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Showing posts from 2016

Liberalism isn't the problem, progressivism is

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Liberals and liberalism are being given a hard time in the wake of Donald Trump's victory and Britain's Leave vote in the EU referendum. But is it really liberalism and the liberal outlook which is at stake here and which really stands accused? I am not so sure. Largely, this is about the way words, terms and labels mean different things to different people and get mixed up in interpretation. On the most basic level, the term 'liberal' means something very different in common American parlance from what it does in the classical British or European sense - complicated by how the American version has worked its way into our consciousness and practice on this side of the pond. In America, being 'liberal' is largely interchangeable with being 'progressive', which is an historical term that aligns us with a version of historical progress, so that our politics are part of a general progression of life from not-so-good to a lot better. That seems fine and g

On post-referendum regret

I was a Leave voter, and I won. However, since that heady early morning of 24 rd June when David Dimbleby announced that Britain was leaving the European Union, reality has dawned. The £ has fallen sharply; bankers and business groups have despaired and threatened to leave the country; there has been a massive jump in ‘hate crime’; the world and especially our former European partners are horrified at us for having chosen isolation and xenophobia over openness and tolerance. Now we are stuck here with all this uncertainty, not knowing what that ugly word ‘Brexit’ means, while our government is clearly clueless and doesn’t know what it’s doing. It’s a new dawn, a new day – and the new reality we’re living in certainly isn’t comfortable or pleasant. That’s the story anyway. Some of it is true. The new reality does come with discomforts and difficulties, and the fractious nature of our politics on the subject of Brexit is pretty unpleasant. But the idea constantly pres

Why Islamists and feminists avoid confronting each other

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our system of diversity is the way feminists and Islamists avoid directly confronting each other. Their ideologies are utterly opposed to each other, but within the system they are allies, so maintain distance and attack others. We can see this in how feminists resolutely avoid picking up on specifically Islamic-related instances of actual misogyny and discrimination in action. They nearly always stick to generalities and abstractions about the world or society as a whole, as Fawcett Society chief executive Sam Smethers does in telling Owen Jones that , “We have a very misogynistic culture in the UK.” In this version of reality, there is a single culture – or at least all the cultures we have come from the same root - and it is ‘very misogynistic’. This is the ‘patriarchy’ theory that is remarkably popular in the upper echelons of the liberal-left, just as it is among young feminists coming out of their Gender Studies courses at universit

My politics, in music (a Blue ex-Labour playlist)

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Music is an important part of my life and an important part of my politics too. Detaching from the political world is a political act after all. But good music also has magical qualities which can inspire and lead us into seeing connections and aspects of life that we may have been only dimly aware of before. In this way it feeds back into our political world. My own politics is an amalgam of all the different tendencies out there. I’m of the left for believing in our responsibilities to each other - especially those who find themselves on the wrong end of 'market forces'. I’m conservative for believing that we shouldn’t try to fix what ain’t broke, for respecting people as they are and life as it is. I’m liberal in believing that we should generally avoid interfering with what people are up to unless they are harming others. I’m Green for believing that we need to protect and conserve our environment and value the natural world. I’m UKIP for believing that Britain need

I have left the Labour Party - a few words

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I left the Labour Party this morning. I won’t go on for ages about why because I don’t want this blog to be about me, but I will say a few words. Firstly, people who have read some of my witterings on here will be aware that I’ve always been critical of the Labour Party, quite stridently in some cases. I think Labour has deep institutional and cultural problems, albeit I think these are really issues of the liberal-left ‘tribe’ and the systems of identity group favouritism it has spread into much of our public life rather than just about Labour. Labour simply provides a focus and a centre for them. My 2015 leadership election ballot paper Nevertheless, in looking at all this as I’ve done here, and on LabourList while I was allowed to write there, I’ve seen myself as a critical friend – as someone who is basically on the same side and wants us to change and become more responsive to all the people rather than just minister to certain groups and our own – mostly middle-clas

René Cuperus on 'the populist revolt against cosmopolitanism'

In 2011, the Dutch writer RenĂ© Cuperus wrote a chapter on 'the populist revolt against cosmopolitanism' for a Policy Network pamphlet ‘Exploring the cultural challenges to social democracy’. I think most readers will agree that the class divide he identifies appears starkly for us now with our EU referendum just a few days away*. Cuperus says: “One could argue, and thinkers like Manuel Castells made this point long before, that globalisation implies two contradicting things at the same time: 1. The world grows more together, becomes more ‘familiar’, interdependent, connected, better-known, better reported and visited and travelled, because of revolutionary changes in transportation, media (the world wide web) and the economy. The world is becoming flat. 2. But, ‘at home’, within nation states, globalisation implies that through global migration or by mergers and acquisitions, national societies become more global, more diverse, more ‘strange’, more fragmented an

This House Believes We Should Leave the European Union - LSE debate speech

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Speech at the London School of Economics Forum for Philosophy debate , 27th April 2016. I was proposing the motion alongside Dr Gerard Lyons  (economic adviser to the Mayor of London), with journalist Hugo Dixon and Professor of Political Theory Katrin Flikschuh on the other side arguing against. Each panellist had seven minutes to speak, followed by questions from the other side and then questions from the audience. Dr Gerard Lyons making his case for leaving the EU. [This is an amalgam of what I had planned to say in my speech and what I did say – so I missed out some of this in actual delivery while adding some ‘umms’ and ‘errs’ and various other stuff] The whole debate is now available to listen via a podcast here . Hello everyone. I want to start off by emphasising that I’m actually a pro-European. I always have been. I even like an idea of the EU (as  an idea, albeit not the idea). But on the balance I think we should leave the EU. I’m probably about

Time to declare on the EU referendum

I have changed my mind on Europe. Or perhaps it’s better to say that I have now properly thought about it, looking not through a lens of vaguely liking ‘Europe’, foreign countries and people but for what the EU is and does as an institution. This forthcoming referendum on 23 rd June is not on ‘Europe’ as a place, but the EU as an institution, one which has great power over Britain and whose 27 other leaders have the power of veto over even quite modest domestic legislation here. We have just seen the latter point with David Cameron’s watered-down ‘renegotiation’ or ‘deal’ demonstrating in stark terms how our government no longer has the power to decide the country’s future in the interests of its citizens. It is subservient not just to veto from the leaders of France, Greece, Poland, Slovakia, Portugal and others, but also to the diktats of the unelected, virtually unaccountable European Commission and European Court of Justice. We may like some of those diktats, for ex

On English identity and Labour

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The language of human ‘identity’ often misleads us into thinking about it as something out there which matches something in here – a literal ‘it’ which is identical in both, rather like in a mathematical equation. In this way you would have an English identity for example if you somehow matched up to a list of English identifiers which we can measure you against. There is an ‘it’ of Englishness out there in this sort of account, and whoever has access to it can decree how English you are by comparing their checklist to you and your likes, dislikes, activities etc. My point here is that someone else other than you can carry out this operation of identity without involving you at all. It is an authoritarian relation, attained by someone with authority matching their knowledge of what an identity is against you and coming up with a result on their terms of what these ‘its’ - of identity and you - are. The same goes when we measure up any sort of identity – to English