Ed Miliband » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

How to rescue One Nation Labour from oblivion

Ed Miliband, Labour Party Conference 2011, Labour Uncut, neo-New Labour, New Labour, One Nation Labour, Reaganomics, unclassifiable No Responses »

May 232013

Kath has an interesting piece over at Speaker’s Chair. In it she says:

Just two years before a general election, and already Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation’ mantra whiffs of failure. It’s not hard to see why. As a slogan, it doesn’t have the oomph of a car insurance advert, let alone the ‘va va voom’ Labour needs to win.

She adds that:

Tony Blair’s New Labour re-branding in 1994 was a success because it meant something. With one short word, he told Britain that the old Labour Party – the party of wildcat strikes, crippling taxation and high unemployment – was gone forever. One Nation Labour tells us nothing. It certainly isn’t going to contribute to a landslide victory in 2015.

Now I can understand where she’s coming from, but I’m not sure I agree. The renaming process of “New Labour” spoke most powerfully about the thus-banished behaviours of the Party itself. One Nation Labour, meanwhile, may be trying to do something far more revolutionary. Even as she argues …

How are voters meant to grasp something so essentially elitist? And why would they bother trying?

… I respond with this comment:

Hmm. I agree that One Nation doesn’t mean much now, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Imagine, if you will, two years down the line, a country finally riven by the cuts which have still barely begun to bite. Imagine how people will feel, what they’ll be really desperate for. Togetherness perhaps? A oneness of nationhood? A society which helps all its members? Is that really beyond belief? Can’t the kind of political rhetoric One Nation rhetoric represents be filled out and made clear for a change by the people, instead of by the politicians?

This is why I think Ed Miliband may have thought this through much more from a strategic point of view than from a marketing point of view. Yes. Like a good Ibsen play, the real action is taking place offstage, in the community in question, amongst the people themselves. In my mind, at least, One Nation may be a political bath just waiting to be filled by the people themselves. And using the multitude of babies (Legal Aid, the NHS, education, social care, disabled support etc) which the Tories have clearly been looking to dispose of.

We’ve been here before, of course – specifically, Party Conference 2011 and Miliband’s famous curiosity of a speech. It wouldn’t, after all, be the first time he has had people misunderstanding/underestimating what he is up to:

[...] But I do think, in an analogous way, that – in his recent speech at Party Conference – Ed Miliband was at least attempting to break certain moulds in quite a courageous manner. The very fact that many people felt obliged to criticise his delivery – and not see his register as conversational rather than traditionally declamatory – does make me wonder if this poor man doesn’t have the hardest job in politics: to sell grassroots collaboration to a political party wary of, and thus resistant to, all such similar promises.

A political party which claims to be the very essence of grassroots politics – and then consistently finds itself in search of yet another charismatic group of fixers.

[...]

Is Ed Miliband’s speech going to be a Hitchcockian achievement [as per Hitchcock's "Psycho"]? Misunderstood on its first outing by those who claim to know – yet generally, in the future, to be well received by those who can only vote? Battling against those “vested interests” which make economies in their own image and for their own purposes is an issue he is courageous to raise. In a sense, then, perhaps we could say – with his conversation – that Miliband proposes nothing more nor less than that neo-New Labour I was unhappy with the other day: but in a better and far more constructive register; that is to say, all the unfinished business which New Labour was never brave enough to get round to effecting.

This, then, in a very Reaganite way, could be how revolutionary One Nation Labour might become. Miliband looking only to place a conceptual framework around the people; not, in any significant way, to play the commentariat game of telling the people what to think and do. It’s not without its own risks, of course. As Ben suggests over at Labour Uncut:

One Nation: the slogan that just will not budge. Still being drummed home to death. We may have tired of it but we’re not going to forget it. The mark of a successful slogan? Not really. I still don’t understand what it means. Or more accurately, what we’re meant to do with it. Alone, it’s meaningless: Labour has broad appeal? It will unite the whole of Britain?

But, all parties profess to do this. Besides, One Nation fails the “elevator pitch:” able to be summarised in one elevator ride. Which isn’t 100% accurate as I’ve just summed it up in a sentence. Unfortunately, the summary alone is so vague it requires several more elevator rides. Heck, it might be easier just to get in one, hit the emergency alarm, and hope the rescue takes several hours.

Yet I see other things which Labour, in the ordinary communities it must win, is doing to create a different feeling. Maybe Miliband isn’t doing as well as he could to flesh out One Nation Labour to the mass media. On the other hand, maybe he’s still holding back as he looks to allow the people to start taking part and doing that job of definition themselves: through the acts he encourages them to take ownership for and in the time and space he is giving the Party in order that it might grow.

This, for example, which I – in sudden partisan-like mood – blogged about thus. In itself, then, a small event – but multiply it up by hundreds of others, multiply it up by the time Miliband is taking, multiply it up so that the members and supporters do really begin to get the feeling that something might be slowly changing inside Labour’s perception of both its activists and voters … multiply up all of that as I suggest and maybe, just maybe, a revolution of sorts could be enabled in the end.

It’s an alternative interpretation, anyhow – worth a shot, surely.

A disaster about to befall us or a revolution in British politics in the making? As I conclude in my comment to Kath’s piece:

[...] This working-at-the-heart of people’s lives, being there to engineer good times and not just complain about the bad, is surely something we should proceed with – and maybe something that can rescue One Nation from the oblivion you all seem to think it may already be destined for.

Perhaps, also, for a traditionally national political party like Labour, Miliband has succeeded in realising – even learning from the Lib Dems in this sense – the importance of all things local to get one’s message across.

Especially in a social media and peer-to-peer networked age.

And even as some observers may find themselves at a loss to understand the true nature of the dynamics in play.

Memo to Ed: “On UKIP and giving the Tories a really really bad name”

Ed Miliband, Labour, Tories, UKIP, unclassifiable No Responses »

May 182013

UKIP’s been getting itself a pretty unpleasant name of late. Holocaust deniers, equal marriage haters, out-and-out racists – the accusations have come thick and fast. Now much of the political debate, for Labour at least, has centred around how far it needs to triangulate to the right of the British political spectrum. Especially in the light of political shocks such as this.

There comes a time when principle must come first, however.

However hard the decisions might be, however unfavourable the polls might seem, however tempting that triangulation becomes, however risky sticking with the values of a wider movement may be perceived, UKIP’s success is precisely the reason why Labour should firmly ignore the pressure-cooker venting of political prejudice clearly going on at the moment.

UKIP is, in fact, a perfect opportunity to paint the Tory right with the broad brush of rancid ideology. The more the rather private British right becomes unavoidably associated with the public witterings of such figures, the more the difference between what we need Labour to be and what the right is becoming revealed as will become clear in the public mind.

It’s time we saw UKIP not primarily as a threat to Labour’s heartlands but as a perfect weapon to sully the Tories’ own attempts at detoxification. It’s not the Labour Party which should be worried about losing its voters but the Tory Party its room for manoeuvre. We need to make that happen. We need to ensure it does.

The good people will come back to a Labour Party which remains firm on this one.

The sad people will bury the Tories one way or another in overbearing prejudices of UKIP’s making. It’s not Labour’s job to make the sad people happy but make the good people realise they were right all along.

Remember that, Ed. Remember that, please.

“The Forgotten Wealth Creators of Britain”

Ed Miliband, Labour, on a high, One Nation Labour No Responses »

Apr 192013

Last night, I posted rather dispiritedly on the future of representative democracy:

This would appear not to be only morally wrong but also economically and socially disastrous. So are we saying that an equilibrium of forces in democracy is bad for society? The legislative log-jams you get in the US would seem to indicate, at an anecdotal level, that this might be the case. But if the paper I quote from above correctly supports Kath’s assessment of the dynamics behind 1970s’ British politics – that is to say, an example of appeasement pure and simple – it’s a pretty poor road and destination ahead for the idea of trying to represent anyone. In a more fractured and niche-like age, if we aim for a responsive environment, then we will only get pulled in separate directions – with the results Kath’s 1970s brought us; with the results that latterday American governance generates. Meanwhile, if we aim for a more prescriptive environment, little more than an encroaching fascism of private largesse will emerge – a private largesse where powerful centres of control and understanding impose their will aggressively on the multitudes. In much the same way as is happening right now.

I thought about this post for about twenty-four hours, but only wrote it after a local branch AGM and nomination meeting to vote for our preferred candidates to go forward in the Chester Labour Constituency Party prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) election process. I suppose I felt obliged not to describe the details of the meeting itself, and instead spoke about my wider thoughts on the apparent futility of current representative democracy.

Not that the latter reflects my feelings of the evening with any degree of accuracy. I am thinking more widely now, and found myself with a desire to write something yesterday.

Positively, however, one of the candidates who did get nominated brought my attention to the video below. It’s about the forgotten wealth creators of Britain, and is obviously – why not? – a Labour Party broadcast. Watch it first, and then we’ll discuss my reactions below.

http://youtu.be/i6j27pG4M-8

My reactions then? It has a tonality and photography, a mise en scène, which so reminds me of so many series about World War II. You can almost breathe the cream-coloured walls, the greens and browns of khaki-uniformed soldiers, the smell of working sweat – and the oppression of a Colditz-informed injustice, as powerful forces impose their will on ordinary working-people caught up in a wider conflict they barely – even now – comprehend.

If this is One Nation Labour, it’s a concept of nationhood which is beginning to be understood through the dynamics of war – perhaps, in particular, those dynamics of Fifth Column activists: the enemy at home clearly being the Tory Party and its hangers-on. Or more accurately still, the Tory Party’s paymasters on whom the venerable organisation so clearly depends: for its funding, for its policies and – ultimately – for its soul.

And although I still find culturally two-dimensional, where not entirely inaccurate, the idea of a One Nation Labour which aims to contain all the nations of our islands, I can also see the potential power of the message: this video is just one element of the process, as the idea of the societal value of ordinary people working together gathers an undeniable weight through the presentation of undeniable evidence.

This is Ed Miliband’s Labour doing an updated Ronald Reagan: speaking to the people directly over the heads of the unrepresentative opinion-formers, in a language which does not simplify or reduce but – simply – uses the sophisticated visual markers which in a televisual age we are all used to and understand.

Good stuff.

Like it very much.

More please, along these lines.

Bloodless technocracy ain’t the solution – so what is?

Ed Miliband, Labour, LabourList, New Statesman, on a high, revolution, Third Way, Tony Blair No Responses »

Apr 112013

The idea of yet another third way (or more grandiloquently put, yet another “The Third Way”) rears its ugly head again. Whilst Tony Blair re-emerges from the ashes of Thatcherism, and asks us to “oppose smartly and govern sensibly” (personally, I think it revealing he didn’t choose “oppose sensibly and govern smartly”) in a piece headlined “Labour must search for answers and not merely aspire to be a repository for people’s anger”, it would appear that Ed Miliband’s Labour is already working out how to be both a repository for people’s anger (though not always in the way they’d prefer) (more here) and its channel, aiming as it is to weave the enthusiasm-winning patterns of community-organisation and policy-empowerment structures:

[...] If all goes according to plan, Graf’s system will transform the Labour Party from a centralised, rusty machine for mass leaflet delivery into a thriving ecosystem of grassroots campaigners. The key, Graf tells me, lies in giving ordinary members ownership of the policymaking process. Then they become not just cogs in a mechanism but evangelists for a cause. [...]

So whilst Mark Ferguson rightly condemns the bloodless technocracy of Blair alongside its all too memorable results (in both the good it stealthily obtained, as well as the bad its legacy became precisely through such stealth), and as we discard Tony Blair’s intervention in a debate already too stale, what answers (to use his terminology – ah, so maybe he does have a point!) do we look for next?

Bloody revolution is clearly no option at all. Not for moral reasons either – the violence of violent property is causing unhappy pain in the streets of Europe, Africa, the US and elsewhere as it is. Unnecessarily so, too. If we went down the bloody route again, the negative outcomes would just pile up on all sides. And on our watch.

In everything there must be balance. And so managing change of the nature we have before us must involve managing change in a balanced way.

As I pointed out recently, evolution has had its day. The only alternative now left us is to revisit a revolution of a kind: not the blood-soaked opposite of the bloodless technocracy which Ferguson rightly finds repellent in his post, but an alternative, carefully couched and parallel process of disruption. A “positive disruption” is how some are now terming it. A revolution which recovers its moral right to exist, via 21st century tools which recover its ability to be ambitious of objectively-measured success.

Just imagine a French or Bolshevik Revolution aligned with the techniques of modern business. Yes. If Labour is looking for “The Third Way” again, it could do worse than investigate such a way. It would automatically find itself able to draw on a huge body of practical implementation in the corporations that already sponsor political parties – and yet, at the very same time, be able to rework the tools in question for a community-based infrastructure of Party organisers.

How about it then? Neither cold-hearted technocracy nor hot-blooded revolution – but, instead, a society-metamorphosing disruption of an entirely bloodless nature.

Bloodless but not blood-free.

There’s the key to it all.

Why Ed Miliband’s Labour lets Liam Byrne strut his stuff

a con, Ed Miliband, Labour, Liam Byrne, welfare, Welfare State 2 Responses »

Apr 072013

The Observer reports this morning on Labour’s blinking first in its face-off with the UK’s ruling Coalition. As a justification for the changes now in the pipeline of “progressive” politics, Byrne is said to have claimed the following:

The shadow work and pensions secretary, Liam Byrne, writing in the Observer, commits Labour to a return to the “old principle of contribution” championed by William Beveridge after the second world war. “There are lots of people right now who feel they pay an awful lot more in than they ever get back,” Byrne writes. “That should change.”

As a “senior party source” in Ed Miliband’s Labour seems delighted to point out (the bold is mine):

[...] “The problem at the moment is that you have a person aged 50 who has worked all his life and then becomes unemployed getting much the same as the person next door who has never worked. It is about linking what you take out to what you have put in,” said a senior party source.

Well. I’m sorry. That’s not what it’s all about. There are millions of people with all kinds of support needs out there who need to be prioritised before such decisions are taken. That they are not being prioritised – ie that we are becoming an uncivilisation unable to see the less cruelly ambitious, or simply less able, as little more than irritants in a socioeconomic environment of self-confidently alpha men and women – is something which should make us think far more than twice about the direction we’re taking.

So let’s take that telling phrase apart just a little, shall we? “‘It is about linking what you take out to what you have put in,’ said a senior party source.” For starters, this is clearly Ed Miliband’s Labour speaking. So let us have no doubts about that.

Then the phrase and thesis itself: for in order to fashion such a link between “putting in” and “getting out”, we assume several things:

The criteria we use to determine what we consider appropriate to value as an input: economic contribution; social; familial; scholarly … the list is obviously fairly complex and really should be debated first.
The starting-point at which everyone finds themselves: essentially, how privilege and post-code lotteries are barriers to or catalysts of societally approved (see number 1) definitions of progress … it’s manifest, after all, that if you start off with millions, you’ll be able to contribute more financially to society (or, alternatively, pay someone to avoid/evade such contributions, if that’s what floats your boat).
The natural justice or not of defining people only in terms of their financial and economic profiles: this, truly, is the monetisation of life to the power of a thousand (see number 1, where I’m sure it’s only going to be the first item in my list which’ll interest our beloved number-crunching politicos; see number 2 for how we so easily justify the felicitous, or otherwise, accidents of privilege) … and something I have spoken about, in fact, on already far too many occasions.

In reality, then, it’s not about “linking what you take out to what you have put in”. If we’re going to be truly progressive about the matter, we’d do well to remember the story of the widow’s mite:

In the story, a widow donates two small coins, while wealthy people donate much more.^[2] Jesus explains to his disciples that the small sacrifices of the poor mean more to God than the extravagant, but proportionately lesser, donations of the rich.^[2]

So where, in Ed Miliband and Liam Byrne’s “progressive” universe, does the widow of biblical proportions now fit? Where are the mechanisms to define people in terms of how far they’ve come and under what adversity? Where is the intellectual desire to understand in all its complexity the actions and efforts of all human beings – whatever their personal journeys, whatever their own hopes and miseries – across the nation they claim to represent?

For that, really, is the issue. The problem isn’t whether Labour has blinked first or not. The problem is how many people will no longer find representation under this democracy. As is clear since 2009, both left and right political parties across the OECD world have catered only to the very top of society. We should hardly be surprised, as a result, when Labour unleashes such ideas as Liam Byrne loves to represent. The stats would seem to suggest it’s been happening everywhere, anyway. And Labour’s history over the last fifteen years hasn’t really led to any long-lasting revolutions in political behaviours.

Two final points:

A hard power observation: linkage may be a good idea under certain circumstances – but only where not gamed in favour of the privileged in society, and only where we do not use nakedly economic outputs to determine the value each person is able to add to a community.
A soft power observation: linkage needs to be carefully, and sensitively, implemented in a world where conditional relationships are destroying our ability to work together to a common good.

And one final question, before I finish writing my political suicide – this time, directly for Ed Miliband’s Labour itself.

Last night I argued that the Coalition government was not just looking to reduce the cost of the Welfare State in its “propping up” of the 99 percent who don’t abuse the system but that it was also looking to increase the amount of public resource that ended up in the pockets of the most privileged. In effect, as I termed it, the privatisation of the Welfare State.

My question, then, for Labour this afternoon – a political party I am a member of, after all – runs as follows: does Labour also plan to continue primarily supporting the interests of the top 6 percent by shifting even more public resource over to the already wealthy? Or will it, one day, ever consider measuring and supporting its voters in ways that do not automatically lead to further enrichment at the very top?

I don’t like One Nation Labour – but I do like this from Ed

Ed Miliband, grassroots leadership, on a high, One Nation Labour 1 Response »

Mar 302013

I don’t think I’m liking One Nation Labour and how it seems to be hijacking the idea of identity exclusively for a single construction of the many nations which occupy our islands. As I said late last night, I often find it difficult to feel love for a Labour Party which triangulates identity politics into a sorry and cowardly backside of ignorant prejudice. I am – at one time – English, Croatian, Spanish, Spanish Jew, Croatian Catholic, lapsed Catholic, atheist and agnostic. These are the influences my life has awarded me; these are the influences which no political party in Britain cares to represent.

So don’t, in such a series of events, ask me to fulsomely sign up to what – in any case – seems clearly to me to be a rerun of flag-wrapping strategies a much wealthier New-Labour epoch was able to afford to engage in.

Cards on the table, then. I’m not a happy Labour bunny.

This, however, does attract my attention. And this, in particular, makes me smile:

“It’s not just about winning elections,” says Mr Miliband. “It’s about constructing a real political movement. It’s a change from machine politics to grassroots politics.”

Perhaps there is time, even now, to do much more than simply win another election on the backs of frustrations, fears and hatreds. Perhaps there is time to think – at this time – of kindness, humility, mercy and forgiveness. A politics made for people rather than a politics made for politicians. Politicians, finally, as enablers then – instead of pin-headed CEO-types perched atop pyramidal structures?

Maybe we will get there in the end, after all.

And maybe something can be rescued from the HR car crash, where party members and voters too have been treated by our government as little more than poisonous waste – a waste which is to be rapidly ring-fenced, and deposited wherever possible in the nearest political landfill. As I commented, a little rantingly, over at Speaker’s Chair yesterday:

[...] f you want a debate on things we need changing – and any change manager of any reputation at all will tell you this – you need to get people onside first. Your people here (both professionals *&* patients) are your resource, not a toxic asset to be casually discarded. I don’t see how the discourses of Hunt and IDS & Co have been *anything* but disrespectful and unhelpful over the past three years. I do see there was some virtue in Cameron’s project, by the way – at least at the start: I posted yesterday on what his legacy could so easily have been. But the need for radical change requires far greater sensitivity in leadership, not less. It’s precisely the moment you need to be more able to rub people up the right way. This hasn’t happened. The government is not competent at people-management (both its own people as well as the voters themselves). [...]

This latter criticism can, of course, be levelled at so many party-political and business leaders. Sociopaths tend to be valued quite highly in such circles – especially by other sociopaths who haven’t quite yet reached the same dizzy heights. And I do think we now have a society which is run mainly for the benefit of such folk. If Miliband (E) is looking to change all of that – to plan not only for the psychotic violence of electoral war but also for the challenges of an unenviable period of fairly skint government – then I have to say I’m with him.

But before he’ll have my full approval, he’ll have to work out how to make One Nation Labour mean – and equal – multi-identity Britain. Because if he doesn’t square that circle with wisdom, the consequences – somewhere down the line – will come back to savage him just as violently as any regime of austerity which – scalpel in hand – has operated unremittingly on its poor.

If independence and respect of the individual are so very important, independence and respect of one’s identity are equally so.

Citizenship and nationality should be a bond to release and liberate, not a straitjacket to tie up and constrict. For me, right now, both party- and identity-wise, though perhaps not as much as yesterday, I currently feel the straitjacket is more the case in terms of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

But that can change. That can change. We can change it – if, truly, he wants not to lead us into battle but instead to enable our needs.

Your call, Mr Miliband. It’s now your call.

David Miliband: A Charitable Turn Of Events

David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Labour, Labour leadership campaign, unclassifiable No Responses »

Mar 272013

Such is the latent paranoia politics engenders in one that on hearing the news David Miliband was stepping down as MP, I tweeted the following:

Careful! What if this is a Progress plot to focus attention on Ed M? Get rid of D, next on list is E. Then once E has gone, D comes back!!!

If truth be told, I have good memories of Mr Miliband (D). I once attended, on a very hot London evening, an Intelligence Squared debate in which he participated. He was very Blair-like, it is true, in his delivery – but his delivery seemed rather more searching and childlike in its desire to get at some truth than Blair ever managed to achieve. Perhaps I was seeing him earlier on in his trajectory; perhaps Blair was more solidified and fixed by the time I lived under him. I was, after all, still in Spain until 2003. And two elections are bound to take their toll on the ability of a top-flight politician to continue in that childlike mode of discovery I, even now, associate with people like Miliband (D).

That Miliband (D) is still on a journey of discovery is, however, made manifest by last night’s news. As the title to this post says, a charitable turn of events. The fact that the charity in question is called International Rescue didn’t half bring to the surface a flood of Miss Penelope and Brains jokes. The fact that an ex-Foreign-Secretary should be taking up a global responsibility in New York doesn’t half make me wonder about succession planning and the role of General Secretary to the United Nations!

Though only idly. After all, Louise Mensch has also moved to New York … (There’s competition in such company, I think; a city full to the waterways of the aggressive.)

What’s absolutely true is that the attention lavished last night and this morning on Miliband (D)’s departure from these shores far more than matches the attention lavished (not) on those ordinary Labour Party members and supporters who cut their connections with the Party over the workfare debacle recently. And perhaps, in such moves, we could inscribe Miliband’s journey also: it’s arguable he’s doing nothing more than following many other political activists of firmly held opinion from the arena of multi-issue political parties into far more satisfying, focussed and pointedly charitable single-issue environments.

What you and you and you and you did last week in relation to your support for Labour, and as a result of attitudes and behaviours you really didn’t approve of, Mr David Miliband has decided to do today in much the same way. We all, after all, have our markers in the sand.

Is this the beginning of the end of political parties? It may be. Fragmentation may inevitably be the pattern from now on in. On the back of Mr Miliband’s sonorous resignation, others may follow suit; others may even cross the floor of the Commons. Not a sudden decline; not one visible to its actors; just a slow and steady fall into an uncertain abyss where one’s voters simply begin to ignore one. As one tweet which flitted past me last night seemed to say: “And why should the David Miliband story affect me exactly?”

A mainstream journalist (either the Telegraph or the Mail) even seemed to suggest that the change of role in question was more a “non-job” than a “dream job”. I think, perhaps, more than anything else, this shows how complicitly foolish those in the Westminster bubble have become. If, as I suggest, Miliband is following millions of other human beings out of party political activity, this doesn’t mean he is necessarily abandoning the political process itself. Governments less and less exert power over how we do stuff. More and more they are tied up by their unspooling obligations.

It may be that Miliband is as ambitious as always, but has seen that parochial little Britain really just doesn’t shape up any more.

And the future for Labour? I’ve already said what I think. And I’ll summarise it all with a final tweet from last night:

Labour’s leadership doesn’t need this or that figure. What it needs is hundreds of thousands of such figures. They’re called members.

Talking of Ed (Miliband, that is)

Blairites, Disraeli theory, Ed Miliband, in a hole, Labour, Liam Byrne, New Labour, One Nation Labour, one-nation conservatism, revolution, workers, workfare, working-class No Responses »

Mar 212013

Following on from my rather widely read post on Labour’s unhappy relationship with workfare (now why don’t you read me when I talk of bloodless revolution? Sign the bloody sustainability manifesto, for goodness sake!), there have been quite a few comments on Facebook. In reply to one which suggested that Liam Byrne was acting as a result of Ed Miliband’s (otherwise admirable, for sure) collegiate leadership style, I made this comment:

Collegiate style is positive, as you say. But you have to ensure there exist principles which guide too. Here, Ed is maybe a little loose still.

I then went on to point out that:

I don’t, however, think it’d take the scalpels of a neurosurgeon to work out that a party called Labour shouldn’t believe in making people who have little power work for nothing because the top brass have mucked up their socioeconomic policies.

And finally laid out my uncertainties at the moment in this way:

Byrne knows what he’s doing and for whom. What I really am worried about is that Ed, actually, likes the idea of using him as an outrider. Now if that’s the case, I’d be questioning Ed’s position.

For all the last decade’s talk of Labour values versus rolling change – how to keep the heart and soul of the Party at the heart and soul of everything we do, even as what we do involves upending some of the tools we’ve traditionally used to achieve our goals – Blairism was finally little more than a cuckoo in a fairly selfless nest of good-hearted workers.

Ed (Miliband) should realise this.

I’m sure he does.

What I’d really like to feel comfortable about is that he realises another cuckoo – in the shape of One Nation Labour (the comparisons between the language of the latter and the original “New Labour, New Britain”, if you think carefully about it, simply don’t bear contemplating) – really isn’t what the country needs right now.

So if One Nation rhetoric is to mean anything at all, let it not mean Blairism Mark II.

Liam Byrne would be its standard.

And we clearly don’t want that.

Time, dear Ed, to define behind whose flag you wish to march.

Time Ed Miliband gave David Cameron a helping hand

Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, Coalition U-turns, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Labour, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, New Labour, New Toryism, on a high, One Nation Labour, one-nation conservatism, Tony Blair, Tories No Responses »

Mar 112013

Paul Burgin asked an intriguing question this afternoon. I retweeted it and answered it thus (for those of you not familiar with Twitter’s syntax, you have to read the second part first and the first part second):

What Ed M is doing right now? Rock boat, but not too much. RT @Paul_Burgin: What does it take to ensure that Cameron remains PM until 2015?

Is it, in fact, time that the leader of the Labour opposition, Ed Miliband, gave David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister, the helping hand it would appear he so desperately needs? After all, this judgement of Cameron’s efficacy and historical potential is biting – and eye-opening:

My friend writes:

“I’m struggling to get the incredulity of the commentariat regarding leadership threats to Cameron. Why should anyone expect that a Party leader who failed to win an unlosable General Election, did nothing with being PM, and apparently has no chance of winning the next General Election would survive unchallenged?”

Ouch. And, as he points out, it is often forgotten that later this year Cameron will have been leader for eight years.

“Eight years after becoming Conservative Party Leader … Thatcher had got inflation from 22 per cent to 4 per cent and beaten the Argies. Heath had joined the EU. Churchill had won World War Two. Baldwin had seen off the General Strike and the Great Depression and broken both the Liberal and Labour parties, utterly. (No other Conservative leader lasted eight years post World War One). Cameron, on the other hand has … well, there’s … umm …”

Now I’m not entirely sure that in that poverty-stricken “umm” everything is necessarily lost. Blair’s abiding achievement, after all, was a bloody conflict in Iraq. It may have been the case that history was cruel to him – but the energy, resource, financial weight and body count which the conflict in question required of us leads me to wonder if a cipher of Blair wasn’t exactly what we were looking for in Cameron. So did Cameron really fail to win an “unlosable General Election” – or was it, rather, that he instinctively comprehended the British people’s need to tether just a bit more definitively their next leader to their evermore parochial kennel?

Sometimes, the closed system that is politics has its own karma. You give up a country’s sense of itself to a foreign power such as the US, however apparently justified at the time the deal may have appeared to be – and the next leader but one who comes along has no alternative but to reverse the ship of state. No more foreign adventures for the moment – no more Falklands, no more Kosovos, no more Iraqi conflagrations. If you must lie to the people, then divide the country cruelly up into deserving and non-deserving; get your communications paid for by the viewers via the TV licence fee; and tell those huge lies as hugely as you can, whilst history – or at the least the next general election – remains firmly on your side.

But whether Cameron is the cipher we needed or not, I think it’s pretty clear we in the Labour Party now need him to remain. We need his frantic straddling of supposedly detoxified Toryism on the one hand and the lurching to the right which UKIP’s current bounce presages on the other to continue for as long as it might.

And it is in Paul Burgin’s original question and in Iain Martin’s perspicacious friend that I think I finally discover the reasons behind the modest approach which, to date, Labour’s Ed Miliband has taken. Miliband has had Cameron’s measure since the very beginning. After all, Miliband was an MP under Blair – had the opportunity to observe at close quarters the very man Cameron has surely modelled himself on.

In both Cameron’s strengths as a professional obfuscator and his manifest weaknesses as a professional salesman, Miliband will have seen it all before.

Miliband knows Cameron’s laying his own traps. He just has to be there for him – with the kind of helping hand all enemies proffer.

Enough rope to keep him hanging on.

Not too much to hang him.

Not yet.

On Ed Miliband’s uphill battle to go downhill

Conservative Party Conference 2011, Conservative Party Conference 2012, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Labour Party Conference 2010, Labour Party Conference 2011, Labour Party Conference 2012, on a high, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations No Responses »

Oct 112012

This tweet got me thinking:

Cameron is not a prophet, a genius or even an inspiration. But he is the best all-round politician of a limited generation.

For the sake of a mind experiment, let’s assume that latter assertion is true: he is the best all-round politician of a limited generation. The question that then comes to mind is: why is the generation limited?

It’s a well-known fact that more than fifty percent of Conservative Party funding comes from the financial services sector – what you and I would inexactly call the banks. Banks are for a number of reasons the most hierarchical organisations on the planet. Regulatory bodies and the need for an iron-cast governance make them that way. Except that, of course, events have shown that what should’ve been a virtue has become a weakness. Top-level CEOs have brought such businesses – and by extension, our personal economies – to rack and ruin, precisely through the top-down power which such pyramidal structures offered them.

Meanwhile, in British society it seems that political parties have had a bad press of late. Yes. They do tend to promise rather more than they deliver. They do tend to throw up charismatic leaders who eventually forget where they came from. But if properly constructed, if constructed along the lines of those virtuous virtual communities the web is always throwing up, political parties could have a quite different purpose: that is to say, help engender a creative environment in which party leaders would no longer have to sit uncertainly atop an unstable structure, but could – instead – find themselves amongst collaborative colleagues, members and supporters all looking to work together.

If – as the tweet argues – the generation is limited, and I’m happy to accept for the moment that is so, is it actually because we stand at a massive structural crossroads in our societies? On the one hand, we have socioeconomic conservatives in politics and business – in the UK, the Tory Party and their banking sponsors – looking to work together to sustain centuries-old ways of thinking and doing. On the other hand, we have socioeconomic progressives – I used the word “progressive” uncertainly, I must admit – trying with difficulty to see their way through to different ways of organising people, societies and civilisations.

And in this latter band of social miscreants, I see Ed Miliband himself. That he might not be the best of a limited generation, as – for the moment – Cameron could be, isn’t because he’s not up to the job of leading a country. Rather, it’s because he belongs to a quite different generation from that which Cameron has cared to represent.

Miliband’s is a generation which looks to learn from the iconically 21st century. Words like collaboration, cooperation, communication and dialogue.

He’s most definitely not looking to reassert that the 19th century at its zenith should be our objective.

If Cameron does appear to be the best of a bad bunch, perhaps that’s because he really is.

And if Ed Miliband appears to have been having an uphill battle, perhaps that’s because he’s far more ambitious than Cameron: perhaps he refuses to settle for being the best of a bad bunch. Miliband, quite paradoxically, may be aiming to use party politics for a quite different purpose.

Not to command from up on high in the rarefied atmosphere of a political Everest but to enable in the luxuriant and fertile downhill slopes where the vast majority of people use their daily intelligences to eke out their livings.

A case of an uphill battle to go downhill? Downhill to that part of society where the greatest abundance of thought and wisdom lies?

Why not? On many occasions in history, perception is everything. You can be right, but if people’s misinterpretation of you kicks in first … well, there’s very little you can do to right the vessel after that.

When Labour under Miliband first talked of that New Generation, I truly do think they were on to something. The only question which remains in my mind right now is whether they remember exactly how much that something was.

Because I do.

____________________

Further reading: this on Miliband’s One Nation strategy is well worth your time. Disillusionment waiting in the wings for some? Perhaps. If this is the case, how much more important is it to ensure we reach the abundance of creative party political structures – before, that is, an inevitable closing-down of options takes place.

When Britain really did deliver

Coalition, Conservative Party Conference 2011, Conservative Party Conference 2012, Ed Miliband, in a hole, leadership, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations, war No Responses »

Oct 072012

Watch this and read this – and then let’s talk:

The Wartime Farm team tackles the conditions faced by British farmers in 1942, when Hitler’s U-boats continued to attack British ships, slashing imports and inflicting massive shortages on the country.

Ruth finds out how Britain coped with shortages of the wood vital for the war effort in the building of aircraft, ships and rifles, as well as pit props for crucial coal mining. With her daughter Eve, she travels to the New Forest and discovers how women known as ‘Lumber Jills’ were drafted in to fell trees in the Women’s Timber Corps.

Meanwhile, Peter and Alex face up to the wartime petrol crisis. Peter embarks on an ambitious plan to convert a 1930s ambulance to run on coal gas. Alex experiences the conditions faced by the Bevin Boys – conscripts who were sent to coal mines instead of the armed forces because the need for coal was so great. Having converted the ambulance and collected the coal to run it, Peter faces the question: will it work?

Well, quite. Now those of you who read these pages regularly will know I’m not the most patriotic of souls. But the “Wartime Farm” TV programme linked to above demonstrates exactly how spirited and socially minded – especially in the face of terrible adversity – the British people as a whole could become. It communicates in its beautiful description of ingenuity under pressure how clever ordinary people can show themselves to be, given the right circumstances and environments.

A lesson for all those who knock the United Kingdom as a political structure and as a singular people? Well. Before you give up on your knocking – or, indeed, before you continue breathlessly on your jingoistic routes to the next general election – the Open University, joint producers of the series in question, has this to say about our history. Interesting, to say the least (the bold is mine):

In Wartime Farm Alex Langlands, Peter Ginn and Ruth Goodman will take on their biggest challenge yet. As with Victorian and Edwardian Farm, they will be taking up the running of a farm for a full calendar year, using only the tools and materials of an historic era.

But this time they will be turning the clock back to World War Two – and mirroring the demands of an agricultural endeavour unparalleled in British history.

Alex, Peter and Ruth are about to embark on nothing short of a revolution in British farming – one more akin to Soviet-style collectivization than anything else. With quotas and targets imposed by the Ministry of Agriculture, new sweeping national standards were set down, irrespective of what type of farm you had or where it was located.

I wonder if there isn’t a lesson in the above for the times we are now living. And I ask the question in all good faith – striving with great difficulty to be even-handed as I do. What if our Coalition government is right to express absolute fear about the depth of the financial crisis – the figurative war – we are currently engaged in? What if they are right to say we need urgent measures – and now? What if they are right to have wanted to deal violently and aggressively with a situation shortly on the point of spiralling out of control?

And what if they are simply not up to the job – even as their analysis is correct? Imagine World War II had been driven by a vacillating Chamberlain instead of a Churchillian … well … Churchill. Imagine that is now the case here. A rudderless nation which doesn’t even realise it’s actually, truly, engaged with 21st-century war.

Tom was interesting the other day in a long, complex and fascinating piece on One Nation politics. I urge you to read the whole of it, but for the purposes of today’s post, I’d like to extract this short affirmation:

The fact is, as happy as I am to accept the rhetoric of One Nation, if I was a Tory, I would be a Thatcherite. I respect ideological leadership, sticking to guns, and having guns to stick to in the first place.

And I do think that many of us (though not, it must be said, myself) do secretly admire those kind of behaviours in many if not all walks of life.

What, then, allowed Britain to deliver so effectively in World War II? Partly, of course, it must’ve been the outright fear – shared by everyone – of Nazi imposition and the consequential massacres that would have followed. So fear was one element. But it can’t have been the only one. The collaborative instincts and the sheer social intelligences shown in “Wartime Farm” do not flower so generously just in a state of fear. Overarching targets, however, are a quite different matter.

It seems to me, on a relatively cursory inspection, that the “Wartime Farm” thesis will end up demonstrating that collectivisation can be good, liberating and creative – especially where carried out for a specific purpose, during a particular timeframe and for a concrete and manifestly clear reason.

That is to say, for a reason people see – out of their own initiative and thought processes – as understandable and inevitable.

So what’s missing today for Britain to able to deliver as we would all love to be the case? Fear, surely not. There is plenty of fear. But instead of serving to bind us, our government has used it to divide us – and, in this, we can quite rightly attach to it a massive and outrageous blame.

First, then, we need to redirect that fear so that it encourages us to work together instead of continuing to spin us apart. Fear re-engineered and legitimately channelled can motivate people to do good things – as long as we feel that the major forces in society doing the channelling truly want to help us to better times.

Instead of helping themselves to what we live, own and are.

In order to convince us that the fear of societal destruction – this figurative and very 21st-century war I allude to above – can actually bring us together, we need the second part of the equation: convincing leadership. The best leadership involves every level of the pyramid, however flat or tall that might be, acting effectively.

Which is what “Wartime Farm” would seem to indicate took place in the 1940s.

The reality is that we’ve gone dreadfully back in time. Our current leaders don’t understand the concept of leadership at every level. Nor do they understand the importance of channelling fear constructively. All they understand is the sound of their own voices and the heavy beat of their actions.

And meanwhile, whilst Britain could deliver, the Tories in power will vacillate like Chamberlain would have done – until the enemy from both without and within finally destroys what the Nazis never were able to: the British people’s sensible understanding that moments of wartime – which is kind of where we currently find ourselves – sometimes demand processes of collectivisation aimed directly at the short-term common good.

A kindly collectivisation of our rational selves.

Carried out in the very best of faith.

Perhaps what Ed Miliband was really getting at when he spoke of One Nation Labourism.

Five-year plans anyone? (Rebranded, of course …)

One Nation Labourism – a challenge just to the country?

Ed Miliband, Labour, Labour Party Conference 2010, Labour Party Conference 2011, Labour Party Conference 2012, on a high No Responses »

Oct 022012

Paul Waugh summarises Ed Miliband’s speech (my initial response here) as a kind of Labour equivalent to the Pepsi Challenge of yore. It’s a nice comparison. But I wonder if the challenge is only to the country. In a way, especially in the sense that progressive/left-wing politics does tend to split and splinter a little at the best of times, One Nation Labourism as espoused by Miliband today could just as easily relate and allude to his very own, sometimes rainbow, coalition.

In this, we may be seeing more of that curiously hidden ability of Miliband’s to keep highly political tabs on what has, at times, been one of the most politically devious parties. And I mean that in the internal sense.

Imagine what could have been, two years after losing a general election to a rag-tag army such as the Coalition. And yet, today (perhaps self-interestedly with all that internecine Tory jockeying-for-positions on the horizon as we speak), he even gets plaudits from magazines such as the Spectator.

I have my own doubts born not of Miliband’s character, which is about as kindly and honest as it ever could be so far up the greasy pole of political achievement, but – rather – because of the magnitude of the task ahead. Let’s clear away all the deadwood of suspicion and conspiracy theories. Yes, maybe the Tories have deliberately messed things up so there’ll be no turning back from zeroing the state, whoever gets in next time round. Yes, maybe it’s a massively constructed agenda between business sponsors and their governmental puppets to line the one percent’s pockets even more than is currently the case. And yes, maybe the business of war and death wants governments to be generally pliable to corporate aims worldwide. But the truth of the matter, whatever they are up to, is that they are – as Miliband says – incompetent even in their incompetence.

They will leave a world worse for the wear when they finally leave power. Miliband’s challenge, and Labour’s more widely, is not to allow such an incompetent leaving to tie their hands in such a way as Thatcher’s legacy did with Blair. In this sense, One Nation Labourism isn’t just a challenge to the country. It’s also a challenge to how the Party has been used to engendering order, once it sniffs the anteroom of general-election victory.

In Blair’s time, he saw no alternative to imposition – and look where it finally led us.

Will One Nation Labourism end up repeating the experience – or does Ed have even more surprises up his sleeve?

Citizen Ed vs that Coalition shower

Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, Coalition U-turns, Ed Miliband, Labour, Labour Party Conference 2010, Labour Party Conference 2011, Labour Party Conference 2012, LabourList, on a high, one-nation conservatism No Responses »

Oct 022012

I’m watching Ed Miliband’s speech at the moment. It declaims a little – which is not his strength; but coaxes a lot – which is where he comes into his own. When he mentions One Nation Toryism, and talks of post-war governments – both Labour and Conservative – meeting the challenge such an approach set out for British politicians through the ages, I’m driven to tweet things like this:

Although I don’t agree with everything he says, I’d really rather not mind if Ed was a citizenship teacher of mine. Citizen Ed?

He’s right when he talks of the Coalition shower – the Coalition’s total inability to do a politics which serves the people who elected it; he’s right when he talks of the incompetence amongst those who will claim they are nevertheless born to rule; and he’s right when he talks about the top of society needing to be held properly to account.

But where he slips a little is in the assumption that what I called “Surface Politics” the other day – the politics of extreme hierarchy where there are people with massive responsibility who rule over a democracy of voters they argue is simply in need of a tad more accountability – cannot be re-engineered in any other way. If we’re looking to excise from our communities the excesses of democratic disengagement, we need to change the nature of the structures we use to rule just as we need to change their levels of democratic oversight and control.

Yes. If you’re happy to see Britain as just one nation (which, intuitively, I am not), the speech is a careful enunciation of all the damage this Tory-led, and Lib Dem-enabled Coalition, is doing to the very British kind of socialism some of us still believe in. But the question is not whether from Manchester we can feel for the plight of that Motherwell soul he empathises with. The question is whether our political life, heart and future depends on enabling a Motherwell soul with as much democratic efficiency as we might enable the life of someone who lives in our very own neighbourhood.

And whilst he’s absolutely on the ball as far as the NHS is concerned, Citizen Ed’s lesson on British democratic spaces is still a little incomplete – maybe, even, a little half-baked for the moment. But I think there could be enough in there, amongst the declamatory phrases which don’t quite fire, amongst the coaxing delivery which does, to give us all hope for a socialising and supportive future which might yet rescue us from the quagmire we might term Bad Democracy.

After all, if we look at the stats from awful times past, a certain Margaret Thatcher didn’t have it so good the year she won a general election either. And, as the man says, look where she ended up.

Saving capitalism from itself stuff? Ed, you’ve got it sort of wrong!

capitalism, Ed Miliband, in a hole No Responses »

Sep 152012

Ed Miliband makes some rather desultory declarations today (the bold is mine):

Ralph Miliband, his father, was an anti-capitalist of the Marxist left but the Labour leader said he does not think as his father did.

“My dad was sceptical of all the Thatcher aspirational stuff,” he said. “But I felt you sort of had to recognise that what she was talking about struck a chord. I want to save capitalism from itself.“

Whilst understanding the need for a bit of delicate triangulation right now – after all, Labour is only around nine points in the lead over the Tories in the opinion polls, with two parties, the Lib Dems and UKIP, both scoring that difference – I do fear Ed is going to get this monumentally wrong, if he’s not very careful.

He needs to focus on saving the people, not a system; he needs to start with the people, not a tool; he needs to create a humane objective, not make of a means a fetish; in effect, he needs to concentrate on the finites and not the eternals – those perishable goods who have no time to wait in their lives for clever elites to once again decide their futures over their heads.

For if he aims to save capitalism from itself, all he’ll end up doing is save capitalism for itself.

And that story and political narrative is one which brought us here in the first place.

I’m no economist, but …

Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition economics, dumbing down, economic blackmail, economic democracy, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, Ed Miliband, Labour, process, unclassifiable 3 Responses »

Sep 142012

This news, clearly part of a broadening government attack on workforces’ rights, is just the start, isn’t it? Beginning to move the goalposts, so that in law unfair dismissal is no longer unfair, is only part of a wider process designed to shift the blame for economic injustice and inefficient process from the so-called wealth creators to the workers themselves.

In truth, if these wealth creators were really so very good at their jobs, they wouldn’t resort to the simplistic notions of firing workers to get out of economic holes they’d gone and dug for themselves. After all, the easiest thing when parachuting into a company with problems is to order a three-month review and fire ten percent of the people. Far more difficult, far more value-adding, far more deserving of the high salaries these supposedly clever people are able to command, is to analyse all the processes which operate in the company and rework them little by little so everyone employed has a value-adding role.

It’s much easier, however, to shift the blame for inefficient economies onto surplus workers who are surplus through no fault of their own. And since it’s much easier, government and business lobbyists both look for intellectual cloaks to justify their poor and shabby instincts.

We, as workers, deserve far better strategies. They, as supposed wealth creators, have none.

For in reality, in any case, these wealth creators seem of late mainly to be putting their wealth into non-manufacturing and low-employment sectors – where the financial returns for their own private money piles are going to be much higher. As an example, I remember reading a short while ago about how major car companies now make more money out of financial services and investments than they do out of making cars. I wonder how much employment such decisions now generate. I wonder how many workers, as a result, aren’t even contracted in the first place.

The worst of it all, of course, is that in an economy where consumer confidence is low – and demand is just about as shaky as it could get – we’re getting business leaders looking to make their shrinking markets less unprofitable by cheapening the cost of hiring and firing labour. So where is the entrepreneurial ambition in that? What’s more, where is the economic common sense? You’re hardly going to get demand up on its feet if you make workforces, consumers and families in general feel even less confident about their futures. And yet cheapening the cost of hiring and firing labour is exactly what that will achieve.

One final thought. The Labour Party is investing much of its energy in the idea of predistribution. One element of this concept, if I have rightly understood it, is that we should believe in and aim for high-quality and high-skill economies. My experience of working in a large banking corporation would, however, indicate this is not the way forwards that at the very least big business is looking for. In giant organisations, they always look to dumb down competencies, for several reasons:

Reduce the impact of staff turnover.
Reduce the cost of retraining.
Reduce the cost of salaries.
Reduce the danger of intellectual property loss.

These are all key elements in the decision to choose the dumbing-down of processes over the training-up of staff. In reality, high-quality and high-skill economies can only operate in those societies where there are extremely high levels of trust and stability between workers and management. This is definitely not the case in Coalition Britain.

And if Ed Miliband’s right-wingers continue to encourage him to sit on his hands, as they probably will do, it’s hardly going to improve under any future Labour government.

Is insanity at the root of all power?

David Cameron, David Laws, Ed Miliband, in a hole, power No Responses »

Sep 092012

One of my favourite quotes – one I have squirrelled away on my “Odds & Ends” page – is from David Brin, science-fiction author and NASA engineer:

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

If we can fairly argue that money is at the root of all power – there is for example, after all, no point in being locally popular with the people if you cannot control what the council spends its income on – equally we should consider with care this clearly well-meaning thesis from Shibley this morning:

While Miliband’s new policy may not be officially redistributive in terms of its economics, his framework is unashamedly redistributive politically. [...]

I understand the desire to support Miliband’s approach, even as I myself find it difficult to share. But to argue that one can convincingly propose sharing out power on the one hand but not economic levers on the other is, surely, naive to a pretty fundamental degree. And whilst Shibley may be observing Miliband accurately and not prescriptively, it is Miliband who should shoulder the blame for such a smoke-and-mirrors approach.

Those of you who read these pages will know I’m not the most knee-jerkingly supportive member of Labour. But it’s not out of a desire to pick holes. Rather, it’s out of a desire to mend them. Plenty we’ve suffered over the past two decades for us not to want to fashion a new mode of doing society as well as we can this time.

Unless the real aim is to make us suffer even more. In which case there is little hope on the horizon.

There is, of course, a final thought we can extract from Brin’s quote. If sanity is to be found in other things than power, should we also conclude that insanity – as well as money – is the essence of wanting to be in charge? And if this is the case, and those in charge are bound to be a more or less off-beam, is this the real explanation for why they despise not only the so-called disabled but also almost everyone else so very very much?

The Spanish do, after all, have the following phrase:

Cree el ladrón que todos son de su condición.

Which loosely translates as: “Thieves believe that everyone’s the same as them.”

Perhaps, in fact, it’s not even insanity which is at the root of all those who would be powerful but an overwhelming urge – maybe a primitive and primeval urge inside the vast majority of human beings – to want to try and break the rules and get away with it whenever possible.

Expand the edge of the envelope. Stretch the rubber band. Do the very best you can to get one over on the law without bending it too awfully. What those with an entrepreneurial spirit do every single day of their lives. As, in fact, our government would like the whole of society to do.

On the other hand, isn’t that a kind of insanity too?

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