolate what's going to happen in any other election from them - and that applies to all parties. You only need to look at our emphatic second place in the County Council elections, where we got 28% compared to Labour's 23%, which equalled the share we got in 2005, held on the same day as our best general election result in decades.

If the British public are looking for an answer to current woes, both sets of elections, European and local, show that they are not confident of getting it from the Tories. Only 38% voted for them in the Counties - way short of what they would need to get an overall majority in a Westminster election and not much more than a quarter chose them for Europe. William Hague, whose leadership of the Tory Party provided them with some dark days, actually got 6% more of the vote in 1999 than nice shiny new reforming leader "Call me Dave" Cameron could muster now.

The Labour result was so excruciatingly bad across the whole country. 15% across the country is bad enough, but, bloody hell, less than 21% in Scotland, turns electoral disaster into an art form. They're a mess. Enough said.

And, ok, yes, the SNP did get the highest share of the vote in Scotland, credit where it's due, but I'm not sure why given that they were almost invisible. I live in what is effectively a Labour/SNP marginal and I didn't get one single thing from the Nats. Given how deeply unpopular Labour are, their failure to meet even their 2007 vote of 32.9% is somewhat surprising. Jeff has been predicting that we'd be sending 3 Nats to Brussels for months and that's simply not happening.

So, there are reasons to be cheerful, and proud, to be a Lib Dem. It might not be a spectacular result, but we did, in the circumstances, quite creditably.

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Tories get it wrong again

The Tories have put out a new campaign video featuring a very cute baby with the comments that the baby has "his dad's nose, mum's eyes and Gordon Brown's debt."

The shot then moves to the baby being given what is clearly a bottle of formula.

Are we not supposed to be challenging the idea that bottlefeeding is the norm and encouraging and supporting breastfeeding?

All the evidence points to human milk being far superior than anything you could ever manufacture.

I'm not suggesting that the Tories should necessarily have shown the baby breastfeeding, although it would be good to have a society where even Daily Mail readers felt comfortable with that image - just that they send the wrong message by being seen to promote formula feeding.

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