tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12643651306551714872024-03-18T21:55:57.862-07:00My Correct Views on Everything(or a collection of inane scribblings on politics, mostly)Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comBlogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-77821613763694348332016-10-13T08:03:00.002-07:002016-10-13T08:05:37.923-07:00Two tribes go to war: making sense of the battle for Labour<div style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.028em; line-height: 1.04; margin: 0px 0px 0px -2.5px;">
Piece for <a href="https://medium.com/@SteveAkehurst/two-tribes-go-to-war-making-sense-of-the-battle-for-labour-44a7c6209e2d#.6a1q9b9sg">Medium</a></div>
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<span class="markup--strong markup--h3-strong"><span style="font-size: large;"> Two tribes go to war: making sense of the battle for Labour</span></span></h2>
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In 2013, commenting on the downward spiral of his party, Republican consultant Mike Murphy observed:</div>
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">“There seem to be two schools of thought in GOP. One group, the Mathematicians, look at the GOP’s losing streak and the changing demography of the country and say the party needs to make real changes to attract voters beyond the old Republican base of white guys. Not just mechanics, but also policy. They want to modernize conservatism and change some of the old dogma on big issues like same sex marriage. I’m one of them. The other group, the Priests, say the problem is we don’t have enough ideological purity. We must have faith, be pure and nominate “real conservatives” (whatever that means; the Priests are a bit slippery about their definitions) who will fight without compromise against liberalism. The Priests are mostly focused on the sins we are against; they say our problem is a lack of intensity; if we are passionate and loud enough, we will alert and win over the rest of the country. The Mathematicians hear all this and think the Priests are totally in a… echo chamber of their own creation and disconnected from the reality of today’s electorate…The Priests hear the Mathematicians and think they are all sell-outs.”</em></div>
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This is the debate that is defining all kinds of political upheaval across the Western world today. It is not a simple matter of left vs right, establishment vs grass roots or the centre against the fringe. In fact it’s happening between and within movements and organisations of all kinds — political and civil society — all across the political spectrum.</div>
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It is though at it’s most obvious in the UK in the fight going on within the Labour party, where the priestly disposition of the influx of new members is at odds with the party apparatus and longer standing members. What makes this so intractable, and gives it the feeling of a culture war, is that is is not a pitched battle over policy per se — the differences between the two sides are over stated. It’s really a fight between two different modes of activism; one that have at their core two different and largely incompatible theories of persuasion, and how you win people over to your side.</div>
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The mathematicians, such as we are, start from a position that most people — voters, members of the public — disagree with us, and need to be won round. Our model of persuasion is one built on compromise; hold the same objective but meet the person you’re trying to win over half way, give a little on mood music or detail if you need to; half a loaf is better than no loaf. At it’s worst it can feel transactional but it is also rooted in a sort of humility and pragmatism. Out of this approach falls the more professionalised approach to campaigns associated with New Labour, and an approach to communications (that I outlined <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2015/10/win-again-labour-must-learn-lesson-alex-salmonds-grandfather" href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2015/10/win-again-labour-must-learn-lesson-alex-salmonds-grandfather" rel="nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">here</a>) focused on earning the right to be heard.</div>
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The priests, on the other hand, start from the position that people already agree with them — they just don’t know it yet; in some way they have had their consciousness obscured. In so far as they even think about ordinary people that disagree with them, they will often explain things in terms of the message not being properly heard. Perhaps it’s being distorted by a lack of conviction, some third party or ne’er-do-wells in the media. Or, when the cognitive dissonance becomes too much, faith is held in the idea of a large hitherto unengaged mass, just waiting out there, desperate to be inspired. Either way, the remedy is almost always to shout louder and shout better.</div>
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Their approach to persuasion was captured quite amusingly in a recent <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n16/tom-crewe/we-are-many" href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n16/tom-crewe/we-are-many" rel="nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">LRB piece</a>, covering a Momentum event in the swing seat of Nuneaton:</div>
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">“I had checked the local branch’s Facebook page on the train: 35 people were confirmed as attending and someone had recently posted an article entitled ‘1983: The Biggest Myth in Labour Party History’. As I approached a woman was bellowing ‘Vote Labour! Save yourselves! The Tories will destroy you!’ to no one in particular….The speeches were similar to those I’d heard elsewhere…Only a handful of passers-by stopped to listen…”</em></div>
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This is a creed best imbued in Tony Benn’s famous quote about sign posts v.s weathervanes. If you hold your ground and your line you will be there to reap the benefits when the tide of history turns your way. This has the virtue we commonly ascribe to ‘sticking to one’s principles’. It also tends to give rise more easily to things like paranoia, conspiracy and self-pity.</div>
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Again, this is not a simple matter of left or right. For example, I think Owen Jones’ estrangement from Corbynism, <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://medium.com/@OwenJones84/questions-all-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-need-to-answer-b3e82ace7ed3" href="https://medium.com/@OwenJones84/questions-all-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-need-to-answer-b3e82ace7ed3" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">such as it is</a>, is probably based on this divide. Though formidable in the pulpit he has a genuine interest in how you win people over by starting from where they are. He is a mathematician amid a movement of priests.</div>
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Even the likes of <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/labour-the-way-ahead-78d49d513a9f#.viokl7ffw" href="https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/labour-the-way-ahead-78d49d513a9f#.viokl7ffw" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Paul Mason </a>or Aaron Bastani in their better moments have at times shown flashes of realism over winning over UKIP or Tory voters.</div>
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But the Corbynite backlash against Mason’s proposed pragmatism on free movement is instructive. He is fundamentally misunderstanding the social movement he has ridden in on. If nothing else it is a movement built on a total rejection of any compromise, in either detail or framing and communications. Any attempts to professionalise it is doomed to fail.</div>
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Indeed, at it’s core Corbynism’s sole interest is not policy or elections but process — namely, defeating the mathematicians’ mode of party politics and activism, which they associate with capitulation. This currently travels under more pleasant talk of ‘letting members decide policy’, ‘party democracy’, ‘wrestling back control from elites’ and so on, but it should be seen for what it is. Much more than anything else, it is what makes it so urgent that it must be defeated.</div>
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We on the other side have to understand it as a challenge to our entire philosophy of politics, and learn to fight on those terms.</div>
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There are a number of reasons for this.</div>
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Firstly, for what it’s worth, <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/pub/Chong%20Druckman%20APSR%202007.pdf" href="http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/pub/Chong%20Druckman%20APSR%202007.pdf" rel="nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">every shred of evidence</a> around voter psychology suggests you can persuade voters — but only if you make the argument with a value frame they have some kind of sympathy with. So you can move people to a progressive place on immigration or welfare, for instance, but you have to talk about things like contribution or patriotism — things many left activists feel instinctively uncomfortable with. Banging on about open borders or entitlement may feel good but it will always bounce off people.</div>
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In more cynical moments, you suspect many of the ‘priests’ know this — they just don’t care. From this perspective their mode of politics seems much more about expression than anything else; it is about what they want to say, not what the unpersuaded need to hear. We have a habit of saying this is ‘naive’ or ‘idealistic’ but narcissistic might be a better word.</div>
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Dangerous may be another. Whether it knows it or not, this expressive, populist form of electoral activism de facto gives up on building cross-class, cross-societal voter coalitions. In its place is a purer form of identity politics that instead doubles down on reinforcing the virtue and prejudices of the already converted. Other than being electorally suicidal, it begets a political culture rife with bitterness, sanctimony and righteous anger; a country where cultural divides are doubled down on rather than reached across and mediated. It’s end game is a society where ever tinier, cordoned off cantons — the liberal cosmopolitans in the big cities, the communitarians in the suburbs and provinces — are in constant conflict with each other, rather than part of a wider movement.</div>
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This, one imagines, is also why so many Corbyn allies favour proportional representation — it lessens the need to reach outside of those enclaves.</div>
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It is this form of individualised boisterous identity politics that is tearing apart broad church movements and institutions across the Western world, from the Republicans in the US, to the British Union and social democracy across Europe.</div>
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It is this understanding which should frame the moderate counter argument.</div>
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Too often we portray our mode of politics as cold instrumentalism or about necessary evils to gain power (I appreciate the framing of ‘mathematicians’ is unhelpful here).</div>
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But it’s not. At its heart it is about reaching out; building broad alliances and solidarity. It’s easy to sneer at the more professionalised techniques we might employ — focus groups, polling, messaging — but it could just be called<em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">listening</em>. Empathising with people and building bridges. Genuine movement building. This is not just a route to power but a good in itself, adding to the sum of solidarity and togetherness in a country we love and want to improve. Done properly, if it moves us just one single step closer to our shared goals, it is more than worth most compromises it might entail. It is a form of politics and togetherness far more beautiful than listening to another sulphurous speech against neo-liberalism in a run down town hall in Lambeth.</div>
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But at present that argument is being lost across Western democracies, and most acutely within the Labour party. Until that fact is acknowledged as a root cause, and until that argument is renewed, made again and made better — in a way that resonates with those sceptical of it — and people are recruited on that basis, Corbyn will continue to advance. A better, kinder politics will be defeated. The priests will inherit the earth.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-19956700990697533032016-03-15T16:02:00.000-07:002016-03-15T16:06:32.712-07:00Seeking the ‘persuadable Corbyn’ vote<div class="graf--p graf-after--p" id="9530" name="9530" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">
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Blog on <a href="https://medium.com/@SteveAkehurst/seeking-the-persuadable-corbyn-vote-d8ccbd9c5d30#.353gtoyn7">Medium</a><br />
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<strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><span style="font-size: large;">Seeking the ‘persuadable Corbyn’ vote</span></strong></div>
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Ian Warren over at <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://election-data.co.uk/" href="http://election-data.co.uk/">Election Data</a> did wonks everywhere a huge favour this week, publishing a load of very thorough polling of the Labour selectorate for free.</div>
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There’s been a dearth of these kind of polls since September, partly because it’s expensive and partly because most people with an incentive to commission it would probably prefer to keep the results for themselves. This data also has the advantage of being from YouGov, one of the best in the business and the only company to call the Corbyn surge last summer.</div>
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What it gives us is the first real chance to investigate something that has long bugged me: what exactly is the make up of the Corbyn coalition? <strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong">And, more importantly, which segments are potentially ‘persuadable’ for the moderates and when, and what defines them?</strong> (I ask this not as someone with any particular dog in the fight, just someone for who staring at this kind of stuff represents a fun way to waste an evening in the one life I have).</div>
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The full data is <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://election-data.co.uk/ElectionDataPollOfLabourMembersPartOne.xlsx" href="http://election-data.co.uk/ElectionDataPollOfLabourMembersPartOne.xlsx">here</a> and <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://election-data.co.uk/Labour_membership_poll_part_two.xlsx" href="http://election-data.co.uk/Labour_membership_poll_part_two.xlsx">here</a>.</div>
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So what does it say?</div>
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At a glance things aren’t too promising, either methodologically or from the perspective of anyone vying for a change in the Labour leadership. What you’d ideally do here is ask members to rate how likely they would be to back Corbyn in a future contest on a scale of 1 to 6, then see what demographics make up, say, ratings 3–4. These questions don’t have that kind of question; they largely force members to choose if they approve of Corbyn now or not and want him to stay to 2020 or not.</div>
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And within that, as <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/02/new-poll-shows-huge-landslide-jeremy-corbyn" href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/02/new-poll-shows-huge-landslide-jeremy-corbyn">widely reported,</a> there is broad approval for the Labour leader right now, with very little movement since September: 72% approval, 63% wanting him to stay until 2020 and 62% backing him in a mock leadership ballot. Looking across the crossbreaks, almost all major demographics and groups of members show overwhelming support.</div>
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So definitely not great for the anti-Corbynistas. But there is a small chink of light for them in question 8: <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">“If the Labour party perform badly in May’s election in Scotland, Wales, London and English councils do you think Jeremy Corbyn should or should not continue as leader of the party and fight the 2020 election?”<br /></em></div>
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In that circumstance, the numbers wanting Corbyn to stay until 2020 drop to 53%. 40% would want him to go either immediately or before the election. 8% are up for grabs either way. Obviously this is still very healthy for Corbyn, but it’s movement, and something worth investigating.</div>
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Roughly 30% of Corbyn’s 2015 vote comes into play at that point, thinking he should go before the election (though some of this is plugged by Burnham and Cooper voters thinking he should stay).</div>
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So in that circumstance, which groups are flaking away from him?<br /></div>
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<strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong">The <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">only </em>factor that makes a significant difference to how members answered this question is how long they had been a member. </strong>In no other cleavage (age, class, location etc) is there any notable change between now and post-May defeat.<br /></div>
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<strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong">In short it would largely be the pre-2015 members breaking away from Corbyn</strong>: members who joined under Ed Miliband (‘Ed joiners’), and members who joined pre-2010. Make no mistake: both of these groups overwhelmingly voted for Corbyn in September 2015 and support him now: 55% of ‘Ed joiners’ currently think he should stay until 2020 (66% approve of him), and 50% of pre-2010 members think he should stay (59% of them approve of him).<br /></div>
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But both groups see a notable dip in support for Corbyn when the prospect of electoral disaster in May is presented to them. In that circumstance, support among Ed joiners for Corbyn staying until 2020 drops to 41%. Among pre-2010 members it falls to 39%.<br /></div>
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By way of comparison, even in the face of electoral disaster in May, 61% of members who joined after May 2015 would still think Corbyn should stay on to 2020, and 89% of members who have joined since September — basically the same proportions of these groups as think that now. They are barely moved.</div>
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Ok, so none of this is mind blowing and the movement isn't enormous — but it does give us more than we had before. It puts to rest the idea that the key divide in the Corbyn voter set is age or class or any particular issue per se. If they are going to be prised apart, a key fault line is the point at which they entered the party, and, seemingly, how much it matters whether Labour win elections. It’s a wedge.</div>
<div class="graf--p" name="8d9e">
This intuitively makes sense. It’s not a left/right thing: the data shows pre-2015 members hold broadly the same left wing views on key policy issues as post-2015 members. But it’s probable longer-term members simply balance these views off against winning elections slightly more evenly. And they are currently waiting to see how things pan out, having convinced themselves the Labour leader could succeed electorally.<br /></div>
<div class="graf--p" name="b8f7">
Also, they were part of the party when it was in power or seriously competing for it. By contrast, many of the post-2015 members seem to be purer movement types, less interested in the machine or elections. And they are likely to be far more attached to Corbyn than the party itself.<br /></div>
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Of course, there’s still lots we don’t know about this pre-2015 group: are there any other characteristics that define them? Who within them are the most persuadable? Why did they vote for Corbyn? Exactly would constitutes ‘performing badly’ in May to them? What voices in the Labour movement influence them most? Etc. These would be interesting questions for further research, some of which would need to be qualitative.<br /></div>
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But there are some things the data does tell us about pre-2015 members:</div>
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<li class="graf--li" name="c3d3">They still make up just over half of the membership</li>
<li class="graf--li" name="29e4">They overwhelmingly disapprove of Labour MPs publicly criticising Corbyn now, as much as post-2015 members do (so a period of silence for the PLP might be a good idea).</li>
<li class="graf--li" name="5de9">They are much less supportive of John McDonnell</li>
<li class="graf--li" name="e1ec">They are anti-Trident and military intervention but less likely to see these as decisive factors in a leadership election</li>
<li class="graf--li" name="92f0">They generally nurse a lot more doubt about Corbyn’s ability to win a general election</li>
<li class="graf--li" name="fbc4">They tend to overindex on reading the Daily Mirror, as opposed to The Guardian or Independent, compared to the membership as a whole</li>
<li class="graf--li" name="e590">There’s some evidence they tend to more highly prioritise the economy as an issue (though margin of error makes this tight), and less issues like the environment.</li>
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<div class="graf--p" name="5d08">
I’d also guess (just anecdotally) they are more likely to turn up to CLP meetings and the like.</div>
<div class="graf--p" name="c817">
Again, to be clear, i’m definitely not saying this group is about to defect from Corbyn en masse. <br /><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><br />What this also doesn't mean is that Labour moderates can just rely on cold calls to electability to shift them</strong>. They clearly will need inspiring on values and issues too — far better than any of the other candidates last summer managed. This kind of inspirational agenda is currently something sorely lacking in the anti-Corbyn parts of the PLP.</div>
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But I think it is fair to say that this group are far softer than the rest of Jeremy’s vote, even though they make up a big portion of it. They at the very least present an opening for those to the right of Corbyn, then, if they can get their act together. Any switch will start with this group of the membership; any electoral disaster in May marks the point at which a fair number of them begin being open to <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">an argument</em> on leadership change. Any successful moderate leadership bid probably wins a big chunk of this group as their core support, encourages them to get their friends and family to join up, while winning a slither of the post-2015 members on top. Labour moderates’ efforts should therefore go into dissecting, understanding and targeting this group over and above newer members.</div>
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<div class="graf--p" name="8210">
That’s my take on it anyway. I’d be interested in your thoughts.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-1488824836402440472015-10-30T07:50:00.001-07:002015-10-30T07:50:23.427-07:00To win again, Labour must learn a lesson from Alex Salmond's grandfather<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2015/10/win-again-labour-must-learn-lesson-alex-salmonds-grandfather">For New Statesman</a><div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">To win again, Labour must learn a lesson from Alex Salmond's grandfather</span></h1>
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"If you're going to say something radical, make sure you wear a suit". This is the solitary piece of advice Alex Salmond's grandfather is said to have sent him packing with as he started his career in politics thirty years ago.</div>
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As party conference season draws to an end, it's this advice which separates the two main parties in British politics, and defines their current trajectory. One side gets it, the other ignores it.</div>
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It isn't really, of course, a line about what constitutes proper dress - or at least not just. What Salmond's grandfather meant was simple: if people can pigeonhole you, they will – so don't let them. Confound expectations.</div>
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It remains as relevant as ever. Unpack why and you get to three truths that most pollsters will tell you define the ways voters engage with politics: they consume it in very small quantities, largely through TV and newspapers; they make their mind up quickly; and, most crucial of all, they filter what they see back through the lens of what they already think. If you sound and look how people expect you to, they will box you in as that, even if what you're saying is eminently sensible. So much is not about what is being said, but who is saying it.</div>
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This is difficult to absorb when most political discussion is still wedded to the idea of a rational-actor electorate. But the reality is most normal people respond to signals not details (and abnormal people in fact: most of those who read this article and tweet me furiously about it will only have bothered reading the headline and top line).</div>
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Thus a huge part of electoral politics is challenging prejudices people have about you. In this contest advantage accrues to those who can do unexpected things; the counter-intuitive. So, for instance, only a party that can convincingly present as moderate earns the right to govern as radical.</div>
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This is ultimately the fatal mistake made by the many people – including myself – who wrongly thought Ed Miliband had a shot at Number 10. Because he never ruthlessly and publicly dealt with Labour's weaknesses, particularly spending and welfare, his broader agenda never got a hearing. James Morris<a href="http://kpedley.podbean.com/e/polling-matters-ep-23-labours-election-polling-w-james-morris/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c1002a; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">argues</a> Miliband's early years spent talking about “too far too fast”, however economically justified, just hardened for voters their own pre-existing prejudices: that Labour wanted to spend more and can't be trusted with tough decisions. Later, Miliband just switched the subject. As a result, <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/tpxa0flfs6t49cb/BritainThinks%20Election%20Second%20Breakfast%20Briefing%20Website%20Version%20FINAL.pdf?dl=0" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c1002a; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">BritainThinks</a> found that even when he said things that polled well, voters simply asked “yes but where's the money coming from?” in a way they never did of the Conservatives.</div>
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Which brings us back to this year's party conferences.</div>
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The Conservatives spent most of their time in Manchester, as they have since May, playing to their strengths while happily, ruthlessly and publicly attempting to deal with their weaknesses among undecided voters. For “party of the rich”, see the living wage and overtures on “the workers party”; for “the nasty party” see Cameron's paeans to equality. How substantial this in practice is irrelevant, in the short term at least. It was all clipped for the news for the same reason it will have cut through with floating voters: because it's counter-intuitive. It buys them cover to be quietly radical and, in many areas, push a traditional free-market agenda Michael Howard would never have got away with.</div>
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Labour badly needs to learn this skill: presenting as moderate, governing as radical. At the moment it is adept at precisely the opposite. Windy socialist rhetoric is cranked up only to be accompanied by fairly conventional social democratic ideas. An economic policy largely the same as Ed Balls’ sent the conference hall into raptures because it was wrapped in the crotchety language of anti-austerity.</div>
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This is the surest sign of a movement in love with the sound of its own voice. Everything it did will have entrenched voters’ prejudices about them, wittingly or not. To be fair, most damningly of all, it seemed designed precisely for that purpose. Every signal was aimed at pleasing the already converted and reaffirming their virtue. If there was any talk of persuasion, it only showed through in a desire to lecture the public: “busting myths”, “nailing the lie” and so on. Not an ounce of self-reflection, or an understanding that these rights have to be earned.</div>
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To be fair, the frenzy among activists was been whipped up largely in response to a half justified grievance: that New Labour managed to be seen as moderate but didn't exploit it by governing radically enough, as the Conservatives are now, particularly when it came to political economy.</div>
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But the fact remains: Labour will not get the chance to change the country again unless it re-learns what Alex Salmond's grandfather taught him. It will not even get a hearing until it is willing to confound perceptions of it among Conservative voters in particular, as the Tories have learnt to do. Why does it deserve one?</div>
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The reason this hasn't been done is that it's not easy. It doesn't mean aping every last detail of Conservative policy – but it does mean moving closer to the small-c conservative values that run through the population of this country outside its big cities: prudence, fairness as opportunity not just outcome, quiet patriotism, contribution. At the moment the party is a world away: obsessed with an arid Keynsianism, infatuated with ideas of entitlement and embarrassed about national identity.</div>
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The change here has to run deep; it has to be more than finding the most temperate words in a thesaurus. The challenge is to renew the party's politics in a way that intrinsically deals with its weaknesses, but leaves it with a prospectus bold enough to change the country. It has to look, over and over again, like it genuinely cares about things voters don't expect it to: the deficit, waste, unfairness in the welfare system; the middle as well as the bottom, as well as being comfortable with technology and innovation. Otherwise it will never be able to broach a conversation about inequality, reforming the economy so it works in the interests of the many, or tackling vested interests. And British politics will remain what it is today: a non-competitive sport. </div>
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Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-53871806335227537652015-01-23T10:13:00.003-08:002015-01-23T10:13:51.936-08:00Who is Senator Elizabeth Warren and is she a serious US election contender?Piece <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/01/who-senator-elizabeth-warren-and-she-serious-us-election-contender">for New Statesman</a> from 5th January.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">Who is Senator Elizabeth Warren and is she a serious US election contender? </span></b></h2>
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Six years ago this month, in the bitter winter cold, 2m people crammed on to the mall of Washington DC to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama. The gritty reality of what followed – a good if not transformational presidency – make it easy to forget the spirit and energy of that day, and Obama's ascent generally. A palpable cry for change in the wake of the financial crisis then gripping the country, and for an outsider to shake up an ineffective DC establishment, swept him beyond McCain and Hilary Clinton before that.</div>
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But it's worth bringing it to the debate over his successor as Democratic nominee for 2016. There's a reason that, as the <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2003fdd4-877e-11e4-8c91-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3NfkomQRy" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">FT reports</a>, "very few people in Washington have the clout that Senator Elizabeth Warren has right now". More than anything else, it's because she is tapping in to that same energy, and giving it greater form.</div>
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Warren has spent the last four years rallying against those on Wall Street and Capitol Hill who she blames for poisoning the American dream. Across a range of issues – the bank bailouts, credit card and mortgage regulation, student loans – she's channelled a still widespread anger at the financial crisis, giving voice to a economic anxiety held by huge swathes of America.</div>
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This anxiety if of course borne of the same forces shaping people's lives this side of the pond, despite an improving economy: stagnant wages, rising bills, a hollowing out of middle class jobs and growing inequality. Warren has argued that these are not facts of life akin to the weather, but in large part the product of rules "rigged" by an orthodoxy seizing the US political system, one kept in place through the influence of organised money. It's an orthodoxy that has sometimes thwarted Obama, but one he has also felt the need to indulge.</div>
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In short, she is the first mainstream, progressive populist to fully emerge out of post-crash politics in America.</div>
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All of which has sparked a MoveOn.org petition to draft her in to the 2016 race against Hilary Clinton, who is threatening to run again. </div>
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As a result, much of the Democratic establishment are already on manoeuvres against Warren, sniffily dismissing her a East Coast liberal bound for the same fate as Howard Dean. At first glance it's easy to sympathise with this. But there is more to Warren demanding of further attention.</div>
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For a start, she is (and speaks like) an Okie; a Southerner, hardly Democratic heartlands these days.</div>
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Despite reaching the gilded halls of Harvard (where she taught bankruptcy law), Warren came from very little. Her father was a janitor and a maintenance man, her mother a phone operator. So when she speaks about threats facing the American dream, she speaks with an authenticity the likes of Gore and Kerry never could.</div>
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More importantly, her politics are more complicated and progress beyond the traditional 'tax and spend' of the Democratic left. She is largely concerned with economic reform: breaking up and remaking the banking system, consumer protection, infrastructure. In her own words, "effective counterweights" against the interests of organised money. Before being elected in 2012, Warren set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency which has put over $4bn back in the pockets of Americans swindled by financial institutions.</div>
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In the context of tight budgets, and after a generation of trying to ameliorate inequalities through the tax system, this is the most sensible territory for the centre-left to be on.</div>
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But in many respects, Warren's themes are far more in the conservative tradition than the Democratic one: aspiration, breaking up concentrations of power, making markets work better, opposing no-strings-attached bailouts. She also supports school vouchers in the public education system.</div>
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None of which is surprising given Warren's Republican background, but all of which makes for an interesting blend of left and right that is making her slightly untouchable on Capitol Hill at the moment ("It's like we're dealing with the most popular girl in school", one bank executive <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2003fdd4-877e-11e4-8c91-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3NfkomQRy" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">recently</a> whinged). Most importantly, it gives her the potential to speak beyond the Democratic base if she gets it right.</div>
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She is also aided by the weaknesses of her potential opponents. The GOP have long since abandoned traditional conservative thought, in favour of an unhinged worship of the already wealthy (and a dependence on their largesse).</div>
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And then there's Clinton. It isn't obvious what agenda will particularly animate her bid for the White House, or her supporters – at the moment it's just a strange cult of personality. In any event, the rising tide of anger and insecurity potentially pose a significant problem for her. Many of the questions angering Americans, certainly Democrats, today are essentially ones of economic reform. On this theme, Clinton is a status quo politician. What she thinks about these questions i'm not sure, but one suspects she doesn't think about them very much at all. They involve upsetting vested interests that a generation of Third Way politicians cut their teeth making peace with. Moreover, as Warren herself <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12mJ-U76nfg" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">found out</a>, her more direct ties to Wall Street compromise her.</div>
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So if Warren does decide to run, she could easily wrongfoot the presumptive nominee. In many ways, Warren is already dictating the terms of the debate. Clinton recently felt the need to make a rather half-hearted and awkward <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/why-wall-street-loves-hillary-112782.html#ixzz3IsAIwvyC" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">pitch</a> to define herself against Wall Street ("The least convincing populist on earth", as one newspaper put it). Meanwhile, there are <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/07/06/this-means-warren-obama-backs-challenger-to-hillary/" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">rumours </a>even Obama himself sees Warren as his true heir, and is urging her to get in the ring.</div>
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It may not happen, of course. For a start, it isn't clear Warren even wants it or feels herself up to it. After years of stalemate in Congress under Obama, Clinton's strongest card is as an arm-twister who knows how to get things done. Warren would have to work hard to build a broad coalition of support, and strengthen her hand on foreign policy. But the elements are certainly there to make things very interesting. If you're looking for a political earthquake, it is worth at least keeping an eye on the American left this year. </div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-8000570372227762702014-09-29T10:19:00.000-07:002014-09-30T16:52:29.627-07:00Please help get clarity on the future of the RVT<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<img src="http://pubshistory.com/LondonPubs/Lambeth/RoyalVauxhallTavern.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />Please help get clarity on the future of the RVT</span></b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There's
not many more wonderful or important gay venues in London than the
Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
many ways it's hard to tell the history of gay and lesbian London
without it. For sixty odd years the no bullshit fabulousness of its
club nights – with its drag acts and theatrical performances –
have been a kind of safe haven from the outside world for LGBT people across
London, one of the handful of places in which the words 'gay
community' makes sense. First, from its role in the sexual revolution
of the post-war period, then its position on the frontline of the
AIDS crisis in 1980s (Paul O'Grady, a regular Tavern performer back
then, talks about this movingly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDVWlEP9Fkc">here</a>).
It's recent cameo in the movie Pride is just the latest recognition
of its status.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Today
it's endured as a bulwark against the wanky nonsence of a lot of
Soho; a place where you can see many of the same faces mixed in with
the new each time you go, and probably the first place I felt at home
when I moved to London a few years back.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />All
of which made me sad to hear and read that it might be at risk. What we do know is it's either been sold, or is about to be sold, to investors. Who exactly is
unclear, but most likely from abroad.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One
of its previous owners will continue to manage the place for now, and
they've done an amazing job over the last decade to keep it thriving.
But by all accounts the Tavern's long-term future is still unclear.
There are still persistent rumours that it will eventually be torn
down, transformed into apartments, a hotel, or otherwise sanitised
out of all recognition.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyone
who's been to RVT will know its location makes it prime real estate.
Indeed sadly none of this can be stripped from the wider context of
the creeping gentrification and commercialisation of a lot of South
London, including parts of the gay scene. To see the RVT go the same
way would be a real act of cultural vandalism. Sadly, as yet there's been a
stony silence from the Tavern's new owners on their intentions.<br /><br />So,
<b>a small campaign has started up </b>to get assurances about its
future, and to secure the Tavern as a community asset under the
recent Localism Act. If successful with Lambeth Council, this last
measure would give the community the right to bid for the Tavern in
the event that its put up for the sale again. It's not impossible that some local group would come forward to bid for the place.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
the meantime, the questions that need to be asked and which many
people are anxiously waiting the answers to are:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<ul>
<li><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who
has bought the RVT?</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What
are the new owners' plans for the place both in the short term and
in the long term?</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #141823;">Will
they share those plans, or consult on them?</span>
</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Can the new owners
provide proper assurances that it will stay open as a gay venue, and
true to its long history, for the long-term?</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On
all of these, there have been no answers. So if you are reading this
and are as fond of the RVT as many of us are, please take time to
either share this blog or ask the questions of RVT yourself via
Twitter @TheRVT or email <a href="mailto:info@rvt.org.uk"><span style="color: #008bda;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">INFO@RVT.ORG.UK</span></span></a>.
And please push the issue to local politicians, media etc.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Again,
this is not about denigrating the management of the Tavern, who have
kept it alive and kicking over the years. It's just about getting
clarity and assurances over its long-term future, and that any plans
for it stay true to its character. If this were any other bar, we
could all just find somewhere else to get pissed on a weekend. But
the strength of the RVT is that it engenders greater feeling than
that, and it means more than that – past and present. Those who go
there aren't just its customers, but a community too, so we should
act like it until its future is secured.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">--</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>EDIT: </b>Thanks to everyone who has helped push this issue. The RVT have now put out a statement in response. It's here: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheRVT">https://www.facebook.com/TheRVT</a> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Good news that they're engaging on it, but sadly the statement is mysteriously silent on most of the questions people are asking. The most simple one being who owns the RVT and what their long-term intentions are. It's important we all keep asking that, which many of us will - this has only deepened the mystery for me, anyway!</span></div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-10407213694877673562014-07-09T02:15:00.000-07:002014-07-09T02:15:00.430-07:00<div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 0.8em; margin-top: 0.6em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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A thing for the New Statesman <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/staggers/2014/07/politicians-must-address-fact-britains-middle-class-rapidly-sinking">here</a><br />---</div>
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<b>The British middle class is sinking. Is our politics big enough to meet the challenge?</b></div>
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An interesting statistic crept out of the Department for Work and Pensions last week, while the pubs of Britain no doubt buzzed with discussion about Jean-Claude Junker or how <u style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4137016.ece" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">someone in Ed Miliband's office</a></u> may or may not have recognised someone at a <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">FT</em> summer drinks reception.</div>
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According <u style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/325416/households-below-average-income-1994-1995-2012-2013.pdf" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">to the DWP</a>,</u> the average household income in 2012-13 was £440, unchanged on the year before. It represents the third consecutive year of stagnation or decline (depending on how you cut the figures). As the IFS have <u style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jul/01/household-incomes-no-higher-2002" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">noted</a></u>, in real terms this leaves median household income in roughly the same place as it was in 2002, and comes off the back of painfully slow wage growth from the start of the 2000s.</div>
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In the same week the increase in the price of homes reached an all-time high. Add in that a majority of people on typical incomes now have less than one month's income as savings, plus the slow <u style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21583307-growth-back-many-britons-it-does-not-feel-it-squeezing-hourglass" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">hollowing-out</a></u> of middle income jobs, and a pretty clear picture emerges. The foundations of middle class life – a decent income, assets, savings, pensions – are getting harder and harder to attain, especially for those just starting out. In many cases, debt has filled the gap.</div>
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This goes beyond just failures of the private sector. The welfare safety net has also become residualised. People on reasonable incomes can work their whole life and receive only paltry amounts when they lose their job. When it comes to both work and the state, people in the middle have been putting more in than they've been getting out for a long time.</div>
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It should go without saying that working class communities have had it hardest over the last thirty years. But the idea of middle class decline too is too often met with derision, especially among progressives.</div>
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Part of this is down to a distorted view of what "middle class" is, a popular association with what is in effect the upper middle classes; the world of piano recitals and Waitrose where "struggle" means difficulty meeting school fees. Of course, the middle class contains many like this too and they are doing more than fine. In fact, the most interesting development that experts have<u style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jul/24/middle-class-in-decline-society" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">pointed to</a></u> in recent years is the fracturing and polarisation of the middle class, between the upper echelons and those at the lower end. And previous generations who started out at the lower end of the middle class, bought a house at the right time, settled into a profession and now face retiring near the top may well be the last to make that journey en masse. In short, the bottom is falling out of the British middle class.</div>
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There's been a lot of talk about "narratives" recently. There's also been a lot of talk about how Ed Miliband doesn't have "a narrative". But in his defence, he's one of the few at the top of British politics to grasp this phenemenon, whatever his other difficulties. He's not totally alone – some figures on the right, for instance, including the brilliant Peter Franklin at ConHome, have twigged too. But wider interest is otherwise conspicuous by its absence, in Westminster at least.</div>
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Instead we get slightly echoey outdated debates about Europe, whether X or Y is "pro-business" or "anti-business", whether a particular view of public services is sufficiently "reforming" and so on and so forth. But surely the shape of that discussion changes in the face of such huge societal shifts? No doubt this failure to catch up is partly because the senior ranks of the commentariat are largely made up of those at the comfortable end of things (themselves probably among the last who can expect to make a good living out of a profession like journalism) - but it's depressing all the same.</div>
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To be fair, the answers are neither easy nor obvious. The likes of Resolution Foundation have been fantastic at laying out <u style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.resolutionfoundation.org/media/media/downloads/Growth_without_gain_-_Web.pdf" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the problem</a></u> of stagnating wages and ways to ameloriate it, but no one has come up with a wholesale plan for reversing the trend. Some of this is because it rubs up against global head winds and the modern divorce between power and politics. It probably requires trans-national solutions, or at least a revisiting of the way Britain approaches globalisation – a debate that hasn't even been opened here.</div>
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But those who over-play the inability of national government to fix things are also wrong, and usually have a vested ideological interest in doing so (in this sense the argument between those favouring a "bigger" or "shrunken" Labour offer in opposition is mostly phony, and a proxy for a bigger one about what can be achieved in government). Ideas that would be both effective and achievable include wholesale reform of corporate governance to include a significant role for workers; profit-sharing and other ways of spreading wealth; lower-cost routes into home ownership; breaking up and remaking British banking; decentralisation to cities; the prioritisation of vocational "middle skills"; prioritising British industry in procurement; reform of takeovers etc. When it comes to welfare, there is IPPR's <u style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.ippr.org/assets/media/images/media/files/publication/2011/07/national-savings-insurance_110726_7775.pdf" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">National Salary Insurance </a></u>scheme or SMF's "<u style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/Publication-Anglo-Flexicurity-A-safety-net-for-UK-workers.pdf" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">flexicurity"</a></u> proposals.</div>
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All of this can only start, though, with a recognition that our current journey back to basically the same political economy as we had before the crash is not what success looks like. It wasn't good enough then and it isn't now.</div>
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Marx famously wrote:</div>
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The lower strata of the middle class... all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.</div>
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Things may not be as apocalyptic or revolutionary now, but they are bad, and contradictions within modern British capitalism mean the lower end of the middle class <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">is</em> sinking. The entire middle is being stretched, squeezed and polarised as never before. The result is entire neighbourhoods – which on the face of things look serene – in fact struggling to keep their head above water, facing futures significantly less secure, less stable and less well-off than their parents. This shapes millions of people's everyday lives and influences their political attitudes, and it should influence our political discussion too. At the moment, though, it doesn't seem to be. Future generations will surely look back and wonder what on earth we were talking about instead.</div>
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Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-9506102870149618972014-03-06T04:02:00.001-08:002014-03-06T04:02:41.045-08:00Tory modernisers' best hope is an Ed Miliband victoryPiece for <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/03/tory-modernisers-best-hope-ed-miliband-victory">NewStatesman</a><br />
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<b>Tory modernisers' best hope is an Ed Miliband victory </b><br />
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<img alt="Defeat would open up space for reinvention." height="218" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/03/463218701.jpg?itok=k9T4i-mg" width="320" /><br />
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The British Conservative Party needs shock therapy. It may still scrape back into government in next year's general election but if it does, barring a miracle, it will be on a smaller share of the national vote than in 2010. This has been the case every time its been victorious since 1950. As a growing number within the party recognise, it's reaching a point where things have become unsustainable. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/25/tories-win-2015-working-class-ukip-disaster" style="border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Forty per cent of voters now say</a> they wouldn’t even consider voting Conservative, while the party has little base among ethnic minority and working class voters, especially in the north. Once-proud Tory heartlands like Sheffield and Manchester now have not even a single Conservative councillor. As the impressive David Skelton of Renewal has argued, voting Conservative in these parts has become counter-cultural.</div>
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In the 1980s and 1990s, the left was forced into a reckoning. It had suffered successive electoral defeats but it had also been intellectually defeated, with the end of the Cold War and shifts in the country's social fabric. The Conservatives have never really undergone such a reckoning, largely because Thatcher was never defeated at the ballot box, mostly thanks to a divided opposition. And so a mythology has grown up and still has hold over the party: that her brand of free market triumphalism won over the whole country, benefited the whole country, and can do so again.</div>
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This was always dubious – but has sustained itself even as the impact of her legacy on country and party sews division and resentment, especially in the deindustrialised north, and the "party of the rich" image has been baked in. As a creed, Thatcherism has come to rest on public deference to business elites, a faith that whatever their excesses, their inherent superiority will benefit us all in the end, which has been severely undermined by the financial crisis and flatlining wages.</div>
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Moreover, Britain may be a conservative country, with many attracted to Thatcher's ethics of self-reliance and discipline. But few outside the south-east ever shared the values of break-neck economic liberalism to which those ethics gave rise. A lot of people don't like to be made to feel powerless to forces shaping their lives, or like losers for not wanting to be self-made billionaires.</div>
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And yet Thatcherism remains the default instinct for much of the party – any departure is usually tactical or skin deep (with the notable exception of gay rights). Contrary to what many on the left think, the Conservative tradition is rich and long pre-dates the neoliberal era, encompassing communitarian and even social democratic schools of thought. Yet these days, any thinking in its ranks which entails fundamentally challenging the Thatcherite comfort zone is tossed aside. If the party get back in to power in 2015, this sleepwalking will continue, even if in its obliviousness it further erodes the electoral ground on which they can be returned.</div>
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Increasingly it seems that the only thing that can reverse the trend is Ed Miliband, smiling from the steps of 10 Downing Street. If this sounds like preposterous accelerationist tosh, think about it. Being beaten after just one term by a man the party's leading lights have long deemed unelectable would provoke huge internal recriminations. In this post-mortem there will open up space for those who understand the need to reinvent the party, from top to bottom both ideologically and organisationally; a project that Cameron initially grasped and then retreated from.Even if the initial leadership contest doesn't produce such a candidate, Labour may still rescue the Conservatives with their spell in government – though only if Miliband is as successful as he intends to be.</div>
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Unlike his predecessors, the Labour leader has made clear his desire to rework the political economy that Thatcher brought into place and New Labour left largely in tact. If (and it's still a huge if) he is successful, it would re-wire the rules of British politics: towards intervention in markets to make them work for consumers; towards active industrial policy and economic populism. Living standards and wages – reform of the economy to make it deliver for ordinary people - would become the central issues of British politics.</div>
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Such ground is the only place from which Conservative renewal can be fought, given the kind of votes they need to win. Were they to move onto it, combined with already potent messages on welfare and crime, they would be a formidable threat. Yet they seem incapable of doing so of their own accord. It's almost certainly too late in this Parliament, having already surrendered so much ground Labour in favour of a much narrower agenda. Increasingly, it seems, they will have to be forced there.</div>
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This may still be a little sunny, admittedly. Defeat for the Conservatives could well just result in a prolonged turn to the right and doubling-down, as it did last time. But unlike before, there's a range of intelligent and interesting people in Conservative ranks who understand what the party needs to do to broaden its appeal, and have placed reforming capitalism at the heart of their pitch. Jesse Norman, Skelton at Renewal, and Rob Halfon are just a few. Though currently fighting an uphill battle, they have already laid down a marker for any future battle to come. And who knows, their ascent may yet end up being Miliband's biggest threat, and greatest achievement.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-13944646460953768732014-02-13T08:56:00.000-08:002014-02-13T08:56:09.608-08:00In-work poverty is the greatest moral outrage of our generation - it deserves to be treated like it Blog from January, originally <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2014/01/the-moral-outrage-of-in-work-poverty/">here</a>.<br />
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<img alt="Poverty-in-Birmingham" src="http://shiftinggrounds.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/birmingham_poverty.jpg" /><br />
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The moral outrage of in-work poverty</h2>
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All things considered, I thought some of the reaction on the left recently to George Osborne’s intervention on the minimum wage bordered on the churlish. Even if Osborne’s conversion does owe more to psephology than theology, that a Conservative Chancellor sees Government action on it as a vote winner can only be a positive thing in the long term.</div>
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That said, as the Westminster road show has quickly moved on to other matters, the issue of low pay certainly shouldn’t be allowed to be ticked off as covered or consigned to footnotes in next year’s election. Not least for the Conservatives because it will take more than one policy announcement to reach the type of voters that have felt long ignored by them</div>
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More importantly, the matter demands far more attention than that – and a great deal more anger among Westminster opinion formers than it’s currently granted.</div>
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It’s also not just about economics, but the withering of a basic social contract, and something that goes to the heart of what’s gone wrong with work in this country.</div>
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No matter what <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">popular mythology tells us</a>, a great many people don’t actually like work; it’s supposed to perform a function. The bargain used to be that if people looked for work, got themselves out of bed and contributed, they would at least be afforded the dignity and self-sufficiency of being able to pay for a roof over their heads and food for them and their kids. Maybe over time there’d come the chance of a higher wage or home ownership.</div>
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It’s an understanding that has sustained support for capitalism, through all its flaws, for generations. Ultimately it survived in Britain because it could – when run in the right way – put food on the table for the vast majority.</div>
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Now all of that is unravelling. People are putting more in but getting less out. Growth up and wages flatlining. The jobs market hollowed out, making social mobility even harder. Affordable housing disappearing, rents ballooning. Increasingly, people are subjected to having to rely on help of the state or others to prop them up – not momentarily, but permanently.</div>
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A miserable litany of facts bears this out, so numerous they could fill the rest of this page. To spare you and give just a few: over 90% of new claims for housing support are from people in work, while the Trussell Trust say half of people who need to use their food banks have a job. For <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25287068" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">the first time</a>, more living on the breadline are in work than not. Two out of three children growing up in poverty do so in working households.</div>
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This applies to people who come here looking for a better life, too. For some reason, the likes of McDonalds and Costa have started to get their employees to bear a tiny flag of their home nation on their name badge. Visit one and the panoply of nations represented is a reminder if needed that these are the sort of jobs migrants do when they arrive: low paid and insecure. Its useful context for when politicians go headline hunting on ‘benefit tourism’. The number of migrants claiming social security is infinitesimally small, of course. But given most work, it’s likely that the bulk of those who do claim are in employment. Figures are hard to come by, but take the Working Tax Credit – 14.5% of its claimants are <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10426202/Migrants-more-likely-to-claim-work-benefits-than-Britons.html" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">non-UK national</a>, compared to 6.4% of out-of-work support (just 2.7% of JSA is claimed by EU migrants).</div>
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Contrary, then, to those who look to play people of different nationalities off against each other, their plight is a tiny part of a much broader picture affecting millions of their British neighbours and friends.</div>
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The sense of contributing more and getting less is echoed higher up the income scale too – higher tuition fees for the same standard of education; house prices up, quality down – but it is most acutely felt by those on lower incomes. It’s hardly any wonder so much of the electorate are so angry. Nor that many, grimly, take it out on those they (wrongly) deem to be getting an easy ride while they struggle.</div>
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Somewhere along the line, something has gone badly wrong. And given that low wage, insecure jobs are about the only jobs we’re creating as a country at the moment, it’s a crisis which will only get worse without action.</div>
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Even putting aside issues of GDP and central government spending, restoring that basic social compact of work providing a decent life is fundamental to restoring the spiritual and moral health of a country that calls itself first world. Certainly no one in public life can ever again talk credibly about ‘work being the best route out of poverty’, of opportunity or aspiration, without acknowledging it.</div>
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Tackling the cost of living is a vital part of this, of course, but it’s only one half of the challenge. Many uncomfortable with asking more from the powerful push lower tax as the answer, but even abolishing all tax on people on the minimum wage, at great expense, would still leave them with less money than a Living Wage paid by their employer.</div>
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Even at £7 an hour, a full time worker in London takes home just over £1,000 a month. The average private rent in the city is £520 a month per person for a flatshare. A Zone 1-3 travelcard: £136. Then there’s council tax, utility bills, and so on.</div>
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Far stronger across the board action on the Living Wage (and London Living Wage) is simply non-negotiable, not least as it would have a positive upward pressure on the wages just above it too. Employee representation on company boards also desperately needs to be strengthened if the distribution of rewards are ever to be addressed properly, and sectoral collective bargaining strengthened. These last two are partly what has distinguished the <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2014/01/labours-economic-plans" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">‘Coordinated Market Economies’</a> of northern Europe which Labour rightly admires.</div>
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Needless to say we have not arrived at this sorry state through the failure of any one individual, government or even party. But that someone in Britain can now work a 37 hour week and still not be able to provide the basics for themselves and their family is a national disgrace, and the starkest symptom of how far we’ve fallen as a country. If our politics can’t fix it, we’ve every right to wonder what it’s there for.</div>
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Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-49361622775481745562013-11-13T14:14:00.000-08:002013-11-13T14:22:34.319-08:00On energy and elsewhere, ownership matters too<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
For<a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2013/11/public-ownership-energy-germany/"> ShiftingGrounds</a><br />
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<img alt="Berlin" src="http://shiftinggrounds.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Berlin-460x270.jpg" /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: DroidSansRegular;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><b>On energy and elsewhere, ownership matters too<br /></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: DroidSansRegular;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Modern German politics is not known for it’s cliff-edge drama and ideological adventure, yet it’s capital city had a bit of both in the last few days. Last Sunday was polling day for a local referendum on whether to take Berlin’s energy grid into local democratic ownership, following a long-standing community campaign (</span></span><em style="border: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Berliner Energietisch</em><span style="color: #222222; font-family: DroidSansRegular;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">) to force the issue onto the ballot paper. Public anger at Vattenfall, the company that owns the grid and has long monopolised Berlin’s energy, helped it on its way.</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">In the end, a whopping 83% of votes cast were in favour of local ownership, though the poll came just short – by an excruciating 0.9% – of the strict voter turn-out rules imposed on local referendums, thus failing (somewhat grim vindication of spoiler tactics employed by CDU and SPD opponents to force voting-day into dark rainy November). Nevertheless this moment in German politics is worth a closer look, not least for how it can inform our own debates in the UK.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">For a start, it’s not the first such campaign in the country – voters in Hamburg have already recently approved ‘communalisation’ along the same lines, as disaffection at privatisation grows. It also runs parallel with an even more impressive campaign run by local people in Berlin (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">BürgerEnergie</em>), separate to the vote and therefore still ongoing, to buy and run the grid <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">themselves</em> when the franchise comes up for renewal in 2014.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The scale and ambition of both Berlin citizen campaigns are stark. Both go beyond narrow party political lines, drawing in church groups, tenant organisations, welfare groups and the like. Both want to invest in Berlin profits from what is a natural monopoly, rather than see them siphoned off to shareholders. </span></div>
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But crucially, both also offer an alternative not just to privatisation but more conventional top-down nationalisation too, which in many countries (including the UK) became overly-bureaucratic and unresponsive. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Energietisch</em>, for example, proposed that the board of the body set up by the local authority to run Berlin’s energy grid would be made up of 6 directly elected Berliners and 7 employees, with the other 2 seats reserved for the local energy officials. They also aimed to open the system up to low-power, small and medium sized renewable producers.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">All of this is useful in expanding the horizons of our current national debate on energy, however much it has shifted in a progressive direction recently. It’s a reminder to keep thinking big. Ed Miliband deserves huge credit for getting our energy debate moving beyond the status quo, and he has been brave and commendable in his push for a price freeze, moving the centre-ground in a way his critics always said couldn’t be done. But there is still space to explore beyond even that (which <a href="http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/11/04/nationalise-energy-and-rail-companies-say-public/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px; color: #0066cc; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">the public would already permit</span></a>, incidentally).</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">There is always going to be a limit to corralling private organisations into doing or not doing something. Are democratic ‘public options’ or co-operative alternatives, to undercut profiteering, realistic? Surely it’s worth exploring, as the Germans have started to do.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">This goes beyond energy, too. In general Labour could be thinking a bit more about democratic alternatives to both privatisation and top-down old-style nationalisation, rather than just relying on the old levers like the tax system to influence private behaviour.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">This could work in important areas of policy being strangled by private interests, such as city transport (regional authorities running train or bus services) or housing (local authority-run social lettings agencies, for instance, already exist but are in need of a bigger push – they are also self-financing beyond the initial start-up money). Employee reps on company boards are also a good start, meanwhile, but there is a huge amount more in that area that could be done to bring the voice of employees at the top of companies in the UK up to speed with the likes of Germany or Sweden (the <a href="http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1674829" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px; color: #0066cc; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">1977 Bullock report</span></a> is a good place to start).</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Beyond that, as a movement the left should arguably be doing more to encourage, foster and support the kind of genuine community movements that might want to make a bid to run a local service or utility, where the private sector is failing.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Such movements are not pipe-dream stuff, and while not mainstream they’re not as rare as you think. One already exists <a href="http://labourlist.org/2012/09/dover-a-chance-to-put-theory-into-practice/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px; color: #0066cc; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">in Dover</span></a> for instance, where local residents, businesses and port employees recently banded together to stave off privatisation of the local port, and are currently in <a href="http://www.peoplesport.org.uk/home/agm-2013-dover-town-hall/16" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px; color: #0066cc; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">talks</span></a> to bring it under community control. Likewise, in football: a growing number of fans are starting groups aimed at part-owning their football club, the most prominent of which is Manchester United fans’ <a href="http://www.joinmust.org/about/index.php" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px; color: #0066cc; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">MUST</span></a>. The legal and logistical barriers to these kind of groups forming and succeeding need to be interrogated at a national level.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course there are a hundred and one other competing priorities as the election draws near. So let’s at least set a realistic mid-term goal: it would be great to see a senior Labour figure give a speech on the kind of themes discussed above in the next six months.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Over the last few years, the party – and the left in general – has finally become comfortable and eloquent in talking about the limits of markets, or where they have broken and failed to deliver; now it’s time to take the German’s lead, and start discussing the role of new public alternatives in fixing things.</span></div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-51491108172456269432013-10-06T10:23:00.001-07:002013-10-06T10:25:48.689-07:00Return to growth has helped Labour more than the ConservativesBlog for <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2013/09/conservative-conference-2013-the-return-to-growth-has-helped-labour-more-than-the-conservatives/">ShiftingGrounds on 30th Sept</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: DroidSansRegular; line-height: 21px;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Return to growth has helped Labour more than the Conservatives</span></b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: DroidSansRegular; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Wandering around Labour conference last week, it was hard not to be struck as much by what wasn’t being discussed as what was. Among everything, there was one particularly notable absentee. It’s something which should give the Conservatives, who kicked off their get-together in Manchester yesterday, more pause for thought than they might initially grant it.</span><br />
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Flicking through the fringe guide in Brighton, I struggled to spot a single event dedicated to austerity. By comparison, last year’s conference fizzed with debate on double dip recessions, multiplier effects, what a fiscal stimulus might or might not look like. This year: barely anything. The trench warfare of ‘austerity vs growth’ that so dominated the first few years of this Parliament is dead, it seems. Largely it’s been killed off by a nominal return to growth, of sorts, and the Labour leadership’s recent decision to back Conservative 2015/2016 spending plans.</div>
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In many ways this is profoundly depressing. The intellectual case against the Government’s economic strategy was and remains overwhelming. While it continued to drag the country back into recession or flat lining growth, it was perfectly understandable that pointing this out consumed the large bulk of Labour’s emotional and political energy.</div>
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But the truth is the party have long been fighting an uphill battle with public opinion on this issue. Not least this is because, as widely noted, the Conservatives and their friends were very adroit at framing the problem as one of over-borrowing and over-spending; credit card metaphors and all. Whatever the empirical merits of its case, the left by comparison has failed to come up with a critique of austerity that resonates outside the pages of the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">London Review of Books</em>.</div>
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Consequently, even as economic news worsened, while the deficit and economic crisis were the dominant concern in British politics, Labour were – and probably always will be – at a disadvantage.</div>
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Thus, as the agenda has moved on as growth filters back, it’s been to the party’s advantage. While I <span style="border: 0px; color: navy; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/05/fran%C3%A7ois-hollande-has-achieved-far-more-his-critics-suggest" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">still think</a></span></span> there were less painful ways of neutralising the issue, the pledge to match the Coalition’s 15/16 spending plans has also at least made it harder for the Conservatives to allege that Labour will ‘turn the taps back on’.</div>
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The resulting breathing space has allowed Labour to move on to broader, longer-term and more populist themes that <span style="border: 0px; color: navy; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/09/if-ed-miliband-socialist-so-are-most-public" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">go with the grain</a></span></span> of public opinion: who benefits from growth, the cost of living and the fundamental structural problems in our economy. Ed Balls gave a much more rounded speech than in recent years, including on childcare among other issues. Chukka Umunna spoke encouragingly on economic democracy and employee representation within companies. And in the best speech of his leadership so far, Ed Miliband outlined the big strategic themes that would define his premiership: a global race to the top, not the bottom, and an economy that works for working people.</div>
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Though more will need to be done to flesh all of this out, already Labour are making head way, as the poll bounce off the back of Miliband’s pledge on energy prices has shown. They have set the agenda and started to <span style="border: 0px; color: navy; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2013/09/ed-miliband-the-imaginary-centre-ground-of-the-british-elite/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">forge a new centre-ground</a></span></span>, tapping into what Miliband advisor Tim Horton <span style="border: 0px; color: navy; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jan/12/battle-middle-britain-angry" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">has called</a> </span></span>‘the angry middle’. It’s hard to imagine they would have the political oxygen to do so if the economy were still in the tank as the party gathered in Brighton.</div>
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The Conservatives, meanwhile, are left in a difficult position. Growth may be strong enough for Labour to see the need to broaden its pitch, but it isn’t strong – or <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">felt</em> – enough for the public to give the Conservatives any real credit in the polls, or for the party to credibly be triumphant. Labour’s new living standards agenda also plays to three key Tory blind spots. The first is that the key squeezes on people’s disposable incomes – energy, transport, housing and the like – along with stagnating wages, all represent failures in private markets. All ultimately require critiques of and interventions in those markets.</div>
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This is not something Cameron and co. feel instinctively at home with. Like most politicians who cut their teeth in the pre-crash era, they are much happier reforming the state than the market. When they do offer answers they tend towards the tentative or technical. You feel they will probably always struggle to tap into the public’s anger on these issues, or match Labour for zeal.</div>
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The second weakness is Osborne’s continued faith – repeated over the weekend – that rising growth will be enough to help increase living standards across the board. The Resolution Foundation have long shown that this is no longer the case, and has not been since 2003.</div>
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Finally, and most pressingly, is that Cameron has long struggled to define himself or his Government beyond the ‘national emergency’ of tackling the budget deficit. Both in opposition and in government he has done little to map out what kind of country he would like Britain to be in twenty years time. There is little sense of mission beyond the bottom line. The ‘Big Society’ was his first and doomed attempt at redressing this. The ‘Global Race’ narrative is probably his best effort, but it remains clunky and lacks cut through with the public.</div>
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All of which represents a significant opportunity for Labour as the agenda moves beyond the narrow politics of the deficit, though none of which should be a cause for complacency for the party. Unfortunately, welfare in particular is still an issue in which the Conservatives are able to mine vast reservoirs of public enmity – and the Labour leadership still need to do a little more to grapple with the issue.</div>
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But the last few weeks have shown anything, it’s that the second half of this Parliament will be fought on much tougher ground for the Government than the first. The facts of British political life are no longer Conservative.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-1325773050294855232013-08-29T12:31:00.000-07:002013-08-29T12:32:32.653-07:00Intervention in Syria comes not too soon, but too lateBlog for <a href="http://politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2013/08/29/comment-intervention-in-syria-comes-not-too-soon-but-too-lat">Politics.co.uk </a><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Intervention in Syria comes not too soon, but too late</span></b><br />
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It's hard not to feel dizzied and bewildered by almost every aspect of the Syrian crisis – including the debate on intervention which has now engulfed the UK. Following it in recent days, I've seen a great many furrowed brows over the possible strengthening of Al-Qaida, frets over the risk of escalation and exhortations to 'Stop the War' and keep 'Hands off Syria'.<br />
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All good stuff, you understand. Except oddly, they all seem to be taking place now - in August 2013 – rather than in 2011 or 2012, when they were most sorely needed, as the original democratic revolution was being brutally put down by the Assad regime. Since then, 100,000 people have died, half of whom are civilians. Al-Qaida-linked elements within the opposition have been significantly strengthened. Things have escalated.<br />
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This has occurred at least in part because of Western failure in the face of human catastrophe to provide the necessary solidarity and support for moderate secularist factions in the Syrian opposition (all the while, funding for their more extremist counter-parts flooded in from Qatar and elsewhere). Or to take active steps, as in Libya, to protect the Syrian population from systematic slaughter. This was something neither left nor the right in either Washington or London were willing to countenance, stuck variously under their 'realist' or 'anti-imperialist' shades of isolationism.<br />
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The result is what we see before us today: a cramped and partial debate, confined to punitive strikes over a single chemical weapons attack. Should such strikes come, they are better than nothing, whatever their flaws. Hopeful cries for a 'political settlement' or to 'get round the negotiating table' tidily side-step the fact that the Syrian regime currently has little incentive to do so. It's a grim reality that it often takes the credible threat of force to even get tin-pot thugs like Assad to the table, as experience with Slobodan Milosevic twice showed in the 1990s.<br />
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But this narrow focus on chemical weapons has made the government's political wrangles yesterday evening rather predictable. When a mandate is sought on the back of one specific event, it is quite logical that more evidence will be first sought on that event. More importantly, though, this limited focus won't help protect the civilian population from murder by other means. The foreign secretary has been advancing a humanitarian case (publicly stating the aim to avoid further "humanitarian distress"). But what is being proposed militarily – precision strikes on chemical weapons facilities - will not achieve that on its own. He is setting himself up to fail.</div>
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The truth is the red line should have been set far short of chemical warfare, because intervention in Syria is horribly belated. As ghastly as footage from last week is – so much so I'm not even going to attempt the words to do it justice – from a humanitarian point of view it's not obvious why it's so much worse than any of the number of other civilian massacres Assad's militias have gleefully carried out since late 2011. Take Houla in 2012, for example, where they went door-to-door with guns and knives, executing children one-by-one along the way. These are at least analogues to the atrocities which triggered war in Kosovo.<br />
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Needless to say, piecemeal approaches to such butchery will not suffice. Assuming that Western powers are now serious about halting it, intervention must come in the form of wide-ranging efforts to both protect civilians and tip the balance of power in favour of moderate rebels against both Assad and Al-Qaida. The former should constitute humanitarian safe-zones properly patrolled by the Free Syrian Army and a No-Fly Zone. As well as air strikes on weapons facilities and army airports, the latter - possible under such protective cover – should see every effort taken to actively train, arm and build up the moderate FSA, as <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139874/michael-weiss/how-to-oust-assad" style="color: #c1272d; margin: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Michael Weiss</a> forcefully argues.<br />
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None of which is to pretend this would be easy. Even if it went well, it would still be hideously imperfect, ugly and complex. To put it mildly, Nato power and influence is a less than ideal instrument through which to achieve progressive ends. But it's simply not true, as those on the far left contend, that its every move is always and only reducible to an act of imperialism. <a href="http://politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2013/08/28/the-anti-war-left-s-response-to-syria-has-been-teenage-and-i" style="color: #c1272d; margin: 0px; text-decoration: none;">As Ian Dunt argues</a>, few can explain through this prism why the West are acting now. The reality is states' interests are not fixed or neatly explained, but constructed and constantly in flux; a mesh of time, place, systems and personalities.<br />
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Very occasionally, that can and should be pressed into engineering the least worst outcome in a humanitarian emergency. That is all we can hope for in Syria. But it is better than what most Syrians have lived through for the last two years, or what awaits them if nothing more is done. Achieving even this, however, won't be possible unless we face up to our own failures and omissions, and recognise that the time for action came a long way back on the road to Jobar.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-60191346491521724392013-07-07T13:17:00.000-07:002013-07-07T13:17:54.165-07:00Croatia and the EU: more questions than answersPost for <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2013/07/croatia-and-the-eu-more-questions-than-answers/">ShiftingGrounds</a><br />
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As preparations gathered pace in Split for Sunday’s celebrations, marking Croatia’s membership of the EU, the city’s local radio stations provided a fitting soundtrack. ‘Go West’ by the Pet Shop Boys seemed to play almost on loop throughout the day, filtering out of nearly every restaurant or coffee shop you walked by.</div>
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The country’s newspapers had been counting down the days. Despite public scepticism, there is a sense at least that Croatia has taken up its rightful place. The journalist Jenine di Giovanni wrote in her 2004 book on the Balkans:</div>
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“…this colourful image [of the Balkans] was exactly the sort that the Croats did not want to promote. They were not <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">really</em> Balkan people; they often told you they were Southern Austrians. The Croat denial fostered a sense of mixed identity in Zagreb. The people dressed in Armani but lived in apartments without central heating. They carried the latest Nokia phones but had no money in their bank account…</div>
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Their biggest grievance was belonging to a Balkan group they did not want to be part of. They saw themselves as a Western democracy.”</div>
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Yet identity and pride aside, it’s hard not to wonder what question the country’s EU membership is the answer to – not least when considering the way its political class has prioritised it over the last ten years (hence much grievance from them, too, on the extensive vetting the European Commission subjected Croatia to).</div>
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True, it – or rather the prospect of it – has been good for the region’s fragile peace, helping to hold the Dayton settlement in place. The scale and horror of Serb atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina often obscure Croatia’s own crimes in the same country just two decades ago. It was the Zagreb government, after all, who connived with Bosnian-Croat forces to turn brutally on their Bosniak allies, aiming to tear off parts of Bosnia for their own, in pursuit of a lesser but still stark Croatian imitation of Milosovic’s expansionism.</div>
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Here Brussels has dangled EU membership effectively. It has used it to ensure Croatia properly complies with the International Criminal Court’s investigation into war crimes during the 90′s. The same incentive has also played a role in dissuading Zagreb from resuming support for still restless Bosnian-Croat secessionists.</div>
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But even still, in the long term it’s far from clear that the Bosnian question is totally settled. Leaders in Bosnia’s Republic Srpska – the Serb state within a state created at Daytan – have made obvious their own desire to secede. One of the main barriers to this at present is the lack of support they’re likely to enjoy from Belgrade, who are also on their best behaviour under promise of EU membership.</div>
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However, once this promise becomes a reality and the incentive disappears, that could easily change. In the ensuing melee, who knows how the Croats – now a member not a prospective one – would react. They may again see a opportunity to claim what isn’t theirs, especially given Bosnian-Croats have a (not insignificant) vote in Croatian elections. This is unlikely under the current SDP government, who don’t rely on those votes, but could be feasible if the centre-right HDZ returned. Certainly far right Croatian nationalism hasn’t totally gone away, as the uncomfortable amount of fascist graffiti scrawled across Split can attest to.</div>
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More immediately, however, there’s the prospects for the Croatian economy. Croatia’s bid for EU membership was kick started 12 years ago, when Western free-market capitalism – which post-Maastricht the EU has become the standard bearer for – was in its pomp. Entry to the EU represents in many ways the completion of long efforts by Croatia’s political elites to ‘harmonise’ the country’s economy with European orthodoxy.</div>
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Croatia’s economy today is thus completely deindustrialised (albeit this was aided by war damage); it is in large part a service sector economy, dependent on tourism and retail – which struggles to provide adequately for a lot of the country. Most of its growth in the early 2000′s was driven by consumer credit.</div>
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Sadly, between Croatia’s application and accession, the flaws of that model have been horribly exposed across Europe. Its economy is consequently stuck in our recession; at 20%, Croatian unemployment is worse only in Greece and Spain in EU terms (youth unemployment is over 50%). Its banks, largely foreign owned and piled high with European debt, are vulnerable. Household debt has shot up, as has government debt.</div>
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The dichotomy that di Giovanni wrote about has seemingly continued – though new shopping complexes have continued popping up across Croatia’s cities, absolute poverty has almost doubled over the last decade.</div>
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Despite the vague hopes of Croatia’s President, Ivo Josipović, it is hard to see how formal acceptance into the European club helps all this. Indeed in at least one sense it’s made it worse: one of the ugliest components of Croatia’s EU ‘preparations’ was the sight of Brussels forcing the privatisation of the country’s shipyards, which still make up a sizeable chunk of Croatia’s exports. In Split alone – across town from the palm-treed, tourist friendly promenade that hosted Sunday’s celebrations – this has seen over 1,000 people lose their jobs. The jobs of the remaining 2,000 workers hang in the balance, but if the private company which now owns the yard do take them back on, many will be on a part time or temporary contracts.</div>
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All of which leaves you with the feeling that a great country has been rather led astray. Croatia stumbles into the EU mired in recession, with falling living standards, and in desperate need of a new model of economic growth. The Commission needn’t have worried; it will fit in all too well.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-30587858284546111252013-06-11T10:09:00.000-07:002013-06-11T10:09:43.133-07:00Why Is There No Daily Show In The UK?<br />
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Blog for <a href="http://vadamagazine.com/11/06/2013/opinions/daily-show">Vada magazine </a></div>
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“Why is there no socialism in the United States?” was the question that occupied lofty European intellectuals in the early 20th century. As they gazed across the Atlantic they wondered where their American brethren had gone wrong. This week that grand tradition has been turned on its head, by the news that Britain’s very own John Oliver has<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/jun/07/john-oliver-the-daily-show" style="color: #7f034f;" target="_blank" title="http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/jun/07/john-oliver-the-daily-show"> stepped in for Jon Stewart on <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Daily Show</em></a>. This poses a question that’s long bugged many of us who share a love for US TV, namely, why is there no <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Daily Show</em> in the UK? Why have we never even come close to producing one?</div>
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If it’s worrying that a comedian as sharp as Oliver couldn’t find a home on these shores, it’s more obvious that he would fit right in on <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Daily Show</em>. As the recent fall out to Stewart’s brilliant send up of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyDOAQNsTrI" style="color: #7f034f;" target="_blank" title="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyDOAQNsTrI">Mohammed Morsi</a> – which sparked a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/03/us-embassy-cairo-twitter-stewart" style="color: #7f034f;" target="_blank" title="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/03/us-embassy-cairo-twitter-stewart">diplomatic incident </a>- highlights, the great thing about the show is that it does not only observe the news astutely, it very often helps shape it; such is its influence. For instance, it played a subtle but important role in discrediting the <a href="http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/jon-stewart-takes-down-fox-and-their-chaos" style="color: #7f034f;" target="_blank" title="http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/jon-stewart-takes-down-fox-and-their-chaos">Romney campaign</a> during its formative stages last summer.</div>
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The state of satire in the UK, by comparison, is painfully weak. The lamentable, self-serving narcissism of <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Mock The Week </em>and the vacuity of the innumerable and interchangeable weekly panel shows of <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">8 out of 10 Cats</em>’ ilk just do not compare. Then there’s <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">10 O’Clock Live</em>, which returned for a second run recently. Styled as an answer to<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Daily Show</em>, it has just never felt anywhere near as clever, usually coming off instead like every dickish common room clown you ever hated. Even the more grown up <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Have I Got News For You</em> doesn’t have the bite of old.</div>
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Can anyone imagine any of these making it into the news broadcasts, or being feared by the powerful? Could they threaten to make or break a politician’s career?</div>
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In seeking an explanation for all this, it’s hard not to reach a rather obvious conclusion: how many mainstream comedians in the UK actually care about politics? I mean really care?</div>
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For them, the political class and politics exist mainly as something to have a dig at, to wring cheap points from. Few of our comedians understand politics, few want to understand it. They are divorced from the process they joke about. For them it is something easy to point at, a sitting target for a few more lithe one liners.</div>
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Looking back, this is probably best embodied by Jimmy Carr on <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">10 O’Clock Live </em>as he cracked lame jokes about tax avoidance while practicing it himself. Or the airy uncertainty of Lauren Laverne, trying to look interested in the slightly stilted studio ‘debate’ she’s introducing off the autocue, before the show dissolves into another bout of pointing out how funny Ed Miliband looks. Or the silly stunts of <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Revolution Will Not Be Televised</em>. It is political satire made by people who couldn’t care less, made for those who feel roughly the same.</div>
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Ironically it’s the <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">10 O’Clock Show</em>‘s other presenter, Charlie Brooker, who shows us where this style of comedy leads us, in an episode of his mini-series <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Black Mirror</em>, ‘<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw_ytQolRMI" style="color: #7f034f;" target="_blank" title="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw_ytQolRMI">The Waldo Moment</a>‘.</div>
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True, outside of weekly shows of this sort, we have <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Thick Of It</em>, which though cynical has generally been well researched and three dimensional, but even this in its final series tended to play to the gallery. It felt a little too easy as it went looking for the next cult one-liner, or sweary portmanteau, and proved less interested in exploring the bigger picture.</div>
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The difference with <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Daily Show</em> is it does actually care. It is so funny and effective because it has politics – and often the rightness of its broader point is what makes it so potent. Stewart pokes fun at the stuffiness and absurdity of the system, but he evidently believes passionately in the possibility of politics itself. Much of <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Daily Show</em>’s comedy comes from a frustration and exasperation for a better world that you just don’t get from its British counterparts.</div>
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Much of this could be put down to Anglo-American cultural differences, but that doesn’t seem wholly satisfactory (the French, for instance, have the similarly fearsome <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Les Guignols</em>). Maybe there is a simple lesson at the heart of <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Daily Show’</em>s endurance, while so many of our British pretenders have fallen by the wayside. To effectively laugh at politics, you have to learn to love it first.</div>
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Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-45023327115635357422013-05-08T12:36:00.000-07:002013-05-08T12:38:06.485-07:00François Hollande has achieved far more than his critics suggestPiece for <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2013/05/hollande-still-offers-some-hope-for-the-left/">Shifting Grounds</a> and <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/05/fran%C3%A7ois-hollande-has-achieved-far-more-his-critics-suggest">New Statesman</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.65625px;"><br />If you listen carefully, you can hear it coming. With next Monday marking one year since François Hollande was elected French President, a tidal wave of I told-you-so’s and smugness is about to be visited upon us by Westminster’s commentariat.</span><br />
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It’s fair to say that most of them have never much liked the French president. And we are sure to be gleefully informed that the first year of his Presidency has been a disaster. It will invariably be held up as a stark warning to Labour against carrying any challenge to the austerity consensus into the next election.</div>
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It won’t surprise you to learn that upon closer inspection, things turn out to be a bit more complicated than that.</div>
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Hollande has certainly had a difficult time of it, sliding recently to 25 per cent approval in the polls. Much of this can be laid at the door of his one unambiguous failure – his inability to overcome German opposition to redrawing the EU’s fiscal pact towards a greater focus on growth. As a result, unemployment is stuck at around 10%, and consumer confidence is low. The Eurozone remains largely frozen.</div>
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Some of it is also his own personal style. Hollande’s more low key, unfashioned image and patient approach – once a selling point – has bored a nation who became used to the glitz and hyperactivity of the Sarkozy years (in much the same way that ‘Not Flash, Just Gordon’ rebounded on Brown).</div>
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But if he has failed to offer much hope at a European level, the same cannot be said about his record at home. For starters, he has already made good on most of his key campaign promises, such as the hiring of 60,000 new teachers, raising the minimum wage and setting up a Public Investment Bank to lend where banks won’t (which given time could prove crucial to the country’s recovery).</div>
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But it is on budgetary matters – tax and spend – where Hollande has offered something most markedly different. Contrary to received wisdom in parts of the British press, the French President never campaigned against the principle of deficit reduction; simply against the notion that this is best achieved through deep spending cuts and huge tax hikes on ordinary people (this is after all what austerity has come to mean). And it is here that his actions in government bear far greater scrutiny than the widely held, lazy caricature that he has bowed to 'inevitable' cuts.</div>
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In 2013, only a third of Hollande’s deficit reduction measures comes from reducing spending. And all of this is coming from departmental spending freezes, not deep cuts.</div>
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The rest comes from increased taxes, largely on big businesses, banks and wealthy individuals. This includes increased wealth taxes, alongside hikes on taxes on assets and dividends. A new 45 per cent top rate has been brought in for incomes over €150,000, while companies will have to pay 75 per cent tax on any salaries over €1 million (replacing the 75 per cent income tax rate struck down by France’s constitutional court). Big banks and oil companies have also been hit with special levies. Tax exemptions have been scrapped.</div>
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While weak growth across Europe has made things harder than expected, these measures will still see France’s deficit fall to 3.7 per cent in 2013, from 4.8 per cent in 2012. Hollande has also shown admirable flexibility, resisting pressure to bring in any further deficit reduction measures to meet draconian EU targets while the economy is still weak (he has instead delayed them).</div>
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The ratio between taxes and spending reductions will level up a little in 2014, and some entitlements may be means tested. But freezes are likely to continue to take precedence to significant cuts on the spending side.</div>
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Whatever one’s view of Hollande, to equate this with the medicine meted out by other Governments in Europe is fatuous. Compare it, for instance, to George Osborne’s approach, whose ratio of cuts to taxes is 80:20, with that 20 per cent borne by people on average incomes while millionaires pay less. It’s also a world away from the broad-based slash and burn policies being implemented in Italy or Greece. Low and middle income households in France have been protected, as have public services.</div>
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Here Labour can still draw positive lessons, as beyond the need for short-term stimulus now, they face up to longer-term decisions over whether to accept the enormous cuts currently pencilled in by the Tories for 2015 and beyond. The deficit faced by any incoming Labour government is likely to be of a similar order to that faced by the French President.</div>
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Drawing inspiration from Hollande, but outside the fiscal straight jack imposed on Eurozone countries, Labour could set a longer more flexible timetable for elimination of the deficit. Assuming they inherit low growth, they could then pledge a freeze on overall departmental spending. This would be tough but would cancel planned Tory cuts and shut down accusations of profligacy or ‘turning the taps back on’ in a relatively painless way, providing them space to talk more about growth and living standards. Beyond that, levies on the well off and big businesses (e.g Financial Transactions Tax, Land Value Tax, restoring the main rate of corporation tax etc) should go towards paying for the rest of deficit reduction.</div>
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Within this overall spending envelope, further tax rises on the top (a 50p rate, mansion tax etc) could pay for tax cuts for those on low and middle incomes, aiding demand. Growth measures requiring capital spend would then be funded by taking money from budgets with the least impact on domestic demand (cuts in defence and international development to pay for a large house building programme, for instance).</div>
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There are many areas, of course, where Miliband will want and need to do the exact opposite of Hollande. He will have to be careful to not be seen to over-promise, given the public’s already brittle faith in politics. But a closer reading of François Hollande than we will be afforded in our newspapers reveals an important truth; one that can be rescued from the carnage of an otherwise difficult first year for the Socialist President. When it comes to how, when and on whose backs the national books are balanced, there are still choices.</div>
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Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-37306647292928827862013-03-26T06:29:00.000-07:002013-03-26T06:30:11.381-07:00<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: DroidSansRegular; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; padding: 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">
<a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2013/03/ken-loach-clement-attlee-can-we-revive-the-spirit-of-45/">Piece for ShiftingGrounds</a> on Ken Loach's new film</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Can we revive the spirit of 45?</span></b><br />
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<img alt="Clement-Attlee" src="http://shiftinggrounds.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Clement-Attlee-460x270.jpg" /></div>
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Of the twentieth century it’s often remarked that “the left won the culture war, the right won the economic war”. If nothing else, Ken Loach’s Spirit of 45, out in cinemas last week, is a useful reminder that this did not always seem like being a foregone conclusion.</div>
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A great deal has changed since then, of course, as the film expends little subtlety in telling us. And indeed many have wasted no time in dismissing Loach as nostalgic or simplistic, something he probably leaves himself open to with his use of sepia tone and eventual descent into agitprop (Ms Thatcher emerges from nowhere to shatter the reverie, encouraging the audience in my showing to audibly hiss!).</div>
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But past its casual bursts of pantomime, The Spirit of 45 is a beautiful and inspiring movie. It leaves you, as I suppose it intends to, with the question of what we can revive of that time – of, as the late Tony Judt might <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/?pagination=false" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">put it</a>, “what is living and what is dead?” What can be resuscitated and how?</div>
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The first – and the most striking thing about that era – was the sheer scale of ambition of the Labour government. They faced circumstance which make today’s problems seem meagre by comparison: a country decimated by war, fiscal deficits of 21.5%, national debt at nearly 250% of GDP. And yet they embarked on a programme of wholesale transformation of the British economy and society – not because it was romantic, but because it was the right way to solve those problems.</div>
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In many ways an experiment, this boldness is a salutary reminder to those of us on the left who at times have had our horizons narrowed by the last thirty years of free-market triumphalism, or even the austerity of the past few. Too often we content ourselves to talk big but fiddle at the edges; a tweak and a nudge here, a tax incentive there. Ownership and control matter, as do institutions; public and private interest are not synonymous – the former should always be a buffer to the latter, not a mere facilitator.</div>
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Simple truths but ones too often forgotten. And relevant when we look at our country today. What really is the case, for example, for continuing with the absurd public subsidy to train companies to run our railways, instead of just taking what is a natural monopoly back into public ownership? In energy and banking industries, we should at least be looking at national or regional ‘public options’ which could undercut profiteering from the cartels that dominate those industries.</div>
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What these institutions might look like brings us to what Loach pinpoints as the failure of the left in the late twentieth century. While the collectivism of the post-war years expressed itself through politics, that spirit largely stopped at the ballot box. Nationalised institutions eventually became sclerotic and bureaucratic; run in the interests of people but with little of their input.</div>
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The only way by which the left of today can take up the spirit of 1945, while not repeating its failures, is through a relentless focus on <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/03/the-case-for-economic-democracy/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">economic democracy</a>. Where institutions are state backed, they should be run equally by management and employees, ideally with third party input too. The plans for a <a href="http://labourlist.org/2012/09/dover-a-chance-to-put-theory-into-practice/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">‘Peoples Port of Dover’</a> – controlled equally by employees, local residents and businesses – provides a good model.</div>
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This ethic also needs to be extended right across the economy, including to businesses. For example, <a href="http://www.redpepper.org.uk/economic-democracy-the-lefts-big-new-idea/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Peter Tatchell</a> and others have long argued for medium and large companies to be required to be run in this way, with shareholders and employees represented equally on boards, alongside an agreed (smaller) third group. This reflects the recommendations of the <a href="http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1674829" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1977 Bullock Report</a>, never enacted in time before the tide of Thatcherism swept all such considerations away.</div>
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The dream of abolishing the profit motive has evaporated, and it is very unlikely to come back. Over a century social democracy (and even democratic socialism) has indeed sadly gone, as <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/76/dylan-riley-bernstein-s-heirs" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Dylan Riley</a> puts it,“from a strategy for achieving socialism to a policy package for managing capitalism”. But if that’s to be the case, lets at least do it comprehensively.</div>
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Undoubtedly though, there are a some elements of the era Loach venerates which are dead – and to which it is less easy to reconcile. The working class still exists, but it is <a href="http://leftcentral.org.uk/2011/08/05/chavs-the-demonization-of-the-working-class-by-owen-jones-a-review/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">far more fractured</a>, far less homogeneous than it was; the very nature of our <a href="http://newleftreview.org/I/166/eric-hobsbawm-labour-in-the-great-city" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">cities have also changed</a>. This all creates significant barriers to the important work of political and trade union organisation, particularly in the private sector.</div>
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As does the most pressing change of all: the way globalisation has transformed capital, making it more fluid and global, and far harder to regulate or tax. These problems are not insurmountable. But as <a href="http://novaramedia.com/2013/02/why-its-still-kicking-off-everywhere-in-conversation-with-paul-mason/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Paul Mason has said</a>, they do pose a dilemma for the left. Namely, this is whether we pursue a programme of ‘deglobalisation’ (capital controls, anti-outsourcing measures etc.) or enter the far more untested and ambitious terrain of global governance. This debate has yet to even really get under way in mainstream left circles, nevermind reach a conclusion.</div>
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Nevertheless, we have enough to be getting on with. As Eric Hobsbawm told <a href="http://www.ippr.org/juncture/171/9704/the-forward-march-eric-hobsbawm-in-conversation-with-jonathan-rutherford" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Juncture</a> shortly before his death:</div>
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“Politics is the only aspect of the 21<sup style="line-height: 0;">st</sup> century world which globalisation [has] weakened but not transformed. It remains the only effective mechanism for social redistribution…It has its problems and abuses, but it remains the last bastion against the free market. And it needs politics – politics by collective action to move it.”</div>
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It is this which we can take forward as the true essence of the spirit 1945, linking that which can be rescued from that time to what we can bring to new challenges; the centrality of politics and collective action. This has never been more urgent than now, as we look back at the unquestioned inequity, inequality and unsustainability of the pre-crash years. Just as those post-war generations did, we too should vow never to go back to “that sort of peace”.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-49841937043898887612013-01-30T15:53:00.002-08:002013-01-30T15:53:56.056-08:00Obama must make poverty reduction a priority for his second termPiece for <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/star-spangled-staggers/2013/01/obama-must-make-poverty-reduction-priority-his-second-term">New Statesman</a> website<br />
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As Barack Obama prepares for his second inauguration in front of the Capitol building on Monday, most politicos are by now familiar with the demographics which helped put him there. Election night saw 96 per cent of African-Americans vote for the President; 70 per cent of Hispanics and 73 per cent of Asian Americans. Less dependent on traditional independent voters, the Democrats 'expanded the electorate' by boosting turnout in these communities. </div>
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That this causes a problem for the Republicans has quickly become conventional wisdom. It's been little noted, though, how the demographics of 6 November create a challenge for the Democrats too. An important component of the Obama campaign's <span class="st">"get-out-the-vote"</span> (GOTV) effort was the President's personal appeal. There was a pronounced sense of a personal connection between many non-white voters and Obama, and of protectiveness (of which race was one but not the only factor).</div>
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The question for 2016 is, how do the Democrats maintain that level of support without Obama on the ticket? They are unlikely to find a candidate with the charisma, backstory and platform to match Obama, whose breakthrough was a truly once-in-a-generation event. </div>
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The answer can only be that, from the White House to the Senate, Democrats need to go further in the next four years to deliver on substance for these communities. Here, immigration reform is often mentioned. But just as pressing is the indelible link between race and poverty in America, particularly in urban areas.</div>
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Far too many of the majority black neighbourhoods that helped deliver Obama's re-election in states like Virginia or Ohio continue to be blighted by hardship. A litany of grim statistics bears this out. More than 1 in 4 African-Americans and Hispanics grow up in extreme poverty - with millions struggling just above this threshold. Forty per cent of children in African-American communities grow up below the poverty line (the US is ranked 34 out of 35 of industrialised countries when it comes to child poverty). Poverty is not of course simply an ethnic minority issue – but they are clearly disproportionately affected.</div>
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None of this is new. The statistics are familiar, and wash over many American heads by now. But as Michael Harrington once wrote in his seminal book on the subject, <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Other America</em>, "you can rationalise statistics...but you cannot rationalise an indignity". Nearly fifty years after Martin Luther-King said that "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits", a significant chunk of the US is still held down by hunger, violence, illness, poor education and precariousness. And sadly, that number <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/04/under-obama-african-american-unemployment-up-wealth-wages-political-influence-down/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">has </a><a href="https://mail.newstatesman.co.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/04/under-obama-african-american-unemployment-up-wealth-wages-political-influence-down/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">increased</a> since 2007.</div>
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Anyone going door-to-door in the election in some of the poorer parts of places like Franklin County in Ohio would have found many who benefited in some small way from the President's first term. Particularly so on healthcare. Stimulus spending and his general stewardship of the economy have also stopped a total collapse in living standards. It could have been a lot worse.</div>
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But, as the likes of Paul Tough <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/obama-poverty.html?hp&_r=0" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">have argued brilliantly</a>, this is not the prospectus on poverty that Obama the candidate first emerged on. Then, he gave speeches – like the one in Anacostia which Tough details – arguing for a wide-ranging approach to poverty in America. Higher minimum wages and better union representation featured, but also specialised parenting, nutrition and early education programmes. </div>
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If the campaign was anything to go by, the prospect of returning to this seems weak. In the parks and multi-purpose arenas in which Obama delivered his campaign stump speech, the mention of poverty was noticeably scant for a candidate largely relying on GOTV among poor neighbourhoods. If it was name checked it was in a more conventionally liberal way, usually about the need for more teachers – rather than at the heart of his moral vision as once before; his words had lost their transformative edge. As some observed, at times it was like listening to a John Kerry speech.</div>
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Prior to that, in office, Obama put up none of the fight for an increase in the minimum wage that <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/05/obama-minimum-wage_n_1184752.html" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">he had pledged.</a> He gave not one single speech on poverty itself. Many of the programs he once envisioned exist but remain under-funded and minuscule compared to his initial vision. The basis of union organisation remains weak, as legislation aimed at strengthening it fizzled out early on.</div>
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Little of this is Obama's fault alone, of course, but it speaks to a nation's priorities. It's part of a wider cultural blind spot in the US. As Harrington wrote all those years ago, a key dimension of poverty in America is its invisibility to many people. There are certain neighbourhoods most folks don't go into, certain parts of town many go their whole lives without seeing, especially in places like Washington. There's little space in the 'American dream' narrative for those who don't pull themselves up to greatness, or the middle class, but who quietly struggle for their whole lives. It's time the President carved one.</div>
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As in the UK, the problem is one not just of unemployment but perilously low wages and economic insecurity. The percentage of those working but still in poverty is at its highest in nearly two decades; average wages are in a thirty year slump. And more and more Americans are <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1a8a5cb2-9ab2-11df-87e6-00144feab49a.html#axzz2GGrqR44p" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">falling closer to the threshold</a>. </div>
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For this reason, it's particularly welcome that Obama prioritised, fought for and won protection of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit in the recent fiscal cliff negotiations, which the Republicans had earmarked for abolition. Beyond that, though, he urgently needs to rediscover the spirit and ideas that animated his early words and interventions on poverty, like the one in Anacostia. African-American community leaders are <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/11/9/part_2_tavis_smiley_and_dr_cornel_west_on" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">gathering this week</a> to pressure the President into making urban poverty a priority for his second term. </div>
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There's no doubt that Obama remains a deeply intelligent and thoughtful man, of authentic social compassion. But his record on poverty is a case study in his journey from transformational candidate to good, solid but unspectacular liberal incumbent. He is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/us/politics/now-a-chance-to-catch-up-to-his-epochal-vision.html?pagewanted=all" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #cb3848; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">said to worry</a> about his place in history in this respect, and has asked historians how he can match up to likes of Lincoln. Bringing poverty out from the political fringes offers him this opportunity. For the Democrats, too, it can no longer be dismissed as a 'core vote' concern which turns off swing voters – if they are to replicate 2012's voting coalition in 2016, turnout among minority voters is the swing vote. They will need to act and deliver on a malaise still ubiquitous in far too many of those voters' lives. An electoral imperative has been given to an issue which should long ago have been a moral one.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-54039697844556581012012-12-02T13:10:00.003-08:002012-12-02T13:11:14.998-08:00Smarter HIV prevention in the UK<br />
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<span style="color: #555555; font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Piece for World AIDS Day 2012. Originally appeared </span></span><a href="http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2012/12/01/smarter-hiv-prevention-in-the-uk/" style="color: #555555; font-family: georgia; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">here </a><br />
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<span style="color: #555555; font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 18px;"><b>Smarter HIV prevention in the UK</b></span></span></h2>
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World AIDS Day. For many it will conjure image of young men in the 1980s dying helpless, horrible deaths in hospital wards. Many old enough to have been there will still be able to recall the raw panic that enveloped the early years of the epidemic.</div>
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In truth, though, while such imagery unquestionably helps us remember, and to raise money, they are not terribly useful for understanding the reality of HIV in 2012 – or for informing HIV prevention policy. Which is not to say HIV is longer an issue – last year saw the highest number of new HIV diagnoses among gay men in the UK on record. But rather that the epidemic here has moved on. And we desperately need to take heed of this if you’re going to bring down rates of HIV infection.</div>
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For one thing, thanks to treatment, if diagnosed early someone with HIV can expect to enjoy a near-normal life expectancy. Second, and most importantly, that treatment can reduce infectiousness by up to 96 per cent – making it extremely unlikely they will pass it on to others.</div>
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Quite obviously, though, this is only the case if the individual is diagnosed early. And it’s this which is the great challenge of HIV today. Late diagnosis explains the vast majority of people who die or develop AIDS. What’s more, crucially, it’s the undiagnosed who are now driving our epidemic. Fifty per cent of people with HIV in the UK are diagnosed late (CD4 count of under 350), 20 per cent very late (under 200). Twenty-five per cent of the 100,000 people with HIV don’t know they have it.</div>
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Earlier diagnosis through more regular testing thus becomes not only beneficial for personal health, but vital for public health and stopping the spread of the epidemic.</div>
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Clearly, conventional HIV prevention such as condom promotion and sex education remain crucial. But they must be coupled with a range of interventions aimed at increasing testing. Just throwing more money at community groups alone will not solve the problem. In short, we need a smarter approach to HIV prevention.</div>
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So what are the building blocks of this? Well-funded HIV services and a universal public healthcare system are pivotal. Sadly, both are being undermined by this government.</div>
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Beyond that, there are a range of steps the government need to take if they are serious about doing more to reduce rates of HIV. These include:</div>
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• Political commitment. The UK has no HIV strategy. The last one, introduced by Labour, expired in 2010, and has not been replaced by this government. This leaves us as one of the few countries in the world without a national HIV strategy.</div>
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• More proactive testing by health services. At the moment, testing is conducted on an ‘opt-in’ basis – it requires voluntary commitment by the patient. We need to move towards an ‘opt-out’ system – where your consent to be tested is implied unless you explicitly withdraw it. In high-prevalence areas, all GP surgeries should routinely test all new patients for HIV, while hospitals should do the same for every patient who walks through their doors. The last government commissioned a report which found that this was was feasible, cost-effective and highly successful in reducing rates of undiagnosed HIV. This government has made no real effort to back or implement this.</div>
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• In general, testing needs to move outside of just the GUM clinic into GP surgeries, hospitals, communities, saunas and clubs.</div>
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• Better HIV partner notification. Telling your recent hook-up when you’ve been diagnosed with HIV is a surefire way of getting them to go for a test. It’s really effective as a means of diagnosing people earlier. But it’s difficult. Services within GUM to support it are patchy at best, and need to be improved.</div>
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• An ‘annual testing’ message for Africans living in Britain. It exists for gay men – why shouldn’t it for Africans too? After all, they make up nearly half of the UK’s new HIV diagnoses.</div>
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Such steps are not as sexy as high-profile national prevention campaigns. But they would be as effective, if not more so, in stopping the spread of HIV in this country today. So let’s use this World AIDS Day to give money and remember those lost, but also to renew and update our public conversation about HIV and the steps we take to stop what is still, after all this time, a profoundly preventable condition.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-55150605890999631362012-11-30T05:36:00.000-08:002012-11-30T05:36:36.493-08:00The myth of the millionaires' exodus over the 50p tax rate<br />
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Blog for <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/steven-akehurst/the-myth-of-the-millionaires-exodus_b_2209623.html">HuffPost</a><br />
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<b>The myth of the millionaires' exodus </b><br />
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This week the Treasury spin machine went into overdrive in response to Labour's push to highlight the cut in the 50p top rate of tax.</div>
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The centrepiece of their case was that the 50p tax had reduced the number of millionaires paying tax in the UK by 10,000 from 16,000 to just 6,000. <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9707029/Two-thirds-of-millionaires-left-Britain-to-avoid-50p-tax-rate.html" style="border: none; color: #0088c3; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial;" target="_hplink">The Telegraph</a> faithfully reported their argument, informing us that "two thirds of millionaires left the UK to avoid 50p tax". <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2239534/Millionaires-exodus-Two-thirds-Britains-earners-deserted-UK-50p-tax-rate-introduced.html" style="border: none; color: #0088c3; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial;" target="_hplink">The Mail</a> did likewise, publishing unquestioningly Harriet Baldwin's extrapolation that this cost the UK "£7 billion in lost tax revenue".</div>
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This narrative has been accepted by the right - of proof of the age-old maxim that taxing the rich proves counter-productive - and even by the left, as a cause for despair. It's also reached the other side of the Atlantic, giving succour to the Republican blogosphere in their argument against Obama's case on the 'fiscal cliff'.</div>
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The trouble is, it isn't true. Or at least there is no credible proof that it is.</div>
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The figures used have been worked up on the same basis as the HMRC's report on the 50p tax back in the Spring - and they're disingenuous for that same reason.</div>
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As I <a href="http://liberalconspiracy.org/2012/03/22/why-the-50p-tax-cut-is-based-on-osbornes-own-dodgy-dossier/" style="border: none; color: #0088c3; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial;" target="_hplink">argued</a> in a piece for LibCon back in March, this report was fatally - and probably intentionally - flawed, seemingly fixed to reach the conclusion George Osborne wanted it to. Primarily, this was done by isolating the top rate tax yield for tax year 2010/2011 - the year the 50p tax was introduced. The report showed a significant drop in top rate revenue for 2010/2011 from 2009/2010, and this was the main basis of the argument that the 50p tax 'raised no money' which justified it's abolition.</div>
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A gaping hole in this argument is that by the HMRC's own admission, a great deal of this drop was accounted for by (the non-PAYE paying) super-rich bringing bringing forward their income ('forestalling') and declaring it in 2009/2010 tax year instead, ahead of the pre-announced 50p tax rise. The key point is, by its nature forestalling can only happen once - those who did so could not have kept doing it in the years after; they would have had to have paid up. The 2010/2011 yield was thus artificially deflated; totally anomalous, and unreliable as a baseline. There may have been other more permanent forms of evasion in the mix, but the only way of knowing this - and the true effectiveness of the 50p tax - for sure would have been to wait for 2011/2012 returns. Which is presumably by Osborne avoided doing just that (given there was good evidence it raised a significant sum of money).</div>
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And so to yesterday's numbers. They too take 2010 figures, on the number of people declaring an income above £ 1 million, compare it to 2009 and note a drop - leaving the Telegraph and Mail to argue without evidence that they have all moved abroad. But just as with the tax yield, these figures are highly distorted and unreliable, given we know many top rate payers moved their income for 2010 forward to 2009 (this is especially likely to be the case with millionaires, as few would be on PAYE).</div>
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Treasury sources go on to state that the number of millionaires is now 10,000 - and shamelessly attribute this to Osborne's announcement of his intention to cut the 50p tax. In reality, it's much more likely that this increase is simply those who forestalled in 2010 returning, as they inevitably have to (a large part of the remaining gap between this figure and the mid-to-late 2000s numbers is likely explained by the financial crisis).</div>
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There remains little to no evidence that high earners have, or are planning to, move abroad in response to high tax regimes. For people on the right and left to take such blatantly skewed figures at face value does a real disservice to the level of debate an area as totemic as tax policy should demand. Sadly, I doubt the sleight of hand will stop here. My guess is the next trick will likely come a year before the election. Given the cut in the 50p tax has been pre-announced, it's possible that some income will be delayed being declared until after the cut - <a href="http://www.wardwilliams.co.uk/news/91/strategies-for-delaying-income-to-2013-14" style="border: none; color: #0088c3; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial;" target="_hplink">some chartered accountants are already advising the super-rich on just that</a>. This will artificially inflate the 45p rate 2013/2014 revenue, allowing Osborne to compare it to 2010/2011 and announce the top rate cut a great success in getting the rich to pay more. If the debate on this issue so far is anything to go by, it's likely he will go unchallenged.</div>
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There are evidently parts of the Government intent on fighting a war on behalf of the richest 1% in our society. The first casualty of that war looks to be the truth about the 50p tax.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-61431620996046002852012-11-09T11:36:00.000-08:002012-11-09T11:36:24.742-08:00Post for <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/11/the-rise-of-resentment-in-america/">ShiftingGrounds</a>--<br />
<b><br />The rise of resentment in America</b><br />
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Three days on from the re-election of President Obama, the hangovers that followed a night of celebration for Democrats have receded. As a nice bonus, the Republicans, by contrast seem to be facing a four-year long headache. The inquisitions and post-mortems have already began. Demographic shifts have altered the political landscape to leave them with a challenge on par in scale with that faced by the UK left in the late 70s and early 80s.</div>
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As it turns out, the GOP didn’t understand (or even want to) the nature of the country they so often profess to love. But if the emphatic defeat of Mitt Romney is provoking head-scratching from the US right about America 2012, it should also cause pause for thought among their bedfellows in Britain who – judging from coverage before and in the run up to the election – don’t seem to have updated their view of the country in twenty-odd years.</div>
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As <span style="border: 0px; color: navy; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100180168/id-be-horrified-if-i-thought-mitt-romney-was-going-to-become-american-president-fortunately-he-isnt/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Dan Hodges noted</a></span></span> of his Telegraph colleague Tim Stanley back in September, these days “the problem isn’t actually with Lefty idealists transposing their dreams on to Obama. It’s Right-wing idealists who transpose their ideological romanticism on to the United States in general.”</div>
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In particular, a cornerstone of this is the notion that Americans have no patience for ‘European-style’ attacks on wealth. The story goes that broadsides on those at the top, calls for them to pay more in tax or curb profit-seeking, are resented by ordinary Joe’s who one day think they could be that millionaire chief executive or investor. Money men are always respected, success never resented, we are told. If we “don’t do God”, the Americans don’t do class politics. For years the British right – aghast at their countrymen’s growing resentment of the top 1% – have gazed longingly over the pond and repeated these mantras.</div>
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The plutocrats in the US have long spun the same yarn: bashing a billionaire isn’t only just wrong, it’s un-American. One of the stories of this election campaign, though, has been the total unravelling of this narrative.</div>
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For those of you raising a sceptical eye-brow, consider this. Romney ran for President on the basis of being a rich man – a successful businessman – and he lost on that same basis. His entire pitch was that as someone who had made it in the private sector, he knew how to create jobs and get the economy going. In times gone by this would have gone largely unquestioned and unparsed.</div>
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However, the Obama campaign (in a move straight out of the Rove playbook) turned this supposed strength into a weakness. Those in the Obama camp arguing for an attack on Romney’s record at Bain Capital won out over those preferring to hit the Governor on the safer ground of being a ‘flip flopper’. From early on the campaign sought relentlessly to define Romney in terms of what he actually did to make his money: outsourcing, asset stripping, firing at will, tax dodging. In doing so, they peeled Romney’s supposed ‘experience’ away from ideas of enterprise or wealth creation. And it worked. His reputation never fully recovered. In the home of free-market fundamentalism, Obama’s team were able to pick and win a fight about predatory verses productive capitalism.</div>
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This approach was replicated in the furthest reaches of the campaign. Again and again the Obama campaign counter-posed their candidate’s platform “For All”, as the campaign sticker blared, with that of Romney’s. Over and over, the phrase “millionaires and billionaires” tripped from the tongue of Democrats with scorn any time GOP plans were discussed (so much so it upset <span style="border: 0px; color: navy; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/06/investing/wall-street-hates-obama/index.html" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">those poor dears on Wall Street</a></span></span>). Tax rises on the very wealthiest also formed a key policy plank for Obama, as he separated the top 1% out from the broader ‘middle class’ in his tax plans.</div>
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All this is no small feat, and took some degree of courage when you consider Fox News has spent the past half-a-decade screaming that the President is some sort of Bolshevik. But the space for it was only made possible by a growing anger among swathes of American society at the country’s wealthiest business and financial elites. This comes not just from the financial crisis, but years of declining wages and living standards, as well as Wall Street excess and the saturation – ratcheted up since Citizens<em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </em>United – of US public life with money, SuperPACs and special interests. Romney’s categorical defeat at a time when all the economic indicators suggested he should have won will be remembered as the time that the groundswell of anger at the super-rich that has built up in Europe over recent years reached American shores, and swept the Republican candidate away.</div>
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Quite obviously, the US has not suddenly become a socialist nirvana. American society is still beset by huge disparities in wealth and power, and little basis for its transformation exists in a politics where the most progressive US president in forty years has governed as a pretty conventional liberal by UK standards. If taxes on the wealthy do go up as planned, it will only be to where they were under Clinton – far from levels as recent as the 1970s.</div>
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But the way in which Romney was defeated is nevertheless important. Fundamentally, it chips away at a notion that has proven vital to the maintenance of the status quo: that the behaviour of the wealthiest is somehow inexorably linked to the public good, and that anyone who is good at money-making must automatically be good at governing or economics, and afforded special status.</div>
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It also means that insufferable sirens of the Thatcherite right have one fewer place to point to in the world where their brand of rapacious economic sadism enjoys broad public support. That once-vaunted bond between free-market capitalism and liberal democracy just got weaker still.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-58069498578030727392012-10-11T07:56:00.001-07:002012-10-11T07:57:15.673-07:00Cameron strikes some nice notes, but plays the wrong tunePost for <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/10/cameron-strikes-some-nice-notes-but-plays-the-wrong-tune/">Shifting Grounds </a><br />
<b><br />Cameron strikes some nice notes, but plays the wrong tune</b><br />
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There’s no doubt that David Cameron’s speech to Tory party conference
yesterday was one of his better ones since becoming Prime Minister. In
some ways it was his most Presidential, not just in the personal touches
woven in throughout, but in his attempts to transcend national politics
and sketch out a vision of a new frontier – in this case, the new
global economy – and place Britain at the heart of it (sometimes called
a ‘moon shot’ in US politics). We are, he said, in a “global race” with
new countries on the rise, “sink or swim. Do or decline”.<br />
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Cameron also had strong dividing lines on welfare and schools – two
issues Labour has no settled position on, but will clearly need to have
in the next few years.<br />
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But the speech had a fatal weakness. At its core was a diagnosis of a
country full of budding businessmen and women and ‘can do’ creatives,
being held back by a bloated state and unreformed public services. The
solutions that flowed from this were predictable enough – hack back the
state, reform welfare, get the deficit down, liberalise school
provision. Growth will naturally follow.<br />
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But this fundamentally misreads British politics today. Most people
won’t become ‘entrepreneurs’, and most don’t want to. They just want to
get on, get a good job, earn decent money, provide for their family, and
lead happy and fulfilling social lives. The biggest impediment to this
in 2012 is not the welfare system or planning laws, but an enormous
squeeze in living standards and an economy that only works for those at
the top. Wages are stagnating, jobs hollowed out, yet utility bills,
rents, train fares, tuition fees and mortgage deposits are all rising
(this is the true face of ‘Britain on the rise’ under the Tories). And
so are bankers’ bonuses and executive pay, all the while SMEs – a real
engine of jobs – can’t get access to finance, and young couples can’t
get on the property ladder.<br />
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Even those traditionally upwardly mobile parts of the population – at
whom the speech was clearly aimed – are suffering from this squeeze.
Polling for <a href="http://www.policy-network.net/publications/3899/Southern-Discomfort-Again" target="_blank">Southern Discomfort Again</a> showed
that between 41%-47% of floating voters in key middle class marginals
say they are now not confident they have enough money to make ends meet.
As Lord Ashcroft’s <a href="http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2012/10/suspicious-strivers-hold-the-key-to-tory-election-prospects/" target="_blank">polling shows</a>,
a key feature of the ‘suspicious strivers’ group he identified is
economic insecurity and precariousness. The squeeze is also having
obvious effects on demand and consumer confidence – without which all
the “diplomatic showrooms” and ankle flashed to multinationals matters
not one jot. Economically and electorally, post-crash Britain is defined
more by strugglers than it is by strivers.<br />
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To this backdrop, a speech about the ‘global race’ in the new world
economy, or unleashing a nation of Steve Jobs style entrepreneurs, is a
little arid and far off. It’s not irrelevant, it’s just remote; a bit
mid-1990s. On the real day-to-day challenges and anxiety facing people
already in work, Cameron had little to say. Bank reform did not feature
once in his speech, nor energy companies, or even the words ‘bills’ or
’wages’. The Prime Minister may have struck some nice notes along the
way, but he played the wrong tune.<br />
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The truth is, most of the obstacles holding back prosperity in the UK
and our place in the world come not from an unreformed public sector,
but an unreformed private sector. That a Conservative Prime Minister,
who came to political maturity in the age of neoliberalism, feels
uncomfortable talking to that challenge is not surprising. But it
ultimately leaves him unable to connect with the lives of people he
needs to reach to win.<br />
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It is this divide that Labour needs to put the Tories on the other
side of. The party needs to find a consistent line on welfare and
schools, but it can’t allow the election be fought on this ground. They
need to make 2015 an election about living standards and the squeezed
middle; who wants an economy which puts money in the pockets of ordinary
people, and who only looks out for the top 1%. Making banks and energy
companies work for people, an active industrial strategy, even tax cuts
at the bottom or middle paid in part by rises at the top – all, among
others, have a role to play. On this divide, the Tories are extremely
vulnerable – because they simply don’t grasp Britain’s living standards
crisis to begin with. However eloquently delivered, David Cameron’s
speech yesterday proved that.Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-20109959741934302872012-09-29T12:46:00.002-07:002012-10-11T07:57:25.207-07:00The 'modernisers' of British politics are in retreat<br />
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Post for <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/09/labour-has-a-leader-to-be-proud-of/">Shifting Grounds</a>. Hopi Sen wrote an interesting response on his blog <a href="http://hopisen.com/2012/do-they-mean-us/">here</a>.<br />
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<b>The 'modernisers' of British politics are in retreat</b></div>
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Since the summer reshuffle, a lot of discussion has been devoted to the right-ward shift of the Conservative party. As Stewart Wood <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/07/the-return-of-the-toxic-tories/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="blocked::http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/07/the-return-of-the-toxic-tories/">writes</a>, the Tories detoxification strategy seems like a “distant memory”.<br />
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But arguably the fading of the Cameron project is just one piece of a broader picture, which is the fall from grace of a sub-sect within the political class which once reigned supreme in all parties: the so-called ‘moderniser’.</div>
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It is rarely noted that inside the three three main parties sit a relatively small group of people – advisors, MPs, lobbyists mostly – who have far more in common with one another than their own respective party faithful. Their views are distinguished by a metropolitanism and social liberalism. They are intensely relaxed over gay marriage and women’s rights, but also the filthy rich and the City; supportive of public services but besotted with ‘reform’ defined by marketisation; mildly redistributionist but sharers of a faith that increased tax on higher incomes hits aspiration, that the British middle class starts at sixty-grand a year and the working class has been replaced by an underclass. An unswerving commitment to flexible labour markets is likely to make them uncomfortable with anxiety over immigration, while crime is usually addressed through depoliticized phrases like ‘social exclusion’ or ‘problem families’.</div>
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As Julian Astle perceptively <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/20/alchemists-of-liberalism-nick-clegg" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="blocked::http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/20/alchemists-of-liberalism-nick-clegg">notes</a>, in one of the few articles written on them, this group will tend to give different emphasis to these views depending on their respective party’s historical weaknesses. Most importantly of all, though, they position and define themselves by a battle with their own more provincial party base.</div>
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And for years they won out. This is what came to capture the essence of ‘Blairism’ and many Blairites within the Labour party by the late 1990s. Success at the polls meant their agenda framed British political debate practically unchallenged. Despite ousting Blair himself, ultimately Brown and the people around him couldn’t carve out an alternative to a zeitgeist still going strong within the party and in media circles.</div>
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That Cameron came to pick up the Blairite playbook is well known by now; the huskies, the pledges on public spending and overseas aid, the commitment to gay rights and a more open approach to Europe – all key components of the Cameroon project. What is less appreciated is that in retrospect the ascendency of Clegg and co. at the top of the Liberal Democrats was just another variation on a theme, as he moved his party away from the ‘soft leftism’ of Charles Kennedy towards this more fashionable centre. Out went taxing income to better fund public services and opposition to marketisation, in came greater focus on taxing property and pollution, on free schools and on aridly defined ‘fairness’ within existing budgets. Both Cameron and Clegg kept red meat for their base, but their direction of travel became clear enough.</div>
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Now, though, it’s a very different story. The Cameron set are well and truly in retreat, ‘in office but not in power’ as the old saying goes. The resignation of Louise Mensch (a politician quietly liked by trendy triangulating types within the other two parties) and emigration of Steve Hilton comes as the Tories prioritise brutal spending cuts and slash tax for millionaires, all the while stalling on gay marriage and trashing any green credentials they once had. Clegg is more secure – the Lib Dems are less factional than commonly thought – but even he has had to tack back towards proposing higher taxes on the rich, and speculation persists that he’ll be ditched for the more leftish Tim Farron.</div>
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Meanwhile, the defeat of David Miliband, the departure of Alan Johnson for Ed Balls and the dominance of the likes of Tom Watson has drastically reduced the influence of Blairites or ‘Third Wayers’ over the direction of Labour. This is the real stupidity of the<a href="http://www.leftfutures.org/2012/04/gmb-congress-to-consider-investigating-party-within-a-party-progress/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="blocked::http://www.leftfutures.org/2012/04/gmb-congress-to-consider-investigating-party-within-a-party-progress/"> recent GMB motion</a> to ban Progress. Their formal power within the party has never been weaker. The soft-left totally dominate strategy, policy and often selections. And if we can’t make the most of that ascendency, then we have only ourselves to blame, not nonsense conspiracies about plots or coups.</div>
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Indeed, there is an opportunity to forge a new consensus amid the rubble of the old one. The old modernising consensus has fallen from favour in all three parties mostly because its playbook was forged at a time when the basic questions of political economy were settled. In this respect, it was broadly in tune with public opinion. But the financial crash and the decline in living standards has incinerated most of those assumptions, and meant the old agenda satisfies neither party rank and file nor voters. Public opinion is much more volatile and harder to capture than before (increased anger at bankers, the rich and inequality but also – sadly – recipients of welfare). It is this which explains what Rafael Behr laments as <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/09/hollow-centre-british-politics" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="blocked::http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/09/hollow-centre-british-politics">“the hollow centre of British politics”</a>.</div>
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As both Behr and Wood argue, the Tory right has sensed this gap too. They are pushing on with <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/aug/22/britannia-unchained-rise-of-new-tory-right" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="blocked::http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/aug/22/britannia-unchained-rise-of-new-tory-right">increasingly bold and frightening agenda</a> to plug it. Unlike Brown, Ed Miliband has proved he can operate effectively outside the old ‘modernising’ formula – he has not pointlessly picked fights with his base nor felt the need to match Tory policy or indulge in huskie style stunts.</div>
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But there is still a sense of caution to him at times – he recognises the moment British politics finds itself in, but seems reticent to fully follow through on its implications. For the first time as leader, he and the people around him head into conference this week without any real threat, as a chunk of his critics find themselves in the wilderness or fighting their own internal battles. That space needs to be used to match bold critique with bold policy. There may never be a better chance.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-64255490906872217862012-09-09T14:16:00.000-07:002012-09-09T14:16:34.900-07:00Dover – A chance to put theory into practice…?<br />
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Piece for <a href="http://labourlist.org/2012/09/dover-a-chance-to-put-theory-into-practice/">LabourList</a></div>
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<br />The Labour party has not agreed on much since 2010. Understandably following such a long stint in power, a lot of time has been spent contesting ‘lessons learned’ and ‘where to from now’. One area where there has been broad agreement, though, is on the virtue of Co-ops, mutuals and other community-based models of ownership. This not only formed the bedrock of Blue Labour thinking, but featured in the <a href="http://www.labourleft.co.uk/theredbook/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #ca0002; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Red Book</a>, the Purple Book, Compass and Fabian literature. Warm words from cosy seminar rooms are one thing, however – but do we <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">actually</em> believe in this stuff? If so, there is a fight going on, in a tiny corner of England, which offers the chance to turn theory into practice.</div>
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The port of Dover a key strategic hub in the region, hosting a number of small and large businesses (mostly ferry companies) and enabling the movement of goods and people across our border. Since 1604 it has been the source of stable and secure employment for thousands of men and women in the local area – from stevedores to electricians - while other industries have deteriorated or declined around it. The dock is deeply embedded in both the local and national economy, facilitating trade, transport and acting as a ‘gateway’ to Britain. It has come to form as integral a part of the community as the famous white cliffs which it neighbours.</div>
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Now, though, it is on the verge of privatisation. The Government is gearing up to sell it to the highest bidder, with a number of multinational private equity companies looming. We already have a prelude for what this will mean, as current administrators ‘fatten the pig for market day’. Jobs have been cut, wages slashed, skilled port workers put on zero-hour contracts; all to push down costs with a view to showcase the profits that potential bidders could line their shareholders pockets with.</div>
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As well as an affront to years of history, private ownership would likely be a horribly inefficient way to run the port. There is no evidence that it would improve the way it’s operated. That’s why ferry companies are so opposed to privatisation, and 97% of the town voted against it in a referendum last year. From the bidder’s perspective, it is simply about turning a huge profit on a ‘service’ they will have a natural monopoly over (it’s rather hard to ‘marketise’ this industry unless you want to give Dover citizen the right to set up their own shipping port…). For the Government, it is merely about a short-term boost to Treasury coffers – but even that would be lost in the long-term damage on jobs and demand.</div>
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Just as there is nothing ‘modernising’ or progressive about this, neither is there anything inevitable about it. The one group standing between a Tory government set on selling off the family silver, and the grateful arms of an overseas corporation, is ’Dover Forever England’. A coalition of groups that includes supporters of state ownership as well as the community-owned Dover People’s Port Trust, they are looking to stage a fight back on a scale we saw around the proposed sale of Britain’s forests.</div>
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But the Trust are not just opposing the privatisation of the port, they have come up with a detailed, coherent alternative. They plan to buy it from the government, and run it in partnership withDovercitizens, employees, port users, local businesses and local authorities. In other words, the port would be put in the hands of the people, locked away forever from bean-counters in Whitehall or transnational business elites. Revenue would be spent on jobs and infrastructure, not shareholders.</div>
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As well as an alliance of citizens, workers and businesses people, the Trust has teamed up with both Labour and Conservative MPs and councillors to stand against privatisation: the embodiment of the ‘Big Society’ Cameron professes to believe in. Sadly, though, if there’s cross-party consensus pushing for an alternative to the sell-off, there is also an uncomfortable degree of continuity on the other side of the argument. The idea of selling off the port originated under the Brown government, highlighting an instinct among many of our political leaders that most things are better run privately – an assumption that has disfigured much policy on public services, industry and the economy for over thirty years. An alternative to it – and in my view the idea that everything should be controlled bureaucratically, top down from Whitehall– is desperately needed. Though it may appear to be just a local scrap, the fate of the port of Dover is a crucial battle in a much larger war, with huge implications.</div>
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That’s why everyone on the left – and groups within Labour who have identified the crucial role community ownership can play in breaking with the past – should give their support to the campaign, do what they can to get involved or spread the word about it. Only this way can the Government be forced to listen, stop the sale – and hopefully hand the port over to the people of Dover.</div>
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The Government is set to decide on the port’s fate and whether to put it out to auction in the next few weeks. Ahead of this there is a big campaign meeting tomorrow (8th September), 11am at Pencester Gardens in Dover. If you can’t make it, then you can share articles about the campaign (<a href="http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2012/08/14/for-sale-%E2%80%93-the-white-cliffs/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #ca0002; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Patrick Macfarlane</a> at Progress, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/01/big-society-free-market-neoliberalism" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #ca0002; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Tristram Hunt</a> or <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9509107/Dont-let-the-barbarians-hand-over-the-White-Cliffs-of-Dover.html" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #ca0002; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Julian Baggini</a> are good places to start), sign up to the <a href="http://www.facebook.com/DoverForeverEngland" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #ca0002; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Facebook group</a> or donate to the Trust through its <a href="http://www.peoplesport.org.uk/home/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #ca0002; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">website,</a> to play a part in the vital effort keep Dover forever England.</div>
Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-9257649464439525622012-09-02T16:33:00.000-07:002012-09-02T16:35:53.076-07:00Caro shows us the human side of politicsBlog for <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/steven-akehurst/caro-shows-us-the-human-side-of-politics_b_1846885.html">Huffington Post</a><br />
--<br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;">Review:</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"> </span><em style="border: none; font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Lyndon Johnson Years: Volume 4, The Passage of Power</em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;">by Robert A. Caro</span><br />
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Should you be looking for a window into the lopsided nature of the 'special relationship', you need look no further than the reverence with which political classes on either side of the Atlantic observe the others internal affairs. While most inhabitants of the beltway view our politics with a sort of wry curiosity, wonks of all stripes over here obsess at the labours of American Presidents, campaigns and Congresses throughout history. To this the pride and place of Robert Caro's latest offering on the summer reading lists of Westminster watchers everywhere is just the latest testament.</div>
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The equivalent, I suppose, would be shipping a six-hundred page tome covering six years in the life of Harold MacMillan over the other side of the ocean and seeing how it flies. But in the fourth instalment of his monumental life's-work on Lyndon B Johnson, Caro shows us not only why we fall in love with American political life - but what it is that grips us about politics in the first place.</div>
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The Passage of Power spans just a portion of Johnson's time in Washington (1958 to 1964). But it is gloriously rich in detail, as Caro brings out the many competing facets that make up the texture of a seismic chapter in US history. Indeed in many ways it is a book defined by contrast and contradiction, even a certain dialectic, personified by Johnson himself.</div>
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It begins with LBJ at his peak in the Senate, but quickly descends into a study of his time as JFK's sidelined Vice President - "the man of power who suddenly finds himself short of it", as one journalist described. Johnson wound up there having calamitously misjudged Kennedy - "a whipper-snapper, malnourished, yellow, sickly, sickly" who "never said a word of importance in the Senate, and never did a thing". All of which was true - but none of which was germane to the changing nature of Presidential politics. The telegenic Kennedy glided to the 1960 candidacy, as Johnson tortuously dithered and delayed over whether to enter. This from a man at the height of his powers, famed not only for his ability to read men, and the tides of US politics, but for his decisiveness.</div>
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Having been offered the Vice Presidency (in the teeth of opposition from Bobby Kennedy - a passage which Caro relates in intimate detail), Johnson proceeds to make a second error of judgement. He believes he can take an ostensibly ceremonial role and forge a separate political base, as he has always done ("power is where power goes"). But an early power grab falls flat spectacularly, and Johnson is shut-out of the Kennedy White House, starved of influence.</div>
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Here the portrait of him offered by Caro is painful. Haunted by premonitions of his own thinly-attended funeral, he skulks around Washington debasing himself in an attempt to get back in the President's good books ("like a cut dog"). The once proud Texas lope is reduced to a slump or a slight kneel in Kennedy's presence, in a sycophantic attempt to hide his height advantage. In a particularly excruciating passage, he even tries to work Kennedy's kids onside ("I want you to call me Uncle Lyndon" he pleads). All to no avail. This period captures Johnson at his most inadequate; shrivelled and pathetic, by turns self-pitying, bitter, jealous, hawkish and corrupt. His greatest fear realised, he was humiliated (humiliation being Washington's answer to the ice pick).</div>
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All of which is turned on its head by the crack of a gun in Dallas, and Kennedy's assassination. If it seemed impossible to find a fresh angle on one of the most famous events in human history, Caro achieves it. He vividly puts you right in the back seat of the car - carrying Johnson - that trails the Kennedy motorcade. Better still is his depiction of LBJ in these moments, thrust into the Presidency - a man re-born, reanimated by power. He is sworn in by the same district judge who once symbolised his impotence (Sarah Hayward, whom he had previously failed to personally place on the Federal District Court himself).</div>
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The years and pages that follow showcase the better angels of Johnson's nature. His intimate understanding of Washington's "tribal rituals", his ability to see the broader war in an individual skirmish (and face up to it as such), and a razor sharp judgement of character. All were matched with the right dose of idealism and oratory to twist the right arms in the right way, press the right Congressional levers, bring Kennedy's people onside and set an agenda that went where their fallen hero never could - on civil rights, tax and later, poverty. As Caro concludes, Johnson's performance in the aftermath of the assassination was a masterclass in art of power and government. At his best, he was close to a model of Presidential perfection - as majestic as he was once pitiable.</div>
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Yet Johnson's weaknesses and fallibility do not totally disappear from sight, they continue to co-exist alongside and jostle with his strengths - the latter just win out in these circumstance. We get a prelude as to how they return in Caro's next volume, in his mendacious attempts to deny Bobby Kennedy an Arlington burial in 1968 (and his dark, impudent delight at news of RFK's demise, "Is he dead? Is he dead yet?"). Even here, they bubble not far from the surface; his needless humiliation of press secretary Salinger, for instance, or his horribly misjudged phone call to Bobby almost immediately after his brother his shot - conducted under the auspices of a constitutional technicality, but clearly in part a taunt at the still grief-stricken attorney-general.</div>
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This is the ultimate strength of The Passage of Power: it is not a fairytale. LBJ does not 'overcome' in a way the arc of a Hollywood movie might have it. He is so fascinating precisely because his every move is the product of a tussle between avarice and idealism, guts and pettiness and statesmanship. The enmity between he and Bobby Kennedy may light up the book, but in truth the bigger clash was with the whole Kennedy set, for which Bobby was simply the prefect. Johnson was not urbane or intellectual, born into power - "all social graces" - like Washington's ruling class. He was an outsider who never truly belonged to any tribe. His whole life was spent clawing his way inside, learning the rules, climbing over bodies, and he carried the battle scars as a result: rampant insecurity, paranoia and a fear of mimicking his fathers failings. He was and remained throughout deeply flawed, and deeply human.</div>
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In this sense, his successes in this volume are more inspiring than Kennedy's ever were, marshalling as he does his own multitudes and the democratic machinery, itself a bundle of contradictions, towards some good. He showed us the best and worst of what human beings are capable of, and in doing so embodied the best and worst of what politics is capable of.</div>
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Like its subject, the book is not perfect; in places it is sloppy and baggy. But it is Caro's ability to tease out and corral the true nature of this complexity - so rarely achieved in popular depictions of politics - that makes Passage of Power such a triumph. As the American author Scott F Fitzgerald famously wrote, "the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." By this marker, and every other, Caro's is a work of pure genius.</div>
<br />Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-17304926657132980372012-07-31T05:28:00.000-07:002012-07-31T06:16:27.364-07:00The ever so slightly weird cult of Tom Daley<br />
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It's a slightly unfortunate time to write a blog on Tom Daley being the target of dubious attention, given the genuinely <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/olympics/article-2181189/London-2012-Olympics-Tom-Daley-blasts-Twitter-troll.html?ito=feeds-newsxml">horrible nature</a> of some of the stuff aimed at him yesterday. But though it pales in comparison, nevertheless, I felt the need to get something off my chest about the 'bigger than Jesus' like popularity of Daley in the gay world. <br />
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The poor boy only had to show his face at the opening ceremony on Friday and my Twitter feed exploded with gays seemingly experiencing a sort of collective orgasm; my phone all lit up with friends letting me know quite what they’d like to do to him. Maybe this is just representative of the people I’m friends with or follow, but I can’t remember many days passing where I haven’t seen people trading speedo pics of him. Even outside of the Twittersphere; I was out in Soho on Saturday night and I could barely shuffle five yards without unwittingly eavesdropping on a conversation about him.<br />
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Far be it from me to piss on everyone’s chips, but does anyone else find all this a bit, well, weird? Is it just me that feels a bit queasy over it? It’s not just ogling per se, its how merrily explicit a lot of it is; I wouldn’t consider myself particularly prudish, but even I’ve been pretty shocked by how graphic and unabashed a lot of ‘Daleymania’ is! <br />
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Don’t get me wrong, he’s pretty ‘n all, and he seems like a lovely guy. But, for one thing, he is <em>painfully</em> young. I mean, he’s <em>barely pubescent</em>. This is a boy who, picking a song that “reminded him of being twelve years old”, chose Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ (Yes! The one released in <u><em>2007</em></u>!). This is obviously less pressing an issue when it comes to the twinky types who lust after him, although even on this I think there's something to be said (more on that later). But, judging from Twitter and my own personal experience, a lot of the people engaging in this seemingly endless Dutch auction of inappropriateness are old enough to know better, to put it mildly. One of the guys I was out with on Saturday - a 40-year old man (in a relationship!) - had a picture of him as his phone wallpaper/screensaver! That's odd. <br />
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Part of this is undoubtedly because a lot of gays have convinced themselves that he is “one of us” and therefore somehow tantalising attainable – there are allegedly ‘doubts’ (mostly cast by gay men) over his sexuality, although point out that he reportedly has a girlfriend and the sincere haste with which this is insisted to be a cover story is a bit creepy (“I’ve analysed every word of what he says about her, and I can tell you it means nothing” a friend sniped at me recently). But even if he is a homo (doubtful), does that make people in their 30’s or 40’s publicly leering over him ok? If so, would you think the same of a middle-aged man ogling an 18 year-old girl? And don't cop-out and wibble on at me about 'power differentials' - there is clearly a power differential between an older man and a barely-adult male. <br />
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Even outside of the age issue, if polite society, at least, places limits on the leering of straight men, why do none of these seem to extend to us gays? If (or when) a straight man you knew started tweeting or banging on in a bar about how they'd like to fuck this or that female swimmer - what would your instant reaction be? If you move in more civilised circles, i'm guessing someone would probably sound a note of discomfort, at the very minimum. If you object to any boundaries on such issues - gay or straight - then fair enough, but if you don't it seems mildly hypocritical to enforce them for straight but not gay men. <br />
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It's also noteworthy that the vast majority of Daleymania is focused on his physique ("those abs" et al!), and is a symptom of a wider trend. To much an extent, the worship of him represents and reinforces a worship of a very particular ideal of beauty: tall, lean, young, short-back-and-sides, muscularised, sculpted abs, no trace of hair or fat anywhere in sight etc. I cannot remember a time when this ideal was more ubiquitous in the gay world than now: in promos for bars, on gay dating websites (I know one guy who won't go near another guy if he doesn't have big arms!), in the gay press, the lot. <br />
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In this respect, Daley is positively identikit. To be honest, to my eyes he resembles something more belonging to Madam Tausades than endless pages in Attitude. It's just so <em>dull</em>. But that is my view, obviously, and tastes vary. People don't consciously choose what they find physically attractive. Nonetheless, this view of beauty has not always been as dominant among gays as it is today, as <a href="http://wenku.baidu.com/view/5757f6116edb6f1aff001f6d.html">research</a> documents - it is not necessarily given or natural. Much of it is driven by porn, for instance. <br />
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I'm also not sure that its overwhelming dominance is particularly healthy, or rather that it goes without consequence. A <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rosi-prescott/body-imagine-anxiety-in-men_b_1306510.html">recent study</a> by the YMCA, Succeed Foundation and academics at UWE Bristol found that gay men are much more predisposed to suffer from anxiety about their body image than straight men. The APPG on Body Image's report this year found similar, citing gay men's greater propensity to chase "unrealistic beauty ideals". Unsurprisingly, eating disorders remain consistently higher among gay men. Interestingly, backing up the earlier point about boundaries, the YMCA study also found gay guys far more likely to engage in "body talk" - speech that reinforces the particular standard of attractiveness I mentioned above - than straight men (91% to 77.4%). You don't have to be a genius to draw the dots together. <br />
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I'm not arguing that gays suddenly developing a suspiciously avid public interest in synchronised diving will on its own drive a mass of homosexuals to the toilet bowel with two fingers down their throat. Neither am I leading the charge for a re-introduction of Victorian sexual values (I've no wish to see pictures of Tom Daley's ankles, for one). All i'm saying, I suppose, is would it hurt if we were a <em>bit </em>less predictable once in a while? <br />
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</div>Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1264365130655171487.post-46432851786384535062012-06-25T15:13:00.000-07:002012-07-03T17:03:51.002-07:00The left must find its voice on Syria<br />
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Piece for <a href="http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/06/the-left-must-find-its-voice-on-syria/">Shifting Grounds</a><br />
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<b>The left must find its voice on Syria</b></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">On 26 March 1999, Russia and China tabled a UN Security Council resolution condemning the US-UK led intervention in Kosovo, which had been launched following the escalating massacre and ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by Serb forces.</span></div>
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The resolution denounced NATO action as a flagrant breach of sovereignty and demanded its cessation. In an important moment, the motion was resoundingly defeated. By 12 votes to 3, Western and non-Western states, many of whom were not natural allies of the US, lined up against it and backed the war. Summing up the mood, the Dutch representative said:</div>
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“Today we regard it as a generally accepted rule of international law that no sovereign state has the right to terrorise its own citizens…Times have changed, and they will not change back…”</div>
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This consensus did not emerge out of nowhere. It was a norm built up throughout a decade that counted the costs of inaction in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and particularly in Bosnia at Srebrenica. But this was not some neo-con project. The idea that, in very limited circumstances and by very strict criteria, intervention could be justified to prevent an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe was pioneered by thinkers on the centre left, where it enjoyed broad support.</div>
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Thirteen years on, Dutch pronouncements look horribly premature. Bashar Al-Assad’s militias rampage through Syria, shelling and slaughtering his own people en masse – gouging out the eyes of children while they <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/article3430302.ece?shareToken=9ff5af6c6f90f29bcc1634dd0ae942bc" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/article3430302.ece?shareToken=9ff5af6c6f90f29bcc1634dd0ae942bc">execute them</a>, one by one – to see that his dictatorship retains power. As UN monitors withdraw, Russia and China shield the regime from any meaningful recourse, just as with Kosovo – except this time there’s little or no will to defy them. Times have changed back.</div>
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What is striking though is how relatively little we on the mainstream left have to say about all this. I am not for a second accusing people of not caring about events. But there is little of the pressure on William Hague to help find a solution that Robin Cook or Tony Blair felt, and which played its role in the decision to confront Milosevic. There is instead a sense of paralysis, a fatalism that nothing can be done. If this silence is ever broken, it’s usually to warn of the perils of action, rather than inaction.</div>
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But it doesn’t necessarily <em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">have</em> to be like this. That’s not to argue that the model used in the Balkans or Libya will work in Syria. Ill-judged actions could easily make things even worse; each case is different with its own complexities, and should be treated as such. But there remains a host of at least plausible options far short of occupation or even air-strikes which could help make a horrendous situation in Syria a bit less so, and stem the bloodshed. One is a no-fly zone. Another, the most comprehensive, is a proposal for humanitarian safe havens (‘No Kill Zones’) put forward by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the US (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/opinion/how-to-halt-the-butchery-in-syria.html?_r=2" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/opinion/how-to-halt-the-butchery-in-syria.html?_r=2">here</a> and <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/06/01/154131748/foreign-policy-syria-is-not-unsolvable" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="http://www.npr.org/2012/06/01/154131748/foreign-policy-syria-is-not-unsolvable">here</a>). These, as she outlines, could be defensively patrolled for instance by the Free Syrian Army, with the conditional logistical support of Arab League states, Turkey and the West.</div>
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Such plans may not in the end stand the test of scrutiny, though they have so far, and something like them is favoured by the French. But at the moment they are not even being countenanced by those on the centre-left in the UK; they are not even being discussed, let alone pushed for. Instead most seem to have succumbed to the gloomy assumption – until now the preserve of the far left – that all and any action involving Western power is reducible to an act of imperialism that can only end in disaster. If humanitarian intervention ever appears in our discourse, it’s rarely without inverted commas and a sneer.</div>
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What lies behind all of this, of course, is Iraq. The disastrous invasion and occupation has made it easy to tar all Western intervention with the same brush (helped further by proponents of war with Saddam cynically appropriating humanitarian language after initial rationales had been exposed). One opened the door to the other, so the argument goes. The histories of the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and lately Libya are constantly being flimsily re-written to fit this neat worldview.</div>
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But whatever you think of those wars, it is possible and necessary to separate them out from Iraq and Afghanistan – or to support one but not the other. The former were wildly different interventions, prosecuted in totally different circumstance and for totally different reasons. Iraq met few of the criteria set out under <a href="http://r2pcoalition.org/content/view/73/93/" style="border: 0px; color: #db2e28; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">R2P</a>, for instance, or even Blair’s own Chicago speech. Similarly, there was no oil in Pristina, and very little geo-strategic benefit to Benghazi. Life is more complex than that.</div>
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More to the point, the interventions of the mid-to-late 90s and in Libya actually worked. They were enormously imperfect, complex and bloody (and in the case of Bosnia, belated), and occasionally horrible mistakes were made in the course of them. But they ultimately helped end conflicts which at one point had promised butchery, ethnic cleansing and human misery on an infinitely worse scale. Western influence and power remains a very blunt object indeed, and people across the left are right to treat it with suspicion. It will always be selective, and of course is sometimes the author of brute <em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">realpolitic</em>. But occasionally, it can be pressed into engineering the least worst outcome.</div>
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Again, what is possible in Syria is likely very different to before. But progressives urgently need to address this mental block to any outside action at all, which seems to have set in among many of us, because at the moment it’s leaving an eerie silence in the face of immense brutality and suffering. The situation is not simple, and as Rory Stewart has said, “we do not have a moral obligation to do what cannot be done”. But we do have a moral obligation to open our minds, and at least arrive at that conclusion honestly.</div>
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<br />Steve Akehursthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11662752973452389678noreply@blogger.com