Brontides

I’m working up the energy to make my final two long posts on the parties, their policies and their manifesto pledges – we have foreign policy, my personal pet peeve, and social policy, which promises to be highly subjective. I’ll get around to those, hopefully over the weekend, but first I’d like to speculate about endorsements.

It’s customary for each of the major newspapers, and many of the main weekly news-based periodicals, to endorse a party or candidate at election time. In the coming week we can expect to see all of this swing into action, which means that it’s prognostication time.

Expect the Murdoch press to go blue this year. The Sun is historically opportunist and has thrown its weight enthusiastically behind Cameron and the Tories. The Times has been more measured but is unlikely to be able to resist the pressure to obey the corporate line.

They stuck by the Blues through the lean years, and they’re sure as hell not going to turn on him now that he has a sniff at power. They have too much access and too much influence within the Conservative party to make a principled rejection likely or desirable. Expect all of these to stay reliably right-wing.

The flip side of that soin is the question of what happens to Labour’s pet press, when Labour is heading for the worst crushing they have seen since 1983. The Mirror has a phenominal amount invested in its support for Labour, particularly Labour’s left wing – it is largely bankrolled by the Unions and has a great deal of access to Charlie Whelan, Ed Balls and the rest of the “Old Labour” remnant. In 2001 Mirror readers were 60% more likely to vote for Labour than the general populace, making them by far the most supportive constituency for the Government. In 2010 they will have to continue that trend. The Guardian is less dependent and thus less dogmatic, and may well go for the Lib Dems. Uniquely, they have an open endorsement process, in which all members of the production team can have a say and in which the readership can make their opinion felt; by most accounts the Lib Dems got a heavy majority of the support this time around. They have form; the Guardian embraced the Lib Dems in the European elections last year. If the Guardian were to go Labour then it would entail a dramatic editorial intervention. The Independent will almost certainly go Lib Dem, despite its generally more left-wing editorial policy.

On the face of it, these two fairly serious publications are straightforward left-wingers in the UK arena. But this really reflects the nature of British politics over the last decade; the Tory party has been a decrepid wreck since 1995, and the Economist and FT have accordingly, grudgingly, kept their weight behind Labour. When the Economist tepidly switched to Labour in 2001 it was a bombshell; it was the first time in 40 years that the paper had gone red, and served to underscore the dramatic intellectual collapse that the Tory party had suffered following the collapse of Thatcherism. It is crushingly unlikely that the Economist will repeat this trick. The question is: have the Lib Dems made a pragmatic enough attempt at credibility this time, or will the Economist revert to form and go Tory? As an institution, the Economist is small-c conservative, and may be content to revert to the safety and familiarity of the two-party system. Intellectually its tendencies are far more Lib Dem, however – although the Tories’ school reform plans are meat and milk to the magazine, their record on civil liberties and economic populism will have dismayed many of their staff, and the Lib Dem’s ideas on Trident and immigration liberalisation will have pleased them. The FT should stay on the left, and will likely either endorse the Lib Dems or not endorse at all.

…so to avoid talking about it, I’m going to exercise my blogger’s prerogative to write about something else that interests me instead.

Photo credit: me

Matt Yglesias calls it the most important story no-one’s paying attention to. I think that’s a bit strong but certainly the question of what exactly happened in the waters off of Baengnyeong Island are being underreported and underexamined, especially here in election-fixated Britain.

The bare facts of the case are that a South Korean warship, the ROKS Cheonan to be exact, was sunk nearly a month ago not far away from the disputed maritime border with the North. 46 crew members went down with it. North Korea has denied any involvement, but the denial is starting to look implausible; investigators have determined that the explosion was likely external. The US Military, with typical restraint, has already jumped to the obvious conclusion; definitive proof is elusive and unlikely to be forthcoming.

That said, the range of alternative potential explanations is limited. The North appears to be quite content to ratchet up the stakes; last week the government in Pyongyang announced that it was confiscating South Korean owned property in a jointly-owned venture close to the border. Obviously missing, however, is a motive. Opaque as North Korean internal politics are, it’s hard to see what benefit the sinking would have. Speculation abounds that one of the North’s top generals has been promoted as a result of the operation, however, so if the North did do it then it was certainly planned. Outlandish theories abound (was it a manned kamikaze torpedo?!) but the truth is unlikely to surface any time soon.

The US and ROK governments are both playing their cards close to their chests. A resumption of hostilities is unlikely but possible. The government of South Korea doesn’t really want a war; it’s a rich, comfortable country now, and has a lot to lose, not to mention the problems that winning against (and thus having to govern) a poor, underdeveloped neighbour would bring. Alternatives exist, complicatedly; Kim Hyun-soo, professor of international law at Inha University lists three (namely: take it to the UN security council; try the International Court of Justice; or impose a unilateral blockade on the North). Julian Ku at Opinio Juris evaluates thus:

The first option seems no problem, except that it is hard to get the Security Council to do anything. The second option is a problem since, well, North Korea has not accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ. The third option seems the most interesting, but it is also the most complicated one legally. The Koreas are in a state of cease-fire. But blockades, at least in theory, are not permitted under the U.N. Charter except when authorized by the Security Council (see U.N. Charter Art. 42). The 1962 U.S. “quarantine” of Cuba was carefully not called a blockade to avoid this legal problem. I suppose South Korea could end the cease-fire, initiate hostilities, and institute the blockade as part of its right of self-defence. Now that would be legally defensible, although it would probably start an all out (maybe even nuclear) war. So let’s hope they go with option 1.

Whichever option they go with will cause a sharp response from the North, which has been rumbling about a third nuclear trial for months. It’s a thorny, intractable problem, and the Korean peninsula is unlikely to see any peace soon.

Photo taken from the BBC, with the caption “The remnants of the egg thrown at David Cameron.”

Because of its stupid paywall, I can’t link you to the Times article in which a number of top generals have come out and said that they agree with the Lib Dem position that Trident should be scrapped. Nevertheless, they have, and ahead of the debate on foreign policy tomorrow it’s going to give Nick Clegg a bit of a credibility boost. It’s not unprecedented – in fact it does come up outside of election politics from time to time – but in fairness it’s not even really inherently surprising, as the decision to retain a nuclear deterrent in the UK is fundamentally a political one rather than tactical.

This sprung to mind when I was reading an excellent post by Michael Krepon at ArmsControlWonk. The post is about the Indian strategic thinker and journalist Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam. Subrahmanyam is an ambiguous figure – at one and the same time he is one of the foremost promoters of India’s nuclear programme, and one of the fiercest critics of nuclear weapons and their use. He describes nukes as “terror weapons,” but rationalises India’s ownership of them not by their own virtues, but by their iconography:

The nuclear challenge is not just the one posed by the Pakistani efforts to acquire nuclear weapons or even the Chinese challenge. [Writing elsewhere, Subrahmanyam estimated that Pakistan acquired a usable nuclear device three years before India.] It is a challenge arising out of the global strategic environment in which nuclear weapons have been accepted as the currency of power, nuclear capability has transformed the game of power to coercive diplomacy and the subcontinent is surrounded on all sides by nuclear weapons…

What’s this got to do with Trident and Nick Clegg? Subrahmanyam’s position is revealing; here, he justifies his stance, but also throws down a gauntlet for those western powers who, between them, own some 95% of the worlds’ weapons. For a country like India, the strategic equation is straightforward, and Professor Raj Krishna made the point in the April-June 1965 issue of India Quarterly:

It is an illusion to suppose that military weakness rather than military power makes a nation more influential in pressing for disarmament…. Virtue is respected only when it is backed by power; power without virtue is disastrous; but virtue without power is helpless. The fate of the merely virtuous is often decided in the assemblies of the powerful without reference to and at the expense of the virtuous.

This argument is often used by those who argue against the idea of unilateral nuclear disarmament by the UK. It’s not an entirely unreasonable position; it would be hard to argue that the UK could expect to lead the way by disarming, setting in motion a “domino effect” that would topple the atomic storage houses of America and the former Soviet Union. But it does ignore the fact that the UK is not in the same position as India, and thus the strategic calculus does not quite resolve in the same way.

In the first quote above, Subrahmanyam referred to nukes as being part of the currency of power. For India, that’s a realistic assessment; it’s closest neighbours, trading partners diplomatic concerns include two nuclear states with a recent history of belligerence towards India. The risk to India, then, is not that Pakistan or China might use their weapons; it’s that the weapons are a bargaining chip that India can’t counter, so has to neutralise. More to the point, as a second-order power, having nuclear weapons gets India a seat at the table. It means that America and Russia have to court its attention, and that China can’t move against it without the rest of the world exacting punishment.

Unlike India, however, Britain is still, just barely, a first-order power. And that means that it doesn’t have to act out to get attention on the world stage; it’s not surrounded by enemies, literally or figuratively, and no-one’s going to slam a nuke down in order to leverage trade concessions. Over the last twenty years, I literally cannot think of a single diplomatic, political or military engagement that would have gone differently had the UK not possessed nuclear weapons. And if you can effectively forget that they’re there for twenty years then what’s the point of having them?

But there’s a broader principle here, and that’s that the nature of power is misunderstood. If we return to the premise that nukes are part of the currency of power, then it has to be asked: what gives them their value? Again, this is the difference between first-order and second-order powers. For the first-order countries, it’s not the raw destructive power of the nuke that gives it its potency, because no-one believes that the truly powerful actors – the US, Russia etc – will actually use them. In fact, the raw destructive power of the US is basically the same with or without nukes; there’s only so many ways that you can tear a country apart, after all, and in the absence of nukes the US’s conventional forces would be more than adequate. The relationship actually goes the other way. Nukes are potent as power currency because powerful countries own them.

Within this are the seeds of the logic of disarmament. If power were to become correlated with the rejection of the bomb then that, too would spread. We know this because it’s happened:

Concepts and institutions which were considered inescapable and having no alternatives have become totally unacceptable and discarded into the dustbin of history. Slavery was a hoary institution… Monarchy and the divine right of kings had their day… No one today will fight for a king… The colour bar and discrimination based on it was prevalent even a couple of decades ago, but is no longer defended as a way of life… Colonialism is indefensible today – though in its heyday it was hailed as a civilising mission… All that has changed within our lifetime.

All of which is slightly airy-fairy and intangible, and doesn’t entirely relate to Britain – again, Britain no longer has the capacity to lead on this, so the argument is more appropriately directed at America. But for Britain to disarm would provoke a debate; we would be the first major power to voluntarily give up these arms. It would earn us diplomatic friendship in those up-and-coming countries with whom the unfairness of the non-proliferation treaty has always rankled: Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and, yes, India. And it would buy us all the goodies that Nick Clegg put into his manifesto with the Pot of Infinite Trident Money.

It seems increasingly like a good deal to me.

When a politician refers to “front-line services,” they are talking about a wide array of things. Firefighting, the Post Office, jobcentres, and embassies all qualify. But in truth, the politician is probably talking about something much more narrow. In politicianese, the term “front-line service” is really shorthand for two things: schools and hospitals.

If immigration is Britain’s equivalent to the bitter cultural clashes of America’s bipolar body politic, then schools and hospitals are more like the First Amendment: although arguments as to details may get heated, there remains a consensus across the political spectrum as to the overall direction of travel. If Britain is to succeed in the 21st Century, then education needs to be strengthened and broadened; and the NHS is part of our political and social heritage, and should remain well-funded and widely accessible. This level of broad agreement means that the debates surrounding school and hospital reform tend to be somewhat more advanced than those surrounding crime or migration – which can make “correct” outcomes hard to judge.

Schools
Despite the very best of intentions, schools have not done well under Labour. It’s a stark statement but not an unfair one; results have declined over the past decade. In studies by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, British 15-year-olds came well above the average in 2000, at eighth in mathematics and seventh in reading out of 27 countries. In 2006 they scored below the average in both, at joint 18th and 13th respectively. In science, at least, they remained above-average—but fell from fourth to ninth. The 2009 data are due but there is little evidence to suggest that they will to buck the trend.

One thing that the Labour years have clearly demonstrated is that this isn’t a spending problem. Real spending per student has doubled since 1997, to an average of £5,900 per student per year. School buildings have been improved and facilities extended; teacher pay has risen above inflation; teacher shortages, barring a few persistently problematic areas like mathematics and physics, are mostly receding, although tough schools in poorer areas can face a fearful struggle to attract a capable and qualified faculty. A lot of money has been spend on classroom assistants; a recent report (pdf) was critical of the impact that this influx of support staff has had.

Meanwhile, the Economist, amongst others, alleges that young talent has been ineffectively managed:

Able pupils have also been shortchanged. Labour has started and then wound down three schemes to stretch students in the top 5%, whether academically (“gifted”, in the parlance) or in music or sport (“talented”). Attempts to find some sort of talent in everyone, and teachers opposed to giving anything extra to those already doing well, scuppered each in turn.

While this feels like more of a political or philosophical point than one based in fact-based evidence, it’s noticeable that while all three parties have pledged to do more to support struggling students, there’s a general lack of willingness to engage with the question of how best to stretch those students whose capabilities exceed the necessary restrictions of classroom teaching.

That notwithstanding, the proposals for how to best support struggling students are mostly weak; Labour do promise to provide individual tuition for children who fall far behind their peers in primary school, but this is uncosted; the manifesto claims that:

This will include up to 40,000 six and seven year olds benefiting from extra tuition in English and Maths through ‘Every Child a Reader’ and ‘Every Child Counts’

but it’s unclear who would be delivering the extra tuition: existing teachers, classroom assistants, or additional resource. The Tories, however, seem to have a fairly narrow idea of what education needs; the manifesto devotes a measly 3 pages to it, mostly advocating a return to the 1920s – “better teachers and tougher discipline” seems to be the unifying theme. (Especially entertaining is the Troops to Teachers programme, in which the Tories envision ex-service personnel being retrained for the classroom – presumably to instil some barracks-yard drill-sergeant discipline into the youth of Peckham.) The Lib Dems are favouring the approach that they seem to have gone with in most of their manifesto promises – reach into the magic pot of Trident money and chuck it at the problem:

• Increase the funding of the most disadvantaged pupils, around one million children. We will invest £2.5 billion in this ‘Pupil Premium’ to boost education opportunities for every child. This is additional money going into the schools budget, and headteachers will be free to spend it in the best interests of children.

• The extra money could be used to cut class sizes, attract the best teachers, offer extra one-to-one tuition and provide for after-school and holiday support. This will allow an average primary school to cut classes to 20 and an average secondary school to introduce catch-up classes for 160 pupils.

The approach of targeting investment at schools that are struggling is welcome, especially after Tory and Labour proposals to link performance to results (apparently with the logical understanding that the way to fix schools with poor results is to give them less money), but it doesn’t hide the fact that the Lib Dems don’t really have any concrete proposals for actually improving performance: their manifesto contains such well-meaning emptiness as “improve discipline by early intervention to tackle the poor basic education of those children who are otherwise most likely to misbehave and become demotivated” – hard to disagree with but a long way from being an actual policy.

Having said that, both the Tories and the Lib Dems offer suggestions on how to recalibrate the curriculum (all Labour do in this field is promise to add a teacher training qualification for Mandarin). The Tories proposals are muddled (they promise a primary curriculum organised around subjects like English, Maths, Science and History; the current primary curriculum is organised around English, Maths, and Science) but they explicitly state a desire to make exams, particularly Key Stage 2 exams, harder. One interesting proposal is the suggestion that public schools would be free to offer international exams, similar to those offered by private schools, although one would hope that the governing principle would be a desire to ensure that GCSEs are competitive against these fancy international baccalaureates. The Lib Dems’ proposals are bolder. They would establish an independent body to regulate standards, incorporating OFSTED and replacing the existing (toothless) Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency. They would scale back Key Stage 2 examination, relying on teacher checking and ongoing assessment. They would remove the arbitrary distinction between academic and vocational education, and echo the Tory policy of allowing a broader range of courses and examinations to be offered in schools. Perhaps most radically, they would axe the National Curriculum, replacing it with a “minimum curriculum” upon which teachers can embellish. This last is bold, but probably problematic, as it raises questions of how testing will be standardised and whether tougher schools, with less experienced and qualified teaching staff, or smaller schools, in which the teachers already bear a greater burden for lesson design, will be able to offer as well-tailored a product as more affluent and better-resourced schools.

Teaching is not the sole driver of results, however. The way that schools are created, closed and run is also important. The Tories have their much-mooted Swedish policy, under which the decision on who gets to open new schools will be removed from the dead hand of local government. Parents, charities and other not-for-profit groups will be encouraged to create new schools that could be open by September. Funded by the state according to the number of children who attend, they will stand or fall according to their popularity with parents. Smaller, more expensive schools that local councils are ready to abandon could be rescued by a committed citizenry.

There are costs to this. Like the (existing, mostly popular) City Academies, this scheme will be expensive and will sit alongside the existing state school infrastructure, possibly to its determent. Discouraging well-intentioned and not-so-well-intentioned groups with agendas would be more of a burden here than in small, liberal Sweden. But the truth is that until it’s trailed, it’s hard to say how effective this will be. The one place where this will certainly be unpopular is the teaching unions, whose political power would be sharply reduced.

The Lib Dems are also keen on supply-side reforms but have no idea how to go about it; their policies mostly leave schools still dependent on local government, which means that they would struggle to seriously change how schools are instituted and funded. The manifesto speaks of well-meaning platitudes, such as an Education Freedom Act banning politicians from getting involved in the day-to-day running of schools, but little of any concrete worth.

On higher ed, the picture in Britain still looks mostly positive. As discussed in a previous post, however, the Tories have policies in place that would dissuade lucrative foreign students from gracing Britain’s elite universities. Meanwhile, The Lib Dems have reinstituted their long-held policy of scrapping tuition fees, which is still a terribly policy that seriously undermines their credibility when it comes to universities. The Tories and Labour go the other way, and both parties are likely to back a raise in the cap it tuition fees from £3,000 to £5,000 per year.

This will be unpopular but may be necessary, given the lean years which are ahead. Labour argue that they missed their target, under which they aimed to send 50% of young people to University, by a whisker despite raising the levy to £3,000 in 2003; the UK’s system of student loans and grants meant that the raise actually affected admissions very little. And, to be fair, the higher education participation rate for young people from the most disadvantaged areas has increased every year since 2004. Labour have also intimated that funding for expansion of university places will linked to course types – science, tech, engineering and maths will all be promoted.

Conclusion
I have used my last two posts to talk down the importance of some major electoral issues – the economy and crime in particular. But education is genuinely important – probably the most important single issue at stake in the UK right now, and our long-term economic and cultural vitality is dependent on the right mixture of policy, infrastructure and regulation.

All three manifestos have some merit, as well as some obvious deficiencies. The Lib Dems’ approach to primary and secondary curriculum reform are probably the strongest; not just by default (Labour barely even have a policy on curriculum reform, and the Tories’ policy boils down to “whip them with nettles”) but because it contains ideas that are genuinely worth exploring, such as the flexible funding for school budgets. The Tories’ Swedish school commissioning model is interesting despite it’s potential pitfalls; although potentially expensive it could inspire some excellent results if implemented properly (neither Labour nor the Lib Dems showed up to this event). And Labour generally seem to have the strongest thinking on higher education and universities.

On the grounds that universities are generally doing reasonably well at the moment, I’m going to discount Labour on education; their manifesto reads more like a defence of their record than a serious or credible plan for reform at the mandatory levels. On education, then, it depends which area you think is important and what you’re prepared to hold your nose over. If you want a better commissioning model vote Tory; they probably won’t get their illiberal primary curriculum changes through parliament without a significant majority anyway. If you want better funded schools and a more rational approach to struggling children, vote Lib Dem – again, a tuition fee ban would never make it to law. I’ll probably do the latter but I don’t see the former as an entirely indefensible choice.

The NHS.
The health service has consistently been one of the three most important issues to voters since it was implemented over sixty years ago. This year is no different. What is different, however, is that broadly speaking there is consensus between the parties. There are no major policy objectives in this field; even the Lib Dems are saving their huge stack of Trident money for other areas.

The engine-tinkering is mostly minor stuff – all three parties have ideas about procurement, for example. The Liberal Democrats would have the Primary Care Trusts, which do the buying for hospitals, locally elected to give them more clout. The Conservatives would give GPs much more of a say by reviving the 1990s system of fund-holding, in which many GP practices had their own budgets for elective care done by hospitals. Both opposition parties would also drop or gimp performance targets; the government has been moving away from them of late suggesting that Labour would do the same. The Lib Dems would go farthest here, offering to cut the Department of Health by 50% (fun fact: I’m currently engaged in a downsizing project for a major Department, and cutting an organisation like that in half is much harder than you’d think). Labour and the Tories are also pursuing their bizarre world of perverse incentives here, threatening to use the payments system of the internal market to reward quality and penalise poor care – effectively taking money away from hospitals that are struggling.

One thing that is noticeably absent from the manifestos is closures and cuts. But some scaling back is not just demanded by the state of the economic climate, but also desirable. David Nicholson, who runs the NHS in England, thinks that by 2013 the service could wring 15% out of its budget, meeting increased demand with the same real resources. But pay would have to be held down and the workforce cut by around 10%. Some district hospitals would have to close, or do less. This will be unpopular but isn’t really a political issue. Expect whichever two parties don’t win to oppose it bitterly, and for constituency MPs of all strips to fume at length on local news programmes.

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Aside #1: On Typography
The Tories and Labour manifestos are both hideous on screen. They are clearly meant to be held and read in the hand; both go with dense, serifed fonts (Times New Roman for the Tories – suggesting that CCHQ doesn’t know how to change its defaults – and Book Antiqua for Labour). The Lib Dems’ manifesto is in a much more aesthetically pleasing Helvetica Neau. I may have mentioned in the past that there are good reasons and bad reasons for voting for or against a party. Typography is a good reason, and I look forward to punishing the Labservatives at the ballot box.

Aside #2: In Which I Discover Google Analytics
To the person who googled their way to this site asking “cet school tyumen good school?” the answer is: yes, as is the school in Nizhnevartovsk, or at least they were when I was there a year ago. On the other hand, the person who googled “did hassan steal the rubaiyaat from omar khayyam” – the answer to that is no, I’m afraid. It’s one of many narrative details that Amin Maalouf invented for Samarkand to make it a better story; the truth is that there probably never was an “original” Rubaiyaat – just a corpus of work that Edward FitzGerald pulled together and published, much of which is questionably attributable to Khayyam at best. Although Sabbah seems to have regarded Khayyam as an intellectual inspiration of sorts, it’s not entirely clear that they ever actually met in person, and there’s certainly no evidence to suggest that he was obsessed with Khayyam once Alamut became firmly established.

There’s been some chatting about a push-poll that YouGov allegedly put out as part of its daily tracker for News International. It was a quiet weekend so I can forgive that but it’s not plausible for any number of reasons.

Here’s the question:

Nick Cleggs says the other parties are to blame for the MP scandals, he has taken money from a criminal on the run, many of his MPs have been found guilty of breaking the rules and his own party issued guidance on how to fiddle the expenses system?

Firstly, that’s not a question. It’s a statement that has had a question mark stuck to the end. Secondly, YouGov would be out of their mind to publish such a flagrantly misleading question – it would trash their reputation and shut down their main competitive advantage: that they are the only firm posting daily poll results, which has gained them a phenomenal amount of publicity in this cycle. The key to this story is in today’s Guardian, where one of YouGov’s top brass have come out and stated that the question’s not actually from the tracker poll:

Anthony Wells, the YouGov political analyst running the poll over the weekend, said: “We test lots of messages and ask people in different ways to see which are the most effective ways to sell an idea. I cannot say who the client is but this was not part of the work we do for News International.”

The key point there is that YouGov (like every pollster) tests messages for whoever pays them to do so. This is part of their commercial business and is perfectly legitimate; they usually go out to small samples and are designed to see what happens to a generic voting intendion question when it is prefaced with the message in question that is to be tested. Polling firms are commercial businesses and political polls are usually posted at a significant loss; they are done as a form of advertising, to enhance the prestige of the firm doing the polling (especially if the polls turn out to be accurate) and to attract message testing work of exactly this sort. It’s not unreasonable to expect that all three parties are doing it, or have done it in the recent past; the Tories were just deeply unlucky to get caught out. I seem to recall that an episode of the West Wing dealt with this exact scenario.

Why the Tories? Well, whoever wants to test the message is testing the ground for a smear attack on the Lib Dems, and Labour don’t have any money. Another helpful clue is that the Tories have already overtly stated that they are using YouGov for message testing. It doesn’t take a genius to thus ascertain that someone in CCHQ is planning an assault on the Lib Dems’ change credentials. Whether this leak will deter them or not remains to be seen.

Nick Clegg’s rise could lock Murdoch and the media elite out of UK politics:

Make no mistake, if the Liberal Democrats actually won the election – or held the balance of power – it would be the first time in decades that Murdoch was locked out of British politics. In so many ways, a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote against Murdoch and the media elite.

Actually, you won’t find female empowerment halfway up a pole:

Pole dancing is grim and I don’t see anything empowering about learning it. Even if you say that it’s just dancing and good exercise, surely it would be more empowering to learn a dance that can be employed in contexts other than strip clubs? And if, as Francisco claims, it’s “not intended to be sexual”, why is it only for women?

h/t Kevan.

Very amusing Dr Seuss style song about Copenhagen.

Immigration
Migration is Britain’s abortion. Nothing divides right from left in the UK in the way that immigration policy does; it engenders anger in more or less anyone who has an opinion on it. Polling data on the subject is surprisingly sketchy. One thing that we know for sure was that the Tory party ran on an explicitly anti-immigration ticket in 2005 and got thumped. Beyond that, the best I can do is a poll commissioned by the BBC in 2007. (You can use the hand to drag about, and the magnifying glass to zoom into and out of, the results table of the poll below.)

While Labour’s policies on immigration were heavily negative (72% against to 24% for), a slender majority thought that immigration helps the UK rather than harming it. A clearer plurality (37% to 27%) believed that immigration was specifically good for their community, although most respondents thought that it actually had no effect at all.

The idea that immigrants might pose a threat to public order and safety met with very low agreement (36%). On the ideas of immigration posing a threat to employment 52% agreed, 48% agreed that a lack of immigration might damage the economy. The most widespread agreement (62%) was with the idea that immigration might lead to Britain losing its identity. The young are far more pro-migration than the old; possibly reflecting any one, or a mixture of, the arguments that the young will need increased migration to pay for their pensions, the young have a markedly higher admiration for cultural diversity and a lack of investment in existing community structures, and the experience of the young shows that the idea of migration threatening employment is increasingly hollow.

So broadly speaking, the gap between left and right seems slight. Howard lost not necessarily because he argued for restricting immigration, but because he ran on an explicitly anti-immigration ticket; the position he occupied was fringe by the standards of Britain’s benignly migration-sceptic population. The positions of the three main parties are now broadly aligned with the will of the electorate: some migration, enough to keep the economy at a light simmer, just not too much.

This frothy summary masks deep divides.

The first big problem is the question of how much is too much. Britain once had one of the most liberal migration policies in the rich world, and migrants responded in kind – 5.6 million have entered Britain for a year or more over the last 13 years, and 1.6 million of them have been granted permanent residence. The population of the UK is set to rise to 70 million in the next two decades, and that worries many of those who already live in crowded, congested cities and have to cope with stuttery underfunded public services.

There is some irony to the effects that this has had. Recent curbs on migration have made truth of a lie. One of the earliest complaints against migrants was that the influx was causing British people to lose out on jobs, driving wages down and inflating unemployment. At the time this was a gross distortion, masking more deep-seated prejudices; most migrants were unskilled labourers, and Britain had one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. There seems to have been some downward pressure on wages at the bottom end of the job market, but on one estimate they have fallen by less than 1%: the national minimum wage means that pay for people over 22 cannot legally go below £5.93 per hour, and many of these jobs were on that baseline already. The low-paid, outdoor, tiring jobs that Poles and Lithuanians have often taken are not ones that the long-term unemployed in Britain seemed wild about turning out for. Had Britain not imported the workers, it might have had to export the jobs. It became an issue regardless, however, and Labour reacted reflexively. The immigration controls that they implemented had the unintended consequence of making the criticisms that inspired them true, at least to a limited extent. By implementing curbs on unskilled migrants, Labour encouraged skilled migrants to arrive in the UK in greater numbers – most of whom settled down in congested London and rather than the parts of Britain that actually lacked labour.

That’s the preamble; what about the policy? Well, the Tories have proposed a tighter cap on the number of migrants allowed to enter the UK annually, while Labour want another crack at implementing a points-based system (which would effectively also function as a cap, but with a more rigorous process of selection). The Lib Dems agree, but go further still, saying that they will have regional points-based schemes in which each part of the country will be able to calibrate its own priorities, ensuring that migrants are sent to the areas where they are most needed. While EU law reduces the flexibility that the parties have when dealing European migration, the Tories have stated that they would place an absolute limit on annual non-EU inflows, although this is a task made near-impossible by the time-lag in the publication of reliable statistics on migration. The Tories would also force foreign students to pay a “bond” upon entering the country, to be repaid when they leave. This is a deeply stupid idea that borders on the criminally negligent; Britain’s universities are almost entirely propped up by these students’ lucrative tuition fees, and disincentivising these students from coming to the UK can only have a negative impact on our education system and thus all aspects of our social and economic future.

A large part of the UK’s problems with migration is that much of the legislation has been knee-jerk, riddled with unintended consequences; and this is partly because the information that the UK generates and gathers about migration have historically been lacking. The Lib Dems have pledged to improve border recording. Labour’s ID cards, regardless of their other demerits, would have the effect of enhancing the information available on migratory trends. Labour also want to insist upon harder English tests for entrants and promise to ensure that all customer-facing public service workers have an “appropriate” level of English, acknowledging that the problem is as much one of perception as fact. The Lib Dems will use some of their Trident / Mansion Tax money to bolster the border guard.

Advantage? Still not the Tories, who stubbornly refuse to accept that a problem this complex needs a solution that is more nuance than “squeeze harder”. Not Labour, who really have no new ideas beyond the ID cards, which are troublesome for other reasons. The Lib Dems have an interesting suite of proposals; the regional points-based system, the enhanced border guards and the greater focus on data-gathering seem like a sensible half-step in the right direction, if implemented correctly. But in truth, all three parties deserve a lot of the blame for the fact that it’s impossible to have a sensible debate about migration policy in the UK. Some level of migration is clearly needed, but wanting to manage the way in which our economy handles that migration makes good tactical sense. All three parties need to abandon the more extremist elements of their rhetoric and devote some serious attention to the actual effects of immigration policy, and come up with a suite that meets the needs of the country. At present, none of them do.

Crime and policing
There are three issues at stake when talking about crime. The first is how to deter them, the second is how to catch those who won’t be deterred, and the third is what to do with them after that. Britain is average at the first, very good at the second, and lousy at the third.

First, I’ll look at the second part, because some errors in the electoral propaganda of both the Tories and Labour need to be straightened out. Crime has been falling in the UK uninterrupted for the last 15 years. It’s currently at its lowest rate since before World War 2, and is some 45% lower than it was when Labour took power. Violent crime, the crime that tends to excise, is at its lowest rate since 1991. Labour deserve a lot of credit for that, as do the police forces of the UK – particularly the Metropolitan Police in London – who have modernised their methods, drastically reduced the corruption in their own ranks, and increased the level to which their communities support them. People are generally much happier about the level of criminality in the UK than they were twenty years ago. However: crime is an election issue, because crime is always an election issue. ‘Twas ever thus.

The parties are thus fixing their sights downwards, at what is termed “anti-social behaviour”. The Tories plans are pretty anaemic; they want to crack down on bars that sell alcohol to children, increasing fines and making it easier to shut down repeat offenders. Labour have more teeth, but their policies remain avowedly statist; more benchmarks for chief constables to meet, including the power to sack police heads if they don’t “improve standards”. On the other hand, they have a stated policy to allow “restorative justice” – ‘where they are able to tell offenders directly how their actions affected them and accept an apology’ – which is a bit bewildering. The Lib Dems will put more police on the streets (that pot of Trident and Mansion Money is going to run out soon, guys), and will put prisoners to work in a policy that may just contravene several key facets of existing human rights legislation. Punishments for anti-social behaviour may also be devolved to local Justice Panels under Lib Dem proposals.

All parties agree that the paperwork and centrally-imposed targets designed by Labour to drive up standards must be reduced, to eliminate the perverse incentives that they created. The Tories would like to abolish the form that officers must fill in when they stop someone to search or question him; details would be speedily radioed back to the station instead. The police themselves are making some efforts to get a bit leaner: the head of Scotland Yard recently announced that officers in London would walk the beat alone, rather than in pairs, in order to increase the number of patrols.

Incarceration remains the big problem, however.

Britain’s prisons are underfunded and wildly overcrowded. Labour are taking an amusing shot at corporate fraudsters, insisting that high-earning offenders will need to foot the bill for their own incarceration. But the party that has done the most to come up with creative solutions to the problem is the Tories, who would sell off old prisons (which often occupy prime real estate) to finance the building of new, modern, larger prisons in more remote areas. The credit crunch may affect that policy but it still seems reasonable to expect that selling off Wandsworth Prison would easily finance a larger, more effective construction somewhere outside of the Home Counties. This should create a virtuous cycle; more space means better resourcing for rehabilitation, which means reduced recidivism.

The Tories are also planning, however, to initiate some upheaval in the current sentencing regime. They propose to scrap the automatic release on parole that many prisoners enjoy after service half of their sentence, forcing them to “earn” their early escape instead. What form this “earning” will take remains opaque, but it seems clear that this will drastically increase the prison population. Given the financial pressure the next government will experience, this policy seems unlikely ever to see the light of day.

When it comes to preventing crime and recidivism, all three parties are clearly constrained by budgetary priorities. All parties agree that more needs to be done to treat drug addicts rather than imprisoning them; Labour will support “family interventions” rather than implementing new policies. The Lib Dems and the Tories have both made vague promises about enhancing rehabilitation policies but there are no new ideas here.

The Lib Dems are generally not to be found on the issue of crime. Their claim of 3,000 more police is eye-catching but given the fall in crime, and the fact that the number of police officers has risen by nearly 30% in the last decade, suggest that it may even be overkill. Labour have some smart policies but their lack of ideas on prison reform is distressing. For that reason it seem to me that the Tories have the strongest suite of crime-related proposals.

Sadly I missed the debate last night – I was busy being wined and dined at Gary Rhodes’ swanky restaurant in Tower 41 – but it looks to have had as much impact as its advocated hoped.

There were quite a load of sketchy push-polls from various media outlets after the debate last night which will reflect the bias of their readership – the Sun, the Mail and Sky News all have particularly egregious entries. Happily, three proper polling outfits also took the temperature last night: YouGov, whose daily tracker has been the default for the election thus far, ComRes and Angus Reid. A slightly incredible poll from Populus also appeared in the Times – Populus are a legit outfit but their claim of a 61% Clegg victory just isn’t credible. That Clegg carried the night isn’t really in question but that lead is just a bit too fantastic.

The top-lines are as follows: YouGov has NC51, DC29, GB19. ComRes has NC 46, DC 26, GB 20. Angus Reid has NC48, DC20, GB18. Over the span of the three pollsters that’s probably strong enough to take with a degree of confidence – it’s worth noting that the YouGov panel didn’t allow for respondents to select “Undecided” or “None”, which is why Clegg and Cameron have slightly higher scores (and which suggests that Brown’s 20% is pretty much stable).

Angus Reid has released its table – which is still being updated so you’ll have to excuse me if the numbers have shifted slightly in the interim, although I’m fairly confident that the themes will prove to be static. You’ll immediately see that Clegg has by far the most support from his own party – 81% of Lib Dems got behind their leader, while the Labour faithful backed Brown only 51% of the time. What should really worry Cameron is that he only kept 46% of Tories with him. Conservative panel members were slightly more likely to approve of none of them than Lib Dems or Labourites, but couldn’t match the skepticism of those who went into the debate undecided. Clegg drew over 30% of each of the other major parties’ support, suggesting that any poll bump will be drawn equally from both sources. He also hoovered up over 50% of the independents on the panel.

All in all, 43% said that they would be more likely to vote for Clegg in the aftermath of the debate. The post-debate analysis may push that number up, especially if a dominant media narrative springs up and starts to drive some momentum in the Lib Dem’s direction. The Dems can also probably expect a bit of a funding boost off of the back of this. There’s talk this morning of the Lib Dems having a credible shot at second place; at the moment I think that’s fanciful, but there are still two more debates and plenty of events ‘twixt cup and lip.

I’m starting with the economy because, rightly or wrongly, for many it will be the defining issue of the campaign. Did you notice the hedge in that last sentence? I’ve argued against the economic alarmism of the times before, but it bears particular emphasis today. For the most part, the economy will be what it is. The capacity of the government of the day to affect economic performance is, yes, measurable, but by and large the economy will continue to perform in a manner dictated by forces beyond human control. For most of us, things are going to feel pretty bad for the first half of this decade regardless of who occupies Downing Street.

Nevertheless, we have to play the game, and the first point that needs to be made is that past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future performance. The Tories managed the economy very successfully – until they failed. Labour managed the economy quite successfully, too – until they failed too. The Lib Dems were widely seen to be failures in waiting, and are now reaping the benefits of unexpected success. So before we delve too deeply into this, it’s worth taking a moment to let go of existing sentiment – even if you, like me, are feeling the effects right now – and engage directly with what’s ahead.

The headline fiscal policies of the three main parties have largely converged, to the extent where heated arguments about whether and when to cut are more of a distracting sideshow than a real issue. In a way, this is a shame; it was easier to point our straightforward right and wrong when there was an appreciable difference. The concensus that has emerged, happily, is the right one: the deficit needs to be cut but not yet. Public sector spending needs to be counter-cyclical, and in these lean times a robust public sector is a necessity. The real debate will come with the good times; look, then, for the party that appears to be happiest to cut. In the meanwhile, the meat of choice is in the details.

Banking
Despite the often incendiary rhetoric coming from the three main parties, only one – the Liberal Democrats – has pledged root-and-branch reform of the financial services sector. The Lib Dems’ Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, has called for the big banks to be broken up, and for those in state ownership to be forced to lend more to credit-hungry companies. This is probably the right thing to do, although doing so in a manner that avoids the impression of declaring war on finance is important. The straightforward truth is that London’s economy needs banks, and Britain’s economy needs London; and while clear failings existed in the regulatory status quo ante it will be important to resist the temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Banking can be safe, profitable and positive – financial services have been at the heart of human civilisation since Darius – they just need to be run and overseen properly.

The Tory’s proposals are in many respects bolder than Labour’s; they want to abolish the FSA, shift supervision of banks and other financial institutions to what they see as the safer hands at the Bank of England, and create a consumer-protection agency. Labour’s rhetoric is spicy but their proposals are flaccid and statist. The Government would assume greater control, grant itself greater powers of regulation and oversight, and institute a broad array of mostly ineffective bodies to administer each other onanastically.

The Economist, in their pre-election feature, said that:

the differences come down broadly to this. Labour offers more of the same; the Conservatives would rearrange the deckchairs; the Lib Dems would shake up the system but haven’t really said how. It’s a choice, if not a great one.

I think that’s pretty much on the nose. In almost all respects, Labour are the clear loser here.

Manufacturing and business
Again, the opposition parties have a clear advantage in both style and substance. Labour’s proposals for the post-election recovery have been most heavily tax-led; the increase in National Insurance is unquestionably a mistake, compounding controversial proposals to extend its tax reach over foreign subsidiaries controlled by British-domiciled companies. Talk of capital flight (when businesses, put off by a hostile tax regime, move overseas) are overblown, although some companies have already moved away to friendlier climes. But Labour’s more positive, business-friendly ideas are also muddled. They rely over-heavily on tax-breaks and other subsidies, which distort the tax code and create complicated and unclear incentives. This is a threat that the Tories and Lib Dems recognise; although the Conservatives also have their fair share of tax breaks, they are proposing to directly cut corporation tax and have pledged to look at simplifying the tax code and associated regulations. The Lib Dems have made a point of targetting “complex reliefs”.

The Tories would be slightly kinder to small businesses than their competition. From the manifesto:

As well as stopping Labour’s jobs tax, for the first two years of a Conservative government any new business will pay no Employers National Insurance on the first ten employees it hires during its first year. To support small businesses further, we will:

• make small business rate relief automatic; and,

• aim to deliver 25 per cent of governmentresearch and procurement contracts through SME s by cutting the administrative costs of bidding.

We will support would-be entrepreneurs through a new programme – Work for Yourself – which will give unemployed people direct access to business mentors and substantial loans.

All of this is tinkering with the engine, however. The main inhibitor of business performance is the deficit and the government’s domination of the credit markets. Until that’s resolved none of the parties will be able to do much to attract business, although they can still do plenty to repel it. Advantage Tories, but don’t base your vote on it unless you’re a small-business owner.

Employment and Inequality
Britain is more unequal than it has ever been.

The blue line in the chart above is the Gini Coefficient, the standard unit used to measure inequality. The higher the line is, the more unequal Britain gets. Two trends stand out; firstly, over the thirteen years of New Labour, inequality has slightly risen despite the huge amount of time and effort put into reducing it. And secondly, the rise under Thatcher was unnervingly sharp.

I mention this not in spite of my earlier injunction to ignore prior performance, but because it’s important to understand where inequality comes from and what can be effectively done to combat it. Labour’s anti-rich policies have been Sisyphian; high-earners liberated by Thatcher’s market reforms have raced ahead, far outstripping the government’s capacity to hold them back. This can be a good thing, if properly managed; wealth is not something to be feared, and in a truly equal society the promise of weath can in erode inequality by promoting inter-generational social movement. But the flip side of the coin is that Labour’s anti-poverty measures have been equally ineffective, and that causes a real problem. Real poverty, especially amongst pensioners and children, has barely fallen since 1997 despite the best of intentions.

So if tackling inequality was so hard in the boom times, what hope is there during the lean? The two main weapons to use against inequality are employment and education – education will be the subject of a later post, but employment is very much of the now. Unemployment has risen on Labour’s watch but not my much – it’s still well below the OECD and EU averages, and Labour have promised to move further and more decisively to squeeze employment. They’ve promised credits to ensure that working is always more lucrative than benefits; advanced apprenticeships; a Future Jobs Fund for young people and a crackdown on benefit fraud.

All well and good. The Tories take a far less liberal line on this, with populist policies bound to go down well with the middle class but unlikely to do much to tackle the employment figures. Under the Tories, long-term benefit claimants who fail to find work will be required to ‘work for the dole’ on community work programmes. Anyone on Jobseeker’s Allowance who refuses to join the Work Programme will lose the right to claim out-of-work benefits until they do. Those who refuse to accept reasonable job offers could forfeit their benefits for up to three years. While there are some positive reinforcements on offer, on the whole the Tory employment package is devoted more to sticks than carrots.

When addressing broader questions of inequality, the three parties have a broader suite of offerings. All three parties will scrap compulsory retirement ages and raise state pension ages, although the Tories will do so fastest; these are clearly the right thing to do, however much it may dismay us on a personal level. The Lib Dems will raise the tax-free earning threshhold to £10,000, which will be of benefit to most; paid for by a levy on expensive houses, this is a purely redistributive measure and is the central strut of what is probably the boldest and most innovative on inequality in this election. All parties would broaden flexible working options; the Lib Dems would introduce name-blind job application forms to reduce sex and race discrimination in employment, initially companies with more than 100 employees. Labour plan to extend elderly care and a publicly-funded national Care Service would be created, although probably not under the next government.

The Tories have a history of not taking inequality seriously and show no signs of reversing that trend here. The main theme of their manifesto is self-determination – the “Big Society” soundbite is really a fetching way of telling people that it’s time to fend for themselves. While it will, again, resonate with middle Britain it’s a proposal that will not bear fruit in the long term. Inequality cannot be combated passively, and while many think that inequality is not a problem that affects them, the lack of economic access and educational opportunity for a significant subset of the population is a huge economic problem that could undermine recovery or prompt a future collapse. If central government has any function at all then it is to avert exactly this kind of indicator.

Labour’s proposals are worthy, but will be expensive. Their costings remain opaque and some policies (“over the next Parliament more than 8,000 new therapists will ensure access to occupational psychological therapy for all who need it”) are just a bit odd, leaving one to question whether they’re strictly speaking worth spending money on at all during a time of recession. Labour’s guarantee to ensure that working is more lucrative than the dole is excellent, although the proof of the pudding will be in the eating – will an extra £40 a week really be enough to get those who currently resist working into jobs? The work-shy are, after all, work-shy.

And the Lib Dems? Their proposals are really the most robust. Theirs the only suite to be fully costed – thanks to the mansion tax and the proposal to scrap Trident (of which more in the post on defence) they have money to throw at their proposals without having to increase the tax burden or cut other, equally essential services. The ironic thing about the Lib Dem position is that, despite being generally not regarded as a credible prospect for power, their proposals are far more plausible than those on offer elsewhere. On this issue they have a clear policy advantage.

Conclusion
There are areas in which the next government can make a big difference. At present, the economy isn’t really one of them – or at least, not directly. The long-term health of the British economy rests on other indicators – migration, education – and the big economic changes that could make a difference, such as radically simplifying the tax code, aren’t being discussed. On the basis that inequality is the one area in which improvements can be directly made, and on the grounds that they appear to be more robustly in favour of reforming the financial services industry, I’d tepidly endorse the Lib Dems on economic matters.

Apologies for the recent silence. While there have been interesting bits and bobs on the world stage, the home media have been monomaniacal in their fixation on the usual trivialities of the early days of the election. Comme ci, comme ça.

I promised a post giving my view on the merits of the various political offerings presented in this election. Over the next few days I’ll do all that and more; a series of posts addressing the question from the perspective of various policy strands awaits. I’ll be doing this because it helps me to get the clutter out of my own head; although I already have a pretty good idea about where my vote is going, I’m not an adherent of any one party. As Jeremy Paxman once said,

I am a political person. But I’m not a party political person. I don’t believe there is a monopoly of wisdom in any one party. I suppose as one gets older – I would have described it at the age of 21 as the process of selling out, but another way of looking at it is to say, actually, the world is not a very simple place, and that as you get older simple-minded solutions seem less attractive.

And that’s the truth. Given the extent to which a political party can change from one election cycle to the next, where’s the logic in remaining unquestioningly devoted to them? Even claiming allegiance to a broad “wing” of the political spectrum is a futile gesture, because ultimately all political positions have some merit, if only in a cautionary or illustrative sense. Without engaging with those ideas and allowing yourself to believe – even for a second – that they may have some kernel of validity, then any attempt you make to ultimately reject them will be predicated on an incomplete understanding, and any attempt you make to defeat them will be undermined.

See, I warned you that this would be a space for mental de-cluttering. In a time of intense political activity, this political nerd will be taking the time to be introspective. The day-to-day minutia of an election is, after all, deeply tedious.

What it boils down to, though, is this. The key to deciding who to vote for is based on three small things and one large thing. The three small things are: deal in facts, know your sources, and don’t overconsume. The big thing is to know what matters and not to get distracted by trivialities. There are people in this world who will allow the Cameron’s upcoming bundle of joy to sway their vote; if what matters most is who can fix the economy then focus on it.

I guess I’ll be elaborating on all of those things as I go.

Are you ready for the next thirty days? The options have never been poorer but in a month we’re going to have live with one or the other of ‘em.

What a dreadful thought.

Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy reports on The Times’ humiliating climbdown over its attack on the Human Rights Watch, an international and non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. As the second link, from Opinio Juris, points out, the attack is as inaccurate as it is unprincipled, and although the retraction is fairly all-encompassing there are some distortions that remain uncorrected.

At the end of his post, Sunny asks:

In other words [Jonathan] Foreman didn’t really do his research properly and ran a hatchet job that smeared HRW. If he approached HRW in advance with these points that could have been corrected.

So why didn’t he? Why did it require HRW to contact the Sunday Times after the article had been published?

If this had been an isolated issue then it would be a fair question, but attacks upon progressive international organisations have been a staple weapon in the armoury of the right-wing media – and in particular the Murdoch-owned press – in the UK and America for a few years now. These attacks are often incoherent and frequently attract corrections and retractions, but the effect is cumulative. Take Robert Bernstein’s criticisms of the organisation, from October last year, as being “left-wing, anti-Israel [and] anti-Western” (note that not only is HRW anti-Israel, it’s actually anti-Western, and – worse yet – left-wing). As an attack it holds together by the barest of threads, and is quickly demolished by Kevin John Heller of Opinio Juris, but the headline that sticks in the memory is that the organisation’s own founder turned on it for its anti-Israeli policy, and that’s a problem.

Nor is it the only problem. Recently Amnesty got into a spot of bother over a whistleblower who claimed that the organisation was working with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Times led the charge on this one, and I’m disinclined to defend the charge – for better or worse, Amnesty was working with the Taliban, and silencing internal dissent on the matter rather than forcefully articulating and defending its policies was the wrong decision. But that’s not my point. My point is that if you go back and look at that Google search, you’ll see that – with the exception of one story, detailing the origin of Israel’s white phosphorus shells – the Times has effectively ignored the entirety of Amnesty’s 2010 activity, mentioning the organisation only to report this story. A brief list of some of the other things that Amnesty has done in 2010, which other organisations have found newsworthy:

• Released a report detailing the rate of capital punishment in the world in 2009
• Detailed the failing system of maternal healthcare in the US
• Reported on migrant abuse in Malaysia
• Commented on a survey showing that 1 in 7 women students have been subjected to sexual assault or violence in the UK
• Attempted to prevent the execution of a Lebanese man in Saudi Arabia
• Held a panel discussion on how religious fundamentalism affects gay and women’s rights
• Called upon Sudan to respect the work of NGOs and allow them to work unmolested

…You know what? I’m bored. That’s not all of 2010; just what I can find, from other news organisations – most of which are significantly smaller are far more poorly resourced than News Corp – from the last month. The Times has covered none of it.

What it has done is to take some chunks out of DfID – the UK government’s Department for International Development – for, again, no very good reason. I could go on in this vein but you get the gist.

The question is, why does the right wing mistrust and fear internationalism so much? The economic right should love it; organisations such as Amnesty, HRW and DfID set up supply routes and manufacture chains that, in the long run, can form the paths that corporate bodies can follow to new markets. The problem is the social right, whose witlessly reflexive delusions grow ever more elaborate – witness, today, the claim that Lady Gaga is the principle obstacle to Middle Eastern peace, and those pesky settlements are just Beltway bleating. There really isn’t much that can be done about that – other than to oppose it when it emerges and hope that enough people are listening that it doesn’t take root.

As an aside: a track from the new New Pornographers album exists. It’s good; check it out.

Straightforward question: y/n. What do you think?

There was an excellent interview in last weeks’ London Review of Books with Tony Judt, the American historian of European history. As I said, it was in last weeks’ magazine, but the whole thing’s available online, so you should read it before I fisk it.

There’s quite a lot here, so I’m going to speak to general points rather than specific lines or paragraphs. Firstly, I think that there are a number of ways in which events have quite rapidly played out to undermine some of Judt’s points. He early-on makes the point that Barack Obama is a compromiser, a consensus-builder – a common criticism that is balanced out by the counter-charges that he is a “machine politician” (FiveThirtyEight did a fine elaboration on that theme way back in 2008). On the whole, I think that the later group has the right of it. Obama is not a bridge-builder, he’s just someone with an acute and subtle understanding of how the machinery of power and legislation works. Sometimes, that requires him to at least appear to seek compromise. At others, it requires him to screw his party to the sticking point and ram legislation through Congress by brute force. The recent passage of healthcare exemplifies that, and should silence those who chirp about Obama’s lack of courage in the face of intransigence, at least for a little while.

Judt later observes that courage is unheard of in today’s politicians; that it is, in fact, a negating virtue. It should be noted that the passage of healthcare was considered by many to be courageous. I’m not convinced that it was – the Dems had a majority in the House, and once they’d been talking about it for a year, passing it was more or less the path of least resistance – but I do think that some individual politicians displayed considerable courage.

His comparison of the US President with the position of his European counterpart, however, was on the nose. Although it should be noted that the UK, tepidly, held out for a much more powerful and robust holder of the mandate, by and large the actions of the EU’s leaders have been exemplified by a stark lack of spine. It’s fair that the leaders of France, Germany, Spain and Britain fear an eclipsing of their individual national clouts, as a robust EU Presidency would do exactly that; but it’s a hit that’s worth taking, because the individual national clouts of France, Germany, Spain and Britain are slight and diminishing by the day. Relinquishing some local power in order to gain access to much greater, wider-scale influence should be an easy decision to make, but it takes courage, and Europe’s leaders are trained to be some of the most risk-averse in the world.

But the internal politics of Europe are thus in most regards. Judt also talks about Europe’s relationship with Israel, correctly observing that:

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time… However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East [...]They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage.

This is largely correct, and indeed economically and politically it has largely succeeded. Most international companies who divide their regional operations by continent will have Europe and MEA (Middle East & Africa) – with Israel firmly in the former camp. This is largely a practicality; a sales rep or local manager with an Israel stamp in her or his passport will struggle to cross Arabic borders. But it is also a reflection of a broader truth, in which the state of Israel is culturally divorced from the land upon which it lies, even as its claims of legitimacy depend on that land for their historical vigour. Should Europe start to push back – making political and economic ties incumbent on the observation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, for example – then Israel would be faced with a choice that has the same outcome either way: one that forces it to reconcile itself with its neighbours and the contested land upon which it is built.

Judt asserts that Europe resists the impulse to use this economic and cultural leverage out of a misplaced sense of historic guilt; that many European states continue to treat Israel with kid gloves as a way of continuing to atone for the events that it either perpetrated or failed to prevent. I think that this relies on too many assumptions and thus fails to meet the standards set by Occam’s Razor. Treating Israel as a member of the club of civilised nations, when it already has America’s robust backing, is simply a continuation of progress along the path of least resistance.

That this multinational spinelessness must be rooted in a domestic system that encourages and perpetuates a venal political elite seems like the next logical conclusion, and to an extent, Judt makes that link persuasively. He talks robustly about the “bad use of fear” that has taken hold of Europe’s social democratic model:

There is the demagogic exploitation of fear of outsiders and strangers, which culminates in putting up barriers against immigration, refugees or exiles. The sense that things are out of control, that we may lose our jobs next year because of competition from China or India, or that some farms may become unworkable in five years’ time because of climate change, has been intensified by globalisation, and it has given rise to large, unspecific fears which are played on [...] in Denmark by the anti-immigrant party, or in Switzerland with the referendum against minarets [...] Britain has more closed-circuit television cameras, which keep a record of almost everyone’s movements everywhere at all times, than any other democracy in the world. In the old days we would have seen this as an unacceptable intrusion on personal freedoms, yet today it’s accepted because people are frightened of crime, outsiders, terrorism. We no longer have a choice of a wonderfully happy and prosperous, secure and stable future: this isn’t Sweden in 1965.

Again, this can be explained in many forms, and socially it makes a lot of sense, but politically it’s only rational if most or all of the actors are acting in a narrow, cowardly self-interest. Acquiescing to these fears breeds nationalism, patriotism, preventive wars and repressive anti-terrorist legislation. These trends can be satisfying for a population in the short term, but the ugly truth is that in the end it’s just excessive state power. They have no power to combat or limit terrorism; they don’t strengthen our economy or our cultural vibrancy; they limit our international political power and tarnish our model of governance with claims of hypocrisy; and in the long run, they make the local population less comfortable and less free. But the European politicians with the courage to make these points and argue forcefully against the encroaching illiberality of the state are noticeable by their absence.

If the cause of this trend is understandable then the ways of fixing it seem daunting. When asked how and why we have reached the point where mass protests are ignorable by political elites, Judt talks about the disconnect between the people and governments; and as he correctly observes, in the span of a nation’s transition to democracy from an earlier state, the window of opportunity – where a political system is sufficiently unstable that it has to listen to popular will – is quite narrow (although it can be artificially extended). In late-19th Century Britian, he remarks,

They felt very vulnerable. Elections could remove them from power and if elections didn’t work, then the masses on the streets might achieve the same result.

This isn’t a state that lasts, however, and one of the weaknesses of democracies is that as democratic structures become more entrenched and social continuity becomes more normalised, the threat of actual consequential popular uprisings recedes. It doesn’t help that much of today’s European political activities are quasi-undemocratic, being run from bureaucracies and unelected bodies (such as the European Union, haw haw).

When I did my degree, we learned about a process called “incorporation,” by which subcultures are amalgamated into the mainstream. It’s a two-stage process; first, superficial and somewhat challenging aspects of the subculture are embraced by society at large; then, the remaining aspects are rejected as extremist and ignorable. This was presented as a process affecting the subcultures that surround musical genres (for example, clothing and some of the musical trappings of punk were assimilated, while the broader political and social aspects were attributed to anarchism and discarded), but it can also be clearly seen as affecting non-artistic philosophical and social movements – in feminism, for example, in which superficial aspects of female empowerment are embraced and prominently displayed as virtuous while the wider complaints of inequality and rape culture are dismissed as excessive and extremist.

I mention this because, to some extend, it corroborates the earlier discussion of cowardice in Europe’s political ranks. Courage is, after all, collocated with threat, but the political determination of the populace has been largely incorporated into modern mainstream politics. Elections and mass-media provide some semblance of what can be referred to as direct democracy, but the wider, more effective trappings of people power are dismissed as extremist – protest, worker collectivism and engagement with party politics. Against this backdrop, modern politicians lack a serious threat and thus have very little incentive to be courageous. The truth is that, no matter how easy and tempting it is to blame the electorate for Europe’s malaise, the power to reverse it has been removed from them.

Temporarily, though. The problem with Judt’s analysis is simply that it’s too pessimistic. It treats the status quo as a final state; it assumes that cowardice is a feature that Europe is doomed never to escape. It is this underlying assumption that is shown up by the one encouraging sign that comes from across the water, where Barack Obama – the machine politician – has demonstrated that courage, or the appearance of it, can be its own political virtue. The marvellous thing about democratic systems is that they have the potential to be self-renewing; that in a time of cowards, the courageous man is valuable simply by dint of his courage, let alone the effects and intentions that lie behind it. The era of loud, brash direct mass involvement of populaces in politics may well be over, and that may not be a bad thing, but a population can still make its will felt in terms of broad themes, if not entirely on matters of specific policy.

All of which is to say: if you value political coherence and courage enough, and vote accordingly, then it will come. In the meantime: please write to your MP and demand proper debating time for the Digital Economy Bill. It’s a dreadful piece of legislation and an accelerated period of debate won’t help that.

Hopefully I’ll do some proper blogging over the long weekend. In the meanwhile, please enjoy the following clip of an idiot being eviscerated by someone significantly smarter than him:

The problem is, most climate change deniers are no more coherent than that. And yet it’s infinitely self-perpetuating. The mind boggles.