The Anonymous 'V for Vendetta' mask is an icon of the Occupy movement. But how does this band of deviant web pirates fit with the Occupiers' apparent ethics of responsibility, transparency and democracy? Cole Stryker's new book goes some way towards deconstructing this tension.

The end of OurKingdom’s year-long debate on the Networked Society, making way for a new focus on the Occupy movement, comes at a formative moment in the future of online activism. Aaron Peters' excellent summing up of last year’s events demonstrated, amongst other things, the increasingly important role that networks have had in the mobilization of political resistance against states held to ransom by non-democratic financial bodies. His concluding question, 'What would it mean to 'occupy' everything?', is an urgent one, and in the context of the imminent Occupy LSX eviction and the low-key release of the networking site occupii.org, appropriately anxious.

One factor in danger of getting lost in this shift of emphasis onto Occupy, is the still germane issue of anonymous ‘hacktivism’, reference to which is notably absent from Aaron's walk back through 2011. Given the recent surge in DDoS attacks attributed to (capital a) Anonymous, including unprecedented assaults on government bodies supporting SOPA and ACTA, it is important that the online community do not make the same mistake as the mainstream media. We must keep this issue in discussion while the strategy of ‘occupy everything’ is being formulated.

In Place of Austerity: Reconstructing the economy, state and public services by Dexter Whitfield, Spokesman Books, £18.00

A few months ago, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA, posted a remarkable but little-noticed article on his blog, headlined ‘NPM – RIP’. Taylor wrote:

“The core ideas of NPM [new public management] – greater reliance on market based mechanisms and contracting out, greater separation of decision making, professional and process functions – have been in the ascendancy for at least two decades. Today, the evidence of their failure is all around. Public service productivity has stagnated and fallen in the countries where NPM has been most fully applied. In the UK, the Private Finance Initiative – which as well as being a crude way of circumventing short term public spending limits is also heavily influenced by NPM thinking – is now exposed as a disaster.”

The article was remarkable because, as Tony Blair's former chief advisor, Taylor was – in his own words – an ‘advocate and architect’ of such policies. ‘Now he tells us!’ was one of the more printable reactions from a public sector union campaigner who had battled NPM doctrine over the last decade.

It's been an extraordinary year in politics. In no particular order, here are ten books I enjoyed that can help make sense of what the hell is happening and what can be done.

@ is for Activism by Joss Hands: Pluto Press, 2010 The past year of riots and revolutions has proven beyond doubt that the terrain of collective action is being transformed by the internet. How exactly remains unclear since, too often, mainstream scholarship lags woefully behind the practice. Joss Hands’ book is a powerful exception. It provides rigorous theoretical analysis of how digitally-mediated social movements mobilise to challenge centres of power, placing recent developments within a broader history of technological transformation.

Hands discusses the fashionable idea of “swarm intelligence” but argues – rightly, in my view - that this concept lacks the necessary space for democratic deliberation within movements. He prefers to talk of Quasi Autonomous Recognition Networks (QARNs); loose associations, such as UK Uncut, bound together by agreement on certain things and able to expand rapidly through digital networks of communication. The QARN may be too much of a mouthful to catch on, but it’s a useful theoretical framework for activists and scholars to get to grips with as we enter a year in which networked movements will undoubtedly continue to play a critical role.

Liberalism: A Counter History by Domenico Losurdo: Verso, 2011. This is a major revisionist history of our dominant political tradition. If I had my way, it would be obligatory reading for schools minister Michael Gove, who, along with the neoconservative telly don Niall Ferguson, and other collaborators, is re-writing the History curriculum in line with the most boorish and parochial Whig triumphalism.

According to this self-congratulatory view, liberal ideas of individual independence, natural rights and limited government are discovered by progressive thinkers from John Locke onwards and then exported, along with the values of property and free trade, to initially resistant but ultimately grateful native populations in less civilised parts of the world. This is the mythology that Losurdo explodes. Since its earliest beginnings, he shows, liberalism has been profoundly at ease with inequality and exclusion. Liberals were systematic apologists for the most appalling practices of slavery, colonialism, ethnic genocide, patriarchy, and exploitation. Lorsurdo has great fun parading the most outrageous statements by the pantheon of liberal heroes, such Locke, de Tocqueville and Mill. This isn’t, he insists, a case of applying our own anachronistic moral standards to the past. All too often, it was liberals advocating barbaric practices against contemporaries, including ancien regime thinkers, such as Jean Bodin who combined a preference for absolute monarchy with staunch opposition to slavery.

There are some difficulties with Losurdo’s approach, not least who he defines as “liberals” (see here for an in-depth review by Ed Rooksby), but what lessons does it imply for radical thought? My own view is that the universal normative commitments of liberalism should not be repudiated entirely. It is far better to see liberalism as an incomplete version of socialism, rather than its polar opposite. The task of emancipatory thought is to radicalise the content of the liberal tenets of liberty and equality and dramatically expand the sphere of social relations to which they apply. This means first and foremost, challenging the property relation, the bedrock of exclusion, which, Losurdo shows, liberals have long been prepared to defend with terroristic violence.

The Politics of New Labour: A Gramscian Analysis by Andrew Pearmain: Lawrence and Wishart, £15.99

Downfall: The Tommy Sheridan Story by Alan McCombes: Birlinn, £9.99.

Stories which explain British politics and, in particular, Labour politics, capture a phenomenally narrow strip of the political landscape.

The classic accounts and influential books on British Labour have been like this: in them, life in the distant provinces of Scotland, Wales and the North of England exists only in a small walk-on cameo or primarily as a steady flow of cannon fodder for the Westminster world.

The Purple Book: Biteback, £9.99, September 2011.

Fight Back!: openDemocracy, Free, February 2011.

These two anthologies are poles apart. Fight Back!, published in February, documents the ‘winter of discontent’, the student protests of 2010-11. The Purple Book, published in September, sets out the ideas of Progress, the New Labour think tank, for the future of the Labour party. Both belong, then, in some nominal or residual sense, to the English Left, but in attitude and tone, the differences are enormous.

Among the contributors to The Purple Book (TPB) there is a preponderance of ex-ministers and ministers-in-waiting, (such as Liam Byrne, Peter Mandelson, Tessa Jowell, Liz Kendall and John Woodcock). Despite a few flashes of radicalism and creativity (Tristram Hunt on mutuals and Steve Reed and Paul Brant on community organising) it is the middle-of-the-road, give-the-swing-voters-what-they-want arguments of Mandelson and Robert Philpot (head of Progress and editor of TPB) that dominates. There is a stress on localism and citizen empowerment, in an effort to reappropriate the ‘big society’, backed up by ritualistic references to Labour’s decentralising heritage; but in the end, this is still much the same old New Labour.

The Purple Book, ed. Robert Philpot, Biteback Publishing, September 2011.

Political colours are all the vogue at the moment. We have had Red Tories and Orange Book Liberals. And now we have the latest manifestations, Blue Labour and Purple Labour.

The last two are signs of some intellectual activity in British Labour, as it tries to come to terms with the post-Blair/Brown era.

Blue Labour is associated with Ed Miliband’s favourite guru, Maurice Glasman. It emphasises community, authority and the need for the state to provide some solidarity in society.

Purple Labour is the creation of ‘Progress’, who have this week published ‘The Purple Book’ which brings together 22 contributors including a whole pile of former ministers and special advisers representing the Blairite political classes, plus Douglas Alexander.

Kettled Youth, by Dan Hancox, Vintage Digital, July 2011. 

The very best kinds of journalism, which are rare and difficult to accomplish, are not those which seek to present a spurious, pseudo-objective ‘balance’, but which dwell in the heart of their subject matter, overturn orthodoxies, present an event from its inside. By that definition, Dan Hancox’s new pamphlet Kettled Youth (available on Kindle or iPad) is very good journalism indeed. In the pursuit of such ends it can be easy to traduce or simplify one’s subjects, or cede to the tabloid instinct for pruriency, or search for the ‘telling’ detail confirming a reader’s prejudices. That Hancox avoids doing so on a subject so extensively written-about as the largely youth-centred uprisings and ‘student movement’ of the end of last year is laudable. That he chooses to pursue instead an understanding of a difficult, politically complex and defining moment in the beginning of the anti-austerity struggle makes the piece crucial reading.

Bob Marshall-Andrews and Richard Wainwright were two MPs who, in very different ways, belonged to the honourable and increasingly rare breed of parliamentarians who brought integrity and a willingness to speak up to the House of Commons, the public and their parties.

Off Message: The complete antidote to political humbug, Bob Marshall-Andrews, Profile Books, £16.99 hardback; Unfinished Business; Richard Wainwright, the Liberals and Liberal Democrats, Matt Cole, Manchester University Press, £65 hardback.

One of the most effective protections of our governing political-media consensus is to label those who question it as “mavericks”, i.e., as rogue and unpredictable steers.  I am afraid that the marketing of Marshall-Andrews’s rollicking memoir plays into this scenario to the detriment of understanding the serious and principled role he played in the House of Commons from 1997 to 2007. New Labour of course had other ploys too.  Marshall-Andrews recounts how Lord Levy branded him as a “trot” to his friend Lord Razzall. (This was a technique they deployed against many of us on the left in the party. When I became editor of the New Statesman in 1987 I was interviewed by journalists from the Times and Sunday Times, both of whom had been briefed that I was a Monster Raving Hard Left Loonie by the party’s managers.)

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, by Owen Jones, Verso, June 2011. 

Owen Jones has taken on a big job documenting the way most of the citizens of these islands are commonly portrayed. It’s a task long overdue given the changes that have turned “the salt of the earth” into the target of routine abuse by The Sun and Daily Mail, the patronised guests of Jeremy Kyle and the caricatures of Little Britain. 

Vicky Pollard from Little Britain

“Chavs” - a 21st century acronym for those of our fellow Britons styled Council Housed And Violent - have become representative of the feckless “underclass”. They are those who choose benefits over hard work, who prefer drunkenness, obesity and drug addiction to fitness, who elevate racism above decency and single motherhood above respectable family life. They are the people locked well outside the communities of Middle England and those above such communities, to many of our politicians, journalists and commentators they are natives of a foreign land. 

The Politics of Electoral Reform: Changing the rules of democracy, by Alan Renwick, Cambridge University Press, February 2010.

Many liberal democracies change their electoral systems rarely, but a few do it all the time. Why is there this divergence? And what kinds of electoral reforms succeed, while others fail to ever get implemented, or loiter in the long grass for decades before finally being enacted? There could be no more relevant questions for the UK, first, because we have implemented a lot of incubated electoral reforms already since 1997 – think of the proportional representation systems now used for theScottish Parliament, Welsh National Assembly, the Greater London Assembly, electing Britain’s MEPs, and Scottish and Northern Ireland localgovernment, plus the Supplementary Vote for electing London’s mayor. But second, of course, we have our first national referendum since 1975 on introducing the Alternative Vote in May this year, and sometime this year should find out how the coalition government proposes that we elect some of most members of a reformed House of Lords or Senate.

Alan Renwick’s approach is to look at six overseas changes of electoral systems, three of them being detailed cases of what he calls ‘majority elite imposition’, where the ruling party or coalition bloc forces basically partisan changes on the majority of voters (with some constraints). The cases are the repeated changes of the parliamentary system in France, notably under Mitterand; the 2005 change of the electoral system in Italy by Berlusconi, to a kind of majoritarian top-up for a PR election (along with much tweaking of the post-war PR system from the 1940s to the 1980s); and in Japan the long post-war persistence of a unique system that sustained the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). (The system is called ‘Single Non-transferable vote’ for real enthusiasts).

Empires Apart: America and Russia from the Vikings to Iraq, by Brian Landers, Picnic, £15, April 2009.

As events in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia are daily displaying, America’s global influence is rapidly waning, requiring its citizens and allies to seek a more refined and solid understanding of global reality. This is an apt time to return to Brian Landers’ Empires Apart, a hugely impressive comparative study of the imperial imperatives of America and Russia - one which stimulates reflective thoughts on other empires, not least our own here in Britain.

What role will Britain find after losing its empire, asked former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson more than 50 years ago. Landers, reflecting on Tony Blair’s part in the invasion of Iraq, answers: “British troops continued in their role as America’s ghurkas”. Empires Apart is loaded with such sharp perceptions, shaped may be by the author’s background, which is not that of a professional historian. Landers is widely read and ruminative, as are many whose livelihood is to study the past. But he’s spent a lifetime in the higher reaches of business and government, a good many of them away from Britain. This, and the accumulated wisdom of the years, brings a fresh, radical and witty edge to his work often lacking in the more narrowly bounded specialists of our time.

Stuart Weir, Associate Director of Democratic Audit, reflects on Nicholas Shaxson’s new book on the scale, depth and penetration of tax havens and tax avoidance across the globe.

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, by Nicholas Shaxson, Bodley Head, £14.99, January 2011.

I am all for the UK Uncut campaign against tax avoiding companies like Boots, Vodafone, Barclays, etc, highlighting sums of lost revenue that could pay off the deficit over a few years. Shaxson’s Treasure Islands reveals just how justified the protests are – and also how likely they are to prove impotent.  The scale, depth and penetration of tax havens and tax avoidance is a world-wide phenomenon in which the UK, US and other nations collude, and to which national and international authorities have surrendered.

Shaxson has compiled a remarkable dossier: part analysis, historical and contemporary, part expository, part anecdote and gossip, wholly revealing, shocking and, yes - entertaining.  His publisher’s proof copy for reviewers suggests that he has written a thriller, and certainly his often over-written narrative strains for that effect. For me it is possibly the most important political book that I have read since The Spirit Level.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, by Owen Hatherley, Verso, £18, September 2010.

The ‘new ruins’ – poorly designed and shoddy shopping malls and mass-produced housing – are ubiquitous throughout our cities. Ken Worpole finds that Owen Hatherley is a witty and erudite gazetteer of terrible mistakes, but wonders if the acerbic author is as fair as he could be.

Owen Hatherley has been blogging about architecture and politics for a number of years now with increasing effect.  The acerbic humour which underpins his writing is evident in the names of the sites on which he blogs: Sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy (James Maxton’s famous injunction to the hapless Labour apostate Ramsay Macdonald in the House of Commons); The Measures Taken (one of Brecht’s unforgiving plays, which I once saw performed at the Duke of Wellington pub in Dalston, with intimidating musical accompaniment by Cornelius Cardew’s People’s Liberation Orchestra); and nastybrutalistandshort.

In a review of Wilkinson and Pickett’s first edition of their book for OurKingdom in April this year, I discussed their central finding that the greater the level of income inequality in a society, the more widespread a whole range of social ills are to be found, across all income groups. Governments which spend huge amounts of taxpayers’ money combating these ills are dealing with the symptoms rather than the cause, they conclude, and would do better to address the level of income inequality directly.

In an additional chapter written for a new edition of the book, the authors do three things. The first is to explain why the message of the book has met with such an overwhelming response from readers and audiences at their many lectures. The reason is that the great majority of citizens in unequal societies of the developed world are ‘closet egalitarians’: they would prefer greater income equality, even though they typically underestimate the extent of inequality that actually prevails. The book has given them compelling evidence to support their intuitive view and to come out of the closet, at the same time as the self-serving justifications for grotesque salaries and bonuses in the financial and corporate sector have been exposed as bogus.

According to A. J. P. Taylor, in 1934 Oxford University Press commissioned its History of England series on the basis that ‘England’ was still “an all-embracing word”. It meant “indiscriminately England and Wales; Great Britain; the United Kingdom; and even the British Empire” (A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945, OUP 1965). Looking back from the 1960s, AJP still believed this to be the appropriate historiographical perspective to take, and in private correspondence he made this very clear. “I am obsessed with England”, he wrote to his editor G. N. Clark in 1961, “to hell with Scotland, Northern Ireland and still more the Empire!!” (A. J. P. Taylor to G. N. Clark: 20 May 1961, Clark Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS Box 30.). One wonders if he thought Ireland even worth sending to hell.

Taylor never sought to conceal his Anglocentrism. He revelled in it. But having penned the fifteenth volume of the History of England series, he was far from being alone in assuming that England – its people, economy, government and monarchy – provided the central storyline for the history of these islands. The assumptions of English dominance inherent in J. R. Seeley’s famous lectures on The Expansion of England have resonated across the last century of historical writing. In fact, although a follow up series to the one begun in 1934 was commissioned by OUP – with the first volume appearing in 1992 – the editors still plumped for the title New Oxford History of England.

Professor Brian Harrison’s Finding a Role? The United Kingdom, 1970-1990 is the latest volume in that series, and – as the title implies – the story of the United Kingdom is central to the period in question, covering as it does the beginnings of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the development of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and the entry of the UK into the EEC in a supposedly post-imperial age. Harrison’s book provides an admirable synthesis of the cultural, social, economic and political history of the period, but this is not ‘four nations’ history. Although the constituent parts of the UK do feature, England remains the central reference point.

For many professional historians then, England has, and often continues to be the primary historical mover and shaker in the history of these islands, and hence by implication the history of the expansion and contraction of the British Empire.

Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law, Allen Lane, £20.00 (available from Amazon.co.uk for £12)

In the second review of the book on the rule of law by Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, Keith Ewing argues that far from being crusaders for the rule of law, our judges regularly fail to protect human rights. See also John Jackson on Tom Bingham in Lord Bingham’s Footsteps.

I.

In one of its first ever decisions, the new Supreme Court declared that the government's far-reaching provisions freezing the assets of terrorist suspects were ultra vires. The court did not, however, provide that these illegal measures were to be invalid with immediate effect. Rather, it gave the government 40 days and 40 nights to change the law to make lawful that which had been declared unlawful.

True to form, the government did just that. The short and little noticed Terrorist Asset-Freezing (Temporary Provisions) Act 2010 of only three sections declares retrospectively that the unlawful provisions of the asset freezing Orders "are deemed to have been validly made", and that "the prohibitions and obligations imposed by [them] have legal force".

So much then for the rule of law and parliamentary sovereignty, matters both addressed by Lord Bingham's new book. It is not clear who is most at fault here: the Supreme Court in failing to annul unlawful government action with immediate effect, or a craven Parliament willing to rush through unconstitutional legislation at high speed. Let's call it a draw, but ask also where was the press to comment on this constitutional outrage?

Christopher Harvie, Broonland: The Last Days of Gordon Brown, Verso £8.99 (available from Amazon.co.uk for £5.83)

Chris Harvie is a rare bird in the field sport of Scottish politics, a cultural and historical polymath and bon viveur who in part seems to belong from another era, one of Victorian romance, grand visions and eclectic ideas.

Harvie has spent most of his academic life in Baden-Wurttemberg in Germany and upon retiring came back to Scotland. Standing for the SNP in the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections, he found himself, as No. 5 on the list in Mid-Scotland and Fife, in the surprising position of being elected.

There is something joyously surprising and uplifting in today’s age of party automatons in Harvie’s election, a feeling added to by the sight of seeing him strutting around the Parliament, dressed like a character from some age of Tory squires or an Ealing ‘Victorian’ comedy.

Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law, Allen Lane, £20.00 (available from Amazon.co.uk for £12)

In the first of two reviews of the former lord chief justice’s book on the rule of law, John Jackson discusses the issue of its compatibility with the doctrine of Parliamentary Sovereignty. Keith Ewing offers a more sceptical approach to a crusading judge.

In 2007 I wrote two pieces, one entitled Lord Bingham’s Remarkable Journey, the other Who makes the law in Britain?, about the developing views of Lord Bingham, then the Senior Law Lord, on the rule of law and its relationship to the doctrine of Parliamentary Sovereignty, encapsulated in the phrase, ‘Parliament may do anything, except bind its successors’. In short, he seemed to be moving from strong adherence to the ‘rightness’ of Parliamentary Sovereignty as ‘fundamental’ to an acknowledgement of its possible incompatibility with the rule of law – equally fundamental. He was becoming concerned about the constitutional position of the judges if they were called on to interpret legislation, enacted by a sovereign parliament, which they might regard as contrary to the rule of law.

Lance Price, Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers V the Media , Simon and Schuster, £20.