Merry Christmas, you cold-hearted bastards

One minor act of disappointment, one spectacular cock-up, and one note of festive cheer. Don't say I never give you anything.

Photo by Mike Arney on Unsplash

Good morning, it's the last newsletter before Christmas, so let's start with some disappointment, then watch me make a massive twat of myself, and then work ourselves up into a state of moderate festive bliss.

Labour is expected to release its slate of new peers today - probably around 30 of them. It is the latest stage of a staggered and contradictory process in which the party has managed to be too tough, then too soft, then utterly self-interested in its assessment of the Lords. They've ballsed it up, really.

Here is the basic argument for the House of Lords. I'll do it very briefly, because most of you will have heard me say it before. It is the only place in the British constitutional system which values expertise. Certainly that's not the Commons, where MPs vote without the slightest idea what they're doing. It's not the ministerial ranks either, where politicians are regularly moved on just as they've come to understand their policy area. It's not the civil service, where officials move nearly as regularly as ministers. And it's not journalism, where declining revenue means reporters now cover multiple stories a day. No-one in any part of the British political system has any idea what they're talking about.

Apart from in the Lords. One-hundred-and-eighty-four of the peers in the Lords are crossbenchers. This means they have no party loyalty. They are there because of their experience in law, business, volunteering and so on. They actually have some understanding of the world outside of Westminster. They are joined by party political appointments - of the type that Labour is making today - as well hereditary peers and bishops.

It's in the Lords that the actual business of improving laws takes place. Amendments are proposed. Governments often accept them, but more often they formulate their own version in response. All the tiny changes that turn a bad law into a tolerable one take place there.

Why? Firstly it's because peers are more independent - the crossbenchers have no party allegiance at all, but even the party peers find it easy to stay at home rather than vote for something they don't like. Secondly it's because they have genuine expertise. And finally it's because there is no government majority. Once you are prevented from forcing something through you have to convince people of your position.

What kind of Lords reform do we need? Well obviously not democracy. Elections would remove the first two attributes that make the Lords effective - independence and expertise.

Sensible Lords reform is really quite simple. We just need to remove the hereditaries and the bishops, who obviously have no business being there. Then we should put the House of Lords Appointments Commission on a statutory footing and have it decide which party political appointments are made, according to set criteria, rather than allowing prime ministers to do it. In an ideal world we would want a Chamber with as many crossbenchers as there were party political appointments. They should have renewable 15 year terms.

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Labour's policy towards the Lords has been concerning. It's not so much the policy conclusions they've come to, although these have also been terrible. It's the manner in which they announced them despite not having really thought about them, and then walked them back when they realised it was a stupid thing to promise in the first place. I'm generally of the view that Labour is much better than people give it credit for. Its approach to Lords reform does not help my argument.

They started by saying they'd scrap the Lords and replace it with an elected Chamber. I think this is still technically their long-term policy but it's pretty clear now it won't happen. Thorny constitutional issues are either dealt with in the first term or not at all. God knows why they said this. It's the kind of thing someone murmurs over their croissant as they read the Guardian when they don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about. But anyway, that threat has now dissipated.

They then announced they would get rid of the hereditary peers. This is good stuff. It’s low hanging fruit, sure, but believe me - you can barely walk in Westminster for the fruit lying on the ground which people nevertheless refuse to pick up.

And now there's the party political appointments. Evidently Labour plans to do what others did before it and stuff the Lords with their people, in a bid to try to sabotage the third reason that the Chamber works. There was one minor element of reform - they'll now need to provide a paragraph justifying each nomination. But who cares. It's nothing really. Barely an improvement at all.

Boris Johnson in particular abused his nomination power, using it to place party donors and figures highlighted as a potential security concern in the Chamber. Liz Truss behaved similarly. It's tinpot stuff. It makes us look tawdry and pitiful. And worst of all, it causes huge damage to the public's view of the Lords. The one place that actually does its job in Westminster is made to look like an ermine-clad retirement home for loyalists, when it is in fact the strongest example of proper scrutiny.

Starmer now looks set to follow down this path. It doesn't matter whether these opening nominations are good or not - no prime minister has any business making them in the first place. It is patently a conflict of interest for the person in charge to pick people for a place in the legislature, like they're some kind of feudal monarch. It encourages them to use a place in the Lords as a way of keeping people in line, and then incentivises them to select people on the basis of loyalty - or worse, donations - rather than competence or expertise.

No-one would recognise the bravery of reform in this area. Left-wingers will ignore any change short of democratisation for ideological reasons. Right-wingers will treat it as vandalism. Most people just won't give a damn, or understand enough about the Chamber to comprehend what was happening. But giving up his power of appointment would be a sign that Starmer was truly a historic leader, someone who would do what was right over what was beneficial to him.

It looks like instead we're going to get the same old vulgar process. It's a disappointing result and a shit way to end the year.

Last week's post used a CNN report on a man released from a Syrian prison cell as a framing device for a discussion about the country and how it had impacted global politics.

In the intro, I wrote this:

As he sits under the sky, he is told that the government has collapsed. The torture camps are gone. The secret police are gone. "Syria is free," the rebel says. "Are you serious?" he asks. And then he looks at the man with an expression which simply cannot be defined.

It is relief, and bafflement, and newfound innocence, and the first hesitant vulnerable expression of hope. In that expression there is everything politics can be. There is every decent sentiment and honourable motivation of the political mission. His face represents the aspirations of centuries of liberal struggle. If someone were to ask what liberalism is - what it wants, what it aspires towards - it is the face of that man, in that moment. I can't remember the last time I saw something so beautiful.

Well now it turns out that I look like a right twat, because this guy seems to be a former intelligence officer with the deposed Syrian regime. As a CNN report earlier this week said:

"An image obtained by CNN on Monday now points to the man’s real identity – said to be a lieutenant in the Assad regime’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate, Salama Mohammad Salama. A resident of the Bayada neighborhood in Homs gave CNN a photograph said to be of the same man while he was on duty, in what appears to be a government office. Facial recognition software provided a match of more than 99 percent with the man CNN met in the Damascus prison cell."

There's some criticism that CNN should not have broadcast the report before verifying the identity of the man, but that seems overly harsh to me. It's a war. Full verification of each individual as they appear is simply not realistic. They shot the scenes as they took place, they broadcast them, they then investigated them, and they were public about their own failure. It's embarrassing, but they've performed about as well as you could expect in the circumstances.

Those who raised concerns about the footage turned out to be right . But it's worth noticing that not all of the claims they made were correct. The suggestion that CNN "fabricated" the story is, needless to say, entirely wrong.

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One of the key distinctions in modern politics is about exposing yourself to doubt. It is not about always being right. No-one will achieve that. It is about being honest when you are wrong. It is about exposing the things you believe to be true to the same harsh scrutiny you expose the things you believe to be false. Conspiracy theorists love to say that people should 'do their own research', but their own research is shit. They are forensic in their assessment of that which does not suit their position and unbelievably credulous about that which does.

The CNN report is embarrassing, but these things do happen. The key is how a news outlet behaves afterwards. They've shown vigour in assessing their own reports and honesty about providing the results, even though it damages them.

The same goes for people like me, who referred to the report. We have to be honest when something was wrong. But there's more to learn than that, I think. I wrote that the man's expression "simply cannot be defined" but it contained "relief, and bafflement, and newfound innocence, and the first hesitant vulnerable expression of hope". My main crime here was that this section was overwritten. My lesser crime was that it's now demonstrably bullshit. Then, because I am a parody of myself, I wrote that his face reflected "the aspirations of centuries of liberal struggle". It is therefore a shame that he seems to be an Assad loyalist putting on an act.

I can learn several things from this. First, I must never, ever, under any circumstances become a police detective. And second, we really do see what we want to see. We can project, especially in dramatic but changeable circumstances, the things we want to believe, the story of a world we wish to be true. We all have it within us to look a right mug and I have accomplished that here.

Right, we've done disappointment and regret, let's end with some Christmas cheer. When I was growing up, BBC2 would occasionally have a short introduction to a film by a critic. I used to love those introductions. They had this sense of being invited into the world of the movie. The intro would be in the recording I made of the film when I taped it off the telly, and I'd often watch it so often that it became part of the landscape of the movie. I'd be confused when I got a DVD later and the intro didn't appear there.

That's how it was with Mark Cousin's introduction to Dazed and Confused, which I watched so often the VHS tape started to fade. I remember him lying in this idyllic sun-kissed park landscape, as if he was some kind of bohemian spirit guide. And he said that the film reminded him of 'that feeling you get when you're young, that all the best stuff is happening somewhere else'. It's been nearly a quarter of a century, but I was able to write that out, I suspect, word for word. That's how often I watched it and how taken I was with that sentence.

Sidenote: I have just checked for this online and found it. I can’t tell you how delighted I am to see it again after all these years. The internet really is wonderful sometimes. This is also one of those rare moments where my memory is absolutely spot on. It's all exactly as I remember it. And look at him: Look at how fucking cool that is, to introduce a film while lying in a park with some bloke doing yoga behind you.

Anyway, that feeling becomes less intense as you get older but it never quite fades away. There's always that sense that perhaps we're missing out, perhaps things are better somewhere else, perhaps something is going on that we're not invited to.

One of the best things about Christmas is that none of that is true. For one week, between Christmas Eve and New Years Day, everything just…. stops. No-one is doing anything. Everything just becomes terribly quiet. The frenzy is gone and with it all the suspicions and worries that usually accompany out day-to-day life.

So merry Christmas. Nothing is going on anywhere. You're not missing out on shit. Enjoy it.

I'll see you next Friday for the final newsletter of the year, which includes the very first annual Complete Dunt Awards, featuring all the saints and sinners of 2024.