Compass Conference

I went to the Compass conference on Saturday 14th June at the Institute for Education in London.  Compass are a think tank for the democratic left who seem to be focussing on rivitalising the Labour Party, and attempting to offer it a moral compass to help it navigate its way out of triangulation and meaningless political posturing and maneuvering.  I wanted to share a few revelations and points of interest from the Conference -

I had never seen Ed Miliband speak before but I was very impressed.  He took to the stage, without notes, and paced the stage talking charismatically with the aid of a roaming microphone.  It was very Cameron.  He was personable, funny and inspiring.  He seemed much more honest and passionate and progressive than most.  He opened by saying that the Compass conference was probably too 'left' for his brother David, our Foreign Secretary, but that many of his other family members were probably in the audience. The Miliband family do seem to be a nice wholesome bunch.  They all go to the Hay Festival. Sadly David already seems too hampered by political spin-speak, but Ed struck me as more straight-forward.  I was seized by the idea that Ed should stand as leader of the Labour party and that he has the charisma to seriously challenge Cameron, with the advantage that Labour has a much better record on progressive issues than the Conservatives.  The Tories have been boasting about their women MPs, but they only have 17 to Labour's 94 and that is because Labour had all-women shortlists.  It was Labour that pushed the minimum wage when the Tories opposed it and now Cameron is talking about fairness and equality.  Ed Miliband advanced the case for Labour to reclaim its language (currently being hijacked by Cameron) examine and publicise the historical record of both parties and then hold fast to its old tradition of fighting for equality.  You can read Ed Miliband's edited version of his speech on the New Statesman here.

I shouldn't advocate him too heartily yet as I have not checked out his voting record or researched him in any depth.  I just found it a revelation to see him speak.

Whilst sitting outside having lunch, I realised Tony Benn was sitting next to me smoking a pipe.  A founding member of Compass sidled up to Benn and started ranting.  I found the conversation quite illuminating so will replicate it here -

Compass Member (CM) - "Young people are so apathetic now.  Only the over 50s vote.  It's dreadful.  I think we should have the Australian system where people get fined for not voting.  Young people just don't care"

Tony Benn (TB) - "That's not the impression I get.  The young people that speak to me just don't believe a word any of our politicians say and can't see any difference between them. We live in a one party state.  There's nothing to vote FOR".

CM - "Look, I lived through Thatcherism!  I don't want to go back to that!  I wouldn't wish that on anyone, that's what I tell my children"

TB - "We've got Thatcherism!  Thatcher said New Labour was her greatest achievement!  Look, we need something bigger than all this, something bolder, truer and more inspiring".

CM - "Yes, but it's just so hard to find a position"

TB - "No.  It's very simple.  Say what you believe in".

It really doesn't need to be complicated.  I think Tony is sometimes the only voice of sanity in a mad political world. I completely agree with him.

Polly Toynbee delivered the final address and advanced the argument that Labour should seize the chance to act radically now.  Gordon has waited years for power so shouldn't fritter it away playing politics, but should use his position to advance an agenda that he really believes in.  Here's Polly -

"The one thing that we can say about now is that nothing can now be seen as political suicide"

"People who are about to die can do anything!  We've got two years, lets be brave and do everything we can to do what is right and cement it to the floor so that it is bloody hard to unpick.  Don't waste time triangulating and then loose!"

Who knows?  If Labour actually acted radically, showed principled conviction and led from the heart then people might actually vote for them anyway.  They would appeal to people's best instincts and moral conscience. The current politics is a vacuum.

Boris Johnson

Charlie Brooker summed up the support for Boris Johnson in a phrase - “BORIS LOL WHAT A LEGERND!” One visit to Boris’ support group on Facebook confirms this reaction. His vocal supporters post comments such as ‘I want a BJ’ and ‘Legend’ does feature repeatedly. Boris is the candidate of the irreverent student body, the people who believe that policy is boring and that what we all really need to do is chill out and have a laugh.

But this isn’t entertainment. This is a man contending for an extremely powerful, influential and symbolic position. If it was The Apprentice then I would say, ‘gosh that Boris is such a twazzock that we must keep him in, just for a laugh’. But it isn’t The Apprentice or Celebrity Big Brother and if he gets elected on May 1st then nobody will be able to vote him out for a few years.

I can see the appeal of the man. As a guest and presenter on ‘Have I Got News for You’ he was funny and witty. I like his journalism. It doesn’t matter that I don’t agree with his views, because his writing his lively and bold. He’s a great bastion for free speech because he is not constrained by trendy views about what is politically correct. His frankness is appealing and liberating. As a journalist this is an excellent quality, just as it is for a comedian. It is even refreshing and valuable for a politician who wants to take some risks. But it is the content of his opinions that alarms. The laughter masks what are often quite abhorrent views of the hard right. Boris Johnson is a fanatical Thatcherite. As a journalist he was a commentary writer for The Telegraph and editor of The Spectator. The BNP have endorsed Boris as the candidate their supporters should vote as their second preference.

Fortunately his journalistic record, largely archived and preserved online, leaves us a terrific resource to see what Boris really thinks about things. This is a man who opposed introducing the minimum wage, opposed the Kyoto treaty on climate change, was fervently for the Iraq war, wished George Bush and the neo-cons to be elected and re-elected, defends privatisation of the railways and supports steps to privatise the NHS. He doesn’t just support fox hunting, he goes further than most and advocates stag hunting as well!

I took a thorough look at Boris’ policies for Mayor of London and shall relay the crux of them. The newspapers are reporting characteristically and unhelpfully on a personality war between BoJo and Red Ken, advancing the celebrity shimmer to it by the day. Underneath this veneer is what really matters. So let us examine.

His environmental policies are incredibly lightweight. They highlight tidying up litter and preserving parks. Of course everyone supports that, how inoffensive and untroubling and easy. It reminds me of myself at infant school tottering off happily on litter-picks in the park. I’m glad Boris wants to protect our parks but I don’t think Ken is threatening them. In fact Ken is planning to create the largest urban park that Europe has developed for over 200 years. Boris will support the Low Emmisions Zone. That’s good, but as Ken set it up it is probably safest in his hands. Boris wants to ‘reform’ the congestion charge (whatever that means) and perceives Ken’s new levies as a ‘stick to beat motorists’. The congestion charge was a radical policy that raises revenue for environmental projects and is now being replicated in other major cities around the world after Ken’s bold and brave piloting of it. Boris would never take that leadership.

Wait, here is something good, Boris will have a ban on bottled water and internal flights. What’s the catch? It just applies to the Greater London Authority. Well, we should be thankful for small mercies I suppose though the cynic in me feels patronised by that level of tokenism. Boris is at least bike-friendly, we can say that. I’m glad he wants to take protectionist measures against bike theft and roll out bike-for-hire schemes. A policy check reveals that Ken has tripled the cycling budget and will be creating more cycle lanes and is also adopting a bike-for-hire scheme to encourage new cyclists to have a go. So that’s covered.

Boris says he opposes a third runway at Heathrow. Thank heavens for that. Oh, but he supports a new airport by the Thames. That counter-acts his first impulse. Ken genuinely opposes a third runway at Heathrow. The Green Mayoral candidate Sian Berry not just opposes a third Heathrow runway but would also close City airport. She’s obviously got more balls than the men in suits.

Boris did win me over with his bid to protect London gardens from new-build projects. He says that we need to preserve our green spaces as they help protect against flooding in a concrete city. This is commendable but Ken insists that all planning applications are presided over by local borough councils and so a change of Mayor can’t solve this problem anyway.

In contrast to Boris who opposed the introduction of the minimum wage, Ken supports the campaign for a London living wage which aims to raise the minimum wage in the capital to reflect its heightened cost of living. Sian Berry is a patron of the movement. Boris talks about how he hates inequality but he has no policies whatsoever that attempt to counteract it or make business more fair for the exploited.

Paul Merton once announced “Boris Johnson is the person to lead this country back to the 17th century!” He makes a prescient point. Having Boris for Mayor would be incredibly regressive and damaging. I think that the journalist Brian Cathcart summed the situation up perfectly when he asked, is Boris bothered? "Twenty years of his journalism say no, and so do ten celebrity years in which he came to embody the idea that it was clever not even to bother understanding”.

Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a governor that ran with the slogan ‘I’ll be back’, doesn’t ‘get’ Boris. Check out this hilarious YouTube clip where he says Boris is “fumbling all over the place”. And Boris certainly does fumble. But the word ‘fumble’ makes him sound too harmless, too loveable. He obfuscates too. Watch his cringe-making refusal to name the cost of his bus policies on Newsnight when Jeremy Paxman repeatedly asks him for an answer before resigning himself to despair. A similarly embarrassing refusal to stop his nonsensical tirades can be seen on Andrew Marr’s Sunday AM show.

I can see the appeal of a politician who is funny, irreverent and human. So many politicians look smarmy, slick and untrustworthy. Boris blunders and says silly things and we relate to him. He makes racist and misogynistic comments and we laugh because it is flawed and real. But beneath this jolly veneer lies an ambitious politician as power-hungry and dishonest as those we blindly disassociate him with. When Boris ran for President of the Oxford Union years ago, his colleagues recollect that the Tory publicly embraced the popularity of social democrat principles. As soon as he was elected, he asserted himself boldly as a Tory again. This time he is not even pretending. His policies, in all their weakness, are there for all to see. His archive of hardcore right-wing opinions are easily found on the internet and his published books. Unfortunately such facts have been largely banished as irrelevant. Saying so is like switching off the music in the middle of a party. You’re seen as the boring, stick-in-the-mud party-pooper. It’s cool to like Boris. He is a Facebook legend. Middle-class, ironic students, freshly moved to the big-smoke lap him up and will vote on the day. I pray they don’t outweigh the sense of more discerning people.

On the subject of boycotting Burma...

This is a letter that I recently sent to Carl Mortished of The Times in response to an article that he wrote about Burma -
Click here to read the original article!

Dear Carl Mortished,

I feel compelled to write having read, and re-read, your commentary 'Boycotting Burma Makes Things Worse' in The Times on Wednesday October 3.

I fully appreciate your point that sanctions are complicated and result in job losses that can harm the poorest people. However, your argument doesn't seem to balance this with the gains sanctions could bring. Or why, if this was the case, so many people in Burma are calling for sanctions and international intervention (including the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi that you mention)?

You say that Europeans who protest "that foreign investment fills the generals' pockets are washing their hands of responsibility". How exactly? Surely these people are trying to take responsibility for the way our money is spent. They are trying to be responsible for the repurcussions of that investment.

Also, it IS a Ghandi-like civil rights movement. The people and the monks in Burma are peacefully marching for their democratic rights. That seems fundamentally humane and reasonable to me. It's not an even-handed civil war between two sides, but rather the majority of Burmese people asking the Junta for democratic rights. Some soldiers have run away because they don't want to harm the monks, so you can't neatly posit the army and the monks against eachother.

Your sentence "Both the mendicant monks and the parasitic military are a burden on a society that has never properly developed a professional middle class" is full of western pomposity and is, frankly, nauseating and infuriating.

What I truly don't understand about your article is it's closing note. You say that organising a boycott without Asia's participation is "not just pointless but likely to undermine the moral authority of Western business principles". What moral authority are you referring to? You compound this idea with your final paragraph -
"If our only response to offensive regimes is to cut them off, we not only lose a business advantage but the moral high ground as well".
What moral high ground do we have by continuing with business as usual? I just feel confused by this purportedly 'moral' ending to your article, when it hasn't been earned or justified! I can't see any evidence of how we can use our business dealings to have moral authority if we indiscriminately do business with oppressive regimes.

George Monbiot's argument set out in The Guardian felt much more coherent. His closing paragraph read -
"If, like me, you have been shaking your head over the crushing of the protests, wondering what on earth you can do, I suggest you get on the phone to these companies, demanding, politely, that they cut their ties. I sense that it wouldn't take much more pressure to persuade them to pull out. By itself, this won't bring down the regime. But it will cut its sources of income, and allow us to focus on confronting the reality of Chinese investment, rather than the excuse."

I don't think imposing sanctions means leaving the country in isolation (which as you yourself say, is "killing by neglect"). It is the first step in taking the moral highground. From such a position of action you can pressurise countries like China, without hypocrisy, to remove their support for the regime. This is, at least, despite it's difficulties, a positive form of action and humanitarian intervention.

Your article doesn't seem to offer any solutions at all. As far as I understand it, you propose business as usual, whilst simultaneously dismissing the protests as a civil war - a particularly Burmese quarrel. However, somehow, we can congratulate ourselves on having the moral highground without lifting a finger. You seem to have it every which way and offer no answers. It might be convenient for your readers to shrug their shoulders and say "What can you do?" but it leaves me decidedly uncomfortable and confused.

I would be very grateful if you could clarify your thoughts on this. I'm sorry this email comes so late but I have tried to puzzle through what you mean myself before writing. I have shown your article to a number of friends and everywhere it has met a similar level of perplexity. Perhaps it was edited strangely.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Thank you for your time,
Nicola Cutcher