Videos
The evocative sound of a blind busker whistling Jerusalem resonated around the vast tube station as I emerged at Canary Wharf. This was apt as I was on my way to see Ed Balls speak at tonight’s Open Left event. Praise from Irwin Stelzer in this week’s New Statesman may have further fortified Balls to not let his sword sleep in his hand:
“Remember, Brown and Balls got it right when the financial crisis hit; this puts Balls in the best position of all the candidates to point out that the Tories got it wrong. And it is economics that government will be all about for the foreseeable future, for the solution to the deficit problem will determine the scope of the welfare state.”
Certainly, this economic credibility makes Balls an asset to our party and tomorrow morning he will turn his economic fire on David Cameron and George Osborne. While his speech tomorrow will rightly stress the importance of having a strategy for growth, this can’t be at the expense of Labour credibility on the deficit. Part of this credibility is itself about having a growth strategy, as the deficit will be far more manageable in a growing economy. It is also, however, about tough choices on taxes and spending, which, as Pat McFadden has sensibly argued, crafts a Labour response to the deficit that is about neither Thatcherism nor denial.
At the Open Left event, Balls lamented the failure of Gordon Brown to more straight-forwardly make the case for the socially just Britain that they both believe in. “In a 24-7 media age”, Balls said, “you can only win by being straight, open and authentic”. This is as true about the tough choices that we now face on economic policy as it was about Brown’s political philosophy and motivations.
Oddly enough, this reminded me of some advice that Bruno offered to Brown at the London premiere of Sasha Baron Cohen film. “Admit who you really are”.
“Theirs is to win if it kills them, but they’re just human with wives and children.”
Oddly enough, these lyrics from Race for the Prize, a brilliant song by the Flaming Lips, quite often occur to me when thinking of politicians. For example, when Andy Burnham recently described his selection as the Labour candidate in Leigh to Labour Uncut:
“I represent my home seat of Leigh. That often isn’t what people associate with a career politician. I went to Leigh when Laurence Cunliffe resigned. I lived back at home with my mum and dad, and basically worked on it for a year. It was pretty much a year where I campaigned solidly every weekend to win the nomination for Leigh.
“So nobody parachuted me in. Nobody gave me a ‘oh well, I’ll speak to this person, speak to that, all these doors will open’; none of that happened. I went up there, based myself there, knocked on every door of every member and won the Leigh nomination through grassroots campaigning. In many ways as a parallel to what I’m doing now in this leadership election. The establishment isn’t necessarily helping me; the media establishment, the union establishment. Even the Labour establishment. My connection is with the grassroots, ordinary members.”
Ok, Labour Uncut later filled in some details about his selection, as well as those of other Labour leadership contenders. But the sense of a quite lonely race for the prize for himself and for his community, from windy doorstep to windy doorstep, is evident in Burnham’s words; a sense that invariably seems absent from how politician’s are usually thought of. While this sense reflects the reality of many of the experiences of politicians, it is lost in the public perception amidst the dodgy expense claims, broken promises and general disillusionment with politicians and politics.
Hopefully, Labour’s next leader can address this disillusionment. Someone who certainly has is Ed Rendell. ”The most stunning turnaround in recent urban history” was how The New York Times characterised Rendell’s achievements as Mayor of Philadelphia. Yet, it wasn’t always like this for Rendell.
Buzz Bissinger’s A Prayer for the City, an insider account of Rendell’s first term as Mayor, discusses the position in which Rendell found himself after the disastrous failure of his first attempt to become Mayor in 1987, which had followed a 7 year spell as District Attorney of Philadelphia.
“Those who knew him and saw the law firm that he worked at, Mesirov Gelman Jaffe Cramer and Jamieson, or saw him socially after work, could feel the anxiousness that still welled inside him, the bolts of energy still running through him, but with no place to go. He held court. He gave opinions, but fewer and fewer people were inclined to listen. It was hard not to feel sorry for him, hard not to think of him as one of those baseball players who after that great rookie season just fade away because the timing of the swing has gone sour.”
This baseball parallel brings to mind – in my mind, at least - Morrissey’s Little Man, What Now? ”A star at eighteen and then – suddenly gone.” While Rendell may not be physically small, he must have felt small after his 1987 failure. It required great reserves of courage and single-mindedness – more important preconditions for his success, it would seem to me, than any talents - to raise himself from the rock bottom he was in to achieve what he eventually achieved for Philadelphia.
The race for the prize is tough, but Rendell is just human and he has a wife and child.
Local community groups have identified sites which they would like to use as allotments, such as that at School Knott in Windemere. The Labour government has introduced “meanwhile leases” which should allow them to do so. But the failure of Lib Dem controlled SDLC to use these “meanwhile leases” has prevented this from happening. Along with Labour SLDC council candidate Kieran Roberts, I explain this in the video below.
Ok, I’ve been to dinner parties. But not in Islington. Though, I probably am in the “chattering classes”. Still, I’ve never been at dinner parties where “innate and uninformed” prejudices against London comprehensives have been expressed, the superior virtues of Harriet Harman to Peter Mandelson have been extolled or Polly Toynbee, Greg Pope, Barry Sheerman and Charles Clarke – aka Mistletoe & Whiner according to John Prescott - have been lavishly praised. In the past day or so, I’ve noticed, without trying, that all of these things have been said to occur at the dinner parties of the chattering classes.
I can only wonder at what horrors would be alleged to occur at these parties – if that is the right word – if I made my observations more dedicated and maintained them for a longer stretch. Thankfully I have better things to do.
Nonetheless, I have to ask: What is going on? Can the honour of non-chattering class status be bestowed on me? I do hope so. Or, alternatively, is all of this chattering classes stuff just a term of lazy journalism and thinking?
If the clattering classes do exist, perhaps, we’d all be better off if they could take out their frustrations at “murder cafes”, rather than having their frenzied wrongs spill out at their so-called ”dinner parties” (Is food even served? Aren’t parties meant to be fun?) The “murder cafes” concept is explained 5 minutes 20 seconds into the video below, which also contains many ideas that David Cameron might want to take up as he takes forward the promised beefing up of his policy platform in the new year.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE5sxADDhew]
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, argued that “on Saturday 15 February (2003), a new nation was born on the street. This new nation is the European nation”. This conclusion was drawn, notes Timothy Garton Ash, “from the simultaneous demonstrations across Europe on 15 February 2003, protesting against the Bush administration’s advance to war with Iraq … That summer there (also) appeared in many European newspapers an appeal for ‘the rebirth of Europe’, co-signed by Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas, two of the continent’s most famous living philosophers”.
“What Habermas argues with philosophical density”, Garton Ash went on to note, “and Strauss-Kahn with eloquent political hyperbole, is that Europe is different from the United States, that in these differences Europe, is on the whole, better than the United States, and that a European identity can and should be built upon these differences – or superiorities. Europe, in short, is the Not-America”, as the David Bowie below song almost goes.
However, a new book by Peter Baldwin provides plenty of quantitative evidence for ”the way in which the presumed chasm dividing the Atlantic is not, in fact, nearly as deep as opinion among the chattering classes and their mouthpieces believes”. So, to be European is to be Not-American, which is hardly a positive sense of identity and isn’t even one based in fact. Why does Europe seem more comfortable with a negative sense of identity? And what might a more positive sense involve?
Baldwin provides something of an answer to the first of these questions: “Europe’s various cultures are ones still steeped in the lore of national stereotypes and quite happy to wring whatever elixir can be had from them … Having a transatlantic whipping boy is convenient and serves politically useful purposes, especially if there is little else that you can agree on. The purveyors of anti-Americanism in Europe appear to have rediscovered the truism that nothing unites like a common enemy. And the Bush administration played into their hands by serving up caricatures by the spadeful. It will be interesting to see how the European pundits deal with Obama once he does something they do not like. While Bush could be portrayed as an ignorant cowboy, which of the available stereotypes will they dare lambast Obama with?”
It was clear when Obama visited Europe in March that European governments did not give him the help he came looking for on troops in Afghanistan and co-ordinated fiscal policy. Obama may have been the change that Europeans wanted to see in the world but Europeans still ask what America can do for them, not what they can do for Obama. This was an attitude that Charles Clarke touched upon in a lecture to the Fabian Society last night.
It seems odd and unsatisfactory that Europe should both free ride on the back of America and seeks to be Not-America. It is welcome, then, that Clarke’s lecture pointed towards the stuff of a more positive future and identity for Europe. In 5 policy areas – financial regulation; justice and crime; migration; climate change and energy security; peace and security – Clarke argued that the EU’s policy interventions could be improved. These improvements would, he argued, make it easier for pro-Europeans to make their case in the UK. These are improvements that will produce an EU with what Roger Liddle, in a question from the floor, described as output legitimacy – which, it is said, “ is satisfied when the Union delivers what people expect from it”. These outputs will not be gained, however, denying British citizens the associated benefits, if the UK were to follow Eurosceptic strategy of David Cameron, claimed Clarke.
This is a strategy that has been widely criticised across the EU and certainly, it seems odd – but so does the persistent coolness of British voters towards the EU – when the case for further EU co-operation was made so convincingly by Clarke in respect of each of his chosen policy areas. His focus upon output legitimacy reminded me of the thinking behind a pamphlet by Mark Leonard. Liddle queried, however, whether pro-Europeans should be making a “bigger argument” than this.
He seems to hanker after an account of the philosophical underpinnings of the European project in an era of continued globalisation. Pro-Europeans will wonder whether this approach or an approach based upon outcome legitimacy will bring them most joy in the UK – and, incidentally, Clarke seems to think that neither will gain much traction in this country until the “boil is lanced” and a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU is held and won – but the approach of Liddle seems more likely to lead to the stuff of a positive sense of Europe, at least. Somewhat similarly, Roger Casale, formerly Labour MP for Wimbledon, asked us to reflect upon the EU “not from inside but from outside”. He would seem to want us to consider what kind of world we would like to create and what role the EU might have in this. How might the EU, in other words, be the change that we want to see in the world?
I suspect that Clarke and Casale are approaching things from different ends of the same pro-EU telescope. Casale’s vantage point is the macro, global one, while Clarke’s is the micro, British street level upwards perspective. Both of their visions, however, are far more coloured, as the evolving realities of globalisation dictate, by the fusion of issues that were previously considered “domestic” and those that were once seen as “foreign” than a little-Englander view like Cameron’s would ever allow. The EU, I am sure, will be considered by both Clarke and Casale to be a key institution in terms of managing the globalising forces that drive these visions in a more humane and better way than can be the case at present.
However, Europeans will lack a real compass with which to address this task and a sense of identity that is more positive than being Not-America until it addresses the question posed by Casale. The EU’s history as a great liberating force in formerly fascist southern Europe and formerly communist central and eastern Europe should be a rich source of inspiration in tackling this question. This is the kind of answer – grounded in the Copenhagen criteria of institutions that guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights, the protection of minorities and a functioning market economy – that Mark Leonard put forward in Why Europe will run the 21st Century. It seems hard, nonetheless, to imagine that the prophecy of Leonard’s book will come true without some of the nuts and bolts policy revision that Clarke so well argued for - There certainly seems much scope for improvement in this respect as Wolfgang Münchau recently concluded that the EU, like a fish, is rotting from the head and Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, laments that: ”The European Central Bank is the only institution in Europe that works well”.
These policy revisions may be undertaken a bit more speedily and efficiently if powered by the inspiring vision set out by Leonard – And it would be wonderful if in this vision Europe’s leaders can find more to agree upon than Baldwin notes they do at the moment. May be, then, I will know what it means to be European. It won’t be until this point that European cultures will really escape “the lore of national stereotypes” that Baldwin rightly argues they remain ”steeped in” and which Cameron is keen to give in to and which our present Not-America identity is more a symptom of than an escape from.
