Videos
Below is the now infamous footage of Michael Martin losing his rag earlier in the week. The constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor observes:
“The authority of the Speaker rests on utter impartiality, not only between parties but between backbench MPs. Criticising the views of individual members, such as Kate Hoey and Norman Baker, is unprecedented. The Speaker is the servant of the whole House, not just of those MPs who agree with him. It is now for MPs to decide it is time for Speaker Martin to be handed a revolver and a bottle of whisky”.
This crisis and its implications are so profound that “it is now for the public to play their part in saving Parliament from itself”. One means by which the public may be able to do this is to take up the suggestion of “Patricia Hewitt, the former Health Secretary … that MPs’ remuneration be considered by citizens’ juries. A citizens’ jury is a group of between 12 and 20 people, selected at random, who examine witnesses to reach a conclusion on some public issue”.
The irony is that in the House just a few minutes after the footage below was shot Hewitt made this suggestion and was greeted with harsh jeers. YouTube if you want to - and, incidentally, never has the old adage that a week is a long time in politics felt more apt than thinking about how long it feels since Hazel Blears cut us with her razor sharp wit – but I have tried and can’t find footage of the Hoey/Barker outburst that runs for long enough to feature Hewitt making this argument. I have, however, previously watched on TV a replay of the short debate that followed Martin’s statement and the jeers from behind the cage of the parliamentary zoo were definitely real. These jeers testify to the bizarre, self-destructive creatures that the parliamentary zoo has taken to keeping. Offered up what this country’s leading constitutional expert considers to be their salvation and they can only jeer. With those jeers Martin saw fit to draw to a close the short debate that he allowed on his statement. At least, he managed to refrain from insulting Hewitt as he did so, though the jeers meant that he didn’t really need to. They are indicative of the absurd, tragic, slow-motion car crash that we are living through. The sky is, indeed, falling in, as Martin Bright says. But very slowly and very painfully. And it is an embarrassing, depressing, crushing pain that ordinary people, like myself, feel profoundly, not just the parliamentarians. This is, after all, a national shame and emergency. Sitting on or being subject to a citizens’ jury seems a very small price to pay to go some way towards correcting such a grave wrong.
Newsnight’s “Ethical Man”, Justin Rowlett, spent one year doing all that he could to reduce the carbon footprint of his family. He went to more considerable lengths to do so than, I think, the overwhelming majority of people in this country would even contemplate, as he discusses in the video below.
The end result of all of this sacrifice? A 20 percent reduction in his total carbon footprint. So, a gain, but enough of a gain to justify all of the pain? There was certainly more pain involved than, I fear, the average Brit could tolerate. Some might shrug their shoulders in the face of this and say: “What the UK does doesn’t matter anyways, as the key to averting climate change is what happens in China”.
It’s certainly true that it would be possible for everyone in the UK to go through the pain of Ethical Man and for all of the consequent gains to be more than cancelled out by legion upon legion of dirty power plants and similar in China. However, it’s also true that China is less likely to cut back on its emissions while it continues to feel that the west is not making serious attempts to do so, as Ed Miliband recently said:
“China used to think the developed world is not serious. That’s what they were saying [at UN talks] in December. But now they know the US is on the pitch and ready to engage with them. It has made a real difference to what China is saying”.
President Obama seems to be changing the terms of engagement. He’ll only be able to continue to do so, however, if he is able to begin to deliver reductions in US emissions. China will doubtless judge him by his actions as well as his words. How will he deliver such action?
He might expect every American to ape Ethical Man tomorrow or he might think that his government’s decisions are at the crux of things. As Gavin Esler says in the introduction to the video below: Ethical Man’s “experience raises profound questions about how far individuals really can do much and how far government decisions on coal, carbon taxes, plastic bags and the like really are the key.”
Matthew Taylor has discussed government-centric and citizen-centric models of change. Ethical Man, obviously, offers a citizen-centric model but if Obama decides that every American is unlikely to ape Ethical Man, he will prefer a government-centric model. Certainly, there is much that governments can achieve on “coal, carbon taxes, plastic bags and the like” but, equally, citizens live in communities.
What might Ethical Man have achieved if he had attempted his experiment on the scale of a community? The village of Ashton Hayes, Cheshire, has actually attempted something similar; so, the notion isn’t an entirely fanciful one. Ethical Man’s reduction in his direct carbon footprint was a more impressive 37 percent. The difference between 20 and 37 percent is explained by the carbon contained in services that he used – schools, hospitals, etc - which he did not directly control. But, collectively, his community probably did control, at least to some extent, many of these carbon emissions that weren’t under Ethical Man’s direct control.
Surely Ethical Man’s total reduction in his carbon footprint would have exceeded 20 percent if he could have convinced his community to change their behaviour in certain respects? Citizen-centric models of change can’t simply mean the lonely endurance of pain but must also encompass an attempt to change the behaviour of those around you. That, ultimately, must lead to greater gain. It makes me wonder what the citizens of East Dulwich, the part of London where I live, might achieve if they worked together.
If communities across the west did this, then it would be that much easier for the likes of Obama and Miliband to make the case to China. That’s not to say, however, that our leaders won’t need to make some tough choices on “coal, carbon taxes, plastic bags and the like”. It’s simply to say that the pain of being ethical will be minimised and the gain of being ethical will be maximised if citizens can make their communities, rather than simply their households, ethical. Be the change that you want to see, as Obama didn’t quite say.
I loved David Peace’s The Damned United and I am very much looking forward to the upcoming release of the film version. In the trailer below Michael Sheen as Brian Clough bellows “football is all about money now”. But how much more true is this today? Clough has been compared with Jose Mourinho but Clough didn’t need a Roman Abramovich to transform relatively minor and provincial teams like Derby County and Nottingham Forest into English and European champions. Paul Gascoinge has recently absurdly claimed that no player will ever be as good as he was. He, obviously, hasn’t seen Steven Gerrard, for one, play lately. However, it seems very likely that no manager will ever match what Clough achieved at Derby Country and Nottingham Forest. Most people think Hull City have done well this season. Nonetheless, if they had of matched the trajectory set by Clough at Nottingham Forest, they would have won the Premiership this season and the European Cup next. These were the kind of fantasies made real by Clough. But, perhaps, football now is so much about money that we have made it impossible for such fantasies to be real again. If we care about this, Michael White today suggests an unusual source of inspiration: the NFL. May be we need our own version of what White calls American socialism if we are to see another Clough.
Andrew Rawnsley yesterday wrote something that I have long thought myself but rarely seen expressed. ”Too many”, quangos, ”have grown into bloated, pretentious organisations, interested above all else in justifying their own existence. They spend absurd sums of taxpayers’ money on lobbying government for more taxpayers’ money. It is time for a robust audit of how they use our cash”.
When I was younger I tended to think that public choice theory was based upon an excessively cynical premise but quangos spending taxpayers’ money on lobbying government for more taxpayers’ money to further justify their own existence is, perhaps, one of the strongest illustrations around at the moment of the continued relevance of public choice theory to explaining policy and political outcomes. However, these are outcomes that rarely tend to be efficient or fair. We should wake up to this.
Of course, Blur are years ahead of the game, as ever.
“You can’t expect to feel cock-a-hoop every minute of every day”, rightly writes Mark E. Smith in his hilarious autobiography. “My Mam and Dad’s generation understood this”. In contrast, Dr Carol Craig argues that today’s generation of school children are being encouraged to believe that the most important thing in life is whether they feel happy. This is problematic because it threatens a generation of egotists and it is impossible to argue with Craig when she observes that “narcissists make terrible relationship partners, parents and employees”.
They also make poor citizens. Citizen-centric policies seem required to address many of the biggest policy challenges that we face. Climate change, for example, requires active citizens to change their behaviour, as well as government action. But citizen-centric policies have little chance of success amidst a citizenry of narcissists.
“My grandfather’s favourite phrase,” writes Michael Ignatieff in The Russian Album, was “Life is not a game, life is not a joke. It is only by putting on the chains of service that man is able to accomplish his destiny on earth”. But narcissists think that life is a game to be played towards one objective: their own happiness.
Mark E. Smith sees modernity as increasingly narcissist – and blames this upon “the American hippies”, who “saw an in there, a way of making money out of bad moods”. Of such hippies, Mayor Daley of Chicago, once famously asked: What trees do they plant? The implication being that hippies might be good at tree hugging but less good at making a lasting contribution to society. Hippies, in other words, are averse to the chains of service. Children should be brought up to avoid such aversions, not to expect to feel cock-a-hoop every minute of every day.
The kids should be suitably inspired by Mark E. Smith putting on the chains of service to read the football results.
