What causes trans people?

Silly question I hear you say. "Sexual intercourse between your mum and your dad of course!" comes the reply. OK but why are some people trans and some not? There have been all sorts of theories including something in our childhood, too much estrogen/testosterone in your mum's tummy, environmental pollution etc...

There are even scientists beavering away trying to solve such problems; coming up with ideas such as androgen receptors, brain stems, even DNA. The trouble is, what is known as "publication bias"; the fact that if a study produces no link between something and being trans then it is unlikely to be published, makes the small number of studies which are published (and usually subesquently discredited) seem less noteworthy.

However, there is a much more plausible and simpler explanation for the existence of transgender people, and it comes form the work of the Professor of Biology at Stanford University, Joan Rougharden. Her detailed analysis of nature and the way most of the animal kingdom and almost all of the plant life on this planet do not fit the pattern of fixed, stable sex categories or gender identities suggests that our view of the world is not what it ought to be. In fact Roughgarden is seriously critical of biolgists from Darwin onwards, for the way they have presented social, sexual and gendered life within the animal kingdom. It is not by chance that animal social and gendered behaviour, if you look at Origin of Species, resembles that of middle-class southern England in the 1850s. The animal kingdom has been viewed through the lens of existing social expectations of gendered behaviour by biologists and zoologists for at least 150 years. It is this bias which has done such harm to our perceptions of ourselves as a species. The bigoted, the narrow-minded and the outright vicious have used biology to argue that cisgendered heterosexual monogamy is natural and as such should be considered 'normal' and anyone whose life does not fit this must be at best deviant, at worst criminal or evil.

The fact that these justifications for bigotry and hatred were based on a fiction is only now beginning to come out. Strangely, whenever a natural history programme, or school textbook wants to talk about our nearest relatives on the evolutionary chain, they refer to chimpanzees. The social life of chimpanzees is conveniently close to that which the rich and powerful in capitalist society would like our society to be. They are fiercely competitive to the point of being violent towards each other, very territorial, heterosexual and selfish, the perfect image for human societies such as the laissez-faire, 'liberal' unregulated capitalist ones would like to project as natural, and without alternative.

The problem is that, of course, chimpanzees are not solely our closest relatives, they are jointly closest along with the bonobos. You don't hear so much about bonobos do you? There's a reason for that: Bonobos live in sharing, cooperative, collaborative and peaceful communities, and not only that, they enjoy intense and varied sex lives, all of them being bisexual. This image does not suit the controllers of our society and as such we hear very little of them.

Similarly we hear very little about animals whose gender structures that differ from ours. The image of the coy female attracted to the biggest and most aggressive alpha male is a myth not borne out by reality. In some species there are multiple genders - such as one type of salmon which has three male genders and two female genders, and in some species the female in not coy she is aggressive, and in some she isn't interested in having a strong, handsome male as the father of her offspring, she wants a male who will help her care for them. In some species the male and female enjoy a family life lasting only 10 minutes, spending the rest of the time either in single-sex company or alone. The cis-het nuclear family suddenly doesn't appear so natural any more.

So what does all this have to do with gender identity? Well the answer is that what humans perceive as the binary gender system, has nothing to do with what is natural. The binary gender system is a social construct, like nationality or class. In fact humanity is naturally a very diverse species. In fact it would be bizzarre to assume that we were not much more diverse in every way compared to all other species on this Earth, after all, we posess larger brains than any other animal with the possible exception of dolphins, who of course do not posess the ability to communicate or create and use technology in the same way we do. As such it would be unreasonable to expect humans not to be extremely diverse, given that the animal kingdom is very diverse, especially from the point of view of gender identity and expression.

So, from my point of view, transgender people are not to be explained by theories of social depravation as young children, or by pre-natal occurences or hormone imbalences or other physical damage. We are transgender because being transgender is a natural element of humanity. There is no explanation for our existence which is not the same as any explanation for the existence of any other human being. We exist because the human race naturally has transgender people in it. There is nothing unnatural about being transgender, trans people, in that respect, are no different from anyone else.

What is unnatural however, is the gender binary system which most societies live by and which most of us expect to fit into, and which expects all 6 billion people on this planet to fit neatly into its two categories. It is this which is unnatural not us. It is time people woke up and realised this. Transgender is natural. Binary gender is not.

Citizen Gove

Recently there have been some reruns on TV of an old 1970s sitcom called "Citizen Smith". In it a deluded left-wing politico, leader of the "Tooting Popular Front" believes that the country (or at least Tooting) is waiting desperately to be led into a revolutionary left wing government. Of course the reverse happens and shortly after this the country, in its wisdom, elected a particularly nasty Tory government in the shape of Margaret Thatcher.

The ultimate deludinoid Citizen Smith has now been surpassed in the delusion stakes by Citizen Gove. The new Tory education secretary has become the most deluded man in history, comfortably surpassing Wolfie Smith in the delusion stakes.

That he has achieved this within only a couple of months (yes it has only been a couple of months!) of being in government, demonstrates quite how spectacularly out-of-touch this man is with reality. Out of 25,000 schools in the UK just 153 have actually applied for his "academy" status, the Tories' flagship education policy. That is well under 1% of schools.

Citizen Gove, almost certainly aided by his chums in the Daily Fail, The Torygraph, the Scum and the Daily Excess believed the propaganda they built up over years, indeed probably decades, by the right-wing media. This created an unquestioned consensus in the media that there were all these schools, teachers, heads, pupils and parents just waiting to have their local schools set free from the Kremlin-like control of the local councils which were deliberately ruining educational opportunities for children by...well...er...running the local schools...er... democratically.

This iron-fisted grip of...er...democratically elected...councils imposed their will...er...on schools on whose governing bodies the parents had a majority...

Parents were crying out, looking for leadership and turning towards the shining light of Michael Gove, the education secretary who would set them free, the exalted hero who would replace these ...er...democratically elected councils... and ...er... democtratically elected boards of governors with what the parents really want; the freedom for schools to go-it-alone, and do away with all this democratic hinderance as they are taken over by large private companies, religious zealots or run centrally by Government diktat. This is what parents wanted, this was the media consensus, this is what all right-minded people (especially journalists who tended to regurgitate official pronouncements on education without questioning their contents or wisdom) believed. More meddling in structures, freeing schools from local control and accountability and runnig them directly from Whitehall would herald a new dawn for education in which all children would learn their 3R's and every school would be special.

Into more than 20 years of constant restructuring and 'freeing' schools from local control jumped Citizen Gove. The man who would save the schools of this country from the their own locally elected representatives, and the yoke of accountability to the parents of the children they teach. Here he was, this was the man, his time had come! With one bound Michael Gove was going to be the man to set them all free, to give them all exactly what they had wanted.

Except it turned out that, exactly what they all wanted, was to have nothing to do with Citizen Gove's hair-brained ideas. Despite the fact that Gove had used emergency legislation to rush through his Bill to enable these schools to start up as soon as possible, despite the fact that even his own Tory MPs had described his actions as undemocratic, the future of the country was at stake and he needed to act fast to save the children from their own parents and their parents' locally elected representatives.

Predictably he has made a complete and utter fool of himself. Unforced error after unforced error, he could be an England goalkeeper.

The thing about Gove is that he is the same as all other education secretaries only more so. He has been to school so he knows all there is to know about education. Education secretaries have, for as long as I can remember, taken this attitude. An I-know-better-than-teachers-heads-parents-educationists-advisors-inspectors etc... It is like appointing someone with no knowledge of economics to be chancellor (OK so Osborne has no meaningful knowledge of economics but at least learning about economics is fairly easy compared to understanding how children learn). Education secretaries have all actually not really had a clue about learning, much less about teaching. So what have they done? Pretend they are doing something. Tinker with the superficial structures of schools rather than listen to teachers and education experts about how to improve teaching. It's not as if there are no models of excellent education systems in other countries to get ideas from; for example Finland's concentration on quality teaching with high quality teacher training and more professional freedom and respect for individual classroom teachers. This is in contrast with the top-down management structures of the UK, where decisions, which should be taken at classroom level, are too often taken at management or national level.

The problem is that Gove, and the rest of the Tories don't want to look at the successful countries like Finland. Because they know they will not like what they see. So they carry in making arses of themselves instead and fiddle while Rome burns.

Reclaiming "Transgender" and speaking for ourselves

This post is about the dangers in allowing non-transgender people to define and speak for transgender people. This is something which is becoming more common and which is likely to become increasingly so as trans people become more visible and political progress towards greater trans liberation is made. The conspicuous absence of trans people at David Cameron's LGBT reception in Downing Street suggests that the trans community has to consider who represents it and misrepresents it to the rest of the world.

The word "transgender" has become a phenominal success. Indeed it is one of the linguistic and political success stories of the last 20 years. Yet, in its current usage it is only 18 years old. In fact "transgender" was originally coined by Virginia Prince back in the 1970s to describe people (like myself) who were somewhere between "cross-dresser" and "transsexual". However it was used by Leslie Feinberg in a publication entitled "Transgender Liberation: A movement whose Time has Come" in 1992.

This was a call to arms and, in this case the word "transgender" was used as an umbrella term for all the various different transgender people who could come together to achieve political advancement of trans people. This is the current main usage of the word. As a Foucauldian political rallying-point it has been astonishingly successful and the last 18 years has seen transgender people emerge and become much more publicly visible and politically active, engaging in campaigning to achieve liberation for all trans people everywhere.

Although there is still a great deal to do there have been advances in terms of legal protections for transgender people such as legal gender changes on official documentation and protections against discrimination in areas such as the provision of goods and services and employment. The academic discipline of Transgender Studies has established itself as a bona fide academic field of study, and transgender people have been elected to important positions such as the state governor of Hawaii and MPs in Italy and New Zealand. Two transgender people have been appointed to work in senior positions in President Obama's administration. Even the normally conservative Royal Air Force has accepted the first transsexual pilot almost without batting an eyelid. Sass Rogando Sasot and Justus Eisfeld became the first transpeople to speak at the UN General Assembly last year. The depathologisation of transgender people is gathering pace with, so far, France and Cuba removing transgender people from the list of people with mental health issues. Holland, Spain and Scandinavia and other many countries are expected to follow soon.

Astonishingly, all this was achieved after what Susan Stryker described as the two "dead" decades for transgender people. The 1970s and 1980s represented a 20-year period when it became acceptable to bully, misrepresent, pathologise, demonise and ridicule transgender people. Malicous and ignorant "academics" such as Janice Raymond called for our extinction by public pressure from non-transpeople. "Mandated out of existence" was the phrase she used, a thinly veiled esprit fasciste inviting discrimination, pathologisation, cultural non-acceptance, media mistreatment and social bullying of transgender people who, remaining subalterns who cannot speak, were unable to defend themselves. Her call for non-transgender people to act against transgender people was as clear, her intention to mobilise the masses against a minority group reminiscent of the Nazi history she attempts, through dissemblement and innuendo to attach to trans people. The" Transsexual Empire" remains a dire warning of the need for transgender people to remain eternally vigilant against this sort of incitement to hate-crimes.

The success of "transgender" in bringing the trans community together has been documented by David Valentine, in his excellent study, 'Imagining Transgender'. However, he raises some issues about definitions and inclusion within the the group 'transgender' which, even in the last few years of the last century, were becoming problematic. Some people who were born male but lived as women did not see themselves as "transgender", especially those from ethnic minorities in the US, and some trans people who were born female may not include themselves in the category. Some, such as gay male drag queens, also did not include themselves under the umbrella term "transgender", although here the politics of gay liberation intervenes as gay men have sought to throw off stereotypes of effeminacy. The emergence of "transgender" as a category distinct from "gay" has been helpful to their cause from this point of view. Incidentally, the group within the transgender umbrella which has probably gained most politically in the last two decades has been transsexuals. Some view this being because they remain within the gender binary. However this is a rather simplistic view; Tam Sanger's research has shown that many transsexuals simply feel that changing their physical sex enables them to feel much happier and spiritually whole in a body which better approximates their identity rather than actually being a 'man trapped in a woman's body' or vice versa.

However we are now however seeing other people, who are not transgender, or organisations which do not have adequate knowledge of transgender people starting to define, to the perception of the public at large, what "transgender" means. Although Sefton's Transgender Work Volunteer Scheme is to be thoroughly approved as an example of how affirmative action can be taken to help transgender people in an area of high unemployment, and represents a fantastic piece of inclusive thinking, it still equates "transgender" with "transsexual". Yet people who are not transsexual may well be deterred from applying for this if they do not meet this criteria. Even two academics, Rebecca Dittman and Pam Meecham, who should know better, have written a scholarly article about transgender children where "transgender" appears to be interchangeable with "transsexual". Given that we know that not all transgender children become transgender adults, and not all those who do will want to have sex reassignment surgery, this is not merely a case of negligence but could be downright dangerous.

A more recent academic article by Richard Elkins and Dave King now seeks to identify two 'new' transgender identities; "Autogynephilic transsexuals" and "Adult male sissies". This is where I start to have problems with the concept of "identities". From my point of view these represent sexual practices rather than any particular type of identity. Autogynephilia has been the subject of much conflict between transgender people and that small group of psychiatrists who continue to try and pathologise us. Indeed, there appears no reason for this definition of a particular group to exist at all, other than to provide the likes of Blanchard with regular and substantial income. Elkins and King fail to enter into any discussion of this other than describing it as 'unwelcome', a description they also attach to "adult male sissies". In my opinion, these do not represent "Gender Identities" nor should they be lumped together under the "transgender" umbrella.

The reasons for this are not simply because, I believe, these activities should be categorised as sexual activities rather than gender identities, but because of the origins and purpose for the adoption of the term "transgender" by trans people. "Transgender" should be seen as first and formost a political term, and one which covers a range of different people from cross-dressers, genderqueers and drag kings to transsexuals and many others in between. It is not an academic category. That is not to say that academics should not study transgender people nor consider the study of transgender people to be an academic discipline; "Transgender Studies". This is not a problem. The word "transgender", and what is included in it is first and formost a political matter and a political matter for transgender people. Attempts by Elkins and King and others to 'discover' new transgender identities should as such be viewed as political rather than academic acts. As transgender people we should therefore be careful as to whether we accept the inclusion of these 'categories' and the political effects of that inclusion. It should not be up to cisgender academics to decide who should and should not be considered transgender. As Donna Haraway argues in The Cyborg Manifesto "Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousnes". The matter of who is involved in the construction of this consciousness is vital to it's effective functioning as a political concept.

I am not saying that transgender people should have the absolute right to veto who is and who is not transgender (not that we would all agree on everything anyway) but it is probable that the inclusion of such groups would not only cause division within the transgender community but also result in a loss of credibility from a political point of view whilst at the same timehaving no potential to achieve tangible political gains. The tiny number of Autogynephillic transsexuals (if indeed they do exist) are not going to benefit, in terms of their political or civil rights from being considered a seperate category from other transsexuals. As such we should ask what the political purpose of including "Adult male sissies" and "Autogynephilic transsexuals" as distinct categories within the transgender umbrella. Transsexuals are of course fully paid up members of the trans community (although some post-operative transsexuals would disagree with me there) what transsexuals' sexual preferences are is no concern of anyone else in the same way that cisgendered people's sexual preferences are not a determinant of their gender identities. Likewise with adult male sissies; it is probable that not all of these people would view themselves as transgender anyway, much less feel that their gender identity is dependent upon something they do in private at home. If the variety of sexual practices engaged in by cisgendered people are not used to define them as cisgendered, or to categorise them as a seperate category within cisgendered men and women, why should these practices apply to transgender people?

Whilst this post is ont intended to discourage our cisgender friends and supporters, it is clear that cisgendered people who are involved with the trans community need to be careful, as most of them already are, to respect the wishes and opinions of the transgender community.

We need constantly to remind ourselves that transgender is first and formost a political concept, and a particularly successful one at that. As such it is the more the property of transgender people than anyone else and who is included as transgender, or as seperate identities within that umbrella, should be a matter for us all, not academics. The consequences of weakening the transgender movement and a return to the days when "academics" such as Janice Raymond can openly call for others to engage in hate-crimes against us will not be borne by cisgender academics but by ordinary transgender people in their everyday lives, workplaces, schools, streets and homes.

Why Iain Dale is wrong about Parliament Square

I must confess I like Iain Dale, he is one of those few Tories who is prepared to argue stuff rather than just restate things over and over again Gobbels-style like most Tories do.

So it is bearing this in mind that I have to respectfully disagree with his blog post today about the protest camp in Parliament Square. Iain argues that this is unslightly and a disgrace and that we should not allow it. Falling back for a moment into traditional Tory mode he derides those who disagree with his position as being "lefties" and associates by implication those who occupy this space as scroungers and the like. Strangely he also argues that the camp is effectively denying others the right to use the square, although quite what anyone else would want to do in the middle of a roundabout that is busy 24/7 is beyond me.

However his view on this is taken from a typically Tory POV; Tories have never had to struggle to get their message heard by large numbers of people, if not by everyone in the UK. The protesters in Parliament Square have never had that luxury. They do not have right-wing billionnaires who own national newspapers trumpeting every inch of their cause; The Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, The Daily Express, the Times, the Evening Standard, Sky News, etc, etc, etc...

Those who wish to have issues raised which the super-rich owners of these papers do not want to have discussed find themselves effectively censored, their arguments not publicised their activities unknown to huge swathes of the population. Let me give you an example of this censorship.

A week or so before polling day this year, a friend of mine felt compelled to go public about one of the Tory candidates, one Philippa Stroud, the Tory candidate for Sutton & Cheam and now one of Theresa May's special "advisers" (and I thought the government was supposed to have been cutting out such 'consultants'). She related how Stroud had funded a church in which gay and trans people could be taken for strange voodoo-like religious rituals to "cure" them of their homsexuality or to "fix" their gender identity "problems". She felt compelled to do this because David Cameron had been at pains to tell everyone how much the Tories had changed and were no longer the homophobic bigots many of them quite clearly are.

Stroud was living proof that the Tories' "liberal" approach to human rights was neither as firm nor as embedded as Cameron would have liked us to believe. This information being made public just before an election could have deterred a lot of people from voting Tory on the mistaken premise that the hateful bigots were no longer part of modern "progressive" Conservatism; that interesting and ultimately meaningless contradiction in terms. Apart from the Observer this story was reported nowhere, with the notable exception of the Telegraph (which prides itself on the quality of news, even news which sometimes undermines its own editorial positions). Nobody ran it. It was effectively censored.

Just to compare, so that the argument cannot be made that it was not important enough, the story about a no-hope, maverick Labour candidate in an unwinnable constituency, who had been disowned not only by his local party but by his own mother, criticising Gordon Brown made headlines everywhere at the same time.

So people who espouse causes which do not fit into the manufactured news agenda of the wealthy far-right supporters of the Tory party are familiar with the concept of the artificial invisibility of some information, stories and arguments. As such the only means they have at their disposal to publicise them is to use tactics such as occupying prominent places, so this is very much a free speech issue. Free speech, is only an academic right, if no-one else can hear you. It becomes a huge issue when certain information is deliberately and systematically censored by self-appointed private-sector censors; "Banned in Boston" still lives on today in the UK media. Until the media in the UK becomes less one-sided, more democratic and stops resorting to censoring information it doesn't like, the existence of the demonstration in Parliament Square will be as justified as the existence of Iain Dale's blog.

The Time for Action for Labour is NOW!

The leadership and membership of the Labour Party need to wake up and get their act together extremely quickly. There is a political disaster for the people of this country about to happen and only swift, intelligent and careful action by the Labour leadership (together with the Lib Dem leadership) can prevent it from happening.

The Threat

People seem almost oblivious to the real threat to the prosperity and wellbeing of the people of this country. It is not the economic crisis or even an Icelandic volcano. It is the Tory proposals on constituency reform. Their proposals would result in a system with an inbuilt Tory majority which would be impossible to defeat. We are looking at perpetual Tory government with Labour, or indeed, any other party would never be able to break down.

The Tory Plan

The Tories will never concede electoral reform in a pact with the Lib Dems. As such it has to be expected that there will be no coalition with them and the Lib Dems will be forced to try a coalition with Labour and other smaller parties. It is at this point when the Tories and their friends in the media start to rock the boat in every direction possible. The statesmanlike pose that Cameron displays will disappear into a kind of aloof sniping, with the press barons hacking away at the Rainbow coalition as hard as they can. In other words any coalition will need to be rock solid if it is to resist the Tory Political Establishment’s drive for another election as early as possible, in the knowledge that they have loads of money and the other two parties are broke.

Resistance and cooperation is the only solution

A Rainbow coalition would need to work and work quickly and it would need to get electoral reform on the statute books as fast as possible, with or without a referendum and in the face of enormous bully-boy tactics of the multibillionaire media barons who support the Tories. For this to happen the Labour Party needs to do the following;

• 1. An urgent leadership contest while Brown serves as caretaker leader.
• 2. Adoption of Proportional Representation as a matter of party policy
• 3. Ditching some of the most unpopular policies such as ID cards
• 4. To be ready to form an electoral pact with the Lib Dems

The reasons for this are as follows;

Brown is too easy a target for the media. Someone new with a good media manner who can deal with the media onslaught and be listened to by the public and who can be ready to fight any subsequent election at very short notice.

PR is going to be the only way ahead for the UK, the old system cannot cope any more, failure to adopt it will eventually result in the Tories gerrymandering their own system which will result in 15 or 20 years of unchallenged Tory rule. Everything labour has fought for, all the positive changes we have introduced, will amount to nothing.

With both parties out of funds the only way we would be able to fight a short-notice election this year would be to adopt an electoral pact which would mean that, in some constituencies Labour candidates would not stand in order for the Lib Dem candidate to be given a clear run at the Tories and vice versa in seats where Labour was the main challenger. Some sort of local or regional twinning might be necessary. This would obviously put some noses out of joint but would stop the Tories in their tracks.

Let me also put it another way; if we don’t do it now we will have to do it in five, ten or fifteen years’ time. Only then we will have had five, ten or fifteen years of Tory cuts, crime and economic misrule. Collaboration will have to be the norm from now on unless Labour wants to leave the population of the country to the mercy of a particularly nasty right wing political-media establishment which will tear the fabric of our society apart, and which will be impossible to dislodge.

This is the time when politicians can really show their mettle, this is the time for great deeds, sacrifice and fortitude. The alternative does not bear thinking about.

“A Small, Closed and Restricted Offer”, and other Excuses

There is no sense in dealing with the Tories; they have form for lying and will stab Clegg in the back over PR. A much better deal with Labour could be worked out...

As Nick Clegg talks to Cameron about his inappropriately described “big open and comprehensive offer” he would do well to take the utmost care. Unless he comes away with the promise of an immediate binding referendum on electoral reform, as a bare minimum, he might just as well not have campaigned in the election. Anything less will cost him votes and his reduced number of seats will further dwindle, he will end up the worst loser.

I say ‘immediate’ because agreement on a referendum a couple of years or even months down the line would give the Tories the chance to stab him in the back and call another election whenever they can find an excuse to do so. Let’s face it, the very last thing the Tories want, is any change to the voting system. Indeed their only policy on this issue proposes to make the iniquities of the first past the post system even worse, to the extent that many observers believe it would have the effect of building in a Tory majority which would make it virtually impossible to elect anyone else.

This Tory policy of rigging all subsequent elections should represent a dire warning to Clegg that the Tories cannot be trusted. Cameron has used the expenses scandal as an excuse to try and make parliament even more unrepresentative. Indeed this is one of the main characteristics of Tory politics: the excuse. The Tories have a core political philosophy which is rarely expressed. It includes the clear determination to reduce enfranchisement, obtain and centralise power vesting it in unelected, often private sector organisations, at almost any cost and to use that power for the benefit of the few rather than the many. As such their main modus operandi revolves around the excuse. Any excuse. Their policies are based on searching for the excuse to get away with whatever they can get away with. The economic crisis caused by their friends in the City is the perfect excuse to slash and burn public services way above what is absolutely necessary. The concept of the so-called ‘big Society’, a vague and malleable enough concept to be used as an excuse to cut police and social services. Their policy on free schools, now being abandoned as a failure in Sweden from whence they got the idea, is an excuse to create greater inequality in the education system...

In other words they have form, their principles are flexible to the extent that they will find any kind of excuse to justify any policies which suit them in their all-embracing quest for power at any cost. The main basis of this power is the first-past-the-post system, a system which skews the election results meaning that they get access to unrestrained power on a regular basis. To abandon it would effectively mean that they will never be able to achieve the same level of power in the future. First Past the Post is as such the main basis for their power. Proportional representation is something they will do anything to avoid. ‘Anything’ in this case would include finding any excuse to prevent this from happening. As such precipitating another general election would be something they would be very keen on doing to prevent a referendum from taking place or to prevents the results of a referendum from being enacted. Of course Cameron’s promise of an all-party commission to look into the issue of electoral reform is one of the most obvious way of achieving this. Kick the issue into touch, get into power and call a general election before the issue is resolved…

Fortunately Nick Clegg has to obtain a deal which he can sell to his party. The chances of doing that without an immediate, binding referendum on electoral reform are slim. However he would be ill-advised even to consider wasting his time on negotiations without this crucial part of any deal. He needs to secure agreement on this before discussing anything else. He needs to remember however, that a Tory-Lib Dem pact would be the biggest political gift to Labour in history. With a new leader and ditching some of its policy baggage associated with the Blair-Brown era, Labour would be able to Hoover up a fair proportion of Lib Dem votes along with the inevitable dissatisfied Tory ones.

Let us be realistic; A Tory-led government would become extremely unpopular very quickly. In fact it would have one of the distinctions of being already unpopular even before it takes office. Clegg would, without doubt, suffer by association from this and with the combined exodus of progressives to a Labour Party headed by one of the Milibands, and with people who leave in revulsion at the unnecessarily swinging cuts, their vote would be the gift that Labour has always wanted. Assuming that no proportional representation system has been agreed with the Tories, we would be looking at a landslide for Mr Miliband or Mr Miliband whenever the next election took place.

It is clear that Clegg feels he would be in trouble if he went into coalition with Labour and might lose any referendum on electoral reform (although I am not convinced any referendum would be necessary), because of “public” revulsion (as one paper put it); a euphemism for “Tory media media outrage” at him being seen to prop up a labour prime minister who is unpopular. Obviously his stated demand that Brown goes would be fairly easily met by the Labour Party but having Harriet Harman as caretaker PM for a few months until a new leader can be re-elected would also not go down well.

So I would like to propose a solution which might trump all this threatened media backlash; arrange a referendum in late September or early October and install Nick Clegg as Prime Minister until that time. This would enable Labour to sort itself out with a new leader and give the Lib Dems the best platform from which to argue the case for electoral reform in that referendum. The media would find it much harder to attack a Lib-Lab pact headed by a Lib Dem than by a Labour Prime Minister. A public agreement for the Premiership to be handed back to Labour for the rest of the parliament after the referendum would ensure that Labour get their turn in the time needed to set up the new voting system. Once that has happened, the Lib Dems would probably no longer find it in their interests to continue in a coalition government and an election would be inevitable.

A progressive coalition (which don’t forget would have to include some of the smaller parties such as the Nationalists, Northern Irish parties and the Green MP) would actually represent more than 60% of the electorate, and could be repeatedly justified in such terms. I cannot see any other way that proportional representation can be achieved, other than by such a large coalition.

The Tories don't have policies, they have excuses...

The Tories main excuse is the excuse to reduce public spending. The economic problems caused by their friends the bankers have given them the perfect excuse to slash and burn the public sector. An excuse to reduce spending on the NHS and increase waiting times once more, an excuse to cut the pay of hospital staff, an excuse to put up prescription charges.

Their excuse to give more money to rich middle-class parents is that they want those parents to set up their own "free schools". This is an excuse the Tories have taken from Sweden, where they introduced free schools. This was so successful that they are now closing them all down because of the damage they do, taking resources away from everyone else and increasing inequality in education.

The excuse they will use to cut money to the poorest people is that they need "incentives to work". I always thought the best way to motivate someone to do a job was to pay them a living wage. At the same time the excuse that they will use to justify tax cuts for the richest 3000 people is that they need incentives to work...

But their biggest excuse is the reform of the voting system, and by this I do not mean proportional representation, I mean their new "super-first-past-the-post" system. Reducing the number of MPs to 500 constituencies will get bigger and parliament will become even more unrepresentative. The new system will make it much more difficult not to elect a Tory government, a system in which probably 250 of these constituencies are Tory safe seats with half a dozen LibDems and the rest split between Labour and the minor parties. An inbuilt Tory majority for ever. The excuse will be to reform parliament, an excuse he will use to make it almost impossible to elect anyone else. Proportional non-representation.

Whatever happens this excuse for a party should not be put in the position where it can use these excuses to pander to its own dysfunctional prejudices. We need a government which acts based on what is best for the country, not one which is there simply as an excuse to make the rich and powerful richer and more powerful based on excuses rather than coherent policies.