Anthony Painter « Labour Uncut

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Sunday Review: Visions of England, by Roy Strong

14/08/2011, 12:00:19 PM

by Anthony Painter

In the aftermath of urban riots in the US in the 1960s, president Johnson set up a commission under Otto Kerner to review root causes and recommend responses. On top of recommending hundreds of billions of dollars of government expenditure and conclusively blaming poverty and inequality for the riots, the report hit the headlines with its conclusion:

“Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal”.

What is more: white institutions were to blame for this state of affairs. Not surprisingly, President Johnson ignored it. Ed Miliband should be careful what he wishes for in asking for a public inquiry into this week’s riots. What England’s riots do warn, however, is that the modern English experience is not the same for all. Roy Strong’s new elegy for England, Visions of England, presents an idealised version of the nation. What we saw across England over a few days was a terrorised England. One is England as a dream; one is England as nightmare. Neither feels real.

Sir Roy Strong’s English idyll is passionately bonkers. He asks us to choose an England of pastoral tranquility. Constructed around the iconography of artists, writers, monarchs, and religious thought, Strong would have us revelling as modern John of Gaunts of Shakepeare’s Richard II. This is a blessed plot and it should be revered. (more…)

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Sunday Review

31/07/2011, 01:30:31 PM

Revivial: the struggle for survival inside the Obama White House by Richard Wolffe – reviewed by Anthony Painter

The American constitution is a wonderful construct for a nation of reasonable men and women. The problem is that the political representatives who currently populate the nation’s capital are not, in the main, reasonable people. There is an exception to this- the president. But how can you lead as a reasonable man in a political system stacked with checks and balances which allow unreasonable people to obstruct reasonable endeavour?

The answer as Present Obama has discovered since new intake entered Congress in 2011- with Republican control of the House of Representatives- is with enormous difficulty. It is like attempting to lead while restrained in manacles. And despite extreme restraint it is the president who will be called to account for the political madness that is now engulfing Washington as the battle over raising the debt ceiling reaches its insane climax.

Birmingham born Richard Wolffe’s Revival: the struggle for survival inside the Obama White House is the second book about this presidency from the de facto official biographer of the Obama White House. Renegade: the making of a president was the first in a series in which there will surely be more to follow. At the centre of the latest book is a discussion about the revivalist (idealist) instincts of the president versus the survivalist (pragmatic) instincts. I’m not sure that it is much of a spoiler to say that Obama ends up as both. Survival is necessary but not sufficient in the making a great president.

Familiar personalities drift into the story during the early months of 2010 which is the period on which the book concentrates. Those who remain from the campaign such as David Axelrod or return such as David Plouffe tend to embody the president’s revivalist trait while the survivalists tend to be Washington insiders such as Rahm Emmanuel. The president’s first chief of staff gets a bit of a rough ride. One of his colleagues says of Emmanuel: “It’s all tactics and no strategy. That’s something the president feels very strongly he’s missing. How do I get from here to where I want to go?” We are never quite told where that destination is. (more…)

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Sunday Review: The economics of enough: How to run the economy as if the future mattered by Diane Coyle

17/07/2011, 01:58:43 PM

by Anthony Painter

The Israeli management guru, Eli Goldratt, once asserted: “Tell me how you will measure me and I will tell you how I will behave.” What we measure defines what we value. As a society we measure many of the wrong things so we value the wrong things.

As Diane Coyle argues in The Economics of Enough:

“Profit-oriented capitalism has always drawn on support from other institutional values. The policies of the past thirty years have lost their anchor in values outside the market.”

It should be stated out the outset that this is not a book that is solely about measurement. Its scope is staggeringly broad. It is iconoclastic, counter-faddist, intricate, readable yet grounded. That is some achievement given the book’s ambition: to redefine how we look at our economic institutions in the light of how they contribute to shared social values.

The easy thing to do when writing a book like this is to shoot off into the distance and say what we value is valueless; instead of material things, we should value happiness, the environment, each other and so on. Instead, Coyle articulates a pluralism of values and given that then argues for a balanced economy that allows us to achieve a mixture of fairness, efficiency and freedom while being honest about the contradictions between them. The easiest trick to pull is to say that fairness equals efficiency equals freedom and that’s the trilemma resolved. Generally when things are too good to be true they are and there are choices to be made. Coyle is brutally honest about that.

Of all the conversations that are intelligently engaged with in The economics of enough it is the one about measurement that has the potential to be the most radical. (more…)

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BSkyB bid dropped – now we must push for media ownership reform

13/07/2011, 03:22:48 PM

by Anthony Painter

It would be lovely to think that the BSkyB bid has been dropped because of Parliamentary unity and clarity of voice. Unfortunately, this is not really the case. The reality is that two other factors are likely to have led to this decision.

The increasing political and media attention on the scandal in the US and the impact of this focus on News Corporation’s financial standing is undoubtedly a major factor. Questions posed yesterday by Senator Jay Rockefeller who has insisted that allegations that victims of 9/11 had their phones hacked should be investigated have forced the Murdochs into a rear-guard action. BSkyB is no longer the focus- News Corporation itself is the concern and the corporate share buy-back yesterday indicates the emerging crisis for the company.

The second issue is the ticking time-bomb of the Ofcom ‘fit and proper’ test. If they fail that, then not only would the bid have been stopped in its tracks, if may have had to divest itself of its existing highly lucrative 39% shareholding.

There is an important caveat to this. Rupert Murdoch is nothing if not tenacious. His thinking will be that this is the end of the battle but not the war: stabilise the situation in the US and come back later. So be it. However, next time the rules of the game must be different. This is not about one individual or a family or a single company. It is about understanding how we’ve been shown the consequences of allowing large concentrations of power to swell- corruption. Now we must say: never again.

It would be astounding in reality if News Corporation was able to launch another bid in the foreseeable future whatever Rupert Murdoch may be hoping. Nonetheless, if it does it should be on different terms. The Communications Act 2003 is now looking like a highly flawed piece of legislation: most particularly, its public interest test is too narrow. It is not good enough to wait for the public inquiry to report- we need to draft some amendments to our media ownership laws immediately. The following would seem to be sensible:

– Ofcom should be asked by the secretary of state to continue with its ‘fit and proper’ assessment of News Corporation executives with the evolving criminal investigations taken into consideration.

– ‘Fit and proper’ itself must be reviewed to ensure that it encompasses executives presiding over the types of malign and illegal behaviour we have seen within News International over the past few years.

– Cross-media ownership should be more heavily restrained. 20% ownership is the current limit. It should be reviewed with a view to lowering it and it must be revisited should a media company exceed the new limit even after a takeover has occurred.

– Content provision and carriage should be separated. In other words, no company should be both a content provider and media infrastructure service provider.

– The BSkyB plan could ultimately evolve its digital television into a walled and bounded internet platform- this is anti-competitive and should not be allowed. If a company provides access to any of the internet, it should be obliged to provide access to all of it on an equal footing (ie same ease of access and download speeds etc.)

These changes will ensure that corporate media power will be heavily constrained. It will not hamper free, fair and determined journalism which is a public good. It will create an open, diverse, and dynamic information market.

We can’t drag our feet in diluting concentrations of media power. We now have the opportunity to act with clear heads.

News International is the power lever; BSkyB is the cash machine. At least the bid has been stopped in its tracks. We are at the end of the beginning of this scandal. Now we can push for an open, competitive, plural, transparent, and dynamic media and an enriched public and commercial space. Time to get on with it before it’s too late again.

Anthony Painter is an author and critic.

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The week Uncut

09/07/2011, 02:00:20 PM

In case you missed them, these were the best read pieces on Uncut in the last seven days:

Atul Hatwal on the Lib Dem reaction to the NoTW revelations

Anthony Painter says News International needs to be broken up

Dan Hodges on the kaleidoscope of renewal

Michael Dugher says the govt must swallow its pride and adapt to the Arab spring

Jonathan Todd says as Huhne divides, Labour must conquer

Peter Watt asks; can trees really be more “sexy” than people?

…and this weeks PMQs sketch

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You cant reform a monster – News International must be broken up

07/07/2011, 12:26:59 PM

by Anthony Painter

When information empires become too powerful they have to be broken up. News International and connected companies have become too powerful. They should be broken up.

Tim Wu’s The Master Switch details many such moments in US history where communications and media companies have reached a size where they dominate the marketplace and begin to infect public and cultural space. Courts or the federal government have stepped in to either break up or place such behemoths in a regulatory stranglehold. It happened when the Nixon administration began the break up of AT&T in the 1970s for instance.

All this begs the immediate question: what is too powerful? It can take a number of different forms. In the case of News International, it is its ability to subvert democratic process and divert law enforcement from its proper course. In other words, it’s not the morally reprehensible and criminally abhorrent phone hacking that occurred at the News of the World per se. It is the fall out from hacking that makes clear the degree to which News International and the News Corporation have been able to prevent due process from occurring and its capability to resist political and public revulsion at its behaviour. (more…)

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Sunday Review: The great stagnation: how America ate all the low hanging fruit, got sick, and will (eventually) feel better, by Tyler Cowen

03/07/2011, 10:30:20 AM

by Anthony Painter

There is a complacent assumption that austerity will pass. As soon as our course is corrected, then the upward charge begins again. The sunny uplands of things only getting better will return. Just in case you were feeling a wave of optimism, these assumptions that have served us well for a couple of centuries and more may no longer apply. We have entered a great stagnation. Or so Tyler Cowen thinks.

Whenever things are bad there’s always a Malthus on the scene and in his short book, The Great Stagnation, Cowen is one of the candidates for the vacancy of pessimist for our times. He tells America that it will eventually feel better, but that’s just the soothing words of a doctor refusing to dispirit a terminally ill patient. You’ll have more bad days than good with this illness. This is not to dismiss this pacy and powerful book or the argument he expounds within it. It’s just not ultimately convincing.

The thing about Malthus figures – and I’m using this in a broad sense of pessimistic accounts about our economic future – is that they are occasionally right. There are occasional disasters – economic or otherwise – so if you predict them you are going to be right now and again. When you are right then you become a global celebrity. Just ask Nicholas Nassim Taleb. It is important, though, to be right for the right reasons a much as it is to be right per se.

(more…)

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Sunday Review: New British Fascism: rise of the British National Party by Matthew J Goodwin

19/06/2011, 02:00:33 PM

by Anthony Painter

The BNP has overreached itself. In an attempt to make the political big time, it stretched its resources and organisational capability beyond the point of elasticity. Triumph for the forces of hope over the forces of hate? Yes. But, as Matthew J Goodwin argues in the New British Fascism, the extreme right is a more permanent phenomenon than we wish to admit. This has deeper consequences for our politics than we seem to want to face up to.

Where this book succeeds is in tying together narrative history, survey and statistical evidence, and interviews gleaned from BNP activists themselves. It gives us both a sense of context and continuity. The rise of the BNP was down to a different way of communicating hate – focused more on culture and nation than race per se – and it was also dependent on community based organisation. However, the BNP tapped a reservoir of support that was particular and politically instrumental.

Whether the BNP is still with us at the next election or not, it will have a successor. Its exodus is latching onto other groups and parties – the English Democrats and the English Defence League seem obvious places for disillusioned BNP activists to head. Indeed, ex-BNP London Assembly, Richard Barmbrook, was invited to join the English Democrats. It remains to be seen whether they can survive their transformation into the successors to the BNP as their existing membership base revolts.

Two substantive factors have changed over the last decade or so. Racially driven extremism has been rejected. They are still racist but the BNP and others have evolved their argument into a more sophisticated critique of cultural threat, political betrayal, and economic desolation. This is what has enabled the BNP, falsely, to claim that they are the “Labour party that your father voted for”.

(more…)

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The week Uncut

11/06/2011, 02:42:29 PM

In case you missed them, these were the best read pieces on Uncut in the last seven days:

Dan Hodges says it’s time for Labour’s flat earthers to get real

Matt Cavanagh on Cameron’s lies and betrayal on knife crime

Michael Dugher says the NHS changes tell us all we need to know about Tories

Peter Watt looks at Labour’s funding challenge

John Denham says Labour needs relentless focus on private sector growth

Anthony Painter reviews the Master Switch by Tim Wu

Atul Hatwal says our message on the economy isn’t cutting through

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The Sunday Review: The Master Switch, by Tim Wu

05/06/2011, 05:37:27 PM

by Anthony Painter

The information and communication revolutions of the last few decades have given us access to more content than we could possibly have dreamed of. Imagine what it would have taken to establish Labour Uncut just twenty years ago. You’d need an investor, an office, professional writers, paying subscribers, access to a printing press, and some form of retail and/or mail order distribution. The chances that it would exist are slight.

Labour Uncut is not alone- there is a huge diversity of political blogs and websites providing access to an enormous range of voices. That’s before Twitter or Facebook are even factored in. This is a golden age of access to content diversity. We are fortunate because if the history of the information industries is anything to go buy, these periods of openness are relatively short-lived. The age of the open internet is precious.

It is not the only time such a diverse range of content has been publicly accessible. In the US in the 1920s, radio was a cacophony. It was limited by frequency and amplitude in a way that the internet in the broadband age isn’t but it bears a striking similarity to the internet of today. Local enthusiasts would broadcast their take on the world, local gossip, critical community information; it was a true people’s medium. Alongside that there were the early radio networks: Radio Corporation of America and AT&T’s National Broadcasting Service who merged in 1926 to become what we know today as NBC. Thus, radio of the mid-1920s was a blend of national commercial might and enthusiastic amateurism- much like today’s internet.

Could the two sit together in perpetuity? Of course not. And the big guy won. It wasn’t even a fair fight. The Federal Radio Commission stepped in and, in the interests of clearing the airwaves to enable a higher quality service, all but killed amateur radio. The master switch had been flipped. In Nazi Germany, Goebbels centralised radio in the interests of the creation of bringing ‘a nation together.’ The US did it in the interests of corporate power and customer service. In each case, however, they chose a closed over an open form of information provision and carriage. (more…)

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