Layer 536 . . . Hollande's Victory, Clegg's Nonsense, and a Web of Privilege

Brilliant news yesterday from France - every bit as uplifting as the day Berlusconi was booted out of power in Italy -

French president François Hollande promises 'a new start' for Europe

After victory over Nicolas Sarkozy, Socialist says he will fight back against German-led austerity measures

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/06/francois-hollande-becomes-french-president

François Hollande has won the presidency of France, turning the tide on a rightward and xenophobic lurch in European politics and vowing to transform Europe's handling of the economic crisis by fighting back against German-led austerity measures.

The 57-year-old rural MP and self-styled Mr Normal, a moderate social democrat from the centre of the Socialist party, is France's first leftwing president for 17 years. Projections from early counts, released by French television, put him on 51.9% and Nicolas Sarkozy on 48.1%.

His victory is a boost to the left in a continent that has gradually swung right since the economic crisis broke four years ago.

From the town of Tulle in his rural heartland of Corrèze in southwest France, Hollande declared victory. "May 6 should be a great date for our country, a new start for Europe, a new hope for the world," he said. "I'm sure in a lot of European countries there is relief, hope that at last austerity is no longer inevitable."

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Meanwhile, here in Poundland, we have the Guardian giving column space for Nick Clegg to make himself look as big a dickhead as he undoubtedly is:

Local elections: this coalition is stable and the centre will hold

The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition isn't about to lurch to the left or the right. We spent two years on rescue. Now it's reform

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/06/nick-clegg-coalition-local-elections

This is a classic, as are the dozen or more pages of comments beneath it. Enjoy.

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The wonderful Gary Younge wrote this superb column today:

A web of privilege supports this so-called meritocracy

On both sides of the Atlantic, the social ties that bind our political, legal and corporate forces lie exposed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/06/leveson-murdoch-cameron-brooks-privilege

Class privilege, and the power it confers, is often conveniently misunderstood by its beneficiaries as the product of their own genius rather than generations of advantage, stoutly defended and faithfully bequeathed. Evidence of such advantages is not freely available. It is not in the powerful's interest for the rest of us to know how their influence is attained or exercised. But every now and then a dam bursts and the facts come flooding forth.

The Leveson inquiry has provided one such moment. It was set up last year to look into the specific claims about phone hacking at the News of the World, alleged police corruption and the general culture and ethics of the British media. But every time it probes harder into the Murdoch empire it draws blood from the heart of our body politic, telling us a great deal about how Britain's political class in particular and ruling class in general collude, connive and corrupt both systemically and systematically.

Issues of alleged criminality will eventually be determined in the courts. But while illegality would be more damning, much of what we now know that is legal is no less corrosive. The evidence has laid bare the intimate, extensive and insidious web of social, familial and personal ties between the political, corporate and legal forces that govern a country: a patchwork of individual and institutional associations so tightly interwoven that to pick at one part is to watch the whole thing unravel. The "sit downs", pay-offs and class camaraderie on display owe more to a cross between Downton Abbey and the Sopranos than the functioning of a 21st-century democracy.

Now that Brooks has agreed to hand over her text messages to Cameron, we are about to learn whether rumours that they exchanged as many as 12 texts a day are true.

Brooks was arrested both on suspicion of phone hacking and corruption last year. She was arrested again this year with her husband, Charlie Brooks, on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. Charlie went to Eton with Cameron – as did the Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

Such is the incestuous nature of the British ruling class and the gene puddle from which it draws its stock. Such is their brazen venality, complicity, contempt and mendacity. Eton, Oxford, Bullingdon, Westminster – if you're looking for a tiny minority who are struggling to integrate, look no further than the cabinet.

The issue here is not class envy but class entrenchment. The fact that they were born rich is irrelevant. They had no choice in the matter. But the fact that they appear to want to give even more to those who already have a great deal while denying much to those who have little is unforgiveable.

Rocked in the cradle of power from birth so that its rhythms become second nature, these people imbibe their sense of entitlement with their mother's milk. But the personal tutors, private schools, the most expensive universities do not, somehow, suffice. As though the benefits of wealth were not enough, they apparently feel the need to game the very system they already control.

Which brings us to the manner in which these interactions mock the very notion of democracy on which the nation's illusions are based. For the meetings, lunches and visits showcase a parallel, unaccountable universe where actual decisions are made and deals are done. 

Layer 534 . . . Hunt, Cameron, Murdoch, BSkyB, and Urgent Questions for the Prime Minister

So the latest polls indicate that support for the Conservatives has fallen back to 29% - which is pretty much their 'core' vote. This simply confirms that come hell or come high water somewhere between a quarter and a third of our population will continue to support the Nasty Party - either because those supporters are wealthy enough to directly benefit from Tory policies, OR because they are stupid enough to believe Tory propaganda and the crap published by Tory supporters who act as Conservative cheerleaders in our mass media.

Anyone with half a brain now understands that there really isn't any such thing as 'compassionate' Conservatism. Meet the new boss - same as the old boss. Clearly Cameron wasn't just trying to placate (and finesse) the extreme right wing of his party when he said that his mission was to finish whatever it was that Thatcher started. He really means it. He really is bent on privatising or at least marketising (which is almost as bad) our public services, on cutting them back as far as possible, on boosting the entry of private enterprise into our public services, and on selling off anything he can get away with selling off. Just like the old boss.

I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, I really did. But look at his recent behaviour. A stupid and nasty budget. One of his own backbenchers* calling him and Osborne a couple of posh boys who understand nothing about real people and their lives. A lack of apparent concern that the national economy is back in reverse gear, and back in recession. And now the revelations as to what he and his Culture Secretary have been up to vis a vis Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp empire.

As a matter of fact, even Tory commentators have been expressing their disquiet. Here's Simon Heffer ( a dyed in the wool Thatcherite) writing for the Mail today -

There is enormous public disquiet about issues that the Coalition refuses to address, presumably because it does not find them to be so important. For example, the disastrous state of the economy, and the arrival of the double-dip recession that some of us had long feared inevitable.

Here is a problem that voters would love the Government to address. It is one that is keeping well over three million of them out of work (rather than the official figure of 2.7 million, which has been massaged in various ways). 

The recession is handicapping manufacturers and service providers, and deterring entrepreneurs. Outside central London, it is driving down property prices. It is depressing tax revenues. The threat of unemployment is also causing millions more to fear for their own financial security. It is, in short, a calamity.

The reaction of David Cameron and George Osborne to Wednesday’s announcement that Britain had fallen into a double-dip recession was to bury their heads in the sand. Perhaps backbench Tory MP Nadine Dorries — a proper tribune of the people — had a point when she berated ‘posh boys’ in power for not understanding how the other 99 per cent live.
However, I fear the reason for the failure of Messrs Cameron and Osborne to get a proper grip is not because they are posh, but because neither can bear to lose face by admitting his serious errors.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2136402/Nadine-Dorries-point--politicians-detached-real-lives-voters.html#ixzz1tWk7sGPP

Of course extreme right-wingers such as Heffer will always seek to blame the leadership when Tory support falls below 30% (rather than blame or question Tory ideology as such), but obviously he makes some very good points - those points that are blatantly obvious to anyone who has eyes to see and a little bit of their brain in working order. He goes on:

If that wasn’t enough to make people feel politics was no longer relevant to them, along came the exposure of Jeremy Hunt’s activities as Culture Secretary in the proposed takeover of BSkyB by the Murdoch empire.

Recent history shows that nothing revolts the public more than proof their elected representatives are behaving improperly. Mr Hunt has, of course, denied any wrongdoing. However, the notion that no wrong was done was exploded on Wednesday, when Mr Hunt’s special adviser resigned, admitting he was ‘too close’ to the Murdoch empire. 

What inspired him to get too close? Could it have been that he thought Mr Hunt wanted it? And if Mr Hunt wanted it, why did he? Could it have been because he thought Mr Cameron wanted it?

So, from the point of view of the public, we have a Government not only adamantly in denial about the gravest problems facing the British people, but also up to its neck in cronyism, impropriety and downright sleaze.

So - our extreme right-wingers such as Heffer can see all of this, our extreme left-wingers can see it, and so can the vast majority of us in the middle. This government is in deep excrement.

As for Cameron refusing to investigate what Hunt and his pals were up to, it's pretty obvious that he's terrified of anyone examining too closely Hunt's text messages and emails because some of them will have been copied to Cameron to keep him in touch with what he was doing, and therefore making him an active participant in the conspiracy to hand complete control of BSkyB to Murdoch.

It seems to me Cameron will continue to stall on this issue until Thursday's local elections are out of the way - at the very least. This week of all weeks he can't afford to have any more shit hit the fan, which it will do if either Hunt resigns or if he has to sack Hunt.

This lunchtime the unelected Baroness Warsi was again on Radio 4 news to tell us that the people of this country don't care about the Hunt affair. How come this person is usually the one the Tories put forward to do their bullshitting and dissembling? Is it because she speaks with a slight Northern accent, and is less likely to say something downright idiotic than Cameron's actual MPs? How come she spouts such patronising rubbish - telling us what we do and don't care about?** Of course she's spoken with 'ordinary' people who don't care about the Hunt affair, and who probably aren't even aware of it - but we can all go out and find a few dipsticks to say what we might want to hear. This doesn't mean they're in the majority, or are even 'representative'. The Baroness ought to be aware that more than 70% of us are now fully aware of what the Tories are doing (and not doing) and we don't like what we see and hear.

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* "On March 6, 2012, Nadine Dorries MP attacked the leadership of the Coalition over their taxation policies. Referring to the proposed cuts in child benefit, she told the Financial Times "The problem is that policy is being run by two public schoolboys who don't know what it's like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can't afford it for their children's lunchboxes. What's worse, they don't care, either". She again criticised Cameron, and also George Osborne, in similar terms on 23 April, calling them "two arrogant posh boys who don't know the price of milk - who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others"." - Wikipedia

** These are the actual words of Warsi today:
"If you go out and speak to ordinary people, this is not what they are obsessing about. When people look in Westminster Village and see us obsessing about these kinds of issues, and see us playing party politics, using systems and processes to score points against each other in this way, they say 'a plague on all their houses'. What people care about is their schools, their future, and that is what they want us to be talking about."

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Speaker Bercow has agreed to summon Cameron to the Commons this afternoon to answer "urgent questions". He's due to appear live on the Parliament Channel sometime after 3.00pm. The following is taken from the Guardian's 'politics live' blog today:

1.23pm: Ed Miliband should get hold of a read-out from the Number 10 lobby briefing before he asks his UQ on Jeremy Hunt. The exchanges illustrated some of the questions which David Cameron could find it hard to answer. Here are more details.

• Will Cameron definitely order an inquiry into allegations that Jeremy Hunt broke the ministerial code? Cameron has said that he wants Hunt to be allowed to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry and his spokesman repeated this line this morning. "We should let the process run its course, let the inquiry establish the facts," the spokesman said. But Leveson has said that it is not his job to investigate breaches of the ministerial code, and the prime minister's spokesman was unwilling to say categorically that Cameron would refer this matter to his independent adviser on ministerial interests, Sir Alex Allan, if Leveson did not address it. All he would say was: "The prime minister has been very clear that he would not duck his responsibilities on the ministerial code." That's a hint that Cameron will order an investigation in due course, but not a confirmation. Cameron may have to firm that up this afternoon.

• Why does Cameron think Hunt has not breached the ministerial code when people like Lord Butler think he did? Asked about the remarks from Butler the spokesman just said that Cameron "has said that he has seen no evidence that the code has been broken".

• Has Cameron asked Hunt directly what he knew about what his special adviser, Adam Smith, was saying to News Corporation about the BSkyB takeover? Asked about this, the spokesman said that this would be covered by the evidence given to Leveson. He also said that Leveson has given a ruling asking people not to disclose their evidence before it is heard by the inquiry.

• Why did Hunt tell MPs that he had published all details of his department's exchanges with News Corporation when he hadn't? In March last year Hunt told MPs: "We are publishing all the documents relating to all the meetings – all the consultation documents, all the submissions we received, all the exchanges between my department and News Corporation." But he did not release details of the exchanges between his special adviser and the News Corporation lobbyist, Fred Michel. This information only emerged in a 163-page dossier released by the Leveson inquiry last week. Asked about this, the prime minister's spokesman said that Hunt addressed this point in his statement last week. When journalists said that Hunt did not actually answer this question last week, the spokesman replied: "I have nothing further to add to what the secretary of state said."

• Why did Hunt tell the Commons that he always accepted the advice of independent regulators when he did not follow Ofcom's advice and refer the BSkyB bid to the Competition Commission? Asked about this, the spokesman insisted that Hunt said he was minded to refer the bid to the Competition Commission. (David Leigh went into this in more detail in a Guardian article last week.)

• Will Cameron reveal all his text messages and emails with Rebekah Brooks? Do the text messages still exist? And, if they are disclosed, will they be redacted? All the spokesman would say on this was that Cameron would provide the Leveson inquiry with "whatever he is asked to provide".

• What contact have government officials had with Lord Justice Leveson about his inquiry? Last week it was revealed that Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, spoke to Leveson about the Hunt affair. Today the prime minister's spokesman said: "I am sure that there have been contacts between senior officials and the Leveson team." Some journalists found this potentially suspicious, particularly when the spokesman declined to elaborate what those contacts were, but the spokesman said contacts of this kind were to be expected given the fact that several ministers are giving evidence to Leveson. The spokesman also insisted that the inquiry was "entirely independent".

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1.19pm: Here's what Ed Miliband said this morning about the Jeremy Hunt affair. He was he was asking an urgent question about it because it "goes to the character of the government".

"People need to know, particularly in these times, that they have a Government that stands up for them, not the rich and powerful. People need to know that there is the utmost probity and integrity in the way that government is run. I am afraid the events of the last week suggest that something other than that has been going on.

It is a pattern with this prime minister, particularly around News International. He resists the calls for change. He resists the calls to do the right thing. Exactly as he did in phone hacking last summer, exactly as he did with Rebekah Brooks, exactly as he did with Andy Coulson. He is doing the same now when everyone can see that the obvious thing for him to do is make this referral to Alex Allan. That is what he should get on and do rather than seeking to use Jeremy Hunt as a firewall."

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2012/apr/30/cameron-hunt-statement-politics-live

Here's a piece on Harriet Harman's concerns:

http://www.labour.org.uk/ministerial-code-investigation-on-bskyb,2012-04-25

Here's the Independent's view:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-hunt-on-the-brink-as-he-is-accused-of-misleading-parliament-7687530.html
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Layer 372 . . . Legacy Thoughts, Philosophy, Widdecombe, Strictly, Politics, Obama and Congress

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A Legacy of Thought

Having been a fairly avid listener to the 'legacy tracks' feature on Radio 4 for some time, I started thinking about the legacy of 'ideas' that our parents bequeath us - whether or not we know it.

One thing I've come to understand is that we often misunderstand things our parents say when we're young, especially when we don't have the critical capacity to think about them adequately, let alone challenge them.

We also need to realise that everyone's ideas, including those of our parents, tend to evolve and change over time. I would hope that my parents gained in wisdom over the course of their lives, and I assume they thought differently about certain things when they were, say, 50 or 60, as compared with when they were 30 or 40.

For the sake of clarity it might be an idea to write down the key ideas we'd like to pass on to our children as part of our legacy. Here are my current top 20. Tomorrow I'll list the following 20.

1. Pursue enlightenment rather than material wellbeing. The enrichment of the soul is far more valuable than worldly goods.

2. Accept the help, advice and support of others, but don't be dependent on them for survival and wellbeing. Take responsibility for yourself.

3. Learn the difference between falling in love and enduring love. Don't imagine that the endorphines-induced bliss of being 'in love' is sustainable. Don't overlook the dark side of other people, any more than you should overlook your own.

4. Don't imagine that the 'pursuit of happiness' will provide you with happiness, which tends to occur when you make the wellbeing of others your priority, and possibly make it your life's work. Don't be a martyr, however. Pursue work that's meaningful and fulfilling. Happiness is an indirect consequence rather than a direct goal.

5. Don't sacrifice your own wellbeing for the wellbeing of others. Take care of your own physical, mental, intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual health in order that you can help others with theirs. Become a three-dimensional and self-actualised human being.

6. Understand that the only highs worth having are natural highs. Avoid artificial stimulants and substance abuse. Eat and drink in moderation. Avoid strong doses of religion, and only use it as a temporary crutch if all else fails.

7. Realise that sexual pleasure is not necessarily the same thing as emotional intimacy and intensity. Making love is good, but isn't necessarily the same thing as loving.

8. There's nothing wrong with recreational sex, as long as its participants recognise it for what it is.

9. Learn to meditate, and take time to meditate, as a means of growing in spiritual intelligence, experiencing satori, and controlling destructive emotions. Learn about Zen. Zen is meditation, and a pathway to satori, reality, and oneness.

10. Discover your true self, and become your true self.

11. Learn about philosophy and religion, in order to understand other people - their beliefs and motivations.

12. Familiarise yourself with the works of great thinkers and writers.

13. Familiarise yourself with the uses and abuses of politics, economics and political thought.

14. Develop your capacity for creativity and creative self-expression.

15. Discover your true voice in speech and writing. Also in music and other forms of artistic expression, wherever possible.

16. Enrich your soul and spirit by experiencing and enjoying a wide range of music. Whenever possible learn how to play musical instruments, learn how to sing, and join with others in creating music - for pleasure rather then reward.

17. Pledge yourself to non-violence and the avoidance of harm to others.

18. Learn the arts of self-defence, such as aikido.

19. Learn the value of true friendship and links with others.

20. Learn the value of time on your own.

To be continued . . .

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Widdecombe and 'Strictly'

I've been meaning to write something about Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", which I'm currently reading - but that's going to have to wait. Instead I just need to mention Ann Widdecombe and Strictly Come Dancing, which seems to have the nation in its thrall.

Widdy made the cover of G2 this week, under large headlines - "This sort of prolonged frivolity I haven't had in years."

It turns out that she's never, ever, enjoyed frivolity, and is only now turning to it in her retirement. And why not? I hear people say. Maybe because there's a problem with "having fun" when it's done through being or becoming an egocentric attention-seeking media whore with no dignity, no shame, and no sense of embarrassment at having no talent whatsover for the thing that she's meant to be doing and is causing people to laugh out loud.

Decca Aitkenhead published a highly sympathetic interview, however, in which she said,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/nov/02/ann-widdecombe-strictly-come-dancing-fun

I last met Ann Widdecombe when I interviewed her 13 years ago. Although already out of government, she was still in her Doris Karloff phase – practically boasting about being "short and fat and ugly", and stridently anti-image, anti-celebrity, anti-vanity. But my suspicions were aroused when she got her office to call three times in the following week, to enquire about when the piece would appear. Hmm, I remember thinking. Not quite without vanity after all, then.

The more she talks, the more one can see quite how far she has had to shut down, to protect herself . . .

She will concede a certain sadness at how the career she chose, and for which she sacrificed so much, has lost much of its grandeur and dignity in her eyes. "Parliament was an institution of enormous standing when I was aspiring to go in. It isn't now. When I first went in we had very significant people there. I mean, in our intake there was a brain surgeon on the Labour side, a consultant gynaecologist on our side, we were taking in quite a high level, not a whole load of career politicians. And you look at parliament now and you cannot see the top lawyers, the top medical men, the top businessmen. They are not there."

. . . her basic approach to political life . . . essentially consists of telling people what they should be doing.

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Obama and Congress

I was going to write something about the defeat of the Democrats in the mid-term elections, but the whole thing is just too awful. I can't even raise the energy to think about Obama's problems and his triumphs. The whole American political system is appalling, and even the Democrats are well to the right of European conservatives such as Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron and Clegg. As for the Tea Party . . .
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Layer 264 . . . Fear and Loathing in New Labour, and backing the Lib Dems

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Fear and Loathing in New Labour

Having mentioned in Layers 261 & 262 the articles by Simon Jenkins and Mehdi Hasan, I notice there's a letter to the Guardian by Robert Proni, who says,

In light of the articles by Simon Jenkins and Mehdi Hasan it seems evident that there is the need for a rearticulating of the political discourse. The hegemony of neoliberal thinking [Thatcherism, neo-conservatism etc] has defined the political space for 30 years, so much so that even in the present crisis, when we all should be marching on the streets against the bankers, New Labour is still running in fear of framing the debate in social democratic terms.

For the 30 years the right have had a stranglehold on how we define freedom. The political classes have been fearful of any reference to the state as a means of solving problems.

Individual freedom, essentially defined in terms of freedom from the state, has been their mantra. For example, George Osborne's first reaction to the nationalisation of the banks was to jump (enthusiastically) up and down, claiming that old socialist nationalisation is here again. Cameron is careful that his slogan that there is such a thing as society is followed up by a clear rejection of any idea that this means a bigger state.

The current crisis has left both parties searching for ways to rearticulate a progressive politics, but it is up to the left to grab this opportunity, because they won't have another like this, to reshape the political discourse and redefine the state and its relation to individual freedom. This is a hegemonic struggle to reclaim the terms of liberty and equality in social democratic terms.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/13/fear-and-loathing-new-labour

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Benedict Birnberg also wrote an excellent letter:

Neil Kinnock (Letters, 10 March) utterly fails to comprehend the burning sense of disillusionment that has driven so many former Labour supporters either into cynical abandonment of politics or, like John Kampfner, to embrace the Lib Dems.

The charge against the New Labour project is not that it did not deliver the benefits he lists. It did, and there were others which curiously he omits, above all the lancing of the Northern Ireland carbuncle and significant constitutional reforms – devolution and human rights legislation. The charge is that it squandered its massive parliamentary majorities and the goodwill that the electorate bestowed on it to transform a divided, sick society.

On the contrary, it took to its bosom the neoliberal [neo-conservative] ideology that nourished that divide, extending privatisation; it renounced and even demonised public sector initiatives and went back on the welfare state concordat that was the hallmark of the postwar Labour settlement.

So, Labour administrations have presided over the widest gulf ever between the haves and have-nots and now the inevitable massive recession. We have witnessed a generation of politicians intent on feathering their own nests, the expenses "scandal" being a minor part of this. Not to speak, as Neil Kinnock dare not, of the criminal adventure that was the Iraq war.

I, a onetime Labour activist, like John Kampfner, have joined the Lib Dems, who I see as a catalyst for, and working partner of, a rejuvenated Labour party once it is purged of the New Labour virus.

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On the same letters page there were these little gems:

So, there is now a suspected link between priestly celibacy and sexual abuse (Report, 12 March)? Is the pope a Catholic?

Dr Allan Dodds

Nottingham


If the cliche correspondence still has legs, then I'm all ears (Letters, 12 March).

Margaret Hughes

Chester


When your cliche correspondence does finally come to an end, our thoughts will be with the cliche community.

Mike Hine

Kingston, Surrey

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/mar/13/israel-palestine-social-care-pope

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Also on that letters page there was a good "Face To Faith" piece on the "universal teachings of Islam", by Usama Hasan:

East is not always best

Muslims in the west need to find their own expression of the universal teachings of Islam

One of the problems that Islam and Muslims now have in Europe is that we are often too eastern: from visibly different dress to traditional gender roles to a lack of emphasis on democracy and human rights. Eastern Islam does not sit well in the west, and is often rejected as alien and foreign. Racist individuals and groups can also easily hide their prejudice, pretending that they are upholding western values and ideals. Muslims often still speak about "Islam and the west," whereas we should be speaking about "Islam in the west."

There are too many of us trying to replicate Saudi, Iranian, Pakistani, Egyptian or Syrian Islam in Europe and North America. What we need is simple: an authentic and organic expression of the universal teachings of the Qur'an in our various societies and contexts. The good news is that this is already happening, and is providing a powerful counterbalance to extremism and fundamentalism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/13/islam-east-west-religion

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Also good value and worth reading in this copy of the paper is an editorial -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/13/israel-palestine-obama-biden-america

Israel and America: Foolish tricks

By its continued settlement expansion, Israel makes the two-state solution ever harder to realise

By its continued settlement expansion, and its cack-handed treatment of its friends, Israel makes the two-state solution ever harder to realise. That is not just bad news for the Palestinians; it is bad for Israel.

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The reference in Birnberg's letter (above) to John Kampfner reminds me that I should have mentioned an excellent piece in the Guardian that JK wrote a few days ago -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/09/labour-lib-dems-left-cookites

Why I'm backing the Lib Dems

It started with Iraq. But in 2010 Nick Clegg's party has become the natural home for left-liberal Cookites like me

The New Labour project was born of the traumas of the 80s and 90s. It was based on the notion that centre-left governments can change society only at the margins and only by stealth. The party accepted the economic settlement wrought by Margaret Thatcher. Blair, and even more so Brown, restricted their aims to offering limited palliative care for the most disadvantaged: redistributive bolt-ons.

Unable or unwilling to deal with the causes of inequality, they confined themselves to tackling its effects. Having raised the white flag to the super-rich, ministers exerted their power elsewhere, seeking ever more ingenious ways of telling ordinary people how to lead their lives.

Labour had one of the great opportunities of modern times to transform society. It made some changes for the better – Sure Start, the minimum wage, civil partnerships and more. Yet the audit for 13 years is disappointing. Debits outweigh credits. The Blair and Brown eras will be remembered more for the toxicity of their politics. Whenever they faced pressure, they bowed to the powerful and tacked to the right.

The two drivers of economic growth were brittle – a consumer binge based on excessive borrowing, and a financial services sector drunk on hubris.

The default setting, this belief that intrinsic centre-left values were somehow a minority interest, was not just debilitating; it was not borne out by the numbers. At every election where Thatcher was leader, a minimum of 56% of the public voted for parties committed to higher taxation and spending – Labour, the Lib Dems and others.

The fear, aggression and ideological caution were indistinguishable. One reason why so many in New Labour acted thuggishly is because their passion was based not in the desire to engineer fundamental change, but in one all-consuming purpose: re-election. Since 1997, their every working day was based around the task of prolonging their term of office. It filled in the ideological hollow.

Alongside a million other voters, I deserted Labour in protest at Iraq, in favour of the Liberal Democrats – the only party to oppose the war. My decision to back the Liberal Democrats in 2010 is based on a more fundamental appraisal of Labour's record, together with a positive assessment of the Lib Dems' platform.

Their analysis of the failures of the deregulated market has been consistently, and painfully, accurate. Their tax reform plans, taking 4 million low-paid workers out of tax altogether, are the most redistributive of any party, alongside green taxes, a "mansion tax" on high-value properties and the closing of tax loopholes (on pensions and capital gains) exploited by the rich. The Lib Dem approach to criminal justice, human rights, foreign and social policy is close to mine.

I understand the dilemma faced by Labour's army of dismayed who still cling to the hope of reform from within. That will not happen with the tribalists at the helm.

People can only for so long be exhorted to hold their nose, to vote for a party they feel has let them down, simply because the alternative is worse. It is deeply damaging to politics to resort perpetually to the double negative.

There is a bigger task facing left-liberals. The election should be used as a means of promoting a more pluralist politics. Whichever party forms a government will do so knowing that it has a wafer-thin endorsement and a weak mandate in the midst of economic hardship and the widespread disparaging of parliament. Politics is more fragile and fluid.

This is the opportunity facing the Liberal Democrats. They could become the natural home for the left-liberals that Labour has lost. The more the other two parties rely on caution, the more the Lib Dems must eschew it. Rarely have the circumstances been more propitious for a party to demonstrate that, in its policies and in its behaviour, it is very different from the others on offer – and not afraid to say so.

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Coincidentally I had a canvassing visit yesterday from the local Labour party - one of the existing ward councellors accompanying a young guy who's standing for election. I actually quite like Cllr M, who asked me why I'd dropped out of local politics. Naturally I gave him both barrels about both the local and the national NuLabour fuckups. And politely told him there's no way I'm ever supporting the Labour party unless and until it gets rid of the scumbags who have gone along with the wars, the privatisations, the target-setting culture, the lack of City regulation, the pandering to Murdoch and the Mail, etc, etc, etc.

I want full and frank apologies, I want a new leadership, I want a completely different set of policies, I want a return to social democracy and socialist egalitarian thinking, or they can fuck right off. I think they'll find there's a few million of us who feel the same way, and not just John Kampfner and me.
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Layer 261 . . . Return to Bankers, Reform, Progressive Solutions and Obama's Democrats

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There are lots of things to catch up on this week, and three good pieces in the Guardian today.

Simon Jenkins wrote another superb column -

The bankers lied. And Darling, a mere puppet on their string, knows it

Britain has paid a horrific price for allowing the City to dictate credit policy. Yet there is no inquiry, no questioning, only silence

Still no inquiry. Still no answers.

The lack of accountability, the sheer lack of curiosity from the political community, is amazing.

 Advised by bankers, surrounded by bankers, obsessed with bankers, Darling paid.

I would like to know why. Ask those involved and they go wide-eyed and mutter "Armageddon", rather like Tony Blair explaining the Iraq invasion. To these people, not letting banks fail was not an option but a creed. They cannot explain what is "wrong" with taking hold of a reckless bank in trouble, guaranteeing its deposits (and cash machines) and continuing to lend against a Treasury guarantee, while dumping the casino activities into administration. Shareholders lose out, but that's capitalism. Talk of bank doors closing is rubbish.

So why were RBS and Lloyds/HBOS not fully nationalised, rather than given unconditional largesse?

An Economist headline put it pithily: "Banks fine: pity about the customers."

Darling did not even require banks to curb their extraordinary bonuses, even when they consumed a large share of reported losses. The American financier, Warren Buffett, famously protested that banks were "being run for their employees… with lucrative paydays that enriched people who are not particularly intelligent and add little value". Since he claims to own them, Darling might at least explain why he was further enriching them at public expense.

At a time when consumer demand was collapsing, the government found itself unable to respond with more VAT cuts, pensions bonuses, higher social security and more public projects, in other words a classical Keynesian answer to a slump.

That is what Germany and many far eastern countries did, with benefits rises, tax holidays and consumer scrappage schemes. The British government did the opposite.

Why did Darling not let HBOS or Lloyds fail, merely guaranteeing their deposits? Alternatively, why did he not nationalise and split up the ailing banks in October 2008? Again, if they really were too big to fail, as they alleged, why has he not made them emphatically smaller, so when they fail next time they do not drag the economy down with them?

Gillian Tett's book on the psychology of credit greed, Fool's Gold, shows the corrupting effect of unfettered derivatives trading on the whole financial system. Darling has done nothing to mitigate that effect. The world is alive with talk of curbs on bonuses, hedge funds, short trading, proprietary dealing and transaction taxes. There is talk of stress tests, living wills and higher reserve ratios. In almost all these arguments, Labour ministers are on the side of unregulated banking and against further controls. They are the wildest of free-marketeers. Brown and Darling have gone native and become puppets on a banker's string.

Britain has paid, and will go on paying, a horrific price for this government allowing bankers to dictate credit policy after 2008. To avoid ministers suffering the ideological odium of proper nationalisation (as opposing to bailing-out), Britain is being forced to lose jobs, firms, infrastructure, prosperity and the happiness it brings.

Too big to fail has taken a savage toll on the economy. If it was worth it, I would like to see the account. If not, someone should pay. Yet because the policy was backed by all three main parties, there is no questioning, no inquiry. All is silence.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/11/banks-lied-darling-puppet-city
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Mehdi Hasan wrote this:

It's defeatist nonsense to talk of a crisis of leftwing thinking

Progressives have been vindicated. The public are far ahead, and to the left, of government on the reforms we need

The left never seems to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Social-democratic political parties across the west are in danger of allowing the financial crisis to "go to waste". Instead of seizing this once-in-a-lifetime chance to promote a radical, progressive and even populist political and economic agenda, much of the left has retreated into a familiar and introspective comfort zone, in which navel-gazing and self-flagellation become substitutes for action.

Eighteen months on, few, if any, of the leading neoliberal ideologues have recanted their belief in the sort of market fundamentalism that unleashed the worst financial crisis in human history.

The irony is that leftist analyses, for example, of the fragility of financial markets and the corrosive effects of inequality, have been vindicated by events. Never before in living memory have such large swathes of public and expert opinion endorsed policies and positions long advanced by the progressive end of the political spectrum. The public is to the left not simply of New Labour, but the political and media classes as a whole.

The reality is that the public are far ahead, and to the left, of the government on financial and economic reform. Polling by YouGov in February, for example, revealed that 76% of those surveyed wanted the government to introduce a law to cap bonus payments; 51% said they backed the so-called Robin Hood tax, or Tobin tax, on financial transactions; and 68% said they supported rules to split retail and investment banking. The latter view is backed by the Trotskyist governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and the former by "Red" Adair Turner of the Financial Services Authority.

Then there is the role of the state. The right could offer no real alternative to the de facto nationalisation of the banks in 2008 – and the late Michael Foot went to his grave having seen a key section of his 1983 "suicide note" manifesto implemented by a (New) Labour government. But the hankering for state ownership of the so-called commanding heights of the economy is not restricted to the financial sector. Polls show voters in favour of the renationalisation of electricity, gas, water, the railways and the telecommunications industry.

In fact, throughout the Thatcher era, more people voted for high-spending, tax-raising parties than voted for Thatcher. Despite three decades of tacking to the right, under Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, the public has remained rather collectivist in its attitudes. Happily, recent events have only served to entrench this British mindset – and Labour's belated semi-conversion to a populist, Keynesian social democracy surely explains the narrowing of the Tory lead since the new year.

To talk therefore of a crisis of leftwing thinking is defeatist nonsense. It is the market-worshipping right that should be in crisis. But there is a serious question as to whether, after a decade-long Faustian pact with the City, Labour, as it is currently constituted, is capable of delivering the radical, progressive agenda voters crave.

The left should be much more confident, triumphalist even; for this is a progressive moment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/11/defeatist-nonsense-leftwing-thinking
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Michael Tomasky wrote this very depressing piece about the state of the nation in the USA:

A disgrace for the Democrats

Obama's congressmen will sabotage the health bill to keep their seats. It is stomach-churning

The players in this drama are participating in the destruction of their own party. They know this. And they persist.

They live in fear of being tarred by a future Republican opponent of having abetted the march of socialism. So they voted no on the most important piece of social legislation that body has had before it in probably 40 years.

Living in mortal fear that they might lose their seats. But are they thinking about how to fix the bloated mess that is American healthcare, or serve their uninsured and underinsured constituents? Maybe in private, but certainly not in public.

Disgraceful. Virtually all of them have tens of thousands, or sometimes more than 100,000, adult constituents with no private insurance. If they're not in Washington to do something about that, then what are they there to do? Please don't answer that question.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/11/disgrace-democrats-sabotage-health-bill.

Layer 207 . . . Free Speech, Privatisation, Annual Elections and Parallel Universes.

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Some things the Guardian gets wrong, but there's a very great deal which it, and its writers,  get absolutely right.

George Monbiot, for example:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/19/eady-libel-tourism-free-speech 

How our senior libel judge stamps on free speech – all over the world

This is a very important focus on this country's appalling libel laws, and how they serve mainly the interests of the rich and powerful. Starting with the Guardian's clash last week with Trafigura and its solicitors' attempts to prevent publication of information that ought to be in the public realm -

“Trafigura's super-injunction is weird for lots of reasons. But the strangest fact is this: it has nothing to do with the Honourable Mr Justice Eady. The company's lawyers injuncted the Guardian, injuncted their injunction, and tried to injunct reports of parliament's proceedings. And they did all this without enlisting the help of the hanging judge of the Queen's Bench Division, the legal censor who appears to be fighting a one-man battle against freedom of speech. That's quite an achievement.

But even as the Trafigura case was being discussed in parliament, the court of appeal was handing down yet another damning ruling on Sir David Eady's judgments.

Eady [appears]to see the interests of the state and the interest of the public as the same thing.

In another case

"The law lords decided that Eady was "hostile to the spirit" of the public interest defence and that he had "rigidly applied the old law" in a way that was "quite unrealistic … unnecessary and positively misleading". In one amazing passage, Lord Hoffmann compared Eady's approach to that of the Communist party censors in the Soviet Union.

But perhaps the gravest judgments against the Honourable Mr Justice Eady are those made by legislators in the United States. Such is the reach and severity of his illiberal rulings that four states have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws, and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgments, and the English law he interprets. The Eady laws arise from his encouragement of libel tourism: allowing cases with only the most tenuous connection with this country to be heard in London, and using them to stamp on free speech all over the world.

Monbiot then goes on to say

Eady's clerk tells me that the judge doesn't want to comment, but I expect he would answer that he was merely applying the law. And, though his interpretation is draconian, the sad truth is that he would be right. Long before Eady's reign of terror began, gangsters such as Robert Maxwell were using the defamation laws to sue the backside off anyone who tried to investigate their crooked affairs. Such are the perversities of this law that the English courts can be used by criminals to prevent exposure of their crimes. With average costs 140 times higher than those of other European countries, libel proceedings here can be defended only by people . . . who have a lot of money and a lot of guts. Until the law is changed, men like Mr Justice Eady will continue to hold free speech to ransom.

Perhaps the real target of this column should have been Straw, whose determination to preserve this bookburners' law means that all of us are forced to share his terror of upsetting the rich and powerful. Through 12 years in power, a government of frightened little men has done nothing to reform the democratic world's most illiberal laws, which permit an old-fashioned judge to punish us for holding power to account.

…................................................

Polly Toynbee, meanwhile, says

Beware the zealots selling miracle cures of privatisation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/beware-zealots-selling-miracle-cures

"Harsher, deeper and faster, comes the call from the CBI, licking its lips as it eyes up public services cuts. Yesterday's report from the business lobby group urges an eye-watering extra £120bn to be cut two years earlier than the government proposes. Whatever remains of the public sector after all these cuts should, they say, be subject to outsourcing and privatisation with "wider use of co-funding" – the polite word for making people pay for services that are at present free.

Less for more is what happened when Tony Blair rushed out independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) to inject private sector values into NHS surgery. In 2003, Blair and Alan Milburn commissioned 36 centres with a few mobile and diagnostic units to add extra surgery beds for rapid-throughput, simple routine surgery, mostly on hips, knees and cataracts. Some more capacity was needed to speed up waiting times: old people were waiting up to eight months for cataract operations. Some consultants who kept long lists to promote their private practice needed a sharp prod.

But ISTCs were ideologically designed to part-privatise the NHS, with no level playing field for fair competition with existing hospitals. All were centrally commissioned by diktat without local consultation. The priority was "to increase private capacity" so even the most flourishing foundation hospitals were banned from bidding for the contracts. Some companies that won contracts, such as United Health, later employed key Blair health advisers. To prevent competition with the NHS, only foreign doctors were employed, many of them unfamiliar with British practice.

The contracts were disastrous from the start. They guaranteed higher prices per patient than the NHS tariff, though it should be cheaper to treat routine surgery patients in brand new units with no untidy emergency cases or old people with complex broken pelvises.

Ignoring local need meant many beds stayed empty – but the ISTCs were paid anyway. By the time many units opened, the NHS had already cut waiting lists to target levels, and there was no work to be done. When Gordon Brown came in he took one look and cancelled most of the second wave: Alan Johnson found one centre with bed occupancy under 10% and closed it at once, though cancelled contracts cost the NHS £37m. The Tories, egged on by private health companies, unfairly accused Brown of being the roadblock to Blairite "reforms" for ideological reasons. The truth is that the Department of Health finds ISTCs still cost 11% more per operation, and government sources say bed occupancy falls as low as 78%, far below the NHS which is well over 90%.

How is the quality? Officially, it's good, but a two-year study published last month in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery casts doubts: examining patients sent from Cardiff to the Weston-super-Mare ISTC, two-thirds of hip replacements showed evidence of poor technique, with 18% needing repair surgery. That is 20 times the normal NHS rate for revisions and each costs about £15,000. Leading orthopaedic surgeons report similar evidence, pointing out that ISTCs should perform better, since they are never sent complex cases.

Weak public managers are often even worse at drawing up private finance initiative, public-private partnership or even bog-standard procurement deals with the private sector. The danger is that canny companies will run rings round civil servants with neither the knowledge not the greedy motivation to squeeze out every penny's worth.

I have a small example: researching my book Hard Work, I took an agency job as a hospital night cleaner and it was plain that far too many hours had been assigned to a simple routine. The hospital manager who drew up the contract had long lost touch with cleaning and was clueless as to how long a job should take. There are worse examples, where hospital cleaning companies undercut each other and skimp on the job, with disastrous consequences. Either way, ward sisters have lost the power to manage cleaners to their own standards, as they used to in cleaner pre-contracting days.

There is no one-size-fits-all. The lesson of the ISTC debacle is that politicians who dash for eye-catching quick fixes, "modernising" and "reforming" with an ideological zeal for the private sector will come a cropper. Blair did it often with his "scars on my back" political distaste for the public sector; Brown's worst case was his botched PPP for the London tube, done to spite Ken Livingstone. Beware politicians of all complexions who defy complexity to opt for political, not pragmatic solutions.

One of the main reasons for highlighting so much of this is that my own mother was one of the victims of those badly performed hip replacement operations.
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Geoffrey Wheatcroft this week writes a good column about the need for annual parliamentary elections -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/chartists-electoral-reform-annual-parliaments

Now more than ever, Britain needs the last Chartist reform

"The expenses scandal has prompted a panoply of ideas to fix politics. But the strongest of all is missing: annual elections

Although the expenses scandal has prompted various schemes for constitutional and electoral reform, here is one that has gone missing. And yet it was among the radical Chartists' demands for parliamentary reform more than 150 years ago, and is the simplest and potentially the most effective of all.

But repellent as the MPs' impenitence is, institutional reform of parliament is desirable in its own right – and should be achievable. Looking over our political history, it's striking how daring radical demands once seemed, and how almost all were met, and quite soon at that.

The People's Charter in 1838 demanded six reforms, only one of which has not been achieved to this day. Universal suffrage took less than 80 years to accomplish, and property qualifications for voting were finally ended . . . The secret ballot was introduced as early as 1872.

Successive reform acts slowly addressed the Chartists' demand for "equal representation", in the sense that all constituencies should have electorates of roughly equal size.

As to the fifth demand, payment of members began in 1912, and has had an unintended consequence, not to say a lamentable one: the emergence of a new class of permanent, if often mediocre, professional politicians. This was further encouraged by a system of expenses that, even when it wasn't flagrantly dishonest, rested on the assumption that politics was a full-time profession. That has now met its nemesis.

And the sixth demand? This was the one never achieved, rarely mentioned now, but simpler than any of the others: annual parliaments.

To those Victorian radicals it was axiomatic that the best way to make the government accountable to parliament was to make parliament accountable to the electorate – every year. The objections to this are themselves revealing. Too expensive? But elections don't need to involve enormous sums of money spent by parties, and we would be much better off without that. Governments would be less stable and weaker? Well, yes, that's the point. Electing parliament every year would keep our rulers on their toes. More than any other possible reform it answers the simplest call of all: power to the people."

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A very lucky universe

There's a fascinating column by John Gribbin on the subject of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN which has “suffered a series of mishaps preventing it from commencing its search for the elusive Higgs Boson particle”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/cern-higgs-boson-particle

As I understand it, Gribbin is saying that in a parallel universe this collider did actually work when it was switched on, and it immediately caused that particular universe to unravel and disappear. The reason we're still here and still trying to get the collider to work is because it refuses to work each time we press the switch, in our particular universe at least. However, several other parallel universes have probably already disappeared owing to the thing actually working (in them) each time we've tried to switch it on. Lucky us! All we have to do now is stop trying to make it work.

PhillipD comments -

As Niels Bohr once (more or less) said: 'If you don't get a headache thinking about this stuff, you don't understand it'.
Fortunately, I don't understand it so just maybe I'll sleep tonight :-) If I could really grasp this stuff I suspect it would drive me nuts!

AllyF says -

I read about multiverses, time-travel, particle transportation and all this stuff. I think hard about it.
Then I return to the conclusion that you're all making it up as you go along.
But good luck to you. It's more entertaining than sociology.

ThurrockHunt says -

Future ripples and multiverses my arse, it doesn't work because they've ballsed up the wiring. Same thing happened with our boiler.

DomC -

This is all very well but both Blue Peter and Tomorrows World promised me Jet powered rocket pants by now... where are they? That's what I'd like to know

ChanceyGardner -

Computer says No.

delphinia -

Schroedinger's blasted cat wakes me up at 3 am on alternate mornings.
Did you know he ( Schroedinger, not the cat) is buried in Alpbach, Austria, with a minging little plaque?

Butwhatif -
If 8 out of 10 of Shroedinger's cats prefer Whiskas, what about the other 10?

Haliborange -
Parallel universes?
You can buy one here for a quid.
http://www.youruniverse.co.uk/

Bristol Boy -

excellent artic .  .  .  .  .
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Layer 126 Gaza, Vegas, Pollock, Brown and the Bankers.

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Human rights researchers were featured on Radio 4 yesterday, since they’ve issued a report on the Gaza slaughter of hundreds of civilians. Their central concern was the use of weapons that were guaranteed to kill innocent women and children, and men. White phosphorous that causes flesh and guts to burn unstoppably, tank shells fired through the windows of houses, bombs that release ‘flechettes’ or barbed arrow-heads by the thousand, high explosive bombs and shells fired into streets, markets and public buildings, all caused carnage. Israel more or less shrugs its shoulders, says the Hamas fighters shouldn’t have hidden themselves in urban areas, and says the use of phosphorous was unauthorised by their government. No apology though.

Could it be that the Israeli state sees God as its role model, I wonder, since the Bible tells us that God was very much given to smiting bad guys? He apparently smote places like Egypt with plagues of locusts, unhealable boils and the death of first-born children. When He got really pissed off with the human race He apparently just drowned the lot of them, with the exception of good old Noah and his missus.

Maybe the Israeli government sees itself as enacting God’s will in smiting the people of Gaza? They’ve certainly gone further than extracting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They presumably see themselves as the Chosen Ones, carrying out the will of God.

So did God tell the Nazis to murder 6 million innocents? Was that God’s will? Or the Devil’s? And if the Devil can be responsible for the killing of innocents, could he then be responsible for the killing of more than a thousand innocents in Gaza? In which case, was the Israeli state acting on behalf of the Devil?

And in any case, how does all this square with God’s commandment that thou shalt not kill? It’s all too much for my poor little Zen brain.

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On a much lighter note, the BBC are re-running the Johnny Vegas comedy vehicle - Ideal. Last night they showed the episode where the Vegas character and his girlfriend are discussing their simultaneous affairs, which are supposedly at an end.

The girlfriend berates him for the way he carried on his affair so indiscreetly, so blatantly, whereas as she blah, blah . . . To which Johnny replies, “What’s this? An infidelity masterclass?”

Their relationship, however, is messed up by Johnny’s acquisition of a massive television set. She makes it clear that the TV has to go, and that he has to choose - her or the TV. The TV stays.

She later returns to the flat to try a reconciliation, and the new girlfriend has to quickly hide - behind the TV. From her hiding place she overhears a conversation about how Vegas had talked about the new girlfriend as a complete idiot. She bursts out of her hiding place and wails, “I know I’m stupid! I’ve tried learning, but it just doesn’t happen for me!”

Finally they’re happily curled up on the sofa, with the TV towering over them, and Vegas murmurs contentedly, “You and me and the big telly were just meant to be.”

And what are they watching? “Clangers - as relevant today as it was then.”

Well, he is a dope dealer, after all.

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This bit’s going to be boring, but it has to be said. Gordon Brown is an idiot. He tried learning, but it just didn’t happen for him.

He clearly thinks we’re idiots. The article he wrote, or was written in his name, for the Observer on Sunday was headed “We will put people first, not bankers.” Future tense, we notice.

And this is the crux of the matter, and why people now despise him and want to punish him, to smite him, as well as the bankers - precisely because we’re not idiots.

[Guardian front-page story yesterday - Britain Faces Summer of Rage - Police. ‘Middle-class anger at economic crisis could erupt into violence on streets.’]

For 10 years and more Brown presided over unregulated casino capitalism and ignored the calls from a multitude of critics, notably Will Hutton as far back as 1995, who were demanding that he do the things that he’s now saying he’s going to do.

In the article he blathers on about our values as a nation and the need to protect people from the ‘downturn’ and prepare ourselves for ‘every future challenge’. Quite right, Gord, but we wouldn’t now have a ruinous banking crisis and a recession if you’d taken action back in ’97 to re-regulate the bankers, prevented a property bubble developing, insisted on due caution when handing out mortgages, put limits on people and companies building up ‘portfolios’ of residential houses and flats for private renting, etc. “No more boom and bust”, indeed.

Gord goes on about “a reformed and more responsible banking system”, which is exactly what Will Hutton wrote about in “The State We’re In” before NuLabour came to power - so why didn’t our great leader do something about it before the shit hit the fan, before the horse bolted? Only now he wants to shut the stable door and clean out 10 years’ worth of droppings.

Gord says he “understands and shares people’s anger towards the behaviour of some of the banks”, but he doesn’t see the anger that’s towards HIM? I’m sure he does, but a complete lack of integrity and honesty prevent him from acknowledging it.

If he had any integrity he’d resign and allow someone who’s consistently advocated proper banking regulation to become the party leader and PM - if such a person could be found within the Labour party. (It’s surely axiomatic that there’s no such person within NuLabour.)

But lo! There’s more. “We must make changes both in the banks themselves and their regulation.” (Why didn’t he do it 10 years ago?)

“Banks must act in the long-term interests of their shareholders and therefore of the economy as a whole.” (Why didn’t he do something 10 years ago?)

“This starts with a rejection of the old short-term bonus culture.” (Why didn’t he do it 10 years ago?)

We must have “long-term incentives and claw-backs if future performance is poor”. (Why didn’t he do something 10 years ago?)

We must have “better governance of banks. Their boards must have the expertise and power to challenge management and they must be able to understand the risks the company is taking.” (Why didn’t he do something 10 years ago?)

Board members must have “the necessary expertise and the right incentives to monitor executives.” (Why didn’t he do something 10 years ago?)

“We need both better national and global regulation.” (Why didn’t he do something 10 years ago?)

“Institutions with global reach should be regulated in a global way, not by a patchwork of national regulators.” (Why didn’t he do something 10 years ago?)

“We have to be clear as a nation about what we expect from our banks, and clear too about how people . . . expect these vital institutions to be run.” Fuck off, Gord! You weren’t clear about that, 10 years ago? 20 years? I certainly was. A great many of us were clear about it. Socialists certainly were. It was just NuLabour that wasn’t. Even the Tories and the neo-cons were clear about what they wanted, which is exactly what you gave them.

“Britain needs to lead the world in reforming and restructuring our banking system.” Too late, you arrogant twat. Leaving aside your crappy syntax - since the world can’t restructure OUR banking system - many other countries never had governments that made their central banks independent of their government, never deregulated to the ridiculous extent that we did, and never had so-called watchdogs that were as useless and pathetic as ours was.

What’s happened is thanks to YOUR laissez-faire lack of attention. Thanks to YOU appointing the actual mad bankers to run the so-called watchdogs.

AND it was YOU who appointed mad bankers to be your top economic and financial advisers. Instead of competent professional economists with an independent and disinterested, non-partisan, non-neo-con viewpoint. People like Will Hutton, for instance.

New Labour did none of the above, did none of the things Gord now says he intends to do, in spite of a crying need to do so, because it was bent on slavishly following the neo-cons and the Chicago Boys, not leading us towards a more enlightened system that was “the servant of our economy, and society, never its master”, which is now what Gord says he wants.

Fair enough - he’s now (finally, belatedly) seen the light. But where’s the credibility? It’s not like he can say he was busy doing something else with fisheries or the health service or education whilst the economic time-bomb was being constructed. He was right there, in the Treasury, surrounded by advisers (the wrong ones - Ed Balls!) and able to take decisive action any time he chose. Except that he wasn’t able.

Oh dear! Tony wouldn’t let him! George wouldn’t let Tony! No doubt these will be the excuses he’ll trot out in his memoires. Better to be in there, tinkering around as best he could within the neo-con straitjacket, than not there at all. No doubt.

Except that he could have resigned. He could have made a stand. He could have drawn our attention to what needed to be done. The reason he didn’t do that either was simply because he was an idiot and he believed people like the ex-head of RBS when they told him that all was for the best in the best of all possible capitalist worlds. Wasn’t London now the epicentre and the hub of the world’s financial markets? How great was that? Brilliant!

Gord has now learnt from hard experience that this wasn’t the case. That’s ‘hard’, by the way, in the sense that other people’s lives are now being devastated. Gord himself continues to occupy Number 10 and still spends his weekends in the splendour and comfort of Chequers. Why?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/gordon-brown-comment-banks

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Polly Toynbee wrote an interesting article last week about the Labour leadership. She makes the point that a change in the leadership won’t necessarily improve NuLabour’s electoral chances. What’s needed now, she points out, whoever leads the party, are the right policies that will lead to economic stabilisation and recovery, with the least amount of pain and misery for the innocents who will take the brunt of the implosion of the current free-market, globalised system.

It's life and death for Labour in the here and now, never mind who leads the battered remnants if Labour loses as badly as looks likely.

Fiscal rectitude can wait: for now, 100,000 more unemployed every month matter most. Promise a job or apprenticeship for every school-leaver, create green jobs, build homes and railways. Make mortgage rescue work. Talk openly about the divide between the majority in work, doing rather well with low mortgages and falling prices: they will need to share more with jobless families and pensioners in real hardship. Explain the need to spread pain and gain more fairly. Describe what's happening honestly and why there must be no cuts in public services. Make bold savings on Trident, aircraft carriers and ID cards among other things and, for the sake of foreign investor confidence, admit that later taxes will need to rise for those who came through this well.

Clarity and honesty are the only hope: April's budget is Labour's last chance. It's an all or nothing gamble. But since the Tories will go for the jugular on debt anyway, Labour needs to take a bolder Keynesian line that really will save millions from suffering. Brown's talk of the "spirit of the Blitz" might start to resonate if he makes a braver fight against this ever darkening depression.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/21/labour-leadership-budget-toynbee

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Last night I watched a superb film about the life and times of Jackson Pollock, the notorious Jack the Dripper, and his ever darkening depression. It was fascinating to see such a good drama depicting his development as an artist, his poverty, his rise to fame, his madness and his alcoholism - the affliction that eventually ruined his work and ended his life through a car crash whilst out driving when he was completely pissed. Tragically he also killed the young woman who had taken the place in his life of his long-term partner and wife, Lee Krasner.

I can still remember the first time I saw paintings by Pollock in an exhibition. What was stunning, apart from their size and apparent simplicity, was the fact that they clearly weren’t painted, in the accepted use of that word. There were no brush strokes - just incredible surfaces looking as though they were actually moving, swirling, shifting. They had this sort of rhythm and sway, and were truly mesmerising, which I hadn’t been expecting. Completely abstract, with no figurative elements, they spoke directly to the soul and the senses.

A body of work like Pollock’s reminds me that it’s not the length of our lives that matters - it’s what we do with them. He died at 44. Van Gogh at 37. Hendrix died in his twenties. All of them ruined by drugs and/or personal demons. All of them produced bodies of work that were stunningly original, incredibly vibrant and uplifting, and will never be successfully copied or replicated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock
http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/pollock/

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A Final Word on Gaza and Iraq

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/11/pankaj-mishra-democracy

I’ve been meaning to blog about this article for a couple of weeks. It’s by Pankaj Mishra, author of Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tibet.

When last week in Ha'aretz the Israeli historian Tom Segev judged Israeli "apathy" towards the massacre in Gaza as "chilling and shameful", he brought on deja vu among Indians. In 2002 the Hindu nationalist government of Gujarat supervised the killing of more than two thousand Muslims.

As the Israeli right looks likely to be the latest electoral beneficiary of state terror, it is time to ask: can the institutions of electoral democracy, liberal capitalism and the nation-state be relied upon to do our moral thinking for us? "Trust in the majority," they seem to say, but more often than not the majority proves itself incapable of even common sense.

Hannah Arendt's phrase "banality of evil" refers precisely to how a generalised moral numbness among educated, even cultured, people makes them commit or passively condone acts of extreme violence.

Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf. We were shielded from many of the deleterious consequences, which worked themselves out on obscure people in remote lands. The free world's economic implosion is bringing home the intolerable cost of this collective deference to apparently efficient elites and anonymous, overcomplex institutions.

It is too easy to blame Bush, who told Americans to go spend and consume while he ratcheted up pain levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the grotesquely overrated technocrats running banks and businesses. As the New York Times columnist Frank Rich reminded Americans last week: "We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture. We did so while a supposedly cost-free, off-the-books war, usually out of sight and out of mind, helped break the bank along with our nation's spirit and reputation."

The prosperity many democracies enjoyed lulled citizens into political torpor. The prospect of economic collapse has persuaded a majority of Americans to exercise more individual judgment than they showed while re-electing Bush in 2004. But collective failures of the kind Barack Obama spoke of in his stern inaugural speech will continue to occur among citizens of other democracies - and they will have no Obama to exhort them to personal responsibility.

In any case, economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy. They are more likely to make authoritarianism attractive, as European democracies in the 1930s and Russia in recent times demonstrated. Many Indians and Israelis seem set to elect, with untroubled consciences, those who speak the language of torturers and terrorists. More disturbingly, these corrupted democracies may increasingly prove the norm rather than the exception.
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