Category: Politics

Why I intend to vote for Ken Livingstone

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Ken Livingstone courtesy of WikipediaThe issue that affects me most on a day-to-day basis that falls within the Mayor’s power is transport. It is my experience that transport – mainly the buses – has improved. There are more buses; they are new and clean; night provision has improved; and there are more routes.1 The Oyster card has worked brilliantly, the only opposition to it coming from some mainline train operators; apart from being quicker to use, it offers good value, particularly considering daily rate capping.

Beyond that, there is a vision for London’s transport; Crossrail, the Croydon tram, the cross-river tram, support for cycling & walking and the aforementioned Oyster card are examples of a decent, integrated multimodal transport system. London Overgrouns, though, has to be one of the best things to happen to transport in London for some time. When the project is complete, the London Borough of Hackney will actually have tube stattions, for one thing, but it is also a remarkably effective way of loadsharing as the first step towards an orbirail system. By highlighting on the map the existence of these lines and shifting from a timetable to metro system, ridership and accesibility is increased with minimal laying down of track.2

The congestion charge was incredibly controversial when it was brought in; it has been so successful that even Mr Johnson talks in abstract terms of reform and efficiency but not of scrapping it. Again, Mr Livingstone had a positive vision for London that he offered to London and implemented successfully before standing on his record.

The next thing that concerns me is housing. Whatever protestations Boris Johnson may make, boroughs controlled by his party do worst in terms of building affordable housing. Wandsworth successfully built three units in 2007. Where Messrs Johnson and Paddick say they wish to cooperate with the boroughs, Mr Livingstone is rather more in touch with reality by looking at how the boroughs actually behave.

A large reason for me for voting for Ken is ‘equalities’. That covers a multitude of different issues – race, disability, gender, sexuality, religion, income &c. – but it is essentially the answer to the question “what kind of city do I want to live in?” The answer, for me, is one where I can do what I want so long as it doesn’t stop anyone else doing what they want and where anyone else can do what they want so long as they don’t stop me doing what I want. That, after some philosophical studies at LSE, is the best definition of freedom I’ve come up with. It requires not just the absence of racism or the silence of homophobes, but an active recognition that diversity is needed for London to continue as a preeminent cultural and financial centre. It requires, beyond that, an acceptance that diversity is good in and of itself. It also requires practical support for people at the bottom of the pile; the Mayor’s steps to address transport poverty suggest to me that he has a good grasp of what’s going on.

Much of the criticism of Ken, including the Despatches programme, falls, I think, into two categories; criticism of the LA and criticism of the office of the mayor. In the first instance, it refers to the failure of AMs to push their work locally – local papers, groups and so on. Quite a lot of the blame I direct at those AMs who have two full-time jobs. The other criticism is effectively that the Mayor doesn’t have enough power, and so can’t tackle issues like education and waste. I have strong sympathies with both these arguments, as does Mr Livingstone with the second, but they are not the subject of the upcoming election. The irony is that the first criticism would mean a return to the GLC and the second means the same and shows that the Mayor has been effective in persuading people to work together.

The GLA has other competences – fire, development, crime, improving deprived areas, the environment and so on. I may well return to them in future; the above are my, positive reasons for voting first preference for Ken Livingstone.

xD.

1 – the bendy bus and Routemaster are red herrings; there aren’t many
2 – objections around privatisation don’t hold up as the contracts can be unwound and there is no transfer of ownership

Stop the War Coalition and Channel Four

Posted on by David Landon Cole

A group has been set up on Facebook called (in capitals, so it must be important) ‘Vote Stop the War Coalition for Channel 4 News Award’. It reads rather like the headlines of spam emails and the content of the group is similarly inaccurate. The award in question is ‘most inspiring political personality of the last decade’ and the Stop the War Coalition are not (repeat: not) up for the award.

Stop the War Coalition logo‘Anti-Iraq war protestors’ are up there along with Tony Blair, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness, Ken Livingstone, Alex Salmond and the Countryside Alliance. Have a look on the Channel Four website. The fact that the award goes to a rather nebulous group of people rather than one of the organisations behind the protests is interesting. It suggests that the brand identification of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) is negligible and Channel Four have to copy Time Magazine‘s ‘person of the year 2006’1 in going for a non-entity. This is rather surprising, given that the Stop the War Coalition’s logo is really rather good – easy to remember, easy to identify and easy to reproduce – and its message was supported on a grand scale.

Why, then, has the StWC declined from public view?

Part of the answer is in a previous post of mine:

If the Stop the War Coalition was going to continue as a meaningful force, it needed to attract and retain the soggy left of the ‘Various People Against Nasty Things’ variety. Providing placards that said ‘Victory to the Resistance’ was, at risk of being controversial, not the best way of building a broad coalition. It was a very good way of alienating the people who don’t consider the Socialist Worker newspaper to be some of Fleet Street’s finest editing and putting the few remainders a short step from carrying SWP banners.

although now I would add ‘We are all Hizbullah’ to ‘Victory to the Resistance’. In short, the aim was not to build a mass movement, but to increase the number of members of the SWP, StWC and RESPECT. If the hitrate for long term, useful members was (say) one in a thousand, that would still have yielded two thousand members from the Day X march alone. It made sense to the SWP; given that they believe we are in a permanent arms economy anyway, the war going ahead or not would have been largely immaterial.
Equally, the StWC didn’t represent all of the anti-war movement; it was one of three organisations, the others being CND and MAB, that called the protest. A lot of the people who opposed the war and marched under the StWC’s roundel never felt any particular attachment to it as the representations made by Lindsay German et al. never really resonated with the Chelsea tractor drivers. The messages were about imperialism, when what people felt was either that Britain was a client state or that it was just a wrong decision, badly taken. Imperialism – the desire to cow the Iraqi people – didn’t enter into most people’s opposition because they didn’t believe it to be so.

I am not sure of this point, so forgive me if sounds a bit strangled, but the StWC also sought to forge links with the Muslim communities in the UK. The questions there are which Muslim communities? and who’s linking to them?. Had the StWC really been about preventing a racist backlash in response to the Iraq war, it would have done a lot more to bring groups together. It didn’t, the evidence being the quite common anti-Muslim sentiment we see expressed in the press. I’m not blaming StWC for racism, but I am saying that they failed to do as much as they could have done because they were more interested in building a political movement that wasn’t there to be built.

There was never single set of ideas behind the brand; in essence, there never was a brand. The StWC had an organisational role that it could have used to advance political knowledge in the UK. It squandered the opportunity so that, a few years later, all people remember is that a lot of people were quite annoyed about …something.

There is, at the time of writing, no mention of the award nomination on the Stop the War Coalition website.

xD.

1 – I’m thinking of including ‘Time person of the year 2006’ on my CV.

Political party funding

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Over at Liberal Conspiracy, Sunny asks four questions.

1) Is Labour still the vehicle for liberal-left ideals?
2) Or is that only because it is in power?
3) What should be the future for party financing?
4) How can any grass-roots liberal-left movement have impact?

Here are my answers.

1. Is Labour still the vehicle for liberal-left ideals?

Yes. It has the history, the recognition and the systems in place. If we look at one of the alternatives that has been mooted on LC, the
Green Party, we see that it is only starting to make serious headway in electoral terms and that it continues to struggle with finding a
consolidated public voice.

Equally, the emotional attachment to Labour for many people is strong. Some people have the opposite emotion, and would quite happily go to a
Respect or SWP, while some would go for an Orange Book flavour of LibDem. There can be no doubt that trying to change vehicle would lead
to the liberal/left going in lots of different directions and giving the Tories almost free rein.

It does not mean that it cannot be the only body, but the single issue campaigns that I suspect many of us identify with stand a better chance of having effect with a single party to promote them at Parliament.

2. Or is that only because it is in power?

The Government is starting ? just starting ? to give the impression of being in Government but not in power. However, devolution to Wales,
Scotland, Northern Ireland and London, and to a lesser extent local councils, means there are other things for which to fight. I would say
that it is a lot easier to make changes when in power than when out of power. Even if Labour were out of power at Westminster, it would remain the best chance of regaining it.

3. What should be the future for party financing?

I am not an expert on the law, but I’ll give some thoughts; they largely follow on from Hayden Phillips’ report.

Firstly, there must be a hard cap on expenditure; donations are a trickier issue, but the arms race that drives the search for donations
could be limited and so make concentrating on a strategy of more, smaller donors more attractive. Labour would like to see less corporate donations to the Tories, and the Tories less to Labour from the Unions. As these are red lines that the parties won’t cross, it seems to me that the funding issue is only going to move slowly and with tinkering at the edges; expenditure is a different matter.

Secondly, if there is to be further state funding, it must be on a capped, donation-matched basis. I remain very dubious about the effect
that state funding has on preventing political parties dying out and being formed.

Thirdly, spending outside of elections must be included in a cap. It is too easy to saturate an area before a Parliament is dissolved.

Fourthly, the parties must realise that they are going to have to change their advertising strategies and see that they will not have
the financial wherewithal to run campaigns like a commercial organisation would. This means less money on billboards and more on
supporting local parties to go door-to-door.1

I was Treasurer of my CLP for two years and had to report certain donations if they fell above a given value. It is a time-consuming job
and one consideration must be for any changes to be practicably implementable by volunteers.

Ultimately, it must be connected to a cultural change in campaigning for it to have effect.

4. How can any grass-roots liberal-left movement have impact?

The grass-roots liberal-left movement should be the Labour Party. I think there is a degree of putting the cart before the horse on this
one. The question is one of engagement; how does the Labour Party get more people to give small amounts of money? I would say that
The Labour Party probably can’t, but that the Anytown Constituency Labour Party can. Achieving this requires members of the
Labour movement – the Party, the Co-Op movement, the Unions – to turn up to meetings, to take an interest in internal party democracy and to show that there is a ‘market’ for this. It also requires people nearer the top of the Labour Party (and here I’m thinking of the elder
statespeople of the PLP) to convey both the message and the weight behind the message.

A brief note; over at Liberal Conspiracy, there is mention of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act. It has only a few lessons
for the UK because candidates rather than parties attract funding in the US; because of the winner-takes-most effect of the presidential
system; and because of the Supreme Court’s ability to overrule decisions made by the Congress. There is also greater public acceptance of large donations. The main thing to learn, as McCain said at the time, is that it is not possible to ever come up with a definitive set of laws as people are always looking for loopholes. Vigilance and adaptability are key.

xD.

1 – I think measures to reduce the distortion towards marginal seats would be useful, but that is a different kettle of sustainably-caught fish.

The Oxford Union, a Racist and a Holocaust Denier

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The Oxford Union is a private debating society; only members can attend its proceedings. Its appeal for speakers is in being able to influence some of the top minds in the UK and the world and, of course, being recognised as worthy of such an opportunity. It does not matter a hoot whether people outside the intelligentsia have heard of it, particularly as it is frequently confused with OUSU, the Students’ Union, and that its finances are secure thanks to the formation of the Oxford Literary and Debating Union Trust.

The invitation to Nick Griffin and David Irving were not ever about free speech; they were about raising publicity for the current administration of the society. There was no facility for Messrs Griffin and Irving’s comments to be disseminated; consideration was not given to those who would speak against this pair of pukes – viz. an email from Luke Tryl of October 15th – beforehand.

Equally, Griffin and Irving are the worst people to choose to argue for freedom of speech; not because of their repulsive politics, but because they are too easily open to arguments against the person rather than the arguments they propose. Furthermore, they well know that few people at the Oxford Union will give two hoots for anything that a thug of a politician and a poor historian will say; however, the boon to the BNP and its fellow travellers will, I think, be substantial. If the Oxford Union wanted to have an informative debate for its members on freedom of speech, I would have thought that John Gray, Inayat Bunglawala and Ayaan Hirsi Ali would have been better speakers; controversy for its own sake is a poor substitute for radical thought and honest learning.

I said at the beginning of this post that the invitation was about publicity, not free speech. Perhaps that is unfair, and I should attribute it to incompetence rather than malice. Either way, I hope that Mr Tryl, who appears to have a nascent political career, takes a step back to consider the effects that the actions he and his associates have undertaken will have. The message that will be taken away from this is that a bad politician and a bad historian are people who are worth listening to.

Oxford Councillor Antonia Bance has one take on it; Skuds has a rather different one.

xD.

Letter to the Guardian

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I am delighted to have had a letter published in today’s Guardian; it’s the second one down on this page. It reads

Your article (It was murder: the Chávez version of liberator’s death, November 17) neglects the importance of Bolívar’s last days to any interpretation of his impact on Latin America. Reviled by the educated classes and with just a few friends who remained loyal, Bolívar was leaving for Europe when he died. He considered himself a failure, believing that “those who have served the cause of the revolution have ploughed the sea”.
David Cole
London

First published letter. The original article is here.

xD.

Luke Pollard for South West Devon

Posted on by David Landon Cole

My friend Luke Pollard has been selected as Labour’s prospective Parliamentary candidate for South West Devon, standing against the Tory Gary Streeter. I’m delighted that Luke is standing in the county from where he hails. He’s a hard-working candidate with the experience, both professional and campaigning, to make a real difference to the area. His knowledge of all levels of political life will prove, I’m sure, invaluable.

His website is at lukepollard.net.

xD.

Tasteless money-grabbing

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The Tories have failed to prevent an £8.3m bequest to them being overturned on the grounds of mental illness. The details are unimportant; while I feel that it’s unfortunate that the Conservatives felt the need to contest what seems, prima facie, a clear, if tragic, case. It is not, though, the Conservatives that, in this instance, I am accusing of ‘tasteless money-grabbing’; rather, it is the system that forces parties to go after every last penny.

I am no advocate of state funding of parties, but the financial situation of the parties is parlous, opening them to undue influence from single individuals. A good start would be for the parties to stop advertising on billboards. Quite apart from, as Adlai Stevenson put it, that “the idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process”, I’m not sure that it’s effective; the image a party presents is developed over the parliament preceding an election, not in the few short weeks leading up to it. It may even be self-defeating, as people are probably smart enough to realise that if political parties believe they can secure votes with a clever logo or a catchy slogan, they’re probably not going to be doing detailed, community-based policy formulation.

A rather better solution would be for the parties – all parties – to focus on membership. We could all learn a useful lesson from Howard Dean, who, with average donations of less than US$80 in the famously moneyed world of American politics, beat the previous Democratic record for single-quarter donations by US$4.5m (the previous record of US$10.3m having been held since 1995 by one William Jefferson Clinton). Beyond the financial factor, I am of the opinion that one friend saying that they are a member of a party and are voting for it is worth more than a party political broadcast and that a knock at the door – which requires motivated people to do the knocking – is worth more than an election address.

Of course, to do that, you have to show that it’s worth the party member’s while; I’d suggest, for various reasons that we’re all familiar with, that this is not happening at the moment.

xD.

House Resolution 106

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I agree with Ewan Watt that the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Relations Committee should not have recognized the Armenian Genocide as such, but perhaps for slightly different reasons. Ewan is, in foreign policy terms, very much a realist and I do agree that the results of the Committee’s decision have already been profoundly negative – Turkey has summoned its ambassador to Washington back to Ankara for ‘a week or ten days of consultation’ but has stopped short of a recall. With US troops deployed in Iraq, a country that borders Turkey, Turkey’s strategic position and role and the desire not to alienate a country that teeters between West and East or to fuel the continuing problems between Turkey and Armenia – Karabakh and Baku-Ceyhan for instance – it seems like a poor decision.

Nevertheless, fiat justicia ruat coeli stands as a principle; if it is just, I feel it should be done, even though the consequences are uncomfortable, shall we say; to do otherwise is hypocritical and leads to a host of problems in international relations.

I question why the Committee felt the need to address the issue at all. Ewan also identifies the answer – special interest lobbying – but the implications haven’t been thought through. There are many other crimes – some committed by the US – that could be condemned.

More importantly, it is not the role of a Government to decide what history is; there can be no official version without grave risk of a government interfering unjustifiably in the process of discussion and debate. Equally, as Nye Bevan put it, ‘this is my truth; tell me yours’; whether ordained by the state or not, there is no one, true version of history, only arguments that are more or less persuasive. When the arguments are emotionally and geopolitically loaded, officially recognising a term can only cause problems and is, from a state, philosophically invalid.

As a note, I think it is wrong to use a category to encompass the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust; they are both sui generis, IMHO.

The Committee chair, Tom Lantos, put it well in his comments ahead of the vote:

Today we are not considering whether the Armenian people were persecuted and died in huge numbers at the hands of Ottoman troops in the early 20th Century. There is unanimity in the Congress and across the country that these atrocities took place. If the resolution before us stated that fact alone, it would pass unanimously. The controversy lies in whether to make it United States policy at this moment in history to apply a single word – genocide – to encompass this enormous blot on human history.

xD.

The decline and fall of The Independent

Posted on by David Landon Cole

If you consider yourself of the leftwing persuasion and want a high-brow newspaper, you’ll take The Guardian; its opposite number, identifying more firmly with the Tories than Guardianistas do with Labour, would be The Daily Telegraph. At the bottom end of the scale (well, just above The Daily Star) would be The Sun for the right and The Daily Mirror for the Left. The middle-brow for the right can choose between The Daily Mail and The Daily Express, which I know is like choosing between syphilis and cholera.

The middle-brow gap on the left has been filled, it would seem, by the Independent. I hope it does not try to ape the Express or the Mail; there can be good news coverage without being as dry as the FT. As it happens, I agree with Jeremy Paxman about the Indie – “if any paper chooses not to be part of the pack, it’s the Indie”. Although the Indie is not running with the pack, it can still be headed over an unfortunate cliff. I rather suspect that Mr Blair’s attack on the Indie is because of its rather trenchant attacks on the former PM, particularly as it is a non-Tory newspaper. A point that both Blair and Paxman have made is the need to separate hard news reporting, features and opinion. Unfortunately, the Independent frequently puts Robert Fisk on the front page.

Fisk is a serious journalist and one of the few westerners to have had a media interview with Osama bin Laden (in fact, on three occasions, in 93, 96 and 97, which suggests that he’d cottoned on to the man’s importance before the formation of the Bin Laden Issue Station in 96); his writing is engaging, polemical and usually pretty factual. It is, though, his personal account; Fisk is on record as not believing it possible to be objective, and that therefore you should be subjective as a reporter. While it might be very worthy of the feature section and his opinions perfect for the later pages, it should not be at the front of a newspaper.

The perception is made worse amongst bloggers because of the verb ‘to fisk‘; I don’t think it’s entered mainstream usage, though.

The Guardian has been doing very well out of an imagined community built around Comment is Free and it has influence beyond the number of its readers, as does the Telegraph; the Sun has sheer weight of numbers and both it and the Mirror have the advantage of speaking to the perceived bases of the Labour and Tory parties. It is no surprise that I consider the Mail and the Express to be execrable, but not just for their jingoistic, occasionally factless, rabble-rousing ‘news’, but because their journalists are not – in my opinion – as good as those on the Sun or the Mirror; they are stuck in their mindsets and ways with no appreciation for that situation and no desire to leave it1.

It might be possible for the Independent to have more of a magazine feel about it and still have a purpose as a daily newspaper; however, it seems to be going the way of the Mail and the Express with features such as ‘Personality: What makes you the way you are?‘ which has the ominous line:

What kind of personality are you? Take this test to discover the truth.

The truth about my personality? I thought that was why I had a psychiatrist…

That article featured not in the magazine or review, but in the run-of-paper. My objection – and I’m rather sad about this, because the Independent used to be my newspaper of choice – is that you are not going to get a serious psychological analysis from a daily newspaper that costs seventy pence and that people who look for serious psychological analysis from a seventy pence daily newspaper are not going to give you the weight of the Guardian, particularly when the market is cornered by the Express and the Mail.

xD.

1 – Yes, Melanie Phillips. Having changed once your political position does not mean you will change again. I’ve heard it said that journos for the Sun are the best in the business and grasp stories more quickly than anyone else. That may be so; however, it seems to me (in my admittedly limited experience) that they grasp the story sufficiently for them to be able to write a story on it – the in-depth knowledge is not there and their news reporting is not factual. Equally, a newspaper is not just the factual reporting. Compare the comment and analysis in a tabloid to that in a broadsheet; compare the letters pages.

PS: An interesting link: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060817macdonald/

The myth of victims’ rights

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Many blog inches have gone to discussing the case of Learco Chindamo, the murderer of Philip Lawrence. The opposition to Chindamo’s being able to stay in the UK could be charitably described as shrill. Kris Stoke Newington‘s entire post reads

Hang on. This killer does not have a British passport and because of his murder conviction can never get one, yet somehow it is his “human right” to remain in the UK at the end of his sentence?!

It is all a little bit like The Daily Mail. Fortunately, the Ministry of Truth has pointed out some of the Mail‘s, ahem, oversights. Iain Dale asks a simple question in response to the Human Rights Act being cited in allowing Chindamo to remain in the UK – “What about THEIR human rights?” – what about the human rights of the family of the victim, Philip Lawrence.

There is an immediate and very strong answer from none other than Tim Worstall:

[H]e [Chindamo] won an argument under the Human Rights Act that he was entitled to respect for a family life and that removal in his case would be disproportionate. But this was secondary to his case under EU law. Under articles 27 and 28 of the EU Citizens Directive 2004, which took effect last year, an EU citizen can be expelled only on grounds of public policy, public security or public health.

So all the criticism of the Human Rights Act in this case is misplaced.

Nevertheless, people are attacking the Act more and more often and the ghastly spectre of victims’ rights has started to rear its head. There are some things that should be called victims’ rights; amongst these are effective investigation by the police, speedy resolution of the case, support from the counselling part of the police, financial compensation and keeping the media at arms’ length; not all of these apply in every case, and there may be more.

Victims do not, IMHO, have rights against the person who committed a crime and their rights to appropriate treatment and sensitivity certainly do not extend to the penal process. This is for three reasons.

Rights are not zero-sum; that is to say, there is no logical necessity for the duty of care that state owes a victim of crime resulting in that person having rights against the criminal. Put another way, we do not demand ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ or ‘a lifetime of vengeance for a life cut short’.

Secondly, victims are not special. In the case of Chindamo, I fail to see, if he is such an unpleasant character (which I dispute based on the evidence available) why I should be pleased that the problem is removed to Italy. I do not see why, judicially, a second crime on a person should be feared any more than a first crime on second else.

Thirdly, they lead to unacceptable variations in the law. If someone were to steal a Snoopy stuffed toy, you might say that it was a minor offence. If someone were to steal my Snoopy stuffed toy – my companion since birth – I would be devastated and probably be demanding blood. If I, or I think any person other than a dessicated calculating machine, were the victim of crime, they would immediately become biased to such a point that they could not make a neutral decision; they are partial.

xD.