Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Our mothership has linked up with Polit.ru in Moscow to start an English/Russian blog and publishing platform on openDemocracy - an exciting partnership you can find it HERE. One of the first articles is a careful interview with Peter Riddell about how we change our leaders in Britain. Putin's handover of the, er, Presidency is not mentioned. But it is fascinating to think of how our leadership changes, especially those without an election (this time no names mentioned here!), might be viewed from Moscow. It is a great initiative and if you are not interested in Russia but know someone who might be please send them the link or tell them to look for it on the oD front page. Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I have avoided reading the Cherie Blair selections. But I have just read Mary Riddell in the Telegraph wrestling with the implications of the "bad example" Cherie has set. The stench of double standards was one of the things that made me avert my eyes. 
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Anthony Barnett

Recently, I was talking with Kay Dilday – a contributing editor of openUSA – about the rise of Barack Obama. She said she still could not believe that he would make it. I said I thought he could and in part because he was an expression of the normalisation of America in the aftermath of its shaping control over globalisation. Now, it was becoming a country – still a very considerable one of course – like others. It was joining the world. Kay objected that on the contrary, no other country could make someone like Obama its leader. Implicitly, she was suggesting that were he to make it, it would be evidence of American exceptionalism.

I’m not holding Kay to her argument. I’m reproducing it because I guess lots of people think on these lines and it made me question why I think differently.

Of course, it is true that no other white country would make a black man its leader at the moment. But what other white democracies countries have had such significant numbers of blacks as part of their historic population? Isn’t the exception that the US had slavery and then Jim Crow? When its Nobel Laureate for literature and finest living writer is a black woman (Toni Morrison), its Secretary of State is black (Condoleezza Rice), and its previous Secretary of State (Colin Powell) was not only black, he had also been a hugely admired head of the armed forces – then what are we seeing??

I’m not trying to diminish the importance of an Obama presidency, or even his selection as the Democratic candidate. I’m trying to look at whether it means the US is out on a limb or getting closer to the trunk of humanity.  Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): On Friday after the local election results and before London had been announced I wrote an analysis of why Gordon Brown could not lead his party to a recovery (First thoughts on Labour's Debacle). Contemplating the ruins now after a sunny weekend in Dorset both a deeper analysis and superficial gossip confirm the diagnosis.
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Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Thanks to a tip from Gareth Young in the vigorous comments section on his OK post about The way forward for the Campaign for an English Parliament, I’ve just read Bill Bragg here in CiF. Billy defends his call for an English patriotism and makes a lot of what is happening in Scotland to prove his case that progressive politics and civic nationalism can go together. He’s right. Two things strike me. Billy makes an explicitly socialist case - from a socialist addressed to socialists - saying internationalism and patriotism are not incompatible and the right should not be permitted a free ride on England. But the SNP have never been a socialist or an explicitly social-democratic party - even if this is what their government is turning out to be. So we have to ask the question: why is it that the most left-wing government in the United Kingdom is not from the Labour or socialist tradition?
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Anthony Barnett

So Geraldine Ferraro has resigned from the Clinton campaign after claiming that, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position".
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Anthony Barnett

There are clashing accounts of whether the move against Hillary and towards Barack is generational or reproduces traditional prejudice against women. Gloria Steinem talkes the latter view in the NYT in a much emailed Women are never the Front Runners. I have a different view in OurKingdom, picking up from Will Smith's I Am Legend.

In the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum argues with Europeans (not me) that a Black can be elected and adds, "Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, she is running for election at a moment when the flaws of oligarchy and dynasty are on display as never before". This picks up an issue that Beverly Anderson, a Jamaican-American living in Neww York, takes up in a comment in the OK discussion, "I don’t see how it helps to have a woman candidate running on her husband’s record. I would have had more respect for her if she had run as Hillary Rodham and not pretended that her experience consisted of anything more than her Senate term".

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Anthony Barnett

I have signed a statement on Turkey and a new vision for Europe supported by a group of us from across Europe. I'd very much like to see Turkish mem-bership of the EU. I'll leave for others the discussion of all the necessary con-ditions which this may need, the changes in Turkey that have to be supported. But there is one aspect which the statement does not raise which I want to emphasise: that Turkey is specifically special to Europe in a profound histori-cal sense.

The statement refers to refusing any “clash of civilisations”. It is indeed possi-ble that the rejection of Turkey could force it towards an alliance not so much with the Muslim world as with Russia and Iran and authoritarianism. Those who think that if we in the EU do not accept Turkey as a member it will con-tinue to hover in a positive way looking westward could be badly mistaken. There is a momentum in all relationships. The fate of most of the ex-Soviet countries and east-central European ones seems to show that if they are not offered the dynamic of entry into the EU then they adopt another dynamic taking an different kind of political and social direction.  Thus in refusing Turkey, the prospect is that the EU could create the conditions for a wider “clash”. Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett

The leading Repubican financial regulator Alan Greenspan, one of the architects of today's global order has just published his memoirs, The Age of Turbulence. Paul Krugman takes him apart and shows how he is whitewashing his role and trying the 'don't blame me it was my brother-in-law' gambit as we totter on the edge of a crash. Now he's just given an interview to Richard Adams in today's Guardian. He had praised the intelligence of Cheney and Rumsfeld. "They [meaning the Republicans, his own party] had the Presidency and control of both house of Congress and a budget surplus, and a very capable group of people." So, the interviewer asks "what went wrong?" He shakes his head ruefully, "I don't know".

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Anthony Barnett

According to today's London Telegraph Alan Greenspan the famously long-serving head of the Federal Reserve has said in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil”.  Could he have been reading Paul Rogers?

Anthony Barnett

DICK CHENEY IS RIGHT!

Take a look for yourself

Anthony Barnett

May Day 2006 took on a different face across the United States. Enormous demonstrations throughout the country mobilised the immigrant communities. Its immediate cause was the controversial House of Representatives immigration Bill passed in December 2005. If it had

become law it would make illegal immigrants without proper papers "felons". Estimates of their numbers range from 10, even 12 million. Not only would they be criminalised, anyone who helped and assisted them would also be criminalised, from the Catholic Church to their families and relatives.

In an astonishing demonstration of the organising power of DJs, text messaging, the informal internet and non-English language publications, a new force was born last month when vcast demonstrations took the centre of cities like Los Angeles and Dallas, unused to pedestrians of any kind. This May Day, the organisations were better planned and more widespread - taking place in multiple cities and venues.
 
These photos are from the Manhattan demo. There were others in New York, the one in Queens led the local TV news. Across the country factories and distribution centres and restaurants closed for the afternoon and their workforce showed the power and necessity of the new wave of American immigrants to the economy and wellbeing of the United States.

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Anthony Barnett

In this week's Spectator (web pages are closed to subscribers only) their political editor Peter Oborne comments on David Cameron's Demos speech. Oborne has welcomed the ascent of Cameron while scorning his support for Bush and silence on extraordinary rendition. Now he kindly sympathises with both David Marquand and myself (who clash over Harold Macmillan see below) for our despair over what he calls Blair's democratic centralism, or what I call his corporate populism. Oborne says Cameron's embrace of civil society is very significant and returns the Conservative party to its historic role as a more than a free-market cheer-leader. He also conjures up the figure of Harold Macmillan in his role-call of social heroes... END  Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett

What should the world make of the new Tory leader, the first for ten years who might really win a general election? I wrote an assessment after  hearing him talk, posted below.  Alas  we have had to shut off our 'comment'  facility after it was used for a viral attack.  It is being repaired. Meanwhile, we will post comments which can be sent to the readerseditor@opendemocracy.net with  subject line Priority Cameron Blog. Here are the first two from Nicholas Boys Smith, author of the Demos pamphlet True Blue and a brief sharp warning from David Marquand. Also a reply from me. 

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Anthony Barnett

David Cameron on the Constitution

I went along to listen to David Cameron the new leader of the Tory party. He was speaking at Demos,  the London think-tank that helped to change the zeitgeist in the nineties and open the way to New Labour.

Cameron gave a speech packaged as a major presentation of his emerging political philosophy (the link to it on the Conservative web site is currently broken).

He positioned himself as the person who can make Blairism work, and he deployed what seemed like powerful comparative statistics about why Britain isn’t working to rub the point home.  It was not inspiring, but he is intelligent, at ease with himself and a definite contender.

I was struck by the way that the Tory leader repeatedly called on ‘civil society’ as a force for the good. Apparently it will be essential to the success of his “compassionate conservatism”. Did the assembled press share a clear understanding of what it is? Perhaps he had been reading Michael Edwards (although I somehow doubt it) and the openDemocracy debate over Edward’s book on the concept, which was unfairly traduced by Neera Chandhoke in ‘What the Hell is Civil Society’.

In the Demos blog, Duncan O’Leary, contrasts Cameron’s view of the state with a quote from Gordon Brown. Cameron claims that Brown set his face against “sharing responsibility” and insists that “Only the state can guarantee fairness”. But is this, er, fair?

It seems that Brown actually said, “So fairness can be advanced by but cannot, in the end, be guaranteed by charities, however benevolent, by markets, however dynamic, or by individuals, however well meaning, but guaranteed only by enabling government”.  

Personally, I am not convinced that fairness can be guaranteed by anything this side of the day of judgment (which I am assured takes everything into account including earthly penance). But Brown’s is hardly a case against “sharing responsibility”.

After the speech a leading front-bench colleague of Cameron’s who accompanied him to the Demos office told me, “I think fairness is a great conservative term, it is appealing and can be measured”.

However Cameron used the word not at all. Nor did some other great words pass his lips, for example, ‘citizen’, ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’. Brown, in his recent wrestling match with Britishness made a great deal of fairness, claiming it was part of the ‘golden thread’ that links Britains to the Magna Carta, no less.

But ‘fairness’ is the central term in a new pamphlet by Nicholas Boys Smith which Demos launched at the event: ‘True Blue, How a Fair Conservatism can win the next election’ . It provides a witty account by a young man of being a Tory over the last ten years. He says that it is an open letter to his leader, but he told me that Cameron has not read it yet.

After he spoke Cameron took a few questions from the press. All except the last were about the headline grabbing spat with Norman Tebbit, Thatcher’s old-time, knock-about proponent. The last question was mine.

I asked Cameron whether, given he was being advised to create a fair Tory Party, with a fair economy that would create a fair Britain, he would share his view on whether the country could have a fair constitution with a fairer upper house and a fairer electoral system.

He told us that the Conservatives are bringing themselves up to date on the constitution. He is not very interested in the second chamber. Rather he wants to make sure that the House of Commons does a much better job and he thinks that it needs people in it who see themselves as legislators rather than proto-ministers. So that’s it for Lords reform.

On the electoral system, standing in front of a sign saying Demos he firmly ruled out proportional representation.

Instead, he had a smart formula, “everyone’s vote should be equal” meaning by this, he said, that everyone should be in a constituency of the same size.

With the UK’s winner takes all, first-past-the-post system, this really means that everyone should have an equal chance to have their vote stolen. Provided, of course, that the population is evenly distributed geographically in its voting intentions, which it is not.  

I’ll leave the maths to the specialists, but I suspect that re-drawing the constituencies on the lines Cameron proposes will give the Conservatives, especially in a three–party system, a comfortable permanent parliamentary majority with a minority of votes. It would also allow them to rule in confidence over Scotland and Wales, from whence, without PR, there will never be significant Tory representation in Westminster.

How can everyone’s votes be equal when they are not proportional, beats me. More significant, this is a pure, small ‘c’ conservatism that sees no problems with the existing constitutional settlement except the need to make it more efficient.

What do I make of Cameron? When Demos director Tom Bentley introduced him he congratulated him on thinking long term and addressing basic quality of life issues. For his part, Cameron stressed the need for “sustainable” policies and scorned Blair’s obsession with initiatives and headlines as “government of the short-term, by the short-term, for the short-term”.

This was bang on target. In a fight with either the Prime Minister or a Labour successor who does not have the time to shape his own distinct agenda, Cameron will win.

For the essence of the Cameron ticket is: “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” (The more things change, the more they are the same thing).

How attractive it must be to have it both ways. He is not a Bush style neo-con right-wing ideologue. Rather
he is the latest modernisation of the oldest, most successful right-wing tradition on the planet.

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Anthony Barnett

Marc Schulman's blog on the article I wrote with our Editor Isabel Hilton misses most of the points despite generous quotations - thanks for them. Solana linked to it below. It is far too defensive. A huge debate is finally opening up in the United States about the dangers of the way it is seeking to impose democracy, and it is not 'anti-American' to make these points just because one is not American. As for the leadership of the anti-war demonstrations, I agree. We refer to the exceptional size and genuine character of the popular feeling against President Bush's war of choice. Alas, the leadership of the organisations that called them were there because they opposed the war in Afghanistan. In my view, their sectarianism ensured that there was no popular, or democratic follow-through.  Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett

by Todd Gitlin

8 July 2005

Hearing the news, a pall came over America, and then:  solidarity, horror, memory, resolve, dark fatalism, and regrettably, some smugness (we got hit first so welcome to the club, New York Governor George Pataki seemed to brag while relaying good wishes to London).  Police poured into the subway cars.  Calls for spending money on rail safety, subdued for months, years, revved up.

And inevitably there were lunatic spasms.  Unimpressed by new fact, barking heads launched into messages that sounded prerecorded.  “Finish the job,” “stay the course”—these were among the cant phrases that spilled through the airwaves. 

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Anthony Barnett

I had a call from Sam in the office warning me not to get the tube as there had been a power surge at Liverpool Street. Then a shout from my partner, "its the real thing". I had left my computer at the office! Unlike Bill Thompson (see below) I had to fall back to the steam age and watch television. I saw a police officer tell me he was in operational control of my city and everyone should stay where they are. The mobile phone connection went dead. It was terrible over the course of the morning to know that people were dying below ground. There was one advantage of watching TV. You could see how the broadcasters were eager to stir, seeking sensation, demanding to know about panic and alarm! Despite this, even when shaken and bleeding, eyewitnesses were careful and matter of fact.  Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett

 

The Prime Minister is not famous for reading policy papers. It is not that he is a potato, it is just that he prefers meeting on the couch and doing without the embarrassment of minutes that come back to bite you.

Nonetheless, his policy advisors do read. At least they do until they get into the House of Lords. So we decided to give them a copy of the openDemocracy debate on the politics of climate change.

Here is where to find a brilliant neat summary by Caspar Henderson, its tenacious and knowledgeable editor. He gives his best eight for quick dippers and analyses how six major themes are addressed: science and uncertainty; the rights and wrongs of Kyoto and after; global justice and development; technical and policy challenges; arts and imagination; and how to create more environmentally friendly cities.

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Anthony Barnett

Just back from Brussels. I was at a meeting where members of the Club de Madrid were advancing their Madrid Agenda on confronting terrorism through democratic means “at the European level”. Both The Council of Europe and Amnesty International’s European office circulated documents. The Council of Europe has 46 member states in a loose alliance (which has to be distinguished from The Council of Ministers of the European Union, of which more in a moment). The Council of Europe document sets out a now familiar back-footed approach that the everything must be done to defeat terrorism provided that the measures are lawful and do not include the use torture. The Amnesty International response available on its website is refreshingly more combative. It argues that it is the breach of human rights that creates the risk to our security. What’s needed is a far more vigorous pursuit of human rights in response to the attack on secular and constitutional values by terrorists. This argument applies to the wholesale moves to secure biometric surveillance now being debated in openDemocracy. As Mary Robinson put it, speaking at a public meeting of the Club de Madrid and the European Policy Centre, we need to “scale up our sense of purpose” if we are to revitalise democracy.  Read the rest of this post...