Why Europe’s left can rise again
“They Only Look Dead” was the title of leading US political commentator EJ Dionne’s excellent book – published at the height of the Newt Gingrich revoution – to argue the counter-intuitive thesis ’Why progressives will dominate the next political era’, arguing that the populist and polarising anti-government fervour of the US right misread the mood of America.
Very few political observers thought that Bill Clinton could recover from the crushing defeat of the 1994 mid-term elections, when he had to argue that the Presidency was “still relevant” to win at a canter in 1996. But Dionne’s was a longer-term analysis, which he reflected on in an essay last year on The Liberal Moment, and the possibilities and tensions for hopes of a new progressive era in the US.
In next week’s Newsweek magazine, I set out an argument as to ‘why Europe’s left will rise again’.
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Re-thinking Obama (pt2): Why the left is frustrating
Barely had Barack Obama been crowned Democratic nominee for presidency that the doubtful editorials started. How badly will he disappoint us, the liberals, lefties and greens started asking in earnest. Everything from his stance on national security, foreign policy, the environment and even (bizarrely) abortion rights have been held up as examples of his betrayal and coming disappointment.
I can’t begin to tell you how much such attitudes frustrate me. But they do offer a brilliant illustration of why the left in Britain today remains at the margins of political power.
To me there are two ways of shifting the political consensus in any direction. The first, by getting into power and enacting policies that become part of the furniture (welfare state, NHS, BBC, minimum wage etc). The second way is to build grass-roots organisations and put pressure on politicians and shift the public discourse. (Being over-exposed on, or controlling the mass-media is a third option, but you’re not Rupert Murdoch so let’s keep it simple).
It is often said that left-wingers want all the power but none of the responsibility. In watching Barack Obama’s run for president unfold, this has never been more true.
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Surprises from the airline plot
There will be more than a few surprised people tonight, both in the media and outside it, at the verdict reached by the jury in the “liquid explosives” trial. The case, after all, had been presented, as George Tenet famously said, as a “slam-dunk”. Here were 8 Muslim extremists, caught red-handed with quantities of hydrogen peroxide, used by both the 7/7 and 21/7 bombers in their attacks, having recorded “martyrdom videos” and with apparent plans for the blowing up mid-flight of an unspecified number of transatlantic planes.
There were shrieks of initial incredulity then horror from the press, all liquids in containers above 100ml were banned from planes as a precaution, with mothers having to taste their babies’ milk, apparently as a result of claims that the bombers were prepared to blow up their children and use their bottles as containers for the explosives. This last claim, as Craig Murray notes, was nonsense.
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New Labour, fascism and silly squabbles
What would the blogosphere be without other blogs to gripe about? Harry’s Place continue this fine tradition with a screamer of a post about an image dreamed up by Derek Wall, leader of the Green Party, posted along with an article at the Socialist Unity blog. When I say a screamer of the post, I mean read the comments section; the post itself is fairly anodyne but Harry’s Place seems to be pulling Hayek-style “socialism equals fascism” wannabes by the dozen.
If you’re at a loss to understand what all the fuss could possibly be about and can’t be bothered visiting either site linked to above, look at the following picture:
We don’t do class struggle well, do we?
Britain – or England, to be more exact – was famously the home of the first great revolution of modern times, in the shape of the Civil War of 1642-1651.
I’m sure the Decent Left of the day found clear grounds on which to oppose it, especially considering the obvious parallels between Oliver Cromwell and Saddam Hussein, both brutal dictators at the head of one party theocracies. Perhaps they called on the American colonies to mount humanitarian intervention.
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Brown isn’t ‘bonkers’ enough
I gather that some fat bloke who always refers to himself in the third person has suggested that Gordon Brown might be ‘bonkers’. Right-thinking people have condemned this.
My complaint is different. It’s that, to paraphrase Niels Bohr, Brown is not “bonkers” enough.
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Has Britain really been ‘buying’ medals?
Now the last glittering firework has sputtered and died and Beijing has regained its industrial atmospheric fog – our Olympic athletes will amble through airport security with less chance of a cavity search than… well, a state-educated person has of winning a medal. Or an inhabitant of a “low-income nation” apparently.
That is according to Matthew Syed who does a good job in stating the bleeding obvious really. Private sector schools have more money to throw at sports, never abandoned the competitive ethos, haven’t sold off quite so many playing fields to make ends meet, etc – and when were the Olympics ever ‘egalitarian’, anyway?
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We need a new paper for London
The Evening Standard has something close to a monopolistic position on London news. My objections are not because it is right-wing, obsessed with Ken or a bit tabloid.
Rather, it is that they are unchallenged in their position. My objection to the newspaper market in London is that it leaves great swathes of GLA and borough politics untouched.
Despite its attempts to move upmarket, ES’s news coverage is pretty poor. It doesn’t cover borough politics and only lightly covers the Mayor and GLA. There is room and need for competition for the broader (rather than just middle market tabloid) London news market. But the Evening Standard has singularly failed to capitalise on its online activities.
I believe that better news coverage and debate about London – effectively the fifth home nation – would be a good thing. The question is how.
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Insane? But it’s what these Tories are about
David Cameron yesterday called the latest report from Policy Exchange ‘insane’. As well he might. But for the modern Conservative Party, the only thing insane, was to say this stuff out loud.
Because for the think tank, the ranks of which make up a large chunk of the new Tory establishment, these views are nothing out of the ordinary.
Do we need a Bill of Rights?
The Joint Committee on Human Rights seems to think so. On Sunday it said:
The government should adopt a Bill of Rights for the UK, a cross-party committee of MPs and peers has urged. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said the bill should go further than current human rights legislation. The bill should give greater protection to groups such as children, the elderly and those with learning difficulties, it said in a report.
…
The committee said the bill should include rights to housing, education and a healthy environment. Its report referred to a survey conducted in 2006 when more than three-quarters of the people polled agreed that “Britain needs a Bill of Rights to protect the liberty of the individual”. The report said the new Bill should include all the rights spelt out in the Human Rights Act and then enshrine others in law.
What we really need, I feel is a British Constitution, not just a Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities). The problem then is that a BoR will just kill off any hunger for a proper constitution. Either way, I think a better codification of our rights as citizens is good idea.
The full report is here. Thoughts?
(they sent the whole report to me for some unexplicable reason. If anyone wants it off my hands, just let me know)
Blog Nation and future of politics, online
I was reading about the US event Netroots Nation over the weekend and realised – I hadn’t properly written about Liberal Conspiracy’s own Blog Nation event a few months ago. There was plenty of commentary across other blogs but it didn’t really reflect what I had in mine when I organised it.
Blogging about blogging again? You betcha. I’ve been discussing the future of political blogging at various events, and I’ve been invited to participate at the bloggers fringe at both the Libdem and Green party conferences in coming weeks. Oh and there’s the infamous David Lammy incident I want to go over again.
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We should ditch the oath to the Queen
The Daily Mail today screams: “MPs want to ditch oath to the Queen“, quoting arch conservative Norman Tebbit as saying, in typically hyperbolic fashion: “This seems to be an attack on the state itself”.
Another Tory Geoffrey Cox argued that the oath should stay because: “The Queen is the centre of the British constitution.” Yes, she is. And this is why the principled objections to the oath matter and that is why the oath should, at the very least, be optional.
Republic was behind the parliamentary challenge to the oath, after launching the Challenge the Oath campaign back in April. As the website says, a legal requirement to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen is discriminatory and unjust. We also believe it is objectionable in principle.
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Can Cameron’s big ‘nudge’ idea work?
The Spiritual Civilisation Construction Commission has the job of curbing anti-social behaviour in Beijing whilst cultivating courtesy and civility instead. It has issued booklets and launched campaigns to minimise littering and China’s problem with public spitting, it has issued edicts on sartorial and social matters from handshaking to the length of one’s skirt. It has also been accompanied by a zero tolerance, broken windows approach to minor infractions such as spitting.
This is interesting for one major reason: it sounds very much like an extreme version of policies suggested by David Cameron, a whole suite of policies that might be labelled “soft paternalism”.
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We need your help for a briefing on Anthony Browne
A week ago the director of the right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange, Anthony Browne, joined London Mayor Boris Johnson as his new policy director. He was replacing Nick Boles, also formerly of Policy Exchange, for screwing up over the Ray Lewis incident.
Put aside for a minute that the Charity Commission recently said (pdf) that: “there was no evidence of [Policy Exchanging displaying] party political bias towards the Conservative party or any other political party.”
After all, so what if James O’Shaughnessy, another former director of research at Policy Exchange, joined the Conservative Party as director of research. So what is one of Policy Exchange’s authors and fundraisers, Munira Mirza, is Boris Johnson’s director of arts? No connection, see?
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Compass v Progress – who will win?
Neal Lawson’s recent article, offering suggestions on how New Labour could rebuild its election winning coalition, has attracted some predictable flak. Here’s Labour councillor Luke Akehurst:
What’s striking about the policy reactions to Glasgow East, such as the statement yesterday from Compass, is that many of them are just recitations of the writers’ pet hates, not attempts to address voters’ actual concerns. Voters are angry about the credit crunch, knife crime, unaffordable housing, fuel prices and fuel tax, and food prices. The Labour left are talking about hostility to ID cards, Trident, 42 day detention and public services reform and PFI, issues where the public support the Government or just don’t care.
And here’s Tim at TOK:
Some people will never learn. While the UK Labour Party is indisputably stuffed at the moment and most definitely needs to address its utter lack of direction and message, it is beyond my comprehension why so many progressives over here want to model a new electoral strategy based on the Labour Party of 1983, rather than the Labour Party of 1997.
You could characterise this as the ‘Compass versus Progress‘ debate.
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How tabloid journalism works (pt 934)
It’s the silly season, it’s a Sunday, and you haven’t got anything approaching a front page story. Do you: (a) put in the effort and attempt to find a new angle to the problems facing Gordon Brown? (b) continue to go on alarmingly about the moral decline in society because a rich man who enjoys being spanked has won a court case or (c) turn the most innocuous addition to a social-networking site which just happens to be a rival to the one owned by your own proprietor into a super splash?
There’s just no contest if you’re a Sun “journalist”, is there? I’m not on Facebook as I don’t have any friends, but even I know there’s a whole plethora of “poke” applications, such as giving one of your friends a virtual sexually transmitted disease, as well as literally dozens of similarly hilarious things. There isn’t however at the moment a moral panic about STDs, but there certainly is about knives.
An open primary for London
In the past few months, we’ve heard a lot about what Barack Obama’s presidential campaign could teach British progressives (indeed, I’ve been more guilty of that than most), but too much has been vague hypothesising and rueful ‘what ifs’, rather than a practical sense of how to get started.
So I think Sunder Katwala’s support for an open primary to choose the next Labour candidate for Mayor of London is a really positive first step.
There’s much in the mechanics of the Obama campaign (and the US netroots in general) that we can admire and wish to transplant into British politics, but as none of it has ever been tried before, we’ve no idea whether it would work in a country that appears to have a more cynical, less involved approach to politics than you’ll find in America.
At the very least, having an open primary in London would give us the opportunity to road-test methods like online fundraising, organising and building a movement that tries to reach as many people as possible (ie, not just Labour activists) and bring them into the tent.
If it doesn’t show any signs of success in Britain’s biggest city, then there’s not much hope for the rest of the country. However, if progressives do find some positive signs from the attempt, there’s hope that the process of choosing mayoral & parliamentary candidates could one day be more open, inclusive and, yes, democratic.
Cameron is disowning Thatcher’s economics
David Cameron is moving further away from Thatcherism. This is one interpretation of his call for a US-style chapter 11 bankruptcy law. He says:
Instead of companies going straight into liquidation and having to lay off staff, they get a stay of execution and they can be restructured to try to save the business, to try to save the jobs.
This is a flat contradiction of standard neoliberal economics. This says that the very fact that a company is bankrupt is a sign that it has little value; the market – customers – judges things right. The firm should therefore be broken up, so that workers can be released to find more productive employment. And in removing excess capacity from an industry, the firm’s more efficient rivals will become more profitable, allowing them to expand.
And the notion that bankrupt firms can be restructured is pish; if there were a way for the firm to become more efficient, either the existing managers would have found it, or the firm would have been bought by those who can make a go of it. That this hasn’t happened shows there’s no hope for the firm.
Now, this view was pretty much orthodox Thatcherism. “Lame ducks must go to the wall” was a cliché of the early 80s. And the reason Thatcher called coal mines “uneconomic” – rather than just unprofitable – was because she thought miners would find better work than digging up cheap coal*.
In calling for a chapter 11, Cameron is rejecting this view. Why?
One possibility is that the evidence is on his side. We know now that displaced miners generally did not (pdf) find work, suggesting that workers don’t quickly find valuable work elsewhere. There’s some (but limited) evidence that firms can turn themselves around in chapter 11. And it’s not clear that firms in chapter 11 in industries with excess capacity actually do harm their more efficient rivals. Chapter 11 does, then, have its supporters.
But there’s another possibility. Whether or not chapter 11 is good for the economy generally, it’s certainly good for investment bankers and lawyers, as creditors spend a fortune fighting over the scraps. So perhaps Cameron has just listened to his friends.
* Of course, it’s possible that Thatcher’s pit closure programme was motivated not by economics but by mere class hatred. But no-one believes this, do they?
Why Karl Rove is right
I don’t agree with the conclusion, but Bush strategist Karl Rove’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal about Obama’s campaigning is spot on:
For a campaign that says it wants to end the politics of the Bush-Cheney years, the Obama for President effort has cribbed an awful lot from the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004.
…
Sen. Obama’s organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille’s plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros’s 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran “virtual precincts,” using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today.
As I said not long ago, I wonder when the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats are effectively going to start doing the same here. Notice the key word: ‘grassroots’.
Why a fixed-term Parliament might be needed
David Lammy MP’s recent call for the introduction of open primaries for candidate selection into British politics got a bit lost on LC, because
- quite understandably, not a few people preferred to play the man rather than the ball;
- the Single Tranferable Vote fetishists feared that our broken electoral system might be fixable in some other way (I’ll come back to that);
- Lammy didn’t make his case anything like as strongly as he might have done. And he didn’t, because he didn’t look at a different, but connected issue.
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You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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