Dominic Lawson
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On liberal intervention, great power rivalry and climate change
DAVID GOODHART: Let’s look back at the story of liberal interventionism over the last ten years and the apparent return of great power politics in recent weeks—and how they are linked. The use of violence to solve international problems has not been very successful, and arguably we are now getting the boomerang back in Georgia. If we want a rule-bound world, haven’t we got to stick to the rules?
DAVID MILIBAND: Well, violence rarely solves things and the definition of liberal interventionism is not violence. The origins of liberal intervention is the now-hackneyed view that we have a self-interest—not just a moral interest—in the actions of others because of global interdependence. It’s also about “responsible sovereignty”—the responsibility of states to their own people according to certain universal values, but also the responsibility they have to the international system. That’s where I start the debate about when it’s right for a state or group of states to interfere in another state.
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Philip Cowley
What happens if the next British election reflects today’s opinion polls and Labour is wiped out—slumping from today’s 350 MPs to 200 or even fewer? The conventional wisdom is that moderates and Blairites sit for the more marginal seats, and leftist old Labour types for heartland safe seats that would survive a disaster. The result, it is claimed, is that the party would implode. The parliamentary Labour party (PLP) would become a socialist rump, with the moderate minority splitting to form a new party, or perhaps to join the Liberal Democrats.
As often with conventional wisdom, there is something in the underlying assumption. Labour’s very marginal seats are disproportionately held by party loyalists. If Labour were to lose its 44 most marginal seats, for example, it would lose just one MP who backed the left-wing John McDonnell for the leadership against Gordon Brown last year. And seats held by Labour with a majority of 10 per cent or less are disproportionately held by MPs who have not cast one dissenting vote against the government since 2005.
Yet anyone hoping for a leftist takeover of the PLP will be disappointed. For one thing, the effect is not very strong. For example, of those Labour MPs who are currently committed to fighting the next election, around 62 per cent have not voted against the party whip since the last election. If Labour loses every seat up to, say, a majority of 5 per cent, then 70 per cent of those who fall are loyalists, 30 per cent rebels. So loyalists go faster than rebels, but mainly because there are more of them; any disproportionality in the rate of defeat is marginal.
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Andrew Adonis
Teach First—the scheme that recruits graduates from elite universities to teach in inner-city schools for two years—is turning into one of the most successful social movements in the country and helping to reinvent the idea of post-university public service. In July it was announced that the scheme will grow over the next five years to 850 graduates per year, up from the current figure of 380.
Teach First recruits top graduates, mainly from Oxbridge and the other “Russell group” universities, and trains them intensively in the summer after graduation. The students-turned-teachers are then placed in mutually supportive groups of up to seven (almost never singly) in lower-attaining secondary schools in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and other conurbations.
Teach First was launched five years ago based on the Teach for America scheme in the US. This year’s 380 students were recruited after a tough selection process from nearly 2,000 applicants, all projected to get first-class degrees or 2:1s from top universities. An extraordinary 5 per cent of the entire graduating cohort at Oxford applied this year, attracted by the two-year challenge, the social mission and the CV boost offered by the training and classroom experience at the sharp end.
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Richard Reeves
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The first headmaster of Stowe school, JF Roxburgh, declared his goal to be turning out young men who would be “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” A mixture of courtesy and courage used to be essential to the idea of a British citizen’s character. Brits were the sort of people who knew both how to survive a Blitz and queue politely. Similarly, Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scout movement, aimed to induce in his young charges “some of the spirit of self-negation, self-discipline, sense of humour, responsibility, helpfulness to others, loyalty and patriotism which go to make ‘character.’” He described his movement as nothing less than a “character factory.”
But in the postwar shift towards a less constrained and judgemental society—”character-talk” in Stefan Collini’s phrase—dropped out of public discourse, except when considering someone’s suitability for high office. The idea of good character came to sound old-fashioned and patronising.
“The reason we find the concept of character difficult is because of class conflict in British society,” says Matthew Taylor, former head of strategy for Tony Blair, in an interview for my recent Radio 4 Analysis programme “Character Factories.” “There was a sense that good character was handed down from a patrician class to the great unwashed.”
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Kieran Brett
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With the economic and political clouds darkening for Labour, the debate about how to restore the party’s electoral fortunes is well under way. Many urge the government to return to its ideological “roots”—though not everyone agrees on what these roots are. Perhaps loudest are those who urge Labour to return to a leftist agenda. John Harris, writing in the Guardian, insists that we must forgo New Labour “rot,” join Compass and support Jon Cruddas for prime minister. Similarly, Neal Lawson urges Labour to return to “collectivist solutions only the state can offer.”
Others counsel a return to Labour’s ideological traditions from a different direction. Philip Collins and Richard Reeves have recently argued in Prospect that Labour needs to excavate its liberal tradition and turn away from the “poisoned well” of Labour’s Fabian wing. But is a return to ideology the right route to take?
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Helen Goodman
Labour won the 2005 general election on the somewhat vacuous slogan of “Forward not back,” but now we learn from Philip Collins and Richard Reeves that we could go simultaneously forward and back to the Liberal election victory of 1906.
In their article “Liberalise or die” (Prospect, June 2008), Collins/Reeves argue that we should abandon social democracy for liberalism. But it turns out that this is just a function of their arbitrary labelling. Where they agree with a policy (being more green or raising inheritance tax), they call it “liberal”; where they disagree (as on tackling childhood obesity or regulating new casinos), they call it “social democratic.”
This gets them into a tangle. They are, for example, scathing about the government’s play strategy. But it is a genuine problem that today the average ten year old is allowed out to play only 100 yards from home compared with 800 yards 30 years ago. If we are to give children back their freedom, then it is right to invest in parks and playgrounds and to bring down road traffic speeds. These are political issues.
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Philip Collins
In the drama of British politics, a Labour tragedy is unfolding. A combination of strategic errors, political mishaps and bad luck has left the party in a vulnerable position. The economy is turning soft and the electorate sour. The focus, at the moment, is on the lead characters—Gordon Brown and David Cameron—rather than the stories they are telling. Of course they matter. Leadership is about character. But Labour’s woes do not flow simply from weak leadership and poor politics.
Labour is failing to win—or even to grasp—the big political argument: how to ensure people are in control of their own lives. The government has tested, often to destruction, the idea that a bigger, higher-spending state can deliver a better society. It has enjoyed some success in rehabilitating the idea of the state as an enabler. But Labour has reached the limits of what can be achieved through central-state diktat, and is running out of money.
For New Labour to survive, it must become new liberal. The key dividing line in politics is no longer between left and right, but, increasingly, between liberal and authoritarian. The Labour government too often finds itself on the wrong side of this divide. One of the lessons Labour ought to have learned from 11 years in charge of the state is to be humble about the limits of that power. Another lesson is that the demands of individuals for more say in how public services are provided and delivered are growing stronger.
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Manneken Pis
Is it all over for Blair?
When asked who should be the first president of the EU, most European leaders refuse to speculate on names, claiming that the terms of the job need to be defined before individuals can be discussed. At least that’s what they say on the record. But the main French newspapers recently revealed, in strikingly similar reports, that sources at the Elysée were ruling out Tony Blair for the job as there was too much opposition to him. Even the left-wing groups in the European parliament don’t want him, said the unnamed sources. Instead, Jean-Claude Juncker, veteran chain-smoking premier of Luxembourg, was the favourite.
So who was doing the briefing? These stories appeared just after the newspapers’ Brussels correspondents had been invited en masse to the Elysée for an audience with none other than the president, Nicolas Sarkozy. On the surface, this is a considerable blow to Blair, because Sarkozy first put the former prime minister’s name into the frame. Now even Sarko thinks Blair is a dead duck. But it may be a mistake to take this at face value. The front-runner for an EU job invariably fails to secure the position, because their enemies are given enough time to stop them. So Juncker may not relish being in pole position.
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John Elsom
British theatre is in some kind of timewarp. It revives 40-year-old plays considered to be radical in their day as if they were modern classics. It treats the 1960s generation of left-wing dramatists, including Edward Bond, Harold Pinter, David Hare and Howard Brenton, as if they were beyond criticism. But we have moved on since those days, and they have not moved with us.
Jonathan Kent must have thought that it would come as a bit of a shock to offer Bond’s 1973 play The Sea during his season as artistic director at the Haymarket. This is the most Edwardian of London’s theatres, perfect for a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest; whereas Bond is a poet of the left, accustomed to wag an accusing finger at the middle classes that make up the bulk of the Haymarket’s audiences. Yet seeing the play—which runs until 19th April—brought no shock at all. It was as if this early warning against the perils of Thatcher, who when the play was first seen was known to the left as “milk-snatcher,” is what we have come to expect from the theatre.
The Sea is over the top and farcical, which may be why it is billed as a comedy. A grand lady, Mrs Rafi, ruins a haberdasher with her extravagant orders and failure to pay, until he turns mad, blaming aliens for the collapse of his business. It has one scene of mindless violence—Bond’s trademark. The shopkeeper ferociously stabs the corpse of a drowned man, mistaking him for a foreigner. The British class system, in short, is to blame for the ruin of the economy and the way in which we behave so aggressively towards others.
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David Herman
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Is the New Statesman in crisis? The departure of its editor John Kampfner means that the political weekly has had seven editors in just over 20 years and its circulation is still hovering close to 23,000—the figure in 1996 when Geoffrey Robinson bought the magazine. Perhaps most serious of all, the Statesman has ceased to matter. When was the last time you heard someone discussing an article they had read, or the magazine itself?
This may seem severe. After all, since its redesign in 2006, the magazine looks more inviting than it has for years. More than 60 pages, full of colour, with a lively arts section, it boasts some excellent contributors. Hunter Davies, a long-time columnist, is one of the best sports writers around. Andrew Billen, now writing on “performance,” is a fine television critic. A recent issue included book reviews by Hanif Kureishi, John Sweeney and Alex Brummer and arts pieces by Colin McCabe and top-rate music writer, Simon Broughton. There is a polemical piece by William Dalrymple on Pakistan and a solid article by David Marquand calling for a new progressive alliance. The magazine is an easy and informed read.
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