Articles tagged with: Charles Clarke
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]
The point of Roger Casale, which I highlighted in my last post, seems all the stronger in light of an observation made by Martin Wolf today.
“The relationship between the US and China will become more central, with India waiting in the wings. The relative economic weight and power of the Asian giants seems sure to rise. Europe, meanwhile, is not having a good crisis. Its economy and financial system have proved far more vulnerable than many expected. Yet how far a set of refurbished and rebalanced institutions for international co-operation will reflect the new realities is, as yet, unknown”.
It is towards global institutions, like the IMF, the World Bank and the UN, that we must first look for the refurbishment that our Chinese century requires. However, Wolf’s comment – along with the criticisms of Charles Clarke, Wolfgang Münchau and Helmut Schmidt that my last post also noted – would seem to suggest that the EU too is also ripe for some refurbishment.
In absence of such refurbishment – or at least an improved claim upon output legitimacy – Europe can expect to drift ever further from the real crucible of global politics as this century progresses. The seeming addiction of Europe’s body politic to navel-gazing and nation-centric politics – exemplified by the current EU elections in which anything other than EU issues are being discussed - is corrosive in its inability to rise to the bigger global picture as set out by Casale. The longer Europe persists with this inward-looking, complacent, arrogant attitude the more likely this global picture is to take a form that is displeasing to European values and interests.
China is ascendant and hardly seems to have an excessive respect for the Copenhagen criteria. India may be closer to satisfying such criteria but Russia and Iran seem likely to increasingly feature amongst the global picture and the stuff of the Copenhagen criteria are as much of a joke to them as the idea, pace Francis Fukuyama, that history has ended.
History moves on. But the EU seems increasingly left behind, as its poor response to the economic crisis well illustrates. The Copenhagen criteria embody the kind of values with which Fukuyama presumed that history had ended and so, in this sense, they seem more univeral than European values. Nonetheless, the way that history has developed since Fukuyama made this claim would suggest that, perhaps, these values are not necessarily quite so universal after all – at least not yet. The EU needs to raise its game if these values are not to become not so much universal as the preserve of Europe and north America.
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.
“This was the week in which Labour lost the next election”, according to Matthew d’Ancona. A coalition between Labour and the Lib Dems is the best response, thinks Sunder Katwala, while Matthew Taylor suggests a, “radical departure from past practice. How about declaring a unilateral political ceasefire?” John Prescott was spitting feathers in a wholly absurd and unnecessary fashion with Taylor. Presumably, he is at least as angry with Katwala. But, at least, Prescott wants to fight this war; the next general election.
Danny Finkelstein suggests that Ed Balls is briefing against Ed Miliband as part of the next war; the race to be the next leader of the Labour Party. Balls, allegedly, wants to be the candidate of the left in this contest, though I can’t see him usurping Jon Cruddas from this position. Given that Labour could well swing leftwards in opposition, as a Blair/Brown backlash occurs against a backdrop of continued economic struggles, this is a position from which Cruddas could be victorious.
This is an outcome which is unlikely to delight either of the Eds, but the extent of Labour’s leftward swing in opposition may be directly proportionate to Cameron’s majority. Labour Party discipline will be easier to maintain if the party feels itself to be closer to a return to government. So the Ballses and the Milibands may best fight their next war (i.e. the Labour leadership election) by focusing entirely upon this war (i.e. the general election). In this much, Prescott is right. But, I think, there is more to be said for Taylor’s suggestion than he thinks. Certainly, the public appetite now is very much for sincere and strategic leadership, not political game playing. While I am not quite sure how one goes about “a unilateral political ceasefire”, Charles Clarke would seem to have suggested a good place to start.
“Surely it would be better both for Labour and for the country if the prime minister were now to announce the date of the next general election (my preference would be 6 May 2010). That would show confidence in the government’s economic approach, rebut any allegation that Labour was trying to manipulate economic decisions for party advantage and remove the rampant speculation around election timing which can erode the clarity and direction of the government’s leadership”.
Saturday 20 September, Labour Party Conference Diary
Train heave on to Euston”, once sang one of Manchester’s favourite sons. My reverse journey began with a blizzard of Cabinet Ministers: Hilary Benn, suited and booted, and seemingly fretting about his ticket; John Hutton, relaxed in both dress and in his ability to emerge from a long queue at W. H. Smith’s with a newspaper in time for his train. He may have read the Mirror editorial proclaiming that Labour faces “one of the most important conferences in its proud history”. Many of the pivotal moments in Labour’s history have been forged in the fiery furnace of conference. So the journey north was charged with anticipation and occasion.
Morrissey called upon arrival in Manchester. This was Helen, my CLP Secretary, not Stephen Patrick, with a tip on navigating the secure zone. First I had to contend with a taxi journey to my B&B which was extended by “the loonies marching,” as my driver put it. I was content to take this focus group of one as the authentic voice of Manchester’s working class.
