Its a question that recently has been agitating the conservative blogosphere in the UK: two of its principle representatives, Tim Montgomerie and Matt Sinclair have argued that private lives do matter. Both of their posts are worth reading. Montgomerie’s essential argument is that there are public ramifications to private decisions and politicians ought to acknowledge when they have made private decisions that harmed the public good: ie taking drugs for example. Matt adds to that by reminding us about the emmense power that politicians hold over us: as he says, “we can’t judge politicians entirely on their policies because we are not just electing a manifesto but a set of oligarchs to rule for four to five years.” Matt doesn’t really develop that point, but I think that’s the central reason that we ought to be interested in the private lives of politicians.

Many decisions in government are made in ways that cannot be predicted at the time of election: in 1982, 1990, 2001 and 2003 the United Kingdom went to war in places that could not have been predicted by the general public when the elections beforehand were held. Tony Blair’s second term in 2001 turned from a domestic reforming term (as intended by Blair when elected) into a Premiership concerned with the battle against terrorism. Understanding how Blair responded to terrorism of course includes understanding his ideology: New Labour was always committed to democratisation in foreign policy from the Kosovan adventure of 1999 onwards and because of the events of the early and mid 1990s in Bosnia and Rwanda, but there is more than that to it.

In order to understand Blair’s decisions about Afghanistan and Iraq you have to understand his personality and way of working. Iraq, in particular, as Lord Butler’s inquiry made clear, was the result in part of the way that Mr Blair and his inner circle worked: their methods meant that they divorced themselves from the reality that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, something I think Blair believed but something he was in error to believe. The problem is that often when we talk about private lives, we seem to be talking about sex lives but actually as I think you can infer from what I’m saying someone’s sex life is actually not the crucial part of their private life.

In this case, US political culture, much more used to a system where one individual stands at the pinacle of power, is much more impressive than the UK’s political culture. One of the reasons that some Democrats distrust Hillary Clinton is her inability to run her own campaign. Senators Clinton and Obama have not really run anything before today- but the way that they are running their campaigns indicates the way that they might run their White House staff, and the way that they respond to campaign crises, indicates something about the way that they might respond to crises during their Presidencies. The same approach ought to be made more use of in the UK: for example very few of us know anything about the way that Nick Clegg or David Cameron would govern- would they like John Major use their cabinets or would they like Tony Blair rely on a close coterie of advisors, what kind of Prime Ministers or ministers might they be (the question is relevant to Clegg as in the case of a coalition he would be running one of the great departments of state)- it is a question that we aren’t looking at at the moment and that’s not a great thing.

Looking at a politician’s previous life can also tell us things about the way that they would behave within politics: Gordon Brown’s time as a PhD student seems to have established his own patterns of behaviour, as both Peter Hennessy and Peter Mandelson have commented Brown behaves like a research student, locking himself away with the data before he comes out with a decision. Often though that means that we pay attention to the less sexy parts of a politicians’ lives: a politician’s affairs seem to me to demonstrate very little about their method of governing, neither does taking drugs as a teenager. As for Tim Montgomerie’s arguments about externalities, I disagree, politics is not a contest about which politician has the most altruistic behaviour towards the public, its a contest about who is best able to run the commonwealth for the interest of all. Politics is of course about ideology and argument: but it is also about management, how the politician manages events and manages a large staff in Downing Street, in order to assess politicians, we need to assess their behaviour as managers of events and people. In order to assess that, often in the case of opposition leaders in particular, we have nothing else to turn to but their private lives. Such may not be perfect indicators: but with nothing else to go on and the certainty that at some point, a politician will be challenged by events that none of us could have predicted, we need to have an idea about how they might respond.

Ultimately its less the private lives of politicians, than their personalities that matter. For the key thing to think about is with what mentality they come to make decisions- are they angry, rash, thoughtful, hesitant, cautious or sensitive? Do they like detail or despise it, preferring the broad brush? How do they treat advice? The difference could be the difference between war and peace.

What is that appeal? Well I’d propose that actually the intelligent design figure is a false one- what is actually going on here is that 30% of Brits and 60% of Americans believe in a supernatural account of the creation of the species and believe that it is a scientific explanation. Once you have crossed that divide there are two ways of putting that belief: the mildly more acceptable intelligent design and the downright crazy Creationism. In the UK a more secular society, 2/3 of those that believe in a supernatural account of creation beleive in Intelligent Design, in the US a more religious country only a 1/3 of those that believe in a supernatural account believe in Intelligent Design.

Its an interesting statistic which suggests the importance of social stigma in forming beliefs (the utility of in other contexts political correctness peut-etre) and also the way in which Britain is a very different country from the US.

The first type of obvious terrorist activity is that going on in Iraq, in Palestine, in Afghanistan and in Chechnya. In all those conflicts there is an occupying force and there are people who oppose that occupation. The kinds of opposition differ in all those cases and there are oppositions that you would want to negotiate with and oppositions that you would want to isolate. But say in Afghanistan, which is an example Mr Simcox picks out, it would be daft not to negotiate with those who oppose us. Afghanistan is made up of lots of different clan groups and tribes- some of them came together under the Taliban in the 90s and some are fighting us now under the Taliban moniker with ideological groups now. Just as in the Sunni areas in Iraq, it might be that we just have to negotiate with those tribal groups if we are going to establish stability in Afghanistan. Many of their objectives are perfectly consistent with our policies for the region: for example I’d suggest that lots of the unrest in Afghanistan has to do with patronage from Kabul, with policies to do with the destruction of opium and with corruption. I’m not entirely sure that those are not problems that can’t be in principle negotiated about without abandoning western civilisation or accepting an Islamic Caliphate in Witshire. Negotiations with certain people make life easier when you are occupying, they even might make it possible for us to withdraw- and talking about the whole Iraqi, Afghan or Chechnyan opposition as though they were the military wing of Al Qaeda is quite simply to have adopted the mental attitude of President Putin.

The second type of terrorism is what we might call the existential threat. Ok Osama Bin Laden wants the end to Christianity, Atheism etc and to execute all homosexuals and wrap women up in carpets and preferably abolish the whole female sex. That’s probably all true- and there isn’t much help of negotiating with him. But lets get this straight- the Henry Jackson society like loads of blowhards on the right talk endlessly about the ideological war with Osama- and they are right, we are fighting an ideological war with Osama and then they write an article for retired colonels to read and harrumph over in the Sunday Telegraph. In order to win that ideological war, you have to work out what is going on inside the heads of the 15 year olds in Bradford who believe this stuff, who idealise the bombers. And its important for us to try and work out why they think this stuff, because if we don’t work that out, then we’ll never win the ideological war- all we’ll do is pontificate at each other about how well we are pontificating. The reasons that someone becomes a terrorist are complicated- all sorts of things go into the creation of a terrorist- there are ideological things like what Olivier Roy calls a globalised Islam. Roy argues that one of the consequences of mass movement of populations is for religiously devout people to want to find a pure form of religion: and fundamentalism is an offer on that marketplace. There are psychological reasons for people becoming attracted to terror and there is a growing literature about that (summarised in part in this Congressional research document here).

I’d suggest that one way forward is to look at these people who join terrorist organisations and ask the question, how did you get involved. So for instance we should start looking at their careers- where did it go wrong and what could we do in order to make the next person on the conveyer belt go a different way. We need therefore to talk to them. Since 2001 we’ve seen all kinds of efforts to communicate better with people likely to become terrorists- for example in Turkey in 2005 you saw programs to retrain Imams in delivering less incendiary sermons. Similar ideas have recently been adopted in Saudi Arabia. I am not suggesting that these are the answers but rather that you are not going to get to any answers if you stop talking and listening to those who are becoming terrorists: we need to work out why people become terrorists in order to win an ideological conflict against them. It may be that one of the answers is that some of the people who become terrorists are just murderers and psychopaths- in which case they will always be here and there isn’t much that we can do and there isn’t any point in talking about a war on an ideology. But if you think like I do that there are some other reasons which may go from sociological to cultural to religious why some people want to blow up other people, then you ought to listen to the people doing the blowing up and try and talk them out of it. Ultimately doing that, doesn’t mean you compromise on votes for women or marriage for homosexuals, but it does mean that you try and work out why these people are doing these things and then try and work out how to solve the problem. The thing is that if you are fighting an ideological war against terror, you have to listen to the terrorists because that is the data by which you can assess how that war is going. You know that you’ve won when someone who might have committed a terrorist action decides not to- and you won’t find that out by sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘Go away’ whenever someone mentions Allah.

The one area of his article I do agree with is that we should not say that there is a true Islam represented by the MCB and we should pay attention to the more moderate groups and promote them as representing a different vision of Islam. But that misses a trick as well. Because one of the real problems that we have is with a promotion of the image of Islam as a political entity- and that is a problem with people like the Guardian employing prats like Inayat Bunglawala and he is right about that. But that’s a different issue to talking to the actual people on the ground who commit terrorist acts or might commit terrorist acts- if you really want to win this ideological war that Simcox thinks we are in, we need to go down and find out why we aren’t winning it now. Why some individuals like this ideology and how we stop them liking it- one way may well be to stop saying that the MCB represents Islam in the UK- but I don’t think that is the end of the problem of how we deal with this. Going deeper into the theology may help: and just as a suggestion can we stop praising people as moderate Muslims- something that implies that they believe less than the fundamentalists. I’d use a different form of words which might provoke a different image- for example you could say that Muslim fundamentalists are not extremists, but takfiris who arrogate to themselves a right of excommunicating other believers which is only God’s. The language of this is important because we are fighting a battle for hearts and minds.

The problem with the Henry Jackson society approach is twofold. Its really good if you want to feel good denouncing some Arab terrorists- its fantastic as a way of masaging the ego. But if you want to actually deal with the problem and minimise terroris, so that its only the unavoidable acts of terror which proceed from psychopathy which take place, then you have to listen and you have to talk to terrorists. You have to work out why they do what they do and what to do to diminish the allure of radical Islam. Furthermore if you want to deal with a situation like Afghanistan you have to talk to the Taliban- anyone who doesn’t think that is living in Dailymailland.

Basically the only way to win the war against Al Qaeda is to talk: if you don’t, you don’t stand much chance of success.

Obama’s speech stems from a concept that seems almost forgotten on the right wing of the political spectrum- charity. Stemming from religious ideas about the way that we should behave around others- Obama encouraged his audience to hate conditions which promoted racism and other vices but not to hate the individuals that held those views. Perhaps this came through most importantly when he spoke of Reverend Wright: he said

I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Its worth reading that again and again and realising what Obama rightly is saying here: none of us is entirely present in our worst moments. Jeremiah Wright’s worst moments abstracted from the record are ugly- and he should not serve (and since he has resigned does not serve) upon Obama’s campaign. But he is not a devil incarnate- and were Obama to walk away from him now, Obama would have failed in his own duty to remember the man’s kindnesses and not judge him by the worst moments or utterances of his life. Political campaigns often seem to be run by and for those who cannot accept human life in all its complexity and just feel a rage, a rage which seeks to consign everyone who makes a misstep to the outer darkness. If anyone ran their lives in this way then they would be poorer for it, and I think it is a sign of maturity that Barack Obama doesn’t.

Furthermore Obama then went onto consider why Wright felt what he felt. Why did he say the things he said? He linked Wright’s arguments to those of whites angry about their treatment within the United States. What Obama picked up on though which is an interesting and important lesson (it is also the main point of the flawed film American History X) is that hate gets you nowhere. It is Obama’s contention that his pastor’s hate is the wrong way to deal with the history of Blacks in the US. Blacks in the US have been discriminated against for hundreds of years- they suffered massive discrimination as late as just after World War Two when they were systematically excluded from various welfare programs to help returning soldiers. Obama is right to say that that situation encouraged many of his pastor’s generation to become incredibly angry with the system that had produced such injustices- he is also right to say that such anger is not productive. It led his pastor into massive error: Obama is right to say that he himself is a product of an interracial marriage that would not have been possible in many societies before the twentieth centuries and in many places apart from America might have been more difficult to maintain. Furthermore hatred threatens to destabilise society in the opposite direction- not creating a perfect union but leading to more resentment from the other side and to the growth of all sorts of other kinds of social instability. Obama’s charity extends to trying to understand those who oppose him, trying to work out why they are angry and rather than share their anger, trying to work out what would appease it.

Hence, Obama suggests that the real way forwards is to fix the problems that afflict American society- and often afflict white and black people, women and men. He suggests that the US needs to confirm yet again its commitment to a more perfect union based on the equality of citizens before the law and before each other. He suggests various reforms to do that and to enable the poorest to reach the top of society. Such measures Obama argues will defuse the anger that his pastor feels, whilst dealing with the problems his pastor accurately diagnosed and diagnoses. This is a speech of a candidate who wants to move beyond that hatred to something else- to actually dealing with the problems that Americans of all colours and sexes feel. That has to be the proper approach. Afterall there are white male Americans who suffer as much as anyone from the failure of the US to provide universal healthcare. And furthermore it remains true to the essentially Christian message of hating the sin and not the sinner that Obama wants to propagate. Obama’s campaign is one of the most religious campaigns in US history- definitely more religious than many Republican campaigns from the religious right have been over the last couple of decades- because Obama understands that point about sin and sinner. He understands also the point about the futility of anger and furthermore the point about individuals being a sum of their good points and errors, not just explained by their errors.

Obama restates in this speech that he isn’t an advocate of racial revolution or even civil war: he is an advocate of reform which will help all Americans but particularly the poorest (who happen to disproportionately come from communities that were historically disadvantaged). In that sense he wants not merely to move beyond racism and endorses racial equality, he wants to create the situation in which more and more people will agree with him by dealing with the causes of racism. That has provoked snide comments from the right, but compared to the work of the Steyns and the Schiffrens this was a mature and thoughtful examination of what lies behind racism and how we can deal with its causes.

However they also argue that this lack of consequences stemming from globalisation for public expenditure, arises because there is a compensatory effect- that politicians are rewarded for compensating their constituents who fall out of work and who might fall out of work. The fear of the consequences of globalisation mitigates those consequences in a paradoxical way. Its an interesting finding- it doesn’t alter the way that the economics of globalisation- but it does remind us that that does not determine what we do about globalisation.

The point is that economics does not always lead politics, especially in a democracy. Democratic power, manifested in the ballot box, creates incentives to mitigate the consequences of loss and I would argue that demonstrates not merely the justice of democratic systems but also their stability.

It is because of a democratic system, that some measure of equality is preserved despite the inegalitarian consequences of competition. In this sense the argument about globalisation is part of a larger argument about the way that democracy goes hand in hand with a just and stabalising social policy. It would be interesting to see whether that’s true and whether the spending policies of dictatorships and democracies say in Latin America are very different and also to see what impact compulsary voting has upon the way that governments spend money.

Overall though, because this is a dual study of policy in the OECD and in a larger collection of countries, I think its possible to say that the responsiveness of politicians to electorates has led to different policies being created. The fact that most current governments see their legitimacy as rising from the people, not descending from some other authority, leads them to a situation in which they are constrained in their actions.

Ultimately when it comes to globalisation, the constraints to appealing to public legitimacy seem to cancel out the constraint of global market pressure.

*The article is only free for a while, so it may become unavailable at some point in the future.

Basically Willets argued, rightly, that law is much more than just an act of government. Law embodies convention. In some sense what is written in the law is an expression of the conventions by which we operate. As Willets demonstrates for reasons to do with game theory and also evolution, such conventions are neccessary to maintain a stable functioning society. He does not really go farther than making this point- and its a sensible point and his talk is well worth reading, but I think it leads on to some important consequences particularly for us on the liberal left.

The first consequence is that leglislation is not the be all and end all. It is important to obtain leglislation in many areas- one being for instance safety at work where leglislation creates a normative equilibrium using which companies compete. But it also reminds us of the virtues of doing things which are not leglislated. Take my example from above for a moment, I think one of the most important advances in life in this country during my parent’s lifetime and partly during my own is the advance of equality- sexual, racial and between sexual orientations. The evolution of attitudes on those matters has not been something only produced by government- its been produced as well by people changing their behaviour and that has often come about because they have been shamed into changing their behaviour.

Campaigning works. I’ve been in rooms where people have argued that explicit consent isn’t needed for sex or that homosexuals are worse than heterosexuals- and seen the distancing that everyone else in the room does from those people. The intake of breath, the slight contempt in the voice, all those things tend to create an unwritten but still powerful social consensus that operates to constrain what people can and cannot say. In reality this is what we mean by political correctness- its a code of convention and for the most part its a sensible code of convention.

You can see it in other ways as well- but it gives us on the liberal left a challenge.

Because to have recourse to government action to repress attitudes is the easy but ultimately flawed way of doing things- it doesn’t work in the end. Governments can leglislate against discrimination in the workplace, against all sorts of tangible crimes but attitudes are hard to change by the blunt instrument of leglislation. Rather it is social stigma and generational change that changes a society’s mores. We can do little about the second- but we can do a lot about the first.

Its why campaigning say against sexist advertising is so important because it sends out a signal that this is unacceptable.

We have done a lot of good work in the past on this- but we need to keep up the fight say against perceptions of black people as physically strong mentally weak individuals. And its also why some of the right’s counter attacks- from semi-racists like Mark Steyn- are so worrying because they enable people to think that this sort of language- and ultimately this attitude is a legitimate one when it isn’t. Its immoral.

What we on the left have to continue to do is what American political scientists call framing.

Framing means making the debate fit into our norms by using things like this website and other avenues to say that racism, sexism etc is not merely wrong but that its immoral and to be condemned. By doing that we create conventions. But we also have to be alert to other people manipulating the discourses of society- for example the religious claiming that they are discriminated against- when they actually are not. Being forced to treat others equally is not being discriminated against, it is being coerced and such coercion may be justified.

Also, we on the left can really get to an important dimension of citizenship and fellow feeling- equality. A society riven by class hatred is a society which cannot sustain recipricocity in its values, it cannot sustain in the long run the kind of world that David Willets wants to produce. Ultimately such a society devolves into one where the people’s allegiance is bought by politicians and where class becomes such a dividing line that people feel no sympathy or empathy across it. Mr Willets’s logic leads one to put a priority on equality as a means to social cohesion and to democratic stability.

One last point deserves emphasis though, because although Willets’s arguments do not naturally prescribe a moral system- there are indications in there of what a moral system that would fulfill his conditions looks like.

Game theory relies upon the idea of trust: I break my word with those that break their word and I keep my word with those that keep their word. We all prosper more in a society which does the latter rather than the former. And that involves of course the most important moral sentiment within our consciousness- sympathy. If you think of the moral advances of the twentieth century- from the emancipation of women to the creation of a welfare state- they have all depended upon the extension of sympathy to a class of people who previously did not receive it in the same way. Sympathy is the centre of any system of morality which prioritises the way that we behave towards others- and as Willets discusses there are good evolutionary reasons to be sympathetic.

Far from suggesting that we need to embrace a Christian world view as the basis of our normative thinking or ushering in a reign of relativism, Willets’s arguments lead us to a position where sympathy, in classical Scottish enlightenment terms, becomes the basis for our moral position in society. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, they all maintain sympathy as a moral value but also do much more: if we are to seek the kind of minimalistic moral concern that will satisfy everyone and make the law best reflect the way that people think, then working off the basis of sympathy gives us some clue as to how that could happen.

That also gives us clues as to how to argue and what to argue. It refocuses the debate upon the real issue between us and conservatives of every hue: that is what we do about equality. Ultimately we argue that in an unequal society the bonds between people, the productive equilbria in game theory, are disintegrated by the mutual distrust produced by massive inequalities. Ultimately should some people or classes of people have better access to law, Parliament, the instruments of power in the market etc, that delegitimates the games that we play.

Either we end up with a population which quietly accepts and does not engage, or worse we end up with a situation involving rising criminality and fear. Willets is right to target the way that we see each other and the way that we behave each other as the best avenue to pursue in understanding the productive synergies that we produce in society: he is entirely right in appreciating the force of convention in changing behaviour. Where he is wrong is to underestimate and not even to mention the effects that inequality can have on all of this.

Inequality is most often economic inequality- but it can also take the form of glass ceilings which may not show up as easily in statistic. However understood, inequality is corrosive to society and corrosive therefore to the productive externalities that wider cooperation between us all can produce.

My Lords, have the Government considered increasing the age at which young people can buy alcohol to the level in the United States? I have observed in the university world that young American students coming to this country are amazed at the alcohol consumption of our undergraduates.

Lord Broers’s solution is daft, just think for a moment about where that would leave the ages of consent. He seems to be saying that you should be able to vote (age, 18), drive a car (age, 17) and even have a child (age, 16) but that raising a pint in a pub at the age of 20 is somehow beyond your ken. Its interesting that Lord Broers seems to want to make childhood extend so long that it takes people into their twenties, thinks that a pint in a pub is a more serious act than voting for a government or even having a kid, and considers the best way to deal with a problem for some is to make something illegal for all. What’s interesting about Lord Broer’s comments is their paternalism: ultimately irresponsible people voting doesn’t matter because voting doesn’t matter, but irresponsible people getting drunk at midnight on the street does matter because one might be leaving the opera then. Furthermore if 10% of 19 year olds in the UK can’t handle their drink, that’s obviously a reason for the other 90% to have alcohol forcibly removed from them.

We will never solve the problem of young people drinking in this way- as the minister noted a prohibition would be deeply ineffective- it would also alienate teenagers rather than persuade them. Public information campaigns- the drink driving campaign is a great one to emmulate- even city centre planning regulations- are likely to be much more successful instruments in dealing with this problem. Raising the drinking age would merely criminalise a large segment of the population who are behaving perfectly sensibly and betrays an attitude of mind where the first response to a problem is what should be the last resort- having recourse to the statute book to ban someone from doing something.

Compare that to the behemoths of China and India with over a billion people each, the United States or Brazil with 300 million or even Russia with a population of 150 million. The truth is that the UK is only so powerful because proportionately its people are more wealthy than the Brazilians, Chinese or Indians- but its in the interests of the people of the UK that that doesn’t continue to be true.

It’s in our interests that that doesn’t continue to be true – because though proportionately we grow slightly poorer as the Chinese and Indians grow richer- absolutely we grow richer. That happens in two ways. Firstly we grow absolutely richer because they buy our products. Simple economic theory, and the experience of the world since the industrial revolution, demonstrates that central truth. The British have never been richer than they are today- never been in substantial ways because of technology a healthier people. Proportionately this century has seen Germany, the United States and later plenty of other countries pass the UK: but Britain has only been in relative decline, absolutely the country has got richer and is more prosperous today than at the height of the empire. Indeed the fundamental critique of British foreign policy since the second world war has been that if anything, we have been too concerned about our position in the world- say with the preoccupation with having a bloody Union Jack on a nuclear device (to quote Bevin) and too little with domestic tax cuts or spending.

Relative decline is a good strategy for the next century in foreign policy terms too. If we accept that, and I think its a fair point, increasing education and increasing wealth result in fewer wars, (Ok that can be a contentious point in detail, but I think as a broad generalisation its fair) then increased wealth say on the Indian subcontinent can only be a good thing for the UK. Education might lead to a softening of attitudes over Kashmir. Again if you are worried about immigration, then the only way to deal with it really is to create incentives for people to stay in their own societies- no fence or border police will ever be as effective as the opportunity to earn as much by staying as by going. In that sense making the rest of the world wealthier has real good consequences for the UK.

But that will come at the expense of the UK’s own position as one of the world’s premier nations- its not that the UK will not be wealthy, but that it will no longer be wealthier than India or China as they grow and industrialise. A rightwing view of the EU- say the Ted Heath view- is that Europe would provide a launch pad for the British to reassert their power, their imperial mission. I don’t think that Europe will ever be able to carry the weight of that expectation- though it can of course help us economically and in terms of our immediate security (Europe in NATO or through some other defensive arrangement, and through sharing policing information). The discussion about foreign policy though that we haven’t had in this country is not a discussion about the merits of intervening, but about how the UK can function in the future as we become progressively proportionately weaker.

Of course our current status is historically atypical. The period roughly from 1688 to 1990 was an aberration. Historically the UK has never been that significant- there have been moments when say as in the 15th Century briefly Britain had an impact on Western European politics through interventions in France, but more typical is the experience of Henry VIII, claiming vastly more importance than he had, or of England under Henry II, part of a much bigger entity including French territory. The real point is that we have for 300 hundred years been in a strange situation- and it will be odd not to be in that situation after so long a period. The British discussion of foreign policy still feeds too much off the American, when America is demographically and economically far more secure as a great power. We need to think about a world in which we are no longer a great power- and in which our capacity to intervene overseas is much more limited. We need also to recognise that it is in our interest to get proportionately weaker on the world stage- the objective of British foreign policy is to help other countries take up and over take us, as their citizens get richer. Pakistan, India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, they all have populations so much bigger than ours, that even were their citizens half as wealthy each as our citizens are, they would matter more economically.

Losing our status as one of the world’s great powers would be a good thing for us all- but it will require us to think in a different way about foreign policy. That challenge is scarcely being met in a Westminster culture that is still suffering an imperial hangover.

If one candidate won in terms of their manner and the way that the debate went, it was Senator Obama. Hillary came across on several occasions as mean spirited and picking up on trivial points.

For example, at one point she pressed Obama to reject as well as denounce Louis Farakhan. Senator Obama agreed to do both though looked understandably mystified that there was a great difference between the two concepts. Senator Clinton was on the attack more and was more negative about her opponent. Senator Obama concentrated less on attacking Senator Clinton and more on arguing for his own candidacy and on attacking Senator McCain, the Republican candidate, whom Senator Clinton didn’t really mention. Senator Obama needs to beware though, questions about Farakhan are easy to dismiss. But questions about an anti-semitic pastor from whose sermon, Obama borrowed the title of his book ‘The Audacity of Hope’ will come up again.

In terms of policy, its very difficult to draw any line between these two senators. In truth much of the difference revealed was tempramental. We don’t know what the next US President will face- any number of things could make all the debate that we are seeing at the moment irrelevant in the next couple of months. Character is almost more important than policy detail. Senator Obama demonstrated a calmer temprament than Senator Clinton but then its easier to be calmer when you are in the lead. Foreign policywise both candidates seem to be roughly in the same place. Senator Obama is committed to taking out Al Quaeda terrorists on allied soil- in Pakistan for example- and he has demonstrated a more aggressive strategy there. Senator Obama is possibly a tougher global policeman than Senator Clinton. Senator Clinton on the other hand waffled about her vote in favour of the Iraq war and still can’t answer Obama’s criticism on that point. But both promise a multilateralist approach and a swift withdrawel from Iraq- the differences between them at this point are wafer thin. On domestic policy, the questions didn’t really bring out many of the main differences- it would have been interesting to hear Clinton defend the concept of tax credits. The health discussion demonstrated that both candidates understood the detail of their policies- but how far such detailed plans will survive Congressional scrutiny remains to be seen.

Overall the debate was interesting- but it won’t be crucial in defining the campaign- no Nixon-Kennedy moment here. The dynamic has not changed- I would award the debate to Senator Obama marginally- but there were no knock out blows. Lets hope the Democrats can get a candidate before the convention.

Williams’s speech has usefully been put up on the Guardian website. Reading it one notices a couple of things. Williams is not really talking about Sharia – the discussion of Sharia is just a bridge into a much more important theoretical issue which is the attitude of the law to the citizens who live under it.

What Williams wants the law to do is to distinguish between citizens based on what they believe: he tells us that

there is a risk of assuming that ‘mainstream’ jurisprudence should routinely and unquestioningly bypass the variety of ways in which actions are as a matter of fact understood by agents in the light of the diverse sorts of communal belonging they are involved in.

Williams of course over emphasizes the communal (and Matt Sinclair has criticised the Archbishop adequately on those grounds here): but he also mistakes what the law is about.

The law is the instrument by which we maintain peace and mark out civil goods and bads: it delineates that which the country considers private and inoffensive and that which the country considers public and dangerous. The law insofar as it does that cannot respect the will of the particular agents who operate under it, even if they have a sense of ‘communal belonging’ which say excuses murder: the question before lawyers is what did they do and what is the punishment. In some situations the law also arbitrates and here you could argue that the intentions of the agents matter- but that is only in the sense that the law intends to respect both of the agents. The sense of the agents is not what governs the process of arbitration but its a factor in it. For example, say I am someone who believes that animals are equivalent to children: the fact that I believe that is a factor in the decisions the court might make, but it does not govern those decisions. Williams is right that the law should not be blind to the intentions of agents as factors in any decision, but it should not be governed by those intentions (and he knows it shouldn’t- at one key moment he qualifies his own position to exclude the religious courts ever destroying someone’s rights- quite how he would do that when almost all law concerns questions of right is a different and interesting matter). Ultimately the standerd to which the law aspires is not Muslim, Christian or Jewish justice or Mormon or Scientologist justice but its justice as defined by statute and precedent within Parliament- justice as it applies to everyone who is any of those five religions and to anyone who isn’t from the Sikh to the Satanist, from the atheist to the polytheist.

The problem with Rowan Williams is in part that he is deceived by his own subtlety- go and read the lecture it is an example of encasing yourself in sentences like a mummy in wallpaper and then trying to walk through a crowded tube platform. But its more than that. As a theologian Williams wants us to think about revelation all the time: but revelation doesn’t have that much to do with politics. In a democratic secular state, revelation is a factor in any decision but it doesn’t govern what the government should or shouldn’t do. Ultimately people who believe owe just as much as people who don’t to the state because the state is not a religious formation- it is on its Western model a secular foundation which exists to perpetuate the well being of its members. The point isn’t that religious people can’t be religious, or can’t be members of society, but that the state isn’t interested in their religion. They can use religious justifications for their political actions if they like- but those justifications will only appeal to those that share the same religion and will irritate those that don’t- they will produce communities struggling against each other. The state is a minimalistic project in the sense that it talks a minimalistic language of politics- the problem with Dr Williams is that for him that just isn’t enough.

Its a common problem that you can see here and across the Atlantic- the current Pope is another person guilty of demanding accomodation on his own terms alone. But what people need to realise is that as soon as you create a legally privileged religion or argue that all argument has to take place in religious terms: you do abandon the whole idea of a secular state- a meeting place between people of different religions and none which does not proscribe any faith but tolerates almost all. There is a lot of modern work been done on these questions- Mark Lilla has just published an interesting book I mean to write about here in the future on the philosophy of this area. But ultimately it all comes down to the reasoning of the earliest modern philosopher of secularism, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes had a dark vision of where arguments like the Archbishop’s could lead us: towards a hell of civil strife and communal violence, towards religious tyranny and massive unhappiness.

Despite my admiration for Rowan Williams, who is a very intelligent and thoughtful person, this time I’m with Thomas Hobbes.

But he is wrong. Because its my case that even if politicians are as venal and horrible as Fawkes says, that doesn’t matter so much compared to the harm that they do with their policies. And it is precisely the kind of politicians that Fawkes believes exist that are most likely to adopt faulty policy ideas and carry them out in stupid ways.

Guido has declared recently in a personal manifesto his own views on why he blogs. He does it he says because he has a ‘suspicious mind’ and because the louder you hear a politician bleat about how normal they are, the closer you should clutch your wallet. He suggests that ‘political self interest is their primary motivation’ and that ‘policy is a tool of partisan self advancement’- essentially most politicians deserve to be in jail and the ones that aren’t there are lucky. He admits that there may be some honest politicians- interestingly he names an honest campaign but doesn’t quite say that the MP running it is honest (I’d accept correction on that!) but basically Guido’s attitude is that he performs a public service. He is like a hose which flushes out the political refuse of our day.

There is a lot of course that is right about that. Politicians need to be kept to standerds, they are ultimately our servants and they must obey the public will. It isn’t for them to use the proceeds of our activity- taxation- to fund their own activities without telling us. Corruption is a sin- and those who are corrupt need to be pursued. There are problems to my mind with the way that Guido does this. I have never been that fond of a presumption of guilt and guilt by association attracts me even less. Furthermore many of the allegations that Guido throws around seem to me to be trivial and mean nothing: he is more fond of insulting people than parsing evidence fairly and he definitely seems to have a partisan attitude to who he dislikes and who he likes. He has been accused of a multitude of other sins. However there is a greater problem with what Guido says than what I’ve said above. You see the flaw in Guido is not just one of character, its one of analysis. He is just wrong about what is wrong in our current state.

Concentrating on corruption reduces all politics to the individual. The question becomes is the individual a good guy or not? Its about character. There are good reasons that I would like to explore in a later post that we judge politicians based on their character: I would not have voted for Rudi Giuliani as President of the United States had I the option because of his character (as well as many of his policies). But there is something even more fundemental to the way that politics is conducted which I think Guido misses. You see, politicians don’t act out of self interest- they act out of what they perceive to be their self interest. Alistair Darling is not about to deliberately destroy the UK economy: were he to do so, he would betray those who elected him, but more importantly would be foolish for him politically (in a recession the Chancellor seldom comes out with a great reputation). The economic policies the government carry out are the policies it thinks will work: at the margins it will seek to present them in the best way possible, but no government is going to deliberately destroy the country it runs, because to do so undermines its own authority. That goes for any set of politicians and Guido will note is based on the simple idea that he puts forward, that politicians are self interested. Furthermore all politicians seek when they criticise to have a sensible position from which to criticise: if I was to say that Tony Blair was an awful PM because he didn’t fund UFO research, my political career would last five seconds. Politicians are always going to try and sound intellectually respectable and do things which perpetuate their careers: the question is how to they get to the point at which they think they have a good policy.

Policy decisions come out of a discussion within think tanks, policy groups, seminars and political parties. Certain decisions ie giving Independence to the Bank of England are seen as good policy and others such as raising the top rate of income tax to 95% are seen as bad policy. Conventional Wisdom drives the behaviour of politicians: as we have seen above. That conventional wisdom drives the formation of policy: certain ideas are ruled out and others are ruled in. That discussion has far more impact on your daily life than do any of the corruption charges against British politicians current at the moment: compare Derek Conway’s nepotism and its affects (the wasting of tens of thousands of pounds) and errors about defence procurement which waste millions. Error proceeds not merely from politicians but from a wider discussion going on between academics, analysts, economists and other experts. For instance few British foreign policy experts would ever councel a Prime Minister to go against the United States, is it a surprise then that neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown have been able to extricate themselves from a relationship with George Bush? That relationship had disastrous results.

The point about Guido is that he is a distraction. He is such in the sense that he isn’t interested in the real errors which flow from mistakes in the conventional wisdom, he is about eliminating individuals from the political game. The real issues though are ideological: they are about bad decisions which have massive impacts on people’s lives. Ludicrous choices often follow from ingrained beliefs: PFI for instance is the product of a government that believes that if you fix the word private onto something it is neccessarily better, the Olympics are a huge vanity project justified by a belief that vanity projects produce public goods. If you can expose those arguments and change the conventional landscape to something better then you are actually doing something very worthwhile. Of course when there is corruption you ought to bring it down: but the problem with our media and with Guido and all the blogs I read isn’t that they focus too little on corruption but that they never provide an analytical account of policy or of political thinking. Lazy journalism offers us a world in which politics is a competition of personalities and tribes, not a competition of policies and ideas about government, sincerely held. Furthermore lazy journalists don’t ask the difficult intellectual questions which expose weaknesses in conventional wisdom: take Iraq, if the combination of oil, tyranny and Islam is disastrous in the Middle East (the neo-con argument) why do people like Blair want to get close to Uzbekistan where the same conjunction is visible? Such questions need to be asked and the problem with Guido is that he isn’t interested in them: he is just interested in how to get rid of a minister.

I don’t have a naive view of politicians, but I think Guido has a naive view of politics in which there is an obvious answer which the politicians are just too corrupt to get to. I think the stuff of politics is actually much more complicated than Guido allows and also that all our understandings are much worse than he thinks his is. I wish for a world in which political journalism could be as frivolous as that on Guido’s site, but I don’t think it exists yet. Political journalists seem to imagine in the vacuous way they report that it does exist. If only we could work out what the ‘best’ policies were, then I think politicians, being self interested, might carry them out, in their own interests, and we could concentrate on pursuing petty corruption charges. The challenge for journalists and others including people on this site is not to find out who is more corrupt but to provide us with accounts of why the conventional wisdom is wrong, what answers it fails to give and how it can be improved.

Nabbing a minister and putting him in jail is easy: working out a political philosophy is much harder and persuading others to agree with you is harder still.

The costs of climate change therefore may be greater than we assume. Climate change may open up new opportunities for diseases- some research suggests that it already has resulted in epidemics amongst wildlife. Plague is not a priority at the moment besides other diseases like malaria and aids- but with the effects of climate change and the growth of resistant strains it may become more important. Other diseases are almost certainly in the same situation. And because at the moment they are not seen as frontline dangers, they are perhaps underestimated especially when the speed of climate change as its occuring is taken into account. This represents a very good reason for us to look at slowing the rate of man made global warming- there may be costs which we do not anticipate from climate change but which could have devastating impacts, perhaps as devastating as the more obvious dangers of rising seas and strong winds.

outrage at the diminution of choice and freedom those families suffer at the hands of the greedy government, the frustration families must feel as their incomes are snatched from them and frittered away by inefficient and wasteful bureaucracies “for their own good”.

In Alex’s world government spending doesn’t liberate, but taxation does enslave. For him the poor we redistribute to, or the sick that we give care to, or the children that we educate, thanks to taxation aren’t aided but are told things by bureacracies ‘for their own good’. If only we could leave them alone. Well his colleague, Conor Burns disagrees and provides a wonderful account of why government spending is neccessary: he is affronted that an old lady is having her travel tokens removed from her and been given a free bus pass. Now she could use her travel tokens to pay for a taxi whereas the bus is less convenient (its also cheaper for the state to pay for which I presume is the reason why the government have withdrawn the token and replaced it with a buspass- to stop ‘frittering’ that money away). As Conor says, all the old lady wanted to do was

to maintain her independence and look after her husband.

Let me agree with him, that the old lady ought to have a travel token and that this is a bad government policy. But lets turn this round- the worst thing for her would be to have that pass withdrawn entirely- she would lose her independence completely or it would be subject to the random whim of some charitable millionaire. Furthermore this isn’t an isolated case- this is what a wide variety of benefits give, they create freedom for people.

The freedom for a disabled person say who cannot work to have a reasonably normal life, the freedom for an old person likewise, the freedom for a poor person not to worry about their health because there is the NHS and to spend their money the way they wish like the rest of us to a large extent can.

Conor is right- and that’s what people like Alex can’t understand- that despite all the frustrations its better to have a state that gives people the freedom, the independence to do what they want, than a state that doesn’t. Alex lauds Newt Gingrich’s contract with America- I don’t. I want that old lady to be independent and look after her husband and I want the state to make that possible. That’s what government spending should go on- cut away at the bureacrats as much as you like- but lets not let anyone forget that government spending helps the weakest in our society and strengthens those without strength, so that everyone can live a free and independent life as far as that’s possible.

Freedom is not simply about lower tax rates, it is also about being independent enough to shape your own life the way you want to. Alex Deane thinks he is supporting freedom by cutting taxes- actually he is supporting a new kind of servitude where the poor are slaves, depending on the philanthropy of others for their lives and livelihoods, not upon benefits guarenteed by the whole community as a due from the wealthy to the less well off.

There are people who look credible VPs at the moment- Jim Webb, Evan Bayh might be good Democratic names- but the paucity of good coverage in the UK press is reflected by the fact that when British journalists do talk about the possible VP picks of Presidential candidates they tend to suggest people like Leiberman and Gore who realistically are unlikely to be the second name on either ticket in November.

Sunny adds: I found this on Robert Rouse’s blog, hilarious.

Pragmatically, one of the best reasons for decreasing government expenditure is the perception that government actually works not for those who it should serve- the public- but for those who run it- politicians and civil servants. Government’s purpose is to serve the whole community and not merely those who work for it. If you establish that it doesn’t do that- that’s a very good reason for suggesting that government is a true burden for the rest of the economy and the population. This kind of action taken by MPs suggests that that perception is true- that government is something that ‘they’ run for ‘themselves’ and that ‘we’ ought to be in favour of reducing.

Lots of things are pragmatically bad ideas- some of them though are on principle good ideas- spending money on asylum seekers doesn’t get votes, but should be done anyway. But this is on principle a bad thing too. Its a bad thing because any leglislator ought to be in a position where they could be subject to the law that they pass. Obviously some laws few legislators will ever be subject to- one thinks of unemployment benefit for example- and some laws have to have exemptions for leglislators- laws say limiting access to particular buildings for security reasons. But in general the privileges of office ought to be minimised- MPs and others ought to bear the same costs in so far as is possible as ordinary citizens bear. There ought be no exempted groups when a law is passed- as such exemptions created legally privileged classes and undermine the principle that equality before the law is a vital component of modern democracy.

Sometimes its all too easy to dismiss Tory attacks on this present government as motivated by political advantage- and I’m sure often they are. But its worth remembering that as in this case, sometimes they can get at something- a principle and a pragmatic reality that liberals ought to be concerned with to. Exemptions for MPs for laws that they pass ultimately harms the arguments for government intervention in the lives of citizens and also is contrary to the general principles of a liberal state. Dizzy is right: ministers ought to withdraw this allowance- MPs like everyone else should pay their rubbish collection charges from their normal salaries.

The Children’s Crusade, as its most recent chronicler Dr Gary Dickson, Emeritus Fellow of History at Edinburgh University declares, was a single instance of a much more widespread phenomenon in medieval society. Throughout medieval history one comes up against crusades which came from below- Europe was afire throughout the Middle Ages with crusading fervour. In some areas- the Chartrain where the crusade of 1212 originated- frequent tours by preachers bred a receptive population who dwelt firmly with the conviction that they had an obligation to redeem the Holy Land. Often these movements, springing from below, were not what their instigators expected. Dr Dickson beleives that the inspiration for the Children’s Crusade was a tour of the Chartrain to collect men to go and fight in Spain, not to wander off to Southern Italy in search for passage to Jerusalem. The elites of the time were terrified- a crusade of young men (possibly  it would be better to call this crusade the adolescent’s crusade) coming uncontrolled through Germany and France into Italy was not what they had in mind. Furthermore such crusading undermined the authority of parents, it undermined the authority of the church and the state to decide what avenues religious fervour ought to pursue.

 Those questions seem medieval but in reality they are not. They are central to how we understand stability in the modern world and particularly terrorism. Lets abstract them a little for a second from their context. Essentially the Children’s Crusade proves a couple of things- or shows a couple of things in action. The events of 1212 demonstrate that religious messages of conflict will not neccessarily be received by those who hear them in the ways that the speakers design. Whether its Papal attacks on Islam or Saudi attacks on America, the literate minded recipient of the information will most likely interpret it in their own way, no matter what a more politique leadership might suggest that they think about it. That means that whereas the specific ends of the policy from the Papacy or the Ulema is unimportant, its vocabulary is vital. In a society like medieval Europe in which information was strictly rationed, that vocabulary conditioned the ways that people behaved politically. Consequently with a movement like the Children’s Crusade- a variety of motives, economic, intergenerational and others were all expressed in the medium of an eschatalogical crusade. Rhetoric from the top influences but does not control the way that popular anger is expressed- Spain might have been the Papacy’s preferred destination but the children didn’t hear about that, they heard that Jerusalem was in danger and went on the march.

Understanding something like the Children’s Crusade- the way it both adopted and challenged the ideas of the elite- enables us to understand a bit more say about the thinking of terrorists in the West Bank or of the religious right in the United States. In order to work out strategies to defeat those movements, we need to think about their mindsets. I’d suggest that when we do, we look at the way that people involved in them interpret the world, using vocabularies supplied by those who provide them with information. It won’t neccessarily matter what say Iranian TV says about bombing America today if it tells people that Americans are evil every day. It might even be worth applying such analysis in the West- though the presence of more sources of information makes it more complicated. Even so its worth remembering that the influence of the media that we have is more important when it comes to our general framework in which we interpret the world, than our interpretation of specific events. We are educated ideologically by the news, we respond to events according to our understanding of that ideology. Obviously this can go too far- but its worth thinking about the Children’s Crusade and other events like it, when you analyse the way that information is disseminated through society. The importance of propaganda is often not in provoking a reaction to a particular event, propaganda provides the canvass and that largely governs the nature of the picture- even if its an alarming one for the rest of society.

That’s particularly true given the rest of the content on their website. They have published articles which argue that Sufi scholars collaborate with the Pharoah of our time George Bush and that Sufism is a trend in Islam that promotes a passivity desired by the zio con forces of evil. They have also published articles defending Sufism but it definitely seems to me that MPAC beleives that this is a legitimate debate- its strange that they don’t have any articles saying that any other strands of Islam aren’t Islamic! Furthermore their official statement, ‘The Hunt’ supports the anti-Sufi case- they state there that the Sufis have been used throughout history as a weapon in the arms of Russian and British and now American imperialism. The slurs on Sufism are absolutely and completely ridiculous. Anyone who knows an iota of the history of Islam- obviously noone involved in MPAC can be listed in that category, knows that Sufism is an old and established trend in Islamic theology.

For the benefit of MPAC, it might be worth rehearsing some of the contributions of Sufism- and others can add to this- in stimulating Islamic theology and political thought. Plenty of sources see Sufic communities going back right to the beggining of Islam- into the eighth century. Muzaffar Allam in his study of Indian Islamic political thought argues that Sufis have been present in India since the 11th or 12th centuries. As Richard Eaton demonstrates in his studies of the growth of Islam in India- Sufi movements provided many of the missionaries that spread throughout India to convert communities to Islam. Indeed David Cook shows in his studies of martyrdom and Islam that Sufi movements were also central to the growth of Islam in Indonesia and in many other places around the world. Great Sufi poetry and art has animated Islam: think of the Persian/Turkish poet Rumi whose work provides inspiration for art in the middle East right up until today, where its often quoted in the novels of Orhan Pamuk. The thesis that Sufis have never done anything for Islam- implied by MPAC- is just plain wrong and perhaps the organisation would like to withdraw its slurs.

Quite frankly though this goes further than just that. Because MPAC in reality are saying something else. They are saying that they have the right to define what Muslims ought to do or be- Muslims can’t support say the invasion of Iraq. What utter nonsense! It is not for MPAC to define the essence of Islam. Muslims have been throughout history a group with a wide variety of beliefs just like Christians and Jews and Hindus and all other faiths. MPAC demands the names of these researchers because ultimately it wants to publish them and expose them- it doesn’t want to argue or discuss (afterall they are Zio Con quislings) it wants to condemn. It doesn’t want to examine why some Muslims might decide to help Policy Exchange- that they do convicts them and means they are irrelevant- they don’t need to be talked to, they just need to be condemned. That stance fits into a general pattern- whereby their rhetoric is violent and conspiratorial- they don’t seek to understand, they don’t take on other arguments, they just want the luxury of an easy assertion that everyone else is evil. Their rhetoric avoids unhelpful facts- how can the war against Islam be a verifiable fact when Tony Blair bombed the Serbs out of Kosovo. How can it be a verifiable fact when the West repeatedly attempts to do things for Darfur and when westerners put their hands in their own pockets to help victims of the Tsunami? Has MPAC ever looked at the amount of aid that the EU gives to Palestine? Have they ever considered the support that America has always given to Pakistan?

MPAC want to define Islam and define certain people out of Islam. They seem to want Islam defined politically. Their politics is bizarre, conspiratorial and has a tangential relation to reality. But it goes further than that- in reality their conception of Islam excludes many Muslims from its definition. They basically argue that Sufis are quislings- they basically say that they would junk the entire tradition of Sufism because of the closeness of some present Sufis to politicians that they don’t like. They are apocalyptic in their language. They are aggressive in their abusive calls for the silencing of those that disagree with them. If there is one thing likely to make me sympathetic to Policy Exchange in this whole debate, its the attitude of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. I still feel that there are legitimate questions about the reporting in Policy Exchange’s work and I have no problem with critiques of it: but as Liberals we should stand, as our enlightenment predecessors did, against religious bigotry. And religious bigotry is what MPAC peddles against Muslims who don’t back their political line and against plenty of others as well.

American historians unfortunately reinforce such hubris but compiling lists of great Presidents- evaluating Washington against Reagen (as though it were possible to compare a ruler of a small agrarion republic to the ruler of a vast multicultural complex state). One of the reasons that politicians make me laugh is that they claim that their reputations will be assessed by history- and that they will pass some grand examination in the future at which dons, sitting like schoolmasters, will award passes and fails.

Actually there never will be such an examination. People tend to presume that there will be because they tend to presume that historians will know in the future things that we don’t know now. We can now see that Harry Truman’s policy of containment was a successful strategy to combat Soviet Russia, we can now see that Neville Chamberlaine’s policy of appeasement was a failure in combatting Hitler’s Germany. Neither of those judgements were so obvious at the time. But equally there is much that historians are ignorant of, that those close to events or even those contemporary with events do know. Most importantly because historians do know what happened, they don’t know what it was like to be there- to take the decision.

Even I have a better idea of what Tony Blair thought in 2003, because I was there and had to think about what I would have done. A historian can’t do that, his art lies in imagining himself into that position but he can never be there. Furthermore so much of life happens casually. Think about it this way, imagine you died tommorrow and all memory of you was purged from the world- all we would have of you would be the documentary traces you left. We wouldn’t know what you were like- we would only know what others thought you were like, and even then only what they would commit to paper or film about what you were like. Uncertainty is the lot of the politician, it is also the lot of the historian.

And that uncertainty leads to another factor- its seldom that those stentorian dons are ever in accord. You can hold a poll and get a result- but that’s like an election and historical fashions change. Since the 1960s the English Levellers have gone in the history of the civil war from being close to Karl Marx to being close to Billy Graham. Since the 18th Century, empires have waxed and waned but so have their reputations- for Gibbon’s contemporaries empire caused corruption, for Kipling’s it represented a civilising mission, for ours it seems brutal and constraining and we all use Rome as an example.

Putting your trust in the judgement of history is like putting your faith in fashion remaining unchanging. Yes its difficult to imagine for instance that anyone sane will ever think Adolf Hitler was a good thing, and equally that anyone sane will think Winston Churchill in 1940 was behaving badly- but the majority of politicians don’t start genocides or fight brave lonely conflicts. The majority of politicians make mistakes and misjudgements, and have good intentions- and the balance between their error and their success is a fine one. Clement Attlee’s reputation in England depends on where you stand politically, as does FDR’s in the US. Its a very odd politician that is everyone’s hero or everyone’s villain.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t judge politicians- but we should remember that we judge them not against the standerds of some abstract historical tradition, but against our own moral sense. History will render no judgement on Blair, Bush or Nixon- the discipline of history allows us to evaluate different versions of what happened and why against the evidence, its then for us to come up with the moral judgements.

Historians are not Gods but human beings. As there is no view from nowhere- and politics is all about balancing competing moral needs- a historian judges, just like anyone else, by his moral compass the ethics of a politician’s behaviour. He might know more facts: but his moral judgement is just the same as any one else’s.

So I agree with Paulie largely- but I differ from him in one perspective and its something I don’t think anyone in the UK blogosphere has really thought about. The Americans are obviously years ahead of us in readership and in the influence of blogging- and there are big differences in the market for political blogging- there is no Guardian website equivalent in the states- furthermore the British newspaper market has always provided partisan commentary in a way say that the New York Times or Washington Post in the States have never sought to provide. But the American example is fascinating- because its interesting to reflect for a moment on where and on what the blogosphere has had a real effect on politics.

To stick to one site on the left for a moment, consider Daily Kos. Kos performs a number of functions on the American left- but to caricature his biggest successes in terms of influencing politics have come in sponsoring or promoting candidates who are second tier in the states and have been neglected by others. You could think of Howard Dean’s Presidential campaign, you could think of Ned Lamont’s challenge to Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut senatorial primary, of Jon Tester’s run for the Montana senate and of a number of other races. Kos and others like him have been effective at promoting people who were second tier, not known much and creating a momentum behind them. The Democrats have raised vast amounts of money and got large numbers of volunteers to work through the web. You could say the same thing has grown on the right behind the ‘no hope’ candidacy of Ron Paul: Paul would be nowhere without the millions raised on the net, the volunteers that he has produced through the net and is now running in high single figures in New Hampshire and Iowa.

It is hard to see how that might work in the UK. Central party organisation means that there is much less space for a grassroots campaigning support for people on the web. We can overestimate the degree of centralisation in British politics- local campaigns can work (say in Wyre Forest) and on both sides millions have been donated directly to the campaigns in marginal constituencies particularly between elections. I’m not sure though how directly this model will work in UK politics- constituencies aren’t like states- politics in the UK is far more centrally directed than in the US. The donation of a thousand individuals might effect a local campaign, but they are nothing when compared to the money that a Mittal or Ashcroft can pour in to the central party coffers. Local MPs often lack identity beyond their position as lobby fodder- though again one can imagine mavericks or charismatic individuals getting support from the blogosphere which would help them in marginal seats. In general though the structure of politics is much less hospitable for bloggers in the UK- much more centralised, much more national than politics is in the US.

Obviously things can and might change- and will have to change if the British political blogosphere is to have more of an impact- but at the moment the British blogosphere is a pale shadow and imitation of its American cousin.

Firstly its noticeable that on their website, they claim the need for this survey because these public sector workers are paid so much more than teachers, soldiers and policemen. The politics of envy resurfaces and is evident in many of the comments! Such an argument presupposes a commitment of some kind to equality- and acknowledges the injustice of directors of the Royal Mail sitting in plush offices earning millions whilst soldiers sit in Basra risking their lives earning thousands. I’m not sure how that sits with the reductions in taxation that the TPA advocates elsewhere- nor am I sure that the only inequalities are within the public sector.

Secondly they argue that the salaries of public officials should be justified- and they are right. Lets take Adam Crozier, chief executive of Royal Mail. He is paid a ridiculously vast amount of money, but he was recruited from being Chairman of the FA- and before that was a leading advertiser. If the TPA believe in the efficacy of private markets setting wages then Adam Crozier is probably being paid at about the market rate for a chief executive- and so are many others amongst these fat cats in the public sector. Ultimately the cause of the pay of the public sector fat cats is the pay of the private sector fat cats. If you want to get your hands on these types of people you have to pay these types of salaries. So if you want to take a look at public sector people being paid too much for these jobs, perhaps you have to either settle for rubbish directors (of which more in my third point) or you have to think about private sector pay scales.

Thirdly, ah says my Taxpayers’ alliance friend- but the question is whether they have any impact on their organisations. But again that presents him with an ideological problem. Generally researchers for the TPA believe in hierarchy and hence in differentiated pay. There is lots of evidence, just have a look at Chris Dillow’s blog, that company directors don’t necessarily have an impact on their company stock’s performance- and its quite possible that the same thing applies in the public sector but again all the arguments in favour of or against hierarchy apply similarly in both sectors and hence all the arguments for and against large pay differentials and packets!

The ultimate problem with this kind of Daily Mail politics is that in order to establish that well paid bosses don’t make the public sector any better off, the Taxpayers’ alliance would have to accept that well paid bosses don’t have any positive impact on any organisation. Otherwise they are arguing for poorer public services! (Or perhaps that equality is a moral good which trumps efficiency, but again is that a unique truth for the public sector!) All these arguments seem to me to rebound upon their owners.

In a sense this isn’t important- the list they did didn’t really make the national media. But I think its worth thinking about. Partly because of what it tells us about the fact that even for the right-wingers in the Taxpayers’ alliance, equality is a moral good- the fact that teachers are paid a fraction of what the fat cats get matters to them in this context- so you have to ask why it doesn’t matter in other contexts. The other thing about it is that the Taxpayers’ Alliance ends up arguing that large salaries are unnecessary to promote efficiency and that they should be justified by results- again there is nothing necessarily limiting those insights to the public sector- those insights could be applied to the private sector. The thing is that as soon as you examine the logic of what the Taxpayers’ Alliance are saying you end up with politics far closer to the tradition of George Orwell than that of Margaret Thatcher.

I’m not sure that was what their intention was.

Lets leave aside for a moment the more divisive questions about when to go to war, whether Iraq was right and what it is right to do in various situations, let us just accept a simple fact that today’s foreign policy is not merely Westphalian.

We are not merely concerned with the defence of the principle of international borders. Whether it be for human rights reasons, terrorism reasons, or more mundane economic and criminal reasons problems have a habit of overspilling their borders. Almost everyone agrees with this argument- from those who opposed the war on Iraq but support forcing Isreal and the PLO to a peace treaty to those that supported the war in Iraq but can’t see a need for much acceleration in the Middle Eastern Peace process. Obviously there is a minority who are purely libertarian and would argue that foreign policy itself is misconceived- Ron Paul is perhaps their most prominent leader- this article doesn’t address their arguments. We all are, whether we like it or not, internationalists now.

That mundane premise leads us to another vital issue. International policy depends on knowledge. Knowledge not merely of the way that other countries dispose their forces in order to attack international borders, but knowledge about life inside a country. Evaluating the risk from a Pakistani revolution which might bring Fundementalists to power, a North Korean bid for nuclear weapons, an armed confrontation across the South China Sea involving Taiwan, Russia closing the pipes upon which Europe depends for gas or Cuban influence in Latin America, all requires information and knowledge. That’s a worrying conclusion for the one thing that we all do know about the last ten years is that our knowledge about the world, particularly the dangerous parts of the world is not that great.

If anything proves that, it is the Iraq war. In the invasion of Iraq in 2003, just in case anyone here has forgotten, it was the threat of weapons of mass destruction that was cited again and again as the casus belli. All the intelligence agencies of the West it appears supported that assessment. Our knowledge about that threat it now appears was built upon one particular informant, codenamed Curveball, who was captured by the BND, the German intelligence service, in 1999 and questioned by them until 2001.

Bob Drogin has written a recent book about the case and I reviewed the book myself on my own blog, giving a longer account than I can here of Curveball’s impact and importance for the WMD allegations. But what emerges is two structural flaws in the way that we collect intelligence and the way that we think about politics, structural flaws that I think the left is better able to think about than the right.

Firstly the real mistake with Curveball lay in the failure of communication between the BND and the CIA. Petty nationalistic rivalries meant that both sides had only pieces of the evidence and didn’t trust the other intelligence agencies: they never dealt with each other fairly as partners. The BND refused to let the CIA actually meet Curveball, the CIA didn’t trust the BND when they said that Curveball was untrustworthy. Neither intelligence service listened to the other and the consequence for both was unpleasant surprise: the BND when they heard Powell’s speech at the UN, the CIA when they finally interrogated Curveball himself.

The second big mistake was the fact that the CIA responded so easily to political pressure. The CIA was working towards the designs of Dick Cheney and George Bush. Ultimately noone got promoted for questioning the agency’s account of the weapons in Iraq, you got promoted for supporting it. At crucial points dissidents weren’t listened to as opposed to proponents because the bias of the meeting was towards the line of least resistance.

The politicians wanted information to look a certain way and because the CIA’s leading men depended on those politicians for patronage they went to pursue that way. Ultimately the bureacratic incentives all worked one way- and this took place within a structure in which the CIA competing for the attention of politicians was also constantly downplaying the efforts of other agencies- ignoring other agencies and not sharing information in case it would lose them their privileged position.

We have therefore two key facts about what went wrong. Essentially the evidence that came from Curveball which was crucial in persuading Colin Powell amongst others that there was a case for the UN, would not have got through had the intelligence agencies of western powers (and its not only Germany and America, the UK and Isreal had parts to play in this too) talked to each other more and talked to the UN more. Furthermore this would not have happened with a truly depoliticised civil service machine generating advice for politicians.

Leftwingers keen to think about politics should absorb these two lessons- one prompts us to be more internationalist in our approach if we are to think about transnational problems on a global scale, the other pushes us to the advocacy of a civil service independent of political patronage.

W.B. Yeats once said that the problem at the beggining of the Twentieth Century was that the centre would not hold. Assuming a Blairite, liberal, neo-conservative or even conservative foreign policy at the end of the century, the question is whether the international centre can hold.

This thesis is the ultimate refutation of the idea that in some way leftwing concerns with equality can be accomodated alongside any concern for liberty: the suggestion is that the left tends to wish to create the best society, irrespective of the views of those people living in it. Rightwing blogs tend to argue that the left for instance wants to create a tolerant society, and do that with the blunt instrument of the law, proscribing what people can and cannot say and ending up with a situation in which free speech no longer exists.

Is there any truth in these ideas? Obviously the left can become totalitarian and there are parts of the left which are totalitarian in the UK today- very minor parts like the communist and trotskyite parties of the far left. So incidentally can the right, clerical dominion is nothing if not totalitarian in its ambitions. But there is something more going on here- and that is the equation of economic liberty with liberty tout court.

An equation that the libertarians amongst us are eager to make- if that equation isn’t true then the argument that the left is neccessarily totalitarian collapses like a house of cards. The issue therefore is whether economic aid transferred by collective consent from the top of the socio-economic pyramid to the bottom is totalitarian.

Various respectable bloggers on the right would definitely argue that case, but I think they are wrong. If you accept the definition of liberty that it is the absense of coercion, you then face a problem which libertarians are rather too keen to forget about, which is the definition of coercion and who can coerce. For the straightforward libertarian answer is that only the state can coerce, but that is obviously nonsense.

It is obvious nonsense when you consider that the state has an unlimited distant power over our lives, whereas the company that we work for or even the people that we spend our days with have a limited close power over our lives. Let us for instance take communication, rightly in my view libertarians tend to be up in arms whenever the state listens into our conversations on the phone or in email without good reason, but what about companies who do the same and monitor the use of phones at work and desire their staff to be contactable 24 hours a day on their blackberries, is that not the same- the result is the same and the member of staff who refuses risks losing out through losing their job or their promotion prospects.

Take blogging as well, numerous bloggers are terrified of the distant prospect of the government enforcing a code of conduct over blogs on the internet. Very few seem to be as upset that companies have sacked people for running blogs on the internet- is that not a constraint on the freedom to run a blog, the idea that you might lose your livelihood by doing so. Of course you can define coercion down, Thomas Hobbes did that, but if you do you end up with neither the state nor other agents coercing anyone- as Hobbes does in Leviathan.

That’s one big gap and it leads me to a second big problem in the libertarian account of freedom- which is that freedom must be negative liberty, the freedom from coercion and that is the only legitimate definition of liberty, anything else is totalitarian. But again if we follow that definition of liberty strictly and solely we end up in absurdity. We end up with the thesis that the beggar is as free to eat caviar and drink champagne as the millionaire!

Interestingly rightwing libertarians often cite George Orwell to support their case against the totalitarian left- but of course Orwell was a socialist and was such for precisely these reasons. Orwell had lived as a down and out in both Paris and London for a year- such is the title of one of his books- he had been to Wigan to look at how the miners lived- and he brought back harrowing pictures of devastation and of degredation. Orwell definitely leaves you with the impression in both those books that poverty itself constitutes a limit on humanity. Poverty changes what it means to be human just as wealth does- we are all fond of quoting Lord Acton that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but what about absolute powerlessness what does that do to someone.

The strict libertarian definition of liberty does indeed make the left totalitarian- because any concern with any other value except liberty will lead to action which retards the growth of liberty. But libertarianism too needs to be examined in its definitions of liberty- too often libertarians assume that the only body which can coerce is the state and that the only way that you can be unfree is to be coerced.

LATER I apologise- but somehow this published before I was ready to publish it so the argument is unfinished. I haven’t looked at any comments but this is the coda to the argument which should make it at least make sense, apologies for the folly of the author- I’m not entirely sure how this happened.

Isaiah Berlin argued cogently that goods were held in competition with each other- that moral choice involved tragedy. Part of my critique of libertarianism would be that it is too easy, that it involves the substitution of one concept of freedom for an entire political philosophy. So that it actually involves real decreases in other types of freedom- the freedom within a society to do what one wishes to do, the freedom of non-dependance that Quentin Skinner and others have described. The problem with libertarianism is that it also accepts huge suffering as the neccessary price for freedom, it isn’t a humane doctrine. The devil takes the hindmost. Furthermore by only recognising one type of liberty, libertarianism strays into an argument that becomes unrealistic.

Part of being leftwing therefore is an attempt to releive the implausibilities contained within libertarian thinking on liberty. That doesn’t mean that the left should ignore the dangers manifest in its own approach to society, we ought to remember the twentieth century and there are good reasons for example to guard civil liberties with all the ferocity at our command. But it the fundemental concern of the left is important to recognise as well- without equality there are extents to which we cannot be free. Without equality, we depend on others, we can be manipulated and controlled by others, they may not be the state but the coercion and dependance are very real and we are unfree. The state therefore should intervene to redress the balances amongst ourselves, to protect our liberties against the powers that surround us. The state will often get things wrong- but it isn’t inevitable that it always gets things wrong and the jibe of totalitarianism masks the fact that libertarianism itself has an insufficient account of liberty.

This can all be illustrated if we turn to a recent Congressional Research Service report on the subject of some Latino Gangs that are increasingly worrying both the US and Central American governments.

The Report (pdf) was released to the public on the 2nd November and it paints a very interesting picture. Firstly we have an argument, presented as coming out of the criminological literature, about first, second and third generational gangs. The key group here is the third generational gang- thinkers at the Pentagon like Max Mainwaring have already begun drawing together arguments concerning these types of gangs (as can be seen in this pdf).

Essentially a third generational gang is a gang whose mission has become more generalised and organised- less of a front for the exploitation of a particular profit making illegal activity- John Sullivan, a criminologist, argues that these gangs are part mercenary part ideological gangs, he sees their emergence both in Latin America and in Iraq at the moment. Returning to Celinda Franco’s report for Congress, she provides evidence that some third generational gangs can become transnational and have bases in two or three countries which communicate and liase with each other. There is an argument, she suggests, that particular Latino gangs in the United States such as MS-13 and M-18 may be becoming such a force, that both are evolving in that direction. MS-13 in particular is taking on features of a third generational gang. These gangs have together around 40,000 members in the states and somewhere near 70-100,000 in central America.

Obviously that presents real dangers to the United States and to central America- both of these gangs are deeply unpleasant organisations. What is interesting though is that for the first time we may have something to compare terrorist networks, like Al Qaeda. to. For terrorism is essentially the product of a third generational transnational gang- exactly like say MS-13 and M-8. Even if we believe that Al-Qaeda has now evolved into a franchise operation- what is interesting is that it must have evolved through this stage of being a transnational violent gang. By looking at examples like MS-13 and M-8 we might get an inkling of how such organisations develop and how they are created.

For example one of the possible origins of MS-13 and M-8 as transnational gangs lies in their dominance of smuggling people across the Mexican and American border. The roots of some of the militant Islamic organisations in Europe could similarly lie in the management of the evasion of immigration controls. One might argue that this is exactly the phenomenon that we are seeing at present in France with the rise of the GSPC. What this analysis also supports is the idea that broad brush explanations could well lead us in the wrong direction- we need to reevaluate the threat of terrorism as John Kerry argued all those years ago as a criminal problem, as well as an ideological one or a geopolitical one.

We tend to be too limited in the way that we think about terrorism. Both far right organisations and third generation gangs may offer us useful models for analysing and understanding the behaviour of Al Qaeda. Ultimately the behaviour that results in terrorism may have the same roots as that which leads people into gang violence and far right violent groups. Ultimately what we find looking at the evidence, is that as any liberal would expect, terrorism is not a Muslim propensity but a human propensity and that understanding it in order to diminish its threat, requires us to look comparatively at other similar organisations around the world instead of starting a war between civilisations.

Part of the argument I think for suggesting that we need to train people as oppose to educate them is an assumption that what our society needs is a constant supply of labour. We need lots of workers and very few drones. But I think that misses something about education that we ought to think about. Because we aren’t merely a capitalist society, we are also a democratic society. There might be skills that a citizen needs in order to make decisions, vote and take part in the political process that aren’t the same as those that she requires as a worker. The point is for instance that if you can’t at a very basic level interpret and evaluate what politicians are saying on TV, you can’t really understand which party to vote for. Education should help you understand a bit of the world around you- understand something about the way that people live and enable you to understand more about that. Obviously it shouldn’t indoctrinate you, but it should provide you with the means to understand and think about things.

As liberals, and therefore committed to democracy, I think we should be a little more ambitious in what we want education to do. I don’t know what this means in policy terms- and obviously there are a hundred different arguments to be had about that. I don’t think it means anything in the context of the debate that Mike and Chris Dillow are having about the school leaving age. I do think though that if we aren’t careful we might just design an education system that reflects the language that we are using about education- that would be a disaster because it would bequeath us a generation of people, who were perfect employees, but unable to contribute to the world around them.