Quaequam Blog!

I’m a bit of a shy republican, but today gave me a glowing reminder of why any sane person should be one (sorry Dad).

On the same day the Queen “generously” agreed to “rededicate” herself to the UK, Downing Street let it be known that the Cabinet spent their time “banging the table” to celebrate the passing of the Health and Social Care Bill.

It is no accident that this little snippet of information was leaked today. The triumphalism is palpable, as is the very explicit attempt to indelibly tie the Lib Dems to the reforms. So too is the signal it is intended to send.

This quintessentially public school act is very clearly meant to send the opponents of the bill a very clear, class-ridden message: “know your fucking place”. It is no coincidence it has been declared on the same day as all the pageantry going on with the Queen’s visit to Parliament.

This is all about class warfare. And, given the country’s response to the royal wedding last year, it will doubtlessly be extremely effective. Until we somehow manage to extricate ourselves from this mindset, the country will always be extremely vulnerable to such propaganda; however much we might consciously find such behaviour repugnant.

Know your fucking place, serf. And if you don’t like it, what are you fucking going to do?

(7 votes, average: 3.14 out of 5)

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On 1 November 2011, I announced on the Social Liberal Forum that I was “returning to the fold“. On 5 March 2012, I announced I was leaving the party – and thus my role in the SLF (constitutionally, only Lib Dem members can be members of the SLF). So what happened in the four months in between?

Tangibly speaking, not a lot – and that’s what forced the issue. I had a lot of good intentions, but I found myself doing only a small portion of them. The SLF needed someone who would take on the role of looking at its broader strategy and public affairs brief. I had broad idea of what I needed to do; but none of it actually happened. And in the process, I was very aware that I was starting to alienate a growing number of colleagues who felt that I was coasting off their work; mainly because I was.

It was trying to understand why someone like me who normally is quite enthusiastic about taking on such a role could make such a bodge of it that lead me to this point. In the end, I came to the conclusion there were two reasons.

Firstly, my day job. I’ve taken on wider responsibilities within the organisation at a time when the work of the organisation has become much more challenging (I work at Unlock Democracy if you don’t know). Influencing a coalition government is significantly different to influencing a single party government, particularly when your focus is on democratic reform. Every issue goes through the prism of which party “owns” it and therefore which party would be “gaining” if that policy were to be prioritised, even issues such as House of Lords reform where both parties had a manifesto commitments. It’s challenging and tough, and doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else. Coming home from a long day to do more political work was quite hard mentally.

But while that’s a good reason to scale back my activities, it only works so far. Most political activists will be able to tell you that the main thing they need to keep going is not really time but enthusiasm. The latter does a remarkably good job at stretching the former as and when it is required. If you feel that what you’re doing is making a difference, however marginally, you keep going.

It isn’t always 100% evidence based either. In the first by-election I ever took part in (in Rochdale in 1995), we won by about 10 votes and I personally managed to get at least double that many people out of the door to vote. That’s tangible. But most of the time, you work on the basis that what you’re doing is helping in much more abstract and amorphous ways; even losing a debate can sometimes lead your opponent to shift their position in order to defeat you, for example – that’s often how it works in politics. You’re never quite sure to what degree you are actually changing things or to what degree they wouldn’t reach that position without your intervention. However much you might rationalise it, most of the time you depend on instinct and faith to keep you going.

And I, quite frankly, have lost that faith (and yes, you do have permission to laugh at the atheist’s expense for writing that). I can’t get it out of my head that the Lib Dems’ fate for the next few years has already been sealed, based on a number of very crucial decisions that were made early in the lifetime of the coalition (and a number beforehand). Changing the course of that is beyond my meagre abilities. But at the same time, I’m not a spectator, and I’m not willing to just sit there and watch things happen.

When Lib Dem Voice announced I was leaving, Lord Greaves lampooned the fact that I said I might eventually return to the party in his characteristically generous and affable way: “when the rest of you have dug in and beavered away with time and energy to sort out the problems”.

He has a point. What I’d say in my defence is that I’d be doing that if I merely quit my roles in the party and just became a passive member for a couple of years. I’d also question the underlying assumption behind it, which is that the simple act of doing stuff is effective. Indeed, one of my problems with the Lib Dems is precisely this attitude towards activism, what Simon Titley regularly critiques in Liberator as “Maoism” (pdf).

I’m not going to cease being a political activist – my day job wouldn’t allow it apart from anything else. But I am going to have a very serious think about what form that political activism should take. I could try, to use that most Churchillian of phrases, to “keep buggering on” but my big fear is that all that will mean in effect is focusing on narrower and narrower parts of the agenda and not really thinking about the bigger picture. The problem is ultimately much, much bigger than the Lib Dems. We have a horrendous political culture in this country which the party has traditionally claimed to not be a part of but which now is in danger of consuming it whole. But at the same time, that culture itself is starting to fall apart, with the banking crisis, the expenses scandal and the media hacking scandal. Something very scary but potentially wonderful is happening out there but the Lib Dems are stuck in a bubble effectively propping up the status quo – at best gently reforming it on the inside but all too often being changed by it. I worry that so much energy is being put into keeping the good ship Liberal Democrat afloat at the precise moment that a new generation is experimenting with flight.

None of which is to say that I can honestly tell you that there are better alternatives to parties as a means of democratic participation. But if you content yourself with being a member of the “least worst” party working within the “least worst” system then I contend you aren’t ever going to achieve very much to be proud of. I need to think about alternatives for a bit and if I can’t find something better I might at least be able to come up with some ideas and approaches that the Lib Dems might adopt.

All of this must come across as horribly abstract but, as I say, I didn’t leave because of policy X or Y; it’s been an accumulation of things. I’ll no doubt return a few times to what specific problems I have with the Lib Dems at the moment but for now this will have to suffice.

(14 votes, average: 3.43 out of 5)

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Against my original intentions, I’ve decided to write a short follow up to my resignation announcement on Monday.

I’ve been touched by the overwhelmingly sympathetic and supportive responses that I’ve had. I was expecting a lot more anger and gloating and that’s taken me aback somewhat. Thank you; it means a lot to me. And I really am sorry if I’ve upset anyone.

To everyone concerned about my welfare, I want to assure you that I’m absolutely fine. I’m certainly busy, but very happy.

A lot of people have been bemused about my big mystery act, declining to explain why I’ve left. I’m sorry about that, but I’ve done it this way because I didn’t want find myself caught up in the media circus, or to cause more unfortunate headlines for the party in the week running up for conference.

While not being a particularly important person in the grand scheme of things, my various party positions are such that I can be described, in journalistic terms, a “senior Liberal Democrat” or worse, if the journalist in question is particularly cretinous, a “close aide to Nick Clegg” (clue: I’m really not).

If I’d written an explanation, whatever I wrote, however temperate and constructive, would have been selectively quoted beyond all meaning and shoehorned to fit into whatever predetermined narrative the journalist in question had decided on that morning.

I want people to understand my decisions for leaving; indeed it is a theme I intend to return to quite a few times. But I have no desire to play that game. I’m nobody’s trophy.

The fact is that while my non-explanation might be upsetting for fellow party members who genuinely value my opinion, it is deeply, deeply boring to the average journalist. And thus far, my ploy has worked. I’ve only had to turn down one (polite) media bid.

So, anyway, that was my thinking and right or wrong I’ll be revealing all soon. It will probably be an anti-climax when I finally do publish, but that suits me just fine.

Thanks again everybody.

(3 votes, average: 2.33 out of 5)

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Last night I formally resigned as a member of the Liberal Democrats, effective immediately. To answer some likely questions:

1) No, I’m not joining another party. As if.
2) No, I’m not making a protest or resigning because of a specific issue.
3) No, I’m not planning to write a self-aggrandising article about my personal reasons for resigning, at least not this week (and when I do I’ll try my best to keep the self-aggrandising to a minimum).
4) Yes, I’m planning to continue this blog.
5) Yes, I might well come back. Then again, I might not.

I’d just like to add my thanks and appreciation to my friends who have been so understanding, and in particular to the Social Liberal Forum council and exec team who I am, frankly, leaving in the lurch.

Onwards and upwards.

(13 votes, average: 3.62 out of 5)

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On Thursday I attended the Foyles launch of Regeneration, a collection of essays focusing on the theme of intergenerational equity. A number of my more talented past colleagues from the Yes campaign we’re involved in the book (one or two are even brave enough to admit this past affiliation in their biographies!), so I thought I should show up in support. Having got back, I thought I would write a short post, not to criticise a book I haven’t read (indeed I encourage people here to read it, which is free to download after all), but to pose some questions which the discussion at the launch provoked and which I hope to come back to later.

Long term readers will know that this has been one of my pet subjects; indeed in 2006 I contributed a chapter on the subject for a pamphlet. It is interesting to read that chapter five and a half years later, with all it’s dire predictions of the housing market collapsing and the credit bubble bursting. Thank goodness that never happened, eh?

The main frame of this new book is to look at intergenerational justice from the perspective of the cohort born from 1979 onwards, the so-called Thatcher generation. I can understand why they chose this frame, but I’m not entirely sure it is that helpful.

For one thing, it airbrushes my cohort out of existence entirely. The baby boom is generally held to have ended in 1964, ten years before I was born. While the nifty rewrite of history would have you believe that no one (apart from St Vince) predicted that the economic model was actually working, particularly for young people, before the crunch, the fact is that there were indeed growing anxieties being expressed by people my age who were struggling to understand how they were possibly going to get onto the housing ladder. The economic crisis may have lead to the creation of a “jilted generation” but it is at least worth spending a few minutes considering the experience of the cohort before them and ask why precisely their concerns failed to capture the public imagination. It will be interesting to see how the book tackles that, if at all.

But my main concern with the 1979 boundary is that it invites a narrative which I worry is spectacularly unhelpful – and indeed one which has been actively encouraged by many baby boomers. That is, that by treating the rise to power of one Margaret Hilda Thatcher as a sort of Year Zero, the reflexive response is to think along the lines of merely having to get back to those halcyon days before she took charge.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Thatcher did not emerge in a vacuum. She took control, and had a particular agenda, precisely because of the abject failure of the left in the 1970s. For pretty much a decade before, successive governments of different hues attempted to appease the trade union movement and failed. Now, you can argue until you are blue in the face that the trade unions were all a bunch of misunderstood pussycats, and you can certainly argue that Thatcher was the wrong solution, but you can’t claim that the left had done a remotely good job at inspiring popular solidarity during that period.

Nor would I argue that the problems were limited to the 70s. However great an achievement the post-war consensus was, the fact is that it was funded off the back of foreign debt (of a model which we should perhaps be revisiting) and extremely high income taxes. Adam Ramsey suggested at the launch that universalism as failed to unite the middle and working classes; I would argue that one of the reasons it failed was because it was paid for by people’s hard work. Perhaps because of the Cold War and anxiety about communism, the notion of funding universal welfare from wealth was never really broached since the Lloyd George’s plans for a land value tax burned two ashes on the fields of the First World War.

In short, what I’m suggesting is that perhaps the post war consensus was not quite the rose garden that those baby boomers who benefited from it before tearing it to shreds would have us believe, and that if we analyse everything purely within the frame of how we can get away from post-Thatcher neo-liberalism we risk simply repeating the mistakes of our forebears. Once again, it will be interesting to see how the book deals with the wider historical perspective.

Finally, one of the things that surprised me about both the discussion at the book launch and from searching through the PDF of the book itself, was the lack of attention given to intellectual property. My search function can find no references to IP itself, to “piracy” or to “copyright”. I’m genuinely surprised by this; what issue better demonstrates the intergenerational divide than online piracy?

I wrote a few years ago that I thought that copyright would be a key political battleground in the 21st century and I still think that. More to the point, if the key to our future well being is to embrace cooperation and co-ownership (as would appear to be one of the key arguments in the book), how can we hope to do that if the very concepts that rattle around inside our heads are to remain in private hands for long after we’re dead. Whatever criticisms you may have of the Spirit Level, I was impressed that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett seemed to get this.

In my view, the future worth fighting for is not only one in which we have a more active level of participation in the running of our supermarkets and banks but one in which culture itself has been restored into public hands. The result of that may be fewer Lady Gagas and fewer Avatars but, aficionado I may be of both, I really can’t see us being the poorer for it. We can’t expect people to embrace a more collaborative future until the arts equip people with the ideas necessary to be able to imagine it. And they won’t do that while the arts are ultimately working in the interests of big business and the status quo.

So the final thing I will be looking out for when I read this book is how it deals with culture and the creative sphere.

Overall though, I’m delighted to see intergenerational equity finally starting to get the attention it deserves. As was made quite clear repeatedly by the authors, this is a frame by which to consider the troubled times we live in rather than a new model which supersedes all the others; it is often a revealing frame nonetheless.

(4 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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On Friday I went to my first barcamp and, as per the rules, I’m meant to blog about the experience. So here goes.

First of all, I should write about my expectations. In retrospect I think they were a little too high, like I had just got some kind of golden ticket into the inner sanctum of the social media world. Somehow I had it in my head that I was going to have some revelatory experience due to the format of the event itself. None of this is rational, but to hear some people talk about barcamps and unconferences, you’d think that people had come up with some sensational new form of organising which was quietly transforming the world. The reality was a little more prosaic.

As someone with a background in politics, and in particular youth and student activism – typically disparaged by the social media world for its lack of inclusiveness – the format itself wasn’t that different to what I’m used to. Indeed, the lack of structure was in many ways inversely related to the level of participation. I could have really done with a bit of hand holding to begin with.

I’ve already been told off by colleagues for making so-called grumpy tweets about the lack of an icebreaker. I didn’t mean them to come across that way; they were meant to be constructive. But my fundamental concern about the day is that I left without a clear idea of who else was attending, when I feel I really needed to know that at the start in order to make the most out of the day. And, while many people are blessed with the ability to go up to complete strangers and start engaging with them, I’m not. In the end, I got the most out of the more salesy sessions than the discursive ones for the simple reason that the organisers of the former had more of an interest in being engaging.

Let’s just get a few other housekeeping things out of the way. Again, this isn’t meant to criticise, just for future reference:

1) Organiser Sylwia Presley acknowledged on the day that the structure of a main plenary room and breakouts wasn’t ideal for the format. In my experience, a large room like that can be made to work but you need to break it up into several small groups and discourage the conference format wherever possible. Arrange the chairs into 3-4 circles around the room at the start. If a full plenary is absolutely necessary, then get people to move their chairs to form one. But should a full plenary, at least on conventional conference lines really necessary?

2) Instead of leaping in with some rather specialised topics, start the day with some deliberately general topics (“introducing barcamp” or “what are the challenges we face?”) and get people breaking into groups to begin with. Encourage people to spend those first sessions talking about what sessions might be needed for the day. Give them post-it notes to write the ideas down. By all means have pre-prepared topics, but don’t put them up straight away as that will automatically dictate the agenda to everyone else; instead have them as a fallback. Attempt to gain some consensus on them first before putting them up, so that everyone is on a more level playing field; you may even find it makes more sense to merge two sessions or hold multiple slots or another topic that way.

3) For a building which houses the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, 19-22 Charlotte street did have some remarkably poor signage. Personally, I never got my head around where two of the breakout areas where and missed some interesting sounding sessions as a result. Always come to a venue armed with makeshift signs and blu-tack.

With all that out of the way, what did I actually learn from the day itself?

1) Google Hangouts are interesting, and there might be something in it, but I’m yet to be convinced of its value for non-profits. I can see their potential as an organising tool, for getting groups from around the country to interact. But with a maximum of 10 users at any one time, it has the potential to become a victim of its own success with willing participants unable to jump in. Admittedly, getting to the stage where that becomes common would be a good problem to have for a small network.

I was wholly unsold on the claims that they are powerful because “TV news anchors might pop by” (one of the speaker’s anecdotes about George Takei being a keen exponent lead to me having an extremely vivid dream that night about George Takei turning up to support a campaign I was organising; he was a lovely bloke. But I digress). While I can totally see what is in it for celebrities to use such tools to engage with fans in a manageable way, I can’t see how the same applies to NGOs, aside from some weird bragging rights.

2) I was rather more sold on using AudioBoo; indeed, this was one of my take-aways. I can see definite merit in my organisation making much greater use of this app in the way that I attempted, and failed, to make use of video in the past. The problem with video is that even a short three minute video winds up being a couple of hours in terms of editing and faffing about. Uploading short interviews on a regular basis and have the website sort out feeds, iPod channels and embed codes? Given that I’ve had an AudioBoo account since its early days, I can’t understand why I didn’t think of it before.

3) I think I can see the potential of Storify as a curating tool for campaigns, but the website itself is hopeless at explaining its potential and I didn’t actually attend the session at which this was discussed. So, I’ve had a little play myself to get my head around it. I can see how this could be quite useful in terms of creating an accessible space for people to follow a specific campaign or issue that an organisation is focusing on.

4) The challenges facing large nonprofits and small ones are wildly divergent. This was brought home to me when I found myself sitting in on a session entitled “who owns social media?” In my organisation the answer is, broadly, whoever wants to. The problems people described in that session, in which tech teams would be responsible for designing sign up tools but not necessarily have a clue about making the best use of language, or of struggling within an unmanageable command structure, were quite alien to me. I think it would have been useful to unpick whether such structures are genuinely beneficial to an organisation but without much of a common frame of reference, I struggled to really find a hook as a means to contribute.

5) Too many people see a dividing line between campaigning and fundraising that isn’t really there. This is a small organisation problem as much as it is a big organisation one, and something I struggle with myself (having recently taken on direct responsibility over fundraising at UD). The web in general, and social media in particular, blurs the edges between the two to the point where distinguishing them as anything other than two sides of the same coin is no longer helpful. It was my perception however that there were a lot of people at the event who were only really thinking of social media as a way of making money rather than as a way of fulfilling their organisation’s goals more generally. I suspect that if you only look at it as a way of feeding the cash cow, you won’t ever get it to be a profitable exercise for you.

6) Last week was Social Media Week. Now, I’m a pretty web-savvy person and I’m a total Twitterholic. Yet I had no idea about this. I’d be amazed if anyone other than a self-identified “social media professional” had a clue that this was going on. That ought to send chills down people’s spines because spending a week talking to yourself and not even expanding your audience is an utter waste of time.

The day itself gave me plenty to think about both in terms of social media and event management and I’m glad I went. With the whole barcamp thing now demystified, next time I will hopefully be a little less backward in coming forward!

My thanks to all the organisers who made the day happen.

James Graham is the Campaigns and Communications Manager of Unlock Democracy but writes here in a purely personal capacity.

(1 votes, average: 1.00 out of 5)

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I’ve just been fuming listening to a ridiculous interview with John Gledhill, the Bishop of Lichfield and Alan Beith MP by Evan Davies on the Today programme. It wasn’t the interviewees who infuriated me, although Alan Beith’s argument that disestablishing the Church of England would lead to an aversion culture akin to “elf’n'safety” did come pretty close. What I found infuriating was the normally sensible Evan Davies’ repeated use of the phrase “militant secularism”.

I seem to remember being here before. Back in 2007, at the height of the rise of the so-called New Atheism as espoused by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, there was a similar counter push to present this new wave of assertiveness as sinister and extreme. I got particularly annoyed by a “balanced” (in the worst sense of the word) article by Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian which leant people claiming that “Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube” a wholly uncritical platform.

With the tube bombing now a more distant memory no-one has quite gone as far as Colin Slee, the now dead former Dean as Southwark, did in that article. Nonetheless, over the past week or so we have seen a whole slew of attacks, partially provoked by the National Secular Society’s court action against Bideford Town Council and the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s MORI poll suggesting that many people who define themselves as Christian don’t actually agree with basic Christian tenets (only 28% of people who self-defined as Christian said they believed in the teachings of Christianity).

It would be far too generous to credit Baroness Warsi with coining the term “militant secularism” – nonetheless, alongside “secular fundamentalism”, it was a term she used in her recent speech at the Vatican.

For someone as absurd as her (remember this is the woman who made a direct appeal to get BNP voters to support her when she was a Conservative Party candidate) to make such a statement is one thing; for the BBC to use it as if it is a legitimate term is something else entirely. Because the implication takes us right back to Colin Slee and his quite offensive notion of equating vocally expressing a desire to see Church and State kept separate with a desire to wound and murder.

Although I actually got on better with Dawkins’ The God Delusion than I was expecting, I don’t actually agree with him on a number of issues. I think he goes too far when he claims that raising a child as a Christian is a form of “child abuse” (I appreciate the point he is making about the important of allowing children to make their own minds up, and there are certainly disreputable practices worthy of condemnation, but you could the same thing about any parent passing on their beliefs to their impressionable offspring as child abuse – and yet it is an inevitable aspect of raising a child). I’m not a fan of the National Secular Society either, which tends to take things too far, and unlike Clive Bone I doubt I would have been sufficiently outraged by the idea of prayers happening at the start of town council meetings to take the matter to court. But none of these people can be described as extremist, militant or fundamentalist in any way which reflects the meaning of these words. At worst you could call them perhaps strident (although they are typically softly spoken), imposing or intolerant – and even then it is hard to see how they could be described as particularly more strident than, say a Giles Fraser, let alone a George Carey.

They are people with a point of view who express it. Not only are they not bombing tube carriages, but they rarely even employ the tactics of public demonstration – which would make them rather less strident than the majority of politicians (of all colours), trade unions or democracy campaigners (guilty).

In fact, the only palpable quality that these people have which warrants a term like “militant” is that their views provoke a fury in their opponents in such a way that in almost every other sphere we would consider extraordinary. It is akin to the heightened atmosphere that I lived through during the AV referendum campaign, except that it isn’t time limited in the way that was. That in itself is a subject worthy of further investigation, but in short, it suggests that opponents of secularists are playing the man not the ball. Nor is it limited to the religious. Plenty of non-religious people appear to be sufficiently provoked by Richard Dawkins’ voice alone to use similar terminology. Nonetheless, the implication of using such terminology for such unextreme views is, as it always has been, to keep the holders of those views in their place and to warn off others who might share them from expressing them. It is a framing device designed to chill debate.

That’s entirely fair enough in public square, so long as people don’t mind having their bluff called. But, like I say, it is another thing when a public service broadcaster decides to pitch in for one side. When they do so, they cross the line from referee to player. The meaning of words matter. The BBC ought to be more careful.

UPDATE:

Two things I should add to this post. On a happy note, Evan Davis responded to it on Twitter, saying:

@jamesgraham A very reasonable blog. It was a bit slapdash on my part.. trying to entice the guests to themselves be more explicit.

— Evan Davis (@EvanHD) February 18, 2012

On a more sour note, the Sunday Telegraph have today done a hatchet job on Richard Dawkins and attacked him for, um, being the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of slave owners. I suggest you ignore the article itself and just read Dawkins’ own account of the interview.

(11 votes, average: 3.82 out of 5)

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The government’s response to its defeat in the Lords last night over benefit caps has been notable for its lack of substance. Iain Duncan Smith has taken two lines: that the policy is enormously popular, and that Bishops and left-leaning peers ought to be as concerned by the people paying for the benefits as they are of the people who receive them.

The popularity argument is, well, true. But it is a pretty hollow one. It is hardly surprising that public attitudes have hardened following years of rightwing propaganda emanating from what passes for the British press and, given the small amounts of money involved, this is rather a bread and circuses argument. Throw a couple more Christians to the lions to keep the plebs happy.

They are on stronger ground when they argue that peers ought to consider the needs of hardworking taxpayers more. But this looks like crocodile tears from the Conservatives who appear only willing to raise regressive taxes like VAT, are pressing to cut the upper rate of income tax and won’t even consider the introduction of wealth taxes. The fact that Vince Cable’s Mansion Tax is considered radical within the cabinet, which would only be levied on properties worth over £2 million, shows you how far we need to go to make the case for a fundamental shift from income to wealth taxation.

Fundamentally, this cap saves very little (and may even cost money), applies only to especially large families and undermines the concept of a universal child benefit. It is ironic that Iain Duncan Smith, the great proponent of symbolic taxes designed to encourage marriage is attempting to force through a benefit change which would give the poorest a major financial incentive to break up their families. It is a complete distraction from the real debate which is needed about benefits reform.

One thing that appears to be getting lost in this debate about the benefits bill is how much money is being wasted not to help the poor but to subsidise the privileged. I touched on the way the welfare state subisidises large companies who refuse to pay decent wages – thus ramping up the tax credit bill – last week. When it comes to housing benefit, too few politicians seem prepared to question why we are shelling out so much money which goes straight into the pockets of private landlords and only propose to tackle this issue by forcing people into worse accommodation.

This blind spot isn’t limited to the coalition; after all the housing benefit explosion continued unabated throughout the Labour years. The only justification for it appears to be that policies designed to tackle this problem at the landlord end of the telescope might harm property prices. And property prices help drive the economy.

There is some truth to this: no-one doubts that a collapse in property prices would damage growth. But it does rather bring all this talk of “ethical capitalism” into perspective. Because who is actually benefiting from this racket? Not taxpayers, who have to pay inflated housing benefit bills. Not the poor on welfare, who don’t see a penny from this spending. Not hard working people struggling (and mostly failing) to get onto the first rung of the property ladder. The beneficiaries are, once again, the very people who have managed to insulate themselves from every other aspect of the economic downturn.

If the introduction of land value taxation – which would discourage the speculative ramping up of rents – is not to be contemplated, then the very least we should be considering is the return of rent controls. The introduction of such a policy would mean many more winners than losers. The only real barriers to doing so is dogma about distorting the housing market (which one could argue has already failed chronicly) and fear about how the financial sector might react in its customary intimidatory way.

Instead, we seem hellbent on driving through policies designed to stigmatise the poor and provide everyone with less security. Until politicians on all sides are prepared to take on this beggar-thy-neighbour form of rentier capitalism, I won’t be getting too excited by this ‘new ethics’.

(6 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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Zoe Williams makes a good point in the Guardian when she questions why the taxpayer effectively subsidises companies like Tesco by paying out tax credits which would be unnecessary if they paid decent wages, whilst executives reward themselves massive bonuses from the profits they make as a consequence. There is clearly something wrong here.

But she only tells half of the story.

Yes, allowing highly “profitable” companies pay low wages is a scandal, but so is artificially increasing those wages by imposing income taxes on low incomes. This is effectively a dead weight cost on labour; neither the employer or employee benefits from it. It artificially raises the minimum wage which, in turn, strengthens the hand of those who would have you believe that the national minimum wage is an unacceptable burden on employers. And it undermines Zoe’s argument; that subsidy she alleges is at least in part coming out of the very low wages she is so critical of.

For this reason, it is absolutely crucial that personal allowance is raised to ensure that, eventually, no one on a living wage should be paying income tax. The coalition government has already made a start on this, and should be encouraged to move as swiftly as possible.

It would be nice to think that such a policy measure would be entirely uncontroversial; sadly it is not. In 2010, Left Foot Forward teamed up with the Fabian Society to produce a series of articles designed to prove that such a policy was one of the least fair and most regressive policies ever devised. On the narrow point about higher income earners gaining more from the policy than lower income earners, they had a point – although their manufactured outrage rings hollow in light of the new Labour orthodoxy about sticking up for the “squeezed middle”. In any case, this could e easily solved merely by lowering the higher tax rate bracket by the same amount as the personal allowance increase, which is indeed what George Osborne has done.

But it represents a wider failure of imagination on the part of Labour thinkers; that is to restrict their definition of fairness to purely one of income distribution. I strongly agree this is an important factor, but it would be a profound mistake to make this the only fairness test in public policy. Any tax policy which has the effect of making it more affordable for employers to pay people a decent wage should be championed; the public purse should indeed be used as a safety net, but it is simply madness to create a system such as the one built by Gordon Brown in which money unduly paid out on low incomes is recycled to top up the pay of people on low incomes. This is Alice in Wonderland economics – and that is even before you consider the billions in unclaimed benefits that this shockingly complex system effectively deprives people of each year. Surely even the most staunch statist cannot rationally argue against the inland revenue butting out at this point?

In short, we have a right to expect corporations like Tesco to pay decent wages to their employees – but Tesco have a right to expect the state not to have policies in place which actively discourage them from doing so. Both the government and corporate sector need to take action here, while Labour needs to decide which side they are really on.

(8 votes, average: 3.88 out of 5)

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Charlotte Henry has a curious article on the Total Politics blog, suggesting that Clegg’s speech on a more participatory form of industrial democracy will help us to seperate the “real liberals” from the “SDP-statist-sandal wearers”.

There are several problems with this diagnosis. For one thing, the famed “sandal wearers” and the SDP members are very different people. Indeed, when I joined the party in the mid-90s, the two were at daggers drawn. The “sandal wearers” – a term generally used to describe the aging young liberals “red guard” of the 60s and 70s would cling to their copies of Liberator, openly mocking the “sogs” who had produced their own Reformer (which eventually became the house organ of the Centre for Reform) in response. The two groups could not have been more different; indeed, if anything it was the SDPers – with their support for “the Project” – who were perceived as more rightwing than the basket weaving liberals, the latter with whom I personally identified more closely with at the time. Indeed, the forerunner to Liberal Vision and the Orange Book, Liberal Future, was an odd hodge-podge of SDPers and former pro-Euro Conservatives.

A decade and a half later, the people on both sides of that rather silly schism have moved on. A great many SDPers now identify closely with the what is lazily known as Orange Book tendency as well as the Social Liberal Forum. The people from the liberal wing of the party find themselves on both sides of the debate as well.

But is there a disagreement with them on employee-ownership schemes? I don’t see it. The first Social Liberal Forum Chair Richard Grayson, who is quite proud of his SDP heritage, was especially keen that we take on the task of reviving industrial democracy as a central plank of the Lib Dem platform, and argued to this effect when the party was drawing up its last manifesto (indeed, one of the SLF’s first meetings was on this topic).

Much as I might like to pretend that the more classical liberally inclined members of the party would have a problem with Clegg’s speech, I doubt it very much. I would humbly suggest that this is probably for two reasons: 1) the people Charlotte feels free to take potshots at may be rather more liberal than she assumes and 2) there is probably rather more to unite the party than some of our more factional members like to think.

As David Howarth points out in Reinventing the State, the party is essentially social liberal – the only real dispute between groups like the SLF and the Orange Book tendency is a rather pragmatic one about what method of public service delivery works best (admittedly, this is a debate which can get pretty heated at times; rightly so, given the stakes). There certainly is a fairly deep schism between those who identify with a narrowly defined view of classical liberalism and the rest of the party, but you can count the number of these people on the fingers of one hand.

Calling people out on some kind of “real” liberal purity test is self-destructive at best and claiming employee-ownership is likely to be a sticking point is to fundamentally misunderstand the real debate within the party. Let’s not try to make up disagreements which aren’t there.

(13 votes, average: 4.38 out of 5)

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