Guy Beres

Borgen and the third party fantasy/fallacy

Guy — Sat, 05 May 2012 14:17:04 +0000

These days the English, believe it or not, are looking east and a bit north for their quality television; to Denmark, præcis. Fresh on the footsteps of the noir crime drama The Killing (Forbrydelsen), come The Bridge, and Borgen, a political drama that might well feel tantalisingly utopian for viewers living in staid Western democracies around the world. The first season of Borgen tells the story of a charismatic, principled female leader of the minority Moderate Party who manages to break the big party stranglehold in Denmark to lead a coalition of parties as Prime Minister. It is, simply put, The West Wing for the post-noughties generation. Who wants to watch the humdrum story of a principled Democrat and his team fighting for and gaining office when a lot of the real action, inspiration and colour in modern politics sprouts from the backblocks of community organising in much smaller parties?

With all the water that has passed under the bridge in recent decades, from the centre-left’s embrace of economic liberalism & New Labour’s “principled” invasion of Iraq, to the seeming predilection of conservative parties for high defence spending, “big government” and politicised social welfare, what normal, rational person doesn’t occasionally dream of a democracy where the major parties get a taste of their just desserts?

The “third party” or outsider fantasy that Borgen depicts is not so much of a stretch for Danish politics, where the government is regularly lead by coalitions of smaller parties; but it does remain a stretch for most of the rest of us. The Westminster breed of government and certainly a fair proportion of the adversarial electoral systems that are prominent internationally are structurally configured to encourage big, powerful parties at the expense of smaller ones. The United States remains the textbook case; an ironclad bastion of major parties, albeit with a Republican Party wracked with internal division courtesy of the evangelical Right and the Tea Party movements. Will we see a President of the United States who is not either a Democrat or a Republican in our lifetimes? Almost certainly not.

In the United Kingdom, of course, Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats are two years into their warm embrace of the Conservatives in government; they are finding that the embrace is slowly suffocating them. In local elections this week, the Lib Dems lost 329 of their 767 councillors. Since the 2010 election, support for the Liberal Democrats has fallen from 22% to 11% in a recent YouGov poll, behind even the somewhat barmy UK Independence Party (Ukip). Everyone with a bit of conscience who cared about democracy “agreed with Nick” in the lead-up to the 2010 poll, but you’d be hard-pressed to find many who do so now. It was inordinately fashionable to agree with Nick back then – even The Guardian editorialised in support of the Liberal Democrats in 2010. Now the Lib Dems have the look of a party sleepwalking towards disaster when the next national election swings around, unless some drastic changes can be made to the way they are doing business with their Tory masters.

In Australia, we’ve had our momentary dalliances with minor parties in the last couple of decades, but only impressionable students, members of the Greens, or the pharmaceutically inspired could argue that Labor and the Liberal Party are significantly waning in terms of support at elections more than they are waxing. Tony Abbott is leading the Liberals with a civilisation-crushing 51% of the primary vote, according to Newspoll; Labor may be in the doldrums at the moment on 27%, but then they have been doing a bit of foot-shooting of late and Julia Gillard is well and truly on the nose in suburbia. The Greens have showed quite an admirable level of staying power over the course of the last decade, consistently sitting at 10% or thereabouts, but arguably, Australia’s close relationship with George Bush’s Republican administration in the first half of the noughties and Bob Brown’s recent resignation may have seen their political high watermark come and go. Bob Brown was always a fairly dignified, relatively likable figure, enjoying a not inconsiderable media profile. Christine Milne, and/or whoever follows her is going to find it desperately difficult to “maintain the rage” whilst maintaining and growing their current fledgling level of support nationally. The fate of the Democrats, another worthy minor party, hangs heavily on the shoulders of would-be innovators in the Australian political scene.

For us, the Brits and the Americans, Borgen is just a twinkling of utopia; it tells the story of a place that our own countries, at least without a drastic and unlikely overhaul of our respective political systems, simply cannot be. There is more than a dash of “grass is always greener” about this, of course. Danish viewers of Borgen would – let’s not kid ourselves – probably snort derisively at any suggestion that their decidedly multilateral incarnation of parliamentary democracy is necessarily something to covet. The often brutal level of compromise and imperfection that modern democracy delivers in spades, regardless of which political party is in office, is not something that anybody yet really has the answer to. Canberra, Westminster and Washington, for many, feel so distant and so alien that they may as well orbit Alpha Centauri, for all the good they do and all the meaning they have in people’s everyday lives.

But yet, through the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and yes, the British National Party, our collective “third party” fantasy lives on. Unless this fantasy transforms itself into an organised movement for electoral reform however, it will remain a fallacious mirage: a distraction from the far more profound structural problems that so bedevil democracy in the 21st century.

Major parties and minor parties at the end of the day are playing the same game by the same rules, and sadly, it’s a damn sight easier and sexier to make a few more little, largely ignorable chips off the old block than to think about fashioning a whole new block.

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Larvatus Prodeo and the state of the blogosphere

Guy — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:00:09 +0000

Larvatus Prodeo, which can reasonably claim to have been just about the most popular and most compelling independent blogging community in the Australian blogosphere, has post its last. LP was a trailblazer in the Australian context in its early life; in its later life, much less so, but it always offered a dependably warm and learned whirlpool of debate and opinion. Founded initially as a personal blog by Mark Bahnisch back in 2005, LP swelled in numbers over the years to include contributions from many interesting and different voices, both “above the line” (including my own recent minor contributions) and indeed “below the line”. Long, often wide-ranging comment threads were peppered with interactions both fierce and friendly, and predictable skirmishes between right and left were – whilst not civil in the strict sense of the word – more civil than could be expected in the blogosphere generally. A certain camaraderie between adversaries was encouraged because the tone of debate was just that crucial bit higher than your average.

LP emerged in an era when newspapers and mainstream media (MSM) organisations were only just starting to engage with the challenges and opportunities offered by the Internet, and will exit stage left in 2012 with those same organisations having progressed and professionalised their online offerings. Anybody who involved themselves in any way with blogs since 2000 will know that that independent blogs stole a march on the MSM in the early noughties; the tide has now turned. Comment threads on articles and opinion columns have emerged as an MSM standard, supported by often ruthless paid moderators and a growing legion of willing participants. Sites like The Drum and initiatives like the Guardian’s popular if light touch Comment is Free have semi-successfully reached out to new, mainstream news-consuming audiences to an extent that independent blogs have failed to match.

So is the independent political blogosphere as we used to conceive of it dead, or dying? Certainly not everywhere; in the United States, political blogs seem to be enjoying a continuing stretch of success and influence. In the Australian context however, it does seem to be heading down that path, at least in the prevailing political, technological and economic climate. The perfect storm of rage and frustration that built up throughout the broader left in response to the continuing political success of the Howard Government has dissipated, as the fortunes of Federal Labor have waxed and waned, and then waned (and waned) some more. State governments across the country have by and large failed to engage people’s interest, and failed to inspire punters of any political stripe. Political parties by and large have failed to effectively engage with the potential that blogs offer for interaction with voters and likeminded activists.

Economically speaking – running and administering a timely and responsive blog with quality content is a considerable challenge. Just about all bloggers (shock, horror!) have busy lives: partners, friends, families, jobs, study commitments and plain old recreation time tend to impinge on one’s 24×7 content production and news processing time. The “street cred” that independent blogs initially enjoyed has slowly but steadily been overrun, overpowered by the mainstream media’s wilful use of their comparatively massive financial resources. Operating and maintaining a thriving political blog-driven community really does require not just the part-time contributions of many, but the full-time attention of at least a dedicated few.

As an IT consultant, I also find the technological aspect to the equation quite a fascinating topic. Is it possible to conduct deep and meaningful discussions on blogs? Of course it is, but in general, the presentation layer doesn’t always make it easy. As comment threads get longer and longer, on most commonly used blogging platforms, it becomes more and more difficult (and less attractive as a contributor) to maintain a serious, multi-way conversation. It’s not very nice in user experience terms to have to scroll through pages and pages of comments or down an interminably long page of comments to find the ones that interest you. Responses to comments get lost in the mix, particularly when people’s lives get in the way of the conversation, and the discussion changes course (or ebbs away) in the meantime. I do feel as though there could be some rich rewards to be found in hacking away at a WordPress or Drupal base to produce a community political blogging platform that transcends many of the limitations of the bog-standard blog platforms doing the rounds. Some of the underlying concepts that have make Facebook and Twitter such fun applications to use for millions could be brought to bear to encourage interactions between contributors to the site and produce a richer level of conversation. The barrier between posters and commenters could and should be made considerably looser. The forums in which debate occurs could be extended to offer more than the one-dimensional post-comment-comment-comment model. The community could extend beyond a site and more thoroughly into the “real”, social world.

The future for online political debate remains bright, but innovation, collaboration and luck are all going to be required in order to unlock the potential that is out there.

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The coming death of the “high street” – and does it matter?

Guy — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:24:07 +0000

Embarrassingly, it was only when I initially lived in London in 2007 that the concept of “the high street” really twigged; growing up in Penrith, New South Wales, the fact that our main street happened to be called “High Street” was until that point meaningless. In the UK of course, amongst London’s varied boroughs and municipal areas and certainly further afield across the countryside, “the high street” really does mean something to people. In fact, it means a lot. It means so much to heartland British voters that the Cameron Government commissioned celebrity retail consultant Mary Portas to conduct a review of the state of “the high street” and report back, which she duly did in December 2011. Since then, the government has not exactly leapt to implement the recommendations offered up by the so-called “Queen of Shops”, but to be fair, it has had some other rather pressing fiscal and political matters on its hands so far in 2012.

The picture painted by Portas, needless to say, is not a rosy one. The charm of the traditional high street, with its local, independent shops and offerings is disappearing, and with it, the whole concept’s raison d’être. High streets across Britain are increasingly being peppered with failing or vacant stores, their essential uniqueness incrementally crushed by the omnipresence of large retail companies and supermarkets. If you are going to do your weekly grocery run at the local supermarket, why not go to the local satellite mega-market with its colossal car park, rather than struggle through the car-parking nightmare of a traffic-clogged main street? Better yet, why not do your shopping online and save on petrol and indeed energy? Increasingly in the UK this is proving an attractive option, as major supermarkets Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose and e-businesses like Ocado and Amazon offer lower prices and a bigger range that any local bricks and mortar store can manage; often with free delivery to boot. Thanks to the latter, nobody much is buying music, books or even computer games from their local any more: iconic chains HMV, GAME and Waterstones are all struggling for their corporate lives. A recent Deloitte report suggests that up to an astonishing 40% of shops on the “high street” could close in the next five years.

The local retail experience has in fact been more dramatic and more pronounced than in Britain; in most Australian metropolitan suburbs there is no “high street” to speak of, at least in the British sense of the term. The domination of the grocery sector by Woolworths and Coles and malls in the American style have reduced many of our main streets to depressing wastelands of “$2 shops”, chain stores, take-aways and struggling restaurants. The only “pop-up” shops (a London trend spruiked optimistically by Wayne Hennessy in the Guardian) that tend to appear in Australia can be described as such because they tend to disappear from the scene just as quickly as they arrive.

So is the “high street” really worth saving through direct local and state government investment, or is it a concept that, in reality, is past its used-by-date? I am certainly sympathetic to the idea of providing some incentive or subsidy to local, independent businesses trying to make a start in the centre of town, but it also feels a bit like government would be a small fry pushing against the tidal wave of the retail market.

It would be particularly interesting to hear of people’s personal experiences with their own local “high street”. Is it alive? Has a local mall taken over? Does it really matter if the malls win?

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

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The politics of the top income tax rate

Guy — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:09:35 +0000

Regardless of what the national fiscal situation looks like at any given point in time, few topics divide the commentariat right from the commentariat left as keenly as whether or not the top rate of income tax should be cut. The right will have you believe that cutting the top rate of income tax encourages the rich to spend more and the entrepreneurial to expand their businesses; that a heavy top tax rate discourages people from striving to earn more and encourages them to find ways to cheat the tax system. The left will have you believe that cutting the top income tax rate, explicitly (as it is) in aid of the affluent, cannot be morally justified when there are so many more worthy targets for government expenditure out there. Why put a few more dollars into the bulging pockets of society’s most fortunate, when you could put a few more dollars into schools, hospitals, or to help the needy or vulnerable? Ethically it just doesn’t add up.

As someone firmly on the “left” side of the argument, I do wonder whether there would be any circumstances under whether I would feel that a cut in the top rate of income tax could be justified. Society, I think, would have to be motoring along swimmingly, with a high median income and a high quality of public service provision for people from all walks of life. There would need to be a clear sense that people on high incomes were really being stifled by the tax system, or that the tax system was configured in such a way that the top tax rate was proving ineffective in delivering revenue.

Two of the giants of Western Europe have seen some of these philosophical issues rise to the forefront of public debate in recent weeks. In France, the Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande has proposed a bold tax rate of 75% on personal income earned over €1,000,000 per year. Contrastingly, in the UK, a furore has arisen in the lead-up to the Budget (to be delivered on Wednesday at 12:30PM UK time) after it emerged that the Conservative/Lib Dem Coalition are planning to cut the top income tax rate from 50% to 45%. Andrew Rawnsley at The Guardian has a ruminative piece summing up the machinations, and asks the question most LP readers are probably wondering:

Reducing the top rate will please a lot of Tories and it won’t have escaped Mr Osborne’s notice that these are the people who will ultimately select Mr Cameron’s successor. It will obviously go down well among the minority who earn enough to pay the top rate. No doubt it will be justified on the grounds that a 50p rate sends a negative signal to entrepreneurs and deters talented people from working in the UK. But the chancellor will struggle to explain why he has made a priority of cutting the top rate to the far greater number of less affluent voters who are suffering the worst squeeze on their living standards in decades.

In short, cutting the top tax rate (as Rawnsley quotes “senior Labour figures” as describing it) really does sound politically mad. It will literally benefit just the top 1% of tax-payers, leaving a sizable proportion of the remaining 99% feeling appalled at the government. It provides the struggling Labour Opposition with a stonking great club with which it can beat the Conservatives and condemn them as being out of touch.

This is an act that reeks of the Tories’ self-perceived need to touch up their own supporters, with scant regard for either the state of the economy or the vast majority of the British population. The next election is still a few years away – so there is a palpable sense of “now or never” for the blue-bloods, with a few years grace yet to patch up their image before the public gets to pass judgement on them again. What is ironic is that Hollande in France is taking a mirror-image approach; 75% is a hefty headline-grabbing number seemingly designed more to mobilise and appeal to his party’s base rather than to solve France’s economic woes or to aid the struggling.

When did the top income tax rate become little more than an intellectual chew-toy for the political classes?

Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo.

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The newspaper is dead, long live the newspaper?

Guy — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 16:59:59 +0000

As we all know, newspaper circulation is falling and colossal pressures are being brought to bear on the media industry. Newspapers today need to find ways of doing more with less, to keep advertisers interested enough in their product to turn a dime (and indeed to fund quality journalism), and to make the paradigm shift from static, daily publications to 24×7 constant online content production and curation.

Now take a look at this brilliant ad from The Guardian. It’s a poignant reminder that the opportunities offered by the Internet to journalism far exceed the threats.

Editor Alan Rusbridger talks some more about The Guardian’s “Open Journalism” initiatives here. The newspaper is also holding an “Open Weekend” in late March which I will be attending. I’ll report back to LP readers about the initiative and some of the more interesting topics of discussion.

Will we still have newspapers as we know them in 20 years time? I ask this question as a Kindle convert who likes holding a physical newspaper but am not missing the tactility of the newspaper at all.

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Are you experienced? Working for free in an economic apocalypse

Guy — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:29:44 +0000

Since the global financial crisis shook domestic economies across the planet in 2008, the labour market in Europe has remained a buyer’s market. With austerity measures still biting hard and the Eurozone crisis rolling on without a defining resolution in sight, only blithely optimistic souls would argue that the mood is going to lighten in the short-term. Unemployment in the UK rose yet again for the three months to December 2011 to 8.4%, its highest level in sixteen years. Youth unemployment stands at an astonishing 22.2%. Unemployment across the channel in France remains high at 9.3%, down slightly from the peak of 9.6% reached in the throes of the GFC in late 2009. These figures provide a distinct contrast with the numbers coming from North American and indeed down under; Australia’s unemployment rate of 5.1% seems much more than a twenty hour flight away right now, and Barack Obama has seen unemployment drop on his watch by close to 2% since late 2009.

Under the Conservative / Liberal Democrat Coalition, swingeing public sector cuts, the squeezing of people off welfare and the prevailing economic climate on the continent has engendered a ferocious level of competition for jobs. Quoth the Jimi Hendrix Experience, are you experienced? If you don’t have experience, there is nothing to separate you from the tens or hundreds of other applicants out there, most of whom are willing to put their shoulder to the wheel for less than you. Put to one side for just a moment the perennial Western problem of kids dropping out of school early: even well-qualified British graduates are today truly struggling in the fluid labour environment of the EU. Why would a company hire a green youngling with no experience when they could hire someone who knows what they’re doing because they have done it before – perhaps even at the price of a graduate given the desperation many immigrants and locals have for paid work?

The path increasingly well-travelled for young people and those trying to get a foothold in the world of work is unpaid work: volunteering, or “interning”. A desperate jobseeker wants what they can’t get without a job: experience. A company or charitable organisation gets a warm body to do with what they like, effectively free of cost to the bottom line. Everybody is happy. The Cameron Government was so enamoured with the concept of getting jobseekers experience in this way that in early 2011, it extended a scheme operated by the Department for Work and Pensions, so that some lucky welfare recipients would be forced to work for free at Tesco, Sainsbury’s and other large for-profit businesses. Suddenly what seemed an innocent swap of free labour for some much-needed experience seems rather more sinister. Has modern capitalism created conditions so toxic that there is an expectation that some people should effectively work for nothing for enterprises making multi-million or billion pound yearly profits? When does volunteering become exploitation – is it really when one initially decides to offer up their labour, free of charge?

Thinking back to my own experience after university – I don’t think I would have hesitated to embark on an unpaid short-term stint with an IT company if necessary, as a stepping stone to a “real job”. As a young graduate with basically no working experience and no life skills, how could I compete otherwise? What would I have to offer, besides some witty interview responses? A close relative has had a wonderful experience volunteering – after around 20 years out of the workforce and with his self-esteem at rock bottom, he decided to volunteer with a local thrift store: this led after some time to a paying job, and a 180 degree turnaround in his life’s fortunes. Still, I am sure for every happy ending, there may well be just as many (or more?) unhappy ones. There is a fine line between exploitation and the market offering a helping hand to people who are in dire need of one. I don’t see how it can be fair for people to work practically in the same way that salaried staff do without being renumerated for their efforts, purely because they are so desperate for work. It’s undignified, unjust, and whips people’s wages along on a merry race to the bottom.

What of your own (no pun intended) experiences? Do you feel you have been exploited by your own volunteering or unpaid work, or were you, under the circumstances, quite happy to work for free? Is the holy grail of a bit of experience ever a just reward?

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

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“Reassurance Labour” and post-Blair social democracy

Guy — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:55:01 +0000

Globally, the centre-left is enduring a period of public weariness and dissatisfaction. In Australia, a relatively unpopular government battles on against a red-blooded Opposition Leader, with the spectre of a leadership context lingering unerringly in the background. Between Kevin and Tony, there’s not much free air for Julia to articulate what she is about and why she deserves more time. In the United States, the ramshackle cavalcade of the Republican presidential primaries rolls on. As we collectively chortle at the successive victories of the likes of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, dividing the centre-right, we also quietly question whether Barack Obama will be able to ride home this November on the same wave of good will and anti-Bush sentiment that served to swell his support in 2008. Across Europe, the political cartography doesn’t lie: in 23 of the 27 EU nations (24 if you include the six party (!) coalition in Belgium), the centre-left does not control the government.

A couple of weeks ago, David Miliband, former foreign minister and the exiled elder brother of Labour Opposition Leader Ed, contributed a rambling “vision” piece on social democracy to the New Statesman. It’s the kind of piece that was self-evidently designed to be high-minded without being too controversial, to try and add something to the debate without undermining his brother, or being so practical as to indulge in any policy specifics. It would have floated by altogether, unremarked and soap bubble-like, if Miliband had not taken the opportunity to take a heavily padded pot-shot at former Deputy Leader Roy Hattersley and his recent piece [PDF] with Kevin Hickson for The Political Quarterly:

He is convinced that there exists an obvious instrument for putting social democracy into practice – the central national state, whose strength has been underestimated, he argues, in a rush of market fundamentalism on both left and right. His fundamental point is this: that Labour in the past 20 years has been scared off the most potent vehicle for the expression of its values, and in the process has come to be seen as ineffective as well as unprincipled.

For some, this will be seductive. It is what I shall call Reassurance Labour. Reassurance about our purpose, our relevance, our position, even our morals. Reassurance Labour feels good. But feeling good is not the same as doing good – and it gets in the way when it stops us rethinking our ideas to meet the challenges of the time. And now is a time for restless rethinking, not reassurance.

“Reassurance Labour”, in short, is just the latest rhetorical salvo in the ongoing war between the hardminded, working-class socialists of the 1970’s and early 1980’s and the so-called “Third Way” Blairism of more recent years. Historically, the centre-left has sought to make its values manifest through the wilful manipulation of the gears and levers of the state, with the national government perceived as being the preeminent mechanism through which this can be achieved. Since then, the world has changed, but how much has it really changed? Miliband clearly feels that any renewed embrace of this top-down approach would be misguided, despite the strong emotional connection that most people on the left have with the proactive welfare states of yesteryear.

The Australian political scene seems to be operating in a slightly different world to the one where this debate is blundering on, in part perhaps because Labor is currently focused less on any grand thematic vision for the future than keeping its head above water in the run up to the next election. Government – particularly when you’re struggling in the polls – will do that to you. Looking back over the last few years, however, one gets the sense that the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments have dipped quite a bit into “Reassurance Labour” economics, pursuing interventionist tax policies on climate change and mining, and betting the farm on the success of the National Broadband Network project. In the current climate of fiscal uncertainty, after all, nothing says political conviction quite like pumping tens of billions of dollars of public money into a nationwide infrastructure project. It’s a bold policy, and it is quite difficult to imagine a UK government of either political stripe dancing down a similar path in the current climate.

I am unsure about whether this implies the Australian bodypolitik is somewhere ahead or somewhere behind the debate going on in the UK, but one thing is certain: nobody can in practical terms define themselves as being simply “pro-state” or “pro-market” anymore. Governments are increasingly being pushed towards the middle ground by market entities and forces with more unhinged pulling power than themselves, and indeed by pockets of the impotent shouty filling the space vacated by mass political parties and organised participatory democracy.

Despite his departure from the scene, we are all still living in what we might one day call the Blair era – named not for any whizz-bang political dynamic dreamt up by Tony Blair and crew, mind, but the prickly, atomised, tabloid-oriented political environment that created and crowned him.

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

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Where is Australia’s Joey Barton?

Guy — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:03:43 +0000

For the uninitiated, Joey Barton captains and plays midfield for the Queens Park Rangers (QPR), a newly promoted side in the Premier League. He enjoys a certain amount of infamy in British sporting circles; having worked his way up through the ranks at Manchester City and been capped for England, he went a little off the rails and was jailed for assault at 25 in May 2008. In the same year he launched a vicious assault on teammate Ousmane Dabo during a training session, for which he received a suspended sentence. So far so typical, I guess we might say. Every other rugby league team these days seems to have one or two lads who sport shades of the Joseph Anthony Barton of 2007/2008.

Since then, Barton has not divorced himself completely from controversy, but he has turned his life around to a remarkable extent, becoming in the process one of the most interesting and polarising sportspeople in Britain. He is a prolific tweeter (@Joey7Barton), racking up 4000 tweets and boasting over 1,000,000 followers, covering all manner of sports, religion, the media, politics and touching often on his appreciation for George Orwell and The Smiths. He has become an avid reader, started writing a regular column for The Big Issue, and has recently offered some explosively challenging but common sense commentary on the John Terry racial abuse trial to be heard in July this year.

It is difficult to think of a single figure in Australian sport who is both willing and able to combine his or her efforts on the sporting field with a public intellectual life as well. Our sportspeople seem to be either not trained at all to be public professionals, or trained so ruthlessly to focus on the physical aspects of their work and their “media image” that they end up coming across as bereft of personality and without a non-sporting opinion to their name. Polymath truly is a dirty word in Australian public life.

Surely it is time for some of our sporting superstars to stand up for the nation and play a larger role in the public discourse that extends beyond their muscles and physical attributes. As a sporting nation, are we all really so “white bread” – so single-minded in our individual physical pursuits? Perhaps its time to change the widely accepted definition of what it means to be a successful sportsperson in the 21st century. I’d much prefer to hear what Australian’s next big swimming star thinks about the republic or gay marriage than who their next lucrative sponsorship deal is with.

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo

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David Cameron’s socialism by some other name

Guy — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:09:16 +0000

Whither Keynes? For the past six to twelve months, the big philosophical imponderable doing the rounds in British political life has been the extent to which the government should intervene in the market in order to stimulate the national economy. The Conservative/Lib Dem government’s “Plan A” to cut, cut and cut some more is flatlining; growth is stagnant. Unemployment has risen to 8.4% – the highest it has been since 1995 – as the jobs that the government’s austerity programme has ripped from the public sector and wrung from the strangled charity/NGO sector are not being replaced in the for-profit sector as hoped.

This is by every empirical measure imaginable a failing fiscal plan, but Plan B remains firmly off the agenda. And why? Keynesian economics is not policy anathema, but it has become political anathema. Central to the fable being spruiked by Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservatives is that Labour’s clunky and interventionist approach to economic matters is to blame for the mess that Britain now finds itself in. If the Tories were to take a backward step from their “Plan A”, the economic dogma they’ve peddled since May 2010, they would be letting the Opposition off the hook. They would also be pricking the bubble of fallacious confidence that George Osborne et. al have, in effect, hitched a ride with throughout their war on public spending. It’s easy to forget given all the sanguine polling doing the rounds, but this is a government sustaining itself not through success in matters of policy, actual popularity, or anything resembling hard work, but merely ego: a reserve of confident bloody-mindedness that the market will eventually prove them right and that those on welfare should be punished.

The rigid stance adopted by the government on economic stimulus is particularly galling when one considers some of the moral peccadillos that the Tories apparently feel do warrant some intervention. This is a government that has no qualms about pulling levers and interfering with the market like a bunch of cardboard cut-out social-engineering lefties when doing so will slap and tickle their upper middle-class conservative base. A crusade to cap welfare benefits, directly impacting the lives of some of the nation’s most needy children has in recent days seen support for David Cameron soaring to a 22 month high. Jobs may be disappearing into the ether by the thousand across the country, but as Allegra Stratton alluded to in The Guardian recently, Cameron’s willingness to engage in blinkered market intervention has been plainly evident for some time now:

In a WH Smith not far from Westminster, there are no Terry’s Chocolate Oranges on sale at the till but there’s every other calorie and additive on offer. This stroll to the newsagent counts for political research because if you listened to David Cameron six years ago, flogging cheap chocolate to captive targets was an exemplar of immoral capitalism run amok.

“As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WH Smith promote half-price Chocolate Oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?” Cameron protested. Through the bully’s pulpit of office and opprobrium, he sought to change it.

In America, they would call out such a protest as socialism. In Britain, it would just be an all too typically fluffy intervention into the market on behalf of the morally conservative, rich or powerful, while the brutalisation of the truly needy by the market continues, wholly aided and abetted, in the background.

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Occupy London: radical or conservative?

Guy — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:28:07 +0000

For almost two months now, the Occupy London camp has remained firmly entrenched outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, having been banned from the private grounds of Paternoster Square, where the London Stock Exchange is located. After winning its philosophical “huddled masses” tête à tête with the St Paul’s authorities, the movement is preparing itself to tackle its next challenge: eviction proceedings being brought to bear by the City of London Corporation. The formal hearing is scheduled to take place from 19th December.

It certainly feels that despite its raison d’être being as self-evident as ever, Occupy London is on the cusp of an existential crisis. In the coming weeks and months, the camp will need to fight for the right to maintain its most visible presence in the British capital, one of the world’s international finance hubs. The storm of publicity attracted during the movement’s disagreement with the St. Paul’s hierarchy has died away, and with it, many of its most effective tendrils of engagement with the general public. Amidst all the background noise of day-to-day news and political developments, the debate is slowly and steadily shifting away from the question “are the international Occupy movements right about modern capitalism?” and towards the question “is it time to finally get rid of all those tents outside of St Paul’s?” We all know how hungry the 24×7 news cycle beast can be; it would very much like another dramatic (and hopefully violent!) Dale Farm style confrontation between the authorities and people who purportedly shouldn’t be where they are.

In short, it is difficult to see what the next step for local branches of the global “Occupy” movement should be. Turn radical, and they stand to grab some more publicity and potentially reinvigorate their campaigns for economic justice – but they also stand to turn large swathes of the law-abiding general public off their arguments. The current tack, at least in the London context, seems to be rather more conservative; just last week Occupy London published an “Initial Statement of the Corporations Working Group”, effectively a press release. It sure sounds high-falutin’, but it’s all a tad banal frankly: here are the three key points:

We must abolish tax havens and complex tax avoidance schemes, and ensure corporations pay tax that accurately reflects their real profits.

…

Legislation to ensure full and public transparency of all corporate lobbying activities must be put in place. This should be overseen by a credible and independent body, directly accountable to the people.

…

Those directly involved in the decision-making process must be held personally liable for their role in the misdeeds of their corporations and duly charged for all criminal behaviour.

Laudable sentiments, yes, but hardly visionary ones, and my, what a vague and middling way in which to express them! If the purpose of the Occupy movement was to establish an amateurish tent city of students, interested passers-by and disenfranchised Liberal Democrats, firing occasional uncontroversial missives into the offices of news organisations across the country – they have succeeded. But it’s clearly not the right path.

Occupy London needs to find a new, creative way of continuing to express its message, or risk fading inconsequentially into the background static.

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