It’s great to see such incisive and detailed discussion of the education bill. Take today’s theguardian:

Michael Connarty, MP for Linlithgow and East Fife, said: “I think Ruth Kelly has done a wonderful job with a very, very bad idea, but it’s still a bad idea.”

Yup, that’s pretty much the level of debate in this article (and we’ll skim over the fact that Michael Connarty is an MP for a Scottish constituency not covered by this bill). The whole piece is about trying to predict how many Labour MPs will rebel. Is news so thin on the ground that we can’t just wait and see? Last night’s Panorama was on the same subject, following the rebels and trying to infer whether a big rebellion would speed Tony Blair’s depature. Discussion of the proposals themselves was relegated to a few mentions here and there.

Governments are supposed to lose votes, of course. Blair’s massive majorities in 1997 and 2001 insulated him and the idea of Labour trouncing all opposition on every vote became the status quo. Now that Labour are less dominant in the House of Commons, you would expect Blair to lose the occasional vote. But what’s most tedious about this “will-they-won’t-they” coverage of the rebellion is that the bill is going to pass.

The Tories, Her Majesty’s Opposition, think they have a great wheeze to get rid of Blair sooner – and they long to face to Gordon Frown. We’re being told that a bill passed only because of Tory support would be a disaster for Blair. And yet, with the Tories backing the education bill, Blair is likely to achieve one of the largest majorities for any of his public service reforms. Whether we like the proposals or not, Blair has secured a consensus amongst a significant chunk of Members of Parliament – a sign, surely, of success for a Prime Minister. If the Tories really want to hurry him out of Number 10, actually defeating his flagship education policy would surely be a better way.

From theguardian again:

The prime minister’s working majority is 69, so the rebels need 35 votes against to force a reliance on the Conservatives. One rebel campaigner said this would leave Tony Blair running a “minority administration”.

No, it wouldn’t. Because this is one issue, and on this one issue the Tories are voting in favour. That’s an administration with an even higher majority than it got in May 2005, not a minority administration. It may be a sign that Blair is implementing Tory policies – but to whom is that news after nearly nine years of his premiership? It could equally be a sign that the Tories now back New Labour policies.

Nor does relying on Tory support show that Blair has lost the support of his party. If 50% of his MPs were voting against, then yes. Even if 20% were voting against him. But we’re talking about a rebellion of around 10%. They are the ones who will be appalled if the bill gets through on Tory votes, but we already know most of them want Blair out. The vast majority of Labour MPs will vote in favour.

There’s an excellent leader in today’s theguardian about them thar cartoons. While I value freedom of speech and right to cause offence, I agree with the article that this doesn’t include an obligation to cause offence – so there’s no chance of me putting the images online here in solidarity.

People who are offended by these cartoons are well within their rights to protest: that’s as much of a freedom as to print them in the first place. Boycotting Danish products – while a bit extreme – is a perfectly valid way of getting a point across. Storming embassies and kidnapping civilians isn’t.

My understanding (although I’m not a theologian so I stand to be corrected) is that the original reason for banning images of the Prophet was to prevent idolatry. I can’t help wondering if certain people’s responses are just that.

Two choice selections from Wednesday’s paper. First, in the corrections column, the paper withdraws an entire story:

We said in error that the rap artist 50 Cent is billed to appear in a Sunderland pub on February 29. Neither the performance nor the date will take place. The next leap year is 2008.

Goodness knows how they managed that but the words “press” and “release” and the phrase “cut and paste” spring to mind. Meanwhile, Simon Hoggart on Mark Oaten’s chances:

The reason why [Lembit] is backing Mark’s campaign may be because it is slightly more likely that a heavenly body will destroy all life on earth than that his candidate will become leader of the Lib Dems.

Oh, Polly, Polly, Polly… I’m tempted to write a letter to theguardian, but rather than cut my rant down to something short and pithy, let’s do the show right here.

Polly wants to see Red Ken given some more powers. Everyone loves good old Ken, so that’s OK. Let’s not have lots different waste authorities for London, but make them into one. Might be sensible. Let’s take powers from the Government Office for London, a UK body, and devolve them to the elected mayor of London. Excellent. She argues that councils need more control of planning to help regenerate their areas. Fine (although this would also give them more powers to be the very NIMBYs she complains about elsewhere in the article).

But… Polly has found herself a worthy-sounding project in Lambeth which might be blocked by local LibDem councillors, but which Ken would back. Ergo, local councils should lose powers over this sort of thing, and it should be up to the Mayor.

Or rather, up to Ken. Because it’s all very well demanding this when you agree with the Mayor and disagree with the borough council, but what if it was the other way around? Making constitutional changes on the basis of who hold particular posts at a particular time is never a good idea. For every Labour voter in a Tory council area wishing the Government would overall the local “tin-pot dictators”, there’ll be a Tory voter in a village somewhere demanding that Labour let the local Tory council veto a new incinerator/wind farm/asylum seeker detention centre. And if the Tories get back into power nationally, the two groups will swap.

Why would a party political Mayor of London be less inclined to oppose automatically, as Polly suggests, a proposal from another party than a local council group? Why should Kenthe Mayor, running the whole of London, be more appropriate to decide on the structure of an estate in Lambeth than Lambeth council? If she wants devolution – she argues that the council should approve the plan because local people back it – Polly should be asking for the local neighbourhood to have the power to institute this sort of change without needing approval from a distant authority, whether that’s the local council, the Mayor of London or the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Polly cites “accountability” as a reason for giving these powers to Ken:

This is the kind of arbitrary nonsense that happens right across London as tin-pot dictators in the 32 boroughs run economies the size of small African countries with virtually no accountability. In this empty democracy, few people vote and no one knows the name of their council leader, council member or even which party has control. But the one person voters do know is the mayor of London. Give him the power and make him accountable if he gets it wrong. Let them blame him for London’s woes – and praise him for improvements.

(“Small African countries” have their own governments but carrying the analogy to its logical conclusion, a load of them should group together and elect one man – well, it would be a man, wouldn’t it? – to run all of their affairs centrally.)

So how is Ken accountable? Elections are once every four years. In the mean time, the GLA – a body elected by proportional representation (which Polly backs) that is more representative of London than a single Labour mayor – doesn’t have the powers to truly hold him accountable. There is an election every four years, but it’s across the whole of London, so Ken could turn down every popular planning application in Lambeth and still remain Mayor on the votes of the other boroughs. Is that local accountability?

What about those London boroughs who have directly elected mayors themselves. Why should their powers be handed over to Ken?

Local government needs reform, but what it doesn’t need is to be eviscerated. Just because boroughs are part of London doesn’t mean they don’t have their own identities and their own problems, and it doesn’t mean that they should be run from the other side of the city. Taking powers away from bodies the public already take little interest in will not enliven local democracy. Give them the power to make a difference – and, of course, an electoral system that makes them representative of their communities – and people will notice them.