“I got here about two months before Christmas, and after a month I just collapsed,” a friend told me in the Coach and Horses, the fugly Soho pub, initially made famous by Jeffrey Bernard’s ‘Lowlife’ column in The Spectator – and later, by a rumour that Jarvis Cocker had met the girl he wrote ‘ Common People about in it.* “I just couldn’t hack it anymore. I closed the door and didn’t come out till I flew back to Oz for Christmas.”
Amen to that, sister. In the background, someone was doodling on the piano – recently introduced for Saturday night knees-up singalongs, for the benefit of Japanese tourists who have just seen Priscilla, The Musical. Other than that there is no music, ever. The Coach is a perfect venue for London horror stories.
Unlike most West End pubs, it’s never been re-Victorianised, with fake caryatids and bevelled mirror tat, instead retaining faded salmon-pink carpet and scuffed, varnished wood. Time settles like a slow Guinness. You half expect the bartender to turn on a radiogram and hear that we’re bombing Suez again.
Phillipa and I were trading war stories over the process of, well, breathing, in London – a place where the simple business of getting a bank account, renting a mailbox, etc pitches you into a Boschesque inferno combining bureaucracy, the war on terror, residual snobbery and the collapse of trust in a fuming post-Thatcherite slum of nine million dole cheats and Russian mafiosi.
To rent a flat, for example, you not only need to pay a fee to the agent (who is also getting a fee from the landlord), you may have to pay a fee simply to view the property. After that, you pay a deposit and a credit check fee. If you fail the latter, some landlords keep the fee. Others keep the deposit as well. After that – more fees.
By midway through an afternoon of doing this, largely around properties so small that the tenants had to step outside for the agent to show us the flat – this being Soho, I swear to God at least one such couple was a hooker and her john – you are done, juiced. What wears you down is less the rudeness, the crowds, the dirt, the expense, but the simple and omnipresent requirement that you prove your legitimacy as a citizen over and over again.
Whatever meagre protection renters had against landlords and agents were largely abolished by the Thatcher government, and new Labour didn’t come running to bring them back. But the attitude is more deeply rooted than that, an ultimate expression of the idea that people who have to find their own housing shouldn’t be in the business of looking for it at all.
If you can’t afford an agent to find you domiciliation and communicate the address to your butler, perhaps you should never have left your village of Little-Sodding-On-The-Wold in the first place. Everyone flakes eventually and pulls the door for a while. It’s why the TV and biscuits are so good here.
The general lack of anything resembling modernity is one of the reasons why Gordon Brown’s announcement today that he would try and push through plans for a referendum on constitutional reform has been greeted with light but general derision. The reforms Brown announced – speaking at a press conference timed, by an extraordinary coincidence, to coincide with Clare Short’s no-sh-t appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry – were specifically to do with the voting system, and the UK’s first-past-the-post system.
More than two-thirds of UK MPs are elected with less than 50% of their constituency’s vote, a situation which demands change – just as it did in the 1900s, when Keir Hardie, the first Labour leader, drew attention to its manifest unfairness once electoral contest had become three-cornered.
For decades politicians have sought to reform the system. Let me rephrase that. For decades, Liberal party politicians – and members of subsequent parties there from derived – have sought to reform the system. Now regularly scarfing up around 22% of the vote, the Lib-Dems get around 10% of the seats. Aside from a brief period in coalition with Labour – in the late 70s, a great time to choose to be in power with Labour – the Libs have never been in a position to wield their slice of power.
Should there be a Conservative landslide in 2010, they’ll miss out again. But with the polls coming in – a recent one puts the Tories only 7 points ahead, a margin which would leave a hung parliament – the middle party believe they may be on a winner.
So does Gordon Brown, which is why changing the voting system has become a matter of urgency, a mere 12 years and three elections after taking power. Like most Labour politicians, Brown has had to be dragged kicking an screaming to any abandonment of fppp – not only because a new system would give progressives the chance to play the parties off against each other, but also because of a belief that fppp somehow expresses something amounting to a general will amongst the population, a cleaving to at least one defined programme.
How to support the movement for electoral change, while ensuring that fppp has the best possible chance of remaining in place?
Brown’s ingenious answer is to champion the single worst reform proposal of all – a shift to what the Brits call AV, and what we know as a single-member compulsory preferential vote. When the late Roy Jenkins was commissioned by New Labour to re-paper some shelves – sorry, produce a report on UK constitutional change – in the late 90s, AV was the one system he insisted shouldn’t be introduced, for all the reasons we know so well.
Labour’s remaining enthusiastic shils, now seeing the faint possibility of the merest glimmer of something resembling hope, were all over the evening politics shows spruiking AV to a sceptical audience. That a recasting of votes in the most recent election took the Tories from 220-odd seats down to 175 has nothing to do with their new-found enthusiasm for the principle.
The truly wonderful thing about the introduction of AV is that it would make British politics even worse than it is. One of the most important effects of fptp is that a seat can be won or lost on the strength of a local member with a solid enthusiastic base – who, facing a split opposition, can triumph with around 35% of the vote. That gives selected individual members more clout, and in turn makes possible a system in which the dissent and defection from the party whip is frequent and expected.
These are people the leadership would like to do without. Clare Short, the Blair government’s international development secretary, turned out to be one of them, and her evidence to the Chilcot inquiry today was useful for its forthright view of the lead-up to the war, and the manner in which the flagrant contradiction in attorney-general Lord Goldsmith’s advice to Cabinet was ignored by a sycophantic bunch of Blair clones – who howled Short down when she attempted to raise the issue (or so she says).
Having announced at the time that she would resign should the UK join the war without a second UN resolution, she was talked out of it by silver-tongued Tony, playing on that greatest of female weaknesses, self-immolating self-sacrifice. Promised a substantial budget for Iraqi reconstruction, she was given sixty million quid, which didn’t pay for bottle-tops. Then she quit, which served to make her look mercurial rather than the war wrong.
That her account of the circular logic that went into the invasion – we need to commit the troops to the region in case we invade/we’ve committed the troops now, we’ve got to go – received an actual grilling from the panel, in contrast to the tongue-bath given to Mr Tony. But Short held her own, and some of the grace notes – her regular teas with Gordon Brown, where he complained that Blair was committing to war out of a narcissistic obsession with his legacy – manages to make both Brown and Blair look worse than they did.
Not that it mattered. Indeed it mattered so little that the BBC cut out of the feed halfway through, to go to Gordon’s press conference on the voting reform scam – preferring to focus on future failed reform, rather than past reform failures. Or, choice, as we call it in the UK. And everyone will withdraw behind their doors again, until winter clears. And in the Coach, the Guinness will settle, and a hand will switch on the radiogram, to tell us we are bombing Suez again…
*later found to be apocryphal.
Dispatches from London are interesting for a while, but this is becoming a bit Bazza McKenzie for me. Why isn’t Guy here writing about something more interesting? Have we traded Rundle for Monckton?
[“When the late Roy Jenkins was commissioned by New Labour to re-paper some shelves – sorry, produce a report on UK constitutional change – in the late 90s, AV was the one system he insisted shouldn’t be introduced, for all the reasons we know so well.”]
Those being?
[“One of the most important effects of fptp is that a seat can be won or lost on the strength of a local member with a solid enthusiastic base – who, facing a split opposition, can triumph with around 35% of the vote”.]
This has nothing to do with FPTP, and everything to do with the major parties only getting about 70 per cent of the vote between them. In almost any constituency where a Clare Short (leaving aside the fact that she never polled less than 50 per cent) got 35 per cent, the result under AV would be decided by preferences from the large minor parties, which in most cases would mean the Liberal Democrats. How many such voters would favour a Tory over our hypothetical Clare Short?
AV suits me quite well, thanks. I could consider multi-representatives in larger communities, but exhaustive preferential, by whatever name, is well suited to sparse populations.
What gets to me is the lop-sided and obscure process whereby the Senate returns d_ckheads every election, gives Tassie its single biggest natural advantage over the other states (super representation) and ensures that NSW and Vic are done over regularly in the Senate by parochial self-serving barrow-pushers.
At least the Brits had a go at updating their Upper House a decade or two back. Its time that Aussies did the same.
This is just narcissistic blogging.
Relieve Rundle’s misery. Send him to comment on local government in the Whitsundays…
Yep, I worked in housing in London for far too many years advising private tenants that their rights were something very very close to zero. And yes, if you ever go and live in the UK, never wait for the landlord to give you back your bond/deposit – always take it from the last few weeks rent.
I seem to recall that Clare Short engaged in way too much “crying wolf” and her eventual resignation had nowhere near as much effect as it would have done had she acted promptly at the time of her initial concerns.