|
|
« January 2007 |
Main
| March 2007 »
Last night’s Progress event on how Labour should be greener was encouraging, but also a little worrying. Listening to Ben Bradshaw, I was impressed by how much he had a grip on the issues. He highlighted where coming government legislation has scope to tackle climate change. This includes the next Energy White paper, planning legislation after the Barker review and the negotiations over the replacement for Kyoto Treaty.
The Minister is right. All of these different policy areas are important. Crucial, in fact. And it is laudable that the Government has grasped the breadth of initiatives needed. The problem, though, is it was not at all clear what it is specifically going to propose in the white paper or actually do to the planning system. We heard that there are still debates to be had, details to work out, issues to resolve…
By the end of the discussion, I had a strong sense of everyone being caught up on the big, long-term (and hard to tackle) policy issues: nuclear power or not; road-pricing or not; and how to make the rail network low-carbon.
Unfortunately, the public opinion commentator, Deborah Mattinson, emphasised a politically inconvenient truth for Labour: that the British public thinks the Government has done little on the environment. Now, at least, it appears to be full of good intentions, but hampered by Whitehall bureaucracy and yet to deliver much. With climate change in particular, there is a sense of the Government having been rather slow and indecisive. In the aftermath of the Stern report, the IPCC report and Al Gore’s film, we all know there is the need to act now.
So long term strategy is undoubtedly needed, but if the Tories win a General Election in a couple of year, many of these policies may never happen. Gordon Brown, or whoever takes over as PM, needs to grasp the ‘quick and easy win’ approach. Australia has just banned old-style electric light bulbs. You’d be surprised how much of a dent in carbon emissions that will make. Ken Livingstone is doing lots of things in London already home insulation schemes, carbon audits for council estates and incentives for people to drive lower emission cars.
The new Leader needs to impose some direction. And quickly. It is time to stop pondering the minutiae of every possible environmental policy issue and do what it is possible to do immediately. A raft of quick and easy steps to tackle carbon emissions could be launched in the first 100 days, whilst the Whitehall bureaucrats are squabbling about the long-term decisions. Light bulbs and home insulation schemes first, power stations later…
That will look like the Government sees the urgency, is taking action, and getting on with the job.
The Times' Peter Riddell calls for a leadership contest. The Guardian is breathless about a meeting today to discuss future policy. Yes, it's just another day of the press offering the Labour party advice on leadership and how to renew in office. Well, what will happen will happen. But I would caution that taking political advice from the press is like getting tips on healthy eating from your local undertaker. The press want conflict and drama above all else. They are longing for a closely fought leadership contest, when the time comes, so they can cover it and so they can influence it.
This valet wrote about how the press actually covers leadership contests last year. Right now, the press are saying it will be a battle of ideas. I confidently predict that if a contest arises it will all be about hairlines, not ideological dividing lines. The Observer, which has the distinction of the most febrile and callow comment pages of any paper, will support whichever candidate is youngest. The Telegraph will support a candidate who isn't running. Candidates will spend their time wooing newspapers, looking to generate the 'big mo'.
There will be a contest, or there won't be a contest. If there isn't naturally one, it is not the duty of the party, let alone the leading contender, to magic one up. Whether or not there is one has absolutely nothing to do with Labour 'renewing in office'.
The key word in that phrase is 'office'. This valet has warned before of the dangers of Labour pulling over and popping the hood to have a play with its engine. Labour is in government. People like governments to be strong and purposeful. The way to renew in office is with policies delivered and communicated, not with abstract debates. The greatest danger for the party in power is that it grows used to government. Every day of governing is privilege and a chance to improve the country.
I was at the House of Commons last Wednesday, for the debate on the New Politics of Well-Being. It was standing room only, even after we moved to a larger venue to accomodate the 300 or so wishing to attend. Just goes to show how this topic has shot up the political agenda.
As the chair, Derek Draper (now a reformed psychotherapist), observed, the new politics are being driven by an awareness of how the way we live is contributing to the prevalence of discontent and mental illlness in wealthy societies.
Oliver James, the author of Affluenza, hyped up the proceedings by laying the blame squarely on the "selfish capitalism" being promoted by the likes of Blair (who he insists on calling Blatcher) and Bush. In an entertaining address sprinkled with expletives he emphasised the World Health Organisation's finding that English speaking nations were twice as likely to suffer from mental illness than people in Europe and Japan. In this country the figures were about one in four of the population with another quarter "feeling like s##t most of the time". Massive inequalities and the stress of keeping up in a highly materialistic, over-competitive, celebrity-worshipping culture (encapsulated in the word "affluenza") had a lot to do with what had gone wrong. The remedies? Reduce inequalities, nationalise estate agents, knock a nought off house prices, pay a parent the national average wage to look after their kids up to the age of three, which could be "easily" paid for by abandoning Trident and wars of aggression, like Iraq. All good knockabout stuff but as I pointed out to him at question time, hardly conducive to winning over those who need to be converted.
Lord Layard (author of Happiness-Lessons from a New Science) lowered the temperature somewhat with a more measured and pragmatic contribution. His "killer fact" was that happiness in developed countries (which can now be scientifically measured) has not risen over the past fifty years despite the huge increase in per capita income. He put this down to these societies being too centred on personal success at the expense of essential human relationships. "There has been a tsunami of individualism coming at us from across the Atlantic". His five remedies were (1) use schools to teach children how to live rather than just how to earn a living, (2) cut back advertising, especially where it is directed at children (3) stop reducing job-satisfaction in the public sector by an over-emphasis on modern management techniques, such as performance related pay, (4) address the increase in mental illness by boosting the numbers of psychotherapists available, particularly cognitive behaviour therapists (the government is understood to be acting on this recommendation) and (5) echoing Oliver James, reduce inequalities.
The non-parliamentary contributions from the platform were completed by a typically over-stated attack on globalisation and New Labour (it's not new or Labour enough!) from Neal Lawson of Compass, but with a telling point about how commodification had crept into every corner of our lives and by a passionate plea from Sue Palmer (author of Toxic Childhood) on -inter-alia- the need to halt the atomisation of the family resulting from the personal technologies available.
The politicians (our own James Purnell, Minister for Pension Reforms, and Tim Loughton, the Shadow Minister for Children), predictably brought us back to party politics. Whilst both acknowledged that well-being was an idea whose time had come, James did his duty by reciting the facts and figures of what New Labour had achieved in this area, making the connection with the government's "choice" reforms in the public sector as a means of providing the personal autonomy that was such an important ingredient of contentment. Loughton in turn did his bit by holding the government almost wholly responsible for the sick society described by the other speakers. It was clear that his sharp and witty references to "the ticking time-bomb of mental illness" under this government, the need to reduce pressures at work, the over-testing of our children (what's next, a SATS test for embryos?), people having too much too soon, and mothers going back to work too soon , was striking a chord with the young, largely female audience (even though the meeting had been mainly advertised through the Guardian and Compass).
My own thought on the meeting, as someone who has been involved in these matters for the last ten years or so, is that the politics of well-being could well be the defining issue of the 21st century. Even if one regards social malaise and global warming as two of the greatest threats facing us, there is a good case for arguing that we won't be able to fix society and the planet until we have fixed our heads. Over-stressed people in a culture of competition, envy and greed veer towards addictive behaviour as some kind of solace, whether this be fast cars, drug-taking, binge drinking, or binge shopping, all of which feed into social and planetary breakdown. We don't have to invent fancy new names to describe the condition to be treated. The old name, the rat-race, is good enough. And as Jimmy Reid famously remarked "The rat-race is for rats. We are not rats. We are human beings!"
There is a distinct danger of the Tories outflanking us on this biggest of Big Ideas, if only because people notice what's going wrong in their lives more than they notice what's going right and tend to blame the government of the day for it. The Tories can therefore win their sympathies just by "feeling their pain" and sharing their concern about the direction of travel, without, of course, having the ideological means of changing that direction. New Labour with its belief in greater state intervention where appropriate does have the means of changing course.. That is why the well-being agenda can be a winner for us if we play our cards correctly i.e. by accepting what's wrong, whilst rejecting the excesses of the argument, and showing how only a New Labour government can put it right.
Postscript: After the meeting (as is my wont) I approached a young, trendy, well-spoken woman to find out what she thought of it all. Fully expecting the charismatic, Oliver James, Neal Lawson or our own James Purnell to be nominated "man of the match", she enthusiastically went for Tim Houghton. Moreover as a first time voter she was leaning towards David Cameron as the more touchy-feely (her words) of the candidates on offer. Be warned!
Last night I attended a meeting of MPs and other supporters of a predominantly elected House of Lords. It got me thinking about the nature of the discussion about House of Lords reform. Like many political issues It's easy to get bogged down in the details. Which option should MPs choose to give us the best chance of ending up with an elected House of Lords? What should a reformed second chamber be called? How should we vote for any elected members? Who should be eligible to stand? What should the term limits be? How do we make sure that the Commons is still the primary chamber?
Those who oppose any change to the status quo put up objections fundamentally based on the pragmatism of politics. This morning on the Today programme a Conservative MP talked about what a distraction Lords reform would be to any government over the next few years - in his view a good enough reason to leave things as they are.
Maybe on this issue it's time to forget the politics and the business of government. It is time to assert the principle that those who make our laws should be chosen by the people and worry about the details later.
Front page headline in the Sun today regarding Jade Goody's grovelling/career-saving mission to India: 'Jade Says Sari'.
This is, of course, the same paper that berated Goody during the Big Brother racism row for saying of the Bollywood star: 'Shilpa Poppadom'.
The rest, as they say, is silence.
The elections for Labour in the Scottish Parliament are hotting up. The Scottish National Party simply attacks England and the rest of the UK at every opportunity – that is, after all, the only
policy that holds the SNP together – but other political parties are unveiling a host of new policies.
One recent proposal from the Liberal Democrats merits particular analysis: their call to abolish the first year of primary school.
The cut-back would be achieved by holding children back from school until the age of 6. Educationalists have been quick to criticise the idea. There is overwhelming evidence from many European countries – and further a field – that education at an early age produces
better attainment at secondary school. Indeed, there is specific evidence to
show that the intervention of trained teachers at an early stage is critical in
promoting better learning throughout life.
The Lib Dem belief all that parents are better suited, equipped or motivated than schools to educate 5 and 6 year olds at home is mystifying and out of touch with the reality of family life for many
people.
I’ve been highlighting the idea in the constituency of Aberdeen South where I am the Labour candidate, and it is proving very unpopular on the doorsteps. Many parents have pointed out to me that the cut-back would significantly reduce their household income as one of the
parents would often we required to stay at home or only work for when their
child was in nursery. I believe this would have a disproportionately adverse
effect on young women who want to work.
By contract, Labour has unveiled a raft of
new policies: year-on-year cuts in class sizes, a massive increase in the
school rebuilding programme, and raising the school leaving age to 18 by 2012. At
the same time, we will create exemptions and opportunities whereby over 16’s
can leave school on the condition that they are in full time education,
employment, training or volunteering.
There will be additional places in further and higher education for 16-18 year olds, thousands more modern apprenticeships and we will expand Project Scotland, a full-time, structured volunteering scheme.
The choice is clear: more schooling with Labour, or less schooling with the Lib Dems.
Unlock Democracy, composed of those familiar democratic reform-seekers, New Politics Network and Charter 88, will be staging a 'Lords Reform Day' on March 7. This is the likely date of the Commons vote on what proportion of the House of Lords should be elected and the campaign seeks to get as much of the Upper House elected as possible.
It's a cause highly worthy of progressive support. The arguments in favour of a fully-elected Lords are well rehearsed. This makes them no less compelling. And there's been a profusion of counter-arguments put about in light of Jack Straw's recent, ham-fisted attempts to forge a fudge of the issue.
These anti-democratic counter-arguments are in the best tradition of the quietist, obstructionist, fusty, 'nay saying' face of the British establishment. Particularly hilarious is Lord Lipsey's notion that '[e]ven electing 50% of the Lords would completely ruin it'. All of a sudden, this well-renowned assembly of reactionary near-stiffs is really an august Assembly of Experts.
Granted, the partial reform has improved the performance of the Lords. But contrary to some claims, there's no evidence that it performs better than the Commons. The fact is that both chambers are in need of reform, with the intention of making both more accountable, legitimate and stronger in the face of executive power.
People’s responses to the recent UNICEF report, and to the spate of shootings during the week just gone, indicate that there is a real desire on the part of the people of Britain to tackle poverty and inequality at their roots. Last week, in a speech at the University of London’s Institute of Education, Hilary Benn put forward the case for a campaign on poverty in Britain, what he described as a “campaign against poverty of circumstance, poverty of opportunity, poverty of aspiration. Wasted lives, potential unfulfilled.”
In his speech Benn argued that the Make Poverty History campaign demonstrated that poverty and exclusion is fundamentally about injustice: about the lack of opportunities, the lack of resources and the lack of medicines. Yet, he argued, in Britain, all too often, too many people feel that they have to accept the lottery of birth without question. At the heart of the Make Poverty History campaign was the belief that politics can and does make a difference to the quality of ordinary peoples’ lives.
Benn suggests that the biggest lesson we have to learn in Britain from the developing world is that if we work together, and campaign, and push, and put our minds to it, and fight, politics can change things.
What Benn is really saying is that we must NOT give into the cynics, we must not give into those who will argue that the problems are so enormous, so vast, they are cannot be tackled.
Hilary Benn is reminding us all of the strength and virtue of collective endeavour, he is reminding each and everyone of us of the values and principles on which our movement was founded.
My partner and I took his kids to play with a water-powered rocket on Hampstead Heath at the weekend. Despite only managing to get the thing to go a few feet into the air, we had lots of fun getting soaked with water and caked with mud. After pumping it up for one last time, foot ready on the release mechanism, we saw a park warden stomping towards us. (What is it about wardens that make you feel like a twelve-year-old again?) She proceeded to tell us that our rocket “technically constituted a missile” and that it was illegal to use such a thing in the park because it might hit a dog passing by. She also informed us that we were on CCTV and that someone had already informed the park police of our activities. What a snitch!
She did add, in a conspiratorial way, that if we had chosen a place away from prying warden’s eyes, we might have got away with it. (But then we would have been less likely to be near a ready water supply). I’ve tried to find what exactly are Hampstead Heath by-laws, and they’re certainly not easily accessible on the internet, but I’m more concerned about what this says about how we assess risk against the benefits of our children (and adults) having fun in communal spaces. In the light of the recent UNICEF Report and the growing debate about children’s mental health, particularly through the Good Childhood Inquiry, I think there is a real need to put more emphasis on encouraging children to have fun outdoors. It often seems that our parks are more set up for the benefit of fussy dog owners than to encourage our children to live healthy lives.
And in any case – what constitutes a missile? Someone throwing a stick for their dog? A low-flying kite – should we ban them as well? Either would be heavier, faster-moving and more likely to cause injury than our little rocket, which was essentially a small, empty plastic bottle. Last year, in a different part of the heath, my friend got a Frisbee smack bang on her lip which proceeded to swell. She actually found it quite amusing, but if she had had a different temperament I guess she might have considered it a missile. Everyone should be able to enjoy our outdoor spaces in a risk-free way, but if it becomes so difficult to have fun because of our plethora of by-laws, the park police have rather missed the point.
Tony Crosland died thirty years ago today (I wrote an brief Grauniad piece about it here).
In its early days New Labour and the wider left were keen to respond to the legacy of Thatcherism. (You even got left-wing academics - like Andrew Gamble, Hilary Wainwright and Raymond Plant - writing about Thatcher's great hero, Friedrich Hayek, in a positive way.)
After 10 years, as Labour takes stock, it is not so defensive. A change of Prime Minister provides a chance for Labour to return explicitly to its social democratic roots. This is why Crosland is still so important. His distinction between ends and means, his rich understanding of equality and his libertarian streak mean that his work should continue to provide important insights for Labour as it moves towards its second decade in power.
Last Thursday, at the invitation of local Welsh Assembly member Huw Lewis, I travelled to Merthyr Tydfil to deliver the annual Keir Hardie lecture to the local constituency Labour party. Keir Hardie, Labour’s first MP and party leader, represented Merthyr, which was also the setting for the first known raising of the Red Flag – during the Merthyr Uprising of 1831 - and the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. In many ways, Merthyr has a great claim to be the birthplace of the Labour movement.
When I was writing the speech I had a look back at the manifesto upon which Keir Hardie was elected for Merthyr in 1900. It is amazing how much of it still resonates for the Labour party today: opposing low pay; supporting families; providing all children with a decent education and a good start in life; improving housing; and banishing unemployment and striving for full employment.
As I said in my speech (which you can read in the lectures section of the news pages on my website), I am immensely proud of the war on poverty we’ve fought over the last ten years and particularly proud of the determination we have shown to cut child poverty. But I was also keen to talk about the ‘war on inequality’ which I would like to see Labour fighting in the years ahead. It is one that needs to be fought on many fronts. We need, for instance, to look at how we meet our commitments on child poverty; how we ensure that work truly is a route out of poverty; and how we help people on low and middle-incomes reduce some of the high costs of living. I also argued we need a new culture of corporate social responsibility to tackle the explosion of pay at the top which I know concerns many of us.
Some of the ideas I suggested we might look at in order to meet these challenges included an across-Whitehall Poverty Impact Assessment test for all new policies; new post-16 learning accounts which could be spent on both academic and vocational learning and support; and the creation of universal Advancement Agencies to assist those who, having moved from welfare to work, are now ambitious to advance and develop a career.
After the speech I spoke to Radio 4’s World Tonight programme about some of these ideas. Ed Mayo from the National Consumer Council, who was also on the programme, called it a ‘fantastic speech’ with some ‘really interesting ideas’ in it. Why don’t you see what you think?
I must say I was hoping for a rather more substantive response to my earlier post about the Iraq war. After all, this is a defining issue on the left.
The comments received so far indulge in petty name-calling, poke fun at the length of the piece, question the semantics, nit -pick around the edges of the argument and refer me to other works without specifying how they affect the case I was making. All very much par for the course when you try to seriously engage with opponents of the war.
I do not apologise for the comprehensiveness of what I had to say. Part of the problem of the pro-war case is that it has been reduced to a series of seperate soundbites (for media purposes). This inevitably oversimplifies and fails to do justice to the totality and mutually reinforcing nature of many of the factors involved (the sum here is very much greater than the parts).
As for the other criticisms, I was tempted to conclude that if this was the best the opposition can come up with then they can be safely ignored. However never one to duck a challenge and in the interests of having some sort of debate on this site, I decided to have another look at Robin Cook's resignation speech, as suggested by Dave Heaseman. I did so because I have always had great respect for Robin's views (I knew him quite well from my SERA days). I also believe in answering the best of my opponents' arguments rather than the worst (something that others would do well to follow).
Robin's objections to the war boiled down to four points: the lack of full international support for the war; the importance the government attached to securing that second UN resolution which never came; the need for more time to allow the inspection and sanctions policy to work and the supposition that what was left of Saddam's WMD programme did not represent a threat to anyone else. All good points and not fully covered in my piece. But not unanswerable.
First, any possibility of coordinated international action was being blocked by the French and the Russians for their own geopolitical and economic reasons( not necessarily related to the rectitude or otherwise of going to war). Second, the governments efforts to secure a second UN resolution had more to do with PR considerations than any legal requirement. Third, there was a good deal of evidence that the inspection and containment approach was fast unravelling (with the costs beginning to outweigh the benefits).. Fourth, there was every indication, before and after the invasion (see the Iraq Survey Group's report highlighted in my Ten Lies post) that Saddam was simply playing for time with a view to resuscitating his WMD programme once the spotlight was off him to a level that would make him invulnerable. As Oliver Kamm pointed out in his excellent Guardian article that covered much of the above, whatever the invasion did or did not achieve it did allow a confrontation with Saddam "at a time of our choosing".
So the best case of the best of the war's critics is not as clear-cut as the anti-war lobby would like us to believe. Even if we continue to disagree about the rights and wrongs of the war perhaps we can now at least agree (taking into account my related posts) that the arguments are so finely balanced either way that Tony Blair doesn't deserve the abuse that has been heaped on him in this respect.
Yesterday I was introduced to the Party's exciting new 'Member's Personal url' pages (MpURL in web-speak) which Party members can find here.
It's got a great feature called 'Pin2Win' which lets you find out what events are happening nearest to you (and right across the country) as well as allowing you to post events too.
Everyone is given their own blog space and there are chatboards for each of the National Policy Forum Commissions. It also enables you to get in touch with other members in any other constituency as long as you know the name of their CLP. A particularly nice touch is a forum called 'Stories from the Doorstep'. There's a great story on there recounting a response from a long-time Labour voter who had been asked whether she needed a lift to the polling station. Her response: "thats a very kind offer dear but I prefer to use the cars supplied by
the Tories. They are far nicer vehicles and it gives me great pleasure
to waste their time." Classic.
Since I didn't realise that there was this new space for members to get active in, I'm guessing that there a few others out there too and thought it should be flagged up! Sign up today!
What will result in more people voting Tory at the next election?
A new party logo?
Championing the environment?
Polly Toynbee writing the Tory manifesto?
Hoodie hugging on a mass scale?
Tory MPs and candidates engaging in community service in northern towns and cities?
Celebrity endorsements from Busted, Cilla Black and Jim Davidson?
No. The simplest way for a Tory to get more votes is... try and hide the fact that you are a Tory.
It worked for Patrick Cormack. The problem is his local association now wants to deselect him. According to the Birmingham Post:
'Executive members had also complained that he failed to display the word Conservative prominently on his election leaflets, he said. As I had the largest swing to the Conservatives in the country at the last election, I did not take that particularly seriously.'
In the latest issue of Progress, Gordon Brown elaborates on his stated desire to see 'a new kind of politics'. In short, 'The challenges of the next 10 years will be different to the past 10 years.'
But it is in two areas that have shamed British governments for decades that the next prime minister can make a really radical move to a new kind of politics. The first is the woefully undemoratic House of Lords. Jack Straw's recent white paper simply isn't good enough. To elect only half of the Second Chamber isn't a new kind of politics, but timid pragmatism.
Secondly, as George Monbiot's excellent Guardian piece yesterday highlights, the next prime minister must end the scandalous privileges enjoyed by the British arms trade. The really enlightened, really radical British governments (I'm thinking 1906 and 1945), openly took on the unacceptable face of the British establishment. And what could be more unacceptable than a corrupt industry that makes weapons that kill innocent people receiving special favours from the government?
Excellent article in the Japan Times about the proliferation of walls around the world. There is something peculiar about a world where goods can move freely, but not people. I sometimes wonder whether my grandchildren will ask me in wondering tones about that time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the growth of a thousand little walls and conflicts. Was it a paradise, Grandpa?
All major party politicians agree that ‘Green taxes’ are part of the solution to global warming. But all are equally nervous about actually specifying anything very punitive to force us out of our cars and our foreign holidays. So wouldn’t it be wonderful if the white knight of new technology could come galloping over the horizon, to save us from having to make too many hard choices?
Maybe it will. If only carbon capture and storage could be made to work, we could burn fossil fuels without putting CO2 into the atmosphere. At Peterhead near Aberdeen, BP are proposing to build a £500 million plant pioneering carbon capture and storage. It’s one of many such initiatives around the world, although the British are ahead of the game in some aspects of the technology. Yesterday on the Politics Show, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne took the opportunity to urge Gordon Brown to do what it takes to ensure this investment goes ahead.
You might think this would be a political no-brainer. Why on earth wouldn’t any politician wanting low-carbon energy back this technology? Well one reason is the expense of such projects, and at the liaison committee last week Tony Blair (while praising Peterhead) said that the subsidy was the reason the government hadn’t decided to back Peterhead yet. But in fact the pound of flesh BP are asking for (and George Osborne seems happy to provide) is something rather more complicated. At the moment the power companies are compelled by the government to meet a ‘Renewables Obligation’ – in effect, to buy a certain amount of their energy from expensive sources like wind power. BP say that if they are to build their plant at Peterhead, they need to be sure there will be a market for its product (which is, not surprisingly, more expensive than power produced where the CO2 is simply pumped into the air). So they want energy produced by carbon capture and storage to be included in the Renewables Obligation. That way, power companies would have an incentive to buy it. The only trouble is, this one plant at Peterhead will produce 475MW – as much as all the wind turbines in Britain put together. So who will buy the wind-generated energy, if the power companies have already met their Renewables Obligation from Peterhead?
Of course the government could simply raise the Renewables Obligation at the same time, and over time they certainly will, but this is not without cost – it means higher fuel bills, and more impoverished pensioners struggling to heat their homes. Carbon Capture Storage is still energy from fossil fuels, which are still finite, and still running out under the North Sea. And one hopes a Labour government would think twice before allowing BP and other oil companies – hitherto the villains of the story - to pitch their tent all over the renewables’ ground, crowding them out of the market painstakingly created for them. It seems superficially attractive, which is obviously good enough for superficial opposition politicians: but sooner or later they are going to have to face the fact that you can’t cloak yourself in greenery without having to face tough and unpopular choices.
In total Africa is likely to get something in the region of $5bn (£2.6bn) in 'soft loans' and grants from Chinese government over the next few years. On the face of it this sounds a fantastic deal for the continent but the reality is that such loans may end up doing more harm than good. Massive loans like these could well plunge some African countries back into debt and undermine the West's efforts to promote good governance on the continent.
This is why Hilary Benn is right when he argues that China's offer of cheap loans to African governments will risk driving back into debt countries that have only just benefited from debt relief. Both Christian Aid and the Financial Times agree with Benn's stance. The FT argues that: China's policy in Africa is not an alternative to neo-liberalism. Beijing is intent on securing raw materials and commodities to fuel its own booming economy, and on finding new markets for Chinese exports. That sounds very like the past strategy of western colonial powers."
The sad consequence is that if the Chinese continue to offer no-questions-asked loans, many US and European banks will inevitably think again about linking loans to good governance and other conditions. Who benefits then?
Nick Cohen's controversial polemic What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way has reignited the debate about the rights and the wrongs of the Iraq war. In an earlier post I exposed ten lies about the conflict which have shaped anti-war sentiment. I now go further and set out a more comprehensive point-by point case for the war which to my knowledge is fairly unique amongst all the material that's been produced on this issue. I do so because the self-righteous opponents of the war continue to insist that there can be no good argument for the war. Also I believe that the full weight of the pro-war argument has largely gone by default.
Such has been the success of the anti-war lobby in claiming the moral high ground for their views that there are now few on the left who are prepared to challenge them over the whole range of their propoganda. Even Nick Cohen provides only a very narrow justification for the war (the desirability of over-throwing an evil dictator and standing by the Iraqi victims of the insurgency), thereby conceding much valuable territory regarding the other equally valid reasons for the war.
Here then, in chronological order, are no less than 22 reasons why progressives should stand up against the prevailing opinion of the liberal-left on this issue, particularly at a time when their mindset threatens to undermine the chances of Labour winning the next election.
1. The second Gulf war of 2003 followed the first Gulf war of 1991 which resulted directly from Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
2. Instead of over-throwing Saddam at that time, the allies gave way to liberal sentiment and left him in power on the basis that he would never be in a position to threaten neighbouring countries again.
3. The terms of the 1991 cease-fire (not a peace settlement, by the way) forbade Iraq from developing WMD.
4. To that end a UN inspection regime was imposed by resolution 687 and several related resolutions, non-compliance with which would represent a breach of the cease-fire.
5. Several years passed during which UN inspections were continually being thwarted.
6. In 1998 Iraq ceased all cooperation with the United Nations and economic sanctions and no-fly zones were imposed.
7. Then came 9/11 which underlined the world-wide terrorist threat and highlighted how failing anti-West states could be used as sanctuaries and attack bases for jihadists.
8. 9/11 also pointed up the dangers of UNDER-reacting to intelligence information.
9 The intelligence was showing that Saddam still possessed WMD and was continuing with his WMD programme, despite the terms of the cease-fire and related UN resolutions.
10. The UN inspectors, most governments, every intelligence agency in the world, and even Saddam's own generals were convinced that these weapons still existed and represented a threat, either directly through Saddam or indirectly if they were to fall into the hands of Al-qaeda. In a post-war interview with the Iraq Survey Group Saddam admitted that he was trying to give the impression that he had WMD for deterrent purposes.
11. If there were any doubts about the intelligence the feeling after 9/11 was probably that it was safer not to take any chances and that anyway why should a tyrant like Saddam be given the benefit of that doubt, particularly if it provided a legitimate reason for getting rid of him?
12. After being given every opportunity to comply with the UN resolutions (over a considerable period) Saddam rejected the final demand under resolution 1441 (passed unanimously in November 2002) which called for "an accurate, full and final disclosure of Iraq's WMD's and of all aspects of its WMD programme", and which encompassed presenting evidence that WMD stocks had been destroyed. Opinions differed amongst eminent international lawyers on whether a second resolution was needed for military action. Such differences are quite common in international law since very little is clear-cut in this fairly new and arcane area of the law.
14 To argue that the war was DEFINITELY illegal is not therefore defensible whereas the Prime Minister's parliamentary answer (March 17, 2003) putting the legal case for the war is legally defensible.
15. The ensuing invasion presented an opportunity for (a) finally dealing with the WMD threat perceived at that time (b) removing a tyrannical dictator (c) neutralising Iraq as a potential base for world-wide terrorism (d) demonstrating that the international community could not be defied on such vital issues (e) allowing US troops to be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia and its holy places (which up to that point was one of AL-qaeda's main recruiting causes) and (f) allowing progress to be made towards a Middle East settlement (Saddam was offering 50,000 dollars for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers!).
16. Blair's dilemma was, therefore, this. To go into Iraq meant war with all its terrible consequences. But not going into Iraq meant Saddam defying the international community and literally getting away with murder thus setting an example to other dictators and enemies of democracy. It also meant Saddam proceeding with his WMD programme to a point where he might become invulnerable, possibly passing WMD on to the jihadists, continuing his repression of his muslim population, and continuing to undermine a Middle East peace settlement. Finally the need to keep US troops in Saudi Arabia would continueto give AL-qaeda a cause-celebre regarding the holy places. In other words he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't.
17 In coming down in favour of the war Blair probably saw this as the lesser of the evils and as the chance to act as a restraining influence on Bush in a way that those opposing the war were not able to do..
18 Far from the invasion being anti-Islamic, the (Islamic) Kurds, anti-Saddam Sunnis and the Shias rejoiced at being liberated from Saddam's tyranny (even now despite the post-war mayhem a recent poll has shown that over 60% of the population believe that overthrowing Saddam was worth the hardship entailed, 75% of the Shias and 81% of the Kurds).
19. Yes, terrible mistakes were made in the post-war period (as in any war). Amongst these was underestimating the sheer depravity of an enemy which seems to be prepared to destroy the country and slaughter its people rather than to see it progress under a democratically elected government.
20 Iraq is NOT under occupation. The occupation was ended in 2004 under UN Security Council Resolution 1546 when the interim Iraqi government took power. Coalition troops have been mandated by the UN to keep the peace. The US government is pledged to comply with a UN resolution requiring them to leave if requested by the Iraqi government.
21. Millions of Iraqis risked death to elect their government. Their government therefore has a greater legitimacy than almost any other government in the world!
22. That government wants our troops to stay as long as it takes to do the job. To cut and run now would be one of the most ignoble acts in our history.
From this perspective then there is no betrayal of what the Labour Party and the liberal-left are supposed to stand for. Quite the opposite. Here we have a courageous Labour leader trying, against all the odds, to uphold the principles of democracy, social justice, humanitarianism, and international solidarity which the Labour Party was founded to promote. To be sure, there is a downside. But those who constantly dwell on these negative aspects without putting them into the above context are simply giving comfort to one of the most despicable enemies we have faced, thereby stiffening their resistance in the belief that western public opinion does not have the stomach for the fight and that one more spate of high-profile suicide bombings will precipitate demands to bring home the troops and thus bring them victory.
Over to you.
Tories changing their minds is nothing new - particularly under David Cameron's leadership - but to be in favour of ID cards one day and opposed to them the next smacks of ... opportunism.
In the run up to the 2005 election we were told:
"Sources within the Conservative Party told the BBC Michael Howard has always been in favour of ID cards, and tried to introduce them when he was Home Secretary."
Today we are told:
"The Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention to cancel the ID cards project immediately on our being elected to government."
Why exactly?
I have always had my doubts about ID cards - mainly centred on the pragmatic aspects and not the principle. As far as I can see the planned cards will only contain basic identification information including the name, address, gender, date of birth and a photo of the holder - not unlike many Storecards that millions of people in Britain already have.
The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern world. Biometrics give us the chance to have secure identity and the bulk of the ID cards' cost will have to be spent on the new biometric passports in any event.
It is also the case that a national identity system will have direct benefits in making our borders more secure and countering illegal immigration.
ID cards should be made compulsory for all non-EU foreign nationals looking for work, this will enable us, for the first time, to check accurately those coming into our country, their eligibility to work, for free hospital treatment or to claim benefits.
|
|
