David Cameron is moving further away from Thatcherism. This is one interpretation of his call for a US-style chapter 11 bankruptcy law. He says:

Instead of companies going straight into liquidation and having to lay off staff, they get a stay of execution and they can be restructured to try to save the business, to try to save the jobs.

This is a flat contradiction of standard neoliberal economics. This says that the very fact that a company is bankrupt is a sign that it has little value; the market - customers  - judges things right. The firm should therefore be broken up, so that workers can be released to find more productive employment. And in removing excess capacity from an industry, the firm’s more efficient rivals will become more profitable, allowing them to expand.

And the notion that bankrupt firms can be restructured is pish; if there were a way for the firm to become more efficient, either the existing managers would have found it, or the firm would have been bought by those who can make a go of it. That this hasn’t happened shows there’s no hope for the firm.

Now, this view was pretty much orthodox Thatcherism. “Lame ducks must go to the wall” was a cliché of the early 80s. And the reason Thatcher called coal mines “uneconomic” - rather than just unprofitable - was because she thought miners would find better work than digging up cheap coal*.
In calling for a chapter 11, Cameron is rejecting this view. Why?

One possibility is that the evidence is on his side. We know now that displaced miners generally did not (pdf) find work, suggesting that workers don’t quickly find valuable work elsewhere. There’s some (but limited) evidence that firms can turn themselves around in chapter 11. And it’s not clear that firms in chapter 11 in industries with excess capacity actually do harm their more efficient rivals. Chapter 11 does, then, have its supporters.

But there’s another possibility. Whether or not chapter 11 is good for the economy generally, it’s certainly good for investment bankers and lawyers, as creditors spend a fortune fighting over the scraps.  So perhaps Cameron has just listened to his friends.

* Of course, it’s possible that Thatcher’s pit closure programme was motivated not by economics but by mere class hatred. But no-one believes this, do they?

I don’t agree with the conclusion, but Bush strategist Karl Rove’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal about Obama’s campaigning is spot on:

For a campaign that says it wants to end the politics of the Bush-Cheney years, the Obama for President effort has cribbed an awful lot from the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004.
…
Sen. Obama’s organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille’s plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros’s 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran “virtual precincts,” using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today.

As I said not long ago, I wonder when the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats are effectively going to start doing the same here. Notice the key word: ‘grassroots’.

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.
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I need David Cameron lecturing me on moral responsibility in much the same way as I need a layer of icing applied to my lasagne.

Cameron had the gall to give this speech on the eve of the Glasgow East by-election campaign, in a deprived city licked to a splinter by the economic policies pursued by his party in the 1980s.

He said:
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A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

On the assumption that most people who read this are as sad and nerdy about politics as I am this week’s ‘must read’ item is ‘Taming Leviathan’ from IEA, more details below.

Other than that enjoy and as ever please flag anything I may have missed. Also if anyone would like to be included in the email version please let me know…

Reports & Publications…

• The Centre for Policy Studies have two interesting reports this week. Anthony Jay presents his view on the need for a much-slimmed down, self-financing BBC and Maurice Saatchi has a highly provocative paper called “Enemy of the People” – a mocked-up high court judgement on Labour’s 10 years in office.
• The Centre for European Reform have a briefing note by the CER analysts on the French EU Presidency - “France’s EU presidency was always going to be ambitious, with wide-ranging plans for climate change, immigration and defence. Now, however, President Sarkozy will have to focus on resolving the legal and institutional mess created by the Irish No to the EU’s Lisbon treaty.”
• The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) has an interesting report on how free-market liberal think tanks can influence public policy the world over – drawing on insights from 13 authors from think tanks around the globe it observes that “though the ‘war of ideas’ has been hard fought, it has been only partially won. New threats to freedom have emerged, including environmentalism and big-government conservatism. In some countries the burden taxation and regulation has never been greater” – the report is called ‘Taming Leviathan’ and you can read it here.
• IPPR North released a paper on the Barnett Formula arguing that “current disparities in funding across the UK is becoming an increasing source of tension between the four nations, especially between England and Scotland, and that unless addressed it could have implications for the union”
• The Joseph Rowntree foundation published a report by Andrea Waylen and Sarah Stewart-Brown called “Parenting in ordinary families: Diversity, complexity and change”. The report ‘examines parenting in Britain during early and middle childhood within different social and cultural groups and looks at how parenting develops and changes over time’.
• The New Local Government Network offer up a collection of essays on ‘Next Steps for Local Democracy: Leadership, accountability and partnership’. The collection “brings together the reflections of leading thinkers within local government, setting out a range of ideas on future service delivery, leadership, citizen interaction and rebalancing the relationship between central and local government”
• The Policy Exchange have produced a report on gun & knife crime which, according to the Sunday Times, is getting some attention in Downing St. I’ve spoken to Policy Exchange and the report isn’t actually online at the time of writing (Friday 11th am) but will be later today – their publication area is here.

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“It’s a total waste of bloody money!”; “I have not made my mind up yet”; “I’ve voted for him already” (one of 10,000 postal ballots requested, 59 per cent sent them in); “I just don’t know about politics, I don’t vote.

A lady somewhere will be turning in her grave” (clearly meaning her mother); “I never thought I’d vote Tory, but this time I will” (an enthusiastic Lib-Dem); “Look at all these leaflets!”; Definitely I’m voting for Mr Davis … I don’t need a car thank you, my son will walk me there”.

I canvassed for David Davis on the eve of the by-election. The uncertain did not want to discuss. We had a single conversation with a man who did raise 42 days - he was for locking them up, but not, on consideration, if they were innocent. Davis’s core team is very competent. But it is hard for them. Many voters are puzzled about why David Davis has done it, especially Conservative voters. I’ll come back to this, his core problem at the moment. But also party activists who worked especially hard to ensure he won the constituency in 2005 to frustrate the Lib-Dem’s “decapitation strategy”. They backed a leader. They wanted him to be Home Secretary.

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There probably aren’t that many ways to spark a revolution in Britain. But Sir Antony Jay, of Yes Minister fame, may have alighted on one of them in his proposal to cut the BBC down to one TV channel and one radio station (which would be Radio 4).

His pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies was intended to be well timed, coinciding the with the publication of the BBC’s annual report today. But it was also, perhaps, ill timed as it comes at the end of what seems to have been (for this viewer anyway) a pretty good week for the BBC.
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I think the Obama-McCain contest means that we have the chance to see the best of America in this election year.

During these last few months, as I spent time in Chicago and Wisconsin in February during parliamentary recess and then on the doorstep in Crewe and across Greater London in April and May, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what, if anything connects these events. What do they have in common? What direction do they point us in for the future?

There is something about these two outsider candidates that connects with people, whether that is with rural communities in Iowa, casino workers in Nevada or students in Wisconsin.
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I’ve been pretty critical of two massive government IT projects – the existing plans to introduce mandatory identity cards with a huge database behind them and also the Home Office talk of a database of all phone calls and emails made anywhere in the country.

My criticisms in both cases are three-fold: the money involved could be better spent on other projects (such as giving us more police rather than keeping huge databases of the activities of innocent people), they involve a huge infringement of our liberties and privacy, and – thirdly - big IT projects like this are likely to go wrong and to be vulnerable to misuse.

But I’m not a Luddite. Over time I’ve found embracing IT innovations has made my life easier and made me more efficient - whether it was years ago buying a laser printer to speed up production of casework letters or more recently starting to use the text-messaging based blogging service Twitter to help keep residents informed of what I’m up to as an MP.
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What David Davis did today was not unprecedented, but it was something quite rare. However, I would urge caution on rushing headlong to leap into bed with him and give him our support.
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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.
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It’s difficult to say anything new about Gordon Brown’s attempts to extend pre-detention charge to 42 days, though if you want to read two accounts made recently, Anthony Barnett at OurKingdom and Martin O’Neill at New Statesman are a great start.

There are those who see the-Muslim-terrorist-threat-that-may-wipe-out-western-civilisation as so big that locking up British (Muslim) citizens for 90 days without charging them is not far enough. I’m not going to bother repudiating them. I’m not even going to bother answering those apparently on the left who are strenuously defending this stupid piece of legislation that, for once, has the entire left-wing and right-wing press united in opposition. Oh, apart from The Sun and the Daily Express, just so you know.

So why is Gordon Brown still stubbornly going ahead with it?
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Last week Boris Johnson called for a two-term limit as part of his fight to “protect Londoner’s from cronyism”.

But as Boris’s own band of ‘forensic’ cronies release their interim report on waste at City Hall, it is worth remembering that it is not just time itself that leads to these problems, but the people who are chosen to set the clocks.

Because when Boris ran for Mayor, he did so off the back of a series of claims from the Evening Standard which centred around Ken Livingstone and his supposedly socialist cabal in City Hall. Boris deliberately never got himself involved with the detail of these claims, but instead positioned himself as the new broom that would sweep the old dirt clean.
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Mike Ion thinks the Labour leadership should do more to combat the rise of the BNP:

Gordon Brown would send out a powerful message to his party’s core supporters if he were to personally throw his weight behind a call for a new “coalition of the willing” that will help to blunt the advance of the far-right in this country by addressing some of the genuine concerns of white working-class voters while at the same time openly challenging those concerns that have no factual or legitimate basis.

I fear Mike’s plea will go unheeded. The fact is that our electoral system gives Labour little incentive to fight the far-right, or listen to its core supporters.
Labour will not lose the next election because of the rise of the BNP in places like Stoke (Mike’s example).

It makes no difference if Labour’s 10,000 majorities in Stoke’s constituencies are cut by thousands because of the BNP or abstainers.

What will cost Labour the election is the loss of places like Worcester or Oxford West. And although abstentions or BNP votes by white working class voters in those areas could be a problem, they are less a danger than middle-income floating voters swinging to the Tories. It was his grasp of this fact that helped Blair win three elections.

So, could it be that ignoring its core support - and the rise in the BNP this threatens - is one of the prices we must pay for our first-past-the-post system?

Though Labour’s loss of Crewe and Nantwich is a blow for Labour and an unwelcome boost for the Conservatives, it hardly represents a surprise.

The Brown government’s serial mistakes - most notably, the recent watershed abolition of the 10p tax band - and failure to develop a convincing political narrative were always going to make success difficult, but the death blow to the party’s chances was delivered by an inept, negative and poisonous campaign.
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“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative”. What wouldn’t I give to be able to come up with soundbites as sharp as that?

Sadly, these are not my words, but rather a verbatim quote from John Stuart Mill. Such incisive invective would probably have made the Victorian philosopher a great blogger.

The tag of ‘the stupid party’ has accordingly stuck to the Tories for the last 150 years or so. Surprisingly, for the most part supporters have seemed to revel in what was clearly intended as a put-down.
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1) Consistency is not really her strong point, Bookdrunk said yesterday when Unity blogged the amendments Tory MPs are proposing to the HFE Bill. There’s Mr Edward Leigh supporting amendments to reduc the limit to 12, 14 or 16 weeks and there’s Nadine Dorries supporting reducing the limit to 20 weeks and 16 weeks! Is she not conviced by her own arguments?

But you see, that isn’t her ultimate agenda and neither is it of these other mysogynist MPs.
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Until relatively recently, standard British usage meant that describing someone as ‘a progressive’ was more or less the equivalent to branding them a communist fellow traveller. Not any more; we are all progressives now, it seems.

Isn’t anybody willing to stand up for honest-to-goodness barking mad reactionaries these days? It’s not as if they are an endangered species, after all. Surely such a sizeable constituency surely deserves a spokesperson more articulate than Melanie Phillips.

Yet the way things are going right now, most politicians would rather confess diabolism or an entry on the sex offenders’ register than admit to being on the wrong side of this divide.

This silliness reached its apogee in an article in the Independent last Friday, in which Tory leader David Cameron - pictured - attempted to rebrand the Conservatives as ‘the true progressives’:
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A guest-post over at Harry’s Place by ‘Ben’ advertises what it means to be a ‘Decent.’ Seemingly this is shorthand for someone who supports the war, is opposed to anyone further left than Jon Cruddas and genuinely thinks that the Parliamentary Labour Party should be staffed by people like Oona King.

With these blanket labels flying around, it is difficult to know the extent to which any given author is perpetrating a deliberate slander, or to which they’re simply caught up in their own misguided rhetoric.

I’m not sure which is the case when guest-poster Ben makes the following declaration about why he turned from Stopper to idiot:
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This is the start of a weekly round up of what various think tanks and such organisations on the liberal-left are doing and publishing. I do a weekly round up on my blog for think-tanks on the left and the right.

• The IPPR challenges a union \ left-wing shibboleth in highlighting that at least some of the problems we see in education can be attributed to poor teachers. “[I]n the last ten years teachers’ pay has improved and the number of people choosing teaching as a career has increased. But teaching is still not attracting the very best graduates and poor performing teachers are not being dealt with effectively”
• They also carry an worthwhile report on the complexity of UK migration numbers - half of those who’ve arrived from new EU members since May ‘04 have now left but I think the Daily Mail missed that story.
• “New Labour is now dead” - according to Compass who, to be fair, have been trying to administer last rights since about 1998. Last Thursday’s results have boosted their confidence somewhat - “The strategy that saw the Party continually triangulate interests and concerns, tacking endlessly to the right, doing what the Tories would do only doing it first, fixating on a mythical middle England and denying that free market policies are having a damaging effect on society is now finished”
• Also on Compass Hilary Wainwright takes a pop at the impact triangulation has on traditional supporters and one of their regular ‘thinkpieces’ tackles ‘Capitalism and Social Recession’.
  Anthony Painter also did a write-up on LC after a Compass event here.
• The Social Market Foundation have an interesting piece on individual behavioural change and the challenges policymakers face in linking that with broader cultural changes.
• CentreForum have a great (and timely) piece on whether Liberal Democrats and Conservatives can co-operate. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are “two declared liberals [who] share a vision of a new, ‘post-bureaucratic’ politics in which power is devolved, not just from central to local government, but from government at all levels to individuals, families and communities”