Apologies for the pause in posting: I’ve been ferociously busy with other things, not least of which was the launch of the new, improved Counterfire website. Feedback so far has been (almost) universally excellent, and site visits seriously in excess of what I (at least) anticipated. It’s too early to say whether this early success will continue, but I think our hunch about the need for an open, accessible UK lefty website is going to pay off.
Ashcroft and nostalgia computing
March 3, 2010Ashcroft the non-dom close to brewing into a proper, old-fashioned Tory scandal:
Revenue investigators were last night facing demands to launch an inquiry into the tax status of Lord Ashcroft, the billionaire businessman bankrolling the Consevative party, amid new questions about how he was allowed to break a promise to permanently base himself in the UK to secure a seat in the House of Lords.
As anger grew over Ashcroft’s admission that he has secretly remained a non-dom for the nine years he has sat in parliament, there were separate calls for inquiries into his nomination for a peerage in 2000 and his tax affairs.
In a knowing 2010 twist on a mid-90s classic, the foreign businessman lavishing the cash about is actually English and resident here. It’s not nostalgia politics, it’s self-aware, ironic nostalgia politics.
Hopefully Ashcroft can be persuaded onto one of those I LUV 1994 programmes to talk about what japes they all used to have with the citrus fruit and the brown envelopes and whatnot.
The benefactors of Ashcroft’s tax-free largesse also have a whiff of something over-familiar. Wired magazine this month has a feature on “Merlin”, the computerised vote-targeting system, an update of Labour’s 1997 system, “Excalibur”. The Guardian blog has some details:
Merlin allows the party to combine information about a local area gathered from canvass sheets with Mosaic – a subtle classification of voter groups developed by the research firm Experian, which gives a detailed breakdown of 65 consumer “tribes” such as “cafe bar professionals” and “high spending families”. Crabtree writes: “Those socio-demographic categories let candidates see who lives in their patch simply by typing in a postcode”.
This sort of detailed voter information is the life-blood of an election campaign. But there’s nothing new about it.
For well over a century, mass, democratic politics has made use of this sort knowledge. Local activists have always had to know what sort of person they would find behind any particular door. Success in an election campaign would depend on knowing how to target messages. Years of practical, on-the-ground experience have built up inside the major political parties.
The Tories’ system effectively digitises that knowledge base, like copying vinyl records onto CDs. The same underlying information is there, just in a different format. So it’s not clear Merlin does anything more sophisticated than what a well-informed local party branch could do.
And a computer system, however sophisticated, cannot make the imaginative leaps that people can. Politics is a creative art. Initiative and imagination matter.
Except, of course, allowing local activists’ the initiative is something Cameron’s team have become rather wary of.
An expensive new system like Merlin would be a good way to challenge local control. And it might compensate for withered local organisations. In a tight election, that can matter. But it’s no magic wand.
Ducks, Chinese burns, hurled paper balls
February 28, 2010Far be it for this blog not to comment on the story of the year, nay, decade, as the bullying folderol rumbles on into its second tedious week.
It’s manufactured nonsense, with its attendant crowd of quick-buck merchants flogging either books, or (muffled laughter) “human resources consultancy”. Richard Seymour has a good take on it here.
Had Brown been lurking about in St James’ Park, giving Chinese burns to schoolkids and stealing their lunch money, or kicking the ducks, there might have been a more convincing public outcry.
But when it’s faceless senior advisors and members of the PM’s inner circle being subjected to the odd tirade – really, who cares? Bullying at work is serious, of course, but there’s a world of difference between the average harassed worker, and the powerful, well-rewarded, well-connected aide to the Prime Minister.
There are too many people too interested in the story’s prolonged life for this one to die a quiet death just yet. Its real impact, however, is minimal.
Platoons
February 26, 2010David Marquand has an interesting piece, also in the New Statesman, arguing that Cameron’s “modernisation” of the Conservative Party is entirely in keeping with the traditions of Edmund Burke and Tory paternalism. On this basis, the left “dismiss Cameron at their peril”. I’m not convinced – Cameron, as discussed below, hasn’t “modernised” very much. It’s also not clear that Burke’s “little platoons” of stable Tory support still function in quite the way he intended; still, it’s a well-written article, and worth a read.
Crystal Castles – Atlantis to Interzone remix
February 25, 2010
Finally tracked it down. So much better than the slightly plodding original.
Hacked off, and failing to spot the merits of Neil Kinnock
February 25, 2010Another wheel is slowly winding loose:
David Cameron’s communications director, Andy Coulson, will come under fresh pressure to defend his editorship of the News of the World and his knowledge about the illegal activities of his journalists amid new allegations about the paper’s involvement with private detectives who broke the law.
Brendan Montague, who blogs over at The Sauce, was one of the News of the World’s victims named by the Guardian. He takes up the story:
When I finished talking to the Sunday Mirror news desk I found I had seven missed calls. It seemed rather strange but on this particular day nothing was ordinary.
A friend of a friend had spent a few nocturnal hours with a married celebrity chef after meeting him in London’s Chinawhite and somehow this unremarkable fact had found its way back to me.
This was not the sort of journalism I valued but it was impossible to work in Fleet Street and not know the value it had – so I called the News of the World…
It was only later that I realised that the repeated calls which came in a quick burst while I was on the phone were made to hack into my voicemail. The reporter I had spoken to at the News of the World was Clive Goodman.
The hacking attempt was aided by T-Mobile’s unbelievably lax security: “The person who rang pretending to be me fell at the first hurdle: apparently I couldn’t remember my own date of birth.”
For my money, all this knocks the Brown “bullying” tittle-tattle sideways. That Prime Ministers in general, and Brown in particular, might not be the most pleasant people to work with is hardly news.
That the would-be PM’s director of communications, whilst editor of Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday tabloid, seemingly allowed the hiring of private investigators known to have broken the law, and known to have hacked personal information – that is a little more noteworthy.
The investigator singled out by the Guardian, unnamed at present because he is “facing trial for a violent crime”, appeared to be “blagging bank accounts, bribing police officers, procuring confidential data from the DVLA and phone companies, and trading sensitive material from live police inquiries.”
A real charmer, evidently. And with 19 people now positively identified as having had their voicemails hacked by NotW, with over 100 still unknown, it’s not clear how long Coulson’s timely bout of amnesia can hold out.
This isn’t the only reason the Tories haven’t clinched the deal. They have neither wholly convinced the City and business in general, nor sufficiently swayed the country at large. Their poll ratings have remained stubbornly below the 40 per cent barrier regarded as necessary to clinch an election, this close to its date.
Brown and Labour aren’t popular, obviously, but as we’ve seen since at least the 2008 London elections, a half-way credible Tory threat pushes Labour voters back into the polls. Turnout will be up in the tighter contest of 2010, breaking the pattern of the last decade.
James Mackenzie, writing in the New Statesman, I think gets Cameron’s underlying predicament spot-on:
Cameron has done much to change the image of his party, and his desire to reach out beyond the core Tory supporters is genuine. But on policy, he and Osborne have long boasted that they need no “Clause Four moment”, no dramatic demonstration of change equivalent to Neil Kinnock’s expulsion of Militant in 1986. On each major policy issue, from allying with fringe far-right parties in Europe to offering tax allowances to married couples, Cameron has ultimately jumped rightwards.
The Cameroon project has been to maximise the perception of change while minimising the reality of it. The approach is summed up by a sentence in a leaked document about Tory candidate selection, written by Gove. “Like a conjuror, we’ll get more applause if the audience cannot see exactly how the trick is performed.”
Kinnock spent years knocking seven shades out of the left – losing two elections in the process – but preparing the way for New Labour. There were witch-hunts, expulsions, political dramas of every kind, aided every step of the way by a concerted intellectual effort associated, in particular, with the Marxism Today magazine. The rise of New Labour is impossible to understand without grasping all this first.
Cameron has done none of that. He has produced, instead, a virtual reality Blairism – a simulation of New Labour, without the real political meat. Where Labour reformers could call upon Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbawm, say, for intellectual clout, David Cameron has, um, Philip Blond for “mood music”. Where Kinnock set up kangaroo courts to drive out his opponents, Cameron has quietly (as Mackenzie says) accommodated to them.
His reforms fail to convince because they are not really reforms. It is one thing to presume that the route to power lies through the destruction of much of your own side, and to loudly proclaim this belief. It is another thing entirely to actually carry this out.
If Cameron were wiser, he would have paid more attention to Labour in the 80s, than Labour in the 90s. There lies his model for reform.
But then who wants to be history’s second Neil Kinnock?
Euphemisms
February 24, 2010The Governor of the Bank of England, on euphemistic form:
“I’m sure the rating agencies and the markets will be looking… for a more detailed explanation of how the structural fiscal deficit will be brought down over the lifetime of the next parliament,” said Mr King.
“…more detailed explanation”: also known as spending cuts, post-election. Big ones. Note, incidentally, who appears to be really running Britain’s economic policy.
For the time being, however, it would appear Darling’s cuts-tomorrow strategy retains the markets’ confidence; the projected growth figures may be hokey, but the Cabinet behind them looks a better bet for the City than the chancers on the benches opposite.
Whether that confidence will hold until the general election is an open question. A single bad day’s trading could focus minds on the UK’s ropey public finances, sparking a speculative attack.
And in Greece, the protests are hotting up as the full, miserable extent of the austerity package there becomes clear. The question of a political alternative to the bankers’ diktat is going to be posed sharply: either we break the grip of the financial markets, or they will break us.
Mark Fisher interview
February 23, 2010Infinite Thought flags up an interview with Mark Fisher, over at ReadySteadyBooks.
I went along to his lecture at Goldsmith’s the other week, on Capitalist Realism – still having not read the book. The lecture and its audience were interesting: an unusual mix, for academia, of theory (or Theory), accounts from the front-line of the “auditing culture”, and convincing calls for unionisation amongst education workers. Here’s Mark:
The failure of the future haunts capitalism: after 1989, capitalism’s victory has not consisted in it confidently claiming the future, but in denying that the future is possible. All we can expect, we have been led to believe, is more of the same – but on higher resolution screens with faster connections…
Neoliberalism has made it seem self-evident that “modernization” means managerialism, increased exploitation of workers, outsourcing etc. But of course this isn’t self-evident: the neoliberals fought a long campaign on many fronts in order to impose that definition. And now neoliberalism itself is a discredited relic – albeit, as I argued above, one that still dominates our lives, but only by default now.
Part of the battle now will be to ensure that neoliberalism is perceived to be defunct. I think that’s already happening. There is a change in the cultural atmosphere, small at the moment, but it will increase. What Jim McGuigan calls “cool capitalism”, the culture of swaggering business and conspicuous consumption that dominated the last decade, already looks as if it belongs to a world that is dead and gone. After the financial crisis, all those television programmes about selling property and the like became out of date overnight. These things aren’t trivial; they have provided the background noise which capitalist realism needed in order to naturalise itself. The financial crisis has weakened the corporate elite – not materially so much as ideologically.
And, by the same token, it has given confidence to those opposed to the ruling order. I’m sure that the university occupations are the signs of a growing militancy. We need to take advantage of this new mood. There’s nothing old fashioned about the idea of rational organisation of resources, or that public space is important.
