Layer 446 . . . Genius, JMK, Hating Liberals, Understanding Economics, Friedman, Will Hutton, Elephant Mothers and Education

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John Maynard Keynes was a liberal, and was a member of the British Liberal party.

Right wing and neo-conservative Americans hate all liberals, for reasons it's important for the world to understand.

JMK was a genius who received worldwide recognition for his work in economics - and yet very few of us have even heard of him, let alone educated to know about his work so that we understand his ideas even at a very basic level.

This is a level of ignorance we should be ashamed of. It's like having no knowledge of science whatsoever - like not even knowing that water can both evaporate and freeze depending on its temperature; like not knowing that matter is composed of atoms and molecules; like not knowing that micro-organisms can cause sickness and death.

The right-wing economic theories of Keynes-haters like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have caused social devastation, sickness and death on a massive scale, but very few of us understand why.

Keynes was a political and ideological individual in that he wished to rid the world of the evils of poverty, unemployment, ignorance, greed, hyper-inflation, extreme inequality and unfettered capitalism. These are goals which are shared by all true liberals and socialists, who also understand that government of the people by the people and for the people has a massive role to play in putting the needs of "society" into political policy and practical action.

All true conservatives, like Hayek and Friedman (and Bush, Palin, George Osborne, oligarchs, bankers and the majority of financiers) hate the idea of being governed by the will of the people - hate the idea of collective action to end poverty and social injustice, hate the idea of regulating the activities of the rich and the super-rich.

Barak Obama is hated by American conservatives and Republicans because he's regarded as a liberal or even a socialist - since he advocates tackling poverty and extreme inequality, and wishes to re-regulate capitalism for the benefit of the people as a whole. He's hated because he expresses disgust at a world in which most people are undereducated and unnecessarily impoverished whilst a small elite live in conditions of unnecessary and unimaginable wealth and luxury. Obama wishes to 'spread our wealth a little more fairly'.

Conservatives do not. Conservatives love speculation, casino capitalism and financial bubbles because these things enable them to get even richer - at the expense of the poorer and the more ignorant sections of society. Conservatives hate the very idea of taxation and will do everything possible to avoid paying their share of it. Conservatives love the idea of a 'flat tax' which means that everyone pays (roughly) the same amount of tax, regardless of their abilty to pay.

So what did Keynes discover, and what did he say? Hands up everyone who hasn't a clue! Yes - you there at the back! Before jumping to Keynes' 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money', consider these quotes -

Ideas shape the course of history.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employment,_Interest_and_Money

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That's probably enough Keynes and economics for today. Tomorrow we can consider the fact that Chicago-school Friedmanite economics has, for very obvious reasons, come to dominate political and economic discourse throughout the world - to the extent that a whole generation of politicians like Blair, Brown, Osborne, Cameron and Clegg have grown up in lectures and seminars where their tutors have deliberately set out to discredit Keynes and indoctrinate the ideas of Friedman and Hayek. Most of the civil service leadership and a new generation of political "special advisors" also seem to have taken MBAs which were mainly or totally free-market Friedmanite Chicago-school in their approach. And you don't get your MBA unless you subscribe to the globalisation/trickle-down/free-market/deregulation/small-governernment/low-taxes bullshit.

Homework for today is to read up on John Maynard Keynes from a variety of sources, eg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/keynes_john_maynard.shtml

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUkeynes.htm

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Those wishing to read around this subject should also have a look at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/sep/15/politics


http://www.davidhilfiker.com/docs/Economics/The%20Shock%20Doctrine%20-%20summary.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/the-book

http://www.scribd.com/doc/16090536/Klein-The-Shock-Doctrine-2007-Synopsis

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Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.
William Beveridge

Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege.
William Beveridge

The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of common man.
William Beveridge

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Will Hutton

It's impossible to overstate the need to read Will's book, The State We're In. Here's a man who never abandoned his allegiance to Keynesianism even during the dark days of Thatcherite triumphalism and the pre-bust days of neo-conservatism.

His last three or four pieces in the Observer are also well worth looking at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/16/will-hutton-bankers-bonuses

Bringing the bankers to heel must start right here, right now

Big Finance has to be brought under control or outrageous bonuses will still be paid and there will be another crisis

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jan/23/ten-ideas-for-better-britain

Ten ideas for a better Britain

Here are ten challenges for the Labour party to rediscover its radical edge

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/30/will-hutton-davos-world-economic-reform


Where are the leaders who will reform the world's economy?

The world financial system needs a radical overhaul, though last week's cosy Davos conference suggested otherwise

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In this week's column Will raises some really key issues which are as much about education and schools as they are about economics, society and finance, insofar as they deal with innovation, creative thinking and imagination.

Don't be blinded by the web. The world is actually stagnating

If we want to step up the pace of invention, there has to be a huge shift in the way we think

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/13/will-hutton-innovation-must-be-encouraged

Western policymakers were bullied by the financial oligarchs into believing that the market is magic. Thus banking could become a deregulated global market, privileged ahead of all other forms of economic activity. Innovation was left to look after itself. What were seen to matter were lower regulations, lower taxes and reduced worker entitlements – not using the state to build the ecosystem in which innovation, experimentation and investment flourish as had been done through the early part of the 20th century, even until the free market revolution.

If we want to step up the pace of invention, there has to be a huge shift in the way we think.

This is a huge ask. For 30 years or more the consensus has been that governments necessarily and always fail – and only markets succeed. But reality is beginning to intrude. Even the coalition government, wedded to the old-time religion, is finding that if it wants a growth strategy it has to do what used to be prohibited – design markets and build institutions that innovate.

An innovation strategy is being devised. Invention and innovation, we are discovering, are much too important to be left to the tender mercies of markets.

What Will doesn't emphasise, and what's hugely important, is that our education system nowadays doesn't even set out to help young people develop the skills that they, and we, desperately need. Our schools concentrate almost entirely on coaching children to pass tests and exams. Parents hire tutors to cram their kids to get better grades - even in piano and guitar playing. Grades are currency - the wealth of youth with which they purchase places at colleges and universities.

Meanwhile they're failing to develop the more crucial life skills - critical thinking, imagination, creativity, innovation, communication, team-working, and so on.

Of course we can't (and shouldn't) mark and grade and categorise these higher aspects of learning, which need continuous practice and encouragement from birth if they're to flourish.

The Chinese, the Finns, the Danes and a few others have understood the importance of a type of education that releases young people to develop their full potential. We have not. We once led the world in progressive education, but the conservative counter-revolution long ago killed off all innovation and progressive thinking in most of our schools.

We're now a stupid country led by stupid people and brainwashed by a mainly stupid media into thinking stupidly about children and education. How long will it be before people wake up and see the truth? How long before children are allowed to have a proper childhood and grow up as fully developed human beings?

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The human race needs elephant mothers, not tiger mothers

Where is the appreciation that we are social animals in Amy Chua's competitive approach to parenting?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/13/tiger-mothers-parenting-children

by Peter Singer

Many years ago, my wife and I were driving somewhere with our three young daughters in the  back, when one of them suddenly asked: "Would you rather that we were clever or that we were happy?"

I was reminded of that moment last month when I read Amy Chua's Wall Street Journal article, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," which sparked more than 4,000 comments on wsj.com and over 100,000 comments on Facebook. The article was a promotional piece for Chua's book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which has become an instant bestseller.

Chua's thesis is that, when compared with Americans, Chinese children tend to be successful because they have "tiger mothers," whereas western mothers are pussycats, or worse. Chua's daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to watch television, play computer games, sleep over at a friend's home, or be in a school play. They had to spend hours every day practising the piano or violin. They were expected to be the top student in every subject except gym and drama.

Chinese mothers, according to Chua, believe that children, once they get past the toddler stage, need to be told in no uncertain terms when they have not met the high standards their parents expect of them. (Chua says that she knows Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish, and Ghanaian mothers who are "Chinese" in their approach, as well as some ethnic-Chinese mothers who are not.) Their egos should be strong enough to take it.

Stanley Sue, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, has studied suicide, which is particularly common among Asian-American women (in other ethnic groups, more males commit suicide than females). He believes that family pressure is a significant factor.

Chua would reply that reaching a high level of achievement brings great satisfaction, and that the only way to do it is through hard work. Perhaps, but can't children be encouraged to do things because they are intrinsically worthwhile, rather than because of fear of parental disapproval?

Chua's focus is unrelentingly on solitary activities in the home, with no encouragement of group activities, or of concern for others, either in school or in the wider community.

Tigers lead solitary lives, except for mothers with their cubs. We, by contrast, are social animals. So are elephants, and elephant mothers do not focus only on the wellbeing of their own offspring. Together, they protect and take care of all the young in their herd, running a kind of daycare centre.

If we all think only of our own interests, we are headed for collective disaster – just look at what we are doing to our planet's climate. When it comes to raising our children, we need fewer tigers and more elephants.

Copyright: Project Syndicate 1995–2011

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I agree with all of the above - I'm 100% behind the idea that we should educate children to become socially, emotionally and spiritually intelligent - but again it's important to stress the disastrous effect of indoctrinating young people into believing that competitive grade-getting is more important than learning to be creative, imaginative, innovative and critical thinkers.

Children also need guidance in setting their own learning directions and agendas, and encouragement to look within and think critically about what's there - to overcome negative and destructive ego-states.

Ego-driven hyper-competitive people like Amy Chua need to read some Chinese philosophy and try to cultivate some wisdom instead of mere academic attainment. They also need to be charged with being abusive to children.

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Layer 318 . . . A Realignment of the Mind and Halting the Capitalist Merry-Go-Round

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There were some good articles (and CiFs) in the paper yesterday which sum up pretty well the current state of play in politics in a way similar to my own recent ramblings, only more articulate and concise. This is going to be a long one, but I think it’s worth trying to summarise where we’re at in politics.

This one's by Peter Kilfoyle:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/24/neil-kinnock-support-for-ed-miliband

Labour leadership trio perpetuate Blair-Brown years

The Milibands and Ed Balls only reinforce the status quo when the Labour party needs a fighter to galvanise members

I am mystified as to the basis upon which Kinnock's enthusiasm for Ed Miliband is built.

I have to assume it is a social experience of Ed Miliband. They had never worked together; and, having spent five years alongside the younger of the two precocious politician brothers, I fail to recognise the panoply of political and personal talents so admired by Kinnock.

Yet perhaps this is one of the difficulties which humble members in the provinces face. We do not have the social interaction so beloved of the London-based chattering classes, and the influence they exert on processes such as the selection of a new Labour party leader.

Left to our social (and, so they would have it, intellectual and political) superiors in the capital, there would probably be a choice of no more than three candidates – Ed and David Miliband, and Ed Balls.

It must be a great disappointment to Lords Mandelson, Falconer and Adonis – among others – to find an ungrateful and impertinent party demurring from their judgements.

Indeed, it is a measure of the decline of the party that we have the three leading contenders we do, and who are being heavily promoted. In background, there is little between them. Each has that narrow set of experiences seemingly mandatory for contemporary party leaders – Oxbridge, research, and political bagcarrying. Life experience outside of that restricted world is nonexistent, and their politics are apparently of the pick-and-mix variety.

What is truly astonishing is that while Miliband major has served all of nine years as a member of parliament, Miliband minor and Ed Balls were both first elected only in 2005. It was widely believed at the time that they were shoehorned into seats to look after the interests of their long-term boss, Gordon Brown. It now seems as if it was for premature promotion.

Indeed, this trio of hopefuls look set to perpetuate the Blair-Brown years; and a London-centric perspective of the Labour party would continue to be the case. Although each has a northern seat, they are not of the north.

Their politics are not even those of London but those of the Westminster and Whitehall villages; theirs are the politics of spin, not of conviction; of advancement, not of service; of an elite, not of a wider political community. Their political apprenticeships were served in the rival courts of Blair and Brown rather than on the mean streets of Britain.

It is, therefore, very depressing for Labour members throughout the country to see the same old charade in the build up to what, for millions of people, will be a vital election.

The country is crying out for a break from what was presented in the past as consensual politics. Our loyal supporters want us to fight for them, recognising that clever talk of triangulation is a betrayal of those most loyal and most dependent on Labour. Away from the spin and the mealy mouthed rhetoric, our intrepid trio offer only more of the same.

That is just not good enough. They have neither the real roots in the wider party, nor the established ideological commitment, to offer either real opposition in the short term or a bankable alternative to the present coalition at a general election.

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This comment from SamJohnson

I heard Balls on the radio at lunchtime.

He was MAGNIFICENT!

A splendid example of the emptiest, stupidest talking points imaginable. He knew perfectly well what he was saying was drivel and insult to the intelligence of listeners. I've never heard such a pathetic going through the motions exercise in my life. This is a man without principle and without passion. A cynical triangulator. Talk about the spawn of Brown!

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stucathome

The questions for Mandelson, Milibands and the NuLab muppets are:

What purpose do you serve except your own interests?

Have ever knowingly told the truth?

Labour is dead, murdered by the NuLab addiction to self-aggrandisement. A curse on all your houses say I to the incompetent lying corrupt tossers who can very rarely be bothered to get their greasy snouts out of the trough long enough to see the damage they have caused and never long enough to care or regret.

exiledlondoner

As one of the London-based chattering classes (when I'm not here in Spain), I do have to ask why you northerners keep electing these poncy southern scumbags?

David Miliband - South Shields.
Ed Miliband - Doncaster.
Ed Balls - Morley.
Tony Blair - Sedgefield.
Peter Mandelson - Hartlepool (that really takes the piss).

If you want to get rid of these entryist spivs, stop electing them.....

RapidEddie

New Labour turned out to be not very good at this capitalism lark that they embraced with such gusto. I fail to see that drawing your next leader from a pool of candidates who were at the very heart of the New Labour project restores confidence or moves you on from the perception that policy wonks and professional politicos make for disastrous real-world decision-makers.

They had a 13-year shot at making their case as competent capitalists. They flunked it. Now they're a party of no fixed beliefs and about to elect a leader with straight down-the-line New Labour credentials. I hope that makes sense to somebody.

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This is by Chuka Umunna and Lisa Nandy  - both newly elected Labour MPs

Labour leadership battle gives time to create future agenda

History cannot be allowed to set the parameters for debate as the Labour party takes the time it needs to select a new leader

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/25/labour-leadership-contest-create-agenda-for-future?

The task ahead: to restore the historic strength of a party formed and led from its grass roots, and in so doing, offer a vision that is in step with the concerns of the electorate.

But first, there is the contest. It is vital we not only involve members but the wider public. Next to the more traditional leadership hustings and inevitable TV debates, why not get candidates out, in every part of the country – not just London – to do high-street walkabouts and town centre soap-box sessions? That way members will see the leaders-to-be in action and judge whether they can connect and talk "human".

Then there is the discussion on where we went wrong and how we must change. This cannot be some arid dialogue between Blairites and Brownites, left and right, modernisers and those who supposedly want to turn the clock back to Militant and the 1980s.

Yes, we can learn from history but it cannot be allowed to set the parameters of debate in this new era.

These are different times requiring a different set of policy responses – people want to hear a response from the candidates. Undoubtedly, the City needs greater regulation so it better serves all of us and not a highly remunerated financial elite who are allowed to play fast and loose with our money. But what does "better regulation" look like?

Several candidates are already talking about immigration. Let's drop the cheap mantras and be honest with people: we allowed this issue to become a smokescreen for some of our biggest failures in government – the failure to get to grips with the housing crisis and the failure to address the race to the bottom in respect of the wages and the terms and conditions of a great bulk of the workforce, particularly temporary and agency workers.

Our belief in markets and globalisation blinded us to the fact that many have been left behind by globalisation. How do we address this? Both of us like the idea of a minimum-income guarantee that makes work pay, but how do we put this in place in the context of public expenditure restraint?

And then there are the quality-of-life issues, which seemed absent from so much of the general election debate. We work longer hours than any other country in western Europe, yet we are neither more productive nor, above all, happy. We have so much more material wealth than many third- and developing-world economies, yet in so many studies British people are less satisfied. How do we tackle this social recession? Professor Richard Wilkinson suggests this might have something to do with the outstanding gap between rich and poor . . .

There is so much to talk about. We found it impossible to properly consider where to go next while in government. We now have the time and space to map out an agenda for the future. It will be a gross dereliction in duty if we fail to do so this summer.

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A suitably angry and impassioned comment from orwellwasright:

Let's face it, party politics as we know it is on its way out - you lot are so discredited not only as effective and fair-minded "leaders" but as basic human beings - lacking in what resembles normal emotions and a sense of compassion - that it's only a matter of time before everyone's so sick and tired of the mealy-mouthed bullshit and servility to bankster fraudsters and warmongering big business that they'll think "fuck it" and storm the halls of Parliament. Which, judging by the continued looting of the global economy and this foolish drive to push austerity on the entire world so Goldman Sachs/JP Morgan thieves can buy another island, is not far off.

So rebuild the Labour party all you like - you'd be better off running for the hills though. I can hear the sound of pitchforks being sharpened.

Oxlan

Tellingly you seem to have completely failed to mention little things like the perception of Labour as the enemy of civil liberties.

That's the one that turned me from a default "vote Labour because they're the Tories' main opponents" (yep, being a student in the Thatcher years left its mark) into a LibDem activist. Moved a good few other people I know firmly out of the Labour camp, too.

And before anyone else brings it up, no, as a LibDem I don't regard the coalition as betrayal, undemocratic, etc . . . : with the things Labour were doing I regard them as worse than the Thatcher crowd and the coalition as the best available option for the country as a whole, given the hand the election dealt.

MartynInEurope

John McDonnell is the best hope for Labour supporters, for a fast return to an honourable, decent, democratic, egalitarian and inclusive Labour Party.

If Labour continues to be managed by New Labour spivs it deserves to become the Liberal Party of the 21st century.

Time for Labour to return to values of social justice and to become the party of real community transformation, by embracing the desire for and the will to enable a constitutional, democratic, egalitarian, decent and civil society.

Labour has the chance to unite the democratic left into a truly transformational force, and these opportunities don't come along every day.

John McDonnell for Labour Party leader!

Fbayes

You say we can't look back to history, how you sound like David Miliband's whipping boy. Guess what? People are still REALLY pissed off with Labour for invading Iraq and thus making Britain complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians - and how much of a financial cost for New Labours (I mean the Neo Conservatives) war - hard to tell them apart sometimes.

I wont even begin about civil liberties. No Chuka, this once great party needs to face up to the awful things that it did.

alisdaircameron

How revealing and damning is this line

    We found it impossible to properly consider where to go next while in government

That'd be because you jettisoned principle and pursued power for power's sake, and this manifested itself in many dismal ways; by both increased authoritarian intervention in the day-to-day lives of citizens and an invocation of positive liberty, in a narrow and twisted fashion that suited New Labour control-freaks and power-hungry cliques at the cost of the citizenry, propagandising and pushing the (unsustainable) consumerism and consumption as freedom shtick: this is the way to a better, shinier, new, improved future, so we'll force you towards it, whether you like it or not, then you will attain some higher, nobler liberty, because hey, we're the smartest guys in the room so obey (or else).

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This excellent piece is by David Marquand:

Green, socialist, republican: the new politics needs a realignment of the mind

Tarted-up neoliberalism won't cut it. The great question of our time isn't the deficit, but halting the capitalist merry-go-round

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/25/caroline-lucas-deficit-neoliberalism

The great French philosopher-statesman Alexis de Tocqueville once called for "a new political science for a new world". It is a good motto for liberal social democrats who hoped for a realignment of the left and centre-left, and now confront a baffling counter-realignment of the centre-right.

Fundamental to any progressive alliance worthy of the name would be a politics of power-sharing, tolerance and republican self-government. Such a politics is light years from Labour's inherited instincts. There are pluralists in Labour's ranks; the pressure group Compass contains many. But most Labour people are power-hoggers by nature, not power-sharers. Labour could not have taken part in a genuine progressive alliance without a cultural revolution. Of that there was (and is) no sign.

For would-be realigners, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are both broken reeds. Compass or no Compass, the Labour party is not going to change in a hurry.

Though realignment as Westminster politicians have understood it is now a dead duck, a richer and deeper realignment is desperately needed. For the last two years we have been living through the third great capitalist crisis of modern times; and it is not over yet. The neoliberal paradigm that has dominated policy-making throughout the developed world, not least in the institutions of global economic governance, has been turned inside out. Markets, we have discovered (or rediscovered), do not always know better than governments. Private greed does not procure public benefits. The lords of creation in the hedge funds and investment banks are not wealth creators. They are wealth destroyers. A rising tide does not invariably float all boats.

The self-regulating market of neoliberal economic theory is a phantom, whose pursuit led to a shameful increase in inequality and eventually to a catastrophic fall in employment and output. The newly untamed capitalism of the last 30 years has not been driven by "rational economic actors": the "rational economic actor" is another phantom. It has been driven by stampeding herds of electronic gamblers. It is not only monstrously unjust, it is also unsustainable – not only economically, but politically, environmentally and, above all, morally.

Yet the implications have not sunk in. In Washington, London and the capitals of the eurozone, the hunt is on for a tarted-up version of business as usual, radical enough to seem new, but conservative enough to keep the essentials of the old show on the road. Hayek and Friedman have been toppled from their perches; Keynes has returned to his. Tougher regulation, banking reforms, quantitative easing and even bank nationalisations have been the order of the day; some still are.

However, this is an elaborate exercise in rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. As Will Hutton once pointed out, the point about the Keynesian revolution is that it wasn't revolutionary. Keynes was a small-c conservative, not a radical. He wanted to save capitalism, not to supersede or even to transcend it. And almost by definition, he couldn't foresee the accelerating environmental crisis of our day. There will be no salvation from his quarter: of the great economists of the past, Marx is a better guide than Keynes to the turbulent, masterless capitalism of today.

But none of the economic gurus of old days is of much help now. The one certainty is that we can't continue indefinitely on our present path – and by "we" I don't just mean British politicians and voters; I mean the human race. Sooner or later the crisis-haunted capitalist merry-go-round will have to stop. The great question for our time is not how and when to cut the fiscal deficit, or calm the markets, or curb the bonus culture, or tax transnational financial transactions – pressing as all these questions are. It is how to halt the merry-go-round before it is too late: how to switch from an unjust and unsustainable economic order to a just and sustainable one. [My emphasis]

No single thinker, party or school of thought offers a complete answer, or anything like it. Answers will have to be hammered out in open-minded dialogue, between all those who accept that tinkering is not enough, across the lines of party and creed. The need, in fact, is for a realignment of the mind, socialist in economics and republican in politics. In such a realignment the Green movement must surely have a central place, along with radicals and dissenters from all parties and none. Caroline Lucas, over to you.

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PeterGuillam said:

Spot on. Neo-liberalism has failed, comprehensively, but politics hasn't caught up. Two years ago the banking system fell apart and with it the basic ideology of neo-liberalism - that markets know best. Apologists for that ideology tried to pretend that the collapse was in fact a failure of 'statism', that it was the state's fault for allowing the banks to act as they did. But of course that was nonsense in terms of neo-liberal ideology, which holds that individuals and corporations are the best judge of their own interests. If that was so, then it would not have mattered what corporations were allowed to do, since they would not have used that licence in contradiction to their own interests. But this they manifestly did, hence the collapse of Lehmanns etc.

The wholesale screw up by the banks required national governments to step in because, whatever the theories of neo-liberalism, allowing them to fail would have wreaked such havoc that no democratic government could entertain it. So the private risk of banks became the public deficit. Now, unbelievably one would have thought, that public deficit incurred to rescue the banks is being used by the banks (or 'markets' - as if these were some kind of force of nature) to penalise the states that rescued the banks from oblivion.

So we have the extraordinary situation where the banks have been rescued by the state, creating huge state indebtedness, but now demand that the state cut every last piece of public welfare because it is now indebted - as a result of the banks! It would be a joke, were it not for the massive human misery it will cause.

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DWearing

Caroline Lucas has been quite clear - repeatedly - that the Green Party is firmly of the left, and the (entirely correct) economic policies in the 2010 Green manifesto bear that out.

I personally find Lucas' refusal to apologise for being of the left - whenever its presented to her as though its an accusation - very refreshing indeed. As Marquand points out here, the economic failures of the present day are right-wing failures (which the Labour Party shamefully bought into). New thinking on economics and social justice is urgently required from people, like Lucas, who care about people more than profits.

There's a large constituency in the country beyond the Green Party's current voter base - including disillusioned Labour and Lib Dem voters - who will welcome a voice like hers in British politics.

rd232

It seems like the entire world is now losing its head and deciding that having bailed out the financial sector, we now need to kowtow to it like never before - even at the cost of another Depression. Keynes would be rolling over in his grave . . .

PS to those who think the Greens' views are fringe: consider that they came out TOP at http://voteforpolicies.org.uk, based on nearly 300,000 surveys. Yeah they got 1% of the vote in a close first-past-the-post election - so what? Just wait for electoral reform (especially if it's ACTUALLY proportional, and not just AV).

englishhermit

The Green Party is a bottom up party. Each local party, sometimes ward by ward, is independent from the others. This is green philosophy as with Greenpeace whose national organisations are independent and Greenpeace International provides co-ordination but cannot dictate what each national organisation does.

The same principle goes for the Greens. We don't really need a national leader except for publicity purposes. There is no central office diktat as with all the other political parties. This the foundation stone of green politics. Localism building upwards.

dierobdie

yoric:

    How many people who voted for the Greens a couple of weeks ago actually really understand how they would have to live and change their lives, IF the Greens were running the Country?

Quite. God forbid that there arent 20 different types of automatic air 'fresheners' on sale at Tescos. That would really reduce my choices and make me less free. The Green also advocate a shorter working week. Utter lunacy! How would people be able to afford ring tones or vote in X factor?

The horror!

Stargrave

So there are only 2 " alternatives"? What an absolute poverty of vision and imagination.

What about (real) Social Democracy, or mutualism, or cooperativism or various combinations of these and direct democracy?

Looked at objectively the policies that the Greens in England and Wales just offered in their election manifesto were basically left wing social democratic policies with a strong Green/Environmentalist theme. As hard leftists never tire of pointing out, this would have been close to mainstream 40 years ago.

The fact that this reformist leftism was seen as the most "left wing" electable programme, and has the "libertarians" and neo cons and wing nut ranters screaming "Commies!" or "Medievalist primitivists who want us to live in caves!" tells us more about the level of political understanding and development of much of the current right (and their excitability or preference for hyperbole and exaggeration and smear) than it does about the Greens.

The Right who rant on in such terms are of a similar mindset to the Tea Party crowd in America who think Obama (for goodness sake) is a "Commie". In short, not to be taken seriously politically, but to be watched in the knowledge that such concotions of conspiracy theory and scapegoating have a nasty history and potential trajectory.

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Simon Jenkins, meanwhile, writes sensibly about the new government:

Radical? Hardly. But Cameron is so much more than Blair reincarnated

The Queen's speech may cleanse only Labour's most fouled stables. Yet Cameron has proved an original political personality

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/25/david-cameron-radical-original

A four-page coalition agreement, a 36-page manifesto, a £6.2bn cuts programme and now a 22-bill Queen's speech. The post-election fortnight began with a weekend of promiscuity and has abruptly morphed into two weeks of fruitful bliss. The bond formed by David Cameron and Nick Clegg on May 11 produced an almost surreal moment in British politics, not so much a coalition as a fusion. Two lookalikes have become feelalikes, and it is hard to see how they can ever part. A cynic can add: fine so far … wait and see. But something remarkable has happened. It is time to take stock.

The Queen's speech and pre-announced cuts will cleanse only the most fouled of Labour's stables. Illiberal registers, databases, inspectorates and regulatory quangos typified the regimes of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and obsessed such control-freak ministers as David Miliband and Ed Balls. Disbanding these bodies meets the libertarian spirit of Tories and Liberals, saving money and freeing frontline administration. To deplore this as a savage assault on the welfare state is ludicrous.

The same goes for George Osborne's cuts, a mere tenth of those proposed by Labour before the election. After the profligacy of Brown and Alistair Darling, 1% less public spending is hardly crippling. The quango cull is mild and 3% off bureaucracy modest. Most departments and local councils have already allowed for such cuts.

Where the government demands to be judged is elsewhere, in using the financial crisis to steer the public sector towards greater accountability. Cameron has promised less state intervention and a more co-operative society.

Now Cameron and Clegg want to bring power closer to the consumers, "to devolve greater powers to local councils" and "repeal unnecessary laws". Everyone wants that. But unless the two comprehend what balked Thatcher and Blair, they will get no further.

The coalition can't seriously finance selective white schools in black, urban areas – the chief driver of "parental choice" – in defiance of local catchment areas. There is no way the Liberal Democrats will buy it. While much of Gove's programme, in teacher training and curricular freedom, is admirable, the old antagonism to local government jars. As before, the Treasury will stop it.

If this is the coalition's most radical moment, it is not very radical. The withdrawal of ID cards and the children's database is hardly controversial. Both were toys arising from Labour's infatuation with computers. There is no curbing of such regulatory monsters as the Criminal Records Bureau or the Health and Safety Executive. There is no review of farm payments, the NHS computer or the lunatic digital radio edict. As for Osborne's proposal to freeze council tax, it is the purest centralism. Whatever the Queen says, local councils will stay shackled to Whitehall.

The government's ideological ambitions are almost identical to Blair's in 1997, which is why Cameron was so deftly able to fashion a centre-right coalition out of the ruins of New Labour's centre-left one. But he is a cleverer, deeper politician than Blair, with whom he once compared himself. Blair was hobbled by his obsession with headlines and his failure to understand how government worked. He surrounded himself not with doers but cronies.

Cameron suffers some of the same handicaps. But he seems a more original political personality. He is less blinded by the glamour of office. He walks to work and has dictated an ascetic administration. He seems to care about civil freedom, unlike Blair, and to be thinking afresh in areas of foreign policy.

Coming after John Major, Blair and Brown, Cameron faces the prospect of proving merely a better class of disappointment. The British centralist state is a monstrous, unyielding beast. No one knows how soon the coalition will find itself embattled by its backbenchers or its constituent parties in the country. No one can predict the engulfing tide of events. For all that, his ministry has started well and has held, so far. Britain can at least cheer it on its way, so far.

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Exactly. So far.
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Layer 313 . . . One Nation Conservatism, Harold Macmillan, Barcelona and Unicef

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It’s been so long since this country had any Tories who could call themselves “one-nation conservatives” it might be worth taking a moment or two to consider Harold Macmillan and what he stood for. He was certainly a liberal conservative who believed the State had a major role to play in national reconstruction. David Cameron has to be assessed in terms of the similarities between him and Macmillan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Macmillan

Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC (10 February 1894 – 29 December 1986) was a British Conservative politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 January 1957 to 18 October 1963.

Nicknamed 'Supermac' and known for his pragmatism, wit and unflappability, Macmillan achieved notoriety before the Second World War as a Tory radical and critic of appeasement. Rising to high office as a protegé of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he believed in the essential decency of the post-war settlement and the necessity of a mixed economy, and in his premiership pursued corporatist policies to develop the domestic market as the engine of growth. As a One Nation Tory of the Disraelian tradition, haunted by memories of the Great Depression, he championed a Keynesian strategy of public investment to maintain demand, winning a second term in 1959 on an electioneering budget.

He spent the 1930s on the backbenches, with his championing of economic planning, anti-appeasement ideals and sharp criticism of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain serving to isolate him from the party leadership. During this time (1938) he published the first edition of his book The Middle Way, which advocated a broadly centrist political philosophy both domestically and internationally.

"The governing principle of the Colonial Empire should be the principle of partnership between the various elements composing it. Out of partnership comes understanding and friendship."

Economy

Macmillan brought the monetary concerns of the Exchequer into office; the economy was his prime concern. His One Nation approach to the economy was to seek high or full employment. This contrasted with his mainly monetarist Treasury ministers who argued that the support of sterling required strict controls on money and hence an unavoidable rise in unemployment. Their advice was rejected and in January 1958 the three Treasury ministers Peter Thorneycroft, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Birch, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, and Enoch Powell, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, resigned. Macmillan, away on a tour of the Commonwealth, brushed aside this incident as 'a little local difficulty'.

Foreign policy

Macmillan took close control of foreign policy. He worked to narrow the post-Suez rift with the United States, where his wartime friendship with Dwight D. Eisenhower was key; the two had a productive conference in Bermuda as early as March 1957.

In February 1959 Macmillan became the first Western leader to visit the Soviet Union since the Second World War. Talks with Nikita Khrushchev eased tensions in East-West relations over West Berlin and led to an agreement in principle to stop nuclear tests and to hold a further summit meeting of Allied and Soviet heads of government.

In the Middle East, faced by the 1958 collapse of the Baghdad Pact and the spread of Soviet influence, Macmillan acted decisively to restore the confidence of Gulf allies, using the RAF and special forces to defeat a revolt backed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt against the Sultan of Oman in July 1957, deploying airborne battalions to defend Jordan against Syrian subversion in July 1958, and deterring a threatened Iraqi invasion of Kuwait by landing a brigade group in July 1960.

Macmillan was also a major proponent and architect of decolonisation. The Gold Coast was granted independence as Ghana, and the Federation of Malaya achieved independence within the Commonwealth of Nations in 1957.

Election campaign (1959)

Macmillan led the Conservatives to victory in the October 1959 general election, increasing his party's majority from 67 to 107 seats.

It has been argued that "The key factor in the Conservative victory was that average real pay for industrial workers had risen since Churchill’s 1951 victory by over 20 per cent".

Macmillan supported the creation of the National Incomes Commission as a means to institute controls on income as part of his growth-without-inflation policy. A further series of subtle indicators and controls were also introduced during his premiership.

Relations with Thatcher

Macmillan found himself drawn more actively into politics after Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader and Prime Minister, and the record of his own premiership came under attack from the monetarists in the party, whose theories Thatcher supported. In a celebrated speech he wondered aloud where such theories had come from:

“           Was it America? Or was it Tibet? It is quite true, many of Your Lordships will remember it operating in the nursery. How do you treat a cold? One nanny said, 'Feed a cold'; she was a neo-Keynesian. The other said, 'Starve a cold'; she was a monetarist.

Macmillan finally accepted a peerage in 1984 and was created Earl of Stockton and Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden. He took the title from his former parliamentary seat on the border of the Durham coalfields, and in his maiden speech in the House of Lords he criticised Thatcher's handling of the coal miners' strike and her characterisation of Marxist militants as 'the enemy within'.  He received an unprecedented standing ovation for his oration which included the words:

“           It breaks my heart to see - and I cannot interfere - what is happening in our country today. This terrible strike, by the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's and Hitler's armies and never gave in. It is pointless and we cannot afford that kind of thing. Then there is the growing division of Conservative prosperity in the south and the ailing north and Midlands. We used to have battles and rows but they were quarrels. Now there is a new kind of wicked hatred that has been brought in by different types of people.

Stockton is widely supposed to have likened Thatcher's policy of privatisation to 'selling the family silver'. What he did say (at a dinner of the Tory Reform Group at the Royal Overseas League on 8 November 1985) was that the sale of assets was commonplace among individuals or states when they encountered financial difficulties: 'First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the salon. Then the Canalettos go.' Profitable parts of the steel industry and the railways had been privatised, along with British Telecom: 'They were like two Rembrandts still left.'

...........................................

It should also be noted that in The Middle Way Macmillan advocated both a minimum wage and a minimum for payments to the unemployed.
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http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRmacmillan.htm

While at university Macmillan became involved in politics. He joined the Canning Club (Conservative), the Russell Club (Liberal) and the Fabian Society (Socialist). At meetings of the Oxford Union he supported progressive causes such as women's suffrage. He also voted for the motion: "That this House approves the main principles of socialism." Macmillan supported the "radical wing" of the Liberal Party during this period and was greatly impressed with David Lloyd George, who made an entertaining speech at the university in 1913.

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Barcelona and Unicef

I was reading the other day about Portsmouth FC’s bankruptcy and their phenomenal debts – over £100m – and the fact that over 90% of that money was spent on player’s wages. I hate this insanity in the modern game.

Ever since the Final of the Champion’s League this year I’ve been meaning to write something about the Barcelona team having the word UNICEF printed on their shirts. I’ve always hated clubs having the names and logos of ‘sponsors’ on their kit, and I remember fondly the days before this advertising was permitted. Barcelona had appeared to be the last team in the world to have their shirts free of any advertising. They also happen to be one of very few clubs that are entirely owned by their supporters.


So here’s the lowdown on the Unicef link.


Barça take the moral high road

Everybody knew Barcelona's shirt would end up carrying a logo sooner or later, says Paolo Bandini, but nobody could've guessed whose.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2006/sep/13/barcelona

For over a century Barcelona’s club bosses stubbornly resisted the march of time and capitalism to keep their team strip sponsor-free, at a time when every other club from football's upper echelons right down to your average Sunday League side had given in to financial expediency. To be fair this may have profited them, with their logo-free red-and-blue-striped tops taking on something of an iconic status worldwide, and it was always assumed that when they did eventually sell out they would be all set to command unparelleled sums for the taking of their sponsorship virginity

Instead, quite without warning, Barcelona's top brass have gone in a very different direction. Last Thursday, president Joan Laporta signed up to a five-year collaborative agreement with Unicef that will see Barcelona not only sport the children's charity's banner on its shirts, which they did for the first time yesterday night against Levski Sofia, but also contribute just over £1m to its humanitarian projects each year. Obviously that sort of money is barely going to register a dent in the club's finances, but if you take into account how much they could have made from selling to a conventional sponsor [surely even more than Juventus's £15m-a-year deal with Tamoil], the decision is staggering.

"For the first time in our more than 107 years of history, our main soccer team will wear an emblem on the front of its shirt," said Laporta at a Unicef executive committee meeting. "It will not be the brand name of a corporation. It will not be a commercial to promote some kind of business. It will be the logo of 'Unicef'. Through Unicef, we, the people of FC Barcelona, the people of 'Barça', are very proud to donate our shirt to the children of the world who are our present, but especially are our future."

The conspiracy theorists will paint this as just another cynical marketing ploy by a club that is doing a fine job of casting itself as 'everybody's second favourite team', but with the sort of popularity and worldwide appeal they already had, I find that argument hard to swallow. Barcelona's squeaky-clean image has been overstated at times and I don't doubt for a second that they have been guilty of as much gamesmanship and underhand tactics on the pitch as any other team, but after constant reminders of the greed in football over recent weeks, let's give some credit where it's due to a team that's giving something back, even if only a little.

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http://www.unicef.org/media/media_35642.html

NEW YORK, 7 September 2006 – Futbol Club Barcelona and UNICEF today kicked off a global partnership to benefit children in the developing world. The first beneficiaries will be vulnerable children affected by HIV/AIDS in Swaziland. During the announcement ceremony, the legendary sporting club unveiled its 2006-2007 jersey featuring the UNICEF logo on the front, the first time in the club’s 107 year history that a logo has been featured.

In addition to the UNICEF-branded jersey, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCB) has also agreed to donate at least €1.5 million per year to UNICEF over the next five years to support UNICEF programmes for children all over the world. The first year’s donation will support programmes in Swaziland aimed at preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV, providing treatment of paediatric AIDS, preventing HIV infection among adolescents and protection, and providing care and support for children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS.

"This partnership joining UNICEF and the Barcelona Futbol Club will help push open a door of hope to thousands of children," said Ann M. Veneman, UNICEF Executive Director, during the announcement of the new partnership at the United Nations. “Barcelona shows us that sports can be a powerful, positive force for children.”

The sporting club’s philanthropic history includes its foundation, Fundació Futbol Club Barcelona, which is committed to social, cultural, educational and humanitarian activities in Catalonia, and has expanded internationally during the last few years under its motto “More than a Club.”

“At FC Barcelona, we are aware of the global dimension of soccer. The increasing number of FC Barcelona supporters and fans around the world in the last few years has been spectacular. The club has an obligation to respond to this enormous positive wave. The best way to do so is by using soccer as a tool to bring hope to millions of vulnerable children in need around the world”, said Mr. Joan Laporta, President of Futbol Club Barcelona.

During the first year of the agreement children affected by AIDS in Swaziland will benefit from this partnership. Swaziland is working hard to stop AIDS, but faces enormous obstacles. The country is estimated to have the highest estimated adult HIV prevalence rate in the world. In 2004, 43 per cent of women seen at antenatal clinics tested positive for HIV. But just under 12 per cent of HIV positive pregnant women are receiving the drugs necessary to protect their newborns from contracting the virus.

The first year’s donation will improve children’s lives in Swaziland on a number of fronts. Education and sports programmes will be strengthened to provide better protection, care and support for orphans and vulnerable children. Those same programmes and other outreach efforts will raise public awareness to limit the spread of AIDS. Children and their mothers will have improved access to life-saving drugs to prevent transmission of HIV and dangerous opportunistic infections of the virus, including access to life-prolonging antiretroviral treatment.

UNICEF is spearheading the Unite for Children, Unite against AIDS global campaign which aims to ensure that children affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic are an integral part of the global AIDS response.


FCB is one of the most beloved and accomplished teams in professional soccer. More than 60 million fans follow its exploits, and it has earned 57 major national and international titles. While the value of the signage on the jersey is estimated at $20 million, for UNICEF it is a donation that will remind football fans everywhere of the importance of putting children first.


“For UNICEF this is a priceless donation,” said Veneman.

About UNICEF

For 60 years UNICEF has been the world’s leader for children, working on the ground in 156 countries and territories to help children survive and thrive, from early childhood through adolescence.  The world’s largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.

http://www.unicef.org/index.php

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Since its founding, Barcelona has never worn corporate advertisements on their shirt. On 14 July 2006, the club announced a five year agreement with UNICEF, which includes having the UNICEF logo on their shirts. The agreement has the club donate €1.5 million per year to UNICEF (0.7 percent of its ordinary income, equal to the UN International Aid Target, cf. ODA) via the FC Barcelona Foundation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Barcelona

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BARCELONA, Spain (March 15, 2010) — Lionel "Leo" Messi, one of FC Barcelona's bright young stars—and a member of the Argentine national soccer team—joined the ranks of celebrated UNICEF Goodwill Ambassadors today.

In a sun-filled room above Camp Nou, FC Barcelona's legendary home in the heart of the Catalonian capital, the 22-year-old soccer player signed a two-year commitment to work on behalf of the world's most vulnerable children.


Ready to do everything I can

Football star and newly appointed UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Lionel 'Leo' Messi with children from the FC Barcelona Soccer School.

Football star and newly appointed UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Lionel Leo Messi with children from the FC Barcelona Soccer School.

"I know there are a lot of children that have diseases, many that don't have an education, many that don't have good nutrition. I am ready to do everything I can to help them in my collaboration with UNICEF," said the newly minted Goodwill Ambassador.

"We are very proud and very excited to welcome you to the UNICEF family," Director of Private Fundraising and Partnerships Philip O´Brien told Messi, speaking on behalf of Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. "This is a commitment you are making not to UNICEF, but to children," he added.


Across-the-board commitment

FC Barcelona has shown deep commitment to UNICEF and its mission. Through the FC Barcelona Foundation, the club runs educational programs at its stadium, where local schoolchildren learn about fair play, health and education—and gain a solid appreciation of the beautiful game, as soccer is often called.

In 2006, FC Barcelona signed an agreement with UNICEF that placed the agency's logo across the front of its team jerseys, earning the club the distinction of being the first sports team to use its uniforms to advocate for a cause, rather than advertise a commercial sponsor.

Beyond agreeing to display the UNICEF logo, the club pledged $5 million to HIV and AIDS programs; it has committed another $3 million over the next three years. Some of that funding will go to Haiti, where families and communities are struggling to rebuild from the devastating earthquake in January.

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http://www.unicef.org.uk/sport/page.asp?

Futbol Club Barcelona

In 2006, UNICEF and Futbol Club Barcelona renewed the second year of their five year partnership with the handing over of this season’s team shirt bearing the UNICEF name and a pledge to give a further 1.5 million Euros for children.

This follows another 1.5 million Euros donated to UNICEF by FC Barcelona the same year. The funds were used to help children affected by AIDS in Swaziland, the country with the highest estimated HIV rate in the world.

"At FC Barcelona, we are aware of the global dimension of soccer," Joan Laporta, President of Futbol Club Barcelona, comments. "The increasing number of FC Barcelona supporters and fans around the world in the last few years has been spectacular. The club has an obligation to respond to this enormous positive wave. The best way to do so is by using soccer as a tool to bring hope to millions of vulnerable children in need around the world."
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Layer 311 . . . Cameron, Liberal Conservatism, Will Hutton, Fair Pay, and Reinventing Labour

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As someone who believes it's right to give credit where it's due, I have to say Cameron's performance on the Marr programme this morning was impressive. I have plenty of reservations about someone so young and with so little experience being able to run a country, but he really sounded like he's thought long and hard about how to run a government, and his performance was pretty flawless. What's more, he even sounded sincere.

He was calm, unflustered, and actually addressed Marr's questions, instead of making prepared statements, which is what we've become used to with Blair, Brown, and co. As a personality he's far more appealing than any of the New Labour mob, who were truly gruesome, with the sole exception of Harriet Harman. For example, I'm trying to remain open-minded about Ed Miliband's bid for the Labour leadership, but it's impossible to warm to him as an individual, and he's a very unconvincing speaker.

I'm not saying I like Cameron as an individual, but it's hard to actually dislike someone who appears genuine and sincere, even if he is a Tory. Down the years I've come to at least respect other 'liberal' conservatives such as the latter day Ted Heath, as well as Michael Heseltine and lately Michael Portillo. Today Cameron described himself as a liberal conservative, which is going to alienate him from at least half of his party, and this is much to his credit.

It strikes me that he has a great deal in common with Barack Obama, and not just politically. The Democratic Party occupies much the same part of the political spectrum as Cameron's 'progressive conservatism', and it has to be said that Cameron is developing the ability to speak convincingly, and to think calmly and objectively.

So what did he say today? Firstly, that he's asked Will Hutton to chair a fair pay review. BLOODY HELL! Will Hutton! Fair pay! If the last government had done this we'd have been ecstatic! Those bastards didn't even TALK about fair pay. This is amazing. The one thing I really wanted from the last government was to adopt the proposals Hutton made in 1995 in "The State We're In".

What's more, Cameron is actually talking about reducing inequality! When did New Labour ever do that? Those bastards were 'intensely relaxed' about the super rich. Cameron also said no civil servant should earn more than 20 times the pay of the lowest paid, which means that top pay has to be reduced or the lowest pay has to be increased. Bloody hell!

He also said that it's wrong for civil servants to be given bloody bonuses, and for £1.5 billion to be given to bloody consultants! Amazing. What New Labour never understood is that it's wrong to pay huge salaries to civil servants when their retirement pensions are also calculated on the basis of final salaries. When you do this, what incentive is there for civil servants to speak truth to power?

It's wrong to give 'commercial' salaries to people in safe government jobs AS WELL AS generous retirement pensions. It's got to be either one or the other, which is the way we used to do things in this country under the old social democratic concensus. You have to say it looks like New Labour were prepared to bribe their senior civil servants with fat salaries to keep them sweet and keep them onside.

But back to Cameron. He said he still has no plans to raise VAT, which is a tax that hits the poorest the hardest. Having put down this marker it will be hard for him to backtrack on it. Excellent.

He said he'd raise capital gains tax because people were cheating by calling part of their salaries 'capital gains' in order to get the lower rate of tax, and this isn't right. Excellent. He also mentioned the capital gains people get from selling second homes, etc, and said this shouldn't be seen as being as beneficial to society as capital gains arising from investment in business and industry. Why couldn't New Labour have said this?

He said he wants to see the big banks broken up and wants to crack down on their obscene bonuses. Why didn't New Labour do this?

He said he's a liberal conservative and modern Conservatism should be about achieving progressive ends. Yes!

He drew attention to the fact that he's legislating for fixed term parliaments, which takes away from his powers as Prime Minister.

We already knew this government will also legislate for a fully elected second chamber and for a referendum on voting reform.

They've also agreed to drop the Tory proposals for raising inheritance tax and for tax cuts for couples who marry.

I have to say that at this rate Cameron is going to win over a great many floating voters who were very afraid that the next Tory government would be hard line Thatcherite, and not at all progressive.

...........................................

Now this could all be window dressing - putting the most attractive goods out front in order to compensate for the fact that the shop in fact contains a lot of very nasty products inside. We shall see. But there's no getting away from the fact that this government is doing and saying plenty of things that New Labour should have said and done.

There must be a real chance, however, that Cameron is indeed the liberal/progressive Conservative he always claimed he was, and that he's about to drag his party into the genuine middle ground of one-nation conservatism. If so, he deserves the respect and gratitude of social democrats and democratic socialists, not their scorn and sniping.

The fact is, the country decided to boot out Labour and give the Tories a chance to run the country in alliance with LibDems, and the best that Tory opponents could hope for is a government that seems to give a damn about fairness, social justice, civil liberties, political reform, City and banking reforms, etc. To have them also talking about fair pay, capping civil service salaries, etc is a big bonus.

The left, in particular, should be grateful that, thanks to the loss of the election by New Labour, there's now an opportunity to purge the Labour party of its nasty elements and completely marginalise people like Adonis, Campbell, Balls, Blunkett, Prescott, and all the other muppets who were cheerleaders for Blair and Brown. They have no further use or credibility. Not that they really had any in the first place.

As for the Millipedes, only time will tell. I can't see that Brother Ed is going to excite anyone except a dyed in the wool New Labourite, and as for Brother David - well he may be making friendly noises towards the likes of John Cruddas, and giving himself a social democratic makeover, but as my son says - who's going to vote for HIM?

Oh well - there are maybe four or five years to go before the next election, which is time enough for a substantial figure to emerge. In fact, if this government holds to the centre ground, as it seems to want to do, and if it's at least competent, and if it successfully banishes the spectre of the Thatch, then there may well be a ten year stretch before the Labour party stands any chance of winning an election. By which time - who knows? - this government may have decided that PR isn't such a bad thing after all.

A world in which the key players are Obama, Clinton, Cameron and Clegg doesn't look nearly as scary as a world that was driven by Bush and Blair.

The Labour party has a lot to be ashamed of and a lot to recover from. In five years time the LibDems might easily be more popular than Labour, if all goes well with this government. I'm sure Cameron has factored that into his thinking, and will do what he can to assist the LibDems to go up in the polls. Besides, just being in the political spotlight, as we've seen, is bound to help the LibDems.

As for the Labour party - it must surely now set out its stall as a party of social democrats and democratic socalists, which is what it should have done back in 1997, and is what it's supposed to have been from its inception. Anything else is a waste of space, and those political careerists like the Balls Family and the Millipede Brothers can just fuck right off. They had their chance, and they blew it on the New Labour project. Very badly indeed.

These are very interesting times.

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Wild Flowers and Full Moon Fever

I forgot to mention yesterday that one of Tom Petty's best albums is Wild Flowers. It's also one of his most melodic and original collections of songs. My favourite order of play is to begin with Crawling Back To You and Wake Up Time. I love the chord progressions within these tracks, and the feelings they evoke. Tom may not be in the same class as say, Dylan, as a lyricist, but he's a brilliant writer of melodies and a creator of music that is pure emotion. The use of an orchestra on Wake Up Time is also pretty special.

Full Moon Fever dates from the Wilbury period, and could easily be the third Traveling Wilburys album, since it has such a similar feel and is produced by Wilbury Jeff Lynne, who also co-wrote the tracks with TP. Interestingly the two Wilbury albums were called Volume One and Volume Three.
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Layer 52 Liberals, Leaders and Learning.

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For everyone who's either entering retirement, or looking ahead to that wondrous time, perhaps with some trepidation, there was a very encouraging feature article on ex-Pres Jimmy Carter in yesterday’s Guardian magazine.

During the past three decades, since leaving office, 83 year old Jimmy, who's still going strong, has written 25 books and has refused to sell out by grovelling for pots of money from the ‘lecture’ circuit on the back of the Carter ‘brand’, such as it is or was.

The man has integrity. He’s been busy pursuing a liberal agenda, seeing himself as a spiritual leader rather than a political one, championing unpopular causes. At 83 he still finds life exciting, challenging, gratifying, adventurous. His Carter Centre employs 150 people - “Waging Peace; Fighting Disease; Building Hope”, Advancing Human Rights and Alleviating Suffering. Way to go, Jim.

I always liked Carter. He can be proud of the fact that under his presidency the USA took some ‘revolutionary’ steps: establishing human rights as the basis of foreign policy, discontinuing support for fascist dictators who happened to support America’s ‘economic framework’, and never dropping a bomb or launching a missile. The man had principles. He refused to let the USA go on abusing its power and its weaponry. How things have changed.

America is clearly back to seeing itself as having the God-given right to run the world, and a Boss mentality. Consultation? Fuck off. Collaboration? What for?

What an incredible arrogance for any country to think that it can manage the whole world, and force the rest of the world bend to its will. So might is right . . . And right-wing Americans can’t understand why so many millions around the world despise them. Those foreigners - they’re ungrateful assholes, right?

Thank God for Obama. He understands this stuff, and is a brilliant advocate for liberal Americans who really do get it. He may not get elected this time around, though he surely must (please!), but he’s got the ear of the nation, come what may. And he won’t stop bending that ear, or cease from bashing enlightenment into the darkness.

His eloquence matches his passion and his clear sight. The only question now is whether the majority of Americans are ready for ‘change’, just as we Brits were in ‘97 after the Thatcher project finally hit the buffers in a train wreck of mangled ideology and sleaze.

In ‘97 all but the hard core of conservative Brits were finally convinced that social justice and decency were the way to go. Pity we didn’t quite manage to go there, thanks to Blair and Bush and their ilk. So Cameron’s now our next best hope? Ha! But a parliament with no overall majority could be interesting for a while.

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The blessed Jeremy Hardy, on the News Quiz last week, was right about people generally being rubbish at managing things, which is as true of the private sector as the public sector. Things stay crap because the majority of those in charge haven’t a clue how to create permanent, sustainable improvement. Even if they see the need for improvement.

But Labour’s closet neo-con administration, clueless and panicking, are increasingly attentive to officials and advisers of a right-wing bent who continue to beat the drum for privatisation and the out-sourcing (and the shedding of direct responsibility) of everything in sight.

Today's Observer, meanwhile, on its front page, trumpets "Schools Get Ultimatum: Improve Or Face Closure. Team Of 'Superheads' To Tackle Crisis".

Crisis? What crisis? "The major announcements by Ed Balls are part of an attempt to to claw back political ground from the Conservative party, which is pulling ahead in the polls."

The BBC’s sports editor, on Radio 4, did a piece on why British national teams more often than not fail to reach the finals of major competitions. Management! Oh dear, what a pathetic roll-call of duffers we’ve had. I’m convinced that our teams would have done a lot better if they’d been left to work out tactics themselves as an anarcho-syndicalist collective.

Management claim the credit when things go well, so they should take the blame when things fall apart, as they surely have, time after time. The Boss mentality has infected sport as surely as it’s infected the rest of our national life. The Boss says jump, and everybody has to jump, regardless of whether the Boss is an idiot or not.

It’s the same with the teaching profession - where attitudes are moulded and where young people are exposed to models day after day of teachers managing the learning of young people for better or for worse. And if teachers model ways of reaching learning objectives that require the involvement, commitment and understanding of those who are meant to benefit from the system and from the organization, then that sends out powerful messages about how to reach objectives.

Our traditions demand the opposite - children are expected just to passively do whatever teacher says they should do. Active engagement with their own learning, and agreeing their learning objectives - even just sharing what those objectives are supposed to be - usually isn’t on the agenda.

This has to change.

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Another news item today said that we’re eating fewer and fewer oranges. Children can’t even manage to peel oranges. Parents aren’t passing on the skills. As Jeremy Hardy said, it doesn’t matter - kids have all got knives anyway.

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Another news item last week. Imperial College, London University, one of our most prestigious technological and scientific establishments, has announced it’s no longer going to use ‘A’ level results - the so-called ‘Gold Standard’ - as the basis for deciding admissions.

WHAT!!?? BLOODY HELL!!

So what are they going to do? Easy. They’re going to assess applicants through their own tests and interviews. Wow!

They’re going to assess their thinking skills, their problem-solving ability, their creativity, their general knowledge, subject specific knowledge, etc. Revolutionary stuff.

Credit will given to those who would be the first in their family to attend university; credit will be given to those from schools which do not achieve good A-level grades.

Looks like the earth may be beginning to move a little.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article3999109.ece