Compulsory volunteering…?

You couldn’t make it up. Or, if you did, you would be derided by all right-thinking people. It appears that Brown’s next big idea to restore community cohesion, or whatever the latest buzzword is for people getting on with each other, is to compel young people to do at least 50 hours of community work before they leave school.

So let’s get this straight. In order to persuade young people who have little stake in society that they really, really want to become engaged with the community, they’re going to be forced to work for it. How can anyone possibly think this is a good idea? Certainly, we might have more litter picked up, but it’ll do nothing to deal with the underlying causes of disaffected youth – namely, that they see no role for themselves within society.

If you, as a young person, learn that the best you can hope for out of living as a valued member of society is a precarious job in a call centre, then it’s actually a rational choice to not respect that society at all. If you then learn that you’re going to be forced to do work for a community that has nothing to offer you, you’re only going to become more resentful.

This will not work. Not just because it won’t do anything to make people get on with each other, but because if you tell a teacher or social worker that he’s got to supervise thirty 16-year-old lads who really don’t want to be there, then he’s going to find some way to make it palatable for them – which probably won’t involve doing anything actually useful. But it’ll hit the target, and that’s what matters, right?

This policy could not be more New Labour. It’s an imposed central directive that does nothing for the root cause of the problem, and is likely to waste time and money. But people will see youths out on the street (probably in orange bibs) doing something, so clearly the Government is trying, right?

Seriously, The Left, shut up about the state. There IS an alternative.

Over Hyde Park, the weather appeared unable to make up its mind. The blazing sun was interrupted by showers of hail, seemingly depending on who was on stage at the time. Whether this counted as some sort of divine disapproval was uncertain, as the hailed-on speakers took it as an opportunity to praise the crowd for braving the weather. And indeed ‘brave’ was the right word – unlike many of these protests I’ve been to, most of the crowd looked like they were unused to mud.

This was the ‘Put People First’ march, whose clarion call was ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’. Given the diversity of groups under its banner (154 separate organisations at current counting), the lack of specificity in how these goals were to be achieved was probably inevitable. There was a clear consensus on who was to blame for them not being achieved, however, and at the top of that list were the bankers. There was also a clear consensus on who would provide the means to achieve those goals – the leaders of the G20.

Flash forward to Wednesday, and the agenda of the G20 protesters becomes even less focused. Now it’s about simple anger at a banking sector collapsing in under its own hubris. Change is demanded – but what change?

In Hyde Park, only Mark Thomas actually used the word socialism, and only to condemn Labour for not believing in it. Even Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, limited himself to condemning government incompetence. The focus of the grand anti-capitalism protests – Seattle, Genoa, May Day – has always been on actions the protesters are demanding from the state, or from international organisations. It has never been as a coherent ideology, which has meant their efforts are frequently (and correctly, in today’s case) painted as simple anger with the system. The classic of this has always been the banner which states, ‘Let’s overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nicer!’

That anger has always been with the state in its role as an agent of change – in essence, it presupposes that the state is the sole agent of change within society. It comes from a statist viewpoint, even if it never describes itself as such. The actions demanded by Put People First are exclusively about what the state can do to mitigate the financial crisis.

At this point, I imagine a lot of you are going, ‘Well, duh, the state has all the power.’ This is wrong. One of the worst aspects of socialism is the disempowering impact it has on the individual; jobs, justice and the mitigation of climate change are on this viewpoint something that can only be provided by the state. The left has been talking the talk of socialism for many years without actually believing it, and it has been left without a coherent ideology of its own.

The original pre-9/11 anti-capitalist movement took its inspiration from the excesses of capitalism as detailed by the investigative journalism of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, the work of people like Naomi Klein and John Pilger. These were not political treatises, but rather exposes of the dubious nature of many of the monoliths of corporate world. Again, the language was the same, to do with the actions of states against the villainous corporations. It was moral indignation in a socialist framework, with the meat of the socialism part taken out.

Now in this crisis of capitalism the left has been reduced to merely demanding more government power over the economy, when it was precisely the government’s mismanagement of the rules of credit that brought us to our current predicament. There is no coherency to the movement, beyond the indignation we have seen previously.

The root cause of this indignation has been claimed to be the structure of the corporation itself as a legal entity. Because shareholders do not manage a corporation, and because the managers of a corporation only have a responsibility to create profit for the shareholders, at no point within its structure is there a place for moral accountability. The manager who employs sweatshop labour can claim that he or she is compelled to do so by the duty to create profit for the shareholders, and the shareholders can claim that since they do not control the actions of the corporation, those actions are not their responsibility.

We have seen this in the banking sector. The enormous bonuses given for producing short-term gains were a direct consequence of the duty of the directors to maintain the profitability of their bank and maintain the share price of the company. Therefore the long-term interests of the banks (and therefore the economy based on them) were sacrificed for short-term profit. And yet, no-one is morally responsible.

It is this structure, rather than capitalism itself, which I argue has been the root cause of the anti-capitalist protests over the past two decades, and to which the left must propose an alternative.

Thankfully, we need not look far, as an alternative has been in existence for hundreds of years. In Principles of Political Economy, JS Mill argued for the institution of limited liability partnerships in which every worker would contribute a share of the capital. Today, we call those co-operatives. And they work, and work well, across the world. Indeed, I bank with one. The Co-Operative Bank has been one of the few high street chains to come out of the credit crunch entirely intact. Unlike a corporation, the members of a co-operative are collectively responsible for its actions, as they are involved in both its financing and its day-to-day running. They are the progressive left’s answer to corporatism.

But this leads me to the most important part of this argument. Co-operatives can be set up in law already – there is no need to lobby the state. They create jobs, they lift people out of poverty and are generally environmentally friendly. The only remaining element necessary for change is not the state, but you. Do you want to put a stop to corporate excess? Then find others who feel the same way you do, and compete against those corporations.

The left needs to accept that the agent of change in society is no longer the state, but the individual. The state has a role to play in enabling the founding of co-operative businesses, in terms of providing education, training and start-up loans – but it already does that. Those on the left who wish to see the demise of the corporate system need to stop lobbying the government, and engage with the rest of the population, to tell them that they can co-operate to get themselves out of poverty, and no longer have to rely on provision by the state. Socialism is not the answer – working together at the individual level is.

As I write this, the windows of the RBS branch on Threadneedle Street are being broken. RBS can afford to lose a few panes of glass. But if the 35,000 people who attended Saturday’s protest started banking co-operatively, that would be a different story entirely.

Essay on the Commodification of Experience

I haven’t written on philosophy in a very long time, so if you’re not a fan of slightly meandering (and in this case rather simplistically written – I haven’t really slept for a while) discourse  I suggest you look away now. But as I get (very slightly) older, something has been intriguing me, and that’s the notion of paying for particular experiences.

Now, while that may sound as though the subject of this essay is prostitution, what I’m referring to is the modern practice of paying to experience something that would have initially been done as part of a broader venture. I’m thinking about sky diving. I’m thinking about holidays to Macchu Picchu. I’m thinking about, in essence, paying for adventure and for experiences beyond the norm.

Surely, you might say, this is just an extension of ordinary holidays? It’s not. What it is is revealed by the language used in the advertisement of these experiences; typically this involves phrases like ‘Discover the..’ or ‘A unique adventure’, the ‘unique’ in this case seemingly used in an unironic way. The language used is typically structured to present the image of an opportunity to overcome adversity; even though it is clear that there is no real adversity to be had – that has already been taken away by the pioneers of these ‘unique experiences’. What would Hiram Bingham say if he realised that, a century after his (alleged) rediscovery of Machu Picchu, tourists would be sold the chance to ‘discover’ the city for themselves?

I am going to argue that this sort of activity is (surprisingly) entirely defensible from the standpoint of any existentialist approach which includes a concept of authenticity, and from the standpoint of any concept of one’s relationship with society in the context of an ever-expanding human population. First, a definition.

Authenticity in philosophy is frequently difficult to pin down, and I shall not attempt a precise definition here. It can be broadly described as acting in accordance with one’s inner self, rather than external pressures. Thus, an authentic act is one that is performed with respect to how one wishes to encounter the world rather than how one wishes to be perceived by the world. This is, as is clear, not a moral stance, but rather an experiential one.

It would therefore seem to be the case that the purchasers of adventure are acting inauthentically; in seeking adventure they are not going beyond social convention and setting out into the wild, but rather following a path that has already been laid down. Every single Westerner trudging up the Andes to Machu Picchu is following in the footsteps of Bingham – does that not devalue their experience? Does it not mean that they are living inauthentically by merely acting in accordance with an established means of encountering this experience?

No. The key point here is that it is entirely possible to live authentically in the context of social convention if that is what one seeks to do. This is because if one seeks experience purely for the sake of it becoming one’s own experience in isolation from what has gone before, it does not matter if the path is well-worn – it is unique and authentic to oneself. The distinction is between seeking adventure and seeking to be perceived as an adventurer; not between actually being an adventurer and merely having similar experiences. Travelling to the Lost City of the Incas for the purpose of seeing it and travelling to the lost city in order that one may be the sort of person who talks about travelling to lost cities at dinner parties are two different things, and only one can be labelled authentic.

There will still be some who resist this notion, arguing instead that the contemporary Western lifestyle of selecting from a smorgasboard of purchasable experiences is in some way a betrayal of one’s own authenticity; that in order to be authentic experiences must be won for oneself in a true struggle with adversity. This is to misunderstand the place of the self on a planet shared with six billion other people – there is simply little room for adventure. One cannot seperate one’s adventurous experiences from this basic truth – the authentic life is one that is lived in accordance with one’s inner self in all contexts, not simply when adventuring. And when encountering the world one cannot fail to be limited by it – some external pressures are optional, some are not. One is not living an inauthentic life if one cannot follow through on one’s desire to fly by flapping one’s arms. The authentic life must be lived within physical constraints, and one of those constraints is not the wishes of society, but simply the sheer number of other people.

In a world where many are striving to be authentic, unless one’s inner self leans towards the vicious end of the spectrum, the only way in which one can encounter the world in an authentic manner is to choose to experience in way that permits others to engage in that experience as well. This is almost a Kantian maxim; to experience in such a way that one’s experiences can be repeated by others.

The purchase of experiences permits others to repeat them. Now, while some may still decry this as being inauthentic on their own terms, many choose to follow this while still retaining authentic lives. Authenticity is not the sole province of the intellectual or artistic, but rather the individual who lives one’s life in the way in which they choose. And this may involve moving to the suburbs and going on adventure holidays.

Israel & Palestine: Punch & Judy writ large

I originally posted this on Lib Dem Voice, but I had so much fun writing it I thought I’d put it here too. Disclaimer: The following post does not represent my own views, but rather a question I’ve always wanted answered.

Geoffrey Payne wrote:

I do not want to be misunderstood in this sense. I think there are people of good will on both sides of the divide who are voting for extremists, and that is the real tragedy. Democracy is not working. The main reason is that both sides have a very different understanding of the history of the conflict, much of which is no longer in living memory.

Whoa there. If democracy doesn’t produce the result we would like, it doesn’t mean it’s not working. If it produces a result that the majority of the demos do not like, then it’s not working. And this is a crucial point, which seems to have been missed in all this talk of ‘historical understanding’ and ‘justifiable body counts’ and whatever.

Both the Israelis and Palestinians have voted for governments that actively want to kill the other side in the conflict. Wouldn’t this seem to indicate that this is something they want to do? And so, this is my question: why not just let them do it?

There are two extremes in the ways in which we can view the participants in this conflict: as two societies of deranged madmen who glorify killing, or as two societies of people who’ve formed a rational response to living with violence and death in day to day life. I always find expressions like ‘historical understanding’ rather snooty; they seem to indicate that we as westerners have some sort of enlightened perspective on such things unavailable to these poor violent barbarians. Isn’t it rather the case that if your family was threatened (or you believed them to be) by an outside force, it is reasonable to want that outside force to be eliminated? Isn’t that preferable to the sort of self-effacing peace deal advocated by the West, where one side stops killing the other (in any number of ways, witness the economic-collapse-inducing Israeli blockade) for an indeterminate amount of time until the other stops too? During the period where the other side is still committing violent acts, your family is still at risk.

So why not let them do it, if they want to? Certainly, all death is a bad thing, but we and France were happily killing each other for hundreds of years before we decided to band together to kill Germans instead. To shift the rational position from the one mentioned above to a position where one side can unilaterally stop requires an exhaustion with war, and a recognition that war itself cannot achieve the goal of eliminating the other side. We haven’t reached that point yet, and we will not for some time.

I begin to worry that Western discourse on this subject has forgotten that the Israelis and Palestinians are people too, and has rather turned them into moral puppets onto which we project our particular worldview.

A rather macabre Christmas message

I love mocking things. Really and truly, I do. And frequently I offend people as a consequence of doing so. In my eyes, nothing is ever so sacred that it should not be mocked; offense-giving notwithstanding, it is an important part of a free society that such mocking is permitted. This is because the unmockable is frequently the unquestionable, treating a subject as if it is beyond the bounds of humour involves giving it a moral primacy above its fellows. Indeed, there is a correlation between the boundaries of what people hold to be sacred and the boundaries of, to them, acceptable humour – the obvious examples are the Danish cartoons dealing with the Prophet Mohammed.

What’s interesting in a Western context is the personalisation of the sacred. Our society permits any form of humour without recourse to the law, even racist jokes are not actually illegal except in cases where it can be shown to lead to incitement to violence. But individual people will hold certain things to be unmockable – in most households in the UK, racist humour is frowned upon. Treating other races as equals is something that is widely held as sacred, and that is certainly a good thing.

And so  we reach Christmas time, and given our Christian heritage it’s worth having a think about what we wouldn’t mock, what is sacred to ourselves as individuals. After all, it forms a core part of what we ourselves are, even if it is unacknowledged – how often do you say to yourself, “I wouldn’t mock this or that – they’re too important to me,”? I’ve been doing just that. The results have been somewhat surprising.

I frequent a website devoted to scraping the underbelly of the internet and laughing at what comes off. I won’t link it in, for reasons which will shortly become obvious. One day, an article was posted on this site which began with a discussion of the antics of anti-abortion campaigners near the writer’s home town. They’d paid to have a billboard-sized photograph of an aborted foetus towed behind a plane in order to shock people into getting behind their campaign. He made the point that this sort of activity is a frequent recourse of the anti-abortionists: to present an emotively compelling image to the public in an effort to sway opinion. The writer then raised the very serious point: what’s stopping the pro-choice movement using similar tactics?

To illustrate his argument, he brought up the case of a little girl born with Treachers Collins Syndrome. Children born with this disease are born without a face. They require a tracheotomy to be simply able to breathe, can barely see through their shrouded and distended eyes, and are simply too hideous to be able to engage with society. In a terrible example of nature’s cruelty, unlike with many similar diseases suffers of this syndrome are normally born with normal intelligence, and are fully aware of what has happened to them.

It is a heartrending article, but it’s not this disease that I consider to be unmockable – although anyone doing so would be open to the charge of trying to make humour from something that’s too pathetically easy to mock to be ever be funny. What I realised I found sacred was what the writer mocked next. The girl’s mother had created a website about her daughter, wherein she kept a diary of her life along with a collection of photos – the sort of photos that any mother would take of her child. But in this context they were horrifyingly wrong, and rather felt like the mother was illustrating a freak show. I will not link the page, because as its title says, it would mean that, “I’m here to ruin your day”.

The thrust of the article was, as you may have guessed, that the child’s mother had known of her daughter’s condition before birth and instead of having an abortion the devoutly Christian woman had chosen to carry her child to term. And this, the website, and the mother’s behaviour were the subject of the writer’s mockery, and it was the combination of all of this that I realised I could not mock myself.

Certainly, the life of the child is so awful that it is the case it would be better if she had not been born – I will admit I very nearly welled up on learning the girl’s favourite film is Monsters Inc – but what’s important here is that despite the number of chances the mother (and the father, of course, although he doesn’t really get a look in) to allow the girl to die or to be shut away from the world, they had refused. And what comes out of the diaries and the photos is an overwhelming impression of unconditional love. They love their daughter, and what they want more than anything else is for her to be happy. And, as a consequence, they’ve received an enormous amount of pain – from society, from other children and from the media. It is certainly the case that their lives would be easier if they had never had the child.

I feel as though in contemporary society the notion of unconditional love is in some way denied. Certainly, you can say in the above case that, “Oh, well, clearly the parents are just using the child to attract attention, and they’re dressing it up for photos because they wanted it to be normal, and so they’re hurting the girl”, but what this illustrates is a modern tendency to believe that somehow any tawdry motive instantly devalues even the most sacred; as though doing good was somehow diminished by enjoying it. It’s as though the capability of modern psychology to identify the many and varied ways in which human thought works has married the ancient religious tendency to claim that any pleasure is bad, and created a situation wherein no action can ever be good.

And this is where I’d like to wrap up this Christmas discussion of the mockable and unmockable, both with my surprise upon learning that there’s something I wouldn’t mock, and also with the advice that even if you enjoy performing a good act it in no way stops it from being good. Unconditional love, or agape to use its ancient name, does still exist.

Merry Christmas to one and all.

Issues about Single Issues on the Climate March

I attended the Climate Change March on Saturday, mostly to seek absolution for my lack of domestic recycling, but also to support the Cleggmeister in his attempts to sway hippies with powerful rhetoric.

Previous readers of this blog will know I love protesting. There’s always a little bit of theatre that makes me believe it’s all going to somehow work out right, whether it be the hippies with the painted faces pushing a cart labelled ‘Climate Change Bandwagon’ or the entrepreneurs selling whistles to the communists, protests are always reassuring.

And so it was again. Despite the fact that a protest consisting mostly of socialists marched on a route that took in the Rolls Royce & Bentley showrooms, the Ritz, innumerable Starbucks, and the US embassy no-one threw any bricks at all. We arrived in Parliament Square in good spirits and settled down to listen to some hippy band’s deep and meaningful song about how capitalism was bullshit, man.

Then the voices of the young Liberals and middle-aged environmental Liberals around me rose in cheering as the Clegg came on stage to give his speech. And it was very good. He’d clearly worked out that his audience weren’t going to be particularly market friendly, and so his speech was full of exhortations to environmental action.

“No to a third runway at Heathrow!”

Hippies cheer!

“No to Kingsnorth!”

Hippies cheer!

“And no to spending twelve and a half billion quid of our money to give us a short-term VAT cut – which we’ll all have to pay for in the future – when every penny of that money should be spent on public transport, on green energy, on sustainable housing for the future.”

Hippies look confused!

That last part was a typically Lib Dem complicating of the issue, I admit. But it did make me observe the reactions of the rest of the protest during the remainder of the speech. It brought something interesting to light.

During the, “…the scandalous situation that the big energy companies are charging a pensioner – scrimping and saving, living on her own, to perhaps heat one room in her home (or his!) – is charging her or him more than a multimillionaire who’s heating their five-storey mansion from top to toe…” section, the only ones cheering such an ostensibly worthwhile statement were us. Even the socialists didn’t want to know about little old ladies. Everyone just looked grumpy.

Why would that be? Theoretically, the majority of the crowd were the self-defined ‘ethical’ sort, who doubtless do their recycling, owned a wormery, biked everywhere and generally are very nice to the planet. But they don’t appear to care about little old ladies.

I’d like to make a distinction here, based not on science but on public perception. It’s about single issues. They fall into one of two camps: the ’sexy’ single issues, and the ‘unsexy’ single issues. Climate change, human rights and the developing world fall under the former, the plight of the elderly, the mentally ill and arguably trade unionism fall under the latter. The test is whether you’d find someone more attractive depending on which field they worked in. “I work with the elderly” isn’t as attractive (to me at least, putting subjectivity aside here) as “I work for Friends of the Earth”.

And this is the danger. People who think they’re saving the world don’t want to be reminded about the people who are too poor and too old to join in. As evidence, I give you the crowd’s reaction on Saturday. While single issue campaigning has been spoken about as a reflection of society’s new individualism, with people focusing on the issues they care about, I see it more as intellectual cowardice. If you don’t consider that your new bill that’ll cut carbon emissions by whatever percent by levelling a higher duty on fuel will leave the elderly to freeze to death in the winter because they can no longer afford to heat their homes, then you’re a monster. Reducing the sphere of the ethical to an individual’s relationship with the planet ignores the rest of society. Single issue campaigning will ultimately lead to bad policy – if it hasn’t already.

So the next time you’re confronted by an environmental activist who’s demanding that you recycle more, ask them if they’re sharing their wormery with the little old lady living by herself in the flat upstairs. Picking and choosing when you’re going to be ethical is despicable. Luckily, I chose not to be ethical. I work in politics instead.

Wrongfooting the Russians

While the rest of the world engages in some transcontinental slapping of Obama’s back, the Russians have decided that now is a good time to reveal their national paranoia about the US’s missile defence system.

A lot of the commentariat are calling this an interesting opening move. I’m not convinced. It betrays an implicit assumption that Medvedev is making – that the US system produces leaders with exactly the same policy priorities. Medvedev doesn’t appear to have realised that the Russian method for selecting leaders is not repeated across the ocean.

Obama has a free hand to act in any way he likes, and can, unlike Medvedev, overturn his predecessor’s mistakes. While Bush always claimed that the US missile defence system was aimed at Iran, his ignoring of a Russian offer to use one of their radar systems as part of the network made it appear that it was directed at Russia. This is part of what has led to the increased tension between Russia and the West.

Now, a lot of commentators have expressed concern that Obama will scrap the missile defence system, and thus appear weak as a consequence. But there’s no need to. While he would probably prefer to spend the money elsewhere, I suspect that his response to Medvedev will be to reopen negotiations on bringing them into the missile shield. More than anything else, this will force the Russians to admit they were wrong about the target of the defence system, and leave them looking a bit silly. Obama gets a clear foreign policy break with Bush, a diplomatic victory over the Russians, and increased security for his allies in Europe. I believe this is the best possible option at this juncture.

Crunchy outcomes: What we do next

Passing through Canary Wharf yesterday and playing a game of ‘Spot-the-dead-bank’, I had a chance to develop my thoughts on the likely outcomes of the credit crunch, and how the Lib Dems can respond to them. I don’t pretend to be an economist, but I do pretend to be a politician. In my mind, there are two possible generalities of outcomes:

1) The current rescue package fails to rally the sector, and the remaining independant banks go under. Consumers shift their money into the government-owned banks. Credit becomes much harder to come by, and under far tighter regulations. The lack of access to credit depresses consumer demand, and sends many smaller businesses to the wall. Deprived of income from the City, the Government is forced to either raise taxes, slash spending or some combination of the two, cutting into economic growth any which way.

However, a crumbling pound and collapsing commodity prices represent a great boon to our manufacturing industry, which still makes up about 20% of our GDP. This may be the lowest proportion in the Western world, but it does give the lie to the ‘We don’t make anything any more’ refrain of the letter-writers of the Daily Mail. A weak pound will help make UK manufacturing exports competitive again – and give a point to the pool of unskilled labour in the North which the Policy Xchange decried recently. This will help our eventual recovery, but what’s more important here is its political effects.

In the event that the rescue package fails, Brown will lose the next election in 2010. However, having his fingers on the levers of the capital in the newly-government owned banks means that he will have the option to invest significant amounts in job-creating businesses in Labour-held areas, reinvigorating Labour’s core vote. Even if he does not do this, the expansion of manufacturing as a proportion of GDP will increase the influence of unions within the country and the Labour party, meaning that Labour will reconnect with its core vote eventually. Old Labour resurfaces.

2) The rescue plan succeeds. It is copied across the world, as appears to be happening now. Gordon Brown is lauded as the hero of the hour. Sensing his Falklands moment, Brown calls a snap election early next year, which he wins with a reduced majority. The inevitable economic downturn caused by the ossification of the City over the next few years takes its political toll, and the Tories get in with a small majority in 2014. But pictures of Gordon Brown opening bottles of champagne with City financiers (and all that entails) eat into Labour’s core vote substantially, allowing other parties to rise in its place.

So what does this mean for us? Option 1 will see the Tory rise continue, but abated by the fact they’ve been largely absent during the crisis, having no real ideas of their own. Playing the Vince card heavily in our Tory marginals may allow us to hang on to held seats, but the real gains will be made against Labour. Lower tax for the less well off will play well, and a reputation for economic competence will allow us to paint ourselves as the party to hold the Tories to account. We do comparatively well in 2010.

However, the eventual renaissance of Labour this represents does not bode well for our long-term prospects of governance. It may be that we see a repeat of the squeeze of the early 20th century.

Option 2, on the other hand, sees this situation reversed. We are heavily squeezed next year, and end up coming out worse. However, the decline of Labour means that we have a real prospect of ending up as the second largest party in 2015, albeit in a parliament that includes the BNP.

In campaigning terms, either option means that we’ll get the most bang for our buck by redirecting resources into Labour held areas now – for both long-term and short-term measures. However, Option 1 means that post 2009 we’ll need to refocus on Tory marginals, while 2 means maintaining our efforts against Labour.

Either way, I forsee Focuses with pictures of Gordon Brown in the City in the near future.

The Racist Narrative

Out canvassing in Clerkenwell, in a towerblock. I knock on the door of a white woman in late middle age, who doesn’t seem particularly pleased to see me. This is nothing new, canvassers are used to being greeted with low level suspicion. I begin my spiel, and ask a few questions about issues affecting the local area.

“Well,” she began, and her eyes darted across the hallway to the door opposite, which a black woman talking loudly into a mobile phone had just entered. “You wouldn’t like it if I told you what’s wrong around here.”

“From your tone, I’m sure I can guess.”

“You know, my daughter, who’s got two little girls, can’t get anything. And Them across the way never do a stroke. That door just bangs all day long”

In Islington, whenever anyone who lives on an estate is talking to someone associated with politics and says something about ‘getting anything’ they mean social housing. It later transpired that her daughter did indeed have ’something’, which was a one bedroom flat. But since she had two daughters of her own, she wanted more.

I did some further digging. She had voted Lib Dem all her life, up until the last election. She didn’t want to tell me who she’d gone for. But, she said, “I bet you can guess.” And I could. In Clerkenwell, and the rest of old Finsbury, the socialist vote is divided between Labour and the Independent Working Class Association. The IWCA is, in essence, a communist version of the BNP. They employ the same standard of thuggish activists and are only missing an additional ‘W’ from their acronym to sum up what they represent. They do have something else in common with the BNP, and that’s their narrative.

Right now in the campaigning world there’s a lot of people still having Obamagasms over the way in which the candidates have conducted themselves in the US presidential elections. I’ve written about this before, but what seems to have been missed in all the fuss and bother over the narratives of the main parties is that the far right has been using this approach for some time, and it’s been effective. We’ve missed this for several reasons; partly because the things they say on the doorstep don’t get back to us in the way that their campaign literature does, but also because mainstream politicians have a well justified loathing of the BNP and what they stand for. We don’t want to believe that they’re capable of using the same political tricks as lovely Obama.

But they have, and what they’ve done is very clever – in a rather sickening way. The narrative goes like this. The bourgeoisie brought foreign workers over to undercut the wages asked for by British workers. The foreigners are now taking the jobs and the resources (e.g. housing) that should be going to people from round here. When you complain to the Government, they say you’re being racist. But racism is something invented by the bourgeoisie to stop you complaining about Them coming in and taking our jobs and houses. Only the BNP/IWCA are telling the truth about what’s really happening.

It’s a classic Marxist analysis of power; the bourgeoisie are using social ethics to control the working classes. If it’s made immoral to complain about resources being given to Them, then the working classes can no longer do it.

Of course, this is ridiculous. Distributing resources on racial lines is immoral however you cast it. But it’s a narrative that can be seductive for those whose lives are directly affected by inadequate social resources. When someone mutters darkly that there would be enough housing for your daughter to have a place that’ll fit her and her kids if They weren’t here, you’re more inclined to agree if you’re a Clerkenwell grandmother than if you’re a suburban teacher. And it is true that if They left there would be enough social housing in London for the white working classes.

The fact that that social housing wouldn’t be there in the first place if not for the additional wealth brought in by importing workers is neither here nor there; macroeconomic arguments have little relevance for the grannies of Clerkenwell. And outright condemnation of those espousing the racist narrative does nothing except play into the hands of the racists; it’s what results in the response “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Try living down here,”on the doorstep.

I still do not think that the BNP will ever be a major party. But, at present, we are not countering the racist narrative. We need to do better.

ConfBlog #2: Attack of the Clones

There was something rather different about Conference this year. It was something to do with the people. There were far fewer bearded sandal-wearers (although they were about), and rather more people who, to not put too fine a point on it, looked rather like Nick Clegg.

It was odd. Omnipresent was the dark brown hair, the hint of a quiff, the slightly inelegant suit, and the conviction that the last thirty years hadn’t happened and that this was still the Liberal party. This was forceably rammed home at a debate on Re-inventing the State, the old SDP members’ response to The Orange Book. Richard Reeves, director of Demos and possessor of a quiff-in-waiting argued that the book’s authors, and by extension many of the people in the room, were social democrats who should join the Labour Party. This was because of their focus on the state as the solution to all of society’s ills, which the book’s title rather gave away.

Naturally, this rather got up the noses of the people who’d just been told they were in the wrong party, and the debate descended into a reunion of SDP members versus Reeves, who rather seemed to enjoy it. He may have been condescending, but at least he was amusing with it.

As the press has doubtless made obvious, this was merely an undercurrent of the far more significant exchanges taking place in the Conference Hall – the rebellion over which I referred to in my last post*. The debate on Clegg’s Make It Happen document took the form of a queer melange of competing alliances; on the one hand there were the out-and-out social democrats with their Old Trot fellow travellers, and on the other were the Quiffs and their born-again-Liberal allies. The most interesting factor in the debate, which the press entirely failed to pick up on, was that both sides were trying to out-Progressive the other. It was very much a case of ‘Empower the poor by giving them opportunities via the state’ versus ‘Empower the poor by giving them more control over their earnings’. The destination was the same; the distinction was in the journey.

As such the victory of the Quiff side did not represent a shift to the right, more of a shift of methodology. A leadership promoting a policy which called for the taxing of the rich to give to the poor being called right-wing is something that could only happen in the Liberal Democrats.

In keeping with that theme, I got an opportunity to address a Fringe event via a method and subject that could only succeed in the Lib Dems. The Electoral Reform Society ran a Dragons’ Den style event in which the winners of a public vote would get the chance to pitch their Big Idea for Democracy to a panel of judges.

I decided that I wanted to do this. And I had just the scheme in mind: a Federal Britain using the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as its constituent parts. I had never decided whether I actually thought it was a good idea as opposed to merely an amusing one, but the latter was enough to make the whole thing fun. But how to make sure that a ‘radical’ idea such as this one was voted top in a party containing more STV fetishists than Berlin contains people with more than a passing interest in rubber?

The answer was clear. I would run a campaign. I would select a target demographic, devise a message that would connect with them personally, and communicate it to them. Now, who would want to return to the 10th century? Who would find the idea amusing? The answer was clear. Geeks. Geeks would love that shit. So what else do geeks love, that I can somehow relate to democracy and Saxons?

Doctor Who. Specifically, the end of the third season wherein The Master is elected Prime Minister with the aid of a whole bunch of posters saying, ‘Vote Saxon’. This was an obscure reference, but hell, geeks love obscure references. So I made a collection of ‘Vote Saxon’ flyers and gave them out to geeky-looking-people around the Conference Hall.

I won. And so, I got to give my first talk at Conference. And I was honoured by one of the Dragons saying, “Only at the Lib Dem Conference could someone suggest a return to the tenth century.” I looked him in the eye, clasped my hand to my heart, and said “Sir, you make me proud.”

*And did, in the end, consist of handing out leaflets. WE’RE LIB DEMS, goddamnit.