Ivo Mosley ( Exeter, imprint academic): I’m here for the Political Studies Association Annual Conference on, wait for it, Democracy, Governance and Conflict: Dilemmas of Theory and Practice, at Swansea University. We are selling a hundred different books that try to stimulate honest debate on politics. Is there an appetite for honesty in academia, or is it just a replica of the endless dance of position-taking that is politics itself? Is it honest to describe what you do as ‘Political Science’? Politics being a pragmatic business informed by ideals, this association with the word ‘science’ seems misplaced to me, but perhaps it sounds grander and more able to change the world than mere ‘Thought’.
Anyway, here congregated are the measurers and conclusion-drawers on everything in our lives from ‘good citizen behaviour’ to ‘the shifting deckchairs of politics’ - a reference to the Titanic perhaps? Strange the tiny number of ethnic minority present - is an insatiable appetite for managing the world a genetic disease?
Setting the agenda was recognised as the most important political activity in democratic Athens, and so it is in academe. Here will be discussed everything that it is politically correct to discuss, and will be assumed everything that it is politically correct to assume. There are literally hundreds of talks being given in two days to small panels, so one can sample nothing but the titles of most of them.
My first panel discussion is a Round Table on ‘Think-tanks and New Labour’. Assembled are David Goodhart, editor of Prospect, playing Arthur, Julia Margot a voluble Guinevere, Neal Lawson of Compass as Sir Lancelot and MP John Cruddas as Gawain, and a couple of other knights in armour who want to change the world. The ideas they generate, we are told, must be designed to ‘generate policy agenda’ and have to be small-picture realistic enough to achieve this as well, of course as 'changing the agenda'; think-tanks seem to be like courtiers to elected monarchs, with all the hazards of flattery and saying-what-the boss-wants-to-hear. The bosses - paymasters - are either politicians or big businesses, so there is little chance of any idea surfacing that threatens the established powers. What’s more, John Cruddas pointed out, political parties now look to think-tanks for ideas, so that has stopped grass-roots political thinking from having any influence on party agendas; another blow to democracy. It seems the huge need of graduates for paid jobs in varieties of social management has made the rest of us irrelevant.
Oh well, at least we are in caring hands. More from this hotbed of 'political science' tomorrow after hearing Andrew Gamble on 'Western Ideology' tonight to stimulate our dreams.
