“Like Thatcher, Miliband has sought to identify a unifying theme to which all Britain’s problems can be related. Where Thatcher chose ‘socialism’, Miliband has opted for ‘responsibility’. The theme has obvious merits … The problem is that it is inherently non-partisan. When Thatcher railed against ‘socialism’, it was obvious that she was talking about Labour. No one on the Conservative benches self-identifies as ‘irresponsible’, and that limits its power as a political weapon. ‘Responsibility’ has no political hook; indeed, if it were to ‘take’ as a theme, there would be nothing to prevent David Cameron from simply co-opting it.”

First, why now?

Many of the Treaties that define the UK’s relationship with the EU were signed by Conservative PMs, e.g. Maastricht Treaty. We didn’t have referendums when these Treaties were signed. Are Conservatives now saying that we should have done? And should now retrospectively do so?

The priority for all MPs and MEPs should now be economic recovery. Almost everything else is a distraction. Resolving the euro-zone crisis would significantly improve the economic prospects of the EU and the UK. This is, therefore, a more pressing issue for debate than whether or not the UK should have a referendum on EU membership.

Second, how do Conservatives propose that the euro-zone crisis be resolved and how would this impact the UK’s relationship with the EU?

The UK’s interests here are: That the euro-zone members find a durable solution to their crisis, while properly allocating responsibility within this solution to EU and euro-zone members and ensuring that the benefits of EU membership continue to be enjoyed by non-euro EU members.

What matters, therefore is: encouraging and supporting euro-zone members to find a durable solution; requiring that euro-zone members properly face up to whatever responsibilities are created for them in this solution; and guaranteeing that this solution does not forego the benefits of EU membership enjoyed by the UK. We, for example, must insist on UK access to and involvement in shaping a deepened single market, even in the context of further consolidation amongst the euro-zone members.

Third, do Conservatives not accept that we should return to this debate on an EU referendum in the UK after these pressing and profound issues with the euro-zone have been properly and fully addressed?

We should be focusing all of our energies on resolving these issues in a durable manner, which protects the UK’s interests, as a non-euro EU member, both in the near and longer-term. It may be that these solutions necessitate changes that are constitutionally significant to the UK. In which case, a referendum would be entirely appropriate. But we are a long way from resolving the euro-zone crisis. Until we get to this stage, all debate about the EU amounts to shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.

Fourth, why can the Conservatives not work constructively to resolve the euro-zone crisis, instead of re-hashing debates of the 1980s and 1990s?

Let’s return to the here and now, as this could not have more serious questions to answer. These are questions that will impact the incomes and wellbeing of all British citizens. It ill behoves any elected representative to create distractions to the resolution of these questions.

When these questions are resolved, with the euro-zone crisis behind us and the UK’s interests protected, if this resolution has necessitated a constitutionally significant change in the UK’s relationship with the EU, let us then return to this debate on a UK referendum on EU membership.

As we tried to get our heads around events outside the cafe, uninvited pictures were taken of us by what appeared to be paparazzi. Obviously, we weren’t celebrities but our Caucasian skin probably led to the presumption that we were American and maybe “grieving Americans in Oaxaca” was thought a picture worth having. Our picture, though, didn’t appear in the local newspapers that we bought and which somewhere, probably my parent’s house in Cumbria, I’m fairly sure I retain as a piece of local perspective on an epoch defining event.

For the most part, the Mexicans with whom we had contact were shocked and respectful. I remember a conversation in Spanish in our hotel reception coming to a hushed silence as we returned. The receptionists looked at us, looked at the reports from New York on the TV behind them and looked again at us. We didn’t speak much Spanish and they didn’t speak much English, but their body language communicated a bewilderment and concern that we, as assumed Americans, might be more directly impacted (which, thankfully, we weren’t).

My friend and I graduated from Durham University a few months before and I’d been a know-it-all, smart-arse presence in politics tutorials. In these tutorials, I had a (probably conceited and almost certainly naive) answer to any point of view. As we reflected on events, on the balcony of our hotel room, overlooking the city, with its rich Spanish Empire-era architecture, I had no answers. I had barely anything to say. This strike against the great power of our time was utterly beyond my ken.     

The next day the main square of Oaxaca was packed with farmers, with their traditional dress, pitchforks and placards. Primarily, they seemed to be protesting some local issue. The placards that jumped out, though, were those that featured pictures of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the words “a strike against Yankee imperialism” (which even our Spanish was able to decipher). Those pitchforks suddenly seemed more menacing. We left before anyone turned them on us.

Given that the hotel TVs broadcast Spanish language stations and that sitting in an internet cafe all day would have cost a small fortune, our news flow remained relatively patchy over coming days. We’d quickly descend on any TV we came across, seeking out nuggets of information on any developments. The news we were dreading was America letting loose some kind of Armageddon. The possibility of massively violent retribution seemed real.

Between protesting farmers and foreboding about what America might do next, we seemed to have descended to a much more polarised and uncertain world. In this sense, we succumbed to being small cogs in the giant wheel of someone who I had never previously heard of, Osama Bin Laden. Mercifully, his master plan now seems much less on track.

As the national transitional council’s (NCT) grip on Libya tightened, I wondered: What do the Muammar Gaddafi loyalists in their last redoubts want? Having refused the NCT’s generous reconciliation offer, do the Gaddafi loyalists really think that they can recover the whole of their country? As this is implausible, it must be that they remain loyal enough to their barbaric, ego-maniac, delusional leader that they’d rather die in his name than accept Libya’s new reality.

Belief held so absolutely has become alien to most westerners and, thus, inherently terrifying. Willingness to fight to the death is beyond the ken of people unwilling to fight for much besides the TV remote. That’s why it wasn’t just Tony Blair and George W Bush who were mortified by Al-Qaeda. We all were. These ingenuous people would go to any lengths, including sacrificing themselves, to destroy us. What wasn’t to be afraid of?

Well, much less than it seemed. We thought Al-Qaeda’s appalling idea could attract ever more active backers. We suspected that many people, possibly millions, absolutely believed things utterly out of kilter with what we believe fundamentally. And they believed these things with the passion of newlyweds, while the passion of western citizens for the defining values of their states is that of the long married. Not non-existent, but not obviously burning.

While the passionate beliefs of Gaddafi loyalists now bemuse western eyes as much as the passionate beliefs of Al-Qaeda have done, these passionate beliefs are very different, of course. Gaddafi comes from a tradition that starts with Gamal Nasser and hopefully ends with Bashar al-Assad. Upon these strong men Arab states were personalised. Gaddafi was Libya and Libya was Gaddafi. And that just seemed the way things were.

This appeared almost as otherworldly to western eyes as Al-Qaeda, who hoped to replace the secular despotism of the Arab dictatorships with an Islamic caliphate. Ten years after 9/11, revolutions have come, but not those anticipated by Al-Qaeda. Modern freedom was more attractive than returning to the seventh century.

In bravely rising up, the Arabs showed themselves to be not so odd after all. They’ve hungered for the same things that Al-Qaeda want to destroy. Not western values, but universal human values: liberty, democracy, the rule of law, the absence of arbitrary power. Now the Arabs are for the long march through the institutions but with what Hegel called weltgeist on their side. Ultimately, they will arrive at states embodying the universal values for which the Arab Spring strives.

The rise of the rest, particularly China and India, is often taken to mean that weltgeist is passing from west to east. But, while the values championed by the Arab Spring are universal, they have their fullest expression in the west. The power of this advantage is overlooked in the rush to proclaim western decline. Western countries are not convulsed, as China and India are, by the protests of expanding middles classes, no longer prepared to have their rights trammelled upon. Trade with China has often been justified in terms of Chinese economic freedom being a precursor to a more assertive Chinese middle class, which would demand political freedoms.

This argument for Chinese trade is a confident western argument; an argument that believes in the potency of values upheld by the west. Yet, just as the Arabs are inspired by the same values that this now emerging Chinese middle class demands, so underlining the universality and appeal of these values, western confidence seems nowhere.

This diminution was encouraged by needlessly betraying the values that Al-Qaeda assaulted (Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay). As well as an economic crisis in which the commanding heights of private capitalism were massively subsidised by the taxpayer and, subsequently, banking practices remained unreformed amid widespread public and private deleveraging and horribly anaemic growth rates. But these post 9/11 mistakes and the financial crisis were self-inflicted western wounds. From which we could recover strongly with a fraction of the resolve that the Arab Spring has required.

It wasn’t always so. Britons once volunteered to fight against those who would crush universal values. They believed, as strongly as the Gaddafi loyalists who now cling to their wrong-headed beliefs, that if they could shoot Welsh rabbits then they could kill Spanish fascists. The spread of universal values that the Arab Spring and the rise of middle classes in China and India portends, hopefully, means that we won’t have to fight as the International Brigade did for these values.

Certainly, this spread means that the west should have more confidence in our capacity to build a world that would make these universal values universally enjoyed. A confident west would, amongst other things, now be offering the same kind of carrots and sticks towards enduring democratic change in the Arab world as were offered to Eastern Europe twenty years ago.

It doesn’t just matter that the values that shape the west are universal. It also matters that the west believes in them enough to act upon them.

Blue Labour seems less in fashion than previously. It was never the answer to every challenge facing Labour. But it does have contributions to make to Labour’s renewal. Whatever it is, blue Labour seems defiantly rooted in our country and the traditions which have shaped and continue to comfort and inspire its people. Global and jet-set it isn’t.

It feels odd, therefore, to see the core motivations of a creed as unabashedly Anglo-Saxon as Britpop reflected back in the protests convulsing India and Israel. These protests, like blue Labour, are, fundamentally, about rejecting contemporary materialism for the perceived morality and communality of exalted past eras: the dignity of Gandhi’s India; the solidarity of the Israeli kibbutz; and the warm embrace of the Labour party before the middle class dilettantes stole it from the working class. It’s easy to be cynical. There were, of course, no golden ages. But it’s what blue Labour and the protests say about the present that is most interesting.

Tobias Buck recently observed in the Financial Times that 250,000 Israelis have taken to the streets calling for social reform. He described them as ranging “from students to pensioners, and Holocaust survivors to taxi drivers” and as “perhaps the most serious challenge yet to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu”. He went on: “Many Israelis, regardless of their wealth and social status, say they still long for a return to the years when the country was less materialistic and more egalitarian. Even in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, the ideals of the kibbutz live on”.

Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption protests have evoked the spirit of the independence struggle. Jason Burke explained in the Observer that his “asceticism – he eats yoghurt for breakfast, chapatis and a single portion of vegetables for lunch and has just a glass of lemon juice for dinner – has a deep resonance in a time when unbridled materialism is the dominant social ethic”. The bigger question, according to Burke, that Hazare has posed is: “What is this new India that is being created with its 8% year-on-year economic growth rates”?

The financial crisis brutally forced Iceland to confront its national purpose. Sam Knight wrote of this in August’s Prospect. He was told by an Icelandic campaigner: “Everyone said, ‘Let’s go back to fishing’”. Another Icelander said: “It (fishing) is a strong part of our identity”. The ideals of the kibbutz and the asceticism of Gandhi also persist as powerful parts of Israeli and Indian identity. This is in spite, or perhaps because, of the pervasive materialism of these societies.

Globalisation is man-made but, as its pace ever quickens and all that is solid melts into the air, it feels beyond human control. This leaves ever more people in circumstances that seem perilous, arbitrary and unfair. This leads them to questions of belonging and identity. I’ve written previously that the rise of the English Defence League is not the only instance of the search for identity turning ugly. In different ways everything from the birther movement to the success of the True Finns and Thilo Sarrazins can be seen through the same prism.

There are two lessons for the left.

First, without retreating to an unhelpful protectionism, actions need to be taken that re-claim globalisation for what it is: less arbitrary and more man-made. Globalisation isn’t some indestructible genie unleashed from the bottle, leaving us only with its wreckage. If we don’t like this globalisation – tax havens for the few; squeeze for the many – we can have another, so long as we have the political will and imagination.

Second, while talk of another globalisation isn’t fanciful, it is technocratic. Tumultuous times demand more visceral consolations. This can produce the ugly fear of the other, as in the birther movement, True Finns and Thilo Sarrazins, or it can celebrate the past glories of the kibbutz, Gandhi and fishing villages. The left can be more comfortable with the latter than the former, but shouldn’t be uncritically so. Eagerness to return to the Icelandic fishing villages of yore is leading to misguided reform to the Icelandic fishing quota system, while the authoritarianism of Hazare is troubling.

The point remains that people now require reassurances in ways that were denied them by New Labour’s narrow and shrill emphasis on the chill winds of global change. If romanticising aspects of national folk stories provides this, then we should be romantics. At the community level, romance means preserving the things that people want to see preserved, while fighting for change where it’s needed. The romance of preserving that with collective meaning should be as much of Labour’s lexicon as the hard-headed rationalism of confronting change.

While his views on immigration are as batty as the Icelandic fishing quota reforms, Maurice Glasman is quite the romantic. Globalisation can be re-made by human agency, but humans must be at ease and up-lifted in their hearts if their heads are to achieve all that they can. Let us be romantic, so that we may be rational.

At the start of May I argued that President Obama was as vulnerable to a challenger emerging as the seemingly ascendant George W H Bush was at the same time in 1991. This view was then out of kilter with the beltway view of Obama as a two term president. Subsequently the US has suffered an unprecedented credit downgrade, its economy has continued to struggle and grumbles about Obama, most recently due to his holidaying at a “millionaires’ playground”, have got louder.

Republicans are increasingly confident that Obama is Jimmy Carter. But the election will be a choice, not a referendum on Obama. They need a more convincing choice to win. As the early Republican pacesetters have not convinced, the stage remains set for a Republican Bill Clinton.

To date, tea party favourite Michelle Bachmann has probably done the best job of appealing to Republicans with misgivings, such as Romneycare and Mormonism, about the frontrunner, Mitt Romney. There may be enough such conservative voters for Romney to be defeated in January’s Iowa caucuses. The former Baptist pastor Mike Huckerbee won in this first state to vote in 2008.

God isn’t calling Huckerbee to run this time. However, God is said to have called Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, as well as Bachmann. Either they are suffering crossed wires or God’s mind is yet to be made up. God wouldn’t be the only one. The Republican race is fluid.

While Rick Perry’s backing for the three-time married Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and rumours about his own marriage are concerns for some religious voters, his leading of vast prayer meetings enables him to pitch to the religious right. That 40 percent of new US jobs since June 2009 have been created in Texas, where Perry is governor, also creates the basis – though other aspects of Texas’ economy undermine this – for appeal to those (i.e. everyone) with economic worries. A candidate able to challenge Romney for his strongest card, economic competence, and rival Bachmann for the religious right vote has a shout of being the Republican candidate.

There are various ways that this could play out.

First, Perry could crash. Karl Rove, widely seen as George W Bush’s puppet master, considers Perry beyond the pale. Perry has recently accused Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, of being “almost treasonous”, damned global warming “a hoax” and belittled evolution as “a theory that’s out there”. Perry could yet follow the likes of Donald Trump in sending shockwaves through the Republican contest only to fade away.

Second, Perry could, without actually winning it, have a more sustained impact on the race. While Romney’s already backed away from many positions that he held as governor of the traditionally Democratic state of Massachusetts, he would have to tack even further to the right under this scenario and so reduce his appeal to independents.

Third, Perry could take enough of Bachmann’s support from the right and make a sufficient dent in Romney’s claim to unrivalled economic competency to be the Republican candidate. The votes of independents are likely to determine the presidential election and Perry may be even less able to secure their support than a Romney who, as per my second scenario, has been forced to run to the right. This is probably why the White House is thought to favour a contest against Perry.

If Perry’s capacity to appeal to independents really is this limited, then the Republicans are right to look elsewhere – and they continue to encourage Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, and Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressmen, to enter the race. Perry may be a “good-looking rascal”, according to Clinton himself, but he might demonstrate the impossibility of being a candidate able to take Republican votes off both Bachmann and Romney and also appeal to independents. This impossibility means that the Republicans either cannot have a candidate attractive to all their diverse wings or they cannot win in 2012.

All presidential elections come down to who offers the most compelling personification of the latest stage of the American dream and, given the resilience of American cultural and political conservatism, Perry could win by embodying something quite different from Obama. Undoubtedly, an Obama-Perry head-to-head would make epic political struggle of America’s long-running culture wars. It would be spectacular and vitriolic; re-energising Obama’s supporters after the sometimes stodgy prose of his time in office.

Those of us on the left in Europe will largely hope that the man who was our dream president in 2008 retains enough support amongst independents to remain in office. But we should also reflect that the real lesson of his time in office, for our continent, is that we must do more to build the world we want. Not rely on someone who may nominally be the most powerful person in the world and who may appear to share European values, but who, in neither respect, is so without significant constraints.

“It should be. Ted Heath was a relentlessly pragmatic Tory leader who had poor relations with his party in Parliament and in the country. He began in government seemingly fixed on a clear course of reform and modernisation. But then he hit stormy waters and, lacking an ideological compass that might have helped guide him through, was blown over. Having failed to build good relations with his colleagues, he had no reservoir of loyalty on which to draw. When Margaret Thatcher emerged he was sunk.”

Heath, though, did have an objective for his government. He wanted to pacify the trade unions and draw them into a corporatist national project that would make us less like the US and more like France, not simply through being part of the common market, but also in terms of industrial policy and organisation. While one might have misgivings about this, it seems a more substantial project than whatever the defining purpose of Cameron’s government is.

A crisis reveals. The financial meltdown of 2008 revealed Gordon Brown to be a leader of global standing. (Have we seen much of this lately)? The crisis on our streets last week revealed the big society to be something that people just do. As the dust settled the little platoons came out with their brushes.

Something that people already do, seems an odd kind of project for a government. The argument might be made that the government’s point is to nurture and grow such behaviour. But the £2.8 billion of government spending that the voluntary and community sector will lose over the current spending review period is inconsistent with this goal.

While Cameron has even less of an ideological compass than Heath, in many other respects he seems remarkably like the prime minister described by Martin. Cameron, like Heath, has been too aloof to bother working on relations with backbench colleagues. This is most likely to catch up with a prime minister in difficult times. At the height of hackgate James Forsyth reported that a minister had told him that “Number 10 was having trouble getting people to go on TV to bat for the PM”.

Cameron has fair weather friends on the backbenches and growing tension at the top. Internal opponents have recently been briefing against Steve Hilton and leaking his zanier ideas. It is not clear who exactly these opponents are and what they seek to achieve. But this targeting of Hilton, synonymous with the big society, indicates a lack of confidence in high places in Cameron’s big idea and its guru. If Heath was blown over for lack of an ideological compass, Cameron must be at least as vulnerable to such a fate.

His operation has seemed less steady in the absence of Andy Coulson. But Coulson’s past means Cameron must now regret not following through with his initial plan to appoint Guto Harri. Rebekah Brooks intervened and insisted that the then opposition leader go with Coulson. So when aspiring to run the country Cameron considered his judgment subordinate to News International.

His relations with News International are one sense in which the question that came to define Heath hangs over Cameron: who runs the country?

The country has recently insisted that News International do not. Cameron’s deference to Brooks suggests he thought otherwise.

Max Weber defined a state in terms of a monopoly upon violence. So what was the UK when Cameron was sunning himself in Tuscany?

Ministers and police could then not agree on which of them prised the looters monopolisation from them. Now they can’t agree on the utility of the US policing advisor drafted in by Cameron.

The prime minister has also failed to come to an effective agreement with the bankers on their lending. They continue to enjoy backing from the taxpayer but won’t bend to the will of the government.

The extent to which the looters, the police and the bankers run the country isn’t clear. But it’s less obvious than it should be that the prime minister is in charge. Heath got his answer at the ballot box, “not you, mate”. If Cameron were mad enough to now trigger a general election on the same terms, his only saving grace may be the strength of his narrative on the deficit.

This story is of Labour recklessness and Cameron riding to the rescue with tough medicine. The robust return to economic health that we were told this medicine would deliver seems as distant as ever. But Cameron has succeeded in embedding a perception that Labour will tax punitively to spend wastefully.

If Labour can defeat this perception, what is keeping a second rate Ted Heath in Downing Street beyond the next election?

The world has looked perplexed upon the UK this week. Not standing up for justice, but reduced to”violent consumerism“. Clapham Junction isn’t Tahrir Square. We don’t need the international media to tell us something is profoundly wrong after such a debilitating implosion.

We did it to ourselves and that’s what really hurts. Whatever we call this – a Jacquerie (Gabriel Milland), an intifada of the underclass (Andrew Neil/Danny Kruger) – it’s a self-inflicted wound that must rank as one of our country’s darkest episodes in my 31 years. We don’t need to weigh the grief against the miners’ strike (a civil war in which both sides, at least as far as they were represented by Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher, were wrong), Hillsborough (a football match where 96 people died) and 7/7 (mass murder of Britons by Britons) to know this is a bleak and pitiful watershed.

Over a longer horizon than my lifetime, however, the past week might seem less exceptional. Many times in the past, such as in 1780, 1816 and 1936, London saw riots arguably more violent and sometimes just as ostensibly inexplicable as now. The persistence and power of our capacity to descend to disorder and glory in anarchy should be taken as a lesson from this week.

This sits ill, though, with the vaguely whiggish sense of history defaulted to by much of the left. We like to think we’ve progressed since 1780. And, of course, in lots of ways we have. Many people have blackberries now, for one thing. 1780 was no less bloody for want of blackberries. The importance of the state’s capacity to uphold law and order is as fundamental now as in 1780 or in 1651 when Thomas Hobbes wrote the Leviathan.

 But to imagine that the Leviathan of the state can be brought low simply by social media is as much of a misreading as to contend that someone loots a plasma TV because they lost their EMA. To respond to a national calamity with such pure category errors is hardly what the occasion demands. Nor are we meeting these demands by rushing to explanations heavily infused by pre-held ideologies.

For the right, this means a lack of authority in general and from fathers in particular and the destructive impacts of welfare dependency. For the left, resentments fostered by inequalities, a pervasive culture that not only tolerates but actively encourages, at many levels and countless ways, the doctrine that greed is good and that responsibilities to others are simply hindrances to be got around, not the very stuff of humanity.

Neither right or left is wholly wrong in these claims; but can we really only look deep enough into our hearts as to bleat about the same old hobby horses?

The perversity and inadequacy of this is underlined by the failure of anyone to argue in these terms beforehand. No one on the right, to the best of my knowledge, warned that absent fathers risk riots. No one on the left seriously thought the shoplifters of the world would actually unite and try to take over (although, Morrissey took that song title from a Marxist magazine, as I recall).

The plain fact is that, at least for the vast majority of us, events have blindsided us. Out of nowhere we have been exposed to primal urges and a cultural underbelly that are at once both completely alien and utterly human and of our society. The kids in Lord of the Flies were all too human and so are our looters. The difference, of course, is that those that have behaved so irresponsibly this week are, sadly, not fictional. They are our fellow citizens.

Legally and morally they must face the full consequences of their rejection of even the most basic responsibilities. It is as crass to suggest otherwise as to attempt to make cheap political hay out of events. This goes well beyond party politics. It’s about what we are as a country, as a people, as human beings. And it is an immense failure in all of these respects to have amongst us so many so detached from even the most fundamental responsibilities. We should recognise our collective failure and be open to any means, from right or left, which will best correct it.

Picasso said that destruction is the first act of creation. We’ve had the destruction. If we all now really look into our consciences, and draw the right lessons, the creation can yet follow. If we recognise the immense dignity of Tariq Jahan, and have any pride in our country and its people, we would do nothing less.