Gareth Young invited me to ‘The Future of England’.  A debate that followed the annual general meeting of the Campaign for an English Parliament. In plucky fashion it was held in the House of Commons on the day of the State Opening of Parliament. There were more than a hundred crowded into Committee Room 10. I enjoyed it and came away thinking it would last and grow. Not least because it was not the usual gathering of middle-class disenchanted.

Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now in Parliament to give the Secretary of State power to amend copyright law by statutory instrument, effectively allowing he and his successors to do anything, without parliamentary approval or debate, provided it is done in the name of protecting copyright. 

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing has the details:

Parliamentary rebellions, we might be led to believe, are a declining practice that ought to be revived, since they are integral to a strong Parliament. This view needs revising on a number of counts. 

The latest research by Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart of the University of Nottingham was reported in the Telegraph on Tuesday, demonstrating that the pronounced tendency for Labour MPs to rebel that emerged during the Tony Blair premiership has continued under Gordon Brown. During the parliamentary session just ended, Labour MPs rebelled on 74 occasions, a rate of 30 per cent. Moreover, since 2005 a total of six whipped votes have been lost by the government, a post-war record for a party with a majority of more than 60. What should these figures mean to those with an interest in democratic reform?

A new history of the Workers' Party inspires Robin Wilson to reflect on a movement that helped to change the face of modern Ireland

Ever since the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent war of independence, progressive politics in Ireland has been bedevilled by the dominance of the ethnicised version of republicanism which was then first enshrined in martyrdom and later became the official ideology of the southern Irish state.

That this ‘revolutionary’ movement parodied the paramilitarism of Protestant integral nationalism resisting ‘home rule’, and that it only prevailed because of the repressive British response to the 1916 Putsch and the subsequent efforts to impose wartime conscription are historical ironies long lost. Throughout the 20^th century, the discourse of the ‘men of 1916’—including the masculinism—set the terms against which all radical currents of opinion positioned themselves.

Most starkly, while the extension of the franchise to all adult males in the 1918 Westminster election allowed Labour to flourish in Britain, forming a minority government within a matter of years and a radical, reforming government after the next global conflagration, in Ireland, the republican leader Eamon de Valera declared that ‘Labour must wait’ and for two generations after this electoral abstention Labour politics were retarded as patterns of political affiliation were established by the civil war over the 1921 treaty with Britain defining the Free State. The party was to be perennially confined to be junior partner in a coalition dominated by one or other of the ‘civil war’ parties, never empowered to institute the Keynesian economic and Beveridgean welfare policies which underpinned social-democratic success in post-war Europe.

In today’s globalised world, those predominant parties, Fine Gael (whose predecessor wing of Sinn Féin backed the treaty) and Fianna Fáil (which split from an SF rump in 1926 having been on the opposing side), have become zombie categories, their particular historical roots and domestic ideological affiliations increasingly irrelevant. FG was identified following its emergence from a quasi-fascist movement as the party of ‘order’, while FF set its objectives as the reunification of Ireland, divided by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, and promotion of Irish, defined by De Valera’s 1937 constitution as the ‘first official language’—all ill-starred political goals.

At seven minutes, it was certainly a short speech. The main focus was clearly on building a manifesto platform on the economy, the budget deficit, and social care, to fight the next election.  But this was also the first Queen's speech since Westminster's name was dragged through the gutter by expenses and the last before an imminent general election. So, where was the bold action we were promised to redistribute power and rebuild trust in politics?

Barroness Buscombe, the new Tory chair of the Press Complaints Commission, is reported to be considering extending the remit of the PCC to include blogs.

Anyone who knows anything about how the PCC works (or doesn't) will know that this is a very bad idea and potentially a serious threat to the independence and integrity of blogging. This is especially so given the fact the PCC is run by people in the mainstream media who have an obvious interest in restricting the activities of bloggers.

What goodies does tomorrow’s Queen’s Speech have in store then? One of the things it may contain is a proposal that would require innocent people to pay £200 to fight to have their DNA removed from the national database.

According to the Telegraph: “A new power will allow members of the public to challenge a chief constable's refusal to delete their profiles in court - but they will have to pay an application fee to do so.”

Contributed by Alex Holland, associate editor of The Samosa, a new website with a focus on South Asia and British asians. For a full discussion of the left's divergent reactions to the policing of protest, see Stuart White at the Next Left.

Unlike some on the left, I do see a role for police surveillance of domestic protest groups. On the day of the 15 February 2003 anti-Iraq war demo, aka "the big one", I was a volunteer steward on the march. Part of what I did that day was act as a liaison between the march organisers and the police.

I stood beside police officers in a room located beneath the famous neon signs in Piccadilly Circus, watching a river of demonstrators go by. While there I saw undercover police, dressed as protestors, dashing up from the demo into the office and pointing out people on spotter cards, like those shown recently in The Guardian. They then quickly returned to the crowd to keep tracking the movements of targeted demonstrators.

I had mixed feelings about this. The vast majority of protestors I had contact with were, like me, entirely non-violent, law-abiding people who did not deserve to be spied on. However as a volunteer organiser in the European Social Forums, I did know of those who looked for confrontation at demonstrations, especially some Greek and Spanish anarchists. Stop the War organisers were genuinely concerned that demonstrations should not get violent and were generally not unsympathetic to police intelligence efforts to help with this. However I still knew back then what the Guardian has highlighted now. That police surveillance is performed in a way that goes well beyond monitoring a genuinely extreme minority. Its main aim instead seems to be more about deterring legitimate dissent. These tactics have not only been an abuse of people's democratic right to protest. The current approach is also a gross waste of resources that could have been put into tackling genuine violent threats.

Watch Dispatches on Channel 4 this evening at 8pm. Peter Oborne presents a brave expose of the British lobby in the UK. Not that they do anything illegal, just that they should do it in the light. openDemocracy, supported by OurKingdom has published the pamphlet that accompanies the programme. You can read it, and the publishers statement by Tony Curzon Price, oD's Editor-in-Chief, HERE. More on its significance later.

Yesterday I listened to the radio adaption of David Edgar's play about 1989 The Shape of the Table. You can hear it for the coming week here on its iPlayer. He kindly sent me an alert not least after reading my article 'We, the normal' which openDemocracy published and which I posted about here in OK. This is an exchange between Prus, a kind of Havel figure, and a traditional Communist leader,Lutz

Significant new research on quangos is published today by the Local Government Association (LGA) and reported in today’s Daily Telegraph as further evidence that quangos are ‘unrepresentative, closed to scrutiny and offer bad value’.

The LGA report examines eleven quangos which have close connections to the work of local government, ranging from the Environment Agency to the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) and the mammoth new Homes and Community Agency (HCA). While these eleven bodies (or 19 if we count the RDAs as separate organisations) represent a fraction of the 790 Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPB) currently in operation, they account for around one quarter of their spending. The budget of the HCA alone clocks in at 10 per cent of all NDPB expenditure.

A month ago, Democratic Audit teamed up with Unlock Democracy and OurKingdom to launch a new pamphlet, The Unspoken Constitution, satirising the UK’s constitutional arrangements. Inspired by a suggestion made in jest by Graham Allen MP, the document seeks to condense vast tomes of evidence about the UK’s manifold democratic deficiencies into a ‘spoof’ constitution of a few thousand words. Led by Stuart Weir, we sought to produce a text which would be recognised as being authoritative and scholarly as well as critical and funny.

It was a challenging and time-consuming task and we are pleased that The Unspoken Constitution has met with widespread acclaim. But we are also disappointed that we have been subject to so little criticism. After all, what we really wanted to do was to start a debate – and so far it has been a little one-sided.

As Ian Parsley noted at OurKingdom last year, the wall may be down in Berlin, but there are still plenty of them in Belfast. The BBC this week highlighted the work of some of the people who are trying to change that.

Among them is Tony Macaulay, who outlined the scale of the problem at a recent talk in London.

There are 88 barriers, they arent all walls. There are 88 what we would call interface barriers in Northern Ireland. There are a few in Derry/Londonderry, a few in Portadown/Craigavon. The vast majority are in Belfast. Most of them are in North Belfast. The biggest one is in West Belfast, separating the Falls from the Shankill, where I come from.

More barriers have gone up in the ten years following the ceasefires, than in the ten years before the ceasefires. These walls have continued to be erected through the peace process, through the political agreement, the ceasefires and all of that.

The most recent official one was erected in the grounds of an integrated primary school, And there are also now walls still being erected to this day in new private developments, where the private developer decides that people will want to live in an area more if there's a wall separating them from "the other side".

Macaulay was speaking at the Hammersmith Irish Centre, to mark the start of an exhibition by photographer Louise Jefferson and journalist Stephen Martin examining the symbols of separation that the walls represent.

Gordon Brown is a troubled man so the prevailing wisdom goes. He does have his demons to seek, from his flawed personality to the ghost of Tony Blair that won’t quite leave the stage. He is widely seen in the media as an unattractive mixture of indecision, control freakery and paranoia.

In a matter of years he has been transformed from being ‘the Iron Chancellor’ who was feared by the Tories he dismissed with consummate ease such as Michael Howard and Michael Portillo, to being seen as an object of ridicule whose grasp of the most basic political acumen is called into question. Modern politics in this worldview is about in Barack Obama’s telling phrase, ‘the quality of authenticity’, and in this Brown is seen not to cut it unlike that nice Tony Blair and David Cameron.

Some of this is about Brown’s previously inflated reputation now being revisited and rectified. Thus, Brown has gone from being seen as a colossus to an incompetent in a matter of years, where surely the truth lies somewhere in between for both his stints as Chancellor and Prime Minister. Some of it is also that he has been about so long, the media are bored with him, and that his ascent to the top has coincided with the fag end of the New Labour era and numerous chickens coming home to roost.

As I'm sure you've noticed by now, OurKingdom has migrated to a new site along with the rest of the openDemocracy clan. We hope you like the crisp new look of the re-designed site and the improved navigation and readability it offers. Special thanks must go to to OK's Thomas Ash for his impressive and patient tech work over the past six months.

There’s nothing I enjoy more than flushing out the lumpen xenophobes in the blogospehere, and I’m delighted to have done so again (Ed's note - the original comments on this article have been lost in our move to a new site  - we hope to recover and re-publish them soon). It’s good to be reminded that Europhobia attracts nasties they way jam pots attract hornets. But I mustn’t give in to the temptation to exchange insults with them, fun though it would be. I have a few clarifications to make to my original post.

I’m accused of lacking patriotism. That charge leaves my withers unwrung. Samuel Johnson said that patriotism was ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’ and, goodness knows, he was right. However, I am in fact proud of being British. But the Britain I’m proud of is the Britain that stood alone against Nazi Germany for twelve long months; that offered France a total merger with Britain, which would have joined the French and British states in one indissoluble union in 1940; that welcomed asylum seekers from the Hugenots to Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian pale, to Karl Marx, to the parents of Isaiah Berlin; that prided itself on an unarmed police and a long tradition of free speech and peaceful protest; and boasted that an Englishman’s home was his castle. Tragically, that Britain no longer exists. We are the most spied-upon nation in Europe, and one of the most spied-upon in the world; our Government has almost certainly been complicit in torture; our right to live our lives as we like is threatened by the remorseless advance of the data-base state; and instead of rejoicing in the protections to our liberties given us by the European Convention on Human Rights we have an Opposition party that constantly denigrates it, and media barons who lose no opportunity of whipping up illiterate contempt for the rest of the continent to which we belong.

Is activism dead – or is it blooming? Some look at the G20 demos or student occupations and see a vibrant youthful movement, taking on the injustices of the day. Others look at the same gatherings and see only a confused bedraggled crowd, a mere shadow of 1960s mobilisations. 

It is of course difficult to make generalisations about the state of activism. The most radical times have harboured losers as well as the heroes remembered by history. Yet over the past 10 years I have observed a shift in the state of activism - happily, for the better. 

There was a lot of heady talk about late 1990s anti-globalisation demos, but they were actually demoralising experiences. Everybody there was angry but it was not clear what they were angry about. The objects of their anger were big agents of power - America, Israel, corporations, capitalism, globalisation – but these seemed to be effigies against which to rage. Alongside big effigies were a million personal effigies: they were angry about the regulation of pigeons in Trafalgar square, the lack of love in the world or the building of bypasses. 

This was not a group of people calling for something to change in the world, but instead a gathering of discontent. For all the big crowds, there was a curious atomisation: nobody’s concerns seemed to relate to those of others, and in the end it came down to the narcissism of the activist performance. Cameras were everywhere.

Demonstrators in protective gear worried whether their shoulder pads looked okay. These gatherings of discontent came at a specific point in history. The old channels for political mobilisation had gone, but people – especially young people – were rightly still dissatisfied with the world. The social world was not perfect and they wanted to change things, yet they lacked a political vocabulary or political ends.

They had no sense of themselves as an interest group with specific demands, so the result was a disaggregated hostility to everything. Demonstrators talked the Marxist talk about capitalism and power interests but the protest was really founded on the pure sentiment of dissatisfaction. Recent protests against G20 in London or NATO in Strasbourg were very similar to these 1990s anti-globalisation rallies, with the same disparate vague anger, even the same anarchist groups. 

Yet at the same time, we are now seeing the birth of new kinds of groups, which are not gatherings of discontent butcommunities of interest.

Though largely unknown by many democratic reformers from around the UK, the Cornish Constitutional Convention and its drive for a Cornish Assembly continue with the release of - The Next Push (pdf).

Following hot on the heals of the Government of Cornwall Bill (pdf) produced by MP Dan Rogerson, the new paper comes at an opportune time. The debate on how to reform the UK's creaking democracy is well under way at POWER 2010. Current suggestions include: the creation of an English Parliament; further devolution to Wales; and, regional devolution within England. Why not throw the idea of a Cornish Assembly (pdf) into the mix once more.

The present starting point for the Convention's call for change is the newly created Cornwall Council. Can this Unitary Authority become a Cornish Assembly? The document's author responds with the following :

It is not difficult to see, or to achieve when the time comes, a set of changes which would enable the Assembly to be developed without any great change in structure. A slimmed Council would become the Assembly, assuming a higher role; the Delivery Areas would be democratised to become the delivery-driven local government of Cornwall, working with the Parishes to deliver services.

Envisaged as part of a wider program of asymmetric devolution, the arguments for Cornwall to be treated as its own region are re-examined and clearly re-stated. Additionally, although sure to irk both English nationalists and English regionalists alike, analysis of previous failed attempts at regionalisation within England can also be found. Take for example the following two extracts:

23. Nobody asked Cornwall if it wished to be subsumed into a macro-south west regional zone. It’s a pity that a Government, flushed with electoral success and reforming zeal, with Wales and Scotland excited by the prospects of devolution, and with a unique opportunity to de-centralise and to invigorate by not being jealous of power and control, did not take a moment to ask around. If it had set about regionalisation by asking for proposals for a regional network that could effectively replace the outworn legacy of World War 2 rationing and munitions supply, which included the enormous and dysfunctional ‘south west’, it would have received some innovative ideas which would have created a patchwork of regions, big and small, some founded on expediency, some upon industrial synergies and one – Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly - founded upon an historical, constitutional and cultural base and with a rapidly emerging will to positively address its growing economic failure and social deprivation.

24.

At the Labour party conference the Unlock Democracy stall displayed a selection of badges. I still haven’t pinned on the one that said ‘I want Local Power!’, because every time I think of doing so, I ask myself a rather pertinent question – do I really trust my local authority with more power? The great Edmund Burke said, “the greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse”. Some argue that local authorities already have too much power and are free to abuse it with relatively little scrutiny. It was only last year that Poole Borough Council was found to be conducting physical surveillance on families merely to ascertain whether they were living in the right school catchment areas for their children.

A statutory instrument made and laid before Parliament earlier this year will allow draconian police powers intended to catch out crime barons to be delegated to councils, quangos and agencies so that they may seize assets from members of the public. The powers will allow councils and financial investigators for organisations as diverse as Royal Mail, the Rural Payments Agency and Transport for London to freeze assets, search homes, seize cash, confiscate property and obtain private financial records. The new measures come into force this week and will allow these dangerous powers, intended to be used by Police for serious criminal investigation, to be used against fare dodgers, families unable to pay their council tax and other ‘dangerous criminals’. Up until now, the confiscation powers have been accessible to councils and other agencies only through the police. They will now be directly accessible without any police involvement. The statutory instrument, made on 2nd April and laid before Parliament on 14th April came into force on 12th May 2009, although it wasn’t until this week that the powers were delegated. Perhaps just as worrying as the new measures is the fact that there has been so little media coverage of them.

When it says that they were “laid before parliament” this means that parliament laid down before it. There was no discussion, debate, coverage, statement, or justification of a quite extraordinary and potentially dangerous extension of the coercive power of the state.

The confiscations powers or “Al Capone powers” were given to Police in 2003, intended by Parliament to be used to crack down on organised criminals by seizing their wealth. The intention was, according to David Blunkett, to target “the homes, yachts, mansions and luxury cars of the crime barons”. Call me crazy, but something tells me that families struggling to pay their council tax aren’t likely to own yachts, mansions and luxury cars. I’m also guessing crime barons don’t struggle to pay their council tax or hop over the ticket barriers on the Underground, yet the Home Office believe it’s acceptable to use the same measures on people who commit minor offences and almost certainly don’t live extravagant lifestyles.