Begorrazw

Ireland are playing their Euro 2012 group matches on Poland, thus this.

As an aside, the most compelling political argument I've found recently has been the one that the Tories are making vindictive cuts, not because they need to, but because they want to.

The need for a restructuring of the economy (and it is needed) is being used to justify score-settling by nasty Thatcherite fantatics.

That this is an opportunistic political attack dressed up as economic prudence. That it's not the cuts we object to, but their choice of cuts.

When they identify the barriers to growth, they don't see banks that won't lend, or these mythical startups that fail to materialise, or a private sector that hasn't got the entreprenneurial nuts to jump into the space vacated by the public sector.

They don't see consumers and businesses who are keeping their cash in their pockets because they don't know if tomorrow is going to be more rainy. They don't see the unmet need for housing or the uncertain caution of people in precarious employment.

No. They see trades unions who are too strong. Workers who enjoy anti-social employment rights. Bosses who can't fire anyone they please.

Unions have the potential to be the rallying point here. I'm not sure it's an opportunity that they always take, but if ever there was a time for a 'free trade union' campaign in the UK, now is it.

It's a slightly anti-political argument - it plays on a general suspicion about the motives of the political caste. But this isn't something to be afraid of. If it helps to nudge Labour out of it's own bunker-mentality, so much the better.

A few things a few people should know about copyright Pt1.

I like 38Degrees most of the time. They campaign on issues that I agree on. I know one of the people there slightly, and I know that they take on some of the criticisms I've made about the democratic problems around petitions and write-in campaigns. I also think that there are some issues where the Westminster Village needs to be jogged out if it's own obsessions - especially on important issues that slip below the radar at election time.

I also like the way they're diversifying into other constructive forms of crowd-sourcing.

But where I worry most is the way that campaigns can be built up because they have a superficial appeal to a particular activist demographic. On complex questions this can be the case. 38 Degrees and AVAZZ have both made their presence felt on issues around copyright. There is a general, slightly muddy contention that the open internet is always a good thing and that the benefits of letting it rip in all ways outweigh any benefits related to curbing the way it's used. So, no porn-blocking, no piracy-enforcement, and so on.

It's not an argument I've ever seen made much beyond being an idealised contention, though for the most part, I'm in complete agreement with this view (except where it comes to the 'piracy enforcement' which I'll come to in a sec). It's a fashionable view. And, if you hold it, I suspect you may be receptive to claims that support it.

Here's 38 Degrees from a couple of years ago:

The Digital Economy Bill .... gives the government the ability to disconnect millions. Schools, libraries and businesses could see their connection cut if their pupils, readers of customers infringe any copyright. But one group likes it, the music industry. 

This resulted in a significant write-in campaign. There are a number of things wrong with their position (do read the whole thing):

a) Millions? Schools, libraries and businesses?
Er.... only after a range of warning letters. In France, the Hadopi Bill (generally seen as being a good deal more draconian) has reduced piracy significantly without resulting in any civil liberties fiascos it's opponents suggested would happen. The amount of disconnections are expected to be negligible.

This is a massive over-egging of the civil liberties argument to the degree to which the only rational conclusion about the people who make these claims must be this: That no measures that curb illegal copying of copyrighted material are acceptable.

b) "But one group likes it, the music industry."
We'll, yes, they do. I suppose they could have added Disney/Time Warner/Universal from the film industry as well. But this isn't just the big music industry. It's also smaller labels. And its not just the industry. Actually, the most active part of the 'industry' that is supportive of steps to curb illegal copying is the Musicians Union. And then there are independent TV production companies. They hate it as well - and they see their ability to fundraise for new productions being seriously hit by falling DVD sales.

Then there's Equity, the actors union and BECTU (who - declaring an interest, I work for part-time - I blog here on my own time though). And PACT, the independent producer trade body. Not just Hollywood.

Because only one part of the opposition to legislation like this has the lobbying muscle to make itself heard doesn't make it the only part of the opposition, yet these voices get no name-checks.


And here's AVAAZ:

"The oppressively strict regulations could mean people everywhere are punished for simple acts such as sharing a newspaper article or uploading a video of a party where copyrighted music is played. Sold as a trade agreement to protect copyrights."

There is other stuff in there about pharma and patents, areas on which I have little knowledge, but seeing as it sits below such an outrageously over-stated and simplistic case as the one about copying, if it is a good case, it's tainted by association with a bad one.

The claims about censorship (as I've argued at perhaps too much length in the comments here) are nonsense. My real problem with this is that, undisclosed in these circles, is the huge global battle upon which so much hangs. And - more to the point - politicians are now openly speaking about how these campaigns shift them away from decisions they would have otherwise made.

Google stands to benefit hugely - and we're talking about eye-watering numbers here - from the weakness of artists in enforcing their rights.

They have a huge interest in not dealing with piracy. By 'dealing with' I don't just mean 'stopping' but also 'not facilitating an alternative'. The continuing presence of rogue sites that they could easily block damages the capacity others have to create a legitimate market. Delay in enforcing the Digital Economy Act, for example, is the perfect outcome for them.

Google are a monopoly here. As we've seen, they're as close to governments now as Murdoch ever was. When you have a monopoly position, your responsibilities go way beyond some dumb compliance with regulations. (I'm awake to the irony of me posting this on a Google-owned bit of software, btw).

Google are looking down the barrel of a fantastic opportunity here: They could end up as the world's default collecting society - collecting a fraction of the amount that national or regional players would (from Google!) for monetising unlicenced content. Creators will only have a monopoly to turn to.

When you oppose copyright enforcement without coming up with an alternative, then you essentially favour the alternative that inertia promotes. When Johnny Rotten said 'Never Trust a Hippy' he was talking about Richard Branson's Virgin Records after they'd just made the leap from EMI and A&M.

Say what you like about those businesses, they paid something from the profits they made out of musicians' rights. More than Google ever will, I suspect.

I hope no-one gets involved in the next write-in campaign without addressing these questions first.

I've got a few more of these to come as well - stay posted. In particular, it's worth focussing on the degree to which the industry that carries and 'adds value' to content has mushroomed without much benefit to the people who actually make the content.

Esoterica - elsewhere

I'm not religious. Really, I'm not. But I've mentioned here (and here) before that I think sacred music is fascinating. And the biggest, fleeting doubt I've had about my choice of agnosticism has been in learning about the direct relationship between proportion and beauty - the Fibonacci Sequence in structure and design or the mathematical basis of musical harmony, as examples.

I think most agnostics with a limited grasp of natural sciences prefer 'cosmic accident' as an explanation for most natural phenomena, don't we?

I'm not alone in seeing some profundity in these things. All sorts of esoteric cults have grown up around this evidence. Picking at these subjects, I keep stumbling over various artefacts and concepts - the Harmonograph, the 'music of the spheres' or many and varied artworks that I think are worth thinking about.

I suspect my interest will be more similar to curious fascination that drives most readers of The Fortean Times than it will be to the kind of interst expressed by any 18th Century sub-Freemasonary sect.

Rather than boring you about them all here, I've just started using Tumblr to keep track of them here if you're interested.  I've not really got my head around how Tumblr works, but I think you can post things on to it yourself if you feel like it.

Copyright. Patented in Ireland.

The Statute of Anne came into force on the 10th April 1709 (303 years ago today). I mention this as it’s seen as the cornerstone of the anglo-saxon model of copyright (often contrasted with the more continental approach to intellectual property) and it’s a subject that I’m having to think about quite a lot in the course of my work.

I mentioned this to my mother recently. It’s very rare that I discuss anything with her without her finding some Irish connection – usually a connection with Mayo, or – if possible – a connection with the small north-western portion of that county.

I figured the idea of copyright couldn’t have been conceived by some fella from Tallaghan Bawn or anything like that. And, in this case it wasn't. But she was, obviously, happy to correct me any 'copyright wasn't an Irish idea in the first place' misconceptions I may have had:

“The first historic mention of Copyright, which set the universal precedent, can be traced to 6th Century Celtic Ireland. It is contained in a judgement of Diarmaid, High King of Ireland – the legal equivalent of today’s Supreme Court – in his finding against the Christian missionary Columba, founder of monastic rule, later canonised as Saint Columcille, who had become and incorrigible plagiarist......

....The High King took that well-founded legal precedent and extended it in his famous judgement against Columcille thus:

“As to every Cow its Calf, so to every Book its Copy.””

Media Mess

In today's Observer, Julie Burchill - perceptive and pithy as ever - brings the consequences of the media's failure to adapt to a changing world into sharp focus;

"Fewer than one in 10 British children attends fee-paying schools, yet more than 60% of chart acts have been privately educated, according to Word magazine, compared with 1% 20 years ago. Similarly, other jobs that previously provided bright, working-class kids with escape routes – from modelling to journalism – have been colonised by the middle and upper classes and by the spawn of those who already hold sway in those professions. The spectacle of some smug, mediocre columnista who would definitely not have their job if their mummy or daddy hadn't been in the newspaper racket advising working-class kids to study hard at school, get a "proper" job and not place their faith in TV talent shows is one of the more repulsive minor crimes of our time."

Where the sort of Bishops that get invited onto Newsnight have chosen to wring their hands over the bad behaviour of News of the World hacks, the infinitely bigger problem of how creativity and journalism is funded is largely ignored. The superficial moral malaise is but the product of a bigger, nastier structural one.

Churnalism is, after all, largely a product of under-funding and a failure to ensure that journalism has a well-invested future. The dominance of trust-funded kids in music, theatre, film and broadcasting reflects an industry that would rather live on the short-term charity of posh parents than invest in a long-term future in which talent rises on merit rather than on a feudal ability to buy your way into a profession.

Short term dividends to shareholders and sky-high salaries to managers trumps any public interest in journalism.

If we really imagine that we'll have a world-beating broadcasting settlement, a high standard of journalism to counter our low democratic/constitutional settlement, or a film industry that makes great movies / attracts inward investment*, we're just kidding ourselves. Where Julie Burchill highlights our poisonous tolerance of everying that Monarchy implies, this is the price we pay, both in terms of economic value and democratic scrutiny.
 
A rare exception can be seen over on Open Democracy, but even then, Angela Phillips solutions lack flesh or any sense that the injunction to follow the money is usually good advice.

Why is no-one asking this question:

The demand for content is burgeoning. The amount of money going into the digital economy is multiplying at a rate of knots. So why are 'content creators' scuffling for cash? Why can't newspapers pay for journalism? Why are theatres and TV producers so reliant upon interns?

Or more succinctly, where is the money going?

A recent report by Vodafone (pdf) illustrates the tiny revenues – around two per cent – that 'rights-­holders' make from this burgeoning marketplace as well as showing the huge percentages of online traffic that are taken up by the streaming of high-­quality content. It's very fashionable to stick two fingers up to 'rights-holders' (trans: The Man, EMI, the MPAA, even News Corp etc), and there's a great deal wrong with the way that they appropriate and distort creativity, but for now, the fact that a handful of media monopolies - whether it's Samsung, Apple, Google, or BT - are making a fortune adding value to content, is a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance.

Until we can lose our Anglo-Saxon cultural cringe about hardware levies, it's a sin that will largely be ignored. But I doubt if the whole question is one that has even appeared in the periphral vision of most UK journalists.

The copyright debate is an important one. I don't think that most journalists understand it. I don't think they're atuned to the political sideshows that deprive them of their professional incomes and allow their professions to enjoy any integrity. As a related sideshow, the moral rights of journalists are hugely undervalued in this country. I doubt if Lord Leveson would be holding an inquiry if this were not the case.

The media is in a mess. It's workers don't really have any sense of where their incomes should come from. It's quite ironic that a profession whose flag is carried by an investigative branch know so little about what economic value they create - and how little of it that they personally harvest.
 
*Delete depending upon which side of the price of everything/value of nothing divide you fall

Pasties and party funding

All attacks rebound in some way. Sometimes, they blow up in your face and other times, your shoes just get splashed a bit.

Today, Labour had a good time looking terribly 'in touch' in front of their supporters, and a bit smarmy in front of everyone else. The Tories look slightly off their game at the moment, but they still didn't need to work too hard in partly unpicking Ed's 'prolier than thou' credentials.

Still, it was bad day for the Tories and a not bad one for Labour, when all things are taken into account. It could have been a lot better though.

A union could have orchestrated a better stunt. A non-Labour affiliated one could have really gone to town on this one. Or any union's money could have hired the right celeb to take the piss out of Cameron all day long.

This has been in the Tory playbook for as long as anyone can remember. Deniable outriders make the attack before the front benchers turn up with a subtle and statesmanlike coup de grâce. A lot of the attacks Labour would like to make are out of bounds for two reasons: that they can rebound on the people who make them, and because they compromise future policy positions. Not a problem that the Tories have ever had with Taxpayer's Alliance attacks on Labour.

This is why party funding matters less than it seems. Labour and the big unions can help each other more if they start doing it informally.

This is an argument that's unlikely to find favour with Labour and senior trades unionists for all of the wrong reasons.

Is Ken a tax-dodger? Is Boris a hi-jacker? Is mayoral politics annoying?

I hate the concept of 'elected mayors', or at least, I hate elected mayors in way they're intended to fit in with the wider settlement in the UK. I suspect a growing band of Londoners will come to share this view over the next few weeks.

Already, everyone is in pointscoring mode, and anyone beyond Planet Politics who doesn't conclude that 'all politicos are utter wankers' is probably in the sizeable quartile of the population who have previously tuned politics out all together.

Anyway. Back to the shrillness of it all. Personally, I'm really no fan of Ken Livingstone. He's my party's candidate, and he's the kind of devisive figure that smokes out dissenters from within the party's ranks.

For instance, anti-Ken Labour people are happy to give a following wind to this Tory attack-blog idea that he's some kind of tax-dodger or hypocrite.

It's not a fair line of attack. He's not fiddling his taxes or living high on the hog. He's a political obsessive - if he wasn't paying HMRC, he'd be spending the money in other ways to get himself elected in a climate where political funding is hard to get.

As a Labour supporter, if I were to find that a candidate - any candidate - wasn't managing their finances efficiently and couldn't finance their campaign properly as a result, I'd be very unhappy about it.

In addition, given Ken's circumstances as a self-employed individual who pays staff and who almost certainly drags is wife's elbow-grease into his campaign whenever he can, there isn't a single accountant anywhere in the country who would even let him arrange his finances any other way. Anything else would result in him over-paying taxes for the sake of appearances.

If Ken were salting the money away in some tax haven or buying himself a mansion, this would be a fair line of attack - but if not, it looks to me like opportunism.

I don't suppose we've heard even a fraction of the shrill opportunist attacks that we're going to hear on Ken over the next few weeks.

But Boris isn't going unscathed either. Today, a range of Labour people have got their knickers in a twist about how Boris has 'hijacked' ... er .... his own Twitter account. Sorry - that should read "his own TAXPAYER FUNDED account!!?!??!?!!!"

Boris was @mayoroflondon and he is now @borisjohnson. The former has been converted to the latter now he is in 'election purdah' period.

Here's a likely example of the dialogue that took place a few years ago between Boris and a civil servant a few years ago now:

CC: "Mr Mayor, it's in our job description to encourage you to interact with the public a bit more. Now I know that this is a bit of the job description that most civil servants ignore, at the very least, but I've got a time-and-motion person from Capita standing behind me to make sure that I tick everything on my list off. So why don't you .... er .... set up a Twitter account?"

BJ: "Gosh, I say! What a jolly good idea. What is a 'Twitter' by the way?"

CC: "It's a social networking tool (Boris looks blank) ... on the Internet (Boris looks blank) .... on your computer (Boris looks blank) .... the tellybox on your desk that you watched that Thai lady .... you know ... with the ping-pong balls?"

BJ: "Ah! I remember that. Have her sent to my room! What were we talking about again?"

(This goes on for some time). We return an hour later and the conversation is still progressing.

BJ: "This Twitter thing is a jolly good idea of mine. So shall I call it @borisjohnson or @mayoroflondon?"

CC: "Well there are all sorts of silly rules about what you can and can't say. Best if you let us have the passwords so we can step in when ... er ... IF you ever say anything a bit problematic.... about the Chinese Ambassador's wife and ping-pong balls, for instance. So let's stick with @mayoroflondon - and we'll set up a few feeds so that some tweets are automated...."

BJ: "What's a tweet again?" (this goes on for some time). We return an hour later and the conversation is still progressing.

BJ: "OK. I fully understand this now. Ping-pong .... computer .... internet .... Twitter .... can do it from my phone .... shouldn't do it from my phone .... can't pass comment on Frau Bundeskanzlerin's appearance... so how much will this cost the jolly old taxpayer then?"

CC: "Not much. Well, technically, not anything. Of course we signed some PFI deal with Accenture that means that we've got to send a couple of staff on a Social Media Risk Awareness Course at £800 per head. And we've got to then commission some written guidance from them (£6,000). And we've got a similar arrangement with BT that means we've got to  make the account match our corporate house style (don't ask - an arrangement with Wolff Olins). So it'll probably look like about £25k if we get the wrong sort of FOI requests in. But it doesn't really cost anything."

BJ: "Ticketty boo!. And just to prove I've been listening, I'll need some 'followers', right? Do we have an obligation to pay Serco to drum them up for me?"

CC: "Er.... no Mr Mayor. If you can't get a couple of hundred thousand followers on twitter for nothing, then I doubt if anyone can."

BJ: "And I can say anything I jolly well please?"

CC: "Er.... no Mr Mayor. Accenture will draw up a lengthy list of things you can't say" 


BJ: "What? Can't I even have a pop at old Ken once the election starts?"

CC: "Er.... yes Mr Mayor. But at that point, you're on your own. And you'd probably better set up a new account as @borisjohnson"

BJ: "But Ken will be doing this as well between now and then. His lot will have thousands of followers by the time the election has been announced - he's got nothing better to do, and I'll be at a standing start. That isn't fair."

CC: "Well maybe the sensible thing is to re-name your account as @borisjohnson when the purdah period starts. Technically the rules say that you can't use publically funded assets for political advantage, but the account won't be paid for by the public sector. 

And anyway, I suspect that giving you a twitter account without any restrictions on what you can say is technically the opposite of giving you a political advantage.... and it's not really an electioneering tool in itself. Tories don't really use Twitter much anyway...."

BJ: "What's a hashtag again? I say, I appear to being 'followed' by a charming Russian lady who has no followers herself. This looks promising...."

And so on. Get the picture? Ken's not a tax dodger. Boris hasn't hi-jacked anything. And this is going to be a very long month or so.

Paid links

Here's an odd one. Someone is offering me $25 to put a link to a commercial service in an old post. The way they're asking me to do it is not even really an endorsement of the thing I'm linking to and I doubt that the post concerned will get many visits, apart from search-engine crawlers.

Has anyone else had a request like this? It looks like free money to me. WDYT?

Neo-liberalism or Managerialism?

A f**king clipboard yesterday.

Here's a short and simple question to my fellow lefties.

Have we been sold a hospital-pass with the widespread use of the term 'neo-liberalism' to describe the current economic impasse we're in?

Are we, in fact, in a managerial age instead, where all economic activity is designed to increase the status and value of administrators at the expense of workers and the professions?

And - in doing so, are we missing an opportunity to say the right thing and enjoy all kinds of political benefits that we don't currently enjoy?

If anyone still comments on blogs, I'd be interested to hear what people think on this one.

Against certainty - quotes worth noting

On the subject of 'methodological agnosticism' (my current religion), I saw this a while ago:

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence." - Charles Bukowski

Digging around, I subsequently found that Bukowski was actually paraphrasing Bertrand Russell who said (in his worth-a-read 'Triumph of Stupidity' article - a short response to the rise of the Nazis in Germany)...

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

The quote was superimposed on a photo of Sarah Palin. I shared it on Facebook when I saw it. My mate, Steve, commented with his preferred version - this one from Yeats' 'Second Coming'

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity"

Then there's an older quote I heard on the radio (and blogged about it), from the (then) Archbishop of York, John Hapgood:

"Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?"

Or this from Darwin:

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” 

This Wikipedia link to the page about The Dunning Kruger Effect may also be of interest. Or this:

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them." Laurence J. Peter

And then, moving on, to a not-unrelated topic, there's this:

"..you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into” (source unknown). …

I used that last quote in a post that I wrote about The Backfire Effect a while ago- the observation that bringing evidence to bear against strongly held views usually results in the views being held even more strongly.

And who can forget…

 “…when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” (J.M. Keynes)

If you haven't done so already, I'd recommend that you go back up this post and read the Bertrand Russell essay, as it makes some interesting points about the lack of purpose that arises from a lack of intellectual confidence.

And finally, this blog seems to exist, these days, largely to quote and endorse Chris Dillow's writing. His chosen strapline is 'An extremist, not a fanatic' - a nice distinction I think? He's written this and this as well.

Inequality in wealth and political representation

There's a good post over on LabourList by Owen ('Chavs') Jones about the need for a new, two-pronged, class politics in Britain - one in which the yawning material gap in incomes isn't disentangled from the crisis of representation.

I say that it's a good post because it raises essentially the right questions, and that these fundamental concerns don't seem to be on the table almost anywhere on the left with as much clarity.

Where I substantially disagree with him is that I think he underestimates the capacity, suitability or willingness of trades unions to act as the agents for the change he's calling for. I think the following points are worth making:

1. The problem of managerialism is roundly ignored by the left
I'd characterise a lot of the problems that Jones identifies very differently. In the 19th Century, Bagehot painted an 'English Constitution' in which the dignified elements of the state enabled the efficient bits to do their work. It's slightly worrying, reading Bagehot, that his view appears to be somewhat rosy today after a century-and-a-half of democratic reform. At least most of the executive power was actually in the hands of the people who were supposed to exercise it when Bagehot was writing.

Today, even our governing Oxbridge caste of career-politicians appear to be more dignified than efficient. The real business is being done by managers, mostly in the private sector. It used to be the case that managers were the servants of private shareholders or ministers, depending upon which sector you were looking at. That fact that there aren't working class voices in Parliament isn't actually the biggest problem.

Today, society is largely ordered to facilitate government by - and for - managers. Public policy is entirely shaped by the consultariat who have replaced the semi-accountable Whitehall mandarins. PLCs are, similarly, no longer shoveling value at shareholders but at their managers.

It is managers who gauge the value of talent, who aim to replace what professions did with their systems, and who set the wages at all levels of society. The need to replace politicians and professionals with managers drove the privatisation-lite of the New Labour years and has continued uninterrupted into the direction of The Coalition.

I've rarely met anyone on the left who isn't persuaded by this explanation for what Chris Dillow calls The End of Politics, once it is put to them. But I've also very rarely met anyone on the left who is even aware of this diagnosis.

2. We need to be clearer on why the link between wealth inequality and unequal representation exists
Crosslandite social democrats were always 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich - as long as they pay their taxes.' Peter Mandelson was only putting provocative parentheses around Crossland's view that managed capitalist growth would reduce inequality. And - as far as it goes - this could be a respectable argument if the people making it were not also intensely relaxed about the way that some individuals exercise a great deal more power than others at the ballot box.

If you can buy your way into the political process in order to exempt yourself from the process of redistribution, then all of this intense relaxation becomes toxic. If you can do so to change the direction of redistribution - corporate welfare - then it is even more poisonous. And this is often what happened with new Labour in power, culminating in the banker's bailouts - an unparalleled act of larceny.

3. The democratic problem is more straightforward than most people say it is
There's a touch of the Emperor's New Clothes around discussions of democracy. It's a point so obvious to make that no-one does so for fear of being rude. Let's put this crudely. My vote should be no weaker or greater than anyone else's.

If you fund political parties in a way that doesn't involve safeguards, this ceases to be the case. If you use your media ownership to bully regulators and politicians in a way that serves your material interests, again, this isn't the case.

If the private sector is at all of the top-table seats (and the public interest is largely unrepresented) in a parliamentary process about something as central to our politics as healthcare, then you have an unprecedented crisis in British democracy. (Update: Here's the background to the 'Reform' think-tank - it's funding and it's role in health service policymaking)

If, in a more participative and direct democracy (and we're definitely heading in that direction), you have convening power or the capacity to shape the marketplace of ideas, then our votes are going to become even less equal.

4. Unions should help - but probably won't
Jones is right; Trades Unionism should be the key to addressing the diversity of representation in the way that it did in helping to found the Labour Representation Committee back in the day. Remember, this was really the only uniting principle that brought Labour into being. We weren't socialists, mutualists, syndicalists, feminists, fabianists, rationalists or communists. We were primarily concerned with addressing the crisis of representation - where universal male suffrage had failed to result in working class MPs.


Labour was really just a jump-together club of all of those '-isms' - they all thought that their cause would be strengthened by more working men being in parliament.

I'd suggest that Jones massively underestimates the degree to which Unions need to change to facilitate this though. The smaller unions still promote a lot of the civil society ethos that writers like John Dewey saw as being essential to democracy (the 'holding elections does not a democracy make' argument), but the larger unions only seem to grow by acquisition and have very little by way of democratic legitimacy in the way that they conduct their business any more.

The arguments about managerialism that I outlined earlier in this post are ones that should have a massive appeal to a Trades Union movement that is still thinking. It's an argument that I've never heard raised when the brothers meet.


Owen Jones is right: This crisis of representation should be a much greater cause for alarm than it is. I'd suggest that it also needs to be understood more - and that the obvious agents for change (the Unions) need to travel a good deal further than I think they are prepared to go.

5. Let's not underestimate how important The Labour Party is either
I won't bore on about this last point too much - It's such a regular staple here. But in summary, lefties need to drop the idea that they first need to capture the Labour Party, then win an election and then implement Project Utopia. Right wingers have never made this mistake about the Conservative Party.

Alex Hilton has an understandable whine about Ed Miliband's Labour Party (though I can't see why his complaints didn't equally apply to pervious iterations of the party). Hopi Sen answers him and it looks like two bald men fighting over a comb.

Labour should be a boring party that chases votes around the centre ground. The job of the left is to drag that centre-ground leftwards. The big unions that finance Labour waste so much money paying for office space when they could be running campaigns that no politician can ignore.

You Can't Read This Book - Nick Cohen

I've spent a lot of the weekend going through Nick Cohen's 'You Can't Read This Book' - I'd get a copy if I were you.

It's very good, and as a follow-on to his 2007 title, What's Left, it represents a consolidation of many of the themes there about the reluctance of Western liberals to defend what one would expect to be their basic principles.

It's a good read, picking most of the right fights, and I'm not going to highlight too many of the minor quibbles I'd have with some of his approaches here.

There is one aspect, though, that falls into the 'I'd have done more on this if I were writing this book' category, that could provide a useful jumping off point for Nick here.

The book gives a lot of credit to some of the better UK bloggers - notably, David Allen Green on the chilling effect of our libel laws, and Chris Dillow on the cult of managerialism.

He also picks up on the way that scientific method relies upon open collaborative policymaking rather than the closed beltway structures that are found in modern management and government. There's also a nod towards some of the politics of transparency and some of the phony claims made, for example, about Wikileaks.

I think that there's a lot more to write about the dialectics of both managerialism and transparency. The lack of media pluralism, the need for more collectively-managed media structures such as those found, albeit imperfectly, in public service broadcasters such as the BBC.

There's a need for the skeptical (!) readers of Cohen's book to unite not just around what they are against when it comes to censorship, but also what they are in favour of. OK - our libel laws, the flaky responses from liberals to religious zealots and bullying oligarchs within capitalism and failed democracies are part of the problem. But they survive at least in part because they lack a coherent counter-proposal.


Managerialism is hardwired into British politics today. It provided Labour with a disastrous sledgehammer to crack the nut of the charge that a union-backed Labour Party faced in the 1990s. Disastrous in that it fed in to the economic catastrophe of recent years, but also because it robbed Labour of its credibility in promoting collecive provision of public services.

Managerialism was the handmaiden to the privatisation-lite agenda of New Labour. It was the essential pre-condition to state disvestment. Large numbers of professionals were sidelined by the flimsy claims to competence from managers - the same over-confident claims that shareholders have faced as over-paid managers have dwarfed the traditional 'budget-maximising bureaucrats' of statism's mythology in the way that corporations are controlled.

Today, the management of the public sector presents us with a crisis. There is no Plan B - and Cohen hints at one in his advocacy of a more open and collaborative policy making. I'd love to read him expanding on this argument.

What are the essential pre-conditions to a more collaborative approach to public management? I'd say that the answer to this needs a detailed mapping of the different types of transparency and collaboration that we've been offered in the UK over the past decade, along with a deeper understanding of what participation means - what dangers and opportunities it presents. We need to look at what we've been offered in terms of it being misdirection - there's a lot that we've not been offered while the right hand has been offering so much of it's preferred form of largesse on the 'transparency' front.

I try to make it a rule not to plug my own work here. With fewer posts these days, it's increasingly a rule that has more exceptions to it than it used to have, and today's exception is a link to this project that I'm organising over the next few months - helping to promote a wider understanding of the politics and practicalities of a more collaborative and participative form of open government.

I'm hoping to help flush out a few of the answers.

Questions about Scottish Nationalism

I'm even more of a spectator than a participant on the Scottish independence debate than I am on most things. All I have is questons.

Firstly, as a social democrat, I'm very keen on a one-club approach to all political questions. I'd generally not ask "what do I think should happen?", but instead, "what would a good democracy do?"

I'm concious that this is an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world, but I'm more interested in working out what the best way of making decisions is than in what decisions we should make. I'm always looking for this formula;

• Decision-making in the interests of everyone, not just sectional interests (with protection of minorities provided by a 'constitution' of some kind)
• Where sectional interests happen at the expense of others, there is compensation
• Decision-making that is optimised to maximise the quality of those decisions
• As many people as possible involved in those decisions - as long as we can avoid self-interested outcomes at the expense of those who don't have the capacity to participate
• Geographic closeness to the seat of decision-making

 In other words, fair and good government. Or motherhood and apple pie.

It seems fairly obvious to me that decentralisation is an essential pre-requisite to achieving this. And that Federalism offers the only means by which a state that makes decisions according to these lights will not suffer at the hands of its neighbours and rivals.

So, does this make me a supporter of Scottish Nationalism? And if so, does it make me a supporter of the Scottish Nationalism that is currently being advocated by the SNP?

Is Scottish Nationalism an irrational-but-understandable reaction to the traditional injustice of The Union?

Does one-off independence for one part of the UK set back the wider cause of Federalism for all? After all, I'd like to see almost everywhere liberated from decision-making that benefits London and the South East - and I think there's plenty of evidence that this injustice has been growing during my lifetime.

Listening to the debate this week, most sides seem to have - as a starting point - that the outcome of independence will not involve any kind of negotiation in which the final outcome is fair to all. Nationalists seem to be offering a very rosy outcome where The Union accepts separation on very favourable terms to Scottish residents while Unionists insist that the result will involve the Union helicoptering out of Scotland taking all of the investment and strategic assets with them, forcing the Scots to join the queue for EU accession just behind Somalia.

If anyone has written anything that responds to any of this, I've not seen it anywhere. The thing is, this debate has to be about democratic principles, and I think it's quite odd that no-one seems to start from that point.

What's wrong with Labour?

I've been trying to come up with a catch-all summary of why non-Labour people don't like that party. 

Firstly, I'd say that Labour's USP is that it's the party of collective action. This is sometimes misrepresented as 'statism' but Labour people would be quick to point out that non-state actors (the voluntary sector, co-ops, mutuals, trades unions, 'social enterprises', commercial companies performing an 'outsourcing' service, the BBC, etc would all be just as acceptable as the state as agencies for collective action. 

Many Labour people even have a distinct preference for putting the state at the bottom of that list.

To Labour's opponents, it translates thus: Labour are comprised of the lumpen-intelligencia who think that the best way of doing things is to get committee of humanities graduates together.

But let's take this one step further. Today, in the absence of much else to talk about, lefties have been venting their anger at Liam Byrne for spearheading Labour's new year offensive on the workshy. Here's the offending lines: 

"[Beveridge] wanted a responsible government taking determined action to create work, but a responsible workforce too. He would have wanted reform that was tough-minded, and asked everyone to work hard to find a job. He would have worried about the ways that his system had skewed social behaviour because he intended benefits to help people who had their earning power interrupted because of illness, industrial injury or the capriciousness of the trade cycle. He never foresaw unearned support as desirable. 

.... But beyond this, "something for something" means reward for those who are desperately trying to do the right thing, saving for the future and trying to build a stable, secure home. Right now, these families are offered too little reward and incentive – in social housing and long-term savings – for the kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society."

To understand why Byrne is saying this (clearly with the blessing of the leadership) can be understood by reading Anthony Painter, writing for an audience mostly of Labour insiders:

"They [the voters] want to hear a clear voice of condemnation when people terrorise our streets and not hear it suffixed with ‘understanding’ and ‘complexity’. They can’t understand why those on out-of-work benefits – excluding the disabled and the retired – get a pay rise more than the average worker. When they turn to Labour, they want to hear a credible and clear line. Too often they experience a haze."

The thing is, at a point at which it's unclear whether we will ever again enjoy the economic conditions that make full employment possible, the arguments for stigmatising the poor and the unemployed are very weak, as Chris has pointed out here, here, here and here (and elsewhere, I'm sure).

So, here's what we know about Labour: They are transfixed by the need to establish a simple and popular legitimacy for collective action as a necessary pre-condition to practicing it. This may involve the resort to simple arguments that, on their own, don't stand up to serious argument. 

Personally, I think that they could put more effort into attacking the coalition and less into fashioning a pristine narrative of their own, but that's another argument for another day.

It's plain that all of this simplification is being done in the knowledge that the dominant social commentators prefer a simplistic stigmatisation of the poor than any of the sensible steps that would reflate the economy or place the burden of fixing it in the laps of the people who screwed it all up in the first place. 

It's a problem that could be reduced by tackling the lack of pluralism in the media and the monopolistic powers exercised by media owners.

The other day, I argued that technocrats - unsatisfactory though they are - can be acceptable if they can deal with a crisis that has been created by forces that politicians are unable to oppose successfully. But the other condition that we should apply to them is that they should also challenge and degrade the forces that dwarf elected politicians.

The same goes for simplification: If you think that you have to attack the workshy, then that's what you have to do. But when you do it, you also have to take steps to reduce the influence of the demagogic simplifiers of the media. One without the other is the political equivalent of paying a ransom.

Technocrats versus Democracy?

Two recent posts from Chris Dillow - one on the irrelevance of politicians and another on the reluctance of politicians to make the robust moral decisions deserve another look, and not just because they're mostly right.

In both cases, they seem to be based upon the settled view of what politicians should be, rather than the principled description of what they could - and should - be.

In both cases, Chris doesn't start from the most important observation here: Politicians have rivals. Nominally, parliaments are sovereign (with lots of global caveats - here's ours). Nominally, they derive that sovereignty from us - 'nothing about us without us.'

Yet, I doubt if anyone would try to push the fiction that we all have equal influence over our Parliaments. I don't mean the simple aggregate of direct democracy either. As that line from The Putney Debates put it, "the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live" should expect his arguments to weigh as heavily with his MP as "the greatest hee".

Try it yourself. Knock up a few hundred words on Utilitarianism, the oppression of minorities, how parliaments should make policy and the question of who elected politicians should represent.

It's a surprisingly uncomplicated essay to write. Yet no-one would look at most democracies and say that this good balance isn't increasingly disfigured by burgeoning populism or distorted beyond recognition by pressure groups, bureaucratic interests or media owners.

There are clear parallels here with my last post here on the erosion of justice.

We knock politicians for their failure to regulate the finance sector, but I'd like to read the counterfactual history of Western democracies in which parliaments would have got away with calling time on that particular party. For all of my lack of understanding of the climate change debate, I suspect we'd be able to say the same about that one too.

If someone were to come before a court and was demonstrably incapable of making good decisions in their own interests because they had fallen under the influence of a bully, the court would appoint a someone with the independence to make those decisions. New Labour made an early admission of this kind when it make the Bank of England independent and Osborne has created his own ersatz version with the Office for Budget Responsibility.

There is nothing anti-democratic about a Parliament doing the same thing in other spheres - quite the opposite. The only point at which Parliament deserts its duties when it replaces a legitimacy-lite Prime Minster with a technocrat (and in our centralised modern states, that is all that has been happening) and then only gives them one task - to solve the problem that the bully has helped to create.

I'd go further. The most democratic thing a Parliament can do is to appoint someone who can make the decisions that they would make if they weren't under unbearable coercion.

This is not a defence of the current rise of technocrats though. Their mandate appears to be to solve the current crisis and then to restore the power relations that created it in the first place. If technocrats fail to create a long-term challenge to the forces that rival Parliaments, then they're no better than our increasingly centralised and presidential political leaders. But I don't suppose they're any worse than them either.

Justice simplified

Many of the anti-racists who have demanded an uncompromising response to the allegations of racism against John Terry and Luis Suarez will come to regret getting what they've asked for. This controversy also has implications for people with little interest in football.



I'm not sure we'll ever see all of the evidence related to these incidents, but I'm fairly certain that neither were simply one-way racial slurs. In both cases, we've seen clumsy claims in mitigation against a backdrop of an opaque process. The reputation of professional football, it seems, requires the hearings to be conducted in private while the sentences get handed down in public.

With the facts that we have, it's hard to understand why Liverpool FC are going to such lengths to demonstrate solidarity with Suarez. This may partly be because we don't have all the facts and Liverpool players have some that we don't.

I'm not going to make the case that the sentences that have/will be handed out are harsh or disproportionate. I can't know that. But I'm fairly sure that, in another workplace, this would be done differently. The result may have been more lenient or more harsh, but it's fairly clear that it'd be different.

The contrast with the (admittedly botched) justice that the alleged killers of Stephen Lawrence will receive is a useful comparison here, on the day that the judge started summing up with a stout defence of the fair trail.

Here's my problem with this: High-profile people now appear to have been given a semi-constitutional status. Transactions that they're involved in have to combine an institution-saving opaqueness with the requirement to set an example.

It's more important that justice is seen to be done than that it's actually done. There's a parallel here in the way that it seems to be the settled view of almost everyone - even at the Leveson Enquiry - that someone who puts themselves in the public eye then loses certain privacy privileges.

It seems that justice - in the cases of people in the public eye - seems to be based upon what sentence the public will understand as being appropriate once they've seen a simplified version of events. This applies to footballers and general celebrities. It also applies to politicians, civil servants and other political players. It applies to anyone that newspaper proprietors and editors want it to apply to.

It reflects an increased willingness to pander to the demagogic demands of The Hive Mind. It gives a more mundane expression to some of the observations in Charlie Brooker's very good 'Black Mirror' series (especially the 'National Anthem' episode).

Decisions that affect us all are being made in the same way. Sharon Shoesmith's treatment at the hands of Ed Balls is a notable example. The court of public opinion is expanding its remit and no-one seems to be doing much to counteract this.

With Suarez, Terry and Shoesmith, we got the Dopamine-rush you get from swift justice. Children aren't safer as a result. Allegations of racism are now another disruptive tool that can be gamed wherever a celebrity is involved. 

It's another reason for Chris to conclude that politicians are irrelevant now. Why bother standing for office when unelected people with convening power can decide what decisions you are going to make in advance and then harass you until you make them?

The notion of 'the public interest' seems to have taken on a life of its own. Reversing this won't be easy. But it's possible.

Euro-commentary

I'm not an economist. The last time I had a hard look at the history and politics of Europe was some time in the mid-1990s. I don't have much by way of valuable analysis of the current European SNAFU.

What bothers me, though, is the shortage of useful commentary from the professionals.

We all have a bunch of lightly-held priors. Here are mine:

• A European federalist settlement would be a great deal more democratic than the current settlement enjoyed by most - if not all - Europeans
• Monetary union is an accelerant to political union, and therefore, European federalism (although political union and federalism aren't necessarily the same thing)
• There's a cart-horse problem with monetary union - that it can only work in the presence of political union, but political union is unlikely unless it's created by the experience of the Euro. This appears to be what we're seeing, albeit in a hasty and risky form.
• The Euro was implemented very badly. Allowing countries with large black economies to be part of it was potty in the first place (in my defence, I've spent the last decade telling everyone that I know that the Euro is ultimately doomed as long as it includes an unreformed Italy)
• The presence of unreliable, anti-democratic governments like the Italian one within the Euro meant that it was only ever going to be a fiscally conservative union (and I'd add that, from what I can see, the case with Greece is slightly more complicated, but the conclusion is the same). A lack of cohesion makes this inevitable. 
• Britain is a politically conservative place that won't vote for the democratic improvements that a federal Europe would bring. This can be partly explained by it's democratic shortcomings - ones that could be removed by a good federalist settlement. Cart and horse again.
• Britain is, however, one of the most atlanticist forces within the EU and had a strong strategic interest in bringing Eastern European nations into the European sphere of influence. Bringing unequal economies into the EU may be a good move from the viewpoint of national governments seeing strategic alliances, but not good from the Federalist viewpoint. 

So, in the long run, I'm a federalist. But I'm also in favour of a Citizens' Basic Income and Land Value Tax. Both policies that I think would work very well, but ones that don't have an obvious route-map leading to them.

The problem with the way that this seems to be discussed - almost everywhere that I've seen - is that most commentators are letting their priors shape what they say. It's all wishful thinking rather than analysis.

As a federalist, I'm happy to consider the possibility that Cameron did the right thing for non-federalist Britain (though the description of his positioning and negotiating doesn't inspire much confidence). Similarly, I'd be interested to read a British Eurosceptic (sic) saying that the UK may have been out-manoevered quite badly.

The forecasts around the success of the Eurozone seem to be very wide-ranging. Why are Europhiles only capable of predicting success? And why are Eurosceptics only capable of predicting failure?

And why are editors incapable of finding Europhile Eurozone pessimists and their mirror image? We'd learn more if they could - and it'd be more interesting as well.

Round-up of lefty blogs & social media nodes

I don't normally use this site for anything work-related, but I reckon the readers (if there are any left - it's very quiet these days) are the most likely to know the answer to this:

Here's a quick overview of prominent Labour & Trade Union social media initiatives for a talk I'm giving to TU organisers. I know I've not included 'False Economy' here yet, but are there any others that I've missed? (They are in no particular order btw):

•Left Foot Forward: 80k unique visitors per month – winner of last two Total Politics 'Left Wing Blog of the Year'  - very effective myth-busting on pensions & has seized the economic agenda a few times recently

•Liberal Conspiracy: 100k to 120k unique visitors a month. Liberal-left, pushed to take off advertisers from News of the World. Led anti-Rod Liddle campaign when he was being lined up as Independent Editor.

•Compass:  Claims 50,000 members + contact with many ex-Labour members. Used to be very active on Facebook, but restrictions there may have reduced activity

•Labour List:  60k – 70k unique visitors. Big-name occasional contributors (Ed Milliband, Ed Balls & Gordon Brown)

•Labour Uncut: (still trying to get the figures)

•Left Futures: Main Labour left blog. 6,500 unique visitors a month. Helps to create the community around the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy – the parliamentary left

•38 Degrees: Email subscription and crowdsourced campaigning. Notable successes on NHS Reform and forestry privatisation.

Any obvious omissions?

Bayesianism and politics

I went to Westminster Skeptics last night to hear Dr Graeme Archer's very entertaining talk about evidence-based policy and the problems that there are with using statistical evidence to inform policymaking decisions.

Through necessity, Graeme skipped though quite a lot of it and I didn't fully follow everything, but broadly speaking, his talk appeared to give a concrete underpinning to a lot of views that I hold already.

Obviously, this is a very good thing. I appeared to have reached the same position by a bayesian process that he says that he has reached as a practicing statistician in the pharmaceuticals industry.

This may have come up after I left (I couldn't stick around for the questions after) but there was one thing that jarred. He seemed to think that an ability to treat statistical evidence to tweak bayesian priors rather than use it as a device by which we wipe previous assumptions out (and replace them with a beleif in whatever the 'evidence' tells us to beleive in) is a trait that is widely found in the political left but not the right (Graeme is a Tory).

A few quibbles:

Firstly, the pre-Thatcher Conservative Party was a good deal more Burkean than they have been since. Paraphrasing Burke very swiftly, he was clearly of the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' view, and that tradition (the Bayesianism of the most powerful sections of society?) needs an overwhelming case to be made before reform is acceptable. This appears to be the political manifestation of small-c conservatism.

Secondly, I think that he would have had a point if he'd argued that New Labour were particularly guilty of gathering evidence that appeared to support some radical-ish managerial approach, and using it to force through Year-Zero type policies, but there's a political context behind that which I will come to shortly.

Thirdly, if you're a big fan of market processes as a way of making decisions, then Graeme's (and my) views are comforting ones. I'm quite happy to sign up to this statement by way of a general creed:

The distributed wisdom of lots of small decisions will usually be a great deal better than less frequent big decisions made as a result of a formalised process. The main brake upon this means of making decisions should be a counterweight from elected bodies that apply distributed moral wisdom 

 (Apologies again for self-linking).

I accept that this view is held by socialists who aren't dismissive of the markets and by Tory wets, but probably not by Democratic Centralists and their fellow travellers on the left or the Tory right. As such, if you were to map it on a simple (fictional) linear left-right axis, the big bump would probably be on the centre-right.

My criticism of most Conservatives is that they're far to relaxed about the distorting power of monoplies on the economic side of this issue, and of commercial pressure-groups on the political elements.


And surely the phrase 'there is no alternative' rings a bell with any Conservative?

I'd also argue that politicians are behaving rationally (in that very particular definition of the word) when they embrace certaintly - particularly politicians who don't generally get an easy ride from the press. It's one of the reasons that the governing style of the current government is a good deal more superficially attractive than the the white-knuckled hyperactivity of the previous lot.

This may read like an excuse from a political grouping that is sick of constantly losing elections because of media hostility, but I can understand where it comes from.

Finally, to start another hare running, I think I'd be able to argue Graeme into a position where he'd oppose all future uses of referendums based on his views on this, but then I regard almost everything as an argument against referendums.

(This is another of my posts that is too long because I don't have time to boil it down and tidy it up - sorry)

Buyer-beware. Is populism finished?

Has Populism peaked? Probably not. But it may have reached the end of it's beginning.

It's hard to be comfortable about any form of collective punishment, but the Italian people are about to go through a spot of it at the hands of Super Mario. It will take effect as a punishment for picking the wrong government. For allowing the shallow appeal of Berlusconi to trump other considerations, the Italian people have enjoyed a level of economic growth that was only worsted by Zimbabwe and Haiti. And that's only the beginning of a story that may take decades to play out.

It's the demagogic politics of bread and circuses. When a polity is dominated by the politics of purely emotional appeal - and almost nowhere has been immune to it -these democratic shortcomings lead to sub-optimal government. Vote stupid? Pay later!

Berlusconi himself was the protege and beneficiary of previous corrupt Italian governments, and the world is now conspiring to replace him with a technocrat. In Russia, the debased democracy that followed the collapse of communism resulted in a return to the dictatorship-lite of the Putin years.

But in the past week, US Republicans have learned that support from The Tea Party is a two way street that may cost them the Presidency. Let's hope so.

Super Mario's appointment is far from being a cause for celebration. His alleged deal to pull back from breaking up Berlusconi's media holdings is particularly worrying.

This is a crisis that is less rooted in bad economics than the bad democracy that results in bad economics. The EU and the IMF are wrong to allow Italy to duck this bullet and it does not bode well that, everywhere, the symptoms and not the illnesses are being treated.