Paul Evans

On the subject of 'methodological agnosticism' (my current religion), I saw this a while ago:

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence." - Charles Bukowski

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity"

"Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?"

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” 

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them." Laurence J. Peter

"..you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into” (source unknown).…

 “…when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” (J.M. Keynes)

There's a good post over on LabourList by Owen ('Chavs') Jones about the need for a new, two-pronged, class politics in Britain - one in which the yawning material gap in incomes isn't disentangled from the crisis of representation.

I say that it's a good post because it raises essentially the right questions, and that these fundamental concerns don't seem to be on the table almost anywhere on the left with as much clarity.

Where I substantially disagree with him is that I think he underestimates the capacity, suitability or willingness of trades unions to act as the agents for the change he's calling for. I think the following points are worth making:

1. The problem of managerialism is roundly ignored by the left
I'd characterise a lot of the problems that Jones identifies very differently. In the 19th Century, Bagehot painted an 'English Constitution' in which the dignified elements of the state enabled the efficient bits to do their work. It's slightly worrying, reading Bagehot, that his view appears to be somewhat rosy today after a century-and-a-half of democratic reform. At least most of the executive power was actually in the hands of the people who were supposed to exercise it when Bagehot was writing.

Today, even our governing Oxbridge caste of career-politicians appear to be more dignified than efficient. The real business is being done by managers, mostly in the private sector. It used to be the case that managers were the servants of private shareholders or ministers, depending upon which sector you were looking at. That fact that there aren't working class voices in Parliament isn't actually the biggest problem.

Today, society is largely ordered to facilitate government by - and for - managers. Public policy is entirely shaped by the consultariat who have replaced the semi-accountable Whitehall mandarins. PLCs are, similarly, no longer shoveling value at shareholders but at their managers.

It is managers who gauge the value of talent, who aim to replace what professions did with their systems, and who set the wages at all levels of society. The need to replace politicians and professionals with managers drove the privatisation-lite of the New Labour years and has continued uninterrupted into the direction of The Coalition.

I've rarely met anyone on the left who isn't persuaded by this explanation for what Chris Dillow calls The End of Politics, once it is put to them. But I've also very rarely met anyone on the left who is even aware of this diagnosis.

2. We need to be clearer on why the link between wealth inequality and unequal representation exists
Crosslandite social democrats were always 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich - as long as they pay their taxes.' Peter Mandelson was only putting provocative parentheses around Crossland's view that managed capitalist growth would reduce inequality. And - as far as it goes - this could be a respectable argument if the people making it were not also intensely relaxed about the way that some individuals exercise a great deal more power than others at the ballot box.

If you can buy your way into the political process in order to exempt yourself from the process of redistribution, then all of this intense relaxation becomes toxic. If you can do so to change the direction of redistribution - corporate welfare - then it is even more poisonous. And this is often what happened with new Labour in power, culminating in the banker's bailouts - an unparalleled act of larceny.

3. The democratic problem is more straightforward than most people say it is
There's a touch of the Emperor's New Clothes around discussions of democracy. It's a point so obvious to make that no-one does so for fear of being rude. Let's put this crudely. My vote should be no weaker or greater than anyone else's.

If you fund political parties in a way that doesn't involve safeguards, this ceases to be the case. If you use your media ownership to bully regulators and politicians in a way that serves your material interests, again, this isn't the case.

If the private sector is at all of the top-table seats (and the public interest is largely unrepresented) in a parliamentary process about something as central to our politics as healthcare, then you have an unprecedented crisis in British democracy. (Update: Here's the background to the 'Reform' think-tank - it's funding and it's role in health service policymaking)

If, in a more participative and direct democracy (and we're definitely heading in that direction), you have convening power or the capacity to shape the marketplace of ideas, then our votes are going to become even less equal.

4. Unions should help - but probably won't
Jones is right; Trades Unionism should be the key to addressing the diversity of representation in the way that it did in helping to found the Labour Representation Committee back in the day. Remember, this was really the only uniting principle that brought Labour into being. We weren't socialists, mutualists, syndicalists, feminists, fabianists, rationalists or communists. We were primarily concerned with addressing the crisis of representation - where universal male suffrage had failed to result in working class MPs.


Labour was really just a jump-together club of all of those '-isms' - they all thought that their cause would be strengthened by more working men being in parliament.

I'd suggest that Jones massively underestimates the degree to which Unions need to change to facilitate this though. The smaller unions still promote a lot of the civil society ethos that writers like John Dewey saw as being essential to democracy (the 'holding elections does not a democracy make' argument), but the larger unions only seem to grow by acquisition and have very little by way of democratic legitimacy in the way that they conduct their business any more.

The arguments about managerialism that I outlined earlier in this post are ones that should have a massive appeal to a Trades Union movement that is still thinking. It's an argument that I've never heard raised when the brothers meet.


Owen Jones is right: This crisis of representation should be a much greater cause for alarm than it is. I'd suggest that it also needs to be understood more - and that the obvious agents for change (the Unions) need to travel a good deal further than I think they are prepared to go.

5. Let's not underestimate how important The Labour Party is either
I won't bore on about this last point too much - It's such a regular staple here. But in summary, lefties need to drop the idea that they first need to capture the Labour Party, then win an election and then implement Project Utopia. Right wingers have never made this mistake about the Conservative Party.

Alex Hilton has an understandable whine about Ed Miliband's Labour Party (though I can't see why his complaints didn't equally apply to pervious iterations of the party). Hopi Sen answers him and it looks like two bald men fighting over a comb.

Labour should be a boring party that chases votes around the centre ground. The job of the left is to drag that centre-ground leftwards. The big unions that finance Labour waste so much money paying for office space when they could be running campaigns that no politician can ignore.

I've spent a lot of the weekend going through Nick Cohen's 'You Can't Read This Book' - I'd get a copy if I were you.

I'm even more of a spectator than a participant on the Scottish independence debate than I am on most things. All I have is questons.

Firstly, as a social democrat, I'm very keen on a one-club approach to all political questions. I'd generally not ask "what do I think should happen?", but instead, "what would a good democracy do?"

I'm concious that this is an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world, but I'm more interested in working out what the best way of making decisions is than in what decisions we should make. I'm always looking for this formula;

• Decision-making in the interests of everyone, not just sectional interests (with protection of minorities provided by a 'constitution' of some kind)
• Where sectional interests happen at the expense of others, there is compensation
• Decision-making that is optimised to maximise the quality of those decisions
• As many people as possible involved in those decisions - as long as we can avoid self-interested outcomes at the expense of those who don't have the capacity to participate
• Geographic closeness to the seat of decision-making

"[Beveridge] wanted a responsible government taking determined action to create work, but a responsible workforce too. He would have wanted reform that was tough-minded, and asked everyone to work hard to find a job. He would have worried about the ways that his system had skewed social behaviour because he intended benefits to help people who had their earning power interrupted because of illness, industrial injury or the capriciousness of the trade cycle. He never foresaw unearned support as desirable. 

.... But beyond this, "something for something" means reward for those who are desperately trying to do the right thing, saving for the future and trying to build a stable, secure home. Right now, these families are offered too little reward and incentive – in social housing and long-term savings – for the kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society."

"They [the voters] want to hear a clear voice of condemnation when people terrorise our streets and not hear it suffixed with ‘understanding’ and ‘complexity’. They can’t understand why those on out-of-work benefits – excluding the disabled and the retired – get a pay rise more than the average worker. When they turn to Labour, they want to hear a credible and clear line. Too often they experience a haze."

Two recent posts from Chris Dillow - one on the irrelevance of politicians and another on the reluctance of politicians to make the robust moral decisions deserve another look, and not just because they're mostly right.

In both cases, they seem to be based upon the settled view of what politicians should be, rather than the principled description of what they could - and should - be.

In both cases, Chris doesn't start from the most important observation here: Politicians have rivals. Nominally, parliaments are sovereign (with lots of global caveats - here's ours). Nominally, they derive that sovereignty from us - 'nothing about us without us.'

Yet, I doubt if anyone would try to push the fiction that we all have equal influence over our Parliaments. I don't mean the simple aggregate of direct democracy either. As that line from The Putney Debates put it, "the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live" should expect his arguments to weigh as heavily with his MP as "the greatest hee".

Try it yourself. Knock up a few hundred words on Utilitarianism, the oppression of minorities, how parliaments should make policy and the question of who elected politicians should represent.

It's a surprisingly uncomplicated essay to write. Yet no-one would look at most democracies and say that this good balance isn't increasingly disfigured by burgeoning populism or distorted beyond recognition by pressure groups, bureaucratic interests or media owners.

There are clear parallels here with my last post here on the erosion of justice.

We knock politicians for their failure to regulate the finance sector, but I'd like to read the counterfactual history of Western democracies in which parliaments would have got away with calling time on that particular party. For all of my lack of understanding of the climate change debate, I suspect we'd be able to say the same about that one too.

If someone were to come before a court and was demonstrably incapable of making good decisions in their own interests because they had fallen under the influence of a bully, the court would appoint a someone with the independence to make those decisions. New Labour made an early admission of this kind when it make the Bank of England independent and Osborne has created his own ersatz version with the Office for Budget Responsibility.

There is nothing anti-democratic about a Parliament doing the same thing in other spheres - quite the opposite. The only point at which Parliament deserts its duties when it replaces a legitimacy-lite Prime Minster with a technocrat (and in our centralised modern states, that is all that has been happening) and then only gives them one task - to solve the problem that the bully has helped to create.

I'd go further. The most democratic thing a Parliament can do is to appoint someone who can make the decisions that they would make if they weren't under unbearable coercion.

This is not a defence of the current rise of technocrats though. Their mandate appears to be to solve the current crisis and then to restore the power relations that created it in the first place. If technocrats fail to create a long-term challenge to the forces that rival Parliaments, then they're no better than our increasingly centralised and presidential political leaders. But I don't suppose they're any worse than them either.

Many of the anti-racists who have demanded an uncompromising response to the allegations of racism against John Terry and Luis Suarez will come to regret getting what they've asked for. This controversy also has implications for people with little interest in football.



I'm not sure we'll ever see all of the evidence related to these incidents, but I'm fairly certain that neither were simply one-way racial slurs. In both cases, we've seen clumsy claims in mitigation against a backdrop of an opaque process. The reputation of professional football, it seems, requires the hearings to be conducted in private while the sentences get handed down in public.

With the facts that we have, it's hard to understand why Liverpool FC are going to such lengths to demonstrate solidarity with Suarez. This may partly be because we don't have all the facts and Liverpool players have some that we don't.

I'm not going to make the case that the sentences that have/will be handed out are harsh or disproportionate. I can't know that. But I'm fairly sure that, in another workplace, this would be done differently. The result may have been more lenient or more harsh, but it's fairly clear that it'd be different.

The contrast with the (admittedly botched) justice that the alleged killers of Stephen Lawrence will receive is a useful comparison here, on the day that the judge started summing up with a stout defence of the fair trail.

Here's my problem with this: High-profile people now appear to have been given a semi-constitutional status. Transactions that they're involved in have to combine an institution-saving opaqueness with the requirement to set an example.

It's more important that justice is seen to be done than that it's actually done. There's a parallel here in the way that it seems to be the settled view of almost everyone - even at the Leveson Enquiry - that someone who puts themselves in the public eye then loses certain privacy privileges.

It seems that justice - in the cases of people in the public eye - seems to be based upon what sentence the public will understand as being appropriate once they've seen a simplified version of events. This applies to footballers and general celebrities. It also applies to politicians, civil servants and other political players. It applies to anyone that newspaper proprietors and editors want it to apply to.

It reflects an increased willingness to pander to the demagogic demands of The Hive Mind. It gives a more mundane expression to some of the observations in Charlie Brooker's very good 'Black Mirror' series (especially the 'National Anthem' episode).

Decisions that affect us all are being made in the same way. Sharon Shoesmith's treatment at the hands of Ed Balls is a notable example. The court of public opinion is expanding its remit and no-one seems to be doing much to counteract this.

With Suarez, Terry and Shoesmith, we got the Dopamine-rush you get from swift justice. Children aren't safer as a result. Allegations of racism are now another disruptive tool that can be gamed wherever a celebrity is involved. 

It's another reason for Chris to conclude that politicians are irrelevant now. Why bother standing for office when unelected people with convening power can decide what decisions you are going to make in advance and then harass you until you make them?

The notion of 'the public interest' seems to have taken on a life of its own. Reversing this won't be easy. But it's possible.

• A European federalist settlement would be a great deal more democratic than the current settlement enjoyed by most - if not all - Europeans
• Monetary union is an accelerant to political union, and therefore, European federalism (although political union and federalism aren't necessarily the same thing)
• There's a cart-horse problem with monetary union - that it can only work in the presence of political union, but political union is unlikely unless it's created by the experience of the Euro. This appears to be what we're seeing, albeit in a hasty and risky form.
• The Euro was implemented very badly. Allowing countries with large black economies to be part of it was potty in the first place (in my defence, I've spent the last decade telling everyone that I know that the Euro is ultimately doomed as long as it includes an unreformed Italy)
• The presence of unreliable, anti-democratic governments like the Italian one within the Euro meant that it was only ever going to be a fiscally conservative union (and I'd add that, from what I can see, the case with Greece is slightly more complicated, but the conclusion is the same). A lack of cohesion makes this inevitable. 
• Britain is a politically conservative place that won't vote for the democratic improvements that a federal Europe would bring. This can be partly explained by it's democratic shortcomings - ones that could be removed by a good federalist settlement. Cart and horse again.
• Britain is, however, one of the most atlanticist forces within the EU and had a strong strategic interest in bringing Eastern European nations into the European sphere of influence. Bringing unequal economies into the EU may be a good move from the viewpoint of national governments seeing strategic alliances, but not good from the Federalist viewpoint. 

I don't normally use this site for anything work-related, but I reckon the readers (if there are any left - it's very quiet these days) are the most likely to know the answer to this:

Here's a quick overview of prominent Labour & Trade Union social media initiatives for a talk I'm giving to TU organisers. I know I've not included 'False Economy' here yet, but are there any others that I've missed? (They are in no particular order btw):

I went to Westminster Skeptics last night to hear Dr Graeme Archer's very entertaining talk about evidence-based policy and the problems that there are with using statistical evidence to inform policymaking decisions.

Through necessity, Graeme skipped though quite a lot of it and I didn't fully follow everything, but broadly speaking, his talk appeared to give a concrete underpinning to a lot of views that I hold already.

Obviously, this is a very good thing. I appeared to have reached the same position by a bayesian process that he says that he has reached as a practicing statistician in the pharmaceuticals industry.

This may have come up after I left (I couldn't stick around for the questions after) but there was one thing that jarred. He seemed to think that an ability to treat statistical evidence to tweak bayesian priors rather than use it as a device by which we wipe previous assumptions out (and replace them with a beleif in whatever the 'evidence' tells us to beleive in) is a trait that is widely found in the political left but not the right (Graeme is a Tory).

A few quibbles:

Firstly, the pre-Thatcher Conservative Party was a good deal more Burkean than they have been since. Paraphrasing Burke very swiftly, he was clearly of the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' view, and that tradition (the Bayesianism of the most powerful sections of society?) needs an overwhelming case to be made before reform is acceptable. This appears to be the political manifestation of small-c conservatism.

Secondly, I think that he would have had a point if he'd argued that New Labour were particularly guilty of gathering evidence that appeared to support some radical-ish managerial approach, and using it to force through Year-Zero type policies, but there's a political context behind that which I will come to shortly.

Thirdly, if you're a big fan of market processes as a way of making decisions, then Graeme's (and my) views are comforting ones. I'm quite happy to sign up to this statement by way of a general creed:

The distributed wisdom of lots of small decisions will usually be a great deal better than less frequent big decisions made as a result of a formalised process. The main brake upon this means of making decisions should be a counterweight from elected bodies that apply distributed moral wisdom 

Has Populism peaked? Probably not. But it may have reached the end of it's beginning.

It's hard to be comfortable about any form of collective punishment, but the Italian people are about to go through a spot of it at the hands of Super Mario. It will take effect as a punishment for picking the wrong government. For allowing the shallow appeal of Berlusconi to trump other considerations, the Italian people have enjoyed a level of economic growth that was only worsted by Zimbabwe and Haiti. And that's only the beginning of a story that may take decades to play out.

It's the demagogic politics of bread and circuses. When a polity is dominated by the politics of purely emotional appeal - and almost nowhere has been immune to it -these democratic shortcomings lead to sub-optimal government. Vote stupid? Pay later!

Berlusconi himself was the protege and beneficiary of previous corrupt Italian governments, and the world is now conspiring to replace him with a technocrat. In Russia, the debased democracy that followed the collapse of communism resulted in a return to the dictatorship-lite of the Putin years.

But in the past week, US Republicans have learned that support from The Tea Party is a two way street that may cost them the Presidency. Let's hope so.

Super Mario's appointment is far from being a cause for celebration. His alleged deal to pull back from breaking up Berlusconi's media holdings is particularly worrying.

This is a crisis that is less rooted in bad economics than the bad democracy that results in bad economics. The EU and the IMF are wrong to allow Italy to duck this bullet and it does not bode well that, everywhere, the symptoms and not the illnesses are being treated.

If I owned a company and you worked for me, and you did something bad to an innocent third party, I'd have to take some responsibility whether I knew about it or not.

I'd deserve the appropriate sentence - a slap on the wrist, a modest fine, and in the worst cases, a short-ish spell inside. As Chris Bryant says of James Murdoch,

"No CEO of a construction firm could have passed the buck in the way you have tried to do. In the end it's your company, your employees, your profits and your responsibility."

So, entrepreneurship is “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control” (source). It's a nice line, and one that sums up a lot of very profitable new tech businesses very nicely.

Reading this post by Gerry Morrissey* we see in News Corp a company that exercises monopolistic muscle and makes £100s of Millions in the UK out of it's ability to beat regulators - not beating competitors.

With Murdoch, it's easy to form judgements like this. Christ, the guy wears his Lex Luthor credentials so proudly on his sleeve where every European liberal can see them. We've spent the last six months screaming at anyone who will listen: "How did you not see this already you thick gits?"

But where Murdoch has adopted Machiavelli's injunction that 'it's better to be feared than loved', the big tech media players have gone the other route. By giving us shiny things that we like, they've been able to escape the grasp of regulators, because to regulate would be to deprive us all of the free-shiny that Apple and Google let us access.

So mp3 players as fantastically designed as the iPod are worth every penny of the £160 that it costs to buy. Why? Partly, because it allows us to listen to music in breach of the licence by which it was originally distributed - and it adds value to it with a cool user interface.

OK, those licences were daft, iniquitous and inflexible. Probably the optimal licencing regime for music would be some pay-per-listen, often funded through collecting companies and cushioned at the pay-point by bundling it into a complementary service (music in pubs shift beer - and hey presto! PRS!).

But two wrongs don't make a right. If I were a musician and you told me you were listening to my latest album on a file-shared mp3, I'd probably want to bite your head off and shit down your neck. And Apple have made $billions from the process that would have culminated in you having a turd poking out of your decapitated corpse.

My lovely shiny Humax box lets me time-shift and ad-skip. I love it. I've not watched an advert on TV for a long time. Thanks Humax! I just hope I don't run into a Channel 4 TV producer, screenwriter or director next time I spill that story or the same experience (head off, defecation etc) would be my just reward.

Humax have made $millions facilitating this process, crucifying the commercial Public Service Broadcasting model. As have TiVO and Sky+. Regulators with backbones would insist upon hardware and ISP levies to ofset this. But - hey! Hands off! Free-shiny!!

Google give us free tools. They're great! Or in the case of the one social media tool that I genuinely loved (Google Reader) it was great - until last week. I won't bore you with this one again, but I think that this issue raises profound questions about corporations that are given regulatory passes on the grounds that they're facilitating innovation.

Google, Apple Facebook give us nice things. There are huge social positives from what Google gives us for no noticeable charge. Like piracy or open data (the downsides of open data are under-discussed IMHO), these are game-changing processes. But because the innovation often results in positive game-changing and helps support important social strides, we give the corporations that make huge profits from them free-passes without treating them like the utilities that they often are.

And we don't acknowledge that these 'free' (at the point of use) services aren't actually free. They're part of a value-chain. And we don't acknowledge that their users have a right to access the data that they give to these services in a useable way. Google have monetised my sharing of data. They may have a strategic reason to change how it works to make more money, but they shouldn't have the right to simply deprive me of my archive.

There are parallels of course. Facebook have occasionally abused our expectations on privacy (and I doubt if most users yet understand the 'if you're not paying for it, you're part of the service being sold' argument. Millions of people may be consenting to things they wouldn't consent to if they understood them fully.

This is an issue that I'd expect journalists and politicians to take more seriously than they do. OK - politicans are crap at acting on issues they don't really understand - they have an excuse here.

But I've really written all of this because I've got into a debate with one quite-good tech/media commentator who seems to think it's alright for 'free' services that occupy monopolistic and incumbency position to suddenly turn to their users and say 'no pay - no play!'. 

It isn't alright. They're not free services. Normally, a company that has monopolistic and incumbency privileges wouldn't be allowed to do this. But because of the free-shiny, Google can. Like Apple and Google do.

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

I don't usually complain about changes to social networking platforms, but I'm incensed about the Google Reader changes - particularly the removal of the 'share' function, the shared items page and the 'note in reader' browser button.I have loads of stuff in there and I use it to feed all kinds of things (including the sidebar of this blog). All gone now.Sign the petition - (ironically, in Google Docs) and, inevitably, there's this:


 

I've seen a few things recently that underline the way that ideological warfare constantly struggles to avoid the kind of conclusions that good democracies reach.

Take Greece, for example. Unless Pete / Alex / Snowflake et al (below) haven't pulled these arguments out of their jacksies, then we have to conclude that Greece has been the butt of one of the most effective ideological assaults any of us have seen in a long time - world opinion being softened up to accept the long-term smashing of an economy to protect what the Occupy movement call the 1%.

It's a warning to us all. Ideological assaults happen. History is rewritten and reality is fabricated to protect and support the beneficiaries of the failures and shortcomings of democracy. Ideological assault seems to me to be something that the left rarely arms itself against, preferring to perfect it's own analysis. It's the equivalent of ignoring the opposition's team sheet and formation before a match.

I've got a few links below (bookmarks for myself as much as anything), but what's my conclusion? It's a lightly-held one, but it seems to me that Europe's problem isn't poor economic management. If the quality of democratic decisionmaking were better in the EU, we'd be able to share the pain of the little PIIGS fairly easily.

Europe's problem is the falling standards of liberal democracy that the EU is prepared to accept. This mess is the result of bad decisions that were forced by the unbridled demands of pressure groups.

Italy is the real problem - it should never have been allowed in the EU (never mind the Eurozone) and it's done plenty in the past decade alone to warrant expulsion (as I argued in one of my earliest posts here). If Italy were a functioning liberal democracy, we wouldn't be worried by the contagion from a Greek default. If Greece were one, it wouldn't be defaulting.

In the cases of Ireland, Greece and Italy to my certain knowledge, we've seen the consequences of a debased democracy - not a fundamentally malfunctioning economy. This is not restricted to those countries either. It's an explanation that fits the whole post-Lehmans crash, and right-wing populist movements such as the tea party have been given free rein to campaign for it's continued existance.

We've seen democracies and corporations distorted in their aims by the overwhelming demands from powerful interests groups and mangers respectively. This is the problem - and the EU's decision to sidestep it (not least with the individual culprits within Greece) while demanding unpayable penalties from the Greek people speaks volumes.

I don't know why the Occupy movement are thrashing around for a set of demands to unite behind. Surely 'a good democracy' and all that it entails is the answer?

"The first bail-out was designed to stabilise and buy time for the Eurozone. It was designed to avoid another Lehman-Bros-type market shock, at a time when financial institutions were too weak to withstand it. In the words of BBC economist Stephanie Flanders: “Put it another way: Greece looks less able to repay than it did a year ago – while the system as a whole looks in better shape to withstand a default… From their perspective, buying time has worked for the eurozone. It just hasn’t been working out so well for Greece.” If the bail-out were designed to help Greece get out of debt, then France and Germany would not have insisted on future multi-billion military contracts. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the MEP and leader of the Green group in the European Parliament, explained: “In the past three months we have forced Greece to confirm several billion dollars in arms contracts."

"The figure of 53 years old as an average retirement age is being bandied about. So much, in fact, that it is being seen as fact. The figure actually originates from a lazy comment on the NY Times website. It was then repeated by Fox News and printed on other publications....... Looking at Eurostat’s data from 2005 the average age of exit from the labour force in Greece (indicated in the graph below as EL for Ellas) was 61.7; higher than Germany, France or Italy and higher than the EU27 average. Since then Greece have had to raise the minimum age of retirement twice under bail-out conditions and so this figure is likely to rise further."

"Why the consternation in the rest of Europe? Because a bailout will still have to take place - of the banks, shorn of the "cover" and pretence that they were really bailing out the Greeks. In turn this will accelerate the need to re-regulate the banks and separate retail banking from investment banking - in other words reversing the trend set in course by Margaret Thatcher when she de-regulated in the 1980's, and then exported the idea to the world."

"I rather think that Hutton's enthusiasm gets the better of him, mistaking centralisation of power for federal integration. The view from much of Greece is of an economic dictat that will impose endless austerity. Maybe this is overstated and the debt write down certainly gives some breathing space. But what this deal does not seem to do is to reform the structural problems of monetary union and redistribute trade imbalances (as Yanis Varoufakis argues here). Instead it still suggests that the cause of the crisis lies in the moral failures of the peripheral states, requiring the constant supervision of the enlightened technocrats at the centre, whatever their previous record.

Even that would be acceptable if it were not for one thing. The theory - austerity and orthodoxy. Faced with the incontrovertible evidence of failure, they are insisting on implementing their plan with a renewed intensity, even as the social fabric of the indebted nations tears apart."

"There’s only one word that adequately describes the majority of Dutch media reports on Greece right now: a witch hunt."

"In a solidary (sic) Europe, the question shouldn’t be: how do I get my money back with maximum profit? It should be: how do I help a country get out of a recession for which I am partly responsible, and who will foot the bill for that? In the first place, part of the money should be taken from those responsible for causing this mess — from the elite. The Greeks who have committed fraud for years on end, who evaded their taxes, who obfuscated their money and who speculated irresponsibly, are going free, partly thanks to a recent law on parliamentary immunity. It’s an eyesore to he Greek people that Papandreou has failed to sue even a single corrupt politician, to punish even a single entrepreneur or ship owner, and to recover even a single penny from the billions of euros that have disappeared into various pockets. And in no way does Brussels seem to be pushing for such measures. In fact, on this subject, Brussels has remained silent as the grave."

In the wake of last week's story about escalating Directors pay, this article is well worth a look. It opens paraphrasing a book written by the academic Henry Mintzberg back in 1983.

"Thirty years ago Mintzberg concluded that most of the evidence suggested that the power of senior management within corporations has massively expanded and that it was now they, rather than the technical owners – i.e. shareholders – who really controlled the organizations.


What Mintzberg did not say, because at that point it wasn’t quite so obvious, was that having seized power it was only a question of time before the new corporate ruling class also started to seize the money."

Why is the economy in a mess? I've seen a number of explanations - some of them more convincing than others.


The first one is the Bad Banks one. Bankers have been bad. They've cooked the books, re-sold thin-air and drawn huge personal bonuses while doing so. They've then socialised the debt at gunpoint.

It's an attractive argument and one with a lot of popular appeal. But I think that focussing on it is a mistake because it's not really that good an account of what happened, and on reflection, most people won't buy it completely. It also gives us an excuse not to deal with the real problems.

The second culprit is the politics of the past thirty years or so. This article on Crooked Timber concludes that...

"the banks aren’t to blame for the crisis; Bush is. And the solution to the crisis isn’t to fix the banking sector, either through regulatory reform or continuing to bail out the banks, it’s to stop Bush-era economic policies."

"...the exiguous nature of current reform proposals is explained by the institutional capture of governments by the investment banks, the world’s most powerful lobbying groups."

Insofar as anyone notices it, I suspect I've lost a few followers on Twitter and been tuned out elsewhere because of my monomania about referendums.

For the avoidance of doubt, I hate them, and regard opposition to them as an activity to which every democrat should give the highest priority. I've said why at some length here and think that the dangers associated with the gradual process of normalisation that they have undergone over the past quarter-century is being hugely underestimated.

Though democracy is supposed to be central to our way of life - advocacy of liberal democracy unites mainstream opinion in a way that it perhaps never has done before  - we're seeing it being degraded in a range of different ways without a squeak from anyone.

Alongside the normalisation of referendums, I'd include the crude way in which political transparency has been demanded as another example of how the political class (nominally, I suppose, the guardians of the principles of liberal democracy) have fallen asleep at the wheel.

Another way they were degraded was with the way that media-ownership rules were torn up in the 1990 Broadcasting Act. I while ago, I wrote about how the impact of the broadcasting of Parliament had been felt as an example of this, but there will be plenty more to cover once the history of the AV Referendum, the acceptance of semi-subliminal political advertising or campaign funding in the US or the Tories preference for elected officials here is assessed by history.

But for Social Democrats, democracy should be our method. Every single thing we set out to achieve can be done in the most effective and sustainable way by simply advocating the highest standards of democratic practice. Striking the right balance between a high level of public participation, the protection of minorities and good policymaking. Labour is the only party that has nothing to lose from this - yet the party is always perfectly happy to sidestep these standards whenever the opportunity for a short-term tactical victory is on offer.

Here are some questions that I think Labour should have automatic short answers for:

• Should MPs communicate - even indirectly - with lobbyists of any kind?
• Should lobbyists and pressure groups be obliged to meet much higher standards of regulation, governance and scrutiny?
• Should MPs have a budget that allows them to commission research that will act as a counterbalance to the biassed and inductive findings of lobbyist-funded 'research'?
• Should Labour press for a maximalist approach to reducing the concentration of media ownership?
• Should Labour seek to apply global best-practice in the promotion of media pluralism as a high-profile priority when it next enters government?
• When the issue of a referendum comes up in connection with a particular policy area, should the party support such a vote if the outcome is likely to result in Labour's broad aims being adopted?
• Should Labour make it a priority to ensure that an economically sustainable free press exists - and should it take steps to ensure that the media can reverse it's increasing failure to be able to investigate or even report things - even if this means some state intervention to make the funding available for this?
• Should we have a fully elected second chamber?
• Is the democratic deficit one in which active citizens have too little influence - or one where inactive ones with mild preferences and unformed opinions are under-represented?
• Should a Labour government seek to devolve powers to local councillors wherever possible?
• Should a Labour government promote a higher standard of representation at local level as a priority?
• Elected regional assemblies for every UK region without the need for ratification by a referendum; For or against?
• Elected police chiefs - for or against?
• Do MPs have a duty to go out of their way to find out the unexpressed and lightly-held views of their constituents as a counterweight to the views that are readily and repeatedly sent to them?
• Should MPs ever read or respond to petitions? Should they ever change their position on something in response to one?
• Should corporate governance rules be introduced to minimise the ability of commercial organisations to exert influence over policy? Should they be obliged to declare all lobbying - and should the lobbying services they pay for be fully labelled?
• Should Civil Servants or MPs advisers be allowed to work for pressure groups or lobbyists without a 'decontamination period' of (say) five years?
• Should Trades Unions be able to coerce Labour MPs to adopt policies against their better judgement on where the public interest lies? 
• Should Trades Unions ever be given the impression that they can exercise special influence over Labour policy?
• Should Labour create whatever checks and balances will most effectively ensure that party high-ups or officials can't influence local selection processes?
• Should the Labour Party leadership seek to coerce MPs to adopt particular policies in their parliamentary work?
• Should the Labour MPs continue to tolerate colleagues who don't conduct their policy deliberation in an inclusive and rigorous way? 
• Should Sir Stuart Bell have the whip withdrawn from him immediately? Or will next week do?

The 'occupy' movement is mushrooming and largely unreported. This is because events like this one are either subject to a conspiracy from the mainstream media to deny them the oxygen of publicity, or they're widely seen as futile gestures.

You decide.

I honestly don't know what to think about them. On the one hand, there's the under-rated argument that....

• Something must be done!
• This is something...
• So let's do this

I've a fairly old 'don't fisk - it's rude' rule that I need to break because I may has stumbled upon the single most stupid article about how social media changes politics - the author claims to have had 100+ re-tweets - a commentary in itself on the quality of what spreads (as in 'if it doesn't spread it's dead') and the claims made in the article about the aptitude of the 'new governing body in town' to make sense of ... well ... anything.

It is, quite simply, the work of a fantasist. Let's just take this section as an illustration

Why Governments Fear Social Media – the Demise of Representational Democracy
When David Cameron, UK Prime Minister announced the Government were in talks with Twitter and Blackberry and so on to stop or block social media re organised riots, it wasn’t because the Government truly believes social media is the cause of unrest and should be stopped. 

Mr Cameron said talks were to be held with companies such as Twitter, BlackBerry and Facebook, as well as the intelligence services, to discuss actions that could limit their reach, to help prevent further disorder. Social networks were widely used by gangs to co-ordinate the riots across the country. 

He wasn’t just ignoring the fact that Twitter was also being used to do cleanup. No sirree, it was the fact the #riotcleanup hashtag was potentially even more devastating than the riots itself to his Parliament. 

Why? Because communities only self organise when the incumbent organisers are ineffective (read: worthless). If the Police and Local Councils aren’t fixing the situation, then we will: thus spake the People. And once the People figure out they can self organise using online community tools, millions of people, why do we need Councils and Taxes?  From FixMyStreet to CatchALooter, we’ll sort it out ourselves, thanks very much.

NOTE: Representational (sic) Democracy arose in the time when a village nominated a runner to run around Ancient Greece to the big towns to cast a vote for the smaller community. Email and online voting does that a bit quicker these days. Do we really need a “representative” to collect our views and then filter them?  Must get back to Plato & The Republic one of these days.

David Cameron wasn’t being disingenuous. He was saving the political process as he knows it. Too little, too late in my book.

I've posted a fair bit here and elsewhere over the last few years developing my own views on Labour, the left and deniable outriders - looking at how the network changes the sociology of politics, if that's not too grand a way of saying it.

I don't mind saying that Clifford Singer's thinking on all of this is a lot more developed than mine, and with projects like The Other Taxpayers Alliance, MyDavidCameron, False Economy under his belt, the experience and reading around this subject is nicely squeezed into this excellent post that everyone interested in this subject should read.

The one key related area that I think also needs more developed thinking on is on what Labour (and other non-darkside) politicians and formal structures need to do while the outriders are working their magic - adapting the notion of leadership closer to curation or convening and emphasising that individual representatives need to be the sum of their networks (I've picked Tom Watson as the obvious pin up on this one) and not the brand of reflexive budding demagogues that a lot of Labour's top-table seems to prefer.

However, another thing that occurs to me in Clifford's post is the way that writers like Lakoff and Westen look at the framing of the things that people care about.

New Labour ducked a lot of fights - perhaps understandably - but we could argue that they sometimes ducked the wrong ones. There was a common argument that public services had to be closely adapted to meet higher-earners expectations so that they would continue to see them as legitimate recipients of public funding.

As far as I can see, the Tories are moving ever-closer to a subscription model of the state - one where a higher-rate taxpayer expects a higher level of service, and where a freemium model of public service is advanced. You can almost see all politics as a tug-of-war in which active citizens game the tax and benefits system (I fleshed this out more here a few weeks ago).

To my poor mind, this isn't an argument or fight that can be ducked. Nor is it one on which we can't land heavy blows. Watching the way both the US and the EU are floundering at the moment, tracing the lack of historical vitality - governments that don't believe that they have the legitimacy to act - this isn't a trivial issue either.

There's been a fair amount of comment over the weekend on how Labour should apologise for the state it left the country in. Ed Balls has been touring the interview suites this morning saying 'sorry' for regulatory weakness on the banks and on public spending. It all sounds a bit weak, and it's being done in a way that offers Labour no upside.

It sounds like a limp concession to the people in the party who are saying that we won't be taken seriously until we've done this properly.

Is this really the case? Personally, I doubt it. It imagines that our opponents in parliament and the press will say "OK - thanks for getting that out of the way. Now let's move on....."

As a good Catholic boy, I'd also attest that an act of contrition only really counts if it comes with a determination not to sin again.  This is where Labour's opportunity arises.

Labour didn't cover itself in glory by increasing borrowing during an economic upswing in the mid-noughties. The way to apologise to the public on this is the way that you would apologise to a driver if you've just put a dent in their wing a few minutes before a banker steamrollered the same car off a cliff.

If Labour did screw up badly - and demonstrably - it was in two big areas:

1. Allowing the subjects of reguation to dictate their terms
2. Procurement

"It's bold, it's brave, and it's politically suicidal. But you have to hand it to him. Ed Miliband is the new Ed Cojones. No compromise on Labour's economic message. No let up on the attacks on those at the top of society. No pandering to the right-wing press. Ed will be true to himself, and his party. 

There's only one problem. The rules of the game don't change. That's why they're the rules."

Imagine you walked into a shop with a vague intention of buying a vacuum cleaner. You want one that's mid-price and durable. One that will do the job, last for a few years and not break the bank.

Your initial glance around the shelves tells you that there's one right there that probably fits the bill nicely (and indeed, it does - but you're not to know this yet).

Then imagine the salesperson doesn't pay any attention to what you're looking for, but instead starts banging on about a range of irrelevancies. The colour of the thing. The range of unwanted attachments and features. A range of special offers where you get a discount on a washing machine if you buy a particular model. The fashionable traction that a particular brand will bring to your home.

The salesperson also tries to pigeon-hole you into some irrelevant demographic and, on that basis, tries to hard-sell a model that you're instantly sure isn't right for you.

You went in with a simple need on a subject you don't care about that much. The shop could have taken £150 off you effortlessly if they had taken the trouble to look at it from your viewpoint for a few seconds. Instead, you leave the shop with your money and a plan to postpone your purchase and live with the dust for a while longer.

I'm not going to strain any ligaments defending Johann Hari - he just reminds me of what people say about his newspaper, The Independent: "The Daily Mail for people who recycle."

Hari just strikes me as a corduroy-jacketed version of John Gaunt. Massively overconfident in expressing poorly thought-out opinions.

Still, he's hardly unusual within his own profession in that respect, and his journalistic colleagues seem to be prepared to cut him a bit of slack for doctoring his interviews. In a lot of cases, I can't see that a pedantic sticking to verbatim quotes is all that important.

I reckon a spot of community service is more appropriate than ten years hard labour for what he's done here - but there are plenty of other people arguing about that elsewhere.

Anyhoo.... I quite like the idea of 'underarm interviews' - where the interviewer and interviewee collaborate - each editing their questions and answers intending to help each other refine the questions and answers: Stripping out the problems caused by inarticulacy or imprecision.

I did one some years ago with Chris Dillow here - I learned a good deal more about what his position was than I'd ever have got from reading his general writing, or any live interview that we could have done. We did it just updating a Google Doc - often revising an earlier point to help clarify the current one.

I think it worked well - both sides of the table have nowhere to hide. I wish there were more of them. Almost 'set piece' interviews.

WDYT?