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 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.

“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.

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”.

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.

Having taken in Salford Quays, emblematic of the change reaped in this part of the country over the past decade, I eventually arrived at the London Labour reception to hear Len Duvall speak of the change London experienced over the same period. Later at the New Statesman reception, I spotted Hilary Benn wearing the same black suit and red tie combination he had on earlier at Euston. However, Steve Reed, Leader of Lambeth Council, was one of the few males at the Labour London reception not wearing a suit. I think this makes him officially cool.

Certainly Gordon Brown was a model of cool composure as he spoke after Duvall on the political and economic challenges before him. He was also kind enough to sign a bottle of whisky for the raffle. My good fortune means this is now destined to sit in my kitchen next to a champagne bottle signed by Tony Blair. I am not sure whether this makes me a champagne or whisky socialist (that probably depends on the time of day) but Alan Johnson is undoubtedly correct in saying that “Blairites versus Brownites is so last century”. Too many party debates still seem trapped in this tired paradigm. Hopefully a new dynamic will more clearly emerge within the party over the coming days.

Sunday 21 September, Labour Party Conference Diary

Early afternoon Sunday, in the sunshine outside Manchester Central, a sticker is thrust upon me by Richard Caborn. It reads, “Let’s go 4th. The campaign for a Labour fourth term.” By 7 pm Ben Page of Ipsos-Mori had told a fringe audience that there was only a 5 to 10 per cent chance of this objective becoming a reality. No wonder David Miliband appeared at a Fabian fringe that lunchtime in the grand and beautiful setting of Manchester Town Hall to argue that the biggest challenge for this conference is to tackle the sense of fatalism surrounding the party.

The awful polling that appeared in the morning’s Observer tended to focus conference debate on the short term tactics that may alleviate Labour’s predicament. The longer term strategy to be followed, however, should take its inspiration from the insightful and biting analysis offered by Matthew Taylor at the same RSA-BBC fringe that Ben Page covered in a cloak of doom. Page gave a powerful presentation that set out why the business of politics is difficult in the face of such widespread, seemingly contradictory beliefs as 74 per cent of the public thinking that we are heading for environmental disaster unless we change track at the same time as 59 per cent saying they are doing absolutely nothing about it.

Taylor began his response to Page by wryly noting that there is no better time to conclude that the electorate is stupid then when we are 20 points down in the polls. While acknowledging that politics will become ever less relevant unless the challenges set out by Page are addressed, Taylor ultimately provided a defiantly optimistic anecdote to the fatalism bemoaned by Miliband. The future, for Taylor, need not be one of bowling along (as in Robert Putnam’s celebrated tome) but can be one of collectivist solutions being applied to emerging political challenges. Just as attendances at football matches, cinemas and restaurants have reversed trends of long historical decline by revivifying their offerings for changed times, so too collectivist political and public policy institutions can have enhanced relevancy if these institutions can be designed in a way people respond to.

Generating this response is all the more important in an era when behavioural change is ever more a precondition of policy success. I headed for the Fabian reception buoyed by the kind of Manchester swagger, celebrated by Andy Burnham in his address to the Urban Hub; a confidence instilled by the richness of Taylor’s vision that in spite of our disastrous polling the Labour Party remains engaged in an inspirational and vital endeavour.

Tuesday 23 September, Labour Party Conference Diary

Gordon Brown’s big speech was sometimes more mangled by the subtitling on the TV screens in Manchester Central than John Prescott’s most garbled comments. Pieties became “pie yots”. Applause was “platz plau”. This kaleidoscopic interpretation parallels another conference reality: simultaneously breathing in a news event and being less aware of the news than on a normal working day. It seems to take a special effort at conference to seek out a TV to see how events are being reported (and fringes, receptions and bars are always more attractive to me). In contrast, in this highly networked, 24 hour news age, news coverage often seems virtually drip fed to us in more normal circumstances. The view from conference is one that is sufficiently close-up and worms-eye to create both a visceral sense of occasion and doubt as to the completeness of this perspective.

Brown’s speech inspired a sincere sense of purpose, determination and hope amongst the conference attendees that I spoke to. However, as I made my way to an IPPR fringe on the future of progressive politics, I was entirely in the dark about the extent to which this mood was reflected in media coverage and public opinion.

At the IPPR event Peter Kellner drew warm applause for the observation that there is a good case to be made for Labour changing our leader, as there is also a good case to be made for not doing so, but the worst of all worlds is created by the hobbled, half-way house that recent snipping and manoeuvring have created. He, consequently, implored Charles Clarke, another panellist, “to put up or shut up”. The presence of Sky News’ Glen Oglaza in the audience was my one window on the media. He enquired of Clarke whether Brown’s speech would resonate beyond Manchester. Clarke declined to answer directly but gave a hint as to his future intentions by saying to Kellner that he could take this to mean that he was “shutting up”.

John Denham and John Harris completed the cast of panellists, with all being fulsome in their praise of Brown’s speech. John Harris said that he received a text from a member of the government boasting that, “it was the most openly progressive speech he has ever made”. Harris argued that New Labour has pursued progressive ends by stealth but that popular concern about financial convulsions and their impacts created space for more overtly doing so. The government should rise to this “progressive moment” was his message.

Whether “progressive moment” is entirely the right description for a flirtation with a calamity of Great Depression proportions is a moot point. Certainly the political context seems to be rapidly evolving – and in ways potentially to Labour’s advantage. The end of the “Regan/Thatcher era” is being spoken of by such economic luminaries as Paul Krugman. One doesn’t need to be excessively enamoured with Marxist-structuralist reasoning to see economic events as forging a new path for politicians to follow. Catherine Mayer of Time argued at a fringe on Monday evening that this changed backdrop was to Barack Obama’s advantage in the presidential election but that Labour had so far failed to capitalise on the political opportunity that is presented to us, as a party more comfortable with market regulation and intervention than the Conservatives, by a much less laissez-faire popular attitude to laissez-faire economics.

Labour’s best hope would seem to be to have the grumblers/plotters (you decide) “shut up” and to unite behind Brown’s attempt to make a better first of this opportunity. As Brown takes forward the “new settlement” that his speech promised, we should work to ensure that the media is ultimately left to conclude that this also yielded a new Gordon; a popular, respected and General Election winning Prime Minister.

“Gaitskell’s death left Labour in a state of flux”, wrote the historian Kevin Jefferys, “demonstrating that the long civil war of the 1950s had never been satisfactorily resolved. Despite Gaitskellite domination of Party institutions since 1955, revisionism had never completely captured Labour opinion. Fundamentalist socialism may have been down, but it was not out”.

The ideological grandchildren of these fundamentalist socialists sense that New Labour’s long hold over Party institutions may be coming to an end. Derek Simpson’s knifes, for example, sharpen for John Hutton. If Labour post Brown were to slip into a funk akin to its post Gaitskell malaise, this would complete a symmetry between the New Labour era and the revisionist years of Gaitskell.

Blair may have fought far more shy than Brown of positioning himself within past Party traditions or identifying himself in such terms. However, in style and philosophy, New Labour had clear revisionist antecedents. From Blair succeeding, where Gaitskell failed, in reforming Clause Four onwards, New Labour can be understood as revisionism plus. Indeed, Roy Jenkins described Blair as the best Labour leader since his idol, Gaitskell.

Jenkins’ friend and rival Tony Crosland provided the great revisionist text in the form of The Future of Socialism (1956). That the country we live in seems so different from the one this book looked towards has been assigned by Raymond Plant to Crosland’s penchant for mechanical, rather than a moral, reform.

Plant distinguishes these two kinds of reformers. “Moral reformers are essentially bottom-up reformers. Values can only be effective in politics when they are widely shared, and the task of the moral reformer is to take the long view and to try to transform the values by which people live in the direction that he wants to see. The mechanical reformer is a top-down reformer, who believes that there might be political, social and economic strategies available which would produce the desired results, without necessarily having to transform the underlying moral culture of citizens”.

Conservatives, particularly those fired by the social passions of an Iain Duncan Smith like bent, deride “stealth taxes” and tax credits as the ultimate mechanical weapons. “Broken Britain” is, it is claimed, nothing if not the “demoralised” abdication of moral reform. Equally, the advances that the past eleven years have witnessed in terms of the revivification of the public sphere, from the strengthening of community institutions in the form of schemes like Sure Start to the unprecedented increases in public spending, suggest that New Labour has traded in the currency of the moral reform.

The debate will doubtless go on as to the extent to which New Labour has repeated the supposed error of Crosland in an excess of mechanical reform. However, recent comments by David Lammy would imply some kind of failure as a project of moral reform. “It’s wrong to describe New Labour as a movement. I don’t think that it could be described as a movement that filtered down to ordinary people on the ground.”

Never mind ordinary people on the ground, the Labour movement can seem as confused about the values of New Labour as they were about revisionist values after Gaitskell. The irony is that no epochs in Labour’s history have made more of an attempt to have the party defined around a set of values than the New Labour and revisionist periods. The two attempts to reform Clause Four around a set of values pay testament to this. Yet the articulation of these values was evidently lacking.

Crosland, the towering figure of a value-driven Labour politics, distinguished between ends, which are defined by values, and means, which are ever flexible to these ends. It could be, however, that means are inherently easier to grasp than ends and so are latched on to more easily than ends.

Just as the selling of council houses and the taming of the Unions gave Thatcherism coherence in the popular mind, so too these were beachhead policies that created a direct connection between how this project was popularly understood and a Hayekian philosophy. It may be that New Labour’s failings as a project of moral reform relate to a lack of beachhead policies that give New Labour’s values meaning in a concrete sense to the broad mass of the electorate.

The tragedy is that New Labour has always had a strong sense of the values that define it. “We believe that people should be able to rise by their talents, not by their birth or the advantages of privilege”, said Blair in 1996. Gordon Brown, as Prime Minister, has, likewise, embraced the X Factor – the unlocking of untapped talent. This is, essentially, the vision that he promised to set out to the country when he spurned an early general election. For whatever reason, perhaps the lack of a coherent set of beachhead policies, this vision has failed to find resonance with the electorate.

And what does this failure presage? In the divergent thinking of people like Neal Lawson and Charles Clarke the outlines of an emerging civil war within the party can be detected; a scramble to define the party in the post Blair/Brown era in which all of the party’s
neuroses and neurotics will demand blood. However, the real winners in this civil war will be the Conservatives and the real losers will be the ordinary people who stand to gain most from Labour properly becoming “the natural party of government” for this century.