politics » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

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.

Is politics a form of abuse?

a con, abuse, Obama, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations No Responses »

Dec 152012

I have this love-hate relationship with politics. I love that it sometimes seems to be able to enable the best in us. President Obama, as a traditional politician, was certainly there up with the greatest last night in the terrible news coming out of Connecticut. There is nothing more we can say, nothing more we can usefully contribute, as simple observers looking from the outside in on a singular nation’s tragedy.

But we can share the grief at such horrors – even at a distance.

For none of us are innocent any more.

Europe suffered the same unassailable anger and the same malaise last year in Norway.

During the conflict in the ex-Yugoslavia, violent people with cruel weapons did similar things to other innocents.

So in President Obama, in that traditional politician at the top of the organisational pyramid that is the US system of government, we saw yesterday the true worth of such politics: the ability to encapsulate and crystallise the needs of a moment.

To say the right thing.

No.

Not the right thing.

The caring thing.

This, then, is when I love politics. Out of the awful ashes of terrible suffering we truly wonder, at the very least occasionally, as when a smile of a beautiful person captures our touching and ever-so-momentary gaze, whether a better world really can’t await us.

Whether a better world might be within our grasp.

If only we knew how to engineer it.

Not that anyone, even President Obama, can explain how we might achieve that. But to give us hope that some people want it as much as we do is surely a grand achievement in times like these.

I still can’t help feeling, however, that – mostly – politics is actually a form of abuse. Imagine, if you will, the kind of husband who beats up his wife. There are many ways of beating someone up, mind: sometimes physically; sometimes with words; sometimes by retaining resources so that life becomes a terrible burden and battle to get to the end of the month.

And politics, more and more in the recent past, seems to mimic these behaviours.

An example: well-meaning people like to say that you need to get involved in politics, whether you like it or not – because even if you choose not to do politics, politics will still choose to do you.

You have no alternative. You really don’t. You must play the game according to the professionals’ rules – even as by so doing you find yourself at an amateur disadvantage.

Sound at all familiar? Like that beaten-up wife? “Should I stay? Should I go? Will he take my kids away from me? Is it my fault? Is it theirs? Could it actually be his?”

And in our love-hate relationship with politics we see a similar dynamic taking place.

Politics an example of how power abuses the people? I think so. This is abuse at state-sanctioned and industrial levels. This is the kind of domestic violence so prevalent we don’t even perceive it as such.

Where the politician beats up on the voter and the voter beats up on their spouse and the spouse beats up on the kids and the kids beat up on the dog.

The parallels are sadly similar, you know.

Think about it carefully.

When someone makes a habit of hurting people for their own good, and even goes on to say that there is no alternative … well, this is precisely when we have an environment of oppression designed, most exactly, to make us knuckle down against our much better instincts.

No alternative to politics?

Are you really telling me there’s only going to be one way to organise the masses in what we might care to term a fruitful consonance and industry?

Updating and maintenance

maintenance, politics, unclassifiable, updating, Wordpress 1 Response »

Dec 142012

I love WordPress to bits – but one thing I don’t like is its updating process. When a new version comes along, you’re immediately urged to “Please update now” – and then you are faced with the knowledge that they also cover themselves (not always in glory) with exhortations to first make back-ups of files and stuff. Doesn’t really infuse one with confidence – especially when you’re a non-techie sort of person as myself.

It’s almost as if you have to take your life in your hands; almost as if you have to do so unnecessarily.

Perhaps, in that sense, WordPress is like life itself. Sometimes, in life, you have to take that risk. You have to run the risks of an update.

Anyhow. Two are now due. One is the theme I use: Suffusion. Lovely piece of work, but I guess it’s time to make sure I can take advantage of stuff the market seems to be demanding – responsive technologies and stuff like that.

The other is WordPress itself. I’ll be updating the theme first, and then updating our life-risking WordPress.

If I disappear from your screens this weekend, this’ll be the only reason.

By the by, I’m a little sad at the moment. You may have sensed this. I was with my MP this morning in relation to the work done recently by the Joint Committee on the Communications Data bill – a committee on which he sat. I wrote about the whys and wherefores of this appointment yesterday on my site http://error451.me.

The meeting was OK, cordial and reasonably informative, but I did get the impression that Internet freedoms and their importance for our future ingenuity, imagination, creativity and human industry are not sufficiently recognised in Parliament – not even by those who worked on the Joint Committee in question.

Legislation creep will take place.

The same old reasons to make the state more oppressive – paedophiles, terrorists, the violent and the criminal – will continue to be trotted out by those who are terrified of devolving to communities the powers they would need in order to run themselves. And so, just as with those wars on terror, the criminal elements will have succeeded in imposing the law of the jungle on our democracies.

Nothing updated – everything maintained.

Life in the spheres of casual and short-term power continues as always.

One point that my MP made – and I’m sure he won’t mind me mentioning it here – was that it was a good experience for him to have the opportunity of working on one subject over a period of six months. So much of the job of an MP involves being here or there for ten or fifteen minutes. Being able to get one’s teeth into something is surely what drives humans to better things.

Perhaps too much of our politics is superficially so.

Perhaps too much of the power that the powerful exert is made of such experiences.

If only we could create a society which was able to reflect on, and consider with the due thoughtfulness we know we are capable of, our shared human condition. Instead of serving more and more to reflect our least attractive sides.

I unhappily tweeted this thought today:

@itiddly All I see is as a society we demand of our children virtues & ways of being that we refuse to demand of our adults. S’thing’s wrong

When a child’s rite of passage becomes that shabby discovery that their duty as an adult is to renege on everything they were taught in their youth is when we realise our society is much sicker than it ever was.

Yes. Our politicians are often well-meaning – but so much gets lost by those who mean well; so much, in fact, has already been lost.

An example. Ed Miliband has just spoken of the need to integrate non-English speakers into an English-speaking environment, especially where this allows a society to create a single sense of purposeful nation. I wonder how he imagines this might happen in a society where the disabled, the working-poor, the sick and the unemployed English speakers who already live in our country find it impossible to find the integration they deserve. If we can’t properly integrate those who were clearly born here, how can we possibly contemplate that integration he probably rightly proclaims we need for those who wish to come and live here?

And if we cannot even sustain the moral link between youth and adulthood – the cogent and coherent seamlessness that should lead us to build on solid foundations rather than throw away every lesson that every adult tries, a least for a while, to inculcate in their offspring – what serious hope do we have of creating a single society capable of answering the needs of everyone?

My MP is a privileged man – and I think it would be fair to say is unlikely to see too clearly beyond this privilege. I can understand this; if I was in his position I would think the same.

Mr Miliband, meanwhile, is a child of immigration – that he has been able to climb the greasy pole practically to the top means it is hardly surprising he should feel all visitors who cross our borders and wish to make their homes here might go through the same integrating process he surely observed in his own home.

But, in a sense, Mr Miliband is as privileged as my MP.

Neither offers me more than a retread of very old battles.

Neither seems interested in truly updating our politics.

Neither seems interested in doing anything beyond a certain maintenance of a certain status quo.

Isn’t it time we all decided that the events which have brought us to where we are right now actually require us to do a WordPress? Take a risk; see how it pans out; look to make some really game-changing plays.

Take those challenges. Take those deep breaths. Take those perhaps irreversible steps forwards.

We need those moves.

We need to do something radical.

We need to take our lives in our hands.

Because if we don’t, I suspect that by those very same hands – and as a species which once knew what a shared progress really meant – we will end up taking far too many lives of those we should otherwise have nurtured.

Too many lives which deserved much more – and much better – than this mess we still choose to permit.

For just once in our lives, can we focus on what we need?

in a hole, mainstream media, music video, new media, news-gathering, newspapers, politics No Responses »

Dec 072012

http://youtu.be/1vxVyaYuGYE

The news seems to be an unremitting swirl of contradictory forces at the moment. And that “at the moment” seems to have been going on for ages. Whilst newspapers can regulate themselves, Twitter users must face prison and massive fines imposed from without the community itself; whilst freedoms and privacies belong to the rich, the very innermost thoughts of our emails and electronic communications are shortly to belong – if they do not already – to those who govern us and supposedly serve us.

And then we have bankers from the financial services sector who continue to earn bonuses whilst the poor lose their jobs or their houses; whilst the poor who work can no longer afford to live where their jobs demand they must; whilst those in a job become the working-poor.

Hardly a day goes by, in fact, when some item or other of contradictory news doesn’t pull us this way and that in our wearisome fight to fix and fasten a clear agenda to our lives. It’s almost as if those who run the media – and by that, I don’t mean the journalists themselves – are looking to deliberately bemuse, bamboozle and confuse with a surfeit of data, half-truths and – more often than not – downright lies.

So here’s a suggestion. For just once in our lives, can we focus on what we need? For just once in our lives, can we decide to define ourselves in terms of what we want? Can we stop being horrified by this terrible act or that and – instead – aim to inscribe ourselves with the perspicacity of the firm?

We need that certainty, for sure. If we continue to allow ourselves to be buffeted to and fro by these terribly specific and detailed mini-storms of contention, we will be totally unable to understand any bigger picture – we will be totally unable to act.

Yes. It’s important to bear witness to each and every pain out there. Someone must do this job. But if you live your life through the emanations of every screaming angel of dark foreboding, you will become as incapacitated as any human being ever can be.

We need, above all, to focus on what we need. We need to focus on what democracy needs, what our society needs, what our wider 21st century civilisation needs:

Freedom to express one’s opinions, above all.
A collaborative space – call it our body politic, if you must – to allow such opinions thus freely expressed to encounter and engage with the opinions of others.
A legal system which allows any disputes thus caused to be judiciously decided upon to the satisfaction of all egalitarian parties.
An education system which creates an environment of society, support, innovation, creativity, imagination, technology, implementation and sustainability.
Welfare and health systems which give to those who are most vulnerable without attaching any blame.
A system of commerce which recognises achievement accurately and rewards the “hows” of good business just as much as it does its “whats”.
A wider culture of communication and relationships which encourages and engenders respect, humanity, humour and goodwill.

And how have I come about the above seven items? One for each day of the week, perhaps? Or are they, in some way, exactly what I fear our most recent three decades of political and sociocultural endeavour have aimed finally to excise from what we used to call the United Kingdom?

When put to music, my plea sounds so very easy.

When put into practice, my plea becomes so very vain.

I’d rather we thought of music and how its mathematical perfection shows us just how well human beings can work in harmony – at least, when they are driven in some way, and for whatever reason, to do so. So here, to finish, is some more music. Music which came my way via Paul on Google+ the other day. Music which settles the politically disintegrating soul.

http://youtu.be/Lt7KcHvwb2c

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?

“Credible” vs “true”: this – yes, this! – is what’s destroying us

a con, politics, Stumbling and Mumbling, trip switch of truth, Truth-O-Meter No Responses »

Nov 182012

Chris draws our attention to this forty-year-old quote:

[...] What Richard Sennett wrote almost 40 years ago is perhaps as true now as it was then:

A political leader running for office is spoken of as “credible” or “legitimate” in terms of what kind of man he is, rather than in terms of the actions or programmes he espouses. The obsession with persons at the expense of more impersonal social relations is like a filter which discolours our rational understanding of society; it obscures the continuing importance of class in advanced industrial society. (The Fall of Public Man, p4)

And so it is our politics is declining in terms of both the public acceptance and moral high ground it can reclaim for itself. The job of a politician isn’t to tell – or operate with – the truth. The job of a politician is to be believable. It may even be the case that the politician believes him- or herself when they declaim and proclaim their gobbets of wisdom. Self-confusion, self-delusion, self-deception … well, they’re not uncommon skillsets these days – perhaps, indeed, not uncommon in many fields of human endeavour.

Credibility involves making out you know what you’re talking about. Truth only comes from the rarest of qualities: that of choosing to pursue doggedly the profoundest essence of an issue – no matter your tribal loyalties; no matter your preconceptions; no matter your instincts to want to win a consequential battle; no matter your fear of losing terrible face.

Our society really does not put much of a premium on truth, because truth involves putting oneself – one’s ego, in fact – completely aside in a selfless impulse to do what’s often painful. Whilst credibility, constructed – as Chris so rightly points out – from so many class-based trinkets, bolt-ons and add-ons (clothes, accessories, cars, parking places, gadgets, company positions, hairstyles and skin types) can, actually, be purchased with a modicum of wealth quite easily.

Simply put, credibility can be faked whilst truth will never be so.

And that is why our public sphere has begun to fall so awfully in on itself.

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.

On voting

crime, democracy, outsourcing, police, politics, privatisation, unclassifiable 1 Response »

Nov 152012

Today, we have the opportunity to vote. I’ll be voting for our Labour candidate in the Police and Crime Commissioner’s election. I don’t know much about the role and I’m not sure many do. Though I did tweet last night the following thought:

How can you be a police *and* crime commissioner? Surely oversight of one precludes involvement in the other. Should be two separate people.

It does seem to me that the whole role itself is fatally compromised from the beginning.

And if you think this means the vote today isn’t important, I’d refer you back to a post I wrote back in June on the experience other countries have had of different ways of managing crime control. It’s pretty horrifying, I have to say.

Anyhow, just so that you know – those of us who live in Cheshire – this excerpt from an email I received from 38 Degrees yesterday gave the responses to a number of key questions of all the candidates up for the job. Firstly, 38 Degrees’ introduction to their own very focussed interests:

Here’s what the Cheshire candidates said to 38 Degrees members about privatisation. Not all of them have given a clear answer about privatisation, some have made a distinction between “back office” and “frontline” privatisation. Others have said they won’t privatise but may consider outsourcing – having a private company take over some parts of the work that police forces do.

Now the candidates’ replies to some relevant questions:

Ainsley Arnold (LibDems):

I am firmly committed to policing being undertaken by Police Officers.

The Police and Crime Commissioner is replacing the police authority and it will be that person who will formulate the policing plan and hold the Chief Constable to account over policing performance in Cheshire and set the budget.

Companies like G4S have demonstrated that they are incapable of running of services efficiently, so I would strongly resist any initiative that I considered would be to the detriment of Cheshire Policing.

To answer your final question I have no connection with any company that would be interested in police contracts.

As a past Vice Chairman of the Police Authority I am acutely aware of the excellent work our police officers do in keeping Cheshire a safe place for us all to live, and if elected I want to ensure that our police officers are fully supported in their roles.

John Dwyer (Conservatives):

No response forwared to office

John Stockton (Labour):

I will not be allowing the further expansion of private sector contracts in Cheshire Police (currently 9% of budget is spent in private sector – I will be looking to return these contracts to the public or voluntary sector, where I can). I will not let companies like G4S become involved in Cheshire policing. I have no connection to any private sector companies interested in police contracts.

Louise Bours (UKIP):

No candidate can make ‘promises’ regarding budgetary commitments, if they did they would be disingenuous – this is a new role, completely uncharted waters, the entire scope of the Commissioner will only be revealed to the successful candidate, however, considering the recent Olympics fiasco created by G4S, I would be amazed if anyone considered privatizing any aspect of the police service. I believe G4S lost several prison contracts just yesterday.

I can confirm that neither I nor any members of my family, have any connection to any kind of company who would seek tender for any service already provided by the constabular

Sarah Flannery (Independent):

1. Privatisation of Cheshire police services.

I don’t think that private sector expertise, in and of itself, is negative. In some instances such as technology it makes sense to look at the best that is available and utilise it where there are clear benefits for public safety. There are also many examples I can think of, such as victim support, where commissioning services from outside the police service could be of benefit.

That said, I am implacably opposed to privatisation by stealth. I believe in our public services. I want to support their development, their value for money, and our confidence in their ability to deliver successful delivery of results.

So my first response will always be to consider how they can evolve and develop, using private/community/voluntary/third sector involvement only where I believe it can accelerate best practice.

In those instances I would make the commissioning process as clear and transparent as possible and seek to commission any such work or services from within Cheshire if possible to benefit the local economy and community cohesion.

I can also promise that I will never allow profitability to compromise public safety.

2. Will you allow companies such as G4S to be involved in running Cheshire police?

My remit as PCC is to be democratically responsible for the strategic direction of the Cheshire Police force. In all of my campaigning, I have not witnessed any desire that companies such as G4S be involved and, as the voice of the people, I will respect the wishes of the people. The Chief Constable retains responsibility for all operational running of the Cheshire Police force.

3 Do you have any connection to companies which may be interested in police contracts?

No, neither I nor any members of my family have ever had any connection to companies that have, or may have, an interest in police contracts.

It’s notable, I think, given the current anti-democratic climate of this government, that the Tory candidate couldn’t find the time to reply.

Come to your own conclusions. I’ve come to mine. And don’t vote in these elections on the basis of giving the Coalition a kicking. That would hardly be in the democratic spirit we should be entertaining.

Though it might make some of us feel less unhappy at the end of the count.

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.

A shame Obama did have to win

in a hole, Mitt Romney, Obama, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations, USA No Responses »

Nov 072012

This isn’t democracy – it’s medieval kingmaking.

In fact, I don’t think we’ve ever had democracy as it could have been. And they say Romney was so gracious in defeat.

Judge for yourselves.

I felt it was reasonably measured, even if coded in many things I – as a simple Brit looking aghast from afar – find it impossible to understand.

But what really disappoints me this evening as I cogitate is the following pair of statistics which flashed past my eyes this morning from somewhere: whilst Romney spent around $800 million on his campaign plus Super PAC money, Obama is said to have spent just under $1 billion. That is to say, total spending in this single campaign for President of the United States was more than $2 billion.

Democracy – where not kingmaking – is a damn expensive business.

So money, in the end, won the race. But was that the war or just the battle? Does anything ever change? Will the dangerously offbeam finally sit back on their heels and give in to the sensibilities of the majority?

Well. Tonight, I also received an email from the Weekly Standard marketing newsletter. The Weekly Standard is a very right-wing US publication. For some reason, it’s been bombarding me with exhortations from the Romney camp to vote the right way all through the election.

I obviously neglected – once upon a time – to tick the right box when I signed up to something else.

The content of the email in question was titled thus:

Obama Won. The war continues.

And it proceeded thus:

Fellow Conservative,

Last night, President Obama won reelection. This is a devastating blow. But we cannot allow it to be a decisive defeat.

Conservatives cannot give up now. We must reaffirm our resolve and renew our fight for conservative principles.

Heritage Action for America is an advocate and warrior for conservative principles in Washington and across the nation. We will not allow President Obama and his allies in Congress to get away with another four years of unbridled liberal policies.

We have a track record of holding lawmakers to account–which will be all the more important as liberals try to claim a mandate for their failed ideas.

Watch our video to find out how Heritage Action will fight the liberal agenda and work for future conservative victories »

The war will continue. Stand with us in this fight.

Thank you for all you do.

Sincerely,

Michael A. Needham
Chief Executive Officer
Heritage Action for America

Hardly the kind of language, instincts and impulses that are going to heal any civilisation too soon.

So this is why I say it’s a shame Obama did have to win. It’s a shame not because of who he is: he seems, from the very outside looking in, a decent soul; intelligent like very few before him; a grandfatherly figure even as he is young and dynamic.

A gentle man where not a gentleman.

No. It’s not Obama I find so very resistible but, rather, the process that tops such pyramidal structures of power with one or other of two impossibly responsible individuals.

It’s a shame that – in such modern times as these – we can devolve responsibilities for so very many things; we can create new communication tools and structures; we can design new ways of allowing communities to speak to each other; we can invent new processes and fashion new procedures … and yet, in politics, we are firmly anchored – even today – in medieval times of such foolish concentration.

Will it ever be so? Will we never learn otherwise?

Is all-out war conducted on greasy poles the only discourse politics truly understands?

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.

“Deep Politics”

politics, populism, unclassifiable 4 Responses »

Oct 012012

Can we in politics learn anything from the concept of the “Deep Web”? This is what Wikipedia has to say about the latter:

The Deep Web (also called the Deepnet, the Invisible Web, the Undernet or the hidden Web) is World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexable by standard search engines.

We then get the following:

Mike Bergman, founder of BrightPlanet, credited with coining the phrase,^[1] has said that searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed.^[2] Most of the Web’s information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, and standard search engines do not find it. Traditional search engines cannot “see” or retrieve content in the deep Web—those pages do not exist until they are created dynamically as the result of a specific search. The deep Web is several orders of magnitude larger than the surface Web.^[3]

Try reading that – but substitute it with the phrase “Deep Politics”. Do you see what I’m getting at here? Traditional politics, as practised thus far in Western democracies, has consisted of professionals and voters focussing on what we could fairly term “Surface Politics”. Any attempts to deepen the process of engagement – for example, to give a direct voice to working people to espouse the causes they are most worried about – have generally been defused by the elites (here I would include myself – I’m sure I’ve done it even recently) as they draw our attention to the dangers of giving the ordinary citizen control over whether we hang people for awful crimes; whip people for lesser ones; and generally come over all retributive and racist in our rather more cruel, and suppressed, instincts.

But as our government and its elites – maybe across Europe too – become as awfully inhumane as any unthinking mass, perhaps it’s time we renegotiated this unwritten contract and properly enabled the voices of all democratic men and women. No worse could they do than our elites and intellectuals to date.

No?

And wasn’t it always going to be thus, anyhow – always going to be inevitable? I mean, this process whereby ordinarily-educated men and women’s perceptions and intelligences would begin to converge on and reach the level of those who – in other more hallowed epochs – could justify their exclusive hold on government and governance. If you proceed along a path of engineering an education system for all, there must come a time when the populace are intellectually prepared – prepared and also hungering – for a different way of engaging with you, your elitisms and your high-flown structures.

Part of the reason for this currently awful sequence of unhappy populations clearly lies in the previously mentioned broken post-war social contract. But another and quite considerable part must lie in having educated up millions of people to think and act independently for themselves – only to then first fob them off with washing-machines, TVs and iPods; and second take away everything you promised them in exchange for ever-increasing levels of personal and national debt.

The solution may lie in all those nice phrases which talk of re-engaging with people from the heights of “Surface Politics”. But I’m inclined to believe that if we’re really looking for a long-term solution – a sustainable and lasting one, that is, which doesn’t lead us back to 2008 – we need to begin to contemplate how to get hold of that “Deep Politics” I talk of: which is to say, how to trawl, capture, identify and include what people, not professionals, are thinking.

What people, not professionals, want of their lives.

What people, not professionals, really desire deep down.

So is it now time for “Deep Politics” then? What say you? What do you think?

And how, indeed, would it look?

From civil and disability rights – to the language of governance

citizen politics, government, hierarchy of power, language, on a high, people with support needs, political innovation, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations No Responses »

Sep 172012

This is a great piece from abetterpeople.com today – it deserves your full attention and a full reading. This, for example:

Government is still using industrial era terms and concepts, 150 years after Mill’s book.

Our understanding of government and society has changed. our technology has changed. The outcomes that government is expected to deliver has changed.

Does industrial-era terminology still provide the right models for government? Are politicians still ‘pulling the levers of power’, or negotiating equitable solutions in partnership with other organisations and communities?

This, too:

Can we conceptualise a 21st Century model of government using 19th Century terminology, or do the words, and the shape they lead our thoughts into, limit government to outdated modes?

And so I responded as follows:

[...] Language does frame so much of what we do – and what we believe is right to do. The lesson has been learned long ago (though not always paid attention to) in the area of disability and civil rights. It’s time that we should release governments from terminologies the 21st century could quite easily allow them to outgrow, if given half a chance.

I was too young to really live the civil rights movement, even in the UK. I suppose, as a young boy, that demonstrations in favour of equal rights for men and women did impact to a degree on me – and then later on as well, when I became a trades union representative.

Meanwhile, I have had my own contact with disability issues as already documented on these pages – and am well aware of how language affects perceptions and what people think is possible. Whilst living in Spain, towards the tail end as I began to suffer from mental ill health myself, I did translations for a Spanish university on texts relating to what they called “people with support needs” (“personas con necesidades de apoyo”) – never did they choose to call them “disabled people”; quite the opposite. If I remember rightly, please correct me if I am wrong, there was even a moment in Spanish legal history when what we Anglo-Saxons still call the “disabled” were actually called “inútiles” – that is to say, “useless”. Certainly, in a Spanish context much has been done to remedy that state of affairs. But what it clearly teaches us is how language frames our perception of reality and what we can do with it.

So if, as the article linked to above indicates, language such as the “machinery of government”, “fine-tuning” and “spin” defines our sense of what is possible in governance, defines it in terms of the mechanics of the Industrial Revolution and its corresponding hierarchies, how on earth, then, are we going to manage to remake 21st century society and democratic organisation as effectively as we have managed to remake its manufacturing industry?

When people with support needs were described as useless in law, any efforts to change people’s perceptions were going to be just as futile.

Which is why I do get the feeling that until we recognise the need to describe politics and government in a terminology fit for the 21st century communication and relational tools all of us as private citizens are so used to engaging with, until we actively use different metaphors to structure our prejudices, we will remain firmly anchored in a 19th century environment of restricting and unempowering semi-serfdom.

Or maybe, sadly enough, even further back than that.

Time to reopen the book on Margaret Thatcher?

a con, Margaret Thatcher, police, police force, police service, police state, policed state, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations No Responses »

Sep 142012

I see via Twitter, fleetingly I must admit, that Iain Dale has defended Thatcher’s memory in relation to the Hillsborough cover-up. I didn’t hear the programme itself, I believe it was “Any Questions” on BBC Radio, but assume that what we had was a vigorous and convincing separation of action from event. I imagine the discussion would have gone as follows: Margaret Thatcher did not anywhere say or let it be understood that anyone should cover up anything. That evidence will not appear because it did not happen. End of argument.

Margaret Thatcher was a charismatic leader. But not in the sense most of us generally understand the term. Most of us understand charismatic as meaning attractive in some dashing way – plenty of personality, the kind of person who manages to sweep you away despite yourself.

Tony Blair was perhaps closer to the latter understanding of charismatic.

No. The charismatic I mean when I talk of Thatcher is a different charismatic – one I posted on recently in relation to Rupert Murdoch. Part of the Harold Evans quote contained in that piece bears repeating here in relation to Thatcher:

[...] The concept of charismatic authority as applied to the Murdoch empire may be best understood – as a concept, I emphasise, and not a personal comparison – in the use made of Weber’s definition by Sir Ian Kershaw, historian of the Third Reich. Kershaw argues that Hitler was not much absorbed by the day-to-day details of Nazi Germany’s domestic policy, but was nonetheless a dominant dictator. Kershaw explains the paradox by adopting the phrase of a Prussian civil servant who said the bureaucrats were always “working towards the Fuhrer”. They were forever attempting to win favour by guessing what the boss wanted or might applaud but might well not have asked for. Similarly, in all Murdoch’s far-flung enterprises, the question is not whether this or that is a good idea, but “What will Rupert think?”. He doesn’t have to give direct orders. His executives act like courtiers, working towards what they perceive to be his wishes or might be construed as his wishes. [...]

In my previous post today, on the subject – in part – of Thatcher’s reign, I suggested the following:

When those bodies which exist in representative democracy in order to protect the people are, in reality, there only to represent themselves … well, this is when we do really have to ask questions. For example, is the common and underlying factor in all these unspooling scandals actually very English kinds of self-elected and autocratic leaders? Is the nature of our police leaders as allowed to unfold under Thatcher – and perhaps tolerated under New Labour for whatever reasons – an issue which now requires a proper airing? Orgreave and now Hillsborough? News International? Is there really not enough evidence to pull together a broader understanding of what has happened in the past quarter century?

And as Peter in the tweet I linked to first of all rightly concludes:

Ian Dale is being disingenuous. The background created by Thatcher contributed massively to the attitude of S Yorks police.#bbcaq

Absolutely! Spot on, in fact. And this was exactly because Thatcher was a charismatic leader with the kind of power to get things done at a societal level just as she wished – even when she didn’t specify exactly what or how. In a certain impositional way which was bound to feed down to the lower levels, her leadership style contained, as much as Murdoch’s own, that ability to command without specific orders or any dangerous audit trail left behind. That surely, after all, is the purpose of a certain kind of leadership: not micro-manage underlings into a shaky inefficiency but encourage them to flock around one in effective consonance.

So when we all finally conclude Thatcher wasn’t to blame, because the evidence simply won’t exist, we will have to accept that she wasn’t.

Except, of course, inasmuch as she set the national tone through a system that eminent historians concluded was used – in other awful historical circumstances – by a very unhappy, and arguably evil, führer.

Does that make her guilty of anything? The fact that she only set a tone which may have encouraged very specific centres of police power in crucial moments of her government to act as autocratically as she had shown herself able to?

I’m inclined to believe it does. And I’m also inclined to feel that life under Thatcher was so awfully violent and cruel not because she brought it upon us but rather because she brought it out of us. Charismatic authority does that: whilst it leads by example, it succeeds through understanding us far better than we care to understand ourselves. And then it proceeds to work on those instincts and use them to take us all in one horrible direction.

So she didn’t actually do it, did she? She just enabled it.

A paradox. All this time I’ve been arguing against pyramid politicians who impose their will – and in favour of enablers and facilitators who empower the people. Yet it’s quite possible that, in the event, Thatcher was an enabler and facilitator like no other.

Empowering the people doesn’t automatically mean the people will do good.

Especially if the enabler and facilitator in question looks to empower autocracy.

Time to reopen the book on Margaret Thatcher then? I think it is. Her legacy, the past quarter of a century, is now unspooling before our very eyes.

The pit and the pendulum (and how even progressive politics creates pressure-cookers of prejudice)

in a hole, people, perishable goods, politics, progressives, right No Responses »

Sep 082012

Whether you liked it or not – and I suspect it was one of the most curate’s-egg-like movements in British political history – New Labour did lots of things in its time.

It was a manifestation of busyness in political person. Though not always proper business.

I do wonder, however, whether some of its least attractive consequences were precisely because of its commendable desire to heave as many people as possible as quickly as possible out of the dual pits of poverty and ignorance. And I also wonder if the consequences in question aren’t particularly a feature of progressive politics. We are always in such a hurry because we know that people are perishable and finite goods on this planet. Every life which misses its vocation is a life lost to history, civilisation and a wider society.

Yet there is a significant downside. Whilst the pendulum swings our way – and every political generation appears to have wanted to exaggerate its swing since the war – many things are done. But equally, the exclusion of opposition input into the processes leads to a severe frustration whilst in the wilderness of inactivity.

The desire for vengeance, the impulse to recover so much lost time, the blind hatred of the other’s ideas … all this leads to an awful environment akin to a pressure-cooker of prejudice, where time postpones the ability to impose what inevitably become one’s tragic instincts.

Nevertheless, as the pendulum swings back, eventually power does return to the vengeful right – or, indeed, the vengeful left. And so all those suppressed and supposedly politically incorrect opinions find their voice, their bullying courage and their aggressive channels of communication all over again.

Yet pressure-cookers are only good for cooking food. Opinion is surely best let out on a regular basis. As the Spanish would say, only by speaking can we understand people. And if we choose, on either side, to suppress the right for political movements to participate in democratic process, each time the pendulum swings evermore violently back we can only expect further violence in return.

Edgar Allen Poe was absolutely right. We are sinking ever further.

And there is little either side in the political class really, essentially, deep down, cares to do about it.

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