Lib Dem grandee and close Nick Clegg ally calls PM ‘grave disappointment’ and says no campaign has told ‘regiment of lies’ Lord Ashdown, one of Nick Clegg’s closest allies, accused David Cameron of a breach of faith, describing his refusal to dissociate himself from a “regiment of lies” poured out by the no-to-AV campaign as setting him apart from every British prime minister of the postwar period. The former Liberal Democrat leader also predicted that Cameron’s behaviour would have long-term consequences for the coalition, including the terms on which it eventually ends. He told the Guardian: “So far the coalition has been lubricrated by a large element of goodwill and trust. It is not any longer. The consequence is that when it comes to the bonhomie of the Downing Street rose garden, that has gone. It will never again be glad confident morning.” The ferocity of his attack, made after consultations within the party, follows what looks like certain defeat in the referendum on the alternative vote due to be announced on Friday. The party also faces severe losses in the English council elections as results emerge. Senior figures in the yes campaign were predicting a 60%-to-40% defeat on a desultory turnout, with one admitting: “We were providing a solution to a problem the British public did not recognise.” Another said: “Once David Cameron moved in the way he did, the polls moved. It was unstoppable.” Ashdown is furious with the no campaign for personalised attacks on Clegg that accused him of broken promises on tuition fees and spending cuts, and arguments that AV was a “Lib Dem fix”. Ashdown, who led the party for 11 years until 1999, said: “The bottom line is that Liberal Democrats are exceedingly angry. We believe there has been a breach of faith here. If the Conservative party funds to the level of 99% a campaign whose central theme is to denigrate and destroy our leader, there are consequences for that. “What that means is that this is a relationship that is much less about congeniality, it becomes a business relationship, a transactional relationship, and maybe it will be all the better for that.” He went on: “David Cameron is the prime minister. He sets the tone of politics in this country. It is an unhappy fact that when he was asked to dissociate himself from a campaign that was run on the basis of personalisation and personal attacks, and messages that were far more than some subtle bending of the truth, he refused to do that. “I have to say that he did not dissociate himself from a campaign whose nature I believe every previous British prime minister in my time would have disassociated himself from. That is a grave disappointment. “This is a triumph for the regiment of lies. We live with pretty strenuous political campaigns in Britain, but these were downright lies.” Ashdown also accused Cameron of panicking after demands from his backbenchers to step up the referendum campaign. “In backtracking, to use no stronger a word than that, on what was a private agreement he had with Nick Clegg about the way this campaign was conducted, I think the prime minister panicked in the face of his rightwingers. I regret that.” Ashdown said it would be right if his party now highlighted its differences within the coalition. He insisted the Lib Dems would not leave the coalition until the end of the five-year parliament, saying: “We have set our hands to this task and now it must be completed so the purpose of the coalition has not altered, but the mood music, the atmosphere of the coalition most assuredly has as a result of what has gone on in the past three weeks. I think we should be much more straightforward where we disagree. That is not a criticism of Clegg. “I have always said when asked I did not think the result of the referendum could affect the coalition, but I did think the way it was fought could.” He seemed to imply that the party’s willingness to enter another coalition with Cameron may be affected. “I am very clear that the nature of this coalition and the way that it ends, the mood between the two parties when it ends and therefore what happens afterwards, may well be affected by this.” But he urged his party to hold its nerve, and to realise that popularity will take a long time to recover. “We are in there for the long haul, I recall how long it took us as a party to recover after 1991. It is not this year, next year or the year therafter. It is about being strong enough when the dividend comes.” He urged his battered colleagues to keep their nerve. “I am someone who has presided over a party represented by an asterisk denoting that there is no perceptible support for the party in the country, so I am used to setbacks and difficult days as this looks as though these will be. “Anyone that went into this coalition believing that there would be a benefit to the party particularly in the short term was living in cloud-cuckoo-land. We knew perfectly there was a price to be paid for this and it was going to be paid in the short term. “The dividend to be delivered in this will come after three or four years when the government has taken the country through an economic crisis.” He indicated that the Lib Dems’ fortunes were now inextricably bound up with the fate of the economy over the next four years. “The central proposition of this parliament stands: ‘Is George Osborne’s economic judgment right?’ I believe it is. The whole of British politics now rests on that single proposition. The fortunes of the coalition, the fortunes of the two parties in the coalition and the fortunes of the Labour party rest on that.” There is no sign that any senior Lib Dem cabinet member yet wants to revisit the deficit reduction plan. Ashdown challenged Cameron to show that he was the reformer he had claimed to be, by pressing ahead with an elected House of Lords. “It is in the Tory manifesto. Is he going to deliver or not? Let’s see the prime minister’s determination.” He also lashed out at Labour’s failure to back reform, saying: “Yet again Labour has proved it cannot be trusted with reform. Labour claims to be a great radical reforming party but whenever it comes to a key issue of reform, we find Labour defending the status quo.” Clegg and Cameron will try to show it is business as usual when they publish a checklist of coalition achievements before next week’s anniversary. There will be a symbolic joint foreword by the two men. There will also be some action on youth unemployment next week. Meanwhile Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, waiting anxiously for news of the scale of the Labour advance in his first nationwide electoral test, will urge the electorate not to be duped by the promise of a coalition mark 2, predicting sham concessions by the Conservatives. AV referendum Alternative vote Paddy Ashdown David Cameron Nick Clegg Liberal Democrats Conservatives Labour Electoral reform Liberal-Conservative coalition Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Skype is suddenly the prettiest girl in school now that it’s pushed back its IPO. Google is in talks for a joint venture with the online calling company, and Facebook is considering buying it outright, sources tell Reuters . Skype is expected to rake in about $1 billion if it goes…
Continue reading …Leave it to Howard Stern to pull the really TMI remarks out of Jesse James. On his radio show yesterday, the shock jock asked James who’s “more fun” in bed: James’ wronged ex, Sandra Bullock, or new fiancée Kat Von D. “That one’s an easy no-brainer,” James replied. “Kat Von…
Continue reading …Americans will get their own chance to experience royal frenzy come July 8, when Prince William and his wife Kate, née Middleton, arrive in California. The newlyweds will visit the state for three days following an official tour of Canada that begins June 30, the palace confirmed today. It will…
Continue reading …That whole restructuring thing continues to be working out well for General Motors: The auto behemoth posted $3.2 billion in first-quarter profits today, including a $1.5 billion one-off from the sale of its share of Delphi and its stock in a former in-house lender. The number soundly beat…
Continue reading …If you compare pictures from last year and this year, there’s no denying it: There’s something different about Bristol Palin’s face. Maureen O’Connor noted the change on Gawker , wondering if perhaps Palin used “some of that abstinence advocacy money on plastic surgery.” Of course, it could all be normal, the…
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Scientists warn that farming practices must be adapted to a warmer world and rises in global population Global warming has already harmed the world’s food production and has driven up food prices by as much as 20% over recent decades, new research has revealed. The drop in the productivity of crop plants around the world was not caused by changes in rainfall but was because higher temperatures can cause dehydration , prevent pollination and lead to slowed photosynthesis. Lester Brown , president of the Earth Policy Institute, Washington DC, said the findings indicate a turning point: “Agriculture as it exists today evolved over 11,000 years of reasonably stable climate, but that climate system is no more.” Adaptation is difficult because our knowledge of the future is not strong enough to drive new investments, he said, “so we just keep going, hoping for the best.” The scientists say their work shows how crucial it is to find ways to adapt farming to a warmer world, to ensure that rises in global population are matched by rising food production. “It is vital,” said Wolfram Schlenker, at Columbia University in New York and one of the research team. “If we continue to have the same seed varieties and temperatures continue to rise, then food prices will rise further. [Addressing] that is the big question.” The new research joins a small number of studies in which the fingerprint of climate change has been separated from natural variations in weather and other factors, demonstrating that the effects of warming have already been felt in the world. Scientists have shown that the chance of the severe heatwave that killed thousands in Europe in 2003 was made twice as likely by global warming, while other work showed that the floods that caused £3.5bn of damage in England in 2000 were made two to three times more likely. Food prices have reached new record highs this year, and have been implicated as a trigger for unrest in the Middle East and Africa. A rising appetite for meat is a critical factor, said Wolfram. “We actually have enough calories to feed the world quite comfortably, the problem is meat is really inefficient,” as many kilogrammes of grain are needed to produce one kilogramme of meat, he said. “As countries get richer and have a preference for meat, which is more expensive, they price people in poorer countries out of the market.” “The research provides evidence of big shifts in wheat and maize production,” commented Prof Tim Wheeler at the Walker Institute for Climate System Research, Reading University, UK, who added it had involved “heroic” statistical analysis. But he said that, while long-term climate change impacts were another pressure on food prices, short-term price spikes were linked to extreme weather events, such as the Russian heatwaves and wildfires in 2010 . The study, published in the journal Science , examined how rising temperatures affected the annual crop yields of all major producer nations between 1980 and 2008. Computer models were used to show how much grain would have been harvested in the absence of warming. Overall, yields have been rising over the last decades and the models took this into account. The scientists found that global wheat production was 33m tonnes (5.5%) lower than it would have been without warming and maize production was 23m tonnes (3.8%) lower. Specific countries fared worse than the average, with Russia losing 15% of its potential wheat crop, and Brazil, Mexico and Italy suffering above average losses. Some countries experienced lower production of rice and soybeans, although these drops were offset by gains in other countries. The losses drove up food prices by as much as 18.9%, the team calculated, although the rise could be as low as 6.4% if the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere strongly boosts plant growth and yields – a factor that is not well understood by scientists. Global food prices have risen by about 200% in recent years, says Schlenker. Other causes of the rise are the increased demand for meat and the diversion of food into biofuels . Nonetheless, the researchers conclude that the negative impact on crops overall is “likely to be incurring large economic and health costs”. The US, which has the world’s largest share of overall production, stood out in the analysis because it appears to have lost no production to climate change as yet. Schlenker said this was because the rise in temperature there was very small compared to other parts of the world. This was perhaps due simply to luck with the weather, or the cooling influence of aerosol particles, such as soot, that blocks warming. “US farmers are having a good time in the sense that their yields have not been impacted much and prices have been pretty high, so for them it has been pretty profitable,” he said. “But most climate models predict that eventually the US will warm.” Adapting farming to climate change could involved moving to cooler areas as existing areas warm, said Schlenker, but often soils are poorer in the new locations. He highlighted the potential of biotechnology – genetic engineering – to develop new crop varieties that are more resistant to heat, but said the potential remains unproven. “What happens over the next 20 years depends on how optimistic you are about finding those extra ways of adapting.” Food Farming Climate change The meat industry Climate change Damian Carrington guardian.co.uk
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Rolling coverage as results come in from elections to the Scottish parliament, the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies and 279 English councils 9.52pm: Mike Smithson at PoliticalBetting is running a poll on which AV poll will turn out to be most accurate. He lists four polls, ranging from YouGov putting the no camp on 60% to ICM putting it on 68%. 9.42pm: My colleague Severin Carrell has sent me a note about the boundary changes in Scotland. The Holyrood elections have an extra twist to them: boundary changes last year means that many of the Scottish parliament’s 73 constituencies are more difficult to call, lending this year’s election campaign greater unpredictability. A seat-by-seat analysis by David Denver of Lancaster university last year suggests the Tories gain most: if the 2007 election had been fought on the new boundaries, the Tories could have had 19 seats, not 18, while Labour would fall back one to 45 and the SNP to 46, rather than the 47 they actually won. Denver says 42 seats have seen “major change”, leaving 19 new ones as “hotly contested”. In theory, SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon would very narrowly lose the new seat of Glasgow Southside to Labour, while the SNP would take Aberdeen Central from Labour and their first seat in the Borders: Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale. 9.40pm: To put the figures we get tonight into perspective, here are some other national share of the vote figures. From the 2007 local elections, when the seats up for election today were last contested. This is the estimated national equivalent share of the vote figure. I’ve taken it from the chart on page 6 of this House of Commons research paper (pdf). Conservatives: 40% Labour: 26% Lib Dems: 24% From the 2010 general election. (These are the real GB voting figures for Westminster.) Conservatives: 37% Labour: 30% Lib Dems: 24% From the latest YouGov poll of voting intentions in a general election (pdf). Conservatives: 36% Labour: 40% Lib Dems: 11% 9.17pm: One of the key Labour targets in the north of England is Sheffield. My colleague Martin Wainwright will be at the count. He’s just sent me this. Labour has an easy task on the face of it in Sheffield, where the joy of embarrassing local MP Nick Clegg is a much-touted bonus of knocking out the Lib Dem minority administration. But the party is well aware that they only just managed to end the LD’s overall majority last May, and tough-as-boots Lib Dem leader Paul Scriven also survived Coun Bill Curran’s defection to Labour in September. That left Scriven with 41 members against 40 Labour, two Green and an independent. A third of the seats – 28 – are up for election tonight and there are plenty of close battlegrounds. Curran’s Walkley ward sees Lib Dem cabinet member for housing Penny Baker defend a majority of 36 last time she stood. Her colleagues in Gleadless Valley and East Ecclesfield are defending margins of 51 and 74. Nick Clegg isn’t lying low. Far from it. He voted this morning in his Sheffield Hallam constituency, bright an early, and said that local people understood that the government had a difficult job and was trying to do it “fairly, compassionately and responsibly.” First results at the English Institute of Sport are expected between 1 and 2am and a clear picture by 2.30am. 8.56pm: What are the key councils to watch? The best guide I’ve read is the one produced by Andy Sawford at the Local Government Information Unit. He’s written mini profiles of 50 councils where the results will be particularly interesting. 8.29pm: So, how do we work who’s having a good night? All parties manage expectations before elections and this year, in relation to the English local elections, we’ve seen some really blatant examples of this. This is what the three main parties have been saying. Conservatives “We’ll be pleased if we don’t lose 1,000 seats,” is the offical line from Tory HQ. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I interpreted that as evidence that they are fairly sure they won’t lose 1,000 seats. They are defending more seats than Labour and the Lib Dems combined. But, if the national opinion polls are anything to go by, the story of the night will be the collapse in the Lib Dem vote, and around 75% of the Lib Dem seats up for election are being contested in areas where the Tories are their main rivals. David Cameron could conceivably do quite well from Nick Clegg’s unpopularity (which is another reason why tonight could have an interesting impact on coalition relations). Labour Labour say that, on the basis of the way people have been voting in local council byelections, their share of the vote is 38%, the Conservatives’ 35% and the Lib Dems’ 18%. In these elections – real elections – Labour are ahead, but not by as much as they have been in most recent national opinion polls. They say that on this basis they would expect to gain between 400 and 600 seats. Their problem is that Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher of Plymouth University’s Elections Centre, who are the acknowledged experts on local elections, have also been looking at voting in council byelections and, according to this story in the Sunday Times (paywall), they think the trend suggests Labour could win as many as 1,300 seats. Rallings and Thrasher think the Tories could lose nearly 1,000 seats, and the Lib Dems about 400 seats. I’ve asked Labour to explain why the Rallings and Thrasher extrapolated figures are so different from the Labour party’s, but the officials I spoke to were unable to provide an explanation. Lib Dems “We are going to lose hundreds of seats,” a Lib Dem source told me tonight. That does fit with the Rallings and Thrasher analysis. But the Lib Dems are worried that the media will focus on the number of councils under Lib Dem control, and not on seats. There are a number of councils in the north of England where Labour could win control on the basis of just a handful of seats changing hands, I was told. The Lib Dems will claim that such losses don’t represent a drastic collapse in support. 8.27pm: Before we get going, here are some facts about the seats that are up for election today. English local elections Some 279 English councils are holding elections. In English local government some councils put all seats up for election (“all-out elections”) every four years and some councils hold more frequent elections with just a third of the seats up for grabs each time. Today’s poll is a particularly large one – more than 31 million people in England can participate in council elections – because both types of contest are taking place. To be precise, elections are taking place in 49 unitary authorities, 36 metropolitan districts and 194 non-metropolitan districts. Some 9,396 seats are being contested. That’s 52% of all English council seats. On a party basis, they divide up like this: Conservatives: 5,029 (55% of all Conservative council seats in England) Labour: 1,620 (39%) Lib Dem: 1,867 (52%) Scotland All 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament are being contested. Some 73 constituency MSPs will be elected by first past the post. Another 56 MSPs will be elected by proportional representation from regional lists. The boundaries have changed since the last elections in 2007. These are the “notional” results for 2007, based on what academics believe the results would have been if that election had been fought on the new boundaries. SNP: 46 seats Labour: 45 Conservatives: 19 Lib Dems: 17 Greens: 1 Others: 1 Wales All 60 seats in the Welsh Assembly are being contested. Some 40 constituency AMs will be be elected by first past the post, and another 40 will be elected from lists using PR. In 2007 the results were: Labour: 26 seats Plaid Cymru: 15 Conservatives: 12 Lib Dems: 6 Independent: 1 Northern Ireland All 108 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly are being contested. Members are elected in 18 six-member constituencies by the single transferable vote PR system. In 2007 the results were: Democratic Unionist Party: 36 Sinn Fein: 28 Ulster Unionist Party: 18 Social Democratic and Labour Party: 16 Alliance: 7 Green: 1 Progressive Unionist Party: 1 Independents: 5 8.00pm: According to the Independent, it’s Super Thursday. There have been parliamentary or assembly elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and local elections in England and Northern Ireland. There are local elections in England every year, but this is the biggest set of elections in the four-year local government election cycle and more than 30 million people in England have had the chance to take part. On top of that, we’ve all had the chance to take part in the referendum on the alternative vote. Outside of a general election, an election night doesn’t come much bigger than this. Elections are always exciting because of what they tell you about the state of the parties nationally, and as the results come in over the next 24 hours I’ll be posting furiously about what they have to tell us about Ed Miliband’s attempts to revive the Labour party, about what being in government has done to the standing of David Cameron’s Conservative party and about quite how disastrous it all is for the Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg. But this time there’s even more than usual at stake. The result of the AV referendum seems likely to kill all prospects of electoral reform for a generation (which could have quite profound consequences for the Lib Dems, as yet probably not fully understood). The character of Westminster coalition seems to have changed fundamentally as a result of the campaign and the way it has been conducted. Wales and Northern Ireland are electing assemblies enjoying more self-confidence and power than they’ve had before. And if, as expected, Alex Salmond wins a second term as Scotland’s first minister, then we’ll have to conclude that his long-term plan to achieve independence by stealth seems to be going reasonably well. The future of the Union hasn’t been much of an issue in the Scottish election campaign, but conceivably tonight’s results could have considerably bearing on it. Here’s a timetable of what’s coming up. Thursday night 10pm: The polls close. Counting starts in most of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly seats, and in many of the 279 English councils where elections are taking place. 10.30pm: Sky News starts its election programme, Decision Time 2011, with Adam Boulton presenting. 11.35pm: The BBC’s election programme, Vote 2011, starts on BBC 1, with David Dimbleby presenting. Around 12pm: The first Welsh results and English council results are expected. Sunderland is often the first English council to declare. Friday Around 2am: The first Scottish results are expected. A large number of English council results are expected between 2am and 3am. Around 3am: Results should be coming in thick and fast. Sheffield, a key Labour target, is one of the councils expected to declare around about now. 7.30am: Counting starts in the Leicester South byelection. 8am: Counting starts in the Northern Ireland assembly elections. Around 9am: Counting starts in Northern Ireland and in the Leicester South byelection Around 11am: Results start to come in from the small number of Scottish and Welsh constituencies that did not count overnight and from the 160-odd English councils counting on Friday. Around 2pm: Results start to come in from Northern Ireland. Around 2.30pm: The Electoral Commission is expected to announce the turnout in the AV referendum. 4pm: Counting of the votes in the AV referendum starts. The full results are not due in until around 9pm or later, but one side – the no camp, unless the polls are totally wrong – may well get more than 50% of the vote before then. By Friday night almost all the counting will be over. But the final results of the Northern Ireland assembly elections are not expected until Saturday afternoon, and the counting in the Northern Ireland local elections does not start until Monday. I’ll be blogging until around 6am tomorrow. My colleague Hélène Mulholland will then take over as we launch a new blog, and I’ll be back on Friday afternoon in time for the AV results. Local elections Local elections 2011 Welsh Assembly Government Welsh elections 2011 Welsh politics Scottish politics Scottish elections 2011 Elections 2011 Northern Irish politics Local politics Local government Alternative vote AV referendum Labour Liberal Democrats Conservatives Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk
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The US president has attended a moving ceremony at the site of the 9/11 bombings in New York, joined by the emergency services and the families of those who died
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