Private Owners, Public Interests

I live in the North, in a town built on coal. Colliery towers stand like mute memorials; under a tree around the corner from where I live there's an unobtrusive little plaque telling you the tree was planted in memory of those who died in a terrible mining accident on that site a hundred years ago. And everywhere you walk you see the cracks, snaking under the concrete: subsidence. The ground shifts imperceptibly beneath your feet wherever you are - even temperate countries like Britain get minor earth tremors every now and again - but having big voids miles beneath the real estate amplifies that, and you wind up with cracks in the pavement, cracks in the road, and cracks in your walls which - left too long - undermine your house price - and then, eventually, your house itself.

A friend of mine had cracks in the walls of her house, and decided to do something about it. She got onto her insurance company, who engaged a firm of structural engineers, who surveyed the house with a view to eventually starting work. Said company sent out some serious men who planted devices in the ground which bleeped and flashed and took readings and reported back to their base and, after two years of all this, a schedule of works was sent out explaining how, after a summer of scaffolding and noise and disruption, the subsidence would be fixed. All she had to do was phone the company.

The schedule of works arrived on Friday. My friend called the company first thing on Monday. And then she had to phone the other company: the one that, in the course of the past week, had taken over the original company - a fact no-one had bothered to reveal to my friend - and who had also managed to lose all the data about her house. Data gathered, carefully and painstakingly, over two years of hard work.

The efficiency of the private sector: we hear so much about it, especially since our New Tory Overlords seized power last May. But sadly, as my friend's experience, and those of many others, reveal, this 'efficiency' is a myth.

I was reminded of my friend's experience this morning, reading the news that the rushed closure of the Forensic Science Service means contracts to examine DNA, store biological evidence and clean up crime scenes are being handed over to other companies without police forces having time to do due diligence. This on its own is bad enough, and yet another example of how the Tories' free-marketeering zeal is being applied without any consideration for how  their Hayekian fantasies will actually play out in the real world. But buried in the report is something more unsettling: the reason why the service has to be sold off is because it's at risk of going into administration. Hang on, you might well ask. How can a government department go into administration? Isn't that something that only happens to companies?

Indeed. But the thing is the FSS is a company. It turns out that until 2005 the FFS was, as you might imagine, a government department, but for some reason the Blair administration decided to reconstitute it as a government-owned company - the Home Office's only government-owned company, as the Wikipedia page points out.

To me this is, frankly, astonishing. Forensic science is crucial to policework and the administration of justice. People are convicted and sent to prison on the basis of DNA swabs which are matched to evidence from murders thirty years ago. Isn't that something you want to be centrally administered, subject to all the checks and balances of government oversight? Don't you want that to stick around? Don't you want to avoid the risk of that collapsing and having its work turned over to a bunch of cowboy outfits?

But saying something like that, of course, reveals you to be an unreconstructed big government socialist. A heretic who lacks faith in the innate goodness and omniscience of The Market. Why should we leave something like forensic science in the hands of the government? Shouldn't departments like that have to compete on the market with all the other companies? Exactly! So let's blue-sky this thing! Let's blaze a trail! Let's run this thing not as a department, but as a company! Let's show those old civil service fuddy-duddies the market can work!

And let's watch the whole thing fall apart around our ears, like a subsidence-damaged semi. Some things are too important to be left to the market. My friend's house will probably survive the cack-handedness of the private sector outfit losing her data. But what about the biometric data that might be lost if one of these private forensic forms cocks it up? What happens when someone winds up convicted of murder or rape because some lab assistant working unpaid overtime for the 21st night in a row has mislabelled a sample?

Because outside of Ayn Rand fantasies, this is what happens in the private sector as it really is. Corners are cut. Regulatory frameworks are avoided, circumvented, or simpy ignored. Unspoken contracts of working beyond the agreed hours and 'going the extra mile' exist uneasily alongside 'official' contracts to which employers pay lip-service. There is a mission statement that speaks in glowing terms of how the company will satisfy all objectives while neglecting none; but there is a budget, and a bottom line, and bonuses to pay, and shareholders to satisfy: and dissonance sets in. The centre cannot hold. Cracks begin to form, and things fall through them. As a society we have to decide what things we can allow to fall through: and, especially at a time when people are seriously discussing bringing back the death penalty, it ought to be clear that justice should not be one of those things.

Pull the Other One

One could be forgiven, when watching the news of what inevitably became known as 'Hackgate' for wondering what the Hell is wrong with David Cameron. I mean, he can't run an economy, we know that much; he can't win elections without help from his valet, Nick Clegg; basic human decency is something so foreign to him that his initial response to any ethical question is to apologise politely and tell the questioner he doesn't speak Swahili _ but a scandal like this should, surely, be right up his alley? This whole thing is, when you get down to it, a matter of public relations - and that used to be Cameron's job, for goodness' sake.

It's at that point that I remember Dave never got one of the limited range of jobs he's done on merit. Every single career opportunity he's had has been presented to him on a plate, on the 'who you know' principle. Why study and graft, after all, when you can just get a mate from Buckingham Palace to put in a good word for you?

So I don't buy the lazy idea that David Cameron is a 'master of spin'. Blair - he could spin. Blair got landslides. Cameron's much-vaunted PR skillz only got him a deeply unfulfilling political cohabitation with the Lib Dems. And Blair knew how to get angry properly, too: how to project just the right sense of wounded feelings while still rhetorically defending himself. When Blair got angry - even when you were equally angry with him - you had to fight back a strong urge to nod, admire his spirit, and admit you had to see his point of view. When Cameron gets angry, he looks like a petulant child telling Nanny his Papa could have her killed. David Cameron, angry, is one of the most pathetic sights I have ever seen, and I have seen a man vomit into a self-service cinema popcorn machine.

Still, you can't hang around with the real media sharks without some of their tricks rubbing off on you, and I'm not just talking about being able to chop out three lines on the rim of a seatless toilet in Hoxton while keeping the lockless, barely-hinged door shut with your pinstriped buttocks. So, reading the Guardian this morning, I wasn't surprised to see that Cameron's Tory-led coalition have wheeled Vince Cable out to talk about crackers:

'The business secretary, Vince Cable, announced the first phase of the government's "Red Tape Challenge" and expressed hopes that lowering the age at which one can buy Christmas crackers, among other regulatory tweaks, would help restore high-street confidence.'

The inclusion of that Christmas crackers bit by Cable - or whoever wrote his speech for him - is a damn cute piece of PR. The reason it works is that it makes journalists' jobs so much easier. First of all, it gives them a ready-made hook on which to hang the story, and it plays into a well-established tabloid myth about 'health and safety gone mad'. But there's also something appealing about the word 'crackers', a faintly-comic, ludicrous, almost retro word for behaviour that is supposedly insane, but not in a serious way; a word you might find in Whizzer and Chips, or that Bart Simpson might say in the 'cockernee urchin' voice he does sometimes. And one of those words, like 'romp', which seems to find its most natural home in the pages of newspapers. It's irresistible.

Weirdly, the only paper I can find which has went the whole hog and put the word in their headline is the Belfast Telegraph, with 'Crackers: the silly trading laws about to be scrapped'. Maybe the sub-editors decided this was a little too cute, and rejected it in the way that you can find yourself turning down people you desperately want to get off with when they make their own intention to get off with you too obvious. But most papers picked up on the ludicrous crackers rules prominently in the body of their reports. And in that sense, the work was done, and the real agenda of the Tory-led government concealed, as usual, in the last paragraph of the article - or in a hanging sentence, as in the Guardian:

'Cable said the Red Tape Challenge would be extended to 25 more themes and sectors, including employment law, by next summer.'

The italics there are mine: because those three words, 'including employment law', are really what this is all about.

As Justine pointed out in our last post, the Tory idea of helping businesses is to make the labour market more 'flexible': code for a world in which you sell your time to corporations for peanuts and can be sacked at any time. Since before the election  they have carried out a propaganda campaign against two key pieces of legislation: the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equalities Act 2010. Christine Burns has taken note of how the Red Tape Challenge seems unusually preoccupied by the latter of these; many other bloggers have noted the deluge of anti-human rights propaganda in the right-wing press. With that in mind, there can be little doubt as to the true aim the Tories are wrapping up as a silly-season story: they want you to think they're making it easier for you to buy Christmas crackers; but what they actually doing is making it easier for your boss to give you the sack. And if that happens, it won't matter how old you are when you go to the shops for some yuletide cheer: you won't be able to afford it anyway.

Selling Cheap

(We've been quiet of late at You Didn't Win  due to me (AJ) being rather busy with poetry gigs, so apologies for not posting as often as we'd like. In our time away, we've been gratified to see how tough things are getting for the Tory-led Coalition, and we're particularly pleased to see that the moral bankruptcy of their backers in the Murdoch press has been publicised to such an extent that the Digger has been forced to sacrifice part of his media empire, the News of the World newspaper, like a chess player frantically throwing pawns away in suicidal moves to buy his Queen (Rebekah Brooks) another second's breathing space. We're less pleased about the fact that the grunt-level workers of the NOTW will now find themselves added to the unemployment statistics, but not to worry - You Didn't Win blogger Justine has been thinking on the words of Tory rent-a-gob Philip Davies a couple of weeks ago, and may have the perfect solution for them...)

The Tory MP for Shipley, one Philip Davies, caused something of a stir while discussing the Private Members' Bill that would 'allow' employees to opt out of the minimum wage. As one might expect, the response to his comments has been pretty much one of anger and dismay. With a bit of eye-rolling; he's a Tory - would we really expect anything less?

His defence has been the standard attack on left-wing strawpersons and to claim that he was just saying what people with learning disabilities had said to him. Because that makes it all OK, apparently. (Looking at his other twitter interactions with those who don't agree with him, he doesn't come over as a particularly nice person. You remember that thing when we were kids, repeating something back to someone in a singsong voice? I'm reminded of that. And this is an elected representative of the people.)

Never mind that it was probably a small group of people that he spoke to, or that some of those with developmental disabilities have sometimes got issues of vulnerability that mean they can be easily taken advantage of. Given that so many in society believe that people with disabilities and impairments are less productive members of society and need to be SPOKEN. TO. AS. IF. THEY. ARE. DEAF. as well as patronised, is it any wonder that some of them may internalise that and really believe that it's them that need to accept lower wages to be accepted by the rest of us? I have misgivings about a society that places ones' worth so entirely on paid employment; this serves to erode my already-shaky belief in it further. That we would seriously discuss paying the most vulnerable members of society even less than those who are just managing to hang on on £5.93 per hour?

Because if this came into effect, it wouldn't just be those with developmental disabilities who would be affected.

The current Parliament are wanting to overhaul the welfare system, as we are all already aware. One of the things they would like to do is to 'get the long-term sick' back to work. Those claimants fortunate enough to get through the ATOS assessments will only be able to claim Incapacity Benefit (or whatever they'll rename it under the new system) for a year. After 365 days (of if you're in 'luck' and it's a leap year, 366 days) that stops. Perhaps you'll be able to start a new claim. If you need to, there's a chance you'll be more ill than you were a year before. Hopefully you'll be at least about the same. You'll have to be assessed again. It's unlikely that the DWP will leave you alone for that year after your successful claim, too. They will probably want you to maintain your claim over the year, just in case you get better after 6 months or so, and can stop the claim and get to work. Having been chronically ill and claiming for ESA in the past, I have an inkling of how stressful that can be. Stress is generally not conducive to good health or recovery.

So, a year has passed and your claim is over, or you failed the ATOS assessment because, by proving you can jump the flaming hoops they ask you to jump through to pass, you were set up to fail. The Government really don't want to give you any money. The last of your benefits will run out in a couple of weeks, and after that your council tax and housing benefits will run out too. You need a job. But you have this long-term condition that means it's very hard to find an employer who will take you on; your illness may make you 'unreliable'. This Private Members' Bill suggests that you might want to work for less than an employer is legally required to pay you. The Tories suggesting this are at pains to point out that it's the employees who opt out; the employer cannot. Remember when they also said that universities could charge up to £9000 a year for fees? That was suggested to be optional, with only the very best institutions charging the top rate? Well, every university likes to think it's better than average, I suppose. The average for 2012 is about £8,400.

When it comes to maximising income and minimising expenditure, in a capitalist society, of course the fess are going to go up. Of course employers will pay as little as possible for labour. So there won't be outright statements of 'you've got the job if you'll work for less', but there will be a huge pressure on people to offer to work for less. In all my working life, I don't think I've ever gone for a job where there hasn't been a lot of interest. Or, at least, so I've been told at some point in the application stages. Whether it's a bland statement of fact, or a tacit method of pointing out just how replaceable I (and pretty much everyone else) am, I couldn't say. I guess it doesn't hurt to try to make new employees as compliant as you can from the outset.

Put someone who is desperate for an income in the interview chair. Or someone with a disability (not that the two are mutually exclusive; with the planned cuts they will morph into one and the same more and more). Everyone in the room knows that they could increase their chances of 'success' by saying they'll work for less... The job market may end up like a silent auction, but in reverse. The person who 'wins' is the person with the lowest bid.

As part of the defence of Mr. Davis' comments, a number of people have mentioned people working for free, to get experience. There are a number of comments on this Daily Mail article but I'm loath to link to it properly, so that's to the istyosty page of the same, but without comments. Internships are presumably what the commenters refer to. Internships of a fixed period of time (six weeks in the comment I refer to, the time period is more often than not up to a year) of unpaid work. They hinge on a certain amount of privilege; someone has to pay the living costs for that period of time. Lots of people volunteer for charities, but they also have to pay for their costs too, either by also having a job or being on JSA or pensions. To compare internships and voluntary work to working for less than the legal minimum wage is to compare apples to elephants.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: do we want to live in a society that devalues people, based solely on the job they can find? That agrees that those who have disabilities are worth less than those of us who currently don't?

(Note from AJ: this isn't the first time Philip Davies has popped up on my radar. Like Nadine Dorries he seems to be one of those annoying new Tory MPs who see it as their duty to ape the worst excesses of the Tea Party movement - the main difference between Davies and Dorries being that he chooses to do a cack-handed imitation of Glenn Beck rather than Sarah Palin. This piece, on the Telegraph's reporting of a European LGBT conference, contains a short digression on Davies which gives, I think, the measure of the man.)

The Best Misdirection Joke Ever Told

Here at You Didn't Win, we've been pretty consistent in directing our anger at the current government's decisions against the man who, let's face it, makes them: David Cameron. Occasionally, we also include Dave's loyal sidekick, Chancellor of the Exchequer George 'Gideon' Osborne, in our attacks: the coalition is stealing our money and giving it to bankers and George is, after all, the bagman in this little caper. But, by and large, we've kept aloof from what's currently the most popular bloodsport in current political commentary: beating Nick Clegg repeatedly like a human pinata covered in Lib Dem rosettes.

Others, however, have wholeheartedly joined in the Clegg Abuse. We think this is a mistake; below, Neil Ackerman, one of our new Guest Bloggers explains why. - AJ

When David Cameron responded to the fact he had named Nick Clegg as his favourite joke, I don't think even he realised how right he was. Most of the anger aimed in demonstrations over the past year seems to have been aimed at the best joke Cameron ever told. While yes, the feeling of betrayal from Lib Dem supporters may be justified; and yes, promises have been solidly broken; and yes, Nick Clegg has made some monumental judgement errors, where is the criticism of Cameron?

There are people asking questions of him, and since Nick Clegg pulled on his big boy pants and disagreed with him over AV I think this will continue and grow. However, it does seem that most of the questions that Cameron and co. should be answering are being directed towards the Lib Dems and Clegg. Cameron should not be under-estimated; he is exceedingly clever. He has made a man who seemed weak and naïve, but kinda cute, into a man who seems weak and naïve but no longer cute. Clegg is now a dangerous and evil liar who must be stopped. For a young generation claiming to be politically savvy, we have fallen for the most basic trick in the book: “he did it”.

But Clegg didn't do it. Cameron is behind the cuts, Cameron raised tuition fees, Cameron is making changes to education that will damage social mobility for decades to come. Guess what, we're falling for it again, the most basic tricks in the book. He is waving the hand puppet of Clegg manically while quietly doing everything that matters with the other hand. Anyone who's ever done any kind of basic magic trick knows how misdirection works; and as I said earlier, Cameron is not to be under-estimated. He and those behind him are masters at magic tricks and have found the perfect misdirection instrument for us in Clegg.

It can't be assumed that in the next election all the disgruntled Lib Dem voters are going to go with Labour and that the Tories are going to go crashing out with a nationwide yell of “Jenga!”. Recent local council elections in England showed that the Tories are getting Lib Dem votes too. Labour made themselves incredibly unpopular, so the three main parties are all in the dog house. The Tories just haven't been in power long enough to be in there properly, so what's to stop much of the Lib Dem vote going to the Tories? Sitting in Scotland the whole idea of doing that seems unrealistic, but England is not Scotland, and Scotland's vote doesn't particularly matter in Westminster as can be made obvious by looking at the election map.

But Clegg made it all possible, right? No. If the Lib Dems hadn't formed the coalition with the Tory party, a coalition made up of Labour and all the independents and smaller parties would have been so weak it wouldn't have lasted a week. The Lib Dem choice took many, including myself, completely be surprise and many, including myself, were very angry. However, if you were in Clegg's boots, what would you have done? Suddenly you have the chance to be in power, a thing beyond your wildest dreams on the run up to the election. A very seductive Cameron says you can get your AV referendum, and after support from some big names and players over the election campaign you feel cocky. Also, if you're Clegg, you've probably not slept in 48 hours. A few months in and you realise the winning feeling you had at the start has just turned horribly Charlie Sheen.

I'm sure we can all remember going to a party when we were kids: parents have gone away for the week, it's summertime so nobody has school, the person you fancy is going and you just bought some snazzy new jeans. Everything is going well. Suddenly you realise nobody has any alcohol and nobody is old enough to actually buy any. What do you do? You find someone who either has fake ID or who is old enough to buy alcohol and phone them pretending to be their best friend. An hour later they arrive like a hero returning from a Spartan war with their shield of clinking carrier bags. Everybody makes awkward conversation with them for about half an hour before ignoring them. Suddenly the unsuspecting buyer of the alcohol realises nobody actually likes them at the party; they have just been invited to make the whole thing possible. They then spend the rest of the night watching a bunch of kids have fun then vomit all over one another.

Clegg is now a lonely figure in a dark corner of a party that he shouldn't have been invited to in the first place. All the while he's digging a grave for his party with a shovel bought for him by his “new best friend” Cameron, tied in a pretty blue ribbon. Little does he know that when the parents get back and find their best vase broken and their child in hospital with alcohol poisoning, he's the one who's getting the blame.

The Cuts Don't Work (but Dave and Gideon don't care)

Remember David Cameron's shiny-faced pledge to 'cut the deficit, not the NHS'? Of course you do. Like a badly-airbrushed ghost, Cameron's pledge has came back to haunt him recently in the wake of the reforms to the NHS spearheaded by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley. But there's another reason to keep Dave's promise in mind: because, even as his health reforms begin the slow destruction of one of the greatest achievements of postwar Britain, an uncomfortable fact has come to light that - for any rational observer - casts doubt on the Tories' whole cuts programme.

Put simply, it isn't that Cameron can't cut the deficit without cutting the NHS; in fact, despite all the cuts he and his chancellor George Osborne push through, they can't cut the deficit either.

The False Economy blog has the facts:

'The latest official data for public borrowing show a sharp monthly rise to £9.9bn – a record for April. They also show that the government’s cuts policy has failed to work even for its stated objective: reducing the deficit.'

They further note that there was a fall in the deficit over the course of the previous year, but Dave and Gideon have kept schtumm about that because of an inconvenient truth:

'...the trend towards lower deficits has largely been ignored because they have nothing to do with government ‘austerity’ measures. The improvement in the deficit began in April 2010. The election didn’t take place until a month later and the Comprehensive Spending Review didn’t take place until October.  During that time government spending was largely untouched.'

In other words, the fall in the deficit was the work of...Labour. The bad old previous Labour administration which, we've been told again and again, ran Britain into the ground, 'maxed out the national credit card' and left us with 'no money left'...actually initiated the policies which brought down a deficit caused, let's not forget, by the greatest economic crisis since the Depression of the 1930s. Not bad going for a supposed bunch of spendthrifts.

Whereas the hard-headed (and harder-hearted) cost-cutting of Messrs Cameron and Osborne, far from pulling us out of the deficit, has made it even worse:

'...central government borrowing is £2.6bn higher than last April’s total of £10.5bn...what we are seeing now is just the effect of initial cuts, plus falling confidence. Things are about to get worse and those arguing for even deeper cuts would make them worse still.'

So a government which failed to win an election has also failed to achieve its stated aim of reducing the deficit. But don't expect them to reverse course anytime soon. As many have pointed out, deficit reduction has always been little more than a cover for the Tory-led government's real goal of reimposing their brutal, Thatcherite ideology on the country. The announcement today that the government's new sexual health advisory panel will be advised by an anti-abortion group gives a flavour of just how distasteful that ideology is.

This morning, at a momentary loss for something to read, I pulled my copy of the Rapid Eye Movement anthology from the shelves and reread Simon Dwyer's article, 'Brazil'. Named after the Terry Gilliam film, Dwyer's long essay is a detailed examination of Britain under Tory rule in the 1980s. A country in which civil liberties are curtailed, opposition is spied upon, sexual minorities are persecuted, media are censored and the populace are 'educated to once more know their place' by a government in harness to neoliberal free-marketeers and what Dwyer rightly calls the 'pseudo-Christianity' of fundamentalist outfits like the sinisterly-named Festival of Light.

And now, in Britain 2011, a Tory-led government, helped into power by a media machine which hacks into innocent peoples' voicemail, imposes a neoliberal, 'shock doctrine' financial ideology on the country to help bankers get richer, talks of abolishing the Equality and Human Rights Acts, and tries to limit womens' right to abortion and introduce abstinence-only sex education to schools while restricting access to further and higher education on an unimaginable scale.

David Cameron can airbrush his face all he wants, but the ideology of the worst parts of the Tory party never changes. The deficit was only ever an excuse to implement policies driven by that ideology. Now the figures prove Tory policies have failed to reduce it, the deficit excuse will be quietly dropped, and a new justification for the programme will be found. But whatever it is, that justification will be as false as the deficit lie: because, in a country where a majority didn't vote for the current administration's policies - and where even those who did vote Tory voted them in on the basis of promises Cameron had no intention of keeping - the wholesale destruction of the NHS, state education, and civil liberties on which they are embarked can never be justified.

End of the Beginning

So here it is, May 11th, the anniversary of the day the farce of an election no-one won ended in the tragedy of David Cameron being invited to form the government no-one elected. And now, the final day of our campaign to remind Cameron that we're all too aware of the fact of his non-victory. Have we succeeded? In our original aim, yes. But in doing so, we've set our sights higher and have decided to focus on some bigger goals in future.

The You Didn't Win campaign had its genesis in an angry outburst inspired not by the Prime Minister, but by his lackey, the Chancellor George Osborne. On budget day this year, one of our organisers was listening to Osborne talking about his 'budget for growth' (a budget which, by the way, is leading to UK growth forecasts being revised downwards  yet again - go go Gadget Gideon!) and she heard him come out with the opinion that 'you get a lot of political capital from winning an election'. Shocked at the casual revisionism she was hearing, she exclaimed 'But You Didn't Win!'

In that moment, our campaign was born. But it had to wait a while for us to get going. This writer had to take part in the March for the Alternative first, and then we were all busy with work for the next week or so, but after a week, through the magic of Twitter we got together and got the ball rolling. We came up with the idea of the postcard campaign, started the blog, set up facebook and twitter accounts, began getting the word out both online and in person, designed the official cards, came up with the text for them, dealt with printers, posted cards to Dave and cards for other people to send Dave, leafleted, made alliances with people in other campaign groups, and generally hustled our asses off, all in the name of pissing David Cameron off just a teeny little bit...of letting the Tory-led government know that we aren't going to sit back and let them rewrite history to claim victory in an election no-one won.

That's what we've achieved. Cameron and his staff at Number Ten - whatever names they're using - have seen our cards and know that people all over the UK are refusing to buy their triumphalist narrative. For a campaign whose nerve centre has consisted of precisely three people (yes, the vast numbers of staff toiling at the You Didn't Win HQ could fit in a Mini and leave one seat free for a box of postcards), that's pretty good going.

But with this year's campaign coming to an end and giving us time for a breather, we've decided to set our sights higher for next year. Remember, this year's campaign was organised on the fly by, yes, three people with very little experience of campaigning, basically making it up as we went along in a brief window of about five weeks between the end of March and today - a window which included two four-day Bank Holiday weekends which really screwed with our lead times. Next year we plan to start preparing and running the campaign earlier, making more links with the media, organising more impactful publicity stunts, pacing ourselves a little better...and involving more people.

Yes, we want you to be more involved in You Didn't Win 2012. We're looking for guest bloggers to write pieces for this site (we already have one), people to organise postcard distribution around the country for the next campaign, people to design new postcards and other items for next year (ecologically-conscious as we are, we will be reusing this year's cards too - but it's still nice to have new things as well!) and generally just boots on the ground to help us get more stuff done next year. You know the drill by now - contact us at youdidntwin@hotmail.co.uk, via our Twitter feed or on Facebook and tell us what you'd like to do. Together we can make the second anniversary of the election no-one won even more memorable for Cameron...

But for now, today sees the end of the first phase of the You Didn't Win campaign: a movement born in rage and improvised pretty much every step of the way. But, to quote a Tory coalition leader of sterner stuff than Dave, this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end. This is just the end of the beginning. We'll keep updating the blog, our Twitter and Facebook pages over the next year when there are things we want to talk about; and then at the start of 2012 we'll kick things up a notch and ensure that once again, Dave is reminded that...

well. You know what to say by now. ;)

And now, all rise for John Lydon pulling faces and having a good old shout...

Run Extended Due to Popular Demand!

Well, we here at You Didn't Win HQ sent our cards today, and we've been hearing from people who've sent cards all day, all over the country. Those cards will arrive at Downing Street tomorrow, just in time to put Cameron in a bad mood as he tucks in to his post-referendum kedgeree. But something we hadn't expected to happen has also occurred.

As we and others have tweeted and talked about the cards we're sending today, more and more people, hearing about the campaign, have expressed a wish to get involved. And that's why we've decided to extend our campaign a little further - as of today the deadline for sending your You Didn't Win card to Number 10 Downing Street (London SW1A 2AA, remember) is now May 11th. This is the anniversary of the day last year when Our Own Dear Queen Bess, Gawd Bless 'Er, invited David Cameron to form a government - despite his failure to win the General Election (no disrespect meant to Her Maj - it's her constitutional role and she has to do it. But we like to think she was giving Cameron the Royal V's behind her back with her left hand while she shook his right).

So don't despair if you've missed today's post - there's still time to send your cards! You can get official cards from us by tweeting us your address, or sending it to youdidntwin@hotmail.co.uk, but remember that you can also send local postcards from where you live too if you don't have an official one. We do ask that you take a photo of you sending the card and post it somewhere online - tagged with 'youdidntwin', naturally - and you could even send them to the aforementioned email address if you want - we'd love to put peoples' postcard pics here on the blog to celebrate our campaign.

A campaign which is well under way now: tomorrow David Cameron will see the first signs that the people of Britain remember that he didn't win the election. Let's keep up the pressure and keep sending him messages right up to next Wednesday!

The Final Week

So here it is. One week left. Orders are still pouring in for official You Didn't Win postcards, and we're sending them out as fast as we can, but if you don't have time to get them, remember that you can send any postcard you want to 10 Downing Street, as long as you write a 'you didn't win' message on the back! And don't forget to take photos of your cards and upload them using youdidntwin as a tag!

Remember that we want cards to be sent early on May 5th to arrive in time for May 6th, the anniversary of the election no-one won. And remember the address you need to send cards to: David Cameron, 10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA.

Now for the new stuff. For this last week, we want to let as many people know about the campaign as possible. That's where we need your help. We want to get #youdidntwin trending on twitter this week. So tell your friends about it. Tweet people you think will RT the hashtag. Email people. Talk to people about it! Contact your MP and see if they want to get involved - we're really pleased that Washington and Sunderland West MP Sharon Hodgson has agreed to take some of our cards and distribute them. Obviously it helps if your MP is Labour but don't forget that, as we've said here before, recognition that Dave didn't win extends across the political spectrum. If you have a really right-wing Tory as your local MP they might feel Cameron needs a reminder of his failure to carry enough of the vote at the last election to form a majority government too!

Remember why we're doing this: Cameron's Tory-led government needs to be reminded that it has no mandate for its policies; that they failed to secure a big enough parliamentary majority to form a government on their own. Cameron's support for the 'First Past the Post' electoral system has been all over the news with the referendum approaching - if he supports the system so much he must also be aware that he failed to win under that system. So why does he press on with ideologically-driven policies which not enough of the electorate supports? Why does he keep acting as if he did win, bullying and patronising opponents and refusing to accept criticism or moderate his policies? Because he can get away with it: because even when people mention that he didn't win, they do so in passing and move on to other matters.

To resist the Tory-led government's policies we must stress their lack of legitimacy. David Cameron's failure to win the last election should not be something we stress in passing, it needs to form the core of our opposition to the government he leads. Our aim in this campaign is to remind Cameron that he can't pretend he won anymore, and to put his failure to win at the centre of political discourse about this government.

And that is why, during this final week of our campaign, we want the words You Didn't Win spread far and wide. Please help us do that in whatever way you can.

The Postcards are Here!

Exciting times here at You Didn't Win headquarters. This afternoon, while I was tucking into some wholewheat fusili and watching the start of Michael Moore's Capitalism: a Love Story, I heard a loud knocking at my door. I opened it and, after signing one of those electronic things that makes my writing look even more like that of a four-year-old than usual, I was presented with a large box. And do you know what was in that box?

The official You Didn't Win postcards, that's what!

Now that we have postcards, we need to start distributing them. And that's where you come in. If you want some cards to distribute in your area, email us at youdidntwin@hotmail.co.uk or message us on our Twitter feed or Facebook page telling us how many you need and we'll send 'em to you! There's no fixed price, but the observant among you will have noted the appearance of a Paypal button at the side of this blog - we'd love it if people would donate whatever you feel you can to support the campaign - this will cover the cost of this run of postcards (and maybe another if we have time before the end of the week) as well as postage for sending the cards out and any other operating expenses we incur. Any surplus left over will be donated to a charity of our choosing.

Remember, we don't want cards sent to Dave yet - send them on May 5th to arrive for the election anniversary. But if you want official cards to send - get in touch with us now and we'll get them sent out as soon as we can, so that this Friday we can all remind Cameron and his Tory-led government that they didn't win!

Postcards

It's nearly time to start sending postcards to Dave. As per our instructions, we would love it if people were to send cards showing pictures of local landmarks to 10 Downing Street, to show the Tory-led government that people all over the country remember that they didn't win the 2010 election, but we know that some people like the idea of having a special postcard to send too. We are getting some postcards printed up, but for anyone who can't get a physical card, this post will give you downloadable designs for the front and back of your own card to send to our not-entirely-elected PM.

First, download the front:

And then you can download the back, with the address and our message to Mr C, here.

Remember not to send your cards too early - May 5th is when we want them sent, so we can be sure they'll arrive in time for the anniversary of the election no-one won...and ruin Dave's 'victory' party!

Calm Down Dave, you're only a Loser

One of the most annoying things about recent Prime Ministers was that too often it was sometimes possible to find oneself liking them. Gordon Brown got a lot of stick from the foaming-at-the-mouth Tory tendency, but if you were in any sense a halfway decent person you couldn't help but feel sorry for him, trying to pick up the ruins of the British economy after his predecessor, Tony Blair, had scarpered as soon as he saw the going get tough. Blair himself led us into an illegal war in an effort to ingratiate himself with possibly the worst American President since Nixon   of all time, but the slimy little bastard had a weird kind of charm that could sneak up on you unexpectedly and trick you into liking him. John Major is remembered chiefly for liking garden peas and shagging Edwina Currie, but had the disarming advantage of not being Margaret Thatcher, which caused a sense of relief so profound it actually won him an election. You have to look back to Thatcher for a PM so utterly demonic as to be genuinely hated, and even then there was the occasional guilty feeling that those of us on the left should kind of admire her for being the first (and so far only) woman to achieve the British premiership.

David Cameron, however, is rapidly proving himself to be the heir to Thatcher in more than ideology, as almost his every public utterance cements himself more strongly as the first Prime Minister in over a decade you can really hate. Today's news from Prime Ministers' Questions shows that he doesn't even have Thatcher's rudimentary feminist bonafides. As the 'Political Scrapbook' blog puts it:

David Cameron is presumably now regretting telling Angela Eagle “Calm down, dear” during heated exchanges on the NHS. Her shadow treasury team colleague Ed Balls was certainly not impressed, repeatedly calling upon the prime minister to apologise.

The media are treating this petulant outburst from the supposedly-relaxed Call-me-Dave as something out of character - in fact it's anything but. Cameron has form for losing his rag at the despatch box. Mirror Journalist James Lyons reports here on Cameron calling Ed balls 'the most irritating man in British politics' (a statement which suggests an astonishing lack of self-awareness on Dave's part) and also belittling a hard-working backbench Labour MP by telling him he had 'absolutely no idea who you are'.

This is just a taste. Over at The Green Ribbon Tom Griffin has a detailed list of Cameron's strops. Of particular interest in Griffin's list is this piece by Telegraph journalist David Hughes which finds the columnist wondering if Cameron is a bit of a 'Bullingdon bully' way back in November of last year; and this exchange reported on BBC Democracy live in which Ed Milliband turns the tables on Cameron's sneering description of Milli-E as a 'student politician' by pointing out that when the Labour leader was a student he 'was not hanging around with people who were throwing bread rolls and wrecking restaurants.'

So we can see that the bad temper displayed in by Cameron today was hardly out of character. And, as Lisa Ansell observes in her takedown of the welfare reform bill, neither is the misogyny which he displayed to Angela Eagle. Cameron's government is closing Sure Start centres, handing anti-sex-trafficking cash to the homophobic and transphobic Salvation Army rather than the well-respected Poppy Project, and undermining the Public Sector Equality Duty and womens' right to choose. It's no wonder Cameron has now resorted to telling women to 'calm down' - given his government's policies, it's nothing short of a miracle that women aren't hurling firebombs in the streets (then again, given his government's economic policy, they probably can't afford the petrol).

Watching the video of Cameron's performance, it's rather a pathetic sight, really - reminiscent of Cameron's fellow Tory (and misogynist) David Starkey losing control of his class on Jamie's Dream School after insulting a fat kid. But is it really any wonder that Cameron grows more and more aggressive and insufferable? After all, as we've documented here, there 's a steadily-increasing drip-drip-drip of voices reminding the electorate - and Cameron himself - that despite all the advantages he had going into the 2010 election, he still couldn't deliver the Tory landslide everybody predicted. For someone as arrogant and entitled as Dave, that has to eat away at him, reminding him again and again of his own inadequacies, his own failures, his own lack of fitness for the job.

So is it really any wonder that these days the only way Dave can feel like a Winner is by pretending to be Michael?

David Does Drugs

No, not an unsubstantiated allegation against our nation's shiny-faced Chief Prefect, but an apt description of the latest bit of propaganda that Team Tory have released to support their ideologically-driven austerity programme - the numbers of Incapacity Benefit claimants who are obese or addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. Unfortunately, there's a hidden agenda as obvious as the airbrushing on Cameron's campaign posters in this announcement, and - just like Dave's policy of clicking his true-blue shoes together and repeating 'there's no place like the private sector' - the attitudes revealed by the release of this information show how out of touch the Tory-led government is with the world the rest of us live in. Below, a You Didn't Win blogger looks in more detail at what this announcement tells us about the kind of people running our country, and how little they understand about the needs of the most vulnerable:

Last week, the Government announced that more than 80,000 Incapacity Benefit claimants were doing so because of reasons of obesity and addiction (to drugs or alcohol). If you've yet to click on that link, be aware that Reuters have chosen to illustrate the article with a photo of an obligatory headless fatteh. Isn't it funny that, with the rise of the Scourge of Humanity that is the Obesity Epidemic (TM), they focus on that instead of substance dependency? I say 'funny', I really mean 'lazy and disappointing'.

Anyway. It should be remembered that there are just under 2 million receiving Incapacity Benefit (IB) so this 81,000 really only makes up just under 5% of the total claimants. Putting this very small sub-section of claimants beside the total IB bill is probably not accidental - 'those horrible fatties and junkies, costing the public purse £7billion' - certainly fits with the Tory narrative of all these people who could be out at work, contributing to society but instead choosing to leech instead. It's like they write their statements to fulfil Daily Mail wet dreams...

At this point, I'd like to point you to an excellent piece by Vicky Allen in yesterday's Sunday Herald. It's behind a registration wall - free to sign up, and if you uncheck the right boxes, you won't get a heap of spam from them - but I understand that not everyone wants to do that, and probably not just for one article, though I really would recommend this piece highly. As it is, I may quote Ms. Allen a little, as she makes pretty much the same points as I want to, in places. (It's tempting to copy/paste the whole thing and leave it at that, but that's a bit unfair.)

The way the Government has been talking about these people, their conditions exist in a vacuum. The idea that there's probably an underlying cause for both incapacitating obesity and substance dependency seems to have eluded them. If someone has had a severe injury that impedes their mobility, they probably can't take exercise. If someone experienced abuse as a child, they may well self-medicate with drugs and/or alcohol. Not that these are the only causes for such conditions, but they are worthy examples. Some people also self-medicate with food. In this culture where certain foods are actively marketed as treats and rewards, it's not so outlandish as it may seem at first blush - there are also countless women who consciously or subconsiously gain weight as a response to sexual assault, in an attempt to make them less attractive and therefore less attackable. (I'm restraining myself from wandering into a desconstruction of the 'rape as a compliment' myth as it's wildly off topic.)

Some years ago, I read Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg. One thing that has stayed with me for a very long time is the point that the author made about addiction. If you were wealthy and use drugs, you can afford to maintain your habit without too much risk. Paying for your next hit isn't too much trouble, and the drugs you buy as much less likely to be contaminated. Think about it; how often do the police release warnings about unsafe drugs? Not that often, to be fair, but it's usually to say that either a handful of addicts have died after taking heroin cut with something that's lethal, or that they've taken heroin much purer than they usually use (it's not been cut with talc or whatever) and have overdosed. Needle exchanges exist because one of the biggest risks to health was the use of non-sterile needles. The opiate heroin in and of itself, assuming all other factors are as safe as they can be, isn't that hazardous to health. Not that I'm suggesting that we should all go out and start using!

However, if one was a member of an elite group, such as, say the Bullingdon Club, where I wouldn't be surprised if cocaine, for example, was occasionally in circulation, one probably would have direct experience of casual drug use. And if one had been a member of the Bullingdon Club and was now on the front bench, one would probably assume that that meant that one now knows what one is talking about. Never mind that, if one knew that old Johnny had gotten a bit keen on the Charlie, Johnny (or his family) could easily afford the very best in private drug treatment.

So the Government's response to any criticism of unfairly focusing on this very small group has been of the 'we want to help them to help themselves' variety. Supporting them out of their addiction and into work. To quote Chris Grayling "help them back into work, even if that work is different to what they did previously." (Today, BBC Radio 4, 21st April) Reading the subtext; they Government just want them off the benefits, no matter what kind of employment they find themselves in, no matter how inappropriate. And we're back to the culture of forcing people in to jobs they don't want to do (or can't really do) because it's the only job available. Given that ex-users can be vulnerable to relapse in times of stress, is that even going to work in the long term? (How illuminating to read that addiction is specifically not covered by the Equality Act 2010) Would the £580million not be better spent supporting people through dealing with the underlying causes that led to them using and trying to make it much less likely that people will relapse, instead of merely preparing them for employment?

Look at the Bad Thing

 I've always thought one of the best lines in the better-than-expected adaptation of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta occurs in the scene where a news  report on the TV channel which serves as the propaganda arm of the dystopian England where the story is set refers to V's speech on television encouraging people to rise up against their oppressors as 'a message of hate'.

It's a good choice of language because it captures the way contemporary media propaganda reduces complex issues down to simple emotional, goodies and baddies pap. This You Didn't Win blogger used to work in a bookshop, and we had a similarly goo-goo-doll politics book on our shelves about radical Islam, called Because They Hate, which argued that Islamic terrorism doesn't occur because of, say, the situation in Gaza, the stifiling of more traditional dissent in Wahabist countries, poverty or anything like that - it occurs because Muslims are nasty, nasty men.

This retreat to the language of the nursery is always a good way of identifying when the meeja are trying to sell you a line. It shows that the authorities are unable to convince using rational argument or by pointing out the genuinely deleterious effects a thing will have, and so they are reduced to pointing at the bad thing, then waving their arms and saying 'oooooh, spooky spooky bad thing, spooky spooky bad thing' over and over until hopefully people start to be scared of it.

The March 26th March for the Alternative was a good example of the 'spooky spooky bad thing' school of reporting. Half a million people came together to object, peacefully, to the Britain-breaking agenda which Cameron and the Tories are implementing, despite having no mandate, but because people protesting peacefully and with dignity is not very telegenic and doesn't support the status quo, the media chose to focus again and again on a few examples of violence from a group of 'anarchists'. And, with their close-ups, overhead shots and dramatic camera angles they could make it look really scary.

I walked down Oxford Street just after the banks and rich stores had had their windows smashed. It looked no worse than what I've seen at North East bus stops on a Saturday morning. It didn't look threatening or terrifying; it looked pathetic really, in the way that vandalism often does. And I was in Oxford Circus when the placard fire that looked like such an inferno in the overhead shots shown on TV happened, and again, at ground level, up close, it, too, seemed underwhelming. It looked like an act not so much of violence but despair.

But to the media, the violence had to be hyped up, and so papers and reports were full of pictures of scary masked anarchists and sensational stories about 'lightbulbs filled with ammonia' and 'fireworks filled with coins' being hurled at the police. Spooky. Spooky. Look at the bad bad thing.

So when I read reports like those emerging from Stokes Croft today, telling us with a straight face that police turned up mob-handed to arrest 'a number of people they said were "a real threat to the local community"' and also accuse those people of 'harbouring petrol bombs', and then a crowd of 300 people turned up to protect these ne'er-do-wells, I wonder.

Hundreds of people do not try to impede the police when they're after people who threaten their community. That kind of thing only happens when the crowd in an area sees those targeted as members of their community, and thus regards the police as a threat.

Behind this scary riot story it seems there's another story entirely - a story about a bohemian but highly-cohesive community trying to resist the opening of a Tesco Express store foisted on them by Terry Leahy's retail behemoth and the local council. This is a story about the 'Big Society', surely? This is a story about Cameron's sacred promise to let locals be more involved in planning decisions than councils, right?

Well, no. Because for Cameron's Tories locals should only be empowered when they're the right kind of locals. And the Big Society, evidently, is always going to lose out to Big Business where Citizen Dave is concerned. But is that any wonder, when access to Dave's inner circle, the Leader's Group, costs £50,000? Do you know many Community Associations with that kind of spare cash? Of course not. But people in the corporate world do.

Dig deeper into this story, and it reveals the hypocrisy and dishonesty of our Tory overlords, prepared to send armed police in droves to attack people standing up for the very same thing the Tories claim to believe in. But we can't have that, can we? So don't dig. Don't question. Don't think about why 300 people might turn out to protect some 'petrol bombers' from the police, or why we live in a country where riot squads are being sent in to deal with people who protest against Tesco.

Instead, look at the shouty crowds! The flaming cars! Look, look, a police car being attacked! They had saws! They had shields! They were ripping up cobbles I tell you! Look! Look! At the spooky spooky bad thing! And be frightened!

I'm not frightened. Not of protesters. Not of people trying to defend their community from politicised policing. But I am frightened that our police are being used to quell dissent. I am frightened that police were champing at the bit to kettle peaceful protesters during the March for the Alternative. And I'm frightened that a media which should be challenging these actions is enabling them and repeating the police line unquestioningly.

The actions taken by police in Stokes Croft today, and their uncritical reporting by the media, help to feed the arrogance of the Tories who didn't win the 2010 election, but now seek to use their brief time in power to push through as much of their repugnant ideology as they can. That arrogance needs to be challenged. And that's why, this May 6th, the Tories' arrogance must be challenged by reminding them that they didn't win.

Retail to the rescue...or not?

As well as crowing about 'winning' the election, David Cameron occassionally likes to imitate the real grown-up politicians he's seen by announcing what he calls 'policies'. Unfortunately these policies are less carefully thought-out and workable point-by-point solutions to the problems he identifies in politics so much as shallow wish-fulfilment. Perhaps the definitive Cameron policy is his vision of 'the Big Society', which essentially boils down to a heartfelt sight that gosh, chaps, wouldn't it be spiffing if people were just a little bit nicer to one another? and pretends that this is an effective basis for running a welfare state in 21st century Britain. Another of Cameron's flagship brainfarts ideas is that we can gut the public sector needed to stop society tumbling into a Hobbesian nightmare of all-against-all and this will not be a problem because the private sector will rush into the void, create jobs for all the newly-unemployed and run everything super-efficiently - because, as anyone who's spent three hours on the phone to their mobile company to ask why their brand new Blackberry only works if they lean out of a window in their knickers can tell you, the private sector is an absolute paradigm of efficiency.

The following piece by one of our You Didn't Win bloggers looks in more detail at the flaws in Cameron's 'Tesco will save us all' utopia:

The recently released consumer spending figures serve to confirm what most of us already know.

In retail terms, spending is down - the biggest drop of like-for-like (LFL) since records began 16 years ago. Various excuses have been trundled out; the weather, that Easter's much later this year. But anyone who's worked in retail management will likely know that comparing figures isn't as simple as 'on March 1st last year, we made X money; on March 1st this year we made Y.' More often than not, March 1st falls on a different day from one year to the next (actually; every year it's different). A Friday's takings will differ to a Saturday's and a Sunday's. Mondays are often quiet, though most returns come back that day.

(If I may digress, I'm concerned by the creep of retail opening hours. I'm old enough to remember when most shops were shut by 5.30pm. Supermarkets used to close about 7pm. Now, I have heard someone complain that where I currently work opens too late in the morning [8.30am] and that our closing time of 6.30pm is too early. The big supermarkets and chains do have a lot to answer for - a few years ago Debenhams too the decision to open on New Year's Day. As I understand it, the staff were offered triple time and no-one had to work it if they didn't want to. What would happen if the entire staff of one store refused? Would the store stay closed? Probably not. Working elsewhere in a shopping mall that hosted a Debenhams, it was a worrying precedent. There will likely come a point at which people expect retail outlets of all sorts to stay open to their convenience without considering the human cost, never mind the costs to small, independent businesses. At least extending opening hours will create jobs, assuming people can afford to work part-time night shifts for Tesco and Asda Wal-Mart.)

But if people aren't spending money, how many jobs will really be created, even in the big food retailers?

Running a retail business, there are two main costs that you can exert influence over; money spent on buying in stock to sell and payroll. Given that you'll lose customers if you don't have the item they're looking for, it would be foolhardy to cut stock levels too much. So that leaves the staff. There are few full-time (35 hours/week and above) positions in retail - usually management and upwards. A part-time employee may only have a 4 hour contract, even if they regularly work a 20 hour week. A reduction in hours as punishment for some transgression is not unheard of - not the most thoughtful response to a situation, but it happens. If you're already on the knife edge, one shift of 4 hours less can be the difference between being able to manage for another month and getting behind on the rent, or not being able to buy food. Even if you have a lovely, even-tempered boss who would never do such a thing as punishment, the possibility of a reduction of hours during quiet periods (such as between Christmas and Easter) is ever-present. It all depends on the nebulous phrase "the needs of the business". So retail staff are often students, or people who need the flexibility to do something else. It doesn't require much qualification, just the ability to be endlessly patient with rude, unthinking people who are entirely self-absorbed and seem to think that if you're working in a shop, you might not actually qualify as a human being, with the benefits and privileges that brings. For example, the woman who approached the counter on her phone (to her Dad, as it turned out) and continued her conversation without acknowledging my existence. She did, however, apologise to her Dad for interrupting the conversation when I asked her if she needed a bag and to tell her how much she was to pay.

There's little going for a retail career - the pay is usually the legal minimum ('we'd pay you less, but we can't!'), the weekend generally doesn't exist in the 'heyhey, Friday night!' sense, and some people make assumptions about you, allowing them to be fantastically rude because you're not doing a Proper Job. It may come as a surprise, but I fully support Charlie Brooker's suggestion that retail staff be encouraged to give as good as they get.

All this said, retail makes up the largest employer in the private sector, the private sector that is key to the current government's plans. The main idea is that, as public sector jobs are cut, the private sector will take up the slack and employ the newly unemployed. Some of them probably will. Though it probably will be quite a pay cut for those new employees - as I mentioned, retail usually attracts the minimum wage or just above - and there generally isn't so much in the way of pension schemes, probably because staff turnover can be so high as to make it unworkable. People in the public sector now, if they are just managing to make ends meet, will quite possibly go under if they are forced into a part-time retail job. And forced they will be, if they don't want the Job Centre to cut off their benefits.

But the minimum wage is to increase in October. That should make it all better, right? (I need to check back on this, but wasn't one of the Tory manifesto points abolishing the age discrimination in minimum wage levels?)

For how many small businesses will this be the final straw? If someone has already cut their staffing levels to the barest minimum required to keep their shop open, will they have any realistic alternative to either letting go of staff or closing altogether? How many will reconsider their opening hours (say, closing Monday all day and reducing the hours to 10am - 5pm), leading to a downward spiral of everyone going to Tesco and complaining that all the small shops have closed? Just today, a kindly visitor to my place of employment asked if I knew that Safeway (really, that's what he said - maybe he meant Morrison's.) were selling the same item about 60p cheaper. Where I work is a stand-alone independent shop. We cannot sell that item 60p cheaper because it probably costs us that to buy it in and while we're not after massive profit, my employers like to be able to pay the electricity bill and their staff wages; also the tax bill. Sainsbury's (or whoever he meant, assuming he didn't step through a time warp and really mean Safeway's and the price they charged for something 5 years ago) can afford to charge less for their stock because of economies of scale. Another important economic concept to keep in mind is the race to the bottom. If everyone takes this attitude, we'll all be shopping in Asda, because they and the other big supermarkets will be all that remain. At least we'll all be able to get a staff discount.

And one last thought on the endless growth that capitalism is predicated on; once any given company has that holy grail of 100% of market share, what would happen?

Suggested Text

Today here at You Didn't Win, we've been busy checking out printers and designing stuff for our campaign. In the next few days you'll see our design for a pre-printed You Didn't Win card you can send if you don't want to send one of your own. Don't get us wrong - we'd love as many people as possible to send unique cards bearing our message to Cameron - but we also want to make it as easy as we can for people to join in. So if people want a pre-designed card that they just need to pick up and sign, or download online, we'll provide that.

In a similar sense, we'd love people to write their own unique messages to our new Tory overlords on your cards, but if people are struggling, we're happy to provide a suggested message. So here, from the postcard design we've been working on, is the text of our message to Mr C:

Dear David,

                   One year ago today, the results of the 2010 UK General Election were announced. Those results showed that no party had won a parliamentary majority strong enough to form a government on their own.

Nobody won the 2010 election. That includes you.

However, recent misguided statements from your Chancellor suggest you and he have forgotten this fact. You think you did win, and that justifies your policies. This is worrying.

So we, the people of Britain, would like to take the opportunity to remind you that YOU DIDN’T WIN. You failed to carry enough of the electorate to give you a mandate for your extremist, ideologically-driven policies. We request that you acknowledge this, show some humility, and start governing on behalf of the majority of voters in this country who did not vote for the policies contained in your manifesto.

                                                Yours sincerely,

                                                                               YOU DIDN'T WIN!

A question of mandates

From the bastion of factual accuracy that is Wikipedia; the definition of 'mandate':

"...a mandate is the authority granted by a constituency to act as its representative."

To explain with more words and perhaps a few choice metaphors; a political party states their planned policies during the election campaign, let's say to ban the wearing of Uggs out of doors, and to promote a three day weekend. Enough of the electorate are fed up with the sight of Uggs (they're missing the 'ly', surely?) and even more are fed up of the seemingly endless grind of a 40 hour week (who really has time to enjoy life in two days, 48 weeks of the year?) and, crucially, there's enough in both groups to secure this party a clear majority in Parliament. They duly come to power. First thing they do, is attempt to ban the wearing of Crocs.

This was not in their election campaign; they don't have a mandate for that.

The Conservative party did not get a clear majority of the electorate to vote for their policies, therefore they do not have a mandate for them. You could interpret 'mandate' as the will of the people. While it would be ridiculous to suggest that this government put every new policy they wish to implement to referendum (as they are doing with AV), it would be ill-considered of them to get carried away making all the ideological cuts they've been itching to make since 1997 and think they can get away with it. The deficit is getting to be like the proverbial dog that ate the homework, and to mix metaphors, we all remember what happened to the boy who cried 'wolf'.

The Conservative manifesto from the election campaign is a long-winded affair (as all the main parties' are; the Tories' clocks in at 131 pages which is the longest by 20 pages. Admittedly there's a lot of padding because TL;DR isn't an accepted part of politics as yet, so breaking it up with photos makes it easier.) but thanks to the Metro (yes; The Metro) here's some of the headline policies they were standing for last year:

:: Safeguard Britain's credit rating with a credible plan to eliminate the bulk of the structural deficit over a Parliament set out in an emergency Budget within 50 days of taking office.
:: Create the conditions for higher exports, business investment and savings, while cutting youth unemployment.
:: Reform the regulation and structure of the banking system.
:: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the UK's share of global markets for low carbon technologies.

:: Cut a net £6 billion of waste in departmental spending in 2010-11.
:: Freeze public sector pay for one year in 2011.
:: Cut ministers' pay by 5%, followed by a five-year freeze.
:: Reduce the number of MPs by 10% and cap public sector pensions above £50,000.
:: Reverse Labour's planned National Insurance hike for anyone earning under £35,000 next year.
:: Create a single Work Programme for everyone who is unemployed.
:: Boost small businesses with automatic rate relief.
:: Cut the headline rate of corporation tax to 25p and the small companies' rate to 20p.
:: Set an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants admitted into the UK.
:: Block plans for second runways at Stansted and Gatwick, while starting work on new high speed rail network.
:: Freeze council tax for two years and scrap plans for a revaluation.
:: Re-link the basic state pension to earnings and protect the winter fuel payment.
:: Give every patient the power to choose any healthcare provider which meets NHS standards within NHS prices.
:: Stop the "forced" closure of accident and emergency wards, and commission a 24/7 urgent care service in every area of England.
:: Raise standards in schools by enhancing the status of teachers and allowing state schools the freedom to offer same high quality international exams that private schools offer.
:: Give parents the power to save local schools threatened by closure.

You might also recall the billboard campaign that introduced a bizarrely smooth and shiny David Cameron to the general public. Such was the impact of the campaign, it spawned www.mydavidcameron.com.

The vital point to remember when looking at their manifesto is that not enough people voted for them, for their proposals, to secure them a victory. It took a coalition with the Liberal Democrats to get Dave into No. 10. He could've tried to form a minority government, but perhaps even he knew that he'd never get anything past a Commons' vote. Which makes me wonder what a Tory majority government would have been like.

And then I wake up screaming.

I saw Jeremy Hardy's show in Glasgow recently; he was talking at length about the incumbent government amongst other things. He spoke about how there was so much hatred of the Lib Dems, not so much for the Tories. Probably because those who voted Lib Dem (including, possibly, my own mother) never dreamt they'd enable the Tories to get in, and all those voters feel cheated an disappointed. We expect this sort of thing from the Tories, especially those of us who can remember Margaret Thatcher. What's strange and terrifying is that that also happens to be the era in which Dave and Gideon chose to become Tories. As someone tweeted a long time ago, they looked around the political landscape of the mid-80's, saw the Conservatives under Thatcher and thought 'Yes. These are my people.'

Jeremy also suggested that a sort of inbetween generation; those a bit young to really be politically aware in the 80's, a bit too old to be undergraduates mostly, might not be too upset by the actions of the Conservative-led government. I enjoyed Jeremy's show, I feel that I share many opinions with him, but on this one I disagree. I'm 32 and feel it's vitally important that we the Electorate remind Dave and 'George' that they didn't win.

Everybody Knows

In our last post, we looked at the surprising breadth of support for our central proposition - that David Cameron did not win the 2010 election. Left-wing blogger Lisa Ansell and Telegraph columnist Benedict Brogan both wrote separate pieces explaining, respectively, that no-one had won the election, and that Cameron's problems today stem from his failure to win.

Today, reading through my Kindle edition of the New Statesman, I came across not one but two examples of commentators once again reflecting our opinion - again, from across the political spectrum. In an exclusive interview with Nick Clegg, the Marty Janetty to Cameron's Shawn Michaels, guest editor Jemima Khan (who happens to be the sister of Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, so can hardly be thought of as a red-blooded socialist partisan) opines that

'the British public voted - no one party won'

although she also charitably observes that Cameron has won at least one thing - a game of tennis against Clegg.

In the very same issue, however, Hugh Grant turns the tables on News of the World executive Paul McMullan by secretly taping a conversation with him on a great many subjects, including the degree to which Cameron may well be beholden to News International:

'basically, Cameron is very much in debt to Rebekah Wade for helping him not quite win the election'

(emphasis ours, obviously).

A high-flying socialite and a gutter-dwelling hack; the (guest) editor of Britain's best-selling left-wing weekly and a former exec at the News of the Screws. You couldn't get much further apart than Jemima Khan and Paul McMullan, but on one thing they agree: David Cameron may be the PM now - but he didn't win the 2010 election.

Jemima Khan knows. Paul McMullan knows. Lisa Ansell and Benedict Brogan know. Even Nick Clegg seems to know (though he's probably too afraid of getting a chinese burn from Eric Pickles to say so openly). The only people who seem not to know are Cameron and Osborne, gloating about the 'political capital [that] comes from winning an election'. Clearly, the Bullingdon boys need a reminder. And, this May 6th, when they open their post, we'll make sure they are reminded!

It's not just us

It's not a new idea, that 2010 was the election no-one won. Hot on the heels of the election, left-wing blogger Lisa Ansell was saying much the same thing.

Fair enough, you might say - typical lefty sour grapes. But surprisingly, Tories agree with us too. Check out Benedict Brogan, in his column from this Wednesday's Telegraph: 'David Cameron isn't a winner - and that's where his problems begin'. Choice cuts:

'We will shortly mark the first anniversary of the formation of the Coalition, when David Cameron will be able to reflect on his failure to win the last election and all the troubles that stem from that inescapable fact.'

'Mr Cameron...was ahead of his bleary party in realising what an absence of victory might mean.'

'In the coming weeks, plenty of us will contemplate Mr Cameron’s achievements over the past extraordinary year. They are considerable. But we should start by acknowledging that all is not well, and that his problems are an unavoidable consequence of his failure to win.'

It would seem that while a rainbow coalition didn't emerge from last year's vote, the recognition that David Cameron didn't win it really does extend across the political spectrum!

But hang on - didn't they win?

Today has been a good day for our campaign. A retweet from the fantastic comedian Josie Long led to an explosion in other people retweeting us and following. Most of the comments from people about the project have been positive, and it's clear that our plan to admonish the Tories for crowing about 'winning' an election when they couldn't form a sufficient parliamentary majority to form a government on their own has really struck a chord with the public.

Not everyone feels the same way, however. Some have questioned the basis of what we're doing on the oldest grounds in politics: that we're being unrealistic. That objecting to the sight of a trust-fund millionaire claiming that a budget of swingeing cuts is justified on the basis that his party 'won' the election is immature. That we should  just put up with it, in fact, because this is the system and that's just how it works.

Except that that isn't how our electoral system works. The First Past the Post (FPTP) system of elections in Britain - whatever you may think of it in the light of the coming AV referendum - is designed to produce clear winners. In fact, this is one of the main justifications of FPTP in the eyes of those who endorse it as a system. FPTP is designed to lead to parties emerging with a clear majority in the Commons, even if they don't poll a majority of the national vote. Unfair? Perhaps. But decisive. FPTP leads to strong government because, most of the time, it produces a convincing victor.

Except when it doesn't.

FPTP is meant to be coalition-proof. So when it does produce a coalition, it's a sign that something's wrong. A sign that the public has lost confidence in those who claim to govern it. Undoubtedly, the public lost confidence in Labour at the last election. But the failure of the Tories to secure enough seats to form a majority government indicates that large sections of the population have no confidence in their abilities or agenda either.

The good showing the Liberal Democrats made on the back of Nick Clegg's surprisingly strong performance in the televised debates was, in its way, an illustration of how little faith the electorate placed, at that point, in the two main parties. Clegg seemed like something new: the banality of New Labour at its most moribund, of David Cameron's reheated Thatcherism and truisms about the deficit, threw Clegg, with his fresh style, touch of honesty and offer of something new, into sharp relief. The collapse in support for the Lib Dems in the aftermath of Clegg's shock decision to form a coalition with the Tories is a relection of how this sense of possibility has been so desperately squandered.

The sad truth of the 2010 General Election is that it was the election no-one won.

David Cameron's Tories, with the support of the Murdoch press, the clamour of sockpuppet pressure groups like the Taxpayer's Alliance, and the deference of a cowed BBC, were predicted to sweep into power on the back of a landslide akin to that enjoyed by Tony Blair in 1997. Instead, they only managed to gain a 48-seat majority - far short of the numbers they would need to govern on their own.

Labour, despite having averted total economic meltdown in the banking crisis, and having introduced some of the most progressive legislation since the postwar Atlee government in the course of their longest ever reign, were hamstrung by their very association with the crash, by their authoritarian attitude to civil liberties in the pursuance of the 'war on terror', by the catastrophic misjudgement of the Iraq war, and by the tabloid-fanned public perception of Gordon Brown. They did better than almost anyone predicted - but they, too, did not win.

And the Lib Dems came within a hair's breadth of being able to wield the real balance of power by offering 'supply and confidence' support to a minority Tory government - but threw it away to join one of the most ill-judged coalitions in political history, and have haemorrhaged support at the hands of an electorate hungry to punish what it sees as a betrayal. They lost too.

And so did we. As a result of the election no-one won, the British public now face an unprecedented barriage of cuts - cuts which even the Tories now admit go beyond the wildest dreams of Thatcher. Millions will lose out while bankers celebrate with even greater bonuses. The concept of a good education and meaningful adult employment is now further outside the realms of possibility for working class youth than at any time since before the Second World War. The Lib Dems, who seemed to offer so much hope to a demoralised electorate, are now seen as the most reviled members of a universally-pilloried political class. Now more than ever, Parliament seems like a rich man's plaything. After a few windows were smashed during last month's anti-cuts protests, media commentators and establishment figures fell over each other to clutch their pearls and ask how there could be such an orgy of violence. This writer looks around and wonders how there was so little.

For the Tories to claim that they 'won' the election is a slap in the face to the already demoralised people of this country, a populace who know - as the speed with which our campaign has caught on proves - that talk of victory in the context of such an inconclusive ballot is shallow triumphalism. If the Tories truly want to calm tensions and act for the good of the nation, then they need to show some humility and acknowledge how deeply they and their policies have divided and demoralised the country. And they could begin to do that by acknowledging what we already know - that neither they, nor anyone else, 'won' the 2010 election.

And if they refuse - then we're here to remind them.