The royal wedding and why Britain needs to grow up

It’s good to know that amid the fawning frenzy that passed for balanced media coverage of Friday’s royal wedding, the 20% of us who identify as republicans did eventually receive some representation in the emerging pictures. The above, now famous image somehow manages to capture our position within the nation perfectly. As the newly-wed couple loom large on the balcony, a wonderfully stroppy looking girl is hunched over at the bottom of the picture, looking like she’s been forced into a dress she didn’t want to wear, covering her ears to block out the hysteria and presumably wanting the whole thing to end as quickly as possible!

To be honest, I think that little girl may have been the most mature person on the mall. It certainly wasn’t a good day to be in that 20%, with near demented levels of celebration accompanied by much dick swinging from the right (e.g here, here and particularly here). Many have asked republicans why we can’t just put the politics to bed for a day and enjoy the spectacle of two people who love each other getting hitched. I can only speak for myself, but for me the frustration goes wider than the celebration of servitude to desiccated, archaic and unelected rule. My bewilderment goes wider still than at just the collective blindspot it seems to represent in the nation’s supposed love of fairness and meritocracy. First and foremost, it’s about an entire conservative establishment given renewed reason for hope.

Our upper chamber in this country is entirely unelected and still contains members there by virtue of bloodline or what god they believe in, our lower chamber is dominated by the executive and elected via a creaking electoral system, and both are governed by impenetrable layers of convention and pomp which determine everything from the daft language members are required to address themselves in to parliamentary procedure itself. Nowhere is there a written constitution codifying limits to executive power or enshrining the political and economic rights citizens can expect to receive.

This has long been past fit for purpose in the 21^st century, and is comparable to virtually no other democratic country. It is profoundly undemocratic, elitist and at least contributes to the disaffection with politicians which is such grist to the anti-republican mill (“You don’t want President Blair, do you?” they snort).

But it’s the monarchy which keeps the lid on this whole ludicrous, creaking constitutional arrangement - both formally and discursively. Almost every attempt or suggestion at decent constitutional reforms meets with a status quo patrolled by exactly the same sort of self-satisfied, whimsical bunkem paraded over the last few weeks: what we have is “quirky but peculiarly British”, “it works”, “it’s tradition”, ad nauseum.

The laughable notion that the royals are ‘just like us’, or that Middleton’s ascendency to the aristocracy represents a vindication of social mobility, is also in its own way quietly pernicious. Through personalising the institution it quite obviously masks the unimaginable disparities in wealth and influence between the average member of the royal family and the average Briton, including the Middletons. It also in its own small way serves those who want to bury discussion about similar inequalities in wider society and especially the still resoundingly white, male, upper-middle class nature of our political and legal establishment. We shouldn’t be surprised that wealthy, crusty old twerps like Nicky Haslam have taken to the air since Friday lunchtime to announce, “I hope that the English will now drop this terrible class consciousness about middle class and working class. We’re all commoners except the Royal Family” (26m50s in).

The point here is that the monarchy is a fundamentally political construct. I’m not sure everyone – particularly those in my generation - who celebrated yesterday so fervently entirely understand that; that what they are buying in to when they line the streets for a look at The Dress or flaunt a bit of ‘kitch’ merchandise is not a mere figurehead or a bit of quirky nostalgia, it is an entire political order. Hence the crowing of the right (and that Toby Young piece is worth linking to again as the best example).

It is also an utterly bizarre, outdated view of Britishness. Since when was it British to revel in being a complete anachronism within the democratic world? More to the point, the supposedly ‘positive image’ the monarchy reinforces is only that of us as the curious, crumpet-eating eccentrics popular in American mystique. But since when did this align with most people’s experiences of day-to-day reality in 2011 Britain? And since when was just being seen the same as being taken seriously? There’s an element of tragedy here - of glorifying vessels of our autocratic and imperial past (military uniforms et al) because it mausolates images of a time long gone, a time when we took up a place as the superpower at the front of the world’s stage. It’s like a Brit in America who indulges in stereotype by suddenly developing a far more accentuated, tweed accent than he uses at home, enjoying rather than cringing every time he’s excitedly asked to pronounce “bath” or “city”! It all speaks not to our pride in Britain, but to our lack of confidence.

Isn’t it time we grew up a bit as a nation? Isn’t it time we let go, and brought what it means to be British into the 21^st century? There’s so much that we can lay claim to being proud of (the NHS, broadcasting and music, literature) without the need to cling in unashamed deference to a crumpled, archaic and completely insane bunch of aristocrats – or other equally tatty clichés of our heritage - which, in the grand scheme of things, make us look ridiculous and sets back democratic advance.

Maybe I should calm down a bit. Perhaps, as Dan Hodges says, some of us should just relax and learn to pick our battles a little better. But I just can’t help feeling that in a culturally rich, complicated and alert 21st century country, we can do better – that’s all. I’m not angry, Britain, I’m just disappointed.

Humanitarian intervention redux: lessons for Libya from the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq

Humanitarian intervention is fashionable again. Well, not quite. But as events unfold in Libya, the number of commentators suddenly spilling ink over a concept widely presumed buried alongside the dead of Iraq has led many a po-faced columnist and Question Time audience member to ask indignantly: “have we learnt nothing from the last ten years?”

It's something of an unfair line of attack. Throughout the 90s, the idea that states could intervene in situations of “extreme humanitarian emergency” slowly, painstakingly gained legitimacy – though not before thousands had been allowed to die in Rwanda and Bosnia. The culmination of this was NATO's imperfect but timely intervention in Kosovo to stop the slaughter of ethic Albanians at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic's thugs. For many of us the Kosovo war – and later Sierre Leone - shows that intervention genuinely driven by humanitarian objectives is possible in international relations. But by using humanitarian language as a drape for the illegal and illegitimate catastrophe in Iraq - which failed almost every pre-condition for humanitarian intervention ever set out - Blair appeared to have killed dead a doctrine he'd done so much to forge.

Yet strangely much of the debate over no-fly zones in Libya is playing out in an eerily similar way to the coverage and literature surrounding the Kosovo war. Many have asked whether we've entered a strange political time warp. But though it may theoretically be legitimate - as well as altogether more comfortable - for those of us not in principle against humanitarian intervention to dis-entangle Libya from Iraq and Afghanistan, it would be a terrible mistake. It would allow the opposition to claim the last decade for themselves and if replicated by officials lead to significant errors in approach and execution.

Instead we should take from past military successes, learn from past catastrophes and build this in to the really specific set of circumstances before us. While the facts are still being considered in Libya, as Michael Walzer says we should start thinking about what happens if Gaddafi regains control, particularly over Benghazi – as it looks like he will. What if he starts taking revenge on those who have defied him? What if once again we see the systematic extermination of a select portion of the population? If 'humanitarian intervention' in Libya goes ahead, in whatever form, it will be a decisive historical moment for the concept – a chance for resurrection that if squandered or botched would probably prove fatal.

With all this in mind, here's five pieces of advice to be drawn from the recent history of military interventions which should be considered by those advancing the case for a no-fly zone (or more) in Libya.

1. The UN route is vital

Trendy as it is to disparage the UN as useless or dysfunctional, the US brand of unilateralism over Iraq showed that bypassing it nevertheless has massive implications for perceptions of legitimacy. In a region where there is already great (and justified) suspicion of the West, any action in Libya that hasn't received wide international support would be catastrophic. Any half-successful humanitarian intervention in history has been multilateral.

A UN Resolution backing a no-fly zone would obviously be preferable. But it's easy to forget that under a strict interpretation of the UN Charter, the Kosovo war was illegal (the UK and US failed to get a UN Resolution justifying military action owing to the cynical threat of veto from Russia). But crucially, among most scholars of international law the Kosovo war is still judged legitimate, or at least 'not illegal'. This is because of the support the intervention gained from states from a wide variety of regions – a Russian proposed resolution opposing the intervention was roundly defeated by 12-3 – and because a legal norm allowing for intervention in cases of genocide or mass extermination had evolved throughout the 1990s.

The lesson from this experience for Libya is that any attempts to install a no-fly zone must not under any circumstance jettison the UN or international community, even in the event that the threat of veto makes an enabling Resolution impossible. There is a half-way house that is preferable to blind unilateralism. Leading NATO countries should propose a resolution, even if it's rejected, to establish that it is just China and Russia that oppose; they should secure the vocal support of the Arab League, the African Union, explore the possibility of a 'Uniting for Peace' resolution from the General Assembly – draw as many states as possible into the cause, while smoking out the extent of the opposition and their justifying arguments. Ten years ago the idea that sovereignty was sacrosanct had declined significantly, few states felt politically able to use the language of sovereignty regarding states who had turned on their citizens. It'll be interesting to see if and how Iraq and Afghanistan have changed that.

2. The hard left will go berserk, probably best to ignore them.

'Humanitarian' intervention is an anathema to the vast majority of the hard left. Most believe no such thing is possible, given that the structure of international relations/capitalism (take your pick) determines all state behaviour in favour of imperialism, with morality at all times just providing a guise for advancing material interests (i.e, oil). Many of them will pivot their opinion to make sure it maintains the maximum distance from the US in particular, even if this leaves them taking up some quite ludicrous positions. In the Balkans in the 1990s a shameful number (including Chomsky) indulged in the late 20^th century equivalent of Holocaust denial. They claimed among other things that the Srebrenica and Racak massacres in Bosnia and Kosovo respectively were invented or exaggerated by the West to justify intervention, that hey! these things happen in wars anyway and Milosevic was just a big cuddly bear*. Fittingly, Diane Johnstone (whose work on Kosovo was among the worst examples of such filth) has recently penned an article making many of the same accusations about Libya. Expect more of this. More intellectual acrobatics and more revisionism. If Gaddafi escalates the massacre of his own people as he reasserts control, the question that has to be levelled back at John Pilger and the like is this: do you think the international community should just sit by? If so, fine, but face up to it. The West is anything but perfect, but sitting on the sidelines and opining about the structural iniquities in global power isn't much comfort to those being slaughtered.

3. All or nothing thinking is useless

“Well if we intervene in Libya, why not Zimbabwe or North Korea?” may sound like a clever line but it isn't - and it shouldn't be pandered to by those in favour of intervening. The reputation of humanitarian intervention in the 90s and R2P beyond that suffered from the at times almost messianic tone of its supporters - talk of a “new world order” and so on. 'No-fly zones' and the like are imperfect, practical, piecemeal interventions that should be considered on a case by case basis and weighed against wider repercussions (in the case of North Korea, nuclear war!). They do not herald a new era of world government where all is harmonious, universal and consistent. Intervention will always be a political art. It will always be messy and selective, based around old colonial ties, geographical proximity or public affinity with one group of people in light of specific events filtered through the usual partial media lens' – accept it. It doesn't make humanitarian intervention a worthless concept, but it will always be shaped by the subjectivities of the most powerful states and their publics. The question must therefore always be: what are the motivations of the states involved? Do geopolitics outway genuine humanitarian concern?

It's worth adding that by genuine humanitarian concern, of course, William Hague is not and should not be expected to be a paragon of selflessless and virtue. International relations is a cynical business, afterall. But history (especially of the Balkans) shows domestic pressure and the political anxiety – in the age of wall to wall 24 hour media – of being seen to have innocent people slaughtered on 'your watch' can spur genuine humanitarian action divorced from covert grabs for land or oil, or any of the other old 'realist' explanations of state action. Again, this will have to do. It's evidence of overwhelming ulterior motive we should be looking for, not altruism.

4. Can we do good? What are the limits of our power?

Rory Stewart's book Occupational Hazards is among the best of all the literature dedicated to post-mortem of the disastrous Iraq war. His day-to-day account of life as Deputy Governorate Co-Ordinator of Maysan province in the initial years after the invasion carries one important theme: that the US and the UK were intervening in a highly complex political eco-system that they did not understand and were not welcome in. No amount of reading T.E Lawrence, flexible military tactics “or giving lollipops to children” would ever change that fundamental weakness, he says. NATO has the same struggle in Afghanistan. Even in more welcoming circumstance in Kosovo, NATO were left red-faced by the slightly 'off message' (to say the least) actions of the Kosovo Liberation Army they had intervened to support (revenge attacks on Serbs, general crime and corruption).

The point we should take from all this is one of humility. Do the UK, US and France in particular understand the complex web of tribes, allegiances and agendas in which they are embroiling themselves in Libya? Do they have an idea how their intervention will change that dynamic? Do they understand 'the rebels' they are supporting, or even Libyan civil society (in so far as it exists)? Are we 100% sure of the facts on the ground?

Neither should we assume that a no-fly zone will be effective - the initial raids on Serbia were not. What if Gaddfi, as the Serbs did, actually escalate ground violence against civilians and rebel forces? Are the US and UK willing to start an air-campaign 'down town'? If so, innocent civilians will almost certainly get caught in the cross-fire and die. These are all things that should weigh heavily on the minds of advocates of intervention. Humanitarian intervention is war, war isn't glorious. We cannot bomb our way to utopia, we can only aim for the least worst – and bloody – outcome.

All of which, paradoxically, brings us to...

5. No more 'virtual war'

Interventions in the 1990s were severely restricted by, in the words of Michael Ignatieff, the tendency to “talk the language of ultimate cause while practising the art of minimum risk”. If we are going to intervene, it has got to be done properly and it has got to represent a lasting mulitlateral commitment. The bombs dropped on Belgrade in 1999 during the initial NATO campaign were done so from such a ludicrous height, in order to minimise the risk to the pilots, that they proved completely counter intuitive. By virtue of the task at hand, intervening forces will have to be put at risk for anything they do to be effective. Again, something that should at all times be considered by pro-interventionists.
There is also a lesson for Cameron among all this. Media and public opinion is fickle. The groundswell of US media pressure and public support for intervention in Somalia in the 1990s soon went sour once US lives started to be lost – the 'CNN effect' turned into the 'body bag effect'. He may be enjoying the role of an international leader, but things will get difficult and because he will have tied his reputation to the outcome, pressure will mount to almost unbearable levels (Alastair Campbell says the Kosovo campaign was the most testing moment of New Labour's first term – at one point Blair's entourage were even convinced it would break the government). Any intervention cannot be a half hearted affair, and the moment the first allied plane takes off, Cameron has got to see it through no matter the political damage back home. The coalition of political support behind any intervention in Libya will likely be fragile and Gaddafi will feed off any weakness, as Milosevic did - any vacillations could prove disastrous.
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*For anyone interested in a proper debunking of revisionist rubbish over Kosovo and a discussion of its implications, here are two useful links:

http://eastethnia.blogspot.com/2005/10/long-post-anatomy-of-denial.html
http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/wuttke.htm

It's political economy, stupid

As much as I enjoyed myself, a weird feeling stalked me as I shuffled through corridors from event to event, panel discussion to panel discussion at last weeks' Fabian conference. In retrospect it was a restlessness that the answer to every question earnestly pondered – What can the left learn from the right? How do campaigners deal with the deficit?- belligerently remained the same, even if the wording changed, or the faces of the speakers differed from the last.

When you drill down into so much of centre-left soul searching in 2011, the absence of a coherent political economy lies at the root of almost all of it, even if it's rarely acknowledged.

The last few years have finally seen progressives get their critique of neo-liberalism right. Space has opened up after the financial crisis for us to question effectively previously untouchable dogma over the efficiency of free markets and the evil of state intervention. Meanwhile, the extent of public anger over bank bonuses and popularity of the 50p top rate of tax chips away at Blairite mythology that 'aspirational' swing-voters will always view increased taxation as 'the politics of envy'. Labour has even started to find its feet in arguing against the pace of deficit reduction (Ed Balls' famous Bloomberg speech is still the pick of the bunch), while turning to focus on stagnating average incomes (Liam Byrne is good on this here).

These are all sound intellectual advances. But the problem is that at the moment, they remain just that. It remains for progressives to colour these in with practical policy, and then to sell these in a way that is accessible to the wider public and activists knocking on doors. The reason the right has been ascendant for so long on economics is because they have a philosophy that cascades down from the the thinktank ("Free markets are the best way to efficiently allocate capital, government intervention always leads to inefficiency") to the doorstep ("governments shouldn't pick winners, it's bloated and should get out of the way"), translating to peoples everyday experiences or emotions ("why should the government waste my money? I am the best judge of how to spend it"; "We can't go back to the 1970s"), out of which flow practical policy implications (e.g cutting corporation tax, privatisation, deregulation). The latest example of this is the Tories misconceived idea that the private sector will necessarily 'pick up the slack' on unemployment resulting from cuts to public spending.

Meanwhile on the deficit, the right remain aided by the famous imagery of 'maxing out the creditcard' or 'household budgets' ("I have to balance my books, why shouldnt the government?").

The centre-left still cannot compete with this. Even if we are now challenging these ideas at the level of the thinktank, our arguments from there remain fractured or incomplete. For example, if we are agreed that New Labour became over-reliant on tax receipts from financial services, how should we look to 're-balance' our economy? This will usually prompt talk of 'broadening our industrial base' (as echoed recently by Ed Miliband), but what does this mean? How do we make our industry competitive in a globalised economy? Likewise, if we are agreed that median wages are stagnating, how do we get them to rise? Is it just a case of growth as an end in itself, or should the government be directing investment in to certain areas? If so, how? By what means? Assuming we believe in capitalism, what should it look like? How should we translate complex Keynsian arguments over public spending into bite-size chunks of common sense?

These are just a few of the critical questions that, from what I can see, are not being progressed or followed through on. Even the most prominent centre-left writing of the last few years (e.g Ill Fares the Land, Them and Us, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism) is vague on policy, usually impotently acknowledging that it 'doesn't have the answers', but we should at least 'ask the questions'. A lingering sense I got from people at last weeks conference was that if we just taxed the bankers more, everything would be ok. Some are happy for the left to simply be the new 'conservatives', acting as stalwarts of public services under attack from budget cuts.

This is not enough. As popular as it may be in the short term, it doesn't constitute a coherent economic argument and it will not win elections or change the country in the way we want. For all the huff and puff over the end of neo-liberalism, it is still the right who are the radicals, still social democrats who are on the defensive. This does not represent a substantive change in the pre-crash, post-1970s state of play; progressives just have more numbers on the field than they used to, more men behind the ball. To win, it needs to be far more creative.

The rewards for doing so would be great. A coherent alternative political economy would give the left the chance to turn so many debates on their head. Take welfare dependency as an example. Instead of pandering to hatred of those dependent on welfare and extending the current logic of just cutting benefits (or alternatively ignoring the issue), we could legitimately ask why bottom end wages are so low that living on meagre unemployment benefit is a more attractive option, and map out how we can get them to rise. Or, on the banks, we wouldn't need to be held to ransom by obscenely paid financiers who threaten to pack up and head for pastures new every time the status-quo on tax or bonuses is challenged.

Unfortunately, this seems a long way away. Gordon Brown's 'markets need morals' was a good start, but what was it underpinned by in practice? It read more as a plea. Ed Miliband's current problems on the economy are just a projection of the centre-lefts wider dilemmas. Increasingly, it seems we have started an argument we cannot finish. This is the the extent of the challenge for the likes of Ed Balls, as he puts his feet under the table as shadow chancellor. Obviously, I don't have the answers, I'm just asking the questions...

Why ending control orders might not be such a 'fucking car crash' for the coalition afterall

Jerry Hayes has an interesting blogpost this afternoon over at ThinkPolitics on the ending of control orders and the inevitable screams of anguish and betrayal it'll bring from the Tory right. Cameron has been whispering for months that the political battle over the powers, which give the police the right to put terrorist suspects under virtual house arrest, will be a "fucking car crash" for the coalition.

But i've got a niggling feeling that in the long run it might not be so bad for the government. Or, at least, if it is a car crash not as many voters as they think will slow down to take a look as they pass by.

Firstly it almost goes without saying that headlines such as "Nick Clegg 'wins fight to scrap control orders'" (if not the Sunday Times' spin on it) are fantastic for the Liberal Democrats and exactly the sort of coverage I think they need to be generating in order to stand a chance of survival in the run up to the next election.

But even for the Tories, are Cameron's fears really justified? While polls may still suggest public support for strong anti-terrorist measures, all polling on voters' priorities in the run up to the election put the economy far above terrorism/national security. This is not to say they don't care - when confronted on the issue - about the latter, but it is clearly not at the centre of the agenda in the way it was under Blair and in particular following the 2005 attacks. Economic, not physical, security now dominates the political landscape. While the Tory papers will kick up a stink, I'd be amazed if it's not knocked off the front pages by the end of the month. I suspect there is no longer the climate of fear among ordinary voters to sustain it further than that.

Another - little discussed - reason to believe the hysteria will tail off is that control orders is also an awkward topic for Labour. Ed Miliband has made obvious his desperation to dispel the perception that Labour is authoritarian, especially as he seeks to woo disaffected Lib Dem voters. Under pressure from Blairites to out-flank the Tories to the right on crime and human rights, I'd be surprised if he goes to any length to keep an issue in the air that would serve to again highlight his own internal divisions. A trap is laid for him there.

To this backdrop, as Hayes recommends, some political manoeuvring with the security services and a narrative around greater surveillance should provide enough cover in the short-term for the Tories to credibly argue they are not soft on terrorism.

Finally, if the storm on control orders does pass and the idea of the government being weak on terrorism fails to set in among voters, it's worth quickly considering the wider implications. With any luck, it could help shape something like a new political consensus on national security with - heaven forbid - some balance restored to the debate, ending (or at least changing) Westminster's long established tradition of dutch auction whereby each side tries to out-posture and out-scream each other, whipping up as big a shit storm as possible in an effort to prove the other is 'weak'. Cameron's predictions of a "fucking car crush" are predicated on such rules of the game, but it's possible - and here's hoping - the PM himself hasn't quite caught up with the new landscape the economic crisis has foisted upon us. The fact that Brown's attempt (straight from the New Labour rulebook) to posture on detention without trial fell flat in late 2007 is a promising omen in this respect. If the Government stand firm, they can ride this out and the country will be a better place.

Fear itself: Insecurity, not ideology, is the key to understanding the Lib Dems' predicament

Suddenly everybody is an expert on the Liberal Democrats. Among the weirdest outcomes of this years political convulsions has been the transformation of previously disinterested commentators into self-appointed emissaries from planet yellow, explaining the every move and thought of the party in coalition.

The tool of analysis which most of these sages have settled for their chin-stroking is that of the 'Orange Bookers' v the 'Social Democrats'. They inform us that the Lib Dems are led by economic liberals 'at odds' with the social democratic 'grass roots' or 'old guard'. This enables them to explain the history of the coalition as a product of this divide: Clegg was always 'instinctively closer' to Cameron than Brown; the two are "bound by their shared hostility to the state" (Steve Richards); "Just as much as Blair and Cameron, Clegg aims to replace British social democracy with a version of Thatcher’s market-based settlement" (Jon Gray). Even Andrew Adonis recently echoed such a view.

But this is misguided. There are differences in outlook, of course, but the party doesn't factionalise along these ideological lines. The Lib Dems who have rebelled most so far are hardly left-wing ideologues and it's simply not true that the leading lights of the party share a centre-right ideology. It's more complex than that. Chris Huhne, for instance, wrote Reinventing the State, the book frequently touted as the ying to the Orange Book's yang, while Cable comes from a Labour background and he and Clegg devised for the party a whole host of policies (on tax, inequality, banks etc.) which can scarcely be called Blairite.

More to the point, the 'Orange book' analysis obscures the main driver of Lib Dem behaviour since 6^th May: fear. Fear of another election, fear that the coalition will fall apart, fear of electoral decimation at the hands of the Tories.

Most detailed histories written of the Coalition so far suggest it itself was conceived in fear. During negotiations and after, Cameron held up (explicitly and implicitly) the threat of a snap second election in autumn should the Tories be forced into minority government. There's a good chance this would have allowed them to blame Lib Dems for the preceding 'muddle' and turbulence, campaign for a majority and wipe many of the already fragile marginals the Lib Dems hold off the map. It seems the fear of this, with a deal with Labour not viable, is primarily what drove Clegg to lock himself and his party so firmly into a five year coalition, rather than any 'confidence and supply' arrangement.

The trouble the party is now facing, is that this logic is now perpetuating itself over and over again and it is spiralling the Lib Dems into electoral oblivion. Fear that the coalition will collapse and of the resultant election seems to be playing a significant part in justifying faithful parroting of the Tory line, word for word, on almost every issue.

This has lead to the Lib Dems being almost indistinguishable from the Tories, and seen the party's poll ratings plummet. Yet, ironically, the more the polls sink the more the logic justifies itself, as by implication the worse the election performance would be. This is a large part of the architecture of the Lib Dems own 'There is No Alternative' narrative on the coalition.

It's a dangerous gamble, based on the premise that if the economy recovers, by 2014-2015 the Lib Dems will be rewarded in the polls. But polling since May has already shown cuts and fees have punished the Lib Dems disproportionately to the Tories. So if Tory/Lib Dem poll ratings and electoral performance are not fixed to each other, then neither should the Lib Dem and Tory line.

So where now?

While not being an expert myself, I'd say it's been fairly obvious from the start that the main way the Lib Dems can succeed in coalition is by being seen to sand down the edges of Tory extremism and carrying, as far as possible, the 'equidistance' ethos of opposition into government. But their current approach of hugging the Tory line close from the beggining militates against this, limiting Lib Dem influence and hamstringing the party's ability to promote any genuine concessions.

Take higher education reform as a case in point. The Browne review reccomended lifting the cap on fees. But that day, Cables support for the review was full throated. It was Cameron, then Willetts, that signalled the row-back and eventually the retention of a cap. This should have been the other way around! The Lib Dems initial echoing of the Tory line left them no room to sieze on improvement to Browne. If they had taken a step back, staked their opening position a little more carefully, briefed their opposition a little more openly, put their name to row-backs, they could possibly have limited the damage they are suffering on this issue now. At the very least, this approach provides a good template for other, less totemic, policy issues going forward.

Instead, their actions suggest that behind closed doors the Lib Dem leadership is being bullied by the Tories and their spindoctors. Its probably also a case of Westminster politicians operating according to Westminster orthodoxy: difference equals 'splits', splits are bad. But the Lib Dem leadership needs to think outside this political box. Just hanging is not a strategy that will ensure the party's recovery.

What is needed is at least a kind of 'ochestrated disagreement'. Clegg and co need to argue for room to be seen to disagree from the beggining on certain issues, to be seen to force concessions and claim them as their own – school sport presents the latest opportunity. They need the spirit of their coalition negotiations within government, to openly define themselves as much against the Tory right as Labour. This would give them a platform to build on for the 2015 election, wheras on present course it's difficult to imagine how they could forge one.

The leadership should argue with Coulson and Cameron the need for flexibility in this respect – there is no reason if they are aware of this strategy that it will break the coalition. Moreover, the Tories own poll ratings are worsening and there's no guarantee they themselves would fancy their chances in a snap election. The Lib Dems may have more room for manoeuvre than they think in this Coalition- but if they don't start to properly use it, they'll continue to lose it.

Why Tony Judt matters: George Orwell and political writing

I wanted to write a quick blog on historian Tony Judt, author of works such as Postwar, who died recently of Lou Gehrig's disease. In 2009, Judt won an Orwell Prize. It hasn’t gone unnoticed among commentators that in recent years this award has been showered upon those not exactly in keeping with the spirit and meaning of Orwell’s writing (think Peter Hitchens).

This seems to underscore a wider abuse of the great man’s legacy, with every agitprop left-wing writer going attempting to lay claim to his mantle, explicitly or implicitly, at some time or another - usually using his name as a kind of smug trump card to prop up their arguments. But in Judt, I think, the Orwell Prize has found a fitting home and Orwell’s spirit an unlikely echo.

Most of Judt’s obituaries and especially those in US newspapers mark him out as a radical or controversialist, owing mostly to his 2003 essay Israel: the alternative in which he argued a bi-national state the only just and sustainable solution to the Middle East conflict. Yet this was the same man who wrote that if there was to be one lesson from the 20th century, it was that “the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying the consequences”.

This apparent contradiction between the radical and the pragmatist often left Judt in the cold. "I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I'm regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist", he recently quipped.

But such positioning is what made Judt such a great writer. He was no pacifist or fence sitter, but as a documenter of the Soviet Unions’ crimes his writing was characterised by a rejection of ‘master narratives’, whether Marxist or neoconservative, which sought to explain or reduce every phenomenon through an over-arching ideology; that is, absolutism so cocksure it invariably finds its most natural expression through violence and bloodshed - but always, as Judt regularly quoted Camus as noting, the bloodshed of others.

Instead Judt argued that “incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek”. His creed was that of a thread of social democratic ideas which though argued for belligerently never believed it could explain or befit any event before it had happened, and so in acknowledging its infallibility naturally found expression through words and argument, a passion and commitment to slow democratic struggle, to faith in the everyday banalities of activism and collective thought above the outlandish fashion statements parading as serious politics of Chomskyite vogue.

It is this which puts him most firmly in the tradition of Orwell. Orwell was one of the most important authors of the 20th century, but he is misunderstood if he is quoted as a guru of untouchable truth and virtue. As Christopher Hitchens has written, he is best appreciated as an ordinary man who first and foremost battled his own imperfections, prejudices and pride in the pursuit of intellectual integrity.

The point here is that this is an extremely difficult pursuit – as Orwell wrote, “to see what’s under one’s nose requires a constant struggle”. It is also a rather unfashionable one. Countless writers and thinkers set themselves up as tellers of ‘impolite truths’ or contrarians but often this is simply a posture - in reality they’re as liable to the same intellectual contortions as their enemies, as they try to make events chime with their over-arching view of the world or their notions of the human race’s unstoppable historical trajectory. This is not to sneer; the reason true intellectual integrity is so hard-won is because the kind of Manichean, ‘us v. them’, crusading visions of the world are so seductive. The complex problems of the world are much easier when seen through one lens. This is why even great writers like Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen or Johann Hari ended up supporting the Iraq invasion as an extension of the humanitarian interventions they backed in the 1990s despite huge qualitative differences - they got so caught up in the excitement of a ‘new age of liberal interventionism’ or a ‘clash of civilisations’ they just filtered out the inconvenient facts and in doing so discredited their own doctrine. It’s also why so many ‘anti-imperialists’, of which there are too many to mention, end up excusing the most hideous crimes as long as the perpetrators are anti-American.

It’s because Judt took humility as the starting point of any political world view that he largely avoided such intellectual obfuscations and, ironically, in hindsight got so many of the big calls right. His suspicion of dualisms and utopia meant he hardly ever strayed from a clear sighted empiricism. Subsequently he could make radical and often prescient arguments, such as in Israel: the alternative, powerfully based on specific facts on the ground rather than as a wearing anti-establishment posture, while also being able to judge when outright overhaul of institutions was unnecessary*. He proved that it is intellectual honesty alone that renders the dichotomy between the pragmatist and the radical a false one.

There is a crucial final dimension to this. This is that though he had an outstanding grip on the English language, Judt was not a fancy writer. He didn’t deal in the ‘paradigms’ or the flowery jargon which characterizes much academic writing. Like Orwell, his writing was short, sharp and to the point – and all the bolder for it. In this respect his clear thinking was reflected in his clear writing. As Orwell famously observed in Politics and the English Language, and Judt likewise in ‘The Marxism of Louis Althusser’, the more intellectual contortions an author is trying to pull, the more evasive and unreadable their writing. Thus hard-won intellectual integrity is strongly related not just to accuracy of argument, but clarity of argument, and clarity in return to accuracy; it’s a delicate, mutually reinforcing relationship which hardly anyone gets right. Judt did.

Perhaps he did because as a historian first and foremost, he felt distanced from the New Left political writers of the 60s who, though important, tended to tip into dense ‘structuralist’ explanations of everything and carried within their “expressly opaque” writing (Judt’s term) a deep suspicion of traditional academic empiricism. But he did so mostly because he doubted himself constantly, watched himself constantly for hypocrisy and double standards, policed his writing for cant or bunkum. The world desperately needs more intellectuals like this, and with Judt’s passing it has lost perhaps its best, its most inspirational – and above anything else – its most truly radical of all.

Tony Judt: 1948-2010
Some writings of his for anyone interested:

What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy? (Remarque lecture – truly brilliant if you get the chance to listen/watch)

Israel: the alternative
The Dilemmas of Dissidence
Albert Camus: the best man in France? (in Reappraisals - can't find an online link?)
The Gnome in The Garden: Tony Blair and Britain's 'heritage' (likewise)
What Have We Learned, If Anything?
'Edge People'
Girls! Girls! Girls!
Goodbye to all that? Leszek Kolakowski and the Marxist Legacy
Night
Captive Minds: Then and Now
Words

*The best and funniest manifestation of which comes at the end of a brilliantly detailed and rich 1987 essay. The essay speculates on the future of Central and Eastern Europe after the overthrow of the Soviet Union in revolutions lead by intellectuals committed to liberal democracy. “If we are lucky”, Judt wrote, “there are some very dull times ahead”.

In defence of Ooh-missus!: why Andrew Pierce's article marks a worrying trend in the gay community

I've never met Andrew Pierce, but I can't imagine he's much fun in bed. His rather joyless little column in The Daily Mail yesterday, 'Why I, as a gay man, abhor these TV queens' follows in the footsteps of 'Why I, as a gay man, agree with the Pope' in February. Whether this is just lazy sub-editing on the Mail's part or old Andy is developing a camp sitcom-style catchphrase of his own is unclear. Nevertheless, it seems he is fast developing into the Mail's 'House gay' of choice.

There's nothing inherently wrong with criticising the attitudes or values of gay men, but take a look at the bile that drips from Pierce's fingertips in his latest offering. He rails bitterly against “the prancing, preening fashion icon Gok Wan”, the “lisping, limp wristed” Alan Carr, Graham Norton - “with his mincing, ooh-missus act” - and Julian Clary, “who has made an entire career out of making Larry Grayson look butch by comparison”. These “simpering, soppy, superficial cissies” give “ordinary [gay] men” a bad name, he says.

That the Mail has to resort to channelling its resentment towards the gay community through the proxy of a gay man is a strange victory of sorts for the gay rights movement, I suppose. Ironically, it is the history of that movement which Pierce owes his throat-clearing, 'as a gay man...' identity politics-stylee prefix to – a history he betrays by using his article to define himself against other gays. By so thoughtlessly bashing 'camp personalities' he inherently looks to set up a discursive divide between 'ordinary' gay men and 'camp queens'.

This seems to reek of a desperate plea for acceptance to his conservative audience; “Accept me, I'm not like them!”. He swears to them that most of his gay friends just want to watch Football and “worry far more about the state of the economy than over whether Kylie has found true love” (and what a hoot they sound!). Sadly, though, this kind of self-loathing should be placed in the context of a worrying trend within the gay community, where the more gay guys become integrated into mainstream society, the more they become embarrassed by their peers in the gay world. Go to any gay dating website and you'll see men describing themselves as, and looking for, “straight acting guys”; “no queens please”, “Sorry, I don't like camp guys”, and so on.

Many gay guys, at some point, feel alienated by mainstream gay culture and can become resentful. This is usually – like it was for me - just a stage on the path to self-acceptance, owing more to how we feel about ourselves and fretting over what our family or friends will think of us. The trouble is more and more gays are becoming stuck in that stage, legitimising it with the kind of intellectual froth Pierce echoes: gay identity doesn't 'define them', it's 'just who they fuck'; through this view, gay clubs, gay pride seem rather old hat. The corollary is often – as it is for Pierce – that all this is needless now gays have “genuine equality”.

But this is deeply misguided and dangerous for a number of reasons, not least because there are many remaining battles to be won by the gay community at home and abroad. Related to this, though, it ignores the history of camp. It was not 'ordinary gay men' who lead the Stonewall riots, kicking back against police harassment and sparking the gay rights movement in the Western world, but drag queens. That movement was not led successfully by people who defined themselves against others being oppressed or denigrated in a scramble for the lifeboats, but who wore their homosexuality proudly, loudly and with a sense of togetherness and brotherhood against outright hostility.

Most fundamentally, the gay movement which 'camp' spearheaded has achieved what it has because it was radical. It was not fuelled by a desire for Pierce's conservative ideas of equality (non-discrimination, marriage etc.), it has just come to land there in modern times. It was originally linked to a much wider political and social critique; it wanted to change institutions not just be accepted by them, to challenge conservative ideas of 'normal' gender roles not be subsumed within them. Through this prism calling camp an 'act', even if true (a tricky argument anyway based on its complex interaction with orthodox femininity), misses the point and betrays the original cause. Such ignorance could also partially explain so much of the gay worlds disgraceful treatment of transgender members of the community.

I don't mean to imply here, as Peter Tatchell has, that any gay who is not a radical is a sell-out. It is rather that people who bash 'camp' at least partially owe it the comfortable place within mainstream society (and columns in the Daily Mail!) from which they emit their prickish sneers, and should understand and respect its place within gay history.

Just because people like Pierce feel they don't need gay identity, or gay clubs, or gay pride, doesn't mean others cast out by their families or society don't. What binds gay men is not just 'who they fuck' but a shared history of exclusion, denigration and (until recently at least) out right oppression.

Articles and attitudes like Pierce's splinter solidarity and carry within them historically illiterate, depoliticised concepts of sexuality and identity. As worryingly, they are complacent, potentially offering a new cloak for those who wish to attack the gay community or unpick its successes. I've lost count of the number of times straight guys have said to me words to the effect of “You're fine, it's the mincers I don't like”. It will not do for people like Pierce to legitimise this modern form of homophobia. It's high time they thought twice before being so selfish and lazy, and recognised whose rather more fabulous shoulders they stand on.

Twitter: @SteveAkehurst

Also see: The hilarious David Hoyle's little rant!