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Gordon Brown moves on the constitution

I was thinking to write this blog every working day until Britain (or England) has a democratic written constitution. It would be a form of penance and protest.

Protest at the backwardness and low level of the election and even its most thoughtful commentators like Polly Toynbee and Peter Oborne who try to set a larger agenda. Penance because reformers like myself could have done more.

Nothing seems to have been learnt from the last twenty years, since Thatcherism disposed of the crumbling, post-war consensus and it was clear that the old regime of the United Kingdom had entered terminal decline.

Then, this morning, I thought maybe it would not be so long before we got a new constitution: a matter of years rather than decades.

I have been this optimistic before! But the Daily Telegraph leads with a story by two of its sharpest reporters, Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomas. Chancellor Gordon Brown, the smiling dark man who has saved Tony Blair and Labour’s campaign, and is now likely to become the next Prime Minister after Blair gains only a broken mandate on 5 May, says that henceforth only Parliament should have the power to declare war “except in the most exceptional circumstances”.

Foreigners might scratch their heads in puzzlement. Isn’t Britain a parliamentary democracy where war is anyway decided upon by the House of Commons? Well, no. The vote that preceded the Iraq war was without precedent. The power to commit British troops to battle is a ‘royal prerogative’ exercised by the Prime Minister.

Thomas and Sylvester report that Brown believes “changes to the constitution are needed to restore trust in politics”, and that he would consider abolishing the royal prerogative, a change which would “represent a dramatic shift in the balance of power between Parliament and the prime minister”.

It is an example of the despised politicians being well ahead of the commentators, in calling for a change in the system. And I don’t believe you can abolish the royal prerogative without a full-scale constitutional transformation.

There is a tactical aspect to Brown’s move as well as a strategic one. Last week the attorney general’s advice on whether the Iraq war was legal was leaked, first in parts to the Mail on Sunday, then more widely. Finally it had to be released in full by Downing Street. It showed, of course, that the war was probably not legal and that Blair winged it by not circulating the opinion. He’d long taken the decision to go with Bush. His aim was to cajole, bully, deceive and soft-talk his colleagues into supporting him when the self-delusion that he could do the same to the UN was finally punctured (see my earlier blog).

Immediately, the TV studios filled with another round of predictable debate about whether Blair ‘lied’ or not. It was as if the entire diagnosis of the manipulation of ‘truth’, of the Campbell Code, and the nature of political bullshit had never taken place.

Oh well, at least it was poetic justice for Blair, who was forced publicly to sweat with discomfort. It also meant that the question was put to Brown whose body-language had distanced himself on Iraq. Disciplined, he followed his chosen strategy of demonstrating the unity of the Labour leadership and said he ‘yes’ to the question as to whether he would have gone to war in the same way as the Prime Minister. Tactically, he had to distance himself from the consequences of this disgraceful judgement and the Telegraph interview immediately did so.

But that this angle, this shifting of the framework over Iraq to trust in the system and the need for Downing Street to ‘let go’ if it is to rebuild trust, was a considered not a sudden judgement.

Real name comments welcome please email anthonysblog@opendemocracy.net

April 30, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | TrackBack

Dominic Hilton on FiveLive tonight

openDemocracy's great Dominic Hilton will be on BBC's FiveLive tonight talking about "how to get British yoof' engaged in politics, or something". You may remember his article on fashionable anti-americanism, and more recently "Is Britain a Banana Republic?".

On the radio, it's harder to get away with phrases like, "Attractively-packaged, nice tasting, creamy, chocolaty, cookie-dough anti-Americanism that clogs the arteries and numbs the brain". But if anyone can do it, Dominic can. Watch him live or later on the Net.

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April 29, 2005 in openDemocracy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

If you could teach the world one thing

Apparently, 2005 is Einstein Year and on that occasion Sandy Starr & co at Spiked! have surveyed 250 scientists and educators (including 11 Nobel winners) about what they believe is the most important thing to teach/learn about science.

The theory of evolution is way up there, as are methods of science and relations between humans and nature. Some point blank refused to answer like, Gerardus 't Hooft from Utrecht who, contends "spiked's question sounds exactly like the question often asked by students - 'what parts of the text in this book should I learn, to pass my test, and which parts may I skip?' I refuse to answer that."

The whole survey is attractively summarised by Sandy Starr, and it's quite fun to browse through what these opionion-movers and shakers feel is worthy braintertainment today.

April 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Two Sinking Ships

One should never underestimate the capacity of British institutions to patch themselves up and keep going. But the British general election is like a race between two sinking ships. The Conservative Party and the Prime Minister are both holed below the water line.

Of the two, the decomposition of the Tories is the more serious, that of Blair the more striking.

When he became leader it was said that Blair had ‘borrowed the Labour Party’ to achieve his personal ambitions. But it was also true that the Labour Party borrowed Blair to make it electable. When, after Iraq, it became clear that if you live by Blair you will die by Blair, Labour should have dropped him. When they did not it was the Tories great chance.

They missed it. No one sees the Conservatives as a government in waiting, not even themselves.

It was noticeable that Bush and the Republicans in America last year were evangelical in their call to arms – however mean spirited the prejudices behind being ‘pro-life’. They were pro-migration, spoke Spanish, had prominent blacks in the so-called White House and went out and invaded other countries. To put it another way, the Republicans are in favour of the modern world, even if it is their very own incredible version of it.

By contrast Britain’s right-wing party is against migration (even if it does not quite say so). It is against Europe (though it denies this the body language is clear). It is against the Scots (and has a special English clause in its Manifesto which I will blog on soon). It is even against the bullying of President Bush (but dare not say so). In effect, the Conservative Party is against the forces reshaping the world of which we are part.

And it has no credible, alternative worldview of its own. It has built its campaign around relentless attacks on Blair, Labour’s weakest link. But instead of being inspiring in the way that the promise of sweeping out something old and rotten can inspire, the attacks seem hollow and opportunist rather than well founded, as the Tory broom itself has not changed and renewed itself. Matthew d’Ancona, deputy editor of the right-wing Sunday Telegraph, set out the case in a magisterial column. (Registration required including automated marital status)

I can’t resist quoting him. He observes that immigration and asylum are a proxy for the irresistible forces of globalisation, “People sense the forces and are made anxious by them. How could it be otherwise? But that does not mean politicians have a duty simply to parrot these anxieties, to take their script from the doorstep like stenographers… the Tories face a choice between presenting themselves as prospective governors in the modern world, or as refugees from it.”

God help England if by chance the refugees from the modern world should win.

* * * * * * * *

I promised to respond to Sophie Scruton’s comment on an earlier blog (7 April) about the Tory party and this seems the right moment. After the party rejected Laura Sandys as its candidate in Arundel and South Downs I said then that it had failed to renew itself: “How is it possible for the Conservatives to systematically refuse to choose Laura as a candidate? It is not just because local activists don't like intelligent, single women. It is also that the leadership is not modern and does not want the future to be different from the past it once knew.”

Sophie responded that at least the rejection of such potential candidates (and she too wishes to be one) is a truly democratic process open to all local constituency party members, unlike the top-down fixes of the Labour machine.

The raises two questions: What does it mean for political parties to be democratic? And what is happening to the Tories?

I think that parties need to be in open argument with voters, as d’Ancona describes. This might mean opening the choice of candidates to primaries in which voters choose who should be the candidate. Certainly a party leadership must seek to persuade its members to lift up their heads and engage with the larger world. An eloquent exploration of what this should mean for politics is given by George Papandreou in his recent openDemocracy interview.

If a party becomes captured by activists it can become sterile, closed and sectarian. This is the opposite of democratic for the public at large. In this case many who are not Tories want a positive contest. By failing to renew itself, the Conservatives are letting Labour off the hook. I stand by my blog.

Real names comments welcome, or email anthonysblog@openDemocracy.net

April 27, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Marxism hits the small screen

One journalist who is genuinely grappling with the system from within is Peter Oborne, political editor of the right-wing Spectator.

His new book The Rise of Political Lying, published in time for the election campaign, is rather narrow and breathless in its approach, “The presence of a group of shameless, habitual liars at the centre of British power is an amazing state of affairs, without precedent in modern British history”, he writes (p. 244). But he was not talking about the British press. So it was with some trepidation that I watched his special one-hour Dispatches on Channel 4 this evening with its desperate title, Election Unspun: Why Politicians can’t tell the truth.

It was not the film of the book. TV executives hate concepts which are the gateway to thought. But Oborne’s programme deserved to be called ‘Democracy in Danger’.

The election looks, sounds and smells like democracy in action, Oborne argued, but it isn’t. There are no profound arguments and no ideas at stake. The parties are doing everything to narrow the differences. Their policies have been generated from focus group research into computer generated samples of opinion in the tiny numbers of swing voters in the marginals that will decide the outcome, thanks to the United Kingdom’s exceptionally unfair election system.

Professional machines sever political parties from their membership and belief systems. Policies are product lines, voters are sized up by the latest marketing methods, resulting in policies of “stupefying banality” in which even the most radical, the Liberal Democrats have declared that they are for “tough liberalism”!

The cost of the health service will have to rise as the population ages but no party will say so. All are against global warming but none will argue for abolishing the tax breaks that are making cheap air travel the greatest source of the UK’s global warming gasses. And so on.

What I liked about Oborne’s presentation was that all the parties were subjected to his scorn and contempt. This meant the onus was really on the Tories, who, as the main opposition party, should have been the ones exposing and opposing - rather than miming and imitating the government by importing the latest in American computerology.

Oborne brought to life in vivid vox pop the thesis developed by Colin Leys in his study Market Driven Politics, published by the good old Marxist imprint Verso Books back in 2001. Leys quotes Peter Mandelson, who was Labour’s campaign director in the 1997 election that brought it to power. He was speaking to the Institute of Directors a year later:

“It had been the job of New Labour’s architects to translate their understanding of the customer into offerings he or she was willing to pay for. And then, and only then, to convey to potential customers the attributes of that offering through all the different components that make up a successful brand – product positioning, packaging, advertising and communications” (p.68)

Leys comments dryly, “Absent from this model is the idea that a party represents ideals, or even interests, on the basis of which voters may be appealed to and against which policies will be judged.”

Now Oborne has put the consequences on film.

But in doing so, he too seemed to become a victim of the process he attacks. The heart of his criticism is that the politicians won’t even be honest about the obvious consequences of their own proclaimed values. ‘Where are the great ideas!’ Oborne cries. Where are his ideas? Why does not Peter Oborne follow the clear the logic of his own denunciation?

Politics in Britain is indeed the prisoner of swing voters (who, a fascinating section of his report discloses, are likely to be those voters who are heavily in debt and have recently moved house). Their philistine preoccupations and fears dictate the pledges of the country's leaders.

But this would not be the case if the electoral system was proportional, as in all modern democracies. Oborne should state this. He complained at the way British politics has become the prisoner of grey interests because the young don’t vote. Very well, make voting compulsory.

But could he speak the conclusions of his own concerns and keep his job at The Spectator?

When Oborne finally cornered the Prime Minister on the effects of aircraft pollution and the future of the planet, Blair shamelessly responded that the circle can be squared and ecological sustainability is not in contradiction with economic growth. Pressed, Blair added that it was not politically realitistic to make flying more expensive. Oborne despaired at this failure of honest leadership. So Tony knows that his vote depends on those who only find living in Britain bearable because they can fly out cheaply? At least he did not lie! Instead, he will not put his job at risk. Is Peter made of firmer metal?

Real name comments welcome or email anthonysblog@opendemocracy.net

April 26, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Media still hypnotised

Britain’s Prime Minister is still at it. Today he vigorously responded to all the attacks about lies and truth, rights and wrongs, legality and illegality. A decision had to be made and “I decided to remove Saddam”. Hypnotised, the media seems unable to utter the non-word of the campaign: America. Excuse me Prime Minister but the whole thing is a charade, you didn’t decide to remove Saddam you decided to back Bush whatever he decided.

April 26, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Chinese blogs on anti-Japan protests

Official Chinese media were not allowed to report on recent anti-Japan protests in Shanghai, and the word 'march' has even been censored on popular Chinese instant messaging software. But the blogs have churned out account upon eye-witness account of the protests - some patriotic and proud, some more critical. Read the Global Voices summary of blog views from China. On openDemocracy, Isabel Hilton explains where the tension stems from.

April 25, 2005 in News related | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

7 great issues

“Interesting, but not satisfying, I want to know your view”. This was Solana Larsen on my blog before last. Quite right: blogs are about attitude not just reporting. But to answer her I need to spell out what matters.

I wrote about VoteOK and Vote4Peace trying to make an issue out of the election. Why?

The election feels like a charade. It is not that all politicians are liars or mainly lie. This is a cheap untruth. It is not that there is no difference between the parties. The point is that a general election is a rare, four-yearly moment when people can exercise power. We are sold elections as a moment when our views count. But the issues which really count about the directions we should or should not take are not on the table.

There are seven great issues facing Britain. One has been met by Labour – the economy. Thanks mainly to Gordon Brown and his team what was a crippled economy prone to ‘go-stop’ is growing and ensuring employment. There are plenty of remaining questions about structural inequalities, of course, whose resolution demands international action.

But what kind of country does Britain wish to be? Four more issues address this: the relationships with Europe and America, with democracy and between city and country.

The BBC's Nick Assinder says that Europe is the missing issue from this election. America is even more important (as I’ve blogged, it is the central, repressed source of shame these election days). Democracy (in the large sense of how we govern ourselves) is the most important of the great missing issues for me, but is only part of the whole. How city and countryside relate defines the character of a society as a whole.

The next great issue is global. Call it climate change (and see the new openDemocracy debate). Will the planet survive? Excuse me, could the politicians stop agreeing with each other about this and propose action?

That makes six great issues in all.

The seventh? The seventh is the charade itself, the way in which the issues that matter are not being addressed. The POWER Enquiry into the gap between people and politics is about this. It is taking unmistakable evidence that people, young and old, are intensely interested in political issues and increasing disparaging of politicians and official politics.

Talking with John Berger over tea in a sunny London street yesterday (he is here for the festival of his work) he was telling me how the vote in the forthcoming French referendum on the European constitution looks like being a ‘No’. He feels this is not about the constitution. Suddenly a chance has arisen for people to say no to the whole process they are being offered. If it is a “no”, it will be a vote against the charade.

This is where the two campaigns I started with come in.

Sorry if this blog is taking its time, like a puzzle I am trying to draw back the surface of things.

VoteOK is driven by a countryside against city protest. Vote4Peace is about not having a war-prone alliance with America. Both are also about the lack of democracy which links and galvanizes the great missing issues. Both are trying to rupture the charade that POWER is investigating.

In addition, the rapid growth of independent candidates challengingly described by Tom Burgis in openDemocracy.net shows how individuals are rolling up their sleeves to do it their way.

Perhaps all this action will be like the impact of the global warming that the politicians are ignoring. The heat and friction that is being generated may not (but it may) be felt this time. But sometime soon the great glaciers of party politics will break off and find themselves floating and melting and out at sea.

Real names comments welcome, please email anthonysblog@opendemocracy.net

April 22, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Hot Politics

openDemocracy launches what we hope will be the world’s first truly global debate on the politics of climate change. Why? To find out more, read the new openDemocracy blog Hot Politics.

April 21, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

FactCheck UK

I won't say the BS word anymore. But for those who wish they knew the 'facts' behind UK political rhetoric, Channel 4 has started a new FactCheck website, based on the American site of the same name. (via perfect.co.uk)

(You may remember the 2004 television debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards where Cheney referred viewers to FactCheck.com instead of .org and the domain name owners diverted people to George Soros' anti-Bush rant instead.)

April 21, 2005 in Media & the Net | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

No, Blair did not decide to remove Saddam - the Paxman interview

“I tried desperately hard to reach a second UN resolution”. When this failed, “I decided to remove him”. It is preposterous for Tony Blair to claim that he removed Saddam. But he seems to have got away with it. Hypnotising Jeremy Paxman Britain’s foremost interviewer, who knows how to press a question, in their encounter earlier this evening.

Blair did not “decide to remove” Saddam Hussein. That force unmentioned in all the main party manifestos in the UK election (see my earlier blog) took the decision: America. Many openDemocracy readers don’t like the use of swear words. Sorry, understood. But ‘bullshit’ here really does have a clinical meaning. I’m afraid Paxman went along with it.

It was Bush who took that decision. And well before March 2003. Blair had long decided that he would support the President in whatever course he took. What worries many possible voters concerned about the decision on Iraq, and this is why it won’t go away, is that it is not a matter of a moment of decision from which we can move on. It is about the Prime Minister’s embrace of the White House point of view, exhibited then and still continuing.

What Blair’s describes as his “desperate” effort to get a UN resolution, was an effort to manufacture a figleaf. The fact that America had made up its mind anyway then undermined diplomacy in the UN, according to a well placed source there whom I spoke with afterwards.

Blair’s was the “desperation” of wish fulfilment, whose failure alone should have led to resignation. A brief and riveting account is provided in a little read appendix by Charles Grant to his Centre for European Reform pamphlet on The Transatlantic rift. Blair, he believes, if only he had had know what Grant, the director of a modest think-tank, had discovered with a modicum of effort. “would not have pursued the chimera of a follow-up resolution for as long as his did”. Indeed, Grant describes how he wrote and told his contacts why they could get no second UN resolution. But a “senior Whitehall figure” kindly explained to him afterwards that such advice had been discounted because, “We under-estimated the dislike of the US around the world”.

Instead of pressing the Prime Minister on this and on his relations with America Paxman plunged into whether Blair knew he was wrong to tell Parliament that the intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was, as he claimed, “extensive, detailed and authoritative”. Didn’t the Butler Report say it was not? A squabble followed. One for which Blair was comfortably prepared.

Because the issue was not about the intelligence he received, but how intelligent he was in going about getting it. For example the British Government’s introduction to its September dossier (the one that floated the idea that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction he could use in 45 minutes) said that Iraq was currently manufacturing chemical weapons.

Most experts at the time did indeed believe that Saddam had kept some back some weapons in a secret reserve, or had tried to. But none thought he was actually making chemical weapons on any significant scale. Ron Manley, the British expert who had destroyed Saddam’s arsenal after 1991 explained to openDemocracy in a detailed assessment why Saddam could not have been making chemical weapons. But Manley, who was still working part time for the Ministry of Defence and who knew Iraq really well, was not asked for his view of the reports the government received.

The key point here is that Blair hid behind intelligence results that he wanted. The intelligence was ‘bogus’. This was the word used in Parliament at the time by Kenneth Clark, the experienced Tory politician. President Chirac knew it was bogus too and told Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector. Chancellor Schroeder knew it, and, of course, the Americans knew it. The US administration settled on making weapons of mass destruction the reason for the war “for bureaucratic reasons… because it was the one reason everyone could agree on”, as Paul Wolfowitz, the leading spokesman for the invasion, told Sam Tanenhaus of Vanity Fair in July 2003.

It was bogus then, it is bogus now. Above all, for the British it is bogus of Blair to say about Saddam Hussein “I decided to remove him”.

Real names comments welcome, please email anthonysblog@openDemocracy.net

April 21, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Isabel Hilton on BBC in 20 minutes

openDemocracy's editor, Isabel Hilton is going to be on BBC Radio 4's programme, Thinking Allowed at 4pm (GMT). You can listen online wherever you are, live or later. Isabel will be speaking on how working conditions in Chinese factories have changed in tact with the economy over the past 30 years. Read her recent article in Granta (issue 89): "Made in China: what became of the workers' paradise?".

April 20, 2005 in openDemocracy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

VoteOK, Vote4Peace: two campaigns with an aim

A new ingredient is being stirred into the election. Determined campaigners are using of Britain’s first-past-the-post constituency system, to try and swing seats their way. Two are VoteOK and Vote4Peace.

VoteOK started as an attempt to overthrow the ban on hunting. Vote4Peace wants to support MPs who opposed the Iraq war. One from the right and one from the left (although radicals hunt and conservatives have opposed the war).

I talked with Chips Mann of VoteOK, wife of its founder Charles Mann (see one of the few pieces about it in The Times).

Last week she felt “down”. Now she is excited. They have 139 ‘directors’ working in their target constituencies - where the sitting MP voted to ban hunting. They won’t list them which is hardly open of them. But in each one the director coordinates their volunteers. “Candidates we are helping are amazed at the amount of support they are getting”, Chips told me. “Some are even saying it is more than they can handle”.

Although the anti-war demonstration of 15 February 2003 was two to three times larger than the largest one against the hunting ban, the sectarian leadership of the Stop the War Coalition ensured that it has not spun off an equivalently strong tactical voting campaign.

Instead it has been left to independents to seize the need and identify nearly 40 anti-war MPs with small majorities who they want to help, such as Labour’s Bob Marshall-Andrews.

The campaign director of Vote4Peace, Paul Hilder, was out in Marshall-Andrews Medway constituency at the weekend. He told me about “A soft-labour Muslim guy who said “I like Bob but I can’t bear voting for Blair”, then he agreed that we need “the right kind of MPs”. Paul thought he swung him round.

Vote4Peace have found it harder to mobilise than they initially hoped. “People are not intuitively for an independent campaign to support the good guys. It takes time to get their heads around this idea”, Paul told me. “They rail against the dying of the light instead of switching on the light bulb”.

Could it be that while the anti-war voters are locked in grip of whinge and protest, voters across the countryside are turning on their brains - and turning out?

Real name comments welcome, please email anthonysblog@openDemocracy.net

April 19, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More on the manifestos - bodylanguage

Manifestoes are body language before content: an attitude, a spirit, as well as an approach. Having spotted the missing word in my previous blog, here is a closer comparison of the Tory and Labour offerings.

The Conservative Party manifesto for the 2005 British election is a gimmick. Many of its pages full of large handwritten anti-labour remarks. It is a picture pamphlet with little text. It is like one of those books for children which assumes that to make learning interesting it must appear to be exciting. As the late Saul Bellow might have said, the excitation is a substitute for genuine passion. Hollowed out, lacking self-belief, the Tory manifesto dares you not to vote for it.

At one point it even has an action strip of six photographs. These show a woman having her handbag snatched. No caption accompanies the pictures. Are they a manifesto pledge?

In her comment on my April 7 blog entry about the way the Tories selected Nick Herbert Sophie Scruton defends a “thorough democratic process”. I’ll come back on this. I think the Conservatives are turning their back on democracy.

But they are not alone. Labour’s manifesto too is a lacklustre affair. Its gimmick is not to have one.

This expresses its unique character: never before has Labour enjoyed power for two full consecutive terms with a large working majority. Now, for the first time, it has the privilege of writing a manifesto which can say to voters ‘we are experienced, we know how to do things’. Accordingly it has 24,000 words (compared a mere 7,500 torywords). And the core of the document has been drafted by Labour’s younger, practical generation.

But spatchcocked onto it is the leaders introduction and various wrapping phrases and paragraphs. These make the whole thing a Frankenstein of a document of ill-assorted body parts.

In his preface the Prime Minister says, “Eight years ago, I offered new leadership – fresh, idealistic, energetic but untested.”

He does not say what he offers now. But logically it follows that this time he offers a leadership that is stale, cynical, drained and familiar.

At least that sentence was clear. Take this paragraph of Mr Blairism: “In our third term we will cement a new social contract with rights matched by responsibilities. No going back to ‘no such thing as society’. Going forward instead to power and resources in the hands of the law-abiding majority. A government committed both to abolishing child poverty and to putting the values of individual responsibility and duty at the very heart of policy”.

From the word ‘cement’ onwards it isn’t even trying to be clear. The words are a black hole of meaning sucking in the reader in the hope that he or she will project onto them whatever they want to read.

Enough! A hundred pages onwards and Labour’s manifesto concludes with its section on democracy. It declares it has enshrined a new constitutional settlement between the nations of the United Kingdom (pull the other one) and states – it will be OK, its 112 words, I’m not reproducing the other 26,000:

“Widening access to power is as important as widening access to wealth and opportunity. National standards are important to ensure fairness. But the best way to tackle exclusion is to give choice and power to those left behind. Our political institutions – including our own party – must engage a population overloaded with information, diverse in its values and lifestyles, and sceptical of power. However, people are passionate about politics – when they see it affects them. So our challenge is to bridge the chasm between government and governed. Our third term will build upon our unprecedented programme of constitutional reform embedding a culture of devolved government at the centre and self-government in our communities.”

Hold on a second. Did you spot “chasm”? After eight years of enshrining new constitutional settlements and unprecedented reform there is still a chasm! Namely, a vast, yawning gap. And the government is going to build on this? It gives castles in the air a new meaning.

Another give away word here is “devolved”. Non-British readers (and even your average British subject) may not be aware that in UKanian-speak power devolved means power retained. It means giving the appearance of democracy. It means… well, it means long the live the chasm between us in government and you the governed.

Real names comments welcome. Please email anthonysblog@opendemocracy.net

April 17, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Democracy in Iran, blog responses to Sazegara

openDemocracy’s article series on Iran is making some waves in the blogosphere, and it seems to be mainly pro-military invasion bloggers who have latched on to it (at least on English-language blogs). Has calling for democracy in Iran become too Right-sounding to the anti-war Left?

Also check out this moving letter to Mohsen Sazegara from an Iranian openDemocracy reader.

At The Word Unheard, there is an overview of openDemocracy’s Iran debate. Blogger “USMC_Vet” seems sympathetic to Kaveh Ehsani’s argument for peaceful protest but says, “From a standpoint of American security, leaving the framework of this regime of lunatics in place is not an option. Removing them without considerable bloodshed is likely not a possiblity.”

Ubi Libertas takes a similar stance, especially disagreeing with Mohsen Sazegara on the importance of support from intellectuals, writers, and artists: “If the last few years teach us anything it is that poets, novelists, philosophers, playwrights, and singers matter not at all. They're too busy stroking each other to do any actual good in the world. The best we can hope for from them is that they don't actively hinder change, and even that modest hope is often frustrated.”

The Pseudo Magazine applauds Sazegara’s efforts, and practically predicts a Marxist revolution in educated, well-informed and internet-connected Iranian society: “The people will have their voices heard. Woe betide anyone who stands in their way.”

Regime Change Iran comments on the unlikely rumour among Iranian ex-patriates that Sazegara is “an agent of the regime sent to undermine their efforts.”

And Ukranian-American, “Aussiegirl” in Washinton D.C. says Sazegar’s online referendum petition reminds her of something George Bush once said: “Read the referendum -- and see if it doesn't remind you of an American document we all celebrate on the Fourth of July. Freedom is a wonderful thing -- and it appears that the craving for it is universal, as George Bush has repeatedly stated.”

April 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Campaign for European Freedom of Information Act

Over here in the UK, we've not had a Freedom of Information Act for all that long. Although the act itself was passed in 2000, it didn't come into force until the beginning of this year, giving government departments plenty of time to destroy anything too incriminating. Blogger Steve Wood has followed the fortunes of the legislation.

Now the Open Society Justice Initiative have joined together with 16 civil society NGO's, including Statewatch, to call for the Council of Europe to adopt "a new binding instrument entrenching the right to access information throughout Europe".

In the States, where the Freedom of Information Act is coming up to its 40th anniversary, requesting documents using the legislation has emerged as a core practice of some grassroots journalists.  It's fascintating to see what filth gets turns up.

April 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The manifestos - Find the missing word

What word is missing from all the party political manifestos? What all-shaping, decisive political word, cannot be found in them at all?

No one in the openDemocracy office could guess, not even David Hayes.

It’s the gorilla in the nursery, the elephant in the living room.

It isn’t ‘globalisation’, which the Labour Manifesto mentions – the Tory Manifesto one only manages the more feeble ‘global’ a couple of times. It isn’t the ‘constitution’, which Labour claims to have reshaped.

It isn’t Europe. Alan Cowell of the New York Times launched his intelligent election coverage with a fascinating article on how Europe was a key issue at the last election but has simply been bled out of political debate in today’s Britain - even though it is arguably the most important question facing the United Kingdom.

But while not an ‘issue’ in contention, at least all the party manifestos take a stand on Europe and the EU in suitably pious ways.

No, the word all parties fear is: AMERICA

Our new found land and oldest ally has yet to be discovered so far as the current election campaign is concerned.

All three have international sections on Britain’s role in world affairs. In them Labour’s manifesto twice mentions that “we have worked with the US” (without the ‘A’). This is hardly generous. The Tory document makes no mention of the global leviathan at all. Nor does the Liberal Democrat Manifesto.

But the whole of Blair’s approach to world affairs is built on his belief that Britain has to be as close as possible to the United States of America. It is his foreign policy.

No party dares to be seen as anti-American. All fear the call from the US Embassy that would follow. Nor, now, this is a great change, dare they be seen as pro-American, for British voters do not wish to see their national leaders on their knees before Washington, the only posture that seems acceptable to George Bush. So shifty avoidance and silence follows.

It all adds to the smell of discomfort, shame and humiliation of these election days.

All real name comments welcome, please send them to anthonysblog@opendemocracy.net

April 14, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

What to do with your unwanted vote

eBay might be earnestly taking down auctions from disillusioned members of the UK electorate trying to turn their vote into a hard cash, but that hasn't stopped this site from launching. Votes for sale - can this really be the logical conclusion of "political party's wills to buy the electorate"? Although I've already got one vote I don't know what to do with, it seems there might be a market elsewhere for your vote. I'm taking bets on how soon it is before sell-your-vote-to-a-squaddie.co.uk gets launched.

But if you'd rather register your disapproval of the democratic process without letting money sully your intent then notapathetic.com, designed by the folks over at mySociety, is for you.

April 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

On Blair and Bullshit

“Cool Britannia is not a term I have ever used”, Tony Blair claimed last Friday – forgetting that he had used the dread phrase only five days earlier in an article for the Sunday Times.

That was seven years ago in April 1998. The quote is from Francis Wheen, its reprinted in his collected journalism, Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies.

So the Prime Minister has been at it for a long time.

“Why now?” he must be asking Cherie, why don’t they trust me now, I’ve always been like this, and they always used to trust me!

Andreas Whittam Smith addresses the issue in his most recent column in the Independent. After listing some of Tony Blair’s recent deceptions he asks himself what sort of person does this?

Blair himself could answer that he is at least as honest and open as previous Premiers (a point made by Whittam Smith’s colleague Steve Richards – but would you want this said about you? I’d call it a back-handed compliment.)

Whittam Smith seeks out a different kind of comparison: with the crooked newspaper proprietor Robert Maxwell who ended up jumping from his yacht.

“I believe that Mr Blair habitually states what ought to be the case, regardless of whether it is strictly true or false.”

Why ‘strictly’?

“Like Mr Maxwell”, Andreas continues, ‘he is unembarrassed when found out and carries on regardless’.

This concedes much too much. I tried to analyse what I called Blair’s Campbell's Code
It uses ‘truth’ in deliberate instrumental way to crush perception of reality.

If you think that it too conspiratorial, then the other explanation is systemic in a different sense. In a word it is bullshit, as my friend Tom Nairn explains in his new article in openDemocracy, in part stimulated by the reflections in this blog.

All real name comments welcome, please send them to anthonysblog@opendemocracy.net

April 13, 2005 in Blair's Bust - UK election | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Two kinds of protest in China

Many thanks to China Confidential and Riding Sun for expanding on stories heard over the weekend of riots in and around Huankantou Village, eastern China. The protests against pollution from nearby factories were suppressed by police, and there were two fatalities among the crowd. The environmental degradation caused by China's "economic miracle" is cast as a pivotal political issue by the Chinese deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration in our recent interview, China's Environmental Suicide.

Meanwhile in Bejing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen other protests, this time against Japanese targets and apparently motivated by a move from Japan to rewrite its history textbooks to downplay the brutal occupation of China by the Japanese in the decades leading up to the end of the second world war, were seen to be actively encouraged by the Chinese administration.

April 12, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Can the UK election match South Korea's online?

On DoWire.org, e-democracy guru Steve Clift has made a wiki for UK election websites. If you know any interesting sites that are not on the list, you can add them yourself. In his email, Clift said after a practically invisible online effort in the Australian elections, he has low hopes that the UK will be anywhere near as interesting as the American - or South Korean elections.

April 11, 2005 in Media & the Net | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Factory collapse kills many in Bangladesh

The BBC reports that at least 17 people have been killed and more than 100 are feared trapped after a nine-storey factory building collapsed in Savar, 32km (20 miles) north-west of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

Working conditions in Bangladesh's textile factories have long been a source of controversy. A lively debate on the topic took place in openDemocracy last year, with Anita Roddick calling for a campaign for accountability.

Farida Khan agreed with Anita Roddick that working conditions in many Bangladeshi factories continued to be appaling, but differed with her as to the best way forward. Naila Kabeer, whose work on women's conditions in Bangladesh has been praised by the novelist Monica Ali and others, sharply criticised what she saw the fuzziness of Roddick's good intentions, which - she argued- didn''t pay due regard to the likely outcomes of campaigns. Kabeer wrote:

What workers need is to know that it is possible to protest without the fear of immediate dismissal. There is a law to that effect in Bangladesh but it is observed mainly in the breach. Yet this is a fundamental precondition for the right to organise. I would suggest that if the goal is to improve women’s capacity to speak for and organise themselves, then high-profile campaigns targeting individual companies are not the best way to achieve it.

International solidarity would have more positive and lasting effects if it were focused on providing human rights and other organisations in Bangladesh with the support and resources they need to publicise workers’ rights and to take employers to court when these rights are violated.

About 1.8 million people work in Bangladesh's 2,500 garment factories. This most recent tragedy makes the debate ever more pressing.

April 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Bolton: There's no such thing as the UN

Just when we were getting used to the bizarre idea of Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank, Citizens for Global Solutions remind us it's last chance to oppose the nomination of John Bolton for American UN Ambassador. It's one of those internal US decisions, which could become a real headache for the whole world. Democracy Arsenal offers top ten reasons why Bolton should not be named. And here are some of the interesting comments Bolton has made throughout his career:

“There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world and that is the United States when it suits our interest and we can get others to go along.''
John Bolton, 1994, Global Structures Convocation, New York, NY.

"Renouncing the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court “was the happiest moment of my government service."
John Bolton, The Wall Street Journal, 2002.

I'm not sure this counts as constructive criticism. And it doesn't smell like diplomacy either. But not everyone thinks it's a bad idea. Doug Bandow from the Cato Institute says Bolton is right man for the job, and says he was surprised at how measured Bolton was in a chapter of a Cato book they both contributed to: "He did not call for closing the U.N. offices, dismantling the building, and deporting the diplomats," he says.

So maybe we're lucky after all.

On Obsedian Wings, a very thorough overview of who is for and against Bolton's nomination in Washington. "If [Bolton detractors] spent similar amounts of time and energy exposing the crimes and mismanagement at the UN, such as written about here and here and here, perhaps there'd be a new Secretary General by now and the UN would be in a better place," goes the argument.

April 9, 2005 in News related | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Is the UK more Creative or Common?

openDemocracy's Becky Hogge writes another great article. On O'Reilly, she welcomes the Creative Commons copyright license to the UK. She explains the legal difference between the US and UK licenses, which allow freer use and re-use of copyrighted material.

She says adoption of the license is likely to be more painfree in the UK, where there is a stronger tradition of public service media than in America. Certainly, the BBC are supportive, as are OfCom, Research Councils UK, JISC, the Museums Libraries and Archives Council, The National Health Service, and the British Library who have all promised to consider CC licenses for future projects.

The British music industry has been less happy to see a new copyright-kid on the block. Will CC work against the market? Noooo, it will create new ones.

April 8, 2005 in Media & the Net | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The French Republic and "papolatrie"

A new sin has sprung up in France: "papolatrie", or pope worship. Today's IHT describes the debate sparked by the government marking the pope's death.

"The government is giving the impression that it is an advocate for one religion, and that religion is Catholicism. And that's an abuse of power," argues Yves Contassot of France's Green Party.

62% of French people describe themselves as Catholic, the article notes, "but the country also is struggling to shore up its secular identity after banning religious symbols from schools, including Muslim headscarves, Jewish yarmulkes and large Christian crosses".

So is this blatant hypocrisy, as some claim? Here's what you said about the headscarf ban at the time, replying to a piece by our writer Dave Belden. And your discussion that accompanied our trio of articles on the subject.

How does the controversy surrounding papolatrie fit in? Discuss it here.

Our coverage of the headscarf ban:
France unveiled: making Muslims into citizens?, Johannes Willms
A nation in diversity: France, Muslims and the headscarf, Patrick Weil
Hijab hysteria: France and its Muslims, Svend White

April 8, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Pretend-blogger Blair

Apropos the UK election on the Web and trusting Tony, does anybody really believe Tony Blair's Campaign Diary (written in the first person) is really written by him? Robin Grant doesn't think so either. Pretending to blog doesn't seem like a very effective way to be cool.

I was trying to remember what the candidate blogs were like in the US election heyday. I didn't find any archives. But I did find this old nifty comparison survey. Apparently Kerry wasn't much of a blogger, but Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean were. Maybe because they knew they wouldn't get elected. Bush? As the authors conclude, "It’s probably not fair to expect the Leader of the Free World to post blog entries." But maybe the Leader of Britain should.

April 8, 2005 in Media & the Net | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New report: Arab world is democratic "black hole"

The third Arab Human Development Report was released this week after three months delay, allegedly due to American and Egyptian objections to the report's criticism of the war in Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (download it here).

The report is on freedom and governance in the Arab world and is written by Arab scholars. It is certain to cause fury among Arab leaders too. It calls for immediate reform of "black hole" dictatorships, and comes down hard on US policies that tolerate authoritarian governments for the sake of regional stability. The UNDP has been nervous about publishing under its own name.

The World Bank says: "Despite much criticism of the US in the report, the authors backed international efforts to promote democracy in the region, describing them as potentially the most pragmatic way to sustain momentum for change."

One could only wish America's commitment to democracy extended so far as to accept criticism from the people who live with the results of it's policies. Sadly, it seems unlikely the region will speed towards democracy before the publication of the next and fourth report in 2006 on empowerment of Arab women.

(Thanks to Daniel Makar in Sweden for emailing me about the report)

April 8, 2005 in News related | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A new paradigm for the fight against terror

'One of the most surprising pol