British Politics Archives
February 09, 2008
Tories reassuringly stupid and short-sighted
I just wanted to share this piece of elemental stupidity with you. I live in the outer suburbs of London, in a green belt stronghold of the Tories called Radlett. The cutting comes from one of their leaflets. I suppose I could provide some kind of commentary or I could just leave you to treasure the nastiness and pointlessness of this little announcement on your own. I'm practically speechless.
So I'm going to leave it to you to figure out where the evicted kids are meant to go instead of the park, what kind of alternative provision the Tories are making for their amusement and what plans they've made to prevent antisocial behaviour in the future.
January 16, 2008
Gordon Brown Nein Danke
Damn. Since I last posted here things have gone from bad to worse. Britain is now officially governed by what I think the kids call a 'flake'. My early impression of Gordon Brown as Labour's dreadnought, a politically impregnable battleship of prudence and good judgment, has all but evaporated. Who's writing his script? Yesterday he called Hain's donor gaffe 'an incompetence.'
What's the difference between 'an incompetence' and 'incompetence'? No idea. Although I suspect it's probably about a mile-and-a-half of choppy political water. Brown could bring himself neither to condemn Hain ('he was incompetent. He's history') nor to get behind him ('Shut up you bunch of ninnies: he's done nothing wrong and he's staying') so we wound up with the miserable, indecisive non-phrase: 'an incompetence'. I'm dumbfounded and more than a bit worried. And now a Northern Rock nationalisation: another epic opportunity for indecision. God save us.
Still, at least we've got a revival of nuclear power to look forward to. I'm actually in favour. I think that our objections (I was a long-time anti too) are all based on the first- and second-generation kit that's currently rotting at various out-of-the-way coastal locations - and which, of course, we have to deal with whether or not we decide to build new plants.
Objectors have got a skewed picture of nuclear power's risks. Even taking into account the half-a-dozen major incidents since the 1950s nuclear has killed hardly anyone. Add up the deaths directly attributable to emissions from even a modern coal-fired plant and you'll see what I mean. Don't get me wrong: meltdown and catastrophic contamination are not trivial risks but we must weigh them properly alongside the risks of pursuing existing high-carbon base load sources and of acting too slowly to fill the inevitable power supply gap.
The grim statistical truth is that even the real risk of an occasional major disaster will be dwarfed by the reduced long-term pressure on climate and on vulnerable coastal communities, for instance. Climate change really does change everything.
Current nuclear tech is streets ahead of the Heath Robinson plants of the first wave. Look at this marvelous self-contained, neighbourhood-sized unit from Toshiba (by the way, I love this site map). You could fit one in your garage and it would heat and light hundreds of homes for forty years. It also, according to the experts, presents vastly reduced risk of overheating. While we've been at a nuclear standstill the rest of the world has been moving the technology on. It's time we caught up.
Speaking of climate change, I guess you'll have seen this terrific risk assessment from Greg on YouTube. I'm no logician but his thesis looks sound to me. Right or wrong, though, I'm terrifically impressed by the video's author, a high school science teacher, apparently. I think this is a great example of the top end of citizen media: confident, thought-provoking, authoritative. I do hope he's got himself a proper movie deal or a substantial research grant by now.
November 30, 2007
Is Gordon Brown depressed?
I think he's depressed. I suspect he's been depressed for his whole adult life, mind you. But he's just moved to a big new job and that's triggered a crisis. Everything about his behaviour shouts depression. He's turned in on himself. His instinct when things get tough has always been to retreat - hide out, pull the duvet over his head. He hates the aggro and the nasty, rude attention he gets from the opposition and the media.
He doesn't rise to it. There's no fight in him. It must be frustrating to work with him when he's like this. All around him people must be urging him to get a grip, kick some ass, get out into the world and make a difference. But still, nothing.
Where is he this morning, for instance? Has he varied his schedule to sort out the funding mess? Doesn't look like it. As usual he's hiding behind a compliant phalanx of cabinet members. He's in doors, wringing his hands when he ought to be striding the public stage, dishing out the presbyterian tongue-lashings, roasting Humphrys on Today, firing everyone within half a mile of the scandal, reshuffling, rewriting the rules, bringing forward legislation, hosting meetings, taking control!
Why is there still anyone at all at work in the party's fund-raising bunker? Why aren't they all licking their wounds in Starbucks, thinking about a change of career? Where's the evidence that Brown takes this diabolical shambles seriously, either morally or politically? The Blair instinct - to turn a political nightmare into an opportunity to shine as a man, as a leader - is cruelly absent. Brown's in a funk.
Here's my conclusion. He fooled us all (well, me anyway). I saw tough, dour, implacable, unruffled. I missed terrified, lost, out-of-his-depth, passive, ineffective. This is a very scary time for Labour and for Britain and the man in charge has lost his grip, his marbles and his balls. Go on Gordon, prove me wrong.
October 11, 2007
Postal tipping point
Tick tock tick tock. Time is moving on. Change is about to catch up with the Royal Mail. What worries me about the postal strike is that the men and women striking now are so poorly led (I might say 'misled'). Their doctrinaire and backward leadership is taking them up a blind alley.
Postal workers are dangerously underestimating the damage the strike is doing - to their own cause and to their own industry. Maybe it's understandable. We all lack perspective when looking at our own lives, our own circumstances. But this is why I'm so disappointed in the Communications Unions' leadership during the dispute.
Their job is to provide that perspective, to use their not inconsiderable resources to keep the membership informed, to explain to them what's happening in business, in communications, in the world. Postmen and women go to work in a 200 year-old business with a venerable and apparently solid infrastructure. They work hard, many in ways essentially unchanged in 50 or more years. They're to be forgiven if they simply don't see their vulnerability to change.
Every day, though, dozens, hundreds, thousands of businesses and households are deliberately if reluctantly scaling back their reliance on the mail. The office I'm sitting in now is highly dependent on inbound and outbound movement of goods and information. As I write, people around me in the office are planning to move more of the company's shipping to alternate platforms - permanently.
Much is made these days of 'tipping points'. There's a reasonable chance that this strike will turn out (when looking back from a suitable vantage point in the future) to have been the Royal Mail's tipping point, the moment after which nothing can be done to stop the decline turning into a collapse. And if I'm right it will be the fault of the postal workers' blinkered leadership.
Unions don't have to be backward and obstructive. There's nothing to stop them recreating the radicalism and progressiveness of their early years in the modern context. Absolutely nothing stopping the Communications Union really living up to its modernised name (it used to be the Union of Postal Workers) and producing a coherent response to change that promotes members' interests while at the same time acknowledging the world outside.
Meanwhile, a Twitter friend says: "I like the postal strike. No bills. No statements. No junk. No conspicuous absence of fun personal letters" and Marketing Week just emailed me this week's issue as a handy, searchable PDF. Remind me why I get that dopey paper thing every week...
October 07, 2007
Misfit at Number 10
I'm sticking grimly with my image of Gordon Brown as Machiavellian hardman here. Although I suppose a week of political cock-ups: the disastrously managed Iraq announcement, the entirely unnecessary will-he-won't-he election palaver and Cameron's sure-footed conference performance ought to have me worried. I mean maybe he's just a big, stupid Scotsman. A squinty, pudgy oddball. Oh God.
Speaking of oddballs, Marina Hyde's got a terrific piece in yesterday's Guardian. Her scarily persuasive premise is that career politicians are all oddballs. She provides lots of evidence that, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, successful politicians aren't masters of the universe but rather laughable misfits.
October 02, 2007
Tory softies blow it again...
The Tories are looking pretty pleased with their shadow chancellor's inheritance tax plan but Brown's on his way back to town - and he's going to wipe the smile off their smug faces.
Osborne may be... er... uncharismatic but he's a useful politician. The inheritance tax announcement was about the only thing that stood a chance of digging the Tories' out of their present electoral hole - and his method of funding the cut is clever and politically cost-free. The fact that it'll affect hardly anyone (despite the shameless lies about the number of households affected in the announcement) and that it would be the least progressive change to taxation in generations hardly matters. Inheritance tax is a dead duck.
Death tax is anachronistic (it's got more to do with the exigencies of mediaeval warmaking than with funding modern public services) and it's socially indefensible (don't talk to me about the inefficiencies of intergenerational capital transfer. There's an unarguable emotional logic to leaving your money to your kids: we're programmed to do it).
The problem for Osborne and the Tories, though, is that in Gordon Brown's muscular, Tony Soprano-style world his death tax policy is fair game. Absolutely nothing - not courtesy, not scruple, not Westminster clubbishness - will stop Brown from simply copying this policy. In Brown's political New Jersey opponents are dumb resources, unworthy of respect.
Beating up the Tories and stealing their shiny new death tax idea would be a casual, pre-breakfast flick of the wrist for bullyboy Brown. I wouldn't be surprised if he even nicked the non-dom funding wheeze along with it. And you know what, I think I like this kind of disrespectful, butch, smash-and-grab politics. Death tax is finished anyway (only an idiot - or a Liberal - would go into an election campaign with the current thresholds in place) so Brown might as well get on with it. I can almost see him lacing up his shit kicking boots on the plane back from Iraq.
Here we go. Here we go. Here we go...
June 23, 2007
Gordon Brown - Presbyterian Hit Man
I'm impressed. I'm properly impressed. Gordon Brown's night raid on the Liberal party was muscular shit-kicking, twenty-first century politics. It was never going to work but that wasn't the point. I don't think Brown ever actually expected to abduct Ashdown or Neuberger. His message was simpler. He was saying: "you're nothing to me, you're a political irrelevance. You're a resource. You have some good people and If I want to I'll talk to them."
So it's not exactly what it seems: it's not an inclusive gesture, it's not a mold-breaking 'big tent' initiative. It's a successful effort to rough up and irritate the third party. Brown's making a clear enough statement about what we can expect of his premiership: that's the end of charm and emolience, people. Communication will not be this administration's watchword. Don't expect a lot of fluffy ecumenical bullshit. Do expect Sopranos-style political whack jobs and plenty of attitude. As a repositioning exercise it's persuasive: Brown means business and, I reckon, in these febrile times, that's probably a good thing...
May 10, 2007
How does he do it?
How did Tony Blair turn what ought to have been an ignominious retreat – a defeated backward step from power – into a noble and affecting curtain call? I am, again, in awe. The man is the most remarkable political figure of the post-war era. A fascinating, hypnotising, utterly political animal, somehow managing to exist outside or above history, or at least events.
Blair is the first British leader of the 21st Century but also, perhaps, the first truly 21st Century leader anywhere in the world (will Sarkozy be the second?). I know I sound like a fanboy. He's a story-teller, a weaver of powerful, condensed narratives that motivate and win round. And these stories are subtle and economical – a lot like the compressed narratives of advertising.
They're all about Britain, about its people, about its place in the world. Rarely about anything else. Even when he's talking about Sierra Leone or Iraq or Trident or debt relief, he's painting a picture of Britain – robust, honest, fair-minded, forward-thinking – that's as powerful and as influential as any prime minister's before him. Like him or not, his version of Britain is catchy, contemporary – one that will form the template for Brown's (or Cameron's) Britain and for those who follow.
I admire Tony Blair enormously, while I hate the mess that Iraq has become and the damage that it's done to Britain and to Labour and to Blair himself. I think his courage, which is unarguable and instinctive, sets a difficult example for his successors too. Prevarication, absenteeism and avoidance will all be more difficult choices in the post-Blair era. Blair's Britain will, whether we like it or not, outlive his period in office by many years.
January 30, 2007
Going on strike
Industrial action is pointless, wasteful and destructive – and essential for a healthy society
Why do people still go on strike? Haven't we got past all that? Didn't we leave the pointless conflict of boss and worker back in the eighties? Obviously not. Cabin crew at British Airways are flexing their muscles (although their strike is off for the time being). Railway workers are staging one-day strikes. Civil servants are at it too. New Yorkers are into it too. We don't seem to be able to transcend the wasteful non-communication of labour vs capital. Sooner or later (at least where unions still exist) push comes to shove and labour is withdrawn. Strikes do permanent damage to reputations, jobs and the bottom line and they hardly ever produce the effect desired by workers. Everyone suffers. So why do we keep doing it?
A strike (a dispute, a standoff, a work-to-rule... Any kind of labour-side argy-bargy) is a response to some kind of imbalance... an asymmetry. These asymmetries used to have simpler names: exploitation, inequity. They were about unequal access to resources – shitty pay, diabolical conditions, long hours. That's why trade unions came into being. These days the asymmetries are subtler. Circumstances have changed and it's usually about unequal access to information, poorly distributed knowledge or failed communication.
Capitalism is imperfect. Markets are powerful tools for producing and distributing value but they do it mechanically and arbitrarily. Capitalism, of course, actually depends on these asymmetries. Between the value of an asset to you and its value to me. Between businesses with pricing power and those who follow. Between those who make efficient use of capital and those who waste it. Without asymmetries opportunities never arise. Capitalism conducted without unequal access to one kind of resource or another is unimaginable.
In a capitalist system – let's get this straight – value can only be created where there is a useful asymmetry to exploit. So, while these critical asymmetries produce economic value, labour must retain the last resort power to challenge an injustice, to rectify an inequity, to face down capital. Strikes may be crude and often counterproductive but any reading of the contemporary economy must acknowledge that they're a necessary and proportionate corrective to out-of-whack capital. Strikes are an awkward holdover from the first half of the industrial revolution but, it turns out, they retain their value. Strikes are aggressive and negative and messy but they're also direct, appropriate and authentic: we're pissed off and we're not going to take it any more...
The pic is from an excellent flickr set about Knoxville, Tennessee in 1971 by willie_901.
November 03, 2006
Lots of good politics this week
Climate change – some kind of watershed. Iraq – another watershed?. Immigration – the numbers confirm Britain is a net consumer of migrants and has become a kind of 'interchange' for mobile populations (probably not a bad role for a post-imperial power at the edge of a major economic bloc). Privacy – ours is becoming a 'surveillance society'. US Mid-terms – Kerry's foot is firmly in his mouth again but the Republican hegemony is history anyway. ASBOs are cool and David Cameron wants you to ''love a lout'.
October 29, 2006
Another sad, jug-eared Tory comes out...
I bring you – without comment, of course – the voting record of Gregory Barker, utterly true blue MP for the constituency of Bexhill and Battle. I think you'll also want to note TheyWorkForYou's (entirely algorithmic) assertion that Barker's record shows him to be 'moderately against' equal gay rights (Stephen Newton, though, points out that he at least didn't oppose civil partnerships).
October 06, 2006
If you have no policies are you still a political party?
Political parties are developing an aversion to policy. David Cameron's refusal to provide anything more than mood music in Bournemouth is only the latest tock in the unstoppable tick tock that's moving politics into line with the other branches of marketing. Don't mention the product, focus on the brand, communicate the feeling. Mars Bars became – unbelievably – 'Believe' for the duration of the World Cup, mobile phone companies talk about dreams and intimacy and not about call quality or coverage.
Political parties won't 'bang on' about Europe any more. They won't bang on about anything at all in fact. They'll invest their time and money in telling us what kind of 'guys' they are, where there heads are at, what their hopes and dreams are. We'll be invited to identify with them. We'll be encouraged to act on our feelings about a party or a candidate without exploring their relative positions.
All of this will only work in the new, post-ideological political marketplace that all the new-age pols aspire to. The clever young people steering the major parties (or brands) are certain – collectively and across the left-right divide – that the old, differentiated politics is history and I guess, in a way, they’re right. There’s something very last Century – very iron curtain, clash-of-ideologies, Winter-of-discontent, Z-Cars, Sunday Night at the Palladium, Harold Macmillan – about the stunted bipolar politics we grew up with isn’t there?
Shouldn’t we rush at this new stuff? Embrace the funky flow of freestyle Twenty-first Century politics with all the parties arbitrarily arranged on the political centre ground where comparison on fundamentals is difficult and essentially pointless?
The old politics is obviously doomed. The question is, can the political parties survive the demise of political culture?
September 26, 2006
Electrifying
I'm not a reporter. No one relies on me for my opinion. I'm not sought after for my angle. Still, I'm pretty sure you're going to want to fire up RealPlayer and listen to the quite amazing Peter Mandelson on this morning's Today Programme. The smell of political cordite is strong here. The man's been off the British political scene for half a decade and yet he can fly back into town and secure the Nation's premier political interview slot as if he'd never been away and, while he's at it, exercise real influence (as if from beyond the grave) on the succession. Some things make me glad I didn't choose a political career. Peter Mandelson – modern politics' most formidable operator – is one of them. This is the kind of breathtaking political media you know you're going to want to save to play back to your kids.
September 09, 2006
Brown vs Blair links
Charles Clarke's blistering Telegraph interview and, of course, the interview with The Standard's Associate Editor Anne MacElvoy that brought his entertainingly incendiary views to light in the first place. The Statesman's interview with David Milliband (the one who looks like Mr Bean) and, from the same issue, Martin Bright's It's Already Over.
One of those articles that's so juicy it makes you go weak at the knees: Robert Harris in The Times compares Gordon Brown to Richard Nixon, not because Brown's a crook but because they're both autistic. Trust the Beeb to produce a useful timeline. Meanwhile, back in The Telegraph, word has it, this Sunday, that Brown wants a contest, not a coronation. Nice piece from The The New York Times (from a proper London-based staffer Alan Cowell, not an agency) on the mess and Cowell again, this time providing an Idiot's Guide to Gordon Brown for one of those lovely NY Times slide shows (you know when you're really in trouble when the NY Times rolls out a helpful infographic).
I guess I should link to the Beeb's transcript of Brown's interview on Andrew Marr's Sunday morning show (although I really can't concentrate on what Brown's saying since my sister-in-law pointed out that his lower jaw does this strange thing at the end of every sentence) and to his other media appearance this weekend, in The News of The World. Happy also to link to Germaine Greer's Question Time unease with the idea of a Brown premiership from earlier in the Summer (courtesy YouTube).
Couple of whinges: why is it so hard to find articles at the newspapers' web sites? Even the venerable telegraph.co.uk, the first proper British newspaper web site, back in about 1993, still can't provide a useful search feature and The Standard's is worse (try searching for articles by Anne MacElvoy. You could be forgiven for thinking she doesn't work there at all).
The Statesman on the other hand, a tiddler by any measure, must have the most sophisticated web presence of any UK non-techie periodical. Good search, a mature attitude to free vs. paid-for content and loads of simple ways for bloggers and bookmarkers to chip in. At The Statesman they've learnt from the social media phenomenon that you build currency by providing free access to interesting articles: something that's taking the other mainstream media owners a bit longer to realise.
September 07, 2006
Political unwisdom
There are many reasons to be frustrated if you're a Labour supporter right now. First, there's the epic squandering of political capital. In the year-and-a-bit since Labour's important and unprecedented third general election victory in a row Labour has inexplicably surrendered so much ground to the Tories that the humungous electoral mountain that stands between Cameron and Number 10 looks – for the first time – climbable. Bugger.
Second, there's the leadership's profoundly depressing loss of authority. It's scarily like the decline of the Tories post-Thatcher. The upper hand has been ceded to the kind of bitter backbenchers and ministerial nearly-men who brought Major low (the 'bastards') and ultimately precipitated the 1997 Labour landslide. Stupid stupid stupid.
Third, and, I'll admit, most depressing, there's Gordon Brown, looking less and less like the quiet, competent, unflashy leader-in-waiting and more and more like a scheming Venetian Archbishop, hatching plots and directing his lieutenants from palazzo to palazzo in an effort to dethrone The Doge (that's enough dodgy Italian Rennaiscance analogies - ed). Brown's complete silence during the whole leadership row now seems both weird and calculating and his competence to lead both the party and an entire bloody country post-Blair is increasingly in question.
All of this (plus that bloody memo) points to an accumulation of the kind of political clumsiness many of us thought was now firmly in Labour's past. Maybe it really is time for a bracing parliamentary term in opposition (just one please). Something to snap the party out of its solipsistic trance and get it back to thinking straight about Government.
August 21, 2006
What's the point of inheritance tax?
The trouble with defending inheritance tax is that it's impossible to do so without sounding like a miserable, money-grubbing pensioner-basher (although I suppose you're actually bashing the kids). The best its defenders can manage is the obviously contradictory: "It's worth £3Billion per year and hardly anyone pays it anyway." The tax systems of the world are cluttered with these slightly embarrassing throwbacks to times when monarchs were always looking for ways to fund the latest acquisitive war or lavish palace building programme.
Tax collectors of old had to be opportunistic: taxation was arbitrary and sometimes punitive because the assets of the taxable masses were – most of the time, anyway – invisible, out of reach. Death was a convenient moment for the taxman to intervene and grab some cash because, at death, those assets had to surface, at least for long enough to sort out probate (quiz: which is fairer, inheritance tax or window tax?). These days, of course, especially if you've got a proper job, your earned income is on show at all times and the taxman can take what he wants before you even get your share. In this context, taking a share of what you leave to your kids is harder to justify.
Of course it's politically impossible to use the only real justification for taxing inheritance which is the perfectly sound but paternalistic economic argument that you should leave your money to someone who knows how to invest it and probably not to your idiot offspring. The theory is that the investment return on money given to Government will be better than that on money given to your spendthrift kids – who will probably blow it on Cider and trampoline lessons anyway. Leaving a proportion of your money to the Government will boost the economy and produce social goods. Leaving it to your kids might boost the economy but is more likely to provide a one-time boost to the profitability of a local off license or pie shop.
What I find myself wondering is: is there a 'third way'? Could the dieing be obliged to leave chunks of their estates not to Government but to an approved investment vehicle, one which would yield a profit for the dead person's intended beneficiaries but, in the meantime, also benefit, say, the hospital building programme or early years education. If I were obliged to leave 40% of my assets on my death to a fund that would produce visible benefits to the economy while still benefiting my kids in the end I think I might be happier to pay up, especially if I could actually choose the destination for my legacy: if I could pick a fund from a list, for instance.
June 26, 2006
Complete Cant
Cameron's Bill of Rights may be meaningless, even mendacious and certainly legally incoherent but it is outstanding politics. Proper agenda-grabbing spin. A policy so insubstantial as to be practically invisible married to a clever expression of middle-British distrust of soft European 'human rights' nonsense. I can almost see the roomful of rosy-faced twenty-somethings who came up with it now, having their Gillette moment, back slapping and high-fiving their way round to the pub. Still, it might backfire yet. Cameron obviously can't enact this wafer-thin pseudo-policy. He can't even turn it into a manifesto committment. There's nothing there – a rhetorical vacuum. It'll just hang there until, hopefully, it's forgotten and quietly dropped.
May 09, 2006
Fascists?
Some debate about whether or not the BNP are fascists. I guess a narrow definition would exclude them (but then some unhelpfully narrow definitions exclude the Nazis). I like Umberto Eco's 1995 definition of something he calls 'Ur-Fascism'. He provides a handy 14-point, cut-out-and keep recognition guide, including, selectively:
'1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition...',
'6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration...',
'7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country...',
'8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies...',
'13. Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments...'
and so on. Eco was brought up an Italian fascist (a proper fascist, I suppose). You can read the full story in the New York Review of Books here but you'll need a subscription. Click more for Eco's 14-point list (which constitutes about a third of the original article so I guess that counts as fair use).
May 08, 2006
Still angry really
What's frustrating about Blair's culpable ineptitude in the last fortnight or so is that it favours principally the Old Labour rump of maybe 50 bitter and increasingly vocal old-timers. Gordon Brown may be rubbing his hands in anticipation of an accelerated succession but his own room to manoeuvre will be sharply restricted if the old guard win this battle.
Their fee for Blair's early removal will be influence over the Brown programme and ongoing input to Government policy in the next parliament and beyond. The party's 'grey men' must be resisted. Old Labour, like Cameron's 'caring Conservatism' has nothing to offer modern Britain.
May 06, 2006
I'm angry
Why am I angry? Lots of reasons. One: Charles Fucking Clarke gave the fascists a dozen seats because of his complacency and his arrogance and his inability to acknowledge that the foreign prisoners issue was a powder keg. Two: Tony Fucking Blair threw away dozens (a hundred? A hundred-and-fifty?) seats because he fired Clarke after the rout and not ten days ago when doing so would have had a political impact.
Three: Tony Fucking Blair (he made the list twice) half-fired John Prescott instead of actually firing him thus, inexplicably, turning the Prescott issue from a grubby private affair (with a nasty Max Clifford dimension) into a fully-fledged political crisis (with a constitutional twist) and: Four: Tony Fucking Blair (yes, three times) demoted a successful foreign secretary for reasons so impenetrable, so tribal and so self-destructive as to utterly undermine his successor. That's why I'm angry.
April 27, 2006
Clarke: you're a lightweight. You're fired
Ask any leader, anyone who's ever led anything. Sometimes you have to fire someone. Sometimes you have to fire them even if it doesn't really make any sense to do so. This is elementary Machiavelli but also common sense. Blair should fire Clarke tomorrow (he should have fired him yesterday). He should do it publicly and with extreme prejudice.
Anyway, Clarke's already entered the tertiary phase of ministerial paranoia. He just made the speech: the one about the media that you make after you've had a hard time from the media. He's deep in his personal bunker and the only way out now is a good firm Prime Ministerial sacking. Go on Tony. Show us what you're made of. It'll cheer us all up.
April 04, 2006
Remembering Tony Blair, part one
Tony Blair ignored, neglected and ultimately abused the party that gave him power. He was right to do so.
In the early 1990s Tony Blair saw that the Labour Party in its fossilised 1980s form was not only unelectable but, worse, no longer an electoral force. The Labour Party was going the way of the Liberals: a one-time party of government reduced by dogma and an instinctive resistance to change to irrelevance and to sniping from the sidelines.
The Labour Party, though, was still a quite servicable vehicle, a political machine in good enough shape to get him (and his people) to power. Once there, as we've seen, his apparent interest in the party faded and his interactions with it were pared back to the absolute minimum. The party was told what it was necessary to tell it and that was it (Jack Dromey being only the latest elected official to learn that his post was more honorary than managerial).
The party's conference, once Labour's primary engine of policy renewal, became an annual chore, left to juniors (and the doughty, indecipherable deputy), just another diary engagement for the PM, really. The problem with marginalising a deep-rooted institution like the Labour Party, though, is that it just won't lie down and die and now, over a decade later, it's taking its revenge.
The thing is, Blair's rejection of his party is more radical than even his critics think. They characterise Blair's style of Government as 'Presidential' but, of course, even a President still has a party, still needs its machine to produce money and grassroots support and legitimacy. Blair's vision goes much further, I think, to a political scene without parties – where parties, in fact, are irrelevant, where the idea of a party is absurd – to a 'policy marketplace' of shifting personalities and issues and platforms.
In this, of course, he is not only ahead of his time, he is probably right. Parties everywhere – in all the mature, democratic states – are fading fast – both in terms of membership and, of course, of authority. They've had their day. The parties will probably be the first real victims of politics' almost universal legitimacy crisis. We're learning that political parties are not up to the 21st Century job – they're inefficient filters of the popular will and ineffective bearers of political authenticity.
In the modern world outside politics – in marketing and business and the media – it's all about authenticity and directness these days. The winners in the post-party environment will be individual politicians who can tell their stories to electors without the mediation of the clumsy 19th Century clubs we call parties. Tony Blair will be their prototype.
March 23, 2006
I've been in denial
I've been sort of vaguely expecting that Tony Blair's troubles would fade with the arrival of the warm weather and that, by conference time, he'd be secure again and ready for at least another year of office. I've been blithely (and largely unconsciously, I think) dismissing each new crisis – each new horrifying misstep more like – as the exaggerated product of the malign anti-Blair media's bitter campaign against the PM and only incidentally a result of anything he's done himself. So I suppose I'm a loyalist. I'm not stupid, though and I think an important threshold has been passed
I'm now mentally preparing myself for a Brown premiership. If I'm honest I'd say that it's Brown's succession that I've really been blocking out, rather than Blair's passing. I'm worried. I think Tony's dour neighbour is so lacking in the PM's preternatural charm and quite awesome ability to absorb criticism (Blair seems to soak up disapproval and convert it to pure, undissipated energy), that putting Brown in sole charge of the action will directly threaten Labour's hold on power.
Of course this is ironic since it's really Labour's Constant Chancellor we've got to thank for the visible and positive change in our schools and hospitals and for the large and important improvement in the circumstances of poor families and pensioners since 1997. The last couple of days seem to support the idea of a managed transition, as if they've got their heads together and sorted out an orderly process. Blair's speech at Reuters yesterday reads like a valedictory, like the speech of a man preparing for his next role, perhaps running a transnational body – or founding a new one – I think he may be too big or too politically unsuitable for all the current ones.
Maybe Blair's the man to set up the institute (agency? Force?) designed to do all the intervening in local wars and against dictators and demagogues that his speech proposes: shall we call it 'UN 2.0'? Brown's budget, likewise, sounds final: expansive, bravura redistributive showbiz, a grand, confident, proprietorial gesture. "I'm ready for my close-up Mr De Mille". I'm certain now that Blair's departure is imminent and I expect it'll be done and dusted before the Autumn. An election early in the Summer recess would put Brown in place in time for conference and allow Blair at least a month or two to tie up those loose ends (and God knows, there are some loose ends...).
March 16, 2006
Some centre-left reading for you
The thing about Britain's big newspapers, the ones we call broadsheets (although they come in all sorts of sizes these days), is that they belong to two groups: pre-industrial, 18th Century landowner newsletters (like The Times) and steam-powered, 19th Century, industrial-era organs of the modern (like The Guardian). If you look very closely you can still see the shadow of their origins today. They're all in decline, of course but one of them, Alan Rusbridger's Guardian, finds itself, quite accidentally, in something of a sweet spot in this torrid political moment.
With all three major parties fighting over a very crowded scrap of territory about the size of a toupé, just to the left of the old-fashioned centre, The Guardian's special relationship with both sides of the newly recentred British political scene has paid off in a big way. Essentially, if you want to read about politics in Britain now there's very little point getting anything else, least of all the quite bankrupt (and very ugly) Times. Look at last week's Guardian: Will Hutton's hymn of praise for the Education Bill (admittedly in sister paper The Observer) cheek by jowl with Polly Toynbee's open disgust.
Also of note, you've got Fiona Millar's nicely forensic attempt to elucidate Gordon Brown's education policy from years of speeches in which he doesn't mention education at all and (off topic a bit, I know) there's Simon Jenkins' not-unfriendly hatchet job on the Beeb's unhealthy hold over our legislators' affections and, swinging back round to our theme, Jackie Ashley's excellent piece about the surprising (and apparently total) victory of the centre-left in British politics. And, bringing us right up to date, here's Martin Kettle's assertion, on the paper's new comment blog, that Jack Dromey dumped Blair in the political merde for reasons of purest principle and not because he was "...outraged to be snubbed by a Labour johnny-come-lately like Lord Levy..." There. Read that lot. Get yourself up to date.
December 09, 2005
He's good...
Cameron is impressive (although he needs to do something about the hair) but Tuesday's PMQs left me sort of quietly reassured. Principally, I think, because his 'consensus' rhetoric is a gimmick and you can't reform a political party with a gimmick, no matter how cleverly wired into the zeitgeist that gimmick is.
Cameron can't dump the 'ya-boo' culture of The Commons on his own: reforming Parliament's adversarial model will require... well... consensus – across party boundaries and across equally bitter internal party divisions. Check back in a year: I'll bet you a tenner that Cameron's perfectly reasonable (and very grown-up) consensus idea has been quietly dropped.
Likewise, dragging the Tories back to the political centre and dumping the pensioners who own the party infrastructure and fund its operations is going to be an epic task – equivalent to taking on the left for Blair. Cameron will certainly need his Clause 4 moment, or his Clause 4 issue. My guess: gay marriage. Although – inconveniently – the Labour Government already legalised it, it's such a potent issue and will so royally wind up the Tory old-timers that I see Cameron and Osborne and the rest of his kitchen cabinet attending lots of gay weddings in the next few months.
I expect a period of explicit and deliberate provocation of the old guard. Cameron can't achieve his goal without dumping the blue rinse brigade. Item 1 on his 'reform the party' to do list is to alienate the hardcore Tory membership so profoundly that they voluntarily leave the party and create a space for the next generation Tories he believes exist. Cameron knows that if, at the end of this parliament, the party looks roughly like it does now (demographically, ethnically), then it's game over for The Conservatives (which would be interesting, wouldn't it?).
December 03, 2005
MP's salaries
There's a market at work here. School teachers are underpaid because they like the job, prefer it to working in The City or the civil service. MPs are underpaid (relative to the middle-ranking managers they compare themselves to) because of the job's many (quite legitimate) privileges: the pleasures of public service, status, lucrative director's gigs and so on.
You can tell the market is working because there's no apparent shortage of MPs (in fact there are dozens of candidates for every vacancy and the waiting list is years long). MPs should not use their unique position, a position in which they are granted control over their own remuneration, to buck the market.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that we should try to attract highly-qualified people to seats in Parliament but I suspect that the salary is not the big problem. The appropriate response to feeling undervalued would be to take the revolving door back to a job in the legal profession or in business.
November 13, 2005
Outstanding political radio
Geoff Mulgan ran New Labour Think Tank Demos and then Number 10's Strategy Unit. He's an interesting man, full of ideas, unconventional, a proper modern thinker/doer. His three part series for Radio 4's The Westminster Hour is the best political radio I've heard in years. A genuine insight to the policy-making process and a really good overview of politics' crisis – received opinion given a good kicking in the process. Should be compulsory listening, especially for the crowd of puffed up old-timers on the Labour back benches who are getting ready to use their new-found clout to wind back the clock to precisely five minutes before Tony Blair was elected leader.
(I'm going to leave it to trust that the programme's Real streams will not be removed or overwritten...)
November 11, 2005
Howard flips
We're getting used to a certain amount of political role reversal since Blair turned the tables on the Tories eight years ago but watching Michael Howard putting the boot into the police in yesterday's Commons debate was about the most surreal political inversion I've seen, at least in this parliament – almost worth the historic defeat all on its own (his new ACAB tattoo is the talk of the tea room).
November 10, 2005
The trees are moving
This is where the story starts to get really Shakespearian. Blair's messianic tendencies – his readiness to put belief ahead of logic – make him look more and more like Macbeth by the day (the fact that the cast of characters is practically all Scottish helps). His isolation can only intensify now. Gordon Brown – Blair's embittered Malcolm – found 49 happy Macduffs on the seething Labour backbenches today. Blair's protracted public assassination at the hands of his gleeful party enemies has begun.
November 02, 2005
Blunkett brutalised
His offence was foolish but hardly a crime. The Ministerial Code is intended to prevent conflicts of interest from arising. None arose. He entered every transaction into the register of members' interests. He did everything he was obliged to and made a royal balls up of the discretionary bits. He's been a grade A berk.
Does he deserve to have his career terminated, his reputation ruined, his earnings potential permanently curtailed? I don't think so. What makes us so unforgiving of our politicians? Why are we so convinced of their venality that we can't allow even a disabled man at the end of his tether some leeway?
We've become a blood-thirsty bunch, gleefully dissecting the blighted love lives (and failed diets) of celebrities and eviscerating our public servants for even the slightest departure from the kind of probity we long ago abandoned in our own rather less exciting lives. In public life we've exchanged the deference and unearned privilege of the past for the nastiness and unearned brutality of the celebrity era – and it's not an improvement. It makes me feel slightly sick.
October 19, 2005
The Tories' Messiah?
The Tory leadership fight is the best political entertainment for a decade – and I don't like saying that because it suggests they're closer to a come-back than they've been for all of that decade. I'm hardly an insider but it's obvious to me that the party must elect Cameron. They must elect him for the same reason that a business in terminal crisis must pick the oddball for Chief Exec – the third or fourth on the shortlist, not the superstar at the top of the list or the finance guy in second position.
Cameron is young enough and brave enough to tip the Tory party on its head and he'll either succeed spectacularly and lead the revived party back to power or he'll decisively demonstrate the party's final irrelevance on his way to a job running Glaxo or Marks & Spencer or something. I admire his pig-headed resistance to the print media's phoney-baloney piety and I think he feels the weight of history in a way that Blair must have done in the middle of Labour's wilderness years. He's the nearest to a Blair/Messiah figure the Tories have produced since Thatcher herself – and that's thirty years ago.
The official position of the Labour leadership is relief that the only authentic heavyweight has been knocked out of the race but, if they could be honest (which they can't right now) they'd acknowledge that Cameron gives them the first shiver of recognition they've had since the 1997 victory.
There's something gripping about this moment in British politics. If things go the Tories' way (God forbid) this will be remembered as the moment the circuit was closed and the strange convergence of left and right in Britain completed. Say the Conservatives get this one right and say they're able to convince the electorate of their relevance at the next election (or the one after), in a few years we'll be hearing things like: 'I can't tell the difference between Cameron and Blair. The Tories are just a Labour clone. They're not the real Tories...' blah blah.
Labour has unequivocally owned the middle ground for eight years but we may be surprised to learn, once the Tories are back in power (stay with me here...), that, in the long run, the biggest movement on the left-right spectrum will have been from the Tories. To get back to power their social agenda will have to be sharply liberalised, their antipathy to the public sector pragmatically softened and their economics almost totally reversed. Only Cameron can start this process. God I hope they pick Fox.
October 14, 2005
Cameron's drug hell
I honestly wouldn't have dreamt of getting my oar in here (private grief and all that...) if the Tory Party leadership contest hadn't become so God-damn entertaining. Cameron's refusal to confirm or deny is the only politically acceptable response to the drugs question. Everyone (I mean everyone – we are all, after all, sophisticated political semioticians these days) knows that a refusal to confirm or deny is effectively an admission.
Everyone knows that an actual admission would have torpedoed Cameron's campaign with the league of blue-rinsers who control the fate of the final two. Everyone knows that everyone of Cameron's generation has at least tried drugs and everyone knows that his carefully executed strategy is intended to protect him from both the wrath of the Tory grassroots and the risk of a run of 'Cameron always hogged the bong' or 'David rolled an awesome spliff' Sunday newspaper stories. Give the man a break. No politician of Cameron's age could do anything else.
October 06, 2005
Enfranchising prisoners
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain should allow prisoners the vote. I've always felt uncomfortable with denying prisoners the vote. It's an arbitrary, petty and outdated gloss on the withdrawal of liberty and, worse, it grants unelected judges a quite inappropriate role in the democratic process. Taking the right to vote away from those who've already lost their liberty is incompatible with larger and older liberties that we should be more enthusiastically defending.
September 28, 2005
They're still screwed
Nothing about the frozen-in-time short-sightedness of today's Tory party electoral rule change leads me to believe that the Tories can chose an electable leader between now and... ooh... say the heat death of our solar system. Luckily, by then, most of us will be living somewhere else...
August 31, 2005
A Twentieth Century leader for a Nineteenth Century party half way through the first decade of the Twenty-First. Perfect.
Go Tories! Don't dawdle! Pick Clarke! He's just what you need. I'd love to see you elect the shambling jazz buff: a thoroughly unreconstructed and entirely fossilised political force – and he'll be practically 70 by the time he meets scary, chromium-plated dynamo Gordon Brown at the next election. Wonderful. You'd better get on with it, though. If you wait for Cameron to get back from his holiday you'll have missed your chance. Stage a coup or something. Ask one of those '22 guys. They'll know what to do.
May 16, 2005
Dress codes for hooligans
High visibility clothing? How about morning dress? I think we need smarter youth, not day-glo youth. Tails and a top hat at all times please. And nicely pressed while you're at it. And a cummerbund...
April 12, 2005
My fantasy
My wife thinks I'm naive (or it might have been 'stupid' – I can't remember). Anyway, I have a fantasy: Tony and Gordon are good mates. Really. They've been together too long to let a bit of professional rivalry come between them. Tony gets impatient with all that Presbyterian, son-of-the-manse bollocks and Tony's high church mumbo jumbo makes Gordon feel slightly sick. Their wives don't get on, of course, and they hate each other's friends but, basically, they like and trust each other and they're serious about working together to win the election and lead the country into a healthy, modern, fair and un-neurotic future. Of course, I could be wrong.
March 26, 2005
Whacked
Howard's Conservatives look impressively like The Sopranos this weekend. I suppose the unfortunate Mr Flight should be pleased he didn't leave that final meeting in the trunk of a party car. As it is he's been despatched so quickly he's obviously in shock. In short order he's been fired as Deputy Chairman, lost the whip, been kicked out of the party and deselected – his political career has been brutally and efficiently terminated. From made man to dead man in 24 hours.
March 21, 2005
Hon Member for West Bromwich East a bit geeky shock
I probably shouldn't find this surprising really. Maybe it's because the only MPs I've ever met looked to me like they would probably struggle to operate their own trouser buttons, let alone apply an unsharp mask. Hear hear!
I guess the risk of being the only Photoshop-literate MP is that you might wind up being required to airbrush yourself out of the group photos once you've fallen out of favour.
March 17, 2005
Mr Showbiz
Do not tell me you weren't impressed by Gordon Brown's ninth budget performance. He's such a showman. He's like a movie star of the Golden Age – a brooding matinee idol – Robert Mitchum or Ray Milland (with some Methodist preacher thrown in). His delivery is quite awesome. What about that perfectly timed "...and I can do more..." (impossible to convey the subtlety of cadence here: you'll have to listen to it). He should be on the stage – GB for Child Catcher once his leadership ambitions have been finally crushed?
March 13, 2005
Bracing wasn't it?
Like a sort of constitutional cold shower. On balance, and setting aside the merits of the legislation itself (I know, I know...), I think last week's strange and thrilling events in Parliament add up to a pretty good testimonial for British democracy – an eccentric, contradictory and sometimes barely comprehensible institution on top form.
March 07, 2005
Being afraid...
Abridging ancient rights seems to come naturally to British Governments of all complexions. Something about power makes them itch – all those quaint checks and balances and constraints on power really wind them up. “I am in charge now and I will permanently damage the Bill of Rights/Magna Carta/Parliament Act/Ireland Act (delete where not applicable) if I feel like it.&rdquo (and don't even try to tell me that Labour are worse than the Tories or I will be forced to produce a long list of Conservative constitution-busters for your delectation).
In The Observer, Andrew Rawnsley puts a charitable twist on the story. He reckons ministers (especially Clarke) are scared half to death: that a phalanx of spooks and mandarins have made it their full-time job to get them all in a funk about Madrid-style bombings in the run-up to the election. I'll be honest – I prefer this explanation to the more depressing authoritarian scenario and, if Clarke et al are genuinely scared, then I think we ought to know...
March 03, 2005
Matron!
British general election campaigns are sick. Or at least they exploit the sick. Each needs its iconic sick person: someone so desperate for treatment they can even entertain the prospect of a one-on-one with Michael Howard, a man whose bedside manner might, at best, be characterised as 'chilly' ("Now, this might sting a little...").
I know I'm partial (I remember Michael Howard the first time round) but would it be too nerdy to point out that even in a perfectly functioning (say, Swiss or Bahraini) health service, brute statistics make it inevitable that some unfortunate patients (and especially those with real complicating factors like Mrs Dixon) will get their operations cancelled many times?
Politics is the only branch of organised human endeavour in which it's legitimate to build policy and argument around a single, statistically-insignificant case very far from the mean (hold on! I forgot about tabloid journalism). As I've said before, sometimes we're not well-served by our politicians.
January 18, 2005
Evidence Schmevidence
Pols of various complexions have embraced something called 'evidence-based' policy lately. Evidence-based policy is supposed to be more rational, closer to the cool, double-blind, statistically-valid world of scientific experiment (the phrase comes from medicine).
The evidence so far, though, is that evidence is always going to come second to cheap political 'hot buttons'. The evidence: the Government's clever-looking, income-linked fines – which promise to hit the criminal rich with larger fines than the cheeky chavs – is an almost perfect clone of a failed policy the Tories called 'unit fines' in 1992. Kenneth Clark quietly dropped the policy in... er... 1993 when they were shown to be unfair, unpopular and unenforceable.
Will Labour's unit fines survive the upcoming general election campaign? Unlikely. I'll bet you a tenner the scheme is buried by Easter. The evidence is pouring in, though: politicians can't adapt to the more open, networked, media-saturated, post-democratic era that produced the desire to ground policy in reality in the first place. Cheesy political posturing will persist. Real evidence will continue to be ignored.
January 15, 2005
What are we to do with poor Prince Harry?
Simple: vote him out (shouldn't be any difficulty securing the nominations from his equally barmy housemates) and replace him with Kenzie.
December 14, 2004
Fixing pensions
Pensions are important and will be for a long time (how about the indefinite future? Or at least until you can get uploading on the National Health). I find myself really losing patience with the politicians. No one doubts there's a crisis coming and we've seen some interesting new ideas (like the citizen's pension) but something as big as this should present an opportunity to try something new, something really radical and challenging to the legislative status quo.
We need a huge, broad-based, non-party effort and a commitment from our politicians to set aside ideology and the electoral cycle just for once if we're ever to sort out provision for our old age. The legislators should convene a conference or a standing commission representing all the affected groups, give it a long-range remit (twenty years plus) and some insulation from the political ebb and flow (so it won't be swept away in the next regime change) and grant it some legislative clout (access to ministerial resources, drafting rights, some kind of special parliamentary status).
I'd like to think something like this could happen in Blair's Britain. It would be an interesting experiment and, if it worked, might provide a model for other very large-scale (even planetary) and very long-term (>100 years) issues like climate change, trade or migration.
Somehow I doubt it'll happen, though. Pensions will remain subject to the collapsed five year time horizon of MPs and ministers and, as a result, we'll see no solution until it's much too late and the continuation of the 'anything for a quiet life' policy from all of the electable parties will produce a nasty social crisis when the storm hits. Very depressing.
November 24, 2004
We're here, we're Royal, get used to it
If you'd been thinking, before all this media fuss about ambition and status and education, that maybe Prince Charles might make quite a modern monarch – someone a little less trapped by his origins and his status – then I guess you've probably had another think by now. Prince Charles is cut from the same cloth as his parents and theirs before him (and so on back to Canute or The Kaiser or whoever). Perhaps it's unfair to expect otherwise. Perhaps it doesn't matter anyway.
I'm no monarchist but I'm tolerant of the British monarchy within the context of what you have to acknowledge has been a very robust and successful constitutional democracy across the centuries. Maybe I'm just getting old but I fear the absolutist logic of republicanism: "look, it's anachronistic! Abolish it!". I think we've learnt that our freedom and our prosperity and our relative stability as well as the other less easily-defined benefits of being British (and the disadvantages, inequities and general weirdness) are all suspended in a pretty fragile web of institutions and habits of mind, some of which we need to preserve even if they look frankly 'out-of-time'. That's not a defense of the status quo – I'm in favour of real reform all over the funny old British polity – just a defe