Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Gordon Brown has been coming around to the case for giving more tax powers to the Scottish Parliament for some time, as Brian Taylor notes, but last night's speech to the Scottish CBI puts fiscal devolution more firmly on the agenda.

"First of all," he told Scottish business leaders, "devolution has worked but I do see one problem. While there have been good reasons why this is so, the Scottish Parliament is wholly unaccountable for the budget it spends but not for the size of its budget. And that budget is not linked to the success of the Scottish economy. That is why we asked the commission to look carefully at the financial accountability of the Scottish Parliament and this is a critical part of Calman's remit."

 Read the rest of this post...

Helen Coskeran

It sometimes seems that human violence knows no bounds. Recent reports of the brutal honour killings of five Pakistani women have shocked the world. And the reactions from the Pakistani parliament do not do much to ease that shock. When a terrible event occurs, the world looks for explanations in order to begin to deal with it. And even then the shock, horror and disgust will remain, for this is a crime we will never be able to understand.

Honour killings have been a concern to human rights groups for several years. All these deaths are disturbing but these had a particularly cruel twist, with the woman being buried alive. Such inhumanity and disregard for human life suggests that the perpetrators felt these women did something terrible to deserve this punishment.

Their crime? Doing what women all over the world do every day; choosing their own husband to marry through a civil court, away from the traditions of their tribe. The tribal elders then ordered the abduction and shooting of these three teenagers and their two female relatives, who were then sent alive to their graves. And while a female politician attempted to bring the case to the government's attention, another spoke up in defence of the tribal chiefs who ordered it.

The mind boggles and the heart sinks. How could this be defended? And who would expect that the words to justify and explain this would come from a member of parliament? Pakistani teenage girls have long known that choosing independence could cost them their lives. And now they face the knowledge that their killers may be spoken up for at the highest level. Their families will be rendered helpless.

But we must not lose heart. If politicians in Pakistan and other countries where honour killings are practiced, are forced by their own electorate and the west to stop explaining these away simply as ‘tradition', then these women can be given hope, and these shockingly brutal deaths will not have been in vain.

Kanishk Tharoor

Amidst the mountain of praise heaped on Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention yesterday, one assessment stuck out for me. According to NBC's political director Chuck Todd, in Palin, "conservatives have found their Obama".

What does this mean? Like Obama, Palin is young and in her 40s, a striking contrast to the wizened John McCain. Like Obama, Palin is a "Washington outsider", and even more so than the Democrat candidate. Alaska is about as far away as an American can grow up from Washington, where Obama is currently a senator. And like Obama, Palin brings a "breath of fresh air" to positions historically the reserve of white males.

But do these similarities mean that Palin will have the same impact on US politics as Obama has had? Decidedly not. As her speech in the Twin Cities has shown, Palin's role in this election is to exacerbate traditional political divisions and to debase the tenor of politics in the country.  Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Over at the Independent's Open House blog, Steve Richards argues that unless they can spell out an alternative agenda, Charles Clarke and those who think like him will only make Labour's problems worse:

Those who want the removal of Brown have three obligations in the coming weeks. First, they must spell out in detail how they would deal with all the external factors that have derailed Brown’s leadership, in particular the credit crunch and the soaring price of oil and food. Second, they must spell out in more detail their policies for the future and how they connect with a party that is supposed to be on the centre left of British politics. Third, they must demonstrate that they can build a popular coalition of support that gives Labour a chance of winning the next election. Read the rest of this post...

04 - 09 - 08

Comment...

Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): At the end of last month I wrote a post objecting to a phrase by A.C.Grayling. A written constitution should never  be described as "rock solid" and were it to be so it would be failing its democratic purpose. The slip was twofold, a written constitution can't be rock solid (academic point) but also we should not want it to be (political point).

Grayling did me the great compliment of responding swiftly and courteously on a subject that is a great issue. I then broke the First Law of Blogging NEVER POSTPONE A POST! Many apologies. I am engaged in a new project (more on which anon, I hope) that was intensely distracting at that moment and I wanted to gather my thoughts.

The problem with insisting on the argument is that it runs the risk of the narcissism of small differences, when two figures on the edge of a cliff with a landslide approaching and a storm brewing decide to have a punch up! One of the most striking things about British journalistic and political culture over the last twenty years, that I have become very aware of since campaigning for a written constitution as one of the key demands of Charter 88, has been this. For all the fine words and radicalism, and now even when Prime Ministers talk about the need for a new constitutional settlement, this obvious need is rarely addressed and then usually in passing. The media is part of the political class that benefits from the informal, unwritten order. The need for a proper constitution is passed over, drawn back from, or at best referred to as a gimmick. Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): As much as Charles Clarke deprecates talk of 'Blairite plots' against the Prime Minister, his article in the New Statesman today will inevitably be seen in that light.

However it is worth noting some less predictable and more interesting elements, notably a significant departure from New Labour orthodoxy on foreign policy:

Liberal interventionism must be underpinned by military force, but its moral authority was undermined by the glacial progress in preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the ill-considered determination to renew Trident.

 Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK):  Back in August, Borders and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne provided the theme for our summer limerick competition, when he recalled how "In my conversations around Britain, I met an especially eloquent lady in Edgbaston. She said, ‘We can learn to live together, if we only put our minds to it.’ I think she is right. And I think we should approach this task with an air of great confidence."

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Jessica Loudis

As John McCain and Barack Obama prepare to wage their foreign policy battles over the middle east, another much closer region remains a lacuna in the ongoing contest. Latin America has barely featured in the race, despite its historical and persisting centrality in US strategic thinking and despite the growing population of Latinos in the country. Obama will have to hope that his Latin American silence proves golden.

Latin America came up briefly during the primary season. In the November/December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton laid out her foreign policy blueprint for a Clinton presidency, declaring rather blandly that her stance was one of "vigorous engagement" with Latin America. The strategy behind this statement was twofold: first, to call attention to Bush's failed promise to build stronger relations throughout the continent (and perhaps to critique the administration's Cold War approach to the so-called "rogue" Latin American socialist states) and also to cater to her active and substantial Hispanic voter base.

Not to be outdone, Obama, the soon-to-be Democratic nominee, followed suit, also calling for more "vigorous engagement" with the continent, distinguishing himself from Clinton only in terms of his views on Cuba. Clinton's Foreign Affairs article was published several months after she promised to uphold the administration's draconian approach towards travel restrictions to Cuba, which Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation aptly described as "a policy in which people have to choose between attending their mother's funeral, or their father's." (The current policy allows Cuban-Americans to return to the island once every three years, and only after clearing a veritable Olympic course of bureaucratic hurdles). Smelling blood, at a Cuban Independence Day celebration in Miami in late May, Obama unveiled his own approach towards Cuba, emphasizing a greater leniency towards travel and a willingness to relax the 46-year trade embargo (a policy only a year younger than Obama himself).

 Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): The Scottish Government revealed its legislative programme for the next year today. The centre-piece was Alex Salmond's announcement of "abolition of the oppressive council tax in favour of a fair local income tax, bringing much needed relief to household budgets."

Over at Conservativehome, Tory MSP Derek Brownlee raises a number of searching about the assumptions behind the SNP plan for a local income tax rate of 3p in the pound. Read the rest of this post...

Patrick Corrigan

Patrick Corrigan, (Amnesty Blogs: Belfast and Beyond): Looks like the Observer's Henry McDonald has been hearing the same rumours around Belfast as I have – namely, that the report by the Eames-Bradley Consultative Group on the Past is to be postponed (yet again) until the end of the year at least.

The Group concluded its investigation as long ago as January. When I last blogged this topic in late May (Northern Ireland: 'It must never happen again'), at the time of a high-profile speech by the Group's chairs Archbishop Robin Eames and Denis Bradley, I mentioned that the report was expected later in the summer. Then, it was said, it would be out in September. Then October. Now McDonald is reporting December, while I am hearing that we could be into next year before the Group's findings finally become public. Read the rest of this post...

Kanishk Tharoor

As Jim Gabour seemed certain of all along, Hurricane Gustav spared New Orleans a return to the horrors and devastation of Katrina three years ago. Though eight people across the south of the United States died as a result of the storm's arrival, its impact has not been nearly as deadly as feared. The GOP now returns to the misfortune of staging a full convention that will pale in comparison to its Democratic counterpart. And national and international (particularly British) media will once again train their lenses on American political pageantry.

I'm unsettled by the media's total lack of interest in the reality of the storm. The story of Gustav was simply New Orleans. Of course, the city suffered dearly during Katrina. Journalists should investigate how well its refurbished defenses coped. But major media outlets paid disproportionate attention to New Orleans while ignoring the storm's real toll. The deaths of nearly one hundred people throughout the Caribbean passed without mention, or at best as a footnote. See, for instance, this distasteful article in The Telegraph which notes right at the end, as a one-line after-thought not worth dwelling upon, that "Gustav has already killed at least 94 people in the Caribbean".

Some reports claim that the death toll in the Caribbean has exceeded one hundred. Gustav killed at least 77 people in Haiti, while battering Jamaica, parts of Cuba, the Caymans and other islands. For more on the devastation of the storm read Global Voices Online's round-up of the Caribbean blogosphere.

The numbers are not that important; Gustav, after all, is certainly not the deadliest hurricane to sweep through the region. Rather, what is troubling is the absence of the Caribbean in the broadcasts and reports that build international consciousness. Over the weekend in the UK, Sky News transmitted live Mayor Ray Nagin's press conference from New Orleans. I wonder if the mayor knew that a British audience absorbed his dry traffic updates and announcements of road closures to Mississippi. We should never reject this immersion in a distant local experience - particularly one as brimming with human loss and endurance as New Orleans - but it is difficult to accept when its price is the elision of others. From the perspective of western TV, print and internet coverage, all roads lead to New Orleans; the Caribbean was but a path for the storm before it made its real landfall on our sense of what matters.

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): The All Wales Convention holds its third meeting in Cardiff Bay today. As the Western Mail's Martin Shipton notes, it's been a slow start for the body that is meant to consider the case for more powers for the Welsh Assembly. Read the rest of this post...

Keith Sutherland (Exeter, Imprint Academic): The most remarkable thing about the Chancellor’s Guardian interview wasn’t his unusual candour about the parlous state of the economy (“arguably the worst in 60 years”) but his admission that a year ago he had no idea of what was in store. In fairness to Mr. Darling – an intelligent and likeable man – he was in good company, for most economists and senior bankers hadn’t the faintest inkling of the financial crisis about to unfold: “No one did. No one had any idea”.

However it was pretty damn obvious to everybody else (other than practitioners of the ‘dismal science’) that the nation was gorging on an unsustainable debt and asset price bubble and that the whole pack of cards was about to fall down. Why is it that expert political judgment is so out of line with what has been called the ‘wisdom of crowds’? Read the rest of this post...

Kanishk Tharoor

John McCain had a hard act to follow after the thunder of the Democratic National Convention. In the Rockies, Obama scaled the heights of political spectacle, delivering one of the surest and strongest speeches of the campaign year. What could the much more restricted McCain possibly muster in response?

We've now had a few days to dwell on the answer. The choice of Sarah Palin as the presumptive Republican vice presidential candidate breathes new life into a contest that was flagging in the late months of the summer. In selecting Palin as his running mate, McCain anointed a woman he has met only once before; a woman whose anti-choice views are unlikely to win over disgruntled Hillaryites; a woman whose short tenure as the governor of remote Alaska may undermine the edifice of "experience" that surrounds his presidential bid. Yet Palin also adds that element of surprise and adventure altogether absent from the McCain campaign.

 Read the rest of this post...

Guy Aitchison

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): Lib Dem blogger Steph Ashley has news of a generous offer from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in support of No2ID. Any new donations received by No2ID will be doubled by Rowntree. Steph has the details:

From 1st September 2008, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd has generously agreed to match, pound for pound, any *new* income that NO2ID receives. Which means that for every pound you give from 1st September NO2ID will receive TWO pounds to spend campaigning against the ID scheme and database state.

Please send your donation by cheque to our office (please mark your envelope 'JRRT'):

The NO2ID Campaign
Box 412
19-21 Crawford Street
London W1H 1PJ

Or you can donate by credit card or via PayPal using the 'Donate' button on our website, http://www.no2id.net (left hand column)

Double your money offers like this don't come along very often so please, dig deep - encourage your friends, family and colleagues to make a donation. With your help we can stop this.

While you're at it, why not join the campaign, join a local group and take the NO2ID Pledge?

This is a direct repost (with permission) from the journal of superactivist "diffrentcolours"

Hat-tip Lib Con.

Christopher Lydon

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with openDemocracy author Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3)

When you’ve had enough of the dugout convention chatter on the US cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a reporters’ masterpiece (up there with Norman Mailer’s) on the 1968 campaign, An American Melodrama, and many other rapt studies of us. (Forthcoming: The Myth of American Exceptionalism.) Hodgson volunteers in conversation that what he missed forty years ago was the length and depth of the conservative cycle the US was entering with Richard Nixon’s election. Today, forty years later, Hodgson’s keynote is that the conservative ascendancy, having fomented the Iraq War and a Gilded Age of inequality, sounds far from broken. The “change” chord rings to Hodgson more of therapy than political reconstruction. The tune from America these days, he says, still sounds something like the Russophobic ditty sung in England in the 1870s — the song that gave “Jingo” to the lexicon of chip-on-the-shoulder patriotism.

We don’t want to fight,

But by Jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships,

We’ve got the men,

And we’ve got the money, too.

From a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt, around 1877.

 Read the rest of this post...

Simon Barrow

Simon Barrow (London, Ekklesia): For a number of years now the media has both witnessed and rehearsed a ‘debate’ about publicly funded faith schools in which two narratives pass each other in the night and important issues get lost in the shadows.

On the one hand, some say that religious schools are divisive, sectarian and biased, hijacking what should be the secular enterprise of education to perpetuate religion at the taxpayer’s expense. Others retort that faith schools are part of a rich diversity of provision, support community cohesion, give affirmation to minority communities and promote tolerance.
 Read the rest of this post...

Gareth Young

Gareth Young (Lewes, CEP): The Scottish Claim of Right of 1988 was signed by all the Scottish Labour MPs, with the exception of Tam Dalyell.  In 1997, with the advent of the Labour Government of the UK, one third of that initial cabinet (8 out of 24) had signed that claim and were thus pivotal in influencing the Labour UK Government, which issued the white paper, the Scotland Devolution Bill 1998.

The Scottish Claim of Right acknowledged that the Scottish people have the sovereign right to decide the form of government best suited to their needs.  That 'form of government' must include independence as well as devolution, yet those cabinet members do not seem in any great hurry to hold a referendum on independence. When they signed the Claim quite possibly it never occurred to them that the Scottish people might decide to get rid of them altogether. They should be reminded of it at every opportunity.  Rather than display a willingness to hold a referendum on independence, apart from Wendy Alexander's short-lived "Bring it on!", the Unionists claim instead that because there is a Unionist majority in the Scottish Parliament, the people of Scotland have "voted for the Union". It is just possible that the SNP may gain a majority of the Scottish Westminister seats at the next General Election, and if so that will mean, according to Unionist logic, that the people of Scotland have voted for independence. I'm sure they will try wriggle out of that.

The Scottish Claim of Right was a principled recognition of the sovereign right of the people.  It is hypocritical of Gordon Brown, and others who signed that Claim of Right, to now deny that same sovereign right to the people of England, especially as recognition of the Scottish sovereign right has moved power away from Westminster in a way that has damaged English voters.

Anthony Barnett

 

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Amnesty have been marking the 25th Day of the Disappeared. We may think that this is something that only happens elsewhere in the world. To remind us that this is not so, Patrick Corrigan has dedicated his recent Amnesty post to Northern Ireland's disappeared:

Kevin McKee: disappeared 2 October 1972

Seamus Wright: disappeared 2 October 1972

John McIlroy: disappeared 1974

Columba McVeigh (17): disappeared 31 October 1975

Brendan Megraw (24): disappeared 8 April 1978

Capt. Robert Nairac: disappeared 1977

Gerald Evans (24): disappeared 1979

Charles Armstrong (55): disappeared 16 August 1981

Danny McIlhone: disappeared 1981

Seamus Ruddy (33): disappeared 9 May 1985

Sean Murphy (25): disappeared 1986

You can read the full post HERE.

 

Kanishk Tharoor

Barack Obama's nomination as the official candidate of the Democratic Party offers many firsts, not least that he is the first African American to come so close to the Oval Office. Yet more importantly perhaps, Obama is the first presidential candidate to so baldly represent the histories of migration and movement that have made America. With immediate connections to Kenya, Malaysia, Hawaii and the rural midwest, Obama embodies the global narratives that course through American identity.

Such a multitude of connections may be to Obama's detriment. As Michael Powell observes in this excellent, sweeping piece in the NY Times "newcomers always rubbed up against the settled." Just as "primal rootlessness" and "wanderlust" are encoded in American DNA, so too are the myths of the small town, of Main Street and safe white fences staples of American political parlance. Thanks to his roaming upbringing, Obama remains susceptible to right-wing attacks aimed at his supposed "Americanness". But McCain - and a slew of past presidents - has no less "rooted" a past as the scion of a military family. As one scholar tells Powell, "The next US president is going to be Ishmael [the Biblical wanderer], whether we like it or not, and whether he knows it or not."