James Crabtree
Evgeny Morozov, Rishi Saha, Tom Watson and John Lloyd debate online politics, monday, @DEMOS
I’ve been meaning to put this up here for yonks—it was deadline week at Prospect HQ last week, which has the habit of getting in the way of a man and his blog—but better late than never. Tomorrow evening Prospect (along with the excellent people at Demos) is hosting an intriguing debate about the internets, and what mean for politics. It is also a chance to see our cover star, Evgeny Morozov, who is in London for one night only. (Evgeny’s piece is here, and Clay Shirky’s response here—EM will also be on Start the Week tomorrow, 9am, Radio 4). Details below, and there are a few places still left — so if you are free, RSVP to seminars@demos.co.uk.
The title of this debate is “Is the Internet Really Changing Politics?” —and it’s a debate I seem to have been having for at least a decade. It tends to involve someone constructing a nice big straw man of someone who thinks that the internet is going to change politics irrevocabily. No one actually believes this, but this point of view (which is normally dubbed “techno-utopian” by someone by the minute 3 mark of any debate on the subject) is a useful construct. So the question becomes—how far do you go? 24 hour news cycles, databases to track voter preferences, politicians with email lists and Google docs, and all this before the online chit-chat of the blog world, and this year’s “must parse” techno-political innovation: Twitter. Add to this how differently political and technological systems interact: we Brits, for instance, have less money to spend on technology but more concentrated forms of power than the US, meaning that the US is more naturally suited both as a system of government and a political cash-nexus to online innovation.
Anyway, that is just to say I think the debate is going to be genuinely interesting—in Evgeny Morozov we have one of the freshest, most challenging takes on this broad topic of the interaction between revolutionary changes in communication technology, and our maturing understanding of politics and governance. So you should come if you can. More details below the jump.
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John Lloyd
September saw the results of the Plain Speaking Personality prize, a public poll carried out by a brandy company. X-Factor judge Simon Cowell came runner-up, and Jeremy Paxman and Sharon Osbourne joint third. The winner was a figure pre-eminent in the public’s consciousness as the Man Who Speaks His Mind, alone in a desert of political correctness and cowardice masked as tolerance: Jeremy Clarkson.
Clarkson’s celebrity is based on journalism; geeky, scruffy, oily car journalism. But he has turned that unlikely beginning into a platform for fame. His hugely popular vehicle Top Gear started its 14th series in mid-November. But zany and dramatic as the programme can be, it was only a launch pad. For Clarkson now represents a larger constituency: the seriously pissed-off-with-Labour part of England which has not spoken yet, but will in the next election. It is a world where the walking-on-eggshells demeanour of many public figures is mocked, and ministers are steamrollered for hypocrisy, weasel words and corruption with a collective retch of theatrical disgust. A friend of Clarkson’s, who spoke anonymously, said that in his right-leaning suburb “everybody loves his fight against the euphemisms, the correct-speak. I went into a pub, and overheard a conversation in which three blokes were saying: we wouldn’t have anyone else for prime minister.” Last year a petition on the Downing Street website to give him the top job attracted around 50,000 signatures, while in a 2009 YouGov poll Londoners demanded Clarkson (or Alan Sugar) as their mayor.
The popularity of Clarkson’s political views stands in marked contrast to his own attitude to politicians. At a press conference in Australia in February, he called Gordon Brown a “one-eyed Scottish idiot.” Then, after a break of some five months, he followed up by saying “Gordon Brown is a cunt” during a recording of Top Gear. BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow then “had a conversation” with Clarkson, but the official statement—as opaque as any diplomatic communiqué—said only that “she holds both the programme and Jeremy in high regard. After the recording she and Jeremy had a discussion about the programme as controllers and presenters often do.”
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Mary Fitzgerald
lsrael's Arabs: praying for change
As well as claiming the lives of over 1,000 Palestinian civilians, the war in Gaza has exposed deep fissures within Israeli society too. Adam LeBor reports on how the bloodshed has further radicalised IsraeI’s Arabs (currently around 20 per cent of the country’s population). But the last thing they want is to become part of a Palestinian state, he says; instead, many of their leaders are calling for Israel to cease being a Jewish state, and become a “state for all citizens”—with a new name, anthem and flag.
Arab Israelis, however, are just one of many “tribes” causing problems in the increasingly divided and dysfunctional state of Israel, writes John Lloyd. He hears from the country’s leading thinkers about how the threats from within Israel pose a greater threat to its existence than those from outside. Bernard Avishai also picks up on this theme, arguing that Israelis and Palestinians are more at war with themselves than each other. If President Obama is to make any difference in the middle east, Avishai argues, he must understand and exploit the divisions between the hardline and more moderate camps on both sides, and force them to work together. Israel’s leaders, he adds, must be forced into a “panic” that American support is no longer unconditional, but contingent on certain behaviour, like reigning in West Bank settlers.
Meanwhile, Tony Lerman, former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, heralds the long-awaited birth of J Street—a new, liberal American Jewish lobby. In particular, he notes J Street’s strong criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza as both a bold and a risky move. In electing Obama, though, the American public—Jewish or otherwise—have suggested their growing fatigue with Israel’s wars. And, Lerman notes, it’s about time they had a lobby to support them.
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