Trump Towers Over America

Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States in Washington tomorrow, having previously served as the 45th in that office. American socialists came under massive pressure from the wider liberal left to vote for his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in last November's presidential election, with most understandably succumbing to it, something I still think was neither necessary nor helpful to their long-term goals for a number of reasons.

1. The Democratic party is the major obstacle to the US labour movement establishing some kind of pole, even initially a small one, around which it could organise independent political representation for itself. Within the party's ranks, the unions inevitably play second fiddle to the lobbying of the corporate interests which fund it, and are either sidelined in policy terms or become enmeshed in unprincipled deal making, much as the British labour movement was for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Liberal party.

2. Harris is not particularly radical for a Democrat. It would be a different case if someone like Bernie Sanders, standing on an overtly pro-working class programme, had won the nomination.

3. The election was only really a contest in the seven swing states, all of which Trump won relatively easily in the end. Outside of them, socialists voting for Harris were either unnecessarily adding their ballot papers to an already decisive pile for her in blue states, or wasting them in red ones.

4. Trump is undoubtedly an authoritarian right-wing nationalist whose rule will lead to numerous reactionary decisions, especially in foreign affairs, immigration and tackling climate change, but his inauguration does not signal a fascist takeover in which future elections are cancelled, political parties banned, unions suppressed, meetings and demos violently broken up by stormtroopers and basic civil liberties curtailed, not least because of the federal system which grants US states considerable rights, and if it did voting for a Democratic candidate and advocating that others do likewise would not be an adequate response to stop that threat.

 

Radicals in the Park

I've spent the last couple of evenings listening to local bands Blossoms and New Order playing a few miles away at Wythenshawe Park, the sound carrying clearly across south Manchester.

Wythenshawe Park is the last remnant of the country estate of the staunchly Royalist Tatton family and surrounds their former home Wythenshawe Hall, besieged by Parliamentary forces in the Civil War, which makes it a bit ironic that since the late sixties a statue of their republican nemesis Oliver Cromwell, first erected outside Exchange Station in Manchester city centre in 1875, has stood there, after the road layout around the original location was altered. Queen Victoria once expressed her distaste for the statue of a man who had killed her ancestor King Charles I before a visit to Manchester, and since its move to Wythenshawe Park it has been attacked numerous times because of Cromwell's genocidal policies in Ireland (when he was a bus conductor in the early sixties, my dad witnessed Irish drivers opening their cab windows to spit at it as they went past).

Near the north east corner of the park is a street of modern housing called Hallas Grove. I'm guessing that it's named after the revolutionary socialist activist Duncan Hallas who grew up just round the corner on Sale Road in Northern Moor, served an engineering apprenticeship at the massive MetroVicks factory in Trafford Park where my grandad worked as a toolmaker, and then became a leader of the International Socialists/Socialist Workers' Party, although I'm a bit puzzled as to why the middle of the road Labour types on Manchester City Council would bestow his name on it.

Labour's Lost Love

In the nine o'clock slot filled for the past few weeks by a history of the Premier League BBC2 last night broadcast the first episode of a new series about another modernising project created in the early to mid nineties with the self-proclaimed aim of moving away from a traditionally working-class base and image to attract more middle-class supporters, Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution.

The programme highlighted the differing personal backgrounds of the two men, prefiguring the personal rivalry and policy conflicts that would come to define their relationship in government, but conceded that there was very little that divided them in their overall politics. Indeed, beyond the polling and presentational skills of the press and PR officers hired by New Labour, and a centrist message consciously modelled on that of the US Democrats, it found it hard to identify Blair with any real interest in politics except a vague progressivism picked up as a student at Oxford in the early to mid seventies (where he admitted he was more interested in playing in a rock band than the industrial and social tumult of that decade) and later from his liberal barrister wife. Unlike Brown, who worked his way up through the ranks of the Scottish Labour establishment, he seems to have almost accidentally entered politics through a network of legal acquaintances, before discovering an eagerness to become first a MP and then party leader (you can easily imagine him having been elected as the leader of any of the three mainstream political parties).

In outlining the period before the creation of New Labour, the programme threw up a number of what ifs: what if Neil Kinnock had won the 1992 General Election? What if John Smith had led the party into the 1997 campaign? What if Brown had stood against Blair for the leadership after the death of his friend and mentor Smith? All unknowable of course, but we do in a sense seem to be back where we started in the eighties, with a soft left leader ousting a more radical, but electorally unpopular, one before turning sharply to the right, while apparently unable to land a punch on a Tory government with a large majority despite its mainfest failings.

Back to the Briton's

Having not been for a couple of years, I went to the Briton's Protection in Manchester city centre twice last week: for a meeting of Manchester Jazz Society, and then with Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA to present its award for best Mild Magic pub oustside Stockport.

Like the Unicorn where the Jazz Society met until a few weeks ago, I first went to the Briton's Protection for political and union meetings, some of them fringe events of conferences being held across the road at the former Manchester Central railway station, now an exhibition space and convention centre. The Peterloo massacre, the bicentenary of which falls later this month, took place in the area between the two and features on the pub's sign and a painting inside.

One of Manchester's oldest pubs, the Briton's Protection, with its long front lounge, L-shaped corridor and two rear rooms supplied by a serving hatch at the back of the bar, is known for its interior tiling and the number of malt whiskies it sells (it's also home to Manchester Whisky Club). A Grade II listed building, it's included on CAMRA's national inventory of historic pubs.

From being a former Tetleys house with an average beer offer of a couple of cask bitters from regional brewers (Jennings and Robinsons), it's now expanded its draught range to include the products of local microbreweries and other styles, including mild and stout, and well deserves its award for the former, which it now turns over a cask of every couple of days.

D-Day approaches

With Britain's scheduled departure from the European Union now less than a fortnight away, a secret Government document outlining what a no deal exit from the 28-member trading bloc might entail has come to light.

The 42-page dossier entitled Advanced Planning Regulations If Leave Finally Only Option Left, discovered by a parliamentary clerk inside Lord Lucan's missing backgammon set, lists a number of measures which the government intends to implement on the first day of Brexit, including:

1. Petrol to be rationed so as to restrict car journeys to within ten miles of the coupon holder's home address. Special dispensations may be sought for journeys of an especially patriotic nature, e.g. coach expeditions by ornithologists in search of the sialia sialis above the white cliffs of Dover.

2. A new Small Growers' Relief is to be introduced in agriculture, although HMRC is yet to confirm whether this refers to the stature of the farmer or size of their plot. Keen allotment holder and Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn is said to be drafting an amendent restricting this to the growing of organic vegan produce.

3. Working hours are to be cut across the civil service, staff with surnames beginning A-K working Monday morning to Wednesday dinnertime, those with surnames beginning L-W Wednesday dinnertime to Friday afternoon, and those with surnames beginning X, Y or Z being excused from attending completely.

4. A new 2.8% abv limit introduced for beer and a ban on the importation of foreign wines and spirits to boost domestic production of British vodka, champagne and Jägermeister. Wetherspoons to be nationalised under workers' control in order to maintain public morale.

The new British National Diet to be introduced in all schools (baguettes to be renamed long bread rolls).

Remembering Peterloo

I went to the Peterloo memorial event in Manchester city centre yesterday afternoon to remember the fifteen victims of the massacre in 1819 when a crowd of working-class men and women, assembled on St Peter's Field to demand the vote, then restricted to upper-class men, were cut down with sabres and trampled by horses after the city's magistrates, watching the protest from the upper windows of a house on nearby Mount Street, ordered cavalrymen of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a local part-time volunteer regiment mainly composed of wealthy merchants and mill-owners, to disperse them. Hundreds more of the protestors, many of whom had - as some people did yesterday - walked into Manchester from the surrounding industrial towns of Lancashire and Cheshire, were seriously injured after being attacked by the reservist troops charging at them on horseback and then flung against a wall of bayonet-wielding regular soldiers guarding the edge of the sixty thousand-strong demonstration.

Although a memorial event has been held for the last decade, alongside a campaign to erect a permanent one to the victims near the site of the massacre, this was the first one I'd been to. There were probably a hundred of so my fellow lefties and trade unionists there, mostly my age or older, some of them wearing the red liberty caps first donned by the French revolutionaries of 1789,along with actors from the Manchester area including John Henshaw from Ancoats and Bolton's Maxine Peake who appears in Mike Leigh's soon to be released film about Peterloo.

Mike Leigh has said that he never heard or was taught about Peterloo when growing up in the Higher Broughton area of Salford in the 1950's, despite it having happened only a few miles down the road, and similarly I was never told about it or taken to the site when I was a pupil at primary and secondary schools in Stockport in the 1970s and 80s. It was only a decade or so a go, as result of the ongoing campaign, that a new plaque was placed on the outside of the former Free Trade Hall, now a boutique hotel, which, unlike the one it replaced, acknowledged that people had actually died in the massacre.

I'm hoping that the new film about Peterloo will spark increased awareness, interest and activity around the event and that next year's memorial, on the two hundredth anniversary, will be bigger than those which have preceded it.

The centre cannot mould

Rumours are circulating yet again of a new centre party that is about to be launched and will reshape British politics.

British political parties have always been broad coalitions, with people in them who could easily be in other parties, and would be except for some quirk of geography or their personal history. The first past the post electoral system forces politicians without much, if anything, in common into the same parties because, whilst it works in a two-party system,  it doesn't in one with three or more parties, hence those which get millions of votes at General Elections, but evenly distributed across all constituencies rather than concentrated in a few hundred (the Lib Dems, Greens, UKIP), ending up with little or no parliamentary representation.

There are now three broad camps in British politics:

1. Socially conservative, anti-EU, pro-free market economics (the right-wing of the Conservative Party and UKIP);

2. Socially liberal, pro-EU, generally pro-free market economics ( the Lib Dems, the right-wing of the Labour Party, the left-wing of the Conservative Party);

3. Socially liberal, generally pro-EU, interventionist economics (Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru, left-wing of the Labour Party)

So where would a new centre party draw its support from? The Lib Dems seem to be the main players in the project, with between a dozen and twenty right-wing Labour MP's also rumoured to be ready to join it. I can't see many, if any, pro-EU Tory MP's joining up given that they have far more influence in their own party, if they choose to stand up to the leadership. Some of the more maverick Labour MP's who oppose Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the party (Frank Field, John Mann, Kate Hoey) are also anti-EU, as well as having conservative views on other issues that already don't fit well in a mostly socially liberal party, and would do so even less in a new one.

I really can't see a new centre party becoming a reality, and if it did having any chance of taking off with the electorate. As well as the problem of the electoral system - and, at constituency level, simply splitting the left of centre vote to the benefit of the right - there's also the question of establishing brand loyalty/recognition, with all three major British political parties having stood for election under pretty much the same name since the early twentieth century.

We have of course been here before. The example of the Social Democratic Party in the early 80s, formed by twenty-eight right-wing Labour MP's and one Conservative with masses of publicity, an intial surge of support and some notable by-election victories, which later found itself forced to ally and then merge with the Liberals, is instructive here, and will no doubt be on the minds of those tempted to go down the same path.

Votes for Women?

I've just watched Emmeline Pankhurst: The Making of a Militant, shown on BBC Four last night at the same time that the England football team were taking on Tunisia at the World Cup.

I wasn't expecting much from the programme, but it managed to be even worse than I thought it would be. The Guardian trumpeted it as an "excellent biography" of the suffragette leader, but it was actually a hagiography, the life of a saint, with gushing pieces to camera replacing any critical analysis of her politics, and almost everything about her presented in a misleading or partial way.

That slipperiness started at the beginning of the programme with Pankhurst described as a working mother from Moss Side, Manchester, which, while strictly true, is misleading given that Moss Side was then home to the prosperous merchant class, as was nearby Chorlton-on -Medlock which she moved to, and become a part-time registrar in to supplement her income from the store which she owned, after the death of her husband, a radical barrister whose sudden demise she learnt of while travelling back by train from a holiday in Switzerland.

You would never know from watching the programme that about a third of men, in particular unskilled workers, didn't have the vote in 1914, because of property qualifications - a number that rose as men who had the vote moved into the army or munitions factories in the First World War (other men had more than one vote as business owners or university graduates, a privilege that wasn't abolished until 1948).

Emmeline Pankhurst was in favour of women being enfranchised on the same basis as men, which would have had added about a million upper and upper middle class women like herself to the electoral register; the acts of petty terrorism which she inspired (setting fire to postboxes, smashing windows) to further that modest demand is what gained her the reputation as a militant compared to other women from the same class background, like Millicent Fawcett, who campaigned with marches and petitions, as well as the working-class men and women who campaigned for universal suffrage (I once saw the play "Tea with Mrs Pankhurst" at the old Independent Labour Party hall in Nelson, Lancashire, in which the main character, the millworker and trade unionist Selina Cooper, delivers the immortal line to her, "You don't want votes for women, you want votes for ladies!").

While Pankhurst started out on the left, joining the ILP in the 1890's, she later moved to the right, enthusiastically supporting the First World War, and in the 1920's putting herself forward as a Conservative parliamentary candidate (unlike her daughter Sylvia, who, along with several other of her former supporters, split from what had essentially become a personality cult around her mother and moved to the left).

None of this though has put Manchester's Labour council off from commissioning a statue of her which will soon be erected in the city centre.

Labour in vain

BBC Two last night showed a documentary filmed throughout the campaign for June's General Election, Labour: The Summer That Changed Everything, which followed four anti-Corbyn Labour MP's who hoped that a Tory landslide and a heavy defeat for their own party might just finish off a Leader whom they themselves had spectacularly failed to oust with an, at times farcical, parliamentary coup the summer before, ultimately fronted by the comically inept and now almost forgotten figure of Owen Smith.

The highlight of the programme for me was the moment when the exit poll was announced as voting ended at ten o'clock on polling day, showing that Labour had actually gained thirty seats, the Tories had lost their slim House of Commons majority and their hopes of Corbyn resigning had just evaporated, with Stephen Kinnock, next to his father, the failed ex-Labour Leader and now Baron of Bedwelty, Neil in a social club in South Wales and Lucy Powell amongst besuited young activists in the City Arms, long a meeting place for Manchester councillors, being just round the corner from the Town Hall, both attempting to suppress their obvious disappointment as their hopes for a swift return to what they still no doubt see as normal politics were finally dashed by the electorate.

The programme then skipped forward to the Labour Party conference in Brighton a few months later, with the four looking rather forlorn and friendless amidst the, admittedly a bit gushingly admiring, youthful Corbyn fan club. Having twice failed to persuade the membership to elect one of their own as Leader in successive years, you felt that deep down their thoughts were pretty much identical to those which Bertolt Brecht famously assigned to the Stalinist dictators of East Germany in 1953 after the Berlin building workers' strike sparked an uprising against their rule: "Would it not be easier.../To dissolve the people/And elect another?"

The most bizarre Labour Party-related TV moment of the night had already occurred earlier in the evening, when one-time Cabinet minister and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls brought the ex-Communications Workers Union General Secretary Billy Hayes onto BBC One's Would I Lie To You?, not a programme I normally watch, but which I happened to catch five minutes of while flicking through the channels, and introduced him as his former partner in a Lionel Richie/Diana Ross karaoke tribute act.

Post-election number-crunching

Although less so than others in the past, last week's General Election result threw up some clear differences between the votes won by each political party and the number of parliamentary seats which that gave them.

First Past the Post as a voting system obviously favours parties who are able to build up large votes in individual constituencies, even if some of those are then wasted because they end up surplus to returning their candidate there, and punishes those whose support is spread more thinly across the country. So what would the House of Commons look like if a proportional representation voting system had been used for last week's poll?

There are different forms of PR, from single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies to national lists with thresholds for representation, or a mixture of the two, but assuming a strict correlation between votes cast and seats won it would have given the Conservatives (42.4%) 275 seats rather than 317, Labour (40%) 260 rather than 262, the Liberal Democrats (7.4%) 48 rather than 12, UKIP (1.8%) 11 and the Greens (1.6%) 10 rather than none and one, the Scottish National Party (3%) 19 rather than 35, and the Democratic Unionists (0.9%) who with their 10 Northern Irish seats now hold the balance of power half that with only 5 MP's returned to Westminster.

The outcome might still have been a Conservative minority government, albeit one short of the necessary votes to get its legislation through Parliament without appealing to parties apart from the DUP, but Labour too would have had a possible route to power with the support of other centrist and centre-left parties such as the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP.

Roll on the polls

With a General Election now set for 8th June, the bookies are offering longish odds on anything other than a landslide victory for the Conservatives.

I think the Tories will probably gain about fifty seats, and Labour lose about the same. I can't see the Lib Dems winning more than twenty seats, which would nevertheless be a big step forward for them after their electoral wipeout two years ago, or, unfortunately, the SNP losing any of theirs. This election could also, hopefully, be UKIP's last hurrah.

I also think that after such a result Jeremy Corbyn might, to the consternation of most of his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party, stop on as Leader.

I'm not sure why I continue to make these predictions, having called a Remain vote in the EU referendum and thought that Labour would become the biggest party at the 2015 General Election. On the other hand, I did think, in the face of those who told me that I was dead wrong and that there was absolutely no way that it couldn't happen, that Trump might just win last year's US presidential election.

Fifty-first state?

My email inbox this morning was full of offers for Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving shopping holiday in the United States, the news for the last year or so has been dominated by the US Presidential election, and the chances of London gaining an NFL franchise in the next decade now seem pretty high. With Britain about to leave the European Union, and it looks increasingly likely the Single Market too, might it not be better for us to apply to join the USA?

I can see a number of advantages. We would become part of a federal republic in which policies like taxation and healthcare are decided at state level, but Congress has far more control over Government than the Houses of Parliament does here. Britain, with over sixty million people, would become the most populous US state, and with something like seventy-five Electoral College votes a decisive force in Presidential elections. Americans could also vote for a left-wing, trade union-based party rather than one funded by Wall Street.

Becoming a US state could deal with the national tensions within the UK: Scotland and Wales could join as separate states if they wanted, as could a re-united Ireland. In sport, we'd walk the Olympic medals table.

Economically, Britain would have access to a single market not much smaller than the EU's, and of course we'd also gain the right to live and work there. Joining the US would mean swapping the pound for the dollar, probably not a bad idea as the former plummets, and even the five hour time difference between here and the East Coast isn't that much more than the three hours between there and the West Coast.

Lottery winners

I was amused to see that the Conservative former Prime Minister John Major is being credited by some for Britain's medal haul at the Rio Olympics because it was  his Government which introduced the National Lottery in 1994, and ensured that a large portion of the revenue from it was spent on improving facilities and coaching for elite sports, especially in multi-medal events such as cycling and swimming, a policy others have somewhat outlandishly compared to the State sponsoring of Eastern bloc athletes in the 70's and 80's.

There are three basic arguments against the National Lottery.

The first is that it's a tax on the poor, because poorer people will spend more on tickets in the hope of becoming a millionaire, a sort of low cost, no risk get rich quick scheme, albeit one with little chance of paying off. I'm not sure however that many people, if any, become addicted to buying lottery tickets, as opposed to gambling in high street bookmaking shops or online.

The second is that by generating not just cash for its operators but a sense of excitement around the draw amongst players, it serves as a distraction from the social ills that people would otherwise focus on (the same argument has also been made about mass spectator sports like football). George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four even predicted it when he wrote, "The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention." The problem with this argument is that people can play and be excited about the Lottery and be aware of and angry about the cracks which the cash from it helps to paper over (in the case of sport, it can even generate a sense of solidarity and become a focus for opposition). It also assumes that if such "distractions" were somehow abolished, people would almost automatically switch their attention to resisting our rulers' latest dastardly plans.

The third, and strongest, argument is that Lottery cash substitutes for public spending and lets the Government off the hook in its social responsibilities. If Lottery funding ceased, it's doubtful that public spending would increase to match the shortfall, but while it's clearly a problem if schools, hospitals or homelessness charities become dependent on grants, it's much less of one if the British Olympic track cycling team does. And, unlike your taxes, if you don't agree with what Lottery money is spent on, there's a simple solution: don't buy a ticket.

The many Malcolms

I went to an open day at the local mosque yesterday afternoon,

There was a stall with various pamphlets about Islam, including one about Malcolm X which I picked up. It ends "So many people love and admire him, wanting to be like him, and aspiring to follow in his footsteps, yet they see what they want to see and ignore the rest. We must never forget it was Islam that made Malik El-Shabazz [the Muslim name he assumed in 1964] what he was."

The thought struck me that there not many people who so many claim as their own: black nationalists, Muslims, socialists. In large part, that's because Malcolm was all those things, albeit to varying degrees and at different times in his life.

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam, a sect led by Elijah Muhammad, while in prison in Massachusetts in 1948. The NoI opposed integration with what it called "white devils" and ultimately advocated the return of black Americans to Africa, a position which led it into contact with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.

Malcolm X was drawn to socialism not just because of the racism and exploitation he witnessed in America's black ghettoes from a young age, but also because he saw it as the system by which Cuba and the newly independent former colonies in Africa he visited were advancing themselves economically and socially.

1964 was a turning point in Malcolm's life: he split from the NoI, converted to orthodox Sunni Islam and made the Hajj to Mecca, where he prayed alongside white pilgrims. He also formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity which, while still black nationalist, advocated some sort of alliance with poor whites.

After Malcolm's assassination in 1965, while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in uptown Manhattan, the actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis gave this eulogy at his funeral, which also forms the final scene of Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X.

Boycott Spoons?

Tim Martin, the founder and chairman of pub chain Wetherspoons who is campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union ahead of this month's referendum, has placed beer mats in his pubs urging customers to vote Leave.

Unlike other businesses which are campaigning for Britain to stop in the EU, Wetherspoons doesn't trade with continental Europe and is less reliant on migrant labour than those in agriculture and construction. His opposition to the EU is probably based, at least in part, on the rights it gives his workers to reasonable working hours, breaks, holidays and maternity leave which the right wing of the Tory party want to rip up, one of the main reasons why I'll be voting Remain on 23 June.

Having said that, I'm not going to boycott Wetherspoons as some have said they will, for a number of reasons.

1. They sell cheap food and cask beer which is generally well-kept. In a town you don't know, and at airports and railway stations, they can be a reliable fallback. Although many are large and impersonal, having been converted from former banks, shops, cinemas or snooker halls, some are neither, including the one I go to most often in South Manchester which was built as a pub in the 1930's and still feels like one.

2. I don't expect the owners of the businesses I frequent to share my politics. Tim Martin is somewhat unusual in speaking publicly about his, and there are no doubt many others who share his views without saying so. If we boycott all the businesses whose owners' politics we disagree with, we might find ourselves with a very short list of shopping and entertainment options. I also think the call for a boycott smacks of intolerance of others' opinions.

3. For a boycott to be effective, it would have to be on a very large scale. I don't think many of Wetherspoons customers are that bothered about it to make a real difference, and quite a few will agree with Martin. Equally, I doubt the beer mats will sway anyone who is still undecided.

French past imperfect

I've been reading a lot about French politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century recently.

As well as The French Right Between the Wars, I've gone back to the beginning of Émile Zola's Rougon-Maquart series of novels about the French Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852-70), having unknowingly jumped into the middle of it as a teenager and read a couple of the later ones since. The first novel in the series, The Fortune of the Rougons, is about Napoleon III's coup d'état in December 1851 which led to the proclamation of the Second Empire a year later.

The thing to get your head round about French politics is that as well as the left-right spectrum, political parties are (or at least were) divided by their attitude to the monarchy and the Church, so there were liberal monarchists (like the Orléanists, supporters of the Duc d'Orléans from the junior, cadet branch of the French royal house who wanted a constitutional monarchy), conservative ones (Legitimist followers of the Bourbons, and later Bonapartist followers of Napoleon III), and conservative republicans, both clericalist (Fédération républicaine) and secular (Alliance démocratique).

I'm wondering whether I should brush up my schoolboy French and read some of these books in the original...

Separate but equal?

In the House of Commons debate on same-sex marriage yesterday, one of the arguments used by Tory MP's opposed to its introduction was that gay couples could already have a civil partnership so there was no need to extend the right to marry to them.

David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, responded by saying their position was the same as racists in the American South in the fifties who claimed that segregated schools, housing, hotels etc. didn't mean black people were being discriminated against because they were "separate but equal". That clearly wasn't the case but even if it had been segregation would still have been something to be opposed on principle. So how does the same-sex marriage legislation measure up to that test?

 

The Bill MP's voted for last night bars gay couples from getting married in the Church of England and continues to exclude straight couples from a civil partnership. If I were a MP, I'd have voted for the Bill as a step towards equality but I'd also have put foward amendments removing the remaining barriers to it.

The land of the free market

As you'd expect, the media are giving a lot of coverage to US politics ahead of tomorrow's presidential election. The BBC alone had two programmes last night, one a look at Obama's presidency and the other a documentary about JFK's win in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic primary.

There's a tendency in Britain to think of the Democrats and Republicans as like Labour and the Tories, something that's way off the mark. As someone rightly said the other day, the Tories would never be accepted in the Republican party: nowhere near religious enough, far too liberal on abortion and gay rights and pro-gun control. The Tory, Lib Dem and Labour frontbenches could all easily fit into the Democratic party. The Republicans are the equivalent here of a right-wing fringe party like UKIP or the English Democrats. The "Obamacare" health care reforms that the Republicans have denounced as "socialist" give tax breaks to people who don't qualify for existing federally-funded insurance schemes that provide basic health care for the elderly (Medicare) and very poor (Medicaid) if they take out their own insurance. All the money, from the federally-funded schemes as well as personal insurance, goes to the private health care firms that run hospitals. Sounds like a Tory plan to me.

To look for America

Last night on Channel 4, Matt Frei travelled across the American Midwest ahead of next week's presidential election.

Frei was born and grew up in Germany (he did a very good BBC series on Berlin a couple of years back), was educated in England when his father worked here as a journalist and is now a foreign correspondent in Washington. He seems to have picked up the American habit of referring to pretty much the whole population as "middle class", including anyone who's not a millionaire or homeless. In England, someone like the guy he met in Minneapolis who has two jobs, one in a warehouse and one at night in a off licence, would never be called middle-class. I'm not sure how this started, whether it's working-class people aspiring to be middle-class or politicians thinking it best not to talk about a working class excluded from the American Dream.

Frei's trip from Minnesota to Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky didn't reveal much new - guns, racism, poverty -  but the Republican pollster who told him that no president has been re-elected with unemployment over 7% makes me think Romney becoming president might not be as unlikely a prospect as it appeared a couple of months back.

Vote early

I listened to a discussion on the radio yesterday about whether sixteen year olds should be allowed to vote, a debate sparked by the Scottish Government's decision to let them take part in the independence referendum in 2014.

Young people are often stereotyped as politically apathetic, more interested in the latest iPhone than who the Prime Minister is. What came out in the discussion though was that while 18-24 year olds are the least likely to vote, within that group 18 year olds are much more likely to vote than 24 year olds, suggesting that rather than being uninterested they actually start off idealistic before being disillusioned, like students swinging behind the Lib Dems in 2010 - the ones who'll vote for them again in 2015 could fit inside a phone box.

Sixteen year olds should be able to vote as a matter of general principle but it should also be integrated into their education, allowing students to hold hustings and cast their ballot at college.