Humanist meme - 4 comments

Via To the point. I'm a Hardhat.

Quite surprised, really, after my answer to the medieval cathedral question, but there you go. Looks a bit like Sir Stafford Cripps. Funnily enough, somewhere or other, we have a letter signed by him. Will have to dig it out.



You are an atheist, a rationalist, a believer in the triumph of science and of reason over libido. You can't stand mumbo jumbo, ritual, spiritual nonsense of any kind, and you refuse to allow for these longings in others.

Astrologers, Scientologists and new-age crystal ball creeps are no different in your view from priests, rabbis and imams. They're all just weak-minded pilgrims on the road to easy answers. Nature as revealed by science is awesome enough for you, but it's a nature that needs curbing and taming by us on our evolutionary journey to perfection.

Your heros are Einstein, Darwin, Marx and - these days - Gould, Blakemore, Watson, Crick and Rosalind Franklin. Could you be hiding a little behind those absolutist views, worried that, if you let in a few doubts and contradictory ideas, the whole edifice might crumble? Loosen up a bit and try to enjoy the amazing variety of human belief systems. Don't worry - it's unlikely you'll end up chanting your days away in some distant mountain cult.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

Comments - no comments

Bloggers4Labour will shortly offer a comment tracking facility, so that those of you who want to see what the controversial topics of the day are, or who want to find out if anyone dared follow up that potentially explosive comment you left late last night, will be able to - all on one page.

Obviously for all this to happen, your Labour-backing blog needs a comments feed, which pretty much rules out any Blogger users. I'll try to collect as many feeds as I can, but if your blog does have such a feed, you could help me out by sending me its URL (Atom preferred). Thanks.

If anyone has any ideas for new, usable features (kewl is also good), drop me a line. I'm a lot more amenable than this lot.

Henry Jackson / Tripe - 3 comments

Anthony makes a case for the Henry Jackson Society.

The Henry Jackson Society is a non-profit organisation that seeks to promote the following principles: that liberal democracy should be spread across the world; that as the world's most powerful democracies, the United States and the European Union - under British leadership - must shape the world more actively by intervention and example; that such leadership requires political will, a commitment to universal human rights and the maintenance of a strong military with global expeditionary reach; and that too few of our leaders in Britain and the rest of Europe today are ready to play a role in the world that matches our strength and responsibilities.

Despite my aversion to the kind of society whose members meet in rooms at the House of Commons (probably due to those things I used to read about the Monday Club), to organisations named after dead Americans, to the principle of British leadership, to unlimited "shaping of the world", and my suspicion of big name media-political crossover figures, allow me to cautiously welcome the additional publicity this organisation is receiving, and to say that it sound's like they've got their head screwed on.

Perhaps I'm being coy: I've clearly moved in that direction over the past 9 months or so, even if it's more through being anti-anti- than straightforwardly pro-.

I did read Stephen Pollard's article first, over the weekend. As usual, skim over the first few rabble-rousing paragraphs, as there are some good ones to follow:

Jackson was a traditional New Deal liberal, a trade unionist who believed in nationalisation and price controls, and a civil rights campaigner. But his real impact, and his legacy, lay not in domestic but international politics. He was an implacable opponent of the received foreign policy wisdom of détente with the Soviet Union. As the Henry Jackson Society's founding statement puts it: "He believed that this was an unprincipled accommodation, which abandoned the wider cause of human rights, as well as compromising security. Jackson's core belief was that democratic governments should consider the internal character of foreign states when dealing with them."

Jackson's message - the relevance of which is as great today as then - was that the supposedly 'realistic' approach of the likes of Henry Kissinger, which accepted that the Soviet Union was here to stay and sought to reach an accommodation with it which would lessen its threat to the West, was misguided both strategically and morally.

Don't let me leave without citing Pollard's most recent article, a quite nauseating piece of hackery about the former Wings legend, Sir Paul McCartney (I'm no fan, trust me), which can't resist aiming a sozzled boot at the "same liberal mindset that lavishes praise on Fidel Castro as a hero".

Well, The Times deemed it worthy of publication, so perhaps there really is life in your old school essays.

Update: Mick Hartley has also picked up on the McCartney non-story (before me, in fact), and Norm has also added his little bit. The point I wanted to make was that China's intolerance of human rights does not make their intolerance of animal rights any less important. Nor should it be used as a stick to beat those whose area of expertise is animal rights, just because they happen to be a celebrity (especially Macca), and who would no doubt have strips torn off them if they dared to "lecture us about proper politics".

It reminded me of the "How can we think of doing X when there is so much Y in the world?" idea that is so popular with cynics. How dare we ban foxhunting when a million people are on the dole? How could we think of liberating Iraq when the real problem is world hunger? In so doing, almost any practical policy can be blocked, or made to look ridiculous, in comparison to a morally pure policy that may be impractical, or unachievable, and which the cynic may not even genuinely support.

Upgrade - no comments

I'm about to make a minor upgrade to the feed handling. First impressions suggest it'll let us pick out more links. As exciting as that!

Anyway, let me know if you notice any weirdness tonight (on the site).

Inheritance, Tax, and Trade Unions - 15 comments

We have a dramatic disagreement on the subject of both inheritance and trade union rights, in our online Manifesto, so perhaps you can be the judge. Which of the two statements that follow do you believe is:

• The most progressive and most compliant with equality of opportunity?
• The soundest basis for future discussion/work/editing?
• The best fit with Labour values?
• And least importantly (in my view, and at this early stage), which is more likely to work for us electorally?

If they're both lousy, how about a compromise version?

I won't say who contributed the two sections. Here's version (a):

[...] can not be a return to the extremely high marginal tax rates of the 1960s and 1970s. Just because it is politically expedient to tax a particular group, irrespective of their value to society or their treatment of their employees, does not make it just that they are treated differently. Moreover, though there is a minimum income, and a minimum wage, below which nobody should fall, governments should not prescribe a maximum, and keep interference in how individuals dispose of their income to a minimum.

TODO: What about 50% above 100K?

Inheritance: The campaign for equality of opportunity has not always won the hearts and minds of the Labour Party because of the suspicion that the measures it entails are not comprehensive enough to address the real inequalities in society. In reality, this campaign has been hamstrung in the past by its failure to tackle the issue of inheritance.

Though it isn't the Government's right to interfere with how private citizens dispose of their money. However, we believe that all children should start on a level playing-field, and this cannot possibly happen when their passage through life is eased with inherited wealth. This can take many forms: houses with their mortgages paid, and educational trust funds, to name just two. Individuals should be rewarded for the efforts they have made during their lives, and it is quite natural that ones descendants will share in this. However, it is not fair that ones children should have an easier life purely because of "accident of birth" - purely because they happened to be born to successful parents.

We accept that, for many of our poorest citizens, inheritance is an important route out of poverty. When successive generations find themselves unable to escape from low wages, even relatively low levels of inheritance can make a big difference. This is why we propose the existing inheritance tax rates and thresholds be replaced with a simple allowance of £20,000. Estates valued above this will be taxed at 100% of the excess. We feel this will allow the poorest to pass on wealth between generations but reduce the likelihood of people succeeding in life because of the sacrifices of their parents alone.

Employment: we do not believe that the ability of trade unions to call a strike without first winning a ballot of its members would be compatible with democracy, nor would intimidatory picketing. The right to strike is designed to liberate the employee from exploitation in their workplace and denial of their rights; it cannot be used by unions to force them not to work if it is their freely-made choice to do so.

... and here's version (b):

We will, of course not seek to punish those who inherit wealth through absurd and morally repugnant confiscation schemes.

So, question is: where do we go from here?

Email us if you fancy participating yourself, and perhaps bringing the two sides together!

Update: Have read this post a few more times and, though I try to be neutral and even-handed, I do have a very definite opinion. All the same, I'll give the people a chance to speak before sticking my own oar in.

Update (24/11): Sorry, very busy at the moment. Hope to be able to respond to comments by Saturday.

Demos / "True Blue" - no comments

Demos, the "everyday democracy" think tank, is hosting yet another of those making modern Conservatism to Britain Today-type events, named True Blue. Nick "Beaten in Hove" Boles, director of Policy Exchange can usually be found at this sort of event, and this is no exception.

Main man at the event, and author of True Blue, Nicholas Boys Smith, also writes on the same subject in the Sunday Times today.

The issue is why 25 to 34-year-olds ("Generation Gap") are so averse to voting Conservative, despite displaying many of the characteristics that one would associate with conservativism (small 'c') and, let's say, Thatcherite Conservatism. I must say, this is a bit of a turnaround from the early 1990s when we were all so worried about demographic change eliminating traditional Labour voters and our own party failing to win over "aspirational" voters.

Generation Gap as a whole are more Thatcherite and entrepreneurial than their parents. They are more confident and better travelled. They are more socially liberal but still keen on moral standards. The key reason they don't vote Conservative is that they don't think Tories care, and they don't like Tory values.

[...]

In the past three elections Generation Gap have been consistently the least likely to vote Conservative. And even though they are now reaching middle age they are still not. In previous generations young voters started voting Conservative as the weight of mortgages, education and tax began to press - in short, as reality bit. This one has not. Staggeringly, young voters of 18-24 were more likely to vote Conservative in the general election than those in their late thirties or early forties.

So what is it that ties these Thatcher's Children to the Labour Party and, if we're interested in securing a mandate that benefits the entire electorate, what must we do - or rather, keep doing - to hold onto them? I should imagine that a great deal of bloggers fall into this category, so we ought to have a pretty good idea by now.

By all accounts Generation Gap are economically and socially liberal, like "fairness", but are relatively disengaged from society. That being the case, it may be that a more traditional Labour manifesto will fall on deaf ears, short of a remarkable Blair-beating sales pitch. It's not Socialism or solidarity that sees these people turn out against the Conservatives but, I guess, the idea that Labour can be trusted to keep the economy ticking along, avoid making tax demands, pursue moderate redistributory policies, enact liberal and family-friendly policies, and don't have the hard Right and anti-European baggage that the Tories are trying to divest themselves of.

Tony Blair's not long for the top job - we all know that. What of the New Labour project? There are all sorts of objections to that project, in principle and in practice, but is it going to be possible to recast principled but tradition-free, progressive and liberal policies into a new Labour campaign without Blair, but also without the centralism and the "control-freakery", while satisfying both the Left and, this huge Generation Gap group?

If not, David Cameron will be there to gather them all in. What else was he created for?

Sisters / Bears - 3 comments

Sorry for the lack of posts. Here's a links-style post to get me back into the groove...

Anthony at Blacktriangle asks whether this constitutes privatisation of the NHS:

Seven hundred nurses and other health workers plan to form their own company and sell their services to the NHS...

The group - which includes dieticians and physiotherapists - hope to start Central Surrey Health by next April...

They would retain NHS conditions of employment, including pension rights, and continue working for their trust.

Should the use of independent contracting in the NHS be positively encouraged?

Meanwhile, the Lib Dems are apparently abandoning their "high tax policy": they still want wealthy people to pay more (including the 50% tax band) but would match this with cuts for poorer people.

So far, so uncontroversial. What slightly concerned me was this:

The Lib Dem leader also compared the three main parties' recent positions on tax and spend to Goldilocks' three bears.

He argued that the Tories were too cold, the Lib Dems too hot [?!] and Labour in between.

Mr Kennedy said that he aims to reposition his party as one of "two middle-sized bears".

Looks like Kennedy's famous ability to whip the electorate into a frenzy of radical, reformist zeal is as strong as ever.

Oh, and Goldilocks didn't own the bears.

More on the Manifesto to come...

Let's Talk - no comments

Cllr Andrew on the need for real communication in building links between people and politicians, the role blogs can play, the barriers imposed by party discipline, and the risk of a political subculture developing, from which politicians are excluded.

More in the IPPR's new article "Direct Representation: towards a conversational democracy". It's a free download (PDF), and is nice and short.

Manifesto update - no comments

Via Talk Politics, and via some playwright or other:

If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.
Julius Caesar (Brutus at Act III, ii)

If we care about the future of the Labour Party, one way we could show it (I know of no better way) would be to get together to build up the manifesto we're working on here, which all B4L members, and probably most readers too, are encouraged to participate in. Just drop us an email.

I think we have something like 1,400 words so far, in one-and-a-half weeks. I'd like to see something more like 40,000 - something robust and significant, that lots of people can feel proud that they have contributed to. Something that can withstand intellectual scrutiny, enthuses people, and which really turns the dogs on the conservatives (sorry, I meant Conservatives).

I'm sure we can do it.

Satisfying no one - 22 comments

So, Labour's call to allow police to detain terror suspects for up to 90 days without charging them has been defeated, and the arbitrary figure is now to rise from a nice, round 14 to a nice, round 28.

How is that an effective compromise? It allows the police to keep people for two weeks longer without a workable case being made, while letting suspects free in cases where the investigation takes longer than 14 days, which - given that we're ignorant of the factors and circumstances of these investigations - is perfectly plausible. Tell me it isn't.

It does nothing to eliminate the trade-off between a suspect's loss of liberty and the potential terrorist victims' loss of limbs.

Surely (and, given my shameful lack of background reading, this may have been covered elsewhere) the answer is to eliminate the upper limit entirely. If we assume (please try!) that the Police are efficient and will make a winnable case for all suspects who are bona-fide terrorists, this eliminates the "loss of limbs" factor mentioned above.

In order to eliminate the "suspect's loss of liberty" factor, we simply add a requirement that after 14 days (or why not 7?), and once a week thereafter, a Police representative make an account to the appointed judge of the progress of the case and the weight of suspicion/evidence against the suspect. The investigation can continue for so long as the judge agrees that the Police are actively investigating the case, that evidence-gathering is sufficiently complex or difficult to have required an extended period of time, that the suspect can reasonably be thought to be a party to the case, and that evidence is actually mounting up.

This prevents the possibility arising of suspects being hurled into prison, never to emerge, while investigations are mothballed or else move on to accuse a completely different set of people. And we trust judges, don't we?

Not headline-friendly, but it seems a more intelligent way of going-about. No sign of this option on the BBC's poll (which, incidentally, sees Blair's 90-day option ahead by over 15,000 votes), I'm afraid.

... to spite one's face - 1 comment

Sorry, been very busy, so no time for posts, reading, or leaving dumb comments.

Haven't really been able to put much effort into researching the whole French rioting situation, but just some observations from the BBC's coverage of the flashpoints:

• Saint-Etienne: Arsonists destroy two schools and a bus on 6-7 November
• Stains: 61-year old man dies of injuries after being attacked
• Lille: Creche burned down and vehicles destroyed on 7-8 November
• Bordeaux: Employment agency office hit by a petrol bomb on 7-8 November...
• Lyon: Public transport shut down after a petrol bomb thrown at a railway station...

Perhaps the Beeb did just pick out the interesting or unusual targets, and perhaps those buildings were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but talk about counter-productive...

Update (14th November) from the BBC:

... Vandals rammed a car into a primary school in the southern city of Toulouse before setting the building on fire.

In northern France, arsonists set fire to a sports centre in the suburb of Faches-Thumesnil and a school in the town of Halluin.

.

A very minor effect / Brighton Web Awards - 2 comments

Behind The Spin writes about the impact of bloggers during the 2005 General Election. There are some interesting details, but just as it was going so well:

Sandra Howard's blog gained a certain amount of press interest especially when she made a comment about which hairdresser one of the other party leaders' wives used. The parties also had support from blogs created by sympathisers such as Bloggers4Labour, Libdemwatch and Conservativeshome. But overall partisan blogs had a very minor effect.

If you need me, I'll be on the pavement outside a very tall building.

How can an individual blogger compete with the blogging resources of a large organisation like the BBC? ... It has been suggested that a Power Law exists within the blogosphere whereby only a few popular blogs attract a significant audience. For the 2005 general election power clearly lay with the traditional news organisation blogs, not the individual bloggers.

Maybe the law applies, but I'm not sure the mainstream media blogs are the beneficiaries. I find it far more interesting to read contrary opinions from undoubtedly intelligent people, in preference to blogs which have been distilled from the dead tree pages of the parent publication. Ask yourself how many times you bookmarked an article from, say, the Guardian Election Blog, other than to track a particularly heated comment-war on the subject of Tony Blair's cold-hearted, single-handed murder of 100,000 Iraqis.

The UK experience of blogs in 2005 suggests largely that they were bloggocks. Blogs from political actors, commentators and the media provided an interesting backdrop, but not one which appears to have had a significant effect.

Well, maybe not, but things will change.

In the blogging world we're always trying to come up with new ideas, new ways to engage people, and new ways to persuade politicians and the masses to join the discussion. I'm proud to call myself an evangelist, having enciuntered more intelligent and challenging views in the past year or so - from right across the political spectrum - than I have in years of newspaper consumption, and therefore I see no reason why the mainstream media should speak with any greater authority whatsoever.

Finally...

Bloggers4Labour failed abjectly to make the shortlist in the Brighton and Hove Web Awards / Community section, so anyone who fancied the 5-1 price we were offering in the event will be disappointed. Gambling's a mug's game anyway.

I would invite all Labour-supporting bloggers and visitors - you do NOT have to come from Brighton - to check out Jonathan from Assistant's blog. He's up for winning Best Personal Site for the second year running and, if I may declare a personal interest, he is both a friend and, though not a fan of Neu Labour, still basically one of us. He's a seasoned poster (since November 2002) on Brighton issues, centre-Left politics, and far more important issues still, such as indie and urban music.

Olivia from Yummy Wakame is also a wonderful human being, and covers politics as well as Brighton and other world issues. There was a great deal of competition, so neither Chicken Yoghurt, Free Speed Nation, Neil Harding, nor PooterGeek even made the shortlist.

Voting will close on Tuesday, 8th November.

Alles ist schoen - no comments

Just returned from watching 70s krautrock masters, Faust, in Hove, a mere 3 minutes walk from my home. Though I have a fair knowledge of the genre, I hadn't experienced any of Faust's music before, let alone their stage presence, and not much can prepare you for a 50-something French hippy (Jean Hervé Peron) ironing an audience member's jacket on stage, as a burly German drummer (Zappi Diermaier) beats the steel pipes he is holding aloft with a hammer before carving them up on stage with an axle-grinder, sparks flying across the stage. A flautist attempts to play a real clarinet and a child's plastic one simultaneously. A screaming-chorus of local popstrels accompanies one song, a marching band of local trumpeters and saxophonists another.

I wouldn't say it was "difficult" - not like this - even when they drifted away from jam session-rock, melody could be found among the metallic clanks, squawks, and the occasional Germanic chant ("Rund ist schoen!").

They were on stage from, I was told, a punctual 7.00 pm to well past 10. I doubt we saw even half of that, and managed to miss British Sea Power entirely, but it's liberating to be able to hit the bar during a performance, drift back, and find the band still in full flow.

All in all, a great night's entertainment. See them in Newcastle on the 8th. Final word from Jean-Hervé:

When I got back to europe in juli 68 , many friends had been brutally beaten by our repressive police forces and they all followed radical poltical movements. It was a schock for me . I went through a short an intense crisis : I opted in favor of the zen poetry instead of the marxist-trotzkist-leninist communism .
I painfully cut the umbilical cord, rolled my sleepingbag, picked up my guitar and trumpet . I was off , on the road !

Good choice.

Our Labour manifesto - 18 comments

Your chance to contribute to a developing document.

Anyone who reads this blog and looks at the range of posts we display will be aware of the range of opinion among Labour-backing bloggers, and when some groups see the official party position appear to move further and further from their own views, and others shift their world view in reaction to crises like the Berlin Wall, 9/11, and 7/07, it gets disconcerting. What are our guiding principles, and do we really feel they still hold water? Is there a platform we can honestly unite behind, that doesn't rely upon hatred or contempt for something else: Blair, Bush, "Stoppers", Conservatives, or whatever?

I maintain that it's vital that people continue to reassess their views in the light of events and new evidence. Principles are important, but Labour has always faced the problem that even its hard-core voters have lacked enthusiasm for its policies, and by the 1980s, Labour was standing on policies that were difficult to sell, and which many activists could not back with all their heart. It was this intellectual vacuum that allowed Thatcherism to progress as far as it did, or rather, has.

What I'm inviting you to take part in, now, is a 'Fantasy' Labour Manifesto. You may know about collaborative documents: basically, documents that many people can edit, but with some synchronisation so that changes can be tracked. Cllr. Andrew Brown has been promoting this sort of idea for a while, so I should credit him for that (I've decided to use Writeboard for this - I could have set up a small group blog, or a Wiki, but let's see how this goes.)

I believe the idea, as with things like the Wikipedia, is that the best contributions will tend to stay, while the least useful will be rewritten or removed. The theory, then, is that the quality and usefulness of the document will increase over time, and as more and more people contribute.

I want you, reader, to contribute - don't be shy. If you're on the Bloggers4Labour list, just drop me an email. If you're not, still email, but tell me a little bit about yourself.

Who's eligible? Anyone associated with the Labour Party, former members, and sympathisers, from any "wing" of the party. Ideally, clear-thinking people with a good written style, and perhaps with knowledge on particular issues: health, education, economics, etc. Remember, though, that you will be evaluating, checking, and improving each others' points, rather than them being set from 'on high'. This is an exercise in democracy.

Once people have been approved, I'll send them a password to our online Labour manifesto, plus a few guidelines. There's always the chance that someone will try to ruin things, but a few simple precautions should get us where we want to be.

At the moment, you can't actually view the manifesto unless you're logged in. However, you can view the changes as an RSS Feed. Very cool.

Update: OK, we now have 5 people on board (including myself). No time tonight, but I'll set the ball rolling tomorrow if someone hasn't beaten me to it. And hopefully we'll be on our way to 10.

Just a point about eligibility: if you're one of those people who believe Labour has "moved away" from you, or you think, "I can't vote for Tony Blair", or "the principles are fine, but the delivery has been disappointing", or even "these politicians are out for themselves", that doesn't rule you out. Provided you participate in the right spirit, mean well, and have broadly Labour values, then I think you have a place - drop us an email.

That said, I'd be disappointed if we produced something that pretended nothing of any note or value had happened since Blair became leader in 1994 (or since 1979, for that matter)...

Update (November 6th): 8 people (Chris, Andrew, chickenlittle, Antonia, Unity, Gareth, John, and myself) are now signed-up, and we actually have some text up there! [RSS]