David Goodhart
How many new friends does Cameron need to win?
Here at Prospect we eschew the wearisome political cynicism of our age and look forward to the election with a whistle and a skip. Like all national elections it is a festival of democracy—a chance for the country to talk to itself about how to cut the deficit (and whether a hung parliament would make it harder). We have sneaked in with an early “election special” to help to prepare you for the deluge of commentary. But it is not shaping up to be a historic contest.
Indeed, it may be encapsulated by a poignant exchange between a husband and wife (David and Karen) in Luton’s main shopping mall, reported by Sam Knight. “I ask David if he plans to vote Conservative. ‘It’s got to be better than the Labour lot, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘That’s just the way I see it. Maybe it isn’t…’ He is suddenly filled with doubt, and turns to his wife. ‘Karen, if you was voting, who would you vote for? You think they’re probably all the same don’t you.’ Karen looks down the mall. It is full of families. She speaks quietly. ‘I’d give the other ones a bit of a chance,’ she says.”
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David Goodhart
Here at Prospect we eschew the wearisome political cynicism of our age and look forward to the election with a whistle and a skip. Like all national elections it is a festival of democracy—a chance for the country to talk to itself about how to cut the deficit (and whether a hung parliament would make it harder). We have sneaked in with an early “election special” to help to prepare you for the deluge of commentary. But it is not shaping up to be a historic contest. Indeed, it may be encapsulated by a poignant exchange between a husband and wife (David and Karen) in Luton’s main shopping mall, reported by Sam Knight. “I ask David if he plans to vote Conservative. ‘It’s got to be better than the Labour lot, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘That’s just the way I see it. Maybe it isn’t…’ He is suddenly filled with doubt, and turns to his wife. ‘Karen, if you was voting, who would you vote for? You think they’re probably all the same don’t you.’ Karen looks down the mall. It is full of families. She speaks quietly. ‘I’d give the other ones a bit of a chance,’ she says.”
Britain may not be feeling happy and confident but it is not broken either; the Tory slogan “It can’t go on like this” seems rather silly, when it so obviously will go on roughly like this whoever is in No 10. Moreover, it has been an oddly calm recession with no hint of the summer of rage we were promised—despite the fact that the slowdown follows Britain’s biggest ever immigration wave.
Many of the pieces in this issue—including David Willetts explaining how the Tories can foster co-operation without the state, and our special section on brain science—explore how insights from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology can inform politics. The drift of the debate seems to be favouring moderate Conservative positions, so perhaps it is the political zeitgeist leading science rather than the other way round. On most big questions of the day, however, it is shocking to realise how little most of us actually know about anything. Or rather, despite all that data on the web, we know almost nothing at first hand, relying instead on our chosen interpreters to help position ourselves along a spectrum of views and values. This was brought home to me by Roddy Campbell’s piece on why climategate matters. I had believed that the temperature record was a simple thing that gave us an even simpler message about the dangers of global warming. Now I’m not sure. It is still likely that pumping all that C02 into the atmosphere will lead to warming, possibly catastrophic warming, but the record is not yet convincing and its scientific guardians must surely be neutral dullards, not activists. A proper scepticism towards the data is not only legitimate, but necessary, before we change the way we live.
Prospect
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Vince Cable
Vince is a master of the pithy soundbite. But opinions are cheap. The real test is when one has to take decisions. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling stared down the barrel of a gun and, at least for the 24 hours when they nationalised the banks, delivered. Vince’s test came when he published his instant book on the financial crisis, The Storm. He was found wanting. The final section, “The Future, A Road Map,” is no such thing, just a piece of flimflam. We love you, Vince, but let’s not overdo it.
Peter Bazalgette, television producer
Google Wave
Betting against a Google product is scary. This, after all, is the company that revolutionised search and runs the best online email service. But Google Wave, a “real-time communication and collaboration” tool designed to help people work on projects together in real time, has left many nonplussed. It’s been described as email on steroids, which, since email’s beauty is its simplicity, may be the trouble.
Jim Giles, US-based science writer
Anthony Gormley’s 4th Plinth
To be fair, interest in Anthony Gormley’s dreadful Fourth Plinth did not extend past it’s first day – but that was enough. The headlines in every national newspaper and coverage on rolling news channels are how arts council mandarins judge the success of a public art project nowadays. By day two, everyone had forgotten about it, except the people taking part – a mixture of show-offs and political protestors – and Sky Arts, who had this live feed running. What I hated most of all, was the way critics compared it to Reality TV. Really? Gormley’s plinth had nothing to do with Reality TV. His plinthers were selected at random by a computer programme – while the participants in a Reality TV show are carefully cast by teams of cynical television executives, looking for character, conflict, drama etc. That’s why Reality TV is so exciting. Gormley’s Plinth was a boring because it wasn’t Reality TV.
Ben Lewis, Prospect’s art critic
Anish Kapoor
One of the chief exhibits at Anish Kapoor’s Royal Academy show was a gun worked by compressed air that at 20-minute intervals fired a cylinder of red wax across the gallery. The wax hit the wall and made a small mess. The catalogue noted solemnly that Kapoor had first exhibited his gun in Vienna—“the city in which Freud established psychoanalysis.” Also the city that gave us the sachertorte, but so what?
Ian Jack, Guardian columnist
Undervalued Chinese yuan
The magic bullet effect of a higher yuan is overrated. Letting the undervalued yuan appreciate, as the EU and US want, would be a good thing. But it does not guarantee a reduction in China’s trade surplus. In 2005 China did allow the yuan to appreciate and that coincided with the first years of China’s ballooning trade surplus.
Isabel Hilton, editor of chinadialogue.net
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Brian Semple
"The situation is actually good": do you agree with Graciela Chichilnisky on climate change?
Before the Copenhagen climate convention kicked off this week, Prospect and Editorial Intelligence teamed up to gather together some of the world’s top climate change experts and thrash out the most important environmental issues. Last Tuesday’s debate, “What is the Climate on Climate Change?”, featured among others Graciela Chichilnisky, architect of the Carbon Market of the Kyoto Protocol, EU environmental expert Jesse Scott and Rosie Boycott, head of the London Food Board.
The result was a fascinating discussion, in which Scott lamented environment ministers’ lack of financial and intellectual muscle, Boycott insisted that stopping deforestation was the single most important factor in cutting carbon emissions, while Chichilnisky suggested that “the situation is actually good” as long as we introduce certain changes:
We need third generation carbon capture technology, which is carbon negative, to build power plants that suck carbon from the air, and to mobilise the profit making energy industry into doing what they do best–channel those funds to change the $53 trillion dollar energy industry worldwide, and to bring unity to the world economy while resolving this intractable issue of climate change.
Click here to watch these speakers in action, along with responses from Tristram Stuart (author of Waste: uncovering the global food scandal) and Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas.
James Crabtree
Civic service: what would Cicero do?
Britain needs a universal programme of youth civic service, as Prospect argued in a cover essay I wrote with Frank Field earlier this year. Recession-era Britain also needs a massively expensive new public spending programme—whose benefits are difficult to quantify—like a hole in the head. Discuss.
Solving this conundrum is tricky. No one has run the numbers on such a civic service programme for some time. Number 10 did cost a scheme, in secret, in the early 2000s—when they looked at doing something big and bold, and ended up doing “V” instead. While they didn’t publish the result, I seem to remember being told it was “a lot”.
Thankfully, we have think tanks to help out—and so congratulations are due to Prospect’s “one to watch 2010” think tank, Demos, for picking up the ball, and moving it well down the park. They have just produced a paper on how one variant of a civic service scheme might work. And it’s a genuinely strong piece of work.
The authors — Sonia Sodha and Daniel Leighton — have come up with a compelling new model. Their approach is informed by a fair criteria to rank possible policies, and a clear reading of the evidence (full disclosure: I used to work with both Dan and Sonia in different jobs, and admire their work.) Congratulations should also got to the Private Equity Foundation, who supported Demos—and who are currently bringing CityYear—a nonprofit organisation whose primary goal is to build democracy through citizen—service to the UK. That said, the gist of what is interesting here lies in two novelties.
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Prospect
Julie Burchill’s Deptford
23rd October 2009
According to Julie Burchill (November), “there is a higher quota of drunkards, drug addicts and mentally deficient dullards in Debrett’s than there is in Deptford.” She’s absolutely right; yet she refers to Deptford as if it’s some kind of Dickensian slum. It may no longer be the cradle of the British navy or home to Trinity House, but there are still corners that Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn and Grinling Gibbons would recognise as their old haunts. And we’ve got more artists and musicians than you can shake a stick at. Even the New York Times thinks Deptford’s hip.
Simon Cowderoy
Deptford High Street, London SE8
The information curse
23rd October 2009
“In fact” (November) informs us that it took 17 days for news of the battle of Trafalgar to reach London, at an average speed of 2.7mph. But to judge by Stephen Nickell’s column, the information highway to Oxford operates under even more stringent speed limits. The term “resource curse” was, according to Wikipedia, coined by Richard Auty, an academic at Lancaster University, in 1993. Given that Nickell’s column contained nothing new, we can only conclude that news of this curse must have just reached his college in Oxford—taking 16 years or so to make the 168-mile journey (via every other university, development agency and multilateral governance organisation in the world), travelling at an average speed of 0.00119863mph. And people say the world is speeding up.
Tom Nuttall
London E8
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David Goodhart
Twenty years on from 1989, few people still believe that goodwill and dollars alone can solve the world’s problems. But perhaps the last vestige of post-1989 utopianism has survived among the new media apostles who argue that authoritarian states can be brought low by the internet. Evgeny Morozov’s cover essay is a vivid rebuttal of that idea—best summed up by the American comedian Jon Stewart’s retort to those who think the web is freeing Iraqis, Iranians and Afghans: “What, we could have liberated them over the internet? Why did we send an army when we could do it the same way we buy shoes?”
David Cameron’s Tories are not so naive as to believe that Twitter will bring down tyrants, but they maintain an attractive optimism about new technologies and politics in general. Optimism is easier in opposition, but in early November Cameron’s Hugo Young lecture, on the theme “big society, rather than big state,” re-established a coherent liberal message after his rather dotty party conference speech, which almost advocated abolishing the state altogether. Listening to his lecture, it was possible to believe again that the Tories have put the Major, Hague, IDS and Howard years behind them and might combine the best of New Labour with a keener appreciation of the unintended consequences of state action. But there are reasons for scepticism too. First, it is easy to express concern about poverty and inequality to a Guardian audience. Yet the rise in inequality stems mostly from two Tory measures in the 1980s: tax reductions for the well off and financial deregulation. Cameron has no intention of reversing either, so how will he improve on Labour’s patchy record? Second, the Cameron liberals are a thin slice at the top of the party and could get swept aside. Third, the Tories have recently shown serious lapses of judgement. Appointing General Richard Dannatt as a defence adviser astonished some people who know his beliefs in non-military matters. And William Hague’s campaign against Tony Blair’s EU presidency bid—more effective than is generally realised—was an act of unpatriotic party political spite. If we are staying in Europe we must make it work for us. John Major sulked on the margins, but after 1997 Blair bent the EU to our national interest on defence, enlargement, liberalisation and so on. As president he would have helped to reconcile the British public to European realities. Cameron is more pragmatic on Europe, but Hague may call the shots in the event of a narrow Tory victory which will empower Eurosceptic MPs. Does that mean pro-EU liberals have to hope for a thumping Tory victory?
Brian Semple
The internet: a dictator's best friend?
When Barack Obama met with Chinese students yesterday in Shanghai, he called for greater internet freedom in China, saying that “the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes.”
However, in the upcoming issue of Prospect web guru Evgeny Morozov argues that the west has not only vastly overestimated the power of repressive regimes to censor the internet, but is also misguided in thinking that the internet is good for democracy. Instead, authoritarian regimes are finding new ways to control the web:
The “great firewall of China,” which supposedly keeps the Chinese in the dark, is legendary. Such methods of internet censorship no longer work. They might stop the man on the street, but a half determined activist can find a way round. And more often than not, official attempts to delete a post by an anti-government blogger will backfire, as the blogger’s allies take on the task of distributing it through their own networks. Governments have long lost absolute control over how the information spreads online, and extirpating it from blogs is no longer a viable option. Instead, they fight back. It is no trouble to dispatch commentators to accuse a dissident of being an infidel, a sexual deviant, a criminal, or worst of all a CIA stooge.
The December issue of Prospect is available to buy in shops from Thursday 19th November, and subscribers can read the piece online at www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
Brian Semple
Will Sarkozy convince fellow leaders to adopt a Tobin tax?
It appears that Nicolas Sarkozy has taken a leaf out of Prospect’s book. Following last month’s interview with FSA chief Adair Turner, in which he described the City as “socially useless” and called for the introduction of a Tobin tax, there are now reports that Nicolas Sarkozy will urge fellow world leaders at next month’s G20 meeting in Paris to consider a Tobin tax on all financial transactions.
Speaking exclusively to Prospect for the September issue, Turner argued that reforms in the financial sector should be focused on excessive profits rather than excessive bonuses:
“If you want to stop excessive pay in a swollen financial sector you have to reduce the size of that sector or apply special taxes to its pre-remuneration profit. Higher capital requirements against trading activities will be our most powerful tool to eliminate excessive activity and profits. And if increased capital requirements are insufficient I am happy to consider taxes on financial transactions—Tobin taxes, after the economist James Tobin. Such taxes have long been the dream of the development economists and those who care about climate change—a nice sensible revenue source for funding global public goods. The problem is that getting global agreement will be very difficult…”
Indeed, while French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner has claimed that David Miliband is similarly in favour of a tax, it seems that others are less enthusiastic: Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel have voiced concerns about its practicality, and senior EU officials have described chances of international co-operation as “less than minimal.”
So can Turner’s idea work, or will reaching global agreement on this prove impossible? Read the interview and let us know your thoughts here.
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