What a politician’s lies really mean

 a con, lies, politicians, politicking, politics  No Responses »
Mar 082013
 

The job of a politician, fairly so too, is to tell lies.  That is to say, not tell the truth as it is but tell the truth as he or she would wish it to be.  Politicians deal more in the future than the present.  The present is an inconvenience – it is more difficult to shape and manipulate.  Much easier it is likely to be to convince a voting public that tomorrow may just be the corner we are hoping to turn than to convince them that today is not quite as miserable as it (manifestly) is experienced.

In fact, to take care of a voter’s expectations with respect to the future is probably to take care of how they feel about the present.

The past, meanwhile, is for the irritating elephantine figures amongst us who – with their considerable memories – tie down flights of fancy with a reality all too inarguable.

Better ignored, then, instead of faced up to.  Better proscribed instead of prescribed.

Now we all understand and appreciate, I think, the moments in the political cycle when politicians enthuse.  Tony Blair was good at this; John F Kennedy for the Americans too.  When such salespeople of gloriously word-ridden ideals make our emotions fly with their clever crystallisations of moments in a country’s history, we feel – all of us – that anything might be possible.  Whether in adversity or in a time of great advances, a nation’s spirit – how millions feel about themselves and about their environments – can be productively affected by the simple declamations of political leaders.

In companies, some CEOs can do the same.

And in all these cases, in their upsides and downsides, we encounter both the power of that human spirit to overcome and reshape reality as well as a profound appreciation of the value such people add to our experiences of life.

There is, however, a much darker side to these professional communicators: communicators for some – or, as I said the other day, obfuscators for others.  What do we understand by those moments when such leaders claim to have a quite different relationship with the future – those occasions when they say they are taking hard decisions and proceeding to tell us tough truths?  What is the point of such behaviours – and how do we react?  Bad news seems to travel fast, it is true – but, more curiously, bad news seems, like a cinéma vérité surface of edgy camera angles, to engender its own weight of inarguable veracity.  We seem to believe more readily the depressions of tough political love than the emotions of sky-soaring pleasure.

The question then arises: when politicians engage in such behaviours – the tough political love, I mean – what are they really engaging in?  Knowing, as they must, that whole economies will see their precious confidence exhausted, shouldn’t we be suspicious of any political salesperson who chooses to paint a situation as negatively as they possibly can?

What are they trying to achieve?

What are their true aims?

Isn’t it – simply – a desire to fully manage the moods, and perhaps the overarching ability to fight back too, not only of an entire environment but also of an entire people?

Beware the salesperson who chooses to be that bearer of bad news.  They are only out to control you even more than those who – more normally – only choose to sell you the good.

Why do we hate politics so much? (A clue: it ain’t the politicians!)

 political innovation, politicians, politicking, politics, unclassifiable, war  No Responses »
Jan 062013
 

Imagine going naked onto a battlefield every day of your life.  Imagine being a civilian caught up in the collateral damage of professional warriors.  Imagine having to swallow the ideology of people who claim to know what’s best for you.

Imagine, if you will, a war where you have no place which is not that of passive observer; where the stray bullets kill your desire to live even when they miss you by a mile; where the powerful have the whole bloody armoury in their possession and all you can do is observe their trigger-happy antics.

Imagine, in fact, what it must have been like to live in a Sarajevo under siege:

The siege of Sarajevo, as it came to be popularly known, was an episode of such notoriety in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia that one must go back to World War II to find a parallel in European history. Not since then had a professional army conducted a campaign of unrelenting violence against the inhabitants of a European city so as to reduce them to a state of medieval deprivation in which they were in constant fear of death. In the period covered in this Indictment, there was nowhere safe for a Sarajevan, not at home, at school, in a hospital, from deliberate attack.

— Prosecution Opening Statement, ICTY vs Stanislav Galić, 2003[14]

*

It’s nowhere near the same in latterday British politics, of course.  Not yet, anyhow.  Not for a while.  Or is it?

In a way, in a very figurative way that is, perhaps it really is the same.  Perhaps that’s why we hate our politicians so very much.  And, in a very great sense, we are wrong to blame them for it.

I am minded to voice the above thoughts on the back of this piece by Gloria de Piero over at Labour List at the moment.  In it, she describes the results of a poll she commissioned which revealed that a quarter of people interviewed would – in what is admittedly a rather hypothetical context – seriously consider becoming an MP:

Imagine you were in your thirties or forties, and friends of yours suggested you should stand for election to become an MP. What do you think your reaction would be?

Enthusiatic: I’d definitely consider standing – 6%

Interested: I might consider standing – 18%

Total enthusiastic/interested – 24 %

And this is the conclusion she comes to as a result (the bold is mine):

To end on a positive note – the good news for the Labour Party is that of those that voted for the Labour Party at the 2010 election, Labour voters were most likely to be enthusiastic or interested in standing for election and we were least likely to say ‘I don’t like politicians and the way politics works’ though these figures did change when Yougov asked about future voting intention with more Lib dems saying they would want to stand. But I think there’s all to play for the People’s Party in working to create a One Nation Parliament which looks and sounds like Britain.

That bit about the Lib Dems is what caught my attention.  If I’ve understood the data correctly, we’re saying here that those who must feel most frustrated at the moment – most under siege, that is, to use my opening metaphor – are those who’d most like to empower themselves through getting a direct hand on the levers (where not triggers) of power.

It’s not just the Lib Dems either.  When we say how we hate politics and politicians, what we’re really saying is that we don’t like to be swept up in a war where we are only ever collateral damage; a war where we are the victims of megaphone politics; a war where a system reserves for itself a right to behave as uncooperatively as it does, without allowing affected civilians and non-combatants to arm themselves in their own defence.

It’s that level killing-field which Thatcher and Hurd refused to sanction during the Balkan conflicts: an awfully unequal hierarchy of combat, happening all over again in Cameron’s Britain.

In essence, what I’m saying here is that when de Piero’s poll indicates that a quarter of all our voters would be interested in becoming MPs, it’s not so much because they believe in the system and want to dutifully participate but – rather – precisely because they have come to conclude that the system is inevitably a war.  And this 24 percent is now sufficiently unhappy with sitting passively on the outside looking in, whilst the practising politicians continue to toss fiscal, conceptual and intellectual hand grenades at this poor group or that, that they’re looking to fight back – interestingly enough, even on the terms which the existing system requires – by acquiring their own box of sufficiently inflammable and destructive political weapons.

When the Lib Dems, or indeed you or I, say we’d be interested in becoming an MP, what we’re really admitting to is being mightily fed up of being shot at.

What we’re really admitting to is that we’d much rather get the opportunity to do a bit of shooting back.

And really, what this poll is also beginning to reveal is that considerable support is building here in England for a figurative Second Amendment – in amongst the least likely of places, peoples and parties.

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?

Are politicians landgrabbing areas of human endeavour – and do we need to do something about it?

 corporations, evidence-based professionals, fascism, in a hole, on a high, political innovation, politicians, politicking, politics, Roosevelt  2 Responses »
Nov 172012
 

We’ve been complaining – those of us who do – about a manifest private corporate takeover of democracy.  One of my consistently most-read posts includes Roosevelt’s definition of fascism, a definition I am happy to repeat here:

[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

And those of you who read these pages often will know how unhappy I am about this.  Not primarily because it’s allowing corporate bodies to concentrate wealth to the detriment of a wider society.  No.  That isn’t my primary concern.  My primary concern lies in the dangers for our future intelligence and ingenuity such an inefficient conglomeration of interventions in our democracy will provoke.

That is to say, corporate takeovers of democracy, as per Roosevelt’s definition, are actually more inefficient as far as results and outcomes are concerned.  An example.  I read yesterday in a Spanish online magazine that if the earth’s climate warms by more than four degrees (and to be honest, it really doesn’t matter whether this is Fahrenheit or Centigrade, now does it?), then ninety-five percent of the human species will eventually be wiped out.

Try sorting out that mess of a future with the decision-making processes of a corrupt corporate body, looking only to feather its managerial nests.

We need to be smarter and cleverer in how we organise ourselves, take decisions and operate in the future.  Not less so.  And the fascism which is beginning to reign over us here in Britain, that fascism of Roosevelt, that fascism in both deed and thought, is – above all – a far less efficient way of organising and generating our inspiration than other, rather more inclusive and supportive, systems we could use.

Perhaps, in a sense, it’s not the corporations we need to batter.  Perhaps they do, indeed, do just what we allow them to get away with.  And the truly culpable agents in all of this are those individuals, organisations and institutions which specialise in the dark arts of politicking.  In very few areas of human endeavour are you actually voted for, praised and loved as a result of your innate ability to sell a donkey.  So it is that politicians are as they are – and it seems we need them to continue to be thus – precisely because they lie to us.

It seems to fulfil a deep and profound need.

Thus to the point of today’s post: if we cannot change how politics works, if politics must operate as described above, then maybe we need to reduce politics’ reach.  Maybe we need to begin to identify areas of human organisation and ingenuity which can operate outside government control.

When I say government, I do of course include all those private corporations which use existing and supposedly democratically-elected representatives as mere and pliable extensions of their own marketing and policy-making departments.

Private corporations of which there are now really far too many.

But, as I say, let’s not blame them for doing anything we don’t, through our governments, prevent them from doing.

Let me just ask you this question: in your own role at work, whether the company is large or small, do you you operate under the control of reasonably adequate processes and procedures?  And do people follow in a reasonably faithful way such ways of thinking and doing?  And when such ways of thinking and doing are not followed as they might be, are there issues which colleagues will raise as to why they have not been followed as instructed?

Personally, my experience is that such systems are generally followed and used as a basis for logical organisation and information exchange.  In most areas of human endeavour, we do try and operate as evidence-based professionals.  This doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes or allow our emotions to sometimes take hold.  But it does mean that, generally speaking, such emotions are kept in check by being forced to think rationally and clearly, as well as taking time out to explain our viewpoints sensibly.

Politics, right now, from where I’m sitting, really doesn’t seem at all like that.  Headline politics, I mean.  The stuff right at the top.

The higher up the greasy pole they get, the more illogical they’re forced to become.

So then.  We can’t change politics – it is, in fact, an ancient skillset which no one has managed, or cared, to change through the ages.  But where we can attempt to save the planet from the stupidity of illogical thought is to reduce the impact such red-card activities can have on the organisational and decision-making systems we employ.

We need not just to reduce public-sector government (and by extension its bureaucracy) – we also need to reduce the deadening hand of inefficient exercises of power that private-sector bodies currently demand should be theirs by right.

We need to become more efficient – and we need to become more efficient soon.

That is to say, we cannot deny this need in the face of climate change, population growth and a whole host of other problems out there.

Politics and private-sector bureaucracy have shown us historically how they failed us in the past.  But the 21st century’s challenges are far more serious than those of previous centuries: we know, logically, rationally and scientifically, that something truly unpleasant is on the horizon.  The implications of continued failure are simply too awful to contemplate or condone.

Let us decide, then, as we learn and realise that politicking will never change, to increase the scope of those areas of human endeavour which do think logically, do think in an evidence-based way and do understand the importance of creating systems and environments which allow people of different opinions to share them constructively, hammer out productive agreements and create common foundations for future advances.

A question of mighty distrust

 a con, banking, BBC, News Corp, News International, News of the World, paranoia, police, police state, policed state, politicians, politicking, politics  2 Responses »
Nov 102012
 

Puffles summarises in one tweet tonight what I have been feeling for longer than I can remember:

Puffles (*notes*) the crisis of establishment institutions continues. BBC, politics, banking, newspapers, police…all in a v short time space

Now some of you already know that in 2003 I was almost sectioned for an illness which came over me as a result of the lies told around the Iraq War.  The illness came over me because of other reasons too – but principally it involved me furiously writing a blog where I tried to demonstrate that what the politicians were saying was false.

I failed, and fell quite seriously ill as a result.

I was interviewed by a highly unsympathetic psychiatrist at three o’clock in the morning for about two hours – and condemned myself to a month in hospital through the very words I spouted in those two hours.  I was undoubtedly ill, I can’t deny it; had, indeed, done some very strange thing in the weeks leading up to that moment – but my recovery was so much quicker than my social worker said it would be (she told me I could expect to be able to do no more than two hours a week voluntary activities for months once I got out when in fact I started work almost immediately for a fast-food company on a twenty-hour shift) that although it took a while for me to get my wits together, it did finally become sufficiently self-evident that my savage distrust as exhibited by the diagnosis in question was not entirely due to illness: in massive hindsight there is for me a grand sense that the reality was closer to my perceptions and the illness was a consequence not of seeing falsely but – rather – of seeing all too clearly.

I mention all of this today because what is happening in our society, as Puffles summarises so presciently and accurately, may lead far more of us down similar roads of mighty distrust.  I suspect that it no longer really matters whether Mr Murdoch is doing cartwheels over the latest revelations at the BBC (more here), whilst his own irresponsible leadership disappears over the media event horizon; nor should anyone worry whether Hillsborough and Orgreave will finally get the justice they deserve; nor, even, should we care if Masonic paedophile rings riddle the country or not.  No.  In truth, the wider damage has already been done.  Those of us of a paranoid bent are becoming the commonplace, not the exception.  Those of us who see shadows everywhere are seeing we are right to see them anywhere.

In truth, the reality is that the mighty distrust which in other times was judged ill-founded has become a normalised and common reaction to everyone and everything we perceive.

*

This evening my son was walking home from playing football.  He popped into the local Spar to buy himself some Ben & Jerry’s.  Whilst he was there, a blonde woman of around fifty looked him over in a way which called his attention.  He then left the shop and continued his way home.  At the top end of Caughall Road, near where we live, the lady in question, sitting alongside a man who my son didn’t properly see, stopped her car across the road and offered him a lift.  My son didn’t know her; had never seen her in his life prior to the Spar; couldn’t understand why she should even know where he lived.

A case of potential paedophilia?  My son is seventeen, so I don’t think so.  But I phoned 101, all the same, with the details.  The police also found it quite disconcerting.  They didn’t take my details as there was little detail to report, beyond that the car was green and was driven by a blonde woman in her fifties, but did remark that whilst they would have recognised the pattern if my son had been a child, a couple attempting to pick up a seventeen year old was certainly rather strange.

My family called me paranoid for phoning the police.

Was I?

Surely, in the light of all that’s going down, they should see me as foolishly trusting.

To go to the police in precisely that part of the world where accusations of alleged and historical investigatory reticence have recently surfaced is – you could argue – a sign of madness in itself.

Anyhow.  The broader conclusion we might come to could not really be worse.

In the light of all the terribly uninvestigated things that it would now appear have been taking place over the past forty years, one thing ties all these establishment institutions together: all of them – from politicians, the BBC, News International, the police, banking and the Church to business leaders and organisations various – have committed the same mistake.  Lines of command, where authority breeds an unquestioning allegiance, have proved to have been responsible for rotting our institutions from within – to such an extent, in fact, that the whole bloodied pack of cards is tumbling apart in evil procedural slow-mo … even as they attempt so ineffectively to devise a better truth.

The haemorrhage of good was never so terrible as of late.

In the absence of a true war, we seem to have stumbled across an awful instinct to reproduce the conditions that lead up to civil war.  Only the English, as we know all too well, have such a stiff upper lip that they can but ignore these conditions; they can but ignore the implications.

This is, nevertheless, a war of civil characteristics: a war where people begin to side with their tribes; a war where tribes begin to form like puddles in the park; a park which ends up dramatically flooded by a superstorm; a superstorm which terminates communities as it rapes their sense of trust.

The damage is done – as I said above.

Right and wrong don’t really matter any more.

All that matters is fear.

And a growing – encroaching – violently destructive sense of horrific disbelief in almost all the things we once held dear.

So what if Cameron is prejudiced? Aren’t you?

 David Cameron, gays and lesbians, in a hole, politicians, politicking, politics, prejudice  4 Responses »
Nov 092012
 

This, from Jon Stewart, post-US elections, is very funny – and makes me sad.  Its total enjoyment of the chagrin of evil others really does not bode well for the future of consensus politics.  This is, in fact, politics made war – and, perhaps, as a species, it is all we are capable of.

Contrast it with reactions such as these – “No time for collaboration” – and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, Mr David Cameron has mentioned the words “paedophilia”, “witch-hunts” and “gays” in the same conversation.

This has, of course, provoked reactions of all sorts.

I am, myself, actually inclined to believe Mr Cameron did act out of the very best of intentions.  I do feel, however, that – like so many of the rest of us human beings out here – he unconsciously revealed his deepest prejudices.  Just as as the American left as represented by Jon Stewart so visibly despises the hardline American right for all their lies, obfuscation and manipulatory politics, so Mr Cameron probably despises the British left for all their nit-picking and prejudice-catching instincts.  Yes.  He was probably accurate when he said that gays would come worst off in any such witch-hunt.  How could it be any other way?  We’ve already seen how the disabled, sick and poor are equally at risk of suffering the full weight and heavy-handed politics of the worst government we’ve had in the last forty years.

Gays are no different.  A visible and organised group of people who rightly defend their rights to make a life at what used to be the margin of traditional establishment assumptions about what was right and wrong in human discourse.

Mr Cameron prejudiced?  Absolutely.  After all, aren’t we all?  Did he mean to connect paedophilia, witch-hunts and gays in the same sentence?  Yes and no.  He didn’t mean it to come out as he said it – but under that PR mane of suave communication, and perhaps very very deep down, it’s what he surely believes.

Perhaps despite himself.

For example, I’m sure he and his wife wouldn’t choose for their children a nursery school run and staffed entirely by gays.

Now would you?  And if you wouldn’t, why not?

*

In all this, we’re losing something very precious.  The glorious English right to eccentricity is disappearing over our cultural horizons.  Jimmy Savile and his ilk have done far more to destroy the essence of English freedoms than any New Labour-driven obsession with using the state to prevent child and teenage abuse and deprivation.

The impact that all the above will have on our society will shake its reality to its profoundest foundations.

All because those in power had far too much power.

All because our newspapers decided that money and influence were more important than truth.

All because every one of us is prejudiced beyond belief.

All because – in the end – no one ever knows how to properly avoid compromising their principles.

And in this, this terrible sequence of matters, we’re definitely all in it together.

Accusations of paedophilia: a cry for justice, yes – but what else?

 a con, politicians, politicking, referred anger, sex offenders, sexual abuse  No Responses »
Nov 022012
 

If you’re living in Britain at the moment, it can’t have escaped your notice that paedophilia is the flavour of this generation’s angst.  Or should I say, a previous generation’s angst.

I’ve already posted on one high profile case (as well as the media’s lily-livered reaction to it): the DJ and entertainer, Jimmy Savile.  Tonight, it would appear that the BBC current affairs programme “Newsnight” will – if it doesn’t find itself looking down the barrel of a super-injunction – reveal that a senior politician from the Thatcher era was allegedly involved in similar activities.  What’s more, it would seem that this person is still alive.

The Twitterverse is going pretty barmy with the rumours at the moment, as the Twitterverse tends to do in such matters.  But I do wonder if we shouldn’t take a wider look at what’s happening here.  Over the past few days, I’ve read about 650 instances of abuse in 40 boys’ homes located in North Wales; astonishing allegations of a paedophile ring close to the heart of a previous government; celebrities various arrested and bailed by the London police; and a general and growing sensation of something very ugly.

Paedophilia is most definitely ugly: an attack by the strong and imposing on the most defenceless of all our citizens.  This sudden raft of revelations is clearly a cry for justice: that Jimmy Savile appears to have been so “prolific” is, for example, an undeniable way for an emotionally awful boil of such characteristics to be utterly lanced once and for all.

But bringing to light paedophilia as a crime of previous and supposedly responsible generations also fits another curiously appropriate purpose: that of attributing terrible acts to such generations which, however agile and cunning their political arts under normal circumstances, cannot ultimately escape a finally ignominious fate and vigorous condemnation from their very own offspring – both figurative and literal.

It’s almost a challenge from beyond the grave: these politicians, celebrities and makers and shakers of all characteristics might have managed to conserve their reputations as far as history was concerned – but try and beat this rap if you can.

So if I am right in the psychology of this, even a little, even a mite, where Thatcher and her reputation for Iron Lady could not be properly besmirched by political discourse – essentially because those who supported her saw value in precisely those elements which her opposition so violently criticised her for – they most certainly can be damaged, and perhaps in the near future fatally for Cameron & Co, by such profoundly unsettling allegations about the establishment’s behaviours in the distant but still imposing edifices of the past.

In summary, revealing crimes of paedophilia is a perfect way (whether subconsciously or not) to forcefully hit back once and for all not only at the perceived sexual abuses of a prior generation but also their far more prosaically sociopolitical ones: a perfect way to hit back for those of us who are hurting because of what our parents’ generation has done to this world – a world we are now to do little more than survive in; a perfect way to hit back for those of us who feel society has become a heartless machine – a machine whose humanity is now so very visible by its manifest absence.

____________________

Update to this post: today, November 3rd, Tom Watson has published a terrifying series of observations, on the basis of information only a politician of his integrity is ever in the position of having honest access to.  As he rightly concludes:

I wish I could fight the case of everybody who has been abused by a paedophile who has so far got away with it, but I can’t. That is a job for the police. Up and down the country private grief is being stirred by these stories. I cannot help in each individual case, but the police and support services can, must and will. If you were abused a long time ago and want justice now, go to the police. It is not too late.

What I am going to do personally is to speak out on this extreme case of organised abuse in the highest places. At the core of all child abuse is the abuse of power. The fundamental power of the adult over the child. Wherever this occurs it is an abomination. But these extreme cases are abuse of power by some of the most powerful people. Abuse of trust by some of the most trusted. It is a sickening story, but one which – like the truth about Jimmy Savile – is now going to be told.

I strongly advise you to read his article in full.  As with the hacking scandal, this strikes at the very soul of a very British way of doing things.  Whilst communities were destroyed in the name of distant and abstruse economic policy, these politicians were untouchable.  But even an establishment as powerful and navel-gazing as the British clearly has been – well, it cannot resist forever the tidal wave of ordinary people’s disgust.

Whilst political argument and discourse acted as a barrier to closer examination, there was nothing we could do.

But there always comes a time when good people like Mr Watson get to have their say.

A moment and opportunity to truly re-examine our profoundest and most hurtful memories.

All power to him, then.  All power to the people.

On “post truth” politics

 in a hole, journalism, political beliefs, political chicanery, political dissonance, political DNA, political guerilla warfare, politicians, politicking, politics, trades unions  2 Responses »
Oct 062012
 

Jay Rosen has just tweeted the following blindingly obvious truth – blindingly obvious in that way of certain scientific experiments.  The ones which for centuries lie undiscovered and unproven – only for everyone one week to suddenly stumble across their whys and wherefores.  Rosen’s experiment?  As follows:

It just never occurs to old school reporters that the world could evolve away from them. I don’t mean technology but “post-truth” politics.

Bloody hell.  He’s right.  I remember once reading some declarations by the BBC‘s politics guru Nick Robinson.  When asked why he limited himself to interpreting what politicians said and did, he argued something along these lines: politicians were the makers and shakers in our democracies and therefore deserved all the attention the media – and by extension Robinson himself – gave them.

Thus we get that “he said, she said” school of political reporting.  And thus we sustain the hierarchies that have brought us to the disastrous situation we find ourselves in.

I expressed, in my last post, my unhappiness and disagreement with the general satisfaction – and lack of political ambition – which our elites express of late in relation to our “least worst” democratic institutions, as they currently stand.  I suspect just as Rosen implicitly describes those old school reporters as simply unable to understand that the game our politicians are now playing is that of telling barefaced lies, so we could couch my comments in the post I refer to within an analogous situation.  A political science which describes the needs of society in terms of a set of behaviours generally carried out in good faith is ill-equipped to deal with a generation of out-and-out liars.

An example from my own past: whilst I was working for a large banking corporation, I belonged to a trades union which managed to achieve some pretty damn good things.  Amongst many others, one was a company objective to raise union membership across the group to seventy percent.  To facilitate this, every new employee was given a joining pack with union application forms.

The relationship was anything but that of a sweetheart union.  Business was properly and rightly engineered – behind the scenes, that is, as well as in full view of the membership – with great integrity and coherence on the part of the union itself.

Through the vicissitudes of 2008, however, a takeover became necessary.  The company which emerged from the process in question was anything but pro-union.  Many of the mindsets which had grown up over the years on both sides under the previous regime were lost overnight; not by the union, you understand, but by management.

Sadly, for a while at least, at least in my humble opinion, the union continued to believe that the old ways of collaboration, cooperation and trust were appropriate to a radically different age.  There was still that hope – at least as perceived from outside – that the new management could be made to see the sense of constructive industrial relations.  This didn’t happen – and, as a result, my dear trades union was forced to observe a rolling programme of massive redundancies; in a sense, even, administer it.

It seems to me that such huge shifts in perceptions confuse anyone who must participate in the processes that engender them.  Just as the affected may be trades unions and their members or political scientists and their adherents, so they can just as easily be political parties and their voters.

Or, indeed, as Rosen suggests, old school reporters and their readers.

Sometimes – it’s not a crime, mind – the world and its changes overtake us.  This usually happens when we are unwilling to give up on deep, honourably-held and dearly-acquired beliefs.  This does not happen out of ignorance – quite the opposite.  Wisdom and knowledge allow us to hold out for much longer than perhaps sheer observation would indicate we should – in the hope that awful scenarios from the past are not repeated.  But whilst we give our makers and shakers the benefit of the doubt, and they became cheaters and shakers instead, we lose all opportunity to stem the tide of bad faith that begins to overcome – in front of our very noses – even our most dearly-held institutions and structures.

Can you be clever at politics and stupid at government?

 a con, Coalition, government, New Labour, political guerilla warfare, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, pork-barrel politics, privileged white men, professional politicos  No Responses »
Aug 262012
 

I wonder if this Coalition government of Cameron’s isn’t living proof of and a definitive answer to the question I pose in the title to this post.  It was Paul’s article on the English GCSE smoking gun which got me thinking along these lines.  Especially where he says (the bold is mine):

Broadly, I think James is right to point the finger at Gove for deliberate political interference, but I think that interference may have been (deliberately) more indirect, and therefore deniable, than first supposed.

It seems to me that one of the prime dangers for the left right now – and more widely the buffeted people of this nation – is in overestimating the importance of being good at government for modern political parties to stay in power.

It seems to me, quite anecdotally I have to admit, that politics as a process and tool for the betterment of civilisation has morphed into a quite separate survival kit for those who belong to those self-contained shock-and-awe guerilla units which to date we have learnt to call political parties; which used to be sourced in and served to represent the interests of particular and well-defined sections of society; and which now – in their lily-livered triangulations – only manage to side with what they judge, well beforehand, to be the de facto winners in any and every political outcome.

And whilst New Labour for a while managed to attend stealthily to the needs of the less well-off, even as it preached liberty and freedom for the unnecessarily ostentatious, it’s this sub-Blair Coalition government of eagerly PR-focussed and cleverly Machiavellian types which has come to the final and destructive conclusion that it’s not the legacy you leave behind you, nor even what history says you do – but, rather, in each and every moment, when and who you do it to.

This is, after all, supposedly the grand age of all individualisms.  How fitting, then, that politics should have become a guerilla warfare against its own voters.  The ultimate individualisation of all: that which turns those who cede all power to precious representatives into mere weapons of mass and mutual destruction.

We, as voters, are no longer the point of modern politics.  Neither is good government the aim any longer of all this politicking.  Rather, it’s simply become a battlefield for socially acceptable benefit claimants: scroungers off the state galore who use ourselves, the voters, as their more or less permanent means (lobbing us as they do back and forth) to a more or less permanent set of positions of employment.

Professional politicos – don’t you just love ‘em?  So obsessed with their calling are they that they’ve finally managed to split off the external objective – society’s progress – from their own internal needs.

A mighty purification of interests going on there.

A mighty purification indeed.

And is that sorry sound which I now hear actually yours truly falling into yet another clever trap laid by moneyed white Anglo-Saxon middle-aged men?

Middle-aged men, with their inevitable hands on the levers of power, who want to see the socialising and supportive – which is to say, overtly politicised – state fall into:

  1. a lazy unexamined disrespect; and
  2. a rigorously controlled disuse.

I do hope not.

But I rather suspect so.  Don’t you?

Why dequalifying the professions is a bad move

 politicians, politicking, politics, privileged white men, professional politicos, unclassifiable  1 Response »
Jul 292012
 

Michael Gove and bathwater often go together.  He’s the baby – we should throw him out with it.  Or should we?

Once again, he understandably chooses to bury supposedly bad news on Olympic Friday by announcing teachers no longer need teacher-training qualifications to impart their wisdoms.  The implication being that many citizens out there have wisdoms to impart.  In this he is right.  But dequalifying a profession in order to reach those wisdoms is a very bad move.  In politics, in medicine and in teaching too.

There is a massive difference between knowing something and knowing how to transmit that knowledge to someone else.  I suspect our current millionaire government believes it is in possession of significant gobbets of knowhow the rest of us are somehow missing.  And in my current charitable state, on holiday as I am, I’m quite prepared to admit that they may to an extent be right.  Private-sector business, when run well and intelligently, has much to add to our lives.  But dequalifying that business would not help one little bit – just as doing the same to the public sector is going to bring us sadnesses galore.

What’s also clear is that in their desire to dequalify that public sector, this government and Mr Gove in particular demonstrate clearly exactly why we need trained teachers: whilst he may be right in saying we need to allow everyone to be a teacher in some way or other, he himself is showing how difficult such a role is – especially when training is not a part of the mix.  The lesson he’s trying to transmit to us, interesting as I’ve already admitted it might be, is getting lost in his very personal inability to communicate effectively, openly and honestly with his “pupils”.

Gove is using the 21st century equivalent of the cane to move a society brought up in democracy.  What’s more, he’s caning his victims behind the closed doors of Olympic Friday.  That’s not a good example of teaching but a bad example of bullying.

And whilst we do need more plurality and inclusiveness in teaching – in such a profession we will never have enough – we certainly don’t need more incompetence.  If the government accurately represents a majority in society, and there is a feeling out there as yet unbidden that the current system of qualifications makes it impossible for more interesting people to be able to share their experiences with pupils, students and learners, surely what we need to re-examine is the system of qualifications itself – not ditch it entirely as something of little use any more.

As a final thought, I would even be inclined to wonder whether it wouldn’t be a good idea – as already mentioned on these pages – to properly qualify and professionalise the job and role of politicians.

In fact, perhaps the desire to dequalify existing professions has something to do with the rough, tumble and stupidity of latterday politicking.  If I am right in my thesis, those who practise without proper certification in our 21st century democracies are bound to fear any wider movement in society to maintain and expand such systems of training (systems we might argue they are manifestly dismantling to facilitate in part their corporate sponsors). If an inability to properly carry out a political role in modern government is the current qualification, no wonder this crop of politicos wishes to do away with any move towards tests, training and exams for adult practitioners of the “dark arts” of any profession.

For one day, you never know, such an expansion of democratic knowhow could even lead to our leaders being fit for their responsibilities.

And that, surely, at least for people like Mr Gove, would never do.

Now would it?

What if prejudice quite correctly is the stuff of politics?

 conversational politics, evidence-based blogging, evidence-based professionals, in a hole, political innovation, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, prejudice  No Responses »
Jun 272012
 

Chris concludes his post today in the following damning and depressing way:

[...] Miliband says, correctly, that Labour became “disconnected from the concerns of working people.” This is not just a political problem but an individual one for those of use who jumped through the Govean hoops of “rigour”: we become socially isolated, geeks, weirdos and nerds. Academic success has big drawbacks.

It could, then, be that the costs of rigour outweigh the benefits.

If I understand the implications correctly of his conclusion, academia and politics simply don’t mix.  Academia is for a world where evidence is valued.  But the problem politics has with such an approach – quite at the margin of whether we should trust our current leaders and give them the benefit of the doubt in what they do – is that most ordinary people don’t seem to value evidence at all.  In much the same way, in fact, as most political actors in charge – who don’t seem to either these days.

I’ve recently had occasion to criticise politicians for being medieval (more on the greasy-pole theorem here), but Chris’s piece today makes me wonder if I’m being unfair.  What if politicians are right to use prejudice to move the mountains of voters?  What if nations cannot be usefully moved in any other way?  What if we are condemned to a society and civilisation where “the concerns of working people” unhappily equal attitudes constructed on the sands of prejudice instead of solid opinions based on the realities of careful study?

If – as members of political movements, as promoters of evidence-based social and mainstream media and as thoughtful people in general – we are foolishly swimming against an ultimately unstoppable tide, perhaps it is time we admitted that voters are on the whole not scientists, researchers nor PhD students – and prejudice-based politicians who intuitively press our buttons know far more about the business of politics than we, in our white plastic towers of iPads and connected gadgets various, will ever know.

It’s a saddening thought though, isn’t it?  A saddening thought.

____________________

Further reading: a couple of websites which have come my way recently and which attempt to inject evidence and objective information into the hackneyed debates of politics.  First, Political Innovation‘s new project Who Funds You?: a sharp attempt to make absolutely clear which political and business ideologues are funding which allegedly – and in some cases superficially – even-handed think tanks.  Second, a new blog from Andrew which looks at how an overarching superstructure of attitudes, behaviours and hows might inform any British government, whatever the political inclination.

The Greasy-Pole Theorem (or more on professionalising politics)

 doctors, education, evidence-based professionals, laws, lawyers, medicine, medieval mind, politicians, politicking, politics, science, sorted, teachers, teaching, trained lawyers, training  1 Response »
Jun 182012
 

Yesterday, I suggested that politicians – as opposed to evidence-based professionals like lawyers, doctors, scientists and educators – really were anchored in medieval times:

[...] those times when lords did their lording over serfs who did their kneeling; where people occupied castes which knew their place; and where every attempt at social mobility involved a threat against the integrity of the status quo.

I also concluded that:

Even as doctors, lawyers, scientists and educators have left behind them the dark and dreary miseries of medieval imposition and woodentop thought, politicians continue to believe in top-down hierarchies, in pyramidal politics, in tribal loyalties, in conditional relationships of all kinds … essentially, in the pursuit of a grand largesse where you get ahead only as far as birth allows you to; where you get ahead only as far as money defines is permissible.

Now I realise, in retrospect, that I was perhaps using a rather broad brush when I painted all politicians as medieval throwbacks.  So here’s a gentle – and I hope reasonable – qualification of my original thesis: the higher up the greasy pole of power a politician gets, the more medieval his or her behaviours become.

Medieval in the sense I describe above.  Or, alternatively, just as constructively, medieval in the sense of a persistent and resilient plague.

So not all by any means.  Just those who exert power and count.

Does that sit more nicely?

Of course it doesn’t.  And those of you who are practising politicians will resent my casting aspersions on a whole profession – especially in times of terrible crisis.  “It doesn’t help one bit!” you will exclaim.  “It’s unfair, unjust and totally unhelpful to be describing the vast majority of good professionals in terms of the awful ones at the top.”

But that’s the problem, isn’t it?  When we talk of professional classes such as doctors or educators, we’re talking about roles where training periods can be between one and seven or more years.  And whilst this training is taking place, performance, attitude and behaviours are all measured and tested so that the individuals under the microscope of improvement understand exactly what is expected of them – before they go out and practise.

Where is the training-ground of politicians?  Local government politics perhaps?  On the job, most certainly.  My experience at parish-councillor level is depressing.  Most significant decisions were taken (or not, as the case may be) on firmly partisan lines.  No real thought going on there; no careful analysis of what was really needed.  Just small people acting out of personal prejudice – and things they’d picked up from the papers.

Multiply this experience up a thousandfold and what happens?  The more you get these politicians moving out of their comfort zones, the less they are likely to use data to guide them.  Instinct, impulse and hunch rear their ugly heads.  Which is when we get the plague of the greasy-pole theorem I mentioned above.

If politicians truly want to be treated on the same level as other professional classes, they must want to show the rest of us they are prepared to be trained, channelled, instructed and measured in the same evidence-based ways as those they would aspire to rule.  And they must also show, as lawyers, scientists, educators and the medical profession do most days of the week, that their vocation and goal in life is to be what they train to become.

For far too many voters, there is a perception that political activity is a simple springboard – on the backs of ordinary people’s interests – to better and materially more satisfying things.

What do I suggest, then, we require of our political class before they can begin to enable our societies?  A very short list made up of the following two items:

  1. proper and professionally couched training and study as a minimum requirement before any formal political activity which involved representing others can be countenanced; and
  2. a firm and indissoluble promise to never exercise any other profession or activity on the back of one’s political history

Would that do us?

Does that seem reasonable?

What, as a chastened voter, would you think of such changes?

And would you have any other items you’d like to add to the list?

Is God – as a hierarchical model – our only workable alternative?

 God, politicking, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 092012
 

I ask this question in the light of the Queen’s Speech today.  It seems to me – as I pointed out yesterday – that our government is made up of professional incompetents; and so I then wonder what this might be due to.  Is it perhaps that our democracy isn’t the best tool for choosing leaders?  Is it that stuffing politics full of business-world wannabes means you get the dross of what might have been – not the promise of the best?  (Those who can, do; those who can’t, do politics perhaps …)  Is it, even, that our pyramid politics – fashioned as it is on the frameworks and hierarchical structures which latterday big business uses everywhere – is simply inappropriate for a world where grassroots organisation appears to be taking over in so many sectors?

Or is it that the vacuum left behind, in the absence of a more traditional religion (that thought which underpinned Western behaviours for such a long time), has been filled with a foolish and empty-headed political activity where those who act believe that what they do will literally reshape our worlds?

For there was a time in Western society when religion provided the excuse for almost any stupidity.  Such behaviours are still visible in parts of the world: even in Europe, for example, where the Breiviks of our supposed civilisation are just the evil and visible tip of a mostly hidden fascist iceberg which alleges our worldly problems are due to an invasion of Islamic fundamentalism.

So religion is a get-out clause many people continue to freely use.

But it doesn’t bind us in quite the same tribal way as it used to.

Politics, on the other hand, does seem to be developing so.  From the US Tea Party enthusiasts to the Spanish 15-M grouping, a vigorous sequence of movements does appear to be rising from the ashes of a more religious attachment.

Is politics in the process of being hijacked, then, by those who cleverly perceive the inability of modern religion to be that opiate of the people any longer?  As a kind of interface between on the one hand the consumerism that distracts us from the realities of life and on the other those selfsame realities, perhaps politics is becoming a substitute for believing in higher things.

Maybe politics has become a prosaic representation of what God used to be: something we can curse in bad times, pray to in good, genuflect in front of when we find ourselves suppliers of this minister or that … that is to say, where all thinking peoples used to blame the incompetence of belief systems various, we now have the option to interpret all our ills in the light of political practice almost everywhere.

Has politics replaced religion as the cause of our ills – or does it simply serve, as a lightning-rod might, to conduct our ever-growing – often directionless – ire?

And if politics is indeed the cause and not simply the symptom, how can we ensure that society manages to organise itself more efficiently?

Do we need to flatten the towering hierarchies that impose themselves on our organisational structures?  Do we need to share responsibilities intelligently in order that decisions are made more collaboratively?

Or do we simply have to allow our economies and body politics to lurch from clever top-heavy individuals to clever top-heavy individuals – in a sense, accepting that God as our hierarchical model is the only workable alternative?

Sustainable politics, anyone?

 Ed Miliband, party politics, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, professional politicos, Psycho, pyramid politics, sorted  No Responses »
May 052012
 

One of our biggest battles, as we try and think our way out of the mess that New Labour left behind it, is understand and accept exactly that it was pyramid politics itself which became the cause of our problems rather than their solution.

As Adam Bienkov, writing for New Statesman, says of Ken Livingstone today (the bold is mine):

The problem was not Ken’s agenda, but the fact that it was Ken calling for that agenda. The sad truth is that after 41 years in London politics, too many Londoners have simply stopped listening to him. Every politician has a shelf life, a point where voters look at them and coldly decide to give another product a go. For Ken that happened in 2008 and he has spent the past four years failing to come to terms with it.

Now, whilst I’m inclined to agree Bienkov is right in what he says, I’m also inclined to believe he doesn’t have to be right in what he says.

Let me explain.

In the light of the economic crises which have destroyed the standards of living of the vast majority of citizens, we thrash and flail around as we attempt to invent and fashion the idea of a sustainable economics: the sort of thing which doesn’t Big Bang its way onto our horizons, only to contract when we least expect it just as suddenly from our grasps.  No.  Something less dramatic seems to be the tenor of our latterday discourses: something which grows sensibly, sustainably, in accordance with and respectful of the environments we are obliged to operate inside.

A sustainable economics, then, where top people aren’t so top and bottom people aren’t so bottom; where creativity and leadership are allowed to flower at every level; where, indeed, the levels flatten and become as close to a single hierarchy as is practically and sensibly possible.

In times of crisis, we look for such solutions.  Only in times of relative success do we ignore the consistent need for sustainability.

So if we translate this desire to political science, could we contemplate the possibility of a sustainable politics?

Not one based on that Darwinian slant of dog eat dog in unending conflict.  Rather, where modern commercial virtues such as collaboration and teamwork came to the fore of all political activity.

A while ago, I suggested Ed Miliband might be looking for this – even as he tried to negotiate our way out of the bind New Labour had dropped us in; and even as most of us managed to misunderstand those instincts.

In reality, I think, if I interpret them rightly, his instincts are pretty true for a 21st century context.  Both big business and current political practice are still unhappily engineered – at least in part – on the basis of an age-old history of kings, queens, serfs and servants.

What we need now, on the other quite different hand, is a new and sustainable politicking based on the far more democratic ideals of a republic of the voters.

Politicos, Facebook chats, eurocitizens and ACTA

 ACTA, Europe, European Parliament, European Union, eurozone, Facebook, in a hole, politicians, politicking, politics  No Responses »
Apr 262012
 

I am mightily confused by what I’ve just seen missed.  I installed the European Union’s Facebook chat app as per my previous post, and waited for something to happen.  I did this at 13.30 BST, because I’d understood from previous information that the chat was timed for 14.30 CET.  Nothing happened at 13.30 BST – so I waited till the following hour came round at 14.30 BST.  This time the chat was working (Facebook access required), and as I scrolled down the already 300 comments, most of which obviously hadn’t been answered, I readied my observations and questions to be launched into the maelstrom of what seemed like generally unhappy people.

This is what I would have said, had the chat lasted the scheduled hour and I’d had a chance to make my eurovoice heard:

  1. in the negotiation of ACTA, process has been obscure, flawed and anti-democratic since the start;
  2. discussion is OK, listening  is better, consultation is very good – but best of all is involvement from the outset;
  3. the real question for me is not whether we can sort out what was originally an offline problem of counterfeiting and piracy – and which will continue to exist even if the Internet is effectively shut down – but, rather, whether the Internet in the future is to be a public municipal space of the voters or an evermore commercially-oriented private space of public use;

If ACTA and its unhappy sons and daughters are to gain any kind of democratic approval, they need to show they are aware of the implications of all the above and are able to rectify properly the manifest failures committed to date, before – and not after, at some specious “next time round” – the European Parliament consents to passing the treaty.

Which is to say process must be clear; real public involvement must exist from the beginning; and the virtual commons we are proposing must start from the idea of a municipality of empowered and communicating citizens – a public space, that is, instead of a base tool to help a particular kind of capitalism (a model which, incidentally, has demonstrably failed us) gain further footholds in modern commerce.

This, meanwhile, is what Mr Schulz had to say on the subject of that selfsame process and ACTA’s transparency.  To this question …

Good afternoon Mr. President. How can I trust politicians when I have to learn about the ACTA agreement thru WIKILEAKS ?

… he answered thus:

[...] Trust me, the whole debate in the EP was completely open during the whole process. And the necessary steps to make it public and transparent was made by the European Parliament. Wiki leaks may also have played a role.

Was the debate really as open as it should’ve been?  Really?

Are we really trying to say this wasn’t set up as a rubber-stamping operation, where individual sovereign parliaments were picked off one by one in order to create an overwhelming momentum?  A momentum, what’s more, which was finally, and perhaps surprisingly, stopped in its tracks by over two million citizens’ signatures conveying a massive message of democratic resistance to secret treaty-making anywhere and everywhere.

This, after all, is ultimately all about people’s access to 21st century utilities – the basic tools we need to live in modern life.

My last observation then?  Follow Bill Gates’s advice: sort out the real world first before you multiply it up into the virtual.

ACTA doesn’t do that at all.

Democracy requires that it must.

And we, as voters and participants in that democracy, need people like Mr Schulz to say far more interesting things about the importance of democratic engagement and the virtual commons than he has managed to let out of the bag today.

Politicians with backbone or voters with powers?

 Labour Uncut, lobbyists, on a high, open government, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics  No Responses »
Apr 202012
 

Kevin suggests that what the lobbying scandals need are an improved political class.  He writes interestingly when he says:

The correct place to start is to recognise that most MPs – in all parties – are pretty straight. Let’s encourage them to know their own minds a bit more. And let’s provide them with proper independent policy support to help them formulate their own positions on the key issues.

One observation before we continue: whilst I agree that most MPs are likely to be straight, I am inclined also to believe that the higher up the greasy pole they get, the less straight they become.  This is a serious issue, of course, because the higher up they are, the more disproportionate their influences.

Anyhow.  Kevin continues to write interestingly when he concludes the following (the bold is mine):

The conspiracy theorists and gesture politics mob who want to choke-off lobbying will simply fail to do so if ministers come forward with weak measures, or we will see our democracy asphyxiated if they come forward with clumsy, catch-all ones.

But let’s use this moment to change politics as much as lobbying. Unless we beef-up our MPs’ ability to shape the policy agenda, rather be shaped by lobbyists of whatever hue, we will have missed a trick.

And the bottom feeders of the lobbying world will get away scot-free when this latest, predictable and toothless attempt to clean-up the industry fails to do just that.

I said much the same thing when I suggested the following recently, with respect to the related subject of party political funding and PR.  Which is precisely why I argued in favour of a system whereby customers of companies could decide whether to make a purchase on the basis of a traffic-light labelling system which explained how much an organisation was spending on funding and PR per political party.  In fact, I expanded on the theme in another post the other day on the subject of a US site called sopatrack.com.  Here, tools which scrape publicly available data help determine which US congressmen and women vote “with the money” – money the wider constituents of the American Congress may raise for their own, often grubby, purposes.

The virtues of the above two ideas?  Both of them give back to the voters the knowledge that translates into power – without requiring the current political class to change, a priori, its behaviours.  The only legislation we would actually need would be freedom of information powers to access the necessary datasets where access did not currently exist.  Not a small order, I do have to accept – but far easier an order to define and delimit than the diffuse desire to do something about political corruption.

So whilst Kevin is right – we do need a political class with more backbone (which, as he rightly points out, does imply independent means to study  matters of modern import accurately and objectively) – the constituency he misses out of the equation, the voters themselves, also needs a greater capacity to oversee what’s going on.

And the tools I mention above, providing not a political straitjacket but rather constructive carrots and sticks, could achieve just that.

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