Populus poll in today's Times

What to make of the Populus poll in today's Times?

Labout has a 15% lead over the Conservatives, but David Cameron has a 30% personal lead over Ed Miliband.

In the election campaign presumably there are going to be more of the televised Leadership debates?

I think they are undemocratic, but the pressure for them might be overwhelming.

The Leadership debates may well be where the 2015 general election is won or lost.

"Jorts"

Learned a new word today - "jorts".

Apparently they are jean shorts worn in America.

Not sure if these are jeans cut down to shorts or tailored jean shorts.

Perhaps they are also worn here, and I have just not seen them?

Attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities

Interesting report in the New York Times about attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-scientist-says-blasts-targeted-nuclear-sites.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes

Iran is not a unitary nation state it is an empire, and like most empires is full of dissident groups, disaffected minority ethnicities and swirling social ferments.

If you wanted to subvert such a society it would be easy.  There would be no shortage of recruits.  And if you recruit enough seditionaries the natural paranoia of the Iranian religious-political-military power nexus will start to work against itself with purges, arrests and false accusations.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation

Currently ploughing my way through the IPPR report Oceans of Innovation recently published (the authors are Michael Barber, Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizvi).  The report came to my (our) notice because it was endorsed by David Miliband.  It has a McKinsey-style thoroughness and competence to it, although the prose is a bit stodgy.

I have printed the report out (to make notes as I go along), but you can read it on-line: http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/9543/oceans-of-innovation-the-atlantic-the-pacific-global-leadership-and-the-future-of-education

The paper looks at "global leadership" and the way this might be achieved through a philosophy of "everyone as an entrepreneur and innovator" (everyone?).

The Guardian magazine on Saturday published a photo essay on school classrooms around the world, and I found this complemented the dry text of the IPPR report (although I was surprised to read that average life expectancy in the United Kingdom is higher than in the United States).

I will blog more as I work my way through the document.

The report opens with an historical review, stating "the Atlantic Ocean was the ocean at the centre of the global economy" - which reminded me of the Pirenne Thesis which maintained that the Roman Empire was created and sustained by the Mediterranean Sea.

Reference to Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson but I am not sure that the Atlantic trade was responsible to the development of parliamentary government in the United Kingdom - the origins of Parliament are to be found elsewhere.

Link between trade in goods and trade in ideas.

Reference to The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow, a social club to discuss science, society and ideas (perhaps like the Spalding Gentlemens' Society) - "a model of innovation which emerged in the mid-18th century and still has relevance today".   

 "Demand and supply grew in a virtuous circle."

"the good and happiness... of the members of any state is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be determined."

"Global leadership was a result of economic influence; and economic influence a result above all of the extraordinary capacity to innovate."

"...power follows economic growth, economic growth follows innovative capacity and, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Atlantic societies, with Britain in the lead, arrived at a set of circumstances where innovation was let loose."

"The keys to this dominance were openness and competition - openness to scientific evidence, openness to ideas and openness to differences of view; and at the same time competition between countries for wealth and influence."

"If a single moment captured the symbolic dominance of the Atlantic Ocean, it was perhaps when President Franklin D Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met on board USS Augusta in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland in August 1941 to agree what became known as the Atlantic Charter."

"Until the late 18th century, when the great English explorer James Cook made his three voyages to the Pacific, much of the ocean remained uncharted water." 

It seems to odd to think that in the year 1900 the British and the American navies dominated the Pacific (and British naval power was greater than the Americans) - "the two Atlantic powers saw the Pacific as just another extension of their supremacy".

"After 300 years the second half of the 20th century saw the demise of the Atlantic era" - is this really true?  Brazil is a rising power; Canada is a very considerable economic power; Nigeria is a regional power with potential.  Plus for all their problems America and the United Kingdom have not completely faded into insignificance.  

"...the more important feature of the last decade of the 20th century was the emergence of Asia, especially Pacific Asia, as the economic powerhouse of the new global economy" - but surely there is a flaw in this model as Asian growth is dependent on exports to the West and if the West stops buying the Pacific Asia bubble risks bursting (unless they can develop internal markets quickly). 

"In 1960 Pacific Asia's share of global GDP was 9.1 per cent; by 2010 it was 22.8 per cent."

Pacific Asia:  "average growth of 10 per cent per year across such a large area and over such a long period is unprecedented in human history and demands explanation."

"90 per cent of all trade travels by water".

"As of 2011 over 15 per cent of world exports can be accounted for by just three countries:  South Korea, Japan and China."

The state in these three countries is characterised by "a determined, relatively small and relatively uncorrupt elite with a clear vision" (vision is what the United Kingdom lacks - we do not seem to have had a national mission since 1945, and an urgent requirement of government is to come up with a national mission statement and have it accepted by the electorate).  

"A state managed by an expert elite was able to speed up development, aggregate capital and protect infant industries from potentially destructive external competition." 

Discussion of the Washington Consensus "the liberalised free market perspective that dominated the IMF and the World Bank from the early 1960s".

Asian society - "an Hobbesian social contract offering peace and order in return for liberty" (Spain experienced a similar economic advance under the peace and order of Franco).

"the strength of family ties, especially the extended family, meant that the state was able to rely on families to provide the welfare and benefits which western societies demanded from the state.  As a result tax levels could remain relatively low" - the West is experiencing extended families by default as the economic squeeze and lack of mortgages and jobs leads to several generations staying together under the same roof.  Is this a good thing in terms of the IPPR report?

"In the West people developed a 'rights' culture and asked what the state could offer them; in Pacific Asia they developed a 'responsibilities' culture and asked what they could offer the state" - this sounds good but not sure this is what actually happened.

"As Pacific Asia's economies boomed so too did economies on the other shores of the Pacific" - a Pacific Pirenne thesis?

"Australia... has boomed" (but boomed selling raw materials to China which then makes manufactured goods to sell to the West, so once again we see the Pacific region's dependence on the West).

"Chile, with its long Pacific coast, free markets and copper, has grown further and faster than its regional peers" (we should also note the influence of Chicago School economics in Chile).

"The growth of China's economy since Deng Xiaoping opened it up in the early 1980s is the most overwhelming fact of all" - is it so remarkable?  One could say rather that the most surprising fact was how slow China was to emerge from the trauma of the Second World War.  Is it not the fact that every 40 years or so China experiences internal chaos or external threat? (Opium wars, Boxer rebellion, invasion and revolution, cultural revolution, etc). 

"Special economic zones began on the Pacific coast, learning consciously from the success of Singapore and Hong Kong". 

"China... 211 million people have been added to the global labour force." 

"China has already become the biggest market for cars and personal computers, with e-commerce turnover set to overtake the US by 2015 and the number of on-line shoppers expected to increase from 145 million in 2010 to 348 million in 2014."

"The US, and to a lesser extent Britain, remain pre-eminent in game-changing innovation." 

Shooting of badgers

I am disappointed that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has allowed shooting of badgers.

Earlier I signed the e-petition created by Brian May urging the government to stop badger culling:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/38257

Nothing in Owen Jones's piece about Margaret Thatcher on the Independent website acknowledges that she could not have come to power and sustained herself in power for three elections without majority support from the working class.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/not-all-socialists-want-to-dance-on-margaret-thatchers-grave-i-want-her-to-go-on-and-on-8143089.html

This I suspect is one of the underlying reasons Margaret Thatcher is hated by the Left - she took their natural constituency away from them and they have never really got it back again.

Lake Effect by Rich Cohen

Have just finished reading Lake Effect by Rich Cohen.  No idea what made me buy this book - probably it was reviewed favourably somewhere.  I read it in a few days - indicating not only that it was easy to read, but also that I felt motivated to read it.

It is an American book - a memoir of someone growing up in a small commuter town near Chicago in the 1980s.  Nothing dramatic happens, the book is just a chronicle of the ordinary and everyday.  However the writing is very beautiful, and even the most banal aspects of small town life are given a literary gloss that makes them dazzling.

The book is elegiac in tone, with an intense nostalgia for a life that is past and a friendship that has run its course.  There was something about the book that seemed to reference Scott Fitzgerald, and so I was not surprised to see towards the end the line "Gatsby is you and me".  Perhaps that is a sub-theme of the memoir?

Above:  article about The Great Gatsby by Jay McInerney that appeared in the Review section of the Observer in June this year.  On the whole the review sections of both the Saturday Guardian and the Observer have declined over the last couple of years (not exactly dumbed down, but the book reviews are silly).  Occasionally however you still come across articles such as this which are worth keeping and re-reading.

Appalled at how all this has been left to almost the last minute - the past week at work

Monday

Drama in the office today.  Temp Donna in the Admin section walked out after a massive row with finance (I could hear the raised voices from an office the other side of the floor).  Acting Deputy Director and Finance Manager Marcia Walsh came round the desks apologising ("She called me a bitch, she called Katie a bitch...")

News that Institute Director Vijay Singh is ill with kidney stones and expected to be off work for a while.

Most of the day I spent with Development Manager Tim Watts, going over possible announcements we could make at the Conference next month (the Institute is giving a lunchtime presentation).

Tuesday

Vijay Singh in the office when I arrived, everyone telling him he should not be back at work so soon.

More details emerged about Donna's dramatic walk-out yesterday.  Marcia Walsh was attempting a damage-limitation exercise.  "The atmosphere is better now the last of the trouble-makers has gone" she told me (personally I think one of the biggest trouble-makers is Marcia Walsh herself). 

More time with Tim Watts, discussing whether we had time to produce a document in time for the Conference.

Wednesday

The Competition Analysis review meeting was held at 10am.  I had not done any preparation for this meeting and I had to hurriedly put something together.  In the event the meeting was very successful and I was pleased at how well things went (but as usual I found it difficult to follow through and tended to coast for the rest of the day).

Thursday

Having decided to produce a new document for the Conference today was a rush to get things under.  We are to ask a well-known commentator to write the text.  All of the morning I spent sourcing appropriate illustrations.

A meeting with Simon C (Campaign Manager) about whether we should have an exhibition stand.  I suggested we just had a stand for the day of our presentation.  Privately I am appalled at how all this has been left to almost the last minute.

Friday

The team that is to go to the Conference had to go to Head Office today for a "run through" of our presentation.  Vijay Singh did not attend claiming he was not feeling well.  Alec Nussbaum looked in, but did not stay.

Afterwards we sat in on the presentation being rehearsed by an economic organisation attached to Head Office. 

A lack of clarity over what it means to be a socialist in 2012

Above:  leftist activists within the Labour Party are fighting off suggestions of a rapprochement with disaffected LibDems despite some in the Shadow Cabinet (Ed Balls) wanting to welcome them.

Above:  rightist activists within the Labour Party are fighting off suggestions that former Respect leader Salma Yaqoob might join the party, despite some in the Shadow Cabinet (Diane Abbott) pointing to "double standards".

Perhaps this is all just irrelevant socialist tittle tattle.

Or perhaps it indicates a lack of clarity over what it means to be a socialist in 2012 and doubt over what future direction the Labour party intends to take.

Update:

Also perhaps relevant to this consideration, Ed Miliband praises Margaret Thatcher in today's Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/9544538/Ed-Miliband-its-good-to-be-rich-if-you-make-it-the-hard-way.html.

 

Politicians such as Jack Straw are still trying to manipulate the situation

Is it not depressing the way various people are using the Hillsborough tragedy to try to score political points?

Especially distasteful was Jack Straw this morning blaming "the legacy of Thatcher" for what happened at a football ground in the constituency of Labour MP David Blunkett (a future Home Secretary) in the so-called "people's republic" of South Yorkshire.

Jack Straw's attempt to draw in the so-called "battle" of Orgreave is bizarre when you consider that the vast majority of police at that event were from outside the local area.

It is well-known that people in Liverpool have an ingrained dislike for "the Tories".  Is it possible that Jack Straw is hoping to stoke up hatred of "the Tories" in a bid to deflect questions being asked about his likely role (and the likely role of David Blunkett) in the Hillsborough cover-up?  Is it possible that even after all that has happened politicians such as Jack Straw are still trying to manipulate the situation?

There is more of this smear deflecting exercise here:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/apr/12/hillsborough-battle-orgreave

Is anyone asking about the links between the then South Yorkshire Council and the local police?  It seems difficult to believe there was not collusion  co-ordination between the two organisations (at the very least there would have to be minuted discussions between a police force and the local council that funds it).  Sorry if this seems suspicious, but in my opinion the "culture of impunity" would be more attributable to the legacy of Blunkett rather than the legacy of Thatcher.

Update:  Andy Burnham MP (Labour Shadow Cabinet) has said:  "Why didn't my own party do more to help the families of Hillsborough?"

The idea that Boris Johnson could lead the Conservative Party is not tenable - the London mob might cheer him but Conservative Party members would not tolerate a whoopie-cushion leader.

Does the question asked by Chris Bryant later today have any validity

Is it really the case that Chris Bryant MP is so bereft of ideas, imagination and campaigning zeal that when chosen to ask the first question at Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons later today he has to go onto Twitter to find out what he should ask?

https://twitter.com/ChrisBryantMP

So many questions arise from this:

1  Is Chris Bryant not admitting that he is unfit to be a Member of Parliament if he cannot even marshall the intellectual nous to ask a question on his own?

2  What was wrong with asking his constituents?  Or does he really care more about the opinions of his Twitter followers than the people he is supposed to be representing?  Please don't tell me they are one and the same - a tiny fraction of the electorate of Rhondda will have Twitter accounts.

3  Is it not an abuse of House of Commons procedure to allow (encourage indeed) Twitter to influence what questions are asked at PMQs?

4  Are we moving away from a Parliamentary system of government and more towards one in which the ordinary people are able to directly intervene in the House of Commons through on-line participation?

5  If we are moving towards government by social media, is Twitter the best way of introducing on-line participation in the procedures of the House of Commons? - Twitter often brings out the worst in people.

6  Does the question asked by Chris Bryant later today have any validity if it is not really the question of a member of parliament but merely the gobby opinions of some Twitter loudmouth?  

       




No use expecting the Speaker of the House of Commons to intervene - he must be the most biased Speaker of post-war times, entirely pro-Labour.

Telling is not selling

On the Progress Online website former General Secretary of the Labour Party, Peter Watt, is looking for a new form of campaigning.

Beyond Voter ID http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2012/09/10/beyond-voter-id/

Peter Watt is an intelligent politician with a lot of experience of running election campaigns.  And in his piece he covers all the important points.  But somehow he fails to spot the obvious flaw in his reasoning.

He talks almost exclusively about the Labour party telling the electorate, not about the Labour party listening to the electorate.

This is a failure most politicians make.

They fail to realise that telling is not selling (this is so important I am going to write it again in capitals:  TELLING IS NOT SELLING).

There is no need for over-complicated segmentation of constituencies.  Certainly no need for obsessive use of social media.  All a politician needs to do is personally call at every household in the constituency, personally meet every elector (perfectly possible in a five year period), and listen to what they say.

Then represent those opinions, so far as they are able to within the constraints of the party line.

Anything that distracts politicians from calling on their electorate must be considered self-defeating.

This holds true for all parties, not just Labour.

Peter Watt ends his piece with a remarkably candid expression of self-knowledge:  "In our heart-of-hearts we know they do not trust us".

Too true I'm afraid.

They do not trust politicians because the politicians seem incapable of doing as they are told.

Does Surrey Police check staff who are on special leave following "trauma"?

Does it occur to Surrey Police that the individuals might be taking them for a ride?

I see the Bulgarian stalker has reappeared.

The Treasures of Ancient Rome (BBC 4) is excellent in every way.

A faultless production.

I am looking forward to next week's programme which will look at the syncretism between classical and oriental architecture.

Sam Wollaston said that The Thick of It was not very funny this time round

In the Guardian today TV critic Sam Wollaston said that The Thick of It was not very funny this time round (it's a new series).

Although I thought The Thick of It was funny I have to agree that there was something missing.

In part I think it is because attention has shifted from Labour in power to the Coalition in power.

On the whole I agree with the theory that we laugh at things we are secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) afraid of.  Laughter is a form of hysteria.  I know this is a controversial theory, but it makes sense to me.

Therefore we have to conclude that the general population is not all that afraid of the Conservatives.  They are not scary in the same way that Alastair Campbell was scary, or Harriet Harman was intimidating, or Gordon Brown gave off the impression of a violent bully barely in control of himself.  You can test this for yourself by imagining Grant Shapps and Peter Mandelson side by side - which one would you feel most afraid of?

If you read the Twitter microblog of Owen Jones (Independent journalist and left-wing activist) you see lefties trying to outdo each other in their proclaimed hatred of "the Tories".  But sooner or later they get bored with that and start to berate "Progress" and "Blairites" and aim digital kicks at Tony McNulty.  Eventually they turn on Owen Jones himself and condemn him as a counter-revolutionary and a running dog lackey of the imperialists.

In terms of internecine feuding, bitter antagonisms, and dramatic no-holds-barred in-fighting Labour has all the drama and the Conservatives are nowhere.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/sep/09/the-thick-of-it-review

"How Britain has changed"

Have just listened to Eddie Mair's PM show on BBC Radio 4 (just the first fifteen minutes or so, then I had to get on with some work).

The initial report covered the Olympic Parade that took place in London earlier today.

The reporter (can't remember his name) was trying to get athletes and others to say "how Britain has changed" and with palpable eagerness hinting at "diversity" and "ethnicity".

Would it be impolite for me to ask how many of the British medallists were from the white working class?  We know (because the Guardian told us) that the privately-educated 7% sector of the population won about 30% of the medals; and also we know (because Sunder Katwala's report told us) that the Afro-Caribbean 2% of the population produced another 30% of the medals.  So are we saying that the remaining 91% of the population only produced 40% of the medals?

I can understand the multi-cultural enthusiasm for the winners, but should we not also think a little about those who were left behind and why they got left behind?

As Bonnie Greer (and others) have pointed out, it was Ken Livingstone who "got" these Games for London, and did the initial planning.  And the one thing we know about Ken Livingstone is that he was a completely unscrupulous godfather to the BME communities, knowing that they were more reliable voting-fodder than the ordinary white working class.  As Deepthroat would advise us:  follow the money.

Booing

I did not see George Osborne being booed at the Paralympics, but it does occur to me that we should expect a Chancellor tackling serious economic conditions to be booed.  If he were not booed it would suggest he was not doing his job (which is to take hard and painful decisions).  People would boo a lot more if the economy fell apart.

In any case, what does booing signify?

What sort of people are so bad-mannered they indulge in booing?

Ed Miliband only had to mention Tony Blair's name and the Labour Party Conference started booing.

Disappointed G4S did not get the Surrey Police contract.

Not because I am pro-G4S.

But because I think Surrey Police need shaking up.