I'm sorry - I'll read that again

Smash the H-Blocks!

Er... sorry, that should read 'Don't Smash the H-Blocks'

(Nicked from the comments there)

Photo Opportunity

NI Unionist blogger Lee with a gentle warning to the DUP's Nigel Dodds.

Big Society: An opportunity for Labour?

This post by Anthony Painter on Labour List is easily the best commentary I've seen on how Labour should respond to the Tories' Big Society programme, insofar as it is a programme at all at the moment:

"[Labour] ...needs to be listened to again. That means a bit more honesty about where the party went wrong both in the context of the nodding dog leadership debate and the party more widely. It wasn’t just incumbency taking its toll or the unpopularity of the leader. It was also the fact that Labour was seen to have spent too much, too wastefully and had become a meddling, interfering government and a not particularly successful one at that. Acknowledging shortcomings is the first step to being heard."

and

"Labour needs to develop a way of talking about politics that is metaphorical, empathetic and tangible. The Tories play on simple themes such as the household budget as metaphor for the national budget. Well, most people would take out a loan for a car that enabled them to get to their job and enjoy their leisure time more or a mortgage to buy a home. That’s an investment and governments must invest also for a return. The left must do metaphor better.....

....Labour should not be afraid of articulating the importance of responsibility - for us all. Where it critiques the coalition, it must be on the basis of impact on people not policy detail.... Labour will only be listened to if its solutions are credible. It must articulate why the services and investments are important for all of us as individuals, for our communities and the nation. It must be clear how it would cut expenditure - or increase taxes - over what time and by what amount to make the bigger arguments. This is part of being heard again.

Labour must not look gift horses the mouth. Where the coalition is playing to an empathetic framing as it has on criminal justice and the Big Society - in thematics at any rate - don’t blindly oppose. Civic involvement is good for nurturing an empathetic mindset so encourage the Big Society and pledge to expand it and improve it. The easy option is to mock it. But what could be more compatible with an empathetic mindset than people becoming active in their local communities? Don’t forget, we are talking fundamental ways of thinking here: weaken the empathy then leave space for a conservative ideology to tighten its grip and that will have an impact across the whole of range of issues." (My emphasis)

Labour has a number of problems and opportunities arising out of the current situation. The Big Society programme highlights one further serious failing of the last Labour government: That it was captured by a managerial bureaucratic caste that was rigid and wasteful - one that refused to foster or acknowledge the existence of a public service ethos preferring outsourcing, inspection, bean-counting and permanent managerial upheaval. One that had only one measurer of value: Auditors.

There are no end of problems that the Tories will have with the implementation of this concept, not least it's near-addiction to Walter Mitty-type schemes promoted by mythical entrepreneurs and it's faith-based conviction that private sector investment will step in to replace the state spending that they are withdrawing (it really won't, and it's totally baffling to hear anyone claim otherwise).

There is a more sustainable Christian Socialist approach (one that you don't need to be a Christian to value, I'd add) that has prior claims to a lot of the Big Society ideas - but we (and presumably, the Lib Dems) can see where these ideas are simply a shill for privatisation and a Thatcherite buying-off of taxpayer lobbies.

We can also take some inspiration from this coalition government. We spent thirteen years governing as though we had a one-seat majority. It was ludicrously defensive and cautious. This lot haven't even won an election and they're already acting as though they have a 200 seat majority. There is an élan to this government that we never had - and I suspect that this is because they've resolved to take the FDA on and defeat them in a way that Labour never dared to (and should have done).

The Big Society idea - as it is articulated - is one that Labour needs to embrace. It has the potential to wean us off some of our more unattractive associations and help us to address the problems created by a politics that confuses individualism with liberty and democracy.

So, you might say, 'be nice to the Lib-Dems and embrace the whole Big Society idea - hardly the work of a defiant leftie?'

Maybe I'm getting old?

Attacking the Lib-Dems: Dos and don'ts

Don't....

Attack them for signing up for .... (insert regressive Tory-led policy here)

Do ....

Challenge them as to why they couldn't at least have got an agreement to ..... (insert cherished Lib-Dem progressive measure here)

The former will lead them to seek justification for their actions and elicit a defensive response. The latter will create problems between the leadership and the membership.

On being beastly to the Lib-Dems (continued)

Shuggy, in the comments, points approvingly to Blood & Treasure's take on how the Lib-Dems should be treated.

I'm not sure that they've accomplished their mission and should be treated as though they no longer exist - for a number of reasons, and rather than offering you a long post now, I'm going to let these observations out a bit at a time over the next few days.

My point for today is about how we understand what a political party is these days.

I don't buy the argument that the Lib-Dems (like their predecessors with the word 'Liberal' in their title) is simply a project "designed to get a share of power for their senior managers" - or rather, I do buy the argument to a certain extent (I'm sure it applies to Nick Clegg) but think that it applies to elements of all of the main parties.

It seems to me that a political party today is a coalition of different minority political interests that dislike the combined coaliton that makes up other parties more than they dislike the moderated coalition that makes up their own.

If the electoral system changes, I suspect that those coalitions will simply reconfigure slightly as different groupings become more prepared to hold their noses and get into bed with old adversaries in return for a crack at achieving a cherished goal / a sniff of power / getting their pictures in the paper.

The corollary of this is that each political party has been captured - however temporarily - by an unrepresentative social caste usually on the basis that it has persuaded the wider membership that their leadership will result in more electoral success.

This in turn effects our thinking on the question of being beastly to the Lib-Dems. If we keep shrieking at them, telling them that they're a bunch of Birkenstock Traitors, and so on, we run the risk of pushing the wider party into the ballast of Clegg's boat.

Surely, a more productive step would be to highlight the policy-areas where Labour has more in common with the Lib-Dem rank-and-file, while at the same time pointing out what a poor deal they've had from the Tories and how, if the electoral maths were to stack up in future, they would find that they'd have to make fewer compromises and achieve a good deal more by dealing with Labour?

All of that raises the question for next time: What do the Lib-Dems want?

Have a look at The Samosa?

I keep running into Anwar in London - he's a Manc of Pakistani extraction who blogs at The Samosa largely about the relationship between the Pakistani diaspora and Pakistan. This post for example:

One does not need to study Pakistan long or know it in any depth to realise that there is a huge need for reconciliation with India and a lot of unfinished business for both sides. Both sides must acknowledge the mutual hurt that still exists from the bloodshed of partition, and accept the shared culture, soil, peoples and history of the huge land mass and civilisations that make up India and Pakistan.

I spoke to a retired minister of defence who acknowledged that the majority in both establishments want this; it is how they get there that is fraught, given the above and of course the issue of Kashmir. This region needs as much attention as Israel and Palestine. The solution to Afghanistan is in large part also to be found here.

Being beastly to the Lib-Dems

I was on the House of Comments Podcast a few nights ago discussing Labour's approach to the Lib-Dems here. The shorter version of my own position is that, while it may be fun to bang on about Birkenstock Traitors, and it's a good bit of tonic for Labour's troops, that Labour's fire should all be concentrated on the Tories for reasons that seem, to me, to be obvious.

The reason I was on the podcast in the first place was to introduce a project called 'Political Innovation' (no link yet).

When clever kids are left to their own devices

This happens:

A question for people who work in financial services

My understanding of the details of how a lot of funds work is fairly basic, so I'd like to know if the following makes sense - would it be possible?

A lot of people have pensions, savings and endowment funds that are described as 'with profits' funds.

Am I right in understanding that the provider takes the monthly contribution and invests them across a basket of quoted companies that the provider believes will do well - striking the right balance between profitability and risk-aversion?

If so, would it be possible / easy for such a provider to launch a new fund - or offer an option to existing customers to switch to a modified fund - in which they could take a small degree of control over the fund. For instance, I could accept that Legal & General will make decisions on how 95% of my money is invested, but I could then direct them on the remaining 5% - and, say, ask them to invest it in a Football club of my choice (for example - I'm sure you could come up with an ethical alternative or one where the investor could chose to take a bit of a longshot).

Would it be possible / practical / affordable to do this? And could government do anything that would make it easier for the financial services industry to do this?

Football and Capitalist Realism

Via Will in the comments here, go and read this.

"Fans dream now not of their club being revivified by some Brian Clough-like managerial genius, but of it being saved by the largesse of a bored plutocrat. Barcelona famously have no shirt sponsor, and display the logo of UNICEF on their jerseys. United’s shirt sponsor is AIG, the insurance company at the heart of the financial crisis (according to The Economist, AIG’s “tentacles reach into every part of the economy.”) The neoliberal anti-utopia disintegrated with the bank bail-outs, even though it survives in an undead form as a set of defaults which continue to dominate social reality."

F U N E X?

Busy. Here are two tweets to be going on with:

1. People say 'footie' if they don't like football but want to ingratiate themselves with people who think they should like it. This is a rule.
2. To chose your voting system based on the result of a referendum is like using trial by combat to decide who wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

And I'm amazed that I got to be so old without ever seeing this guide to speaking Swedish:

Enlightenment thinking and political renewal

This is a very good post - well worth a read. Particularly the bit about consumer-politics.

One of the most obnoxious infections that hit New Labour was it's fear of presenting policies that contained components that would be resisted.

It took until very late in the term, for instance, for them to pluck up the courage to propose telephone levies - a policy that they were then not equipped to defend when it was attacked.

More on this later when I get time maybe.

A better type of electoral reform than the one that is being demanded?

Why not give every voter the option to break their vote into ten parts so that they can spread them around a bit?

This would surely allow people to respond to candidates more accurately?

Connectivity - good or bad?

A really interesting exchange about how far connectivity is a social good.

Stroke City: Another big day

If there hadn't already been enough happening around Ireland's North West coast, today, the good people behind the Derry-Londonderry UK City of Culture bid will be delivering their pitch in Liverpool. They're up against Sheffield, Norwich and Birmingham.

Now, with all due respect to them, these rivals will - I suspect - be handing in very managerialist bids. Ducks will be got in a row, business cases will be made and - who knows - this could result in the legacy of a new carrot-cake-and-coffee cinema!

Culture is where big important and exciting things happen. In Derry, they nearly fell out with each other over whether they should be bidding to be part of the UK City of Culture and then the usual squabbles went on quietly about the name and so on.

Derry has petty rivalries but sits, historically, on a gaping historical chasm that separates far more than just nationalists and unionists. It's a great little town and one that got into the souls of anyone who grew up in this country in the 1970s.

Our local Catholic church used to run schemes where kids of my age were brought over from Derry for a few quiet weeks away from carnage that was happening around them. Derry has stories to tell and narratives that need to be played out.

It's current iconography - whether it's Free Derry Corner or the murals showing kids in gas-masks priming up Molotov Cocktails, - is one that needs to be mashed up and worked over. One of the most stunning artifacts I've seen in a long time was the way that one of Anthony Gormley's manikins was necklaced (pdf) for some imagined sectarian transgression. It's one of the most stunning responses that I've ever seen to a work of art.

Any cultural focus that Derry gets over the next few years can make a huge difference to the city - and it could teach us all a few things we don't already know.

I hope the judges can get to understand this potential.

How to associate with women while not breaking purity laws

Take a drink!

Summer gig planning

Richard Thompson is hosting the 2010 Meltdown. There aren't many of those gigs that I'd turn down a free ticket. That's how you can show your gratitude for the splendid blogging you find here periodically.

As a consolation, I'll be seeing him among the fantastic line up at the Hop Farm festival (apologies for the flash-laden site) at the start of July.

Other attractions there include Van Morrison, Damian Dempsey, Bob Dylan, Dr John, Ray Davies, Pete Molinari, the Magic Numbers and the Afro-Celt Soundsystem. That's pretty impressive I reckon.

Go. For the weekend. Take a tent.

Labour needs to speak human. And four identikit blokes alone would have blocked it doing so.

I can't remember the last time I didn't care for one of Hopi's posts, but I'm not keen on this one. My problems are with the phrase 'hard left', but also with this line:

"...this process will be used to push forward a policy agenda that will be massively out of sync with the vast majority of the Labour party, and although it will be heavily defeated, it will have an imprint on the party that will last."

This is a very risk-averse argument that doesn't acknowledge any upside to challenging the party's orthodoxy. There are plenty of us who regard ourselves as being on the left of the party without being on the hard left. Yet we have been politically marginalised by a process that should have only been designed to exclude elements of the left that really weren't interested in any compromise with the electorate. Instead, it was also designed - deliberately or otherwise - to exclude elements that were at odds with a narrow (and now, outdated and unpopular) compromise with neo-liberalism.

People with interests in particular policy-positions will be able to point to the way that political factions on the right of the party have been able to shoehorn-in particular approaches that were neither an electoral asset, good policy, or in sync with the vast majority of the party. Insert your own rant here about PPP, lax financial services regulation or a general bias towards private sector involvement in the delivery of public services where the public interest would have been better served by agnosticism.

My problem is a more general one. The Labour government was never a good government in many ways. Sure, it prioritised the concerns of the many and not the few in lots of good ways and it's leftish critics often picked the wrong battles.

But it's hard to deny that Labour had it's reputation for competence deservedly trashed*. The people that became MPs were often puzzled spectators on the whole question of public administration. They often seem to lack the basic grounding in good governance, and are prepared to be bullied by their whips into a spiral of short-termism. They had no idea about how to get government departments to do what they are supposed to.

They didn't get selected for their grasp of public administration, after all. They were chosen for their compliance. And when a headline kept them awake, they arrived at work the next morning ready to add yet another ropey reflexive patch to bad legislation. Instead of fewer, better, bills, before Parliament, we had more and more worthless legislation that is often being replaced on the floor of the House of Commons before it even reached the statute books. Rigged selection processes. Low-grade MPs. A highly-centralised politics of diktat.

Those four male candidates that we're looking at currently all represent this highly reflexive and short-termist approach to politics, and it's an approach that has been nurtured - not challenged - by this form of party management that seeks to always avoid challenges, terrified that the media that will portray us as disunited.

This over-stated fear, and our response to it as a party - has had unintended side-effects. Those four blokes need to face what Don calls 'reality-based soft-left arguments'. Arguments that prioritise the need to build the case for collective action - surely the defining mission of a Labour movement?

It would be very hard to demonstrate that the four male candidates in this election - lifted from a narrow social and cultural clique - are in sync with the vast majority of the party and they are the product of a party that has always and only been obsessed with short-term presentation and tactical - instead of strategic - social democratic politics.

I don't buy the idea that electoral liability and left-ish are always the same thing, indeed there's a strong case now that Labour's inability to speak human is the product of this lack of internal discussion. Diane Abbott's inclusion in the race offers the possibility (not the certainty - I'll concede that) of this happening. Either way, without it, we're in trouble.

*The paras following this point are a bit of a cut-and-paste job from an older post here.

The left isn't ready to start answering the big questions yet

Via Nick Cohen, I see that Bryan Appleyard has picked up on the survey of lefty great-and-goods from the daily journal of the Birkenstock Traitors. With it's emphasis on the need to legitimise speed cameras, Bryan concludes that the left doesn't have an economic narrative. He concludes that the if the left doesn't have this, it doesn't have anything.

It seems to me that the real difference between the left and the right is that we prefer collective action while the right are generally against it except when it is done by firms.

For this reason, it's a bit previous to expect us to have a convincing position on macro-economic questions. We have other fish to fry first. I agree with Appleyard that a defence of speed cameras can't be the key issue, but I would say that a democratic socialist would argue for a move towards improving the quality of democracy - the precondition to arguing for collective action - as the single most important question facing us.

If you have a means of decision-making that results in more optimal policy outcomes while at the same time providing the highest level of inclusion – you are likely to legitimise collective action more. This means we have to ask how we can ensure that everybody's interests are served by democratic decision-making and not just those of the already enfranchised and the nearly-enfranchised. It also means that we need to start addressing how co-ops and mutuals can be reformed and promoted (I blogged on this a good while ago and don't have much to add to it), and how collective action can start to impact upon the way that shareholders control companies. (Tom's triffic blog deals with this question daily)

I have the slightly idiosyncratic belief that a return towards the values of representative democracy and a resistance to the slide towards more direct forms is the key here.

If we can get that right, then the economic questions start to take care of themselves. So our current position is actually more perilous than Mr Appleyard thinks it is. We haven't really started asking the questions that we need to answer in order to address the economic question.

This is all quite bad, isn't it?

And it was so

Diane's done it.

It'll be an interesting campaign now.