UK Politics Archives
November 02, 2004
Snow on polling
Buried at the back of Andrew Rawnsley's excellent Sunday evening Westminster Hour is a consistently fascinating 15-minute segment called The Sunday Supplement. In this slot they're currently running a short series from Peter "Swing-o-meter" Snow about the turmoil in opinion polling. This week's is about the new kid on the block – Internet polling (click here to listen to the latest show).
September 15, 2004
Disposable legislation
Like a lot of those harried urban Labour MPs we've been hearing from lately, I feel a sort of vague discomfort with the idea of people on horses rushing through the countryside in pursuit of small, quite fluffy mammals – it's just not very nice is it? Unlike most of those Labour MPs, though, I don't have a constituency mailbag bulging with threats of deselection and other low-grade mischief.
The hunting ban is an ugly thing: illiberal, politically contingent and irrelevant – a throwback to an earlier era of dogmatic, one-dimensional leftism – sentimental, anthropomorphic, shabby. It's a casual and thoughtless infringement of liberty that will save the lives of (maybe) 30,000 foxes per year – about a third of the number killed by cars. It's such a bad law it makes me feel queasy. It's like dangerous dogs on steroids – trashy, knee-jerk legislation for trashy, soundbite politicians. I'm a Labour Party member and I'm ashamed of it.
August 04, 2004
Animal testing crackdown
The animal rights people aren't terrorists, not even the ugly ones wearing balaclavas and harassing researchers and their families – that's just big pharma spin. They are stupid, though. Their story-book anthropomorphism is simple-minded, reductive and partial. Animal testing may offend you (it offends me – I'm as sentimental as the next man) and there are mature and sophisticated arguments against the subjection of one species by another and especially against our growing reliance on factory-farmed protein but the use of animals in research is a legitimate extension of domestication.
As a species we have put the animals around us to organised use for at least 10,000 years and this ongoing symbiosis has not imperiled or reduced our humanity – rather it has guaranteed it. Animal protein, muscle power and endurance have, to a large extent, made us what we are today. Animal testing, though it triggers some very basic and very understandable anxieties, will, like intensive animal rearing, continue. Our dislike of vivisection flows from our empathy and our squeamishness, from sensibilities developed through centuries of stories about cuddly woodland creatures, loyal pets and majestic wildlife. We're obviously going to continue to produce these narratives (Nemo, Shrek, Animal Planet...) even while we quite happily process millions of beasts into mince and sausages and cutlets and bags of offal daily. In the meantime, sickening or not, we must continue to defend the animal testers – they're the ones who have the stomach to do it for a living and the courage to keep doing so in the face of childish animal rights nihilism.
June 21, 2004
Go Walter!
Listen. I know I can't vote there (what with being British and living in Hertfordshire and all that) and I know I should probably worry more about the British political scene (which is coming along nicely isn't it?) but I can't help it. American electoral politics is going to be so entertaining between now and the Presidential election and the choice of candidates so unappetising (and my mother-in-law found some 1980s US election posters in her loft) so... I'm taking this opportunity to come out for Walter Mondale. He's my man.
May 27, 2004
Fantasies of control
Does anyone know how much David Blunkett's ID cards are going to cost? No. Doesn't look like it. There are no costs in the draft bill (PDF) and only some misleading estimates of how much you'll have to pay for a biometric passport and driving license on the otherwise excellent Home Office ID cards page. So, in the absence of any idea what it will cost us to get to perfect, compulsory, irrefutable ID, we can only wonder what we could achieve if we spent the same amount on cheaper, low-tech programmes to boost social cohesion, trust, transparency and education. I wrote about this in today's Guardian.
May 26, 2004
Abu Ghraib Reading
Susan Sontag on the Abu Ghraib torture pictures: “The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us ideology of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives.”. Mark Danner on reports from the Red Cross and the American military: “dispatches from the scene of a political disaster“. The man who built Abu Ghraib (and was subsequently gaoled there) thinks it shouldn't be demolished. Update: I missed David Aaronovitch's reply to Sontag's piece (thanks to Stephen Newton).
May 19, 2004
Staff development
The thing about those Mirror photos, I think, is not that they always looked like fakes (which they did) but that they really looked more like pages from a training manual: fig. 12a: (humiliation) correct technique for urinating on detainees, fig. 22b: (coercion) use of rifle in producing confession, fig. 31f: (disorientation) use of hemp/hessian sack in interrogation...
April 27, 2004
Management lessons from Ramsay and Blair
I always had Gordon Ramsay down as a superannuated Sunday Supplement wanker. Tonight I saw the first of his Kitchen Nightmares on Channel 4, in which he was parachuted into Silsdon in Yorkshire to fix the unfixable – a diabolical restaurant/bar called Bonaparte's. Inevitably, he failed, and Bonaparte's was shuttered by the end of the show. Along the way, though, Ramsay showed himself to be a sensitive and passionate manager with a genuine understanding of people. I wouldn't like to work for him, though...
Meanwhile, our Prime Minister continues to provide management lessons of his own. Anyone who's ever run a company will tell you that sooner or later you're going to come to work one morning and get a sick feeling when you realise that some malignant subset of the crowd of sweaty herberts you hired (out of the goodness of your heart) has taken over your precious company – or at least plans to do so (or at least thinks they could do so if they felt like it). Peace of mind drains away, replaced by stomach-churning paranoia. The worm has turned. It must be like this for Blair right now. He's still nominally in charge and there's really no prospect of a coup before the next election but the cabal has formed and the ink is drying on the tawdry conspiracy that'll see him replaced. It's just a matter of time now.
Managing his Government, party and increasingly treasonous cabinet through this period while attempting to sell the utterly unsalable European Constitutional Treaty to a sceptical and ignorant public in the teeth of a hostile press is going to be the biggest test of his career and will make Iraq look like a walk in the park.
April 20, 2004
The New Localism
Alan Milburn, proper Blairite (retired), has got the faith (you'll need to have a FT.com subscription). He thinks Labour's third term goal should be 'subsidiarity'. He wants Labour to embrace decentralisation, devolution, community-level decision making and law enforcement and all things modishly grass-roots – 'the new localism' he calls it. Of course, I think he's dead right. One of the big frustrations of the first two Labour terms has been the grim-faced, white-knuckled refusal to loosen the grip on central power – or rather the paradoxical readiness to devolve power to Nations, Cities (and even regions) but, and at the same time, to concentrate real power – mostly in ministries but also in a long list of agencies, committees and commissions – at the centre.
I want to be even-handed – most Governments talk the 'power to the people' talk while in opposition but then find the glamour of undiluted power difficult to give up once in the hot seat – and not always for sinister reasons. The temptation, as a barnstorming, pro-change Minister, for instance, must be to think: "I'll just get this raft of reforms out of the way then I can hand power back to the people in time for my replacement's shift. If I expend too much energy devolving power now I'll never get through my programme and we'll be back at square one".
Still, I don't need to tell you that the net already makes a powerful argument for decentralisation. In a networked world, the theory goes, power, like intelligence, settles closer to the network's edge, in the 'nodes' themselves and miles from the big, dumb core where decision turnaround can approach infinity and where bad decisions – skewed by political contingency, electoral short-termism and simple ignorance – are in the majority.
If Milburn is on the money, if his 'new localism' is going to have Labour's official endorsement for the third term manifesto, I think this is the kind of issue that could excite jaded supporters and catch the imagination of ordinary voters and might give the next Labour Government the boost it needs.
March 31, 2004
Yuck
Politics is an ugly business and there's nothing uglier than Messrs Howard and Davies scoring the easiest points of their miserable careers from the Romanian visa scam. They're so in tune with the Daily Mail's second-rate racial hygiene fantasies that it makes me nauseous. The apparent chaos in the immigration service is hardly encouraging (another frustrating, pointless own-goal) but nothing in this story supports the phony hysteria and gutless populism of the Tories – they can barely contain their glee. It's like free money for a bankrupt political force like the post-Thatcher Conservative Party.
Sealing the borders – rolling on the giant National condom against foreign contamination – is an almost irresistible policy for a mainstream politician at a time of crippling uncertainty, real threats from brown-skinned terrorists and accelerating globalisation of capital and labour. That doesn't make their disreputable double-act any nicer to watch. This is the lowest point in Howard's leadership so far and something tells me we'll see lower.
Some links: today's Downing Street press briefing on the topic – scrabbling when they should be kicking Howard smartly into the weeds. The Commons debate according to today's Evening Standard and tomorrow's Independent. A gripping piece from The Guardian about the business of preparing 'business plans' for wannabe immigrants in Sofia.
March 12, 2004
A grim kind of hope
Is it perverse to hope, as I do, that the Madrid attrocity is ETA and not Al-Qaeda? If it's the former, we can expect electoral collapse for the separatists (the last European hold-outs for a militant, colonial-era model of national struggle) and, hopefully, a final purge of their twisted, irrelevant ideology but, if it's the latter, then the 'nihilists' have their European beach-head and the world looks different again.
January 30, 2004
Inquiring into war
Here's a thought. Why don't we legislate for a statutory, independent inquiry after every war (except, perhaps, those started by others)? The inquiry should be given certain inviolable powers in advance – the right, for instance, to examine relevant intelligence and to require senior figures to testify – to prevent Governments from limiting the range of any post-war inquiry (as Thatcher's Government did with the neutered Franks Report into the Falklands War in 1983).
The inevitability of such a formal inquiry (and the following, also compulsory, Parliamentary debate) might just contain Governments' over-enthusiastic war-making and provide more interesting material for historians than we're used to.
January 28, 2004
Blair's political cojones
Assuming that the top-up fees rebellion was ultimately put down (and pretty brutally put down, by the look of it) by forcing a wedge between the two distinct groups of rebels – those who want to see Blair gone and those who object only to the policy – this is obviously not a great result for Blair. It means, if the Government's strategy was successful in pulling most of the 'soft' objectors back from the brink, that something like 50 Labour MPs would dearly like to see Blair replaced in Number 10 (total guess: assuming about two-thirds of the ultimate rebels are in the anti-Blair camp and one-third voted against on doggedly-held principle).
Still, few commentators have pointed out (it's early, I suppose) that this rebellion, while epic in its implications, is not large numerically – both the Iraq and Foundation Hospitals votes produced more 'no' votes from the Labour benches. Set in its historic context it is also not a disaster. This Government, remember, has still to be defeated in a single significant parliamentary vote in seven years. Compare that with Callaghan, Wilson or earlier Labour Governments, all of whom would probably have regarded this gut-wrenching near-catastrophe as a pretty ordinary day's work.
So, without wanting to over-simplify, Blair got the right result by isolating his opponents in the party and calling the bluff of the more principled objectors who couldn't bring themselves to hand Howard a victory. That, if you ask me, is intelligent, ballsy (and successful) politics. Bravo.
January 26, 2004
Londonistan
Illuminating forensic examination of Britain's increasingly shabby War On Terror from lawyer John Upton in old school liberal conscience, The LRB (I think you only get the first half of this story without a LRB subscription – but that's still a pretty chunky 6,000 words).
January 10, 2004
George W Bush makes good decisions
Listen, I don't mean that they're all good (or even that many of them are), I mean that he just made two big ones that practically gave me goose bumps they were so good (one of them actually did give me goose bumps – but you shouldn't let that affect your judgement).
First, he decided to get with the programme in a properly pragmatic and American way and give illegal immigrants permission to stay provided they're working (which, of course, they all are) and, second, he decided to send astronauts to Mars and put a permanent colony on The Moon. Allow me to repeat myself: “send astronauts to Mars and put a permanent colony on the moon”. Don't tell me you didn't get goose bumps when you heard those words.
January 04, 2004
Borrowed beliefs
So it turns out that Michael Howard's 'beliefs' weren't borrowed from a tea-towel or a greetings card motto or the dreadful 'desiderata' at all, but from the grimly pompous words of robber barron/penitent philanthropist John D Rockefeller Jnr, from 1941. Although the content has been changed, the structure is identical and Howard's designers even chose that unlikely classical typeface to match the one used to carve Rockefeller's message in stone.
January 02, 2004
Howard's desiderata
Michael Howard's sixteen beliefs, published today, read like a National Trust tea-towel with an unsavoury, neo-liberal edge – Max Ehrmann's syrupy, ubiquitous desiderata rewritten by Keith Joseph – the kind of thing your grandmother kept on the wall in her hallway, next to the crying clown, but with an abrasive, Thatcherite gloss. In the original Times ad, the 'beliefs' are even printed in a ghastly 'classical' typeface – presumably meant to give them some gravity I suppose.
It's clear – Howard's days are numbered. We're going to remember this moment as the beginning of the end – “do you remember when he put out that embarassing page of beliefs and we all laughed like drains?”. This is the kind of slip-up that terminates a political career (Kinnock's Sheffield election rally, Foot's duffle coat). There is no light at the end of Howard's personal tunnel and, no matter what happens in the Euro and local elections, he and his party are still a million miles from another general election victory – and they're now drifting off into a candy-coloured dream-world where elections aren't won – they're gifted by fairies. Trust me. I'm sure about this. Howard's extended greetings card motto is just confirmation. He's doomed.
December 05, 2003
It'll all end in tiers
Higher education in Britain is in a rut. The post war revolution in access has left behind an effective but dreary monoculture. The end result of 50 years of hopeful and humane reform is that now all middle and upper class kids go to university while the rest of the population graduates from school direct to the call centre. All universities are the same and all students aspire to little more than a quiet life (student activism amounts to a giant cry of 'leave us alone!'). Change is needed if we're to recover the variety, energy and general bolshiness of earlier eras and to guarantee the creativity and ambition needed to thrive in the post-call centre world.
Meanwhile, the lumpen tribe of 140-ish 160 middle-British Labour MPs who've mobilised against top-up fees (plus the opportunists on the other benches), terrorised by their over-indulged middle class constituents (I can almost feel the heat in the server room over at Fax Your MP), are required to roll out dead-from-the-neck-up 70s dogma about 'two-tier' education and the supposed working class dread of debt (What dread? Non-mortgage debt in the UK is running at an average of £8,000 per household). What British higher education needs is more tiers – tier upon tier of happily divergent provision from independently-minded and inventive universities – but the dogmatists can see no merit in diversity of provision, in promoting educational and research excellence or in any kind of autonomy for the universities themselves.
They would have us believe that our fate under top-up fees is to look more like the American system. The American education system has many problems but tiers aren't one of them. In fact, it's hard to imagine a more accessible, diverse and vigorous education system than the US universities. America's problems are more basic – the approximately forty percent of the population whose poverty denies them access to the social mainstream completely – let alone to university – for instance.
Britain starts in a better place – a relatively prosperous economy, a well-integrated population with low levels of exclusion and an excellent and conscientious educational base. If we're going to do well in the increasingly gnarly global economy we need to get started with reform of higher education now. Bring on the tiers.
November 24, 2003
Bush = Bartlet?
Neo-con doctrine and tough liberalism collided in George Bush's positively Bartlet-esque Banqueting House speech last week. Bush said:
“we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.”
A few weeks ago, earlier in the current series of The West Wing, President Bartlet (must keep reminding myself he's fictional) reversed decades of US foreign policy to intervene in Kuhndu (fictional) because of this exchange with a new speech writer (also fictional):
“Why is a Kuhndunese life worth less to me than an American life?" "I don't know, Sir, but it is.”
'Tough liberalism' is the left's response to the neo-con bid for the moral high ground in foreign policy. Bartlet is its best ambassador. Expect the further West Wing-isation of Anglo Saxon politics.
November 20, 2003
Davis is wrong about the death penalty
David Davis thinks he's got his finger on the pulse. He thinks the opinion polls support his enthusiasm for the judicial execution of serial killers (how do you qualify, by the way? Two killings? Ten?). He's wrong. He's wrong not because the pollsters are lying or mistaken when they report that 62% of those surveyed would support the death penalty for child killers but because when it comes to it – when it comes to the actual decision – we won't go through with it.
We won't go through with it because we have no stomach for the series of secondary decisions we're going to have to make after we've made the big one. Will we put a death row in every gaol? Or have a single, national one? How will we kill the killers? Lethal injection (this is how Davis would like to do it) or electrocution? Hanging even? Will we fast-track the condemned through the system or permit them their constitutional right to appeal after appeal, prolonging this most dispiriting public process for decades? Will judges who object to State killing be permitted to bow out of capital trials? How about jurors, barristers, court officials? (the legal process alone will yield dozens of equally tough questions).
Will we televise the executions, permit relatives and journalists to watch or will they be conducted in secret? What will we do about the statistically inevitable mistakes? Posthumous pardons? Compensation? Perhaps hardest of all, who will do it? Will we advertise for an executioner (and will the successful applicant be allowed a column in The Daily Mail)? Should we elect a fresh executioner for each killing (it could be like jury service)? Or maybe we could empanel a networked firing squad and do it via the web ('1 thousand clicks are required to confirm execution. One randomly-selected click will deliver the lethal dose').
When the time comes – if it comes – for us to decide one way or the other, the task of opponents of the death penalty is to remind us continually that these decisions are ours to make and that they will have real, lethal consequences for decades into the future.
I'm pretty sure we don't have it in us to make these profoundly unpalatable choices – we'll back off and we won't join the shrinking club of nations that kill offenders. I'm also hopeful that none of us could really bear to turn Britain into an inevitably darker and uglier place just to promote the shoddy ambitions of a wannabe Prime Minister.
October 15, 2003
Bismarck's legacy
Europe's pension 'pyramid scheme' is in terminal crisis. In Italy, public pension payments already account for 15% of GDP annually. Everyone knows that pensions are broken (and Britain's are rather less broken than most other European countries – public pensions soak up only 6% of GDP) but no one wants to tackle it – certainly not the politicians. Being one of those problems that can only get worse with time, the brave politician who finally decides to sort it out will probably be too late (and will certainly lose his job over it).
Everyone also knows that there are essentially only three variables: retirement age, working population and the size of our individual contributions. Since fiddling with one or even two variables is unlikely to do the job, we're all going to have to recognise sooner or later that organised immigration has a contribution to make (along with having more children. I'm doing my bit – I've got three!).
No-growth greens are also going to have to tackle this one head on. They're right to point out that stopping population growth in Europe is one of our most important post-war achievements but they must now face the real, political fact that holding the population static can only accelerate the crisis and produce poverty for anyone dependent on state provision in the coming decades. The Economist had a good feature and a leader on this two weeks ago (but I'm afraid you need a subscription to see the story).
September 30, 2003
Blair, Brown, Bartlet and Blaine
Tonight we watched The West Wing (the Xmas episode in which Toby is reunited with his convicted felon dad) and Tony Blair's speech at the Bournemouth conference. We're about 90% convinced that Blair's speech writers are watching The West Wing too. His speech was honest, gutsy, rhetorically sophisticated and beautifully timed – a piece or work, in fact. In The West Wing, it's obvious that Bartlet is the only man within a thousand miles capable of supplying the wisdom, judgement and resolve that his rather soft-focus country needs. I'm afraid that Blair has done a great job of showing that the same applies here. He's the only viable leader for his party by about a mile.
I think I must be the only person in Britain who thinks Blair's speech gives the lie to media theories about Brown's accelerating leadership ambitions, though. I think that if there ever was a deal it's probably still in place. Far from signalling open competition for the top job, the two speeches were a matched pair, dovetailing nicely, overlapping in enough places to provide narrative tension (because a love-in would just be boring). If the Labour Party were a business, on the strength of these two speeches, Brown would be its get-the-job-done CEO and Blair its charismatic Chairman.
The Blair vs. Brown mortal combat story is a bit of showbiz worthy of David Blaine. Quite a lot of people think Blaine isn't in that box at all and that he'll show up on day 44 in some exotic location and the joke will be on us. Likewise, there's a reasonable chance that we've been had by Blair and Brown and that this particular illusion will produce a comfortable third term majority – or at least a more placid ending to the second.
(cool screenshots, huh? Click the little pics for bigger ones)
August 31, 2003
Healing the health service
Ideology may have created it � ideology of the purest, most saintly kind � but it won't be ideology that saves the NHS. It will be management � creative, inspirational management that we somehow have to free from burden of decades of ideology, from left and right. Boring really. The FT reports on a really exciting experiment in freeing the surgeons and carers to provide more choice for patients. The experiment aims to get surgery patients operated on sooner by offering them a choice of hospitals � using capacity more efficiently, basically. An important early lesson:
“It has also produced some uncomfortable lessons for an NHS that is still short of doctors, nurses and operating theatres. It has shown that real choice for patients will be possible only if there is spare capacity - some of which is likely to be permanently underused”
August 08, 2003
Ugliness
Isabel Hilton in The Guardian (I do read some other newspapers, it's just that none of them let me link to their stuff properly!) reminds us how much the current White House looks like the eminently unlovable Reagan White House (and shockingly unlike the one in The West Wing).
This ugly continuity across the decades – which looks like an irrepressibly corrupt strand of American democratic life – ought to contrast starkly with the freshness, openness and... well... morality of the Blair administration (the one I voted for, the one I still give £10 a month to).
That it doesn't much any more – that Blair, Straw, Hoon et al apparently want to close the gap with their American colleagues – is more depressing than I can say.
British politics is largely free of free range snakes like Poindexter and Abrams and Negroponte and this is a substantive good thing but the Kelly case, the dossiers (dodgy and otherwise), the out-of-control spin, the manufacture of politically contingent 'narratives' and the sloppy abuse of the government's huge parliamentary majority contribute to a real and visible decay of British democracy that's really getting me down...
July 17, 2003
A new role for Government: bullying the well-off
James Crabtree and Noah Curthoys from the Work Foundation's iSociety research project have written a report about e-government targets.
They think the current goal of getting 100% of government services online by 2005 is silly and they've found some funny examples from the official literature to back up their assertion ndash; the seed potato classification scheme and burial at sea to name two.
Their analysis is on the money. Indiscriminately shovelling services onto the net is reductive and wasteful. It's the e-gov equivalent of a really dumb marketing plan that attempts to sell everything to everyone – without bothering to segment the market, identify hot prospects or promote profitable top sellers.
I guess their most provocative proposal is that government should consider compelling some of their customers – the most well-off and 'e-literate' – to use online channels. They say that this group is less likely to use the web than the access figures suggest so poor and un-wired service users are effectively subsidising the lazy middle classes.
The press release doesn't say where you can get the report but presumably it'll be here. Click 'more' for the press release:
Continue reading "A new role for Government: bullying the well-off"
July 16, 2003
Early retirement, Mr Kaufman?
You don't have to be a Dykista (A Dykie?) to think that DCMS Select Committee Chairman Gerald Kaufman's attack on the corporation yesterday was unprincipled, opportunistic – really a politically disreputable act. I can't be the only one who's getting fed up with Kaufman's unreconstructed, Wilson-era Statism disguised as consumer advocacy or anti-establishment vim or whatever it is.
His latest soapbox is the extra-curricular activities of Messrs Marr, Gilligan, Simpson et al, which he thinks should be curtailed in the interests of balance, impartiality etc.
How stifling a group of the most intelligent, independent, high-minded journalists on the planet can aid accountability at the beeb is entirely beyond me. That these journos can sustain the BBC's high (and rather unusual) editorial standards while writing grown-up opinion for other outlets is a testament to their quality, not their venality.
July 15, 2003
Bloggers in the house
Maybe it was the over-stuffed surroundings – the Grand Comittee Room of the House of Commons – but last night's 'blogging and politics' event, organised by The Work Foundation and Vox Politics felt sort of important. The long-hairs and the suits, the iBook trendies and the wonks (even a few Trots) – and all three of the currently blogging MPs – all in one room (and a room with wi-fi) for the first time?
Tom Watson, MP and heavyweight blogger, explained the simple, day-to-day benefits he and his constituents get from his weblog. A US 'e-democracy expert', Steven Clift, said that weblogs might never have any big democratic effects but will certainly alter politics. Political columnist (and alleged neo-con) Stephen Pollard gave four or five good reasons for journos to blog – not least it seems to be a good way of using up uncommissioned story ideas. Contributors were practical, un-euphoric. Weblogs as tools for connection with constituents, accelerated idea gathering, better accountability.
Chairman James Crabtree from the Work Foundation worked the crowd well – Tom Coates sputtered at the stupidity of 'reputation management' for bloggers. The usual ragged RCP plant from Spiked! limply debunked blogging – clash of ideas, real politics, blah blah...
Sasha told the story about the blogger, the local councillor and the person from Transport for London getting together to actually do something useful in her community. There was some useful to-and-fro about centralising, control-freak pols vs. out-of-control, hyper-accountable bloggers – deserves a proper work-out, that one. Wikis came up – I'll bet that was a first for the house – and Tom Watson (our blogging MP) was encouraged to put up a PolicyWiki. Very good idea, I think.
More from Sasha, Tom, Linkmachinego and The BBC. And Orlowski is good value, of course.
(Click the pic for a handy key)
July 07, 2003
Mailer, Bush and the war
Whatever you think of it, this is one of those articles you're going to want to have read. You'll thank me for linking to it – no, really, you will. Norman Mailer writing beautifully on the unstated hormonal motives for the war in Iraq, from the NYRB.
“Moreover, we had knockout tank echelons, Super-Marines, and – one magical ace in the hole – the best air force that ever existed. If we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology. Let me then advance the offensive suggestion that this may have been one of the covert but real reasons we went looking for war. We knew we were likely to be good at it.”
June 04, 2003
Neocon update
If you're trying to keep up with the progress of the hyper-adapted neocon meme – coming soon to a democracy near you – this very good NYRB article by Elizabeth Drew might help. Personally (and speaking as a leftie who supported the war and thus probably the perfect target demo for the whole neocon project), I'm open-mouthed in awe at the progress through the Western body politic of this unlikely ideological virus.
April 20, 2003
The Anglosphere defined
This is what I pay my licence fee for. Dennis Sewell with Jonathan Freedland from The Guardian, Anne McElvoy from The Evening Standard, Stephen Pollard from stephenpollard.net and Michael Gove from The Times on the BBC's
(I think you have until next Saturday 26 April to listen to the programme before the archive is overwritten – how stupid is that?)
April 14, 2003
Things are getting better
Will Hutton's a pretty stern critic of the Blair project but you'd be hard put to read this article from The Observer as anything other than an endorsement of Labour's record on public services. To quote the standfirst:
"Things are getting better in health, education and the fight against crime – we've got the figures to prove it."
April 11, 2003
Pilger vs. Lloyd in The New Statesman
Absolutely compelling war writing in this week's New Statesman. John Pilger's article is bitter, Messianic, despairing stuff. For him, the actual conduct of the war confirms everything he said and thought in advance: "...a glimpse of fascism". John Lloyd – one time editor of the magazine – is a pro-war Blairite. His angry article is the last he'll write for the anti-war Statesman.<(You can now buy a 24 hour pass to read New Statesman articles online for a quid. Very clever idea and a pioneering effort for a small, impoverished political zine. Admirable)
March 31, 2003
Tangled web
Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews in The Ecologist have done some forensic Googling to uncover an unsavoury and potentially deceptive (but not surprising) pact between the former Living Marxism entryists at Spiked, the three hundred and fifty year-old Royal Society and the agri-business lobby to promote GM agriculture. The unlikely co-conspirators have set up a lobbying group called Sense in Science and, as usual, the question is 'who's duping whom?'
The article doesn't seem to be on The Ecologist's web site so you might have to go out and buy it.
March 27, 2003
I like this guy a lot
Interviewed by the estimable Wendy Grossman in New Scientist, a geek who uses statistical methods and clever database code to skewer torturers and dictators.
March 05, 2003
The BBC and voting
We should probably keep an eye on this. Matt Jones, dreamer of this parish and information architect at the BBC, is working on an ambitious project intended to get us 'reengaged' with voting and with democracy in the widest sense. Here, Sian Kevill, Matt's 'sponsor', who works in the office of the e-envoy, writes about the project at Open Democracy. Some people think projects like this represent the future of the BBC's public service obligations in the networked era.
February 09, 2003
Napoleon
Even if you're pro-European like me it's impossible to read Valery Giscard d'Estaing's first draft of Articles 1 to 16 of the proposed European Constitutional Treaty without the word 'Napoleonic' forming silently in your head. Amid the careful discussion of 'competencies' and 'subsidiarity' you can make out a continent-spanning centralising instinct which must, sooner or later, be faced down. Local opt-outs are no substitute for getting the structure right now but it's difficult to see how decentralising voices can make themselves heard against the clamour of enlargement. The irony is that a genuinely federal structure would probably permit a proper devolution of power but British repugnance for the word means that it comes up only once in the document – often enough to trigger a tabloid scare, though.
[Danny found an ascii version]
January 27, 2003
The right to be annoying
For some reason, people have been asking me lately about the increasingly visible Trots at Spiked! and the Institute of Ideas. Why are they so cynical and snotty? What is it with the obsessive debunking? Why are they so annoying? Why are they everywhere? So I thought it might be useful to link to three very thorough Guardian articles from two years ago providing the kind of background you won't get from their own web sites, events or publications.
Life after Living Marxism: Fighting for freedom - to offend, outrage and question everything, The Guardian Saturday July 8, 2000
Living without Marxism, but with the bubbly at hand, The Guardian Monday July 10, 2000
Life after Living Marxism: Banning the bans, The Guardian Saturday July 8, 2000.
January 16, 2003
Pants on Fire
Simon Hoggart is a treaure and if he ever actually leaves The Guardian the paper will turn to dust immediately. Today's sketch on Blair's performance in The Commons yesterday is brilliant.
“My guess is that Alastair Campbell has had a silicone chip installed in Mr Blair's Y-fronts. In his Downing Street office Mr Campbell has one of those revolving switches, as if in the cab of old railway engines. Usually he leaves it in the "slow" position. Now and again, just for fun, he swivels it round to "max", if only to see what happens.”
January 12, 2003
Constitutional vandalism
Neither side of the row over Universal ID cards is free of contradiction, neither has a monopoly on logic or morality. The pros are (depressingly) allowing narrow political contingency to shape legislation that will inevitably compromise important freedoms. The antis are (predictably) overstating the fragility of the mess of historic accident and random mutation we call a constitution. I'm pretty sure that the deep waters of British legal and constitutional custom will swallow up entitlement cards with barely a ripple. That doesn't mean I like the idea. It's an ugly, compromised piece of constitutional vandalism and should be stopped. Happily, the cheeky cyber-gerrymanderers at STAND have set up an easy way for you to submit your comments to Lord Falconer's Home Office consultation. Get over there and make your voice heard.
January 10, 2003
Didion's lament
Joan Didion has been the unassailed Queen of the New York liberal elite for decades – essayist, novelist, political commentator. Her latest NYRB piece is hard hitting but reads like a lament for lost freedoms and lost certainties in the post-9/11 United States – a good place to start to understand the crisis in the American liberal consensus produced by the War on Terror and the resurgent right.