How can we convince the public of re-distribution?
My entirely apolitical buddy Nick – we played in a band together in the early eighties – puts the the fact that I am a socialist down to some inexplicable quirk I picked up while I was a wanky student and he was already doing a proper job of work in a bathroom supplies warehouse.
While I subsequently swanned around doing non-jobs and trying to foment world revolution, he knocked his bird up, secured a council flat which he was then able to buy ridiculously cheaply courtesy of Shirley Porter, climbed the property ladder and eventually established his own bathroom supply business, doing a roaring trade knocking out plush bog seats to the Bishop’s Avenue set at two grand a time.
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Radical democracy and imagination – catch openDemocracy at the Compass conference
This is a guest post by Guy Aitchison
The word “crisis” is perhaps one of the most over-used in the lexicon, but when it comes to the astonishing collapse of political and economic orthodoxies in recent months it rings undeniably true.Is it a "good" crisis? Established modes of
thinking and organisation have been de-legitimated but it's not yet clear that anything radically new or different is going to take their place. Thinkers like Jeremy Gilbert have joined a growing call for new democratic forms to give individuals more meaningful control over their own lives, but so far the response from the political elite can best be described as “reforming so as to preserve”.
Can anything positive be taken from the simultaneous collapse in trust in the political system and the financial markets? How do we build beyond this crisis to secure much better liberty and democracy in the 21st century?
This Saturday at the Compass conference a panel of thinkers and activists will discuss these questions and more at a workshop on "Radical democracy and imagination: people and power after the meltdown". Come and join the discussion.
Is Paris Hilton really Britain’s best performing MEP?
Is the TaxPayers Alliance’s latest report, ‘Could Do Better? Grading the Performance of British MEPs‘, its worst ever?
There’s no lack of competition, but this report is breathtakingly stupid.
MEPs are measured against criteria including “campaigning activity”. This is defined as “their frequency as internet hits, demonstrating campaigning and local activity”. However many times I read that explanation – and despite working as a web designer – I don’t understand it.
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ERS launch ‘change’ campaign today
The Electoral Reform Society today launch a new campaign to reform our electoral system. The campaign, with its new branding, is launching in the Observer newspaper.
They also have a new site to accompany the campaign: www.voteforeachange.co.uk. ERS’s Michael Calderbank said: “The emphasis is decidedly not on the particular system (apart from general sense of more proportional), but on the need to have a referendum.”
Advice for “Labour’s next generation”
There have been a few articles from Labour activists who have ambitions of becoming MPs, about how they would act differently if they were MPs. There’s nothing particularly wrong with what they are saying, and some of them are people who I know, like and respect.
But the idea that this is ‘Labour’s next generation’ makes me profoundly uneasy. For a start, I agree with Hopi when he writes that:
when “Labour’s next generation” put themselves forwards as voices of their community, I’d like to hear more about what the community really wants and less about the views of the next generation.
Demos draws a line in the sand by embracing liberals
The think-tank Demos today publishes a new pamphlet titled ‘The Liberal Republic’ to cement its move from being of the centre-left under Catherine Fieschi to its new liberal axis under Richard Reeves. He is a biographer of John Stuart Mill.
As if to politically underscore that point, it also announces that Tory MPs George Osborne and David Willetts will join the board. Pah!
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A wake-up call for the left
With the New Labour project almost over, we can be comfortable with two assumptions: the Tories are coming to power; the left will descend into civil war over future political direction. So I want to draw the battle lines as early as possible, and this is part of that. The question could be posed in many different ways, but this may be the simplest: What has been the left’s main problem over the last decade?
For me, it is the failure to illustrate an easily identifiable vision for the future beyond tired old platitudes, and build mass movements on those ideas. It is the failure to build wide-ranging popular coalitions that aren’t hijacked by the SWP hard-left. It is the failure to build organisational capacity and, more importantly, harness the energy of the people.
What do I mean by that?
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Tories have terrible housing ideas
I’ve just read the Conservative Party’s Green Paper on Housing. Housing policy is a vitally important issue, affecting the lives of millions of people. It is arguably nearly as important an issue as one politician sending an e-mail to another politician with gossip about some other politicians. The Paper is also quite stunningly awful.
The green paper says that we need to build more houses. It then lists a range of policies designed to reduce the number of houses which will be built. Councils will no longer be required to build a certain number of houses (because this is central targets and is bad), it will be easier for councils to prevent developments (e.g. by designating land as green belt or stopping eco-towns), and opponents of housing developments will have more opportunities to try to stop housing developments in their backyard.
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Poll: public against tax avoidance
A YouGov poll commissioned by the UK’s centre-left pressure group Compass has demonstrated overwhelming public support for the government to close in on personal tax avoidance which is estimated loses up to £15BN of public money each year.
The results reveal that 77% indicated they agree that the government should do everything it can to close this £15 billion gap lost through personal tax avoidance.
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A closer examination of Daniel Hannan’s favourite think-tank
It is worth looking more closely at the work of ‘Progressive Vision‘, the “campaigning liberal think-tank” to which Daniel Hannan sources his questionable expertise on the NHS.
It has a great deal to advocate and likes to be heard. But it is very difficult to find the basis on which it is advocated.
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What is the left’s approach to the financial crisis?
On Sunday I wrote an article for Comment is Free criticising left-of-Labour forces for failing to present a coherent economic agenda for change. In the wake of the financial crisis, economics is now on our side, but we are failing to make the most of it.
After it went up, I actually felt rather bad about the cif article. It’s a bit disturbing that the forces I criticise hardest tend to be the ones I most want to succeed. But it wasn’t intended to be an attack; it was meant to be a call to action. The left should have the courage to make the economic case for a fairer society because, ultimately, the argument is ours to win.
Please correct me if I’m missing something, but since the financial crisis the Fabians have produced just one leaflet on green economics possibly being the way forward and written a couple of articles on the crisis. Surely the Fabians’ fantastic network of intellectuals and resources can make a stronger, more coherent case than that? Similarly, Cruddas and Rutherford just published a new e-book in response to the crisis, but it feels vague and confused.
A fiscal stimulus could provide jobs and build public infrastructure and services for the benefit of all – helping private companies increase productivity over the longer term. Income could be raised by taxation on industries that pollute and destroy the environment – taking into account their negative externalities – and bringing in much needed revenue.
An increase in social housing would stop more risky lending and save money on the costly externalities of homeless and poverty that are now on the rise. Making the economic case gives the left credibility – we cannot afford to brush over these arguments because we are uncomfortable with market-speak.
Why Britons still haven’t learnt from Obama’s campaign
While Barack Obama has moved on to a serious if difficult effort to cope with the economic crisis and some real movement towards the investment in infrastructure, health care and energy independence he promised during the campaign, it feels like the British debate has scarcely moved past this nonsensical “who is the British Barack Obama” argument.
The launch of the (excellent) Fabian Society book, The Change We Need, recently brought this navel gazing to a new peak.
In recent months I’ve been meeting with a lot of British candidates and political organisers who seem to believe that if only they could copy one easy thing from Obama’s efforts, all would be well. But they also need to be careful not to learn the wrong lessons from this success.
Here are the top five things I think British left of centre politics still gets wrong:
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Readers’ editor smacks down Nick Cohen
The Observer’s readers’ editor Stephen Pritchard steps into the recent row between Nick Cohen and Sunder Katwala:
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as just so much scrapping by a small clique, but let’s look a little closer at the detail. Shiraz Maher, Cohen’s “Muslim liberal”, is a former Islamist activist who associated with Glasgow bomber Bilal Abdulla, recently jailed for at least 32 years. Readers should have been told that.
Maher wrote in the Mail on Sunday last month about government ministers being unwilling to promote the idea of Britishness, yet the concept of what it is to be British is central to Gordon Brown’s government and has been a major Fabian theme. If Maher really is this out of touch with democratic public debate, it calls into question his credibility on the subject of think-tanks.
Katwala told me that Maher had never had any contact with the Fabians or the IPPR, but “his co-authored paper is quite good; it contains nothing we could not have published”, so it would appear that Maher and Cohen’s accusation of censorship is without foundation in this case.
No doubt Nick Cohen will see this as example of the ‘vast leftwing conspiracy’ in action. Nevertheless, it is a shame Nick cannot engage in a proper debate other than accuse the left of being blind just because “noted lefties” such as the Queen apparently appease Islamists, and then saying everyone is trying to censor him.
Are the TaxPayers Alliance confused?
This is getting confusing. When we launched the Other TaxPayers’ Alliance we thought we were up against just one TaxPayers’ Alliance. Now we realise there were two.
- One TPA stands up for the little guy, protesting that public sector chiefs get bigger pay rises than hard-pressed frontline staff; the other stands up for top-rate tax avoiders and slams moves to boost the wages of the very poorest public sector staff.
Exclusive: Policy Exchange forced to apologise; takes report off website
The right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange has been forced into a humiliating climbdown over its report, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, for making allegations in the report that it now admits were unsubstantiated.
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Propaganda and the media: Counter-Jihad and the ‘Decent’ Left
Over at the Yorkshire Ranter, Alex Harrowell comments on the ongoing story of Glen Jenvey, who featured as an anti-terrorist ‘expert’ in a Sun story about threats, which it now appears he posted himself, against public figures on a Muslim web forum.
It’s a very good question just how many terrorism stories (especially ones that have the “Internet” flag set – it means “stuff I don’t understand” to a lot of editors) are the work of these people, whether the upscale, Decent version or Jenvey’s Comedy Gladio.
There are indeed some interesting connections between the kind of right-wing “CounterJihad” networks represented by Jenvey and the so-called “decent left“.
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Nick Cohen is wrong about the liberal-left
This was in the Observer letters page today:
Cohen needs to find a new column to write. Yet again last Sunday, he declaimed that the liberal-left has failed to engage or support liberal Muslims, asserting that leading voices and institutions refuse to challenge Islamist extremism as well as opposing the BNP. But this is nonsense. It can be easily disproved by what we have all said and done.
What is the Compass strategy?
Neal Lawson and John Harris have a very bad article in the New Statesman called ‘No Turning Back’. The political strategy behind it appears to be that Labour should team up with the Liberal Democrats and leftie lobby groups (and draw comfort and inspiration from such diverse sources as the “Red Tories” and the Countryside Alliance) in order to change society in profound and yet not very comprehensible ways.
As Paul says, this approach is about constructing “the 21st century sanctuary that is the centre-left think tank world and the accompanying blogosphere, a place where the chattering socialist classes can all feel safe and comfortable while the storm of dangereous, savage, rightwing policy implementation rages outside.” I also agree with Hopi’s point that at the moment our priority “needs to be what we’re doing to help people who need a helping hand, not how we’re going to punish those who deserve a slap.”
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Taxpayers Alliance exposed!
Are the Taxpayers’ Alliance a politically motivated, right-wing conservative group? Anybody applying the duck test knows the answer. But not the Taxpayers’ Alliance themselves.
It is “outrageous” to claim they are on the right, or that they prefer any political party, their campaign manager Susie Squire spluttered on LBC Radio, when host Nick Ferrarri described them as across “the party political divide” from Labour, and when Chuka Umunna challenged Squire’s claim that “we don’t have a party preference”.
Given their insistence on non-partisan independence, logically, how outraged the Taxpayers Alliance to find themselves traduced by their inclusion in Tim Montgomerie’s post, intended to dramatically illustrate the “growth of Britain’s conservative movement“, with two very pretty PowerPoint slides showing a sparse lack of activity in 1997 and a crowded market of ideas in 2009.
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Help save Royal Mail!
Lobby your MP now to support EDM 428, calling on government to abandon privatisation plans.
Following media reports over the Christmas/New Year period of our forthcoming campaign on the Post Office and Royal Mail, we’re today asking for your urgent help to get MPs to support EDM 428.
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» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
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