No time for blogging today, but here’s an interesting short paper (pdf) from Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform, talking about how a Cameron government, and David Cameron himself, will handle European issues.
Cameron and Europe
December 10th, 2009Knowledge 1, Internet 1
December 8th, 2009Last night I was reading a post by Iain Dale, which had been cited as a “here’s the proof!” link by someone in a discussion elsewhere.
The post is a bit of an “in my day” article, repeating the old chestnut that in the 1970s everyone was worried about a new ice age, and therefore decades of research on global warming is all just nonsense. Teach the controversy, and all that.
Mr Dale specifically recalls being “taught” about global cooling at school in the 1970s. Well, I was at school in the 1970s too, and I don’t remember that at all – certainly there was no awareness of global cooling anywhere near the current awareness of global warming.
But this was just typical Internet debate: a duel of anecdotes, prejudices and perspectives without any facts behind them. 1-0 to the Internet in the battle with knowledge.
Fifteen seconds of Googling later, I’d found a blogpost on Nature pointing out that only seven peer reviewed articles in the 1960s and 70s suggested global cooling, whereas over forty suggested global warming even at that early stage in the research. It even had a reference to Posted in Web/Tech | Comments Off
Compulsory civic service
December 7th, 2009James Crabtree writes a long article, which is worth reading, following up on his idea of compulsory civic service in the light of recent work by DEMOS.
I have a few philosophical problems with the idea of compulsory civic service, not least the idea that it is the State’s responsibility actively to define what its citizens should do, rather than to prohibit what they ought not to do.
That said, James’s piece makes me a little better-disposed to the proposal, not least because it sites it within the liberal republican tradition (the idea, not to be too wonkish) that this service is part of a range of obligations the citizen has to the political community to which he belongs, as in Switzerland, the Italian city-state republics, and so on.
There is still a problem for me, though, in the idea of compulsion. Are we really going to force people to undertake this service and send them to prison if they don’t? After all, a fine would just be used by the well-off to ‘buy out’ of six months when they could be working in the City or bumming round Europe on Daddy’s millions.
Perhaps an alternative approach might be – in the civic republican tradition – to prevent people from taking up their civic rights of voting, participating in juries, etc., until they had completed the service. Given the level of political disengagement, though, how many people would just not bother?
Have yourself a wonkish little Christmas
December 5th, 2009It’s almost Christmas, and if you’re missing a present for the politics wonk in your life, I’ve put together a short list of political gifts that might fill the gap nicely. The whole list is also available as an Amazon aStore page.
You can pick most of these up at your local bookshop or HMV, but if you purchase through the links to Amazon, a bit of cash will come the Society’s way as well. Merry Christmas!
Talked about:
- Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness
– perhaps a little past its maximum hotness, this libertarian-paternalist tract will still have a big influence on Conservative political thinking in 2010.
- The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
– what Nudge is to the Conservatives, this book will be to progressives: a well-presented and simple set of Big Ideas that can be crafted into a whole political platform.
- Bad Science
– in an age of irrationality, Ben Goldacre is one of the most prominent resistance fighters. This book demolishes homeopathy and the pharmaceutical industry with equal gusto. Despite the title, it isn’t a collection of his Guardian columns.
Politics in 2010
- Total Politics Guide to the 2010 General Election
– Iain Dale’s new political magazine has established itself in 2009, and here presents policy and political information ahead of the General Election that has to be held by June next year.
- British Electoral Facts
– the book to have by your side on election night, if you want to win the quiz or just impress (or scare) your friends.
Political people
- Wolf Hall
– not quite a politician, but always political, Thomas Cromwell is the subject of this historical novel, which won the 2009 Booker Prize
- A View From The Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin
– the diaries of Labour backbencher and former minister Chris Mullin show that unsuccessful politicians are often the best analysts of politics
Political history
- Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe: How a Tribe of Bankers Rewrote the Rules of Finance and Unleashed an Innovation Storm
– not very ancient history, perhaps, but Gillian Tett’s account of the financial crash of 2008-9 is thorough and easy to read. As a senior journalist at the Financial Times, she has had long-term access to many of the prime movers in the debacle.
- A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy
– a layman’s version of his earlier academic work on the “Radical Enlightenment”, Jonathan Israel’s new book sets out a history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that highlights the radical and revolutionary origins of modernity and democracy.
On the screen
- In The Loop
– Malcolm Tucker, foul-mouthed British spin doctor, is the star in a film which unpicks pretentions on both sides of the special relationship (Blu-ray also available
)
- The West Wing – Complete Season 1-7
– with a real Democrat president in the White House, this box set offers you the chance to see how a fictional one got on back in the ’90s. Much loved (and copied) by Whitehall movers and shakers back in the day.
Those evil foreigns again
December 5th, 2009I have been a bit surprised by the number of comments coming in on an old post of mine on the Kercher trial, which has just concluded in Perugia.
I commented on British coverage of the trial when it kicked off in February, noting the tendency of the British press to assume that trials in other countries (even their beloved USA) are inherently unfair, and doomed to condemn an innocent Brit to a rat-infested prison, perhaps with an unshaven man in a sombrero drinking tequila in an outer office.
The foreigns, you see, don’t understand justice and good old British fair play. Their funny little legal systems are all right for them, of course, but couldn’t possibly be used on a British person. This attitude is everywhere, and feels like one of the last mental tendencies of Empire – if one of your chaps is in jail, send off a gunboat (or a snippy comment on the Telegraph website, in the modern variation).
Anyway, this is all by way of a long introduction to saying I was highly amused to see my post from February being the top Google result for “Italian justice” (hence all the traffic), and that the other three of the top four search results were Brits and Americans saying that the trial was a joke, and how could a pretty white woman possibly be judged by some greasy fascist winking at the girls as he drives round the Piazza Navona on a tiny little scooter? Screen shot below.
Screen shot 9.42 on December 5 2009
Have fun running the country
December 4th, 2009If you want a heartening and amusing take on the sorts of issues that kids think are important in politics, I heartily recommend Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids’ Letters to President Obama
Does direct democracy lead to distrust?
December 3rd, 2009I think futurity.org is rather overselling this study by the University of Buffalo:
Ballot initiatives, long thought to encourage democratic citizenship, may actually have the opposite effect of fostering distrust in state government, a new study finds.
After all, there are no directly democratic institutions in the UK and trust in government is just as low here as it is in the US. Anyway, it is a moderately interesting piece of work, showing that US states with more referendums are less likely to express trust in their elected representatives than those in states where they do not happen.
A day to remember
December 1st, 2009Today is a day to remember – I’m serious. Here’s Dan Hannan, MEP, on his blog this morning:
Britain is no longer a sovereign nation. At midnight last night, we ceased to be an independent state, bound by international treaties to other independent states, and became instead a subordinate unit within a European state.
Hannan’s article is a classic of the genre, combining apocalyptic melodrama with a pedantic legalism that bears no resemblance to the reality of the world as it is lived.
For instance, the reason we are apparently no longer a sovereign state is that the EU now fulfils, in Hannan’s opinion, the four-part definition of a state in Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Treaty. Disaster! Stop all the clocks! Write a thriller about it and call it the Montevideo Protocol (starring a devilishly handsome shaven-headed hero who can’t stand socialised medicine).
The possibility that Hannan might be wrong, or that the EU and the UK might be parallel sovereignties, or that they create a new form of joint sovereignty unimagined in 1933, isn’t considered – why spoil a good drama?
For all it is laughably inaccurate, hyperbole of this kind always goes unchallenged and is then forgotten. The sensationalism of the media and the collective amnesia of the public will ensure that in a few months’ time, the UK will lose its sovereignty all over again, on some other issue, like a constitutional groundhog day.
That’s why you should remember this day. Remember, when life goes on as normal, Parliament continues to pass laws, we continue to be grudging members of the EU, and the world, in general, keeps turning on its axis, this this was not a day when we lost our sovereignty, that it was just a day like any other, like October 22, 1844, for instance.
Then when the next great world-changing disaster comes around, you can remember that the Euro didn’t collapse within five years, sharia law isn’t ruling our streets, and we could all use a sense of perspective.
A few words on governance
December 1st, 2009Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.
It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny in its most recent green paper, the Conservatives for setting out proposals on Standards Committee issues that (he suggests) leave the door open for greater councillor corruption. Here’s his closing paragraph (but do go and read the lot):
For healthy local government, there must be corporate governance, there must be a balance between the power of the executive and the checks and balances, in terms of council and scrutiny holding the executive to account, and an enforceable set of minimum standards of conduct. I am seriously concerned that the checks and balances which were an essential part of the 2000 Act Settlement are under attack. That promises a prosperous New Year for lawyers, but not a happy time for local government.
Democracy denied in Switzerland
November 30th, 2009The news from Switzerland is bad, not just for the overwhelmingly moderate Swiss Muslim population, but also for democratic reformers in general. Anyone arguing against democratic reform can now say – “let the people have their say, and you’ll get racism and discrimination, like in Switzerland”.
What’s worse, a minority in British politics see such populist racism and discrimination as positive reasons for more participatory democracy. “Cut through the wiles of politicians and the PC brigade, and let the people say what I … sorry, they really think.”
What case can democrats make against those populists?
It has to start from questioning the democratic credentials of the Swiss vote. Sure, the vote was passed in the proper constitutional form, but there are undemocratic elements to every constitution, and I would argue that the use of referendums to deny minority rights is just such an undemocratic element.
One has to draw the distinction between the false view of democracy as “whatever the people think today”, and the larger view of democracy as a system that secures the right of people to control their government both now and in the future.
When I think about the basic principles of democracy, I’m always drawn back to its original Athenian conception, centred around three words – isonomia (equality before the law), isegoria (equal right to speak), and eleutheria (personal freedom).
Two and a half thousand years on, our conception of equality has moved on a little (no slaves, women voting), but the ancient fundamental that a good state secures permanent equality in laws, speech and freedom is written into the US Constitution, the Declaration of Human Rights, and a hundred other basic laws.
If we start with this conception, the Swiss vote starts to look very undemocratic. In the same way that it is not democracy to vote to abolish democracy, it is not democracy to legislate against the fundamentals of democracy.
This Swiss law would be democratic if it applied to all citizens of any religion – the French concept of laïcité works, in theory, like this. As it is, the Swiss referendum attacks isonomia as it applies to Muslim citizens alone. This is even more obvious when one looks at the form it took: a federal constitutional amendment on one religious building in a constitution that delegates every other religious matter to the cantons.
I don’t know what reach the ECHR has in Switzerland – I assume the country is a member of the Council of Europe. I hope that the ECHR has the power to overturn the referendum result. You can imagine the reaction from the rightwingers on the Net: screaming about a disgraceful denial of democracy. I don’t agree. To overturn this unjust and undemocratic referendum would be in itself a democratic decision – even if not taken by the people.