Evolution of Press in UK

A million iPads and Kindles may have been unwrapped on Sunday – according to tentative analyst estimates – an influx of portable technology that is expected to hasten a decline in the already faltering sales of printed newspapers, adding pressure on traditional business models that have traditionally supported so many titles around the country.

Publishers, preparing for the handheld arrivals, took the chance to break with a tradition that dates back to 1912, when publishers agreed not to produce Christmas Day papers to give paperboys, among others, a day off. For the first time in its 190-year history the Sunday Times published a digital-only edition on 25 December – with the normally paid for product given away in the hope of luring sought after digital subscribers.

Boxing Day publication, for dailies like the Guardian, has also become a necessity – to ensure digital editions for new Kindle and iPad owners to read. The result is that what was a traditionally quiet period for news has become a critical moment to showcase new work, at a time when an industry already riven by the phone-hacking scandal and under judicial examination, is facing what can be described as an existential crisis.

Fifty years ago two national dailies – the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express – sold more than 4m copies each; today the bestselling Sun sells 2.6m. In the last year alone, printed sales declined by 10% for daily broadsheets and by 5% for daily tabloids – and when the News of the World stopped printing last July 600,000 copy sales simply disappeared.

The knock-on impact of the decline has been a push for digital readers that have seen newspapers like the Daily Mail win 5m unique visitors a day – compared with its printed sale of 2m – but struggle to generate revenues to match. The Mail generated £16m from its website last year, out of £608m overall.

Some specialist titles, such as the Financial Times, are managing the transition well – it has 260,000 digital subscribers – up 40% this year – compared with 337,000 buyers of the printed product, where sales are down by 12%. Digital subscribers generate £180 a year and the paper, priced at £2.50 on the newsstand on a weekday, is profitable.

John Ridding, the managing director, says that 30% of the FT's revenues come from digital sales and that "within two or three years" digital readers and revenues will account for more than those from the printed business. During a typical week the number of people signing on digitally is "five to 10 times" what it was a year earlier, as the newspaper looks to a future beyond print.

Others, though, are under pressure. Local newspapers have been hit particularly hard, with 31 titles closing in the last year. Most of those shutting are freesheets – with titles distibuted in Yeovil, Scarborough and Harlow lost. Historic paid for titles have seen their frequency cut: the Liverpool Daily Post is to go weekly in print in the new year, after sales dropped as low as 6,500. Its website, however, will update in real time. Daily titles in Birmingham and Bath have also gone the same way in recent years – while pre-tax profits at Johnston Press, the owner of the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, fell from £131.5m five years ago to £16m last year.

Roger Parry, chair of Johnston Press since 2009, believes the party has been over for several years, since Craigslist and Google began to take classified advertising away from local press.

"I think the future is for local multimedia companies which focus on signing up 50% plus of the households in their area on some form of subscription – that's what happens in Scandinavia," he says. For journalists there will have to be a shift from acting as "print writers to multimedia curators. There will be more content created by local people. The National Union of Journalists will hate this but it is fact of life."

With the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, wanting to license local television stations in 20 cities, that gives local media a new way to reach audiences, although some – such as Witney TV in Oxfordshire – have already made a start with a daily offering of local video news. David Cameron, the local MP, regularly appears, but the site is staffed by volunteers, and its content limited – underlining how tough the digital economics are.

There are commercial pressures in national media too. Although the tabloid media have faced criticism at the Leveson inquiry, not least from the likes of Hugh Grant or Steve Coogan, popular titles remain in fair commercial health. Trinity Mirror's stable of nationals – the Daily and Sunday Mirror, the People, and the Record titles in Scotland – will earn about £70m this year, although they made £86m the year before. The profit margin at the Daily Mail hovers at around 10%.

The challenge for the popular press is retaining printed sales – but the financial pressure is acute elsewhere. Three of the traditional broadsheets – the Independent, the Times and the Guardian – all lose money in a market where five titles compete for 1.3 million print buyers. Their readers are more likely to make the digital transition too, leaving newspapers no option but to embrace new forms of reporting – such as the live blog – and seed content at digital hubs, such as Facebook.

The Guardian may generate £40m in digital revenues from its largely free offerings, but some of that comes from its dating sites. The Times titles have gone for a low price subscription model, which has attracted 111,000 takers, but which generates £11m a year against an editorial budget estimated at £100m.

Some, like Paul Zwillenberg, from Boston Consulting Group, says serious newspapers "will have to cut their cloth because there will be a smaller pool of revenue and profit". But he acknowledges that by pursuing different business models, they may increase their chances of success. The result, though, is that was once an industry of one business model: a printed product sold on the newstand is fracturing into very different types of mainly digital content companies.

Race and Riots

IF THERE was any consolation to be had from the recent English riots, it was that they did not pit one racial community against the police (as in Brixton and elsewhere in the 1980s), or one such community against another (as in Bradford and elsewhere in 2001). Yet the density of black people among the rioters suggests that race played some part, even if few politicians are keen to contemplate it. Just what that role was is a matter of great concern to thoughtful black Britons.

Black people make up slightly less than 3% of the British population. But in the CCTV snaps of rioters that the police in London, Birmingham and Manchester have put on the internet, slightly more than half seem to be black. Many of the areas in which rioting took place, such as Tottenham, Hackney and Brixton, are largely black. In Scotland, Wales and north-east England, which have small black populations, there was no rioting.

Poverty can only be part of the explanation for this pattern. While blacks are, by and large, poorer than whites, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are poorer still. There was no disorder in areas with large Asian populations, including in London; CCTV pictures suggest there were few Asian looters. (The fact that the trouble coincided with Ramadan might—or might not—be a factor in this quiescence.)

The black community suffers other, older and perhaps related problems, too. Black children are disproportionately likely to be excluded from school, and black adults to go to prison (see chart). African-Caribbean males are a special worry. African-Caribbean boys do much worse in school than African-Caribbean girls or African boys. The most recent available analysis of GCSE results by race and sex, which was done in 2009, shows that 56% of African-Caribbean boys got five A-C grades at GCSE, compared with 65% of African boys and 70% of African-Caribbean girls (for all pupils, the figure was 74%).

This is sensitive stuff. Many of the black leaders who are prepared to talk about it do not want to be quoted. They tend to home in on three issues, two of which affect white people too.

The first is family breakdown. David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham in north London, where the first riots broke out, and whose father left when he was 11, has spoken movingly on the subject. He points out that, while family breakdown is increasingly prevalent in white society, it is far more common among blacks: 65% of black Caribbean children in Britain grow up in a single-parent family; nine out of ten of those households are headed by women. Children brought up in one-parent families are more likely to take drugs, drop out of school and end up in prison.

A second concern is culture. Tony Sewell, whose charity, Generating Genius, promotes maths and science among black boys, fingers the rap and hip-hop music that MTV popularised from the 1980s: “Black popular culture used to be based on spirituality and social justice…Now we have a music that glorifies violence, materialism and sex.” Lindsay Johns, a writer who mentors young black people in Peckham, south London, adds another bugbear: “achingly PC educationalists, who call ghetto-speak ‘culturally rich’ and ‘empowering’. Rubbish. It’s a mashed-up, debased language that spectacularly disables our young people, because nobody will give them a job if they talk like that.”

The shortage of other role models and templates of success in the black community makes its youngsters especially susceptible to these influences. Yet they reach others too. “Black male culture is powerful stuff,” says Mr Sewell. Firms use black street culture to sell fashionable goods such as trainers. As a result, he says, it has far more sway among other ethnic groups than it did 20 years ago. “Youngsters in other communities want to be part of it; so if it is a problem for the black community, it becomes a problem for everybody.”

The third issue, which is particular to ethnic minorities and perhaps black people above all, is racism, or the perception of it. The unrest in Tottenham began at a protest against the killing of an armed black man by police; some blame police racism for the ensuing violence. At the Samuel Lithgow Youth Centre in Camden, north London, Jessica, a black 13-year-old girl, says her brother was searched twice on a recent shopping outing: “It doesn’t look as though they’re going for any other race.” Stephanie, a 17-year-old girl of Bulgarian origin, concurs. When she hung out with a mixed-race bunch, the police used to search the black boys and nobody else, she says. Official figures lend some credence to these anecdotes: in instances unrelated to terrorism, blacks are five times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites by London’s Metropolitan Police.

Even if the police are more likely to pick on black boys, both the police and society as a whole are far less racist than in the past. Yet history lingers. A teacher says, “Everybody in the black community is told constantly that they’re victims. Parents think the police are racist, the teachers are racist and the establishment is racist. And they tell that to their kids.” If people believe the law to be racist, some may not regard breaking it as morally wrong.

These problems may be entrenched, but they are superable. Mr Sewell’s outfit has helped 40 black boys from tough schools to get into top universities. Leaders of Tomorrow, the mentoring scheme with which Mr Johns volunteers, has helped students get scholarships to some of the country’s best independent schools. Katharine Birbalsingh, an outspoken teacher, is trying to start a new “free school” to combat underachievement in Lambeth, one of London’s poorest boroughs. And, as Mr Lammy points out, “Tottenham has just had its best exam results ever. Most kids in Tottenham weren’t rioting. They were getting good GCSEs.”

Stop The Fa(s)t Train (2)

THE pound stores, factory seconds shops, bookies and boarded-up windows around Stoke-on-Trent railway station do not bespeak a thriving city. A meagre tourist trade to the home of England’s historic pottery industry has done little to lift its limp, post-industrial economy. And the Midlands city is expecting another blow: two direct trains an hour currently run between London and Stoke-on-Trent, but a planned new high-speed rail line is likely to bypass it. In the future the city might have fewer—and potentially slower—services to the capital.

Earlier this year the coalition government announced details of a £32 billion ($52 billion) super-fast railway line from London to Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham (see map). Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, claims it will be a “fast track” to prosperity. If the project goes ahead—and there is still, just, time to reconsider—the final route, and Stoke’s transport fate, will not be decided until 2012 at the earliest. The first trains won’t reach Birmingham until 2026, and Leeds and Manchester until 2032-3.

There are practical reasons to favour a new north-south line. Good infrastructure lasts a long time: Britain is still enjoying the fruits of Victorian railway investment. At some point in the next 20 years the existing west-coast main line will face a capacity crunch. Upgrading lines is disruptive and expensive, so constructing a new one appears sensible. The vision of a futuristic train scything across Britain at 250mph (400kph) is appealing.

But although the plan has cross-party support, the British public is not entirely convinced. Objections have so far focused on two concerns. First, the environmental damage, particularly to the Chilterns, an area of “outstanding natural beauty” and home to many well-off voters. Second, the business case for the line: the projected doubling of long-distance rail use by 2043 seems ambitious.

Less tested is the coalition’s assertion that the line will transform the prospects of the north of England, and ameliorate the north-south divide in Britain’s economy and prosperity. Mr Hammond says high-speed rail is a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to reshape the country’s economic geography. Most of the other countries that have made big investments in high-speed lines, such as China, Italy and Spain, have likewise adduced the supposed benefits to regional development.

Yet Britain’s infrastructure demands are different from other countries’. Its regular trains are already faster than most other nations’ equivalents. Britain is sufficiently small that even without pricey futuristic technology, Manchester and Leeds are only just over two hours from London. And a greater proportion of the population is already connected to the road and rail network than elsewhere in Europe.

It is also doubtful whether the proposed link would do much to address regional variations. The effect of such projects in other countries has often been to strengthen the competitive advantage of an already dominant city. In France, more businesses have relocated their headquarters to the capital since the Paris-Lyon high-speed line opened in 1981. Since a new Spanish railroad opened in 1992, Madrid’s business population has swelled at the expense of Seville. Far from strengthening the north, then, a high-speed line might end up accentuating regional disparities. The government’s own analysis predicts that seven in ten of the new jobs the project helps to create will be in the South East.

A deeper, and mistaken, geographical belief may be at work in the minds of the Whitehall technocrats behind the venture. It is that “the north” is somehow a single, homogeneous place (a view encouraged by the signs to “The North” on motorways heading out of London). It isn’t.

In fact the putative link, designed to bridge the north-south divide, would barely even reach the north proper: Birmingham is in the Midlands; Manchester and Leeds are only around 170 miles from London; Britain stretches another 300-plus miles beyond them. And even if high-speed does boost the cities it connects, it won’t necessarily help the whole region.

The underlying assumption of high-speed rail is that proximity to London, measured in journey times, is key to regeneration. But some of those precious minutes would be saved by making fewer stops, while train frequency on the traditional west-coast main line will be cut. So for a number of places in the Midlands and the north, the new rail link will make London farther away by travel time.

It isn’t only Stoke-on-Trent that may suffer. Other places that are well-served by current timetables but which the new line would bypass, such as Crewe and Rugby, will also be hit. Trains on the old line might make more stops; passengers might be forced to take indirect routes. Coventry, for example, which currently has three fast trains to London an hour, expects to lose out on business travel, which accounts for nearly half of its visitors. The plans “send a message that Coventry is not a place to stop”, says George Duggins, deputy leader of the city’s council.

Municipal leaders in Stoke-on-Trent are already aggrieved that the new “enterprise zones” in Birmingham and Manchester, which enjoy preferential tax treatment, have drawn investment from their city. Some local businessmen are now lobbying for an additional stop on the high-speed route. For others, high-speed rail is a distraction from more urgent needs: regeneration of the local area cannot wait until its effects are felt in 20 years’ time, argues Mark Meredith, a local Labour councillor.

One-track mind

That such an infrastructure project would benefit over-mighty London and the South East is not necessarily a problem. In London GDP per head is 1.7 times the national average. If that grows, so does the economy as a whole. But this is not the government’s intended aim.

Sir Rod Eddington, a former boss of British Airways, argued in a 2006 review of Britain’s transport needs that mature economies rarely see huge benefits from a single project. “The risk is that transport policy can become the pursuit of icons,” Sir Rod warned. The government seems not to have listened. The £32 billion at its disposal might well yield a higher return if it were spent on less glitzy schemes, such as road improvements and intra-city transport initiatives. If the aim is to regenerate “the north”, the current plan might prove a high-speed route in the wrong direction.

Blair On The Riots

Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband made excellent speeches last week and there was much to agree with in what they said. None the less, in the overall commentary on the riots, I think we are in danger of the wrong analysis leading to the wrong diagnosis, leading to the wrong prescription.

There were some proximate causes of what happened that are relatively easily dealt with. The police are under huge pressure. If they go in hard, they fear inquiry, disciplinary action and abuse. It's all very well to say that they should just follow the rules. The police need to know they have strong support from politicians and public. When the riots first occurred, they would have been naturally anxious as to how heavy to be. Once they saw the country behind them, they rallied.

But my experience with the police is they need 100% backing. Otherwise, you're asking a lot of the officer on the ground in a tough situation.

Then, some of the disorder was caused by rioters and looters who were otherwise ordinary young people who got caught in a life-changing mistake from which they will have to rebuild.

However, the big cause is the group of young, alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour. And here's where I don't agree with much of the commentary. In my experience, they are an absolutely specific problem that requires deeply specific solutions.

The left says they're victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won't help them; neither – on their own – will tougher penalties.

The key is to understand that they aren't symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis.

Britain, as a whole, is not in the grip of some general "moral decline". I see young graduates struggling to find work today and persevering against all the odds. I see young people engaged as volunteers in the work I do in Africa, and in inter-faith projects. I meet youngsters who are from highly disadvantaged backgrounds where my Sports Foundation works in the north-east and I would say that today's generation is a) more respectable b) more responsible and c) more hard-working than mine was. The true face of Britain is not the tiny minority that looted, but the large majority that came out afterwards to help clean up.

I do think there are major issues underlying the anxieties reflected in disturbances and protests in many nations. One is the growing disparity of incomes not only between poor and rich but between those at the top and the aspiring middle class. Another is the paradigm shift in economic and political influence away from the west.

Each requires substantial change in the way we think and function.

However, I would be careful about drawing together the MPs' expenses row, bankers and phone-hackers in all this. We in politics love the grand philosophical common thread and I agree with Ed Miliband on the theme of responsibility.

I became an MP in 1983. Then, MPs were rarely full time, many didn't hold constituency surgeries and there were no rules of any bite governing expenses or political funding. So the idea that MPs today are a work-shy bunch of fraudsters, while back then they were high-minded public servants, is just rubbish: unfair, untrue and unhelpful.

Likewise with the boardroom. I agree totally with the criticisms of excess in pay and bonuses. But is this really the first time we have had people engaged in dubious financial practices or embracing greed, not good conduct? If anything, today's corporations are far more attuned to corporate social responsibility, far better in areas like the environment, far more aware of the need to be gender- and race-balanced in recruiting.

Britain gives generously to those in need abroad: faster and more than many other nations. At a time of cuts, our aid budget – which saves countless thousands of lives – is being protected. There is criticism but the remarkable thing is not how much but how little. The spirit that won the Olympic bid in 2005 – open, tolerant and optimistic – is far more representative of modern London than the criminality displayed by the people smashing shop windows.

And here is what I learned in 10 years of trying to deal with this issue. When I visited the so- called "bad areas", whether in Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, London or elsewhere, what I found was not a community out of control. What I found were individuals out of control in a community where the majority, even in the poorest of poor parts, was decent, law-abiding and actually desperate for action to correct the situation.

In witnessing the lifestyles these individuals have, I found two things came together. First, there was a legal system overwhelmed by the nature of the crime committed by these young people, buttressed as it is by gangs and organised crime.

Second, these individuals did not simply have an individual problem. They had a family problem. This is a hard thing to say and I am of course aware that this, too, is a generalisation. But many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, middle class or poor.

Most of them are shaping up that way by the time they are in primary school or even in nursery. They then grow up in circumstances where their role models are drug dealers, pimps, people with knives and guns, people who will exploit them and abuse them but with whom they feel a belonging. Hence the gang culture that is so destructive.

This is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. You find it in virtually every developed nation. Breaking it down isn't about general policy or traditional programmes of investment or treatment. The last government should take real pride in the reductions in inequality, the improvement in many inner-city schools and the big fall in overall crime. But none of these reaches this special group.

By the end of my time as prime minister, I concluded that the solution was specific and quite different from conventional policy. We had to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred. And we had to reform the laws around criminal justice, including on antisocial behaviour, organised crime and the treatment of persistent offenders. We had to treat the gangs in a completely different way to have any hope of success. The agenda that came out of this was conceived in my last years of office, but it had to be attempted against a constant backdrop of opposition, left and right, on civil liberty grounds and on the basis we were "stigmatising" young people. After I'd left, the agenda lost momentum. But the papers and the work are all there.

In 1993, following James Bulger's murder, I made a case in very similar terms to the one being heard today about moral breakdown in Britain. I now believe that speech was good politics but bad policy. Focus on the specific problem and we can begin on a proper solution. Elevate this into a high- faluting wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally and we will depress ourselves unnecessarily, trash our own reputation abroad and, worst of all, miss the chance to deal with the problem in the only way that will work.

Fascinating 10 Days

The Fallen Ones






The Question Marks




The Hero Of The Saga

In Praise Of...

The first name on the list is John Angus. The records say little about him. He was, they suspected, from London. In September 1938, he was reported "fighting in Spain". He was a communist. In longhand, someone has later added "Returned". Further than that, the record is silent. But Angus is caught in the spotlight today because he is on a remarkable list of more than 4,000 British people who volunteered on behalf of the Spanish Republic in the civil war of 1936-39, which has now been made public in the National Archives. To MI5, which compiled the list, John Angus and the others who fought for Spain were suspicious, perhaps with reason in some cases. To many reading the newly released list today, however, Angus and his companions are heroes, bathed in romance. A few – like the poet John Cornford, against whose name a clerk wrote "DEAD" in December 1936, and then underlined it – were famous in their time. Most were not. They were mainly working-class, often communists, Scots and Jewish. More than 500 people from these islands died for Spain in those three years – more than have died in Afghanistan in nearly a decade. The names of the dead have long been collected together on the International Brigade Memorial Trust website. Now, thanks to a liberal gesture by the security service, the dead and their comrades who survived have been reunited in this much longer list, an enduring roll call of a generation and a company who should be remembered in honour.

Winner Of The Day

Bye Bye or Buy Buy?

Six months ago I proposed in the Guardian that if Britain was short of money it should cut defence. I did not mean reduce defence, or trim defence. I meant cut it altogether. We are desperately short of money and absolutely no one is threatening to attack us now or in the foreseeable, indeed conceivable, future. Besides, as we have seen this past week, other ways of ensuring security make more pressing claims on us. We just do not need an army, navy or air force. So why are we paying £45bn for them?

I am not a pacifist. I accept the need to fight to protect my home, hearth and nation and, in extremis, to uphold some concept of global civilisation against an all-consuming tyrant. I grew up accepting the danger of a nuclear war exchange as real; I was never a member of CND. Nonetheless, it stands to reason that all public expenditure must justify its claim on the taxpayer, especially one such as defence that is essentially precautionary. Defence is an insurance premium, a massive one. But it cannot merely be asserted as necessary, and left to professionals to fix the premium.

Thirteen years ago, I had my defence epiphany on the lay committee for Labour's first and only strategic defence review in 1997. This was under George Robertson. I vividly remember our first meeting when we were given our terms of reference. Such was the radical mood of those euphoric early Blair days that were told to think the unthinkable and discuss everything, no holds barred.

This lasted about five minutes. It turned out we could not discuss the nuclear deterrent; we could not question the Trident programme and its submarines; we could not discuss the Eurofighter contract; nor could we discuss the need for two or perhaps three new aircraft carriers. I remember the smug look on the faces of service chiefs in the room. Our excluded items had nothing really to do with Britain's defence. They were political. Robertson and his colleagues were under instructions not to give an inch to the Tories on defence procurement, lest they be seen as soft on defence. We could think the unthinkable – but not the thinkable.

Only later did I realise that review laid the groundwork for a decade of indiscipline and budgetary chaos. Nothing was related to strategy, let alone foreign policy. Each service ordered what its favourite supplier made, and then kept redesigning it. Some hapless future government would pay, even if it was no longer needed. I was intrigued this year to see the MoD ask that the cost of Trident be shifted from the defence budget to the Treasury on the grounds that the deterrent had nothing to do with defence. The outcome is what David Cameron has called a car crash of a defence budget.

Anyone who takes taxes from others should be obliged to say why. In the case of most public spending, the answer is easy. It is to buy a school, hospital, road, care home or welfare benefit. In the realm of overall security I am glad money is spent on the police and the intelligence services. I accept the need for some monitoring of borders and airspace and coastline. I also accept the need for some territorial reserve, for instance to assist in civil emergencies and in UN operations.

Some taxes are an insurance against future risk, such as being ill or having a sick relative. But they are usually subject to some actuarial assessment of the risk. Defence spending is insurance of a different order. We make no actuarial calculation of the risk of British citizens dying in a military attack or of British property being destroyed. Yet we are required to part with a premium of £45bn a year to prevent it. Why?

Two weeks ago the coalition government bravely tried to answer this question. It published a list of threats to Britain's security in what I must say is one of the most bizarre documents to emerge from the ectoplasm of the MoD. It was a paranoid's manifesto, a Matrix movie horror. Admittedly, the authors had a tough job. There is no Wehrmacht hovering across the Channel, no Napoleonic Grande Armée massing at Calais and no megaton missile with itchy communist fingers pointing at Britain. So how on earth were they to justify £45bn? They decided, in their tidy way, to group various so-called threats into three tiers of seriousness.

The first tier contains four threats, like a Russian doll. Number one, presumably the greatest, is "attacks on British cyberspace by states and cyber-criminals". The second is international terrorism. The third is a "military crisis" between other states, one that "draws in" Britain. The last is "a major accident or natural hazard that requires a national response," such as coastal flooding or flu.

The second tier of threats comprise "an attack from another state using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons". Next come "instability, insurgency or civil war overseas," that affect us by somehow "creating an environment that terrorists can exploit to threaten Britain". In other words terrorism again. Next is a big rise in organised crime. Next is "severe disruption to satellite-based information, possibly deliberate from another state". This is a repeat of the cyberspace threat.

Lastly we have the third tier of threats, the least serious. The first is "a large-scale conventional military attack on Britain" by an unspecified other state. The second, somewhat desperately, is terrorism again, the third is crime again. The authors clearly ran out of threats, but had to fill their threat quota. We are also threatened by immigrants and smugglers "trying to cross the UK border". We are "threatened" by an accident at a nuclear site; by a conventional attack on a Nato ally, and by an attack on a British colony. Finally, we face a curious bundle of threats: fuel shortages, price instability, and "a short- to medium-term disruption to international supplies or resources".

You may note that almost none of the above is a threat. They are crimes and catastrophes or, in the case of being "drawn in" to a foreign conflict, a matter of political choice. Many things on the list may make me feel a bit uncomfortable, but few are remotely to do with the security of the state. They are incoherent and repetitive and rather desperate, like a madman with a sandwich board crying, "They are coming to get you; the end is nigh!"

Yet this list was the basis for last month's strategic defence review with its £45bn price tag. A set of threats that are almost entirely non-military is to be met by submarines carrying nuclear missiles, two new aircraft carriers and dozens of jet fighters.

Let's start with the threat of a nuclear missile landing on Britain. I have seen no analysis of how this might emerge from the existing international order, and certainly no explanation of how nuclear deterrence might apply in any specific case. In the barely conceivable eventuality of Iran or some such hostile state building a bomb, buying a missile capable of reaching Britain and then firing it, the act would be so lunatic as to be beyond any plausible deterrence. You cannot deter a suicidal nation any more than you can a suicidal bomber. Small wonder defence chiefs wanted their nuclear missile reclassified as "political".

As for using this precious weapon to deter a conventional attack, that is surely no less fanciful. Britain's possession of nuclear missiles has had no deterrent value in any of the dozen wars it has fought in half a century. Did we threaten Argentina with it? No. Yet time and again military strategists refer to it as a useful "reserve capability". When a soldier resorts to abstract nouns you know he has lost the argument.

As for the threat of a conventional attack on the British Isles by another state, we can only ask, who? The threat is so negligible as to be insignificant. It is like insuring one's house for billions of pounds against an asteroid attack. Is the attack to come from Russia, or France, or Germany, or Ireland? Defence pundits to whom I put this crucial question look down their noses, as if it were impertinent or undergraduate. They murmur that one can never know. Yet the political preconditions for a conventional attack on Britain are so distant – the review relegates it to tier three – that Britain would have some notice and time to re-arm, as we did with remarkable speed when last so confronted in 1940.

By jumbling together accidents, diseases, natural disasters and crimes as "threats", the government undermines its own plausibility. The defence lobby is trying to hijack the jobs of the police, civil rescue and medical professions. In the case of "price instability", it even wants to hijack the Financial Services Authority. These are not "threats to national security" against which we expect the defence ministry to plan or assemble conventional forces.

The same applies to the threat which the MoD has struggled for decades to make its own, that of international terrorism. The threat review is so keen that it lists it no fewer than three times. It implies a requirement to deploy conventional forces against terrorists, who might be acting as "proxy" for a state. But there is a difference between a state that wants to overpower, conquer and rule us – a ludicrous threat of no serious concern – and one that merely wants to make a nuisance in the hope of achieving some lesser goal, such as getting Britain out of Northern Ireland or making Israel into a pariah.

The latter certainly has applied, but if we were to deploy conventional forces against such a state we might, over the last quarter century, have declared war on Libya, Syria, Iran, the Irish Republic and even the state of Massachusetts. We did not. We treated an act of terror rightly as a methodology, a criminal means, not a political end. As Joseph Conrad said in The Secret Agent, the terrorist was a pest walking the street alone. His is a local and specific form of violence, causing mayhem in the hope of spreading panic and changing a state's behaviour in response to it. Terrorism has no political content unless awarded one by the victim nation.

With the IRA and the PLO in the 1970s, the authorities played down the political significance of any outrage. Prisoners were treated as criminals and denied political status. The most limited coverage was given to their demands. Now we do the opposite. We play up the politics. I remember the admirable response to 9/11 by New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. He told New Yorkers on the day of the attack to go about their business as usual, use the park, go to a show, buy a pizza, keep working and, above all, keep spending. The trouble was, 9/11 was so awful an incident as to apparently transform a terrorist outrage into an apparent state of war, and thus admit it within the ambit of conventional defence. Nobody took any notice of what Giuliani said. They did what al-Qaida wanted, which was indulge in mass hysteria. Blair said the rules of the international game had changed – an astonishing accolade to Osama bin Laden. This cannot be unconnected with the fact that a politician's poll rating soars in the aftermath of a terrorist incident. Nothing helped George Bush more than 9/11.

Politicians rush to the cameras, dive into bunkers and warn of threats to civilisation as we know it. Conventional military forces are put on alert. Blair once rushed tanks to Heathrow in a madcap gesture of self-importance. We invaded Afghanistan for harbouring terrorists. We invaded Iraq on the thesis that it might do so. Do we now invade Pakistan and Yemen on the same basis?

Far from being deterred, terrorists and their sponsors clearly derive prestige and political clout when conventional forces are ranged against them. We thereby put them on the pedestal of state threat. By infringing our liberties and curbing our freedoms in their honour we let them win battles. By being publicly scared, as of this week's parcel bombs, we invite them to scare us some more.

Such an approach to defence is not just wasteful but counter-productive. Politicians from Blair to Cameron declare the aim of war in Iraq and Afghanistan is to make the streets of Britain safer. There is not an iota of evidence for this extraordinary claim. Most analysts, including former security chiefs in the House of Lords, say the precise opposite. These wars have made us less safe, by making Britain a prime target for terrorists and breeding homegrown terrorists in schools, colleges and mosques. Watching Gordon Brown in Helmand mouthing nonsense about boys dying for safer streets was painful. He clearly did not believe it.

So what of the other most common cause of Britain going to war, the threat of being "drawn into" someone else's squabble? First, this is not a threat but a political choice. These wars are nowadays called wars of choice. They are always beguiling. What you have, you are induced to deploy, often for the vaguest of purposes, such as "making the world a better place". The navy cites the need to stop pirates in the Indian Ocean and drug-runners in the Caribbean. Blair contributed British forces to six separate conflicts in his time in office, in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and two each in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. None was in response to a threat to the security of the British state. They were adjuncts to his foreign policy goal of "hugging close" to Washington.

Armies with nothing to do tend to distort the purpose for which they were formed. They become institutionalised. They coalesce into a wide constituency of veterans, territorial and political supporters, above all, equipment suppliers. As with terrorism, so with the government's other listed threats, we should ponder those who leap forward to publicise them. Whenever the BBC calls in a "security expert" to comment on the awfulness of some new threat, we should be told for whom he works. Remember Deep Throat's maxim, follow the money?

Being "drawn in" is the phraseology of the security review. But note the intransitive. Drawn in by whom? In whose interests, or on whose behalf, are we spending billions of pounds killing thousands of people in the Muslim world just now? Shouldn't we also have been "drawn in" to Rwanda, Darfur, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Burma? In each case, man's inhumanity to man has been more gross than in Iraq and Afghanistan. We did nothing.

From the earliest enunciation of liberal interventionism, it has been wanting in rigour. In 1999, Blair spoke in Chicago in favour of humanitarian "just" wars, as if they carried with them their own validation. All they carried was a clutter of moral superiority. I do not regard Germans or Japanese or Indians or Brazilians as lacking in moral fibre for not fighting alongside us in Blair's wars. I find nothing peculiarly moral, first in helping the break up of former Yugoslavia, then the break up of Serbia and now the devastation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

We are left with what I call the ontological argument for defences spending. It exists and therefore it is. It is the ultimate security, to which no concept of proportion can apply. We protect ourselves out of instinct. Like spending on health, you just cannot get enough of it.

It is a response not to known threats (such as Russia), nor even to known unknowns (such as a resurgent Russia), but to those famous unknown unknowns. The great ontologist, Donald Rumsfeld, remains the patron saint of defence expenditure.

The argument can take amazing forms. Come now, say the high priests. Just suppose another Hitler rose again, built a new Luftwaffe and U-boats, and bombed London and sank all our coastal trade. We would need a carrier. Suppose Russia falls under the sway of an oligarch with a grudge against Harrods and a business rival in Kensington Palace Gardens. Suppose he decides to nuke them. Supposed 100 suicide bombers block-booked themselves on Eurostar and went to every Premier League match. You would look pretty silly, Jenkins, wouldn't you?

I would look pretty silly, and probably I wouldn't be the only one. But for the time being, I regard such unrealities used to justify massive spending as no less silly. We can only meet realistic threats. We do not build 1,000 NHS hospitals and leave them to await the return of bubonic plague.

Britain as a sovereign state is less "under threat" today than ever in my life, indeed less than ever in its existence. That is to the credit of recent generations of British governments. But this means we do not need a defence that has been successfully rendered obsolete.

The chief threat to me today, if at all, is from crime. Yet we are appalling at combating it. Obsessed with punishment, we neglect crime prevention. To guard me from unreal foreign attack the government spends £45bn, but to guard my home and hearth from crime it spends just £6.4bn, and badly. I am defended against crime, including terrorist attack, not by an army, navy or air force, but by vigilant acquaintances of the criminals, by an alert school and mosque, by the police and by the apparatus of intelligence, espionage and diplomacy.

The truth of the matter is that our defence spending is misdirected and extravagantly out of date. We are re-equipping for Agincourt on the brink of Waterloo. We are laying down long boats for the battle of the Atlantic. We are deploying cold-war weapons against occasional outrages by fanatics with no capacity to cause the state harm.

I sometimes wonder why I see things this way, when so few others do. I am a pragmatist, not a pacifist. But I respect language, and am suspicious of the vapid cliches about national interest, punching our weight, sitting at top tables and being respected. I hate to see terrorism, a miserable perversion, accorded the accolade of grand enemy of the state. I hate to see statesmen whose job is to keep threats out of sight and mind exploiting the politics of fear.

The fault lies partly in the sloppy language used to discuss defence, which loses all ability to convey risk and proportion and slides into sloppy nouns and sloppy thinking. At that point, leaders lose touch with democracy, a serious threat to the security of any state. The only defence against that danger lies not in armies, bombs and guns, but solely in the deployment of meticulous reason.

by Simon Jenkins

Tweet Of The Day

"I do love the irony, it´s Thatcher´s birthday and the whole world is focused on a mine".

An Enigma

Digested Read:

I wanted this book to be different from the traditional political memoir. Most, I have found, are rather easy to put down. So what you will read here is not a conventional account of whom I met. There are events and politicians who are absent, not because they don't matter, but because they are part of a different story to the self-serving one I want to tell!

No, seriously guys, this is going to be well different. How many other world leaders use so many exclamation marks! And it is as a world leader that I'm writing for you about my journey. And what a journey! When I started in politics I was just an ordinary kind of guy. And you know what? I'm still an ordinary kind of guy – albeit one who has become a multi-millionaire and completely destabilised the Middle East!

You know, I had a tear in my eye when I entered No10 for the first time in 1997, though it wasn't, as the Daily Mail tried to claim, because I was choked with emotion at how far I had come since I was a young, ordinary boy standing on the terraces of St James' Park, watching Jackie Milburn play for Newcastle. It was because Gordon had hit me. Ah, Gordon! He meant well, I suppose, in his funny little emotionally inarticulate way.

I guess some of you will find it hard to believe, but I never really wanted to be a politician. But sometimes courage is about taking the difficult decisions and when Cherie said, "God is calling you to fulfil your destiny", I knew I had to listen. So it was with a heavy heart that I outmanoeuvred Gordon over the leadership of the party after John's death – and whatever Gordo says there was never a deal struck at Granita where he could take definitely take over after my second term. Because I had my fingers crossed!

The first year in office was pretty exciting and it was great fun having my old mates like Anji in the office. (I'd tried to get in to her sleeping bag once when I was 16 but she kicked me out! Her loss!) The death of the People's Princess came as a blow – I always found the Royal Family a bit freaky! – but I had a real sense the public were willing me to succeed. A pity the same couldn't be said for the media who were only too willing to see the worst in the Bernie Ecclestone and Peter Mandelson affairs. Looking back, I feel bad about forcing Peter to resign. But at the time it was him or me. So what the hell!

I find also that Mo Mowlam's part in the Northern Ireland peace process has been rather overstated. So to put the record straight, it was all down to me. The talks had reached an impasse and I said to Gerry and David, "Look guys, we're on a journey," and they said, "Cool Tony, We're with you."

If only Iraq had been that simple. I know there are some of you out there who want me to apologise, but life isn't that simple when there's a war crimes indictment at stake. Look, I feel the deaths of our servicemen every bit as keenly as if the bullets had pierced me like stigmata, but sometimes one has to just stand up and do the right thing even if the evidence isn't there. OK, I will admit I did have a bit of a wobbly – Cherie had to give me big cuddles, know what I mean! – when it turned out Saddam didn't have WMD, but I honestly never lied about them. It was just one, small, teeny mistake and everyone tore me to pieces! Give us a break! And for the record I didn't always have a plan to go to war. The first I heard of it was when Statesman George – Top bloke! Top thinker! – phoned to say US troops were going in!

I was pretty fed up when everyone failed to see what we had achieved in Iraq, but an audience with the Pope, who said, "It is you who should be baptising me", soon cheered me up. And I felt a sense of duty to protect the country from Gordon's incompetence. "You're just waiting until everything's about to go pear-shaped," he would yell. As if! It was only my darling John Prescott's desire to be out of the limelight as my deputy that prompted my resignation. Selfless little old moi!

Yet, though I feel proud of my achievements and sad at the direction the Labour party is now taking, my journey is not over. It continues ever onwards into farce. May my blessings rain upon the Middle East!

Digested read, digested A journey . . . along the path of self-righteousness.

Welsh V Londoner

Flanders & Scotland

All hail Belgium. Plucky little Belgium is now showing the way against the corporatist cardinals of Europe's mother church. On Monday this week the separatist New Flemish Alliance secured most seats in the Belgian assembly. The party leader, Bart de Wever, favours "evolutionary evaporation" of the Belgian state and the emergence of Flanders as a freestanding member of the European Union. Sooner or later, he will get his way.

In 1992 (but on 1 April) the Times published a front-page story pegged to a Belgian public service strike reporting a secret plan for Flanders to rejoin the Netherlands. French-speaking Wallonia would go to France and Brussels become the independent capital of Europe. An editorial remarked that "the dissolution of Belgium comes as a shock", especially as a radio shutdown meant Belgians were "unable to check the date". The paper was inundated by enraged Belgians who, despite producing Magritte and Tintin, lacked a sense of humour.

The Times was 18 years ahead of itself. The joke is coming to pass in the corridors of Brussels. Belgium has been an artificial construct since its invention in 1830. Until recently the Flemish-speaking 6.5 million were dominated by the French-speaking four million in Wallonia. The country never evolved the customary institutions of a unitary state, such as nationwide parties, a single language or a common media and political discourse. Everything was north versus south.

Since the 1980s Flanders and Wallonia have been given ever more devolution, as has the French-speaking Brussels enclave within Flanders. Each round has yielded a desire for more. Over the past two decades Belgium has ceded to Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels services such as health, education, development, agriculture, even foreign trade treaties. Only taxation and social security are national, and these are the proximate cause of Flemings' anger, since their taxes pour south to finance Wallonia's "social dependents".

During the election Wallonia's socialist leader, Elio di Rupo, ignored Europe's economic crisis by calling for ever more transfers from Flanders, for higher state spending on health and pensions and for price controls on food. Belgium is thus a microcosm of the EU, a treaty state in which political entities claim resources by territorial negotiation. The result was inevitable. Just as German taxpayers are finally fed up with subsidising Greek pensioners, so Flemings are fed up with subsidising Walloons.

In these circumstances Belgium's elite has looked to supranational bodies such as Nato and the EU for its status, even as statehood disintegrates beneath its feet. Despite being the battlefield for Europe's wars throughout history, Belgians have no enemies other than themselves. Why should they be expected to cohabit in coalitions that notoriously take months to form and weeks to collapse?

However much Euro-enthusiasts wish it were otherwise, the craving for lower tier self-government refuses to die. Indeed, it is booming. In Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, even the UK, concession after concession is made to devolutionary sentiment. It is made with a patronising nod at the parish-pump quaintness of separatist leaders, dubbed populist, extremist or right-wing, never just democratic.

To the Economist, de Wever is a "populist bruiser". To the Times, his success has "potentially disastrous implications" for Europe. Similar language is used of the Italians' Northern League, Scotland's nationalists and Spain's Catalans. No one says why. To modern Eurocrats, localists are merely below the salt.

Countries dissolve when the political logic that held them together dissolves. There is no reason why an independent Flanders should not be as resilient as Slovakia, Slovenia, Ireland or the Baltic states. Bigness is no guarantee of prosperity, usually the opposite. Big statism is a hangover from 20th-century imperialism and the needs of perpetual war. It is now claimed for globalisation, but as that draws power away from democratic institutions, so the self-governing urge claws it back.

The crisis in the euro was the widely predicted result of the EU's leaders running faster economically than they could ever walk politically. At first they thought they could even out the performance of nations by transferring huge sums from rich to poor. This infuriated the rich and enslaved the poor in dependency. The move from what was a free-trade union to what is touted as a "fiscal-transfer union" has gone beyond what is tolerable to the disparate European electorates who must foot the bill. The euro saga is Belgium times 10.

The European movement now mimics the Roman Catholic church in the 16th century. Its popes and cardinals, in perpetual conclave, fear Protestant dissent on all sides yet do nothing but reassert the dogma of ever-closer union and demand that everyone works for a "better Europe". Rebellious provinces must be suppressed. Any move to democratic referendum, such as in 2005, must be ignored. Top-down edicts pour forth and cash is lavished on subordinate governments. Should a Verdian Don Carlos emerge "to defend the glorious cause of Flanders", he must be wiped out by the Inquisition or ridiculed by the press.

The best analysis of this phenomenon remains Larry Siedentop's Democracy in Europe, which argued, in 2000, that the union was doomed without a legitimacy beyond the synthetic nonsense of the European parliament. Language, geography, history, kinship and customs of consent had to be recognised as the building blocks of a new democracy. Siedentop called for English as the common European language, the evolution of a collective political class, more respect for localism and a European senate. It was not enough to consign national and sub-national identities to a department of minority languages, funny clothes, country dancing and cheese.

The one thing Siedentop did not contemplate, writing still in the 20th century, was that the major premise of his analysis might simply be rejected by Europe's peoples. They might no longer regard it as essential to their security and prosperity to enter a union to finance the spendthrift welfare of Greece and Spain. A new generation might not see the corruption of Brussels as "a price worth paying" to avoid a third world war. Flanders might simply want to rule itself.

Since the debacle of the Lisbon referendums, Euro-pluralism has emerged as proof against ever closer union. The Single European Act of 1986 appears to have been a sort of psychological boundary, beyond which political unity should not have strayed. Go too far, as did the Lisbon treaty, and the threads would snap. Europe would lose touch with its component countries, and they would lose touch with their subnational identities. In extremis, they would face break-up, as have Spain, Austria and now Belgium. The history of enforced European union has, after all, been a long parade of catastrophic dictatorship.

When a country – let alone a continent – lacks the bonds of a collective nationhood it is no longer a country, merely a state. Nations forged in war do not necessarily survive peace. Belgium may retain the trappings of sovereignty, a monarch, an army, a customs union and (perhaps) a football team. But taxes and cross-subsidies will only be acceptable within self-governing communities with a shared sense of co-responsibility, not across whole continents.

Ignoring this maxim is what is sorely testing the eurozone and is breaking Belgium. Nor should the UK think itself immune. Devolution everywhere is a political one-way ticket. After Flanders, Scotland.

by Simon Jenkins

38 Years Later... Justice?

Ralph Miliband & Son

George Into No 11...

Who in No 10?

Good & Shocking Guardian Edito

General election 2010:

The liberal moment has come

Citizens have votes. Newspapers do not. However, if the Guardian had a vote in the 2010 general election it would be cast enthusiastically for the Liberal Democrats. It would be cast in the knowledge that not all the consequences are predictable, and that some in particular should be avoided. The vote would be cast with some important reservations and frustrations. Yet it would be cast for one great reason of principle above all.

After the campaign that the Liberal Democrats have waged over this past month, for which considerable personal credit goes to Nick Clegg, the election presents the British people with a huge opportunity: the reform of the electoral system itself. Though Labour has enjoyed a deathbed conversion to aspects of the cause of reform, it is the Liberal Democrats who have most consistently argued that cause in the round and who, after the exhaustion of the old politics, reflect and lead an overwhelming national mood for real change.

Proportional representation – while not a panacea – would at last give this country what it has lacked for so long: a parliament that is a true mirror of this pluralist nation, not an increasingly unrepresentative two-party distortion of it. The Guardian has supported proportional representation for more than a century. In all that time there has never been a better opportunity than now to put this subject firmly among the nation's priorities. Only the Liberal Democrats grasp this fully, and only they can be trusted to keep up the pressure to deliver, though others in all parties, large and small, do and should support the cause. That has been true in past elections too, of course. But this time is different. The conjuncture in 2010 of a Labour party that has lost so much public confidence and a Conservative party that has not yet won it has enabled Mr Clegg to take his party close to the threshold of real influence for the first time in nearly 90 years.

This time – with the important caveat set out below – the more people who vote Liberal Democrat on 6 May, the greater the chance that this will be Britain's last general election under a first-past-the-post electoral system which is wholly unsuited to the political needs of a grown-up 21st-century democracy.

Tactical option

The pragmatic caveat concerns the danger that, under the existing electoral system, switching to the Liberal Democrats in Labour-Conservative marginal constituencies might let in an anti-reform Tory party. So, voters who share this principled enthusiasm for securing the largest possible number of Liberal Democrat MPs next Thursday must, in many constituencies, weigh the tactical option of supporting Labour to prevent a Conservative win.

Hopefully, if this really is the last election under the old system, such dilemmas between head and heart will apply less in future. For now, however, the cause of reform is overwhelmingly more likely to be achieved by a Lib Dem partnership of principle with Labour than by a Lib Dem marriage of convenience with a Tory party which is explicitly hostile to the cause and which currently plans to redraw the political map for its own advantage. The momentum for change would be fatally undermined should the Conservatives win an overall majority. The Liberal Democrats and Labour should, of course, have explored much earlier and more explicitly how they might co-operate to reform the electoral system. During the campaign, and especially since the final leaders' debate, the appetite for co-operation has clearly increased and is increasing still. Mr Clegg's Guardian interview today underscores the potential for more productive engagement with Labour and is matched by fresh, untribal thinking from his potential partners.

This election is about serious choices between three main parties which all have something to offer. David Cameron has done what none of his immediate predecessors has understood or tried to do: he has confronted the Conservative party with the fact that it was out of step with the country. He has forced the party to become more diverse and to engage with centre-ground opinion. He has explicitly aligned himself with the liberal Conservative tradition which the Thatcherites so despised during their long domination of the party. He has promoted modern thinking on civil liberty, the environment and aspects of social policy.

Mr Cameron offers a new and welcome Toryism, quite different from what Michael Howard offered five years ago. His difficulty is not that he is the "same old Tory". He isn't. The problem is that his revolution has not translated adequately into detailed policies, and remains highly contradictory. He embraces liberal Britain yet protests that Britain is broken because of liberal values. He is eloquent about the overmighty state but proposes to rip up the Human Rights Act which is the surest weapon against it. He talks about a Britain that will play a constructive role in Europe while aligning the Tories in the European parliament with some of the continent's wackier xenophobes. Behind the party leader's own engagement with green issues there stands a significant section of his party that still regards global warming as a liberal conspiracy.

The Tories have zigzagged through the financial crisis to an alarming degree, austerity here, spending pledges there. At times they have argued, against all reason, that Britain's economic malaise is down to overblown government, as opposed to the ravages of the market. Though the Conservatives are not uniquely evasive on the deficit, a large inheritance-tax cut for the very wealthy is the reverse of a serious "united and equal" approach to taxation. Small wonder that the Cameronisation of the Conservative party sometimes seems more palace coup than cultural revolution. A Cameron government might not be as destructive to Britain as the worst Tory regimes of the past. But it is not the right course for Britain.

If this election were a straight fight between Labour and the Conservatives – which it absolutely is not – the country would be safer in the hands of Labour than of the Tories. Faced in 2008 with a financial crisis unprecedented in modern times, whose destructive potential can hardly be exaggerated, the Labour government made some absolutely vital calls at a time which exposed the Conservatives as neoliberals, not novices. Whether Labour has truly learned the right lessons itself is doubtful. Labour is, after all, the party that nurtured the deregulatory systems which contributed to the implosion of the financial sector, on which the entire economy was too reliant. How, and even whether, British capitalism can be directed towards a better balance between industry and finance is a question which remains work in progress for Labour, as for us all. At the highest levels of the party, timidity and audacity remain in conflict. Nevertheless, Labour, and notably Alistair Darling, a palpably honest chancellor who has had to play the most difficult hand of any holder of his office in modern times, deserves respect for proving equal to the hour. Only the most churlish would deny the prime minister some credit for his role in the handling of the crisis.

Labour's failings

But this election is more than a verdict on the response to a single trauma, immense though it was. It is also a verdict on the lengthening years of Labour government and the three years of Gordon Brown's premiership. More than that, any election is also a judgment about the future as well as a verdict on the past. A year ago, the Guardian argued that Labour should persuade its leader to step down. Shortly afterwards, in spite of polling an abject 15.7% in the European elections, and with four cabinet ministers departing, Labour chose to hug Mr Brown close. It was the wrong decision then, and it is clear, not least after his humiliation in Rochdale this week, that it is the wrong decision now. The Guardian said a year ago that Mr Brown had failed to articulate a vision, a plan, or an argument for the future. We said that he had become incapable of leading the necessary revolution against the political system that the expenses scandal had triggered. Labour thought differently. It failed to act. It thereby lost the opportunity to renew itself, and is now facing the consequences.

Invited to embrace five more years of a Labour government, and of Gordon Brown as prime minister, it is hard to feel enthusiasm. Labour's kneejerk critics can sometimes sound like the People's Front of Judea asking what the Romans have ever done for us. The salvation of the health service, major renovation of schools, the minimum wage, civil partnerships and the extension of protection for minority groups are heroic, not small achievements.

Yet, even among those who wish Labour well, the reservations constantly press in. Massive, necessary and in some cases transformational investment in public services insufficiently matched by calm and principled reform, sometimes needlessly entangled with the private sector. Recognition of gathering generational storms on pensions, public debt, housing and – until very recently – climate change not addressed by clear strategies and openness with the public about the consequences. The inadequately planned pursuit of two wars. A supposedly strong and morally focused foreign policy which remains trapped in the great-power, nuclear-weapon mentality, blindly uncritical of the United States, mealy-mouthed about Europe and tarnished by the shame of Iraq – still not apologised for. Allegations of British embroilment in torture answered with little more than a world-weary sigh. Large talk about constitutional change matched by an addiction to centralisation. Easy talk about liberty and "British values" while Britain repeatedly ratchets up the criminal justice system, repeatedly encroaches on civil liberties, undermines legal aid and spends like there is no tomorrow on police and prisons. Apparent outrage against the old politics subverted by delay, caution and timid compromise.

There are reservations too, though of a different order and on different subjects, about the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats are a very large party now, with support across the spectrum. But they remain in some respects a party of the middle and lower middle classes. Labour's record on poverty remains unmatched, and its link to the poor remains umbilical. Vince Cable, so admirable and exemplary on the banks, nevertheless remains a deficit hawk, committed to tax cuts which could imply an even deeper slashing of public services. Though the party has good policies on equality, it has not prioritised the promotion and selection of women and ethnic minority candidates.

Matched priorities

Surveying the wider agenda and the experience of the past decade, however, there is little doubt that in many areas of policy and tone, the Liberal Democrats have for some time most closely matched our own priorities and instincts. On political and constitutional change, they articulate and represent the change which is now so widely wanted. On civil liberty and criminal justice, they have remained true to liberal values and human rights in ways that the other parties, Labour more than the Tories in some respects, have not. They are less tied to reactionary and sectional class interests than either of the other parties.

The Liberal Democrats were green before the other parties and remain so. Their commitment to education is bred in the bone. So is their comfort with a European project which, for all its flaws, remains central to this country's destiny. They are willing to contemplate a British defence policy without Trident renewal. They were right about Iraq, the biggest foreign policy judgment call of the past half-century, when Labour and the Tories were both catastrophically and stupidly wrong. They have resisted the rush to the overmighty centralised state when others have not. At key moments, when tough issues of press freedom have been at stake, they have been the first to rally in support. Above all, they believe in and stand for full, not semi-skimmed, electoral reform. And they have had a revelatory campaign. Trapped in the arid, name-calling two-party politics of the House of Commons, Nick Clegg has seldom had the chance to shine. Released into the daylight of equal debate, he has given the other two parties the fright of their lives.

A newspaper that is proudly rooted in the liberal as well as the labour tradition – and whose advocacy of constitutional reform stretches back to the debates of 1831-32 – cannot ignore such a record. If not now, when? The answer is clear and proud. Now.

Michael Foot (RIP)

Wanted (in Britain)

In Cambridge...