“It seems to have been the heritage of Westminster, by the force of custom, after the institution of the Sanctuary and the formation of its ‘Thieves’ Lane,’ to become the shelter and resort of lawless characters, who find a fitting home in the dirty, narrow, uncleansed streets,- its miserable, undrained, dilapidated courts and alleys, reproduced and rebuilt time after time with the determinate purpose of receiving only the degraded and outcast of the population”

From “The Rookeries of London”.

When you enter the palace of Westminster by St Stephen’s entrance there a map on your left hand side, which imposes the “New Palace” onto the streets and buildings of the pre-1834 fire old palace of Westminster.

I was looking at this map with my sister, who was visiting London this week, when we noticed that three buildings in the old palace were labelled “Heaven”, “Hell” and “Purgatory”. It turns out they were taverns, and fairly rough taverns at that with the latter two based in former prisons. Apparently Pepys used to frequent Heaven, though. There was also a street marvelously called “Dirty Lane”, which is where Abingdon Street is now.I think “getting to parliament via Dirty Lane” should be some sort of code.

Anyway, I didn’t know anything about these places, so I thought I’d have a look to find out more, and I came up with this wonderful quote, which is surely designed to snugly fit into some searing article against the corrupting influence of Westminster.

I worked for the Labour party when Gordon Brown used the case of Whitley Bay schoolgirl Laura Spence to attack Oxford’s admissions system.

To Labour supporters like me, Gordon Brown was using the example of Laura Spence to put a human face on the important issue of widening access to Higher Education. To his critics, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was distorting an individual case in order to score a political point against a politically convenient opponent (An ‘elitist’ Oxford College).

At the time, Brown’s advisers, leftish journalists, and Labour MPs all defended the Chancellor for using an individual case to highlight an important national issue, while Conservative politicians and commentators said that the Chancellor had demeaned his office by seeking to create a political row over an individual case, which was far more complex than he suggested.

Fast forward 13 years (how depressing!) and we find a Chancellor using a newsworthy individual case to highlight an issue he regards as significant.

This time Conservative MPs and commentators are defending the Chancellor for using a newsworthy case to raise an important issue, while the former advisers to the previous Chancellor, Labour MPs and Left wing commentators are criticising the Chancellor has demeaned his office by distorting the details of an individual case to make a cheap political point against a politically convenient target.

So it goes.

The deaths of six children in a fire. This is where the Philpott story ends and begins. In death, in misery, in heartbreak.

It’s not the only such story. Christopher Foster shot his wife and child, then set a fire and died too. Search the internet, and you find a small stream of such horrors. An American man burns down his house and kills his children to collect their life insurance.   Another American man kills himself and his children in an explosion, while a suspect in the investigation of the disappearance of his wife, and again, life insurance may be a factor.

Such tragedies remind us to focus on the horror first, before seeking to spread culpability. Is capitalism to blame for the death of Jill and Kirstie Foster? Were insurance companies responsible for the death of Allen Jeffrey and Joseph Wand? Was the Mormonism of Josh Powell a cause for the death of his children? The offensive idiocy of these questions tells us all we need to know about any debate about whether “Welfare” was responsible for the deaths of six children in a fire, set deliberately.

To generalise from such an act and draw conclusions about a moral and social system is both idiotic and offensive, and that some politicians and newspapers have chosen to degrade the essential tragedy of the Philpott children’s death in a fire set by their father with observations about the welfare state has produced a furious response from those who love and seek to defend the welfare state.

Yet to leave a horror there, as the act of a man with “no moral compass”, as Mrs Justice Thirlwell rightly described Michael Philpott, also seems insufficient. Doubly so when a debate about welfare obscures the tragedy itself.

If any explanation of use is to be found, it is on the particulars of the horror that we should focus our attention, however painful it seems.

It might feel easier, or more politically convenient to use divert ourselves from this family, to generalise instead about a political concern, one that seems tangentially related to the horror, but it is a mistake to have such a debate, not least because it allows us the slip to the comfortable embrace of our pre-existing certainties.

The pain of each tragedy demands of us, that we at least focus on that family, on that situation, on the deaths of six children in a fire, set deliberately, by their father.

If we do this, what we will find will be uncomfortable, whatever your ideology or temperament. How could it be otherwise?

How did a man with a conviction for repeatedly stabbing his partner and her mother, who had recently cautioned for beating his wife, who was facing a court case for a violent road rage attack, whose partner had recently left him and who was trying to manipulate the police into arresting her face, so far as we know, no family intervention, so long as the children went to school and did not appear mistreated? It is not as if the control, violence and obsessiveness that marked Michael Philpott’s relationship with women were hidden from society. They were displayed in plain sight, on national TV, his record known in newspapers, and yet we, collectively, did little but stare and sneer.

These are huge failings.

They are a failing of our welfare and social systems, of our compassion and concern for women who were in such a position that Michael Philpott, a violent and abusive egotist, seemed like a preferable option to their previous lives and obvious alternatives.

They are a failing of our criminal justice and social work systems, that such a case did not result in a concerted attempt to understand the dynamics of this family, and how it came to be so abusive and bizarre. There is much for those who regard the state as the final safety net for the vulnerable to concern themselves with here. The safety net manifestly failed with the deaths of six children in a house fire, set deliberately, by their father, a violent and abusive man.

So when those on the political right say that we must look beyond the moral culpability of Michael Philpott for his own actions, look towards something larger than his evil, search for a wider culpability if we are to prevent such horrors, they have a real point. Yet when we examine the lives of that family, it is a to a welfare, justice and social culture that stands by during abuse, during violence, during manipulation and deceit that should first draw our attention.

The welfare state is no more responsible for Michael Philpott’s actions than the business problems of Christopher Foster were responsible for his murders. Yet that is not enough, not for anyone who believes that government should be a force for good in the lives of the vulnerable.

Should we examine our welfare system? Yes, but we should examine our police, social work, family intervention and domestic violence responses too.

The money intended by society to feed, house and clothe the Philpott children was apparently used by Michael Philpott as another instrument to enable his desired total control of his family, Did the state, however indirectly, thus enable his mania for control and limit the freedom and choices of his partners? Did it fail those children by not offering an alternative to his control? I don’t know, but it certainly seems worth asking.

Why did our welfare state not notice that Michael Philpott’s wife, partner and children were apparently used as his ‘chattels’? Why did his record of abuse not trigger concerns when he started making allegations about his partner? Why did there seem to be no link between prison records, recent arrests, welfare and housing budgets, family services and police?¹

What’s more, there’s every reason to look at our welfare policies again in the light of this horror. For example, what will be the impact of paying Universal Credit to a single account nominated by the couple be in abusive, controlling relationships²? Will the Universal Credit payment method and benefit cap make life harder for those who leave abusive homes and seek refuge?

Finally, there’s the ultimate question. How can we better prevent such abuses in the future, whether through intervention, probation, mandatory counselling and support for domestic violence cases? How are these managed and funded, and how good are they at their interventions? Would it be better to invest more in services like this, either as a complement too existing welfare spending, or even as part of a review of the our overall welfare budget. Why do intensive services for the vulnerable seem a low spending priority when so much is spent on child and housing benefit?

These are all important questions, but we reach them, not by generalising about a culture of welfare dependency, but by examining in unflinching detail all that we can about the dysfunctional life of a specific family that led them to the point that six children were killed in a fire, set deliberately, by their father, a violent and abusive man, who manipulated and controlled those around him.

Not every problem has a solution, not every solution works, and any solution will be imperfect and partial. However, the chances of finding a better solution are greater if we conduct an unflinching autopsy of a tragedy, rather than distracting ourselves in trading insults about welfare systems.

Six children died in a fire, set deliberately, by their father, a violent and abusive man, who manipulated and controlled those around him, helped by their mother, and we did not prevent it.

1. I confess, at this point that I am going solely by the media reports. I don’t know what might have been happening behind the scenes [↩]
2. the regulations suggest that UC payments will be split only in exceptional domestic violence cases where the couple choose to remain together. I have no idea how this would work in abusive, controlling relationships [↩]

Politicians and journalists make dreadful moralisers.

When Tony Blair highlighted the tragic death of James Bulger at the hands of child murderers to make the case that British society was becoming unworthy of the name, he was both wrong and foolish.

He was wrong because, as he later said, the tragedy demonstrated no such thing. Child murderers were no new post Thatcherite phenomena, nor was the horror of that single, awful murder a sign of a decaying society. Look at stories of Victorian baby farms, if you want evidence of utter moral decrepitude.

Blair was also foolish, because the moral power and genuine passion of his case had negative policy consequences, as he later admitted.

The same goes a dozen times over for John Major, who declared that we should “condemn a little more, understand a little less“, a slogan of such powerfully depressing populist stupidity that it has become the unheralded rallying cry of the rising profession of media idiots of both left and right.

And so we come to the Daily Mail, who have reacted with a kind of giddy glee to this tragedy.

It is depressing, and demeaning and obviously untrue to argue that it is the Welfare State that causes a man to father seventeen children, have multiple partners, and to tragically cause their death in a house fire set for personal gain. Would such a crime have been possible without a welfare state? Of course. You only have to look at a Hogarth etching, or read the case of Amelia Dyer to realise that our forebears were sharply aware of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity.

Look into such horrors, and you see so many possible social causes for sallow cruelty that the crime itself can be obscured. Is it misogyny that makes a man treat his partners as these women were? ? Is it indifference to family parameters to father so many children? Is it a neglectful society that gawps dumbly at such a man for entertainment?  Hogarth thought it was want of industry, or a streak of cruelty. The Victorians reacted with disgust, executed the sinners and legislated,  ineffectively at first, then increasingly effectively, in order to protect the life of the unwanted child. Perhaps this was the true beginning of the “nanny State.”?

However, they did not think to address the ultimate cause, the social and financial cost of being the unwed mother of an illegitimate baby. That took many more generations.

Yet for all the contempt I have for the easy morality of the Mail, I find the lefts reaction almost equally depressing. Yes, railing against the Mail’s coverage is worthy, but even if we should not blame the “Welfare state” for this tragedy, the deaths of those six children are a stark reminder of other failures in our society.

This family was dysfunctional, its patriarch abusive and violent, and the response of the state to this seemed to be to do little, or close to little, other than ensure that the family could feed, and clothe and house its children, and ensure they attended school.

At the same time, the reaction of our media was to use the family as a sort of shorthand symbol of fecklessness, seemingly indifferent to, or uncaring about, any pain and suffering that might have led young women to regard Mick Philpott’s home as a better alternative to what they had endured before.

I don’t know precisely how Britain failed the six children who died in Derby that night. But fail them we did, and in families across Britain, we are probably still failing them today.

Our reaction to such horror must surely be a belief that we must change our society, probably in a way which is complex, imperfect and gradual, perhaps something involving an understanding of the lives of vulnerable young women, and the motivations of controlling, parasitic, insecure men, and possible solutions for both.

If we don’t feel that something must change, then whatever our reason for sharing a sense of moral superiority today,  Whether it is a condemnatory superiority over the” feckless”, or our righteous condemnations of the haters of the feckless, then we will have learnt nothing, achieved nothing, changed nothing.

Condemn a little more? We certainly do that in spades.

Understand a little less? We still seem to be doing that.

Please, can we change course, at least in this one small thing. It would perhaps be a small beginning.

A musing on the departure of David Miliband which isn’t really about him, but about New Labour, and how it died, and is sort of irrelevant now, whatever the comings and goings of the officer class, but will come back, but be all grrrrr, not all cuddly.

Also, this is a longer version of an article that’s going on Comment is Free at some point, but was said to be a bit long and insidery, according to the editor, but I like insidery and long and tedious, and you should too, so screw the readership, here’s the whole thing.

Like most significant political ideas, New Labour expired in a back room while vigorous efforts were being made to assert its continued vitality to a bored audience in the stalls.

Yup, forget the departure of Mr Miliband (D), New Labour died sometime in late 2007, passing on as the British economy teetered on the edge of recession. The cause of death is disputed. It was not excess of exuberance -  New Labour did not spend ludicrously too much (It did spend too much, but by only a little, and even then, mostly on worthwhile things) nor the inflation and bursting of a bubble (New Labour was involved no more than anyone else in the developed world) nor was it the suicide of capitulation to market neo-liberal dogma (For all the brave talk of changed paradigms, the left response to the crash is still requires free movement of people goods, and money. Once that is granted, liberalism prospers, neo or otherwise).

No, New Labour was killed off, not by the accession of Gordon Brown, nor the departure of Tony Blair, but by the sudden, sharp ending of an era of forty consecutive quarters of economic growth.

At that point, the compromise that New Labour offered social democrats and market buccaneers – that it was possible to have both a strong, growing state and a political environment that supported and encouraged business choice, and did not attempt to restrict or guide those who would profit by those choice – became less than viable.

Currently, the ‘New Labour; debate doesn’t even feel particularly important.

One of the strange things about being in an extended global slump is that the position of the “Neo-Liberal” becomes, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from that of the traditional tax and spender, or tax and borrower in the short term. Something has to be done, and away from the Austere rigour of the Mellonites and the Austrians, that something involves printing, borrowing and spending money. Lots of money. Lots and Lots and Lots of money.

On the left, this solves all sorts of problems. Social Democrats of all stripes and flavours like the sound of public coin being distributed, especially when there’s a damn good excuse to do so.¹

To a certain extent it doesn’t even matter if you want to make like an Austrian. Run a counter-productive fiscal policy, as the British government has done, and you find that you can’t even reduce borrowing levels significantly, so long as you’re running a facsimile of a modern welfare state.

In other words, your political parties would like to apologise: Normal political discourse is suspended while we try to restore economic growth.

What does this mean for New Labour and our small, brave band of ancestor worshippers? It means that going around muttering about tough choices appears both politically clichéd and economically redundant (I know, because I’ve muttered with the best of them). For now, for the next couple of years, there aren’t any tough choices. The correct policy response is a leftish comfort blanket. The Tories are stupid and wrong, and spending money is the right way to go, and there’s nowhere else for money to go for now but gilts, and just, gosh, let’s party like it’s 1937.

Sure, we can argue about immigration, or public service structuring, or some such, but basically, the question New Labour answered just isn’t being asked now. There’s no need for the left to worry about the most equitable way of sharing proceeds of growth, because there ain’t no damn growth, and that is the only problem that really matters.

Were a Labour government in power today, even a fiscal hawk like me would be urging Ed Balls on, demanding bigger VAT cuts, lower corporation tax rates, even some “Collect £200, Proceed directly to the shops, do not pass go” Super-Monopoly card for the low paid. (Actually, I’d probably be saying, would be “noo, spend more on vocational education, and infrastructure, and an industry bank, and on tax breaks for companies in the north, and on universities, and R&D”, because I’m cussed, and something of a bore).

What joy it is to be on the left in a recession!

Ah, and there’s the catch. This happy state of suspended economic reality will not last. It cannot. Indeed, it must not, because the longer it goes on, the worse things will be afterwards.

The wonder of global capitalism is such that not even a government as bone-headedly, willfully stupid as that led by Mr Cameron will be able to stop growth returning eventually. All they can do is delay it, and leave us in a weaker, more vulnerable position when the recovery eventually comes. When it does return, the question of choices will become relevant again.

When will this be? Let’s be pessimistic, and say no significant growth occurs until 2015, leaving the next Labour government with a pretty unpleasant inheritance. We’ll have a big debt and a stubbornly high deficit. Other countries will be growing faster than us, and so there will be places to invest more attractive than gilts.

That implies there won’t be a lot of room for stimulus, and the costs of failure will mean that even to reduce the deficit gradually over the 2015-20 parliament will require iron fiscal discipline.

If we’re not to enact absurdly painful spending cuts, that probably means tax rises. Even within that, there’ll be huge pressures on what to spend our limited resources on. Do we try to protect services spending, or do we try to invest in future growth potential, via the sort of innovation friendly new-industrial agenda Labour has been quietly developing through its policy review?

It’s at this point that a very different New Labour political position will begin to be relevant to our politics once again.

It won’t be as glossily optimistic as the early Blair era, or as bombastically self-confident as the triumphal tractor statistics of 2006. Indeed, it might be positively dour and earnest. A Jam tomorrow, family hold back, harsh medicine sort of politics, with only the slimmest of sugar coatings to get the medicine down.

I’m about as right-wing as they come in the Labour party. As a junior new Labourite, I got used to being called a shallow populist and an electoral sell-out.  Now though, the most relevant critique is the complete opposite.

I tell people what I think a Labour government will have to choose between, how hard it’ll probably have to cut and how much it’ll have to tax to do even the smallest bit of good, and they shrink in horror, asking “How on earth do we sell that?”.

So, New Labour is dead, but it’ll be back. I suspect though, that we’ll emerge from the political suspension of the slump as a small bunch of flint-eyed tight-fisted zealots planning an austere recovery, not grinning populists disbursing growth funded goodies.

It’ll be less sexy, but probably better governance. (Think of the Swedish Social Democrats, 1994 style, who proposed faster deficit reduction than the right while the economy grew)

As to how to sell such unpleasant medicine?

Well, we’ll just have to find a way.

After all, the alternative is being Francois Hollande. We don’t like to talk about him any more.

1. On the right, of course, it causes lots of problems. Some don’t like it. Some like it, but want to give it to consumers, others tolerate it as a minimal sin, so long as virtue can be restored shortly [↩]

A vibrant new force is being launch on the left.

No, not Ken Loach’s “Left Unity” vehicle. That’s a mere flapdoodle got up by the decayed remnants of Post-Benn Gallowite rejectionism, there mostly to taunt those who’ve put their faith in the Labour party as radical agent of reform.¹

Instead, cast your eyes a smidge to the right and behold the People’s Assembly Against Austerity. This is the real thing, the Unite-PCS-Unison backed broad front of left opposition to Austerity, coming soon to a Corn Exchange near you. Mark Steel is involved. That’s how you know it’s proper.

I feel a bit sorry for the left sometimes. Every time they try to organise a broad front strategy, they have to find a new name in order to avoid drawing attention to the failures of the previous three dozen incarnations of the strategy.

I like to imagine some left greybeard, perhaps Keith Flett, is ceremonially given the solemn responsibility of stopping the new broad front of resistance having the same name as any previous incarnation. “Left Front?” he intones. “Did that in ’36.United Front? That was ’33. Popular Front? Are you having a bloody laugh, sunshine?”.

Anyway, once you’ve deleted past failures and current socialist, left, action and sundry factions (“Hah”, says Ken Loach, “you can’t have Left Unity, I bagsied it months ago!”) there’s very few left words for the next generation of activists to choose from. This time they’ve ended up with “People’s Assembly”, which sounds pretty anodyne, even to me.

Anyway, my point isn’t to poke fun. Well, not much.

I’m sure in its own terms, the People’s Assembly will be a huge success. Articles will be written, demos will be held, fiery speeches will be given and the Labour party will rhetorically tilt a little more to the left than it meant to.

Mind you, given the constitutional position of the Labour party I don’t know why the unions will bother with the last bit, as all they have to do is hold their nerve through the policy forum process and they’ll force concessions from the leadership anyway, without publicly saying a word or lifting a finger.

So it goes.

No the reason I’m interested in the People’s Assembly is because it represents the latest development in an increasingly unusual political situation in British Trade Unionism. It is a sharp divide between radical political rhetoric and relative industrial quietism.

Take last year, for example. According to the Office of National Statistics,  2012 saw a grand total of 249,000 days lost to industrial action, and 181 stoppages. Trust me, that’s Nowt.

Is this low just compared to the Seventies and Eighties? A weakness driven by Thatcherite industrial policy? No, Because in terms of days lost to industrial action, 2012 saw industrial action levels lower than all but two years of the last twenty.

Even when we compare last year to the neo-liberal paradigm era, it represents an industrial strategy about as radical as a soggy biscuit.

To put is another way, even in the Public Sector, where the cuts are biting and the unions are strong, there were fewer days lost to strikes in 2012 than there were in every year of the new millennium, bar the election year of 2005.

((We are seeing a slightly different stirring. Industrial action now tends to involve a publicity focused “Co-ordinated Day of Action” type of protest, designed to grab News Editors attentions as much as managers. The November 2011 protest alone seems to be responsible for over half of the days lost to strike action since the Coalition was formed.))

So what we’re seeing among the unions, and especially in the private sector, is an absence of war.

In this light, the current political radicalism of the Union leadership is best seen as a type of displacement activity for their industrial moderation.

The industrial approach of the unions is pragmatic, flexible, willing to deal, driven by a combination of a firm grasp of the value of negotiation, an awareness of the futility of much strike action and that the membership is generally unenthusiastic about striking, beyond symbolic one day protests².

((I don’t know whether this represents some quiet deal inside unions between the organisers and the union leadership. It sometimes seems like the offices of the General Secretaries can be allowed to get on with yelling fire and brimstone about national politics, as long as they don’t interfere with the actual day to day unionism of practicality. Instinctively, that sort of makes sense as a strategy, although I think the inconsistency reveals a hollowness to the rhetoric. ))

Can this last? I think it will. There just doesn’t seem to be a hunger for industrial action out there.

That said, the gap is glaring, and some in the Union movement do seek a greater level of industrial confrontation. However, those making this argument, like the leadership of Unite and PCS, seek a big strike as an explicitly political move rather than an industrial or negotiating strategy.

However, even inside Unite and on the left, there’s a sense this is a losing battle. There’s a notable lack of enthusiasm for such an action: The main public sector union, Unison is opposed because they say their members don’t want it. Aslef are against, and even Unite worry they wouldn’t be able to deliver anything honoured more in the observance than the breach. Even Jon Lansman is very doubtful. (strike that- was actually Andy Newman. I misread authorship over at left futures, see comments for Andy’s correction.)³

The whole thing seems destined to be fudged, and I expect it’d end up with an attempt to organise another November 2011 type event, which will be largely politically symbolic, rather than industrial, thus keeping everyone’s honour intact without actually doing much.

On the other hand, the political strategy will be significantly more strident, aiming to use Union institutional weight to shift political debate in a way the union membership themselves are unwilling to do in the workplace.

In other words, the Union approach will be a vanguard political initiative, rather than a popular front based in workplaces. It’ll be a revolt of the corn exchanges and Methodist halls, not factory floors and offices.

It’ll be designed to leverage power over the media and the Labour party, not industry and government.

Perhaps Labour should tell the Union leadership to demonstrate a little more industrial radicalism to the Tories before demanding political submission from Labour?

1. The name is teasingly ironic. [↩]
2. Low turnouts on strike ballots being indicative of a lack of enthusiasm, it’s notable the frontline PCS got only 28% turnout in their recent ballot with 61% in favour of strikes. this perhaps explains why a) Many people didn’t notice the PCS strike on Budget day b) The next action will be a “half day” [↩]
3. If you need to raise confidence that such an action is plausible, that means it is currently implausible! [↩]

And lo, it came to pass. A press regulation system, (a rather moderate, and proportionate press regulation system, to be frank) has been proposed, and as I suggested the other day, the drama hasn’t really been about the reaction of Rupert Murdoch, but about the outrage of a grumpy band of modern-day hawkers, balladeers and pamphleteers.

Part of this is self-dramatisation, of course. Nothing is more agreeable to a certain cast of mind than bravely making a stand against largely imaginary oppression. It has all the rewards of standing up to real oppression, but little of the risk.

Anyway, I’m not exactly sure what people are worried about. As far as I can tell, the threat of the libel laws has been pretty effective in clamping down on those who make ludicrous claims on the internet, and it may well be that the changes to the libel laws that have accompanied the Royal Charter actually mean than once it’s all netted up, people like me are freer to make misleading, unfair and tendentious comments about other people to our tiny audiences than we were before.

Certainly, Simon Singh will be freer to make reasoned arguments against balderdash-peddlers, which is probably more important.

What’s more, it seems that some sort of exemption will be drafted for small websites.  Call it the “Unpopularity Exemption”. The rule could be that if no-one really cares what you think, it doesn’t matter what you say! Mind you, that could be quite annoying as well. I’d hate to wait patiently to be oppressed, only to discover that I’m not successful enough to bother with. It’d be a crushing blow to the old ego.  Look, I demand to be regulated as a threat to the common weal. I’m important, goddammit.

So, I’ll wait and see, and in the meantime, I’ll cast myself as a potential martyr for free speech. You’ll prise my website from my cold dead hands, you fascists. Etc Etc.

But for all that I don’t really mind the prospect of being regulated, it still doesn’t mean that the regulation process makes much sense to me. This is as much a technological and industry design issue as a regulatory issue.

How do you ever draw a meaningful exemption between “big” and “small” media, as is now being proposed?

One of the interesting things about the reaction to the draft charter is how it has been driven by those who sit on the uncomfortable interstices of our media landscape.

You see this in the reaction of small magazines, who worry that they will be crippled compared to unregulated websites. You see it in the frowns of medium-sized, professional websites, who fear (or thumb their noses at) at consequences of being included in regulation. On the other hand while they don’t like it much, the big publishers can probably afford to join some sort of regulatory body since they are reasonably well resourced and set up to deal with legal and regulatory challenges¹.

Indeed, if you’re the Daily Mail, or the Sun websites, there might even be a commercial advantage in a media regulatory system that might also regulate more mobile and aggressive competitors. If the 3am girls are lagging TMZ or popbitch, this might actually be good for them – and I have no idea how you draft a legally watertight system that demands control of one, but has no consequence for the other. I’m no lawyer though, so maybe it’s possible. If I were Associated though, I’d be lawyering up on exactly this point.

But even if you can make some legally watertight Plimsoll line for media regulation, I’m not sure that you should.

Again, this is a technological and structural issue. Lets say I go on twitter and say something horrid. I have just under 7,000 followers, and I’d guess half of them either don’t really exist or don’t read what I say. So. I’m small-time, like a weekly free-sheet, say, or a small left-wing magazine. Not covered by any system of regulation.Not intended to be. A blow for my ego, that, but I can take it.

But say my tweet links to my blog, and it gets retweeted, and as a result, by some viral freak a million people see it, and the accompanying youtube video I made? Does the size of my new audience mean that I become liable? Surely not.

But then how is this different from the Sun making the same vile smear, or a big name journalist on their personal twitter account? Does it become a question of intent? Clearly I wanted as many people as possible to see my diatribe, or I wouldn’t have posted it.

Does it become purely the responsibility of the “popular”, so someone with 100,000 followers has a greater responsibility? But then does a local newspaper with 100,000 readers have the same, or a different level of regulatory liability to a part-time journalist with 100,000 followers? If not, why not?

Because one is a business and the other isn’t? But how do you justify treating one business (a struggling small newspaper) differently to another (a successful sole trader/freelancer)?  What if it’s not a business, but I have ads on my site, so I profit from the surge in traffic? Is it about physical presence? But how does one justify that? If I rustle through someones bins to put the contents on the internet, why would that be less intrusive than putting it online?

You can see how all this could get very messy, very fast.

I have a sneaking feeling that this could become a Dangerous Dogs act. A legitimate public concern about feral beasts, translates a reasonable political pressure to act, then a nightmare of exceptions, exemptions, regulation and case law.²

What’s more, it probably won’t even work to stop the intended evils, as Paul Anderson’s example of Scumbag online (and the older history of Press regulation in Britain) suggests.

So while I don’t think the system proposed is particularly onerous in intent, outrageous in purpose or will be repressive in action, I don’t really get the point.

I keep coming back to the view that the outrageous things the media do are generally either illegal anyway (like phone and email hacking), can be made illegal for everyone, large or small, if we want to (like bin-rifling) or are a cultural problem that regulation won’t stop. (Such as the harassment of unpopular or weak minorities).³

These can each be dealt with in better, more direct ways. So why not do that?

1. and minnows, like me, feel fairly sure we’re not covered, but wonder what happens if we ever stopped being miserable failures and bedroom bloggers [↩]
2. It is perhaps ironic that the Dangerous Dogs Act was driven by a tabloid storm. As ye sow, so shall ye reap and all that [↩]
3. There’s also a legitimate fear of unintended consequences – for example for public sector whistleblowers and so on. What if a police officer told a reporter about a sex scandal featuring a celebrity that was being hushed up because the case wasn’t weak enough to prosecute [↩]

“When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Riviera, I must make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy-nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set…
…Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely”
Robert Benchley; “How I Create”

This graph is scary. Very, very scary.

One of my pet hates about the soft left of the Labour party is that it dreams lovely dreams, sets out grand ambitions, talks inspiringly of change (in which they are enthusiatically joined by my friends on the hard left) and then runs into money (like the gimlet eyed lizard souls of my wing of the left) and finds itself frantically trying to reconcile the two things.

As a result, I quite often find myself enjoying an unlikely shared distaste with Trotskyites, despairing of those who will ends, but shrink from means.

If provoked unduly, I can get quite Leninist, and mutter darkly about infantile disorders.¹

Historically, the soft left has dealt with this conundrum by

1) Enduring losing some elections, then selling out to win by embracing an ill defined modernity (and then giving themselves a pat on the back for ‘saving’ the Labour party’ in the process) (see Kinnock, Wilson,)

or

2) Finding someone who really means it to sell out for them, and then muttering unhappily about how said sell out is not radical enough and positioning themselves for the succession if and when things go wrong. (see Blair, Gaitskell, MacDonald)

So it was very cheering today to read Andrew Harrop,who has, intelligently as ever, bucked this depressing trend.

Andrew is General Secretary of the Fabians, so swims firmly in the Soft Left stream of our party.His article is a pleasing case of the soft left “running into money” early.

He writes of the challenge facing the next Labour government:

“I would expect that the best a future Labour chancellor could deliver would be a freeze to overall public service spending, which would still create real pressures and no doubt cuts to certain programmes. And all this assumes that the latest OBR projections for growth are correct. Since they’ve over-shot so often before, a future government could face even worse fiscal choices than the numbers published today suggest.”

Now, this ‘best case scenario’ of a freeze to spending isn’t that of a neoliberal whatchamacallit like me, as it follows Andrew arguing strongly that Labour should bust Osborne’s likely spending limits (Set out, in their most likely form in the graph above). This means leaving room for significant tax increases (The extra tax increases I agree with,  both because I’m a fiscally conservative social democrat and because I value being honest with the electorate about what the hell is going to happen to them over the next decade or so)

What’s more, this spending freeze, remember, comes after the all cuts of this current government, which we are all so very angry about. It relies on a recovery that might well be weaker than projected.It assumes no extra costs from economic failure. Nor does this ‘Best case’ spending freeze deal with demographic or other increased cost pressures, or set out exactly how fiscal space might be created for the sort of pro-growth expenditure we desperately need in our economy. (I suspect this is what Andrew means by the spending freeze meaning ‘cuts to certain programmes.’)

So Andrew’s right. This is the best case scenario and it’s bloody horrible.

So unless we in the Labour party recognise the shitstorm our poor benighted leaders will inherit, we are going to spend the years after 2015 in a state of perma-outrage.

There is, of course, a parallel duty on our leaders to spell this out, and not offer people the comfortable illusion that the election of a Labour government alone will lead to the sprouting of rainbows, the lying down of lambs with lions, and that we will all be sitting down together singing Kum-ba-ya before deciding how to spread our socialist munificence about the land.

This. Is. Not. Going. To. Happen.

It is in this light that I can’t help but feel a bit confused by the current leftish outrage about Labour stance on Welfare sanctions.

Never mind that Welfare conditionality has been Labour policy since at least the 1948 Unemployment Assistance Act. Never mind the political risk of letting the Tories paint us into a corner. Never mind that this is essentially a tactical question of parliamentary management in which Labour had a choice whether to delay the inevitable or secure some concessions now. Now let’s concede all of that, and agree that the Labour leadership was cowardly, selfish, neoliberal and all the rest.

My question is simply this. Look at that graph of spending above. Think about how weak growth is, and how fragile even that path is.

Think about the tax increases needed to bring that line back onto an even trajectory during the ‘blue’ period.

Think about how we have to fund our industrial strategy, our growth policy, and anything else nice we want to do.

What exactly do we think the next Labour government is going to be like?

1. Lenin’s approach to the left-wing communists, by the way, is echoed in the attitude of some of the far left to Ed Miliband. It is essentially the view of those in Socialist Action, for example, that Labour must be helped to victory over the Tories, and then Labour’s reformism will be revealed as the hollow sham it is. Or as they put it “All this will change extremely rapidly once the 2015 general election has taken place and the real character of the Labour government that is elected becomes clear”. I suspect this is why John Ross and other such leftists argue that the real political battle is for Labour’s governing agenda. It’s a test they think Labour will fail, and then Ken Livingstone will be Prime Minister, or something. [↩]

Below is Don Paskini’s comment to my previous post, which I’ve unilaterally hoisted from the comments and rebranded as a guest post, as I think it’s interesting and worth reading and helpful in defining the sort of debate we need on the centre-left. It should probably be read in the context of this post and this one.

One thing which was probably not as obvious to reader as to writer is that my post was modelled on the Dan Hodges one, applying his argument about Liam Fox and Owen Jones. In that sense, it was a pushback against the ‘ideologues of left and right vs us sensible, non-ideological moderates’ argument which he makes.

That said, I think you have no cause to downplay your own influence here! The fiscal conservative case which you’ve developed is one which is supported, at least in principle, by probably about half the Shadow Cabinet, a good section of the PLP, and is the operating assumption for policy development of people like ippr, SMF and the other clever people who are doing the heavy lifting in developing our next manifesto.

The fact that you’ve gone further in spelling out what fiscal conservatism will actually mean in practice than the others means that you get hit by articles such as mine, but it doesn’t mean that you are a lone voice in the wilderness (e.g. it’s not like Anthony’s response was ‘how dare you associate me with Sen’s lunatic ravings!’) In addition, while there is some room for small tweaks, the basic prospectus that you set out is one which Labour would need to adopt if it were to have a go at balancing the budget over a medium timescale.

My critique of fiscal conservatism is not just that it would be unpopular in practice (even if appealing to many in theory), it is that the main reason for this unpopularity would be because it is so far removed from most people’s experience and their own priorities.

I don’t, therefore, think I’m posing the question ‘do we want to be hated before or after the election’. Instead, my question is ‘how can we develop an approach which won’t come as a bolt from the blue to people who don’t work for central London think tanks’? Related to that, how can we ensure that in government we over-deliver, relative to people’s expectations (this, after all, is the sole advantage of the low esteem in which politicians are held, that even moderate competence would come as a pleasant surprise!)

So, for example, before the election we might need to develop the principles of our approach and make sure people understand these , with a few, well tested and modest examples to help people get what we’re trying to do. Then after the election we might need a process by which people can be involved in and feel like they own the choice about which decisions to take, rather than just imposing them in a PASOK-style austerity programme.

If you want, this approach will need to be one part early Tony Blair (in his ‘find out what the British people want and give it to them’ phase, rather than the ‘leadership is about me taking the tough decisions and telling people that we’ve got to do it’ later phase), and one part FDR (cautious before the election, bold, persistent experimentation afterwards, with ‘everyone against him except the people’).

So I agree that there is a need to create an audience for the truth, but disagree on how to do it. That’s probably the most fruitful place to continue this discussion.

“Whereas divers good orders have been lately made by both Houses of Parliament, for suppressing the great late abuses and frequent disorders in Printing many false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed Papers…”

The above sentence is the introduction to the Order on the regulation of printing, 1643, which required the licensing of all printed items and was the cause of Milton’s famous Aeropagitica.

Milton’s objection to censorship has become one of the minor battlegrounds of the Post-Leveson political and media debate. I confess I find the whole thing almost impossible to follow. We appear to have commissioned Lord Leveson to produce a report into improving the conduct of the press, absorbed it and then strained to produce several completely different responses to that report, and then contested which of these various responses would be more effective in achieving virtue, not vice, among the members of the press.

But isn’t the bigger point that the Licensing Order was a continual failure? Sure, there were licensed printers, but all that happened is that the unlicensed press went about its merry way. Six years later, the House of Commons fairly frothed about the “ignorance and assumed boldness of the weekly Pamphleteers”

“Whereas divers Scandalous, Seditious and Libellous Pamphlets, Papers and Books are daily contrived, printed, vended and dispersed, with officious care and industry by the Malignant party at home and abroad, for the better compassing of their wicked ends, the subversion of the Parliament and present Government, which they well know cannot with more ease be attempted, then by lies and false suggestions, cunningly insinuated and spread amongst the people, and by malicious misrepresentation of things acted and done, to take off and divide their affections from that just Authority which is set over them for their good and safety…”

So the 1643 Order couldn’t have worked that well!

Indeed, by 1649, it wasn’t just presses that had to be controlled, but Hawkers and Balladeers too. “And whereas divers vagrant persons, of idle conversations, having forsaken their usual Callings, and accustomed themselves after the maner of Hawkers, to sell and cry about the streets, and in other places, Pamphlets, and other Books, and under colour thereof are found to disperse all sorts of dangerous Libels..” To prison they were to go.

Of course, such regulation was unlikely to work. Printing presses could be, and were transportable, and Quakers, Royalists Presbyterians and others could both print at home and abroad, and the licensers found themselves chasing and chasing their scandals, seditions and libels.

So I find it difficult to get too excited by the debate today. The proposed royal charter is no Licensing Order or Printing Act, and the burdens it places on the press seem mild to me. At the same time, even such a mild and reasonable attempt to regulate the “press” seems laughable at the precise moment when the press itself is dying.

How would a regulator, of any sort, hope to control my subscription to Perez Hilton, or the New York Times App, or the Australian Guardian? On what basis would it claim authority? How would it enforce it? All that would happen, I suspect is that the modern day hawkers, pamphleteers and balladeers would find a way past such regulation, and stand at their distance, thumbing their nose at the regulators.

All the way through this debate, it has felt to me that the real problem was that various media organisations were involved in criminal behaviour. That criminal behaviour was a crime whether I did it, if Piers Morgan did it or if Hugh Grant did it. The problem was that the crimes were not investigated, not taken seriously, not regarded as a priority.

Tackling that issue has always appeared cleaner to me than trying to impose even a mild and sensible form of press regulation. After all, isn’t it the whole point that the mild and sensible press will happily join in any such regulation, while the anarchic, the trouble-making and the resentful will seek to find some way round it, and will almost certainly succeed, thus making the whole regulatory project something of a Mare’s nest?

My expectation is that the people who will be enriched will be the owners of websites located offshore, who will gleefully publish anything they choose, and thus take the readers and the advertising funds from the already decaying grip of the “Press”.

The interesting question isn’t really whether Rupert Murdoch is opposed to press regulation by Royal Charter.

It’s whether Arianna Huffington and Perez Hilton will even notice it.