Idiot of the Week?

There’s always plenty of competition for that title, but I’d like to nominate Val Shawcross, Labour GLA Member for Lambeth and Southwark, who is quoted in the Evening Standard as accusing Tory Mayor Boris Johnson of “letting his personal prejudice override any sense of reason”.

What dreadful thing has Bozza done now? Well, he’s decided not merely to replace London’s awful bendy-buses with rear-platform double-deckers with conductors, but to order 800 of the things – enough to operate most of the routes that run through London’s West End, if not all of them.

It’s hard to believe that bus design is a matter on which the “correct position” can be derived from a love of, or a hatred for, an ideological position on more obviously political matters – and the reality is that Londoners want their Routemasters back, or failing that, as near a replica as possible which meets contemporary standards on safety and “greenness” (they’ll almost certainly be “dual-fuel” jobs). Which is what Bozza wants to give us.

You’d think that people would learn from election campaigns, especially ones they lose. Whilst I doubt Ken’s bendy bus policy cost him his job in City Hall, I never once heard anyone – even Ken – claim during the campaign that it was a vote-winner. You’d think the Labour Group on the GLA might even take the opportunity to back Bozza on this one, if only for the kudos of later being able to say that they don’t go in for childish point-scoring.

‘Loveable’ banking?

We don’t yet know what the effect of this week’s financial crisis on living standards will be. At the moment, the worst hit are those who want or need to sell their home to buy a smaller one, but it is hardly likely to stop there. It seems that our “progressive” politicians don’t have any depth of ideas on which to draw to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. They desperately want to put Humpty back on his wall, but this time he’ll need a rather broader platform if he isn’t going to fall off again.

Those of us who equate our happiness to the prospect of increased material wealth are going to be disappointed, and politicians who set out their stall on that basis – as they all have for as long as any of us can remember – are going to find it tough going, too. Ironically, it seems that Cameron has a better understanding of this than most. Brown is probably relieved that he’s being called on to deal with the financial sector again – his Presbyterian inheritance is of little help to him in developing creative responses to the social responsibility of government – to find a way to interlace community with individual freedom.

Yet the financial crisis does provides an unique opportunity to do just that. continue reading… »

Why “the left” needs new direction - part 2

I argued last week that Social Democracy needs to be re-invented. This week I show how.

Harold Wilson said that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing, a proposition New Labour has tested to destruction. Historically, our ethical impulses have focused on issues of poverty and inequality – or rather, on powerlessness. Empower people, we said, and all will be well. Benn, Scargill, Livingstone and others re-interpreted the ethical dimension as the promotion of the interests of particular social groups. This frame of reference led to a narrative of struggle clearly distinguishable from the Tory narrative of government. The problem with struggle is that either you win, in which case – like the A.N.C. in South Africa - you don’t know what to do next, or you lose, in which case your position is worse than your starting-point. Warlike words such as ‘fight’ and ‘struggle’ need to be dropped from our lexicon. They obscure our necessary ethical focus. continue reading… »

Why ‘the left’ needs new direction

As the Labour Party Conference kicks off this weekend, this article is the start of a series on where ‘the left’ goes from here.
I will be blogging on the subject for LibCon more regularly from now.

Social democracy was the hegemonic form of progressive politics, both in theory and practice, in this country throughout the twentieth century. It sought evolutionary change of institutions and practices rather than revolutionary disjuncture.

However, this had less to do with the political acuity of Labour in that period than with specific historic circumstances that uniquely favored it.
continue reading… »

Why a fixed-term Parliament might be needed

David Lammy MP’s recent call for the introduction of open primaries for candidate selection into British politics got a bit lost on LC, because

- quite understandably, not a few people preferred to play the man rather than the ball;

- the Single Tranferable Vote fetishists feared that our broken electoral system might be fixable in some other way (I’ll come back to that);

- Lammy didn’t make his case anything like as strongly as he might have done. And he didn’t, because he didn’t look at a different, but connected issue.
continue reading… »

Has Political Betting gone Tory?

Some years ago now the former BBC journalist and Liberal Democrat activist Mike Smithson decided to start a blog for pleasure and profit. The story of Political Betting is undoubtedly one of the successes of the British blogosphere - but it also provides a cautionary tale for those who suppose that the internet itself is politically neutral.

Yuri Andropov, briefly boss of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and before that its chief ideologist, believed that the personal computer represented a definitive break, or step-change, in the means of production whose effect would be to destroy socialism. And there can be no doubt that, at least in Britain, the energy of political blogging is with the political Right.

It’s easy and comfortable to think that this is simply because we have an exhausted Labour government - once Labour’s back in its natural home of opposition, left blogging will bloom and the internet become the capillary system of a new progressive politics. For me, Political Betting suggests otherwise.
continue reading… »