Even the terms we use to describe political division are ancient. ‘Left’ harks back to mass labour and command economies, while ‘Right’ conjures up pictures of bosses in grimy towns, Mosleyites in England and Falangists in Spain.

In that context, contemporary politicians too often remind me of George III’s doctors wondering why the King is hallucinating and peeing blue: they’re no better than quacks faced with a new set of symptoms. And just like those court physicians, Ministers and MPs are more concerned about losing position than curing the patient. They drivel on about wicked Tories ‘making the workers pay’ or Labour nitwits ‘paying money to the idle poor’.

One very major reason ordinary people can’t be bothered to vote any more (let alone listen) is that they quite rightly see most MPs now as working The System – preoccupied with themselves and lacking new ideas for a fresh approach. For most Brits outside the policy-wonk bubble, the terms Left and Right belong in history books, not manifestos.

It’s possible that the boneheads who came up with Forward not Back for Labour last time out were thinking ‘How about two new dimensions to this sterile debate?’ but somehow I doubt it. For starters, very few politicos in 2009 want a debate; and for seconds, I can’t imagine anyone being keen to become The Back Party.

Either way, in a three-dimensional Universe we can go back, forward, left, right, up and down. And while I’m quite attracted by the idea of The Up Tendency, we’ve had quite enough of Down governments in the UK lately.

There are, however, other ways of expressing these three dimensions – ways of substance rather than soundbite, and ways that might both inspire electors again, and encourage greater freedom of thought. The most obvious (and therefore perhaps the place to go first) is the polar opposites thing: magnetic/anti-magnetic. Like forward and back, they are by definition opposites, but not laden with values and braindead thinking. One side favours social cooperation through magnetic communities, the other personal responsibility and endeavour.

Another form of expression might be open/closed. Here too there are equally tenable positions: those who prefer free debate on the one hand, and those who prefer elitist discretion on the other.

A third evocation is inspired by perhaps the one divide of opinion common to all societies over thousands of years: those who prefer what is versus those who use that same empirical analysis to wonder what might be. The key opposites here are comfort/adventure.

My vote would go to a magnetic Party keen to pull communities together; a free-thinking Party not closed to the prospect of the unexpected; and a Party exploring future possibility rather than clinging to the familiar (but unlikely) solution.

Traditional thinkers would have enormous doubts about such a Party: how, they might ask, could those who lay stress on social cooperation sit alongside those wanting radical change and entrepreneurial business?

I don’t have a problem envisaging such a political force, if only because I’d see it simply as the Reform Party. I do not doubt (because the psephology supports me) that a majority of voters now yearn for precisely that. But my view is that such a clearly ‘branded’ grouping could only flourish if the ties binding it were looser than at present. In particular, this is a call for no Whips and far fewer control freaks.

For decades now we have heard the endless arguments demanding that only a ‘disciplined’ Party is ever likely to achieve anything. But highly-controlled Soviet-style Tory and Labour governments have delivered only waste, spin, dated polemics, copycat ideas and gesture politics.

During that time, the power of the Executive has increased to such an extent (and in such anti-democratic ways) had he lived to see it, Bagehot would’ve had an attack of the vapours – and probably declared the State no longer constitutional.

If we truly want radical change in Britain (and whether people want it or not, we need it) then four obvious things need to happen: more power given back to non-Cabinet MPs; a reduction in the cost of entry for new Parties; full proportional representation for all elections; and a new House of Lords not based on cronyism.

The media are full of analogies about 2009 Britain: the last days of Rome, 1945, and even 1979. In my humble opinion, what we are facing is a second 1832, but on a far grander scale. From here on there is certain to be a step-change in how and why we do business, where power lies, and the qualitative renewal of liberty and democracy.

Just as in 1832, other reforms will have to run alongside this fresh start if it is to survive. Above all, education needs to be more civic, holistic and attuned to cultural needs, not targets. Health provision must accept reality, be far better targeted, and stop dragging out the same sacred cow covered in tatty rosettes year in year out. And the twin problems of corrupt local government and secretive judicial procedures must be eradicated.

Words like fairness and justice are greatly over-used – to the extent that a Labour leaflet I saw last week proclaimed the Government to be ‘putting fairness first’ – as if there might be somewhere else to put it. But around Britain – if you spend time asking people informally – they no longer express their needs in terms of Labour, Tory or Libdem. Rather, they will say things like ‘anyone with common sense’, ‘anyone telling us the truth’, ‘anyone showing an ounce of honour’ and so forth.

Our governmental and economic system is supposed to work for the People. The vast majority of citizens now (inasmuch as they ever think about it any more) are convinced it works for fat cats, bankers, civil servants, lawyers and grubby politicians. Grudging contrition doesn’t even begin to cut it: the time is right for another Great Reform Act.

An interesting syndrome has come to light, and I am dubbing it ‘this depression is going to be very bad for Britain – but I’ll survive’. There is now what the researchers call a gap between personal optimism and public pessimism.

What can this mean?

It could mean any number of things: far too many people still just carrying on carrying on. Figures from elsewhere showing those in serious debt extending credit still further back this up. It might also be that those with the time to stop and answer a number of impertinent questions are clearly the least worried.

Equally, it may mean people don’t believe (yet) that they will share the same fate as Woolworths employees – upon whom they have always looked down.

But as a long-time market researcher, I think there is an additional and very important explanation that is entirely plausible.

The majority of British people are not entirely stupid. They are still in touch enough with reality to know that the worst outcome is unlikely to mean destitution in any real sense. And they are grounded enough to know that the public finances are in a far, far worse state than their own. Thus their concern is as much for the country of their birth than it is for themselves.

Some key statistics in this study support such a notion. If, for example, you feel that all the folks actually (or likely to be) running the country are cluelessly incompetent, you would indeed be concerned for its fate. Gordon Brown is, on a ten-point scale, currently at 4.97 on ability to respond to and deal with the crisis. David Cameron scores 4.94. Or – put another way – both alternatives are equally unpalateable. Such a score among soldiers going into D-Day, for example, would not have given much comfort to Eisenhower and Montgomery.

On a scale of 0-100, respondents to the poll scored concern about the risk of losing their jobs at 53.5, having to take a pay-cut at 58.4, and security of their savings at 59.4. But while anxieties about the rising cost of living (pretty obvious really) were at 74.5, other scores at that level were less personally directed: overall effect on Britain of a long recession on 72.5, high government borrowing and untenable national debt on 69.9, and the risk of hyper-inflation at 69.6. Of course, money-printing could well lead to personal ruin: but a worthless mickey-mouse currency is as much a matter of national pride as personal disaster.

Lib Dems would do well to take note of this. People are still, I suspect, willing to see a fairly big fall in living standards if it means that Banana-Republic status is avoided. Even in 2009, being British means something to us.

I do not mean by this playing the cynical patriotism card. Rather, we should stress once again the importance of our friends and neighbours when everyone’s back is against the wall. When times are tough, communities come into their own. If the Libdems are about anything, they are about devolving power locally, and preserving community values.

Brown goes on endlessly about global problems requiring global solutions, but this is drivel. What we need is more belief that individuals and communities can indeed influence their own fate.

* John Ward is the owner and editor of www.notbornyesterday.org, a satire and advice site dedicated to promoting new ideas, better ethics and true reform of our constitution, economic model, and community policy objectives.

The problems – however astonishing and severe – are symptoms of the financial sector alone.”
Financial Times leader, 28.12.08

At the moment I would hazard a guess that we are about one-fifth of the way through the current crisis of Zeitgeist. I read last week, on one of the more respectable financial websites, that, with so many companies financially weak, 2009 would see ‘a bonanza for mergers and acquisitions’. For the nth time, a member of the Cabinet parroted that “global problems require global solutions”. Two UK banks seemed unwilling to take the hit for £32 billion worth of losses in 2008: Alistair Darling thought they should absorb them from ample existing capitalisation, but the bankers failed to see why they couldn’t have more taxpayers’ money instead.

The day before, I listened to six property experts on BBC Radio 4 debating how to get the housing market moving again by loosening credit. Later on BBC News I heard Gordon Brown reaffirming his desire that nobody should be repossessed as a result of “overstretched” borrowing.

Everything you’ve read in inverted commas so far in this Opinion piece is about as wrong as wrong could be.

Our problems did not emanate from some oddly No-mates organic thing called ‘the financial sector alone’. They came from bankers forcing debt onto people who had in turn decided to suspend disbelief. And they, in turn, are the products of a dumbed-down Western culture fixated by material well-being, targets, the Office, bling and GDP.

But, apart from the more gullible suckers, long before there was any sub-prime debt (surely the euphemism of the Millennium) most articulate western consumers had accepted that dealing with any commercial manufacturing or service-providing concern of any size involves ignoring all the lies, noting the lack of ethics, and being prepared to threaten in order to get even minimal satisfaction or after-sales service.

Enormous global combines without a clear culture have exacerbated the problem by basing their business models solely on production output and the whims of remote shareholders. In that context, ethics are for wimps – and if the only answer to large-scale failure is yet more M&A activity to satiate even greedier shareholders, then I have news for us all: it can only make things worse. The bigger an organisation gets, the more remote the customer becomes.

Global problems most emphatically do not require global solutions: we’ve tried that to the current tune of $8.5 trillion, and it’s made no impact at all. What we need is to question the whole validity of globalism in an environmentally threatened world, and reject the Friedman/Levitt drivel that started all this nonsense in the first place.

We do not need to bail out any more bankers: we need to remain calm and tell the banks ‘no more bailouts until you start lending to sound young businesses’.

We do not need to loosen housing-purchase credit and allow intemperate borrowers off scot-free: we need more people to accept that houses are places to live in, give the more completely infantile borrowers some proper financial advice about cutting costs and making do – and give those who’ve been chasing the ladder for five long years a chance to get on it.

It seems to me the West is like a patient who has suffered a major heart attack, but interpreted it as the green light to eat more fat in order to lubricate that heart. The banking system (barring further meltdown, which I think entirely possible) nevertheless looks set to survive pretty well intact. The word ‘regulation’ is being bandied about, but ideas about how to give it teeth without biting the hand of commerce are absent. Fiscal stimulus is the new black number on the roulette wheel. Careless spending, poor long-term savings ratios and hopelessly scored credit have been shown up – at last – as the road to Hell in a handcart: but all the G20 has to offer is more of the same. The conclusion seems to be that without an eternity of retail therapy, unwise borrowing and blunt-instrument global regulation, all will be lost.

Why?

The worst forecast available for 2009 is that the world economy will grow by 0.4%. How is it that the best commercial and financing model we can come up with goes into catatonic breakdown when global wealth is still moving forward?

The answer is, I think, not too complicated: a whole generation has risen to positions of responsibility without ever questioning the assumption that growth = inevitable = good. They aren’t the first generation to do so, but it would be nice to think they might be the last. Instead of downsizing their expectations, governments are putting out fantasies about short recessions and recoveries beginning in Autumn 2009.

The assumptive, unquestioning nature of commercial management and commentary during this crisis has been profoundly depressing; but the paucity of creativity being applied to the revitalisation of our economic system – and the means of financing it – is terrifying. I have yet to hear a mainstream opinion leader come out and seriously suggest that the model is intrinsically flawed.

Given the evidence to hand, this is astonishing. Major stock markets lost over 45% of their value in 2008 – not because a large asteroid is on collision course with Earth, but because banks will have to dig into their capitalisation, and thus their ability to lend ‘normally’ has been compromised. This in turn means that at most 4% of the world’s population is going to have to accept lower dividends, or perhaps none at all.

As the Americans are wont to say ‘nobody died’. Many people in the Third World will, of course – but this will be a direct result of muddled thinking on the best use of wheat, and it’s consequently rising price. The notion that The End is Nigh because banks have lent carelessly and global growth has slowed down is so daft as to be surreal.

At base level, global Bourse reverses since late 2007 have been based on three things: unreal material aspirations, banker hubris, and the ever-present plutocrat greed that breeds fear. The fear – ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to be obscenely rich after all’ – is scant reason indeed for talk of meltdown. Personally I’d go further and say it borders on criminal: the pauperisation of over half of us as a result of the stupidity of under 7% is already producing a simmering resentment among otherwise law-abiding citizens. Pensioners going without food so reckless borrowers can avoid pain is a reality that will come into sharper focus as 2009 unfolds; we should all be ashamed of it.

It’s cold out there, and the capitalist coronary victim is revealed to be without clothes. So far, none of the major UK political parties has come out overtly to suggest he should abdicate in favour of a more enlightened and free-thinking prince. In the US, Obama is already showing signs that – albeit cautiously – he doesn’t accept the old rules.

The analysis of Nick Clegg’s first year has, by and large, pinpointed his solid if unspectacular progress in at least taking a step outside the cosy Westminster Establishment. His early promise to deal with any coalition partner prepared to democratise the electoral system showed admirable clarity. Sadly, hardly anyone noticed.

As the peripheral minority candidate, the Lib Dem leader has the least to lose from a single-minded gamble. In truth, it’s not that big a throw of the dice: with RBS and other UK banks already admitting to further big write-offs, British companies queueing up to go into administration, senior Treasury officials talking in private about currency collapse, the IMF offering only dire predictions for our outlook, and Russia about to infect the EU with its own uniquely awful problems, by the late summer of this year a large proportion of the electorate will be ready to accept the necessity for a ‘new model’ capitalism.

Clegg’s natural partner in this endeavour would of course be Vince Cable; more than any other MP, he has thought and predicted the unthinkable early. Just as Obama represented genuine change in the States, the Liberal Democrats could take on the mantle of commitment to constitutional, economic and fiscal change – a change designed to shift the balance back towards the small, the weak, and those whose spirit offers a future in which responsible business replaces rip-off, and honest, vibrant corporate cultures replace the tired and vapid mantra of the globalists.

* John Ward is the owner and editor of www.notbornyesterday.org, a satire and advice site dedicated to promoting new ideas, better ethics and true reform of our constitution, economic model, and community policy objectives.

The Party which belatedly dumped Clause Four clings still to the principle of No Means Testing. In practice, what this means is a Government genetically unable to accept the idea of targeted relief. This is a pretty fundamental problem given that in the current crisis, if Britain is not to finish up both morally and financially bankrupt, targeting should be central to relief strategy.

Being a Liberal, I do not attach the term ‘relief’ solely to the individual employee: I associate it equally with business. The sheer size of the bailout for banks doesn’t make them any different for me to any other welfare cheat; and equally, the innocent victim-families over-persuaded to borrow by banks are no different to the fundamentally healthy small entrepreneurs currently being strangled by those same banks. I’m not one for uncaring Survival of the Fittest, but I do think young primates deserve our help more than pea-brained dinosaurs.

Some of the damage done by untargeted relief is already in the past, worse luck. I have yet to find any economist or politician able to tell me why we didn’t just bail out the Northern Rock savers and let the corporate entity go to the wall. Equally, nobody seems able to explain why we spent more on rescuing our financial system than the Americans did – their economy being 37 times the size of ours, an’ all.

The biggest lesson of all I take out of Globalist Bourse-financed capitalism’s latest bust is that it is not a small world: that as some of us always suspected, Theodore Levitt was talking out of his hat, and Milt Friedman was a theorist whose daft ideas never produced anything other than chaos in practice. It is a very big, culturally and economically multivariate world. A world which – taken as one entity – the G20 leaders have been less than impressive to date in their ‘ideas’ as to how to get the show back on the road.

I think it should be the job of Lib Dems everywhere to put forward the following cogent argument:

Smaller, community-level targeted relief and growth-support policies carried out by devolved and accountable government is far more likely to build for the future. So far, national and supra-national schemes have had minimal effect, rewarding only those who failed in the past. Only targeted support will give the best opportunities for the most deserving businesses and individuals. We only have a limited amount of money: let us ensure we get the best possible value for that money.

This is merely one more strand in the stance that separates Liberal Democrats from the other two main parties. The Tories want devil take the hindmost – we want individuals to take responsibility, but also have a safety net. Labour want to make equality without effort the keystone of a lowest common denominator culture – we want equality of opportunity and the chance for everyone to achieve realistic aspirations. The other two like giving the big and powerful a free hand – we value the protection of small consumers and business people, and moral regulation of anyone who gets too big for their boo ts. The other two think Westminster has the answers – we have severe doubts about that.

I still think the Gordian Knot is planning a snap early election. In that context, focus on our relevant policy distinctions could be the difference between stagnation and breakthrough for our Party in 2009.

* John Ward is the owner and editor of www.notbornyesterday.org, a satire and advice site dedicated to promoting new ideas, better ethics and true reform of our constitution, economic model, and community policy objectives.

Richard Nixon and Gordon Brown do share striking similarities of circumstance and character.

They had puritanical backgrounds with domineering fathers, were intellectual prodigies, intensely private – and awkward in company and public. Both gave the impression of being somehow ‘not quite right’. The 1960 anti-Nixon slogan ‘Would you buy a used car from this Man?’ seemed to fit immediately; and I’ve also now lost count of the number of women who find Brown ‘odd’.

Both were manipulative in their cultivation of ‘poor me’: Nixon the small-town farmboy who ‘never had it easy like the Kennedys’, and Brown the young man agonising about potentially lost sight (a fact the politician kept to himself until he needed a sympathetic leadership image). Dicky wrote about ‘Five Crises’, and Gordon continues to insist he is the best man in crises. Nixon had his Kennedy to envy, and Brown has his Blair to hate: ‘it came naturally to them, but I’ve had to work at it’ is also a shared view – displaying an obvious desire to be seen as noble and heroic.

Fellow sufferers from indecisive depression, they instinctively disappeared from the stage when blame was being assigned. They expected people to accept ridiculous explanations of dubious behaviour, and had associates who insisted they were very nice really – but swore obscenely at aides (or screamed at secretaries) in private.

The observations may perhaps be harsh, but there is something abnormally untrustworthy in the dissembling, shifty nature of these men – an ethical doubt borne out in both cases by shadows and clouds after every episode – and strangely locked cupboards where nobody may go.

Yet Brown is the man whose people are about to slip GCHQ a cool £12 billion to monitor our every website visit, email and mobile phone call. This is Dick Nixon paranoia with the new miracle technology ingredient: an attempt to use Islamism in the same way a crooked President used Vietnam .

We are the Liberal Democrats. All around me I hear soi-disant ‘realists’ saying ‘the personal liberty question doesn’t play well – the voters aren’t interested’. And I say, to Hell with the focus groups: we need to give a lead. And we need to do it far more aggressively than we are at present.

Ever since the Watergate Affair, every political scandal has become the lazy journalist’s excuse to slap ‘gate’on the end. But the arrest of Tory MP Damian Green may well at last merit that suffix.

The emerging facts have been giving me a curious case of deja vu. Say what you like, this smells bad for New Labour – and my hack’s instinct says there is rarely smell without excrement. We have a Home Secretary denying all knowledge of an operation known to others with less reason to know; we have a Leader of the House arranging secret meetings with a Speaker, overruling that Speaker with Executive subterfuge and then a Chief Whip using the familiar despicable pressures to get the vote out and defeat Opposition motions for full enclosure. If ever a person sat in utter contempt of the House of Commons, then that was Harriet Harman last week, grinning inanely as both Opposition Parties poured doubt, scorn and dismay all over her disgraceful performance….but got nowhere.

This is a government led by a man who thinks he has a Higher Authority – an arrogant and obsessively driven man who always thinks he knows best – and has established form as a man who plays the national security card as an airbrush to make his historical errors disappear. The Home Office has plenty to cover up – including (obviously) mendacious cock-ups involving people in the country who shouldn’t be here.

Last Friday, a small piece on page two of the Financial Times pointed up the increasing Conservative frustration with Gordon Brown’s persistent deferral of a promise to brief the Opposition prior to any election. The pledge (allegedly made nine months ago) said that the process in relation to some of the key fiscal and economic factors would begin on January 4th 2009. There is no sign at all of this happening, and this in turn suggests two obvious hypotheses: one, there is yet more smelly stuff the Government doesn’t want the Opposition to know; and two, Gordon plans a snap election during which most of the damning facts are unavailable to both electorate and Opposition.

Classic Nixon in 1972.

Like it or not, on current form the Lib Dems will not have enough powerful things to say in such an election. It seems to me our tax plans have confused people: the fairness distinction has been lost in the meltdown noise. We need to add this to a ‘little man’s champion’ stance. But above all, we need to hammer at the issue of defending those same ordinary folk against creeping totalitarianism.

One of our tasks, I think, should be getting the former New Labour voter to bite very hard on this undeniable reality: had Damian Green been the recipient of leaks from his Deep Throat a few years from now, GCHQ would have known about it instantly – and we would never have known about the content at all.

* John Ward is the owner and editor of www.notbornyesterday.org, a satire and advice site dedicated to promoting new ideas, better ethics and true reform of our constitution, economic model, and community policy objectives.

The main thing it did, of course, was to continue the tradition set by Grimond of creative policy in the face of a changing society. In 2008, Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats face exactly the same challenge. But there is a mainstream way to rise above ‘meltdown noise’ that is Liberal in both its common sense and moral tradition.

Scratch most British voters only slightly, and you will notice that the vast majority believe their short-term frustrations, long-term problems and dire future prospects result from one reality above all others: the dishonest, mendacious and anti-consumer ethics of big business in almost all its forms. Be they banks, multiple retailers, television and internet service providers, telecoms companies, energy suppliers or software manufacturers, they have only two modus operandi: if at first you don’t succeed, cheat; and if you can’t answer an after-sales question, hide.

Consider these few instances of insane (yet tolerated) skulduggery: to unsubscribe from Setanta Sports, you have to write them a letter. There is no telephone number or email way of doing so on the site. The same is true of Microsoft UK if you want to complain. If you complain online to Orange about service (or O2, or Vodafone) you must use their criteria. There is no open email available and no call centre number. If you complain to Orange, the replies never cover your grievance. If you write a more pointed letter, they send you a threatening ‘no reply’ email back saying you are charged with internet abuse – one more time and you’ll be banned from using ISPs.

Supermarkets routinely dissemble about price offers and lie about the forms of labour used to produce their goods. The terms ‘organic’ or ‘free range’ become more diluted with every year. They claim to support Drinkaware.com, but cynically offer two-for-ones and huge discounts to bump up alcohol sales.  Flowers from abroad are dubbed organic and then sprayed with toxic preservatives.

I have a sign in my office these days. It paraphrases Clinton’s infamously opportunist mantra with one I hope has more depth: ‘It’s the culture, stupid’. The global economy is in meltdown for a variety of reasons, but they too boil down to bad behaviour: crooks, snake-oil salesmen and materially-blinded fools. A global system run by the ethically challenged was always going to collapse.

Socialists (and Presidents, and Labour leaders) tell us that the taxpayer is ‘the new model’ for financing banking and business – Robert Peston openly said so in a BBC blog last week. How can taxpayers finance business after it’s gone bust? Bankers, we hear ‘don’t want’ regulation. But what does an honest person have to fear from sensible regulation?

New Labour is hurrying back to its comfort zone, and the Conservatives have too many vested interests in business to be anything better than confused. Everyone is frightened: it is time to change the cultural zeitgeist, but nobody dares. For Liberal Democrats going into 2009, caring is not enough: daring is required. That daring should focus on changing the mindset and goals of capitalism on a threatened planet and in crumbling communities.

Daring need not mean marginalisation for a grounded Party – nor should we ask the voter to swallow the bold paragraph above in one gulp. Policies speak louder than manifestos.

Make it illegal to be an online supplier without obvious complaint and unsubscribe options available via all communications means. Make crystal clear pricing and promises obligatory. Set up huge fines for anyone dissembling about the source and production methods of goods. Produce an FSA with real teeth to monitor the investment portfolio and selling methods of any financial institution offering consumer products at retail.

This isn’t heavy-handed regulation, it’s Page One stuff for any Government truly committed to fair practice. And it represents vote-winning promises to give ordinary people a glimmer of hope that somebody is working towards one key goal: ensuring this nonsense never happens again.

The promise should be clear: vote Liberal Democrat, and both our short term economic policies and long term social regeneration policies will ensure that Britain develops a level playing field between business and commerce on the one hand, and employees and consumers on the other.

John Ward is the owner and editor of Not Born Yesterday, a satire and advice site dedicated to promoting new ideas, better ethics and true reform of our constitution, economic model, and community policy objectives. He recently made contact with Liberal Conspiracy and was astonished to receive a stream of invective back. Despite this, he remains a Lib Dem voter.