Do you want to be winners or losers, people of the Left?

 David Miliband, Guardian, in a hole, Labour leadership campaign  No Responses »
Sep 042010
 

I suppose, in life, this question has many interpretations.  Life is a journey and – as such – can afford itself certain luxuries.  We can allow ourselves to get things wrong more than once.  Maybe – even – over and over again.

But politics isn’t like life.  It isn’t even a simulacrum.

Politics is a race to earn the right to short-circuit half a nation’s rights by short-cutting the route to the rights of the other half.  Or at least that’s how it seems to always play in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  It appears that we can only contemplate the tribalism of the House of Commons writ large.  Two sides to a debating chamber – those who are in and can act and those who are out and must gape. 

Occasionally, that is to say, once in a generally very blue moon, when a Tony Blair comes along and raises the communication bar to such an extent that we verily yearn for their bedside manner, for one glorious sequence of moments we believe these rigid moulds of conceptual concrete can be shed and properly broken.  But our hopes are always destined to be dashed.

In reality, the bedside manner we learn to crave after is too often based on the conclusions extracted from hard drives full of expensive data which political scientists are paid to arrive at.

And the communication bar that is so professionally raised is based more on the ability to sell a human relationship than live a human relationship.

Tonight, the Observer publishes an awful editorial on their choice for Labour leader, which essentially confirms the dreadful state of British politics.  You can read it in full here.

It is a classic example of audience segmentation at its worst and is driven by a desire to square so many circles that the word triangulation seems to contain far to few angles to properly describe its tedious sitting-on-the-fence approach to political commitment.

They got it wrong with the Lib Dems.  They will get it wrong again with David Miliband.

The last paragraph simply reeks of the self-congratulatory and patronising prose of those who grew up in a previous century:

The Labour party would be wise to choose a leader who has the intellectual agility and political experience to meet that threat. The combined skills of the Miliband brothers, working in concert, will be essential. For the top job, David Miliband is the better candidate.

This is a corporate understanding of what modern politics must mean like no other newspaper in the land could understand it.  This is the conditional heartless dynamic of a philosophy of human interaction where everything has its price and no one is exempt.

I miss my Manchester Grauniad so dreadfully tonight.

The Left has lost a great defender of its soul.

Crap really, I’m afraid is all I can say.

And a great disservice to Mr Miliband (D). 

Thinking up five criteria which allow me to vote with a clean conscience

 in a hole, Labour, Labour leadership campaign  No Responses »
Sep 042010
 

I’m trying to analyse myself out of the bind I find myself in.  That is why I now propose to engineer a set of criteria which will allow me to determine how and whom to vote for in the Labour leadership election, without having to resort to abstention or – indeed – rank capitulation.

  1. The first and most important factor is as follows: if a candidate doesn’t win the leadership election, how easy will it be for them to work under someone else’s command – or, alternatively (and more hopefully perhaps), in tandem with someone else’s potentially differentiated leadership?
  2. I thought the second factor to influence my vote should be: how good is this person at exuding an air of wisdom without falling into the trap of being a clever dick?
  3. Three is easy: given my predilection for flat hierarchies and horizontal modes of communicating and influencing, does this person give me the impression that they’re looking for a personal springboard or a societal springboard?
  4. Four is a bit more random: how good do I think this person would be at being my local MP, given the opportunity?
  5. Five is the most difficult to swallow, for me at least: how effective will this person be at moulding a broad church like the Labour Party into a movement that can win general elections again?

So there you.  Five criteria I can choose to blame for how I am going to vote.

Still cogitating for the moment.

Still waiting for that final decision to produce itself.

A lot of reading and watching to put in this weekend.  But then it is a democratic responsibility we citizens should take seriously and understand.  The implications go well beyond our own pockets of generational influence.

And as a final PS to all of the above, if you have any others you think I should add to the list or strongly believe I should scrub any in particular as actually unhelpful, do drop me an email or leave a comment to that effect.  The anguish this process is causing me at the moment is not something I would like to have to savour for too long.

Why I really don’t want to be "consulted" any more

 Labour leadership campaign, pyramid politics, unclassifiable  2 Responses »
Sep 032010
 

So there’s this blogger (that is to say, me), who keeps banging on about his hobby horse here.  Unfortunately, it’s a hobby horse no one else seems to care very much about.

So am I wrong then?  Can politics only ever be a case of putting a warm and empathic individual at the top of an isolating and distancing pyramid – that is to say, about as far from his or her electorate as can be – and then watching him or her inevitably wear him- or herself out?

Inevitable disillusionment, distrust and finally deception.  On both sides of the electoral wall.

So must this happen?

Twitter’s a remarkable tool.  It’s a window onto so many realities – a filter I would not do without any more.  I find myself following hundreds of tweeps who find themselves tweeting their thoughts with considerable sincerity on the web that is Twitter.  It’s often quite wise, too.  Often quite knowing.  But if there is a common currency of behaviours that is currently spreading like wildfire throughout my Labour-leaning part of Twitter, it is that vigorous supporting of this leadership candidate or that – generally circumscribed by a fierce adherence to that policy suggestion or this.

Badges of political courage that – plucked out of mid-air by teams of clever marketing folk – remind me more of Boy Scouts collecting brownie points than a serious attempt to forge a sustainable politics.

We do not need this hierarchical relationship between an enabling top which occasionally deigns to “consult” its base.  Nor do we need a fawning base which picks up the crumbs of “consultation” as if they signalled a banquet of cooperation.

Personally, I do not want to be “consulted” any more.  Or at all.  Being “consulted” is for the politicians who believe in verticals.  I do not believe in verticals.

Rather, I want to be involved.  I want to be part of.

But not as a greasy-pole-climbing careerist politician.

I want to be a writer, editor, father, husband, teacher, learner and Labour Party member all in one.  And I want my colleagues-in-arms to be able to similarly participate – without being bent out of shape, without having to give up what they are in order that they may contribute to what could be.

Right now, to make a difference, to mark a difference between Labour and the rest, we don’t need to fashion ourselves in their image.  We need to fashion ourselves in ours.  Our image is one of participation, of engagement and movement, of a process of influencing and communicating horizontally, of responding to all kinds of threats to our liberty and freedoms in such a way that ennobles our perspicacity and humanity.

The leadership candidate who can convince me he or she understands this, and – what’s more – seriously wants to do something about it, will have my vote tomorrow.

On choosing between a husting, an interview and Nicole Kidman

 "The Golden Compass", Andrew Marr, Jon Snow, Labour leadership campaign, Nicole Kidman, Tony Blair, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Sep 012010
 

There were three discrete blocks of information I could have chosen to focus on this evening.  From 7pm to 8pm, we had the journalist Andrew Marr interviewing the prestidigitator Tony Blair.  My overriding feeling at the end of the taped version I eventually saw was one of terrible sadness.  I once liked Tony Blair very much.  I don’t any more.

But not because of anything he said in the interview.  Rather, because of how he’s saying it these days.

I have to say that I also felt considerable anger towards Marr himself – with regard, at least, to his own professional behaviours and those of his colleagues in the trade.  Comparing then and now, I mean.

Tonight, he showed a remarkable perspicacity and persistence as he politely but firmly pursued Blair’s honed obfuscation on the subject of Iraq.  Meanwhile, when it mattered, during Blair’s reign itself and alongside his media pals, he took the rather easier route of choosing to faithfully transmit the obfuscations without so much as an “Excuse me Prime Minister but that’s arguably a load of hogwash”.

Interesting subjects were covered too, mind.  The subject of liberal interventionism will never go away since it attempts to address the immorality of oppression in sovereign countries with a dose of what I assume to be relatively good faith.  It does also, however, allow those at the top to substitute carefully engineered but hardly populist long-term policies of economic realignment with short-term policies – often of an enormously florid and vote-gathering nature – which accentuate those tendencies certain politicians always exhibit of abusing the services of our armed services.

But, in the end, as I have already said above, from my remote standpoint as a mere Labour Party member, when I now think of Tony Blair I can only bring to mind lost opportunities.

In a sense, David Cameron’s behaviours in the past few months surely indicate that he must be only too aware of such dangers, dynamics and realities.

Curious, isn’t it?  I sometimes wonder if Tony Blair continues along this path whether he won’t in some bizarre and back-to-front way end up appearing to be Cameron’s heir.

Instead of the other way round.

*

When I started writing this post, I wasn’t intending to talk very much about Tony Blair.  The sadness has overtaken me.

The sense of a lost generation is gathering, I think.

I do not know if that generation will most importantly be Blair’s or more tragically my children’s.  But something, somewhere, for someone or other, will soon break quite awfully because seven years ago, at that crossroads of Iraq, Tony Blair and Andrew Marr and all their media pals – whose sacred job it was to create a conduit of communication of democratic trust in British society – seriously messed up in just about everything they ended up doing.

If that Andrew Marr interview with Tony Blair indicates anything of use to the rest of us mortal souls, it is that during Blair’s time the media was peopled with clever individuals who could have said and done far more on behalf of the truth and ourselves than – in the event – they chose to do.

In fact, when Anthony Painter talks about a collective responsibility in relation to the Blair years, the collective he may really be thinking about could quite easily be our journalists.

Our challenge, now, in the light of all this, is surely to understand why this conduit didn’t operate as it should have done and ensure that, next time round, everyone is more clearly aware of where their true responsibilities ought to lie.

*

So what else did I see this evening?  What else made me ponder?

What about the Labour leadership hustings on Channel 4 from 7.20pm onwards?

Little to report, I’m afraid.

All I can say is that David Miliband’s eloquence worries me, Ed Balls’ confidence bemuses me, Diane Abbott’s purity puzzles me and Ed Miliband’s youth makes me want to ruffle his head of hair as I do my eldest son’s quite frequently.

Meanwhile, Andy Burnham seems kindly enough and makes me feel he’d be pretty good as my local MP.

That, however, is the problem of allowing oneself to see politicians through the eyes of the television camera.  A terrible error of judgement I managed to avoid committing until today.

Fulsome apologies, incidentally, to you all for describing you all in such a superficial way.  Sadly, the format of the debate degenerated all potential for dialogue and conversation into what became a question of policy ping-pong.  Jon Snow didn’t help by providing the candidates with quotes from Tony Blair which were batted dutifully back and forth with the respect generally afforded an oracle of questionable wisdom.

If only a different format had been chosen.  A competency interview, for example.  But I suppose that would be expecting too much – either from even a well-intentioned TV station or, indeed, an eager and I’m sure deserving cohort of leadership hopefuls.

My wife and daughter probably got the best deal this evening.  Nicole Kidman in “The Golden Compass”.

Next time round, I might just consider joining them.

Resisting those glaziers of the mind (or on refusing to square any more Labour leadership circles)

 Labour leadership campaign, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Aug 302010
 

Oh dear.

I’m continuing to deliberately keep myself away from the seductive side of the Labour leadership campaign.  It seems to me, nevertheless, that however distant I maintain myself, the moment is coming for me to see my first few campaign videos.

This is where I will lose all sight of objectivity.  Emotions will flood my being and it will soon be impossible for me to judge the candidates on their intellectual merits.  Marketing men and women will begin to stroke my sad and sorry ego.  Soon I will be putty in their hands – a political Polycell at the mercy of the black arts of these glaziers of the mind.

Soon it will time for me to capitulate.  Even as – in my perfect world – I ask for a leader who best knows how to make him- or herself unnecessary.

And I ask myself: are they really all strong leaders who know their own minds and share the values I cherish?  Can they possibly share such values and at the same time be strong leaders – whatever that might mean?  Do they really know, in their verbal sparring and debating brilliance, how to avoid the errors of the past?

We so love the ability the eloquent have to encapsulate and crystallise a generation.  Wilson did it.  Blair even more so.  But is eloquence something we should eagerly follow or – actually, more readily – suspiciously distrust?

I have often been accused of committing such eloquence myself, and have, in small ways, suffered due to its expression.

The problem is that eloquence can become a tool to justify the completely unreasonable.

Eloquence in itself provides no guarantees.

That is why it is sometimes worrying – sometimes something which should preoccupy us gravely.

So, as I prepare myself to capitulate as I describe above, I must weigh up the dangers of this eloquence I look for in leadership and vote as cleanly and sincerely as I can: for yes, it is true, from Cameron to Mandelson, from Campbell to the leadership candidates and even their followers themselves … everyone, absolutely everyone, is sadly beginning to play mind games with everyone else.

But this time I shall vote in accordance with my beliefs.  This time I shall vote not for the person I think can best square the circles of British politics and return any Labour government but rather for the person I think can best understand and communicate, as well as convince a wider population they are prepared to stand up for, the needs of the greatest proportion of those less materially endowed – those less materially endowed who will always need strong governments to defend their interests where no one else will.

For the Darwinian nature of latterday capitalism, exacerbated by the economic depravity and illiteracy of this Coalition, does not allow for a healthy pity to flower – or, even, I am sorry to say, exhibit itself. 

No.  I am not a practising Christian.

But I am a practising democratic socialist.

So please draw your own conclusions – and then vote for the candidate who most empathises with those who are most in need.  That is what I have finally decided to do.  Because empathise equals an innate inability to forget the needs of the most unfortunate, however distracted one might get.

That is why this is as far as I will go to square any circles this time around.

That far – and absolutely no further.

The Perfect Storm we should be really afraid of (or why I’m looking for a good dentist to lead the Labour Party)

 a con, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, ConDem-millionaire complex, Ed Balls, Labour leadership campaign, perfect storm  No Responses »
Aug 282010
 

This, from Ed Balls’ Bloomberg speech, referring to the Coalition government’s assessment of our current economic predicament:

And today I want to respond to what I believe was a fundamentally flawed speech ten days ago:

- wrong in its analysis of the past;

- reckless in its diagnosis of the current situation; and

- dangerous in its prescription for the future.

You really can’t get any worse than that.

Balls talks about the Perfect Storm the Americans are afraid of:

The prevailing attitude I saw in America was not optimism but fear.

Every newspaper I read highlighted people’s worries about their business, their jobs or their home and the growing concerns of US policymakers and business leaders and financial analysts at the emerging signs of a double-dip recession – and not just any recession.

They fear what Americans – especially on the Eastern seaboard – like to call a ‘Perfect Storm’.

A perfect storm where continued de-leveraging by banks and the private sector meets premature fiscal retrenchment from governments and a drastic tightening of consumer spending… as tax rises, benefit cuts and rising unemployment hit home.

The Perfect Storm we should really be afraid of is, of course, that bone-headed two-dimensional (lack of) perspicacity that will be the Coalition’s future legacy, as it proceeds to line the pockets of its sponsors and concentrate wealth evermore utterly in those who were initially to blame for everything that has gone wrong.

If Labour sometimes gives the impression of still living in the 1950s, it now looks like the long stretch of opposition wilderness the Tories have had to suffer is leading them to care more about re-engineering their future electoral opportunities than saving our nation from the generational despair of economic depression.  From gerrymandering constituencies to rigging confidence motion procedures, from allowing the wolf at the door that is the fear of illness to return to the houses of our peoples to the absolute and total massacre of school improvement plans, a destabilising strand of horror at what the future might bring is being slyly slipped into our living- and meeting-rooms.

And as a paradoxical consequence, we have this 19th century caveman approach to capitalism which – sooner or later – will reduce the income of those at the top just as much as it is hurting those poor souls at the bottom.

Don’t get me wrong.  The rich people in our societies will still have their homes and cars.  I’m not talking about their pecuniary income.  Rather more, I mean something slightly different.  It’s more their egos that will suffer the awful bruising of having to announce ever-decreasing end-of-year financial results to evermore churlish shareholders, as wealth begins to stultify and stagnate its capacity to generate more wealth and circulate wisely.

This Coalition government will go down in history as perhaps the most selfish cabal of individuals there has ever been.

This is what a proper and continued engagement of the opposition throughout the electoral cycle would surely avoid, what an improper and unhappy disengagement leads to: the tribalism of the intellectually challenged, the poverty of spirit of the rejected and absent.

We need consensual government like never before.

What we don’t need is a coalition of those who know the true value of their political sell-by date far better than we ever could.

*

I have deliberately avoided all videos, all TV pronouncements, all multimedia appearances from any of the leaders in the leadership campaign.

I refuse to vote this time round in the terms my national media would prefer the campaign to be cast.

I am looking for a leader who – like any good dentist interested in preventative medicine – is looking to make him- or herself unnecessary.

By virtue of his or her capacity to motivate and structure, my kind of leader will be able to devise an organisational and campaigning set of relationships that will allow a team at the top to enable the grassroots to lead and at the same time prioritise the needs of real voters across the country.

That is to say, a political party where voters equal activists and activists equal voters.

That is my hope and dream.

Whilst I live in a real world, I will still hold dear to this hope and dream.  And then, where necessary, vote for my least disappointing candidate.

On JC, DM, FREC and AS (or why it should’ve been a Labour leadership team election)

 Labour leadership campaign, unclassifiable  3 Responses »
Aug 252010
 

Social media, Twitter especially, is a curiously compressed way of communicating stuff.  Thus it is, if you are a tweeter of habit, or if you’ve been tweeting at the very least today, you should recognise the above abbreviations.

For those of you who haven’t, or for those who haven’t been tweeting in my small part of the world, JC is Jon Cruddas, DM is David Miliband, FREC is Florence Rose Endellion Cameron and AS is – of course (perhaps quite appositely) – Arthur Scargill, a gentleman from a different century even when the century was his for the taking.  For different and varied reasons, they are all in the social media news this evening.  In this particular post, I will limit myself to discussing the first two only.

I’ve found it until now very difficult to say anything constructive about the Labour leadership campaign which wasn’t a question of whining on a little petulantly about how pyramids are not the best way of organising society.  But Jon Cruddas’s hot-off-the-press declaration in favour of David Miliband has allowed me to put my finger on what’s been wrong with process all along:

“I’m endorsing David,” Cruddas says now, “because of a couple of contributions he has made — one was the column on Englishness he wrote in your magazine [in our 5 July issue]. Another was his Keir Hardie Memorial Lecture [on 9 July]. What was interesting to me about this was when he started talking about belonging and neighbourliness and community, more communitarian politics, which is where I think Labour has to go.

“He’s the only one [of the leadership contenders] that has got into some of that. He’s tackling some of more profound questions that need to be addressed head-on. What is the nature of the reckoning? We should not just be running from the record but having a nuanced approach to some of the things that went wrong, as well as defending the things that went right.”

Let me just underline before I continue that what’s wrong with the process is common to other political groupings in the UK: this is not just a problem of Labour, even though – at the very same time – it is Labour’s problem.

So why, where and on what do I put my finger?  A certain degree of confusion and discombobulation has been engendered around Cruddas’s sudden conversion to the candidate who – at least superficially – seems most to encapsulate the qualities that characterised Tony Blair before him.  Sunny Hundal’s immediate response was, for example, as follows:

Ahhh shit. This is going to open up a serious rupture on the left.

More recently, another retweet gave further evidence, if evidence was needed, of the fact that process is stretched where not broken – and certainly not as conducive to a constructive resolution of the circumstances to hand as it should be.  We need a leader, yes, of course; this is true.  Yet, more than that, far more than that, we need a team of people at the top who can work effectively together on behalf of the voters of the country at the same time as they accurately represent all the major strands of thought that make up the Party itself.

And voting for one man or woman without knowing how they will create alliances, or – more importantly – what alliances they will prefer to create post-election process, is like spitting in the wind: you really don’t know where your political DNA is going to end up – or, even, to what purpose.

We should’ve had a leadership team election rather than a simple leadership election.  Too late now, of course.  Golden opportunity lost.

Perhaps for next time, then.

Maybe we’ll get it right one of these blessed days.

What say you?

Andy Burnham’s pitch (and my surprised reaction)

 Andy Burnham, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Labour leadership campaign, on a high  2 Responses »
Jun 122010
 

Here’s Andy Burnham’s pitch to Labour Party members, which – to my surprise, of the three I think I’ve received to date – is the one I find most chimes with my current mood.  Comments inline.

Dear Miljenko,

I will always be proud of what our Labour Government achieved. But, now, Labour needs to rebuild. Too many people have lost sight of who we are and what we stand for.

To come back stronger, we need an honest debate about the last 16 years. We must bring the wider Labour family back together. Then, we will be ready to set out for this century an inspiring Labour mission that is both true to our roots and speaks directly to the voters that we need to win back.

This idea of an honest debate about the last sixteen years is absolutely spot on.  Paul at Never Trust a Hippy is coming to similar conclusions in a slightly more focussed context here.

This is what I mean by Reconnecting Labour. I have a strong sense of what we need to do and I believe I can give Labour what it needs:

* a Leader that people everywhere can identify with
* a Leader who can put the heart and passion back into our Party
* a Leader who offers a real contrast to the Cabinet of millionaires that now run our country

This last point may be populist – but Burnham is no demagogue.  The country is now being run by a cabinet of millionaires.

I come from an ordinary family and am proud to represent my home area in Parliament. My feet are firmly on the ground and I’ve never forgotten where I come from. This is why I can give a real voice to the millions of families who fear a Tory Government cutting without compassion, leaving them with no breadwinner or taking away hope from their children.

This goes to the heart of the issue to hand.  Cutting without compassion is what we will get if we allow a government run by high-level decision-makers used to understanding the world through executive summaries to control our futures.

We may not have much choice, of course.  This government may be locked into power for the next five years.  But at least let us ensure the reasons behind our suffering remain clear and visible for all to see and understand.

But I’ve also got the right experience to lead, having done some of the hardest jobs in government, including Chief Secretary to the Treasury. It was a huge privilege to serve as Labour’s Health Secretary and my proudest moment in politics was to bring forward the NHS Constitution which secures our Party’s finest achievement for this century.

But there is much more I want to do. My own life experience has shown me that we still live in a very uneven country, where children without connections find it hard to get on and where life chances are determined by the postcode of the bed you are born in. We still live in a country where families on low to middle incomes often find the odds stacked against them. And we still live in a country where older people live in fear of the costs of care.

The second paragraph again describes realities as seen by foot soldiers.  Yet it is coupled with the first which indicates Burnham would be no procedural pushover; that is to say, he would not be lost at sea when dealing with the buffeting storms, the inertias, of civil service machinations and mandarins.

Labour will reconnect with people by bringing forward inspiring ideas to meet the challenges of a new century that are in the best traditions of our Party. That is why I will continue to argue for a National Care Service – free at the point of use – to give older people peace of mind.

My mission is always to break down elites wherever they exist – and that means looking at how we run our own Party too. For too long, we’ve taken members for granted. We need to listen more. Under my leadership the party, you the members – our MPs, MEPs, MSPs, AMs and councillors – together with the trade unions and affiliates will all play as one team. No more squabbling and turf wars. At times of crisis in the last Parliament, I always put loyalty to our Party first.

This statement is weaker – elites grow up partly, but quite often, because too many people put loyalty to the organisation they belong to before they do to the logic, rationales and realities of a situation.  Burnham had me in his pocket up to this point – but then sort of lost me in a sudden New Labour flurry of command and control-ism.

It is because I have never had any time for factional politics that I can unify our movement.

Yes.  Quite.  We can all agree on that.  But – in reality – how can this be achieved?  Unification around the lowest common denominator or a healthy level of dissonance which leads to true renewal?

And it is by pulling together that we will expose this Government and present the British people with a credible, principled, and more visionary alternative – a unifying force for all those people who want to live in a country with a fairer spread of health, wealth and life chances.

I do not stand for the leadership lightly. I have never had anything handed to me on a plate and have worked my way up from my local branch to the Cabinet table. I now stand to lead the Party I love and have served at every level for 25 years because Reconnecting Labour is my life’s passion not a slogan.

Yours,

Andy

Anyhow, and even despite my reservations expressed above, this gently flawed pitch from Andy Burnham has allowed him to leap up my list – and quite curiously sort of made me wonder if we really do need the telegenic Milibands to rule the absolute heights of the political roost after all.

Why should I get involved?

 broken politics, crowdsourcing, in a hole, Labour leadership campaign  No Responses »
Jun 082010
 

It’s probably not the best time to try and answer a question like this.  A general election has been lost.  A Labour leadership election has yet to catch the imagination of the wider voting public.  Arguably, it has yet to catch the imagination of those Labour Party members who have the right to vote.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has the surreal idea of crowdsourcing the deficit cuts.  An idea so surreal I’m inclined to believe I should get involved.

Meanwhile, I wonder what good – in reality – I can do.

Don’t you ever ask yourself this question? 

Being on the losing side of politics or business reminds one of how Darwinian real life can really be.  No excuses.  No pardon.

I suppose that’s why, of late, I can’t help going back to the thought that tools such as tax credits were a mighty distraction.  Instead of effecting a redistributive policy which would engender an organic change in the way we do things here in Britain, they encouraged a society to live with a situation poorly ameliorated and – in the event – just a tad psychologically unhappy.

Out of a desire to speedily remedy rank injustice, New Labour used sticking-plaster economic policy.  A sticking-plaster economic policy which – with a change of government – could just as easily become unstuck.

So I come back to my original question: why should I get involved?

I’m on the losing side, in both politics and business. 

It’s not my turn.

It’s not my time.

An error of concept and a lack of ambition

 a con, Facebook, Labour leadership campaign, lack of ambition, NC/DC  No Responses »
May 232010
 

It makes a change.  Ars Technica (via Paul Baldovin) reports – in an article well worth reading in full – that the latest privacy issues for Facebook are unintentional.  Their conclusion as follows:

Given the amount of data Facebook and other social networking sites contain about us, this kind of reckless behavior is distressing, and will no doubt fuel the small—but growing—trend of deleting your profile to put an end to privacy concerns. Privacy is about more than having a bunch of checkboxes you can tick: it needs to be considered for every piece of development, or else these accidental problems will continue to arise.

More and more I’m getting the impression that in its overwhelming desire to drive profit, Facebook is creating an alternative Internet which shows us just how unhappy the real Internet could’ve become if those who devised it hadn’t been wiser.

This morning also brings to me the following thought: the Labour Party’s leadership campaign is an example more of this unhappy Facebook than the purest and most robust structures that make up the wider virtual world.  For all its faults, there are certain tendencies amongst the largest supply corporations that have contributed to the making of a cheaper and more connected world.  The Labour Party is simply not tapping in to this world, is not taking full advantage of the technologies available to it – nor the concepts that are generated on the back of such technologies.

It’s tending to place boundaries around its precious intellectual content rather than sharing it with everyone.  It’s looking to develop political intranets of protected belief rather than entirely opening itself up to the whole nation.

It’s firmly anchored in the past as a traditional copyright party rather than striving to become a Creative Commons sort of space.

I mean in the way it’s conducting this leadership election campaign – not in its overall online presence.  The latter would be a subject for a quite separate post.

In the meantime, NC/DC continue with their plans to resize MPs’ constituency boundaries under the guise of fairness – and by-the-by lock out Labour’s potentially progressive renewal for perhaps a handful of generations.  (I’m not saying that this concept of resizing constituencies isn’t fair and all in itself: I’m just saying that the timing is suspicious.)

So – in the light of all the above – doesn’t Nero, Rome, burning and fiddling come to mind?

It’s the damn lack of ambition of those who run the Labour Party that makes me wonder where I’ll be in a year’s time.

My frustration operating here – not any desire, on my part, to be impatiently proactive or, indeed, force anyone’s hand.

La contaminación lingüística (or this awkwardly vacuous Band-Aid of a leadership campaign)

 Labour leadership campaign, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 222010
 

I couldn’t have said it better myself – so I decided to say it in Spanish instead.  John Naughton is absolutely on the ball today as he points out exactly how much courage – and what sort – is required to make other people hurt:

One of the (many) things that infuriated me during the election campaign was all the cant about politicians needing to have the “courage” to make “tough” choices and “painful” decisions. Er, excuse me, but who’s going to feel this much-heralded “pain”? Isn’t it the people who jobs will be terminated, students whose life-chances will be diminished, workers who will have to make do on lower pensions, teachers who will have to handle bigger classes, patients who will have to wait longer for operations, soldiers who will have to do without wearable body-armour? And besides, since when did it require courage to inflict pain on others?

The original source can be found here.

Meanwhile, the lack of ideas in the Labour leadership campaign is patently obvious.  We need only look at how everyone is declaring positions in a mad scramble to curry ludicrous personal favours:

Glad to see so many MPs, having argued for a longer debate, declaring their leadership vote before nominations have even opened.

Where is that sense of duty and obligation to the labour movement as a whole?  Where is that understanding of the 21st century connectedness of the masses?  Where is that honest perception of what should be the utterly new – in this post-New Labour environment? 

Why has the word-of-mouth election suddenly become the election of many words and few ideas?

If it was so important to debate policy during the general election, why must we do little more than run around in silly and intellectually ever-decreasing circles – chattering, generally inanely, about little else but the televisual nature of the leadership candidates?

Whither now our shared Labour future? 

Are we truly condemned to occupying the ground of rank populism?  Are we destined to slide into that BNP lite that Martin Bright suggests?

Surely what should really differentiate us from the rest of the political parties is our openness to society and all the individuals who form it.  And this we can only prove by being as democratic, intelligent, forward-looking and community-based as we would also like to be that wider society.

If we run our party as a reflection of “Britain’s Got Talent”, then we will mine that taste for a discriminatory politics but we will not be able to aspire to a greater moral high ground.  If, on the other hand, we run our party as a reflection of all the good practice that takes place in schools, hospitals, police authorities and private and public industries and organisations – if we can release and free up that good practice, if we can show people we trust them to do their best, if we can demonstrate that in trusting others we ourselves are proven to be trustworthy – then we can create a living and organic political party which feeds off the best rather than encourages the worst.

We can create a political party which ultimately believes, and persistently demonstrates through its policy-making and structures, that the people who populate this world are generally good – and, essentially, deserve a far better deal than they currently get.  Or we can create a political party which places a latterday icon of empty-headed leadership at the top of a pyramid of command – and, through an infamous lack of ambition, thus end up showing the voting public we care only to reproduce and sustain those power structures that already unfairly inflict themselves on us.

Our choice?  Not if no one offers us an alternative. 

Remember: just as form may occasionally – and happily – follow function, so function may – unhappily – be obliged to follow form. 

And, sadly, I suspect the latter will be our lot in this hurried, slapdash and awkwardly vacuous Band-Aid of a leadership campaign.

Leadership, salespeople, that hierarchical pyramid and inventing the future on the back of spiel

 Labour, Labour leadership campaign, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 192010
 

An unseemly haste, is this.  We seem condemned to repeat the patterns of the past.  Whether these were mistaken patterns or not will depend entirely on your point of view.

My point of view is as follows: salespeople are important but need to know their place.  Or, rather, the rest of us need to know where that place is – and then we need to insist that they keep to such a place.

Gordon Brown’s great virtue was precisely that he wasn’t a salesperson.  And so many people held that against him.  He did all the work that was expected of him – and more – but wasn’t able to sell it to a wider public.  But I don’t want that in a man or woman I want to lead me.  I don’t want to have to feel that I must take everything my politicians say to me with a massive pinch of salt – simply because the environment they inhabit expects them to sell me something all the time.

I remember two highly successful politicians who were also effective salespeople: Britain’s Tony Blair and Spain’s Felipe González.  The impression both gave me was similar: you loved to hear them speak but afterwards, often, you couldn’t remember exactly what they’d said.  Their discourse was frequently a victory of form over content.  The salesperson’s way, in fact.

Now, it seems, the Labour Party must – with that unseemly haste I mentioned at the beginning – coalesce around an individual to move forwards.  After all that the Internet has shown us of late, after a decade of open source crowdsourcing, after the virtual connections that latterday communications have thrust upon a society of the willing, how can we possibly continue to believe that the way forward in politics is a hierarchical pyramid?  And, what’s more, with yet another salesperson at the very top?

Surely we’re not going to build the entire renewal of a movement of the workers on the sense, sensibility and persona of one individual. 

Whether that person be ex-New Labour or from the unsullied left of the Party.

Surely there must be a better and more efficient way than this.

After all, the recent banking crisis almost destroyed the Western World as we know it because bankers thought the way forward was to invent the future on the back of spiel.  And we really don’t want any more of that sort of thing.  Not for a while, anyhow.

The diamond that could be the grassroots with a leader in their midst

 Gordon Brown, Labour, Labour leadership campaign, on a high  No Responses »
May 192010
 

My estimation of Brown continues to rise.  Sad how politics and such good men do not go together. 

I wish he were my MP, I can tell you. Read this article and see if you don’t agree with me.  It does, incidentally, also show how far behind the game Ed Balls, Peter Mandelson and Douglas Alexander were.

Whilst Gordon Brown most certainly was not.

In the meantime, the Labour leadership campaign threatens to become a succession, as an article by Jason McCrossan on Labour List points out:

As it stands, I fear another succession. I fear that the party – the grassroots – will be left excluded once more from shaping and forming our direction. We are in danger of spending the next five years with a sparkly new car – but one which is running on empty. We’re in danger of producing a polished lump of coal – but we have the ability to produce a diamond.

And that diamond should, precisely, be the grassroots with a leader in their midst – not a hero looking down from on high who knows how best to control the inner workings of the Party to his or her benefit.

If anything should most firmly demonstrate to the British public that Labour knows about democracy, this should be in how the internal workings of the Party are conducted.

And whilst political parties are still private spaces of public use, we will continue to suffer the consequences.

Let us not suffer them any more. 

Why private spaces of public use in the real and virtual worlds have more in common than you might think

 Facebook, in a hole, Labour, Labour leadership campaign, Liverpool One, open source, Open Spaces Society  No Responses »
May 182010
 

This is a description of Liverpool One, a massive private space of public use.  The description can currently be found on Wikipedia:

Liverpool ONE is a shopping, residential and leisure centre in Liverpool, UK.

The project, previously known as The Paradise Project, involves the redevelopment of 42 acres (170,000 m²) of underutilised land in Liverpool city centre. It is a retail led project, anchored by department stores John Lewis (moving from a smaller site in Liverpool city centre) and Debenhams, with additional elements including leisure (anchored by a 14-screen Odeon cinema), residential, offices, public open space and transport improvements. The project is intended to give Liverpool a dramatic lift in its ranking among British retail destinations and to boost the local economy.

The majority of the development was opened in phases on 29 May 2008 and 1 October 2008, during Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture, whilst the final residential units will open in early 2009. The cost of construction associated with the project was £500 million, with a total investment value of £920 million.

Here is a criticism of Liverpool One you can also currently find on Wikipedia:

The Open Spaces Society has criticised the removal of public rights of way in the development area and fears that universal access to Liverpool’s central streets may be denied to citizens in future.

More on the Open Spaces Society here and here.

Meanwhile, from 2008, here’s an interesting story on the instinct to privatise security arrangements that such private spaces of public use tend to generate:

BUSINESS leaders in Liverpool last night called for the introduction of a “Zero Tolerance” private security force across the city centre.

Lobby group Downtown Liverpool in Business believes a privately-funded security outfit is needed to match the security presence in Grosvenor’s Liverpool One development, which opens at the end of next month.

Now we come to a description and criticism of another private space of public use, with apparently similar characteristics:

Twenty-three million Britons have Facebook accounts, and the site’s organisation of personal profiles and public pages allows citizens, activists, politicians and media pundits to network and share ideas with a semblance of immediate humanity that paper petitions and dry email lists will never capture.

But alongside the obligation to sign over personal data to unknown third parties, campaigns on Facebook are circumscribed by private control of the terms and scope of public debate. [...]

And there’s more from the same article:

[...] Beneath Facebook’s placid navy-blue surface of thrown sheep and targeted advertising widgets are intricate strata of digital control, overseen by a private company that has no official responsibility to provide users with an objective place to organise.

“Facebook seems like a giant blackboard where people can write whatever they want, but actually it’s privately owned. Nobody has an automatic right to express themselves, and the company is entitled to rub out anything it wants to rub out,” explains Kate, an IT systems administrator.

The full story here.

Now what else does all this remind you of?  What about our political parties for example?

Don’t they circumscribe what you can and can’t do?  Aren’t there whole rule books full of arcane legislation which allow those in the know to impose their will on those who stuff envelopes?

And so it is that I ask myself this question: why do the institutions which our politicians operate under have to be run like private gentlemen’s clubs?  Why can only members vote for leaders or make policy?  Wouldn’t we obtain far better the leaders the country wanted if we allowed anyone and everyone – whether member or not – to participate in our politicking?

What, in fact, are we afraid of?

If we find Facebook more and more disagreeable and Liverpool One an uncomfortably unmunicipal step in the wrong direction, then surely a politics run by what are effectively closed shops should also be something we should contemplate discarding.  As Claire Solomon, the activist who recently had her page closed down by Facebook, observes:

“Having my account disabled brought home the fact that Facebook is a service run for profit and controlled by those who own it.” said Solomon. “We contribute content, and then the company makes money by using our free labour to boost advertising rates.

“I’m planning to transfer myself and my friends over to an open-source software model, where we will have more control.”

Time to open up politics.  Oh yes, it’s great that Labour Party supporters have until 8th September to join the Party – and as long as they do so by this date, they will be able to vote for the leader. But it would be a huge step in a 21st century direction if we managed to engineer into our politics the virtues of open source software.

Perhaps, in fact, we need an Open Spaces Society for politics.

What do you all think?

(Not) The Triangulator

 Labour, Labour leadership campaign, on a high  No Responses »
May 142010
 

I’m sorry but I’m not going to do this the way I should.  Yes.  I know that politics these days is structured around voting for a charismatic party leader who can attract all sorts of contradictory folk into the curiously asexual embrace of unthinking emotional attachments that are the branding strategies of modern political parties.  But I’m not going to make that mistake again. 

On the subject of what is now a long-distant deputy-leadership campaign, I remember writing what I think was a useful piece in a previous existence on Members Net, the Labour Party’s intranet for members.  The excerpt I have been able to dig up went as follows:

I shan’t even be voting for the candidate who most closely addresses the issues I am worried out – in particular, civil liberties, terrorism and climate change: that is to say, I shan’t be voting for the person who has suddenly and – for me, quite surprisingly – almost become my political soul mate.

No. In a world where truth has been magically bent by wordsmiths as artful as any Beckham, I shall simply be voting for the candidate I think can make the Labour Party work as a campaigning machine again.

For if we get that right, everything else will fall into place.

Not through the big bucks or the dirty donations of recent times, but through the volunteering activities of good men and woman.

So whoever you think can do that – vote for them!

Unfortunately, I didn’t follow my own advice.  But I am determined to do so this time round.

A campaigning machine?  Surely not, you say.  Well.  Campaigning and evangelism are not altogether unhappy bedmates.  And I truly believe that the recent election campaign has shown that where Labour was able to get its soul across to the voting public, it was not only able to stem the blue and yellow tides but also increase its share of the vote.

“Education!  Education!  Education!” was the famous battle-cry of yore.  In a world thirsty for sincere explanations of how complex financial services could so easily and broadly be allowed to destroy so comprehensively real economies, their workforces and a shared belief in what used to be a common future, there is surely now space for a political party which believes it has a right to educate its members and supporters in the ways of the planet and its power bases.

I can tell you who I shan’t vote for, though.  Anyone who believes that I shall inevitably approve of further triangulating tendencies that aim to replicate the obfuscation of the past decade can absolutely (pardon the expression) bugger off.  The future is not to be found in blindfolding a wider populace or pulling any more fancy wool over its eyes – but, rather, in releasing its inner power and potential to assess, think, put into action and progress.

The new politics we really need is an enabling force.

We need a Labour Party with a leader who knows how to release.

We need a Labour leader who knows how to free up a people in a consistent and self-perpetuating series of acts of constructive and dynamic dissonance.

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