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The death of our civilisation

09/02/2011, 01:43:26 PM

By David Seymour

It seems hard to believe, but this lot are worse than Thatcher. She thought there was no such thing as society and destroyed working-class communities to prove it. But she left intact most of the social structure of what the middle classes think of as British.

David Cameron says there is such a thing as society but he patently hasn’t got a clue what it is. I didn’t used to accept that his highly privileged upbringing – and those of most of his cabinet – meant he was divorced from reality, but I was wrong.

He has attacked such sacred cows that he has unleashed an extraordinary backlash from the middle classes who feel that crucial foundations of our civilisation are under threat. Listen to Radio Four’s You and Yours on the closure of libraries. Look at the people who have gone on demonstrations against the sell-off of forests. Consider why so many previously contented young people are taking to the streets. (more…)

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Sergeant Watson sends a postcard home from Barnsley

09/02/2011, 07:00:50 AM

by Tom Watson

I always find it amusing to be described as “Scottish” in the newspaper columns written by famous people I have never met. I think Jackie Ashley started the trend. Back in 2006 she described me as “burly, Scottish and a former engineering-union official….most people’s idea of the archetypal Brownite”. She was spot on, except that I am neither Scottish nor a former trade union official, though I did work in the political department of the AEEU and some may describe me as “burly”. Had she written, as Ann Treneman once did, that I was a “down market Billy Bunter” she would have been more accurate.

Actually Jackie, I’m a Yorkshire man. South Yorkshire. With heritage in mines and steel that stretches generations. That’s why it’s so great to be in Barnsley helping Dan Jarvis win for Labour.

I think there’s going to be a by-election here soon. And the climate here is a gift for the political campaigner. The people on the doorsteps are writing the slogans. “I want you to go to London and tell that David Cameron that I’m already sick of ‘im, me love”, said a kindly pensioner who voted Tory last May. (more…)

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Should Compass open its membership beyond Labour?

08/02/2011, 12:00:26 PM

by Ruth Lister

Compass is currently balloting its membership on the question of whether it should allow people who belong to political parties other than Labour to be full voting members. Not surprisingly, this move is controversial. It is, nevertheless, a move which I strongly believe Compass should take.

I’ve been involved with Compass since the word go, before it was formally established in 2004. Since then it has grown in both size and influence to an extent we could not have envisaged. I was recently co-opted on to the management committee. In many ways, I see it as my political home. And one reason why I feel so comfortable there is its non-partisan approach to politics. (more…)

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Why do we tolerate these preachers of hate? Because we are British.

08/02/2011, 07:00:22 AM

by Dan Hodges

Sitting in a Luton hotel room on Saturday, listening to members of the English Defence League chanting boastfully, and slightly implausibly, about how they had, “fucked all of Allah’s wives”, my thoughts drifted to the issue of multiculturalism. Being surrounded by a couple of thousand tanked up Islamaphobes can do that to you.

My musings were given structure by the words of David Cameron, delivered that morning to the Munich security conference. British prime ministers have a poor record of departing that particular German city with the security of their nation enhanced, and I perused his speech with some scepticism. Once I’d finished it, scepticism had changed to bewilderment.

There must be a reason why the queen’s first minister chose to deliver a speech on the perils of Islam on the day a significant number of her subjects descended on a town with a large Muslim population and malice in their hearts. It was just that at that moment, as the first beer bottles started to land, and the riot squad began to don their helmets, I couldn’t for the life of me think of one. (more…)

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What Cameron actually said, and why it was cynical cant

07/02/2011, 05:00:39 PM

by Victoria Williams

“Go Home Muslims” signs still littered the streets of Luton as the prime minister took to the podium at the Munich security conference to address the “threat” of Islamist extremism. Attacking New Labour’s policy of “hands off tolerance” to those who choose not to subscribe to Western values, he called for a “more active, muscular liberalism”, to counter what he views as a lack of integration among immigrant communities.

Warming to the theme, he said:

“A passively tolerant society says to its citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values“.

If he’d stopped speaking then, you could be forgiven for thinking “what a sensible man, perhaps I’ve misjudged him”. After all, what on earth could be wrong with leaving people to their beliefs so long as they don’t break the law?

So many were left scratching their heads wondering what Cameron’s definition of the word “liberal” actually is, when he continued:

“A genuinely liberal country does much more. It believes in certain values and actively promotes them… It says to its citizens: This is what defines us as a society”.

So then “liberal” means “forcing your beliefs onto others and excluding them from society if they disagree”. You learn something new every day.

Who, other than Cameron, says that multiculturalism and integration are mutually exclusive? It is hard to disagree with Margaret Hodge when she says that a higher uptake of English lessons among recent immigrants would beneficial to all of us. Outside of that, though, how does having personal faith exclude one from society? The UK is only nominally a Christian country; should those who subscribe to a secular set of values also find themselves on the fringes of society? A society is shaped by those who live within it. It cannot be dictated by the state.

Cameron has quite rightly been accused of playing into the hands of extremist anti-immigration groups such as the EDL and the BNP. He has also humiliated his deputy, Nick Clegg, whose own party favoured a more lax approach to immigration, including extending an amnesty to illegal immigrants.

It remains to be seen whether this will deepen the rift in the Tory-Lib Dem government, already on shaky ground after a number of Lib Dem walkouts over the decision to raise tuition fees. Either way, it will boost the opposition in the long run.

Victoria Williams is a freelance journalist.

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The Palestinians will not find peace through bloodshed

07/02/2011, 02:00:43 PM

by Dan McCurry

Malcolm X once told black Americans, “You didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on you”.

Millions of people from the developing world have risked their lives to get to the West, while the Palestinians had the western world come to them, in the form of Israel. But where this should have been an opportunity, it was more like a great big rock landing on them. They were simply unable to cope.

The photo shows me, in 1986, with one foot in Israel and one foot in Egypt. My anxiety is due to the barbed wire getting caught on my T-shirt. Back then there was no border on the West Bank, never mind a wall. Palestinians were free to come and go across Israel. They worked, they travelled, they engaged in politics. There was violence, but there was also optimism. Then came the suicide bombers.

The word “solution” in the phrase “two-state solution” is misleading. It suggests that the problems will end if property and land rights are settled. It does not promise to create jobs or prosperity for the Palestinians, but it does promise to end any further justification for Palestinian violence.

It was a top-down policy, insisted on by the international community. It created trepidation in the West Bank, with graffiti appearing on walls calling for a one-state solution. The Palestinians want jobs, but the solution seems to promise a permanent partition, with a permanent separation wall. Washington’s policy was never born from reading the writing on the wall.

Wherever I went in Israel, in the 80s, the building sites were full of Arabs. I asked an Israeli if this was somehow racist. He told me that Israelis wanted to get into construction, but the Palestinians wouldn’t let them in. Today, construction workers are imported from Asia. Technology companies adopt restrictive employment policies for “security reasons”. The Israeli economy is being denied to the “ungrateful” Palestinians. (more…)

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I love New Labour and am proud of what we did

07/02/2011, 11:30:24 AM

by John Woodcock

The thing is, I love what New Labour has stood for and I am deeply, deeply proud of what we did in government.

And I just don’t buy into the idea that that should be a controversial thing to think or to say. In some Labour GCs, maybe (though probably fewer than many think). Perhaps even for the dwindling number of journalists still interested in finding Labour splits, who may wrongly think that puts me at odds with my leader.

But not with the public who voted for us.

We must indeed focus on the future, not get trapped in the past – even our more recent past. But I am no longer going to use that obvious fact as a device to dodge saying what I really think about the changes we pursued to make our country better.

Why come out with this now? It is not as though this were an unfamiliar debate after a four month long leadership campaign.

Because while the old battles on particular reforms are thankfully over and familiar slogans now stale, keeping astride the centre ground is essential as we renew.

Ed Miliband showed that with his excellent speech on the British promise on Friday.

But we need to keep saying it: we cannot assume that anything is a given in a policy process where we rightly re-examine the basics to come up with new perspectives.

So I am not going to hedge anymore.

We have so much to do to ensure that Labour, or New Labour, or Even Newer Labour, regains the trust of the British people.

We must go on learning where we went wrong. But we had better be sure of what we got right too.

Robustly siding with individual users of public services against vested interests who do not want those services to change; understanding that crime is a massive issue in poorer neighbourhoods and must never be ceded to the right; believing in the power of public investment but refusing to impose punitive taxes to resource it.

Those fundamental instincts were, among others, central to the coalition of support that New Labour assembled.

Whatever we call ourselves, a party that drifts away from those instincts will struggle to win back the right to change Britain.

John Woodcock is Labour and Cooperative MP for Barrow and Furness and a shadow transport minister.

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Peace in nobody’s time – Why David Cameron will come to regret his Munich moment

07/02/2011, 07:00:40 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The English Defence League marches through Luton and David Cameron pops up attacking multiculturalism. Coincidence? Yeah, right.

Tackling radicalisation and its root causes is enormously important, but blaming the right’s favourite bête noire, multiculturalism, is lazy and wrong. Wrong about the reality of multiculturalism in this country and wrong about what will make us all safer.

In Britain there are nearly 11 million people from minority ethnic communities. The minority population in towns across the Northwest, Yorkshire, the Midlands and Bedfordshire where there have been problems constitute a small fraction of the total in Britain.

In these areas, the muslim population tends to be from the British Pakistani community and numbers about 500,000, of whom the vast majority will be utterly opposed to extremism. The problems that Cameron was referring to are real but are manifest in less than 5% of Britain’s minority communities.

The reality is that in most of the country, people from different communities get along fine. No conflict, no protests, they just go about their business, day in, day out. Because it’s so prosaic, it doesn’t make the news. But it’s what happens. (more…)

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The Sunday Review: The Fighter

06/02/2011, 01:22:54 PM

by Siôn Simon

By coincidence, I re-watched Rocco ei suoi fratelli (Rocco and his brothers) a few weeks before going to see The Fighter. Visconti’s family melodrama had its half century last year. It is one of the best films ever made. Claudia Cardinale is beautiful, Alain Delon even more so. The moral ugliness of the older brother, Simone, is terrible. The pain inflicted and borne for no reason, the need to hurt mixed in with love, tell enduring truths about families and relationships. It is an operatic, Shakespearean film.

The same cannot quite be said of The Fighter. But Mark Wahlberg’s David O. Russell-directed biopic of Micky Ward is another boxing film which is actually about families, not boxing. And, even if it is not quite Rocco, it is a good film.

And the similarities between the triumvirates at the heart of the two films are striking. (more…)

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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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