Non-reasons for reform - no comments

Quotations from Chuka Umunna, Labour PPC for Streatham, via New Direction:

The tumultuous times at Westminster at the moment are quite frightening – foreboding even. But as the saying goes, never waste a good crisis. We need to use this period for long-awaited constitutional reform.

OK, great, but when has the problem been "the time isn't right" rather than "we haven't decided what we want to do, or indeed whether it's worth doing"? Which of the arguments in favour have been strengthened, and which of the counter-arguments weakened? And who's this 'we'?

One thing we need to change is the voting system. It is not a panacea to solving all the problems in our democracy at the moment, but it is a necessary step. [...] At the moment, we have the ridiculous situation in which about 100,000 voters in a few marginal seats decide the outcome of an election.

The situation is bound to look ridiculous if you don't mention the counter-arguments.
Besides, one single voter can decide the outcome of an election: elections have to have results, and as we don't know in advance who the voter will be, what's the problem?

As we've seen so clearly this week, even the safest seat will become a marginal if its electorate feels hard done-by. The more difficult it becomes to predict what the marginal seats are, the harder it is to focus campaigning resources, and the harder it is to focus policies towards those areas (is anyone claiming this does happen?).

As it happens, I would like to see more experimentation with alternative voting systems (though largely because it will fracture the two main parties, exposing the true ideological divisions within each), but all voting systems have their advantages and disadvantages. So to simply single out First Past The Post's disadvantages is no kind of contribution to the debate.

It also means that the whole of our political discourse has become dominated by a battle for the decisive centre ground.

What does this actually mean? That it's wrong for political parties, the mainstream media, bloggers, and individuals, to concentrate on mainstream political issues? That there's a lack of debate about less mainstream issues? Perhaps this is because they have less resonance with people's lives...?

Back in 2003, about a million people marched in London to mark their opposition to the Iraq war, yet Britain's two main parties both supported the military action. What could better exemplify the lack of different voices in politics?

One million is a very small proportion of the electorate, and it was far from a representative one. Secondly, both main parties had their own arguments for supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, which were shared by a very sizeable proportion of the electorate, were developed before the march, and they were under no obligation to change those views to accommodate a much smaller minority.

There was - and remains to this day - no shortage of political parties, newspapers, bloggers who continue to keep these alternate voices very much alive. Is that not enough, or must there be an obligation not just to hear, but to accept them too?

Labour does have a lot of thinking to do: and that requires clear heads, not woolliness; proper analysis rather than rhetoric; and the reconciling of many opposing arguments, rather than assertion.

UPDATE:

Oh, I see, the reason Labour should abandon FPP is because that system is starting to penalise us and help the Conservatives. Awfully quiet about that in 1996, weren't we? FPP was no more unfair before Thursday than it is today.

States v. Markets? - 9 comments

Great post from Shuggy here: "The bank crisis and the left":

You didn't ask but you're getting it anyway: my advice? The left - or at least some of it should a) calm down a bit b) stop conflating issues. I won't link them all because no doubt you've come across the sort of thing I'm referring to: this bank crisis is the end of "kamikaze capitalism", "the end of the neo-liberal world order", the refutation of the "unbridled free-market", it represents the nadir of the "Hayekian/Friedman axis of evil"... Ok, the last one was made up but you know what I mean. Naomi Klein - admittedly not one of the left's most subtle thinkers, to say no more than that - even went as far as to suggest that this financial crisis is for neo-liberalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism. Correction: she said it should be. Very silly, I hope you agree.

Meanwhile, here's Stumbling and Mumbling on Markets as public goods:

The financial crisis is a failure of markets which shows the need for state intervention. The crisis exists because markets are insufficiently developed.These two statements seem contradictory. But they are not. They are consistent. Markets are themselves public goods. And public goods can be under-supplied by the market.

It's along the same lines as the debate I had (well, I left a comment; still waiting for a reply...) at the LRC's Left Economics Advisory Panel blog, over their "Markets are stupid" post. Virtually nobody - even in the best of economic climates - accepts the straw-man that markets are entirely self-regulating - that they can work without any legal framework, regulation, or intervention at all:

[...] the market is incapable of producing rational outcomes even when its own life depends on it. Judged by society's goals it fails further still and it does so because it is the perfect breeding ground for social traps, because it prevents co-operation and because society's values cannot be represented in monetary exchanges directed by selfish individualism and the profit motive.

That markets can work should be obvious to almost anyone who wears clothes, has food in their kitchen, or who has traded something they didn't want for something they did. That these markets have somehow to be created, and sometimes need rules and interventions doesn't seem to me to represent any fatal flaw in that kind of system.

Economists are generally concerned with enabling the existing economic system to work better: by identifying areas where individual markets fail, and promoting policies that their models and analyses suggest will enable them to work better. They might also seek to create markets where economic activity was previously absent or seized-up. They aim to do all this in the most unobtrusive way; the simplest way; the way least likely to have unforeseen, and possibly unwelcome or contradictory, consequences).

Saying that markets cannot ever work, and that much greater state intervention is the alternative (or, indeed, vice versa), is a bit like a mechanic suggesting that instead of him looking at your transmission, you should buy a tank instead.

It's an attitude that distinguishes social scientists from propagandists.

New Labour bloggers, 28 August-date - 6 comments

Here's a list (in reverse chronological order) of the 55 Labour bloggers added in the 45 days since 28 August (the start of my last campaign to find them), together with their original descriptions. Be friendly and visit them. Also, please let me know if you discover new ones - some of these I discovered purely by chance on other blogs.

• Yapping Yousuf - I'm a Scottish Labour activist and this is my blog on Scottish, UK and Student politics.
• Socialist Economic Bulletin - A Bulletin of Socialist Economic Analysis published by Ken Livingstone
• Paul Leake - absit invidia verbo - Thought, comment and rambling from the North East.
• Leftward Ho!
• Left Economics Advisory Panel - LEAP - the Left Economics Advisory Panel
• Chartist - Blog for Chartist Magazine.
• Conor's Blog
• Alien Thoughts
• The Left Way - Promoting Democratic Socialism.
• Sibboleth
• Red Jam - This and that, from a Labour student in London.
• 21stCenturyFix.org - I've been a Labour Party member for a number of years now and the 21st century both fascinates and horrifies me. I don't know if the former has anything to do with the latter, but this blog serves as a reflection of both.
• Some Roses are Red
• Next Left - A Fabian Society blog
• Huw's Views: Live from Conference 08 - MP for Ogmore, Huw Irranca-Davies, blogs live from Labour's 2008 Annual Conference
• Rushanara Ali - PPC for Bethnal Green and Bow
• Lancaster Uni Labour Club - Lancaster University Labour Club
• Speedy Response - Mostly retrospective thoughts of an inappropriately nicknamed socialist
• Jermys Journal
• Bring me Sunshine - City dweller by night, country smallholder by day
• Conservative and Unionist - Commentary on the ravings of Tories on their blogs and elsewhere
• Neoconservative? Moi?
• Cllr John Getgood
• Leftleftleft - A left-leaning blog.
• Washminster
• Tulip Siddiq - Member of the Labour Party Action Team in Bloomsbury and King's Cross
• Tom Copley - Labour PPC for Beaconsfield
• Noel Slevin
• Matt's Mic
• Mary Honeyball MEP
• Let the Work of Change Begin
• Labour Boy
• Dogstarscribe's Weblog
• Cathy Peattie MSP
• BorisWatch
• Grace Fletcher-Hackwood - Labour-supporting, feminist, Manchester-worshipping blog
• Sandwell Boy in Wales - Student Union President from 2002-04. I was working as the Political assistant to Andrew Davies AM for Swansea West from 2004-08.
• Carwyn Jones AM - Assembly Member for Bridgend.
• Wales 20:20 - Welsh politics. Done differently.
• Southpaw Grammar - A young person who likes politics, my last description was used in a false Western Mail story about myself so best not say any more.
• Brother Tecwyn - Socialist, Christian, Welsh speaker and proud. Unionist on good days, apathetic on bad. Labour party member that doesn't always tow the party line. Miserable so and so.
• Cathy Jamieson - Blog of Scottish leadership candidate Cathy Jamieson
• Bill Butler - MSP (Scottish Labour Party Deputy Leader candidate)
• The Citizen - Scottish Labour CfS bloggers
• We Love Larkhall - A community information site for residents living in Larkhall ward, in the London Borough of Lambeth.
• Cllr Alan Dobbie - Alan Dobbie is the Haringey Labour Councillor for the Noel Park Ward.
• Just who the hell are we? - After graduating in June 2006, I settled in Cambridge, working for DEFRA, the Labour Party and for the University exam board.
• A Big Block of Cheese* - I have been a member of the Labour Party since I was 16 and I am passionate about public service.
• Paul Corazzo: On Your Side in Daventry - Kettering Borough Councillor Paul Corazzo is Daventry Constituency Labour Party's PPC
• Southampton Local Politics - Labour Councillor for Bitterne Labour Groups Spokesperson for Children's Services
• Penny Red - Dispatches from the young feminist left.
• Feminist Bite
• spotlightcomments - Political and social comment from a personal perspective.
• Rod's Views
• tomroyal.com - Nothing of any consequence, now with added cats

Blogger feed problems - no comments

Some of you will have noticed, over the past few days, that clicking through to some of the posts we aggregate from Blogger blogs has taken you to a comments page, rather than the actual post.

I'm still investigating, but it looks like Blogger has changed the way it publishes its feeds. In the old days (i.e. a couple of years back), publishing a post would either generate an atom.xml for your blog, or an rss.xml. So, to take one example, Luke Akehurst's RSS feed could be found at: http://lukeakehurst.blogspot.com/rss.xml. Nowadays we have the "/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" syntax, but you could still rely on the old way working. Until now, by the look of it.

Whatever Blogger have done, even the experts have been confused into thinking that the rss.xml of Luke - and many others like him - is actually an Atom feed, the net result being that B4L parses it incorrectly, hence the incorrect links.

It may be that I have to shift every Blogger user still registered under the atom.xml/rss.xml format (165 at the last count) to the new format, but I won't be able to do that en masse until the logs confirm that my analysis is correct and that those I have already shifted are problem-free.

Perhaps everything will be back to normal some time on Saturday.

Voting at 16 - 4 comments

Omar has an excellent article in defence of the Government's Manifesto plan to extend the franchise to 16-year-olds.

Tom Harris MP, who hosted a discussion on the subject last month, offers up a lack of enthusiasm among 16-18-year-olds as reason not to extend the franchise, predicting that few would actually use the new right. This kind of argument can't carry much weight with the Government if their plan for free theatre tickets for the under-26s is anything to go by. I doubt young people queued up to demand this policy either, but the Government feel it to be a good thing, even though very few will (be able to) take advantage of the opportunity, and others might abuse it.

Laban replies to Tom's article:

They're putting the cart before the horse. Instead of asking - 'what's the meaning of the age of political responsibility ? is it the same as adulthood ? does adulthood imply independence ?' they're asking 'how can we engage the young in politics' and 'how can we increase our vote ?’ [...]

Responsibility, in general, is accepting either the credit or the blame for choices you had the power to make, and which you were expected to make wisely - and voters exercise these choices at elections. You don't need a home, a job, or to own any property to vote. You can be someone who does their level best to get out of paying tax. You could be a fervent political activist; someone who leaves anonymous blog comments; a reader of The Sun, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, or the Express; or one who hypocritically argues against both tax rises and public spending cuts, or one who lambasts politicians for their human or political failures without lifting a finger to improve their own communities. And yet if you leave aside members of the House of Lords, imprisoned offenders, residents of mental hospitals, and those who do not ordinarily reside here, age is the sole significant impediment to voting. Political responsibility? It'd be nice to see some. The mainstream media certainly doesn't feel obliged to promote it.

Irresponsible political views, not to mention dangerous and ill-informed ones, are a fact of British political life that idealists have to come to terms with. Those who hold them didn't have to campaign for the right to vote, yet no politician talks of narrowing the franchise, as past generations have bequeathed them the right to be heard and represented. Extending the franchise would allow more people who are subject to the Government to play a part in shaping it, and if that increases the number of people who want to play a responsible part in doing so, so much the better. The wider question of citizenship and behaving ethically within this realm should also be looked at, but expecting 16-18-year-olds to adhere to higher standards than those older hardly seems fair.

One response might be to say that non-'adults', for whom parents are legally responsible, cannot be construed as having voluntarily accepted (in general) the rules of our society, unlike those adults whose presence here constitutes implicit consent. Accepting that might disenfranchise the severely disabled or terminally ill, though if that condition arose during adulthood, misfortune alone should not be considered a withdrawal of consent. Attending citizenship classes, with some kind of ceremony to accept/bestow that status, would be a solution for non-adults, which they could volunteer for as soon as they feel able to do so - and can be judged to have done so. What more should society demand of them?

Crises of Capitalism - 4 comments

A vast amount of coverage, but very little response from myself, thus far. I'm going to diverge from most Labour bloggers by linking to this piece (via S&M), which is a succinct response to the doom-mongers (my emphasis):

On greed, let me repeat: If unusually many airplanes crash during a given week, do you blame gravity? No. Greed, like gravity, is a constant. It can't explain why the number of crashes is higher than usual. And let me add: This isn't a morality play. What we're seeing are the consequences of monetary-policy distortions of interest rates and regulatory distortions of incentives, amplified in some degree by private imprudence, not the consequences of blackheartedness.

And what all of this points out is that laying the finger of blame on "the free market" is utterly in error, but it's an error that's going to get made continually over the months and years to come. If there's one thing those of us on this side of the battle of ideas can do as this all unfolds, it's to do whatever we can to remind people that the interventionist economy that caused the problems and led to privatized profits and socialized losses (and the "solutions" that will further socialize losses) are NOT "the free market." Asking why anyone would think bigger government will solve these problems when it was the major cause is another public service we can provide.

That is to say, profits and wealth for some, unemployment for many.

Many bloggers have argued for tighter regulation of the financial sector. Having kissed a career in financial software goodbye, this month, I'm glad not to be able to comment on particular measures, but my general view is that markets work because they are unregulated, or have been able to work deftly around regulations, just as free trade works - and makes the world richer, and less susceptible to anti-democratic regimes - because it is free. Only political faith is enough to convince people that individual governments are smart and nimble to introduce regulations that are enforceable in an open, international economy.

Free markets do not equal Capitalism, and if there's ever to be a viable Socialism - unencumbered by nationalism and corruption - markets will be free there too, which is identical to saying that economic and social interactions between equal (I know, but read on) individuals will be unrestricted, as they must be in a (I know, but read on) democracy. In practice, Capitalism operates in polities where political and economic rights are unfairly allocated, as they have been for centuries, and where the powerful owe their success to layer upon layer of theft, patronage, and downright luck. The mass of the population have little practical economic freedom, and even relatively benign Governments/States have little to offer.

So when Paulie argues in the comments of this post that "unregulated markets are not compatible with representative democracy", yes, sure, but (a) we (sadly) don't, yet, have workable democratic international institutions; (b) I'm going to suggest that individual economic actions are too nuanced - too frequent - to be able to be scrutinised by politicians, without them having to be made much less easy. There are two axes on the do/don't regulate, do/don't offer a safety-net chart, and I'm suggesting a move not from 'don't/don't' to 'do/don't' but to 'don't/do'. So my solution is similar to S&M's:

The state cannot [...]manage the economy to remove all fluctuations. What it should do is help protect people from the consequences of downturns.

It can provide a more robust welfare safety-net. It can guarantee a Minimum Income for all. It can insure (yes, insurance) - or enable individuals to insure themselves - against a loss of their job or a decline in income. It can encourage mutual ownership of businesses. If billions can be spent injecting liquidity into the banking and insurance sectors, in the hope of saving jobs and businesses, that money could instead be used to fund exactly such an insurance scheme.

This is indeed an opportunity for the political Left. The opportunity is, firstly, to rediscover the economic Left. Secondly, to avoid reverting to Statism. Thirdly, to look Capitalism in the face and take what works - genuinely free markets and competition - and throw out what doesn't - 'favoured' corporations, preferential loans, Corporatism, a fawning appreciation of the power of 'business' in defiance of economic analysis (e.g. when determining corporation tax rates, or when determining the highest earners to be the best and brightest).

The opportunity comes not from any innate anti-Capitalism, but because (a) Labour is in power for at least another 18 months; (b) it should be the work of a moment to demonstrate to people that Cameron is for the status-quo, not for reform; and (c) because Labour needs a bit of intellectual direction. Embracing economic reform, and providing a safety net more secure than any offered in the past, might just do the job.

Psychology and political mind-changing - no comments

I know I shouldn't read science articles from BBC News, like this one, but here's a response.

Scientists studying voters in the US say our political views may be an integral part of our physical makeup. [...] Their research, published in the journal Science, indicates that people who are sensitive to fear or threat are likely to support a right wing agenda.

The political implications of this are scarcely worth taking seriously. Just consider the sample size, the ahistorical assumptions about what constitutes the political left and right, the study's inability to differentiate political opinions outside the fear/risk/security/protection dimension, and its inability to explain radicalisation, or the changes in political viewpoint that so many go through. We don't need new research to show the kinds of effects that horrific images or perilous situations have on human beings.

Undermining our expectations that intelligent human beings are capable of defending their views by appeals to argument or evidence, of recognising defeat and error, then adapting them, and assimilating changes (even belatedly) into the 'political identity' they project, doesn't seem to me to be a price worth paying for explaining people's obstinacy.

Far more compelling explanations are:

• The (largely deliberate) corruption of political language that makes it difficult for individuals to express political views in a distinct and accurate way. Once you're "left", "right", "Thatcherite", "fascist", "weak", or "an X-ite", everything else follows - discussion is ended.
• MSM trivialisation of politics: the obsession with intrigue, "leadership", coupled with the mediocrity of even well-known political journalists, that narrows the sphere of mainstream political discussion and limits the range of "realistic" political options. From these last two springs our old friend, political hegemony.
• Political tribalism and party loyalty: while acceptable and understandable when social mobility was low, and before working-class empowerment, when political identity and solidarity were essential for the disenfranchised, "no X Government could ever be worse than a Y Government" is a statement that nobody should align themselves with (hmm - in a society as atomised as ours). Appeals to loyalty are, generally, made by the powerful in times of (perhaps justifiable) weakness, and any takers for these loans should expect higher returns to compensate for their faith, in case of default.

Some less compelling ones follow. Given that I have my own "faith" in the intelligence of other human beings, I attach much less significance to these ones:

• A psychological reluctance to adapt to political challenges. Understandable in the short-term, but if humans can come to terms with bereavement, and the break-up of relationships, why should their political identity be any more hardy?
• Admitting you were wrong. Admitting that views you once held were, or must have been, false, is not a sign of failure, and is (surely?) uncorrelated with your level of intelligence. Of course, it isn't impressive either.
• A misplaced belief in one's "right to their opinion". That belief certainly is misplaced, and it should be challenged as far as common courtesy allows, but is it so dangerous among non-"opinion formers"? Clearly the brain is working: it has identified a vulnerability and that the political identity is threatened, so dropping a metaphorical smoke-bomb might throw one's opponent off for long enough that the damage can be patched-up, or for a process of evolution to begin. I've rarely met anyone who has been willing or able to maintain a long-term defensive position.

So there you have it, a brief coverage of individual political change, perhaps one that offers a little more hope than that offered by Rice University's researchers.

"Labour Must Die!" - 5 comments

Is the title of an article Andy Pearmain submitted to the Euston Manifesto site just over two years ago - I've just happened upon it again. It's pretty bleak, and certainly hostile to the Labour Party in its present form/state:

The problem for the democratic left is that the actual, final death of the Labour Party, as an organisation of people with deep vested interests in its survival, doesn't look like happening any time soon. Labourism as an ideological strand is clearly exhausted but the Labour Party itself has powerful organisational life-support systems, not least the networks of local and national state patronage it still controls. The Labour Party simply is, even if it has lost any sense of where it might be going and any historic mission beyond the vacuities of the Third Way. The real question for us then is - what can we do to help kill it off? [...]

Then again, it's more constructive to write, and to respond to, an article like that than to read the reports we read in the press and cringe at the state that well-meaning human beings have got themselves into. What follows is my partial response. It's radical and not to be taken 100% literally. 'Defeatist' it certainly isn't intended to be, because there are higher things in this world even the Labour Party.

~

The Labour Party is a vehicle for political change. "Progressive" change, if that term means anything, but Bob Piper has as pithy a summary as any I've seen:

For a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.

Anyone who's unhappy with that, or for whom the Labour Party just offers a job, a tribal affiliation, a sentimental attraction, or a political host to leech off, is expendable as far as the debate over its future goes. Progressives flocked to the Labour Party because it offered the best ever chance for achieving the desired and change, but if/when there comes a time that Labour is too dysfunctional an organisation to make that change, sentimentality should not keep it alive.

~

Why do we support Labour Governments? Firstly, we have faith in the ability of well-meaning Governments to enact good policies. Secondly, the scale of Government power provides the policy with full and equal coverage across the polity, backed by force of Law.

What are the risks? Firstly, that the power of Governments allows a self-perpetuating bureaucracy and political class to develop, through which all Government actions and thought-processes are filtered, generally outside the sphere of public political debate. Secondly, that the more entrenched a particular Government is, the more threatening the possibility of change in either governing party or personnel, even as it finds it harder and harder to develop coherent (let alone fresh) thinking of its own. Thus Government becomes more a case of keeping the other lot out than about what it is proper to do oneself. Finally, whatever the likelihood of Labour achieving 42-43% of the vote at a General Election, and the 324 seats that provides the key to Government, consider - thinking back to 1997 - what concessions have been necessary to enlarge the so-called "progressive coalition" to that size.

So when I declared last month that progressives were misguided to believe that the pursuit of national political power - in the sense of the 5-year+ shot at forming the UK Government - offered hope for solutions to the country's social problems, I wasn't just being mischievous. I consider that, for all the good that has been done, the burning-out of the progressive/Labour (delete as appropriate) movement for a decade to come, amid a mass of disappointment and recrimination, proves that its electoral strategy is misguided.

It's all too easy for Labour factionalists to put this down to "betrayal", but this is about as honest as declaring that you could have scored a missed World Cup penalty with your eyes closed. That, in a decade's time, your incorruptible self could be the one being called for betrayal by an armchair commentator, would seem as far-fetched as it does for today's Ministers.

~

How many 1992-era Labour activists cursed the British electorate for re-electing John Major? How many of us must be poised to unleash the same bile when 2009/10 comes around, and each time a Labour seat falls to the Tories? Love for the British people is neither required, nor expected of progressives. It is fruitless to seek it, putting your own favoured social class on a pedestal, just as it is to hold grudges when they reject your earnest political projects. Just as no human being should live at the whim of another, and human rights are worthless with strings attached so the cause of the disadvantaged and the powerless is too important to be left in the hands of the electorate, even if the power and ability to act of the State has to be given up in the process. No more dizzying highs, or crashing lows, just the possibility of steady, incremental progress.

So, progressives need to devise a way to achieve their social ends outside of the State. Five to ten years of Conservative Government might be as bad for their Party as the years since 1997 have been bad for ours, but unless Labour starts to dissolve the power of Central Government while it has the chance, future Conservative administrations will stymie external progressive action, as well as proving all too tempting a target for Labour politicians who fail to follow the lessons of the past century.

One approach might be to render majority Government impossible, for example, by backing a strict kind of proportional representation. The sooner the spectre of Conservative majority administration is eliminated, progressive non-governmental action can continue unmolested. [The danger is that, without any fresh political input of any kind, Government becomes entirely stagnant and bureaucratised. I leave this question for (any) commenters to mull over.]

Update (14/09): minor tweaks.