Blighty

THERE has been a lot in the news this week about petrol prices. That is partly because they are very high—currently £1.34 a litre, not far off their May peak. It is also because a frenzy of anger is being whipped up about them, in the hope that when George Osborne, the chancellor, makes his autumn statement on November 29th he will announce a freeze in fuel duty, or even a cut.

It is unlikely that will happen. Fuel duty is a very good way for the government to make money—it accounted for 5% of the government’s total tax take in 2009/10. And the chancellor has already put off one set of price rises: in March, he cut duty by a penny a litre, and delayed the next inflation-linked rise until January.

Amid the hoo-ha about petrol, price and how hard up everyone is right now, it is easy to miss the benefits of the tax: as an environmental tax, it works impressively well. The behaviour of car drivers has changed a lot in the past few years, and that has much to do with the high prices and other government incentives. 

A survey by British Car Auctions, a lobby group, this week issued a press release about a survey they had done, saying that half of respondents felt that at some point rising fuel prices would “force” them to change to a more efficient car or alter their driving habits. They made it sound like a bad thing. Job done, I’d say—people should be more discerning about which journeys it is really necessary to do by car and whether there are alternatives. 

The statistics on buying new cars bear out the idea that people really are making different choices. In the year to date, cars in the lowest three emissions brackets (out of 13) made up 28% of all new cars, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. That compares to 20% of sales in 2009, and 11% in 2008. It is an encouraging trend.

There are a number of different incentives to increase fuel efficiency, not all as good as each other. The previous, Labour government-sponsored car scrappage scheme in 2009/10 was a bit barmy: it was a good idea to get rid of some old belchers, but ridiculous to encourage people to buy new cars when a second-hand car might still have been a big improvement. But the vehicle excise duty is a good idea—it’s an annual tax on cars, but the rate paid depends on the efficiency of the engine. That, along with high fuel prices, seems like an appropriate dovetailing of incentives to get a better car next time.

The problem with these statistics, like all data, is that people don’t have to pay for the average, they have to pay for what they have. So if someone has an old, inefficient car but can’t afford to replace it, or doesn’t want to because building a new car actually involves a lot of carbon too (often more than extending the life of a gas-guzzling vehicle), then they are stuck with paying very high prices for a car that gets through a lot of fuel. 

That is why I am encouraged by the fact that people are also changing how they drive, as well as what they drive. Every year since 2007, people have been driving less by car and van.  

I hope that trend will continue. I don’t deny that many people have to use a car a lot of the time—to get to work, to ferry their children around, to do the shopping or to visit family. But 23% of car trips are less than two miles, so some of those could surely be avoided.

The number of people driving their children to school has increased, according to the Department for Transport. Cars taking children to school now account for 16% of the morning peak hour traffic (8-9am), up from 10% in 1995/7. That’s partly because people live slightly further from school than they did a decade ago—but only slightly further. It should come as no surprise that Britons are also fatter now than they were a decade ago. There is a correlation.

The debate on fuel duty in the House of Commons this week droned on for hours and hours. That is because high petrol and diesel prices affect every constituency and so every MP. So many turned to up show that they were making representations from their local members. That’s fair enough. But even if Mr Osborne does delay January’s planned price rise of 3p a litre, fuel will still be very pricey. Oil prices and petrol taxes are likely to stay high for the foreseeable future and not much can be done about that. So if people want to pay less for fuel, something else will have to change.

THE days are long gone when the sight of a member of the powerful member of the Murdoch family being grilled in front of the Commons media select committee seemed surprising. Today James Murdoch, as the heir apparent to News Corporation, was subjected to a sustained battering by parliamentarians about his knowledge—or lack of it—of key events in the phone-hacking scandal.

Apart from proving that he did not contravene the law in his own handling of the matter, Mr Murdoch’s own future prospects in the News Corp empire also depend on his ability to fend off allegations of culpability and incompetence. One challenge is legal, the other is strictly business, though none the less important for that. At issue remains the handling of the incriminating “for Neville” e-mail, which made clear that hacking was being ordered by the News of the World.

Tom Watson, the committee’s most persistent questioner, revealed that the reporter in question, Neville Thurlbeck, had recently revealed to him that the News of the World’s lawyer had told him Mr Murdoch was to be apprised of the existence of the e-mail. Mr Murdoch still denies that this ever happened—and repeated today that his only knowledge of the case pertained to approving a hefty payout to Gordon Taylor, a former football boss, for what he took to be a one-off affair. There was no single moment today at which Mr Murdoch blundered or departed from the line he has previously held on this point.

There is, however, every sign that senior News International figures are beginning to contradict one another. Previously tight-knit corporate ties are fraying: not least in Mr Murdoch’s assertion that he had assumed that his predecessor as chief executive, Les Hinton, had sorted out the matter of what he assumed to be limited hacking—though they had held no conversation about this. (Mr Murdoch is referred to here as executive chairman, but accepted that he had executive responsibility for the British papers, after Mr Hinton departed to run Dow Jones and before Rebekah Brooks was appointed to the role. If it sounds like trying to follow several series of "Dallas" in one go, that’s because it is.)

On a further pay-out of £1m to Max Clifford, a celebrity interview-fixer, Mr Murdoch described this decision as the responsibility of Ms Brooks. It will not reassure those shareholders who are concerned about the company’s governance that large sums were apparently signed off by individual management fiefdoms, without the knowledge of others at the top of the company.

Mr Murdoch was mostly calm though occasionally irritated when committee members presumed to ask about the nature of his conversations with his father—or when he was compared by the bullish committee member Tom Watson to a mafia boss. He deemed this “offensive”. It was meant to be.

But one of the problems with material as various and sprawling as the hacking allegations (some 5,800 alleged cases are being looked into) is that investigations tend to bifurcate between those who want to dig into allegations directly related to the hacking and those pursuing a broader agenda about the influence and networks of the Murdochs and their editors. Mr Murdoch agreed that, say, having investigators spy on lawyers acting for litigants should not happen—a recent revelation—but, however unpleasant, that is not the point at issue.

In a lengthy session, we wandered down several such byways. Philip Davies, a Conservative member, contrasted the allegedly lax financial controls of the Murdochs in paying out money to avoid reputational damage with the financial management of the Asda supermarket group. This may be an interesting contrast in business practice, but hardly adds up to proof of very much.

Earlier, it had been revealed that Michael Silverleaf, the QC advising News International, had warned that there was a “powerful case that there is—or was—a culture of illegal information access" at the News of the World. The question remains how much Mr Murdoch knew of this, or should have known as a top executive.

Mr Murdoch admitted that things ought to have been handled better, though not necessarily by him. Earlier Louise Mensch, a Tory committee member, had drily noted that Mr Murdoch has so far, at least, kept “coming up empty”. This is largely true: though the man himself may well feel that such a conclusion was preferable to putting his foot in it. The session resumes later today.

ACROSS England hundreds of thousands of parents are in the process of choosing a state school for their child. They inspect premises on open days, quiz head teachers and staff, and, at some of the better establishments, they may also be shown round by a well-groomed star pupil who will regale them with tales of derring do. As they decide which schools to place in order of preference on the application form, they will weigh the chances of their child getting into each one. The matter is far from straightforward.

England's state schools have an absurdly complex rule book for how they may and may not choose their pupils. Apart from the 164 remaining grammar schools, none is allowed to select pupils on the basis of their outstanding academic prowess. Some schools instead select on musical ability, which is supposed to be identified using tests that potential pupils cannot be coached to pass, but which many suspect pick up those lucky ones whose parents forked out for piano lessons. Others chose pupils to represent the full spectrum of academic ability, still others do it by lottery. Professed parental piety will help win a place at a high-performing church school. In any event, paying a premium to live as close as possible to the school of your choice will improve the chances of your child being admitted.

Navigating these rules takes guile and money, which segregates England's schools into those full of children whose parents have both and those full of children whose parents have neither. In May Michael Gove, the education secretary, announced that he wanted to reform the schools admissions code to make it simpler and shorter. On November 2nd he unveiled the seventh code in 12 years. Alas, though some reforms could ease social segregation, others will work to reinforce it.

There are some great ideas in the new code. For example, children who are in care have long been afforded first dibs on a school place, which some suspect may be a factor in the inordinate amount of time it takes for needy children to be adopted: if the child is of school age, potential adopters may delay the formal process until after a school place has been secured. The rule is to change so adopted children will enjoy the same priority as those still in care.

Another interesting innovation will be to allow schools to give priority to pupils whose families have a household income of £16,000 or less, and so qualify for free school meals. Schools will also be given extra funding for these children, which will provide an incentive for them to admit them. If schools make widespread use of this new freedom, it could strongly promote social mobility.

But other amendments are ill judged. Priority is to be given to the children of staff employed at the school, a retrograde step given that the abolition of this rule in 2003 led to a broadening of the social composition of secondary schools, according to research published by the Department of Education itself. Mr Gove reckons the reform will make it easier for schools to attract and retain teachers in shortage subjects. Phooey. It will help schools with high standards but do nothing to boost the low-ranking schools that are most in need of improvement.

Allowing the children of middle-class teachers to jump the queue will also infuriate other parents. When it was last allowed, it led to game-playing: there were reports that some mothers took jobs as dinner ladies purely to smooth their child's path into a sought-after school. And it places teachers in the unenviable position of having to chose between what is right for their careers and what is right for their children. Giving priority to the children of school staff is rotten to the core.

THE oldest and most successful elements of England's education system predate the modern state. Small wonder, then, that they are slow to change, even in response to demands from central government. When the call comes from bodies with little clout, you can be certain the proposals will be crushed.

On October 31st the new head of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), through which prospective students apply for university places, launched a consultation on whether to switch to a system in which students chose those institutions to which they wish to apply only after receiving the results of their university-entrance exams, which are typically A-levels sat at the age of 18.

There would be several advantages to such a scheme. In theory, it could advance social mobility. One of the more frightfully unfair aspects to university admissions is that teachers at high-achieving schools consistently predict higher grades for their poorly-performing pupils than do teachers at low-achieving schools for their highly-performing pupils. That gives a dunce from a posh school an edge over a whizz from a poor one under the current system. Such an advantage would be mostly removed by a shift to post-qualification admissions.

Yet there are many good reasons why the current system, which has functioned for the past five decades, represents the least worst solution. It offers prospective students sufficient time to investigate their choice of course and institution. It allows schools as much time as possible to get their pupils up to the required grades. It also allows those universities that are most in demand time to discriminate between applicants.

The reaction from within the university sector has been telling. Wendy Piatt, who speaks for the influential elite universities, issued a statement which read, "It is far from clear that a new post-qualification system would be fairer or improve access to leading universities. Indeed, we would need to be persuaded that changes to the system will not hamper our efforts to attract students from disadvantaged backgrounds, for example, by limiting the time we have to run special schemes and build relationships with those students."

And that's without involving the schools: the UCAS plan involves universities making no alterations at all to the academic year, while schools would be required to hold exams a month or so earlier, and somehow keep school-leavers entertained until the start of the summer holidays. Post-qualifications admissions have been mooted before, then quietly dropped. Expect the same result this time.

150,000 TICKETS, priced at an austerity-defying £50 each, sold in 14 minutes. A week's worth of ecstatic coverage in the press. Even a mention in Parliament by the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband.

To any foreigner who has spent the past week in Britain, and indeed to many natives, the effusive reaction to the reformation of the Stone Roses, announced on October 18th, must seem bizarre. They were not, even in their 1989 pomp, commercial giants or even particularly famous. They never secured a number one album or single, and the biggest live audience they commanded was around 27,000, in 1990. They were big by "indie" standards only. The millions of pounds they are about to make from concerts (they are now the fastest-selling live act in British history) and a putative album will reputedly dwarf the income they accumulated during their original incarnation.

What is happening here? Most likely, we are seeing the results of a generational changing of the guard among opinion formers. People who came of age in the 1980s are now editors of music magazines and arts supplements, producers of television and radio shows, influential board members of cultural bodies. Some run the country and others write about them. (Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, has a fervour for 1980s pop that is something to behold.) 

These people are in a position to celebrate and promote the popular culture they grew up with. A publisher who was a teenager in 1989 can commission a novel loaded with references to ecstasy, rave culture and the Stone Roses rather than one that gives nods to amphetamines, Vespa scooters and The Who. A forty-something television boss can launch a drama set in the 1980s, complete with a Cure soundtrack. A greying Sunday supplement editor can publish an essay on the Hacienda nightclub. Intrigued by the hype, younger consumers investigate. Many of those shelling out for Stone Roses tickets now were learning to speak in 1989.

This has happened before. It was not until the late 1990s, when Peter Biskind published his acclaimed book "Raging Bulls and Easy Riders", that the 1970s came to be seen as a golden age for Hollywood. The Beatles were unfashionable in the 1970s, the era of "progressive" rock and punk ("phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust" sang The Clash), before reprising their semi-divine status.

But the Stone Roses are a particularly extreme example. They have accrued a huge posthumous following (they split up in 1996) among people much too young to have even been aware of them when they were at their best, such is the hype and mythology created around the band by ageing opinion-formers. Their eponymous debut album, released in 1989, was received warmly at the time. But it wasn't until almost a decade later that it began to acquire its present, canonical status among British critics, who have voted it the greatest of all time in more than one poll. The band has come to be credited with everything from the revival of guitar-based rock in Britain to the resurgence of their native Manchester. The hype can be overdone, but this is what happens when people acquire a platform from which to evangelise on behalf of "their" bands, "their" films, "their" era. Judging by the Stone Roses' ticket sales among the young, this zeal is infectious. 

(Your correspondent was seven in 1989. He looks forward to the great 1990s revival scheduled for later this decade.)

ECONOMIC woes afflict many at the moment. The subject has dominated The Economist/Ipsos-MORI issues index for the past three years, ever since Britain slid into recession at the end of 2008. Since then a lacklustre recovery has seen economic concerns peak twice, most recently, immediately prior to the general election held in May 2010. Although voters worry less about it than they did in the weeks before David Cameron became prime minister, their fears are now at their highest since the election. 

Overall some 68% of adults are uneasy about the economy. Anguish over a possible second downturn has become acute: the number of people polled who put the economy at or near the top of their worry list increased by nine percentage points between September and October. Dig a little deeper and an interesting pattern emerges: the disquiet is greatest amongst relatively wealthy. Southerners, the middle-aged and the socially advantaged—the very groups that have so far been cushioned from the worst effects of recession—are those who fear it most.

Meanwhile young adults, for whom unemployment rates stand at levels unseen since the 1990s, seem less bothered than their elders about promoting the economic growth that might create new jobs. Concerns about unemployment in general are shared by 30% of those polled between October 7th and 13th, the same proportion as in September. And they are far lower than when unemployment was last this high: in October 1994, 62% of people considered unemployment to be the most worrisome issue facing the country, placing it at the top of the ranking.

A FEW weeks ago, I blogged on the proclivity of many in Westminster to over-analyse the day-by-day swirl of events. "Most things don't matter" is the first rule of electoral politics. It should be known as Finkelstein's Law, after the Times columnist who learned it the hard way as a Conservative strategist during the party's dog days, and who has espoused it to more excitable politico-media types via his columns ever since.

Media coverage of the micro-reshuffle brought about by Liam Fox's resignation as defence secretary has reminded me that journalists are guilty of more than just over-estimating the extent to which voters are aware of, much less moved by, anything that takes place in Westminster. They also read too much political import and intrigue into small, innocuous decisions.

The reshuffle has been brandished in some quarters as proof of George Osborne's Metternichian guile and insatiable ambition. The evidence is that many of the beneficiaries of the personnel tinkering have worked for the chancellor of the exchequer at some stage: Philip Hammond, the new defence secretary, was shadow chief secretary in opposition; Justine Greening, his replacement at transport, was a junior Treasury minister; Greg Hands, formerly Mr Osborne's parliamentary private secretary (PPS), is now the Treasury whip; and Claire Perry, who advised Mr Osborne in opposition, has become Mr Hammond's PPS.

Now, clearly, Mr Osborne played a large part in drawing up this reshuffle. He exerts enormous influence across the government and his own party. He is more powerful than any cabinet member bar David Cameron, the prime minister. But talk of a burgeoning Osbornocracy, of Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron somehow representing the "effective" and "dignified" parts of the government respectively, is nonsense.

First, almost all the recent ministerial appointments make sense in and of themselves. The Ministry of Defence needed a forensic financial mind to continue the work Dr Fox had begun in restoring some order to the profligate procurement process. Mr Hammond was the natural candidate. The cabinet also needed a woman; at least one was going to join whenever the next reshuffle came along. Ms Greening, as one of the more able and visible junior ministers, was hardly a choice out of left field. As for Mr Hands, who has known Mr Osborne since they were allies in local politics in Fulham in the 1990s, he would be a minister already had it not been for the displacing effects of the coalition. If anything, the surprise is that he has not been given a much bigger job much earlier.

Perhaps the two most interesting promotions have little or no prior relationship with Mr Osborne. Chloe Smith, at just 29, replaces Ms Greening at the Treasury while Sajid Javid, one of the best of the 2010 intake of MPs, takes over from Mr Hands as Mr Osborne's PPS. No doubt this is proof of the chancellor's zeal to brainwash rising stars while they are young.

More fundamentally, Mr Osborne wields all this influence because Mr Cameron allows him to. The prime minister has always been relaxed, even enthusiastic, about delegating responsibilities to his friend and ally, which is why Mr Osborne chairs the government's daily political meetings whenever the prime minister is absent. Precisely because Mr Osborne's power comes with the consent of Mr Cameron, it is not actually very interesting politically. As much as journalists crave a revival of the blood-feuds of the New Labour era, there is nothing remotely similar happening here.

Mr Osborne is not pursuing a distinct agenda within the same government, as Gordon Brown did during his decade-long war of attrition with Tony Blair. He and Mr Cameron do not disagree on major issues, as Mr Brown and Mr Blair did on the euro and the proper relationship between the state and the market in public services. He does not have a cabal of supporters who think of themselves as primarily loyal to him, unlike Mr Brown. (Most "Osbornites" reject the label, describing themselves as government loyalists who happen to know Mr Osborne better than Mr Cameron by plain virtue of having worked alongside him). He cultivates journalists assiduously, but mainly with a view to boosting support for the government, a job that Mr Cameron, who is notoriously indifferent to the press, is happy for him to be getting on with. He is responsible for the Tories' political strategy, and much of the day-to-day decision-making in government, because Mr Cameron rather prefers the high-politics of office.

Although it would be too crude to describe theirs as a principal-agent relationship, in which Mr Osborne is charged with making a reality of the broad strategy set by Mr Cameron, it is closer to the truth than the excitable portrayals of rival power bases and conflicting interests.

Even journalists who know all this insist that, at the very least, Mr Osborne is positioning himself to succeed Mr Cameron; that if there is no rivalry between Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street, then there certainly is one between Number 11 and City Hall, where Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, harbours ambitions to become prime minister. 

There is something to this. Both men probably would like the top job one day (though Mr Osborne does not crave it anything like as much as is often assumed, I suspect). Mr Cameron says in private that he will be succeeded by one of the two. And the chancellor's assiduous cultivation of colleagues, journalists, donors and others will help his cause.

But any vacancy is years away. Mr Cameron will contest the next general election, barring disaster. If he wins, the earliest realistic prospect of his departure is circa 2017, when a battered and bruised prime minister might choose to quit mid-term. If he loses, Mr Osborne, as chancellor, might be too implicated in the defeat to stand a chance of winning a leadership election. Or it might be that, by then, he inspires in voters respect as an iron chancellor but not affection. Or that Mr Cameron remains prime minister for two full terms. Or that the economy collapses. Or that someone emerges from nowhere, perhaps a member of the 2010 parliamentary intake, to overtake the fortysomething big beasts. Or that Mr Osborne is embroiled in some Fox-type scandal that does for him. Or that a system of artificial intelligence known as Skynet becomes self-aware and wages a nuclear war against all humans, thus rendering the question of the British premiership somewhat moot.

My point is this: who becomes the next Conservative leader and/or prime minister is a matter that will be decided by broad, impersonal and unforseeable forces. No difference will be made by a reshuffle carried out in 2011, or any of the other footling developments that the media draw thunderous inferences from. Mr Osborne, being no fool, gets all this. If small opportunities present themselves to boost his position, he will, within reason and depending on the context, take them. But he won't kid himself that they are very important. Putting Treasury hands into big-spending departments last week probably had more to do with keeping his austerity drive on track (you know, the actual running of the country) than with preparing for a leadership run that he might never make. Sometimes a reshuffle is just a reshuffle.

AMIDST the encircling economic gloom, today's unemployment figures were, as predicted, chilling. The number of jobless in the three months to August hit a 17-year peak at just under 2.6m people, or 8.1%—up 0.4 percentage points in the quarter. The outlook for youngsters aged 16 to 24 was particularly dire: with a jobless rate of 21.2%, up 1.6 percentage points and representing almost a million out of work, Britain is now no better than the European average, which is dragged down by very high unemployment in southern countries in particular. Part-time workers in Britain suffered a record cut in employment, and so did those aged over 65.

That unemployment is rising sharply comes as no surprise after repeated evidence of anaemic growth; the puzzle was always that jobs were holding up as well as they did. On October 5th the official figure for second-quarter GDP growth was downgraded to nearly nothing. This week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said economic recovery in Britain looked set to be "the weakest of any since the end of the first world war", with GDP still 4% below its pre-recession peak.

The worry is that unemployment might well keep on going up even if the economy did find some miraculous second wind. It has done so historically. In the early 1980s the jobless rate rose from 5.5% of the labour force before recession started to 11.9% three years after it had ended. In the early 1990s unemployment increased from 6.9% to 10.7% six months after a sustained economic recovery had begun. This time around, as the chart shows, the deterioration in the number of people out of work is greater than at the same point in the 1990s, though at 2.6m the number is still below the 2.9m it stood at then in the 1990s. Joblessness was just 5.4% in the spring of 2008; it could well hit 10% this time around. Grim times.

BUS design arouses the sort of passion normally reserved for critical subjects such as football. When the Routemaster was taken out of service in 2005, eulogies were written to its curvy shape, its open platform, the brightness it apparently brought to the lives of all who saw one or were lucky enough to ride on it.

By contrast the “bendy buses” that numbered among its replacements, 18-metre-long single-deckers with a flexible join to help it go round corners, attracted astounding venom, even though there were only about 400 of a fleet of 7,500 buses ferrying people through the streets of London.

The most notorious enemy of the bendy is Boris Johnson, now mayor of London, who is fulfilling his election pledge to wipe London clean of what he calls these “writhing whales of the road”. Mr Johnson’s initial ire was directed at the threat these buses posed to people who ride bikes—like himself. In 2007, when he was MP for Henley and still campaigning to be mayor, Mr Johnson was quoted by the Evening Standard as saying that these buses “wipe out cyclists, there are many cyclists killed every year by them.” He also made an impassioned plea in the Telegraph that people should vote for him because he would rid the capital of the scourge of “cyclist-killing bendy buses”. 

There are good things about these buses: they are faster to board, carry more people and are cheaper to build. There are also bad things: it’s easier to avoid paying fares on them, one once caught fire, and, most importantly—and relevant to this discussion—they apparently cause more accidents. I say apparently because different people work it out in different ways—allowing for the fact that many bendy buses operated on particularly busy routes, the injury figures are little higher than any other style of bus, according to a report by Channel 4 News. 

I was particularly interested in the original claim, though, of these being “cyclist-killing” vehicles. A casual google search revealed a couple of anecdotal references, but no hard evidence, so I called the London Cycling Campaign, the London Assembly (which includes Mr Johnson’s office) and Transport for London (TfL). No one had an instant answer for me. Several hours later the London Cycling Campaign got back to me to say they had heard no case of a bike-rider dying at the hands of a bendy. I still wanted to check this the people whose job it is to record such things, though, so after making a nuisance of myself by repeatedly calling the other two—and not being called back—I eventually tracked down my original contact at the London Assembly who gave me a definitive answer: no cyclists have been killed by these buses. Only when I emailed TfL to check that they had no evidence to refute this did they give me the same answer.

Mr Johnson is proud that London will soon be free of these buses. Conservative Home, a website, quotes him as saying at a fringe meeting at the Conservative conference on Monday night, that: "The last breeding pair of bendy buses will be despatched this year to the happy hunting ground of some Scandinavian airport.” His bus campaign is popular—both eradicating the bendy and delivering a new bus for London inspired by the beloved Routemaster. It is notable, though, that he has stopped claiming these buses kill cyclists. He still isn’t giving us all the facts, though—not all the buses are going to Scandinavia; many of the capital's rejects are being picked up rather closer to home, by Bristol and Brighton.

I WENT to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park in London this weekend, my first time for a while. It was largely populated by the usual suspects, so a friend and I played Speakers’ Corner bingo: creationist (tick), evangelist (tick), Muslim preacher (tick), love not lust (tick), strangely-hatted man saying nothing much about anything at all (tick). Others were more surprising—one woman in full regalia stood on a box to extol the brilliance of Munich’s beer festival, and was heckled for speaking partly in German. Depressingly, another woman was engaged in an anti-immigration rant.

Of course the quality of speaking and debate varies. Earlier this year people were having conversations at Speakers’ Corner akin to those going on at the time in Tahrir Square in Egypt, and elsewhere in the Arab world, for example. For many years a Libyan monarchist was a frequent attendee at the corner – his arguments seem slightly less hopeless now, though he wasn’t there this weekend to talk to (perhaps he has finally taken his fight back to his own country).

There was some good discussion between participants. But a lot of the heckling—and response to it—was disappointing. I watched a creationist, “Steve” (he wouldn’t tell me his surname), tottering at the top rung of his stepladder and leafing through a tatty bible marked with post-it notes. American-born and a formermissionary to the Philippines, he was wearing a cowboy hat, snakeskin boots, and had “Jesus loves you” embroidered on his white trousers. He goes to Speakers' Corner most weekends, he told me, but his style seemed pretty basic to me: he greeted those who disagreed with him by blowing his whistle at them, shouting “you’re so boring” or simply swearing at them.

Another man made me laugh: “Before I get started I want you all to know that I have the loudest voice,” he said, before warning that Speakers' Corner had been “invaded by nutcases promising a fast track to heaven”. His message was that religions shouldn’t fight each other.

The history of Speakers' Corner is more momentous than the participants I witnessed this weekend might suggest. Hyde Park was a common assembly point for different workers’ movements in the mid-19th century, and protests in the park occasionally turned into riots. This was an era when the vote was being extended to groups who had never previously held it, while an unprecedented density of people in London was forcing into the open issues such as the rights of working men. People wanted their say.

The Parks Regulation Act of 1872 did not enshrine Speakers’ Corner, but it did establish a general principle that some parts of the park could be used for meeting and speaking. That it was a tradition rather than a law makes the legacy particularly interesting, in my view. Vladimir Lenin and George Orwell are among those who have spoken there.

Hopefully free speech is a given throughout Britain now, not just in some corner of a central London park. Arguably there are plenty of more useful forums in which people can now express their views. So it’s interesting not just that Speakers’ Corner has survived, but that just in the past few years it has been replicated across Britain and elsewhere. A speakers’ corner was set up in Nottingham in 2008; Bristol opened one earlier this year. The principles are slightly different—there are organised events at Bristol’s corner, for example, which contrasts with the spontaneity of London. In Hyde Park there is no sign that the zone will become a place for free exchange of views—speakers bring stepladders and old boxes to stand on. Other places such as Lichfield and Worthing have recently built more permanent fixtures.

Other parts of the world also have similar establishments. One was set up in Sydney, Australia in 1878, for example. More tellingly, since 2000 both Malaysia and Singapore have set up official speakers’ corners, presumably in an attempt to signal growing lenience and freedom. Earlier this year the BBC reported that a Tunisian speakers’ corner was being convened after the overthrow of Ben Ali in January 2011.

Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park is listed in every guide book to London, a living landmark to a historical tradition. On Sunday there were visitors from every part of the globe, taking photos and recording speakers. But a number of the people I met there live in the capital: an articulate Pole arguing with the anti-immigration speaker; a man wearing a T-shirt with “Islam is the answer to racism” who was wary of my questions but said he came to clear up some myths about Islam; a 17-year-old “Irish-Indian” called Jamie from south London has his own YouTube channel and visits Hyde Park several times a year; an Egyptian man called Walid who spoke almost no English after two years in London but was videoing the proceedings.

Earlier this year Brian Haw, a long time peace campaigner, died. He did not go to Speakers’ Corner, but set up residence in Parliament Square to protest against Britain’s policies in Iraq. He stayed despite repeated attempts to move on him and his supporters. And a group is now pushing for a speakers’ corner to be set up in Parliament Square, closer to the MPs’ own talking shop. In an age when the internet and twitter make it so easy to get a message out, it is striking how powerful the sense still is that being able to engage in live debate and being present in person is important.

MY MY, that was a core-vote speech from Ed Miliband. Banker-bashing, Murdoch-bashing, chest-beating avowals of Labour's commitment to the NHS, nebulous distinctions between good and bad businesses, neo-corporatist stuff about workers on company boards, and only partly leavened by nods to welfare reform. This was a left-wing version of those William Hague speeches from over a decade ago that would arouse the Conservative base (and nobody else) by deploring Europe, immigration and tax rises. 

The difference was that Mr Hague knew that he was appealing only to his core vote; he had given up on winning the 2001 election and wanted to limit his losses instead. Mr Miliband actually believes that the centre has shifted to the left in recent years, and that his speech today resembles what the average swing voter is thinking. 

Aspects of Mr Miliband's diagnosis of Britain are correct. Voters do indeed see it as a country where the relationship between desert and reward has broken down, where good people are unrewarded and selfish people prosper. And this resentment applies to the top of society (i.e. bankers, tax-dodging millionaires) as well as the bottom (i.e. benefits scroungers, rioters). But in order to persuade voters that he is not a fairly conventional left-winger, Mr Miliband had to attack irresponsibility at the bottom with extra gusto. That is what moving to the centre-ground is all about: doing the opposite of what is expected of your party. 

Instead, Mr Miliband's denouncements of welfare cheats looked pained, as though he was reluctant to issue them at all (and, judging by what I hear behind the scenes, he is). By contrast, the long passages deploring the rich were delivered (and received) with visceral fervour. This is who Mr Miliband is. It is a perfectly respectable social-democratic perspective on the world. But it is not one with a recent record of storming to victory at general elections in Britain.

During the race for the Labour leadership last year, supporters of David Miliband would say that his brother represented "comfort zone Labour", that he would allow the party to indulge its ideological preferences at the cost its electability. Alastair Campbell came up with the most vivid phrase: the younger Miliband would make the party "feel good about losing". There are still four years to go until the next election but the basic critique of Mr Miliband advanced by these doubters has hardly been refuted. New Labour felt like a long time ago today.

Indeed, the most memorable and telling moment concerned Tony Blair. Mr Miliband told his audience that he was not like the former prime minister. Before he could say that he was not like Gordon Brown either, parts of the crowd started cheering. Mr Miliband hurriedly tried to shut them up but the damage was done. The spectacle of Labour and its leader distancing themselves from a man who won three elections for the party will endure. It's not the disrespect for Mr Blair that will worry voters; they don't much like him either. But what it reveals about Labour's view of the world (that Iraq, cosying up to the rich and stealing Tory clothes were the real sins of the last government, not reckless over-spending) will perturb many.

Finally, the sight and sound of the Labour leader are still very serious problems for him. He has reputedly been taking guidance on stagecraft and public performance from Paul Greengrass, the acclaimed British film director, which is a sign that he has the self-knowledge to work on his weaknesses. Actually fixing them is another matter, though.   

In short, today's speech will do little to ease Mr Miliband's problem with the voters, which I described in my last blogpost. It may well compound them. If you think I am being harsh, check out the rest of the media reaction online. Jenni Russell, one of the left's most thoughtful columnists, and an early supporter of Mr Miliband against his brother, describes it as the "single worst political speech I've heard in 20 years". 

THE MOST important rule in politics, the electoral equivalent of Occam's Razor, the clarifying maxim that should be displayed above the desktop monitors of hyper-active politicians, advisers and journalists in Westminster, is this:

Most things don't matter.

Almost all of the tactics, strategies, messages, campaigns, gambits, revamps, speeches, briefings, reshuffles and even policies that politicians and their advisers work on, and that lobby hacks analyse, are of zero enduring significance electorally. Very little of this political activity ever "cuts through" (in the Westminster argot) to voters, and even less of it manages to shift public opinion for anything but a few weeks. It is noise.

Elections are decided by a few fundamentals, such as the political cycle (the longer the government has been in power, the more hostile the public will feel towards it), the economic cycle (the more prosperous the country is feeling, the more likely they are to vote for the government) and, above all, the party leaders. Perhaps the only meaningful thing a political party can ever do to help its fortunes is elect a leader who has that "prime ministerial" quality that is hard to define but easy to recognise when one sees it.

Of course a party's economic credibility and closeness to the centre-ground matter, and these things are conveyed to voters via speeches, policies, campaigns, etc. But how well a party scores on these fronts is derivative, ultimately, of its leader. If a leader has a grasp of the national mood, and the will and the skill to reflect it, the party will be thought credible and centrist. If he does not, no amount of political activity by colleagues and advisers will compensate (in any case, if he is not a good leader the activity will be misjudged because the colleagues and advisers will be badly chosen).

Why am I telling you all this? Because it really, really matters that Ed Miliband, who gives his keynote speech to the Labour Party conference on Tuesday, is performing so appallingly in opinion polls, even though his party is (narrowly) leading the Conservatives. A Populus poll recently found that half of all Labour voters cannot imagine him as prime minister. On the eve of this conference, a YouGov poll for The Sun revealed that 5% of all voters think he is a natural leader, 4% say he would be good in a crisis, 9% regard him as decisive and 6% find him charismatic. Hours ago, a ComRes poll found that only a quarter of voters think Mr Miliband is a credible prime minister-in-waiting. Some of the reactions to him in focus groups are said to verge on the cruel.

Now, if you read my reaction to Mr Miliband's election last year on this blog, when I asked whether you could imagine a CNN newsreader referring to "British prime minister Ed Miliband", you will know that these numbers do not leave me on the floor in a daze of astonishment. I understood that the Labour Party found Mr Miliband warmer and more ideologically sympathetic than his brother, David, whom he vanquished to claim the leadership. But when it came to heft, bearing, judgement, decisiveness, star quality, appeal to swing voters, comfort on the biggest stages, and all the other characteristics that make a plausible leader of a nuclear power with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and a population of 60 million....well, The Economist came to a different view to the Labour Party.

Still, "Most things don't matter" raises two questions. The first is whether a leader's (perceived) quality is immutable. The prime ministerial-ness of a leader may be one of the few things that matters in electoral politics, but is it something that can be developed, like a skill, or is it forged early on, like a characteristic? The evidence would seem to suggest the latter. Most politicians who have been elected prime minister in recent decades have seemed plausible occupants of Number 10 from the moment they became leaders of their party, especially Tony Blair and David Cameron. If Margaret Thatcher did not, it probably had more to do with the fact that Britain had never had a female prime minister before than because she was seen as particularly lightweight or unprepossessing. The opposite is also true: leaders of the opposition who were initially seen as not quite worthy of the big job tend not to dispel that impression over time. Ask William Hague, or Neil Kinnock. Ed Miliband, who is intelligent, in charge of a unified party and a better communicator than a year ago, must hope to win the public over in the coming years. But it may be that they have made their mind up about him, and that they do this with all leaders.

The second question concerns the exact balance between the few things that do matter. Does a prosperous economy trump a weak prime minister? Will a government that has been in power for a long time struggle to win re-election, even if the economy is booming? Labour don't need to do a huge amount to be at least the biggest party in a hung Parliament at the next election. If Britons feel poorer in 2015 than they did in 2010, could that anger not outweigh their doubts about Mr Miliband and see them vote out David Cameron? Again, the evidence is bleak for Mr Miliband. In 1992, the political and economic cycles were strongly against the Conservative government, which had been in power for 13 years and had just presided over its second recession in that time. But voters preferred John Major to Neil Kinnock as prime minister. That was enough to give the Tories a victory (and quite a comfortable one in the popular vote, at least). If you had to choose one of the three fundamental determinants of an election result to have on your side, you would opt for a top-class leader over a favourable spot in the political and economic cycles. When, if ever, has a party with a less esteemed leader than its rival won a general election?

Of course, you can draw all kinds of bold inferences from this analysis: that the Conservatives are in power simply because they have David Cameron, who strikes voters as more prime ministerial than anyone else of his political generation; that Labour would have eked out a fourth term in power had it not got rid of Tony Blair; that the result of the 2015 election was more or less determined on September 25th 2010, when Mr Miliband rather than his brother was chosen to take on Mr Cameron. Bold, simple-sounding and suspiciously reductive claims indeed. But are they wrong?