The Ins and Outs of European Union Membership

It looks as if events - or perhaps that should be les evenements -  have come already for Mr Cameron's administration.  The German Chancellor is so right to demand that the Lisbon Treaty must be revised to provide  permanent mechanisms to deal with the kind of financial meltdown threatened in the last years and the behaviour of some member states in their irresponsible borrowing behaviour (and, in the case of some, owning up to it in official statistics).

What is to be done is a matter for negotiation: the level of automaticity in institutional responses, the retribution for rule-breaking, all this must be settled by negotiation.  What cannot be negotiated away is the need to reopen the Treaty to achieve any useful change in the economic and financial governance of the Union.  And to contemplate introducing changes of the order required while the Treaty is reopened for the admission of the Croats is not serious.  Setting up crisis avoidance and control measures for the Euro  is a central change in the relations of the member states to the Union; and it is irrelevant that the United Kingdom does not use the Euro; the UK is as bound by the Maastricht (and the Stability and Growth pact) conventions as any other member state of the European Union.

The Coalition holds diametrically opposed views on the EU:  Conservatives committed against any further concessions of sovereignty and the retrieval of some powers already given over; Liberals committed to all and every EU goal,  to ever-deeper union.  There's no point rehashing all the arguments over the Lisbon Treaty, but they all stand.  This time there must be a referendum and the question to be answered must be In or out?  Yes or no?

The temporary emergency measures for the crisis come to an end in 2013.  Apart from this the Germans will not permit as a permanent solution  the transfer of their money, or even their guarantees, to peripheral and fiscally undisciplined member states. Nor are the centre-right member states, in the vast majority among the 27 member states now, willing to accept ever again the kind of deficit-drunk, vulgar-keynesian economics espoused by those  who have had to be bailed-out, or have pulled back from the brink only just in time.  Certainly, too,  there is full awareness  that a post-Lisbon treaty will trigger referendums in those countries where constitutional change of this order overtly requires it, and in the UK.   So Germany wants to make a start straight away, this week; has made a start.

Mr Cameron should say at once that  changes like these do affect the United Kingdom, even though we have retained the use of Sterling; that we must engage fully in the negotiations; that the government will report back to Parliament  as these negotiations progress; that once the best deal available for the country has been set out to the country there will be a referendum; and that the question will be whether or not the country wishes to remain within the European Union under the terms of the revised Treaty.   Then his government can get on with sorting out the mess left from the last 13 years of economic and financial mismanagement.

And when we do vote the anti-European Unionists might find they have a very close run for their money. 

Cherie Buys a 10-piece fish cutlery set for £34.99 on e-bay

Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.

It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I'm afraid the preserve's full of stones;
Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

Justified

The court has given its judgment on our culpability in turning a Second World War shelter in the olive terraces near the ecohouse into a tractor shed rather than putting up a great big, metal, prefabricated building that would do the proverbial sore thumb.  (Not unnaturally the shelter was discreet and, from even a short distance, near invisible unless you actually looked for it.  That's what shelters are all about when you are for hiding from a retreating, defeated army, and a  German army at that.)

Mr HG is,  'Assolto perche il fatto non costituisce reato.' [Acquitted because the act is not an offence.] I'm unsure if it is possible to acquit someone of an act that is not wrong in the first place, but never mind.  At least we don't have to start on the bureaucratic nightmare of converting a prison sentence into a stiff fine - Mr HG in gaol would be so unkind - and he's quite capable of insisting on going rather than paying.

And to all those greenies who worry about the selling off of woodland by the government in England: private ownership does not equate with lack of means to prevent deturpation of lovely countryside, even if, on this occasion, we hadn't.

Are We Incapable of Common Humanity?

Failing is invariably damaging to anyone.  For lots of people  an explanation for their lack of paid work  may well be understood quite literally as an incapacity.  While those of us more robustly armoured by education, private income, some grasp on the economic realities that sweep through our lives providing and with-holding opportunity that is entirely outwith our capacities to control, those of us who do not identify ourselves and our lives with  our paid job, we are not made incapable by not being employed for short or long periods.  But others, more vulnerable for all sorts of reasons, are.

If the disgraceful mess left by the last 13 years of Brown/Balls/Miliband requires that welfare benefits to those without paid work and who have no other resources but to claim support from the taxpayer must be cut then why can we not just say so?

Say,  'We must reduce the payment you receive because there is no  more money left.'

There is no need or humanity in subjecting people already rendered incapable of finding a job, often by circumstances beyond their control, to subject themselves to humiliating assessment by an arms-length government agency asking them to touch their knees and walk a line.  Not for £30  a week.   Not for anything.  

There is No Need for Any More G20 Meetings

It is now patently clear that the G20 is a waste of time.   Its first great initiative was supposed to be to implement a concerted quantitative easing; only Germany wouldn't, indeed Europe wouldn't.  It was supposed to reform, and eventually  replace, international financial institutions or, at the very least, ginger them up a bit to act more authoritatively and with more resources behind them.  Only nation states are, and were, already perfectly capable of beefing up the IMF's resources without international jamborees.

The meeting of Finance ministers in South Korea lacked the man from Brazil.  There are going to be missing heads of state and government at the next round.  People simply have better things to do, and better ways of doing things the G20 tried to arrogate to itself. 

Marriage Banns

Peter Tatchell, of the campaign group, OutRage! has begun a campaign for marriage or civil partnerships to be available to all.

"Civil marriages and civil partnerships should be open to everyone without discrimination."

At the moment this demand seems to be set in the context of same-gender couples being able to marry, and different gender couples being able to civilly partner (there doesn't seem to be a suitable verb). Marriage is a much more far-reaching and structurally-important institution in our society than is civil partnership.

Subrosa has a fine post, and many comments from differing viewpoints,  on this topic.  What though does this campaign want precisely?  There have been arguments, for instance, that civil partnerships should be extended to co-habiting siblings.  It would be wholly outside of our cultural mores if such an extension were pressed after civil partnerships and marriage had been made interchangeable. At the moment many do not want gender to be a constraint upon one or the other.  What about degrees of kinship? 



 

Stoned in Sydney

Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman from Sydney will be addressing the Global Peace and Unity meeting at the Excel Centre in Docklands.  Honestly.  Angels didn't make him up. 

He calls for the  the stoning of adulterers.  So watch it all you Sidneysiders.

Taking Things Seriously

HMS Astute, one of Britain's fleet of submarines  has grounded on rocks off the Isle of Skye.  

"This is a not a nuclear incident,"  the Defence ministry said in a statement. "We are responding to the incident and can confirm that there are no injuries to personnel and the submarine remains watertight. There is no indication of any environmental impact."

Officials said the incident wasn't serious.  A crew of around 100 are typically aboard the ship.

A hundred of them?  And they can't drive our submarine in home waters?  Not serious?

Reducing the Cost of London's Government and Services

Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Kensington and Chelsea councils (all Conservative)  are discussing setting up a single 'back office' and having  a single chief executive and set of senior directors. They would share also the entire range of children’s services, education and social care, as well as bin-emptying and street cleaning.    Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham  (all Labour) are at an early stage of exploring extensive sharing of services.  Camden and Islington councils are  in discussions.

The proposals  reconsider  the way in which not only councils but some health and local authorities could share services and (senior and specialist) staff.  Reported savings for the three Conservative councils are between £100 and £150 million.  Even if the projected saving are lower for the other regrouping councils the order of saving is impressive.  Even more could be saved, as the London councils regroup, by a reformation of the Greater London Authority and the office of the London Mayor. 

What point is there in having a pan-London body that is duplicating pan-London bodies?   

A Small, Open Economy Must Acknowledge its Status in the World

The costs of borrowing for the UK government have fallen to the lowest since the 1980s.  Long time ago the 1980s. A generation.  The credit rating agencies are confirming the UK's triple A status.  And the costs of the mismanagement of the UK economy, and the fears of what that mismanagement might have done to our ability to borrow at all, recede.

Meanwhile, Her Majesty's Opposition does its level best to undermine this outcome.  They are in wholesale denial of any need whatever to cut our coat to fit our cloth.  They are also committed to a political stratagem of splitting the Coalition government and forcing either a general election or a Labour administration supported by the Liberal Democrats or, a remote alternative but much beloved by the Union Thugs' wing of the Party, major civil unrest resulting in the Coalition government reneging on its deficit-reducing programme.

This is not Opposition.  This is destructive irresponsibility for party political ends.  And the BBC needs to examine its conscience too. 

German Jobs Not to be Transferred to Wales

The states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony which have to cope with the earlier-than-expected withdrawal of British troops from the Rhine area seemed to have attracted the concern of the shadow Welsh Secretary Peter Hain when he said said it was "a disgrace that the government is binning a world-beating training facility for our armed forces".

But it turned out he was complaining about not spending billions of pounds building up a new training area and a defence college in mid-Wales, rather than the closing down of more or less the same thing in mid-Europe.

The Hateful Mr Johnson

"We have seen people cheering the deepest cuts to public spending in living memory...  This is what they came into politics for. "

What a very nasty man Alan Johnson is.  It took the whole country voting to get rid of the failed administration that had imposed itself, unbidden by the voters, upon us all.  In the sense that we  have now an administration for which we voted, we are all in this together.  In politics.  And we didn't come into politics to hurt other people.  We came because we had to protect ourselves from being forced to live in a socialist country.  We like capitalist society Mr Johnson. We don't have to shoot people in the back as they flee your version of the good society.

It would be bad enough -  if the country had been brought to such a pass by a centre-right government - to have it believed that there being no money left pleases us because coping with the situation can be used as an excuse to curtail social provision that has taken more than a century to build.  But for the spokesman for the socialist party that brought this mess upon us to accuse us, the majority of the electorate,  of vandalism and schadenfreude is an abuse too far. 


Much of the welfare state you lay claim to, Mr Johnson, was put in place by Liberal and Conservative administrations.  The Labour party's claims to being the author of  all social provision and compassion is historical pornography

What has been done yesterday was what we voted for.  There will be more: tax cuts; a major reconsideration of the National Health Service's mode of financing and operation (why should we have a great lump of socialist planning in the middle of our economy emanating baleful effects on everything else?); schools that meet educational needs; the ending of government snooping into everyone's lives. 

But you won't be told, will you?  You and all the people represented by those who were seated behind you.  People like you came into politics to deny that getting on with your life, making a living, enjoying whatever takes your interest, does not require imposing on other people, helping yourself to other people's hard-earned money, and abusing others when we protest by attributing the vilest of motives to our reasonable refusal to be pushed around any further.

Democracy, Mr Johnson, requires that you submit to all the people's judgment every four years, not just your own closed circle of self-righteousness.  That is why your party worked so hard to extrude our democratic institutions from any decision-making process.  The electorate got you in the end though.  So you expose the meanest of your own motives for what you did, and attribute them to us all.

Singing Along

Only it isn't so.  This afternoon is just the beginning.

Folie de Grandeur

When Gordon Brown  declared "No more boom and bust" it was not one of the occasions on which he was telling lies.  He believed it.   Why would anyone think that such an economic outcome could be achieved?  Naive, undiluted, crass keynesianism is the explanation for 'no more boom and bust.'

So we come to the next question.  Who would have been the purveyors of these  pseudo-keynesian platitudes to an economics ignoramus?  There is a considerable group of academic economists who are guilty of effecting this thinking while ignoring the fact that they were advising, indeed pontificating,  in an open, relatively small, economy with a floating exchange rate, in which the unrestrained pursuit of this kind of bastardised  Keynes can lead to external imbalances/devaluation/inflation/ gross increases in government debt (would you like more?); in spite of the fact that in a very large economy running the world currency -  in  such an economy -  they might just get away with giving such advice.

It's still not clear if the United States will get away with it; certainly the United Kingdom could not.

The siren voices calling for the UK to continue following US responses to the crisis are as deluded as the man they advised and who got us into this in the first place.  It did not start in America.  It started with Northern Rock, and a retail  run on an English bank.  The assaults on the American belief in 'no boom and bust' followed this so public disgrace for our financial system.

So tomorrow, when we hear the consequences these folies have brought upon us as individuals and as a society, do not listen to those who argue for keynesian demand management .  America is a case unto itself.  We must cut, regain lenders' confidence and face up to our real economic status and almost ruined financial reputation.

ps Politicians should not swallow whole advice from academics: academics carry no political responsibility for their wildest recommendations, or the realisation of their silliest intellectual stances.

BBC to Pay For Over 75s Television Licences?

What a marvellous idea.  The BBC would not only provide, fairly, a free service to the over 75s, it would encourage the integration  of the elderly back into the family home as they attracted more and more releases from the taxes and imposts of everyday life.

Keep your old mum at home and get extra heating, help with the housework and free BBC.  You know she's worth it.

Cancellation Costs and Their Calculation

It is hard to avoid the thought that so ignoble is the aircraft carrier  decision-taking mess, so revealing of the inappropriate inputs into security planning and equipping the country to defend its interests, that the government is laying it out on purpose to generate an outcry big enough to sanction the renegotiation of those contracts signed in the dead days of the Brown government.

Many arguments were made during their signing that the choices being cast in legal concrete were inappropriate and driven by job-provision for Labour clients, particularly in Scotland, rather than the UK's defence requirements.  Perhaps the government could explain in more detail what has been committed to and how the costs of cancellation have been arrived at.  For the costs of having a pair of Potemkin aircraft carriers are much more than just the money.

LieBour's Leader

Macavity Miliband won't be going to the rally against the government's desperate attempts to undo Brown's economic and financial idiocy.  Oh, he said he would be there:

"I'll attend the rally, definitely.",  he declared as he collected that improper margin of trade union votes to defeat his brother in the Labour leadership contest.

But a spokesperson for Miliband confirmed today that while he would meet TUC representatives as part of a lobby following the rally, he would not attend rally. "There was never a firm commitment that he would attend the rally," she said.

What Are Trades Unions For?

Trade unions  have  no autonomous voice.   They can only be the transmission belt of globalisation to the working people rather than filling their earlier role of being the  transmission belt of Party agendas to the workers.   Under communism their function was very similar - that of disciplining workers and ensuring flexibility in the use of labour and low money wages, as the Party agenda required.  The only difference is that under communism there was over-full employment (not by design but as a by-product of excess demand for under-priced goods). Under capitalism any refusal to transmit globalisation  to the workforce results in additional unemployment - which is an alternative mechanism for disciplining workers.
Globalisation, or free trade as we used to call it, raises productivity much of which is enjoyed by us all through lower prices.  But we cannot have high wages, high employment and low prices resulting from globalisation.

Protectionism  offers higher employment levels at higher wages with higher prices and lower productivity.  If the trade unions under capitalism favour protecting members' employment and high wages then they must press for protectionism. And a ban on immigration and on capital outflows.

What an agenda.  What is the point of trade unions?

Mind Your Own Business

On Thursday Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State and Robert Gates, the secretary of Defence, both made remarks about expenditure on the United Kingdom's armed forces. Americans are marked-out usually for their courtesy and intelligence.  Not these two.

What impossible behaviour, commenting publicly on matters central to our government's spending review and, presumably, attempting to exert influence over it.  No-one doubts that allies consult one another on how much is spent on defence and how this expenditure is allocated.  International commitments both by treaty and by agreement  are assumed to be sacrosanct, to be observed until altered after negotiation with others party to the treaties.  Alllies are always in private contact over resources and allocations. 

Public comments suggesting that the UK Prime Minister is unaware of his country's undertakings or might decide to unilaterally renege on them are an indication more of the third-rate stuff Clinton is made of than any effective kind of warning or policy pressure. 

She was given her job because it was necessary to make a gesture within American Democratic party politics.  Since then she has wandered about the world damaging US interests when she has not been irrelevant. In the case of the UK  defence review she has been irrelevant, if impertinent, which will be why David Cameron has simply ignored her.

Hillary Clinton is to the United States what Cathy Ashton is to the European Union.

Dismantling the Socialist State

The list of public bodies (quangos) to be abolished completely, or have the area of remit returned to politically-answerable ministries is a pleasure to read.  Particularly pleasing is the entry:

'Union Modernisation  Fund Supervisory Board - Abolish body and function. No further rounds will be held of the Union Modernisation Fund so the work of the Board is complete.'

Tax-payer's money will no longer be paid to trade unions who then supply funding to the Labour party. Hah.

Criteria (other than preventing the diversion of tax funds into Party coffers) for retaining a quango are technical function and the requirement for impartiality.  Some clearly belong in the private sector, with private sector funding, such as the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board; others should seek charitable status, such as the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

The entry
'Regional Development Agencies, (x8) - (Angels punches the air like an emerging Chilean miner) - RDAs will be abolished and functions which are to be retained will be transferred to central or local government and others, as previously announced.'
is a triumph for our  democracy.

It's not so much about the money.  It's about spending the money and being   answerable to us through our representatives for expenditure.

Stick to Your Last

Bronzino is on in Palazzo Strozzi.  So we went.  Well, you would, wouldn't you? The Medici's painter, in Florence, with works from all kinds of private collections never to be seen again.  There are some lovely Pontormos in there too.

There was another exhibition going on in the Strozzi.  But we didn't bother. Photos of politicians and rich interiors are not art, they're photos of politicians etc.  A lot of art seems to have reduced itself to words, which is a pity for at least two reasons: artists who use words to communicate have rather missed their vocation as artists; and they're not a patch on philosophers and writers in thinking and writing.  

Educational Scorched Earth

A university education is not just a qualification, a gateway to a particular level of job, or a vocational training.  It is the prerequisite for a happy and intellectually sustaining life.  That's why there are so many mature students, provision for study later in life for those who missed out at the end of their school days, requirements on, say, music students to study for a degree as well as a performance diploma.  If you want a grown-up mind - no, a mind equipped to grow up - then you need a university education.

An education that imparts the ambivalence of things; the complexities of reaching a judgment - that teaches the scariness of judging at all, the difficulty of deciding what is true; the the sheer scale of fields of knowledge  - not just the large, but the importance of the detail; that imparts ideas of beauty, of coherence, symmetry, and of juxtaposition and disjunction; notions of time and of continuity, and choosing the weighting to give to them; ideas on ideas.  And all this through whatever discipline  most accessible to the student, expressed through the student's choice of study.

We don't go to university to get a job.  We go to university to get a life.

Everyone capable of coping with the course of study should have a free undergraduate education, just as they have free primary and secondary schooling.   Post-graduate work begins the training that specialises and qualifies for undertakings in any particular field (except for disciplines that require very early training, again the musicians are the example, they have to do everything at once or not at all) and it is then that people should start to pay the cost of their training individually.  After all, we are only 21 when we graduate, and even that could be reduced to 20 if schools recognised that universities admit from 17, not the 18 that school examination systems impose.

Have the last 13 years so impoverished us that we can no longer educate our children for the first 20 years of their lives, until they have been offered the last two and a half years that enables them to think rather than just learn?

The Browne Report is an act of vandalism.  Another attack on the principle of universal response to our society's nature, another indictment of the terrible extent of the other Brown's incompetence and the scorched earth  he and his Party left in his defeat.

Salsa

Just watch it

The Real Cost of a Minimum Wage

Minimum wages are supposed to redress the imbalance in negotiating power between employers and workers.  The imbalance, it is argued,  results from the usually over-powering bargaining position of employers vis-a-vis employees; furthermore,  the fact that minimum wage is fixed nationally when it should be graded regionally to reflect local costs of living does not justify its abolition.

A government sets the minimum wage - either locally or nationally - on the basis of an assessment  of the requirements for a minimum standard of living.  However, the globalisation of labour through trade  (not so much through de-localisation, which affects only a tiny fraction of the labour force  in any country - in Holland, one of the most highly-affected countries  in the world, it affects only  2% of  domestic employment - , nor even through migration, which affects  on average 5-6% of domestic employment) impinges savagely on such a measure

According to the IMF World Economic Outlook ( June 2008)  employment of labour in the world went up by 60%  in 2005 but world employment weighted by   share of export  went up by 600% in the same period.  Competition in the labour market has become ferocious world-wide.

Something has to give.  Either international mobility of production factors - capital and labour and free trade in goods and services; or wage-levels in advanced capitalist countries.   If we cut wages, protect domestic production, and stop labour migrations and capital movements then we can have a minimum wage.  And even then, with all the detrimental effects thus produced on living standards, only as long as it is low enough not to raise wages, internally and internationally, to non-competitive levels.

National Public Sector Pay Scales and a Minimum Wage Must Go

'National pay grades and scales must be scrapped if Cameron is to rebalance the economy fairly; as must the national minimum wage.', writes Raedwald. An obvious piece of scorched earth that must be reclaimed from the Thirteen Years (and more, unfortunately) of misrule.

Now that universality of benefit from the intervening state has been rejected, it is time to face up to the trade unions and end distortions of the market that result in wages being higher than is competitive in many parts of the UK, and too low in the South-east and London;  particularly as the trade unions are heavily skewed towards representing workers in the public sector.

What reason can there be to pay out more than the market demands for teachers, health service staff, general clerks, and manual worker grades other than that in other times and under other ideologies unions were permitted to impose inappropriate rewards at the expense of tax payers?

The destruction wrought by Labour in its atrocious failure to restrain brownian pseudo-economics   must at least bring down a trade union-imposed folly of paying far too much to some and far too little to others just because the work they do is similar. And there can be no national minimum wage once we have to abandon universality of support for children and the old.

No Universal Benefits, No Universal Charges

As brownian Labour's cack-handed incompetence at economics and finance has cost us universal, flat-rate payments in for families it is only fair that universal flat-rate payments out for families should be abolished also.

First up must be the BBC licence fee.  The abolition of a flat-rate charge on any family with a television  would go to compensating in some small fashion the loss of universal benefits.   Agreed the BBC enjoys universal dislike and distrust, but  now that we have been driven from our universalist mind-sets, its charges are unacceptable.

Camden Makes a Sensible Offer

Spades?  We have them in spades at the ecohouse.  But we don't have spades in Bloomsbury.  You'd hardly take a spade to the window boxes, would you?  So the idea from Camden council that we can get spades from them should the weather turn nasty, to keep frontages clear of snow and ice, seems eminently sensible.

Of course we're willing to go out and clear the bit of pavement in front of our building - it's commonplace in many European countries to do that.  So why is the Mail moaning about Camden Council lending us spades to do it?  Jolly sensible thing to do; last year we were shoving beastly snow about with bits of stiff cardboard.

Can't Bear any More Vivaldi; I'm Doing a Beethoven

Any more 'lost' Vivaldi works coming to light?  Just so I know the moment has arrived to shoot myself - I wouldn't like to go early.  There was a whole opera or two in the last five years; six or seven minutes of a flute concerto seems small beer.

Just because a work has dropped out of sight for a bit does not mean it's been lost.  Lost is when the entire pre-1700s  manuscript collection of Italian music is floating down the Arno from the devastated Biblioteca Nazionale in 1966.  Lost is when the French are required to bring back from Paris what they had looted from Florence, and dumped the lot, music included, in an untidy heap in the piazza della Signoria and said"Sort it out yourselves", which is why there are some oddly inappropriate works in churches and convents that speak of other orders and disciplines altogether, and the music stands in drifts and piles on floors and shelves in abandoned rooms off cloisters closed to all except the clergy.  Get on the right side of the Florentine clergy and discovery is your oyster ( as the Bishop said to the actress).

And that's not to mention what the Russians carted away from Berlin and lesser cultural centres in Germany and distributed in conservatories lost in the wilds of the old USSR.  Even the Fitzwilliam has found Handel bound in among undistinguished scuola di  portfolios.

Anyway, your latest listening as you hold for whoever you hope to speak to is going to be the new Vivaldi 'find'.  Don't be surprised if it sounds very much like all the other Vivaldi you have been forced to listen to.

Labour's New Generation

Douglas Alexander
Ed Balls
Hilary Benn
Andy Burnham
Liam Byrne
Yvette Cooper
Mary Creagh
John Denham
Angela Eagle
Maria Eagle
Caroline Flint
John Healey
Meg Hillier
Alan Johnson
Tessa Jowell
Sadiq Khan
Ivan Lewis
Ann McKechin
Jim Murphy
Ed Miliband MP, Leader of the Labour Party
Harriet Harman MP, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party
Tony Lloyd MP, Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party
Rosie Winterton MP, Labour’s Chief Whip
Baroness Jan Royall, Shadow Leader of the House of Lords
Lord Steve Bassam, Labour’s Chief Whip in the House of Lords

The list, provided by Guido,  has no elected members of the shadow cabinet whose name starts with a letter after 'M' (Rosie Winterton was unopposed in the selection of Labour Chief Whip earlier).  It is thought that the members of the Parliamentary Labour party failed to turn over their ballot papers to the rest of the list of candidates.  Many of those elected are well over fifty.

Debt and the Ending of State-intrusion Posing as Welfare

If the economic condition of the country after the 13 years of Brownian economic and financial administration is bad enough to attack universal benefits for children and pensioners then 'scorched earth' doesn't begin to describe what has been done to our society.

When the principle that the young and the old are protected by the resources of the whole society is breached, then society fragments into groupings that protect their own but not the wider world.  Few of us were happy with Labour's outrageous expenditures to settle many into workless lives under the guise of meeting our hopes for social solidarity, but we had not thought that in order to deal with the sheer destructiveness of Brown's years we would have to dismantle the welfare state based on reciprocity between the young, the old, and the active, working people.  It seems that so bad is the condition we have been left in that we must.   

We cannot abandon the notion of wider social solidarity altogether - that way is a return to primitive society.  And we certainly cannot accept a class confrontational analysis of society, we saw where that led in the 19th and 20th centuries: to wars, sickness, malnutrition, lack of education, and early death.

If we are now so poor, so indebted after the last 13 years, as to prohibit exchanges  between generations,  if we must demand that every individual justifies their claim to the help of others,  then we need to abandon our present welfare system completely.  Reading the account  in this morning's Mail of the many and various tax-funded schemes for families with children - all means-tested and thus intensely intrusive into private lives by the state -  was an eye-opener on why taxes are so high and how Labour was organising  and controlling people's lives.

We need a mind-shift on our own part away from the state dependency that has so insidiously been brought into all our lives.  Shock therapy like the removal of a universal benefit from relatively comfortably-off people is just the start of changing our ideas on what the state should be doing.

But we need higher wages,  lower taxes, better returns to saving as well,  to accompany our return to personal independence and private lives.  And we need this to accompany the shock therapy, not just promises of jam tomorrow.

Moral Philosophers and Polls

If you like moral philosophy (or even if you don't but are interested in it) and you have a nerdish interest in polls, then Leiter Reports: a philosophy blog (see Rockets listings) allows you to indulge nerdishness to excess.

Vote for you favourite moral philosopher.  Consider the arcane depths that polling formats can reach.

Universally Beneficial

'Benefit' used to be a lovely word but has now been degraded by association and misuse.  It was wrong of Labour to  call the assistance that is offered by tax-payers to those who, from personal misfortune  or economic constraint are unable to meet their outgoings, benefits.  Assistance is not a benefit (except in the most generic meaning of the word); it is a helping hand when needed.  Not, note, when qualified to claim  - some make no claim on the rest of us because they do not consider that they need to, even if they are qualified to claim; although there are  others who seem to have made a practice of seeking all and anything they can lay claim to even going so far as to warp themselves, their families, and their lives to fit into  assistance-attracting categories.

Youth and old age are two unavoidable conditions (unless you are very unlucky).  The very young and the very old have absolute claims upon us all, as a society, not just on their individual connexion, for our support.  The old supported us all when we were the young, the young will step up when we are old.  These are universal statuses; they call into being exchanges between generations that involve everyone in our society, if we are to understand ourselves as social beings at all.  They are the stuff of which our society is made.

Eliding the status of means-tested assistance during temporary misfortune with that of exchanges between the generations is always a socialist objective - part of raising working-class consciousness socialists would argue; but what they are actually doing is lowering the tone.

The Coalition needs to consider more carefully what should be cut, and not take the boss-eyed view of the poverty lobby, so hard-working over these last decades,  as correct.

Not a Good Choice of Cut

Universal benefits have the great advantage of doing away with means testing.  Also they include all of us in receiving plain advantage from collective administration of the tax-take.  (Inclusion of this kind when combined with means testing, with all its intrusiveness into the lives of others is, however,  typically Labour and unacceptable.)

What a pity that the subjection of universal child benefit to means testing is to be the first result of Labour's ravaging of our economy.  It's understandable, but regrettable, that the redistribution of actual cash to mothers and children is the easiest to take away and, on the surface, the easiest to justify.  Many of us know, though, through friends and acquaintances, that mothers who are at home looking after the family, from choice or lack of employment outside, are often very short of actual cash in hand for petty, everyday needs; quite well-to-do mothers as well as those with lower-earning husbands. It was a relief to many women when Barbara Castle put the tax relief for having children in a family into their hands directly.

At the very least the tax relief should be reinstated for any families with children.  After all, higher-rate tax-payers are not exactly rolling in money, are they?   Particularly those with children to care for.

Power Games and the Great Reunification

The extraordinary inside story  of the reunification of Germany 20 years ago is covered in Der Spiegel, after the release of documentation by both Germany and the United Kingdom. 

The players dwarf today's political figures, as  the events and tense negotiations described dwarf today's political news.

If you have an hour, read it.

Clapped-out Harman

Cabinet is not the House of Commons.  Cabinet ministers are consistently briefed in far greater detail than the House on Executive policies and decisions.  And if the House of Commons is deliberately misled by the Executive of the day, particularly by the prime minister of the day, it does not bear anything like the same responsibility for policy endorsements as that  borne by cabinet ministers.

If a cabinet minister accepts as 'wrong'  (as the new Labour Leader put it) major policy choices taken by the Executive then their course is to resign, as did Robin Cook over the attack upon Iraq.  The resignation of the then Leader of the House of Commons  followed by his statement to the House shows that determining the worth of evidence for the decision to make war on Iraq was open to cabinet ministers in a way that it was not to ordinary  Members of the House - be they government back-benchers or opposition Members.

So when David Miliband turns in contempt to Harman, asking"Why are you clapping?"  he is not referring to her behaviour as a member of Parliament voting in the House, but to her voting behaviour as a Cabinet member, and her repudiation of cabinet responsibility  during the last  Labour government.

"I am supporting him...",  doesn't begin to justify the public rejection of a central part of our governing system, and the denial of a responsibility that can never be set aside once assumed. 

Brotherly Advice

Did Ed Miliband talk David out of toppling Brown when he had the chance?  If he did his behaviour is so offensive at so many levels, and towards us all, not just his brother, that he's up there with Brown as unfit to lead.

Don't Stand for the Shadow Cabinet, David

David Miliband would be lost for good if he accepted standing for office in the Labour opposition.  That while in opposition Labour elects those who will be members of the shadow cabinet, while allowing the Leader to appoint any of those elected to any shadow office, creates a nightmare in which he finds himself both patronised by his younger brother, and surrounded by 'colleagues' chosen by a ballot in which every elector's eye is on the new Leader and who and what put him there. 

Certainly he would be elected, but who else would be elected with him?  What shadow office could possibly attract him?  Shadowing William Hague?  Miliband's international status far outstrips that of Hague - international interlocutors would feel they were talking to the wrong man - and they would be right.  Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer?  The gulf between what the public service unions, in deficit denial, and what he would know needs to be done, renders that position unavailable.  No other office, shadow or  not, is of any real importance; except for deputy prime minister, and that only because of what a Coalition government has required and made of it.

It might be thought a bit hard to expect him to be his brother's deputy, too.

David Miliband  represents not just his constituents but an entire social democratic movement in UK politics.  Continuing to give that movement voice, expression, and eventually form, free of the malign deformations inflicted by peculiarly British trade union nature and practices  (to which the party led by his brother is once again in thrall) is his political task in this country.  If he doesn't want what that will involve, then he must be off to other things. 

It's no good his brother trying to pretend that he can make a social democratic party free of inappropriate union power.  He can't.   He was put where he is to prevent the development of a democratic, left of centre, party; and he was put there by the former Leader's men.

It is to be hoped that David Miliband will choose to continue in UK politics.  If he does, it must be from a position that defines his division from Labour as it now is.   

Can You Forgive Him?

“I’m nobody’s man, I’m my own man and I’m very very clear about that,”

declares the new Labour Leader.  Well, that's not quite the case, is it?  Ed Miliband is Gordon Brown's protege.  Think what that means: no-one who didn't jump as high as Brown said 'jump' remained in post, and Miliband remained in post, he advanced, under Brown.  He was parachuted into a safe Labour seat in the North of England - what on Earth has Miliband to do with the constituency he was handed?

Deeply involved in the setting up of the New Labour Project from when he was very young, he has declared also that New Labour is dead.  Well, that's not quite the case either, is it?  This phase of the Project is over, the shifting of the dinosaur aspects of Labour towards the centre ground. The next phase is shifting the centre ground itself to the left.  That is what he will be party to.

And  he wants to shed 'some of the baggage' of recent years:  there's  the war-mongering  and its dead to shed; the lifting of all and any regulation on the banks to shed (and Miliband was an economic advisor); the startling growth in inequality within the United Kingdom during the first governing phase of the Project to finesse. And all the assaults upon our civil rights and democratic practices to be denied, now that they are being unravelled by the Government.  Baggage!

Democratic practices are going to be tricky to assert, or even reassert for a man elected to the Leadership of his party by such a doubtfully democratic process as the Labour party's rules.  His predecessor, of course,  didn't bother with those processes at all; but Miliband's party electoral weighting and process is such a despicable fix it's barely acceptable to any modern political party, and not at all acceptable to a democratic party.  It no more confers any claim to be prime minister of the UK on him than it did on those Labour Leaders who have gone before him and achieved general election victories.  Except for Blair.  Only Blair, reviled by Miliband,  rose above his Party to truly claim a democratic mandate.

Miliband's reputation for being indecisive is probably a reflection of being his master's voice or, at least, creature;  difficult to be decisive when every decision, no matter how small or from whatever department, was disappearing into the black (or should that be Brown?) maw.  Not nice, though, either  to assert that standing against your brother is a sign of decisiveness; I'd choose a word more like disloyalty (or  one of the freudian terms were I inclined to interpret the world in that kind of context.)   And getting a kiss from Lord Kinnock is something disgraceful in any kind of context (unless you're Glenys I suppose).

We know what he stands for because it was the manifesto that he wrote on which Labour lost the last election (with a little help from his friends).  And if he has repudiated that as well, now, it's beginning to look as if he will say anything at any time to anyone to obtain office, first in a democratically discredited party, as a stepping stone to bossing-about us all - and we all had quite enough of that kind of behaviour.

The trouble with Ed Miliband is that he is tainted with the very worst of Labour's thirteen years,  and the fact that so were all the other candidates doesn't make him any more attractive.  There is nothing he could say or do that would make me ever believe him.

Or his party until it apologises sincerely for spoiling, indeed taking, the lives of so many millions of people, and demonstrates its remorse and penitence by the putting in place of fully democratic party systems. Then it can pretend to choosing a potential prime minister.

Winter Coats

The outburst of fashionability for Bavarian traditional dress encourages me to recommend:

http://www.lodenfrey.com/Trachten/Damen/Maentel-Capes/Mantel-lf-1.html

When I last went to Munich -  (that was the occasion of the eery walk in the Englischer Garten  round about  midnight with a chap from Transylvania wheeling a large suitcase which, when asked what it contained that he had brought it to dinner with him, replied "A tombstone."  How I hoped my other dinner companions hadn't drawn too far ahead of us - I'd only hung back because the poor chap had this unwieldy burden) -  I bought this lovely coat.

Since then I have worn it every winter, despite being greeted by a German friend on its first outing  with, "Oh look!  The country gentlewoman has come up to town in her best coat."  But then, she comes from Stuttgart and is just jealous she couldn't get away with a loden Mantel, as an Englishwoman can.

Surprise Reprise of Brown "I am Angry..." Number

There must be a union-guaranteed freeby clause in every defeated Project politician's global governance contract. 

"Once you are out of office you will receive a minimum of 4 (FOUR) international outings a year; two will be intercontinental, and the other two will be one each to expensive ski resorts in winter and the seaside in summer.  First class return air fare, greeter at the point of arrival, black Mercedes to five star accommodation, all meals, and at least one opportunity to address an audience of journalists (tamed by equivalent travel and hotel arrangements).  At least 1 (ONE) current Head of State or Equivalent will address your venue during your stay. (Even if only to say 'thank you for coming and we always value your opinion)'."

The return is that the defeated/outworn/not awfully comfortably-off anymore, will keep a closed mouth on anything they may have picked up in office.  

Jaroslavl a Week Later

The Global Policy Forum was a set piece to bolster President Medvedev  against Prime Minister Putin's intentions towards the presidency of Russia.  As such  most of its efforts were not directed to the open investigation of the topics on the agenda - which in themselves enunciated  an already narrowly defined stance towards matters which, of their nature, are wide and long-debated.  For instance "The main topic is how [sic] the modern state should look  like, how it should develop and act to guarantee, on the one hand, freedoms and welfare for its citizens, and, on the other hand, to remain competitive and responsible actor in the rapidly changing world." [actually, sic to all of that, punctuation included.]

The notion that it is democracy that defines the democratic state, not the modern state that defines democracy was not on the agenda.

Instead: 'efficiency of modern democratic states and criteria for measuring it; defining the standards of modern democracies and ways to develop them; the diversity of democratic experiences; the role of the modern state as an instrument for modernization; new challenges that countries and the world community face; legal mechanisms to respond to these challenges; ways of development of regional and global systems of security,' [sic again] was, and corralled the tightly controlled participants.

Round tables of 20 speaking participants (chosen by the organisers earlier) were given minutes to comment on closely prepared, glossily produced working papers, tens and sometimes more than a 100 pages long.  These had been turned out by think tanks (who would have thought there could be so many?) and university departments using Russian and 'international body' funding.  No questions were taken from the floor within the time limits, although occasionally the distinguished audience (never have so many been gathered at such expense to sit and listen to  points of view, opinions and arguments large numbers would dismiss, have already dismissed) could not be contained and things would go off message into valid and interesting discussion that was never reported.  The 1400 journalists, out-numbering the participants 3 to 1 had already received their press summaries of the sessions.  It was claimed:

'Global Policy Forum is the venue where criteria of modern effective democratic statehood are jointly developed, as only collectively elaborated and recognized standards serve in the interests of building a just, balanced, and stable world order providing conditions for decent life of millions of people.'  They might have continued 'and where what we want, and say, goes'.

The section on 'Regional Systems of Global Security' was moderated by "Lord Robertson, George (UK), former General Secretary of NATO, member of the board of directors of TNC BP'  and a Russian I.G. Yurgens, chairman of the board of the Institute of Modern Development."  I never did manage to get hold of the names of the 20 talking heads at the round table, but Robertson says it all, at least for me; and there was no list of every participant attending the Forum available at all.

'New Challenges and the Concept of International Law' argued that 'regulatory development of the international law during the last decades has gone ahead of its theoretical understanding [sic, as ever; why don't they get some decent editors?] Contentious? Just a bit.  But then one of the moderators was the former Federal Chancellor of Austria 2007/8 AND a former leader of the Social Democratic Party of Austria, co-moderating with the chairman of the Russian Federation's Public Committee for the Development of Civil Society (which just sounds so post 1789  France).

This post is just a taster of what was going on; I have piles of licit and illicit bumf collected from the Arena 2000 venue in which we were 'locked down' for security reasons for an entire day when Medvedev and Berluska were there.

A salute to the eminent Italian sociologist Poggi, who pinned Medvedev down on interference with the internet and control over the mass media practiced in Russia, during a round table series of 'questions to the President'; and a salute to President Medvedev who didn't duck the question with blether, though looking decidedly black-faced about it, and insisted that there was no interference with, or intention of setting-up interference with, the internet or blogging, and that the media was for the media to run, its problems and practices its own, and not  the state's.  Which may or may not be true but was at least an admirable view, roundly asserted.

A lot of those who might be thought of as politically dead (cf Robertson above) are alive and circuiting.  M'beki  seemed to be the only one with personal guards - it was rather comforting being greeted whenever going in or out by half a dozen and more smiling Africans with jumpy eyes - one at the lifts, one at the seating area looking over the city, one each side of M'Beki's rooms, more in the rooms opposite.   Mostly though, the obvious security was at the access points.  Lovely spaniels filling in time sniffing who knows what through the grass and into the trees as no bombs were being found, and large alsatians on leads held back by men in black while we all waved labels at commissars (they looked like commissars, I don't know what they were really)  who waved us on in turn.  And people who  consume personal security are probably doing it as a fashion accessory rather than from necessity.  Perhaps one of the themes of the Forum should have been 'Loss of Office does not Imply Loss of Status or Influence in Modern Democracy; Discuss'.

Looking Gift Horses in the Mouth

Some economists are silly.  There was a serious contention that Russia's natural resources were a curse.  That oil and gas were leading to currency over-valuation, de-industrialisation and unemployment.  Surely, the failure to take full advantage of natural resource richesse springs from policy mistakes, not the existence of resources.

This ridiculous argument (coming from a reputed expert in energy policy) of a resource curse, the Dutch disease, the adverse impact of oil export revenues, led to the observation that it can always be left in the ground utilising a costless storage opportunity, used  to take foreign policy advantage, used to invest nationally to promote further growth. 

If poverty of resources were a prerequisite of growth, beggars would ride.



 

Global Forum Gobsmacked by Berlusconi

"This is my speech, prepared for me by my research department" Berlusconi began to the assembled great and good bathed in the curious blue light of the main  hall "but  that is just for the record", he confided, handing it to the chairman of the session.  "Let me tell all of you here what is democracy".

First he claimed to be the greatest of Russia's friends.  It was he who had turned the G7 into the G8 when inviting  Yeltsin to join them in Naples in 1994; he who had told  Putin and Obama thay would not be invited to Aquila unless they signed the agreement on  nuclear disarmament first and they had shown him the signed treaty on their arrival; he who had re-opened the dialogue between Russia and the United States after their relations cooled over the missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic and the invitations to Ukraine and Georgia to join Nato.  He claimed the warmest of personal as well as political relations with Putin and Medvedev, who he called "Un dono del Signore al vostro popolo".  By now sections of the audience where openly giggling or making remarks to their neighbours.

Democracy, we were told, requires three things: freedom from bureaucratic oppression, from fiscal oppression, and from oppression by the judiciary.  For instance, in Italy there are too many rules.  He, Berlusconi, is guided by the principle that we can do anything we like, and that ex post authorisations rather than prior permissions and regulatory conformity should be the only requirements for initiating an enterprise. Otherwise corruption is bred by bureaucratic oppression.

The state does too much: while up to a third of income, paid  in tax, can be regarded as payment for services provided by the state, such as defence and internal security, more than that is an unfair imposition; above 50 percent in tax is theft, indeed robbery.

Finally, oppression by the judiciary, especially  where magistrates have unlimited power and independence, as in Italy, leads to the effective suppression and dissolution of democratic parties by the incrimination of politicians and parties.  In Italy in 1993 the magistrates set out to take power, so he, by popular demand, decided to enter politics as owner of television stations and national newspapers, and of the most successful football team in the world.  The magistrates had tried to prevent his entry into politics by all kinds pretexts and prosecutions in which he has invariably established his innocence. The 1948 Constitution, (the Italian Constitution) seeking to avoid the resurgence of Fascism had set extraordinary limits to government and executive powers and handed the judiciary oppressive powers.  This must be undone to re-establish democracy.

By now the tittering and murmuring had stopped and the hall had succumbed to this remarkable take on the nature of democracy.  His oratory was masterly, it must be admitted. Berlusconi the democratic politician, martyred by judicial abuses, high taxes, and bureaucratic regulatory strangulation.

Without democracy (presumably as freed from regulatory and judicial tyranny, and those pesky taxes) there can be no freedom to develop individual talents and without that freedom there can be no economic growth.  But democracy can be improved. On we leapt into the development of democracy by the introduction of new technologies. We were swept through the digitalisation of public administration, the stabilising of prices in oil, copper, other metals, food - wheat, soya, rice, and the fight against the drugs trade. Strong sanctions should be placed on the personal consumption of drugs - it is the drug consumer who is responsible for generating drug production. All this was to be organised at the next G20 summit in Seoul he added, beaming at the South Korean prime minister, who looked nervously at his aides.

There must be concentration on raising life expectancy to 120 years and improving the quality of that extended life-span, as he was doing by funding research into stem cell technology.  His wish for the gathering was the spread of democracy everywhere, and a longer and healthy life of 120 years.

The audience put their hands together for Silvio and wondered what they had been here for, what they had achieved in all the hours of analysis and discussion, with all their massed expertise in technology, economics, political science, and history.

At least  he had brought them all to a moment of  reflection and self-awareness. Afterwards they were all quite cross.

A Political Intermezzo

I had that Massimo D'Alema  (Italy's 77th prime minister since 1946, from 1998-2000) in the back of my car last night, on the way to the formal dinner.  He had been scheduled to speak (allocated 9 minutes - 12.39 to 12.48) in the section on regional systems of global security.  He'd reneged on the extraordinary grounds that Silvio Berlusconi, who  speaks at the plenary session today, is both capable of, and prone to, saying anything at all.  To make outlandish suggestions such as that Russia should join NATO, which would have been grossly at odds with D'Alema's stance and Party's politics.  (It is very bad form to clash with one's own Head of Government at these jamborees; leads to speculation that a country is changing its policies or otherwise coat trailing).

Despite being the former leader of the former Italian Communist Party, D'Alema claimed to be convinced of Gianfranco Fini's sincerity, of his integrity, despite Fini being the former leader of the former Fascist Party, which thus enabled a good working relationship and a proper opportunity in combination with the PD, to drive Berlusconi from office, .

"But he's a Fascist" I remarked angelically.  "Once a Fascist, always a Fascist.  It's a matter of the heart as well as the head, a way of viewing the world, not just politics.  We can't vote for him ever."  Then I remembered the Communist past.  Same difference.  Woops.

Democracy Considered as a Reward for Economic Growth

The session on the state and technological modernisation consisted of a round table of eighteen middle-aged to ancient men, and an 150-strong audience with a sprinkle of long-legged blonde photographers and journalists.  Spontaneous contribution is not accepted at the Forum.  The Press has a list of all speakers  (there is no published list of all participants) both formal paper-givers and those who comment afterwards (who are timed to four minute contributions.)  Looking round the spectators just on a casual know-by-sight-or-reputation basis, this is a great pity; there are some distinguished men and women here.  But  time is allocated for 'interaction and informal discusssion' only after the sessions - it seems there is a time and place for everything.  People are restive, not used to being bridled in this fashion.

The line is priority to growth and technological development, for while democracy and its institutions are a good thing, it must be acknowledged   that there is no single model or extant type of wholly satisfactory democracy, no Holy Grail yet found and, furthermore, no kind of democracy can be permitted to thwart or hinder economic advance and the achievement of fairness and rising living standards. Sigh.

There are so many questions begged here, where do we start ? (in the proper time and place for informal discussion and interaction, not in the plenary sessions, naturally.)  Of course, those who see democracy and what it confers as desirable and to be installed only when advanced economic success  is achieved under more efficient  institutional arrangements, almost as if it were a high order good to be consumed once basic  economic global goals have been delivered, can stay perpetually in charge - in purely technical roles and with authority derived from purely efficiency-driven needs, they would say.  And they can get together in Jaroslavl, and lesser (though no less costly) meetings of minds, and reinforce to one another and to the world, the rightness of their undertakings and view of how to order the planet.

Capitalism produces initiative, entrepreneurship, innovation, trust, rewards; markets clear. And all this goes hand in glove with individualism,  personal and civil freedoms, flat authority structures and high expectations of participation in the use of state power by regular, democratic consultation.  That is, with democracy; which is at the root of economic and technological success and grows and transmutes with it.  If it is suppressed, excluded, in the name of efficiency both technical and managerial, then we lose the spontaneously produced characteristics of capitalism so successful in providing the advanced world with its high living standards  and individual fulfilment.

They  never give up, do they?  You would think they would have died of shame - the older ones -  and the younger ones have  been convinced by growing up and living under the failures of realised socialism.  But no, all that's needed is to to tweak it a bit, find a means to simulate market functioning, and then democracy and capitalism can be matched, despatched, by benevolent statism and planning.     

Bunfight on the Jaroslavl Express

The hammer and sickle were absent - too much to hope for in retro-decoration, I suppose - but the samovar is hissing at the end of the corridor and a steady supply of black or jasmine tea is being handed into our compartment by a large blonde lady.  Ructions among the assembled trainload of attendees and pressmen as some are getting lunch and the rest cheese and ham sandwich on what appears to be a purely arbitrary basis generated by plan under-fulfilment. Angels are happy with jasmine tea in unlimited amounts (those hotel breakfasts) so are, of course, above the fray.

There are a number of sessions that seem to be relatively insulated from one another.  All are ominously undemocratic but that may be an import from the way Russian speaks of political concepts.  Nevertheless: 'the state as an instrument for technological upgrading; standards of democracy and diversity of democratic experience; new challenges and new concepts of international law; regional systems for global security, taken together to indicate a mindset untainted by libertarian or even individualist and democratic ideals...  There is to be an intersectional panel on the European Security Treaty

Could Russia be envying Chinese command and control economics?. 

To Jaroslavl from Platform 9 and a Half

President Medvedev's Global Policy Forum  is setting out from Moscow on a special train.  If, instead of a giant, dark green engine, emblazoned with red hammer and sickle on a golden ground, wheels taller than a man doesn't come panting up to the platform, with samovars of boiling tea in every carriage, I'm going to be very disappointed.  They wouldn't put us all on the equivalent of the Cambridge Cruiser would they?


The Modern State: Standards of Democracy and Criteria of Efficiency is to have its hash settled in the next forty-eight hours by specialists of every kind and persusasion under the gaze of journalists from across the world - but only here will an angels'-eye view be offered.

Goodbye to All That

Angels are off to look at other worlds.  You may like to look too.

Leaving Home

There are days when the world is rigged against an Angel.  Setting off I have:

 - found a cache of clean clothes I had run through the machine last night, which should be in the case, hanging secretively behind the bathroom door.

-  packed all the story books in the hold bag and now have nothing to read for hours.

-dropped the lavatory cleaner, cap and all, into the loo while performing the ordered ritual of 'leaving the house'.

I haven't even set foot in the street yet, never mind faced volcanic clouds.  Sob.

Deportment

Women with long, slender legs can cross them and uncross them at will and how they like.  There is a sound rule for the rest: 

cross your ankles and only your ankles and, even then, only if you cannot control yourself enough to sit with your feet uncrossed and gracefully placed on the floor - both of them, side by side or one slightly behind the other for an occasional shift in position. 

Women who are not wearing men's clothes should follow the rule and stop displaying fat thighs, in cheap tights, crossed above the knee.  And yes the cheapness of tight can be spotted from a distance, and through a television camera.

And sit up straight while speaking to others.  Or stand up; which has the great advantage of taking the attention off fat legs, except for the truly gross.

Abolish the House of Lords

The House of Lords should be abolished.  Presented as a revising Chamber that undertakes detailed scrutiny of government legislation, and as a restraint upon the near dictatorial powers of the Executive, particularly those of the prime minister of the day, its true role is obscured.  The House of Lords is really a contributor to the overweening power of the prime minister.

Its members are appointed by the prime minister to reward compliance in political life; specifically in the Commons but also in all and everyday compliance, through every political act and utterance in the country at large, and within various levels of Party activity, as well as in all media interactions.

Any role the Lords might have or attempt to exert  to constrain the Executive is negated both by the simple expedient of creating more peers in the appropriate political mode, and by the (slightly more democratic) argument that unelected representatives should not over-rule those who are elected.

Its activities as a revising chamber can readily be undertaken by Commons committees.  The Lords does not play a role as a federal chamber balancing  non-homogenous  federated state representation (though that is one of the functions of second chambers in some jurisdictions); the occasional reconfiguration of the Commons as an English Parliament sitting for English affairs  would meet the need for such a body to match the Scottish parliament, the Welsh, and Northern Irish Assemblies, but the Commons alone should serve as the elected Parliament of the United Kingdom most of the time, as it does now.

Nor does the House of Lords provide technical and specialist skills, especially now that the Law Lords sit there no longer, of any greater competence than the Commons can muster.  And if such specialist skills are required they can be bought in as temporary adjuncts to Commons' committees.

The existence of a second chamber always limits the effectiveness of direct democracy and our second chamber is notably pernicious in this.  Mr Cameron has given up the prime ministerial bludgeon of choosing when to dissolve the parliament, in abolishing the Lords he can end the undemocratic persistence of defeated political elites continuing to advocate and represent policies rejected by  the electorate.

Changing Labour

It's not which of the Milibands that matters.  What needs addressing is the Scottish Labour party, its policies and practices or, that is,  an uncleansed  Scottish Labour party. Neither Labour, specifically, nor the United Kingdom, more generally, can have such an organisation unreformed playing any role in our politics.   Labour needs to hold a very public inquiry into Scottish Labour, and the leadership election should address this requirement.

No democratic, pluralist and UK-wide social democratic party can have something like Scottish Labour involved with it. It's unsafe for the whole of the country, as the defeated regime has shown.

Who Are These People?

Locking school pupils into schools from morning to night is still the unpleasant mindset of the left-overs of the Labour regime.  Any excuse will do but forcing school dinners down people's throats in the name of nutritional purity remains a favourite - after all, there are so many pleasing side effects: jobs for jobsworths (the idea of government employees spying on queues at local cafes to 'observe' what was bought is nauseating); payments for 'nutritional analyses' (doubtless from sprouts of pseudo third sector businesses); directors of yet more quangos (at least two are served up in the article) pontificating on the wickedness of chips and other olefactory pleasures.

Then there are the pressures from the enforced socialisation brigade - eat with the people you are studying with or starve, which is merely an extension of -  study with the people allocated to your age cohort  and locality or read under the covers with a torch to acquire any learning at all. Particularly repellent was the expressed view that if a family hands lunch money to younger members it should be force-fed into the school-provided canteen which, unsurprisingly, has led to delaying lunch until quarter to four for those who are not on free school dinners.

The boast that some schools have 'negotiated' arrangements (what threats came from local authority licensing departments, and the council's elf'n'safety cadres?) that local eateries should refuse service to school students  are exemplars of inappropriate and intrusive attitude to the lives of others.

Cuts needed?  Start with these people.

Welcome to the Sunlit Uplands

It took the whole electorate but  we separated the government of the country from self-identification with the state.  Government has returned to being powerful but not permanent.  We even have a Department of Education again.  And although a particular theory of history as being the product of interacting and impersonal forces rather than the actions of individuals has suffered a blow, we are rid of some remarkably pernicious individuals' influences on our fortunes.  Our objective economic circumstances have not changed but the people dealing with them at government level are competent and, crucially, willing to be advised by the pragmatic and technically skilled.


Various assaults on our claims to pass through our lives privately, pursuing our idiosyncratic interests, are being abandoned and dismantled.  Our data will not be wiped from the half-completed state and 'lost'  data bases, but at least there is an end to any further collection, and what are held are held sufficiently incompetently for there to be a real expectation of the whole shebang falling into disuse.


The Commons has been offered a lifting of one of the greatest powers over its whipped membership - the threat of forcing every member to face re-election unless they do as the Executive tell them to do - and while they are having a passing difficulty in understanding this they will get the idea eventually.


We are to have an elected second  chamber.  Angels would like to see the entire current Lords required to stand for election, alongside any new candidates but, short of that, the withering away of the placemen and troughing party hacks will have to do; at least a start will have been made.  Perhaps the current House of Lords could be bodily removed to a purpose-built heritage museum and the elected Senate installed in Westminster.


The bringing into use of all the machinery of devolved government, particularly between Scotland's parliament and the federal Westminster parliament left even Alex Salmond looking gob-smacked.  Ending the use of Scotland as a Labour party Westminster support system will be immensely beneficial in both countries, and for the United Kingdom as a whole.  Damaging to the Labour party, certainly, but do we care?


Best of all, the progressive alliance that we all knew existed in our country has turned out to be a centre right progressive alliance -   our old, dear friend One Nation Conservatism survived and has been found thriving,  welcomed back by over 60% of us.  The Labour party's renewal will be welcome too, and interesting, once the brace of Milibands and the lowering threat of unenlightened trade unionism has been seen off.  Some of Angels' best friends are social democrats and there are many examples of egalitarian and socially inclusive governance the electorate may prefer when it is able to be offered by a reformed and democratised Labour party.


Normal service has been resumed.

Pandora and the British Constitution

A head of state whose constitutional role is to be above politics isn't a lot of use with coalition politics and fixed term parliaments.  Of course being above politics is a necessary veil to draw over the immodesty of hereditary monarchies wielding temporal and spiritual power. 

If we are to have the new politics we'll need a better, democratic, mechanism for choosing who should be invited to attempt to form an administration after a vote of confidence has been lost.   The misrepresentation of constitutional duty and responsibility inflicted upon us last week by a defeated party leader won't do in the future, any more than it did recently.

Once we choose not to end a Parliament with a lost no confidence motion - a wholly proper and democratic choice, though unfamiliar in our constitutional practice - then we must have a proper and democratic means to determine who gets next go.

We could consult the Italians whose fixed term parliaments are much enlivened by the fluidity of the coalitions operating within them.  We would be fortunate indeed to elect ourselves a president as admirable as President Napolitano but, over time and with practice, we would learn to avoid the more corrupt of our older politicians and recognise  the best of our statesmen.  It would be helpful, too, to provide an elected Upper House for our Parliament, a sort of training ground  for the highest office where years of service in a revising and tempering role would reveal who was wheat and who chaff, for no politician could go straight from the political battles and naked animosities of the Commons  into the statesman status that confers eligibility for head of state.

All this would need a constitutional court with clear and universal accessibility, and to which the head of state could turn for interpretive advice and confirmation.  There is no need to codify the entire constitution and lose the joys and subtleties of its infinite flexibility, just a touchstone, so to speak. 

We could keep the monarchy as well, but more for the expression of national emotions than for the wielding and transmission of power; a necessary  separation  of monarchy's two roles: a wholly mystical depository of  the idea of nationhood; and an efficient embodiment of the power of the state and proper access to it.

Was Any of It Worth It?

The latest figures on the distribution of income and the extent of relative poverty in the UK, covering 2008-09, will be published next Thursday.  The Institute for Fiscal Studies will be commenting on the figures, and recent trends in poverty and inequality in the United Kingdom, immediately after their release and will then be releasing a fuller report the next day, 21 May, on:

- how average incomes and the gap between rich and poor in the UK changed during the first full financial year of the recession;
- whether the rise in child poverty between 2004-05 and 2007-08 continued for a fourth year, or whether the increased generosity of benefits and tax credits for families with children led child poverty to fall;
- whether pensioner poverty has fallen during the current recession, just as it did in past recessions.

Dragging the entire population into the tax credit maw while levying high tax rates on the relatively less well off was a central plank of New Labour's socioeconomic policies.  These figures and the IFS take on them will be a judgment on Labour.

The Man in Silken Stockings

Constitutional change following upon this profound shift in political practice must come soon.  Straight away by-elections are going to be most peculiar without a party list system to enable voters to choose first their party, and then the candidate within the coalitions embodied in their party.  But party list systems belong with proportional representation, which itself calls for centralised political parties remote from local choices.

We need a constitutional court to test the constitutional validity and propriety of politcal actions and polticians' attempts to interpret our diffused constitution; and we cannot again have civil servants drawing up constitutional practices and solutions which are, in themselves, highly political in their effect, to meet the increasing likelihood of  various fall-outs from consensus politics facilitated by  democratic practices other than first past the post .

The study of polical science covers many disciplines: philosophy, economics, statistics, political institutions, comparative politics, history, constitutional law... some respectable institutions of learning and research refused for years even to recognise any discipline at all, and required undergraduates to study in more formally and narrowly organised faculties of history or philosophy or  even law.   The student of political science usually has preferred areas of study; for Angels the most yawn-inducing was political sampling, polling and statistics; closely-followed by comparative politics.  How unfortunate that it is precisely these bodies of knowledge that serve best in current circumstances. 

There is, however, a small ray of sunshine shining from the direction of political institutions and constitutional law, so it is very pleasing that Ken Clarke is now our Lord Chancellor.

Floreat Etona....

...floreat amicabilis concordia!

Delaying the Opening of Parliament is the Next Step for a Labour-Nationalist-Liberal Democrat Regime

Should Brown attempt to meet Parliament with a Queen's Speech he will be defeated, not least by desertion of members of the Labour party aware of the damage to Labour of trying to cope with Brown's economic disaster when supported  by members of the various Nationalist parties; parties whose votes can only be bought by failing to take the spending cuts measures demanded by the economic disaster.

Brown may state that he will not cut anything until next year; the world will not lend after next week.

There is a limit on printing money as experience of the highly inflationary days of the late 1970s under Labour's ill-fated economic policies then demonstrated.  Weimar it will not be - that was over 50% a month, by Cagan's conventional definitions of inflation.  Inflationary levels that really hurt as it hurt in Russia in 1992, at 2500% a year and with the dollar at 36 times its purchasing power parity, are unlikely.  But 500% inflation as in Poland in 1990 (with Deutschemarks used for any serious transaction, though they are called euros now) is not unthinkable; ask the Poles how that felt.   It hurt so much Poland didn't go into recession during this so-called global crisis.

There are parts of the United Kingdom - Scotland, Wales, North  East and North West England and, worst of all Northern Ireland, where the majority of incomes are state incomes and fixed.  Will the people there like it when the automatic stabilisers are frozen and the central bank prints money to be lent out to buy government bonds?  Fixed incomes to meet inflationary bills and living costs.  At the very least we will get back to the 1970s.

And our situation, while all-embracing as in war-time, is not infused with the solidarity engendered by facing a common enemy and the courage and determination that produces.  We are fiercely resentful of the Brown-engineered, equally all-embracing threat to our livelihoods which we will not act together to resolve.  There will be only coercion and bribery, not enthusiastic willingness to give our all to survive, for any measures our government attempts.  This bodes ill for the condition of our society and our democracy.

Should the Head of State be asked to delay the new Parliament's opening, Angels would not be in the least surprised.

The United Kingdom Forced to Prop up the Euro

The European Commission is raising money on the markets using the EU budget as collateral.  Under terms in the Lisbon Treaty it has used all kinds of measures to find three quarters of a trillion euros.  Not unnaturally the euro has risen slightly.  Which is nice for the euro.  But the zombie Labour regime that had to accede to this is lying when Darling states that the bail-out of the euro is a matter only for member-states using the euro.  The decision-taking is only for them, but the guarantees and the borrowing is for all.  Poland and Sweden, who are not euro users (the first because it hasn't qualified yet, the second because it chose not to) have agreed to join openly in support of the measures agreed, and are therefore fully involved in the decision-taking. 

Without a new government, without a representative at the discussions, without defence against what New Labour did in forcing through Lisbon, tens of billions of pounds (which we have not got) are now  committed to the support of a foreign currency.

Five More Years

The delaying of the meeeting of the new Parliament is playing into Brown's hands, as it was intended to do.  Had he had to meet the Parliament within days there could have been no possibility of getting through a Queen's Speech.  But while the negotiations drag on an unlikely and unstable Queen's Speech alliance of rag tag and bobtail 'parties', plus some Liberal Democrats who will break ranks in the vote to help towards a majority, beckons.   If all of the Liberal Democrats can be tempted on board that will make it easier and carrots will be offered to achieve it.   The fissiparous nature of the LibDems    provides opportunity for the threats Brown also made in his phone call offer to Clegg.  The Liberal Democrats will split over a Queen's Speech crafted to split them if they do not ally with New Labour.

Further devolution, difficult to stop anyway, will be enough for the celtic nationalists and, as Ken Clarke withered, you can always do a deal with an Ulsterman though it's never the basis for stable government.   The Green will have rings run round her, why she could even have a little post and office of her own, that should do it.

Then there is the righteousness of letting Parliament decide.  You can just hear the sound of that weird accent practising mouthing the self-justifying words:  we are a parliamentary democracy and it is right that the Parliament elected by the people on 6 May should  decide openly  who leads us in these troubled economic times.  No time for a novice, saved the world, have been getting on with the job, wide support across many parties, stability not change, is needed.

There will be a lot of very nasty detail emerging on the rigging of the polls but that did no harm to George Bush holding power and keeping it, and there won't be any need for it again as the system itself will be rigged in good time for the next 'election'.

The Conservatives had better support their leadership fullheartedly in whatever it judges necessary to concede to get to be the party that presents the Queen's Speech, or  any chance to do so as Conservatives will never come again.

A Progressive, Democratic Alliance of the Centre Right

We, the people, (to borrow a phrase) spoke very clearly on Thursday.  We want a tempered, politically progressive, centre right government that embodies many of the  fundamental values and beliefs of liberal democracy.  We want the end of the surveillance state, the end of high taxes and government-directed redistribution, the end of attempts at indicative planning and dirigisme whose effects are as baleful as its practitioners are incompetent.

No more installation of a caste of political professionals who administer our society for interests of their own  masqueraded as the interests of us all.  Capitalism works and, under decent government, one day so will most of us once more.

 .  

 

Sending for Mr Cameron

Denying the vote to thousands of electors was accomplished and brazen.  Electoral rolls missing names, postal votes failing to arrive, polling stations running out of ballot papers and, worst of all, the locking of the polling stations' doors with queues waiting in the rain, for hours, with no timely attempt being made to get every voter into the polling station and issued with a ballot before the 10 o'clock deadline  (that was on a  democratic par with watching the retail run on Northern Rock.)  Less blatant electoral fraud in the form of personation, padding the rolls, and the manipulation of lack of ballot secrecy will take a few days to emerge.

It is almost as urgent that the new government is installed before the backwash from this disgrace hits home,  as that it is installed to deal with the economic disgrace in which we have been placed. 

There is no 'duty' no 'responsibility' to ensure anything by the outgoing Prime Minister.  He remains in office in a purely ceremonial role of continuance of government while the changeover takes place.  To stand  in the middle of the street  bigging up this role into some kind of shadow Head of State activity is one more act of incomprehension  and overclaim.  

There is nothing more to do but  formally advise the Queen to send for Mr Cameron, and leave.

Herding Cats and Voters

Voting for what we want and voting against what we do not is  to vote with both head and heart.  We can look carefully at the individuals standing as candidates and evaluate their worth.  If they have served before, did they serve us, some other interest, or did they  serve themselves?  For candidates newly offering themselves in our constituencies and wards, are they standing for a party that is in keeping with our ideas of how to make and run our social order?  And when the party for which they stand is in power has the Party behaved well, kept to its electoral manifesto, met circumstances with measures in keeping with  its claimed values and with our own?

We musn't be swayed by attempting to second guess the actions of others and their interaction with our electoral process.  There are too many variables to successfully resolve outcomes that are beyond the reach of our action in voting today; recognising our reach we can only satisfy our consciences.  To remedy bad outcomes is for other days and other campaigns.

Our criteria and our judgements may yield different results for our choices in the national election and in the local elections some of us have.   Local politics and its expression still flickers fitfully in the baleful climate produced by the pressures from the centre to control everything down to the colours of our front doors and the contents of our dustbins.  Locally more then nationally we must choose who will resist the destruction of democratic choices by the centre, rather than who is toeing their Party's line.

We must vote, there can be no backsliding into abstention. Not voting in a fever of disapproval of the lot of them ends in democratic death.  The bamboozling of the electorate with psuedo-political science and arguments for the need to set aside the obvious disqualifications for office of individuals and party, in favour of some meta reality, is a cowardly attempt to avoid being considered on what they have done. We must choose our man or woman, choose our policies, stop second guessing the unguessable, and vote. 

Brown Was Supposed to Go After Lisbon Was Secured

Should Gordon Brown cling on to power through a combination of unholy alliance and/or ballot fraud obscured by the 'hung parliament' narrative pushed now for weeks, we will see some spiteful  acts of retribution - spite being a large part of Brown's political signature.

But should Labour be forced to let go on Friday morning we are told in much of the media that Brown will go quickly, that it would be 'cruel' to him to be an Opposition leader, that there will be an immediate move to choose another.  Peter Mandelson is said to want avoidance of a divisive and contested electoral process and a rapid confirmation of a 'New' Labour  projectista; in short David Miliband.  Looked at purely objectively, Mandelson is right.  A smooth transition in both generation and continuance of policy objectives from the Party leadership will deliver  a relatively undamaged political force which will be quick to be ready to fight another day, a day that could arrive quite soon, if the unpopularity of the incoming administration resulting from inevitable austerities meets Governor King's informed expectations.

Unfortunately Brown's hanging onto office by his finger nails until the last is as damaging to his Party as it has been to our country.  The Labour party's infamous Rule Book of democratic centralist practice provides for different procedures on choosing a Leader depending on whether the Party is or is not in power.   In opposition the unavailability of the Leader triggers the Deputy-leader taking office as Leader while an election, with grotesquely rigged voting, is undertaken. (cf the death of John Smith and Margaret Beckett's short-lived leadership of the Party before she lost to Blair); so either Brown must stay on while a formal challenge and then an election takes place, or Harriet Harman will become acting Leader until the leadership election has taken place.  There is no other provision for choosing a caretaker leader when the Party is out of power.  Mandelson's smooth transition king-making is unachievable out of office.  And Ms Harman is going to be very well placed, in situ to run for the permanent Leadership, particularly if Mr Harman, with all that trade union connection, takes Birmingham Erdington (and if he doesn't who cares what the Labour party might be doing then).

So Brown's pig-headedness in refusing to step aside for Miliband once the Lisbon Treaty had been secured which, in view of   the economic meltdown he engineered could be the only reason for his remaining in Downing Street, has lost Labour this election and may well have cost Labour any electoral hope in decades.

A Way of Life That Labour Has Lost

"The acme of respectability" are the words that my mother would have used in referring to Mrs Duffy.   The account given of Mrs Duffy's exemplary life and family  in the Mail on Sunday is  an account of how much New Labour has resentfully devalued and derided.

Mrs Duffy will be voting for the local elections' candidates in Rochdale.  As her father always said, she noted, if you don't vote you can have no say afterwards.  But not for the national elections; the Labour leadership has lost her support as they have lost the support of so many they took for granted, and Labour will not recover that support until the Party recovers its conscience and  repairs its reputation.

Heckler

Is this the questioner that was manhandled from a Brown election meeting in Sunderland?  He had asked about fast broadband provision in the north east, and why Brown addressed hand-picked audiences rather than ordinary voters. 

Brown refused a response and the voter was dragged outside by a number of people and then given the pointy finger by middle-aged harridan in a red cardigan and a remarkably bad haircut.

Local Candidates Deserve Some Consideration

This is a revulsion election: revulsion at Mr and Mrs Brown, Mr and Mrs Balls and - still - revulsion at Mr and Mrs Blair.  Regardless of party or belief, flying in the face of some widely- and strongly-  held convictions, we are going to vote our utter disdain for a small group of self-seeking sycophants.  Sycophants of what?  Of their self-interest primarily.

And so enormous is the rejection of the values and aims of post-democratic administrative governance by permanent elites, what might be called the caste model of politics, we barely glance at the proposals being put forward by the alternatives.  Then, as an aside, we express our dislike for our own lack of acquaintance with the manifestos of others - but it is our own choice to have just familiarity enough to be sure that they still stand for democracy within our own country and throwing the rascals out. 

On 6 May we will have more than one vote to cast  however.  Having scored the ballot paper through to the wood with a cross for the not-Brown-Balls-and the past, candidate  we will turn over another paper.  Many of the candidates there will be utterly decent people, people bearing Party labels that are badges of honourable local activities and undertakings appropriate to our neighbourhoods and local needs and pleasures.  Often we may not have bothered even to turn out to vote for the local elections but this year, as we are determined to be in the polling booths as the nemesis of the big bad Bs, we might pause before the double error of going too far and acting in ignorance.   Perhaps we should read the record of the local people, ignore their party labels, and choose without breaking the pencil-lead as we put our crosses.