Message from our friends at Refugee and Migrant Justice:

Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ), the largest provider of specialist legal advice for asylum seekers and other vulnerable migrants in England and Wales, went into administration on June 16 2010. 

This is a result of cuts in Legal Aid over recent years and changes in the way in which Legal Aid providers are paid.  RMJ used to get paid monthly, but is now only paid after each case is closed – many cases last many months or even years.  No charity can be expected to wait that long for payment and many law centres are finding it difficult to cope with the new payment system.  David Cameron’s claims to value the work of charities rings very hollow indeed.

RMJ (formerly the Refugee Legal Centre) was founded in 1992 and in the last year alone has helped over 11,000 people. Closure would mean that many thousands of vulnerable people will be left without legal representation.  Many will face being returned to countries where they face persecution and their lives are in danger.

So far the Ministry of Justice has declined to help RMJ. UNITE is calling for RMJ to be saved and for proper Legal Aid funding to ensure that the most vulnerable members of society have real access to justice.

Cuts in public spending are affecting the poorest people right across our society.  But these people did not cause the economic crisis and should not be made to pay for it.

UNITE, the union that represents RMJ’s 340 staff, has called a demonstration outside the Ministry of Justice at 4pm on Friday 18th June 2010.  Please join us.

Ministry of Justice

102 Petty France

London SW1H 9AJ

Tubes: St James’s Park and Westminster

For further details, please contact Rachael Maskell, Unite National Officer, Community and Non Profit Sector: 07768 693933

Topics:  Democracy and government

The day after the announcement of the Coalition I sat down to work through the nature of the surprise. I argued that while the Tories were back in No 10 the coalition meant more than just the very welcome addition of a Freedom Act that would deliver many of the demands that were brought together by the Convention on Modern Liberty. In particular, David Cameron was reshaping Conservatism back towards its one-nation tradition and abandoning Thatcherism, hence my title 'The End of Thatcherism'. The article was widely read and generated a lot of opposition, explicit and private. Perhaps I should have emphasised more that I meant political Thatcherism and the nature of the alliances the Tories would seek, as Coalition replaced Conviction as their branding.

What will happen in terms of the economy and the fate of neo-liberalism is too early to say. Leaving aside the broken influence of the Trade Union movement that makes a further assault upon them otiose, the challenge to the system does not come from wage demands or organised labour but from the City itself, the home of Thatcher's 'Big Bang'. (These points are well made from their respective Gramscian and republican perspectives by Mike Rustin and Stuart White.)

But while the left was arguing about what went wrong under New Labour, not least what the candidates for the leadership are nervously calling its "appearance" of being too close to the bankers, what was immediately apparent was that Cameron was getting something right - setting out on a path that would claim support across all sectors of the electorate.

One month in and we can see the momentum still building behind Cameron's repositioning. Paul Bew wrote this about the Saville findings on Bloody Sunday:

In one afternoon's work the Tory leadership achieved a further decisive modernisation of its image. The British state also no longer appears as authoritarian but as supremely flexible and self-critical.

It's a judgement reinforced by Mick Fealty on Slugger O'Toole reporting on "The day David Cameron became more than a Tory leader…"

It may be that Cameron simply equaled the kind of statement that Blair would have made (whose positive contribution to British and Irish life thanks to the Good Friday Agreement should not be begrudged or underestimated, even if it was delivered by Jonathan Powell as Blair's follow-through was always lazy).

But this is the point, the Tories now consciously occupy the terrain of inclusion not polarisation - not by accident but by design. 

As if to prove this point, they announced the composition and terms of reference of a Commission into UK banking to report by September next year with a sweeping remit and fiercely independent-minded members like Martin Wolf. This morning, on the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme, Will Hutton, himself a Labour supporter who is nonetheless investigating public sector pay for the government, was bursting with frustration at the fact this this was just the sort of initiative that Labour "should have done but didn't".

David Edgar complains in the LRB that

The organisers of last year’s Convention on Modern Liberty are able to hail the programme of this Conservative-dominated government as a triumph.

He thinks we shouldn't do so because the aim of the Coalition is to dismantle not only the welfare state but the whole post-war settlement including even, apparently, universal franchise. For my part I certainly hailed one part of the Coalition's agreement. Nor, clearly, do I think Cameron and Clegg wish to out-Thatcher Thatcher and totally dismantle the welfare state.  I'm sure that the Lib Dems would revolt if they did.

What I also argued was that, in contrast to their policies on modern liberty, on democracy and political reform there are profound tensions in the Coalition between Clegg who has attacked a "rotten system" and Cameron who is, well, conservative. Already there seem to have been differences between them over the critical issue of the timing of the referendum on AV. Clearly, if Clegg wants to win it, it should be held next May with the local elections helping to boost turnout and before the freshness and momentum of the Coalition runs onto the rocks of the cuts and growing unemployment. Cameron, equally understandably, wants to postpone it as long as possible and then hold it as a stand-alone exercise, with the media encouraged to trade on public indifference and populist, anti-politics sentiment, to ensure a low turnout and a high 'no' vote. 

But if AV is rejected and this then destroys the Coalition, as the Lib Dems feel humiliated, it will nonetheless still leave Cameron holding the middle ground. He will be legislating against reckless bankers and lowering the inequalities in public-sector pay, as he builds a Tory state that is "flexible and self-critical" rather than authoritarian. There is no sign at all that the candidates for the Labour leadership understand what they are up against.

Country:  UK Northern Ireland Topics:  Conflict Culture Democracy and government

Blogger Splintered Sunrise sums up the mood of a historic day: 

It would seem that on the big issue – the innocence of those shot on Bloody Sunday – Saville has been unambiguous. From the reaction of the crowd in Derry, and specifically the families, that is the main thing they were looking for. After not only seeing their loved ones killed, but then seeing them being traduced by the now discredited Widgery report, what they wanted first and foremost was that vindication – the formal acknowledgement that those killed were unarmed civilians whose deaths were unprovoked and unjustified. That is also what’s behind the warm response to David Cameron’s statement – notwithstanding Cameron’s obligatory encomia to the British military, Cameron will get credit for playing this straight, and the frank admission of injustice by a Tory (and unionist) British prime minister means an awful lot, especially since the state took this long to admit any fault whatsoever.

Thirteen people were shot dead by the Army in Derry on 30 January 1972. A fourteenth, John Johnston, died of his injuries some months later. The fundamental acknowledgement that all were innocent makes the Saville Report a genuinely cathartic moment. It remains to be seen how far the report's ten volumes settle the debate on other issues.

As Splintered notes, one key question is the extent to which the day's events were premeditated. Although Saville makes a number of criticisms of senior officers, he concludes that none of them could have anticipated that the Paras would fire unjustifiably, placing primary responsibility on the shoulders of individual soldiers.

To that extent, Saville's verdict is the one anticipated by Paul Bew earlier this week when he wrote:

There is now an increasing acceptance on the nationalist side that Bloody Sunday was not a premeditated act. Eamonn McCann, the journalist and a leading figure in the civil rights movement in Derry at the time, has acknowledged that "there was no clear evidence of a high-level plan for a lethal assault on Bloody Sunday". McCann said that he had long believed that Bloody Sunday had been designed to shore up the Unionist government at Stormont: "But I was wrong. No convincing evidence emerged at the hearings to sustain my view."

But that is far from being the end of the matter. If British politicians cannot be blamed, then will the Army get it in the neck? How else are we to explain the deaths of 14 innocent people?

This assessment, however, elides the possibility of premeditation at a military rather than a political level. As such it arguably represents a significant misreading of nationalist opinion, as a fuller quote from McCann should make clear:

It seemed no more than common sense that the paratroopers were unleashed in Derry to save Faulkner's skin.

I wrote this down in books and pamphlets and dozens of newspaper articles. But I was wrong. No convincing evidence emerged at the hearings to sustain my view.

The evidence of Robert Ramsey, private secretary to Brian Faulkner at the time, was especially persuasive on this point and was confirmed in Army memos and other military documents produced in evidence.

On the other hand, there was plenty of evidence that the key factors were the rage of senior Army officers at the insult to their conception of military propriety, even their “honour”, which the no-go area represented.

That, plus the fact that London politicians and civil servants at the highest level, blithely careless of the implication for the safety of citizens, gave the go-ahead to the officers concerned.

A similar verdict to McCann's was reached by Niall Ó Dochartaigh in a highly nuanced interpretation of the Saville evidence in Contemporary British History.

Existing historical accounts of Bloody Sunday treat the killings as the outcome of a more-or-less unified military anxiety at increasing disorder in Derry, combined with unexpected events on the day, presenting the killings as the outcome of essentially responsive actions by the British military. In so doing they lend support to the 'cock-up' theory that represents the killings as the outcome of a series of (often understandable) errors of interpretation and communication. They reject the idea that the killings emerged from a high-level plan to carry out a massacre. In so doing they obscure the extent to which the killings were the outcome of a calculated confrontation carried out in the face of strong opposition from some elements within the security forces. At the heart of these events is a clearly planned confrontational initiative devised by one of the most senior military commanders in Northern Ireland.

This officer was the Commander Land Forces in Northern Ireland, General Sir Robert Ford, who Saville suggests was open to criticism for his decision to use 1 PARA as an arrest force on the day. Saville nevertheless refuses to criticise Ford's decision to launch an arrest operation as such, coming closer to the cock-up theory when he writes:

As to General Ford’s memorandum, where he suggested shooting selected ringleaders of rioters after warning, we are surprised that an officer of his seniority should seriously consider that this was something that could be done, notwithstanding that he acknowledged that to take this course would require authorisation from above. We are sure, for the reasons given in the report, that this idea was not adopted and that the shootings on Bloody Sunday were not the result of any plan to shoot selected ringleaders. In the event General Ford decided to use an additional battalion (1 PARA) as the means of seeking to deal with rioters. We found no evidence to suggest that the use of lethal force against unarmed rioters, who were not posing a threat of causing death or serious injury, was contemplated by General Ford or those senior to him as a possible means of dealing with any rioting that might accompany the then forthcoming civil rights march.

Saville accepts that Ford did not play any role in launching the arrest operation, despite being present in Derry on the day. That was the the responsibility of the local commander, Brigadier MacLellan. Yet Saville makes clear that the Para commander Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford disobeyed MacLellan's orders:

In our view Colonel Wilford decided to send Support Company into the Bogside because at the time he gave the order he had concluded (without informing Brigadier MacLellan) that there was now no prospect of making any or any significant arrests in the area he had originally suggested, as the rioting was dying down and people were moving away. In addition it appears to us that he wanted to demonstrate that the way to deal with rioters in Londonderry was not for soldiers to shelter behind barricades like (as he put it) “Aunt Sallies” while being stoned, as he perceived the local troops had been doing, but instead to go aggressively after rioters, as he and his soldiers had been doing in Belfast. 

Saville's conclusions about Wilford are in stark contrast to his rather milder criticism of Ford. Yet many will persist in seeing in Ford's role a key part of the explanation as to why Wilford and his men acted the way they did.

In his verdict on the most senior general in Derry on Bloody Sunday, Saville understates the culpability of the man most responsible for an escalation which prolonged the Troubles, and which the British state has been struggling to come to terms with ever since.

Country:  UK Ireland Northern Ireland Topics:  Conflict Democracy and government

On the night of May 9, this year, through to the morning of the 10th, Europe faced its death, “stared into the abyss” and was reborn.

Or was it? Like all births, survival of the new infant is most at risk in the early months. In this case doubt not delight was promptly announced by the parenting team. The presidents of the German and Dutch central banks and even the Chief Economist of the ECB - the European Central Bank - let it be known they had voted against Europa’s rebirth, when they opposed the huge new ECB fund. Without their support she is predicted only a short life.
I started to learn about this as I attended a fascinating afternoon of discussion yesterday at the European Council on Foreign Relations held jointly with Charles Grant's Centre for European Reform. It made the debates over the Labour leadership and the UK budget seem childish. In the first session Paddy Ashdown lambasted the fashionable hostility to the EU. “Either deepen or die” was his warning. It seems his party’s Conservative coalition partners can’t see what the fuss is about.

Such is our parochialism.

But the leaders of Europe certainly do know what Ashdown meant.  Particularly gripping were the contributions from Italy’s former EU Commissioner Emma Bonino and Joschka Fischer, Germany’s former Foreign Minister, in a panel chaired by Mark Leonard, with George Soros calmly setting out why the Euro might collapse and precipitate a lasting political and economic crash across the continent.

The ECB vote concerned its buying the bonds of economically “troubled” countries in the Eurozone. At the time, I had assumed that this apparently technical issue was just about managing the markets, even though I knew the €700 billion fund was absolutely gargantuan. In fact the future of the EU's government was recast.
 
What happened was that on Thursday and Friday, 6 - 7 May the Eurozone experienced what Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the ECB described as “severe tensions”.  Bluntly, a gigantic Lehman-style bust was on the cards for the European financial system and the world.

The EU leaders met over the weekend and the vast package of support was agreed. Critically, it permitted their Central Bank to buy bonds from states in the Eurozone, something previously held to be forbidden by Europe’s various treaties. The implication is that these countries will now have to bring their financial systems under shared authority and therefore we - or rather they - are on the way to a European state.

Bonino, who was amazed to the point of incredulity, described “the long night” of 9/10 May when, in Fischer’s words, Europe’s leaders had “stared into the abyss”. Decades of resistance was cast aside in a single session. A two-speed Europe was born, as the financial government of the 16 Eurozone countries was created. The EU treaty forbidding borrowing from the centre was depassed. Centrally determined social and budget policy will follow. (For an account of the battle if not of the significance for European sovereignty see Ian Traynor's Guardian report.)

In an extraordinary interview with Jean-Claude Trichet the European Bank's President, in Germany’s formidable weekly Der Spiegel, conducted shortly afterwards and posted in full on the ECB’s own website, we are told, “There is a need for a quantum leap in the governance of the Euro area”.

This reads less like a suggestion than an announcement. Here is a short extract, with its revealing tone:

we must now demand extensive adjustment programmes from the governments, which the Heads of State and Government committed to the Friday before last. They are committed to accelerating the consolidation of their budgets. They know what is at stake now.

SPIEGEL: Would it not be good if a country such as Greece were able to leave the euro area?

Trichet: No. This is excluded. If a country joins the euro area, it shares a common destiny with the other members. There is a need for a quantum leap in the governance of the euro area. There need to be major improvements to prevent bad behaviour, to ensure effective implementation of the recommendations made by “peers” and to ensure real and effective sanctions in case of breaches.

No more bad behaviour, then?

Everyone seemed to agree on the following: a) the Euro is in grave danger; b) if the Euro smashes up it will be the end of the entire EU project as it was conceived politically and strategically; c) therefore the Euro has to survive; d) it can only do so through a common fiscal policy with coordinated budgets and sharing domestic economic sovereignty under common rules.

Can this happen? Soros, who helped fund and launch the European Council out of concern for the EU’s political weakness, did not seem to be optimistic. For him, the problem was Germany. It wants to be a middle power and not impose its will. But by not wanting to impose its will it is in fact imposing itself, without understanding the responsibilities it actually has to answer for. Shortly, he will give a lecture in Berlin to set out his views.

Joschka Fischer was both more alarming and more optimistic. The Euro had to survive its leaders, the Merkel government was not up to the task, but you could not call for solidarity when one part of Euroland was retiring at 55 and another lot at 67. The Germans, simply would not contribute to that. Nonetheless, he thought that the political determination existed, driven by fear of the consequences of failure.

I asked a question about the democratic legitimacy of all this. The British diplomat John Kerr, who was described as having had a part in drafting more European Treaties than anyone could remember, told the room that what was needed was to “create the facts”. Then try and ensure their legitimacy. Anatole Kaletsky of the Times (now unfortunately closed off from links as he writes from behind the Murdoch paywall) agreed. There was a danger of too much direct democracy, referendums and public participation, he stated. The point of representative democracy was to elect leaders who could take the necessary decisions, the markets will follow.

Soros, who had emphasised the very “profound” nature of the crisis, pointed out that the huge Euro bailout was punitive in its rates, that the attempt was to follow rather than lead ‘the market’ in setting them and that this was not really a solidarity fund.

If there was clear Franco-German agreement the Euro might be safer. But reports like this one from the meeting of Merkel and Sarkozy earlier this week suggest a titanic struggle is taking place. From little Britain’s point of view, all one can say, it seems, is that the future growth of a much weakened domestic economy may depend on the Eurozone growing. For this the Eurozone has to act in unison and survive its already rocky political rebirth - while its banks are terrified, its leaders unready and at odds, and its peoples largely opposed.

Country:  UK EU Topics:  Democracy and government Economics International politics

This Sunday two armies are threatening to clash on the streets of the East End of London. One involves a broad coalition of ethnic, Islamic and far-left groups, plus trade unions, churches and teachers. The other is a loose collection of far-right thugs, football hooligan 'firms', UKIP aficionados, and the odd Sikh or two, united by a fear (or hatred) of Islam.

When the English Defence League (EDL) announced it was to protest outside a local student Islamic conference in a cinema on the East End's Commercial Road, it set in motion a chain of events that has threatened some of the biggest street clashes since Oswald Moseley tried to take his Blackshirts down Cable Street in 1936.

The usual carpet-baggers have appeared: Unite Against Fascism (UAF), chaired by Ken Livingstone, was first on the scene, offering its foot soldiers to the local community. A massive counter-demonstration against the EDL is now planned for Sunday. The community was bound to react – after all, local Bangladeshis saw off the National Front, the British National Party and neo-Nazi gang Combat 18 over the last two decades – but the actions of the Far Left in jumping on a 'cause' are reminiscent of so much in east London politics. It does little to calm tensions and, in my opinion, does little to serve the community in the longer term. The UAF, inheritor of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) mantle, is great at demonstrating, sometimes less well-prepared for understanding the real tensions and issues on the ground.

East London remains a magnet for radicals of all shades. The famous Siege of Sidney Street in 1911, at which Winston Churchill was present, saw a Russian anarchist gang rob a jewelry story and then die shooting it out with the Army. Before that were the street battles outside the synagogue (now Jamme Masjid mosque) on Brick Lane, when Jewish anarchists pelted Ultra-Orthodox worshippers with bacon sandwiches on Yom Kippur in 1904, denying the existence of God. The infamous Jewish gangster Jack Spot "the king of Aldgate" later took an iron chair to Oswald Moseley's fascists when they provocatively marched, with police protection, through Cable Street in 1936.

There are modern parallels, too. Just a few weeks ago, British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin was ready to declare himself 'king' of the east London borough of Barking & Dagenham.

In 2006, the BNP became the official opposition in the area, taking 12 council seats. I wrote about the neo-Nazi movement's growing power in east London in an article for The Observer Magazine (where I also discussed the mirrored growth of George Galloway's Respect party in nearby Tower Hamlets). Disaffection with Labour ran high in both Barking & Dagenham and the East End.

The local Barking economy was hard-hit, reliant on the now-much-reduced Ford motor plant at Dagenham. Pressure on council housing stock, plus some of the cheapest private housing in London – leading to an influx of migrants – caused huge resentment among the largely white-working class population living on their giant interwar estates.

Meanwhile in Tower Hamlets, lying in the shadow of the City, massive levels of commercial property development and the marketing of Brick Lane as the so-called heart of 'Banglatown' did little to appease a second-generation of alienated Bangladeshi-origin youngsters. They lived among some of the worst deprivation in the country. Overcrowding, drugs and gangs ran rife in the East End. Politically-aware Muslims were also becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Anti-Iraq war sentiment was a huge factor in unseating previous Bethnal Green MP Oona King from her 10,000 seat majority and propelling a pre-Big Brother George Galloway into the limelight. A year later, in 2006, Respect took 12 seats on Tower Hamlets council and it too, like the BNP, became the official opposition: a doomed marriage between the hard Left, particularly the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and politically-active Muslim activists, some of whom were reformed gang members and now dreamed of bringing Islam closer to the heart of government.

As I wrote in 2006, the two radical groups – BNP and Respect – shared an interest: "One party had long-opposed 'Zionist' occupation of Palestine, calling Israel 'a terrorist state'; the other wrote pamphlets on Jewish control and influence, saying it was 'cowardly' to pretend it did not exist."

The irony was that the vote for both collapsed at the May 2010 general and local elections. A series of disasters saw the BNP losing all its seats in Barking & Dagenham: Griffin's heir-apparent, Mark Collett, was arrested after apparently threatening to kill his boss. Barking & Dagenham BNP deputy leader Bob Bailey was filmed quite literally putting the boot into a young Asian man's head on the campaign trail, before the BNP's webmaster resigned in protest at his boss's actions in upsetting Marmite's owners, Unilever during a party broadcast and thus exposing the party to legal action. Griffin came a distant third in Barking's parliamentary contest. A massive counter-effort by the Hope Not Hate campaign and trade unions saw the far-right party struggle to maintain its seats elsewhere in the country. (Griffin has promised to resign by 2013.)

Things were not much better for George Galloway, who came third in the Poplar parliamentary contest, where he was challenging Labour stalwart and former Farming Minister, Jim Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had fallen out with one of Tower Hamlet's powerful Islamic factions and Galloway clearly thought he could capitalise on that resentment. He failed. To cap it off, Galloway lost his-rumoured £100,000 weekend slot on Talksport radio. Galloway's heir-apparent in Bethnal Green and Bow, Abjol Miah, closely-linked to the Islamic faction so hostile to Fitzpatrick (and who had taken Galloway to meet many power brokers in Bangladesh), also crashed to third place, losing over 20% of Respect's vote. Already fatally split (the SWP faction had long been booted out and several councillors had defected to Labour), the Respect dream seemed to have ended. The great irony is that Unite Against Fascism's joint secretary, Weyman Bennett, is a long-standing power broker from the SWP – and is about to re-appear in east London this weekend.

This Sunday it is the rabidly-Islamophobic EDL that is threatening to upset what American author Jack London once described as "the Awful East". Barely has one set of battles ended before another has arrived.

Drawn from the ranks of the UK's ignoble football hooligan tribes (or "firms" as they prefer to call themselves), thousands of Islam-hating thugs from the EDL have been threatening to descend on the East End to picket a student Islamic conference at former cinema. Previous EDL events have ended in riots. Despite the event itself now being called off by the venue, message boards have been running riot with dire warnings and erroneous claims that the EDL is planning to come and attack the massive East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre in Whitechapel. A huge counter-rally is now planned by local Bangladeshis, Muslim groups, and anti-fascists (notably the UAF). Most of the prominent power brokers in the Bangladeshi community are less worried about the sight of beer bellies and tattoos than their own young men, many of whom have served their apprenticeships in gangs, doing serious harm to the interlopers.

The irony is that, according to an undercover investigation by The Guardian, many of the EDL supporters trumpeted a recent Channel 4 'Dispatches' programme, Britain's Islamic Republic, as "proof" that Islamic extremists are thriving in the East End. 'Dispatches' suggested that an Islamic pressure group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, or IFE, wielded too much power and influence in the area from its East London Mosque 'base' and was trying to infiltrate the Labour hierarchy.

What was not apparent in the 'Dispatches' programme and follow-up reports by reporter Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph was that there are two Bangladeshi factions battling it out for power and influence right now in the East End. Each have their pocket politicians; each has sought control over budgets and direction of politics. One is more secular in origin, with links to the Awami League in Bangladesh and Labour here. Despite battles with corruption (the local Labour party is in special measures) it is now in the ascendancy. The other – the IFE faction – is more Islamo-political in origin, with strong influences from the philosophies of Maulana Maududi and historical links to the Jammat-i-Islami movement in Bangladesh (broadly-speaking, its followers believe that Islam is a 'way of life', which stretches into politics and all other corners of life). It had thrown its weight behind George Galloway as well as several Labour politicians,which according to 'Dispatches' was the recent Labour council leader, Lutfur Rahman (who has now been succeeded by Helal Abbas, a Bangladeshi from the secular faction who is widely-admired for his incorruptibility).

'Dispatches' most readily-quoted criticism from the secular-linked Muslim/Bangladeshi faction, leveling accusations against the other group, in what seemed like a clear-cut case of an Islamic fundamentalist organisation trying to infiltrate local political parties. In reality, the picture is much more muddied and 'village politics' – ensuring your friends and contacts stuff the ballot box with votes for your faction – still plays a big part. The names of the political parties do not matter so much as which individual supports 'your' interests (which is why votes can change hands so readily).

All this has been grist-to-the-mill for the EDL, right-wing cranks and conspiracy theorists. The subtleties of East End power politics are lost on most Islamophobic thugs or, indeed, on the rest of the population which according to a recent poll still readily associates Islam with extremism. Probably lost on many Leftists, too. There are undoubtedly difficulties and insularities within elements of Britain's, and the East End's, Islamic power brokers. They must shake off some of the literalism of their fundamentalist beliefs. But the reality of east London is that its factions are vying for power, much has always happened. Already the Bangladeshi-origin population is dissipating, moving out to the suburbs as it grows more prosperous. Internet rants, boots and broken bottles, blanket condemnation without context, merely sees the picture as black and white – when in reality it is many shades of grey. The ideologues of the Far Right, and Far Left, would do well to stay away from the East End.

Nick Ryan is author of Homeland: Into a World of Hate (Mainstream/Random House) www.nickryan.net

Country:  UK City:  London Topics:  Civil society Conflict Democracy and government

It would be tempting to say the Public Service Broadcasting Forum’s symposium last Thursday was a load of bollocks. This is usually an accurate description of these sorts of events. Most panels are chaired and populated by men. They disregard or sneer at women in the q&a sessions, who start by saying “This may be a silly question but….” We live in a culture where to be a princess is better than to be a pundit.

But that attitude did not prevail at the PSBF symposium. Of course we had many men enjoying the sound of their own voices but the best bit was an unexpected contribution by ex-Government Minister for Culture Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell, followed by a response from Caroline Thompson, Chief Operating Officer of the BBC. Whilst I don’t believe either contribution was any better because it came from a female mouth, there is no doubt that both speakers seemed unusually honest.

The contributions from the floor were good too (for me in particular Sylvia Harvie of Leeds University) and free from the usual tedious female self-deprecation. In fact I must confess that I was one of the few women guilty of that, in an attempt to be humourous. It’s hard to get over years of having to be amusing in order to be heard – and how brilliant it was during the symposium that so many women spoke with complete ease. In case you think that sounds patronising, it’s an accurate reflection of my own experience at academic debates here at City University. Recently a male presenter from a leading BBC programme chaired a panel discussion in which he managed to take one question in eight from a women, and cut her off in order to précis “I think what you’re trying to say is….” No wonder we often suffer from squeaky voice and shaky confidence syndrome.

It might also be worth commenting that most of the women speakers at the PSBF symposium were older and not necessarily wage slaves or potential employees trying to impress. It all helps.

Facts are always useful – I tried to time it and found that the male panellists tended to speak for at least 10 percent longer than the women. At least one male panellist completely over-rode a female questioner (details on request) but examples of this sort of arrogance were rarer than usual. When it came to the questions and answers, as many female panellists were questioned as male panellists. And though this is impressionistic rather than forensic, I estimate that between 35 and 40 percent of questions came from women, though often the same women. Mercifully though, they weren’t as loquacious as the men. The women actually asked questions rather than becoming supernumerary panellists.

All good stuff. I know (because I banged on about it) that the organisers tried to achieve over 33 percent female panellists and nearly made it. With so many good women in the audience I’m not sure why they failed. It’s worth asking the question on a more general level because at least the PSBF got further than most. With regard to conferences generally, the answer is that none of can help our backgrounds and these things are usually organised by men in their fifties and sixties. Many were unexposed to female intelligence from their peers until their characters were formed. They may try ever so hard to compensate, but deep down, there’s a distrust of female intellect. Unless of course it’s young and beautifully packaged, allowing men the superiority of judging and mentoring.

And there’s another crucial factor too. Women themselves frequently decline to put their heads above the parapet. Understandable, I would say, as someone who has been shot down on many occasions.

But this conference really was better than most. Why? Perhaps because the organisers were tasked with trying. And they were also aware of the irony of a public service debate which ignored 52 percent of the population. If public service is about making sure that those underserved by the market get heard, this was at least an attempt to give female pundits a chance in our princess or nothing culture. So we girls should be grateful to the princes of the PSBF. And if they think that appellation is inappropriate – well, now they know how we feel!

Country:  UK Topics:  Civil society Culture

“… there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families” This was Margaret Thatcher talking to Women’s Own magazine in October 1987. She went on to talk about neighbours but the phrase was made. ‘Thatcherism’ came to be seen as an ideology in which the role of the state was to encourage individuals to make it in the market place without the security and support that comes with good government.

As a central part of his strategy of transforming the image of Britain’s Conservative Party into one that is ‘compassionate’ rather than ruthless, David Cameron has backed what he terms the “Big Society”. He contrasts it with the state. In this sense there is a direct continuity with Thatcher’s argument that people must not look to government for ‘entitlement’. But at the same time there is a welcome call for individuals to behave in a collective spirit that starts small. 

It is a point that David Cameron has made in his calls for a greater role for NGOs and volunteers and also, unsurprisingly, a design that is central to the Red Tory ideas of Phillip Blond. What is essentially being referred to is civil society; the non-profit sector in between the state and the economy. However to make civil society grow, social capital needs to grow first. Social capital makes the difference between participation and non-participation in civil society and, some may claim, between voting and not-voting, between health and illness and between caring and not-caring. And how, you ask, can you increase social capital? Think woggles, think tents, think jamborees and above all, think ging-gang goolie.

Social capital is the glue that binds society together; it is, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s words; the art of association. Social capital means involvement, it stands for co-operation and reciprocity and it means thinking in terms of we rather than I (or, as Geoff Mulgan writes about civil society in general; between ‘we’ and ‘me’). What this country is lacking at the moment is social capital. When the Prime Minister talked about Broken Britain prior to the election, many of the problems he was referring to were problems compounded or caused by a lack of social capital.

Social capital is generated by just being with other people. By talking to your friend you are generating social capital because you are not only strengthening the bonds between two people but you are also interacting and thinking with, and about, others. By playing sport in a team or participating in any other form of organised activity you are again generating social capital. You are living life alongside other people. You are acknowledging the fact that there are others living this life alongside you. In this way social capital crucially generates norms of reciprocity. If I help you, you will help me. If you internalise this state of mind then not only will you help me, but you will also help your other friends and associates. This is a ‘good society’ but not yet a Big Society. The Big Society idea comes when social capital leads to a jump in civic participation. When you realise that helping your friends is not enough and that actually, you would like to help out other people as well. This is where the volunteering that Cameron is talking about comes into play.

However, social capital can expand society yet further. Through civic participation, perhaps it could be through volunteering at a local charity or writing for a local newspaper, a level of political awareness emerges. By getting involved at a local level you develop an interest in the national level and from there to interest in the global level. This not only strengthens democracy itself by increasing voting numbers, it also leads to the beginnings of a global civil society, something that is clearly desirable in today’s globalised world.

If social capital is therefore taken as desirable then it is clear, like so many other things, that it must be generated during childhood for an individual to become used to the ideas of association and co-operation. What better way to do this than through participation in organised activities such as scouting? It is reassuring therefore that scouting numbers are on the rise. However this trend must be continued and broadened to ensure the growth of other types of youth organisations. The type of organisation that a youth participates in is not what matters; the participation itself is the key. The path from the campfire to the ballot box may be a long-one, with many detours along the way, but it is a realistic one. Furthermore the possibility of re-making a Broken Britain whilst on this path remains possible as well. Tighten those woggles, toast those marshmallows; Big Society starts small, and it starts with a campfire.

Country:  UK Topics:  Civil society Democracy and government

The Labour summer show headed northwards; the first UK party leader election since Tony Blair began the New Labour era in 1994. The five Labour candidates along with Iain Gray, Scottish Labour in the Scottish Parliament, appeared in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall before a packed audience of 400 Scottish party members.

This proved to be a lively hustings with good humour, animated discussion and no rancour. If it had any faults it lacked any real disagreements, provided little detail, and pandered to what they thought a Scottish audience would want, referencing the Scottish party’s recent success in the UK election, along with Donald Dewar and Robin Cook. This gave the impression of a group of exam candidates who had engaged in last minute cramming for a viva and were showing off the results, rather than a subtle grasp of non-Westminster politics, or of Scotland…

Iain Gray, opened the proceedings. Before anything had happened he declared that  “that the hustings showed Labour was on the way back”. Then came his official story of Scottish Labour: the party had learnt the lessons of defeat in 2007. When he took over the party had just lost Glasgow East and was 16% behind the SNP in the polls. “We fought back and we won” declared Gray, seeing May’s election result as “one million Scots saying yes to Labour”.

This wasn’t a bad speech; with a certain fighting quality and energy, just wrong-headed. Is the Scottish party really the epitome of health? And was he really saying it was all the fault of Wendy Alexander given the problems of the summer of 2008?

Johann Lamont, Deputy Leader of Scottish Labour, chaired the debate. It did demonstrate some life, reflection and the first tentative steps of recovery - in what may be a long road. All of the contenders talked of the lessons of defeat with David Miliband mentioning that the party has “lost four and a half million votes and 160 MPs since 1997”.

The lessons of the New Labour era were examined with Ed Miliband observing that “we became technocrats and managers” and Diane Abbott that “we forgot our base”. Andy Burnham spoke of the stranglehold of “the London-centreness of our politics”.

This was all spectacularly short of any specifics or wider understanding of the cumulative failure of New Labour and what our politics had become. There was no attempt to explain the scale of the deficit or how to reduce it, no real analysis of what to do about banking and Labour’s culpability in the financial crisis, or indeed of the party’s uncritical embracing of the freewheeling nature of turbo-capitalism.

All five waxed at great length about defending the public sector against ‘tory cuts”: a return to an age-old Labour “Back to the Future” theme. Don’t trust Tories they are just like Thatcher and remember the 1980s, just as a previous generation railed against the memory of 1930s dole queues and appeasement. It took David Miliband to state that “we need a strong private sector given 75 per cent of people work there”.

Most of the candidates when asked about the BP ecological disaster didn’t even mention it in passing, Ed Miliband exempted who talked of “the need for a post-oil economy”. The rest waffled away in the most vague generalities.

On welfare and what a questioner called “the inherited poverty” of several generations endemic in parts of Glasgow and communities up and down the nation, none of the five showed any clue what to do. David Miliband slammed against poverty declaring “that is why we are socialists” to loud applause, before announcing “Iain Duncan Smith hasn’t got the answers” without saying why he was wrong or offering anything positive.

Diane Abbott talked of “the lack of role models” in her constituency of the kind she had when she grew up, Ed Miliband of the mistake of “Frank Field thinking of restricting child poverty and ending Breakfast Clubs”, while Andy Burnham said “it is about one word: hope”.

When we got onto foreign policy via the Middle East with not one of the five mentioning once the words “the occupation”. David Miliband claimed “he was the only Cabinet Minister who spoke out against the Israel invasion of Lebanon”, and that “the worst thing that happened to Tony Blair was George Bush”. Ed Miliband responded with what was perhaps the best soundbite of the day stating, “We could have got off the train George Bush was driving at any time and we didn’t”.

The success of Scottish Labour was mentioned by all five, as was the Calman Commission’s proposals for limited tax raising powers north of the border. Only Abbott had a glimmer of the argument over Calman saying, “we need to look at the business and voluntary leaders who have called for fund-raising powers for the Parliament” (she meant tax-raising). Abbott was also the only candidate who at any time referred to the “nations and regions” of the UK, indicating that see recognised the reconfigured nature of politics more than her four Westminster colleagues.

Scotland was characterised by two themes, both personal. All the candidates said that Iain Gray should be Scottish leader, a member of the Labour National Executive and sit in the Shadow Cabinet. The second, which ran like a thread through the entire debate, was the constant fawning to the memories of Donald Dewar. Dewar was in Blair’s original Cabinet, oversaw the creation of the Scottish parliament and became its first First Minister, but died soon after in 2000, when he was only 63. David Miliband even shaped his final contribution by talking about “the lessons from Donald Dewar’s legacy”. (Perhaps none of them knew that Dewar once told Anthony Barnett that he was Anthony’s “strongest supporter in the Cabinet”.)

All of this seemed audience pleasing and playing into the folklore of Scottish Labour’s sentimental sense of itself. But for a wider Scottish public it can come over as patronising and such self-regard has ill-served the British party as it has clung to various vestiges of its past.

Not surprisingly for a Labour debate at this time there was an overwhelming focus on addressing Labour’s internal structures. In any Labour meeting there is always a default position of talking in-depth about the inner world of the party as if it were the real world and this debate was no exception.

They talked about the lessons of the 1980s and 1990s and whether New Labour had over-reached in its control and “iron discipline”. Ed Balls talked of “reviving the party” while Diane Abbott, Andy Burnham, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband all made sympathetic sounds. Burnham spoke of the old style “theatre of party conferences” and remembered affectionately the “Kinnock versus Hatton battle” which was one of his first party conferences. Balls reflected that he joined the party at its “nadir in 1983 and had no wish to go back to then”.

This discussion brought a response from David Miliband that led to the sharpest disagreement of the debate. He stated “we have to save ourselves from structures which demoralised and nearly destroyed us in the 1980s”. This was taken up by all of the other candidates. Abbott and Balls in particular felt it was a peculiar and anti-party remark. Significantly, facing this challenge, Miliband Senior chose not to reply.

New Labour’s mistakes were mentioned at points, but these were mostly identified as process, not policy or ideas. Thus, various candidates protested against “spin” and the centralist mindset and management, which so detracted from Labour’s achievements. Nobody mentioned the creeping privatisation of public services, or PFI/PPP, or Trident.

There was no clear winner in the debate. Diane Abbott did not put over a serious, coherent critique of New Labour, but she did add spark. Most disappointing were Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, neither of whom have found a distinct voice. Burnham in particular veered all over the place and a National Care Service is apparently his big idea.

This brings the debate down to a family affair: David and Ed. On this showing it could be a very close contest with David more the loyalist and Ed the more critical and open-minded. If this remains the case whatever the result Ed Miliband looks like the coming man.

The overall impression was of a party with some life and energy in it, not completely shellshocked by defeat and the last decade, but still significantly in denial. The debate was introduced as not only about “the election of the next leader, but the next Prime Minister” by Scottish Labour Chair Claudia Beamish. There was no acknowledgement of how New Labour turned British politics upside down, nor how the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition marks a new phase of politics which poses huge challenges to Labour.

For all the debate’s shortcomings Labour has begun an important, perhaps historic conversation. It matters to all of us – not just those inside it. And we should listen, engage and challenge the candidates to move beyond the easy soundbites, clichés and comforts which have shaped Labour for too long.

Country:  UK Scotland Topics:  Democracy and government

Maybe Kanishk Tharoor is just missing London, but he has gone soft for a commercial version of God Save the Queen. Gareth Young reported on the real choice:

"As you may have heard England's victory anthem at the Commonwealth Games will be Jerusalem, thanks to a public vote which ended like this."

Survey by YouGov of 1,896 entrants
Jerusalem 52.5% Land of Hope and Glory 32.5% God Save the Queen 12%

I'm looking for the best world cup football video of it. How about this (hat tip Gareth): <!--break-->

Country:  UK Topics:  Civil society Culture International politics

Apart from the timing of the referendum on the voting system, perhaps the most awesome decision for the reformist credentials of the Coalition and the most consequential for the future of democracy in Britain is how it decides to replace the House of Lords. In a welcome article in the Guardian Simon Jenkins attacks the idea of a list-based, party-controlled elected second chamber, as a step backwards. It would be. Far from opening up politics and making it more representative, it would make it more closed and would be less in the spirit of democracy.

Jenkins calls for pluralism. But he remains stuck in the mental universe of the establishment. Within it, he is a radical in the true and best sense of being unattached, unpredictable and sharp. But he still seems not to have shaken off the baleful influence of having been editor of the Times and therefore duty bound to dismiss any noises that emerge from the throats of the unwashed.

On the Lords, the key arguments have been set out by outsiders. First, what is its function supposed to be? Any effective reform has to follow its purpose. At the moment it remains an active legislative body, initiating as well as amending bills and it is used and abused by the executive (ministers and civil servants) for this purpose. This everyday function is distinct from its more dramatic but occasional role as a potential check on the government. One reason why those unpaid positions in the Lords are so sought after is that they offer lobbyists a means of directly amending legislation as part of normal business.

When I gave evidence, with Peter Carty, to Lord Wakeham's Commission on the Lords - created by Blair in 1999 to ensure democracy was held at bay - there was a telling moment when Wakeham made it clear, as much in his manner as what he said, that no reform would be contemplated that deprived the government of its use of the Lords as its legislative instrument.

One of the main drawbacks of making the existing second chamber elected, therefore, as Simon graps, is that it consolidates this broken and corrupted parliamentary process.

How the Lords is chosen should follow from what roles it carries out and any change should start from saying what these should be.

If, as Simon seems to be arguing, the role of the Lords should be as a deliberative chamber that checks and assesses what the Commons does then a) the Commons should be the only place initiating legislation, and b) the remaining functions of the Lords should be set out clearly. One of these, for example, could be to assess if proposed laws are written in comprehensible language. Once its function and purposes are definied then, indeed, non-elected ways of representing public wisdom can be considered which do not return us to a hereditary aristocracy or continue the current cronyism. 

This is where the Athenian Option, drawing on the deliberation of regular people on a jury principle, comes in as a possibility. Carty and I set out one way this could be included in a reformed second chamber in 1998 and republished the arguments in an expanded version ten years later. The idea constantly reappears, most recently from Alan Urdaibay. While Keith Sutherland has published six other titles in imprint academic's excellent series on 'Sortition and Public Policy' (Sortition is the term for selection by lot.)

Yet Jenkins limits himself to the arguments of established experts such as Dawn Oliver who was a member of the Wakham farce, and Vernon Bogdanor, both of whom have shown a longing to drape their authority in ermine.

Country:  UK Topics:  Democracy and government

Our Take Back Parliament flashmob targetting the State Opening of Parliament was a spirited affair with a decent turnout for a Tuesday morning even if it didn't quite have the drama or impact of the earlier rallies. We'd chosen to position ourselves at the bottom of the steps leading up to Carlton Terrace and a large statue of the Duke of York so that we could make our protest heard as the Queen and her procession passed down the Mall. I was asked to preview the event for Channel 4 (apparently they have a blog with guest contributors) and you can read my post here even if the day itself didn't turn out entirely as planned.

In the end the police were determined to prevent us from getting to our destination which meant that our protest was split up into two groups. There were two officers per protester at times as well as a member of the Forward Intelligence Team taking close-up pictures of us. Perhaps it was the fact it was the Queen, but they seemed even more touchy than normal.

We carried a tongue in cheeck "Fair votes now, Ma'am!" banner, which I think she caught a glimpse of out of her carriage, and had planned to release 32 purple balloons as she passed to symbolise the 32 ultra-rotten boroughs that haven't changed hands since the time of her predecessor, Queen Victoria, but senior officers were determined that this shouldn't happen as it might "startle the horses". We pointed out that these were highly disciplined stallions, trained to stay cool under cannon fire, and that they're hardly likely to care about a few balloons being released twenty or so meters away but it made no difference.<!--break-->

There were a few live shots of our purple banners on BBC and Sky News but in the end the only "protest story" the media covered was Parliament Square and the disgraceful arrest of anti-war protester Brian Haw after his tent was searched by police with sniffer dogs as they descended on the Democracy Village peace protest. The Indy's front-page today does a wonderful job of pointing out the irony of the Queen announcing the restoration of civil liberties and the right to protest inside Parliament, whilst outside Haw is dragged away. (More worrying still is the campaign launched by the right-wing press and blogosphere to persuade Boris to remove the "eyesore" of the Parliament Square peace protest as soon as possible, including an extraordinary intervention by Iain Dale who took it upon himself to track down and contact the employers of one of the organisers of the protest who he assumed must be skiving from work.) 

After the Take Back Parliament protest we had a good debrief and discussion about the way ahead in the nearby Westminster Arms. It was good to see such a determined group of people of all ages keen to take forward the struggle for proportional voting. When we told them that we'd heard the Right is already mobilising for the AV referendum, with expensive PR agencies being lined up to take over the "anti-establishment" terrain for the "No" campaign, they were galvanised even further. The first of the Take Back Parliament Democracy Action Groups was born there and then as we each agreed to do what we could to take forward the campaign in our local area and across London with Andy May acting as the central co-ordinator. The hope is that this will be the first of many such groups and that the early momentum of the purple protests can be sustained and transformed into a nationwide grassroots democracy network. If you haven't signed up to be involved already, you can do so here.

Topics:  Democracy and government

I admire Anthony's superb post-election essay on The End of Thatcherism. Some of the thoughts it prompts are these.

1) None of the parties won the election, but Cameron and Clegg have shown boldness and imagination in responding to an unfamiliar set of results. As a result the Coalition looks like a genuine break with the politics of the past 30 years of neoliberal style 'conviction' politics. 

2) It's clear, though, that New Labour could have made such a bold move in 1997-2000; and perhaps again when Brown took over promising change and renewal in 2007. It didn't. Not only that, where was the opposition within the Party that was calling for it? Blair and Brown, whatever their virtues and achievements, were at root cautious and self-restraining politicians, trapped in the attitudes bred during the long reign of Thatcher's neoliberal Toryism. They were, as Simon Jenkins and others have argued, 'Thatcher's Sons' in this respect. The Labour Party as a whole is left looking conservative, blinkered and  unimaginative in relation to constitutional change and the political culture. Cameron and Clegg have gained what could be a long domination of the language and practice of political innovation and imagination. They look braver than anyone in Labour has been for a long time because they both are taking big risks with their own parties.

3) If the Coalition is in practice, significantly more progressive than Labour on many issues will this open up a trap for the next Labour leadership? Either they will have little room for disagreement and differentiation, or they will have to tack sharply leftwards, and risk being portrayed as self-marginalising. 

4) Anthony's main argument is that the coalition marks the end of the neoliberal era of big government plus big markets, with its corrosive effect on social solidarity and intermediate institutions of civil society. The neoliberal model in politics and economics - the basis of what I call the 'Long 1980s' in the West - certainly lacks intellectual and moral authority now. But this does not guarantee its demise. Consider the contrast between now and the end of the social democratic phase in the UK and USA in the late 1970s. The prevailing model was in disarray and there was a confident, sharply articulated ideological programme and ethos on offer from the neoliberal Right. Now that programme has few overt defenders in high places, but its opponents have no consistent and persuasive countervailing ideology or programme. Hence the incoherence of the backlash against the political establishments that presided over and profited from the neoliberal period. 

5) Convinced and largely unrepentant neoliberals are still in charge in the financial sector and over most of the mass media of US and UK. Therefore, a lot will hinge on how far Obama, the EU leaders and others can mobilise non-finance capitalist interests to back re-regulation and the public interest goals that we need confident state power and social-democratic solidarity to pursue. 

6) The Long 1980s might be over in UK and US politics, and in the EU, but the management of the exit from the neoliberal model in the economy is going to be a terribly rough business - as was the original overthrow of social democratic economics in the UK and USA. This could still open up huge risks of right-populism - as we see in the crazed state of much of the American Republican Party, in far-right gains in Hungary and the Netherlands and Belgium, and in the dire condition of Italy. A badly handled period of economic cold turkey for Greece could even endanger its democracy. 

Topics:  Democracy and government

In ‘Negotiated Constitutionalism’  Stuart Weir praised Keith Ewing’s contribution to the debate on the future of liberty in the UK. He rightly concludes that Ewing’s account of the failure of  Parliament and the Courts to protect our fundamental rights, in the years since the Human Rights Act was passed, requires us to think anew about the constitutional reforms necessary to protect liberty in the UK. Yet Weir praises Ewing in terms that obscure the challenge that his analysis poses to those who support the Human Rights Act and its likely successor, a British Bill of Rights.  

As Weir acknowledges, Ewing is a longstanding opponent of the Human Rights Act, who argues that liberty is best protected not through the Courts but through the workings of a robust parliamentary democracy. Weir, a longstanding supporter of the Human Rights Act, co-opts Ewing’s proposals for strengthening the power of Parliament, for his argument that liberty is best protected when Parliament and the Courts work together as ‘two pillars of liberty’.

It is difficult to disagree with the suggestion that both Parliament and the courts have a role to play in limiting and controlling the power of the state. However, Weir fails to address the question that lies at the heart of Ewing’s quarrel with supporters of the Human Rights Act and British Bill of Rights: with whom should power ultimately reside? Should the Courts have the power to strike down Acts of Parliament that are incompatible with our fundamental rights or should our elected representatives have the final say on where the balance between liberty and security lies?

The belief that the Courts should have the final say has gained increasingly widespread acceptance since it was first propounded by Lord Hailsham in the 1970s. According to this view, the absence of a Bill of Rights leaves our liberties dangerously exposed to the tyranny of the elected majority in Parliament. It might be objected that the Human Rights Act, which gives the Courts the less dramatic power to declare an Act of Parliament to be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, has not been used to curb the stream of illiberal legislation to which we have been subjected. Indeed, Ewing’s analysis of recent decisions of the UK Courts on such matters as the retention of DNA, stop and search, freedom to protest and freedom speech, finds the old judicial conservatism and deference to power, alive and well behind the gleaming new human rights rhetoric.

Believers in the judicial protection of human rights, among whom we can count the Liberal Democrats and some senior members of the Conservative party, deal with this objection by advocating more of the same: enhancing the power of the Courts with a Bill of Rights, along with a written constitution that would, together, confine the doctrine of the sovereignty of Parliament to the dustbin of history.

‘Bonfire of the Liberties’ is one of several works that, late in the day, have sought to challenge this understanding the British constitution and to defend the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament. Whilst Ewing focuses on the practical failure of Court-based rights protection, Adams Tomkins and Richard Bellamy have sought to ground their defence of parliamentary democracy in political theory. ‘Our Republican Constitution’ by Tomkins (2005, Hart Publishing) and ‘Political Constitutionalism’ by Bellamy (2007, Cambridge University Press) seek to persuade that that a Bill of Rights and a written constitution fail to give effect to republican ideals in the way that parliamentary democracy does.

The republicanism referred to here is not mainly or necessarily concerned with anti-monarchism. It is a way of defining freedom as not being dominated by others and of locating freedom in democratic societies where citizens share, as equals, the burdens of self government. This civic-freedom calls for the exercise of civic virtues. It sees politics not as a morally neutral process for the satisfaction of voter’s desires but as the process whereby society comes together to pursue the common good through debate, reflection and compromise.

Bellamy and Tomkins find these virtues in a flourishing parliamentary democracy. The idea that unelected Judges should have a final say about the great matters of principle about which our society defines itself is not only an affront to democracy but is a method of lawmaking is inferior to the democratic process. For Bellamy, it is precisely because of the importance of human rights, the complexity of argument to be considered, the impact that an individual’s rights can have on third parties, the need for public support in making significant changes to the law, that the wide ranging, democratic, debate involved in the legislative process is the best method for the determining their scope. For these writers, a belief in the possibilities progressive politics replaces the fear of democracy that motivates the determination of many liberal thinkers, to shelter fundamental rights behind judicial robes.

These arguments draw strength from the historical insight that most of the rights that we enjoy today, from the right to vote, to the right to join a trade union, to the limitations on police powers brought about by PACE, were not handed down by the Courts but fought for and won in Parliament.

Of course the grandeur of our constitutional history cannot disguise the woeful performance of recent Parliaments in protecting liberty. However, these authors are no more concerned than Ewing is to defend the record of these Parliaments, their caste of professional politicians or the current first past the post-system through which governments from Thatcher to Brown have dominated the parliamentary process.

Instead, the work of Ewing and the more theoretical work of Tomkins and Bellamy represent a profound challenge to the belief that protection of liberty is best ensured by weakening the power of parliament in relation to the Courts, rather than strengthening the power of Parliament in relation to government.

Weir’s attempt to make peace between the two camps is superficially attractive. After all, surely the more protection for human rights, the better? However, constitutional reformers must speak the language of priorities. Not only is a Court-enforced Bill of Rights wrong in principle but the lengthy (no doubt, highly staged managed) process of national debates about the contents of a British Bill of Rights would prove to be a beguiling distraction from the more difficult but important task of shifting power from the Government to Parliament and through Parliament, to the people.

 

Topics:  Democracy and government

The Coalition has published its programme for government online with the opportunity to feedback via the comments system. This is what the new government has to say on political reform:

The Government believes that our political system is broken. We urgently need fundamental political reform, including a referendum on electoral reform, much greater co-operation across party lines, and changes to our political system to make it far more transparent and accountable.

• We will establish five-year fixed-term Parliaments. We will put a binding motion before the House of Commons stating that the next general election will be held on the first Thursday of May 2015. Following this motion, we will legislate to make provision for fixed-term Parliaments of five years. This legislation will also provide for dissolution if 55% or more of the House votes in favour.
• We will bring forward a Referendum Bill on electoral reform, which includes provision for the introduction of the Alternative Vote in the event of a positive result in the referendum, as well as for the creation of fewer and more equal sized constituencies. We will whip both Parliamentary parties in both Houses to support a simple majority referendum on the Alternative Vote, without prejudice to the positions parties will take during such a referendum.
• We will bring forward early legislation to introduce a power of recall, allowing voters to force a by-election where an MP is found to have engaged in serious wrongdoing and having had a petition calling for a by-election signed by 10% of his or her constituents.
• We will establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation. The committee will come forward with a draft motion by December 2010. It is likely that this will advocate single long terms of office. It is also likely that there will be a grandfathering system for current Peers. In the interim, Lords appointments will be made with the objective of creating a second chamber that is reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election.
• We will bring forward the proposals of the Wright Committee for reform to the House of Commons in full – starting with the proposed committee for management of backbench business. A House Business Committee, to consider government business, will be established by the third year of the Parliament.
• We will reduce electoral fraud by speeding up the implementation of individual voter registration.
• We will establish a commission to consider the ‘West Lothian question’.
• We will prevent the possible misuse of Parliamentary privilege by MPs accused of serious wrongdoing.
• We will cut the perks and bureaucracy associated with Parliament.
• We will consult with the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority on how to move away from the generous final-salary pension system for MPs.
• We will fund 200 all-postal primaries over this Parliament, targeted at seats which have not changed hands for many years. These funds will be allocated to all political parties with seats in Parliament that they take up, in proportion to their share of the total vote in the last general election.
• We will ensure that any petition that secures 100,000 signatures will be eligible for formal debate in Parliament. The petition with the most signatures will enable members of the public to table a bill eligible to be voted on in Parliament.
• We will introduce a new ‘public reading stage’ for bills to give the public an opportunity to comment on proposed legislation online, and a dedicated ‘public reading day’ within a bill’s committee stage where those comments will be debated by the committee scrutinising the bill.
• We will improve the civil service, and make it easier to reward the best civil servants and remove the least effective.
• We will reform the Civil Service Compensation Scheme to bring it into line with practice in the private sector.
• We will put a limit on the number on Special Advisers.
• We will introduce extra support for people with disabilities who want to become MPs, councillors or other elected officials.
• We will open up Whitehall recruitment by publishing central government job vacancies online.
• We will publish details of every UK project that receives over £25,000 of EU funds.
• We will give residents the power to instigate local referendums on any local issue.
• We will stop plans to impose supplementary business rates on firms if a majority of the firms affected do not give their consent.
• We will give residents the power to veto excessive council tax increases.
• We will continue to promote peace, stability and economic prosperity in Northern Ireland, standing firmly behind the agreements negotiated and institutions they establish. We will work to bring Northern Ireland back into the mainstream of UK politics, including producing a government paper examining potential mechanisms for changing the corporation tax rate in Northern Ireland.
• We will implement the proposals of the Calman Commission and introduce a referendum on further Welsh devolution.
• We will review the control and use of accumulated and future revenues from the Fossil Fuel Levy in Scotland.
• We recognise the concerns expressed by the Holtham Commission on the system of devolution funding. However, at this time, the priority must be to reduce the deficit and therefore any change to the system must await the stabilisation of the public finances. Depending on the outcome of the forthcoming referendum, we will establish a process similar to the Calman Commission for the Welsh Assembly. We will take forward the Sustainable Homes Legislative Competence Order.

And on civil liberties:

We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.

• We will implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion.
• We will introduce a Freedom Bill.
• We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.
• We will outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
• We will extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
• We will adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.
• We will protect historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury.
• We will restore rights to non-violent protest.
• We will review libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
• We will introduce safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
• We will further regulate CCTV.
• We will end the storage of internet and email records without good reason.
• We will introduce a new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.
• We will establish a Commission to investigate the creation of a British Bill of Rights that incorporates and builds on all our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, ensures that these rights continue to be enshrined in British law, and protects and extends British liberties. We will seek to promote a better understanding of the true scope of these obligations and liberties.
• We will make the running of government more efficient by introducing enhanced Departmental Boards which will form collective operational leadership of government departments.

Topics:  Democracy and government

The Queen’s Speech today is a remarkable moment in British politics: the first British coalition government in 65 years, the spectacle of the Cameron-Clegg double act, and the possible emergence of new political force, ‘liberal conservatism’.

It is also a significant time in Scottish politics, with the announcement of a new Scotland Act, drawing from the ideas of the Calman Commission, but considering delaying or even ditching the most important part: the tax powers.

Calman proposes that Scottish income tax rates would be cut by 10p with the Block Grant cut by an equivalent amount. The Scottish Government would then be able to set its own rate. If it did this at 10p it would return revenues initially to their previous level.

These proposals are meant to widen fiscal accountability, aid Scottish economic competitiveness and growth, and break the pork barrel nature of Scottish politics. Sadly they do none of these, and are dangerously ill-thought out policies which would damage Scotland and its finances.

Despite calls from Jim Wallace, Advocate General, that ‘Calman is not a cherry picking exercise’, but ‘a package’, it would be welcome if the UK Government treated it as such and put the tax powers on the back burner.

Calman’s tax powers would have damaging consequences. If the Scottish Government reduced income tax to stimulate the economy its own finances would suffer while the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer’s revenues would benefit. If the Scottish Government raised the rate of income tax to increase its revenues this would deflate the Scottish economy and reduce revenues going to the UK Government.

The proposals suffer from what economists call ‘fiscal drag’, in which generally an increasing proportion of tax is taken from higher rate taxpayers, while Calman’s proposals take a higher proportion from basic rate taxpayers. As more people are pushed into higher rate tax bands as governments do not increase thresholds in real terms, Scottish finances would be squeezed and become more regressive. The standard, intermediate and higher basic rates of tax from which the Scots could vary, would remain with Westminster, as would tax bands.

The economists Jim and Margaret Cuthbert have written a series of detailed studies itemising these failings, calling Calman’s tax proposals ‘seriously flawed’ and ‘a major danger to the Scottish economy’. Andrew Hughes Hallett and Drew Scott have looked at the potential for the Calman plans to encourage conflict between the Scottish and UK Government in particular over how the overall Scots tax take is assessed.

Scotland needs much more fundamental powers than Calman: control over more tax revenues and rates, more powers to borrow, control over off-shore revenues, regulation of utilities, and power over competitions and mergers policy.

Calman assumes that Westminster and Holyrood will be committed in the future to the same broad direction of public spending and the balance between charges for public spending and taxation.

What Calman misses is the potential of a divergence between the Scottish and UK Governments on public services with a UK Government embracing a privatising, pro-choice, pro-charging for public services agenda, which would have huge consequences for Scotland, cutting its spending via the Barnett consequentials.

Calman is motivated by strengthening the union, yet assumes that the political direction of Scotland and the UK will always be in the same direction, without considering the implications if this is not the case. Michael Keating has explored this, stating that Calman ‘treated the matter of taxation as a largely technical matter’, ignoring wider political dynamics.

Another weakness of Calman is that this is another attempt at a Scottish-only solution – reprising our ‘greatest hit’ of the Scotland Act 1998. This is a mistake, for devolution to Scotland and Wales, has to be seen in a UK context.

The English dimension matters in this, and England’s widening democratic deficit, the last part of the UK still run directly by Whitehall and a panoply of unelected boards and quangos. England is the only nation in the UK which has never had a constitutional vote on its future – whereas Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have each had two.

Calman is a technocratic, elite based fix and interpretation of Scottish politics. When it was launched Wendy Alexander said that ‘Kilbrandon, Scottish Constitutional Convention, Calman, this is how we do our constitutional change’.

This is a partial view, for Calman has had little to no public engagement and involvement, and one which carries little resonance with the public. Calman does not offer us the prospect of a popular story or narrative for our nation, but instead flawed administrative tinkering.

Calman is not the answer for Scotland’s economy, democracy or future, but what is if independence as it has been conventionally understood is not on offer in the foreseeable future either?

Maybe the solution lies in shifting from the politics of post-modern independence, and the pretence of statehood and valuing of symbols which currently characterises much of modern Scotland.

Instead we could embrace a politics of post-nationalist independence and inter-independence, which would entail Scotland developing new arrangements with the other nations of the UK, sharing sovereignty, and recognising the importance of the English dimension.

Many conservatives, pessimists and naysayers will say that such a politics is not practicable, and that instead we should focus on the deliverable plans of Calman. This is profoundly wrong. The old notions of sovereignty and power which define Westminster and Britain have brought about the multiple crises: economic, democratic and geo-political, which shape our modern society.

Viable alternatives exist around the world which offer possible models for Scotland and the UK. The most thoroughgoing form of devolution is full fiscal autonomy along the lines of the Basque Country in Spain which allow them to raise all their main taxes including personal income tax, corporation tax, VAT and excise duties. The devolved administration then negotiates with the central government an agreed share for paying for common services such as defence.

Scotland needs a new story as a nation, society and democracy and Calman is not the answer nor for the immediate period is independence. We need a radical, far-reaching set of proposals for Scotland, which engage the public imagination and involve unlike Calman or ‘the national conversation’, genuine public engagement, and aid the emergence of a new set of arrangements for the whole UK.

The UK has not worked for many years, for the majority of people living in it have been dominated by the interests of the South East and the City, to the detriment of Scotland and most people elsewhere.

The existing British political system needs to be completely recast, and the most centralised state in Western Europe supplanted by arrangements more suited to a modern state and democracy. Scotland can play a major part in this democratic revolution, but only if we ditch the main elements of Calman and aim higher.

Topics:  Civil society Democracy and government

In terms of policy ideas and legislation, how high up the scale do media issues register with the new government?  There was little enough detail in their manifestos: now the LibDemCon coalition have revealed their plans to be very modest at this stage of the new Parliament. 

As expected, the BBC will be instructed to give full access to the National Audit Office.  What that means in practice is not disclosed. The crying need for the NAO to delve into Channel 4’s historic diversification policy, as demonstrated by the recent report from the Commons Culture Committee (see my post on this), has been completely ignored. It is as if the coalition partners do not read select committee reports.

The pressure on the BBC elsewhere will ease.  There will not be a licence fee freeze (the Commons motion to that effect last year was “at a time of near-zero inflation”, says broadcasting minister, Ed Vaizey, justifying the about-face).  The BBC’s governance system – in the present shape of the BBC Trust – will be subject to some change, but the nature and the timetable (clearly not this year) are undisclosed.  The 20:1 ratio between top and bottom salaries that is proposed for the public sector will not apply to the BBC, so Mark Thompson can hang on to his £800k per annum package.

There is no mention of CRR – the “contract rights renewal” formula restricting the way ITV prices its advertising slots.  ITV was hoping it would be removed by direct ministerial action, but Steve Hewlett’s post on this explains why any intervention by the government would draw ridicule.  The pre-election Conservative rhetoric about curbing the powers of the media regulator, Ofcom, is likewise nowhere in evidence in the post-election coalition document.

However, the IFNCs (the Independently Financed News Consortia) that Ofcom laboured so hard to deliver are officially dead.  They were designed to substitute in three ITV areas for the failing regional news service that ITV has for so long said it wanted to dump.  Now ITV is re-considering its stance in two of the three regions (the third, in Scotland, is not controlled by ITV plc, but by Scottish Media Group plc, which supported the Ofcom experiment).  Whatever the merits of the IFNCs – one of the topics of our June 10th public service broadcasting symposium – their status as the first step in the direction of making public funding for content subject to contestability was welcome.

How the coalition otherwise proposes to shore up pluralist supply of public service content – an objective endorsed by both Conservatives and LibDems before the election – is unclear: that is one of the key issues June 10th will address.

Meanwhile, the money that would have been diverted from the digital switchover element of the licence fee to fund the IFNCs will be diverted instead to subsidizing broadband roll-out: though even that measure is not in the Queen’s Speech, and is reserved for Vince Cable’s Business Department, rather than Jeremy Hunt’s Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (the old CMS has become the new COMS – that’s the new politics for you).

Uniquely, COMS is a LibDem-free zone: the only Whitehall department with just Conservative ministers.  Rumour has it that Don Foster, the LibDem’s long-standing media spokesman, was not Nick Clegg’s favourite front-bencher.  Whether Foster and Lady (Jane) Bonham-Carter (a former LibDem spokesperson in the Lords) will be allowed to “shadow” their own coalition is not clear. 

But don’t expect silence from that quarter.  And don’t let coalition reticence quieten our own debate about the future of public service broadcasting.  The most powerful lobbies – the BBC, ITV, News International – will be hard at work behind the scenes, defending their specific interests.  The public interest also needs protecting, and we need to add our voices to the debate on media policy.

Topics:  Civil society Culture Democracy and government

This is Gerry Hassan’s response to his recent piece, After the Politics of Left and Right: The End of ‘Modernisation’ and ‘Progressive Politics’.

This is a perplexing, fascinating time both in terms of the big issues and values, and the immediacy of day to day politics. This sees the hesitant start of the ‘new politics’ of the Con-Lib Dem administration embracing a very unBritish politics, the final burial of ‘New Labour’ and the crisis of the neo-liberal project and with it the ‘Fantasy Island Britain’ of recent decades. Yet, at the same time, we witness the first announcement of public spending cuts which will cause huge difficulties.

J.K.B Sutherland is right to ask ‘is there anything of the political lexicon remaining at all? – left, right, conservative, Labour, progressive and so on, concluding that maybe ‘what Karl Popper meant by ‘all politics is problem solving’’ coming to pass. In part we need to find a new language of politics which does not draw its inspiration from the 20th century, or more accurately the 19th and 18th centuries, and develop new lexicons, philosophies and identities.

Some people doubt this is possible – and believe that the retreat from meta-politics to micro-politics, a world without utopias and visions – is actually an advance; the argument that the road to utopia leads to the gulag and death camp. This seems to mistake the multiple ways in which imagining utopias is part of the human condition, and the closing off of them, and denial of their pull, diminishes us.

Russell Jacoby in ‘The End of Utopia’ (1) found two utopian paths: the utopian blueprint which stretched from the Owenite vision of ‘New Harmony’ to the Nazis and Soviets; but another utopian tradition drew loose, general principles about the possibility of a different economic and social reality, and motivated reformers and radicals of the left throughout history to campaign for justice, democracy and civil rights. The first he saw as horrendous; the second, vital to all of us.

This brings us to the challenges of democratic engagement and who, how and what are the ‘public’ and ‘publics’ raised by Keith McBurney when he writes about the desire for ‘a call to ownership of our personal and plural will, i.e. popular sovereignty’. The old model of party is increasingly broken and discredited as McBurney states, increasingly concentrated upon ‘factional, fractional minorities’ who aspire to and grasp increasingly monopoly, monarchical power.

Yet, the scale of ambition and horizon on how we imagine the people and popular sovereignty is often threadbare, talking about band-aids such as Citizen’s Assemblies, juries and other deliberative forums. Instead, I feel the answer to the democratic deficit of our politics has to be found in going back to some fundamentals such as what is the kind of story and stories we want to tell as a society, country and place? And how do we want to tell it, inhabit it, and imagine it? What kind of form will it take? And whose voices will be prioritised and heard in this and by whom?

This is not a set of abstractions, but was a set of practical questions I recently explored in two projects on stories and mass imagination in what we termed ‘futures literacy’: Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020 (2). People told stories about the future, and created and imagined worlds of the near-future at a Scottish and Glasgow level, which were shaped by philosophy and the importance of values: what kind of principles and values would be embedded and shape the society of the future.

This brings us to the language of ‘the official future’ – and as Neville Cramer points out the way seemingly ‘uplifting words’ and phrases are used to mean something entirely different. For example, the mantra of globalisation has preached a freedom gospel which has wrong-footed the defensive mentality of much of the centre-left across the world. It promised in a utopian like way brave new uplands of hope and prosperity, sweeping away restrictions and outmoded practices, and empowering us all as consumers in public and private life. The reality was of course very different.

What then of the tribes which so shape us? As Stuart Cosgrove comments, ‘tribes often define themselves in contra-distinction to rival tribes’ and increasingly resemble warring football fans. Labour tribalism has been historically one of the factors which has disfigured the party’s basic DNA and the wider centre-left cause in the UK.

This takes me to Mike Rustin’s recent analysis, which in an impressive overview addresses the crisis of neo-liberalism, and the prospect of a post-neo-liberal order. Rustin’s argument is nuanced and subtle, and he is on strong ground delineating the differences between the crises of the 1970s which led to the collapse of ‘the welfare settlement’ and the crises of the 2000s to the present, created by the contradictions of the neo-liberal regime. Yet at the same time, Rustin’s five point plan for a ‘progressive evolution’ shows the paucity and powerlessness of the post-neo-liberals: more active government, constitutional reform, reducing inequalities, enhancing international institutions, and addressing climate change.

I hope that does not seem too critical of a persuasive piece, but I do think we need to be more imaginative, daring and radical. A post-neo-liberal politics demands that it is:

• Not just about the left;
• Is not just about ‘our’ tribe or tribes;
• Not just oppositional;
• And given the demise and crises of socialism, social democracy and progressive politics finds a new form and cause.

Instead we need to aim higher, recognising that we will need an immediate set of responses to the day to day politics of the multiple crises of the UK and globally, while mapping out a more long term politics. This would include:

• Are we talking about a project of ‘the left’ or ‘centre-left’ exclusively, or a wider project, ‘a popular front of the mind’ which keeps left sensibilities and asks others to join on ‘our’ terms, or a more fundamental and totalising rethinking of political terms?

• What is the story or set of stories we wish to tell? It used to be about a sense of ‘progress’, but that has become problematic, challenged by greens and stolen by neo-liberals.

• What is the agency or set of agencies we imagine our politics being informed by?

• What institutions are central to our politics? Left wingers used to have a very sure idea of the merits of the state (redistribution, planning) and the importance of trade unions; both are still important, but we now know more about their limits.

• If we can acknowledge that socialism is no longer a viable project, and social democracy in deep crisis, what name or set of words can we use to describe a project which draws from the best of these traditions?

This would seem to entail a coalescing of values around the need for a new egalitarianism, democracy and liberty, and green, feminised politics. This may sound like a call to a ‘new left’ of the 1960s or 1980s, but many elements would be new and very different, such as a scepticism towards modernity and its utopian promise, and the view of the state and authority. Out of the numerous challenges of the early years of this century, a new political dispensation may arise in the West, which draws from some of the best of left and right, acknowledges the limits of the market and state, and sets out a new ethics for modern life.

Notes

1. Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, Basic Books 2000.

2. Gerry Hassan, Eddie Gibb and Lydia Howland (eds), Scotland 2020: Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation, Demos 2005; Gerry Hassan, Melissa Mean and Charlie Tims, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, Demos 2007.

Topics:  Democracy and government

On Wednesday 19 May, we published a piece that began, 'At 11.36 this morning the mother of an 8-month old baby made a desperate plea for help on her mobile. "I told them please don’t send me and my baby in the van for nine hours, she is too young, I asked them to speak to my lawyer. But she just told me, “Look either you go in the van or we will take your baby in a separate van and you won’t see her until you get to Yarl’s Wood.” '. Here Robina Qureshi, director of Glasgow-based charity Positive Action In Housing, continues their story.

On Wednesday Sehar and Wania were taken to Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire. Sehar was so distressed to see the other families locked up. She mentioned an Iranian couple who had been detained eight months and the wife is due to give birth next month, having spent her entire pregnancy in detention and clearly not fit to travel on a plane so why detain her?

All week we worked hard lobbying the government. We obtained copies of police reports and letters from Blackburn Women's Aid confirming that Sehar had been subjected to domestic violence, as she had claimed, a fact that the authorities had refused to believe.<!--break-->

We sent the new evidence to immigration minister Damian Green. Baroness Shirley Williams took up the case. More than 600 people wrote letters to their MPs and the Home Office. This campaign was particularly vociferous because Sehar and her baby girl were incarcerated in Dungavel on the same day that the new coalition government told us that child detention would end – and end immediately in Scotland – whereupon Sehar was summarily removed from Scottish soil and driven down to Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre to be locked up there instead.
 
On Friday, Heather Jones from Yarl’s Wood Befrienders visited Sehar and her baby just before they were segregated to the ‘family care suite’ — which is Border-Agency speak for solitary confinement prior to deportation. That’s where Sehar and her baby spent their last night on British soil.
 
On Saturday morning at 8.30 AM we made a last minute plea to all the key players including Deputy Prime minister Nick Clegg, Damian Green, and Home Secretary Theresa May.

Friends from Glasgow took a bus down to say goodbye to Sehar at the airport and give her the belongings left behind in her flat when she was detained by Brand Street Reporting Centre on the Monday. Dr Imtiaz Rasul and his family from Birmingham also went to say goodbye at the airport.

‘It was really terrible,’ Dr Imtiaz told me. ‘Sehar looked very small and quiet. She had security officers and police around her as if she was a criminal. It was truly humiliating to say goodbye to her like that. Other people in the airport were watching. Sehar told us to say thank you to everyone, she tried to smile but in front of police we could feel what she was feeling. My country takes in more asylum seekers than the UK. If the UK only wants to humiliate people then why have an asylum policy, just tell people don’t come here. I feel very sad for Sehar and her baby was just upset. We hope in her hearts that her pain does not continue but we are very worried about what might happen.’

Sehar had been detained in Yarl’s Wood just as the families were working together on the letter to Nick Clegg (published in the Observer this past Sunday): ‘We know that it has been agreed that no child should be detained for immigration purposes, but are we still here in the detention centre with children facing deportation,’ said the families: ‘We do agree to maintain border controls but not to the extent where families can be destroyed and human rights abolished...Please, we are kindly asking you to take action and end our nightmare for families and children.’

Sehar added her signature to the letter.

Sehar Shebaz and Wania were deported on a PIA flight at 17:00 HRS on Saturday.

Topics:  Democracy and government

In the euphoria with which centrist and leftish liberals greeted the formation of the new Coalition government, scant attention was paid to issues which traditionally concern social democrats and egalitarian liberals: welfare state entitlements, progressive taxation policy and public services, in particular. Because of the prominence given to civil liberties, democratic reform, and the novelty itself of the formation of a partnership government, these basic instruments of social justice were largely ignored by the liberal commentariat in their reviews of the new Coalition's programme. Today's announcement of over £6 billion of spending cuts in 2010/11 brings them back into sharp relief, however, and shows just how far the Liberal Democrats have moved in recent years to the centre-right on fiscal and social policy.

In the coalition negotiations, the Liberal Democrats held fast to their policy of raising the personal income tax allowance to £10,000. On its own, this is not a progressive policy, since it largely benefits middle and higher income taxpayers. Tax credits do a better job of helping low income families. But the Liberal Democrats could claim - with some plausibility - that their overall pitch to the electorate was progressive, because changes to the personal tax allowance would be paid for by increases in taxes on the wealthy: abolition of higher rate tax relief on pension contributions, a Mansion Tax on properties worth over £2 million, and so on. In the event, however, few if any of these taxes survived in the negotiations with the Conservatives: only an increase in Capital Gains Tax and an unspecific commitment to tackling tax avoidance did so. This left the Liberal Democrat package denuded of much of its progressive content.

In addition, the Liberal Democrats took the opportunity of the coalition negotiations, and the surrounding turbulence in European markets, to shift allegiance out of the broadly Keynesian camp on fiscal policy for 2010/11, in which they had fought the election, towards the Conservative position of prioritising immediate deficit reduction above demand stimulus. Today's cuts confirm that repositioning, with David Laws installed as the deficit hawk in chief at Her Majesty's Treasury. Of the £6.2 billion cuts, only £500m will be reinvested in growth enhancing investments. Vince Cable will shoulder a large slice of the rest.

One cut bears witness to a consistency in the Liberal Democrat position, however: the abolition of the Child Trust Fund. Introduced in 2002, the Child Trust Fund is the world's first universal savings and asset accumulation policy for young people. Every child is paid £250 at birth, and then again at age seven, into an account that is locked away until he or she turns 18. Children from low income homes get double payments, and additional sums are contributed to the accounts of children with disabilities. Contributions from families of up to £1,200 a year can be made into the fund tax free. 

This policy is important normatively, in the sense that it affirms that all citizens should be entitled to a minimum asset stake, and that social justice will be strengthened if each young person, and not just those from better off homes, has the ability to start out in life with some independent resources of their own. And it is important theoretically, because it places the equitable distribution of asset holding at the centre of social policy, rather than just income transfers, such as benefits and tax credits, vital as they are. As such, the Child Trust Fund had the potential to foreshadow a wider transformation of the welfare state, in which the possession of wealth and assets would become an increasingly central tool of social justice strategies. That is indeed how many social policy theorists in the UK and elsewhere saw it.

Unfortunately, this is not a view shared by the Liberal Democrats. They have pledged for some years to abolish the Child Trust Funds, on various grounds (today the stated reason Laws gave is that endowing people with an asset is dishonest when public debt is high, a justification which would surely extend to the higher rate tax reliefs for savings into pensions and ISAs that cost billions more than Child Trust Fund payments?). They have persuaded their coalition partners not just to restrict Child Trust Funds but to abolish them completely from 2011.

It is to be hoped that if a progressive minority exists in the House of Commons, it can be marshalled behind the ranks of Labour Party MPs to oppose this cut.  Indeed, it will be a useful test of the progressive credentials of the parties left out in the cold of the coalition deal making of those early days of May.

Of course, it should be said that none of this is to deny the importance of the classical liberal agenda for restoring civil liberties and securing further democratic reform which the Liberal Democrats took into office with them. But if a lesson in the limits of liberalism was ever needed for the starry eyed on the centre-left, today's announcement supplied it.

Nicholas Pearce is former head of the Number 10 Policy Unit.

Topics:  Democracy and government

This is Mike Rustin's response to comments on his recent piece, From the beginning to the end of Neo-Liberalism.

Naturally,  there is uncertainty about the nature of the crisis (in this case of neo-liberalism, following the financial collapse) and how it will develop. Gramsci  pointed out that in such situations, a long struggle may well take place between conservative forces committed to making the minimum changes necessary to retain their powers,  and those demanding  more radical  transformations. This argument  is now developing around us.  

Tony Taylor asks , where is the working class in all this, following the Thatcherites’  attack on labour  and its institutions in the 1980s,  not least their  defeat of the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5?  Can there be any pressure for radical change without it?  It’s  surprising  how  much a wider consensus of  public opinion demanding  greater equality and justice,  more regulation of  the banks, the defence of civil liberties,  and a more democratic political system, has emerged despite the weakness of  traditional labour institutions. Maybe the forms of democratic political agency have broadened and changed in the past 20 years, so that while political parties have undoubtedly become  weaker,  informed publics which can demand change have grown stronger.  This is why forums like Open Democracy are important. But  if institutions representing working people can be strengthened, so much the better.

BigC,  Anonymous  and others are  sceptical of my claim that neo-liberalism is at a point of crisis.  But   there has been a widespread move to strengthening  the role of governments  in relation to the global financial system, because of what happened in 2008-2009.   This was why Gordon Brown’s global ‘Keynesian’ initiative to prevent an economic meltdown captured its  moment. We  see the assertion of ‘a politics of the centre’, in the USA with Obama, in the new Coalition in Britain, and now in Germany after  the CDU’s defeat in the North-Rhine Westphalia regional election. The main losers in this move so far have  been  free marketers of the right. The Lib-Dem /Tory coalition is in some respects to the ‘left’ of the pre-crisis Labour government, on a number of issues, showing that the whole political spectrum has moved . I’ve argued  that  these adjustments  - e.g. regulating free markets, arresting the extreme polarisation of income and wealth, making democracy work better -  are now seen as  unavoidable by a dominant consensus,  although in the USA these changes are  being fiercely resisted by the right. At this moment,  the policy differences between the three major British parties are very small.  We will soon see if Labour also  chooses a leader with a personal style similar to those of David Cameron and Nick Clegg!  

I agree  with Wa. State Physicist  that the arrival of ‘peak oil’, and its future relative scarcity, is a serious issue.  (On this see John Urry ‘s writings and here) However I do not think this  means the end of economic life as we know it.  Renewal energy has a huge potential, once the necessary investment is made in it. So far as Europe is concerned, solar power in North Africa is probably going to be the largest new energy resource.  Multi-national planning – e.g. in Europe – will be needed to make this adaptation.  We can already see in the UK a move away from expanded air travel (no more runways in the South East), and from road building. The arrival of ‘peak oil’  and the need to deal with it is another reason why  the era of unfettered free markets is coming to an end.

What should be done by political progressives?   Firstly, they need to take time to understand the emerging situation.  Without a theoretically informed map of what is happening.  it will be difficult to find a good political route.  Second,  the more progressive  policies of the Coalition should be supported, while the more regressive ones are fought.   It is important to draw the lines of division in the right places, and not, to take as Gerry Hassan warns us,  mindlessly tribal   positions. Lines of division will emerge soon enough.  Mostly likely these will focus on public expenditure cuts and  deliberately induced unemployment (echoes of 1979-82 perhaps)  and in our need to defend   those public sector improvements that were achieved in the past decade. Also Britain’s economic model needs to be changed significantly,  lessening the weight in it of the financial sector. Lines of  division should be chosen which mark out  genuine advances on the Coalition’s own programmes.  

Finally, the ambience of the Coalition,  which will need  to tolerate some internal differences, and  perhaps  following implementation of  ‘Tony Wright’ reforms enhanced powers of  Parliament, may now serve to enhance the quality and complexity of public debate. Since we should want to see an informed democracy as much as anything (see my  reflections on Raymond Williams) we should try to make this a  positive gain of  the past few months.

Topics:  Democracy and government