Life in the UK – actually corrupt or “simply” amoral?

 corruption, life, power, sexual abuse, unclassifiable, United Kingdom  No Responses »
May 102013
 

This report from the Independent today shows us just how far we have come.  Whilst Tory Euro-sceptics continue to plot final disavowal of that evil anti-British entity that we all know and love as the European Union, we get these choice phrases on the corruption Britain is finally now exhibiting all on its lonesome:

Yet recent British scandals can compete with the best Europe can offer. Besides MPs fiddling their expenses and Jimmy Savile’s history of paedophilia, racing has been hit by Frankie Dettori’s six-month drugs ban, we’ve seen London-based banks Barclays and UBS embarrassed by the Libor rate-fixing scandal, and BAE Systems has been investigated over its arms deals.

And yet it gets worse, as goalposts are continuously moved:

[...] “There is no real accountability of these guys coming in—the cops don’t really investigate them,” says Mark Hollingsworth, co-author of Londongrad, a 2009 book about the Russian invasion. “They see the capital as the most secure, fairest, most honest place to park their cash, and the judges here would never extradite them.”

Meanwhile, with respect to the paedophilia scandals, the desire of power to overwhelm through the abuse of sex just gets worse (more here):

A prominent barrister specialising in reproductive rights has called for the age of consent to be lowered to 13.

Barbara Hewson told online magazine Spiked that the move was necessary in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to end the “persecution of old men”.

Now in a short Twitter exchange this morning it was brought to my attention that the problem isn’t immorality.  In fact, the problem may not even be corruption as such.  Rather, so much of what we do in both large and small corporate organisations is done with a transcendental amorality.  We are circumscribed by process and procedure – and we assume the bigger view is not ours to own.  We assume that those who set up process and procedure knew what they were doing when they trained us.

Yet this very amorality, this unquestioning behaviour, this inability to think from scratch and try and perceive – on a rolling basis – a broader set of consequences from our acts, leads to outcomes which are anything but amoral.  We ourselves are not immoral – most of us are truly not corrupt – but the accumulation of all our individual tasks does seem to lead more and more to utterly unjust outcomes.

Is it then a systemic question as the Independent reports it might be?  Or is it a question of people-culture?  After all, you can have any number of protective processes and procedures in place but if the people who are supposed to operate them are of a mind to, any and all may quite easily – and eventually – be circumvented.

The battlecry for the anti-Europeans is that Europe is a dirty patchwork of vile and corrupt marshes we need to retreat from.  And yet recent attempts to drag us out of such fields only makes me wonder if the true powers-that-be are looking more to defend their own rights to perpetuate a very British corruption from international law and wider socially-inspired movements than to revert what was apparently once an honest public life to a semblance of modest functionality.

Corrupt or “just” amoral?  Does it really matter in the final analysis?  The evidence of the impact of widespread corruption – that is to say, inefficient and ineffective socioeconomic systems – is all around us.  You don’t need to drill down into that individual or the other to know that the inefficiency and ineffectiveness I mention must be inspired by something seriously wrong.

Solutions?  Lord, I really don’t know.  I really don’t know where to start.  But perhaps we should take a lesson from the best corporate organisations: when you struggle to know the true extent of the bigger picture, start with bitesized pieces.  And maybe, just maybe, attempt to comprehend that just as those poor workers were trapped and died in the rubble of a Bangladeshi building, so too many people here in the West – whilst not losing their lives – are wasting their existences in systems which also, in a way, serve to entrap them.

Just because you act in an amoral fashion doesn’t make you immoral.  Even as, perhaps, the results of your actions are.

There’s a lesson to be drawn there, then, about how we see, consult and work with others.

Maybe it’s time we thought the best of our fellow workers.  And acted in consequence.

Is the Establishment losing its ability to whitewash reality?

 a con, establishment, Internet, offline world, online world, Reality Hunger, Spain, Spanish, Spanish Civil War, stolen babies, United Kingdom  No Responses »
Feb 032013
 

I’m currently suffering at the hands of reality.  Whilst in my wife’s home country, Spain, its (anti-)democratic edifice appears to be tumbling around its people’s wider austerity-located suffering, in Britain and elsewhere little seems very much better.

Let’s take Spain, for starters.  Read and tremble.  It would seem, in my limited understanding of the Bárcenas scandal as it stands, that eventually no politician or party will escape the consequences of what is unreeling.  As Spanish democracy takes a massive battering from the bitter dialectic between independence movements and their centralising counterparts, from widespread corruption in both politics and business and from the awful levels of utterly wasteful unemployment in a hyper-educated society, so there is very little left to do for the Spanish people themselves but bemoan the situation, wring their hands and wonder futilely how they got here.

I suspect the final solution, if anyone has any intelligence, will be to leave off forever perpetuating the intellectual and sociopolitical cover-ups, which took place post-Franco as democracy cemented itself.  The Spanish transition, lauded as an example for young democratic movements everywhere, hid under its shiny and very latterday façade crucial hatreds, miseries and very real cruelty (more here, here and here).

This will, I am pretty sure, even as I admit I am a mere outsider looking in, require a truth and reconciliation process as painful and fierce as that which South Africa had to suffer on its own journey.

*

Meanwhile, I read tonight that the largest police force in the UK used an estimated eighty dead children’s identities in undercover (ie spying) operations over a period of perhaps three decades.  Quite precisely, the Met – for, yet again, it is the force in the eye of the storm – assures us that (the bold is mine):

We can confirm that the practice referred to in the complaint is not something that would currently be authorised in the [Met police].

Which isn’t to say that it mightn’t happen again in the future, right?

So can it get any worse?  Whilst in Spain we apparently have a widespread culture of dirty money at the very highest levels of political practice, a society which is creaking under the weight of never having been through any real process of truth and reconciliation and an economic plan which is anything but democratic, in Britain we are getting drip-fed awful tales of celebrity paedophile rings, hotels and practitioners; of police forces in London and Yorkshire which did anything but follow even the letter of the law, never mind its spirit; of casual phone- and computer-hacking in industrial quantities; of the falsification of evidence on police computers; of party-funding scandals; of public- and private-sector corruption; of sweetheart tax deals between government civil servants and transnational corporations; of the demonisation of the poor, disabled, sick and unemployed to the benefit of the wealthy; and, finally, a total re-engineering of the welfare state in order that the Tory Party’s sponsors and puppet-masters in banking, consultancy and health may become the real benefit claimants of the state.

What exactly is happening?  What exactly is taking place?  Is all this information suddenly revealing itself the result of longer-term social media tendencies perhaps?  Is what we do in our private lives, as we denude ourselves to friends and foe alike, spilling over into more work-related contexts?

Are we actually all becoming terribly – and excessively – honest?

Is this, finally, the true legacy of the Internet as it spills over unstoppably into the offline world – a legacy which for so long the real world has managed to keep at arm’s length?

And is the Establishment – an institutional dinosaur if there ever was one (suited perfectly to its environment whilst its environment remained under its control) – suddenly losing its ability to whitewash reality?

Or – more frighteningly – is this a quite new reality with no whitewash at all?

A quite new reality which the overwhelming hubris of those in charge is now awfully and generously happy to regale us with – perhaps certain in the knowledge that there is nothing anyone honest can do about it any more.

How Ed Miliband got Britain wrong and London right (kinda)

 Britain, British people, Ed Miliband, independence, on a high, Scotland, Scottish independence, United Kingdom  No Responses »
Jun 072012
 

Ed Miliband made some massive mistakes on identity in his speech yesterday.  Or was that geography?  This, for example (the bold is mine):

Of course, there are economic and political arguments advanced for Scottish separatism.
But even though they often don’t admit it, the logic of the nationalists’ case goes beyond politics and the economy.
It insists that the identification with one of our nations is diminished by the identity with our country a whole.
After all, they want to force people to choose.
To be Scottish or British.

Personally, I don’t see it.  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or just the United Kingdom if you will (yes, OK – some would even abbreviate this to Britain), is a political union of varying degrees of happiness which has muddled along as such unions might.  The British Isles on the other hand, and perhaps rather more controversially, is a geographical reality which also includes the Irish Republic.  If Mr Miliband is saying that a Scotland which chooses no longer to be a part of the political union that is the UK then misses out on the opportunity to claim its identity as both Scottish and British because it no longer pledges allegiance to London, we are clearly in the presence of a curious confusion between geography and politics which hardly helps clarify anything.

Perhaps, even more sadly though, it also reveals an unhappy understanding of the right London-based politicos reserve for themselves when defining the limits of identity itself.

Yet identity is not just a question of politics and history – those areas of knowledge which people who make and shake nations so delight in.

There is surely a third dimension which I would argue is just as important: that of place.  And place belongs to everyone, whether educated or not; whether powerful or humble.  Place was there before history and politics started; place will remain when we all have gone.

This is why Ed Miliband is wrong to conflate the UK with being British.  If he doesn’t understand the difference, he shouldn’t be talking about it.  If he does understand the difference, then he is obfuscating deliberately.

If the Scots so choose, they can be both British and Scottish and outside the United Kingdom.  It’s the lawyerly politicians who prefer not to see that politics and history and laws can be far more easily changed than the land which lies outside their codifications.

Miliband didn’t get it all wrong, though.  He is far more useful – though still revealingly inexact – in the following description of London’s role in all this antagonism:

There are some people who say that this English identity should be reflected in new institutions.
But I don’t detect a longing for more politicians.
For me, it’s not about an English Parliament or an English Assembly.
The English people don’t yearn for simplistic constitutional symmetry.
Our minds don’t work in spreadsheets, just like our streets don’t follow grids.
But there is a real argument here which does unite England, Scotland and Wales:
And that is about the centralisation of power in London.
This resentment is felt in many parts of England.
A sense that our politics is too distant.
Too detached.

Curious how he says our minds don’t work in spreadsheets when this generation of politicians works with nothing else; curious how he argues that politics is centralised in London to its detriment and in the same breath criticises constitutional symmetry for being simplistic.

He says we don’t want more politicians; he doesn’t say we might not want more of the politicians we’ve got.  He argues that our politics is too detached without admitting that the reality is actually that it’s far too attached to certain powerful and wealthy interests.

He says England doesn’t need new institutions; he refuses to recognise that the United Kingdom as a whole has corrupted the ones it already has.

Yes, Mr Miliband.  London is the problem.  You’re right about that.  But you’re wrong to assume that being together through continued inertia is necessarily the answer.  The answer for the kind of politician you represent lies in making the Union so attractive that no one would ever contemplate leaving.  The problem is that London-based politicians have – quite fatally of late – failed to achieve this essential feat.

No wonder some of us want to leave.  Not our land, which will always remain where it is.  Rather, our politics, which is manifestly unfit for purpose.  Even to the point that it doesn’t understand the difference between it and our geography.

For if the Scots end up leaving the Union, it’s not the land they’ll be shrugging off but the politics.

And if Ed Miliband wants to be taken seriously in this debate, and wants to seriously pursue a long-lasting solution, he really does need to properly remember this.

How Cameron is both anti-poor and anti-right wing (or mutiny on the Good Ship United Kingdom?)

 a con, anti-poor, anti-right wing, David Cameron, in a hole, mutiny, poverty, pyramid politics, Tim Montgomerie, treason, United Kingdom  No Responses »
Nov 252011
 

I wonder.

This story, in fact:

An internal UK Border Agency revolt combined with an 11th-hour breakdown in contingency plans lie behind the government’s desperate appeal for Whitehall volunteers to staff Britain’s borders during next week’s strike, the Guardian has learned.

A significant proportion of the 800 UKBA staff, many middle managers who have been trained to take over border checks during Wednesday’s public sector pension strike, are believed to have decided to walk out instead.

Whitehall sources say they feel let down by the Home Office’s treatment of three senior UKBA managers, including Brodie Clark, the former head of the UK Border Force, over the passport checks row.

May the situation develop thus?  Leadership is not only a question of power but also the way in which that power is exercised.  You might not care to agree politically with Tim Montgomerie here.  But conceptually, at least he has a point worth debating (the bold is mine):

Cameron decided the Conservative party’s problem was that it was too rightwing. He could, instead, have decided the Conservatives were seen as a party of the rich, not for the ordinary man – he didn’t. You might think these too things are the same, but they are not. Being rightwing may have become synonymous with being a defender of big business and privilege, but many rightwing policies are actually pro-poor. A tough approach to immigration protects the living standards of lower income workers. A weak approach to crime has the biggest implications for disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The cost of the European Union’s agricultural and energy policies are felt most heavily by the most cash-strapped Britons.

So what has happened, if Montgomerie’s thesis is to be accepted for the purposes of this post, is that Cameron and Clegg – men who have grown up surrounded by the trappings of the well-to-do – have come together in some curious political frenzy and have fashioned, on the back of Cameron’s decision as per Montgomerie’s perceptive analysis above, a politics of both the anti-poor and the anti-right wing!

The worst of all possible worlds, you could argue.

A war conducted by an inept government on multiple fronts simultaneously – which leaves the all-powerful without the saving graces of friends anywhere but in high places.

And perhaps, as time passes, not even there.

*

Time for a thought experiment.  This is Wikipedia’s definition of mutiny:

Mutiny is a conspiracy among members of a group of similarly situated individuals (typically members of the military; or the crew of any ship, even if they are civilians) to openly oppose, change or overthrow an authority to which they are subject. The term is commonly used for a rebellion among members of the military against their superior officer(s), but can also occasionally refer to any type of rebellion against an authority figure.

And more specifically, this is how it is defined in the United Kingdom:

Today the Army Act 1955 defines mutiny as follows:[1]
“Mutiny” means a combination between two or more persons subject to service law, or between persons two at least of whom are subject to service law—
(a) to overthrow or resist lawful authority in Her Majesty’s forces or any forces co-operating therewith or in any part of any of the said forces,
(b) to disobey such authority in such circumstances as to make the disobedience subversive of discipline, or with the object of avoiding any duty or service against, or in connection with operations against, the enemy, or
(c) to impede the performance of any duty or service in Her Majesty’s forces or in any forces co-operating therewith or in any part of any of the said forces.

So is what we are witnessing bordering on the mutinous? 

Just as what is being kept hidden may be bordering on the treasonable?

Mutiny and treason?  It sure looks like something pretty rotten is building up a head of steam in the United Kingdom right now.  And – if Montgomerie is at all right – it might precisely have its roots in Cameron’s decision to be manifestly anti-poor on all sides.

For a society, after all, can only be judged in terms of how it treats its most vulnerable.  And when power is unleashed from all due sense of responsibility is when the least engaged suffer most at the hands of those who determine to keep themselves on top at all costs.

Is London fast becoming the UK’s very own Vatican City?

 Britain, Great Wall of Westminster, in a hole, London, londonisation, professional politicos, United Kingdom, Vatican City, Westminster  No Responses »
Nov 192011
 

The Lord Mayor as Pope perhaps?  Well.  My thesis is a little more profound than that.

I’ve touched on this issue at least twice in the past three months or so.  First, here:

[...] When London becomes the breakaway Vatican State of the the southern tip of the UK, and Boris becomes Cameron’s highest representative on the face of Planet Tory, only then will we be able to all breathe a sigh of relief – as we then also begin to embrace our hard-won freedoms.

And then more roundly here:

If truth be told, we need to turn London into a UK equivalent of Vatican City – an impervious state-within-a-state, which to all intents and purposes it already is – and recover for the rest of England its right to a homegrown politics; unaffected, that is, by Tea Party-style movements and their hangers-on from across the Pond that now divides us.  If London does indeed want the kind of monopolistic capitalist control of public services which Cameron & Co do so love to promise … well, let them have it.  But let the rest of us out here, who may have far more in common with the Scots than Left Foot Forward might care to let on, be allowed to properly choose the bed we wish to lie in.

Today’s post, however, is provoked by the short afternoon and evening which I spent in London last Thursday.  Although this was a brief experience of the hustle and bustle which is our capital city, I definitely got the feeling that I could understand better where our politicians are coming from when they talk about the deregulation of business and the opportunities which might thus derive.  The problem we really have is that London is clearly a great place to work – but less so, perhaps, in matters of accommodation and wider costs of living.

Our leading politicos truly find themselves in a bubble.  They see only economic endeavour; business in the sense of busyness; astounding movements; opportunities galore; and grand sociocultural influences.  But this is what you get when you concentrate in such a relatively small area so many people and institutional headquarters.  In London, more than anywhere else in the UK, monopolistic capitalism and the trickle-down benefits it can – under very special circumstances – apport are clear to see; even it alternatives which could work just as well are not allowed to flower.

But try and translate brutally this religious and unquestioning fervour for that  “impervious state-within-a-state” to other parts of the country … well, you’re on a hiding to nothing.  There is no way we can reproduce the massive nexuses of opportunities to work and engage with others which such a concentration of humanity has enabled.

And yet, in the name of such a particular reality, we are destroying the very essence of other communities across the length and breadth of the UK.  Out of an impossible prejudice, we are looking to “londonise” more than fifty million people. 

Yes.  A Vatican City for the 21st century.  That is what we are really dealing with when we analyse the Tory-led Coalition project.  Top-down and fundamentalist; blind to uncomfortable realities which do not fit the datasets; fast and easy with smooth and convenient rhetoric.  This is the reality of modern Britain.

We’re wrong about one thing, though.  The problem isn’t that our politicos don’t live in the real world: London is as real as any other.

No.  The problem is that they don’t live in our real world.

And neither we nor they care to appreciate the implications.

Why they despise Alex Salmond so

 Alex Salmond, Britain, civic nationalism, London, nationalism, on a high, SNP, triangulation, United Kingdom  7 Responses »
Oct 222011
 

We have the Bermuda Triangle.  We have the Eye of Providence.  And now we have Alex Salmond.

The connection?

Well.  Precisely this: Mr Salmond doesn’t have to triangulate himself.  And that’s really why they all despise him so.  He now has the freedom they never have had to say what he bloody well likes.

The last decade and a half has seen the British body politic jointly responsible for tolerating the kind of dictatorial behaviours a media genius like Mr Rupert Murdoch has managed to sustain: an all-seeing and all-encompassing process whereby he purchased an entire stratum of society.  This dominance clearly prepared the ground for and led to the hacking scandal at the News of the World – without such traction on those who should have provided the oversight of observant government, things would never have gone as far as they did.

What has been the most unseemly part of the whole damnable process though – at least from an intellectual point of view – is the ever-present and effervescent instinct to triangulate which dominated the thinking of New Labour’s elite.  This led the country not only to its media takeover by the Murdochs and their own particular brand of cavalier freedoms, but also to the absolute control of Middle England by the Daily Mails of this world.  And whilst I’m sure Blair & Co must have become soundly fed up of jumping through the hoops that all this entailed, this doesn’t excuse them from contributing to the unhappy consequences which are only now becoming apparent.

The most unhappy one being, for our wider body politic, that no one seems to escape the burden of triangulation.

Except, of course, and as I pointed out at the top of this post, Mr Salmond himself.

The great thing about being a civic nationalist of the kind I believe Mr Salmond likes to define himself as is that the overarching themes of independence can be used to tie together a wonderful rainbow coalition of voters.  In this case, however, it’s being achieved through an identification with singularly coherent themes that bind openly and straightforwardly – instead of via that cleverly shabby “searching for the lowest common denominator” approach that has characterised politics in England and Wales for far too long.

If those outside Scottish politics – and even some within it – still find Mr Salmond so very resistible, I suggest they ask themselves how the rest of the UK might respond if a mother lode of such rich political clarity were discovered and equally applied.  Something which might tie the English together with such overwhelming insistence that almost anything constructive could be achieved.

Apart from the external threat of a war imposed from without which would serve to engender its own Dunkirk Spirit all over again, I’m not sure, really, that such a force will ever exist again.

Unless, of course, we decide to go for independence ourselves.

In the meantime, the Bermuda Triangle that was the United Kingdom for so long – a place where so many bright initiatives vanished into the political ether – is surely beginning to lose its shape.  And in the absence of the all-seeing eye that was Murdoch and his absolutist control over political discourse, it looks like Alex Salmond and the SNP will have a clear run towards the kind of independence Catalonia has achieved within the confines of the Spanish state.  A permanent tension with central government – and a consistent and continuous improvement of its competencies in matters of health, security and education.

That is to say, keep them guessing as much as you might – and all the time, all the time, get whatever you can.

We, in the rest of the UK, could do worse than to follow their example.

In relation to Westminster, Cameron & Co – and the other navel-gazers down in London.
____________________

Further reading: Éoin has just published this relevant post on Labour’s current polling preoccupations.  Graphs and stats lay it out for all to see.  Localism, nationalism and independence are all issues the Labour leadership is currently refusing to face – to the wider movement’s detriment, both intellectual as well as purely electoral.

A perforated appendix in urgent need of appendectomy?

 David Cameron, in a hole, NHS, NHS cuts, Philosophy Football, Scotland, United Kingdom, www.BestOfTheRest.org  No Responses »
Oct 122011
 

I’ve just bought two books from my dear friends over at Philosophy Football, edited by their very own Mark Perryman.  They’re called “Imagined Nation – England after Britain” and “Breaking Up Britain – Four Nations after a Union”.  I bought these to help me with getting my head around the issues that will surely begin to encroach on the rather bald and half-baked sense of ourselves which afflicts the Union in question.  And when I say ourselves, I do of course mean the English.

For the big vacuum at the hollow centre of a country which contains the totally inappropriate word “united” in its name is, clearly, that absence of English identity – an absence which has led to the expropriation of territory, political ideology, sensibility and sensitivity.  If only the English knew exactly what being English really meant, I’m sure they wouldn’t so wish to impose their will on others; would, in fact, perceive the rest of the world in a rather more favourable light than is currently the case.

Or, alternatively, perceive themselves in a rather less harsh light.

As tris pointed out in relation to my previous post on the NHS bill currently storming its way through what is clearly a sick and unhealthy House of Commons (for the Lords have now shown themselves to be nothing more than a perforated appendix in urgent need of appendectomy), this government is obviously aiming to fill the pockets of its corporate sponsors to the detriment of quality care and universal health services:

I would truly be frightened to live in a country where the health service was to be run by a series of rapacious private companies, bidding against each other and cutting corners with my wellbeing.

I’m heartily glad that our government is considering no such folly.

Only the Tories could oversee such a potentially catastrophic programme. 

And I wonder, in response, if this – the privatisation of the NHS in the interests of corporate and political enrichment – might prove to be the one force which finally breaks up the Union.  Maybe the idea of independence in itself – an unforced war, if you like – would never quite make the Scottish people take that final irrevocable step.  But what if the political and corporate insensitivity became so massive and greed-laden – as indeed would now appear to be the case – that it made them feel anything would be better than this?

An unforced war only the Tony Blairs of this world could contemplate.  But a forced war has a long and honourable history.  Forced wars are for the sensitive souls amongst us – as well as the aggrieved.  And that’s a completely different kind of constituency.

What an awful marmite of a stew the English are allowing their political masters to cook up on their behalf – down in that brimming and heaving London that cares for nothing but itself.

This all needs attention – and it needs attention bloody sharpish.

"Fulfilling the Promise of Britain" (II) (or taking on those vested interests)

 Britain, Ed Miliband, Europe, Labour, on a high, United Kingdom, vested interests  No Responses »
Sep 212011
 

Yesterday, I posted a short video from Ed Miliband.  In it were some pleasant words about how valuable the grafters of the world are.  I think he means it too.  But I wonder, as in all top-down reorganisations, whether the people lower down the hierarchy – in the battle to maintain their fiefdoms – will actually put into practice what Miliband believes; even, that is to say, within his own party structure.

Never mind the vested interests out there and beyond.

Take on all those vested interests?  Banks, energy companies, supermarkets, insurers, private health suppliers and all?  I’m all for it.  If you’re really aiming to do that, Ed, you’ve got my vote where you never had it before.

An article which puts a bit of flesh on the soundbites can be found in the Guardian today.  I do suggest you read it in its entirety; below, I’ll just quote from its dying words:

In Labour’s years in office we should have done more to protect the “squeezed middle”. Our neighbourhoods, too, need protection from powerful interests: the local pub, the green where children play, the shops threatened by a new Tesco superstore. Labour needs to be on the side of the community. New Labour sought a dynamic economy. We refinanced public services. But we should have done more to build a country on our values of responsibility, fairness and social cohesion.

Now Labour’s task is to take on the big battalions, wherever they operate against the interests of the majority. Ed Miliband led the way in confronting inappropriate journalistic practices at News International while the Tories showed timidity.

Equally, there is a Labour way out of the crisis, which is fairer and will chime with the instincts of the British people. The country must turn its back on rightwing solutions which entrench inequality, and whose values are purely market-based. Labour needs to show humility and dedication to service. We need to reconnect with the mainstream, hard-pressed millions who had come to doubt us. And we need to be fearless against the big battalions, however powerful they may be, to rebuild a society based on the British values of fairness and community.

And meanwhile, as a reminder of how powerful and ever-present these battalions are, a tweet from this morning on the subject of battling with the supermarkets – as it refers to what I believe is a David Miliband-promoted organisation:

@eiohel @Paul0Evans1 @sunnyhundal Hope the Sainsbury-funded Movement for Change will be supporting that campaign ;)

Want us to sign up to this almighty conflagration?  Convince us, first, that by burning bridges there’ll be a way out – and back – for those of us who choose to ride alongside you.  Do that – and the whole of British politics will be at your feet.

*

Which reminds me.  One final – though not insignificant – thought for Ed and his advisers.  And what about the Union – European and homegrown both perhaps?  Isn’t it time to contemplate different structures which release and liberate the way we are?  When you talk about “fulfilling the promise of Britain”, do you mean “keeping it together” or “giving each region its head of rightful steam”?  There’s a difference – and we do need to address it.

And sharpish methinks.