'Community organising is the answer'

Neil Jameson of London Citizens is speaking to the Fabian/Webb centenary conference at LSE in the session on how coalitions for change are built. 'We only speak at living wage campuses - so we can only speak in London here at LSE and at QMW', he said.

Jameson made a passionate and effective pitch for community organising's role in

'We have found nirvana. Community organising is the answer to globalisation. It is the answer to the collapse of politics. The issue for us is the governance of the city. Public-facing is what we do. We are not particularly focused with governments or with policy. But we are obsessed with civil society'.

The election of a community organiser to the White House has increased the interest of the media, but mainly in America, he said. A new move in the UK was the creation of a community organiser's guild.

The pockets of power in society needed to be connected together - and faith communities and institutions would often provide the glue, he said.

The institutions of faith and the institutions of labour are the last surviving remnants of a democratic society, along with the charities and voluntary organisations. But the voluntary organisations are the weakest of the three; the trade unions are the next weakest. Faith is, pragmatically, strong. These are pockets of power, and if you can connect this Church to this Church to this Mosque on the things they agree on, then you can connect those pockets of power'

'What they agree on is never ideology, of course', said Jameson. 'What we have pioneered is the politics of assembly. There is no problem of disengagement from that politics. If you get a full room, then you can make things happen'.

This would, Jameson said, bring back the spirit of progressive politics of the late 19th and early 20th century.

'In the Webbs' time, women had no vote. All they could do was march up and down with banners. It doesn't have to all be about Westminster.

And he argued too that the Webbs had a major impact but depended on the tensions created in society since the 1880s. "The Webbs did the business and seized the moment. We must honour consistently too the labourers, the workers, the priests who created the tension which allowed politics to change", he said.

Townsend: Refocus on inequalities and World Bank

Veteran anti-poverty campaigner Peter Townsend said after looking at domestic banks and their weaknesses, it was time to look at the inextricable links between the domestic and international economies.
There were examples of this every day, he said, just this week there had been the announcement of job cuts in Swindon because of the problems going on with Honda in Japan.
Townsend said the key organisation that he would like to "take a bit of stick to" was the World Bank, and part of his interest has arisen because of work on child poverty around the world.
If you took a look at the GDP of the 53 low income countries in the world it was less than the total of the income of the five biggest international companies, he pointed out in a speech that identified the weaknesses of the World Bank.
The World Bank had not achieved reductions in child poverty across the world, he said at the Fabian conference.
Then he went on to point to an increasingly lack of transparency about the actions of transnational companies, partly because of the dismantling of three UN bodies that used to track this, he argued.
Townsend, a LSE lecturer, also argued for decent labour conditions down the line, among subsidaries of big companies, and public awareness of this.

Change depends on convincing society, not just government

"You achieve enduring change by shifting the public and taking the public with you", says Tim Horton, Fabian Research Director, arguing at the Fabian/Webb Memorial Trust centenary conference at the LSE, that the progressive left has forgotten how it achieved its major successes in the early 20th century.

Tim quoted Beatrice Webb's diary entry of her 1909 encounter with Winston Churchill, a member of the Liberal Cabinet.

He did not altogether like the news of our successful agitation. ‘You should leave the work of converting the country to us, Mrs Webb, you ought to convert the Cabinet’. ‘That would be all right if we wanted merely a change in the law, but we want’, I added, ‘to really change the minds of the people with regard to the facts of destitution, to make the feel the infamy of it and the possibility of avoiding it. That won’t be done by converting the Cabinet, even if we could convert the Cabinet – which I doubt. We will leave that task to a converted country’

"Beatrice Webb’s insight was that successful campaigns need to be public facing. But when we look at political campaigning, despite some excellent examples, far too many progressive campaigning institutions are govermment-facing and argue to government for changes of policy. It now seems that the right understands that better than the left. The way the anti-European movement changed Britain from a more pro-European to a more Eurosceptic country: it wasn’t by targeting the government or the Conservative party, it was by shifting public opinion. That is how the Taxpayers’ Alliance drives anti-taxation sentiment

So we need public facing coalitions. But this is not just a message for campaigners. It is a message for politicians too. Margaret Thatcher knew this: 'The economy is just the means; the aim is to change the soul'.

The counter-example is Bill Clinton. He did good things in too office, but did not make public case to shift the argument. His policies could be easily reversed and were like footprints in the sand”.

The new right was ready for the 1970s crisis: the left is not ready for this one

Hetan Shah - formerly of NEF and Compass - challenged Nick Bosanquet's rejection of universalism.

We need a narrative which is about us all being in this together. That was in the minority report: universalism. The policies that will take us forward are universal policies. Can we have free social care and bring the middle-class into that extension of the welfare state?

But he also wanted a more self-critical left, which was not ready to seize a political opportunity in the way that the New Right had been in the 1970s:

There is no shortage of policy ideas. What there is a shortage of is political will.
The economic crisis is an opportunity to rethink the economic model: we now that the neo-liberal economy doesn’t work. The danger is that there is little sign that we are going to take those steps.

...

The trouble is that there is no sign that we are going to take that step. Part of the fault lies in the progressive community: we have not been organised enough intellectually, and especially politically, to take advantage in the way that the right was at the time of the oil shock of the 1970s.

Both Hetan Shah and Sian Berry thought there were important shifts - particularly around the idea of a 'green new deal' - in the US and in Britain and Europe.

'The welfare state is a tragedy of good intentions'

Too often, think-tanks risk inviting speakers who agree too much with each other and confirm their own and their audience's prejudices. The Fabian/Webb Memorial Trust centenary conference at the LSE is hearing from a panel which has been challenged to think heretically, as the Webbs did in 1909, and come up with a new 'politics of the impossible'.

Among those taking up the challenge is Nick Bosanquet - drawing on his family link to Helen Bosanquet, Beatrice Webb's chief antagonist on the Royal Commission as well as his own shift away from Fabianism (he was a chair of the Society in the 1970s; and co-edited studies on the Labour government's equality record with Peter Townsend, who is sitting next to me on the conference floor) to the low tax politics of the think-tank Reform. Bosanquet has contributed to the new Fabian collection 'From workhouse to welfare', writing in favour of the Majority Report.

He defined his task as to make common cause and get Fabians behind a common agenda for the low tax and small state politics.

And this was his message to us.

We see you as well-meaning and well intentioned people who have been taken for a ride. The welfare state is a tragedy of good intentions.

What has happened is that a number of key interests in society have fallen on the welfare state like famished animals. One is big government. Second, monopoly professions. Thirdly, big contractors. Fourthly, the mass media

The tragedy of the welfare state were dependence effects; inequitable funding (once direct and indirect taxation were taken into account) and intergenerational unfairness.

"The welfare state has created more problems than it solved", he asserted.

Bosanquet argued that an agenda focused on raising personal capability; reducing taxes; and refocusing public services around choices and personal budgets.

But he also argued that "the better off should contribute to the cost of their own services ... the welfare state came across the rails when it became a middle-class entititlement programme, and not a poverty programme".

Many of the other speakers have argued that universalism is essential to build coalitions to tackle poverty and inequality. Bosanquet's argument is that universalism is part of the problem.

"Greens need to understand campaigns on poverty and environment go hand in hand"

"There's not a shortage of policy ideas, there's a shortage of political will," according to Hetah Shah, at the Fighting Poverty event.
During an economic crisis there was an opportuntity to refocus on environmental sustainability and well being, he said.
Shah, chief executive of educational charity DEA, said there was a lot of misunderstanding around poverty and inequality and a major education campaign was needed to address that.
He was concerned that the narratives that were emerging were divisive, not universalist.
If you were looking for an activism model then progressives should look towards the green campaigners. Those on the progressive left had to reach out to those campaigning on green agendas and convince them that campaigns about sustainability and poverty went hand in hand, he said.
The Green Party's Sian Berry said the ideas of a green new deal were now gaining more political hold, as investing in green industries and sustainability were now being discussed in the mainstream as a way of creating more jobs.
"It's great to hear this sort of thing being discussed in America. it's great to hear Gordon Brown talking about it."

Roy Hattersley's Speech to the Centenary Conference

The 'Wordle' above is a visual representation of Roy Hattersley's speech to our Centenary Conference, delivered this morning by the former deputy leader of the Labour Party. It gives greater prominence to words that appeared more frequently in the address and provides a quick impression of the themes and emphasis he tried to get across. You can click on the picture to get a closer view of the language Hattersley used.

"Redistribution by stealth is not enough"

Redisribution by stealth is not enough, said lecturer and researcher Fran Bennett at the Fighting Poverty conference.
The public was not aware of the relative successes the Labour Party had made in tackling child poverty, she told the conference at LSE, and that was holding it back.
Bennett said if the public was not aware that any improvements were being made then it was difficult to win their confidence for child poverty policies.
She argued that the government had to attempt to make the welfare state popular again as Tony Blair had suggested in a speech in 1999.
It had to get the language right around the welfare state, and to challenge public opinion as it had done on health and sexuality issues.
It also had to get the administration of benefits right, and not erode national insurance benefits as this was eroding trust.

Heroes, villains and alternative histories

The history panel at the centenary conference on the 1909 Minority Report has contained several chances to interrogate alternative histories which never quite happened.

Roy Hattersley has placed John Burns and Keir Hardie in the dock.

Dianne Hayter, current chair of the Labour NEC and a Webb Memorial Trust trustee, has suggested that the whole history of Liberalism, Socialism and the British welfare state have been rather different had Beatrice Webb married her first great passion, the radical Liberal Imperialist Joseph Chamberlain? Might she then have persuaded the Liberal government in 1909?

Jose Harris, in the new Fabian collection, offers a different alternative history. Had Sidney, not Beatrice, been on the Royal Commission that his skill at committee work would have brokered a compromise between majority and minority report, and perhaps led to reform sooner.

Roy Hattersley did not use this occasion to renew the Croslandite challenge to the Webbs, but rather questioned whether the "second wave revisionists" who had turned Fabianism into a term of abuse knew what they were for at all. Hattersley's historical villians were John Burns and Keir Hardie. Burns for "dishing the Webbs", retailing how that proud, egotistical working-man in the Liberal Cabinet, on being appointed to the Cabinet, congratulated the Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman: "Sir Henry, I congratulate you. This will be the most popular thing you have ever done".

Keir Hardie suffered from a politics of "resounding declarations" and "silly prejudices as an alternative to thought" in seeing social insurance "as a palliative that mitigated the hardship of poverty without removing its causes and left the capitalist system intact". That, said Hattersley, was the opposite of the "practical idealism" which was needed.

Carole Seymour-Jones, brandished the picture of Joseph Chamberlain in her biography of Beatrice Webb, said that one could see why Beatrice had been tempted.

Hayter mentioned that there is an essay on a Chamberlain-Potter marriage in Duncan Brack's alternative history collection of essays President Gore, so I will need to catch up with that). It is, however, difficult to see how the 1909 Minority Report could remain in a parallel universe story. Beatrice's diary relates that she asked Chamberlain whether he could tolerate dissent in his household. His answer: "no".

Seymour-Jones noted too after she accepted Sidney Webb's proposal of marriage, after several refusals, that she had received from him a letter, with full length photograph. Her riposte that "I am marrying the head only". Seymour-Jones was certain not to offer a hagiography of Webb, stressing her grit, abrasiveness and willingness to make enemies in a "life full of conflict and contradictions". Webb had wanted to escape what appeared to be her fate and to lead "an epic life".

Willing the means on poverty

Roy Hattersley's speech this morning to the Fabian and Webb Memorial Trust centenary conference can be read here.

He argued that the government had made progress on poverty, and that the government was reluctant to admit even the degree of redistribution that had been achieved, and so the 'modesty of the reduction is a direct consquence of the modesty of ambition'.

A significant reduction in poverty requires a substantial redistribution of income and wealth. And, if we pretend otherwise we betray the poor. The easy answers are mostly inventions intended to salve the conscience of the middle classes. The “trickle down effect” is a pure fiction. But it is still trotted out as the justification for the rich getting richer and advanced as a warning that, if we take specific action against poverty, we will endanger overall prosperity. There is neither economic nor historical justification for that scare story No sensible social democrat argues for reckless spending - either on social provision or the renewal of the nuclear deterrent. The problem for a succession of Labour Governments has not been recklessness, it has been caution – not so much in terms of the balance of public revenue and expenditure as in the policies on which the money was spent.

Rushanara Ali of the Young Foundation, and Labour ppc for Bethnal Green and Bow, also speaking at the conference, said that the greatest challenge for incumbent governments was getting out of a mindset of incumbency. This was a job for activism as well as for goverment. But she joined Hattersley in advocating a bold approach: that the argument had to be put that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

It is easy for Labour debates to slip into what might have been done differently since 1997. But governments govern. This was also a discussion about what could still be done now.

The test is whether there can be a substantial move in April's budget on child poverty. It would take £4 billion to catch up to the 2010 child poverty target.

Do the recession, the government's role in keeping the economy moving and the banking bailout now make further redistribution unaffordable. Or, as debt necessarily rises anyway, is this the moment for an enlightened self-interest case - for putting more money in the pockets into those most likely to spend it - can be joined with a moral argument.

Hattersley, stressing he has been careful not to criticise the Brown government since the transition, said the central message was clear: "A Labour government can not succeed without a moral purpose". There remains time to renew it.

In her time and our time: poverty battles

Remarkable, says Dianne Hayter of the Webb Memorial Trust at a Fabian conference at LSE, that Beatrice Webb achieved what she did in her time. Even now there have been only 29 women in the cabinet, and only 8% of university vice chancellors are women, that back in the early 20th century, Webb managed to change "society's approach to welfare" with her writings, campaigning and intelligence.

While biographer Carole Seymour-Jones said Beatrice was of her time but far ahead of her time. She had to make difficult choices, the ideas of the minority report were underpinned by her experiences in the East End in the 1880s.

She had a passionate conviction that something should be done. The idea of the poverty line and that in a civilised society we should not allow anyone to fall below that line was something that Webb prmoted, said Seymour-Jones at the Fighting Poverty and Inequality in an Age of Affluence conference.

The debates which Labour needs to have

I am afraid I have become dizzily confused about whether I should back Ed Balls as a stop Yvette Cooper candidate, or rather Yvette Cooper as a stop Ed Balls candidate, and which Miliband might be better placed to block the chances of the other, in the current pretty pointless frenzy in a Westminster bubble about what might happen when the Labour party next elects a party leader at some future point in political circumstances as yet unknown. And, whatever happens at the next election, nobody knows when this would be either.

Firstly, the current assumption of Labour defeat can (and will) change again (more than once) in the next twelve months, though the obligatory goldfish-style amnesia of the political and media classes (further exaggerated by the new internet politics) means that the political herd never remembers once the conventional wisdom has stood on its head since the day before yesterday, and so is equally certain that whatever it thinks today will hold good.

Secondly, any political party which loses any election in future should recognise the wisdom of what Michael Howard after defeat in 2005 and swear never to elect a new leader within the first six months, even should a leader want to go. That is why David Davis is not Leader of the Opposition. The Conservatives might have saved themselves from the William Hague or Iain Duncan Smith experience had either Major or Hague done likewise. Parties which saw the enlightened self-interest in that approach would have plenty of time to debate and scrutinise ideas, policies and personalities out in the political daylight, once a choice is needed. (Steve Richards is right that there has been no real scrutiny or debate of anything or anyone yet).

However, come back to the more immediate political needs of 2009 and there is a different political danger to that identified by Hazel Blears (in a 'calm down' intervention that may have catapulted the speculation up the news agenda).

That would be if Labour ministers - for fear of being thought to be 'positioning' - were to only stick to their departmental briefs and "get on with the job", while the rest of us wonder what the Labour government's political argument for another term in office is going to be. Getting the political choices across is their job too. It is important we hear more from government ministers, speaking in different ways to party, progressive and general public audiences. This can not all be left to any Prime Minister: some political interventions are better made not from No 10 Downing Street. It is the task of at least half a dozen political voices, not just one or two - including those like Alan Johnson, John Denham, Peter Mandelson and David Miliband as well as the four or five names being suggested as possible leadership frontrunners in the last few weeks.

That is not to deny that Peter Mandelson made some very sensible comments this week about the dangers of clamours and calls for instant solutions to the recession and magic wands. And, sometimes, as when twenty governments meet at the G20, it will be vital to have a great deal of sharp policy focus to get a useful result. But the political argument and narrative needs to be a broader one. Ministers have tried to get the message out about the domestic response to the recession, and it is inevitably difficult to do so. But (and perhaps it has been a little too soon, but this becomes urgent this Spring) Labour has not yet articulated a public argument which addresses some important political areas - including the new relationship with progressive America, how Britain works in Europe, and the politics of other key themes. That story and political argument this Spring needs to be different and broader one than the necessity of the intergovernmental policy action plan which may come out of the summit.

Finally, of course the media can and should speculate ahead about Labour politics after 2010 and beyond, especially now that the staple snap election column has been put on ice. My frustration here (with some notable exceptions) is why can this not dig a bit deeper? If the commentariat, deprived of their staple snap election column, do want to delve into specualtion about future possible Labour leaders, could we not at least learn something new and substantive about the emerging contours of the party's debate.

This will be a debate about ideas as well as personalities. There is too much stock discussion of whether there might be pandering to the "base" or the left (understood to be the same thing) when the bubbling under discussions in the party are more interesting, and more nuanced, than that.

David Miliband notes the "gotcha" culture in Jason Cowley's interesting (super-long) profile-interview in this week's New Statesman. If shares in the Foreign Secretary were perhaps excessively ramped up last August, they have been over-sold since. Yet, in all the frenzy about process and positioning, how many attempts were there to interrogate what the potential content of a future Labour argument could be. (My own perhaps excessively pointy-headed attempt to interrogate the substance of Milibandism was rather swimming against the tide). There are several hints in the New Statesman profile suggests Miliband thinks it wise in the aftermath not to stray outside of foreign policy: that is a key political area too, but that depends on connecting the foreign and domestic arguments.

We learn nothing from the blanket assumption or claim that any speech or action must be motivated by positioning. Politicians are politicians: it is surely always the case in politics that there is a cocktail of values, ideals, strategy, tactics, interests and instincts. The interesting question is how the direction of travel of party debates might shift in future and why. (John Rentoul's long GQ profile of Ed Balls (part one and part two may have caught some of that, perhaps by having the advantage of analysing the prospects of a candidate who may not be the commentator's own preferred choice).

Take, for example, the Heathrow debates within government. This was the most interesting piece of intra-Labour politics for several years. And it was new. But I am not sure it has been properly unpacked, and whisperings about political motivations on any side do not scratch the surface.

After all, a discussion which (according to public reports) seemed to see Brown, Balls, Mandelson (and Hoon) on one side and two Milibands, a Benn, an Alexander, Harman and Denham on the other is interesting. That obviously isn't a Blairite/Brownite argument (with two Eds on opposite sides) and nor is it entirely a generational split. There were some policy issues at issue, and a range of strategic and tactical decisions. It was partly about the priority and trade-offs between the economy and the environment. But it also, I think, signalled a new issue about the nature of progressive politics in future - about how far emerging if inchaote ideas about 'movement politics' would see Labour to revisit or overturn the political strategy of the 1997 New Labour model.

The leadership speculation remains a red herring, especially the more exotic scenarios: the heat of last summer and Autumn will not return. But these short and long-term party debates need more content, and so more discussion, and not less. That means breaking through the fear of media misrepresentation as a bar to having any debate at all. It is rather welcome that it has now become obligatory to say that New Labour is ending the era of the top-down politics of control. That remains work in progress, to say the least. It would be a shame to call off the effort before it has barely begun.

The PM shows his support

The Fabian conference Fighting Poverty and Inequality in an Age of Affluence at LSE tomorrow is attracting attention for its coverage of the history of the welfare state, and the inspiration that the minority report on the Poor Law gave to Beveridge four decades later.

We are expecting an interested audience. The prime minister, a keen student of history and the politics of the welfare state, couldn't be there, but he has sent a message of support...

Sometimes ideas are more than simple passing notions – some are insurrections in the human imagination, ways of looking at the world which once unleashed mean society can never be the same again. So it was with Beatrice Webb's 1909 Minority Report to the Royal Commission on the Poor. The report was a landmark moment in the history of political ideas; the first call for not just the abolition of the workhouse but for its replacement with a modern welfare state and national health service.

These ideas of 1909 and the public argument which they began were to guide the post war Labour government as they set about the most radical transformation of Britain in half a century.

While the politics and policy challenges of the global age are often very different, it is right that we should be inspired in our tasks by the progressive giants who came before. So I salute the efforts of the Fabian Society and Webb Memorial Trust in commemorating this centenary and asking how the ideas and campaigns of a century ago can inspire this generation as we work to build in this place and in our time that which Fabians have always dreamed of: the fair society.

I’m sorry not to be with you today but look forward to hearing the results of your deliberations.

With warm best wishes,

Gordon Brown

The shamelessly Mail view

You might imagine that the Daily Mail suggesting that the country is full of benefit “freeloaders” who are living a life of luxury on benefits is something new. But it isn’t.
Back in the first decade of the 20th century when social reformers such as Beatrice Webb and Maud Pember Reeves were out in the poorer boroughs of London doing research about the living conditions of the poor, the Mail was up to the same tricks as it does today; Filling the heads of its readers with ideas that the poor had caused their own poverty and poor health by deliberately taking their wrong path in life.
While another favourite theme is that life on benefits is and has always been easier and more comfortable than working.
In 1905, the Mail ran an article headlined “The Workhouse De Luxe”, suggesting that workhouse was a palace where residents luxuriated with music, drama, hot and cold baths, while wearing tweed suits.
They called it the “Poor Law Elysium” and suggested it was a restful haven from the real world, where others toiled to keep themselves alive.
On another page, it ran a story about how a boy loved his life at the workhouse so much he walked twenty miles to return to it, rather than go back to living with his family.
In a scene which sounds like it might have been plucked straight out a novel, the Mail story records a conversation between the Workhouse Master, the Workhouse Chairman and the 12-year-old boy.
“The Chairman; ‘Have you not sufficient food at home, my boy?’” Answers Jim (the boy); “Yes , but I like the workhouse food better. Please sir, let me come back.”
This relentless theme is pursued in another article of 1909, where a Mail article which argues; “”we are only now beginning to cause of this infant mortality is the lack of proper care and nourishment – the mother is the key of the situation.”
It adds; “over 100,000 babies doomed every year through the ignorance of their mothers; are these mothers whom the State has hitherto neglected to educate, entirely to blame?”
But when Pember Reeves carried out her research on poverty in Lambeth, published in 1912, she found that it was not that mothers didn’t understand their children would be healthier if they were fed milk, rather than water, but they were unable to afford the milk. And families on tiny budgets were doing a sort of Russian roulette when deciding whether to live in a smaller home with better light and cleaner air for a higher rent, or save money by living in a basement flat with poor air and light, leaving them more money for food.
Those children who lived in a home on an upper floor invariably had better health results, Pember Reeves and her Fabian women found during their researches, later published as Family Life on a Pound A Week.
Meanwhile, refer to Beatrice Webb’s Minority Report on the Poor Law to discover the appalling conditions that poor women were living under at the time. Women, of course, were hardly acknowledged as separate beings at the time, acknowledgement of their existence came via their status as married, unmarried or widowed.
Unmarried women with children were not allowed any kind of benefits outside the workhouse, – the sort of harshness of which Mail readers would approve. And once in workhouses women were separated from their children within nine months.
Webb was one of the first to identify the need for women to be treated as individuals, instead of merely as appendages to their husbands, and to argue for a welfare state where every British adult should receive access to the welfare state, whatever their marital state.
One hundred years after the Minority Report, the Mail is still publishing articles suggesting those who live in poverty have no-one but themselves to blame.
So some things change, but others never do. Over the last century, in the 100 years since the Poor Law Minority Report was published, the Mail has continued in a water-dripping-on-rock way to suggest that poverty is often the fault of those that live in it.

Twittered offside

Twitterers among you can follow us at twitter.com/thefabians: 869 of you are doing so.

Lord Iain Dale of the blogosphere has flagged us offside in his post today on the 'top 20 UK Political Blog Twitterers' because we are not an individual. That saves us from being sandwiched us between Alistair Campbell and John Prescott in 7th place. We'll try to get over it: what is interesting is that Dale's top ten includes four Labour bloggers, three of whom (those two and Derek Draper) were not yet blogging or twittering at new year, just two months ago.

(UPDATE: Iain Dale has kindly changed his mind after checking the video replay, so we are now to be found in that Campbell-Prescott twitter sandwich of what has become a top 25 list. Interestingly, four of his top five Labour twitterers primarily have offline presences and reputations which they have recently tried to take online (Campbell, Prescott, Fabians and Derek Draper), while Tom Watson has had a longer established online presence, while those on the right tend to have reputations which have been primarily developed through the internet. UPDATE ENDS).

Another new development yesterday is that we have a new Facebook page and so are encouraging members and friends to join as 'fans'.

The existing Fabian Society group will remain live, but the features of this new NGO page will enable us to make more use of Facebook, linking up with the blog and twitter feed, invite members and supporters to events, and host discussions. We want to encourage the 1600+ members of the group to become a 'fan' of the new page, which will be the main focus of Facebook activities from the national society HQ.

A search for Fabian Society on Facebook will throw up several different Fabian voluntary groups - Young Fabians, Women's Network, Welsh Fabians, and a sprinkling of local societies from the LSE, Bexley, Norwich all the way to Sydney University - so you can join those relevant to you.

And a quick thank you to Michael Haddon at City University and to Katy Taylor for their efforts in helping Rachael Jolley to develop and sharpen our online and social networking presence, so that we can engage with and try to help spark the new social and political movements of our age. The new reach and engagement is a good thing in itself. It's leading more people to join us as members too, and is helping us to push Fabian membership towards an all-time high.

As ever, ideas about how we could use these spaces are welcome - here, on facebook, by email or, if you prefer, by second class post to Dartmouth Street.

Paxman in the workhouse

It was very helpful - as we build up to Saturday's centenary conference on the 1909 Poor Law Minority Report at the LSE - of Jeremy Paxman to try a bit of stone-breaking and a bowl of gruel to capture the indignities of the workhouse in his The Victorians' television series on Sunday night. Bizarrely, this led AN Wilson to ask why our politicians lack the courage to call for a return to the workhouse. My piece about this on Comment is Free generated some very informed and interesting comments about the history of the Poor Laws.

The Guardian's editorial 'In praise of Beatrice Webb' yesterday declared that the minority report issued an obituary for the workhouse, even if it took another generation to achieve it.

The Webbs dealt an ultimately fatal blow to the idea that paupers were to blame for their own condition and that provision for them should be at just above starvation level, lest other morally weak individuals be tempted to join them. Hence the workhouse, an institution designed to offer no comfort, no prospects and no hope ...

The minority report and the less radical majority report were rejected by the Liberal government of the day. Workhouses lingered on in various forms and the poor law itself lasted until 1948 - but Beatrice had already written its obituary in 1909.

These points ought to be common ground across politics, but the leader has sparked an online discussion about the Webb's controversial and contested reputation, particularly around their later pro-Soviet writings. I have joined in the fray.

There are a couple of letters responding to the editorial today, one of which from Revered Michael Peet highlights the events being held across next week in both East London and Westminster to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of George Lansbury.

The other Guardian letter argues for a more participatory approach to poverty. Fabian research fellow James Gregory argues on the Progress website that the idea of the 'basic minimum' became too narrow after Beveridge.

And Peter Townsend, among those who inherited and did most to extend the Fabian tradition at the LSE, argues in his contribution to the new Fabian collection that the spirit of 1909 would today in 2009 be best applied to the fundamental reform of the World Bank.

False smugness over Stanford

The collapse of ‘Sir’ Allen Stanford’s business empire this week forces us again to look at the relationship between money and sport.
Both the English and West Indian Cricket Boards have been heavily criticised for their involvement with the rather dubious Texas billionaire. However, for both maybe it was just too good an opportunity to turn down. Stanford offered such sizeable amounts of money – as much for investment in grassroots cricket in both countries as for individual players – that both Boards had to take it seriously.
Also, despite the rather sordid efforts of the Twenty 20 for $20m last November, Stanford’s investment in West Indian cricket had been stable for the medium-term. His creation of a regional Twenty20 tournament had helped bring new supporters to the game, professionalise many teams and raised the standards of West Indian cricket. Indeed the demands he made of his so-called ‘superstars’ last year – including a 6 week training camp – may well be a major factor in why the team is now beating England in the current Test Series.
Unpleasant brash Texan (and funder of a range of dubious Republican politicians) he may be, but his money has done some good.
Furthermore, his finance offered both England and West Indies a chance to be independent from the ever-growing financial dominance of India. At a time when Test Match dates and player availability were being dictated by the Indian Premier League, the chance to secure a deal that meant both the Boards and their players were not fully beholden to India was undoubtedly an attractive one.
That is not to exonerate the Boards – both have their fundamental flaws and both have abused their supporters and players alike for a number of years. But those who now rejoice at the egg on their faces and the downfall of Stanford should reflect on the real losers here. It is cricket itself. The English Chance to Shine programme, an incredibly positive attempt to move cricket into state schools and be an agent of social change will lose hundreds of thousands of pounds. And the impoverished cricketing islands of the Caribbean will lose the income that has offered a glimmer that the region could regain some of its former glories.
And that is not even mentioning the ordinary Antiguans, 5% of who are reportedly employed by Stanford’s companies and whose earnings are held in his financial institutions. So lets not be too smug about all this.

The boot is on the left foot

Many of us are not always convinced by the French left. But an exception can be made for Michel Platini, and not simply in tribute to how France won the 1984 European Championship in such enormous style, but out of recognition for the effective way he is using his mandate as UEFA President, both in pursuing gradual and incremental reforms to somewhat rebalance European football, rather than always acceding to the demands of the biggest clubs, and also in being a public advocate for much greater scrutiny of the direction of the game and the need for effective governance.

The Times had a good report on his speech to the European Parliament, and The Independent carries an extract:

For the past 15 or 20 years, we have grown tired of hearing that there is no need to regulate, that the market regulates itself, that excesses and imbalances will disappear of their own accord, and that the growth of income in football is an endless upward spiral.

We now know that none of this is true: that in football, as in the economy in general, the market is incapable of correcting its own excesses – and it was not the UEFA president who said so, it was Barack Obama.

The Premier League may well feel challenged by the Platini agenda. The BBC finds some left-right splits among British MEPs, with Labour's Richard Corbett thinking Platini is raising important issues, but the Tories and UKIP sceptical or opposed.

But it is perhaps surprising to see LibDem Graham Watson proposing the Premier League as a good model for football in other European countries. As every football fan knows, the redistribution of income upwards through the Premier League combined with the Champions League restructuring has made English football very much more predictable than it was, with only four clubs able to even think about winning the league. Those concerned about the causes of falling social mobility could find some interesting lessons from football.

German view of that "special relationship"

Guest post by Rolf Mutzenich, Member of the Bundestag.

Europe could hardly wait for President Obama's inauguration. Yet the expectations placed on the new president are far too high, and are partly due to the longing for a contrast with George W. Bush. Hopes for a radical change in course are also caused to some degree by idealistic, wishful thinking in Europe regarding a multilateral American foreign policy. Nonetheless, the mood of optimism in the US is genuine, despite the crisis. And it is spreading to Europe. The signals in the field of disarmament and arms control, in particular, offer grounds for hope.
Despite this hope, however, Europe should not overlook the fact that Obama's scope for action is limited in political and financial terms, and that the new US President will hardly be in a position to work all the miracles expected of him. In addition, Obama wants to consolidate the United States' position of leadership in the world. If necessary, he will act alone and without regard for others.
If there is to be a new beginning in transatlantic relations, it is important to realise that the US is no longer a "European power", as it surely was in the good old days of the Cold War. Today, the United States' strategic interests lie in the Pacific, the Middle East and South Asia.
Moreover, Europe is far from united and still does not speak with one voice. As long as the Lisbon Treaty remains unratified, this is unlikely to change. We need the reforms it contains and we need a European foreign minister. Only a Europe which speaks with one voice and puts forward a shared position can expect to be taken seriously.
This brings me to my assessment of the special relationship between the UK and the United States. Winston Churchill once delivered the following furious riposte to a stubborn de Gaulle: "Every time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we will always choose the open sea."
Many Europeans still see the UK as the United States' unsinkable aircraft carrier in Europe. Yet it should not be forgotten that the special relationship between the UK and the US is relatively new, from a historical perspective. It is impossible to say whether the Central Powers would have lost the First World War even if America had not entered the war. The only certainty is that afterwards there was no point at which they could have won. The fact that America refrained from using its newly won power following the war, leaving Europe to itself, spared the British elite from having to recognise that their empire was overstretched in power-political terms.
As a result, relations between the UK and the US were not without tension or even humiliations. It was impossible to continue a relationship on equal terms after the Second World War, because the two sides were no longer equal. In 1956, the Suez Crisis marked the end of Britain's status as a global power. Today, the UK can do comparatively little for America in political, economic or military terms.
What does remain is a certain sentimentality, visible again in the Falklands war, and more enduring on this side of the Atlantic than the other. With Barack Obama's inauguration as US President, this memory of a shared Anglo-Saxon culture is fading, and demographic change means it is weakening in the UK, too.
What remains of the special relationship is the unique peaceful replacement of one world power by another, and the resulting development of a special love-hate relationship between two related and friendly nations.

Nick Clegg: more libertarian than he thinks

I've just listened to a very interesting broadcast of last week's ippr event featuring Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg.

It is clear that this thing called 'liberalism' matters enormously to Clegg. He is, perhaps, the Liberal Democrat leader who has given most emphasis to the 'liberal' dimension of Liberal Democrat thought. It is hugely refreshing to see a politician willing to go out and make a case for 'liberalism' in this way. Clegg is a politician of genuine ideas, and, as one might expect, there is a lot in his speech which liberals in the Labour party (like me) would agree with.

But just what kind of liberal is Nick Clegg?

Right at the end of the Q&A at the ippr event Clegg was asked what differentiates liberalism from 'libertarianism'. His answer was that liberals think personal freedom is limited by a duty not to harm others, while libertarians do not. This will be news to libertarians. I'm not aware of any libertarian philosopher who thinks we should be free to walk around assaulting others.

Consider, second, his response to another question, about bonuses and placing ceilings on high earnings. While Clegg called for an end to bank bonuses in his speech, he replied, with some passion, that it would be 'illiberal' to place a ceiling on earnings in general, to try to limit them through what he referred to as 'punitive taxation'.

In fact, high taxation of high earnings has a long pedigree of support within liberalism. New Liberals like J.A. Hobson and Leonard Hobhouse argued that the state should tax away high earnings because these almost certainly represented 'economic rents' which were undeserved by the person getting them. More recently, liberals like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin have argued that differences in earnings which reflect unequal talents are 'morally arbitrary', creating a presumption in favour of greater equality in the distribution of earned incomes by the means of taxation.

The phrase 'punitive taxation' - like the phrase 'tax burden' which Clegg used at his party's Autumn conference - is a give-away as to the underlying philosophy here. That philosophy is one which sees market-generated earnings as 'entitlements'. It's because we are, supposedly, already entitled to the income we get in the market that tax deductions can be seen as 'punitive'. On the Rawls-Dworkin view, just, equality-promoting taxes do not invade pre-existing entitlements; they define what we are really, genuinely entitled to: they help ensure that resources end up with whomever is genuinely entitled to them rather than with whomever the market selects. On this view, taxing very high earners to help lower earners is not necessarily any more 'punitive' than requiring a thief to return stolen goods to their rightful owner.

Now, what political philosophy maintains that market rewards are entitlements? The answer: libertarianism, as brilliantly set out in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia.

Of course, Clegg is no advocate of the minimal state which Nozick defends. But his effort to reposition the Liberal Democrats on tax sees him drawing on what are essentially libertarian assumptions about the market, tax and justice. His use of a rhetoric based on these assumptions helps to reinforce the grip which these assumptions have in day-to-day public discourse. And this adds to the obstacles facing progressive liberals who want to use the tax system, rightly, in an equality-promoting way.

So, Nick Clegg: more of a libertarian than he thinks.

A spot of bother with the Treasury

Continuing our series of posts ahead of Saturday's a centenary conference at the LSE here is Beatrice Webb's diary entry from a hundred years ago today, February 18th 1909, as the newspapers covered the majority and minority reports of the Poor Law Royal Commission. The majority report taken more seriously than the Webbs anticipated, while the Treasury sought to block the Fabian edition of the Minority Report. The diary entry also shows that think-tanks and political activists knew media reaction mattered well before the 1990s.

February 18th - The day after the reception of the reports of the Poor Law Commission. We turned out to be quite wrong as to the reception of the Majority Report. So far as the first day's reviews are concerned, the majority have got a magnificent reception. We have had a fair look in, but only in those papers which had got to know of the existence of a Minority Report before the issue late on Wednesday evening. If we had not taken steps, we should have been submerged completely, by the great length of the Majority Report, coupled with their revolutionary proposals, the largeness of their majority and the relative weight of the names. Roughly speaking, all the Conservative papers went for the majority proposals, and the London Liberal papers were decidedly for ours. We secured, in fact, belligerent rights, but not more than that. The majority hold the platform. Perhaps we felt a trifle foolish at having crabbed the Majority Report to our family and intimate friends, and exalted our own. That has certainly not proved

We have had an amusing little encounter with the majority over the separate publication of our report - by the Fabian Society and Longmans. We thought we had the copyright; or that Sidney had it. I told the Royal Commission staff that we intended to publish immediately after the Royal Commission published. A few days before the publication, the Fabian Society received a peremptory letter from the Treasury solicitor forbidding the publication of the Ministry Report as an infringement of the Crown Copyright. This was I think clearly instigated by Lord George or Duff; and it was apparently unwarranted bluff, as there is a Treasury minute (1887) permitting republication unless the public has been notified otherwise. We did not know of this minute, and got a bit flustered. But an appeal to Haldane settled the matter, and the Treasury letter was withdrawn. Both editions were published on Thursday, the day on which the Reports were reviewed in the press.

Webb goes on to note that the government had printed 10,000 copies of the Minority Report "encumbered with Majority Report! and notes and references in a ponderous blue book" at just 5 shillings and 6 pence ("an amazingly cheap blue book", while the Fabians had printed 3,000 copies of their 3 shilling version, with a commercial Longmans' edition (1500 copies) available at 12 shillings and sixpence.

The Fabian edition of the Minority Report went on to sell 25,000 copies during the year.

Before welfare: lessons from history

Today is the centenary of the 1909 Minority Report on the Poor Law: a moment when many of the arguments of 20th century British politics began, with its call to replace poor law relief with universal public services as part of our common citizenship.

As Ed Wallis posted yesterday, we are marking the occasion with a new collection of essays from historians and political writers, and a centenary conference at the LSE on Saturday.

A letter in today's Guardian draws contemporary lessons.

Poverty debates today contain too many punitive echoes of the fierce arguments put by defenders of the poor law a century ago. We call on politicians of all parties to remember the key insights set out in the minority report, and the debate it stimulated, in efforts to tackle poverty today: that we have a collective duty to ensure a basic minimum for all; that charity, while important, can never guarantee this on its own; and that tackling poverty must both support individual efforts and address the wider social and economic causes, not retreat to simply blaming the poor for their own poverty.

This morning's Woman's Hour discussion on the legacy of the workhouse, with Sarah Wise, who has written extensively on 19th century poverty and the workhouse, and Pat Thane, professor of contemporary history at the LSE, can be heard on the BBC website.

If you want to know more about this, Tim Horton's guide to the minority report offers a good starting point as to its argument and influence on political ideas and welfate history. My introduction to the new Fabian collection, which addresses the contested reputation of the Webbs, can also be read on the Fabian website.

There are campaigning lessons from 1909 too. In a piece on movement politics: a century ago for Liberal Conspiracy and a centenary commentary on LabourList, I argue that the left which got us the Beveridge settlement was different from the left which lived off it.

Indeed, Beatrice Webb provided perhaps the best argument as to what the new 'movement politics' of the internet age matters, in her diary in 1909:

October 3rd 1909 - Winston and his wife dined here the other night to meet a party of young Fabians. He is taking on the look of the mature statesman – bon vivant and orator, somewhat in love with his own phrases. He did not altogether like the news of our successful agitation. ‘You should leave the work of converting the country to us, Mrs Webb, you ought to convert the Cabinet’. ‘That would be all right if we wanted merely a change in the law, but we want’, I added, ‘to really change the minds of the people with regard to the facts of destitution, to make the feel the infamy of it and the possibility of avoiding it. That won’t be done by converting the Cabinet, even if we could convert the Cabinet – which I doubt. We will leave that task to a converted country’

From the workhouse to welfare...

In 1909, Beatrice Webb put a radical new idea into the political mainstream: that the poor were not primarily to be blamed for their own poverty and that citizenship was meaningless if we did not accept a collective role to ensure a basic minimum for all. Her 1909 Poor Law Minority Report stands as a landmark, not merely for its argument for abolishing the hated and feared workhouse but for its advocacy of the universal health and education which we now take for granted.

This argument was made a great popular cause by William Beveridge, a young researcher for Webb in 1909, in his famous report of 1942 and they can claim equal credit for laying the foundations of the welfare state.

1909 was also an important moment in the participation of women in British politics: Beatrice Webb should be seen as one of the early heroic Labour women. Her achievement is all the more astonishing given that in 1909 the all-male parliament was yet to make up its mind about whether women could be trusted with the vote.

It is striking that the rival Majority Report was also led by a woman, Helen Bosanquet, who was a leader of the Charity Organisation Society and Beatrice Webb’s chief antagonist. Bosanquet fought Webb on every question, insisting that any state responsibility would undermine the role of charity and fearing that abolishing the workhouse would reward the feckless poor.

Unfortunately we still hear echoes of the arguments of 1909 in our media and political debates today. Of course it is a positive development that Labour’s opponents now admit that poverty exists and have moved on from the 1980s when the Conservative Government claimed that poverty had been abolished, even as child poverty tripled. But not far beneath the surface, the traditional right wing idea that the welfare state was a mistake that crowded out the charitable impulse still surfaces. And if the politicians prefer to present this as a shiny new ‘compassionate conservatism’, supportive media commentators will more often openly champion this pre-welfare state idea of self help and reliance on charity. The reasons that argument failed and made the welfare state necessary in the first place seem to have been forgotten. There’s too much of a whiff of nostalgia for the workhouse in some of the thinking on the right today.

We are launching a new pamphlet this week: a collection of essays commemorating 1909 and drawing out its lessons for today. It reminds us that we can be inspired by the ideas of the past; but also that we have to come up with our own ideas for our own times.

Check out time for bonus boys

In an episode of the cult US TV series West Wing, set in the White House, presidential chief of staff Leo McGarry asks one of his private sector friends what he earns. When the answer comes back "$1m", Leo says: "but with bonuses?", the answer then is "$12m".
When did this happen that bonuses ended up being 11 times their salary?
In most people's heads a bonus was maybe £50 at Christmas for doing a good job that year. But sometime in the last decade, or two, bonuses in the financial sector turned into a value that was not only way more than the average person's salary, but way more than the salary of the person who was receiving the bonus.
That is no longer a bonus, but a big fat payment.
Nearly two years ago the Fabians carried some public perception research with YouGov about salaries and what the public thought was reasonable and fair.
This was a long time before any banks were looking wobbly, and in need of government bail out, and job security and prospects were looking strong.
Even then, in what good times, the public felt some people were earning too much. That the earnings of Premier League footballers and company managing directors were out of touch. They felt that these people should earn a reasonable amount of money but it should not be out of touch with reality, or in other words what others were earning.
At the recent Fabian New Year Conference, Kevin Maguire argued for top salaries in a company being no more than ten times what the lowest paid worker in the company was earning. Is that so unreasonable?
On a day when the government is finally talking about banning executive bank bonuses, the majority of the public will be asking: "Why didn't you say this earlier?". Yes, this is the right thing to do, but why have they been hanging about, letting banks that were being dug out of financial holes with public cash, use that money to pay senior executives bonuses of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Yes, there is a question of morality here. Why would the head of any bank think that using money to pay a senior executive at these times of financial trouble moral fair? More importantly, why would you loan money to someone or something that is using it wastefully?
Let's look at the model of a parent and a small child. The small child has lost its money and is asking for a loan, and the parent considers that there is a fair case for the child to be helped out of a hole. But if the child just went and spent that money on a huge sack of sweets, would the parent think it was a fair use of their loaned money. If you were the person lending the money wouldn't you ask for conditions on how that money would be spent?
More recent polling for the Fabian Society by YouGov found 80% felt bonuses reward long-term performance rather than short-term success, while 57% felt that staff should have to pay back their bonuses if their company failed within two years.
No one would argue that giving staff a bottle of wine at Christmas to reward great performance is unreasonable. It isn't.
But it is time to reconsider what the word bonus actually means. When it is more than your salary it is no longer a bonus, but more of a major pay rise.

Market fundamentalism lives!

"We are talking about the marketplace and people should be free to compete in the marketplace without restriction".

So says Mr Christopher Chope MP, promoting his Bill to allow employers to opt out of paying the minimum wage where they can find people willing to work for less, and dismissing Andrew MacKinley's observation that this would be "unfair competition".

Question one: What, if any, employment legislation would be saved from abolition were Chope's 'no restrictions on market exchange' principle carried through? Sex and race discrimination legislation would go, but why shouldn't Chope get back up to the start of the slippery slope and argue for the repeal of the Factory Acts of the 19th century? (Precisely the same progressive and 'pro-poor' arguments were made; have just found that Labour MP Alan Whitehead has made this point).

Question two: Why did Chope not honestly make it a Minimum Wage (Abolition) Bill instead of weasal words about a voluntary opt-out where employers can find people willing to work for less. What's the difference? "Before anybody accuses me of wanting to impose poverty wages, let me emphasise that I am talking about arrangements for freely consenting adults", said Chope, demonstrating the touching naivety of the neo-liberal about the existence of power relationships in the real world.

Question three: is Chope a lone dinosaur, or is this an argument that appeals to a significant slice of Tory opinion?

Well, ConservativeHome reports that it was "a very persuasive speech". (Read it all and see how persuaded you are).

More intriguing is that more than one tenth of Tory backbench MPs were willing to formally sponsor a Bill which challenges one of the Tory leadership's most prominent 'we were wrong' after the event concessions to New Labour's record.

That Mr. Christopher Chope, Mr. Peter Bone, Philip Davies, Mr. Nigel Evans, Mr. Greg Knight, Mr. Edward Leigh, Mr. Ian Liddell-Grainger, Mr. Brian Binley, Mr. William Cash, Mr. Robert Syms and Mr. David Wilshire present the Bill.

(There would appear to be 90-something Tory MPs on the frontbench, according to the party website lists (somewhere around 99), or almost exactly half the parliamentary party. Can anybody confirm an exact number?)

This is despite the Chope bill not being just substantively wrong-headed - he provides no evidence for the canard that the minimum wage is costing jobs, and it might be an area where research could precede legislation - but daft politics too. There might well be others on the Tory benches with some sympathy with the argument, but more sense of political strategy.

But perhaps Chope is a Progressive Conservative too. He took care to cast the issue as a matter of social justice and fairness for the low paid:

It is ironic that the only people without the freedom to take a pay cut are those on or just above the minimum wage. How can that be fair?

Let's take Europe in a new direction

In reply to Sunder's message I invite Next Left readers to visit the Party of European Socialist's platform for the European elections. On Wednesday we launched our new campaign website - http://elections2009.pes.org/ - to promote our candidates and spread the word about our manifesto to every corner of Europe.

This document, which was developed with the involvement and support of the Labour Party, is our common programme for action. It states that "Our comprehensive progressive reform agenda to transform European cooperation - based on our values of equality, democracy, human dignity, solidarity, freedom and justice - can deliver the change which the people of Europe so desperately need."

More than ever before, the European elections are about political choices. The conservatives and the liberals have no coherent response on financial market reform and the economic recovery. They will be found out. The PES has a plan: coordinated investments in smart, green growth and regulation covering all financial players at European level and at global level.

The campaign website also includes information on candidates, a manifesto film, a photo competition, activists' photos and a blog allowing users to publish articles and comments.

So what is the positive case for Europe?

I have blogged about the detailed argument which Gary Titley made in his Fabian lecture last night. He set some major challenges for those who believe in the EU and British engagement in it, and there was a fired up debate at the event about how to respond.

I was struck by three things:

1. The scale of the challenges being set out for the EU were in stark contrast to either the legitimacy and political capital available to deal with them, and that will remain the case unless the current economic and political crisis does become the opportunity for a major change of approach.

2. The European narratives and arguments of a generation ago need a vast amount of rethinking and renewal if they are to connect to the causes for which the EU is needed. We would need to invent a multilateral EU if we did not have one, but the 'sceptic right is making the running, and the vacuum that is Conservative strategy on the EU has never been effectively scrutinised or challenged.

3. And 2009 is a year of responding to the financial crisis, the G20 summit, the chance to rebuild a multilateral transatlantic relationship, and of European elections and the Copenhagen climate summit. So if we can’t make a case this year, is it ever going to happen?

But it is mid-February already. I don’t know how many Labour party members know what the party’s argument is going to be in the European elections this June. I don’t think I do, so I am not well placed to share it with you. There is now strong awareness of the need to mobilise against the BNP threat, but what is the Labour case going to be?

So what should it be? What needs to change? And how can it happen?

A stark warning on Europe

Pro-Europeans face an uphill battle even to maintain membership of the European Union if they can not make and win the argument as to why full EU engagement must be part of Britain’s future and the governance of Britain, and challenge the sense that the European project is a conspiracy against British interests.

That was the stark warning issued by Gary Titley MEP last night, in his suitably wide-ranging Fabian lecture tonight, having stood down as leader of Labour’s MEPs last month as he prepares to end twenty years in the European Parliament .

The speech (a link to the full text will follow) was much less about the immense changes in Europe since 1989 and rather about the scale of its future challenges.

* Would Europe exert an influence proportionate to its size and strength, or would it remain in a mood of negative introspection?
* In Britain, why was the European Union less understood and less popular, a dozen years after the election of the most pro-European government for decades? Would the current economic crisis be an opportunity to shift the argument, or the latest opportunity missed?

Titley rejected the argument that Europe was less relevant in a global age: ‘We have a global voice because we have a European voice’ he argued, and offered no fewer than eight wishes for the Europe
1. the need for a Cabinet rank Europe Minister, in the Cabinet Office not the Foreign Office, so that the policy and political connections would be properly made;
2. the serious commitments to EU capacity needed, for example in Afghanistan, for the hopes of a serious partnership with a more multilateral US administration to be realised.
3. The supranational supervision of cross-border finance.
4. A European energy policy.
5. That financial reform should involve
6. For the social dimension to be stressed to show that Europe had a soul: this was not, he stressed, a lowest common denominator politics of regulatory harmonisation, based on French socialist myths about the British sending children up chimneys, but a Social Inclusion and Solidarity Pact which would ‘show that Europe cares’
7. For a children’s life chances agenda to give a face to what the social dimension was about. (Something Titley had pushed to Robin Cook in 1997, finding the Foreign Secretary’s interest blocked by a sheer ‘Sir Humphrey’ approach of the FCO and civil service).
8. For the need for European engagement to be embraced as part of Britain’s future.

All of the others depended on the last.

Here Titley’s charge was that the problem of thinking of Europe as foreign policy ‘over there’, the Alastair Campbell dictum that there are ‘no votes in Europe’ and a politics of fear and caution added up to a failure to make an argument. Ministers too often seemed to hope Europe would go away, ceding the public debate to an ever more strident Euroscepticism.


The very well attended event and the debate sparked by the speech demonstrated that Labour’s committed pro-European caucus has both a good deal of warmth for Titley and frustration at the opportunities missed and the continuing ambivalence at the government’s willingness to make a public case for Europe.

Martin Kettle of the Guardian offered some sober pessimism not just about the BNP’s prospects in the June elections – and the shock BNP MEPs could deal to the body politic – and suggested the Labour government could retreat and trim further on Europe and social issues. This brought some sharp responses from the floor, including from some of Labour’s Euro candidates, that this would be the worst way to respond. But it had not been a course which Kettle advocated, but one which he feared could become a default response in the absence of a clear European argument.

Wayne David MP, another ex-EPLP leader and decidedly not speaking in his (Welsh Office) Ministerial capacity talked about the loss of the optimism felt in 1989: when Delors’ converted the labour movement to Europe and the Berlin Wall opened new possibilities. The unpopularity of Europe, not just in Britain, but across Europe meant leaving behind a Europe of ‘we know best’ to find a new vision relevant to voters’ experiences. This could not be the Europe of Treaty revisions and grand federalist schemes. It was possible, he argued, to combine a pragmatic common sense British sensibility to make a clear and confident case about why Europe made sense.

Mark Hendrick MP, speaking from the floor, was candid about the government’s failure to make the case for British engagement. A Euro referendum had been bottled when it could have been won; the political capital had been spent in Iraq. Westminster and Brussels remained different, disconnected political worlds.

Next Left’s intrepid blogger and PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen would have been pleased to hear party members calling for a greater politics of the European left – though Titley was candid about the difficulties of politicisation of European politics when the parliament is committed to building compromises to make progress.

The debate over-ran but there seemed a lot more to say. We will see if those attending want to develop the argument here on Next Left, and can help to answer the challenge of the agenda and arguments which those who believe in European engagement should make.

Government wrong to ban Dutch MP

The British government has banned a Dutch MP from entering the country for fear his incendiary beliefs would incite racial hatred against Muslim populations.

The MP, Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom Party, had been invited to Britain by UK Independence Party peer Lord Pearson to show his controversial film which links the Koran to terrorism and in which he labels it a “fascist book”.

Before leaving his native country he received word from the British Embassy in the Netherlands informing him that he would not be granted permission to enter the UK.

Mr. Wilders has called the move by the Home Office “cowardly” and the UKIP Lord who invited him has been equally vocal in labeling the decision as ‘appeasement’ of extremists. Those defending the ban, such as Labour’s Lord Ahmed have claimed that Geert Wilders presence in the UK would “create more incitement, and racial violence”.

The Home Office has defended the ban, citing EU law enabling member states to exclude anyone whose presence is deemed to threaten public security.

I do not believe that this includes Geert Wilders. The the first thing that must be made clear is that this man is a vile, reprehensible bigot whose beliefs range from the ill-informed to the vehemently racist.

He faces trial in his own country for inciting hatred, and he speaks endlessly on the threats that immigration pose to his country, consistently condemning what he refers to as an "Islamic invasion".

He refers to the Islamic founder as a “terrorist” and a “war criminal” and he compares the Koran to Mein Kampf for its "incendiary content". He then goes on to demand an outright ban on the Koran.

Yet I still believe it is the wrong decision to prevent this man from entering Britain.

His views clearly have no place in the modern and tolerant British society Labour has envisioned in the past decade. Yet it is a mistake to ban this unsavory individual from entering the country for several reasons.

We have laws preventing the incitement of racial hatred – and if he should overstep this mark at any point whilst in this country I would hope that our authorities would deal with him rapidly and severely. However, until that moment let us prompt him to defend his ideas and debate his beliefs openly. We as a mature liberal democracy should feel able to put on display for all to see the intellectual bankruptcy of his beliefs.

By stifling his words we simple magnify them and empower him with a martyr status unbecoming of the man and of the beliefs.

Of course we must protect people in society from all those who seek to fuel division and distrust, but wherever possible and within recognised limits, we must always be on the side of free speech and free expression.

We must also establish a consistency in whom we deem undeserving of entering this country to air detestable views. Some have questioned the hypocrisy of the decision to ban Mr. Wilders when visas have been routinely granted to performers who have regularly incited gun crime and murder.

Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has claimed that "the Home Secretary regularly grants visas… to Jamaican reggae singers who openly incite the murder of lesbian and gay people”.

"It is double standards to ban Geert Wilders and not [this performer].”

So let us challenge Geert Wilders to defend his baseless views and misguided beliefs in a court of public opinion and open scrutiny. That is the only way we can tackle bigotry and hatred; pushing him underground only gives him a perceived legitimacy that he could not hope for nor gain when confronted candidly.

The ongoing saga of Prince Harry

So Prince Harry is now being sent on a diversity course. Well, its something I suppose. Given that he’s already been on a course when he joined the army, you have to wonder how effective this will be.
The real concern is that he needs a course in the first place. It is indicative of the privileged and segregated life he has led. His school did not have a lot of diversity, he has entered a profession where his colleagues are not exactly reflective of the country they serve and his social life of polo and Kensington nightclubs is not likely to bring him into contact with a highly diverse range of people.
Its not really his fault – his lifestyle and upbringing has meant that for him diversity has been something for other people and nothing to do with his lived experience. Courses can only teach a limited amount. No wonder he is now reported to have said to a black comedian "You don't sound like a black chap." He probably has hardly met someone from an ethnic minority background and his experience comes from the casual racism and ignorance of his social circle.
Segregation is not only a problem when we talk about the deprived ethnic minority communities in many of our urban centres.
Harry’s continued problems with these issues also raise the question of whether it is really appropriate for a family whose experiences are so far removed from the reality of Britain in twenty first century to continue to rule over it.

David Cameron, art historian

When was Titian born?

Nobody knows. But, if you are with Chris Tarrant and have to phone a friend, try David Cameron, art historian.

Even if you're wrong, with some eager staff work and wiki-manipulation, you might be able to win on appeal.

Remember, the right practically owns this interwebnet thing.

(Hat tip to Paul Waugh of the Standard and Ben Brogan of the Mail for highly amusing blow-by-blow blogging of the Titiangate affair and the excellent links).

Men attack women attack men attack women

Sadly, the ‘us’ and ‘them’ fight between the sexes is often most clearly illustrated when it comes to discussion of domestic violence. As a domestic violence support worker of several years the most common response I got when I told people what I did was: “Well what about the men?”

This came from both men and women, as if the help offered to women escaping from life threatening situations was undeserved. Here, the backlash against feminism seems to have gone to extremes.

‘Feminism’- often used as a dirty word- is not something that all women identify with, as highlighted at the Fabian New Years Conference. Shunned my women, feminism can move some men to vitriolic, defensive attack.

Discussing male victims of abuse in Scotland, one online commentator wrote: “One always feels that the feminists in Scotland always go the extra mile just to be really, really hateful against men, like as if it's some sort of sick competition where they have to outdo the sexism of those south of the border.”

Feminism really does have an image problem. Surely any woman, indeed any reasonable person, fighting for women’s right to live free from violence does not wish the abuse on men instead. So why such anger in return?

The recent British Crime Survey reported that in 2008 young men aged 20-24 are more likely to be abused than women of the same age. Many have repeated this fact as a sort of validation of men’s hard-done-by stance across the internet. It is still remains that violence against women of all ages is more serious, more sustained and more common that female abuse of men. But it's not a competition.

Yesterday Jacqui Smith unveiled plans for bankers to help prevent victims of abuse being financially reliant on violent partners- a fundamental problem facing far more women then men in abusive relationships. It is a move that also recognises that domestic violence increases in times of financial hardship. (It may also aim to raise the justifiably low opinion we have of bankers at the moment.) The government has also allocated extra funding for helplines and domestic violence training for benefits officers.

Despite being a positive step in the right direction, it really isn’t enough. More money is allocated to far more public knife crime for example, despite it claiming fewer lives each year. Somehow society is more appalled by the idea of dying at the hands of a stranger then they are a supposed loved one.

It is indisputably true that support for men experiencing abuse is horribly lacking. The same is true for people from the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgendered community, and for ethnic monitory women. It is also true for women. There just isn’t enough money. London's Rape Crisis centre faces closure and services all over the country are struggling for cash.

(Any angry men may want to bear in mind that what little money is around hasn’t just been handed to women on a plate. The cash, services and basic rights they have are the result of years and years of lobbying.)

Domestic violence, against women, against men, and against children just isn’t prioritised. It is a hidden crime with appalling consequences that costs society and the state an exorbitant amount of money each year, not to mention a large number of lives. Energy put into the battle between the sexes would be better placed in fighting it. After all, an eye for an eye and the whole country goes blind.

Phillip Blond on liberalism

In a previous post on Phillip Blond's 'Red Toryism' I argued that 'Red Toryism''s concrete policy proposals fall well short of its stated ambitions. But what about the deeper, philosophical basis of 'Red Toryism'?

Striking here are Blond's arguments against something called 'liberalism', which he sees as a shared perspective across right and left. According to Blond: '...if both 20th-century socialism and conservatism have converged on the market state, they have done so by obeying the insistent dictates of modernity itself. And modernity is nothing if not liberal.'

So what, according to Blond, is the problem with liberalism? And do his criticisms have any validity? Kieron O'Hara has already argued that Blond's account of liberalism is awry so far as Adam Smith is concerned. However, the problems go much wider than this.

(1) Anti-social emphasis on liberty. According to Blond, liberalism is so extreme in its emphasis on individual liberty that it ends up prescribing an individualism that is deeply anti-social. As he puts it:

'...so extreme did the defence of individual liberty become that each man was obliged to refuse the dictates of any other - for that would be simply to replace rule by one man's will (the king) with rule by another. As such, the most extreme form of liberal autonomy requires the repudiation of society...'

The main problem with this comment is that it confuses 'dictates' with 'responsibilities' and/or 'moral obligations'. Liberals certainly do not hold that we are obliged to refuse, or even permitted to refuse, genuine responsibilities that we have to others. According to John Rawls, for example, we have a 'natural duty' to support and help maintain just institutions. As such I have a responsibility as a citizen to work for, and to support, measures that make my society just, and to carry out all the responsibilities that justice implies, e.g., to pay a fair share of taxes, participate in juries when my turn comes, join and participate in organizations that further just causes, e.g., trade unions. To 'repudiate society' would, therefore, be a highly illiberal thing to do.

(2) The 'fiction' of the autonomous self. According to Blond, the anti-social individualism of liberal thought is related to a flawed theory of 'the self': in valuing 'autonomy' so highly, liberals imply that 'the self' is properly something that exists independently of any specific community attachments or affiliations. But such a 'self' is a 'fiction':

'...real people are formed by the society of others. For liberals, autonomy must precede everything else, but such a "self" is a fiction.'

Liberals hold no such theory of the 'self'. One would have to be pretty daft not to think that, as a matter of fact, people are 'formed by the society of others', and, whatever other daft ideas liberals might or might nor hold, this is not one of them.

What liberals do think is that people have a capacity to critically interrogate the ways of life in which they are brought up; that they can choose to reject some aspects of their inheritance on reflection; and that this capacity, along with the freedom to act on it, is very valuable and worthy of strong protection.

For example, if a boy grows up in a community that takes a dim view of gay sex, and then finds himself having a gay sexuality as he grows up, liberals think it very important that this boy/man have the opportunity to stand back and consider, in an informed way, how he wishes to lead his life. The liberal does not prescribe any particular line of choice. All the liberal asserts is the value of allowing individuals to approach these kinds of dilemmas in an open and informed way and to act on their own judgement without fear of legal sanction by the community in question.

This is what 'autonomy' is about; and it clearly does not entail any preposterous idea that individuals are, or can be, formed outside the 'society of others'.

(3) Liberal community equals 'big government'. According to Blond, when liberals do try to correct for their anti-social individualism, they look inevitably to 'big government' as the answer. As Blond puts it:

'Even the most "communitarian" liberals - from philosophers like Michael Sandel to politicians like Ed Miliband - cannot promote community without big government. They see the state as the answer, when it usually makes the problem worse.'

Again, I do not recognise this as an accurate account of what liberals believe. When, for example, Tocqueville worried about the problem of 'individualism' in America - the problem of people turning inwards to their familes and friends to the extent of becoming indifferent to the wider society - he did not see the solution as more 'big government'. He argued the 'Americans' had tackled the problem by devolving power down to local communities. John Stuart Mill echoes Tocqueville, calling for a strong layer of local self-government. So, too, does Michael Sandel. In other words, these liberals all call for a shift in the direction of political decentralization and local empowerment which Blond himself advocates as part of the cure to an excessively powerful central state.

Nor do liberals stop there. Sceptical of efforts to initiate 'communism' via the central state, Mill welcomed experiments in communism initiated within society. When Leonard Hobhouse, the New Liberal, wrote The Labour Movement, a statement of his 'liberal socialism', he identified socialism with the coming together of three things: strong local government; trade unionism; and the cooperative movement. The central state had a role, in his view, but not to the exclusion of key roles for these other kinds of community.

(4) Liberalism cannot support a politics of the common good. According to Blond, the difficulty liberals have with community is related to the fact that their philosophy cannot support any understanding of society's common good. As he puts it:

'Liberalism can only be a virtue when linked to a politics of the common good, a problem whch the best liberals - Mill, Adam Smith and Gladstone - recognised but could never solve. A vision of the good life cannot come from liberal principles.'

Well, it all depends on what one means by 'common good' and 'vision of the good life'. What liberals are certainly wary of is the idea that the rationale for state action should rest with a 'vision of the good life' in the sense of a particular religion or similarly encompassing philosophical view: a view that tells us in a comprehensive way how to lead a good life.

But this doesn't mean liberals reject the idea of politics being based on a conception of society's common good. The values of freedom and justice in distribution which liberals like John Rawls advocate represent a view of the common good. And, as I noted above, liberals hold that we should lead lives that are bounded by the responsibilities that flow from this common good; and that we can and should participate in a range of social institutions in order to help achieve this common good.

Liberals don't believe in theocracy; but they do believe in citizenship.

Postscript (February 13): For an interesting discussion of the theological roots of Phillip Blond's 'Red Tory' anti-liberalism, see Theo Hobson's article on the Spectator's site. While Hobson is critical of Blond's anti-liberalism, his position is too concessionary in that he also denies that liberalism has a 'social vision'. Liberalism does have a 'social vision': a vision of a society of free and equal persons and of citizens actively committed to maintaining this society.

A fair deal for workers

The recent strikes by British workers have been part of a wave of actions right across the European Union. In the UK, France, Greece and elsewhere, citizens are - quite rightly - concerned that the extraordinary efforts to save banks will not be accompanied by extraordinary efforts to safeguard employment. And it has not helped that the conservative-dominated European Commission has failed to stop freedom of movement of workers from being exploited to drive down wages.

The right-wing Commission really shot itself in the foot in the 'Laval Case' in 2007, when a ruling allowed a Latvian company constructing a school in Sweden to ignore locally-agreed wages and conditions. Here and elsewhere, judgements have created uncertainty about workers’ rights and collective agreements.

At the Party of European Socialists we believe that freedom of movement can benefit both workers and employers. But until the loopholes are closed this will not always be the case in practice. In these times of recession it is all the more important to support the hard-working women and men who are the engine of the EU economy.

That is why in our manifesto for the upcoming European elections, the Party of European Socialists commit ourselves to 'putting people first'. I am grateful to Denis MacShane for pointing out the relevance of this in a recent Guardian article. The manifesto pledges that “Together with the social partners, we will examine the impact of the Viking, Laval, and other judgements to ensure that rights are not undermined. A review of the EU Posting of Workers Directive is essential. To encourage collective bargaining at European level, we want to develop a European framework for cross-border collective bargaining and collective agreements.” We also propose:

• a European Social Progress Pact with ambitious goals and standards
• a social progress clause in every piece of European legislation
• a European framework for public services
• a European pact on wages, guaranteeing equal pay for equal work
• strengthened workers rights to information and consultation

"Conservatives claim that globalisation makes it necessary for people to work longer and harder. But we progressives know that globalisation does not make this inevitable - only bad politics does."