The Libdems are re-starting their attempts to woo ethnic minorities to the party and to “support talented party members from black and minority ethnic backgrounds”. An event is being held next week for this. About time. I’ll report more when I get back.

I really wish all interviews with politicians were like this. Brilliant interview by Toby Foster on BBC Sheffield with the new mayor of Doncaster.
via James Graham on Twitter)

This video speaks for itself. Brilliant.

They had a lower percentage of the vote in the European election and lost councillors as well. Do the public associate the failures of Labour with centre-left politics? If thats true then its also very depressing, given how a lot of this economic bust has been due to Gordon Brown continuing the legacy of Thatcherism, by increasing the economy’s dependency on the City while championing ‘light-touch’ regulation.

I still maintain that Brown’s biggest mistake was financing increased expenditure in public services through borrowing rather than raising taxation as well (not necessarily income tax, but it could have been something innovative such as some form of carbon pricing). The problem now is having the 50% tax band when not as many people are earning that much money anymore.

Going back to my main point, how have the Lib Dems failed to capitalise on this? Vince Cable has been the most coherent politician on the economy and is seemingly trusted by the public. Is it because Nick Clegg comes across as the epitome of a well to do, upper-middle class politician rather than ‘man of the people’ Charlie Kennedy? Maybe its because he seems quite similar to David Cameron in appearance and speaking style.

In any case, I thought that the only hope for the Lib Dems wasn’t proportional representation, but to overtake Labour or the Tories when they imploded. Well the Tories have already come back from implosion, while Labour are heading towards it now. Yet the Lib Dems are going backwards.

Don Paskini raised this on LC over the morning and now it’s all over the blogosphere. And in fact I’m surprised more isn’t being said about this hilarious episode. In an interview with The Times the other day, this is how an exchange went:

I only get one flash of that Mr Nasty streak in Mr Nice when I raise the question of the Camerons’ various properties. We had been talking about his bewilderment about the depth of dislike that some people in the Labour party have towards the Conservatives: “Where I think Conservatives tend to feel Labour are misguided and wrong, there are some people in the Labour Party who just think the Tories are awful and evil, which is ridiculous and wrong.”

In my attempt to explain why they might have these feelings – I confess to shuddering whenever I see that photograph of young David and Boris in their Bullingdon Club regalia – I mention the four houses: “The four properties thing is rubbish. Touching that you believe everything you read in the newspapers!” You patronising git, I exclaim.

“I don’t mean it like that, but…” So how many properties do you own? “I own a house in North Kensington which you’ve been to and my house in the constituency in Oxfordshire and that is, as far as I know, all I have.”

A house in Cornwall? “No, that is, Samantha used to have a timeshare in South Devon but she doesn’t any more.” And there isn’t a fourth? “I don’t think so – not that I can think of.” Please don’t say, “Not that I can think of.” “You might be… Samantha owns a field in Scunthorpe but she doesn’t own a house…”

The rest of the interview was punctuated with Cameron’s nagging anxiety about how this exchange was going to make him sound: “I was wondering how that will come across as a soundbite”; “‘Not that I can think of’ makes me sound… I am really worried about that…”; “I am still thinking about this house thing”; and his parting shot was: “Do not make me sound like a prat for not knowing how many houses I’ve got.”

Unbelievable.

This is a guest article by Haroon Saad

About 9 months ago, over dinner with a group of friends, we entered into a kind of pact. We decided that it would be good to explore the setting up of a movement that could generate a list of candidates for the 2009 European Parliament Elections. Our goal was NOT to create another party, at least not in way that corresponds to what we currently have. The movement would be based on some key principles:

• Politics is service NOT a career.
• We are “Europeans” but not in the current institutional sense.
• We are committed to developing a more inclusive political discourse – more café style than chamber style. A “ we think” model as opposed to the current “I think” model
• Comfortable with diversity and pro-equality

I’ve been sent an alert posted on the Indymedia website:

Sima Valand is desperately fighting to stop the Home Office sending her to India where she is at risk of murder at the hands of her in-laws. She was not flown on Fri 8th May for reasons that are still unknown but a new removal date has been set for this Wednesday (20th May). She remains in an immigration prison.

Please take the time to send a letter or an email to the Home Office and to Virgin Atlantic Airways demanding that they do not fly this woman into an extremely dangerous situation.

You can help keep Sima in the UK by:
1) Emailing/Faxing Steve Ridgeway, Chief Executive Officer Virgin Atlantic Airways and urge him not to carry out the forced removal of Sima Valand. You can copy, amend or write your own version using the model letter below.

More details on the Indymedia site. Anyone know more on this. Why is the government deporting someone who may end up being subjected to more abuse or even murder in India? And if you doubt the latter, just look up how many family related bride murders take place in India every year.

Update: Just been sent an email saying: “As of an hour ago, the removal order was cancelled!! Sima will still need to fight her case to be allowed to stay in the UK but still, good news!!” – great news!

The former Ronald Reagan conservative, and intellectual Richard Posner wrote a short blog about the decline of conservatism. He says half-way:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

It’s being discussed everywhere. Posner is right in concluding that an excessive move to the left by Barack Obama would bring them back from the dead… though I think Obama is too smart to let that happen.

But the point seems to be about the decline of the Conservative Intellectual. I have a problem with that thesis because most of the arguments that won the Republican Party the battle were not intellectual arguments but culture wars.

Ronald Reagan had three main planks of support: economic right-wingers (intellectuals), foreign policy hawks (not really intellectual) and social conservatives (not intellectual at all). He bound them together through narrative and framing – something Republicans understood better than Democrats until recently (Bill Clinton excluded).

I think the wider problem for conservatives/Republicans is that their principle arguments: small state, low taxes, powerful defence, religion – have either not worked (foreign policy) or been shown as a sham (less regulation will lead to more wealth). Someone else made the point recently that the Republicans have forgotten how to articulate what their society would look like as a result of their policies and got stuck merely on advocating the same policies. I think that’s also a strong argument.

The parallel to the UK would be that the Labour Party has basically forgotten narratives, vision and policies – and relied merely on the argument that they are not the Nasty Tories to stay in power. Unfortunately they seem to be taking the left down with them because the left tied its fortune too closely to the party.

Martin Kettle makes a very crucial point in the Guardian: this isn’t 1997, this is a global recession of unprecedented proportions. Tory sound-bites are propelling them in the polls and will likely gain them victory in the next general election. But then what? They need to state clearly what they plan to do about the current crisis.

As Martin Kettle notes:

There are still plenty of senior Tories who see the current Labour overspend as a huge opportunity to press for a far more ideologically driven cuts agenda than Cameron – and plenty of potential Tory voters – would like. The public is entitled to know which Tory approach it is buying and, the longer the answer is denied, the more suspicious they have a right to be.

Apart from keeping suspiciously quiet and giving the media an endless supply of platitudes, they’ve done the normal opposition thing and opposed every Labour move. This means that where Labour have U-turned, on public spending for instance, so have they, yet no one seems to have a problem with this. They are using this crisis as a stepping stone to power, yet offering no solutions -apart from leaving everything to market forces which got us into this mess in the first place

I must admit I’m a little surprised, I always had the impression Mark Thomas wasn’t too keen on voting. This is another step in the Green Party becoming the ‘left’ alternative for those who don’t want to vote Labour or can’t bear voting Lib Dem.

I’ll come back to this theme later, but first I want to highlight a post on ConservativeHome which publishes this BNP poster:

The comments underneath the article betray typical Tory thinking on the issue.

maybe the Conservative party should plainly announce it’s views on Europe,immigration etc and reconnect with it’s core voters.
Posted by: R.Rowan | April 10, 2009 at 18:28
—-
How about a policy on immigration and overcrowding.
Posted by: erica | April 10, 2009 at 19:15
—-
This is not really worrying. Let’s please not exaggerate the ‘threat’ posed by the BNP. The will not win any parliamentary seats, they will not control any councils. If they win a seat at the European Elections it will be because of the absurdity of the electoral system not because of their popularity.
If we want to fight the BNP effectively then we need to have a coherent,effective policy on immigration which we can sell to all reasonable people.
Posted by: Malcolm Dunn | April 10, 2009 at 19:27
—-
I heartily agree with most of the posts here. You can’t defeat the BNP by calling them rude names, however well deserved.
The only way to beat them is to fight them on their own ground. But we are failing to do this. They have policies on immigration – where are our policies? They have policies on multiculturalism. We mouth PC platitudes…. I could go on.
Posted by: Country Mouse | April 10, 2009 at 20:15
—-
When all three establishment parties more or less agree when it comes to issues like immigration, crime, MPs expenses etc, it’s no surprise people are looking for answers elsewhere. As poll after poll tells us, people care about these issues, and are unhappy with the Labour-Tory-Lib-Dim line.
Posted by: James | April 11, 2009 at 12:34

A few points. First, the BNP poster doesn’t even talk about immigration – rather about corruption, and yet it’s the first issue many raise.

This then suggests that rather than saying ‘we should never have our policy dictated by fascists‘, or saying ‘we shouldn’t be fighting them on their ground because they’re racists/fascists‘ – these Tory supporters actually want to reclaim the ground from the BNP.

Not everyone says that on the thread of course. But my point is – no one actually challenges the view that the Conservative Party should not have its views dictated to by the BNP, and that the party should take a different stance. And actually, I don’t find this altogether very surprising.

The Home Office is not issuing a visa to the Indian minister Narendra “butcher of Gujarat” Modi, I can confirm exclusively!

Obviously I’m disappointed that I can’t protest against the scumbag, but it seems that the government is now strictly enforcing a policy of banning anyone controversial. I don’t agree with it, but I do think that if the government is to ban controversial people then it should do so with bigots all races, religions and ethnicities, not just the ones that people like Douglas Murray don’t like.

Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society highlights a speech by cabinet minister James Purnell. Here’s an excerpt:

What would egalitarian capitalism mean for policy?

It means the left no longer needs to be shy about equality. But we should be smart about it. We can’t create equality in the old way. We can’t simply take money from one set of people and give it to another, and call that equality. That is a palliative. It is trying to compensate for an unequal society not trying to tackle its causes.

Instead, the left needs to remember that it started off as a movement about power. We need to recognise that income inequality is just part of a wider struggle against the inequality of power. The greatest injustice is when people cannot achieve their goals because someone else with power stops them. The credit crunch was a power failure. Too much power was invested in bankers and too little in regulators. Too much power went to the market and too little to democracy. We had the power all in the wrong place – too concentrated, too many bankers with monopoly power. So disperse the power and don’t allow one interest to predominate.

All this may be true, but Labour politicians have this amazing ability to say the right things in front of an audience and get them fired up, and then do the complete office when back in their offices. I’ve seen Hazel Blears at close range talk about how she wanted the Labour party to get in touch with its grassroots!

I need to get around to writing a bigger and fuller article on this, but I have to do that about so many issues that I end up putting all of them on the back-burner. Too much to say and not enough time. So I’ll start with shorter posts that I can build into a bigger article.

There’s a discussion going on between David Semple and Tom Miller about the nature of Compass and how it relates to left-wing politics. David is a Marxist – an intelligent, non-authoritarian one, but on the far-left nevertheless on class politics. Tom supports the centre-left group Compass (disclosure: I’m also a member).

I like Dominic Grieve – he’s a nice guy. In fact I’ve seen him at so many Asian events that you almost forget he’s a Tory MP. In a speech today he will say:

Mr Grieve will refer to “a decade of courting self-appointed heads of minority groups and pandering to special interest lobbies, ignoring the range of opinions and depth of diversity in modern Britain.” He will then argue that this approach allows “negative cultural imports”, such as forced marriage, into British society because of a misplaced commitment to “cultural sensitivity”.

“Indeed the reluctance to exercise reasonable judgment and to criticise or challenge negative cultural imports into our country, including discriminatory practices against women and corrupt political and electoral practices, is one of the most troubling consequences of a culture that wishes to avoid offence and accusations of racism,” he will say. The speech will also contain references to ‘political correctness’, which Mr Grieve describes as an overly-strict set of cultural rules. “Greater diversity within our society must be recognised and applauded,” he will say.

The Independent reports:

Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has accused the Government of exploiting public fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties. Her comments came on the same day as a report published by international jurists suggested that Britain and America have led other countries in “actively undermining” the rule of law and “threatening civil liberties” in the guise of fighting terrorism.
…
“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state.”

Well, talk about stating the obvious but when the former head of the MI5 says it then suddenly it takes a whole new meaning. But there’s no point really just blaming the government. Since 9/11 and 7/7 we’ve seen a whole industry of bloggers, national journalists (Melanie Phillips, obviously, but plenty of others too) and think-tankers (Policy Exchange) and general wingnuts (Douglas Murray) who have become obsessed with finding ‘Islamists Under The Bed’.

Now, some of those concerns may have been real but they weren’t the only ones raising them. The difference is that this whole industry wanted to push as far as they could, even arguing at times (wave to Martin Amis!) that Muslims could – possibly, maybe, just having a thought experiment you know – singled out for further curtailment of their civil liberties. All those people who cheered on the neoconservatives in the US as they used and abused surveillance powers, as stood by New Labour while they talked up ID cards – they are also to blame. The fact that it has become illegal to even take a picture of a police constable is not just the fault of New Labour, it’s also the fault of the apologists on the left and right who went along with that agenda. Dame Remington’s comments must come as a stinging slap. How does that make you feeeeeeeel?

Who is to blame for the financial crisis? If you’re a hardcore capitalist and don’t want to blame banks or big businesses, then you have to find other scapegoats. Enter, promiscuous couples. According to Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome:

“The proximate cause of the banking crisis was the increase in couple cohabitation and the banks supine acceptance of the government’s promotion of “every choice of lifestyle”. The banks lent money to couples who were unlikely to stick together.” – Nick Gulliford has posted the above thought on the thread below Michael Fallon’s indispensable Platform article. It’s a very uncomfortable thought but I bet Nick is partly right. All the stats point to much greater instability in cohabiting relationships. I’d certainly like to see the data.

First blacks, and now promiscous couples (maybe even gays?). I wonder if David Cameron will take up this baton. Will he announce that the Conservative Party’s policy to subsidise married couples will end boom and bust by protecting the housing market? Heh.
(via Mark Pack)

On an different note, I’ve been writing some long articles for different newspapers and websites, and so drowning in work. Hence the blogging is a bit quick and dirty. Apologies for that.

Over at the American magazine The Atlantic, blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates (who has become a must-read) offers an intriguing argument in favour of tokenism. Reflecting on the win of Steele as the first black chair of the Republican party, he says:

But I maintain that you have to begin somewhere. Conservatives have, for years, ridiculed Democratic diversity efforts and some of those efforts should have been ridiculed. There is no question that Geraldine Ferraro, for instance, was a token.

But in the fight for inclusion, like most fights, your persistence is more important than your fuck-ups. The result of decades of persistent Democratic efforts towards inclusion yielded a primary featuring a white woman and black man, both of whom were talented heavyweight politicians–the anti-Ferraros, if you will. Because the GOP, has spent much of the immediate past, celebrating its own homogeneity is way way behind.

This much I agree with. Many on the right say they value merit over even token attempts at diversity, but if they truly did then their organisations wouldn’t be so male-centric. For decades, meritocracy has been a code-word to carry on as before. Here, even the Libdems said they would focus on diversity within the party and got absolutely nowhere. But the evidence is still very mixed since Obama and Clinton are a small sample and it may be that we don’t get more women and black/Asian/brown candidates in America for ages afterwards. After all, the Senate and House of Representatives still remain very male dominated.

Has tokenism within the Labour and Conservative party worked? It’s probably still too early to tell.

I’ll admit that I’ve always sort of liked David Cameron. I’m a realist about politics and hope that when my side eventually loses, the other side has some decent people governing. Canada’s a great example of this – despite Liberal party rule for a long time suggesting that Canada is a fundamentally centre-left nation, a funding scandal saw the Liberals booted out and Stephen Harper, a talented politician but unreconstructed righty take power.

The problem has always been that Cameron’s Tories have been woefully thin on policy, causing people to be suspicious. Also, understandably the whole Eton/Bullingdon thing doesn’t go down well with a lot of people.

So I was interested to see that Cameron has given a speech on ‘Progressive Conservatism’. What does it mean though? Is it just semantic nonsense, influenced by the venue of his speech, or is there some real cause for hope? Lets try and figure it out.

Finally! The home office has made a u-turn for fairness. I doubt the bigots from MigrationWatch would be happy.

Thousands more Gurkha soldiers and their families will be given the right to settle in Britain under a new policy to be announced by the Home Office.

New settlement rights due to be announced could open the door to 36,000 Gurkhas who served in the British Army before 1997. Nepal is understood to be concerned that the loss of so many citizens and their army pensions could leave a huge hole in its economy.

Press release I was sent today.

Rushanara Ali, Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow, has met with a senior Cabinet Minister to underline her calls for a lasting and meaningful ceasefire in Gaza.

The news that Barclays is about to unravel and may even have to ask to be partly nationalised made me chuckle a bit. I remember my friend Riz telling me while he used to work there that the reports he used to produce for the Forex markets were absolute shite, and yet people paid big money to read stuff a monkey could have put together. He said it was soul-destroying work and got out before they took his brain.

Today, Will Hutton says the going is about to get a lot worse. That inspired me to pull out this short extract from a book I read recently.

This is from Sidney Blumenthal’s: The Emergence of the Counter-Establishment (page 90)

———
The origins of the [US Federal Reserve] can be directly traced to the panic of 1907, a Wall Street upheaval that almost triggered a general economic collapse Friedman assiduously presented numerous statistics about the panic. And he attributed the stemming of the crisis to the banks’ refusal to convert deposits into currency. His tone was dispassionate, but he was scoring points. To him, government intervention always destabilises the market. And the creation of the Fed is an ideal case study.

Shariq Updates: In case anyone missed it, a link to the first part of my review of Will Hutton’s ‘The World We’re In’.

To keep a long story short, there’s trouble up in Birmingham with the Labour seat in Ladywood, vacated by Clare Short MP. There were two main candidates: young Asian barrister Shabana Mahmood (daughter of Mahmood Ahmed, chairman of Birmingham Labour Party) and black church-going Labour councillor Yvonne Mosquito – pillar of the community etc etc.

This being Birmingham, the two split many of the people into racial factions. Ms Mahmood was said to be a good candidate by local people, despite accusations of nepotism. To be honest I don’t know much of the local politics. Maybe Bob Piper or PoliticalhackUK do. I am however informed that Shabana Mahmood has been confirmed as of last night as the Labour candidate for Ladywood, Birmingham. Congratulations to her.

But that doesn’t mean accusations of a stitch-up have gone away. This being Birmingham, and the Lozells riots happened only a few years ago remember, racial politics like this can be quite poisonous. Would be interesting to see how it develops.

I’m going to be doing a fair bit of link-dumping over the coming weeks, as I’m trying to write more and develop more ideas on internet campaigning. So I’m going to throw out short thoughts and ideas.
This article on the Washington Post makes a point I wanted to about how political campaigning online, especially in the UK, is badly conceived:

“In this Internet era, it’s not enough to run a campaign; you need to lead a movement,” Mindy Finn, a Republican online political operative, told me less than three days after the election. “That’s what Obama did.” Finn, 27, worked on President Bush’s eCampaign team in 2004 and supervised former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s Web strategy. She worries that, unlike its Democratic counterpart, the Republican establishment hasn’t fully grasped the ways the Web is revolutionizing politics. “If you look at their site,” she said of the Obama campaign, “their online videos, their online ads, everything they did, it wasn’t about ‘me, myself and I.’ It was about ‘we’ and ‘us.’ ”

It was, in essence, about you.

I think the same point can be made here. Most Labour, Tory or Libdem online operations seem to be about promoting the party and their policies, rather than assuming its a new voter who wants to empower themselves or see what this politics business is all about. It isn’t about engaging them in a movement based on any ideology or vision. It’s just: hello! We are the [whatever] party. Come and learn more about us here. In fact, the only party that explicitly thinks of itself as a movement and tries to engage its readers as much as possibly online is the BNP. No wonder they’re so popular.
The Green Party, for a small operation that is meant to be radical, actually has a very conservative site, has changed somewhat with a more explicit focus on its most popular policies, on its front page. But there’s no sense of a movement, which is the only way that party will get anywhere.

Unlike Sunny, I found a lot in Nick Clegg’s speech at Demos that I agreed with. I have some areas of disagreement with the Lib Dems but I think that Clegg lays out a more coherent case for a centre-left democracy than either New or Old Labour.

Take taxation. The present government has always obsessed with being revenue neutral. Rather than making a bargain with the public in which slightly higher taxes will lead to better public services, they have tried to have it both ways.

During the economic bubble, rather than taking action to regulate the financial services sector and reducing Britain’s dependency on it, they let it inflate so that the additional tax revenues would finance the increases in public spending.