Theo Robertson-Bonds

Firstly, excuse my fretting over Europe. I'm raising this as Naddine Dorres and a number of other Tory MPs have demanded a return to 'traditional Tory values', something that will inevitably result in another argument over Europe given the pressure some Tory MPs are under from a vote splitting to more right wing political parties.The Tories don't seem to have learned their lesson from previous years; arguments involving Europe never go well, yet Douglas Carswell and his old anti-Europe cronies are once again stirring things in the melting pot. 

One thing that incensed me over the weekend was a series of tweets, aimed at a fellow twit (I will exclude the suffix -terer in this case, as that would be far too complimentary), trying to encourage them to join the Conservative Party. The reason given that so infuriated me was 'a distinctive line on Europe compared to the other mainstream parties', or something to that effect. This as a distinguishing reason to support the Tories concerns me greatly, not only because it signals an underlying tide of anti-internationalist thought (perhapts to be anticipated) that is entirely inappropriate for the 21st century, but also because it came from a Young Conservative.

Young people joining the Tory Party, partly over European concerns, dismisses the notion that a few old cronies hold the Party's darker line on Europe. Whilst the actions and views of one individual do not speak for an entire established political party, I had previously thought that broadly speaking euroskepticism was confined to older generations. From observation, Europe-hating is (broadly) reserved for patriots who despise a positive reduction in soverignty on sentimental grounds, and for those who do not fully understand the contribution of the Union simply seeing it as a grounds for 'immigrants to scrounge off the benefit system'. It is therefore incredibly sad that some young people are taking this view, especially seeing as we are living in an era of internationalism.

Cameron's move of the Tory group in Europe from the EPP to the ECR, a more euroskeptic European group was certainly aimed to please those in the Party who were less pro-Europe, but this by no means quelled the argument. However, the phrase 'a distinctive line on Europe' still suggests that the Tory attitude is that the institution is fundamentally immoral, power hungry and should have its mandate severely reduced or purged. Again, this attitude seems to exist primarily out of instinct, which is something I find incredibly disturbing. Surely the public, logical as ever, will be able to reason that we remain in Europe out of reason: on grounds of economic benefit, not simply to let in an incorrectly percieved 'tide of unskilled immigrants'? Unfortunately the latter view is perpetuated and in the eyes of many legitimised by the vindictive right-wing media, who clearly lack the intelligence and foresight to understand that many of their patriotically titled 'British jobs for British people' are attributed to European trade.

This movement of thought also concerns me as it pressurised Labour during the policy review stage, the fruits of which will become clear soon. Maurice Glasman, proclaimed leader of the 'Blue Labour' faction, made a number of comments on immigration and suggested that the UK's immigration treaties be renegotiated with Europe. We urgently need to look as a party beyond the anti-Europe agenda fuelled by the demise of the present incarnation of the Euro and enable future policy to take a progressive approach by considering a reformed common currency. As a mainstream party, we must also be cautious not to egg on the anti-European argument that is being quietly encouraged on the sidelines by some Conservatives. Seeing the bigger economic picture, unclouded by instinctiveness, will be vital to our party's reform; Europe is key to the UK remaining competitive in a global economy, and we cannot let individual complaints and patriotic attachments weaken our robust support of this excellent institution.

For the local elections on 3 May, 39% turnout was the figure the Returning Officer gave for my ward, 40% across the district, 32% estimated nationally according to The Guardian; that's the lowest turnout for local elections since 2000. I find it incredibly depressing that this figure has been produced and that there has been minimal conversation around dealing with it, with the focus instead resting on Tory backbencher strops over gay marriage and Lords reform (boo hoo, progress!) and Cameron bending to the tide of Conservatism.

The local government problem

What first strikes me is the overall lack of interest in local government. For many voters, it's too confusing and wooly for them to care about. Sure, it's rather helpful when you're in a mood at 9:30AM, your bins haven't been collected and you want to have a go at someone, but other than that, in my area, what does £151.65/year for a Band D property (an average property) actually buy you other than statutory services? The answer is, not a lot. When voters do try and engage, Councils simply aren't transparent enough or sufficiently willing to open up meetings, and when issues crop up, they're directed to various extensions, phone lines, departments and often the County Council given their line of enquiry. This just adds to the negative perception of local government.

Local government isn't as wasteful as it's constantly portrayed to be, but it is if we let it get into a state where the local authority is simply rubber stamping planning applications, collecting bins and dealing with business rates. Its whole purpose is to bring power to people locally and help communities, something it is spectacularly failing at. Therefore, in order to engage people with local politics once again, local government needs to improve the process of communication. Authorities should be working directly with community groups through Councillors, unifying the number for citizens to call and get transferred to someone who can actually help them on, investing in local non-statutory services and branching out through more modern means of commnication to get in touch with the younger generation, such as social media. Councillors also need to step up to the mark, hold regular surgeries and get things done by managing their casework properly.

My view is that this year's poor turnout isn't simply excused by the usual poor weather; this year's turnout was particularly poor. I believe this problem is tied to 'austerity Britain' and the fact that Councils have been strongly compelled by Government to freeze tax, with many doing so for consecutive financial years. Councils simply haven't been investing in communities, and with that, the connection with voters has disappeared. Voters simply can't tell if their Council is doing anything for them any more due to their lack of transparency and often incredibly poor websites, thus they don't want to get involved unless a carrot is dangled in the form of a general election or a referendum. Effectively, this low turnout is an expression of public dissatisfaction with local government in its present form, and it's a signal from the electorate for local Councillors to bother.

Forcing the hand

I've long been an advocate of the compulsory vote; in this day and age where it's easy for people to 'flexi' their time at work and with polling stations open from 7am-10pm, it's inexcusable that some people don't bother or are reluctant to do so. I cringe even more at the attendance figures given voters can postal and proxy vote as well. Voting should be something people should be proud of, and should not be seen as a time wasting excercise. Indeed, failure to vote should be disapproved of socially, or at least followed up with a nasty fine.

Frequently raised arguments I hear about the compulsory vote include the fact that it is compulsory, and the risk of people naively voting for extreme parties without taking the process seriously. This is an acknowledgement of the broken citizenship teaching system we have in schools, where abstention should be emphasised as a possibility. Why can't students be taught that it's okay to be apathetic on some issues, so long as they make the effort to record this opinion on a ballot paper?

If we keep this system, also have to remember that stresses of employment and childcare should also be accounted for. Why can't government legislate for employees to have a 'grace period' during the working day, inclusive of travel time, where employees should be legally entitled to vote on paid time without sanction if travel arrangements mean they will have difficulty reaching work on time after voting or leaving work with insufficient time to vote? Some countries orchestrate a vote on a weekend, which brings me to question why we cannot also consider these as a possibility -- even though this may increase the cost of staffing an election.

Proper citizenship, incentivised voter registration

One key issue is the silent number of people that fail to register to vote. Why can't the government offer incentives to property agents to get new owners and tenants to register within a week of moving in? Forgetfulness should be eliminated when it comes to people registering to participate in democracy.

Schools also have an important part to play. It is legal for children to register to vote from the age of 16, so why can't we make it legal for local educational authorities to hold the electoral register and check pupils off against it? Can't schools receive some sort of bonus if they have a high rate of registration, thus encouraging them to promote registration at 16? By schools taking ownership of this issue, they may actually invest some time and thought into citizenship lessons as opposed to seeing them as a 'nice to have' extra. Government urgently needs to revive citizenship as a subject to prevent turnout from dipping under future generations.

Votes at 16

Aside from the usual arguments of 16 year olds legally being allowed to be employed etc, reducing the voting age would also bring voting down to the age under which children are in the education system. This would provide an opportunity for teachers to engage students in democracy before they make a decision for the first time, making citizenship seen as a necessity within the curriculum.

Earlier engagement will hopefully do something to normalise the process of voting, with young people being more engaged politically resulting in a generation that is happy to discuss politics and join in with political parties. This may also go some way to remove the possibility of people opening the door and answering 'I don't get politics' in future, something that is particularly depressing during Voter ID.

Conclusions

Government urgently needs to take its head out of the sand and deal with this. The Liberal Democrats and Labour's leader both support Votes at 16, so why let traditional Tory paternalistic views destroy the potential for political engagement amongst the young? The fact is, low engagement is endemic across every borough in the country, and the sooner we remove the wool from the eyes of the population with a constructive way forward to engage people, the better. I will be incredibly disappointed if Labour's new set of policies and the next manifesto does not include anything to radically change this, as having the majority of the country's newly elected local politicians survive on a mandate of well under half their ward's population is shameful, especially in an era of cutbacks to services.

As my Local Authority elects by thirds, I was given the opportunity to stand for election this year. I canvassed during 2010 and 2011's elections, but this year's local elections were noticeably different. For the past two years, national issues have been debated alongside local issues and often connected by voters at the ballot box in the form of the appallingly handled AV referendum and the General Election. Yet this year, there was nothing - however, the number of euroskeptics I met at the doorstep alongside the UKIP vote increased noticeably.

Up until recently, UKIP were very keen and content on promoting their single reason for existence:  withdrawing the UK from Europe. Although their right-wing agenda has always extended a bit further than this - their policies in the 2010 included the legalisation of corporal punishment in schools, something I had a go at the local UKIP candidate Leigh Jones (Mole Valley) over during hustings - they haven't had much local policy, and it hasn't had a noticeable draw on the Labour vote here. However, canvass returns show that the Tory vote and some of the 'disenchanted with everything' vote has moved in their favour.

Crucially, the 'soft UKIP vote' I have spoken with tend to understand local issues in detail, reading the local paper and often taking part in community groups. Yet, their illogical solution to resolve local issues is to turn to a party with little local policy (with the exception of demanding a referendum on every trivial local issue, defeating the point of elected representatives), holding a hard line on national issues such as crime, benefits and immigration, instinctively opposing the supposedly evil 'EU super state'. In fact, one local UKIP candidate took it upon himself to blame rising population (read: immigrants) for the water shortage in the South East!

It strikes me that although risking further calls for a national referendum on the EU would be silly at best and catastrophic at worst, we do really need to have some sensible politicians standing up on TV and explaining how vital the EU is to the UK economy and the wider benefits membership brings. It would help if the right wing press take notes, too. Labour also needs to understand the situation at hand, building an inclusive party that will be seen as the choice for local elections. Those who are disenchanted shouldn't be tinkering with the racist right wing fringe, but instead demanding a Labour council who will build communities and invest in services.

We must marginalise UKIP as a primarily single issue party, push them back to the sidelines and explain to voters why we, The Labour Party, believe what we do believe. There shouldn't be any shame or blame placed on us by the public for the cause of the economic crisis. Multiculturalism and the EU are both excellent things that we should celebrate, and a supportive state is something we should be proud of offering to develop when voters next get to use the ballot box. Only by understanding fully why our values will work best for them will the vote of the frustrated portion of the electorate truly shift to us.

Another problem is that although people may understand our values nationally, locally we lack a consistent character. The Tories are known for their promises of Council Tax freezes, but what should be expected of a Labour council across the board? We must be the party that will champion local issues, can be expected to get things done, and crucially, has realistic policy that works for the electorate -- not just waffle and a desire to verbally please voters on the doorstep (something the Lib Dems are rather good at). Now I will eagerly await the outcome of the policy review...

I'm going to start my e-tirade with a quotation form Conservative Party co-Chairman and Minister without Portfolio Sayeeda Warsi, who was part of this week's Question Time panel:

"What I find really surprising is you're both [Stephen Twigg, Labour & Caroline Lucas, Green] saying we should be spending more. We are in a debt crisis. We are borrowing more because of you. How can you solve a debt crisis by borrowing more? How do you deal with the credit card debts by going out and getting more debts? It absolutely falls in the wrong place."

Oh dear, Sayeeda. Typically, the Question Time audience clapped, as they did for Caroline Lucas and Stephen Twigg's counter arguments; they side with anyone who says something vaguely populist. The fact is, the Conservative argument here was and still is incredibly thin, and they're continuing to repeat it. That, combined with the number of mistakes in Warsi's delivery further detracts from Conservative credibility:

1. You can solve a debt crisis by borrowing more; it's called investment, and is something that is required in order for us to remain a competitive economy. That's why the Government have agreed to sign a £35bn cheque for the High Speed 2 line, as it's there to benefit us in the long term. Hoarding money lacks foresight, as you're restricting the multiplier effect that stimulates growth in the future.
2. The credit card debt analogy, a timeless Tory classic. Re-read point one if you're not getting it quite yet: the nation is not a giant credit card. If an individual racks up a ton of debt shopping, of course there will be a mess. The state isn't about buying clothes or other consumer goods: it must develop and evolve in order to support and aid businesses to prosper. When the state buys something, it usually invests, which is vastly different to consumerism. Investments aim to deliver a return. A better analogy to make with state borrowing would be renovating a property and selling it with an increased market value to make a profit: you're taking on some debt temporarily to do profit in the future.
3. Re-read point one and two. Labour's attitude to investment whilst reducing inefficiencies and reforming state spending plans falls absolutely in the right place. The trouble is, the public have taken to an incredibly hard-line attitude due to misinformation and political spin.
4. Labour isn't saying we should be spending more. However, our priorities on what should be axed and when are incredibly different, and for good reason. We want to hail constructive growth through gradual deficit reduction as opposed to slashing spending, halting investment and freezing the economy. It's part of the reason why the economy is growing so slowly under George Osborne's tenure.
5. 'We are borrowing more because of you.' Really, Sayeeda? Really? Labour aren't in power at the moment, didn't cause the global economic crisis and had to make some incredibly tough decisions in office whilst financial institutions folded. The Conservatives were calling at one point for banks to collapse, which would have resulted in us borrowing more because of them. They're in office now, and due to mediocre growth, state revenues aren't as high as they need to be for George Osborne to meet his deficit reduction targets, resulting in us borrowing more. Sayeeda, we are borrowing more because of you.

The public have taken the bait unfortunately; as with Europe, many can't understand the concept of investment bringing unseen returns. Europe has led to stable democracy and better business due to a common legal framework across member states, courtesy of harmonisation. Equally, investment would increase employment, result in more people paying tax, businesses being able to invest, banks lending and economic growth. Unfortunately, the public favours the Tories' cowboy strategy of slashing investment and chances of growth.

Then, a member of the audience bearing a striking resemblance to a pirate crowed the age old line of "How can Labour be credible? They sold off all our gold at record low prices!" It's an argument that I'm tired of hearing. They managed to guide us through one of the world's deepest and darkest recessions, so they're certainly credible. The fact that they sold a commodity, which can go up or down in price at any point with little warning or security on its value, is invalidated as it is public sector investment: improved healthcare, new hospitals, better schools. That investment produces a skilled population that makes our economy more attractive globally. It's something that will, in the long term, be worth more than the gold.

In 1997, 2001 and 2005 the public elected a Labour government as our public services had been starved by prudent, city loving Tories. Labour wasn't always successful: they failed to make a considerable dent in child poverty, for example, but they aimed to bring about social improvements through efficient, comprehensive public services. They managed the bottom line, but instead of being prudent in the Conservative Party sense, they took decisions for long term value.

I'm not going to defend the controversy Balls and Miliband created at the Fabian Conference. I simply want to make people understand that the economy isn't as simple to manage, as black and white, as the Tories make it out to be. This government is making a mess of things, yet the public applaud their economic perspective, then applaud Labour's response. The reason why they don't support Labour is supposedly a lack of policy, something Cameron had very little of when he came into office as leader of his party. They don't want to provide policy as, like with commodity prices, you can't predict the future. In fact, at one point, Osborne and Cameron said they'd match Labour's spending commitments, later calling them reckless:

Kudos to the member of the public who mentioned Labour's plan for jobs. That's what we need in our politics: not cuts driven by ideological desires, but a pragmatic approach, something Labour is trying to offer. By all means we haven't finished putting the jigsaw together; a policy review is on the verge of completion and our ideas will change as our economic situation changes under the Tories. However, if people just stop and think for a moment, they'll discover that the alternative made available by Labour is far more credible than the Liberal Democrat/Tory option. A robust government, economic growth, properly thought out welfare reform and a functional NHS. That's what we need, that's what Labour offers, and that's what the Coalition cowboys threaten if they get their way.

Don't ask me why, but I've always been a unionist. I'm not a type to submit to blind patriotism or support something simply out of tradition without purpose or reason, yet the Scottish independence discussion that has been brought about by the SNP's election to Holyrood has somewhat baffled me. I don't want to support or oppose the campaign on immoral grounds, such as the impact on the Labour vote which I care so deeply about; I believe the decision that should be made is that of the Scottish people, and that it is the supporters of Westminster's role to argue why the Union makes for a better nation.

I've already had a bitter grumble over Iain Gray's failed leadership and the SNP majority, saving me the time from writing it out again. The fact we must accept is that the SNP were elected with a majority under the AMS voting system, no easy feat, and their primary reason for existing is an independent Scotland. Yet those who gave them the mandate, likely knowing this, may not support independence: according to ICM, just 40% of Scots back independence. Polls are also quite shaky, as people are waking up to the issue and beginning to consider it on their own without the yes/no campaigns trying to influence the vote. What I'm saying here is the SNP were likely elected due to attractive policy for Scotland and not their views on the dissolution of the union.

Regarding the referendum itself, I have a strong opinion. The point of devolution is for Scotland to have control over certain matters, excluding the constitution. If Westminster were to dabble in Scottish tuition fees or their NHS, then there would be pandemonium. The same should apply in reverse with Scotland and the power to change the Constitution. This should not be a discussion at all, as the Scots have not elected a government with that desire in their national policy. A unionist party is in power nationally with that ability, even though they have now given that to Holyrood to set about a referendum. We should not be considering independence unless the national party in power supports it and makes this clear in policy.

Moving on and accepting the consequences of the Government's decision on moving the referendum power over this week, what is my view on the Union? For diplomacy, scale, influence and common interest it should be kept in tact. Yet, if we were to be alone, other than having two weaker nations, would we find ourselves in a superior position in the medium to long term? I am tempted to argue not due to the aforementioned factors.

Should the knot be untied, I certainly won't support currency union. Yet I won't form my opinions on the basis of Labour's future either, although my motive for doing this is minimal: only one Labour government has depended on Scottish votes to support its majority. I shall continue to muse over this matter until the dreaded date arrives.

Yes, I would agree with a constructive argument for its eventual removal, but not right now. I highly doubt you, the reader, have been wrapped in cotton wool for months, but I shall give a few examples that testify to this government's staggering misunderstanding of the struggles they are putting citizens through: uni fees, EMA, public sector pensions and redundancies, police cuts...

I'm not being unreasonable here. I support the Government's plans to lower corporation tax, for example. What I'm trying to say is regardless of my political allegiances, I am not deliberately 'anti'.

Mr Cameron, please restore the services and benefits you have ruthlessly cut from the deprived and then consider your plan.

http://t.co/HAQECsAx
Haroon Siddique
guardian.co.uk, Mon 9 Jan 2012 10.33 GMT