The Real Blog

Well done, Pullman, Horovitz, Morpurgo and Fine

2009-07-16T23:02:00.003+01:00

I must say, I cheered when I read about Philip Pullman and his friends, and their brave stand against the government’s latest child protection database horror.

I absolutely endorse what Pullman says. Like CRB checks for people working with children, this kind of database simply gives the illusion of safety, and by doing so makes people less vigilant. In fact, like so much New Labour regulation, it punishes, frustrates and molests people who comply, but makes it easier for those who don’t – the real fraudsters or paedophiles – to slip through the net.

It is also a brave stand they are taking. It isn’t easy to defy the combined weight of the Sun, the NSPCC and the government, and only people of Pullman’s stature can risk it.

This is the real point. Very slowly, we are constructing a new kind of tyranny here, of suspicion and anonymous informants, which presses most heavily on non-standard families – on anyone who lives their lives a little differently. Who opts out of the school system, for example, or who has unusual approaches to fidelity or marriage.

By doing so, and by transforming professions like social workers and health visitors into checklist gatherers – policing those who stand out – we are creating a gulf between the professionals and those they are supposed to help. No wonder my new local Children’s Centre is almost completely empty.

This is a recipe for child protection failure. It will make more Baby Peters considerably more likely. I also find it increasingly scary, a new tyranny that Liberals everywhere need to challenge – not just because it is tyrannical and intolerant, but because it is supremely ineffective. How can it successfully protect children if every parent, and every adult who works with children, comes under suspicion?

I’m a member of the party’s federal policy committee, and as such am sworn to secrecy about debates there. But this week, we did briefly have a discussion about child protection, and I took my courage in my hands and said what I’ve repeated here, though I was even less articulate than usual. People listened politely and that was that.

Within five minutes of the meeting finishing, no less than four other members of the committee had come up to me and said they agreed with me.

To be fair, they none of them said they agreed with everything I said. But I thought about it afterwards and wondered whether the subtle tyranny was sharper than I’d realised. I’m sure none of them were too intimidated to agree with me in public – we all know each other, after all – and yet none of them did.

That’s why Pullman and his friends are brave, but not brave enough to go it alone. They knew they had to announce their defiance as a group.

The prize for cultural ignorance goes to Hampshire

2009-06-22T21:18:00.001+01:00

The real motive power behind fascism isn’t racism or monopoly power or any of the other aspects that scare us about the BNP. Those things will never inspire the nation – or not our nation anyway. The power lies in its romanticism. Fine within limits, but when the authoritarians team up with the romantics, the imperialist dreamers, the folk historians and the cultural snobs, then you’ve got trouble.

I believe that is why the European nations which dumped their empires and their monarchies during the 20th century nearly all flirted with fascism at some point. Monarchies are safe conduits for this national romanticism. They render it harmless.

The point I’m trying to make in this roundabout way is that folklore and history is important politically. When it is misused, it encourages extremists and nationalists. When it is suppressed, it encourages them too.

So imagine my surprise, when I arrived at Danebury hill fort in Hampshire on Midsummer’s Day, an important Iron Age site, to find a notice from the county council explaining that this was the summer equinox – and setting out an absolutely bizarre outline of traditional midsummer beliefs and rituals.

Kostrub? Surely there was no celtic deity called that, I asked myself. Baked larks called zhaivoronky? I don’t think so.

I concluded that Hampshire County Council was so staggeringly ignorant of our national heritage that they had muddled it up with somebody else’s. A quick look on the internet confirms it. The county council’s notice was taken word-for-word from a website called ‘Spring Rituals’
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/pages/S/P/Springrituals.htm

As you can see from the address, it is taken from the Encyclopaedia of Ukraine. What does this mean?

All hail the Chelsea Barracks victory!

2009-06-12T22:51:00.002+01:00

I don’t buy all this nonsense from the architects about Prince Charles.

It is an irony that it takes someone’s inherited influence to rein them in, to provide any space for ordinary people to comment on the buildings the property world seeks to impose on people. But it is the same irony that it takes the House of Lords occasionally to stand up against government tyranny. We could do with more of that kind of irony, if you ask me.

Lord Rogers’ assertion that somehow only qualified architects are allowed to take part in the debate about what buildings go where is tyrannical nonsense. In short, Prince Charles’ victory over the Chelsea Barracks site is only a victory in Round One, but it is a victory for democracy.

It is also a blow against the creaking assertions of Late Modernism. It’s ideological certainty. It’s tyrannical contempt for human scale. The truth is that the insidious alliance between architects and corporate power, in this case oil power, is not a good combination to decide on the future shape of London's skyline, the one we all have to live with.

The accusation from the RIBA (Remember I’M the bloody architect) is that Prince Charles’ interventions leads to bland design. It may do, but there is nothing as bland as the glass towers that are springing up across London – despite Boris Johnson’s promises to the contrary. The Chelsea Barracks site has been described by locals as a 'new Berlin Wall'. It was to be one of many bland bastilles for the future.

But they are something worse than bland. They demean people. They give a sense of unbridled and unchallengable power, and are intended to. Their contempt for human scale is part of the process of tyranny: they impoverish us all.

Why this is going to be the last ever Labour general election campaign

2009-06-08T21:25:00.003+01:00

I know this is heresy, but I’m starting to feel sorry for Gordon Brown. Politics has a habit of projecting the worst kind of horrors onto those it appoints as fall-guy, and it’s certainly tough in human terms watching it happen.

That said, I believe we are seeing the demise of the last Labour government in history, and possibly the last general election platform by the Labour Party. It has no organising idea, there is no great policy debate between the plotters that might allow it to regenerate in intellectual terms, there is nothing left apart from vague and discredited management-speak. After the election, it will split three ways: Old Labour (to join the fringe lefties), New Labour (to splinter in turn into two factions: Managerialist and Lib Dem) and Brownites.

That puts the Liberal Democrats on the frontline. They are all that stands in the way of permanent Cameronian rule. All that stands also to prevent the slow mutation of the Far Right. We have to hammer out a platform that is angry enough, radical enough and new enough to fill that vacant opposition space.

I know this is irritating of me to put it like this, but I don’t believe that we can do that by trumpeting the usual ‘technocratic dross’ (I quote a senior member of the parliamentary party), or the same old Fabian mush that has allowed the BNP to get a foot in the door.

No, what’s going to make a difference is radical localism, real community politics, genuine handing power back to people, and a whole new approach to public services which chucks the whole massive edifice of factory call centres, IT bureaucracies and monster schools and hospitals into the nearest scrapheap – pointing out, on the way, that it has been such a feature of New Labour and Conservative rule.

We might also say, if we’re honest, that that hugely wasteful and expensive edifice – the real explanation why our services don’t work – also lies behind so much of the frustration among the white working class, and which seems to have led 6.5 per cent of them to vote for a party that blames minorities.

The truth is, of course, that the minorities suffer just as much. Worse, in fact, because they have to be supplicants to the Kafkaesque abomination we know as the government’s immigration service.

Bring back Paracelsus, all is forgiven

2009-06-01T22:58:00.000+01:00

Blimey, I am so fed up with the positivists – those puritanical creatures who disapprove of anything that doesn’t fit their stringent ideas of academic proof. Evidence-based, of course, but only very narrow kinds of evidence actually count with them.

Now here is the poor old vice-chancellor of Westminster University being hammered in public for the temerity of running a course on homeopathy:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23701268-details/University+calls+halt+to+degree+in+homeopathy/article.do

Now, I happen to be someone who has found homeopathy very helpful, and I’ve tried a lot of complementary therapies – some of them not very successfully, sometimes disastrously. But I’m not one of those people who is happy to be maintained in my chronic condition for the rest of my life by the NHS, at great expense to the taxpayer. So searching seems to me to be not just worthwhile, but a moral obligation.

Maybe that means I deserve to be berated by the positivists for dealing in ‘mumbo-jumbo’, but I don’t think so.

What is fascinating to me is that the leader of this bitter reproach this time is the editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald. Go back five centuries or so and you found a very similar stand-off.

On one side, the doyens of ‘approved’ medicine, backed by the reactionary forces of the Church. On the other side, the new protestant upstarts, barefoot healers ministering to the poor, and taking their inspiration from people like Paracelsus: calling for a ‘chemical revolution’ using pills and medicines instead of bleeding and shifting the humours. No guesses whose side the Catholic Herald would have been on back then.

The emerging great revolt

2009-05-18T22:38:00.002+01:00

It is getting stranger, this expenses business, and even rather frightening – and, heavens, I’m only self-employed. I have to charge myself expenses. But I have been thinking about one aspect in the past few days, and it's this.

There is no doubt that the public is very engaged in the expenses story. I keep on overhearing conversations about it on public transport. But the mood seems to be dovetailing with a powerful shift which I’ve been detecting increasingly over the last few months of defiance and revolt against New Labour.

Only today there was the threat by one Steiner School to close down rather than implement the government’s technocratic early years curriculum. "I'm not prepared to struggle on month after month hoping a petty bureaucrat will say this school can continue as it is,” said the head of one of them in the Times Educational Supplement. “I'm not going to kowtow and have children on computers.”

Add this to the list. The police authorities that have rejected government targets. The primary school heads refusing to implement Sats. Something is stirring, and it is important and exciting.

I also think it began with Nick Clegg’s brave and inspirational statement during the leadership election in 2007 that he would refuse to carry an ID card. That was the catalyst it seems to me, but how will this mood dovetail with the public rage at politicians? That’s harder to call, much less predictable and a little nerve-wracking. A bit of populism is urgently needed, but it can be unpredictable, after all.

Time to break up the banks

2009-05-07T21:32:00.000+01:00

Judging by the Today programme this morning, we may be moving into a different phase of the financial crisis. The opportunities for serious reform of the system may slowly be slipping away, and I’m frustrated that the party is still peddling what seems to me to be the wrong position on the banks.

Yes, we are calling for a UK version of the Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment banking from high street banking. That seems to be a bare minimum.

But the basic proposal is that we should use the government’s partial ownership of the banks to force them to lend more locally. We urgently need to face up to the fact that this hasn’t worked, won’t work and actually can’t work.

The UK banks are now so consolidated, and so focussed on the speculative economy, that they can no longer provide the kind of local lending infrastructure that we so desperately need – and which the USA has and which northern Europe has too. There is no local lending expertise; decisions are done according to formula, so in a recession, of course all their IT systems block the loans and tighten up overdraft conditions. They are not designed for that any more.

So for goodness sake, before we go any further, let’s take a distinctive Lib Dem position: break up the big banks, force them to disgorge the building societies they swallows, split them up regionally to rebuild our local lending infrastructure.

That is the way we can rebuild a real local enterprise culture – so we don’t have to rely on the next bubble just to fling us back into the delusion that we are wealthy.

Child abuse by the authorities

2009-05-04T22:41:00.003+01:00

I don’t really know why, but I find I’ve been haunted all weekend by the story of the mother who hit her child on the arm with a hairbrush because he wouldn’t get dressed for school. Maybe it was a bank holiday awareness of the difficulties of bringing up children; maybe it was just wondering whether I had the nerve to write this. Who knows.

But I do have the nerve, so I’ll say it: this seems to me to be a story that accelerates the fear that all parents share, it seems to me, of the emerging atmosphere of witch-hunt created by the child abuse industry. Of the government-sponsored demand for perfect middle-class child-rearing in the approved New Labour style.

None of this suggests that I want to encourage hitting children – quite the reverse. Or that it doesn’t matter – of course it does. Just that loving parents make mistakes, and sometimes spectacular ones, and that sane authorities need to distinguish between these and child abuse.

But no, the mother who snapped has finally been given a 12-month community order. They have taken her child away (he’s eight) and say he may be allowed to come home once the sentence is over (by which time he'll be nine). Nor is she allowed to discuss it with him on their two-hour weekly permitted meetings.

It seems to me quite extraordinary, brutal even, that this ever came to court. There has been no suggestion that the child is in danger, or that the mother (who has just had a breast removed) is a danger to children. Yet these same authorities seem quite capable of allowing real tragedies to happen like Baby P and the horrific rape by Baby P’s grandfather.

If you doubt that there is a new tyranny emerging here, think of these two things:

1. The poor child, taken away from an apparently loving home with no immediate prospect of coming home, at the age of eight. Despite all the rhetoric of ‘what’s best for the child’, children must apparently expect punishment by the child abuse lobby for their own involvement in parental mistakes.

2. My own nervousness about writing this at all. I am not at all sure that, by voicing this kind of concern, I will not myself become a target and a figure of suspicion.

Those seem to me to be prima facie evidence that we have stumbled into a new tyranny. Worse, it is one that is punishing children and undermining our ability to tackle the real child abuse which undoubtedly exists.

The perils of giantism

2009-04-02T18:11:00.002+01:00

I find myself arguing rather often these days that you can't have localism with over-large institutions, whether they are monopolistic supermarket chains or giant factory hospitals.

And there I was talking to a neighbour who has just given birth this week, and find some personal anecdote about merging hospitals means. She went along to Mayday Hospital, as she is supposed to, for the baby's hearing checks (Mayday is near West Croydon station). She was told that because of staff shortages, they couldn't see her - and had made her an appointment in teddington.

For thos not familiar with London, the journey between Croydon and Teddington in the far west of London, is well over an hour - even by car. She has a baby and two other children and no help.

I might add also that recent research in the USA says that hospital mergers inevitably raises costs for the hospitals as well.

Naming the Thing

2009-03-19T21:35:00.001Z

Hilaire Belloc’s first piece of political writing was an essay on the origins of Liberalism: he said it began with William Cobbett and his rural radicalism, rather than with Richard Cobden and the free trade campaign. I think he was right.

I keep thinking about Cobbett as the various stories flow through every day of the outrageous salaries and bonuses, not just in banking, but at the top of the public and private sectors alike. I read yesterday that the top 123 executives at Transport for London all earn over £100,000 a year.

That doesn’t really compare to the staggering greed of Fred the Shred, or the secretive culture of Roger Jenkins, but it is bad enough.

William Cobbett had a word for this. He called this combination of useless, feather-bedded appointees, and the money system they colluded over, ‘The Thing’. We have The Thing just as much today, and its tentacles are becoming clearer. Just as it was in Cobbett’s day, The Thing feeds off the rest of us – we pay for these sinecures in the public sector, but we also pay through our dwindling pensions for the huge bonuses in the financial sector. They rightly belong to the customers.

We await a political force capable of first naming The Thing, and then taking it apart.

Knowledge that defines Britishness

2009-03-17T13:49:00.004Z

A friend of mine does her 'Britishness' test today, to qualify to be a British citizen. One of the sample questions she has been provided with - apparently knowledge that no citizen should be without - is to define a quango.

It really is extraordinary, though perhaps not very surprising, that Whitehall Man believes knowing the meaning of government acronyms is one of those pieces information which defines Britishness - alongside knowledge of Shakespeare and all the panoply of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish culture.

I notice that this same narrowness of spirit is exactly the same in the privatised industries, proof - if you needed any more - that it doesn't matter if a business is public or private, it still shrinks the soul if it is too big.

The evidence: the decision by National Express to ban trainspotters from stations on the North East Main Line on the grounds that they are "a security risk". In fact, of course, they are quite the reverse: they know everything about railways, are inoffensive watchers and crime preventers, better than any security camera. But the bureaucratic mind believes they are untidy. I must remember to shun National Express in future.

More schools, smaller schools. The rest is noise.

2009-03-06T15:37:00.002Z

I can’t be in Harrogate this weekend, which is frustrating, because I wanted to listen to the education debate – though it may be that I will actually stay less frustrated in the end by not doing going.

The proposals on offer are all excellent and urgent. I especially agree with the idea that local authorities can commission parent and voluntary groups to start new schools. But, let’s face it: there isn’t much in there which addresses the main problem about education, the one that looms over all the others. There are not enough schools.

No amount of changing the curriculum, ending micro-management and measuring differently is going to deal with that. Nor is the pupil premium, important though that is.

There are 5,000 pupils in London at secondary school level which have no places, and many thousands more who are being bussed across London to places they would not dream of applying to. Ed Davey is doing really excellent work on this.

The problem is partly that there are not enough good schools, and the proposals will help tackle that. But often they are not good enough because they are too big and inhuman and are therefore miserably letting children down, especially at secondary level.

It is also to do with this fantasy about ‘catchment areas’, as if everyone lived in one. In practice, the catchment area of our local primary school is only about 200 yards around the school. Most people in my neighbourhood live outside any catchment area and are at the mercy of the local authority (Croydon, ugh!).

Education ought to be central to the Lib Dem cause. It isn’t going to really be so until we come up with proposals for a massive programme of new schools and of breaking up the existing ones into smaller, more human and more effective units.

Yes to national service?

2009-02-23T22:47:00.002Z

Who heard the item on the Today programme about introducing a non-military national service? Admittedly it came after the surprising skewering of the Israeli military spokesman over white phosphorous, but it was important nonetheless, and covers the article in the latest Prospect by Frank Field and James Crabtree. This is why I think it is vital for Lib Dems:

1. Because none of our intractable social issues are susceptible to permanent change without an absolutely massive injection of voluntary effort by ordinary people, way beyond our current volunteering infrastructure.

2. Because in the USA, this is a leading liberal issue. Clinton used it in his 1991 campaign and found that it got the biggest cheers from Democrats.

3. Because it provides a potential way forward for national cohesion that genuinely mixes classes and cultures.

4. Because it provides a political way forward for students to earn their tuition fees rather than having to pay for them – the very least the state should owe them after national service is university teaching.

5. Because, bizarrely during the recession, we might have the political will to raise the money to pay for it. It is a good deal more useful than paying people to do nothing on the dole.

How would it be organised? I haven’t the foggiest. I find it hard to imagine local authorities managing it very effectively, but there seem to be few potential infrastructures at national level capable of delivering meaningful local engagement, training and mentoring, except possibly the military, but there are good political reasons for not asking them.

But the basic idea is deeply Liberal. That everyone has a basic need to feel useful, whether they admit it or not – to find, as Kennedy put it, a cause beyond self. There are problems for Liberals with a compulsory scheme, but there is no doubt that anything less than compulsory would simply exclude those who stand to benefit the most.

The party has flirted with the idea behind closed doors for years now, and have now allowed the initiative to go elsewhere (oh, what a surprise!). I had a go at discussing this at a Centre for Reform event in 2004 (see http://www.david-boyle.co.uk/systems/britcorps.html). But I still think we should think about it more seriously. Am I mad?

The meaning of Red Toryism

2009-02-09T21:11:00.003Z

The Red Tory debate, the subject of a forthcoming book by the Conservative theorist Phillip Blond, featured in a fascinating column by Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/09/madeleine-bunting-red-toryism

I’m especially interested because I have been, in a small way, trying to suggest that a very similar mixture of small enterprise, localism, voluntaryism and anti-trust legislation against big business might be the way forward for political Liberalism. Yet here we are discussing it as the new direction for Cameron, backed by a whole range of Conservative luminaries.

I’m not saying I agree with everything Blond says, and there are some worrying areas – the strictures against immigration and free trade are ambiguous. It depends very much what he means by both, and certainly in his writings that I've seen, both get favourable and unfavourable slants.

Madeleine Bunting talks about the risks of this kind of romantic brand of Toryism, anti-Thatcher, anti-corporate (public and private), and it is certainly true that there are risks. Previous incarnations of this kind of romantic politics (Populism in the 1890s, Distributism in the 1920s, Social Credit in the 1930s) all flirted – once they had worn themselves out – with ideas we would consider dangerous.

Thinking about it a little more today, and translating it into American terms, I think the risks are clearer. Because actually this agenda is a neglected corner of Jeffersonian Liberalism. When it was used by the Left it ended up with the populist gangsterism of Huey Long. When it was used by the Right it ended up with the mildly malevolent communitarianism of Pat Buchanan. These are interesting byways, but not very attractive ones.

Only when it stays where it belongs, as political Liberalism – and I accept some of Phillip Blond’s analysis of the contradictions of liberalism – is it rendered safe. Because it is put in the context, as Jefferson intended, of the Declaration of Independence, where we hold some basic humanitarian truths to be self-evident.

So that’s my thesis. Take a closer look at Red Toryism, and be aware that the contradictions of Conservatism are also lurking, and take back those vital, neglected aspects of what are actually part of the Liberal heritage. An urgent part too: it is an antidote to the deadly technocracy of Fabianism which has been a kiss of death for so much of British policy, right and left, and which also lives on in the Liberal Democrats, seeking whom it will devour.

Faceless states

2009-02-03T21:55:00.002Z

I do find it extraordinary what we will put up with from government and corporate alike.

For example. I bought a ticket down to Devon on Sunday. Nobody told me that, in fact, mytrain would not run, that I would be decanted at Exeter put into a bus, told I could not take my bulky luggage. They knew this but never told me when they took my money. They do the same to tens of thousands of people every weekend. Why doesn’t someone take them to court?

And another example (do I sound like a grumpy old man?). It is now past the deadline for filing my tax return on Friday. I met it, but if I hadn’t met it, HM Revenue & Customs would have fined me £100.

But it is also the deadline when I have to pay the rest of my tax for last year, plus half of it for this year (I’m self-employed). But HMR&C haven’t managed to tell me how much I owe.

They promised they would by the deadline when I called some weeks ago, but they haven’t. I’ve just talked to them again and asked them if they will pay me £100 for their failure. I need hardly say that they won't.

Worse, they will charge me interest from February 1 on my unpaid tax which they haven’t even managed to calculate yet, at least not in a letter to me with a paying-in slip so that I can pay it across the counter in a bank. Just imagine how they would all give me the runaround if I wasn't a grumpy old man.

The big speech

2009-01-21T21:35:00.002Z

OK, I've got a small revival of flu, which is my excuse for not writing this yesterday. But wasn't the Obama speech a statement of modern Liberalism you could be proud of - committed to change, internationalist, but including a call to service, and an acceptance that politicians can't do it all?

Why can't we articulate that?

A new kind of money

2009-01-19T21:16:00.002Z

Vince Cable was bang on with his phrase "giving the kiss of life to a corpse". The real problem is not that the banks refuse to lend, it is that they have lost the ability to do so. They have been consolidated to the point of uselessness to the local economy.

They also have no local infrastructure, and what structure they do have points towards the discredited speculative economy, not the real one. It is time to break them up, de-merge them and rebuild a local and regional lending infrastructure like they have in Europe and North America.

But just for a moment, take a quick trip back with me to March 1933, and Roosevelt's inauguration. About 5,000 banks had closed their doors a few days before. The second greatest economist of the age (Irving Fisher) had just published a book called Stamp Scrip, which urged a new kind of local money which lost value week by week, to encourage spending rather than hoarding.

Within a few months, there were 4,000 or so of these local currency systems across the northern states of the USA, following on from the highly successful models in Austria and Switzerland, and all based on the ideas of an Argentine trader called Silvio Gesell. Money that rusts. In Worgl in Austria, the very first, people had paid their local taxes months in advance and the council was able to invest in a range of new infrastructure: the originator there rejoiced in the name of Mayor Unterguggenberger, but that's beside the point.

There we are, some alternative economic archaeology. What's interesting about it is that Roosevelt was persuaded by the bankers to make stamp scrip illegal, in case it undermined confidence in banks. It was almost his first executive decision.

But what's interesting about it now is the reference to the whole affair on Barack Obama's blog, which really makes you wonder what is going to happen in the next few days:

http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=087800000004x6w

No pasaran!

2009-01-15T17:50:00.001Z

The approval of the third runway at Heathrow is an extraordinary and historic event, and I kind of think we will all look back to it (15 January 2009) as the moment when everything changed.

Of course, it is also a miserable condemnation of the Labour government, which has never stood up to anybody rich and powerful and clearly never will. They have never challenged a corporate interest. Never imagined a way the world might be different, cleaner, healthier or fairer. They are, in short, utterly pointless and borderline corrupt in their miserable failure to shift us in any way towards a future where the planet might survive. History will condemn them for the bone-headed, utterly craven fawning on power.

But it is important for other reasons too. Because this is a No Pasaran moment for the green movement, shared by an extraordinary cross-section of society who believe there has to be a limit to what we sacrifice on the altar of wrong-headed progress. That there has to be a limit to the appeasement of those corporate interests that believe with so little evidence that the decision will benefit London, the economy, the jobless or anything else. The destruction of whole villages, twelfth century churches, the peace of great swathes of London, the sight of elderly ladies bundled into police vans: it will change the way people think.

In short, they will not let it happen, and the resulting clash is going to be painful for both sides. But there comes a point in history where the powerful so misread the signs that they lose their power, and so it will prove. I betcha!

The real victims of New Labour snobbery

2008-12-12T20:58:00.002Z

Tell me, was there any disquiet at all at the BBC when the chief constable covering Dewsbury condemned Karen Matthews’ neighbours, a whole class of families, because “they never go out”?

Were there any complaints, or even qualms, at this outrageous piece of New Labour snobbery? I don’t know. I hope so, but fear there wasn’t.

It’s a bit late to blog about this, but we seem to be in the grip of a moral panic led by Ed Balls, which amounts to an attack on all children and their families, and mothers in particular. In the last few days, since I thought about this rather belated post, it has been intensifying worryingly.

I’m not of course defending Karen Matthews. But pointing out that most children with young families rarely “go anywhere” is not exactly an explanation for why someone should kidnap their own child.

Worse, was there anyone pointing out just how fatuous that leaked social workers report on Karen Matthews was – the one which criticised her for a fatal “inability to successfully place the children's needs above her own”?

In practice, do you know any mothers who systematically put their children’s needs always before their own? They are ill, depressed, stressed and sleep deprived. Good mothers understand how their children depend on them to look after themselves, rather than entirely subsuming their own physical and mental needs. That is good parenting.

But no, we are in New Labour fantasy-land, where mothers have to be virginal paragons of saintliness or must risk interference from the state. But who is speaking up for parents and their children in the midst of this nonsense? Who is pointing out that this kind of moralistic disconnection from the real world is likely to damage children as much as ‘save’ them?

Before policy-makers run too far down this path, it might be worth looking at the practical implications of policies based on this kind of rhetoric:

1. Those who need public services most begin to sense that professionals are not on their side. That’s why our shiny new, well-equipped local children’s centre is almost entirely empty.

2. There will be more children removed from ordinary, loving families simply because medical professionals don’t know what’s wrong with them.

3. Because all families are suspects, child protection agencies will continue to be overwhelmed, and we’ll get another Baby P and another and another...

But I think at the heart of all this pomposity is the vilification of ordinary parents, and mothers in particular.

Another tragedy of Baby P

2008-11-19T15:48:00.002Z

There is another tragedy about Baby P. Not just the fate of a child at the hands of adults, but another twist in the rise of what I can only call the child abuse industry.

It means public officials will be even more nervous dealing with children. It means that suspicion will fall on ever more innocent families, and even more vulnerable children will be mistakenly and forcibly removed from their homes, and into the un-tender mercies of local authority care.

The other Baby P tragedy is that it will now be more, not less likely, that his tragedy will be repeated.

Over the past week, a whole army of people have emerged from the woodwork who have reported teachers, doctors and other people to Haringey for suspected abuse, and been ignored. This is not evidence of Haringey’s incompetence; it is one reason why have been so ineffective: because the child abuse industry has persuaded officials that any parents are potential abusers, that every illness that they can find no obvious reason for should bring any family under suspicion.

The truth is that, if every family comes under suspicion, there is no chance at all that welfare authorities can effectively police them. That is not the only reason for the the failure to keep Baby P alive, but it is one of them.

I wouldn’t be so glib as to say that abuse is obvious. Of course it isn’t. But it is a hundred times harder to spot if the field of suspicion covers everyone with children.

What on earth is the matter with us?

2008-10-20T21:20:00.001+01:00

I have to admit to a teeny bit of frustration when I saw the latest poll that puts the Lib Dems down to 14 per cent. The side effects of the crash, no doubt, but even so…

It is true that we have Vince Cable, who has launched an excellent initiative on tax havens, at precisely the right moment. He also seems to have the preternatural ability to be about 48 hours ahead of the mainstream, which was C. P. Snow’s definition of somebody with a reputation for being far-sighted in their own lifetime.

But that isn’t enough to grab the attention of opinion-formers, which is what we need to do, with a distinctively Liberal approach to the crisis.

It may be, of course, that our spokespeople get ignored even more at times of international crisis, especially when Cameron’s Tories are wriggling on the end of a stick. But when we had a captive radio audience in recent weeks on Any Questions, our answers on the financial crisis were absolutely vacuous – international co-operation, told you so, pinch me please to stay awake.

This is actually one of those unique moments when nobody really knows what to do, where radicalism is not just acceptable but is actually demanded. Where thoughtful party leaders could be heard, especially from parties that used to be known and loved for their quality of thought.

I’ve been wondering why we are failing so badly here, and have come up with two reasons:

1. We haven’t had an economic policy since Keynes breathed his last in 1946. Worse, we don’t think economics is very important, and have developed nothing to say on the subject in recent decades apart from bleating on about sound money occasionally.

2. We have no clear idea who our core voters are. If we had, we would realise immediately what needed to be said – because the challenge now for small business, thriving local economies and the voluntary sector are pretty clear. But we don’t say it. Worse, we let the Tories get into the media about small business before we did.

But somehow those two reasons still don’t seem an adequate explanation. So I’m left pleading with fate like a Greek tragedy – what on earth is the matter with us?

The coming new kind of capitalism

2008-09-28T22:04:00.000+01:00

Geoff Payne very kindly sent me the attached essay by John Gray, which says that the collapse of the American model of capitalism is as significant an event as the collapse of the Soviet model. We are now heading for a different kind,he said: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/28/usforeignpolicy.useconomicgrowth

I think that’s absolutely right. The question for Liberals is: what kind?

Because it seems to me that we might have a choice before us. We should certainly express a preference before it is too late. The two kinds of capitalism that remain on offer are:

1. The Chinese version: a technocratic and monopolistic clash of barely regulated giants, where monopoly power is allied to the authoritarian power of the state, where dissent from Tescoworld becomes downright dangerous, all underpinned by the power of sovereign wealth funds.

2. The Liberal free trade version: a model with small enterprise at its heart, where monopolies are cut down to size, where people can raise the finance they need to start in business, and where financial services assume their proper place – as the plumbing function of local enterprise, no longer the fearsome, corrosive tail wagging the dog.

It’s miserably ironic that Liberals should have been searching for the past generation or so for something to say about economics – rather than clinging pathetically to ‘sound money’ long after its funeral oration – when, all along, Liberal free trade needed re-articulation.

It’s simple really. It might feel a little rusty to start with, but we Liberals will soon get the hang of it again.

But we’d better do so quickly, because nobody else is going to do it. And we will otherwise sleepwalk into the long night of Chinese-style corporate capitalism.

Cameron and the hedge funds

2008-09-26T21:22:00.001+01:00

I’ve just listened to Chris Huhne’s slightly intemperate demolition of Chris Grayling on Any Questions. It was good to listen to, and I hope the Lib Dems have grasped that the Conservative vulnerability on the issue of the global financial meltdown is something that needs to be exploited.

But not just exploited. We need to build a philosophy on it which embraces the other issues as well. That’s what you might call a narrative.

David Cameron’s embrace of the hedge funds is a major Achilles Heel. Not just because they have been his funders but because, overwhelmingly, they are his friends. That’s what the Notting Hill Set is all about.

But Liberals are still some way from forging this into the political weapon we need. We have yet to go beyond the ‘bright ideas’ stage of critique of the abuse of the financial markets. Wouldn’t it be good if there was help to prevent home repossessions, or regulations about mortgage lending. Well, yes, it would – but we need a good deal more than that, and we need it quickly. To be absolutely precise, we need three things:

1. A philosophical underpinning which distinguishes between the free market of productive finance and small business, and the greed and abuse of global finance which has ended up threatening and corroding both.

2. A clear set of proposals that goes beyond the dismal, deeply old-fashioned and disabling idea of ‘sound money’ which has deadened Liberal thinking in this country since Keynes. Global finance has become the tail wagging the real economy: it is the precise opposite of sound money.

3. A New Deal that is capable of rescuing us from financial meltdown, but which can make a parallel contribution to tackling the climate and food crunches too, aware that major investment in the green collar economy will also keep its wheels in motion, just as a commitment to tackling monopoly power and rebuilding local economies will keep us all alive.

The key political debate of the 20th century is over. It isn’t public versus private any more, free market versus state control. It is big versus small, and Liberals need to be clear which side they are on – centralisation or life.

Slaves of some defunct economist

2008-09-23T21:36:00.001+01:00

It really is amazing how timid the British authorities are in the face of financial meltdown, despite what Gordon Brown said this afternoon.

The Americans really understand finance – they have a culture and history dominated by financial innovation and banking collapse. The British naively swallow all that stuff about sound money: they really think it’s real – as if anything that cascades round the world at the rate of $3 trillion a day can ever be sound. The authorities watch with fingers crossed as the markets plummet, believing they are watching the free market in action – when actually it is a perversion of the free market, a caricature that corrodes it.

Lloyd George intervened in the banking crisis that preceded the First World War by getting the Treasury to print their own notes. Maybe the Brown government would do the equivalent if they had to, but I wonder.

Keynes had it right when he said that “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Unfortunately for us, the current batch of practical men now rule the world. They certainly rule the UK.

Reclaiming free trade for sanity

2008-09-22T21:30:00.002+01:00

For most of my adult life, we have wrestled with a narrow interpretation of the free market which has come to dominate the globe.

That interpretation seems suddenly to have reached the logical limits. There are no investment banks left on Wall Street, many of the great American financial institutions – and some of the British ones – are on the equivalent of welfare hand-outs from the taxpayer (though their chiefs still seem to be drawing their vast salaries). It is time we wrested the idea of open markets and free trade from their clutches so that we don’t lose the baby with the bathwater.

Yet, in this country at least, where are the politicians? The Conservatives are still defending the hedge funds. Labour (as far as one can tell today) is struggling with plans to keep the excesses going. What are these proposed nurseries for two-year-olds but a hidden subsidy for ridiculously high house prices? It is up to the Clegg/Cable show to set out the way forward.

The truth is that this financial services roller coaster must end, and must end because it is corrosive of free markets – it obstructs small business, bypasses enterprise and innovation except of the narrowest kinds, and threatens to undermine a great deal more than ordinary people’s thrifty livelihoods.

This isn't just my peculiar take on it. The Ur-hedge funder George Soros said that he could believe the financial system would crash far easier than he could believe it would struggle on. The Ur-investor Warren Buffett talked years ago about derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”.

No, it’s time for something else: a return to Liberal free trade based on enterprise and sustainable finance for innovation, not a handful of crumbs from a passing ubermensch.

But it takes a long time for politicians to realise the argument is shifting. It isn’t any more – hasn’t been for some years – about free trade versus state control. We all know pretty much where we stand on that, within some margins. It is big versus small. And when our financial system fraudulently assigns to itself the label of free trade – when it actually allows the big to corrode the small – then it needs good deal more changes than Brown and Cameron are planning.