Cole not Dole

Apparently, our campaign team is following the Conservative candidate around wearing Eton top hat and tails. He didn’t go to Eton, but then, why should the truth matter when it comes to making a particularly crass, ineffective, and divisive point about class? Surely they realise that this is going to backfire?

Morevoer, as Dominic Lawson in today’s Independent, has pointed out, our attack on inherited wealth and status “jars almost comically with Labour’s decision to field as its candidate Tamsin Dunwoody, the daughter of the late MP for Crewe and Nantwich, Gwyneth Dunwoody – who was herself the daughter of the former general secretary of the Labour Party, Morgan Phillips.”

Surely someone realises that these attacks don’t work? Cameron went to Eton, and he’s ahead in the polls. Boris went to Eton, and he bloody well won. Sometimes, I despair…

The obsession with beautiful French women, most wonderfully expounded by the media frenzy surrounding Carla Bruni (born in Italy, I know), has now been codified in a guidebook written by Bernard Kouchner’s speech-writer, Pierre-Louis Colin. The book, Guide des jolie femmes de Paris (Guide to the pretty women of Paris) is meant in a light-hearted way: it is supposedly intended more as a literary essay than the voyeurs’ handbook it has been described as elsewhere, though this is idea is stretched to breaking point with lines like “You do not find in Menilmontant the sublime legs you see at the Madeleine. But you do find perfectly shameless cleavages, radiant breasts often uncluttered by a bra.” But then, what do I know about French Literature? It did after all produce the Marquis de Sade who was eminently more fruity.

There have been the predictable howls of outrage from dungaree-clad academics about the objectification of women but that misses the point slightly. Colin himself admits that the book has been written to provoke reaction. With that in mind, and unlike an undoubtedly large number of people who will rush to condemn the book without having read it, I will simply say this: if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Vive la différence!

After the mammoth last post, this one will be shorter, I promise. Anyway, I was just revisiting some of the impressions that voters had of the party in the early 1980s that made it so unelectable. The top responses by lapsed Labour voters for not voting Labour were:

1. Extremism (commitment to widescale nationalisation, general Militant dicking-about).

2. Trade Union domination.

3. A lunatic defence policy (unilateral disarmament).

4. Weak leadership.

5. The perception of being against aspiration/not caring about the economy.

Certainly something to think about, especially by those who would rather retreat to the comfort of a full-blooded socialist programme. The dangers of talking to ourselves rather than to the public, searching for some elusive ideal of a true faith rather than understanding the hopes and concerns of the average person, have been amply demonstrated in the past. We repeat them only at a great cost to ourselves and the country.

Denis MacShane has just written a paper called The Crisis of the Democratic Left which is written in the aftermath of the local elections. It contends that there is a crisis in the left which is reflected by the fact that only three EU member states have governments formed by parties associated with the Party of European Socialists. MacShane attributes a collective loss of way to ten factors: all are interesting, if not necessarily completely spot on. However, the one that interests me most right now is the idea that the left shows no interest in culture, especially high culture, or history.

This is something that resonates personally: I’ve certainly felt reluctant to talk about the latest art exhibition, opera performance, or musical recital I’ve been to when in the company of party members. It just doesn’t seem appropriate. Perhaps to that extent it’s a self-perpetuating thing of which I am equally guilty of continuing as anyone else. Private Eye regularly claims that this is the most philistine government ever elected: though I disagree with that assessment (the arts are flourishing through better funding) the broader idea, that the left shuns culture, is one that is hard to dismiss immediately.

To some extent, it’s a problem that is more marked in the UK than elsewhere in Europe: it was either Nicholas Henderson or Peregrine Worsthorne that decried the fact that whilst French Socialists are happy to sit in offices adorned with Louis XV furniture, your typical British Labour minister is expected to make do with something akin to a portakabin with plastic chairs. Look, for example, at the furore created when Derry Irvine engaged in redecorating the Lord Chancellor’s apartments.

This has been exacerbated by the fact that part of the New Labour project was explicitly anti-historical, treating the UK as a young country. This in itself perhaps came out of a desire to ignore the past as a time of obscurity for the party, a time of division, drift and defeat. The knock-on was that Britain forgot who it was, lost a sense of self-esteem and became confused about it’s true identity: knocking on doors regularly reveals the fact that a good number of people have a negative view of the country, that there is an impression that things are going down-hill, that decline is inevitable. The boom in popular history books and TV programmes is surely indicative of a wider hunger to rediscover the past?

Whilst the politics of decline have been ever-present in post-war Britain, the reality is that far from declining, Britain is in a remarkably strong position internationally: our armed forces are second only to the US, London is a global city to rival New York, unemployment is low and growth has remained robust in the face of difficult global economic circumstances. Yes, more needs to be done, but one would imagine that for starters there is enough to be proud of, non?

The problem is that national self-esteem is inextricably linked to the question of national identity. This in turn is related to culture and a country’s approach to it. Returning to the example of French Socialists, I am enamoured with the French idea of Grandeur. This is most epitomised by the actions of the ‘old fascist’, De Gaulle, in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Paris (and will hopefully drag us closer to the conclusion of this terribly long entry).

The poet Paul Valéry had died in 1945 and it was one of De Gaulle’s first acts to grant Valéry a state funeral. More than that, De Gaulle led the cortege through the streets of Paris to the cathedral of Notre Dame despite the fact that there were German snipers still on the roofs of many buildings. In this way De Gaulle connected with a sense of Grandeur, a sense of nation that transcended institutions and focussed on cultural identity. He set the mood music for a revived French nation in the aftermath of its lowest ebb.

In the UK, we are fortunate in that we do not have to recover from anywhere near as big a dent to our collective self-confidence. However, whilst the government is currently trying to address the identity question, it seems to be tackling this solely in terms of reforming institutions, passing laws or creating obligations. Until we can broaden out our conception of identity to include its cultural context, to change the mood music of the nation if you will, I can’t help but think that these efforts will be in vain.

[FIN]

“Save the poor, vote Tory” has the ring of “Save the whale, vote Harpoonist” about it.

-Tim Hames, The Times, 12 May 2008

Machiavelli once said that it is better to be feared than loved: watching Rory Bremner’s savage assault on the PM this evening, I’d say that whilst that might be the case, it is better to be anything than laughed at. Can a government hold on to its credibility if the man at the top is a figure of fun?

Interesting blog over at Labourhome. I’m not sure where I stand on this: there are problems with the access profile at Oxford and Cambridge but whether an arbritrary system such as this would work, or is indeed desirable, is questionable. As has undoubtedly been pointed out elsewhere, educational inqualities set in very early on: I think it is by the age of seven that a dim rich kid has overtaken a clever poor kid in terms of achievement. Not long after that the difference between them becomes insurmountable.

It is these educational inequalities that underscore the broader inequality in society: how we tackle the structurally and culturally pernicious effects of low, modest, or non-existent parental ambition for children amongst a significant number of families is hard to answer (short of an outright assasult on the family). However, until we can overcome these problems it is difficult to see how we can dismantle what seem to be increasingly ossifying social structures in this country.

Apologies to Dan for nicking this concept, but life in the gilded cage has thrown up a couple of wonderful old boys. I was fortunate enough last night to be invited to a dinner in honour of John Brademas, congressman for twenty-two years, President of New York University for ten, and now a philanthropist through his charitable foundation. John was majority whip during the Carter Presidency and often had breakfast at the White House: he is planning to write a book on the leadership issues of the era and one of his many foundations is the John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress which hopes to shine the cold light of research on a little understood part of the US system of government.

John was Oxford in the 1950s as a Rhodes Scholar and his PhD thesis centred on the Spanish Anarchist movement. As a huge fan of Orwell, and in particular Homage to Catalonia, I was interested to find out how he conducted his research given that Franco was at the zenith of his power at the time: leftists in Spain were being supressed and any serious insight into the history of the civil war was viewed with good deal of suspicion. The answer, I was told, was to utilise two sources: a large archive in Amsterdam furnished him with a lot of useful information but he said he was also indebted to the head-waiter of a smart Spanish restaurant in London who had been a communist leader in Spain during the war! As the author or sponsor of many important pieces of legislation in the fields of education, the arts and culture, John was a true progressive in Congress, is a patron and advocate of the arts outside, and a tireless fund-raiser for NYU.

The other good old boy was Tony Quinton, a philosopher, Tory peer and former All-Souls Prize Fellow. I was sat next to Tony during dinner and he was a fantastic conversationalist on as wide an array of subjects as could be imagined: I distinctly remember skirting over topics as diverse as MySpace, Gin, and Irish Erotic Literature. Somebody asked him if he still writes to which he replied ‘only cheques these days.’ Top man.

It’s great to see that my colleague in the Oxford Labour Party, Cllr Joe McManners, got a motion passed last year to ensure that all City Council employees are paid at least £7 per hour, effective from April. Getting measures like this passed is particularly critical in cities like Oxford where the cost of living is so high. Hopefully, now that Labour has regained the reins of power at Oxford Town Hall, the extraordinary purchasing power and influence of the council can be brought to bear on all employers across the city to give workers a fair hourly rate.

It’s by taking a lead on issues like this that Labour can differentiate itself from rest: it’s in local government that parties show their true colours, as Polly Toynbee identified a few weeks ago. Whereas Labour councils invest in services, the Tories are reducing youth provision, cutting funding to libraries and school transport, and giving less support to voluntary organisations. So, aside from the obvious political benefits of having a strong base in local government, it is (unsurprisingly) crystal clear that people and families on low incomes benefit from having a local Labour council. We just need to get out there and start selling that message.

A good piece over at Luke’s blog today with a few sensible suggestions about how we collectively take a step back from the abyss in the light of this morning’s awful poll. In fact nationally, it seems that we’re currently watching a demonstration of chaos theory: a few errors at the end of last summer have cascaded into something of near-cataclysmic proportions in the present day.

Hopefully the reverse is also true and a slow, steady stream of good news stemming from a) a recovering economy and b) a collective remembering that we came into politics to help the poorest in society, can start to turn the tide…