oD Today: all articles

Britain, as has often been observed (including, of course, in many articles in OurKingdom), is a country in the grips of a profound identity crisis. This is so much the case that it is even unclear, I would say, what and who we are referring to by the ‘Britain' that is in crisis: who are the British, and what is Britain?

For me, the crux of the issue is the splitting up of the old Anglo-British national identity that was at the heart of imperial Great Britain: the way in which the English have tended informally and instinctively to regard England and Great Britain as indivisible, and as interchangeable names for a single, unitary ‘nation'. Of course, the reality of imperial and pre-devolution Great Britain was never that simple, as Scotland, for instance, always retained many of the institutional trappings and the cultural identity of a distinct nation. But for the English, the English-national and British-state identities merged, making Great Britain (and later, the United Kingdom) to all intents and purposes the proxy-English nation-state.

Devolution changed all of that, once and for all. It was a definitive refutation of the ‘absolute' character of the Union, in both senses: not only the unitary character of the British polity but the ‘union' (merger, (con)fusion) within the English national identity between England and Great Britain. It was this cultural and psychological union that had sustained the political Union throughout its history, as it secured the loyalty and ‘ownership' of the greater part of the UK, which viewed Great Britain as ‘our nation' and the UK as "one of the great creations of this country", to quote Vince Cable's words at this week's Liberal Democrats' conference (The unconscious irony in Vince Cable's statement is that the UK is supposed to be ‘this country' not something that ‘this country' (England) has created!).

But as a result of devolution, it became possible, indeed necessary, to see the UK no longer as the seamless extension of English parliamentary democracy, nationhood and power. And, more fundamentally still, the English could begin to separate their English and British national identities at a subjective and psychological level, precisely because those identities had also been split apart at the objective, political level - with ‘great(er) Britishness' no longer being defined as a continuation and extension of Englishness but as a set of different national identities from which the English identity, too, was differentiated and distinct.

The excellent Open Europe email service includes this item:

"French Foreign Minister suggests Blair is currently the only real candidate for EU President. In an interview with France Inter, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was asked if Tony Blair will become EU President if the Lisbon Treaty is ratified. He said, "In any case, Tony Blair is a candidate and people are talking about it a lot, yes."  Asked if there are other candidates, he said, "Not many."  Asked who, he said, "No, honestly", to which the interviewer replied, "So it's Blair then?"  Kouchner said, "At one point there was Verhofstadt.  Wait! There are others who will perhaps put themselves forward; it is not for straight away.  But for the moment, indeed..." Asked if he thought it is right that a supporter of the Iraq war should become the first President of Europe, he said, "He has given several speeches on Iraq for a long time; he has been a supporter of peace; he has been the representative of the Quartet for peace in the Middle East.  On the other hand, there will also perhaps be Mr. Rasmussen, the Danish President of the Socialist International who will put himself forward, but we don't know of any other candidate."

I'm not being rude or cynical. But diplomatic concern seems pointless. The UK needs some kind of Obama force that offers a significant and positive change of direction and draws on new energy but can deliver inside the system. This is hardly a revolutionary desire! The Lib Dems, with over 50 MPs, millions of votes, a party machine, young leaders, are in the perfect position to be this force.

Much more important, they call it right on issues that are popular. They got the economic crisis right and are believed, immensely important in terms of credibility and popular respect. They led on liberty where the latest poll shows overwhelming, eight-to-one support for the view that the state is taking too much power, a classic liberal view and a constitutional one. Nick Clegg denounced our "rotten" system in the most robust and systematic terms since he became leader. He made a great speech saying that the acuteness of the economic collapse in the UK was caused by the political collapse of Westminster, well before the expenses crisis struck. On the issue of the Iraq war, that gave Obama his original moral authority, the Lib Dems stood out from the crowd. And this is an issue that those who vote still care about.

Why then, when their answers are so often right, principled, consistent and popular are the Lib Dems so useless? Why aren't they at 30 per cent support plus? Why should they have to ask for a place in any television debate, rather than being the main contenders?

The answer seems to be: It ain't what you say, it is the way that you say it.

I recall watching what I think was their spring party conference. For a few flickering seconds, Clegg was in the top half of BBC News. We need an act of faith. It sounded good. It disappeared. I saw no other report. But who was to make the leap? He was calling on voters to bet their faith on him. But what he and his party need to do is to take a bet on the people. It is they who need to make the change, not the voters.

The party's body language is way too Westminster. When push comes to shove, the Lib Dems are reasonable. Their leather radicals in the Lords look forward to an increase in MPs that will make them the arbiters of a hung parliament and their advice stifles the party - they are the UK's last true Establishment.

Now Clegg has written a Demos pamphlet saying it is The Liberal Moment. It's "jolly good". You can hear the plaudits from the noble Lib Dem Lords being dripped into his ears. Their murmurings <!--EndFragment-->are poison! Labour displaced the Liberals a century ago because of organised forces outside Westminster, in the Trade Unions and the Co-operative movement. The reshaping of British society now, that Clegg writes about, does indeed undermine traditional Labour. But its institutional forms are in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and the London Mayor and movements against the EU. There are potential networks across civil society that could and should support the Lib Dems. But the party has to make the first move, demonstrate a hunger for power on its own terms, appeal to these supposedly dangerous elements. Clegg celebrates citizens as unruly and not wanting to be controlled by the state. I agree. No, I strongly agree. But the way it is said seems patronising. The Lib Dems need to be the unruly party if they are to appeal to the unruly majority.  

The Lib Dems have got to start being different and stop playing the game in the same old way.

PS - James Graham from inside the party makes a parallel, thoughtful argument that ends with a call for a Liberal Democrat "movement" as he gasps for oxygen of life.

PSS - The is a response from David Marquand that takes the argument further into a full OK post here.

PPSS - Sunny is in on the act too HERE

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Last week, Home Office ministers announced they were abandoning a clause in the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill that would extended immigration controls to air and sea travel between Britain and Northern Ireland. The climbdown came in the face of opposition from the Lords, where it was confirmed on Monday that new immigration spot checks on the Irish border will also now be shelved.

Although the government remain committed to the planned changes in principle, it looks as if the Common Travel Area is safe for the moment. As Slugger's Brian Walker has noted, it's a pragmatic arrangement supported by all sides in Ireland, if not always for the same reasons:

The particular Irish (north and south) interest in the Bill was to avoid the unique status in Britain of Irish people becoming downgraded more or less by accident because of new restrictions on foreign immigration. “British Unionists” of course are Siamese twins with southern Irish passport holders because of the facts of geography. The Irish, note, are not regarded as foreign in the 1949 Act, passed when the Republic cut its last links with the Commonwealth. Since then , tightening up through the British Nationality Act and successive anti terrorism Acts have pulled away from British- Irish exceptionalism, while the GFA has pulled in the opposite direction, towards interchangeability of citizenship.  

 

 

With Parliament shutting down until the 12^th of October, 38 Degrees is launching a new campaign, MP Holiday Watch, to find out how exactly MPs spend their time. The usual story is that MPs spend this time getting back to their constituents and catching up on case work, but though this might hold true for some, the truth is that we just don't know what our MPs are up to. How many take well paid second jobs or spend most of their time holidaying in the sun rather than dealing with their constituents' issues?

Some suggest that asking MPs to divulge details on how they spend the summer recess is intrusive and a needless violation of the privacy of our hard-working elected representatives. But, as David Babbs points out, these arguments sounds more than a little familiar when one considers the rationale for not investigating MPs' expenses for so long… While there might be a case to be made about protecting privacy if 38 Degrees were demanding detailed holiday plans and day to day movements of MPs, the short survey they suggest MPs take 10 minutes filling in seeks simply to build up a picture of how they will spend the recess – how many weeks on constituency work, how many weeks (if any) on a paid second job, and so forth. Requesting a breakdown of how our representatives spend the 82 days they do not have to be at Westminster is simple enough, and doesn't require the exact address your constituency MP will be staying at in the south of Spain, nor whether the kids will be going too.

A crisis in the US real economy marked by growing unemployment and failing businesses is not a product of the current financial crisis. In fact, the financial crisis was but a symptom of a long brewing systemic crisis in the real economy. These claims are made separately by economists Richard Wollf (Univ. of Massachussetts, Amherst) and Ravi Batra (Southern Methodist University, Dallas). They propose an alternative diagnosis of the current economic crisis. If their analysis is correct, fixing the financial system might just deal with one of the symptoms but not the root cause of a deeper economic malaise. Given the amount of public money being thrown at fighting the economic downturn, it is crucial to consider alternative explanations of current economic problems in order to devise strategies that make the best use of scarce resources.

Housing Bubble

The most widely accepted diagnosis of the current financial and economic crisis is that it started with the housing bubble in the US. This in turn resulted from irresponsible sub-prime mortgage lending coupled with unregulated and reckless financial engineering. When the housing bubble burst, banks found themselves holding heaps of unsecured debts packaged into complex financial products that could no longer find new buyers. Financial institutions suspected each other to be in a precarious financial position similar to their own and inter-bank lending came to a halt. Several of these institutions went bankrupt or would have gone down that route if public money ($2.98 trillion at last count) had not bailed them out.

Wage-Productivity Gap

Wollf and Batra do not deny the role of housing bubble and financial malpractices in triggering the financial collapse. What they seem to suggest is that there is a need to explore the chain of causation further. Doing so in their analysis reveals that a wage-productivity gap since the last three decades in the US created a systemic imbalance between aggregate demand and aggregate supply in the economy. Since the early 1970s wages of employees in the US have not risen at the same rate as their productivity (output per hour). In fact, real wages of roughly 80% of the US workforce have been stagnating for more than three decades. On the other hand, productivity has been increasing rapidly due to technological innovation and improvement in human skill levels. Now, wages are a key lever for creating demand in the economy whereas productivity drives the increase in supply. In other words, workers' wages need to increase in order to absorb the increase in supply of goods that results from increased productivity. Yet, the wage-productivity gap has now existed for nearly 35 years.

The consequence of this imbalance is that demand for goods and services required to keep up with supply is created in the short term by creating new debt. The housing bubble was a product of this demand-supply disequilibrium. Since real wages are not rising in step with productivity, people could only consume the increased supply of goods and services by taking help of cheap and easy credit. But after the housing bubble burst, credit is no longer easily available and levels of debt have been exposed to be unsustainable. Businesses realize that their goods will not be sold, profits will decline and they are laying off employees and in many cases closing shop. Due to the wage-productivity gap, this economic decline may have happened even in the absence of a mortgage driven financial crisis. Then again, the housing bubble may have simply postponed the real economy crisis that was imminent, and in the process exacerbated the systemic tensions between demand and supply in the economy.

Where did the profits go?

So why have wages not kept step with productivity despite a "golden era of profitability"? Where have the profits from the productivity growth gone? A paper by Gordon and Dew-Becker, economists from Northwestern University, found "that over the entire period 1966-2001, as well as over 1997-2001, only the top 10 percent of the income distribution enjoyed a growth rate of real wage and salary income equal to or above the average rate of economy-wide productivity growth...[whereas] the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution fell behind or even were left out of the productivity gains entirely" (italics in original). Additionally, the wage share of national income is declining in the US, while the share going to corporate profits has increased from 17.7% in 2000 to 20.9% in 2005. The European Trade Union Congress complains of a widening wage-productivity gap in the eurozone as well.

It appears that "the killing fields of inequality" (as Göran Therborn puts it in his recent piece) and the relentless pursuit of profits by many businesses are critically undermining the primary source of demand in the economy - its workers' wages. As more people lose their jobs in the recession, there is further downward pressure on consumer demand. Making credit available to businesses alone is not likely to reverse the unemployment trend since businesses will invest only when they have confidence in potential returns on their investment. Lack of demand for goods and services in the economy, however, does not give that confidence. It is a vicious cycle but one that can be broken by restructuring the economic system to distribute the wealth more equitably. And unless this fundamental factor is addressed, according to Wollf and Batra, it is hard to see a long term economic recovery.

What is Mandelson up to now that he has seized higher education as well as business? The philistines are through the gates. But where next? My first reaction is that Blair's aim is to become President of Europe, as has been widely reported in our ever revealing press and broadcasting media. To achieve this they have to keep Brown in control of the UK vote. Once Blair has the job he'll appoint Mandelson as a special advisor on a euro-salary and Brown can... 

But now I suspect that Mandelson is considering other options as well. After all the Commons is now in complete disrepute. There are today seven peers in the Cabinet. Why not go the whole way. As Brown crumbles Mandelson can replace him - picking up from Lord Salisbury who was our upper chamber's last PM. Why not? The demeaning PMQs are replaced by polite exchanges. The wretched Commons is moved into deserved second place. There is far more wisdom among peers than MPs. The New Labour project was to place government in the hands of specialists.What better way to achieve this?

I have a different take on David Cameron's speech to Iain Dale's celebration. He wants to modernise parliament but not really democratise it or our politics. There are some good ideas. Unlike Stuart White's otherwise excellent analysis of the Tory leaders 'populism' I think open primaries are much better than the closed system of selection we have - think Obama. But overall, there is not a chance that he is going to "give power to the powerless", his market model ensures otherwise. What is missing is any inclusion of deliberative institutions that really would be a check on Prime Ministerial dictatorship. No mention of an English Parliament (Iain himself excellent on this) or replacing the Lords (with either election or sortition) and a ludicrous caricature of PR. On one issue where he could have been decisive, fixed term parliaments, he equivocated. Iain greets the signs of movement as mana:

I am delighted that he has come round to the idea of Fixed Term Parliaments. In October 2007, together with several others, I set up the Fixed Term website as a reaction to Gordon Brown's dithering over calling an election. We put the case for fixed terms, and if this has been accepted by David Cameron, it's a real step forward. I remain of the view that it is totally improper for a Prime Minister to call an election at the time of his or her own political convenience.

I'm one of those "several". Indeed I am the site's facebook administrator along with Iain - who did totally all the work - and Stephen Tall. As you can see Cameron has not actually committed himself. He says he is worried about what happens with a hung parliament. But a few seconds research would have led him to the German model, where the term is fixed for four years unless a motion of no confidence is passed. This would take the decision out of the hands of the PM but allow parliament as a whole the flexibility to go to the voters in an impass.

The main thing I want to say about Iain's post however is that he should not go on about how hard reform is and how radicalism runs into the sands of procedure. Not unless you want it to, it doesn't. Blair's talk of the "forces of conservatism" was blather. This is what Iain worries about:

Can you imagine how difficult the crusty clerks in the House of Commons will make it for him? They will resist any change to their centuries old traditions and find 20 good reasons why something cannot be changed. So will the whips. So will the civil service. So make no mistake, David Cameron will have a fight on his hands if he is really determined to effect such radical changes.

I recall how Robert Hazell of the Constitution Unit went on about how long Labour's legislation on a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly would take, not to speak of the Human Rights Act, etc. Derry Irvine just blasted it through. A clear aim, a bit of a bully, and those traditions and clerks prove to be smoke without mirrors. You could not have found an expert in the land who would have said that Labour could have passed the amount of very far-reaching constitutional reforms it pushed through in its first term. What matters is the will to change. That's why Cameron's careful let-out clauses speak louder to me than the fine words. 

 

Many of the sessions at the convention here today are about the state of our politics. We have had 30 years of governments who talk the talk of Liberty. They have presided over an era of centralisation, nannyism, a drip-drip erosion of civil liberties and a perpetual disregard for the spirit of democracy? What can we do about it?

In this context, a session on "Love and Liberty" may seem strange, almost an embarrassment to bring "love" into play at a political convention. The proposition we are exploring -- even proposing -- here is that "love", somehow understood, is a critical missing ingredient in our attitude towards the social and political world, and that without it we have no foundation for civil society or for the true flourishing of humanity that is at the heart of liberty.

Our four panelists will all bring a different interpretation of what that "love" is. For Mike Edwards, thinker, writer and development expert, there are personal attitudes and dispositions of care and friendship which can build mutually reinforcing cycles of political and personal change. Sheila Rowbotham, historian and philosopher of feminism, describes in her recent biography of Edward Carpenter a life that seeks to unite "inner" and "outer" democracy, making a politics out of the everyday experiences of work, sex, home and community. Marina Warner, cultural critic and feminist writer, highlights the importance of the imaginary and the aesthetic in shaping political possibility. Satish Kumar, a spiritual voice of ecology, brings the love of nature and the change of consciousness it requires to centre of building a good, just and sustainable world.

So what has love got to do with it?

For the very radical early nineteenth century Jeremy Bentham, a world ordered by the calculation of utility---the greatest good for the greatest number---is one that has at its core all the natural sympathy and egalitarianism that progress requires. Social problems become technical problems of calculation; society is a causal and computational nexus of utilities. Utility was a kind of civic religion.

However, the "short 20th century" was marked by the horror of the hubristic, dehumanising reason that this sort of technocratic view eventually produces. We should remember Hannah Arendt's view of totalitarianism: it is not evil that creates horror, it is action in the absence of thought. Much of the loss of civil liberty that forms a reason for our coming together can be seen as excused and caused by that view of politics as "the rational adminsitration of things" (in the words of Saint Simon, strange John the Baptist for the database state). Security and efficiency, all go with discretionary executive power.

We will be exploring the role of the emotional, affective, aesthetic, personal, cultural and dispositional in creating another sort of politics, one which really can deliver a modern liberty. There is a long tradition of the serious examination and analysis of "civic religion" -- of the types of consciousness that society must make possible in order to be a good, just and free society. From Rousseau through JS Mill, as well as later in the syndicalist and anarchist traditions, there is a sense that the emotional attachments to society matter to politics. This is what this session is about.

I've just completed my second turn on the front page rota, handing over to Kanishk tomorrow, who hands over in turn to David, who hands over to Tom, then Rosemary then Susan. The system is getting a little less hectic, both in terms of my own preparing for the weekbut also with all the sections on the site getting used to highlighting material that should be considered for the front page. The goal is to make a distributed publication with components all sharing a "family resemblance" that amounts to the openDemocracyy core brand and values. It requires a trade-off between control and freedom that proving exciting to experiment with.

The week had some excellent reflections on the Iranian revolution (I particularly liked this). We carried a lot of material on civil liberties---a current focus given our sponsorship of the Convention on Modern Liberty---for example these posts on the disturbing question of the UK as a torturing state, and a long, three part piece that I have been working on for a while about the relationship between technology and liberty (here, here and here). The Russia section is producing a lot of excellent material, for example distressing piece on the economy of the regions.

We had just under 110,000 page views this week on the main site - that excludes forums and the wiki (about 15,000 pageviews on top) but includes the sections. The most popular articles are shown in the picture here:

If the crisis turns into a new Great Depression, it will most likely be due to a breakdown of cooperation among the major economies. But sustaining international cooperation requires domestic support; ignoring the demands of poor and middle-class citizens for relief will inflame more extreme anti-globalisation views, making international cooperation much more difficult.

 

If the current crisis turns into a disaster on the order of the Great Depression, it will most likely be due to a breakdown of cooperation among the major economies. The history of the modern world economy - and especially of its collapse in the 1930s - makes clear that the principal powers have to work together if they are to maintain an integrated international economic order.

International cooperation needs domestic support for openness

Yet governments are only able to make the sacrifices necessary to sustain international cooperation if they can rely, in turn, on domestic political support for an open world economy. National publics unconvinced of the value of international integration will not back policies - often costly and difficult policies - to maintain it. This can lead - again, as in the 1930s - to a perverse process in which global economic failure undermines support for economic openness, which leads governments to pursue uncooperative policies, which further weakens the global economy.

On both dimensions, international and domestic, we are in trouble. So far, despite high-sounding internationalist rhetoric, governments have responded to the crisis with policies that take little account of their impact on other nations. And the crisis has dramatically reduced domestic public support for globalisation, and for national policies to sustain it.

Why reasonable governments do unreasonable things

On the international dimension, the threat is not so much of explicit protectionism but rather of nationally specific policies that impose costs on others, directly or indirectly.

These beggar-thy-neighbour policies are not normally the result of some inexplicable bloody-mindedness on the part of venal governments, or of purposeful antagonism toward rivals. They are, instead, desperate attempts to defend national economies from gathering storms. But they impose negative externalities on other countries, and in so doing can provoke hostile reactions that can drag all parties concerned into bitter conflict.

Not out of arrogant nationalism but out of domestic desperation

The early-October Irish blanket deposit guarantee, implemented with the perfectly understandable goal of avoiding a bank panic in a small and vulnerable economy, nearly induced a run on British banks as British depositors rushed to transfer funds from British to Irish banks. The current American financial bailout is drawing capital from the rest of the world - including from emerging markets that urgently need it - not out of arrogant nationalism but out of domestic desperation. And the buy-American provisions of the current stimulus package demonstrate the ease with which well-intentioned policies can turn into uncooperative predation.

The range of policies of this type - sincere national initiatives with counter-productive international implications - is virtually endless.

Negative externalities galore

Support for troubled national firms can turn into anti-competitive subsidies to national champions. Currency depreciation, a common recommendation for difficult times, can put competitive pressure on trading partners, leading to round after round of "competitive devaluations." Debt-averse governments can limit the size of their fiscal stimulus, thereby free riding on the deficit spending of neighbours. Countries with intolerable foreign debt burdens can seek debt write-downs that further cripple creditor-country financial markets. And all of these can interact to create powerful protectionist pressures. One country's fiscal stimulus can "leak" into a neighbour, draw in a surge of imports from the neighbour, and provoke a bitter protectionist backlash.

Even with the best of intentions, governments can act in ways that drive wedges among countries, block cooperative responses to the crisis, and ultimately make everyone worse off. And despite today's flowery rhetoric, there is little evidence that national policymakers are willing or able to take into account the international implications of their actions.

If this pattern continues, it will be a major obstacle to a rapid recovery.

Will anyone speak for the rest of the world?

National governments rarely consider global consequences, because their constituents are domestic and national publics are very sceptical about the contemporary world economy.

Even before the crisis hit, there had been real erosion in popular support for globalisation. Economic integration has come to be associated with job losses, competitive pressures, and a worsening of income distribution in developed and developing countries alike. Nearly universally, the lower registers of the income distribution are most dubious about the benefits of international economic integration, and these doubts are particularly widespread in more unequal societies.

The crisis has heightened suspicion of a world economy that appears to be the source of much of our current predicament. There is increasing resentment that the expansion of the past ten years primarily helped the wealthy, while the poor and middle classes are being asked to sacrifice to deal with the hangover of the binge. This is coupled with similar resentment that governments appear to privilege the concerns of international banks and corporations. There is an advancing popular view that insulation will help reinforce national attempts to deal with the crisis.

National publics will increasingly resist making national sacrifices in order to honour international economic obligations. Meanwhile, concentrated interests who support globalisation - such as the international financial and corporate sectors - have been undermined by international economic weakness. Broad popular sentiment is increasingly widespread and powerful that national responses to the crisis must take priority over international obligations.

Attention must be paid: Crisis's impact on income distribution

The impact of the crisis on income distribution cannot be ignored, for it will determine much of the politics of government responses to the crisis. Ignoring the demands of poor and middle-class citizens for relief will inflame more extreme anti-globalisation views, making international cooperation that much more difficult.

These two dimensions, the international and the domestic, are closely interrelated. The less domestic support there is for globalisation, the harder it will be for national governments to reach cooperative agreements with partners. The less international cooperation there is, the greater the likelihood of a deterioration in the global economy. As in the 1930s, beggar-thy-neighbour policies, distributional conflicts, and international economic stagnation could feed on each other in a downward dance.

Into the maelstrom?

Governments have to act consciously to counteract this dismal possibility.

• At the domestic level, governments need to work out an equitable and politically sustainable allocation of austerity across the population. This means ensuring that those sectors of society hit hardest by the crisis are not also the ones asked to bear the stiffest sacrifices. Societies with existing social safety nets will have to expand them and make sure they work for wider segments of the population than they were planned. Countries with weak or non-existent social programs for the victims of crises such as this will have to create them, and quickly. By the same token, basic principles of equity - and even more basic political realities - demand that those who received the main benefits of the boom have to bear their share of the costs of the bust. Governments that ignore the social and distributional implications of the crisis are likely to find themselves either driven toward extreme and counter-productive policies, or swept away. Even sustaining existing social programs is extraordinarily difficult in such hard times. This is true of all governments, which face powerful fiscal pressures as tax revenues dry up and demands for spending soar. The difficulties are especially challenging for developing countries, many of which have lost whatever access they may have had to external sources of capital. Yet governments that do not provide effective relief to those hardest hit by the crisis face the prospect of dramatically increased social and political strife, which will only deepen the disaster.
• At the international level, governments need to work just as consciously to coordinate not just words, but actions. This will not happen of its own accord. So far, the solidarity of OECD central bankers has been impressive. However, this builds upon a long-standing tradition of the solidarity of central bankers, and upon decades of institutionalised collaboration, and can only take us a very short part of the way. There is nothing analogous on other dimensions.

The free interplay of government policies will not spontaneously bring forth international cooperation
Jeffrey A Frieden is Professor of Government at Harvard University. This article is based on a column in Vox. Additional material by Dennis Nottebaum
Collaboration among governments has to be intended, designed, and monitored. This almost certainly requires some international institutional framework, some set of agreed-upon rules and ways of enforcing them. The governments of the major economic centres need to consult regularly on the international dimensions of the crisis, and of its resolution. They need to hold each other to account, and they need some reasonably independent mechanism to identify policies that risk driving governments toward conflict rather than mutual assistance. Other foreign policy goals can and should be linked to supportive efforts on the economic front.

Conclusion

If governments do not pay real attention to the domestic distributional impact of the emergency, and to the international implications of their national policies, the current calamity will feed on itself. The Great Depression of the 1930s was more a failure of national policy, and of international cooperation, than it was a failure of markets. Success in confronting the current crisis will similarly depend on socially responsive and viable national policies, and on globally responsive and viable international cooperation.

Gareth Young (Lewes, CEP): Gordon Brown’s British nationalism project has been seriously struggling of late. The recommendations of Citizen Goldsmith were remorselessly mocked, a British Football Team now looks unlikely and plans for a museum of Britishness have been scaled back.

But amidst all the gloom there are encouraging signs for Gordon Britishness Brown, as the green shoots of a nascent British nationalism appear on the picket lines of oil refineries, construction sites and power stations the length and breadth of Britain. Bonds of belonging, common purpose and shared values are all evident in spades, and the decision of Scottish and Welsh workers to come out in a display of British solidarity with their English counterparts, and to Gordon’s clarion call of “British Jobs for British Workers“, is a delicious irony.

As someone who has lost about 50% of his colleagues to an Indian call centre over the past year, I have a certain sympathy for those British workers fighting to protect their livelihoods, and I will shed no tears for a prime minister hoist by his own petard.

But are there any lessons for Gordon? Yes, I think there are.

1. Don’t steal BNP slogans.
2. Leave British nationalism and economic protectionism to the BNP. They are more left-wing than you, and for all their faults they have a clear idea of what it means to be British - when they say “British Jobs for British Workers” they mean it.
3. Put emphasis on a pragmatic unionism: economic, not cultural, solidarity.

Personal genomics is poised to enter the consumer realm with all the whiz and bang that citizen media did in 2008. Suddenly, with the help of companies like Knome and 23andMe, those on the path to self-knowledge will be able to procure a full or partial sequence of their genome to unlock the fundamental secrets of the psyche. Personal genomics will be the ultimate litmus test of why we are the way we are. There will be no more need to confabulate why you are allergic to peanuts, close your left eye in bright sun, are woefully obese or got cancer at 45. It doesn’t just run in the family anymore. It runs in you. You will point to a long combination of adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, conveniently folded in your breast pocket or downloaded to your iPhone, and explain everything to your thoroughly wowed cocktail party.

Maybe. Since Watson and Crick, geneticists have known genes express heritable traits that have been handed off to us over generations. How those traits can be interpreted in the age of personal genomics is complicated however. Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist at Harvard, recently submitted himself to 23andMe for genomic mapping. His results confirmed items he already knew about himself (above average intelligence, a predilection for walking), raised some potential reasons for worry (26.8 percent chance for Type 2 diabetes) and imparted some pretty useless errata, like the average odds for red hair. Pinker’s hair (see below) is a mass of gray.

Pinker notes that, while there is a “horoscopelike fascination of learning about genes that predict your traits,” the technology for interpreting our genomes for the public good is not up to scratch. Rather, most personal genomic technologies scan for common mismatches in the gene sequence that could cause a certain result your phenotype. Scanning for missing or repeated DNA is not part of the package yet. And identifying bumps in the sequence doesn’t necessarily advance our knowledge if we don’t know how many bumps, or at what frequency those bumps, cause a certain disease. Even if you discover you have the precise genetic sequence for obesity, no doctor can do anything with that information to help you avoid an untimely death from obesity-related complications. Eating less may still be the best prognosis, and it costs far less than a $100,000 gene scan.<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <![endif]-->

Pinker has authored seven books on the nature of the homo sapiens and takes an evolutionary view to explain the puzzle of our species. When he spoke to Big Think he delved into his primary field of study, linguistic generativity with a particular focus on the nebula of irregular verbs. Grammar and language, Pinker argues, are hard-wired into our brains. When a child learns the word for a certain food, it evokes, like a page from the original hunter-gatherer lexicon, certain innate concepts. And over time these concepts imbue the word with a whole family of words and the child's gustatory vocabulary develops.

But, as other linguists have argued, one fundamental law of genetics undercuts this innate acquisition theory: generational variation. Thanks to Watson and Crick, we know variation occurs in the gene sequence. Thus, there would always be certain offspring born without entire concepts of language. They would go through life without the linguistic associations that come with "t-bone steak" or "Brussels sprouts." But such is not the case. Everyone child learns a vocabulary of food. Brussels sprouts are "yucky," a t-bone “delicious” and, unless Pinker's next foray into personal genomics will be to uncover a DNA-level support for his innate acquisition concept, social influences, more than evolution, seem to determine why we say what we say. Watch the video above for more on Pinker’s research.

 

I hand over front page duties to Kanishk next week, then David, then Susan, then Rosemary then back to me. Anthony will join in when the Convention is over.

Why the rota? The idea is that we all work on various parts of the site, commissioning, writing and editing. But bringing the front page together everyday requires thinking about all sorts of trade-offs and about the contribution of each part to the whole. There is no better way of making each part aware of the constraints of the whole by having many people take the reins for a period.

When I explained to a mathematician friend the basic constraints ofpublishing on oD - what capacity we have for articles on the front page; how many readers per day we have; how the various parts of the site develop their own readership, and I further explained that I thought everyone should have responsibility for a part of the whole - heclaimed that sharing in space and sharing in time should come to exactly the same thing. It would be as good to divide the front page into some number of zones, with each person with responsibility over "theirs" as to divide up the year into slots where each person would have responsibility. Clearly, he had taken the level to a level of abstraction too high - splitting in time still imposes the task of creating a unified whole, from quote to lead to which block goes where to pacing ... which a split in space of the front page would never have offered. Anyway, we're experimenting with the sharing through time rather than space.

I'm working hard with Julian to make the publishing process -- everything from picture research to sub-editing to creating shortened versions for syndication and preparing the emails for dispatch -- so standardised that we can start to expand the distributed network of helpers and volunteers. 

Between the rota and the volunteer-based publishing network, we're moving towards the goal of having a mechanism that will wikify the production of agenda-driven analysis.... 

 

Today was pretty Gaza-dominated on the site again. Over in the forums, Gaza-related threads are getting very long and heated. Just asn an example, Iron Mike posted this one on Hamas being the blame for the war, and it now has 110 replies. I think that Avi Shlaim's devastating history of Israel's post-1947 treatment of Palestinians should be read by all those in that thread. It is very powerful to hear this story told by "someone who served loyally in the
Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of
the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders."

We published on the economy too. Godfrey Hodgson celebrates the return of the economically powerful state, while Simon Zadek sees the hope for real accountability in capital allocation mechanisms. Simon links the solution of the financial crisis and the environmental crisis: both are failures to hold the powerful to account for all the consequences of their actions. I hope Simon is right. I feel that the solutions may be less technocratic than he seems to suggest---redesigning incentive systems is unlikely without a firm purpose, and that needs a strong, positive vision to take hold. On that, we could do better.

 There is a very moving story of vision in Jane Gabriel's interview of legend film-maker Theo Angelopoulos. He is interesting on the riots ... but also on the optimism of his own generation: 

"
I belong to an older generation, a generation that believed that
change was possible, that it was possible to change the world, that it
was possible to open up a new path. My generation believed that it was
possible not only to dream of a new world, but also to turn dreams into
realities. It didn't happen. I think we are all carrying the shadow of
disappointment and failure. "

 But read to the end. It is brimming with hope.

We have a huge amount of good material coming in. That's one thing crises do -- send thinking people to write. We don't have the capacity to transform all of it into publishable material. Hat tip to the volunteers in the publishing network without whom output would slow to a trickle!

Oh ... and yesterday's intruder on the Gaza box. He's now written suggesting some writers we might like to commission. That's an improvement in method :)

The towers of Qatar’s work-in-progress skyline go up by the week. The roads, by the day. Traffic lights rise up over night, and broken flyovers pay tribute to the lifeless landscape. By the busload, at the break of day and late into the night, blue, green, and yellow-uniformed armies of migrant workers make the journey from labour camp to construction site.

 

Watch the slideshow

<!--more--> The Gulf peninsula’s expatriate labour force comes mainly from Central and South-East Asia, with the bulk of construction workers being Indian, Sri Lankan, Filipino and particularly, Nepalese.

High above the ground on often ramshackle scaffolding, or digging waist-deep in sandy trenches, Qatar’s unskilled and semi-skilled migrant workforce take home an average of 600 Qatari riyals (US$160) per month, most of which is sent back to their families in their home country. Living conditions are cramped, and work consists of a 10-hour day of heavy, physical labour, in sticky, summer temperatures only slightly under 50 degrees centigrade, and blowy, winter mornings close to five degrees, with one or no days off.

But they are the fortunate ones. A recent investigation into Nepalese migrants showed that many prospective workers arrive on the promise of a steady job, only to find themselves dwelling at the airport for days. Sleeping on the floor, eating hand-outs and drinking water from public facilities, they wait for an employer that will never come because employment contracts set up back home have been bogus. Stranded, and frequently having borrowed money from the local community to make the journey, they have no choice but to do what they can to find another US$1,000 to return home.

In an emirate where nationals account for barely one fifth of the total population of just over 1.5 million, Qatar’s immense oil and gas wealth, due to the domestic ownership of nearly all its assets, means a recorded income of around US$80,000 per person – over forty times the actual amount earned by those who build the nation.

With Gulf states’ customary fiscal surpluses set to narrow next year as the global economic downturn sinks in and oil prices average $56 per barrel from a high of around $150 per barrel six months ago, the realignment of investments could have a sharp impact on migrant labour, with big business construction contracts risking cancellation.

Migrant labour trends from low-wage south east Asian countries are already showing signs of slowing, meaning a severe dent to heavy remittance-dependent economies in the region and potential migrant workers’ families going unfed.

Qatar, however, propped up by a sovereign wealth fund in excess of $50bn worth of assets, a predominant gas-exporting over oil-exporting industry, and forecasts that show the break-even oil price per barrel that will balance its budget at $38, looks reasonably likely to weather the storm and sustain its inflow of working migrants.

Back on the Front Page rota. During the long Christmas break, we had the "Best of" taking up the right hand side and occasional pieces on the left hand side. The crisis in Gaza started before we had planned to start active, disciplined publishing again. Paul Rogers wrote an analytical, clear and devastating assessment of the security aspects. The piece has attracted a great deal of commentary - polarised but serious.

Over the week-end I set up a Diigo group to collect must-reads on the crisis. I emailed the openDemocracy staff suggesting they add material to it. I added a few other people to the distribution list whom I thought would be doing some interesting reading on the crisis. I told everyone that whatever they tagged in the group would be reproduced in the "Gaza" box on the top right of the page.

Fine ... it all seemed to be working v.well. Until this afternoon, when I received a shocked email from a loyal reader: "I am writing to share my surprise (and disgust) at the fact that opening open democracy.net today to access a (fantastic) article about climate change I discovered a “gaza” tab on the right listing no less than 5 posts that are 100% pro Israel. Open Democracy had shown better balance than this in the past and I am deeply disappointed."

When I went to the tab, I indeed recognised none of the articles there. A bit of digging and I discovered that a certain Michael Bremmer had joined the diigo group and was posting this very unbalanced material. I have no idea who Michael Bremmer is. I tried a little sleuthing to see if I could figure who had let him into the group -- there was no simple way to tell. I presume that at some degree of remove, my email inviting a small number of trusted readers had somehow made its way to Michael Bremmer who immediately spammed the Gaza box. I think I fixed the leak and the box is now back to being something I am happy with.

Thank you to our concerned reader. Many eyes make light work, as Wikipedians know. The episode also made me realise how rapidly I could come to a sense of violation --- someone unwelcome had sneaked in and  left an illegitimate trace on the site. My heart goes out to all those who have had treasured domains hacked or otherwise taken away from them. 

 

Baghdad’s infamous Green Zone quietly slipped into Iraqi hands on the first day of 2009. The US embassy is moving to its new fortifications nearby and the hallmarks of American culture that sustained American troops–from Starbucks to Pizza Hut–have been re-exported. But as the US military relinquished control of the huge swath of Euphrates River frontage they have occupied since the spring of 2003, questions remained over how Iraqis will govern from the new Green Zone. Though the national security situation has improved dramatically, and is now completely under an Iraqi mandate, some analysts say insurgents will surely test the zone’s new owners. Big Think looks back on the history of the American-controlled Green Zone with three items: an excellent critique of the zone from the counter-insurgency experts at Small Wars Journal last May; the International Republican Institute’s 46-page “Visitor’s Guide to Baghdad’s Green Zone” (removed from centcom website but available at Wired); and a vivid account of Baghdad’s chaos in 2006 by Time correspondent Aparisim Ghosh. With the occupation in the process of being dismantled, at least militarily, conflict experts can begin to wade through the sea of analyses--spurious and valid--that pave the way to the history textbooks. A good starting place might be the comments of Michael Walzer, Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies. He spoke to Big Think about applying the theory of a just war to the Iraq debacle.

 

I was on my way to an exhibition and the sales yesterday - seeing the headlines on a poster about demonstrators at the Israeli Embassy, I changed my plans.  Only a small but furious crowd , no one I knew, no banner or posters identifying who anyone was, all united  by our righteous anger at the cruel and barbaric bombing of Gaza.

It is a strange and lonely place, to be of Jewish origin in such a situation, thinking of friends and family living in Israel, who also question the hubris and violence of their government. Difficult  also when one of the young men started shouting ‘Nazis!’, but he stopped when I quietly suggested that it was not a good slogan.
It is not difficult to understand his visceral rage and youthful urge to hurl the worst of all insults, and not difficult to understand why the boy wearing a combat jacket was clutching a home made catapult,  after the arrests and assaults the day before, it seemed best to just tell him to put  it away and warn him of possible trouble ahead from the police.

The media were out in force, they focussed on the young and angry , we the elderly and middle aged had gathered by now - alongside the miracle of London’s magical mixture ,veiled, unveiled old and young punky and respectable , Islamic men in long robes and an elderly Jewish man in a tweed hat who spoke with passion of the special responsibility that Jews carry - not to be merely spectators to barbarism and his urgent need to come and protest, he had a warm exchange with a young man by his side explaining why it was the Israeli State that must be condemned not the Israeli people.

It was bitterly cold but as I turned to leave I saw the amazing veteran Tony Benn, a retired British MP, who passionately opposed the dreadful war in Iraq, and has become a beacon of progressive thinking in the UK, at least 25 years older than me out at an edgy demonstration, in the freezing cold, an inspiring model for all of us -young and old.

We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.

Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.

This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally.

Let's do so.

John Berger