A better response to the financial crisis
contribution by Duncan Weldon
The current economic downturn is a crisis of finance. Over the last twenty years alone the world has witnessed a half dozen crises: the bursting of the Japanese ’bubble economy’ in 1989, the Nordic banking problems of the early ‘90s, the Mexican ‘Tequila Crisis’ of 1994, the 1997 Asian Crisis, the Russian Crisis of 1998 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000.
What all of these various episodes have in common is that a problem that began in the financial markets was allowed to spill out into the real economy, often with severe consequences.
So far the left, whilst rightly calling for further regulation is not really advancing a specific argument beyond vague talk of bonus caps and clawing back previous pay.
Neither of these are a bad idea, but any attempt to reform the financial system needs to be based on firmer grounds.
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Why I support a high pay commission
I’ve written a short article for the New Statesman about why the idea for a High Pay Commission, mooted by Compass this week, isn’t a bad idea. I’m expanding on some of the arguments here.
I’m going to start by noting that a ‘High Pay Commission’ isn’t necessarily about setting a maximum wage limit but about reviewing pay at the top and considering capping “excessive remuneration”.
Greed creates instability
There’s an article from the New Yorker magazine that is passed around to Bloomberg interns and employees as the article to read on the financial crisis. I can’t locate it for now. Found it, but the full version isn’t available online. But the basic gist is: you can blame the sub-prime crisis, confusing government regulation and increasingly complicated derivatives for the financial crisis, but actually it comes down to two things: excessive, unchecked greed and disregard for shareholder returns.
The financial crisis exposed the fallacy of the assumption that remuneration is closely linked to performance, especially at the top. The system not only hid deep losses in the financial sector but failed to penalise executives when their failures came to light.
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Is it ‘unpatriotic’ to diss the NHS?
There is a sentiment being twittered and retwittered about the place that the row over Dan Hannan’s self-publicizing anti-NHS comments on Fox News is a perfect storm for Labour, and that Andy Burnham’s intervention is a big plus.
Perhaps not for Guardian readers, who are a bunch of simpering, effete wet-noses obviously – but this will definitely chalk up some points with the solid English-as-the-White-Cliffs readers of the Daily Mail. Well on this one I’m joining the effete Guardian readers, because damned if I’m not unpatriotic too – and so should you be.
I don’t care whether the issue is Malkin attacking Dunkin Donuts, or Pelosi attacking immigration laws, or Hannan on the NHS or the Home Office declaring that protesting against British troops is considered unpatriotic and grounds for denying people citizenship.
Patriotism is a retarded sentiment which should be left to the fifteen year old kids in AOL and MSN chatrooms who type variations on a theme of “My country can beat your country!!!” as fast as they can, as though this justifies any action and can win any argument.
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This is your war on drugs
On 16th February 2002, Valentina Rosendo Cantú was washing her clothes in a stream near her home in Caxitepec, Mexico, when six soldiers approached. Seemingly too busy for pleasantries, the men started barking questions at her: Who was she? Where was she from? Had she seen the people they were looking for? Did she recognise the names on the list they thrust in front of her?
Her answers weren’t good enough, so one soldier pulled a gun and threatened to shoot. Another punched her so hard that she passed out. When she came to, two men tore off her underwear and raped her, one after the other. She was sixteen years old.
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Denying the right to opt out of religion
The Archbishop of Wales has come out against people being able to opt out of religious services at school.
Barry Morgan thinks that prayer offers pupils the opportunity of “recognition, affirmation and celebration of shared values”, and people should not be allowed to opt out of our shared values, particularly if they don’t share them.
He made the statements as Wales followed England in allowing over 16s to opt of religious service as part of their school day. I should point out that if you’re under 16 you’re still forced to sit through prayers, et al, even if you have firm convictions in another direction, like atheism.
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A face and a name come to light
Is she as you imagined her? The slackened jaw; the furrowed brow; the baffled, vacant expression. Does she fit the image you had of the callous, ‘sex-obsessed slob‘ who puffed smoke, glugged booze and watched porn whilst her boyfriend & lodger tortured her son to death?
Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t matter. It won’t bring Peter Connelly back, won’t prevent further abuses from happening, won’t stop other helpless little boys & girls from being murdered by the people in their care. All it satisfies is some short-lived curiosity for a face & a name.
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But where will they send me?
As if it wasn’t bad enough that despite being a British citizen I’m apparently incapable of ever passing the British Citizenship test (numerous goes at the various online versions have ended in complete and humiliating failure), now it looks like the knuckledraggers who post on the white-nationalist-fascist-scum Stormfront forums want to have me deported.
During a recent discussion over there about the Norwich North by-election one of its more evolved members, that is, a Nazi who can not only use a keyboard to spout bile on the Internet but who can even add links and shit too, decided to post my piece about the lies the BNP had been printing in their election leaflets: The BNP’s lies in Norwich North. On top of that, said Nazi also decided to post a piccie of my good self to illustrate the article, one that he nabbed off my Facebook profile.
Now after a minor panic about how the hell he’d got hold of a photo I’ve only ever used on Facebook, and after taking some advice from friends about Internet security (cheers Sunny), I decided to remove my FB profile from public view.
I hadn’t actually realised that doing that would have a knock-on effect anywhere else, but I’m delighted and amused to report that this action has led to my photo on the Stormfront forum being replaced by a generic faceless avatar.
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The witchhunt
Lousy news from the trade union front, people:
The New Labour-loving horrors who run the public sector union Unison have stepped up their campaign to purge their Labour affiliated union of all grassroots socialists and leftwing activists.
We on the left are not pleased.
The union has just banned four of its best grassroots activists – Glenn Kelly (Bromley Unison branch secretary), Suzanne Muna (Unison’s Tenant Services Authority branch secretary), Onay Kasab (Greenwich Unison branch secretary) and Brian Debus (Hackney Unison chair) – from union office for three (Kelly and Kasab), four (Muna) and five (Debus) years.
Their crime? – well, that depends on who you ask, and how highly that person thinks of Labour.
I’m one of the many who believe that Kelly, Kasab, Muna and Debus are being strongarmed out of Unison because they are Socialist party members. They are passionate critics of New Labour, passionately opposed to this government’s privatising of public services, and – and this is doubtless the kicker, as far as Unison’s New Labour lubbers are concerned – galvanising grassroots enthusiasm for Unison to break its formal funding ties with Labour. continue reading… »
The Treehouse Gallery
There’s a great little project happening in Regents Park at the moment. The Treehouse Gallery is an ever growing collective of artists, designers, musicians and educators, who have constructed their own public space in which to hold exhibitions and events.
I’ve been following the development of the events schedule for a few weeks now, which is steadily filling up with workshops and other events, but I don’t see much in the way of debates programmed. Surely some LibCon readers and writers could get together to argue about something? Localism is a live debate at the moment, and would seem a perfect topic to discuss in a community-made space. CSJ? Fabians? Demos? SMF?
Let’s play the Citizenship Test game
I have invented a new game. It is called ‘ask politicians questions from the citizenship test’.
Anyone can play, you take part by turning up at events where a politician is answering questions, and ask them questions from the citizenship test.
Does Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, know when women got the right to divorce their husbands?
Does Frank Field of the Balanced Migration group know how many days schools are required by law to remain open for?
Does Nadine Dorries, author of ‘Is Britain already full?‘, know how many under 18s there are in the UK?
I suspect the results would be vastly entertaining. And just maybe, if enough of the people responsible for introducing this test get publicly humiliated by failing the citizenship test game, they will get rid of this pernicious and vindictive waste of money.
Do open primaries really work?
Very impressive that over 16,000 people in Totnes voted to choose the Tory candidate for the next election in an ‘open primary’. Normally, about 100-300 people are involved in these kinds of selections.
Couple of thoughts:
- Open primaries give a huge advantage to people who have “proper jobs”. For example, in this case the candidate who was a doctor beat two people who were involved in local government. I think this is broadly a good thing, but it is worth having another look at how much campaigning candidates are allowed to do.
If local people are basically making their minds up on the basis of one leaflet per candidate, then parties might end up getting stuck with people who would, in fact, be pretty hopeless candidates and/or MPs.
- Apparently the cost of the whole thing was £40,000. That’s ok for a one-off, but not a good use of resources for parties to adopt as the main way of selecting their candidates (for that amount of money, you could get a full time campaign organiser, office, phone line, risograph etc.) It becomes more feasible if the cost per constituency can be got down to about £3-5,000.
One way to do this could be for local parties to agree to hold their primaries on the same day and send out the information together and let people choose which primaries to vote in. It would require a culture shift for local parties to work together in this way – but isn’t changing the culture and doing things differently what this is all meant to be about?
How to write a good political leaflet
David Semple and Cath Arakelian are both critical of the quality of Labour’s leaflets in the Norwich North by-election. There is a link to some of the leaflets here.
Writing good leaflets is actually quite difficult, and I have seen many horrendous ones produced by the central party and local activists alike. So to kick off a discussion, here are some thoughts about what makes for a good leaflet:
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Why we should say no to Red Toryism
Sunny recently wrote of the danger posed by Red Toryism to the left, following a Compass debate on Left and Right Communitarianism.
He argued that the left was unable to produce an effective counter-argument to Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism. He’s not alone in thinking that the left is in a state of intellectual disarray. It’s a symptom of the collapse of the New Labour project and the vacuum it has left behind it.
This intellectual predicament is nothing new. The Labour Party originally emerged out of Liberalism and developed its own socially conservative brand of communitarian politics – Labourism. It was never distinct enough nor intellectually confident enough to break ideologically with Liberalism. At the heart of Labour remains an unresolved conflictual relationship between Liberalism and communitarianism. This dilemma has tended to dominate the left more widely and kept various forms of socialism on the periphery.
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David Tredinnick MP – giving MPs a worse name
contribution by Josh Plotkin
While second-home flipping and suspect renting arrangements are the stuff of which headlines are made, public scrutiny of expenses has revealed the weird and wonderful reality of some of our MPs. Let’s take…oh, I don’t know, David Tredinnick, Conservative MP for Bosworth.
David Tredinnick has superb form in the field of, well, being an idiot. Over the years he has come out with torrents of rubbish, popping up to add his own ridiculous noise to any debate on homeopathy, alternative medicine or other new-age nonsense.
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The media execs who apparently knew nothing
After the statement from News International over a week ago, and last Sunday’s News of the World editorial, you might have expected that Tom Crone, Colin Myler, Stuart Kuttner and Andy Coulson might have came out defiant and dismissive to the Commons culture committee, especially after last week’s bravura performance from Nick Davies.
The News of the World stance appears to have now changed three times. First it was to deny nothing; then it was to deny everything; now it seems to be know nothing.
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Turn Left: report from the Demos launch
There are only so many ways round you can ask ‘what does it mean to be of the Left in Britain today?’ before you start to sound like Yoda in the small hours of a party conference booze-up. Nonetheless, yesterday’s launch of Demos’ new Open Left project, spearheaded by James Purnell, threw up some very interesting points.
Purnell believes that left ideology necessitates ‘choice in public services’, which is a tad rich coming from the man who single-handedly purged the welfare state of its last remaining shreds of compassion earlier this year with his intricate schemes for lie detector tests, workfare-style sickpay deals and a punitive scheme for addicts and alcoholics.
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A political strategy for Conspirators
The political outlook for progressives in Britain is, arguably, bleaker to-day than at any time in recent – or not-so-recent – history. Even in the heyday of Thatcherism the Labour Party offered a clear alternative vision of what society could and should be. The intellectual energy of the left is sapped: the generation of iconoclasts who came to the fore in the ’70s and ’80s appear to be childless.
The only exception is the Internet, which has enabled us all to connect and debate to an extent that was the stuff of dreams a generation ago. Yet nothing similar has happened here. If the political power of the Internet is to be realised in Britain, it will have to come from beyond the existing parties themselves.
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Does the Jury Team have more potential?
contribution by Josh Plotkin
Following the European elections, it appears that this new please-don’t call-us-a-party party didn’t manage more than a handful of votes. But while the rag-tag bunch of retirees and borderline weirdos recruited as candidates are clearly unelectable, we shouldn’t be so hasty to junk the concept with the candidates.
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The marginalisation of dissent
contribution by Kumi Naidoo
Since the 9/11,terror attacks in the USA and the subsequent ill-conceived and ill-named War on Terror we have witnessed an erosion of democracy, human rights and civil liberties.
In long-standing democracies as well as newer and emerging democracies there has been a growing marginalisation, suppression and in some cases repression of dissenting voices. This has manifested itself in many different ways. The hardest to measure are the levels of self-suppression in a climate of fear.
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Could Red Toryism deeply wound the left?
Red Toryism is perhaps the only intellectually interesting debate that has come from the right over the last, say, 20 years. In many ways it firms up the superficial ‘compassionate conservatism’ agenda that David Cameron had borrowed from Republicans in the US, while he avoided the nasty immigration rhetoric that habitually eminates from the Tories like a bad smell.
But what I like about Red Toryism, and the very reason it poses a great philosophical threat to the left and an electoral threat to Labour, is because it is a deeply emotional philosophy.
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» 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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