2010 in Dicks

2011 has started and seems disappointingly familiar, but it gives us all a chance to look back at the year just gone. And I felt that I'd look back at all the dicks who have made the world slightly worse. And where better to start than...

THE CONSERVATIVE-LEAD GOVERNMENT: We all knew it was coming. There was no way that New Labour could hold on any longer, but the popularity of the Liberal Democrats (a phrase that is as laughable now as it was last January) just kept the Tories from a majority. And then gave them the MPs they needed anyway. Much of the anger has been (rightly) directed at Nick Clegg for backtracking on virtually every promise that made him so popular in the first place, but let's not forget that to bend to the every whim of the Conservative Party, there needs to be Conservative policies to begin with. So whilst Cameron and Osborne are happily pissing on everyone, let's not take out all of our anger on the guy pointing and laughing.

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: This was the year when Paul Chambers was convicted for an illegal use of irony, but at least he was fortunate enough not to end up in hospital at the hands of the police (allegedly, of course). Surely the worst injustice of the year is of the rape victim jailed for eight months for retracting her genuine allegations. Though she has since been released, she still has to fight for her children. The husband had all the charges against him dropped, begging the question: How can they convict someone of falsely retracting allegations of sexual assault, and yet not convict the (therefore genuine) rapist? It saddens me that the organisations that are suppose to protect me -- the police and the CPS -- have shown themselves to be thuggish and shockingly misguided.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Not for his work with WikiLeaks, an organisation which I support and I believe has done a remarkable amount of good work in revealing what it has, but for his entirely dick-ish remarks following the recent allegations against him. Sunny Hundal has compiled a brilliant piece on whether the accusations of conspiracy stand up, but regardless of his guilt or innocence (neither of which have yet been proven in court, and I would not like to speculate on it), he has recently said some phenomenally unpleasant things, such as claiming he fell into a "hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism", that Switzerland is the "Saudi Arabia of feminism", and that these women had got into a "tizzy" about something as trivial about the very serious subject of STDs. WikiLeaks would do very well without him.

KAY BURLEY, ADAM BOULTON AND BEN BROWN: 3 journalists, two working for Sky and one for the BBC. Boulton and Burley provided us with such shoddy journalism that people were compelled to shout at them in the street, but then at least you would expect that of Sky "News". Ben Brown's treatment of Jody McIntyre was a different matter, with the supposedly "impartial" BBC doing all they can to pin blame on a victim of a violent and horrific incident. The official statement from the editors completely misses the point. Would they really interview anyone in the same way? Is Crimewatch an interrogation of the victims, ascertaining whether they were "rolling towards" the criminals, perhaps? It was not a balanced view, but a disgusting display of victim-blaming.

NADINE DORRIES: I have tried several times to write a post about Dorries, about her 70% fictitious blog that she uses to make personal attacks on her constituents, but every time I begin I realise that Tim Ireland has said it earlier and better than I ever will (and been the victim of some vicious and nasty smearing as the result), so I'll just point you in his direction.

DANNY DYER AND ZOO MAGAZINE: Oh how we laughed back in May when Danny Dyer joked about cutting women's faces. Except we didn't, because it was deeply unpleasant. Dyer initially claimed to have been misquoted, but has since offered this apology, in which it becomes clear that the problem was that he was quoted, albeit an off-record aside. He has since resigned, and released the film Pimp to huge box-office takings of £205. Zoo magazine, however, which approved and printed the column, continues to be published to a wide readership.

THE POPE: An inevitable inclusion on this list, the Pope currently feels more like the head of SPECTRE than the Catholic Church. Accusation after accusation after accusation of child abuse and subsequent cover-ups have been leveled at Catholic Priests (too many to link to, but the length of this Wikipedia article is startling in itself), and yet all Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his lot have done is attack homosexuals, secularists, and women. I said back in September that

I will never be able to put into words the horror and sadness that I feel, knowing that there are millions of people who hold this hateful, bigoted, misogynistic homophobe in the highest regard possible.

Since then, the Pope has claimed that paedophilia wasn't a big deal in the '70s, and that child pornography is increasingly seen as "normal". Am I really expected to moral advice from a man who opposes the use of condoms more than child pornography?

So, that's why he's my Dick of 2010. Until the end of Monday you can vote for five dicks here (Cameron, Osborne, Dorries and Dyer were my other choices, by the way).

Happy New Year!

The Tuition Fees Post

Oh, this one has been building for a while...

I've been a Liberal Democrat for pretty much all of my political life. I live in a Lib Dem constituency, and my local MP is Jeremy Browne. Since he's a Lib Dem, he signed the pledge saying he vote against any rise in Tuition Fees. Here he is, number 145 on the spreadsheet. Good for him.

Except he'll be voting in favour of raising the cap to £9,000 on Thursday. Here's his Facebook note on it, and if you can't click through, here's what he says:

This government is having to take dramatic steps to avoid a budget crisis.

The British government is already borrowing an extra £425 million every single day. We will soon be spending £1,000 million a week just on the interest on our debt – way more than the total education budget.

If we run away from this crisis it will make matters even worse. The budget for the NHS is being increased and the overall spending on schools is being protected. But other budgets are being reduced because Britain has to live within its means.

I wish the new government had inherited a budget surplus, but instead we are tackling a disastrous deficit.

The fact is that the Liberal Democrats did not win the election. Our manifesto contained the policy to end tuition fees over a six-year period, however that was not a policy we could deliver as the junior partners in a coalition with just 8% of the MPs in the House of Commons.

Instead, within very difficult budget constraints, we are making the new system of higher education funding as fair as possible. It would have been easy to stand on the sidelines and not get involved, but the right thing to do is to play a strong part in coming up with the best possible solution.

The Liberal Democrats have helped produce a genuinely fair and progressive system that will help people from poorer backgrounds go on to higher education. No one has to pay upfront fees. Graduates will make monthly payments based on their earnings and only after they are earning £21,000 (up from £15,000 today). These monthly payments will be lower than they are today in every case.

So for example, a care worker with a starting salary of £21,000 increasing to £27,000 in real terms over 20 years would pay an average of £7 a month over 30 years. Under the current system, they would be paying back at least £45 a month immediately.

Universities which have higher charges will have conditions placed on them to ensure that they reach out to children and families on low incomes. And we have created a much fairer deal for part-time students who have previously been discriminated against. Our reforms will actively encourage social mobility.

Everyone in Britain will need to contribute to reducing the ruinous budget deficit so we can get our country back on its feet. That is being done whilst protecting the excellence of out universities and ensuring fair access for all potential students.

Disappointed is not the word.

The Liberal Democrats have shown just how little they value their promises to constituents. It wasn't just a manifesto pledge, it was a signed pledge to the NUS, and a key identifying feature of Liberal Democrat policy, along with Proportional Representation and the abolition of Trident (how are those going by the way?). Instead, they place the coalition agreement and the promise of power over the voters who put them into government in the first place.

And it is the voters who have given the Lib Dems the chance to be in government. That 8% figure that Browne quotes (which, to be specific, is nearer 9% at 8.8%) looks tiny, but the other 92% is not all Conservative. In fact, it's less than 50% (47.2%), and that's why we have a coalition government, rather than a majority -- a coalition which the Liberal Democrats are part of. Take into account number of votes cast, rather than just MPs, and almost a quarter of the country voted Lib Dem (23%), giving them about 2/5 the popular vote in government.

And yet, they seem oblivious to this fact. They make it seem as if they're just making up the numbers of a Conservative government, and providing the convenient fall guys for the harsh reactions to the cuts -- ideological ones, rather than essential. I feel like it's a cliche to mention the banks at this point, but only because the countless cries to punish them for their mistakes, rather than the students who have done nothing towards this crisis (how can they? They're under 18!), seem to be falling on deaf ears.

I haven't even directly mentioned the proposal themselves yet. I feel I have little to add after Aaron Porter's 10 points comparing the government's scheme to that proposed by the NUS, other than to agree with him when he says that "It is ridiculous to assume that students won’t take the price of a course into account when choosing it". Simply the threat of £9,000 a year is enough to scare people out of Higher Education, because it looks like a gamble, and a lack of state support makes University Education appear an individual luxury, rather than the right, or the essential part of our society, that it is.

Jeremy Browne's constituency is marginal, and if recent polls are anything to go by, he will probably lose his seat, along with many other Lib Dems, in the next election. Why? Well, I voted Lib Dem expecting a difference should they get to power. I voted Lib Dem because of their stance on Tuition Fees, on Trident, on immigration. I voted Lib Dem because they weren't the Conservatives. Enough people felt like me to create a Hung Parliament, and I supported the ConDem coalition because the calming influence of the Liberal Democrats would take the sting out of the Tories. I was wrong. If the AV vote goes against them, there will be almost nothing to show for them except to expose them as spineless turncoats. How can I vote for a party I no longer trust?