Why the fruitcake party makes mincemeat of our body politic

 in a hole, Labour, Lib Dems, LibDems, Tories, UKIP  No Responses »
May 032013
 

According to the Guardian this morning, on the subject of UKIP’s gains in local elections yesterday, Labour’s Hilary Benn tells the BBC that:

Hilary Benn, the shadow communities secretary, played down the Ukip threat. He told the BBC: “It is a protest party and not a party of government. Its economic policy does not add up.”

Meanwhile, the same paper reports:

Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University said Ukip had achieved a “remarkable performance”. In a briefing paper for the Political Studies Association on the local elections, he said Ukip presents the most serious threat by a fourth political force in England since the second world war.

Now it might, as the Tories suggested recently, be that fruitcake party everyone fears.  Certainly, its selection procedures seem to have been found rather wanting (more here), leading many of us to feel that “fruitcake” is exactly the right metaphor for a grouping whose ingredients are so very mixed.

But I think when Hilary Benn says what he says, and especially when he argues its economic policy does not add up, he is being about as lackadaisical as he could be on the threat that UKIP poses to the allegedly “non-fruitcake” parties.

Let’s just summarise what’s happened under the reign of these non-fruitcakes: we discover that bankers, MPs, police officers, journalists, celebrity sex-abusers and a whole host of other citizens have been allowed to continue for decades doing their stuff, in what most of us consider entirely unfair and even immoral ways.

These non-fruitcake regimes have allowed such things to continue happening unchecked: most stones appear to have been left unturned from Thatcher’s days onwards.  What’s more, in a complex society where technocratic experts hold the reins, they have failed the needs of ordinary people mightily.  Billions of pounds-worth of dosh has been transferred from civil society to bankers, from taxpayers to MPs, from people who struggle to get to the end of the month to people who take bribes, and from licence-payers to famous people who sexually assault under-age boys and girls during decades.

And now it would seem that any present or future governments of the non-fruitcakes will continue to force ordinary people to pay for the awful consequences of the acts of the inefficient powerful.  Is it hardly surprising, then, that voters should want to protest?

So maybe Benn is right when he says UKIP is a protest party.  But if he considers this to be “merely a protest party” sort of message, then he and his fellow MPs have got it really wrong.  To date, we’ve seen little organised protest on the streets of England, or the UK more widely.  We’re not like the Spanish or Greeks – we’re not, yet, at the edge of the abyss.  But when Little Englanders change their voting patterns so consistently and so radically, surely professional “non-fruitcake” politicians should be sitting up and paying attention, rather than casually comforting themselves with the idea that UKIP’s idea of an economic environment doesn’t currently add up.

The real issue being, of course: whose does?

UKIP will continue to make mincemeat of our body politic, if politicians of the calibre of Benn continue to choose to defend themselves via a naked appeal to technocracy.  Technocracy has failed us disgracefully: it’s bloody time to protest about the implications!  And if the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems cannot see this for what it actually is, then UKIP will not only make mincemeat of the body politic, it will be able to do so without having to convincingly add up the economic numbers beforehand.

Not that this would make them necessarily ineligible to govern in Westminster.  Right, my non-fruitcake friends?

____________________

Update to this post: final results for yesterday’s elections have come my way concisely via Twitter just now.  As follows:

RT @Tom_Waterhouse Final seat tally: Con 1,116 (-335), Lab 538 (+291), Lib 353 (-123), UKIP 147 (+139), others 208 (+28) #vote2013

“A plumber, a fireman, a bricklayer … someone able to brace the ruins”

 Catholic Church, Catholicism, ConDem-millionaire complex, Google, Google Reader, in a hole, Lib Dems, Lib-Con pact, LibDems  No Responses »
Mar 142013
 

The quote comes at the end of this El País article last night (original in Spanish, robot English here) on the election of Pope Francis.  I have seen both hopeful and unhappy things written about this election.  Even though I am a lapsed Catholic, I wish the new pope well.  He certainly will have a helluva job to brace the ruins I perceive.

Meanwhile, practically the first thing I see this morning is this cold announcement on Google Reader.

Google Reader - July 2013

Not much more to say on this one, except that Google would appear to be reinforcing its rolling process of centralising all online debate around Google+.  It would seem that long-term the idea of us blogging at our own places and coming together through such aggregating tools is really not where Google is going to.  A Communist Google, in fact, as the model being followed seems far more USSR than USA.  I’ve already complained about other changes made a while ago to their unattended tool – and even suggested that we work out some way of buying up the whole Google Reader tinglado, lock, stock and barrel.

It won’t happen, though.  Voluntary adhesion to common goals was never the corporate way.

So whilst the Church wants to brace the ruins, Google aims to detonate them.  There’s a poetry of sorts contained in the synchronicity of the two events.

*

Two more thoughts to finish.  The next story shows us just how poor latterday journalistic standards – where not prejudices – have become.  An “exodus” of “overtaxed” French bankers becomes around one:

And that’s the sum total of the FT’s evidence of the “exodus,” at least in this article. In a population of 65 million we have one confirmed departure, one effort to leave, and an unspecified number of anonymous departees. (Who, we might ask, are they? Will they confirm that they left for tax reasons?)

Meanwhile, on a piece I posted over at the Speaker’s Chair blogging hub, we get an interesting discussion on Liberal Democrat election chances.  My response to a comment at the foot of the piece runs as follows:

I’m not absolutely sure the LibDems will lose as badly as people think. Yes, for many, they’ve enabled the Coalition – but I bet a huge number of that many would not have voted LibDem anyway. The little experience I have of grassroots LibDem members leads me to believe there is plenty of ideology which would not fit in either Labour or the Tories, and which serves to keep that flock together. I *can* agree with your latter half of your last sentence, mind. The only caveat being that I’m not sure Ed will have too much room for manoeuvre to do very much differently at all. But then tone and discourse are also important – and his would I’m sure be far more kindly and supportive to the most frightened in our society than IDS & Co will ever manage. In fact, a politician who can enthuse through manifest decency and infuse confidence through honesty may just be what our democracy needs right now.

Interesting cases today – in a way all connected.  Whilst the Church and the Lib Dems look to recover from awful moments during which their hierarchies have unfairly damaged their own sense and perception of what they should really stand for, my judgement in both cases is that these “flocks” (flocks of birds more than sheep) will not easily break away from their core beliefs.  Was the last pope, then, the Catholic equivalent of the current leader of the Lib Dems?  Pope Benedict XVI, the prayerful inactivist versus Nick Clegg, the pious teller of half-truths?

Maybe so.

The only certainty I do appreciate this morning is that corporate Google continues to head off in the opposite direction to history.

The Facebook model of walled gardens and ad-infested centralisation is not the way forward, nor was ever going to be.

Google is lost, much as the Lib Dems and the Roman Catholics have recently been feeling.

And, perhaps, in the end, for similar reasons.

What the horsemeat scandal – and Eastleigh too – say about voter motivation

 horses, Lib Dems, LibDems, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Mar 012013
 

At Eastleigh, we discover that in a by-election of such characteristics, local behaviours can out-gun what we might perceive as more significant national issues.  Sex scandals notwithstanding, it would seem the Liberal Democrats had a good and effective infrastructure of ward councillors.  Sometimes, grassroots politics does move mountains.

Meanwhile, as the unpleasant leader of UKIP incoherently proclaims:

UKIP’s Nigel Farage said the surge in support for his party was not a “freak result”, telling the BBC: “If the Conservatives hadn’t split our vote we would have won.”

“Something is changing. People are sick and tired of having three social democrat parties that are frankly indistinguishable from each other,” he added.

But then incoherence never stopped too many politicians out there.  It could seem, to an unpractised eye, that UKIP were about to follow in a long and hallowed tradition of English politics: wrap yourself up in the Union Flag; declaim your dominion over the peoples and nations of these islands; and, ultimately, concentrate all wealth and effort down London-way, as power and the various world stages beckon.

The incoherence I mention?  Either the Tories split the UKIP vote because they (ie the Tories) are not indistinguishable social democrats – or they are indistinguishable social democrats, in which case the vast majority of the nation continues to vote in favour of a much criticised – yet still valued – tradition.

You can’t have it both ways, Mr Farage.

*

A couple of tweets I posted yesterday, and which sort of indicate where – at least politically – I currently find myself.  The first, on the subject of politicians and their relationship with the truth, as follows:

@ChrisClose50 We live in a world where spin no longer describes what is happening. This is a kind of politico-psychosis.

And the second, thus:

@ChrisClose50 If s’one with no parliamentary privilege was caught saying things that those who do have it say, they’d surely be put away.

It’s true.  Whilst teachers, doctors, lawyers and other professionals have professional codes of conduct they must abide by, politicians are loose cannons able to get away with almost everything in the blessed and casual name of freedom of speech.  You describe a disabled child as a burden on your council, fit only to be put down?  A couple of days later, maybe a resignation statement of sorts.  But you find yourself struck off no register of practising professionals – and, maybe, even continue to justify in private your words as those of a silent majority.

One example amongst many out there, in our indistinguishably social democratic landscape.

Which brings me to my final point.  One aspect of the recent horsemeat scandal has been weighing upon my mind: the issue has been couched and understood, by both politicians and consumers, as mainly one of mislabelling.  At no time has anyone seemed to care that contaminated factories which have lost their contracts with major supermarkets mean employees out of pocket – and even out of work.  Certain individuals out there – managers, buyers, negotiators, workers – knew what was going on; were even a part of what was going on.  Did they benefit?  I wonder.  I’m pretty sure they weren’t out of pocket whilst the contamination continued on its merry way for so many years.

And in a way, our politics is now the same.  Our expectations of probity are now so very low, any scandal fails to cause the corresponding reaction which in other times we might have expected.  Sex scandals?  Abuse of power?  Contamination of public discourse through a psychotic relationship with reality?

Who cares?

In the end, we voters become forgiving souls – we become about as Christian as any soul could ever be.

Even as secularism invades more widely our society.

We turn the other cheek to our politicians; we allow them to beat us and smack us to the ground.  And yet we get up and smile encouragingly – and continue to argue in favour of a better way.

In truth, what the horsemeat scandal – and now, it would seem, Eastleigh too – tell us about voter motivation is that in times of fractious societal distress, emotional triggers and appeals to the visceral sides of the voting public are as effective and manifest as they ever were in supposedly less civilised times.

We haven’t changed so very much since those times of fascist imposition.

We don’t really care so very much about the abuse of power.

We just want to ensure, when push comes to shove, that we find ourselves on the right side of such abuse.

A brand new electoral system fit for a coalition age

 ConDem-millionaire complex, election manifestos, elections, electoral reform, Labour, Lib Dems, Lib-Con pact, LibDems, political innovation, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, sorted, Tories  3 Responses »
Dec 012012
 

Here’s an idea – an idea for a completely new electoral system.  Let me explain the background first.

I have to say that before this Coalition government emerged, I thought the idea of a coalition between a couple of left-leaning parties was just what the British body politic was crying out for.  It didn’t happen that way, of course.  New Labour finally blew it under the weight of its evermore creaking contradictions – and the Lib Dems rather more rancid right-wing tendencies came out on top as national government and power beckoned.

But I do now begin to wonder if the problem is really Cameron & Co – or something else.  They are, after all, simply quite old-school first-past-the-post politicians – politicians who find themselves biding their time for a future they expect will bring them ultimate victory.  They may, of course, also be conscious that they’ll get soundly kicked out at the next general election – but by then, through awful self-inflicted economic crisis, they’ll have stamped their positions and policies on anyone who dares to follow on.

Whether this anyone be a different party or – simply – different leaders within the same unhappy grouping.

It does, however, seem that a certain trend and tendency is being established.  Two fairly impervious postures with an osmotic membrane of a kind sidling between.  That the Lib Dems are running the risk of extinction at the moment, precisely because they have allowed the aforementioned process of osmosis to poison the public’s perception of their politics, and that their prior chameleon-like ability to pick and mix has metamorphosed into the uncertainty of violently flip-flopping behaviours, doesn’t mean that the functionality they could provide isn’t going to be needed in the future.

Which is where we come to my idea for a new electoral system: an electoral system designed to enable coalition government by facilitating its transparent formation.  Let’s say, some way down the line, the United Kingdom (or whatever it is by then) decides to adopt electronic systems of voting.  Let’s even suggest, once adopted in that typically British toe-in-the-water way, we decide to embrace further advantages such systems could bring.  One of these advantages could run as follows: for many years, and throughout the first-past-the-post era, people have complained that voting for one party or another inevitably means compromising on certain issues.  Yes.  Labour might be OK for one voter on welfare but not hit the mark quite on Trident.  Or the Tories might convince someone on the economy (well, this is a thought experiment and we are supposed to use our imagination) but not on privacy rights.  Or the Lib Dems might get it right on grass-cutting and dog-control policy but be totally all over the place as far as drugs is concerned.  How about, then, we use an electoral system which allows us to vote for a different party in a discrete number of specially selected policy areas?  Yes!  Once the votes were all counted up across the national landscape, each party would have direct responsibility for those areas the public had judged they should be in charge of.  And a representative from the relevant party with expertise in the corresponding area would then be assigned by the party to hold the ministerial portfolio in question.

The figures of Prime Minister, Speaker and so forth could all still exist.  The PM could, even, continue to have responsibility for reshuffles and changes of government.  But in each case, he or she would have to choose from members of the parties which the people had voted for in each policy area.

This would clearly be a brand new electoral system – a system which depended heavily for its functionality on virtual-community technologies and multifarious software tools.  But it would also be a brand new electoral system entirely fit for a consensual and collaborative – that is to say, a coalition – age.  No longer would politicians have to triangulate their positions.  No longer would the electorate have to compromise when they voted.  In everything we began to do in such a body politic, honesty, sincerity and directness would become the definers of a completely new era in representative democracy.

What say you?

What upsides and downsides do you anticipate?

And how on earth, once accepted the principle by a sufficiently large constituency of citizens, could we convince enough of our first-past-the-post, anti-collaborative and anti-consensual politicians to finally and utterly let go of their carefully-tended turfs?

Were the “Fib Dems” right all along?

 Big Society, FibDems, Lib Dems, Lib-Con pact, LibDems, localism, nationalism, participative democracy, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Nov 012012
 

If localism, as defined by this Coalition government, will end up being little more than a sop to Big Society obsessives – people who have the inclination and wherewithal to use their leisure time for local works which aim to exclude the weary strivers in society from their rightful role in participatory democracy – I do wonder if, knowing this government as we do, whether the plan isn’t to do it on the awful cheap.

And ever was it so, from the very beginning.

I’ve even begun to wonder if we couldn’t usefully redefine the concept of nationalism as localism with a budget.  Nationalism as a properly funded tool to keep transnational business forces at bay.

But that, perhaps, needs to be an idea we expand on in some other future post.

Today, however, I’d like to discuss whether the more recent behaviours at local level of the Lib Dems – or, as members of my political party often like to call them, the “Fib Dems” – have been a logical reaction to, consequence of and creation resulting from a very particular set of very real political needs.

Rodney over at his Team UK blog has just put up a new conceptualisation of what the United Kingdom now needs.  A couple of quotes below.  First, the problem as described thus:

  • Present party politics is letting us down
  • Parties are either very tribal or single issue
  • Tribal parties carry too much baggage to be reformed
  • Single issue parties are too centred on that issue
  • All this has created voter apathy, a state of vacuum
  • Something new is needed to fill the vacuum

A potential solution being:

To create a liberal-minded group sitting in the middle of the political spectrum . . .

If you talk to any group of politicians, you will find a wide range of support or opposition to certain proposals which cut right across party lines. If we assume that these people really do have the good of the country at heart, it seems to follow that they usually ignore the good of the UK for the good of their parties. If we cannot assume they have the good of the UK at heart – they shouldn’t be politicians.

This seems to echo Rob Marchant at The Centre Left (also published at Labour Uncut) (a position – by the way – which Paul has rejected quite forcefully over at Though Cowards Flinch).

What’s absolutely true is there is a massive contradiction at the very heart of national and international politics which, I would be inclined to argue, the “Fib Dems” – for quite some time and generally unthinkingly – were able to address.

Let’s take figures like our own David Cameron and, across the Atlantic, that equally curious politician Mitt Romney.  Both appear to support the narrative of small public governance, even as they describe the value of large private governance.  Our lives are being consistently ruled by such concentrations of private power – and it seems to matter little to most people that the latter vote themselves into such positions of power.  Perhaps this is because the more overtly political and allegedly democratic process involving the former doesn’t seem to have led to greater representation for voters and their families either.

Whatever the reason, the contradiction I allude to above runs as follows: across the globe, in democracies of all shapes and sizes, powerful top-down and virtually autocratic leaders tell us that – for our own benefit – government must get smaller.  Yes!  They claim to want to reduce themselves out of business, to do themselves out of a job.  And I would be fairly happy to bet that never in the entire history of humankind has a political leader ever made him- or herself irrelevant.

Yet the process continues.  Powerful and even aggressive leaders claim that what we need is more declamatory and humongous leaders to achieve a kinder and more human-sized politics.  But how on earth can that follow?  If we want a kinder and more human-sized politics, surely we need kinder and more human-sized participants in political process.  Not the Romneys nor the Camerons of this world; not the boasters nor the gloaters who proclaim their virtue and righteousness through the millions of marketing pounds and dollars which their sponsors care to raise.

A different sort of politics where, as Rodney goes on to argue, policies should:

  • be ‘doable’
  • be backed up by the best available expertise
  • be affordable
  • be enforceable (where appropriate)

Now I know for any Labour readers of this post that what I’m going to say next might stick in your craw.  But, at the risk of hurting your sensibilities at exactly the wrong moment in our political trajectory, I do wonder if English politics needed – and perhaps now needs – what the so-called “Fib Dems”, prior to the 2010 Coalition agreement, used to practise.

I do wonder if their ability to chop and change according to local proclivities and preferences is exactly what a future politics of collaboration would require us all to do.

Labour has demonised such Lib Dem practices to such an extent that it does seem the local collaboration I mention is rapidly becoming impossible.  (As a by-the-by, it’s funny that whilst this has happened, and for a number of years before, the word “collaboration” in a political and business context has lost its wartime connotations of betrayal and has reverted to what was perhaps its original meaning of “cooperation”.  There’s a lesson in that for all of us, I think.)  Such an impossibility of working with other political strands of thought does of course benefit the declamatory and humongous – but few of us appear to be thinking at all clearly enough to realise this for the moment.

My conclusion?  The “Fib Dems” came about because at local level we do need to compromise; we do need to live peaceably with our neighbours; we do need to perceive people as people rather than badges of honour fiercely worn; and we do need to understand different points of view as points of view and not tribal attachments.  That they weren’t liked by many of my party doesn’t mean they weren’t a logical development or response to very real requirements.

And it might even be my contention that we don’t just need such behaviours at local political levels; in truth, we need that redefinition of nationalism I proposed at the beginning: a localism in which “Fib Dems” clearly flourished, before their foolish and hubris-laden leap into the abyss of Tory-led power-broking; a localism with budgets, funding, community participation and – why not? – a sense of identity as well.

*

One final thought: the Lib Dems as “Fib Dems” had a purpose, place and Unique Selling Point in English politics.  Now that they have lost that purpose, place and USP, the field is wide open for something along the lines of Rodney’s “liberal-minded group sitting in the middle of the political spectrum”.

But I’d prefer, I think, before leaving it at that, to rephrase the idea just a little – a gentle and well-meant tweaking of concepts, if you like.

How about this?  A “liberal-minded group collaborating in the honestly-funded ‘nationalisms’ of local communities”.

And then out of such an accumulation of “honestly-funded ‘nationalisms’”, we could create a web of protective measures to preserve the integrity of our localities and regions.

That, I think (am beginning to feel more and more), would be a far more productive way of defending our communities from the most powerfully encroaching forces out there: from not only the most dictatorial and self-serving international politicians but also the most transnational and community-ignoring businesspeople.

No.  You’re right.  It wouldn’t be cheap.  But then was freedom ever so?

Clegg’s apology fever?

 a con, Lib Dems, Lib-Con pact, LibDems, Nick Clegg  No Responses »
Sep 232012
 

Sometimes, when you’ve got a temperature, you’re judgement gets clouded just a wee bit.  Now I’m following these events at a distance, I must admit – but even so, Paul Waugh is a fairly reliable witness, wouldn’t you say?  One of his tweets which has just reached me states:

Clegg re his apology vid: ‘I know what I’m doing is unusual’. Wants Ed Balls to apologise for wooing the City and Lab to apologise for Iraq

Now whilst I can understand that Clegg, as leader of the Liberal Democrats, can safely say his party generally steers reasonably clear of the City and things like Iraq, the decisions he has made on behalf of his party are not quite so crystal clear.

Balls wooing the City?  How about this story (from last September) on the subject of Clegg’s partners in government, the Tories?

Hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms contributed more than a quarter of all donations to the Conservative party in the past year.

The latest research from the Bureau has mapped for the first time precisely which business sectors contributed to the Tories in the year ending June 30.

Our trawl of 450 separate donations given to Conservative Central Office by individuals, companies and limited liability partnerships reveals that 27%, or £3.3m, of the £12.18m donated to the party came from hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms.

The findings come amid growing concerns that some parts of the financial sector, termed ‘asset strippers’ or ‘predator financiers’ by some commentators, profit from financial instability.

The Bureau’s investigation, on the eve of the Tories annual conference in Manchester, shows the proportion of donations to the Conservatives from the entire financial services sector has now reached 51.4% – up 0.6% from last year. This means the City’s financial influence over the Tories has deepened in the past 12 months.

Or this story (from 2003) on the subject of how the selfsame Tories voted when it came to sanctioning the Iraq War – which the vast majority of them, in fact, chose to so do?

No.  This issue of apology fever, which seems to have taken Clegg by the scruff of the neck, isn’t bizarre because I feel Clegg as a Liberal Democrat has no moral right to ask for such apologies.  Quite the opposite, in reality.

Where I do take Mr Clegg to task is in the following: knowing so fully well that Balls and Labour were wrong with respect to the City and Iraq – two sides some of us would argue of a similar coin – how can he now possibly justify having bedded down with the Tories?

Not only were they just as guilty of voting in favour of Iraq as Labour, they’re also now in moral and financial hock to the sector which has caused all our economic ills of the past five years.

Come in from the cold of hypocrisy, Mr Clegg – and see what the doctors can prescribe.

Oh, but they can’t, can they?  Not properly.  The NHS doesn’t quite exist any more – as neither does its private-sector replacement.

:-(

The problem is now much deeper than banks which break the law

 bankers, banking, banks, justice, laws, Lib Dems, Lib-Con pact, LibDems, Tories, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jul 052012
 

A few items this evening.  First, MPs have raucously rejected a judge-led investigation into the Barclays Libor-rigging scandal.  Rejected, it must be said, in the main, by a Tory-led Coalition government voting on partisan lines – and clearly in consonance with the banking community which funds the aforementioned party thus:

The Conservative Party has become reliant on bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity moguls for more than half its annual income, an independent analysis of Tory finances has revealed. Since David Cameron became Conservative leader in December 2005, the amount of money the City has given to bankroll the Tories has gone up fourfold, to £11.4m a year. Over those five years, the City has donated more than £42m to the party.

There’s also been time for personal and distracting fireworks, of course – the blame for these firmly lying at the feet of a man named George Osborne.  To be honest, I’m pretty clear that Libor is just the beginning.  A whole lot more is going to come out in the next few months – and possibly years – of weary discovery.

And it is most wearisome.  Foolish banking caused our economic misery.  Foolish banking provides half the income of the Tory Party.  The Tory Party throws even more money at foolish banking.  And so the cycle goes on.

You see, the problem here isn’t just lawbreaking.  It’s also a question of observing natural justice:

There are two rules that natural justice is concerned with. These are the rule against bias (nemo iudex in causa sua) and the right to a fair hearing (audi alteram partem).

The basis for the rule against bias is the need to maintain public confidence in the legal system. Bias can take the form of actual bias, imputed bias or apparent bias. Actual bias is very difficult to prove in practice while imputed bias, once shown, will result in a decision being void without the need for any investigation into the likelihood or suspicion of bias. Cases from different jurisdictions currently apply two tests for apparent bias: the “reasonable suspicion of bias” test and the “real likelihood of bias” test. One view that has been taken is that the differences between these two tests are largely semantic and that they operate similarly.

The right to a fair hearing requires that individuals should not be penalized by decisions affecting their rights or legitimate expectations unless they have been given prior notice of the case, a fair opportunity to answer it, and the opportunity to present their own case. The mere fact that a decision affects rights or interests is sufficient to subject the decision to the procedures required by natural justice. In Europe, the right to a fair hearing is guaranteed by Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is said to complement the common law rather than replace it.

The issue here, of course, at least in my eyes, is that our corporations, elected representatives, civil servants and other empowered figures are all too clever at getting away with breaking the spirit of the law.  You don’t evade tax (illegal), you just avoid it (immoral).  You don’t force elected majorities to do your bidding, you just use the markets to downgrade their room for democratic manoeuvre.  You don’t fix elections, you just out-gun the opposition in ads, general media support and long-term destructive drip-feed journalism.

None of this is literally breaking the law.  To impose your will in the kind of democracies we are now left with, breaking the law is no longer necessary.  All you need to do is not observe natural justice.

And no one will remember to say anything.

In my previous post, I suggested we should invent ASBOs for corrupting bankers – not for the illegally acting ones, though; for the antisocially acting ones.

Not the ones we might one day be very lucky to prosecute.

No.  Instead, for the ones who under the guise of a supposedly professional occupation will continue to sully and disgrace any concept we might have had of the meaning of civilised behaviour.

And I wonder, after today’s decision by Tory and Lib Dem MPs, whether we don’t need corresponding ASBOs for the political classes too.

For these alpha men and women – those who occupy themselves with business, politics, revolving doors and rotten hearts – have not only been trained by the financial services sector to beg for financial support and kowtow to its every whim; if it were just that, we could still say our Anglo-Saxon legacy might even now be saved.  No.  In everything they do and everything they think, they mirror money’s natural instincts to invent, undo, fire, inspire fear, abuse, disabuse, bully and trample its way to the top.

Natural justice?  Doesn’t exist.  All that exists is the letter of the law.  And when the letter doesn’t suit, we change the meaning of the sentence.

This crisis isn’t just one of banking and its mores.  This crisis is much bigger than that.  This crisis is about how the lending and borrowing and paying back of money has become a Mafia-like construction built on the backs of blameless and humble workforces.  And anyone who touches it and anyone who is touched by it immediately acquires a relationship akin to that of a drug addict with their pusher.

It’s not just the Libor rates they fixed.

It’s also our concept of civilisation; of humanity; and of how we should conduct ourselves in polite society.

Is this the century all communication becomes a crime?

 anti-fascism, anti-freedom, communication, crime, in a hole, Internet, Islamic terrorism, LibDems, LibDemVoice.org, surveillance, terrorism law, unclassifiable, undemocracy, web  1 Response »
Apr 062012
 

This is the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, as summarised by Wikipedia.  Be patient, dear reader – it does have a bearing on what comes afterwards:

A vain Emperor who cares for nothing but his appearance and attire hires two tailors who are really swindlers that promise him the finest, best suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position or “just hopelessly stupid”. The Emperor cannot see the cloth himself, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing unfit for his position; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they mime dressing him and the Emperor then marches in procession before his subjects, who play along with the pretense. Suddenly, a child in the crowd, too young to understand the desirability of keeping up the pretense, blurts out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all and the cry is taken up by others. The Emperor cringes, suspecting the assertion is true, but holds himself up proudly and continues the procession.

I am reminded of this story by four pieces I read this afternoon from widely differing sources.  The first was Naomi Wolf’s savage and dispiriting synthesis of how the US state is using sexually charged strategies to make people who would otherwise protest the immorality and injustice of their circumstances cower before the ever-expanding police state.  She provides many examples of the deliberate humiliations involved and I strongly urge you to read the whole of what she says, even if you feel you might not agree.  But where I would find myself entirely in consonance with her thesis is in this short paragraph towards the end:

Why is this happening? I used to think the push was just led by those who profited from endless war and surveillance – but now I see the struggle as larger. As one internet advocate said to me: “There is a race against time: they realise the internet is a tool of empowerment that will work against their interests, and they need to race to turn it into a tool of control.”

And the evidence behind this assertion?  Well, this actually, on page 3 of a post by Chris Hedges, and which I came across via Wolf’s piece:

There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, The Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M. Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011.

And this, written by James Bamford for Wired, and which in turn I came across via Hedges’ piece (the bold is mine):

[...] “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

These last two articles, as with Wolf’s, also deserve to be read in full.

It is, as I said, dispiriting stuff that from the nation which proclaimed the glories of democracy and freedom in its very birth we should be exposed to these kind of behaviours and attitudes.

And that emperor and his new clothes?  Well, I don’t know about you but I surely am beginning to get the feeling that we’ve been stripped naked by the revolution that is Web 2.0.  It’s almost as if – though I’m sure it’s not really the case – the corporate agencies which work so hand-in-glove with Western governments have deliberately done all the spadework over the past five years and created a series of tools which encourage us to bare absolutely our all.  Is this bad?  Absolutely not.  If we want one day to have a more open society, all of us need to be more open.  It’s not just the politicians who should demonstrate their sincerity and frankness – the voters, their families, friends and colleagues should also sign up to this new social contract.

We do need such confidence-building measures if we truly wish to implement a more communicative society.

Unfortunately, all this generalised and now casual openness may now lead any latterday state to acquire repressive tendencies with the following consequences:

  1. anyone who values their privacy, who does not for example participate eagerly in Web 2.0-style processes or just likes to get the feeling their email content is relatively secure, can be immediately suspected of needing to hide something and therefore potentially guilty of a multitude of sins.  This conclusion is of course manifestly unfair, as some people – even under Web 2.0′s legacy – continue to be simply more jealous of their selves than others; nevertheless, any state which cares to begin to arrest its population into submission will find plenty of reasons to do so in such an environment;
  2. anyone who participates openly in Web 2.0 – social media, social networks, blogging, tweeting, online communities and any number of other tools out there – but does not manage to say the right things, as per the complex and evermore law-ridden rules of engagement which will almost certainly grow up around this whole affair, will surely find themselves falling terribly between the two stools of a notional openness on the one hand and an effective lack of human rights and common sense on the other – an awfully Kafka-like set of circumstances to find oneself in;

The long-term result will almost certainly be far more people in jail for communicating with others than in any other century in human history.  This will, in fact, be the century when the desire to communicate anything worthy of our attention runs the risk of automatically becoming a crime.

*

The final article which drew my attention today was a piece in Liberal Democrat Voice which included a letter from Tim Farron, the Party’s President, to members worried about the Coalition government’s plans to monitor the Internet.  In it, he said (the bold is mine):

I think you probably know my views on this matter. As a Liberal I was extremely concerned by the press reports of new surveillance powers potentially to be included in the Queens Speech.

I also agreed very much with Julian Huppert’s article on Lib Dem Voice — there must be no question of the authorities having universal internet surveillance powers.

We are reasonable people and we should be prepared to look at what will now be draft legislation with an open mind, but we should be prepared to put our foot down and pull the plug if we consider the proposals to be illiberal. We must not as Liberal Democrats fall into a position of trying to amend, unpick or apologise for a piece of authoritarian Tory policy.

Over the last couple of years we have made some mistakes, which is OK so long as we learn from them. This is our opportunity to put those lessons into practice. Britain must be more liberal and free as a result of Liberal Democrats in power, not less. The proposals as they were first set out undoubtedly cross a red line, we’ve crossed enough of those already – no more.

I’m really not too sure, though, in the light of all I’ve laid before you today, whether Mr Farron and his Liberals have any chance of stopping the juggernaut which approaches our shores.  The only solution I can see, and this in itself contains the seeds of our own destruction, is to disengage entirely with a series of systems of digital communication which are becoming so contaminated by big business, unelected representatives and security services everywhere.  But of course, as I have already pointed out, to disengage is also to generate suspicion around one’s motives.

It seems, in fact, that we can neither safely engage, disengage nor even stand mutely in attendance.  Speech, silence, agreement, disagreement – everything we might wish to do or say, or not say or do, may lead us to become tainted with the darkness of being an enemy of the state’s overarching perception of what is good and what is evil.

It seems, in fact, that in the age that communication technologies have reached their zenith, our right to communicate will become criminalised to such a degree that all communication will be a crime unless otherwise notified.

Just as any resistance to communicating in the full glare of the state’s apparatus will be equally and duly noted as a criminal offence.

And meanwhile, no citizens – not even the children amongst us – appear any longer to have the perspicacity of Hans Christian Andersen’s story to draw the fact to anyone’s attention.

The #NHS is Not4Sale

 Brian Moylan, Éoin Clarke, LibDems, NHS, on a high  No Responses »
Mar 112012
 

There’s a great poster going the rounds on Facebook right now.  I reproduce it below.  Feel free to do the same – the originators give us all permission!

There’s also a lovely web tool which Brian has devised over at Éoin’s blog at the moment – and which allows you to email every wavering Lib Dem MP in the NHS debate. 

Brilliant piece of coding I have to say.

<doffs his non-existent cap to virtual friend>

:-)

Imagine this was the Tory gameplan

 a con, Game Plan, in a hole, Labour, LibDems, LibDemVoice.org, Tories  No Responses »
Mar 102012
 

Just imagine the following.  Imagine the Tories knew the key to winning the 2015 general election was ensuring all the bad stuff that was surely going to come along – frontline cuts, homelessness, rising poverty, even deaths directly attributable to government policies – didn’t push the Lib Dems and Labour together in a self-interested, pragmatic and intelligent consonance.

In order to ensure that this didn’t happen, the far-sighted Tory ideologues running the show decided they had to create an environment which meant its junior partner in this bully coalition acted in no other way that was not that of surrogate bully.

Divide and rule is the oldest way of describing the strategy – but this particular case has an interesting twist in the tale.  All the bad news was piled upfront and timed to take place as early as possible in the parliamentary term so that the residual resentments exhibited to Labour by both its own supporters as well as its enemies would still be memorable enough to keep the vast majority of Lib Dems onside – seeing, as they did, that the opinion polls maintained their relative vigour and meant the combined ratings of the two parties in the Coalition succeeded in keeping pace with Labour’s.

The next step, of course, would be to consolidate not only the traditional Tory constituencies but also the wider national vote on touchstone issues such as – for example – the Post Office.  And what makes me think of the Post Office all of a sudden?  This story today, ever-so-strategically timed, from Lib Dem Voice, quoting – in turn – the BBC:

More than 6,000 branches of the Post Office are to be revamped by the government in the next three years.

An investment programme costing £1.34bn will modernise the sub-branches…

The government repeated its pledge that there would be no further closures of post office branches…

The postal affairs minister, Norman Lamb, said: “This government has made a commitment that there will be no closure programme and invested £1.34bn to secure the long term future of the Post Office.

The Tory gameplan in a nutshell, then?

  1. Pile up all the bad news at the beginning of the parliamentary term to fatigue the opposition in a myriad of progressively uncoordinated and unfocussing counter-activities;
  2. Ensure, as a result, that Labour supporters, members and strategists behave sufficiently aggressively to make any kind of rapport between Labour and all Lib Dems totally unworkable;
  3. Put in place electorally-soothing policy add-ons such as securing the Post Office network, parish-council rights and other small but visible improvements to daily life which grassroots Tory and Lib Dem representatives can begin to point to in their local politicking;
  4. Continue to assuage the interests of the corporate sponsors which fund most of the big communications processes, influence Tory long-term policy, and whose activities most of the Tory support out in the field simply does not care to observe;
  5. Win the 2015 election, either with or without the need for Lib Dem MPs;

What do you think?

Any of the above a likelihood?

Answers on a postcard, a tweet or a comment …

Are we hating the Lib Dems so very much because the Tories are simply way too big to deal with?

 a con, Legal Aid, LibDems, NHS, NHS cuts, referred anger, referred politics, social care, Tories, welfare, Welfare State  No Responses »
Mar 102012
 

It’s the classic story of referred anger: the husband beats the wife, the wife beats the child, the child beats the dog, the dog fights the cat, the cat mauls the sparrow …

So it is that I do wonder if all the recent fury against the Lib Dems and their passive enabling of the destruction of the welfare state, legal aid, social care and the NHS is taking place entirely because we’re subconsciously coming to the conclusion the Tories have become way too big to deal with.

For what we really should not forget is that the aforementioned destruction, currently laying waste to our nations, is driven first and foremost by clever and far-sighted Tory ideologues who have imported foreign ways of seeing and doing from the US and adapted them for their own self-enriching schemes and purposes.

The real enemies are the Tories – and every legal tool we have to hand which might contribute to their future fall surely needs to be contemplated in both the short- and long-term.

Even if this involves talking to and working with some of the Lib Dems whose disaffection is beginning to seriously grow.

That long proud history of British coalition governments

 Blairites, body politic, Britain, coalition governments, coalition parties, LibDems, LibDemVoice.org, on a high  No Responses »
Feb 092012
 

If truth be told, we do know how to do coalition governments in the British body politic.  We have done since time immemorial.  It’s just that they’re called political parties – and the shoehorning generally takes place before an election; a process which usually allows most of us to understand what we’re getting.

At least while the new PM is still finding his or her feet.

All three major British parties play the same game.  Like teaching of old, a leader gets elected to the post and then looks for some lowly common denominator – some common theme – which might attract both activists and voters without tying his or her hands too greatly.  Unless, of course, the leader is as politically adept as someone like Margaret Thatcher.  In which case the hands that are tied belong to the activists and voters.

We then find the successful leaders getting their parties elected and proceeding to uncover and reveal all their true colours.  Disenchantment eventually sets in, as it must, and, after a period of rehabilitation, most leaders will become some kind of national monument, safely tucked away on boards of directors of large- and medium-sized companies – or, perhaps more controversially, at least these days – in the House of Lords.

In the latter place, of course, they may choose to wreak the kind of political vengeance on the current occupants of Number 10 Downing Street which they would never have cared to put up with whilst still in power.

As a by-the-by, isn’t it interesting how an ancient democracy such as ours requires so many unelected members to defend it from the tyranny of Coalition politics?  The strangest thing, indeed.  The strangest thing.  It does make me wonder what is happening to our politics.

*

So it is that I come to the event which provokes me to write today’s post.  Recently, the Lib Dems – one of the political parties most adept at forging both internal and external coalitions – have been tussling with the idea that Labour’s Blairites should find their natural home in the party of the junior partner of our current Coalition government:

There have been some high profile (if not high level) Blairite defections to the Tories. While there are some similarities between the Blair legacy and our coalition partners, the defectees seem to have overlooked or discarded one idea – joining the Liberal Democrats.

And in conclusion:

The party has people on the left, people on the right and people who subscribe to the third way anyway. The difference is that all of those people have a voice and it is of equal weight. Yes, David Cameron is the most centrist Tory leader there has been for a while. But what about after he goes? What if the party – dissatisfied with his abandonment of the right – go for a right winger? Would Blairites be joining the Tories if Liam Fox or David Davis had won the leadership contest? I doubt it.

Powell in his book, when offering advice in a Discourses style, would often begin the sentence with the phrase ‘A prudent prime minister would…’

A prudent Blairite would join the Liberal Democrats.

It is therefore doubly appropriate that just as this appeal is made to Labour Blairites to join the Lib Dems, members of the latter should be creating a Lib Dem space – perhaps, even, one day a party within a party on the lines of Labour’s Progress – with the avowed aim of building bridges with those of us who consider ourselves to be on the left and centre-left of British politics.  This nascent website provides us with these interesting paragraphs:

[...] Liberals have long argued against concentrations of power and resources, whether in the hands of the state or of private institutions.  Social Democrats have long argued that inequality in wealth, income and esteem undermine social cohesion. The financial crisis is the result of decades of neo-liberal ideology and politics which has ignored these lessons. Instead public policy has allowed financial markets to consolidate power in the hands of unaccountable institutions, has disempowered communities, undermined local economies and has redistributed income and wealth from the bottom to the top.  The crisis has also allowed a rebirth of social conservatism as those on the right try to blame the nation’s ills on the poor, the public sector, and a decline of family values.

People understand this.  The popularity of progressive single issue campaigns shows a genuine appetite for progressive politics.  We believe that Liberal Democrats should be part of this politics, not its target. This is a time for Liberals and Social Democrats to work together for a fairer and more democratic Britain in which people and communities are empowered to build a sustainable future and in which disparities of income, wealth and power are reduced.  We must also work together to promote our shared approach to public services and attitudes towards social justice.  We believe the state has a clear responsibility to enable people to make the most of their own lives, in contrast to the coalition’s mission to slash the role of the both local and national government dramatically.

To conclude, most usefully in my opinion, thus:

If there is to be any future for the liberal left in British politics, we believe that there must be overt and public dialogue between Liberal Democrats, Labour, Greens and others on the democratic left.  There is a centre-left majority in the UK but it all too often fails to be expressed because of parties not being clear in advance of an election about who their preferred coalition partners would be.  Many of the political problems faced by the current coalition flow from it being a government which most Liberal Democrat voters did not want.  It is ideologically unsustainable and without a mandate.

A future coalition with Labour and others on the liberal left is more likely to secure Liberal Democrat goals than a further coalition with the Conservatives and we should actively work to make that possible.  If that is ever to happen, future centre-left co-operation must not founder on personal hostilities, and policy differences/similarities must be fully understood.  If coalitions are to become more common, then voters cannot be left in the dark over what parties are likely to do (or not do) from their manifestos if they co-operate.  The public deserves to be given a clear idea of what co-operation between Liberal Democrats, Labour the Greens and others would mean in terms of public policy if they are to be expected to trust such a government.

So let us not damn the right of the British body politic to continue making coalitions in much the same way as the entire proud history of its national parties has indicated is perfectly possible – for we have far more experience in the matter than some of our leaders ever care to admit to.

Whether we continue to do so within our parties, amongst our parties or both is, of course, a question of political expediency – and knowing when that moment needs to be chosen.  But the arguments given above deserve, at the very least, to be taken into consideration – if nothing more than because the socioeconomic interests of the nation states which currently make up the United Kingdom are at stake.

Something which only hubris would lead us to ignore.

Enemy territory?

 drug abuse, drug decriminalisation, drug trafficking, drugs, LibDems, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Feb 042012
 

I knowingly went into what many on my side of the fence would have termed enemy territory tonight.  But not only because it was a Lib Dem meeting with Chris Davis MEP.  It was also the essence of the matter under very public discussion: that is to say, the pros and cons of decriminalising drugs.

This was one of the very few subjects under the sun on which I didn’t have clearly (even when inaccurately) formed views.  After the evening’s introduction to the subject from Mr Davis himself – and the debate which ensued amongst not only the assembled Lib Dem faithful but also a sprinkling of interested non-members like myself – I now do, however, have a better idea of the reality of drug abuse, and what we might usefully do to counter it.  And it’s really not a simple picture.

Nothing ever is where democracy has spent such a long time refusing to act with efficiency.

Whilst examples such as the Netherlands and Portugal were given as paradigms to follow in the fight against the illegal activity surrounding drug usage and addiction – their shared motto seeming to be: “Let’s have a policy of ‘harm reduction’ instead of the US-sanctioned ‘prohibitionist’ approach” – there appeared to currently exist little political will or capacity to take on the Daily Mails of the world and their sensationalist behaviours.  I also wondered if we shouldn’t be wary of importing experiences from other countries.  Yes, it’s true: the Dutch may essentially have a small “c” conservative mindset, just as the English; but where the Dutch live and let live in their small “c” conservatism – thus giving an impression of a massively liberal and tolerant society – the English, as exemplified by the Middle England theses of its middlebrow tabloid newspapers, are most definitely anything but a race of tolerant Tories.

If truth be told, I can only see decriminalisation working if – at the same time – a vast process of re-education takes place.  It is not enough to decriminalise by itself – you have to prepare the ground and, little by little, teach the rest of society to stop seeing drug users as the elements the law would previously consider them to be.

To be honest, I can also see a whole minefield of human rights issues opening up before us.  It was suggested, for example, that were drugs such as cannabis and heroin to become legally available, then a dedicated infrastructure of control, user-identification, distribution and taxation would also have to be put into place.  But surely, whilst an immediate “harm reduction” might be achieved by such a set of policies, the damage to the integrity of human privacy, the intrusion by the state into very private affairs and the potential for the abuse of such sensitive information – were it to get out into the public domain – would almost certainly override the virtues of getting rid of the criminal supply chain.

Perhaps we need to look at this differently. 

First, define drugs not in terms of discrete classifications but, rather, in terms of what different substances can do to you – their effects on an individual, not their composition as such.  (Pardon me if this is already the case – as I said at the top of this post, my opinions on this matter are only just beginning to become formed and I speak mostly out of rank ignorance.)

And second, use existing supply chains, companies, institutions and infrastructures to, indeed, allow anyone to safely buy drugs in their local pharmacy.

That is to say, simplify the supply chain to the very maximum you can, so the legal alternative becomes the line of least resistance.  Only then will you ensure another hydra-headed nightmare of illegal drug distribution doesn’t arise out of yet another misjudged democratic inefficiency.

One final thought – and coming back to the concept of democratic efficiency.  I think it was Peter Levine who suggested that efficiency was the essence of any good democracy.  Choosing a policy of “harm reduction” over a policy of “prohibition” could, therefore, be understood as being a good democracy of the above-mentioned characteristics.  But we should be careful of defining our democracy just in statistics.  A policy of “harm reduction” might very well lead to fewer sad and pained people out there – but studies also indicate that the overall number of drug users would increase moderately if such a policy were put into place: that is to say, if drug usage were decriminalised. 

And the very fact that a situation appears hopeless doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no other ways of dealing it a fatal blow.

For there are always better ways out there.  We simply haven’t, as yet, managed to stumble productively over them.

It’s getting more and more like Iraq, in that process is the real objective here

 Coalition, Coalition U-turns, David Cameron, FibDems, George W Bush, in a hole, Iraq, Iraq-ification, Lib-Con pact, LibDems, process, things, Tony Blair  No Responses »
May 192011
 

Yup.  That’s how I feel today.  I’m scratching my head and wondering exactly what the real aim of the Tory side of the Coalition is.

And I am fiercely dragged back to the time of Iraq when we didn’t know if it was WMDs, oil, democracy or Bush’s presidency which truly was at stake in that terrible lead-up to outright conflict.  So what are they looking to detonate here then?  Woodlands?  The NHS?  The Labour Party itself?

Or is it more a very British way of doing stuff?

Slowly I am beginning to wonder if the latter isn’t the case.  As politicking begins to enter a mire of managed soundbites on the one hand and legal recriminations on the other, it doesn’t half seem as if we’re importing lock, stock and barrel the impasse of anti-consensual politics which – at least from the outside looking in – is what American democracy appears to exemplify.

What if it wasn’t really any of these things I mention which the Tory side of the Coalition government (that is to say, David Cameron and his closest cronies themselves) were interested in pulling apart?  What if, instead, it was process they were actually looking to destroy?

Oh, the irony of it all!  To employ the figure of coalition government – about as anti-Thatcherite in its assumption of the importance of fudge as you could possibly get – in order that the British way of getting things done (often, the essence of fudge) could be dismantled in a period of five short years.

Yes.  Irony is the word.  Whilst the radicals, in the figure of the Tory side of the Coalition, dominate the stage once more in their violent desire to uproot all those cosy ways of solving problems we have been so eccentrically familiar with, we find our only alternative to sitting back and waiting for the many axes to awfully fall is to make use of the headlining tactics of our lawyerly friends so beloved of our American cousins.  We ourselves are participating in the process of turning our constituency-connected MPs into little more than empty mouthpieces, fearful of putting their feet in their mouths.  As Chris points out:

But this is not the debate we’re having. Instead, we’re seeing three ugly aspects of our political culture.
One is a tendency to view all political utterances through the prism of whether or not they are “gaffes” – the effect of which will be to discourage plain speaking, or indeed speaking at all.
A second is an atavistic tribalism, which leads both Ed Miliband and The Sun to demand Clarke’s resignation, both on the grounds that he is not “one of us.”
And this leads to a third aspect – the tendency for politics to be reported in terms of who’s up/down/in/out – terms which are to a large extent uninteresting tittle-tattle.
Meanwhile, the real substance of proper politics is forgotten.

This, then, is the wholesale importation of a political culture which has turned into entertainment the otherwise serious business of improving the lot of men and women.  David Cameron’s goal wasn’t the woodlands – because he seemed to give in quite amicably when he saw the opposition was there.  It’s not even the NHS – except inasmuch as the NHS represents quite symbolically all that good socialism is capable of achieving.  (And in Cameron’s world, remnants of this ilk are hardly the most convenient things to have hanging around -  reminders as they are of the truly possible alternatives to the Darwinism of the extreme right.)

No.  Just as Bush used Iraq to keep his constituencies well onside, and WMDs, oil, democracy and most of the rest of the mix were simply things to keep us distracted in the meantime, so Cameron is using the tangibles which raise our progressive hackles (disability benefit, the NHS, the police, the education service, the woodlands, the Murdochs, playground fees and so on) in order to distract us from the far more pernicious objective that underlies what’s really going on: that is to say, the broader aim of destroying forever the bonds and mediums of exchange which have served to tie together even the most contrary of opposition representatives.

It is the virulent atavism, to use Chris’s phrase, which terrifies me most in all of this.  Cameron and his closest cronies are looking to foment a kind of civil war – just as Bush and his closest cronies looked to do so in post-”shock and awe” Iraq.  They are looking to generate that dynamic which says: you are either with us or against us, but never will you be able to choose to station yourself in the middle.  Most Labourites, if asked, would express pure hatred for everything the Lib Dems represented prior to the forming of the Coalition government in May 2010.  (It is not uncommon to hear them described in Labour circles as Fib Dems.)  And yet, in the light of what has happened since, it seems to me that if Cameron is to the Coalition what Bush was to Iraq, then the Lib Dems are to Cameron what Blair was to Bush.

Bush used Blair.  Whilst Blair believed in right and wrong, Bush believed in saving his own skin.  From the perspective of most involved, at least at grassroots level, the same could be said to be true of Cameron and the Lib Dems.

And as Iraq served to enrich the ruthless amongst us, so Cameron’s Britain will eventually destroy all those beautiful British processes which historically allowed the humble to surface, communicate and survive.

Should we actually admire Vince Cable and his ilk?

 David Cameron, Ed Miliband, in a hole, LibDems, Vince Cable  No Responses »
May 072011
 

This, from the BBC today, certainly managed to grab my attention this afternoon during my daily post-prandial fight against what would otherwise be treasured twenty-minute siesta moments (unfortunately, my Spanish wife doesn’t appreciate it when I fall asleep in public and, as we were in a restaurant, we were most definitely in public):

Vince Cable has attacked the Lib Dems’ Tory coalition partners as “ruthless, calculating and very tribal” [...].

In other news today, meanwhile, it’s revealed that cats catch mice and elephants aren’t aspirins.

I do have to say that I really don’t how to react to this statement.  On the one hand, it seems it could be a consequence of his holding a profoundly considered belief about human nature – which the kinder (possibly more naive) amongst us might care to share: that is to say, that politics should be more consensual and what we might term “adult” (no, not in that sense).  That an intelligent man like Cable might have believed the Tories were anything but ruthless, calculating and tribal can really only be explained, then, by his holding such a belief – and his being thus blinded to such bleedingly obvious realities precisely because of his kinder instincts. 

If the latter is indeed the case, there is an argument to be made that the rest of us should actually admire him and his ilk for holding and sticking to this mindset.  In the narrative that is this Coalition, the Lib Dems would truly be looking for partners in power, looking to make more grown-up British politics, looking to extend the British body politic beyond its current flaccid and unhealthy way of being – and being seen.  The inability of major politicians in any civilised nation to talk to instead of at each other hardly ennobles anyone these days – but it would seem to be a given in the United Kingdom.  Perhaps we could even argue that whilst Cameron helps cement the politics of ruthless, calculating and tribal behaviours, we are losing what twelve months ago was absolutely the only bright spot on the political horizon: the smashing of that old and adversarial two-party mould.

So Vince Cable, in his expression of revulsion at what are truly revolting habits, gains our admiration – even as he does go on to add that:

[...] their [Coalition] alliance would continue.

A funny mixture, this Mr Cable.  A good man perhaps, caught up in a dirty world not of his making.  A tragic figure.  A man who perceives only too clearly the garden path down which Cameron is so ably leading the Lib Dems.  A man who is too good to fight back as uncleanly as might be necessary for Cameron to be stopped.  Thinking too much that the wider needs of the country lie in delivering the Coalition policies as if they were written in stone – instead of realising that the true wisdom of political leadership only ever comes from that learning how to change tack and, at the same time, narrate to the voting public such changes as being consequential, coherent, cogent and foreseen.

Mr Cable, it would seem, wants to tell it as it is.  Mr Cameron, however, already knows that the best politicians make it as they would prefer.

No one wins elections by telling it as it is.

Only the dishonest who tell it to us as we would like it to be will ever gain our approbation.

Ed Miliband probably has more in common with Vince Cable than he does with David Cameron.  And I so wish our politics could appreciate the former two over the latter – even as I fear Cameron is truly beginning to have our measure.

It’s not too late.

Not yet.

It might be soon, though.

So are the Lib Dems the hackers of British politics?

 Amazon, code, hackers, LibDems, new political metalanguage, on a high, online constitutions, public space, WikiLeaks  No Responses »
Dec 172010
 

Some interesting articles tonight.  Firstly, from LabourList, we have Simon Wright saying how the Lib Dems may be coming of age:

I certainly believe this is the end of the LibDem magic, that ability to be all-things-to-all-people. I certainly hope it means the incoherence of some of their positions is finally exposed and their failure to stick to a policy will become a very public habit. However, I fear that it might come to be seen as the period when the LibDems started to grow up. The trauma of this experience could give them the resolve not to ever let it happen again. They might learn that people respect parties that can take difficult decisions. There is a long time ahead for this coaliton government – incredibly there are still four and half years planned – and few other topics on which the LibDems are so vulnerable. Our laughing at their current difficulties could seem a bit hollow if they turn out to be teething troubles on the way to becoming a grown-up political party.

Second, we have a lovely piece of traditional logging-the-web from John Naughton, picking up on a piece from Luis de Miranda, where the protocol-riven worlds of diplomacy and the Internet are compared and contrasted:

In what way are the Internet and diplomacy similar? Both are governed by very strict protocols, but their strictures are somehow each others’ opposites. Diplomatic protocol lives on the surface of things, a layer of varnish that actually allows all the treachery, hypocrisy and dirty dealings to go on. The protocol is theatre, while shenanigans play out in the shadows. The rigor of the Internet, on the other hand, operates in all that is invisible: the source code, the programming language standards, the networking standards (TCP/IP, HTML, RFCs). What is on the surface on the web is joyful chaos, depravity, free expression, every manifestation of the kaleidoscope of humanity. We have all been somewhat aware of the stuffy old world of diplomatic protocol, the attention to etiquette and to the rank of governments and their envoys. We are less familiar with the new world of digital protocol.

As de Miranda goes on to point out (the bold is mine):

The world of diplomacy, the world of the rulers, is certainly no sacred realm. The content of the leaked cables – as has been pointed out – is not all that surprising. But Marshall McLuhan strikes again here too: the message is the medium. The momentous nature of Wikileaks comes in its form, not its content: the digitalisation of our representations of the world around us is a new global DNA. And that digitalisation brings to the foreground – partly by contrast – another, complementary aspect of humanity: what I call crealism, the desire to become self-created, to establish a space of liberty outside the automata by seizing democratic control of of the protocols that rule us. Another word for this is empowerment.

In this sense, what is happening to the Internet and what it is happening to the Lib Dems are parallel and perhaps mutually informing processes.  Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Coalition experience should be forcing the latter to grow up as Wright suggests, as Paul bemoans and as I observe … just at the very same time that WikiLeaks consecrates the coming of age of the Internet.  For we realise that what we are dealing with is a private space of public use.  And just like Liverpool One in the real world, such worlds are not happy places at heart.  As Der Spiegel points out:

The different reactions from Internet firms to the WikiLeaks publications reveal a dilemma. Many citizens regard the Internet as a public space, but in fact it is a private sphere. And the companies that control almost all the forums on the Web can, if in doubt, exercise their rights of ownership and ban who they like.

The extent to which citizens are free on the Internet depends on whether these companies want to get into conflict with the state or other firms, for example copyright holders.

They have to work out, on their behalf, how far the right to free speech goes, and when it infringes upon other rights, for example personal or author rights.

There is a saying “pick your battles.” Well, Internet giants Amazon and PayPal have clearly decided not to join the fight for WikiLeaks. They are avoiding conflict and have thrown out the activists by pointing to their terms and conditions. They have the right to do so. Companies should be allowed to be cowards, if the risk seems too high for them.

That risk could be a general threat from the US political establishment — or the fury of US customers, who regard WikiLeaks as a platform for state treason. Such rage could hit the company a lot harder than the revolt by those activists now calling for a boycott of Amazon and PayPal.

And as it then proceeds to add:

Yet these calls for a boycott should be welcomed. They could show the companies that the situation is actually the exact opposite to what they had assumed: that perhaps they have been wrong in their appraisal of the reaction to WikiLeaks and have actually annoyed more customers than expected with the block. Then perhaps the next time they will do things differently.

The underlying issue does, however, remain the same.  Private spaces of public use are uncomfortable places to be.  As OldTrot tweeted to me the other day:

@eiohel The Social Web is a carefully fostered illusion. Twitter is a private money-making venture. Tweets & trends are traceable & filtered

And furthermore:

@eiohel the open forum is as old as Democracy itself, but the Market monetises, corrupts, and yes sells it. Free speech commodified

So it is we discover – through the implosion that is caused by both WikiLeaks and the Lib Dems – that our 21st century world is not honest, sincere or progressive in the least.

Not in its form anyhow.

The most we can hope for – if everything remains the same (if, that is, we are left at the mercy of those who design and write the code) – is a cuddly kind of content that likes to pretend it loves our every being.

But when it comes to creating the protocols … we are at the mercy of those who create.  And if we do not create them ourselves – or, at least learn how to regularly deconstruct them – then we are lost.

Perhaps it’s time we all become hackers.  As de Miranda’s piece makes only too plain:

Wikileaks was born of hacker culture. Hackers are not spotty, destructive teenagers who provoke a third world war while tinkering at their computers. Hackers work firmly in the real world: they try to reverse engineer the digital world around us. They try to understand how code has been built, especially code whose goal is to keep people out, to monopolistically restrict access. Once the code is understood, it can be mastered and directed to the hackers’ own uses, often open-sourcing the knowledge. The code becomes usable by anyone who puts the effort into understanding digital protocol. This hacking culture does not apply only to digital programs: the hacking digital natives have this attitude towards the whole world; our politics, society, behaviours, tastes, beliefs, identities, have all been assembled like code and are the instruments by which we are controlled.

And as he concludes:

The old, elitist, analog world of double-speak and counter-bluff, the worlds of diplomacy and political institutions, cannot hope to survive the two-pronged attack from digitalisation and empowerment. The message sent by Wikileaks to governments is this: “you are using the digital to organise the world and to control the people; but that means that the people will also have access to your mechanisms of control, the code and the data; the people will be able to hack you – to uncover and subvert your hegemonic uses.” The only way governments could stop this democratising force would be to imprison the coders – a temptation some seem to be tempted by.

Perhaps, then, in the light of all the above, we could see the Lib Dems as the hackers of British politics.  They could be – in some curious way – reverse-engineering our political code, even if not consciously, even if not intentionally.  We’re not quite sure – at least not all of us – that this isn’t being done for entirely undemocratic purposes.  But a small chance still exists – a chink of light coming through the political DNA that might, even so, end up being rebuilt – that perhaps some good will come out of all this pain.

As with WikiLeaks, however, and all those gloriously private spaces of public use we have come to so enjoy … from Amazon to Facebook, from blogging to video streaming … well, it is still utterly unclear if the gain will make the pain worthwhile.

See what I mean?  We can learn a lot from analysing the virtual world.

Especially when the real world begins to become outrageously indistinguishable from it.  Or, alternatively, our thought processes begin to mimic those of the glorious hackers of old to such a degree that absolutely everything becomes reducible to the building blocks of fabulous code.

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