Monthly Archives: May 2008

Weekly think-tank round-up

Blog, Think-tanks

I missed a round-up last week for family reasons but it’s still a bit thin this week – I think everyone’s been consumed by reaction to Crewe so not a tremendous amount out there in terms of new & interesting thinking. As ever please flag in the comments anything worthy you think I might have missed…

Left \ Liberal Think Tanks

  • At Compass, Jonathan Rutherford calls on Labour to ‘challenge the New Conservatism, understand its strengths and expose its weaknesses’. According to Jonathan Labour’s central error was to ignore society and the dramatic changes in personal circumstances and the way communities operate. He says the Conservatives have understood this and are offering a compelling and attractive argument about how to address it.
  • The IPPR carries a piece addressing a tension most people have noticed in recent years – that between the Government’s transport policy and the environmental agenda.
  • On the ‘FreeThink’ blog associated with CentreForum there’s a lengthy discussion on how the current political landscape risks a fatal squeeze for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.
  • With rather unfortunate timing the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) says the EU should pay attention to who takes the helm of the UN Peacekeeping forces and that engagement with UN global activity is as if not more important than EU interaction with NATO. (This piece appeared in the Observer too).
  • The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has a piece on ‘Designing Citizen-centred Governance’ – “The fundamental challenge for the governance of communities is how to create flexible, effective organisations for delivering public services, while at the same time promoting the values of local democracy”.

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Thoughts on online campaigns, the left and the right

Blog, Media

I was initially going to circulate this just internally but for reasons that become clear near the end, I’ve decided to discuss it openly.

The HFE bill debate and controversy over abortion and IVF parenting was a turning point for Liberal Conspiracy, I think. The issue won’t go away of course and neither have all the debates been resolves. But I think its worth looking at surrounding issues.

Coalition building.
The aim of this group-blog has always been to find ways in which different single-issue activists on the liberal-left could together on ideas and campaigns.

In that regard, the HFE bill campaign worked well. Lefty bloggers that normally would not write much on abortion joined up with (lefty) feminists to not only blog about the issue, but expose the agenda of one MP who tried her best to distort the debate (to put it charitably).

I still think there is still a lack of coalition building across the liberal-left (especially online) among various single-issue groups and to challenge the reactionary right, this needs to change.
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We Hate the Kids pt1: the madness of young men

Blog, Crime, Economy, Education, Equality

Hypermasculinity, like hyperfemininity, is a pose of the powerless. There is a reason you don’t see gangs of City bankers stalking Moorgate and Maylebone with long knives and hoods pulled down over their heads – and it’s not because they’ve been better brought up.

It’s because they’ve no need to. When you’ve got money and status and class and education and power, you don’t need to act out physical prowess and aggression because it’s not all you’ve got – although the hard-working ladies at Spearmint Rhino might well testify to the fact that city lads too are prone to the odd bout of gibbon-like strutting and howling.

Finer minds than mine have discussed this function of the culture of young male violence.

The pronouncement of US anti-violence educator Jackson Katz on gang culture amongst young black males in the States can be applied equally to disenfranchised boys of every race in London:

“If you’re a young man growing up in this culture and the culture is telling you that being a man means being powerful… but you don’t have a lot of real power, one thing that you do have access to is your body and your ability to present yourself physically as somebody who’s worthy of respect. And I think that’s one of the things that accounts for a lot of the hypermasculine posturing by a lot of young men of color and a lot of working class white guys as well. Men who have more power, men who have financial power and workplace authority and forms of abstract power like that don’t have to be as physically powerful because they can exert their power in other ways.”

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Men Are From Mars…

Uncategorized

Welcome to our daily web review. Feel free to share your recommendations in the comments. Today’s guest compiler/writer is Sarah, who takes a feminist take on the blogosphere. 
 
Pickled Politics – Sunny Hundal is my favourite male feminist. So why is he fighting with one?
Clive Davis – Describing Scarlett Johannson’s voice. And not being very complimentary!
Open Democracy – Rosalind Eyben says development policy and discourse are shifting away from gender equality… again.
Cath Elliott – Cath explains why she’s so angry, she could strip!
The F Word – Helen G on why we shouldn’t show our… er… chests.
Remembering The Ability in Disability – May I point you over to my blog, where I link to two excellent books.
Fay Young – An example of the left – in this case, a labour councillor – getting something done in Edinburgh.  No anxiety over values or the efficacy of local representation there.
Alix Mortimer – Thinks that you really ought to check out Charlotte Gore’s new blog.

Seasteading, libertarians and internet millionaires

Blog, Civil liberties, Economy, Environment, Libertarians

Rich American Libertarians are planning to live on huge metal platforms out on the ocean. Which is good news. Now if only all of our problems could be got rid of so easily.

Executives from Google and Paypal are financing the creation of new independent ‘seastead’ states which will be anchored out in international waters. Once built, anti-social millionaires fed up with those tiresome duties of having to obey laws and pay tax, can sink their millions into the project and rust their days out on the high seas.

Of course founders Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich don’t quite put it like that. In their manifesto: Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas they write of new sustainable communities that will serve as models of ‘open source’ government.
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See her for what she was

Arts, Blog

Mary Whitehouse has always been a peripheral idea in my life — one of those puppets on Spitting Image I never really recognised as a child, but laughed at anyway, because if I didn’t seem to be paying attention, my parents might revoke the ‘being allowed up late to watch Spitting Image’ licence they had so generously granted.

Later, in my smart-arsed adolescence, came the Mary Whitehouse Experience, the apotheosis of smart-arsed comedy. I don’t think I really knew where the name came from, save from the notion of some batty old woman.

That batty old woman turned up again last night, in the BBC’s Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story.
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Give ‘em enough rope…

Blog

Sunny’s comments on the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook opening up a blog using the Daily Telegraph’s open blogging platform sparked off a lively discussion, as you might expect, and also prompted a couple of questions from Letters From A Tory that merits a considered answer…

My question to you is do you think it is possible to stop the emergence of the BNP (especially after their election to the Greater London Assembly earlier this month) – and if so, how?

The short answers to LFAT’s questions are “Yes” and “Give ‘em enough rope and they’ll hang themselves”, or to be more accurate, given time and a position where they’re views and activities are open to public scrutiny, morons like Barnbrook will inevitably set themselves up nicely for a [metaphorical] public hanging . Far from worrying about stopping the emergence of the BNP, all you need do is have a little bit of patience and gut it out until the right opportunity presents itself, which it invariably does.

It’s not so very long ago that the area in which I live was one of the BNP’s supposed ‘breakthrough’ areas. They picked up a couple of seats on the local council, for the first time, in 2003, held on to one of them, albeit with a different candidate, in 2004, when boundary changes meant all seats were up for re-election, and added three more in 2006.
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Voting out the far-right

Blog, Our democracy, Race relations, Realpolitik

Mike Ion thinks the Labour leadership should do more to combat the rise of the BNP:

Gordon Brown would send out a powerful message to his party’s core supporters if he were to personally throw his weight behind a call for a new “coalition of the willing” that will help to blunt the advance of the far-right in this country by addressing some of the genuine concerns of white working-class voters while at the same time openly challenging those concerns that have no factual or legitimate basis.

I fear Mike’s plea will go unheeded. The fact is that our electoral system gives Labour little incentive to fight the far-right, or listen to its core supporters.
Labour will not lose the next election because of the rise of the BNP in places like Stoke (Mike’s example).

It makes no difference if Labour’s 10,000 majorities in Stoke’s constituencies are cut by thousands because of the BNP or abstainers.

What will cost Labour the election is the loss of places like Worcester or Oxford West. And although abstentions or BNP votes by white working class voters in those areas could be a problem, they are less a danger than middle-income floating voters swinging to the Tories. It was his grasp of this fact that helped Blair win three elections.

So, could it be that ignoring its core support – and the rise in the BNP this threatens – is one of the prices we must pay for our first-past-the-post system?