Posts Tagged ‘Anthony Painter’

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The week Uncut

06/02/2011, 10:30:09 AM

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

Atul Hatwal says don’t believe the hype, Labour isn’t surging ahead

Richard Burden thinks the small change to AV could make a big difference

But Michael Dugher says the whole debate is a waste of time and money

Sally Bercow wants exploitatively high-cost lending to stop

Kevin Meagher says choosing office over power has destroyed the Lib Dems

Anthony Painter asks if the movement for change is the right direction

Andy Dodd takes a look at the big society and finds a hollow sham

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Movement for change: the man who coined the phrase questions its embrace by Labour

04/02/2011, 11:47:10 AM

by Anthony Painter

It is rum that community organising has risen to such prominence as a result of the election of Barack Obama. Because, of course, he would never have been president had he not turned his back on community organising. By the time he went to Harvard to study law, he had lost faith in the ability of organising to achieve significant change.

One of his leading activists turned around one day and said to the young Barack, “Ain’t nothing gonna change, Mr Obama. We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can”.

David Mendell, Obama’s biographer, also chronicles his loss of faith in organising by his third year on the south side of Chicago. He had come to the conclusion that without hard political power, his time was wasted. Upon the untimely death of his political hero, Harold Washington, Obama “felt shackled by the limited power of a small nonprofit group to create expansive change”, writes Mendell.

His campaign certainly adopted some of the insights of the community organising tradition: focus on organisation building, networked through kith and kin, focus on the ultra-local. Equally, it concentrated ruthlessly on hard political power, was centrally directed and had intense message discipline. In other words, its core narrative came from the top, while its organisation reached into community grassroots. It was focused on the hard power of community campaigning rather than the soft power of community organising.

When the Birmingham Edgbaston campaign looked to learn from the success of Obama ’08, it sought to understand it as a community-based hard political campaign, as opposed to looking back at Obama’s community organising years. Obama ’08 – the movement for change – was a political movement. Its plan was to mirror the “new (political) organiser” model described by Zack Exley, and then develop ever more sophisticated means of issue-based community engagement once victory had been secured. And that is what it is now doing. (more…)

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The Sunday Review: How the West was lost, by Dambisa Moyo

30/01/2011, 03:00:39 PM

by Anthony Painter

On their way to discuss “shared norms in the new reality” in Davos this week, many of the world’s leading politicians, businesspeople and media figures will pick up a copy of Dambisa Moyo’s How the West was lost. Those coming from “the West” will turn the pages nervously. Those from emerging nations will smile contentedly. The future is China’s. The US will not only lose its number one spot but will decline precipitously and end up as a bloated socialist state. How the tables have turned.

We have been here before. In the 1960s, it was the USSR that was going to overtake the US. Sputnik focused minds. NASA landed a man on the moon and all was fine again. By the 1980s it was Japan, when a spate of books detailing Japan’s onward march to global domination filled those same bookshelves that now hold Moyo’s book. Now, it is China. Surely, this time it’s different?

Actually, this time it probably is different. China will end up as the largest global economy. It’s huge, its population is four times that of the US and it’s growing fast. The surprise will be if China does not replace the US as number one in the next couple of decades. Japan has already slipped into third place as a result of China’s rise. (more…)

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Bloomberg speech shows Balls can find what he needs in Keynes

21/01/2011, 05:55:27 PM

by Anthony Painter

Following his very well received Bloomberg speech, I cautioned back in September on Uncut against a “no retreat, no surrender” political strategy. Ed Balls is now shadow chancellor. He faces a number of challenges. One of which is how to respond to the Bloomberg speech.

Actually the speech – if followed to its logical conclusion – provides a powerful political narrative that in some ways resolves one of Labour’s current problems: how does it free itself from the perceived failures of its past?

The speech had a core argument that was anything but deficit denial. It was actually a different strategy for dealing with the deficit. Counter-intuitively, but based on completely sound Keynesian economics, Ed Balls argued that, in these circumstances, government should pursue an expansionist fiscal policy. The result will be an economy that grows more quickly and creates more jobs. The government’s counterargument is that in an open economy there are limits to the degree to which you can do this. Furthermore, they said, by May 2010 the UK was breaching those limits (there was scant evidence for this as tracking long term interest rates demonstrates; though the argument was of risk rather than immediacy). (more…)

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The Sunday Review: Obama’s Arizona speech

16/01/2011, 02:30:01 PM

by Anthony Painter

On a chilly April night in 1968, America’s second greatest poet-warrior in modern times climbed onto the back of a truck and gave a speech of transcendent power in the aftermath of the assassination of its greatest poet-warrior. Largely ad-libbed, Robert F Kennedy defined the moment, eschewing violence and outrage in favour of hope and healing.

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black”.

The words could almost have been uttered by Martin Luther King himself. Perhaps in a strange way they were channeled through King – at a conceptual level at least. The theatre of modern politics is less chaotic, more stage-managed, and more crafted. Even in the context of higher production values, words can retain their moral force. President Obama’s challenge in the University of Arizona on Wednesday was to comfort a moment of national tragedy and set a new course. He did so and reminded the US of his poet warrior status at the same time. (more…)

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Sunday Review: the giving green paper

02/01/2011, 10:30:26 AM

by Anthony Painter

Lying a short reach from my keyboard is a Cadbury’s Twirl. I want to eat it, as I like Twirls. Most connoisseurs of corner shop chocolate bars do. It seems a fairly logical response for me to eat it. But wait. Eat too many and all sorts of bad things could happen. I could become obese. My teeth could rot. I could end up with diabetes and heart disease. These are not nice things.

What we have here is a defective choice architecture. All the benefits of eating the Twirl are in the here and now. The costs are deferred. Our decision-making is flawed. Even the knowledge of the harm that too many chocolate bars will have is not strong enough to override the impulse to consume this Twirl. Even if we are consciously aware of the long-term cost, it is very difficult to overcome the overwhelming short term emotional benefit.

Somehow, I need a short term nudge to prevent long term pain. Essentially, this is what the Tory-Lib Dem government’s Giving Green Paper is about. How can we be nudged to do good to make ourselves and those around us more happy? (more…)

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Jesse Norman offers utopian conservatism, but the big society is the left’s for the taking

26/11/2010, 03:00:53 PM

by Anthony Painter

Two golfers shuffle up to the first tee. The first pulls out a shiny new, technologically engineered driver and pings a 250 yard shot straight down the centre of the fairway. He strokes his designer cap and steps back so that the second can settle into her stance. She lifts her single club- a six iron- and swings at the ball, just clipping it as she loses her balance in the effort of it all. The ball bounces a few yards forward, coming to an embarrassing stop 65 yards and 45 degrees off to the right. She daren’t take another shot such is her shame.

How can these golfers compete?

A fabian – as Jesse Norman caricatures the entire left in his new handbook for Cameronism, Big Society – would reach for the handicap system right away. The caricature is fair neither to fabianism or the left but let’s run with it.

They could play together for a while but really it wouldn’t be a competition. The first player surges ahead, wins, the scores would be narrowed at the end and both players would be left angry, frustrated, or both.

If I’ve understood Jesse Norman’s argument right, I suspect we’d have a similar analysis of a better way to proceed than that. As it happens, despite her humiliation the second golfer showed some instinctive talent for the pastime. She takes some lessons, practices intensely for a few years, and when the two players end up on the same tee once again they have a good, competitive game. They even get on rather well. We forget the result. In philosophical terms, this is the capabilities approach associated with Amartya Sen in contrast to outcomes-oriented philosophy of John Rawls.

But our lady golfer has to work long hours at minimum wage, she has a family to feed, and a husband who is not sympathetic to her taking up a pastime. She lacks time, resource, support, and consequently esteem. The rematch never happens. Quite simply, she doesn’t have the power to nurture her talents so that she can at least compete and gain some form of parity of esteem.

It is on the question of whether the second match happens or not that Norman and I diverge. I suspect it probably wouldn’t. Norman is more optimistic that it would. It’s important to understand why we would disagree. (more…)

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Alan Sugar is right. Nick Clegg is wrong. It’s people that matter, not “progress”.

24/11/2010, 03:30:09 PM

by Anthony Painter

Lord Alan Sugar couldn’t care less where you’ve come from or what university you’ve been to. All he cares about is how you acquit yourself both personally and professionally. Your individual performance matters, but so does your emotional intelligence and ability to work in a team. He judges people on their merits as he sees them. To impress him you have to think on your feet, adapt yourself to the task in hand. It’s not merit in a formal sense. It’s about creativity and worth.

Nick Clegg has sought refuge in “social mobility”. Politicians at a low ebb of creativity and imagination tend to. Let’s take social mobility to mean ending up with a higher status or in a more elevated social class than your parents. In this regard, Lord Sugar is highly socially mobile. Nick Clegg is pretty static. The former was luckily enough to be born into a north London working class family; Clegg had nowhere to go really, but good for him in maintaining his family’s class and status.

Straight away we are seeing how ludicrous social mobility can be as a concept. It gets worse. By focusing on social mobility we exacerbate that very British bad habit of obsessing with class and status. Do we really want the measure of “success” to be your class (economic position) or status (social standing)? In measuring success in this way you only exacerbate social division and stigmatise “failure”. In a highly mobile society, anyone who doesn’t end up with a higher status or in a higher class has failed. And to achieve the supposed idyll of perfect social mobility implies a monumental and brutal task of social engineering, the like of which won’t be contemplated- rightly, because it’s monstrous.

Just before the left gets too smug, it has a similarly divisive view of the world. Nick Clegg’s Hugo Young speech has been adversely criticised by some on the left for failing to appreciate the link between inequality and diminished social mobility. This is just as bad. First, it accepts the end of social mobility unquestioningly. Second, it reduces the means to that end to greater “equality” (a lower Gini coefficient). The attitude is basically “we’ll set you the goal and give you help to fly up the social ladder and when you don’t we’ll compensate you anyway then we’ll play the game again with your kids and their kids”. Politically, it’s a nonsensical proposition. (more…)

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Anthony Painter sees life’s winners making losers by the million

20/10/2010, 05:09:18 PM

Spending cuts at this rate are unnecessary. Everyone who isn’t a Machiavellian Osborne-ite or an ethically empty Liberal Democrat frontbencher knows that. These strutting macho men (and Teresa May and the other one in Defra) in their 40s are ripping apart the ties that bind and the life chances of millions. They gleefully gamble on growth because they always have been and always will be winners, no matter what the level of unemployment. At least now there is no doubt where these self-imagined Flashmans are coming from.

It’s one thing to take to hack away at the roots of the good society with cockiness and bravado. It’s another to dissemble, dodge, and mislead every step of the way. They know what they are doing. They are sure they are right- when are they anything but right?

So why not tell it straight? This spending review document takes spin into a new stratosphere. New Labour? Communications amateurs. These guys are something else.

You don’t have to delve very deep into the document before you discover all the tricks of presentation that the modern politician has at their disposal. By the second page of the executive summary we are told that the UK is to remain a world leader in science despite only maintaining the cash budget over the next four years. I’ll remove your leg but in cash terms you’ll still have two. Sure Start the same: maintained in cash terms. Perhaps Gideon would be willing to exchange his trust fund for its 1950 cash value? It’s the same after all.

(more…)

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Far from being the left’s embarrassing secret, the state is actually its trump card, says Anthony Painter

14/10/2010, 08:54:51 AM

What weird contorted, politically arrogant logic comes to the conclusion that David Miliband should join the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, as Nick Boles attempted to argue yesterday? While setting on a course that gives Margaret Thatcher a run for her money in terms of its social and economic destructiveness, the government has finally been lifted from the ground with the hot air of its own rhetoric. The definition of socialism is what a Labour government does and anything this government does is progressive reform – by definition. Why? Well, because it’s a progressive reformist government, duh.

With Labour’s leadership election out of the way, the fog of war is starting to clear. David Miliband and all those on the left who know that the state must change – be more personal, more local, and more innovative – equally know that the type of reform offered by the Tories and Lib Dems is anything but progressive. David Cameron and Nick Clegg know that as long as they can be seen to be taking it out on relatively high earners as well as the least well-off then the progressive fig leaf will stay in place.

So high rate taxpayers lose £1billion of child benefit. Others much lower down the earnings ladder lose up to £15billion a year. There is a £9billion hit for 3.5 million disabled people over five years according to the think tank, Demos. Progressive. Then there is the pupil premium: the government’s get out of jail free card when it comes to fairness. Or so they think. It conveniently ignores the fact that there already is a pupil premium. It goes to local authorities. Meanwhile, investment in creating the school buildings of the future for many is cut. Progressive. (more…)

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