You might think that after the Jacqui Smith pay-movie story and multi-homed minister Geoff Hoon we must have plumbed the depths of “politicians on the take” stories. You’d be wrong. Tens or hundreds of thousands of claims by MPs are shortly to be released publicly. Most are unexceptional and within the rules. But according to plugged-in government sources, some are “awful, just worse than you can imagine” and likely to destroy careers.

Voters are going to be furious at some of the wheezes used. I am told that many of the 1997 intake of MPs have been particularly brazen. Incumbents at the next election are going to face opponents waving copies of their expense claims. The cost of DVDs, sofas, garden gnomes and nights out will crowd centre-stage, elbowing aside quantitative easing and the future of higher education. If I’m right, and some MPs are forced out this year, then we may see damaging byelections following what will surely be bad local and European elections for Labour. Even those who stay on will face a higher than usual toll of unseated MPs when the general election comes.

….my first thought was that voters should not only elect an MP at a General Election but also determine their salary and expenses.

If they didn’t like the employment package their electors had hit upon, they could always resign and a by-election ensure. But I did have an awful lot of expresso yesterday and then another thought occurred to me.

Assuming Brown goes to the bitter end, there’ll be a Labour Party conference in the autumn.

Is it really credible that this issue won’t be on the agenda? Well, the leadership will doubtless do all it can to make that happen. And I think we should do all that we can to ensure that it is.

What can LC do? We can either draft a model motion for CLPs, Trade Unions and affiliates (yes, Sunder this means you) to pick up. Or, perhaps better, we can adopt one that someone inside the Party has already drafted.

We can monitor its progress through the Party machine. We can name and shame CLPs etc that refuse to discuss it at all or pass it in some form. We can support any attempt at emergency de-selection of Labour MPs whose expenses are particularly outrageous.

We can seek to contact every CLP Chairperson and ask for their personal view on such a course of action. And we can report what they say.

We can give space to those inside the Party who put in the hard yards to ensure that Conference is faced with such a groundswell of opinion that the Leadership can’t ignore it.

We would probably need to set up a little group to progress this, preferably of those Conspirators who also hold Labour Party cards. We would need collectively to agree that this should be the campaign to which this site commits its energy in the next three months, when Conference motions are being prepared inside the Party machine.

For Labour has to show that it has done all in its power as a Party to sluice out the sleazeballs and scumbags who have pissed in the face of everything that the Party was set up to promote. And yes, that does mean the expulsion of Parliamentarians, including some who are to-day in ministerial office.

I was more interested, though, in the behaviour of the dog in the night. Not one of the free-marketeers who comment so copiously here cared to offer another name of a successful entrepreneur who had made their pile transparently and cleanly.

Free-marketeers love to tell us that every time a transaction takes place, that because the parties are willing to agree to the price, that price must therefore be fair.

This, of course, is horse-dung – the very same people in real life, like the rest of us, often say “I got a bargain” or “I paid over the odds for that” – like the rest of us, they have an idea of a price being ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ – such belief being based in part on what we believe the “going rate” to be and for the rest, on how important the item in question is to us.

It would be equally rational to hold that in every transaction one of the parties is defrauded – it’s just that we don’t know which. To suppose that that makes it all right is like saying that it’s all right to sustain serious injury falling off a balcony, just as long as you’re blacked-out on a surfeit of booze at the time. In no other area of life would being ignorant of having committed or sustained a wrong be considered a justification or even an excuse.

To be fair to them, economists have a dim awareness of the problem. One way to appreciate it is to look at a labour market. The entrepreneur needs to hire, say, ten software programmers to deliver the contract he’s made.

He might try to crack a deal with each of them individually, but more likely he’ll advertise at a price which he believes will get him the ten people he needs even though eight or nine of them would take less – there is an element of rent, or super-profit in the salary he pays (the price of labour is set by the marginal supplier, the one who least wants the work on offer). The entrepreneur knows it’s there, even if he doesn’t know how much it is.

He passes it on to his customer who passes it on in turn and so on until it reaches the shopper. And what is true of one factor or production is true of the others, too. And because the entrepreneur doesn’t know how much he’s overpaying, he doesn’t know how much of his own time to invest in doing something about it, so he takes the easy way out.

The consumer has a similar problem. Abebooks provides an efficient on-line market for second-hand books (or would, if the booksellers could get around to cataloguing all their stock). The efficiency of the market is proportional to the number of copies of a given book on hand.

If there are many available, the price I’m quoted to-day will likely be the same to-morrow or next week or next month. But if there are few, there’s no way to tell if to-day’s price will be higher or lower than next month’s and no matter how rational our consumer is, she doesn’t know whether to buy or not because she can’t work out a discount rate.

There may well be no alternative to markets for the majority of transactions. But let us not mistake necessity for desirability. Diplomacy is meaningless without the potential to threaten war, but that hardly makes warfare morally good. Each time we enter the market-place, whether as seller or as buyer, we do so lovelessly, and this must surely diminish our capacity for affection and altruism, if only slightly and temporarily. Perhaps that is why it is so difficult to point to those who have made shedloads of money and say of them, there is an honest, decent human being.

And it’s undeniably true that the track record of religions when they intervene in political life has, over the centuries, been remarkably poor. It’s as though there’s something about the exercise of power which is hostile to the central message of religion, that you should love your neighbour as yourself.

And yet this message is so obviously true, and so obviously represents a thing both perennial and urgent, that there will always be a yearning to unlock the puzzle and find a way in which at least those religious people who do hold that message to be central to what they do can engage fruitfully in the political arena.

One current such attempt at unlocking is the Charter for Compassion whose sponsors include Desmond Tutu, Baroness Julia Neuberger and Tariq Ramadan. It seeks to unite people of all faiths in the promotion of compassion and the Golden Rule, one version of which I quoted in the previous paragraph.

One man whose support I’m sure they’d've been canvassing, were he still alive, would have been Reinhold Niebuhr – a 20th century American Protestant minister and labour organiser who is said to be Barack Obama’s favourite theologian.

Today Niebuhr is best remembered as the supposed author (he disclaimed the honour) of the “Serenity Prayer” – God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

His main interest, however, lay in social action and why religious people were so lousy at it. His answer is striking, and will be of little comfort to Archbishop Tutu and friends. He claimed that “the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world”. Why would such a duty be “sad”? And why does he think the world “sinful”?

It’s important to notice that by “sin” he does not mean people’s failure to follow religious “laws” of some kind, whether of scriptural or customary authority. Indeed, he thinks that the very existence of such laws is part of the sinfulness, because religious law confuses the things of God with the things of Man (a very Augustinian distinction).

By “sin” he simply means each and every failure of compassion, whether large or small. And the duty of politics is sad because all that politics can even try to do is to establish justice – and justice can never substitute for compassion.

This is truly radical theology – so much so that it is hard to get across its full import: the idea of Divine Justice is a deeply embedded meme in so many cultures from Christianity to China. Yet the whole point of what Nieburhr has to say is that there is no such thing.

Humanity invented God not so that kings and later parliaments could make and enforce laws (though the idea has been perverted to that end with all too much success) but so that women and men could better understand their own impulse to compassion, as a way of making sense of that other-directedness which lies deep within us all.

And political action, even at its best, can only ever be about the provision of justice. For Niebuhr’s other great insight is that compassion is a by-product of intimacy. We can only experience it in respect of, at most, a small number at a time. That’s just the way human beings are.

When we seek to project it onto a wider canvas, perhaps the whole people of Zimbabwe or Zaire, or some interest defined by class or gender, what we finish up with is an intellectual counterfeit which collapses all too readily into shame and anger.

The world community may – or it may not – be able to restore justice to those countries in the form of a functioning civil society, but it cannot replenish the store of compassion, the loss of which is at the root of their misery. And so Niebuhr calls political duty “sad”: it is always necessary, but never enough.

So I suspect that if he were alive he would be saying to the promoters of the Charter: do you realise what you are suggesting? What you want is nothing more nor less than the old anarchist dream of replacing justice and politics itself with a utopia based solely on human love. Tell me why that will work now, when it never has before, and then – and only then – will I join you.

What dreadful thing has Bozza done now? Well, he’s decided not merely to replace London’s awful bendy-buses with rear-platform double-deckers with conductors, but to order 800 of the things – enough to operate most of the routes that run through London’s West End, if not all of them.

It’s hard to believe that bus design is a matter on which the “correct position” can be derived from a love of, or a hatred for, an ideological position on more obviously political matters – and the reality is that Londoners want their Routemasters back, or failing that, as near a replica as possible which meets contemporary standards on safety and “greenness” (they’ll almost certainly be “dual-fuel” jobs). Which is what Bozza wants to give us.

You’d think that people would learn from election campaigns, especially ones they lose. Whilst I doubt Ken’s bendy bus policy cost him his job in City Hall, I never once heard anyone – even Ken – claim during the campaign that it was a vote-winner. You’d think the Labour Group on the GLA might even take the opportunity to back Bozza on this one, if only for the kudos of later being able to say that they don’t go in for childish point-scoring.

Those of us who equate our happiness to the prospect of increased material wealth are going to be disappointed, and politicians who set out their stall on that basis – as they all have for as long as any of us can remember – are going to find it tough going, too. Ironically, it seems that Cameron has a better understanding of this than most. Brown is probably relieved that he’s being called on to deal with the financial sector again – his Presbyterian inheritance is of little help to him in developing creative responses to the social responsibility of government – to find a way to interlace community with individual freedom.

Yet the financial crisis does provides an unique opportunity to do just that. We need banks, and since we need them, we need loveable banks. And the first banker to realise this is going to do very well, assuming – as I suppose we must – that the banking system is going to get through this.

What would a loveable bank look like? Its products would be simple, and easy to understand. It would, for example, express risk not in terms of adjectives or mumbo-jumbo letters and arithmetical symbols, but as the simple likelihood of a product going belly-up. It would provide tools so that its customers could get into the habit of financial planning and control every bit as comprehensive as its own. It would provide periodic face-to-face financial health-checks for its customers. It would be driven not by greed but by professional pride. It would not be particularly entrepreneurial, instead seeing its role as that of enabling entrepreneurship in others.

Such a bank would probably not be listed on the Stock Exchange, although it would undoubtedly use the money markets, particularly for short-term dealing, as banks do now.

If all this sounds much like the old mutual Building Society – or even Credit Union – brought up to date, it’s intended to. We need a major mutual player to keep the others, if not exactly loveable themselves, at least honest. And of course, the government – by buying all those bank shares – now has a wonderful opportunity to make it happen. It should encourage one of the clearers – whichever is the weakest – to re-organise itself as a ‘loveable’ bank, specialising in the personal and small business sectors. Its shareholders could be compensated, over time, from the proceeds of the sale of the government’s interest in the others. And if they can’t wait for their money, that’s what markets are for: to buy debt (don’t we just know it…).

Harold Wilson said that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing, a proposition New Labour has tested to destruction. Historically, our ethical impulses have focused on issues of poverty and inequality – or rather, on powerlessness. Empower people, we said, and all will be well. Benn, Scargill, Livingstone and others re-interpreted the ethical dimension as the promotion of the interests of particular social groups. This frame of reference led to a narrative of struggle clearly distinguishable from the Tory narrative of government. The problem with struggle is that either you win, in which case – like the A.N.C. in South Africa – you don’t know what to do next, or you lose, in which case your position is worse than your starting-point. Warlike words such as ‘fight’ and ‘struggle’ need to be dropped from our lexicon. They obscure our necessary ethical focus.

We need to focus as much upon psychological poverty as its material equivalent. We have forgotten one of the messages of 1968: that politics both can and needs to address itself to the question of love, the kind of selfless love Christians (of whom I am not one) call agape. The clearest example of our psychological poverty is the scourge of drug- and alcohol- abuse. Those who look to the state make bellicose noises: War on Drugs! A Drugs Czar! – whilst market fetishists call for unfettered access to every substance known to nature and the pharmacology lab. Both miss the point completely. The problem isn’t the substances, it’s the people who take them. People don’t get out of their heads or off their faces week after week, wreck their own and others’ lives because they’re happy: they do it because they are miserable.

A progressive politics which is unable to analyse the cause of that misery and then work to remedy it is simply not worth having. We are raising another generation of inner-city kids who believe their options are celebrity or worthlessness. By implication, they are saying that they want more from life than a deadly dull job paying £20k a year in a box built on a flood plain with a few consumer goodies and sunny holidays –and they’ve got a point, haven’t they?

If not-for profit third-sector activity is to become the engine of a future progressive politics, there will need to be a major conceptual shift in what we think political parties are for. One key instrument of change could be the co-operative: a form of common ownership which seeks to make a surplus which it typically re-invests in its business. The movement even maintains a ghostly presence within the Labour Party. Even Cameron has had warm words to offer co-operatives, but the devil will be in the detail. I would expect the Tories to write the rules to persuade co-operatives to sell on to the market sector – but there is no reason, in principle, to suppose that co-ops couldn’t deliver primary health care or community adult education. However, a progressive politics would also involve them in the failings of the market – for example, receivers could be required to show good reason why the business should not be reconstituted on a not-for-profit basis. More generally, the land-use, planning and taxation systems provide powerful engines for the promotion of this sector as the default for new economic activity, although once again, the tests of efficacity would be pragmatic.

The other principal component of the third sector is charitable activity. The Charities Act 2006 introduced a ‘public benefit’ test for charities which is still being consolidated by the Charities Commission. Many on the left are uncomfortable with the notion of charity, believing it to be inherently inegalitarian, and it often has been, particularly if it seen as a substitute for the welfare net. But it also has a progressive history – our public libraries owe much to Andrew Carnegie, and charitable donations are essential to guarantee the academic independence of universities against the demands of both State and markets.

The left has no monopoly on the analysis: even Cameron dimly understands that our social dysfunction is a consequence of fifty years of consumerism. But both his intellectual framework and the dues he has to pay will prevent him from being able to do anything about it. Because fraternity, citizenship, agape – for all that we have neglected them– are inherently components of the political space of the left.

Social democracy was the hegemonic form of progressive politics, both in theory and practice, in this country throughout the twentieth century. It sought evolutionary change of institutions and practices rather than revolutionary disjuncture.

However, this had less to do with the political acuity of Labour in that period than with specific historic circumstances that uniquely favored it.

These were:

• a working-class which had some education and wanted more
• the need to rebuild social solidarity after the trauma of war, a need made more urgent by the perceived “betrayal” of servicemen and their families after 1918;
• technological change which replaced manual with office-based work, so that the economy required far more “middle-class” labour and aspirations to a better standard of living could be met in a way that had never before been possible – this change also revolutionised the options available to women;
• more flexible financial institutions which permitted the development of mass owner-occupation and the stimulation of demand through access to credit facilities.

I want to advance some new themes for the future of left, or centre-left politics over the next ten years or so. To do so, it is first necessary to note that the circumstances described above were unique.

For example, the principal reason for the intractability of poverty in Britain today is that technological change is now reducing the number of “middle class” jobs that even the most willing of the poor can aspire to. Anti-poverty strategies, as this government has discovered, are like walking up a down escalator – you do well if you stand still.

A demographically ageing society requires immigration, and this creates tensions and questions to which “social democracy” has no clear answers. The ‘good life’ of consumerism has reinforced a traditional English (if not British) tendency to engage as little as possible with the public sphere – citizenship is an interruption, not part of the warp and weft of everyday life.

The only counter to a move to the right, the only way to avoid being dragged along in the powerful undertow of market-fetishism, celebrity populism and single-issue politics, is to re-think the role of the State and to disconnect progressive proposals from what “they” can do for “us” – in short, to propose a new model of what a political party is and what it seeks to do.

It is also necessary to acknowledge that markets are now more powerful, more global, than ever before. It is arguable that globalisation means that progressive taxation is no longer a practical political option: a key component of the 20th century social democratic consensus no longer applies. More generally, the contemporary state may be seen as simply too weak to implement a social democratic programme.

The state is a Janus. It is both friend and foe, and a new progressive politics will confront this directly. It is a friend principally as the precondition of civil society, whether in terms of an equitable and transparent legal system, or as a provider of social services of all kinds.

It is a foe because it demands trust without reciprocity, and because its agencies invariably create their own, unaccountable agendas which all too often turn progressive intention into repressive practice. A progressive politics will know all this, and will apply the pragmatic test to state action as much as it does to markets.

However, the state and the market do not exhaust the social space. There is also non-governmental, not-for-profit activity. This is the crucial area for the re-invention of progressive politics.

It is this third sector which offers hope. Against the liberty that the market promises but only partially and inequitably delivers; against the equality that the state pretends to uphold in those few moments when it isn’t attending to its own needs and fears – the not-for-profit sector can offer an expression of social solidarity

- quite understandably, not a few people preferred to play the man rather than the ball;

- the Single Tranferable Vote fetishists feared that our broken electoral system might be fixable in some other way (I’ll come back to that);

- Lammy didn’t make his case anything like as strongly as he might have done. And he didn’t, because he didn’t look at a different, but connected issue.

A mid-term change of tenant at 10, Downing Street used to be a relatively swift, and certainly manageable process. A ballot of the party’s MPs would be held and a Callaghan or a Major emerge.

But both Labour and the Tories are now committed to electing their leaders on a far wider franchise, and the process can take months. It’s designed for opposition, when finding the best candidate is what matters, not how long the process takes.

Labour recognise this: their rules require that, in government, the Shadow Cabinet elect one of their number to go the Queen, with an inner-party election to follow: in what circumstances this could be other than a coronation I’ve no idea – all the effort Brown put into preventing anyone else getting the nominations needed was sheer overkill and wasted energy.

It also means that the Deputy Leadership, unlike the US Vice-Presidency, does not mean that you step up in the case of a sudden vacancy – no one knows why the Labour Party bothers to have a Deputy Leader at all.

So Labour actually now has, in office, a less open process than it did a generation ago. And of course, the Tories potentially have the same problem – wholly theoretical as of now, but it is difficult to see how they could deal with it differently when the time comes.

We seem to be groping towards an American-style primary system – and not only for leaders. The Tories have experimented with open caucuses for candidate selection, and I expect Labour to go down this route in opposition too.

The reason the process is muddled, and the movement towards it somewhat crab-like, is not hard to find. The wider you cast the net, the longer it takes, and the less it can be managed without a fixed timetable. Democratic selection, whether of party leaders or parliamentary candidates, really requires fixed-term Parliaments.

Oh, says conventional wisdom, that’ll never happen. No Prime Minister will ever give up their right to ask for a dissolution at the time of their own choosing.

An exception
There is, I suggest, one exception to that. And Gordon Brown is in that very situation. He is going to run up to the buffers – no one can see why the polls should shift dramatically in his favour in the meantime, and half the PLP is going to be turfed out anyway, so they’ll want to enjoy their tenure for as long as they can.

This is exactly the situation in which fixed-term Parliaments can be brought in.

The Government should introduce a Parliament Bill to provide for:
- the dissolution of the current Parliament at the end of its term, with an election on May 6, 2010;
- fixed-term four year Parliaments thereafter;
- primary elections for Parliamentary candidates to take place on the first Thursday in October the year before the general election – all registered parties to have the right to participate.

These would be “open” primaries – everyone would be able to vote once only, for the candidate of their choice of the party of their choice. A candidate would be nominated if they topped the ballot in their own party, and that party received at least 1,000 votes – politics doesn’t need joke candidates.

Parties could then choose leaders specifically to fight elections – who might or might not be the current leader of the Parliamentary caucus – as the Germans do already.

The somewhat vague commitment to look further into electoral reform will provide a constitutional fig-leaf for the Bill and hopefully stymie any obstruction in the Lords.

I think it’s a sellable proposition: it addresses the changes that are taking place willy-nilly, and it much reduces the “wheeling and dealing” that turns people off politics. Primary campaigns would represent an opportunity to engage far more people in the political process itself – that’s what we all want, isn’t it?

Oh, yes, STV. Why we should introduce a system which would insulate MPs of all parties those of their constituents who don’t share their politics, I’ve no idea. And that’s before we get to the inner-party fighting that distingushes the politics of the Irish Republic, for example.

But we don’t need to debate its merits in a vacuum. If, after a fair trial, it produces more effective local councils and higher voting numbers in Scotland, it will doubtless win more friends south of the Border, too.

Yuri Andropov, briefly boss of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and before that its chief ideologist, believed that the personal computer represented a definitive break, or step-change, in the means of production whose effect would be to destroy socialism. And there can be no doubt that, at least in Britain, the energy of political blogging is with the political Right.

It’s easy and comfortable to think that this is simply because we have an exhausted Labour government – once Labour’s back in its natural home of opposition, left blogging will bloom and the internet become the capillary system of a new progressive politics. For me, Political Betting suggests otherwise.

I need to say at the outset that I like and admire Mike Smithson: otherwise I’d hardly have organised the first get-together, in a central London pub, of his contributors. I told him then that he’d got a tiger by the tail, and he’s worked as hard as any start-up entrepreneur has to. I have no beef whatsoever with him, but what his blog has become ought to be a warning to liberal conspirators more generally.

And what it has become, by general consent, is “ConHome lite” – not only in the proportion of right-wing contributors, but also in their vehemence and arrogance. There are thoughtful Conservatives there, of course – David Herdson, for example, would make an excellent guest writer on these pages, for example – but they are as rare as lefties.

And the zeitgeist was expressed by the fact that only right-wingers got a look-in when the contributors voted for “commenter of the year” – the runner-up was hack novelist and Cornish Europhobe Sean Thomas who, although perfectly capable of reasoned argument, prefers to heap “lower fourth” type abuse on other individuals and is, for some reason, not moderated. (I should say that I’ve never been on the receiving end myself, so this isn’t sour grapes).

The final straw came yesterday when Mike (or possibly one of his guest co-editors – he’s on holiday though still actively posting) saw fit to run a piece on the future direction of the Labour Party written by a Tory activist who has his own blog anyway.

It’s utterly opaque to me why a blog whose purpose is to identify future political betting opportunities, and is very good at it, should want to compromise its brand in such a way. The only explanation I can come up with is that Mike can now only get Tories to write for him. And it’s true that perhaps as many as two-thirds of those who comment on his blog are Tories.

The Tory Party gets an easy ride – not a single adverse comment on Giles Chichester’s behaviour – while every of one Labour’s sins is endlessly rehearsed, and new ones constantly discovered (did you know that all those drunks on the Tube last week-end were organised by the Labour Party?)

Mike Smithson is entitled to say that anyone can comment, and he’s just the referee – but he has to take the consequences of such a hands-off approach, and the consequence is that his brand is in danger of becoming tarnished: like attracts like, and if he wants left-of-centre voices on his blog, he needs to work to attract them.

Mike needs to think through where he’s going with his project, and beef up his editorial team on the back of that – until he does, I shall, sadly but with fond memories, let Political Betting go.

Re-inventing politics
But this is about more than one blogger’s lapse of editorial judgement. Andropov was right, or partly right. The internet divides us as much as it brings us together: we think we can extend our social networks hugely, but all we do is meet the personas we carefully craft. And it is ideologically individualist – it cannot teach us fraternity or solidarity.

Gutenburg created the technological infrastructure for the possibility of left-wing politics, previously unknown to humanity: hyptertext mark-up language may yet close it down again. Technological change does open up and close down political possibilities: to regard the internet as politically neutral is naïve.

The energy and hegemony of right-wing voices in the blogosophere may well be as much a consequence of the nature of the medium as it is of Gordon Brown’s daily political misjudgments. Time spent at a keyboard is time away from one’s fellow humans: the internet is necessarily a playground for egoists. (A blog is probably a necessity to-day for anyone who wants to become an MP, and before long that will be true at local Council level, too.)

But if all we get on the blogosphere is relentless self-promotion, the potential of the medium to engage people in fruitful debate as to the future direction of our society will be tarnished: what ought to attract will instead repel. Life on-line is a series of fleeting transactions: to the extent that it replaces real-world human relationships it degrades all who engage in it.

And there is no doubt that it works best in the commercial sphere: the most successful sites are those engaged in buying and selling, not those which offer meaningful human connections. It is not an accident that one of our premier political websites is devoted to betting as well as politics: the lure of something for nothing is stronger than the attraction of citizenship.

Those who wish to harness it to re-invent progressive politics will therefore do well to regard themselves as operating behind enemy lines. For if the “left” – broadly defined as anyone who considers rampant individualism to be insuffiicent for the good life – is to re-shape itself, it will focus not on égalité – which the nation-state can no longer deliver – but on fraternité.

And that means going beyond article and comments in hyperspace – it means building real-world networks in localities committed to re-engagement, to the political education function the Parties long ago abandoned.