There’s a reason why this post is happening today, and it’s not going to be a surprising one. The Huhne departure and the subsequent intake provoked fevered speculation (£) and even a a flurry of moves on the betting market. All of which is marvellous, and I’m sure that the merits of the Huhne story will keep us all entertained for weeks to come. But what was noticeable was the change in the way that such political events were handled.

For a start, the reshuffle was announced by Clegg rather than Cameron. I wouldn’t care to dig back into the stats, but it’s certainly the first time since the beginning of Thatcher’s government that a reshuffle was announced and presented by someone other than the PM.

The significance of this is heralded by the fact that it was widely referred to as a “Lib Dem reshuffle”. And lo, only Lib Dem ministries were affected, and hardly any of those at that – Ed Davey, a grassroots favourite, joining the bigtime, with Norman Lamb picking up his old seat at Business. And that’s pretty much it: a tiny reshuffle, by any measure. This mirrors the replacements of David Laws and Liam Fox, both of whom were replaced in straight promotions.

What’s the point of all this? I find it interesting that three high-profile exists have resulted in no shuffling of the deck chairs. Nearly two years into the parliament and the only changes to the roster have been those enforced by circumstances. What’s going on?

Well, partly it’s a reversion to the norm. The Blair and Brown ministries were tumultuous; the former was a famous reorganiser, making no fewer than fifteen discretionary changes during his 12 years in office. Wikipedia has the movements of the Brown Ministry (which just over two years, remember) in handy diagram form:

Click to enlarge

This frenetic pace was due to the tactics prioritised by both Blair and Brown during their times in office, and is due in part to the dual nature of a cabinet role.

On the one hand, a seat at the Cabinet table is a job. It requires understanding, dedication, and knowledge, often of a broad area of policy with far-reaching effects on the lives and livelihoods of a chunk of the population.

On the other, it is a perk – a position of power and responsibility, and a visible measure of one’s position in relation to one’s colleagues and coevals. It is a springboard for further career development, or an acknowledgement of distinguished service.

These two impulses are often found in opposition to one another. An MP who is granted cabinet office as a political stepping-stone, as part of the process of being groomed for leadership or simply to keep a talented public figure inside the tent tend not to have a background in their designated office, and tend not to have a very developed interest in its minutia. In a climate where political offices are treated as tools of favour rather than jobs, any MP who has a background in a specific area tends not to be ambitious beyond the remit of that area, and thus simply gets stuck. Chris Mullin MP said in his valedictory speech, and transcribed into his diaries:

“Mr Speaker, government needs to become a little less frenetic. The practice of annual reshuffles is massively destabilising and confers enormous power on the civil service. There have been eight secretaries of State for work and pensions in the ten years since that department was invented. Of late we have been getting through Home Secretaries at the rate of almost one a year. Goodness knows how many Health and Education secretaries we have had. We are on our tenth Europe minister. Our ninth or tenth Prisons minister. I was the sixth Africa minister, the current incumbent is the ninth. Mr Speaker, this does not make for good government.”

One of the things that the Cameron government has done right has been to settle the ship in that area. I’ve written before about the merits of Iain Duncan Smith as a knowledgeable and capable Secretary of State, but it is notable that most members of the cabinet have a background in their chosen area. There is a real reticence towards moving people around for the sake of securing political obedience. When Tory rising star Louise Mensch was misquoted last year about being discontent at her lack of ministerial position, the response was tepid – not because Mensch is uncapable (she is capable) nor because she is unpopular (she is one of the leading faces of the 2010 intake), but simply because this is not a government that reshuffles lightly.

But this is part of a broader tactical change brought about by the coalition government. One of the key advantages of the approach taken by the government towards reshuffles is that it means that Secretaries of State can spearhead their own Departments’ initiatives. This is a big tonal shift from the recent past, and one that the opposition has failed to fully adapt to.

The effect of this is that backlashes to unpopular policies – and there have been many over the past two years – are effectively confined to their silos. While private schools (Michael Gove), NHS cost-cutting (Andrew Lansley), benefits cuts (IDS), banker-bashing (Vince Cable) and baton charges (Theresa May) – not to mention austerity (George Osborne) – have roused ire on both the left and the right, David Cameron’s popularity has stayed more or less completely static, and the damage to the government’s popularity as a whole has been surprisingly muted. Because David Cameron is not perceived to be spearheading any of these initiatives, attacks from Ed Milliband on him personally – both in speeches and at PMQs – have failed to stick. But because he represents the government in the mind of the electorate, he provides his party with a degree of cover even as his ministers’ reputations get progressively worse and worse.

This is a huge shift in the way that government is conducted. Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown all ruled, to a greater or lesser extent, in a presidential style, taking political ownership of policies enacted by their cabinet and ultimately coming unstuck when they could no longer evade the consequences. Cameron is returning to an older style of politics which prioritises collective responsibility. It has its weaknesses – back-bench unrest is harder to quell with the promise of patronage, as seen by the growing number of Tory and Lib Dem mutineers (the latter part has seen more defiance against the whip since 2010 than it did in the entire prior decade), and in the unlikely event that the government enacts some popular provision it is, by the same token, unlikely to rub off on Cameron himself. But it is also an astute response to a time of coalition and austerity. Whether it can keep the poll numbers of the coalition partners robust until 2015 remains to be seen.

The BBC’s currently catching some heat due to its lack of female representation in its top news programming. Lib Dem MP Tessa Munt is leading the charge, and is currently not facing much resistance. The Today Show, Radio 4′s flagship current affairs programme, typically has a male host, and around 80% of its correspondents are men; Tory MP Louise Mensch is taking aim.

Of all of the BBC’s woes, this is a relatively simple one to fix. The bigger issue is cultural, and is as follows: As an institution funded by a mandatory tax, it is almost impossible for the BBC to fulfil all of the functions it is expected to fulfil.

I’m not going to delve too deeply into that as it’s a well-trodden issue. An institution that both annoys Rupert Murdoch and gives a mouthpiece to Jeremy Clarkson knowingly runs the risk of making enemies. The BBC think that they can handle this and they should know.

What I want to talk about is the fundamental structure of the BBC and how this adds to their woes. The biggest obstacle to the BBC’s public image is self-inflicted: the sense that the BBC is a single organisation with a single objective, rather than a series of four or five entirely separate bodies with entirely separate objectives, business models and output.

The “main” BBC, which sits under the Director General and is what people generally think of when they refer to “the BBC”, is a mostly public body which supplements its income from some clandestine private ventures. It is responsible for all programming; it is subdivided into BBC Vision (which handles BBC 1 to 4 and commissions their various outputs), BBC Audio and Music (which handles the national radio stations as well as music-based television, such as the BBC Proms and the output of the BBC Philharmonic), and Future Media (iPlayer and the like), as well as corporate functions. This covers a lot of the BBC’s visible function in the UK, and is thus frequently considered to be the most significant part of the BBC. In fact, it is politically and economically the least important part of the Corporation. It has a single function: to partially justify the continued existence of the licence fee.

The BBC Trust is a separate body with an overall monitoring function. It’s mission is to ensure that the BBC acts in the best interests of licence fee payers. Its existence is mandated by the Royal Charter that gives the BBC licence to operate on the basis of a levied television tax; it is funded entirely by the licence, taking its chunk directly from HMRC rather than from the BBC itself. The current government wants to abolish the Trust and have the BBC entirely subject to external oversight when the current Royal Charter expires in 2016.

Next is BBC News. BBC News nominally sits under the “main” BBC, and is thus funded in the same slightly ambiguous way as the parent corporation, but is operationally distinct. Since the early 2000s, there has been political pressure on the BBC from all sides to protect the editorial independence of BBC News, which has massive influence in the UK, and the current Government has a stated policy of forcing the BBC to divest of the News operation altogether and have it be run as a separate entity. In practice this is functionally already the case; the BBC has been steadily preparing for the inevitable for several years.

Slightly further along is the BBC World Service. The World Service functions as the credible half of the BBC’s Trojan Horse of Cultural Diplomacy. The World Service deals with the BBC’s news channels outside of the UK; it transmits programming in 27 different languages and is available by radio in most of the world. While the BBC Charter mandates that the BBC World Service be politically neutral, it is of course anything but. It’s production is handled by BBC News, but its editorial and managerial structures are entirely separate, and – until 2014, following reforms enacted in 2010 – is funded by the UK Government’s Foreign Office rather than the licence fee. It is thus explicitly political and is used as such. Iran hates the Farsi version of the World Service, while Aung San Suu Kyi is a big fan. Neither of those things are unrelated to the World Services’ editorial positioning.

The BBC’s operations start to get murky when we get to BBC Worldwide. BBC Worldwide is the “commercial arm” of the public entity and, again, is run as an entirely separate concern. It was spun off from the main BBC in 1995 with an explicit mandate to be run as a commercial, profit-making entity, and its revenues are routed back to the main corporation to subsidise their operations. Over the last decade and a half Worldwide has taken a very flexible approach to the activities it is permitted to perform.

Worldwide’s core activities initially involved producing commercial BBC products (broadly, anything that you can buy in a shop: magazines such as Good Food and the Radio Times; Top Gear DVDs; In The Night Garden stuffed toys) and selling the rights to BBC programmes overseas. This has expanded greatly and BBC Worldwide now operates its own commercial, advertising-supported satellite and digital channels, both overseas (BBC America [which is unrelated to the operations of the World Service, despite the naming convention], BBC Entertainment in India) and in the UK (it is little known that channels such as Dave, UKTV Gold, Really, Blighty, Watch etc are all run by the BBC). Further: BBC Worldwide now commissions original programming for its commercial channels, including panel shows for Dave and nature documentaries for Eden. BBC Worldwide is the sole owner of Lonely Planet’s line of travel guides. More worryingly, Worldwide may be on the verge of buying the UK’s Channel 4, further consolidating the BBC’s stranglehold on terrestrial programming in the UK.

The interesting thing about BBC Worldwide is that it exposes a little lie: that the BBC can’t operate without the licence. In many ways, Worldwide is duplicating the BBC’s operations at a smaller scale, but it is by some distance the most profitable satellite operator in the UK, annually returning more money to the BBC than Sky does to its shareholders. Access to a half-century of the BBC’s most beloved programming helps; while the decision to create a channel with low operating costs, dedicated to showing repeats of Top Gear and panel shows, was extremely low-risk, the success of channels like Dave has surprised even the upper echelons of the BBC’s senior management.

But the money generated and returned to the BBC’ budget by Worldwide still only accounts for around 10% of the Corporation’s operating budget. While Worldwide is an interestingly murky corner of the BBC’s operation, it doesn’t yet provide a model that the rest of the BBC can follow. It would be interesting to see what Worldwide could do with BBC1′s viewing figures, however. The argument has always run that the shelter of the licence fee allows BBC the creativity to experiment with its programming. Whatever Worldwide’s approach it is, however, it can’t be worse than season 2 of Sherlock.

First, a recap. The dramatic interventions of the House of Lords put paid to a couple of the cabinet’s initial skirmishes; plans to cap the benefits that can be claimed by a single household to £26,000pa were stymied by an amendment which has caused child benefits to be excluded, essentially rendering the policy pointless (as the £26,000pa cap is impossible to reach without child benefits being a factor). In a further incursion, the Lords blocked a plan to make single parents pay for the right to claim child support from their absentee coeval. Earlier, the Lords had also dispatched some of the more egregious depredations planned for the Disability Living Allowance in the aftermath of the Responsible Reform (“Spartacus”) Report (pdf). All in all, it’s been a series of bloody defeats for the government in the House of Lords.

Taken individually, you could quite justifiably suggest that the government was acting in a manner that was arbitrarily and deliberately malicious to single mothers, the disabled and the unemployed. Of course I couldn’t possibly comment.

But these individual battles do take place in the context of a wider war. The government wants their benefits to carry a smaller price tag, and are unrepentant about the fact that this will require a reduction in the overall levels of benefits paid out. However, the endgame also features a few policies with real value, including a promise of the holy grail of benefits reform.

Firstly, it’s important to look at the idea of the Universal Credit (£) as a principle. In short, the Universal Credit rolls most existing benefits – including income support, jobseeker’s allowance, disability living allowance, child benefits and housing benefits – into a single means-tested benefit.

This isn’t a massively new idea. The DWP has been pushing the benefits of a universal credit internally since the end of the Major government, and it has been the recommendation of most benefits-focused think tanks and organisations at some point over the last two decades. The reason why it doesn’t exist already owes a lot to the nature of politics in the UK. One of the main criticisms levelled against the last Labour government was that it failed to take the Work and Pensions brief seriously. This was symptomatic of the way that Blair in particular organised his cabinets: positions were often allocated on the basis of loyalty rather than expertise, and as a result the position of Secretary of State in what became the DWP was treated as a political stepping stone rather than an office with an actual function. Part of the problem is that Work and Pensions is not one of the sexy Offices of State – it lacks the glamour of the Foreign Office, or the power of the Home Office or the Chancellery. The benefits portfolio is massive – accounting for by far the largest portion of government spending – and one that it is almost impossible to succeed in.

Whatever criticisms can be levelled against Iain Duncan Smith, however – and there are many – he is the first Secretary of State that the DWP has had since well before Thatcher that both supports the premise of a benefits structure and possesses a practical interest and knowledge in its workings. He is not a careerist – he has lead his party and has no aspirations. That alone is important for one reason: the continued presence of an interested Minister means that, for the first time in decades, there is a genuine interest in reform.

The shift to a Universal Credit comes with some positive and negative consequences, but responses have split – as everything does, these days – along strictly tribal lines. So before we go too much further, this needs to be said: the idea of a universal credit has held a position of logical necessity for almost every expert in the field of benefits reform for nearly thirty years. The specifics of implementation are important and worth more rigorous consideration, but the raw benefits and disadvantages of a universal credit go deeper than political ideologies.

First, pros. The administration of a single universal credit scheme would be massively more manageable than the bloated manpower infrastructure and costs generated by the DWP, which is something like the fifth largest employer in the UK today. If the government has to cut costs then this is an unambiguous win – every penny that can be saved in benefit administration is a penny that doesn’t have to be cut from the benefits themselves. A massively detailed pdf by Gareth Morgan suggests that those who require benefits for a single reason would find themselves better off under the scheme. More will be done on a sliding scale, meaning that benefits can be more flexible to recipient’s needs, rather than the currently rather inflexible scheme that sees millionaire pensioners automatically receiving bus passes. Finally, the single universal credit has the big advantage of removing the delineation between different types of benefit, and thus the attached stigma that comes with specificity.

Then there are cons. While the recipients of single benefits would on the whole be better off, those who claim multiple benefits – child support and disability living allowance, for example, will find their net benefits decreased, although they will also find the process of applying for the single benefit more straightforward than the current melange. On that subject, however, means testing is controversial. That dispute is also varied in quality – some assert that it is a way of bullying recipients into accepting less, some claim that it’s a more direct way of objectively evaluating and eliminating scroungers – but either way, it is indisputable that means testing results in lower payments overall. Importantly, given the government’s recent record of aggression towards claimants, a wholesale switch in systems can be used as a trojan horse to sneak benefit cuts in through the back door. And finally, while the operation costs of a universal credit are much lower, the implementation costs are high. The Chancellor is reportedly relaxed about this, but there are reports that some of the more extreme attacks on existing benefits levels are being added at his behest, so it is unclear whether the calculus will change for him if the Lords continue to work in exclusions.

Finally, the risk of any change to the benefit system is the accompanying rhetoric. Whatever happens, expect more fulminating about scroungers.

So the devil remains in the details. On balance, a universal credit’s benefits outweigh its depredations – any negative impact on overall benefit levels can be counteracted from the massive stack of money that will be saved from operation costs. Whether you trust the current government to pass a policy that works as benignly – or think you can count on the House of Lords to stand in the way of the worst excesses – is another issue.

Because that’s what the good men of SEAL Team Six did – they were given a kill order and they executed it, no pun intended.

It’s a complex question and gets tangled up in a lot of other problems, both emotional and intellectual. This post aims to unpick some of that.

Was it legal?

Many will hardly care whether it was legal or not, arguing that right and wrong are not always reflected in law. That’s a fair point, but legalities are still important, if only because they’re the difference between the subjective opinion of an individual and the agreed parameters established by a society.

On this issue the rules are actually very straightforward and relatively unambiguous: killing Osama bin Laden was inalienably legal under international law.

Under international humanitarian law, a member of an armed organised group can be killed as an enemy combatant, and as al Qaida was a recognised participant in the war in Afghanistan his death is an entirely justifiable act of war. The only strictures on such an action are the principles of distinction and proportionality, and the action in Abbotabad seems not to violate either of those restrictions.

Under international human rights law (a separate and oftentimes contradictory code), targeted killings are harder to justify but still not impossible. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 is the document that governs this code, and it states that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life” – meaning that assassination is legal so long as it can be justified. If he had attempted to surrender then the case would be sticker, but the White House claims that bin Laden resisted arrest and that is certainly consistent with his own pronouncements of the issue. Given that the White House holds video of the killing – which can be subpeona’d – we can probably assume that they are being truthful in this regard.

Was it morally justifiable?

The question of moral right or wrong breaks in two – ‘can it be coherently justified to others’ and ‘is it, at a fundamental level, consistent with the moral norms established in our society’. One can be critically examined; the other is conceptually much more woolly.

The question of whether the killing could be justified is straightforward. Yes; it is clearly possible to build a coherent and convincing argument asserting that killing bin Laden was morally preferable to taking him alive. Here’s how you do it:

• He was an enemy combatant, not a civilian. While taking him alive was an option, killing him was an equally viable one, and the question needs to be viewed in that light.

• There was no gain to be had from taking him alive, for the following reasons:
• He would not have given up information except under extreme torture, and the compulsion to use that torture would have been acute.
• Taking him alive would not have changed the ultimate outcome. He confessed to the crime, he only would have been tried in America, and he would have been put to death.
• The only difference is that taking him alive would have subjected the world to the spectacle of a court case, which would have had no real value. It would have been impossible to try him fairly, it would have been perceived to be a humiliating sham amongst our enemies (and many of our allies) overseas, regardless of how rigorous the trial actually was, and it would have given him one last prime-time podium from which to agitate for further slaughter. I accept that we should not be afraid to face extremist rhetoric, but that doesn’t mean we have to give it our network airtime.
• The key point in the above section is that it wouldn’t actually win us any friends. People don’t like that we assassinated him and that’s sad, but the shitstorm we would have faced for trying him would have been much worse. The Nuremburg trials would have been invoked, and probably not entirely unfairly. America’s own divisions would have come to the fore as everyone’s favourite bigots – Beck, O’Reilly, Palin, Trump – would have vied to be toughest on the terrorist. Even our allies in the region would have been forced into the position of defending Islam, and bin Laden by proxy, from the acid tongues of America’s most divisive assholes.
• Every day that he spends on TV in an orange boiler suit and shackles, his friends get more pissed off. That means reprisals, and not just against us – against anybody.
• The videotapes of bin Laden’s final hours would be passed from hand to hand like relics. It’s a short-cut to martyrdom.
• All of these would be equivocations from a moral imperative, though, were it not for one thing: he was an enemy soldier in a time of war. If he was a political leader, a civilian, then it would be a different matter, but he was a man whose life was war. Ultimately, this was the end he chose, and we shouldn’t let an obsession with abstract principles interfere with that.

So it’s certainly morally defensible. If the Dalai Lama can bring himself to recognise the justification then it seems bizarre to suggest otherwise.

Was it right?

If it’s legal and justifiable, then surely that shouldn’t be in question?

And yet. Outside of ground zero, away from the gates of the white house, many people – not just the airy-fairy left – are uneasy. The policy of whacking terrorist leaders is from an Israeli playbook that has a tendency to inspire revulsion, as Alan Dershowitz notes:

Among others, these critics include officials in Britain, France, Italy, Russia, the EU, Jordan, and the United Nations. [Jack Straw, the former British foreign secretary] once said, “The British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called targeted assassinations of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counterproductive.” The French foreign ministry has declared “that extrajudicial executions contravene international law and are unacceptable.” The Italian Foreign Minister has said, “Italy, like the whole of the European Union, has always condemned the practice of targeted assassinations.” The Russians have asserted that “Russia has repeatedly stressed the unacceptability of extrajudicial settling of scores and ‘targeted killings.’” Javier Solana has noted that the “European Union has consistently condemned extrajudicial killings.” The Jordanians have said, “Jordan has always denounced this policy of assassination and its position on this has always been clear.” And Kofi Annan has declared “that extrajudicial killings are violations of international law.”

Yet none of these nations, groups or individuals have criticized the targeted killing of Osama Bin Laden by the US. The reason is obvious. All the condemnations against targeted killing was directed at one country. Guess which one? Israel, of course.

I disagree with Dershowitz’s conclusion – I think that bin Laden is a qualitatively different name from Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, and politicians tend to be sensitive to the political sensitivities of condemning the killing of such a widely despised man. But nevertheless, a bad taste lingers. No-one is quite sure if they’ve passed through the looking glass.

Bin Laden wore no uniform. Is the argument that he was an armed combatant not a legal fudge? Yes, putting him on trial would be politically difficult. Isn’t that the kind of difficulty a strong society, with a sound ideological basis, should welcome? And aren’t the flag-waving crowds at ground zero… kinda crass?

And ultimately, those are justifiable concerns. I agree with the decision as it was made, but still, I am uneasy. It’s never comfortable to see an act of war feted on a widescreen TV.

Perhaps this moment will be a moment of closure, a final transgression that allows America to move past its dirty wars, to put Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay behind it, and to close the door on “enhanced interrogation” and extraordinary rendition. If that turns out to be the case then the moral qualms will have to be quashed, because it will have been worth it, this final destruction of the mirror that reflected America back upon itself. If not then America will continue to owe us a little more justification for this than it has yet been able to give, to quiet that tiny voice of conscience; but in that case, more and greater atrocities await.

Two stories have emerged concurrently that cast the question into new light. While most citizens tend to be happy with the theoretical notion of covert defence, security agencies usually try to keep the visceral practicalities of that defence obscured, as support for their methods often vanishes like spit on a hot rock when exposed to the full scrutiny of public opinion.

Yesterday, I discussed the story of Shahram Amiri the Iranian who was kidnapped by / defected to the CIA in 2009. To my chagrin, the post was overtaken by events almost as soon as it was posted; Amiri was flown back to Iran and has started to talk about the events that led to his disappearance:

Speaking to Al Jazeera during a transit stop in Qatar, Shahram Amiri said he was interrogated for 14 months by US agents who refused to allow him contact with his family, but that he “never cracked” and had not revealed any secret information about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Washington has denied the claims, saying Amiri had lived freely in the US, had himself reached out to US officials, and was free to come and go.

[..]

“They gave me a shot which made me unconscious and then transferred me to the US onboard a military plane,” Amiri said in Tehran, before making allegations that he was tortured during interrogations in the US.

“Within the first two months, I was subjected to fierce mental and psychological torture by agents and interrogators from the US Central Intelligence Agency.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera during his journey back to Iran, Amiri said he had been forced by US authorities to say in a video released on the internet that he was enjoying life in the state of Arizona.

Although it seems unlikely that the US will receive the censure it deserves for this, it is still unquestionably a scandal of severe proportions. The US government kidnapped a man on a religious pilgrimage, held him against his will for over a year and subjected him to torture and coercion. The man in question was not a military target, nor even a political one. Both the US and Iran deny that he was involved in the country’s nuclear programme, so whatever paltry justification the CIA may have had has become noticeably thinner.

Meanwhile, this morning the Guardian is reporting that the UK has also been complicit in kidnapping and torture, this time of its own citizens. The Guardian has helpfully highlighted many of the key passages, but the entire document is worth reading.

A few thoughts emerge from this. Firstly, dragging these revelations into the light of day is hard and the organisations that have done so deserve to be praised. Iran will probably not receive any credit for this in the wider world, but by doggedly and tenaciously pursuing the fate of its citizen it exposed a cruel double-standard at the heart of America’s security apparatus. Here in the UK, civil liberties organisations such as Liberty and, in particular, Reprieve deserve a tremendous amount of credit for their lobbying and legal action in exposing the worst excesses of the government in the early days of the Global War on Terror. These organisations should be celebrated for their achievements and offered every support.

Secondly, citizens should not be content to give abstract permissions to government in any situation, let alone one as broad-ranging as security and defense. We have an obligation to understand exactly what is being done in our name, and if we don’t ensure that the government is acting in accordance with our wishes then we are complicit in whatever acts they undertake.

Third, it is distressing that this is so unsurprising.

The list of areas to be targeted describes a largely positive direction of travel. ID cards and biometric passports are to be scrapped; the fingerprinting of children at schools is to be curtailed. Government databases are to be pruned back. FOI is to be extended; libel laws will be reviewed to protect freedom of speech; CCTV is to be regulated. A “Great Repeal Bill” promises to cut through swathes of redundant and obstructive legislation; in an email to his supporters, Nick Clegg suggested that the bill would

…roll back Labour’s surveillance state, scrapping ID cards, the children’s database and restoring civil liberties.

In areas like education, health and policing people are going to get much greater powers over the services in their area. And we are going to hand more powers to communities and councils.

All very fine and worthy. But the proposals are geared overwhelmingly towards a single section of society as beneficiaries. ID cards and CCTV are middle-class concerns. Freedoms of information and speech can be seen as a stimulus package for Britain’s already over-eager newspaper industries and will result in ever-more salacious stories for their largely middle-class audiences. The power to modify the services offered by schools, hospitals and local police forces are dogwhistle sops to Middle Britain. And while the exact form of the Great Repeal Bill is yet to be revealed, it seems unlikely to tackle such personal infringements as stop-and-search, the Dangerous Dogs Act, control orders, or ASBOs, which tend to target the poorer sections of society disproportionately.

But even the wild class disparity in the conversation is mild compared to the glaring hole that exists when talking about the most disadvantaged groups of all: political and economic migrants, and asylum seekers (the treatment of whom can be particularly inhumane). While the government’s commitment to reversing extended detention without trial is a big, and welcome, improvement, ASBOs in particular continue to be used as a method of suppressing dissent, as in this account from 2006:

Recently, at a demonstration outside Harmondsworth detention centre in solidarity with asylum seekers, I was hemmed in with 50 other protestors when the police used powers under section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to impose a blanket Asbo on anyone who tried to get near the buildings.

They then used powers under section 50 of the Police Reform Act 2002, which makes it an offence to refuse to give your name and address to a police officer who “reasonably suspects” that you have engaged in “anti-social behaviour”. A few people who refused were arrested.

This was no violent protest, and there was no threat to public order or anyone’s personal safety. But the demonstration gave the police an opportunity to use the laws to collect intelligence on “troublemakers”, without having to show that they had actually made any trouble.

This is particularly germane on the day in which the Parliament Square protestors lost their legal right to express their views – thanks to a decidedly illiberal misuse of existing powers.

The discussion on civil liberties in the UK remains too enmired in privilege. Part of this is because libertarians strongly tend to be middle class, white and male; their political preferences tend to reflect their (often unchallenged) social biases and privileges. Part of it, too, is because Labour have consistently chosen not to make social freedom a cause that they would fight for on behalf of the working classes, leaving it as a policy ground for the Lib Dems and the Tories – parties with their roots firmly in the middle classes – to scoop up.

But whatever the reason for the disparity, there is an opportunity now for the civil rights of all sections of society to be strengthened and extended. It requires that we not allow the discussion to be limited to those rights enjoyed by those who already enjoy entrenched rights and securities, whose political access is already entrenched. The work of organisations like Liberty needs greater support and needs to be extended to ensure that human dignity is respected at all levels of society. The rights enjoyed by well-off British citizens, while by no means complete, are some of the most extensive in the history of the world. It behoves us to extend those rights as far through our culture as is conceivably possible.

But “shock doctrine” is one of those phrases that just annoys me. It annoys me all the more because it comes from the left – a space which I nominally occupy – but yet is such a deeply incoherent piece of intellectual padding.

It was popularised by Naomi Klein in her 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which she argued that free-market capitalists and their political backers have used, and occasionally manufactured, crises and disasters in order to inflict social change on populations that are unwilling to accept them but unable to resist, due to the aforementioned upheaval. The term gained traction on the left after the Haiti quake, when the US right-wing Heritage Foundation caused an uproar by suggesting that aid be tied to economic reforms. Here’s Adam Ramsay again:

News stories about Haiti are full of tales of looters. There’s less talk of a bigger scale plunder to come. In Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine‘ she maps the rise of “disaster capitalism”. She describes how, over 40 years, The International Monetary Fund (IMF), Pentagon, and various mega-corporations have increasingly used (or created) disasters as an excuse to push through unpopular right wing economic policies, and asset strip vulnerable economies.

I was just finishing this book on Thursday as the scale of Haiti’s earthquake was becoming clear. My immediate fear was an obvious one. So I did what all young lefties do in a time of crisis. I set up a Facebook group: “No Shock Doctrine for Haiti”.

I plucked that quote a little bit selectively but it illustrates my first problem with the term and its use: shock doctrine is a methodology seeking application. Exponents of the theory tend to force this most fashionable of ideas onto situations rather than respond to the unique characteristics of an individual incidents. The book, for example, rests on the idea that the policies of free marketeers tend not to be very popular. For the most part this is unarguable – even Milton Friedman would concede as much – but in her zeal to apply her theory to every possible case Klein makes some dramatic reaches. Apparently, Hurricane Katrina led to the “privatisation” of New Orleans against the will of the population; however, the reforms imposed on New Orleans were structural and mostly welcomed by a population frustrated by lazy and corrupt local government. Haiti is another example of this; although tying catastrophe aid to any kind of condition would have been horrifically wrong, measures to curtail corruption and establish good governance in one of the world’s poorest countries would have enjoyed overwhelming local support. Klein’s depiction of the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis as a conflict between grasping capitalists and honourable democrats shows a profound lack of historical understanding, and her claim that the protests crushed in Tiananmen Square were against further market freedom is based on pure ignorance. And those are just the cases that stretch credibility; the claims that Margaret Thatcher fabricated the Falklands War as a way of breaking the unions shatters it irrevocably.

The second problem is to do with the way that the argument is cased. At one level, the problem is that the issue is mischaracterised as being a tool used purely by the right wing to advance their corporatist goals. In truth, the technique of using a crisis to drive policy reform is as popular on the left as it is on the right. The New Deal in America was launched on an unwilling society as a result of the Great Depression; the great social reforms in the UK of the late forties and early fifties, which led to the formation of the NHS, arose off the back of the post-war slump; Barack Obama used the current economic collapse to the same ends. Blair and Brown spent much of their respective times in office extending the powers of the state, evoking the spectre of terrorism and war as justification.

But this gap masks a deeper problem with the argument, which is the assumption that governments should not use crises as a way of driving social change. It’s predicated on a somewhat condescending lack of faith in populations; it assumes that electorates, struck numb by catastrophe, are unable to resist the snake-oil of perfidious political salesmen. In fact, crises inspire rare moments of national unity; often these moments arise because the crisis in question has exposed a policy failing or fault that simply needs to be corrected, and the correction of which is obvious. Thatcher had to break the power of the unions; whether she needed to do so quite so thoroughly is an open question, but most even on the left now assume that the unions were too powerful, and that to persist in allowing them to run entire industries was a path to economic and social ruin. New Zealand, Chile and Brazil abandoned socialistic policies for freer markets because the former weren’t working well and induced economic crises.

There is some limited value to some of the ideas contained within the term “shock doctrine”. Attaching conditions to Haiti aid, for example, would clearly have been grossly wrong, and those who suggested it were rightly excoriated. The term itself, however, masks deep intellectual failings that continue to undermine the legitimacy of left-wing economic arguments. There is plenty to debate in the new UK budget; the rise in VAT, for example, will be economically and politically unpopular for some time to come. Branding it as “shock doctrine” is ludicrous and shrill, and will neither advance the debate nor grow the left-wing base in opposition.

Naomi Klein, meanwhile, remains an extremely poor role model for the left, and in an ideal world would join Michael Moore on the island of left-wing intellectual rejects. Honestly, we can be much better than this.

So no overlap on the venn diagram between “foreigners” and “decent, law-abiding people” then, Theresa?

(h/t Jenny for the spot)

Pippa Norris has a great analysis of the parlous state of female representation in Westminster. This election has clearly demonstrated that more needs to be done to encourage women to run for high office. This can’t be achieved just by instituting all-women shortlists; not only are they controversial and prone to generating ill will, they also don’t address the problem of a lack of women engaged in politics at the lower levels – councillors, party activists and political pundits. America has a generally more robust mechanism for this; the Democrat party and the leftwing have EMILY’s List, a political action group dedicated to increasing female representation at all levels; a British version sprang up in 1993 but appears defunct. There is a clear need for a similar UK body.

So, the Labour leadership contest.

What on earth has happened to Labour? They’ve become a party of the spineless. The slimeball Milliband looks like being coroneted all but unopposed, the worst possible outcome in the circumstances. What’s worse is that the main candidates – the two Millibands and Ed Balls – are politically indistinguishable, belonging to the liberal, interventionist, statist school established by Blair, promulgated by Brown and rejected by the electorate two weeks ago. The differences between them are being talked up in the media – David the Ditherer, Ed the Equivocator, Balls the Bully – but their plausible manifestos, cabinets and policy priorities are more or less identical.

Labour needs to recover. It needs a proper, realigning leadership election between a wide range of candidates with competing visions. The Tory relaunch in 2005 was just that – a clash of ideas, between the traditional Conservativism of David Davies, the internationalism and fiscal prudence of Ken Clarke, the social conservativism of Liam Fox and the modernising, “compassionate” neo-conservativism of David Cameron. It’s not that the Labour party lacks these polarities – Alan Johnson represents the traditional left, a slice of the electorate under-represented over the last 30 years, and Hillary Benn, John Cruddas or Yvette Cooper would be modernisers who could pull the party back to the centre. There’s a huge intellectual gap in the opposition vacated by the Lib Dems when they joined the government; Labour could expand to fill that niche quite happily, but they’re choosing not to.

Part of the problem is that Labour has, over the last 13 years, been trained to value unity over intellectual dynamism. The final years of the Blair / Brown “dual government” were horrible; the lesson that Labour learned from them is that internal strife is a fast track to weakness and collapse. Thus Brown’s continued tenure, always keeping a grip on power as those who sought to topple him bottled their chances as quickly as they arose. But it was based on a false premise. Internal conflict can be destructive, but the essence of political renewal – as with any kind of intellectual discipline – lies in constructive debate, in the contest of ideas that are firmly held and passionately defended.

There is a leadership vacuum in Labour and I don’t think that any of the candidates can fill it. I hope that there’s another leadership election within Labour before 2015. Otherwise, the only outcome that seems plausible is that the Tories will find themselves with a much firmer grip on power.