It’s Sunday, so here are twelve thought-provoking articles to stimulate your thinking juices…
Europe’s long shadow – Anthony Beevor isn’t optimistic about the continent’s future as cuts bite: ‘This is what risks creating the bitterness and national resentments which encourages people to listen to demagogues and turn their backs on democracy.’
A bail-out by any other name – Charlemagne looks at the latest bail-out re-scheduling of Greece’s debt: ‘the euro zone is crossing the Rubicon: it knows it will have to take losses in order to keep Greece in the club.’
The Future Jobs Fund: what a waste – Jonathan Portes despairs of unevidenced government policy: ‘the programme has already been cancelled, so instead of spending money on something we now know works – for young people on the dole, for employers, and for society as a whole – we’re spending it on other things. And we don’t know (yet) if they work or not. That’s a real waste.’
Making sense of the Mary Whitehouse experience – James Howell assesses her legacy: ‘Whitehouse may be 11 years dead, but it seems she did leave a mark – it’s just that nobody is quite sure what it is.’
Political debate turns to panto – Sadie Smith rails against professional provocateurs’ pretence that intractable issues have easy answers: ‘Disagree with what the government’s doing. Disagree with what Israel’s doing in Gaza. But if you think the answer lies in simplified polemicist rantings then you are emphatically not part of the solution.’
Why would the Tories form a pact with a party that’s largely B-rate, erratic and berserk? – Craig Barrett makes the point: ‘UKIP is a vanity organisation with merely one recognisable face – when have you seen anyone else represent UKIP on Question Time?’
The Slate Book Review Top 10 of 2012 – Slate staffers pick their this year faves, including Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies.
Leveson: what the public really want – Peter Kellner analyses public opinion: ‘We don’t like the idea of politicians curbing the freedom of speech; but neither do we want editors and publishers remaining in charge of regulation.’
The Leveson inquiry is irrelevant to 21st-century journalism – Emily Bell points out the elephant in the room which Sir Brian referred to but ignored: ‘Domestic regulation of the press is already at odds with some of the freer aspects of the internet (as with contempt law), and the real remedy is a change in culture at every level.’
What can Governors do? – Chris Dillow questions the influence an individual can have over the economy: ‘The role of Governor is not so much to shape the economy decisively as to give the impression that he is in control.’
Why murders are down – The Economist tries and fails to work why New York just experienced its first murder-free day in living memory: ‘Basically, we don’t entirely know why America’s urban murder rate has fallen.’
The Tories flirting with Ukip are feeling the siren lure of unelectable purity – Rafael Behr points out the real difference between the Coalition parties: ‘most Lib Dems are enjoying being in government while a solid rump of Tory MPs are not.’
* Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall.
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7 Comments
“when have you seen anyone else represent UKIP on Question Time?’”
This is a silly criticism. The BBC wouldn’t dream of having any other UKIPper on other than Farage, just as they insist on maintaining a highly-artificial representation of Britain’s Liberal Democrats.
Excellent article by anthony beevor, tho I would like him to explore this statement further:
“In Italy, the Five Star party of the comedian Beppe Grillo swept past all the traditional parties in local elections and is now expected to take 12 per cent of the vote in national elections. In Germany, recent poll estimates gave the Pirate Party 10 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Greens, even if this was not quite confirmed in the North Rhine-Westphalia election. Is this development similar to the 1930s, where countries with systems of proportional representation found themselves vulnerable to political polarisation and disorder? Is the whole European project doomed to achieve the opposite of what it set out to achieve? Will the European centralising ideology, and now the need proclaimed by some leaders to exert a quasi-dictatorship over the eurozone, exacerbate the militant nationalism that it sought to make redundant?”
I believe he is right, but I’d like to know why he believes this.
The FPTP electoral system has fantastic advantages over PR because by giving a government so much power to make change you allow it to react to a changing world more readily than can ever be achieved in the viscous morass of coalition politics as typified by the continent. For a people that are happy to accept that challenge; to compete with the rest of the world with ideas and commerce there is no better system of governance, however its major problem is the need for a cohesive society.
Throughout centuries of brutal warfare, from the Thirty Years War, the Napolenic War, the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, the Second World War, and many more, europe has suffered political instability repression and revolution. How many EU countries have not been facist, communist, revolutionary, dictatorships, or repeatedly invaded in the last three hundred and fifty years? Only one. Have many have suffered at least one of the above within living memory? The rest. The EU represents stability to the continent, a framework for peaceful cooperation for the past half century.
The fascination with using proportionalism in defence of ‘victim’ groups, the institutionalisation of multitudinous identities, and the end of majority rule in favour of power sharing, all of these serve to break the network of trust that binds the citizen to their state, to be replaced with endless waltz of realignments as you ceaselessly redefine your identity, and a serf-like deference to a supra-national authority. You are too busy to care about the previous loyalty, and anyway, wasn’t it replaced by something ‘higher’?
All of this must be at least somewhat appealing to peoples who have never been properly protected by their state, whose shifting borders have left pockets of ‘others’ cheek-by-jowl with people whom they share no common history, and people who retain a nascent wariness of whatever catastrophe will next be inflicted upon them by their neighbours. Wouldn’t it be so much better if there were a less contentious way to live…………
It is no coincidence that many european states have a political system based on proportional representation, why would you not when repeated trauma and dislocation prevent the electorate from trusting the politician not to become a tyrant, and the politician from trusting the electorate not to install a demagogue. Democracy is the fusion between the Demos and the Kratos and in europe there are evident fractures between the two.
As for Britain, remember that although the EU was born of fear we joined for economic reasons, and that we have not in recent history suffered; unstable borders, traumatised populace, displaced people, revolutions, fascism, communism, or dictatorship. Britain is an island nation, as a result of which we have no compelling motive to dilute our aims and expectations with groups whom we do not share a common history, that fear does not exist. The first-past-the-post electoral system is more than anything a declaration of trust in the cohesiveness of ones society, and by the same token a rejection of the victim politics commonly used to justify proportional representation.
When you hear people whine about the “tyranny of the majority” they are really only transplanting a problem from the continent in an effort to hide the growing obsolescence of the view they represent. The most important benefit of the FPTP system over PR is that it allows the electorate to punish failure, by kicking them out of office.
It allows change that can keep pace with events, thus prioritises evolution over revolution.
If UKIP wasn’t the big story, I wonder whether Stephen might have pointed to an alternative story from the New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/staggers/2012/12/george-osborne-cannot-possibly-know-how-long-austerity-will-last ? It’s our old friend the output gap again, the size of the structural deficit and what Osborne might find in 2014 if the OBR accepted a measure for the output gap from Capital Economics (6%) rather than feebly taking the average of all the forecasts (3.3%). Even Oxford Economics is up to 5.5%.
On Wednesday we shall have signed up to unnecessary further cuts if our aim was truly to remove the structural deficit.
“when have you seen anyone else represent UKIP on Question Time?’”
They had deputy leader Paul Nuttall on recently!
@David Allen
“They had deputy leader Paul Nuttall on recently!”
Missed that one. Nuttall by name, nut all (figuratively) by nature. 🙁
It seems to me that UKIP are about where the Liberals were (in public perception – not in policy) when I “came in “. Do others of my generation recall when we used to bewail the fact that whenever the BBC invited a Liberal to be interviewed or to take part in a panel discussion it was always Jo Grimond ( subsequently Jeremy Thorpe)? And yet we had a leaflet entitled “This Is Liberal Policy” with nothing on the front sheet other than the title and a photograph of the Leader’s face?