On Any Questions recently, someone asked the panellists whether they intended to cut down on their meat consumption, for environmental reasons. There were a couple of hesitant, nondescript answers and then Ken Clarke calmly guffawed at the whole idea. Like I’m going to cut down on my merry feasting, he basically said.

And the audience found his cavalier confidence sort of reassuring, and laughed. Here, it struck me, is the very nub of the Tory soul: it enjoys showing its lack of angst. And such confidence impresses people. Let us be ruled by these Nietzschean strong souls, we cravenly feel, who are too busy living well to entertain cowardly moral scruples.

Y’know, misrepresenting the motivations of your opponents might not be one of the worst characteristics of an ever-corroding political debate, but it is one of the more grating.

Whilst I’m sure the liberalism Theo Hobson subscribes to is suitably right-on and resplendent in its idealism, it still pales when compared to the bold (and apparently naive) ideal of treating people on the other side of the debate like human beings.

The distinction Hobson draws here – between the environmentally-aware, socially just and eternally earnest liberal and the arrogant, self-interested Tory with no regard for anyone but himself – is so crude as to be unworkable, even as political rhetoric. All we would have to do for Hobson’s dichotomy to fall apart would be to locate just one Tory who agrees with him on an issue he holds dear.

In fact, he need only ask the aforementioned Ken Clarke, whose preference for European integration and prison reform is ground upon which a Tory and a Bleeding Heart can share.

Nor is it at all accurate to insinuate that Tories possess such a serene sense of calm that they’re exercised by nothing other than their own tax rate. Of course there’s such a thing as Tory Guilt, it’s just that those fears are differently located from our own, and we have far more pejorative descriptions for it: racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, Catholicism, climate denial and milk snatching.

There will be occasions when some of those descriptions are true and occasions when they’re not, but as irritating as it might be to have my rational, well-grounded arguments for Nice Things dismissed as ‘liberal guilt’, I’d do well to admit that I get off pretty lightly.

Plus, it’s not like the types of topics Tories worry about is any kind of secret; just open up the feverishly anxious Daily Mail on a given day and you’ll find plenty of proof. They worry about family, and think the breakup of the nuclear ‘ideal’ will have troubling consequences for society. They worry about education; they long to see a return to discipline, selection & more traditional subjects. They worry about the state; they believe states should be small, that tax burdens should be low and that encroachments into the public’s private life should be avoided. They worry about immigration, and fret about what increasing numbers of foreign men & women will do to the cohesiveness of society.

Obviously, I share few of these concerns. I think some are overblown, some unfounded entirely, some based in reasoning or faith which I don’t share. Nonetheless, they are fears which are often as genuine and deeply-felt as our own, and simply believing them to be wrong doesn’t make them vanish. Nor will simply mocking those concerns make anyone more susceptible to your point of view – tempting though that often is.

In the long run, of course, we’re all dead, but if we want to go out of this world with a little deeper an understanding of humans than we currently possess, if we want to gain a broader understanding of the beliefs and principles that guide the people around us, if we want to edge just a few inches closer to the better societies we profess to want, it would be useful for us to take the time to understand our opponents rather than ascribing unfairly miserly, misanthropic attributes to them. That goes for the left and the right.

The most obvious, of course, is cost; even if you did have the resources to find yourself private accommodation, you might prefer living in social housing if it leaves you with a little extra money for food, clothes, transport, a night out and the odd holiday.

The second is the security that social housing can offer. Not every private landlord is as scrupulous as a local housing association, and the further down the price scale you go, the less security you’re likely to have. Social housing can offer considerably more peace of mind for tenants.

The third reason is community. People might just prefer the part of the world they’re staying in: they’re on good terms with the neighbours; their parents live up the road; their kids go to the local school. Why would they want to leave those social networks – that familiarity – behind?

Although the first two reasons will be most commonly cited by those concerned about David Cameron’s social housing announcement, I think the last one is most significant.

Functionalist sociologists – more often linked with the political right than the left – often talk about a thing called social solidarity. They believe that social harmony is best achieved by members of a community all sharing similar norms, values, lifestyles, histories and traditions. They’re the things that bind us together, that give us common ground and foster neighbourliness and a public spirit.

When you look at our post-war history, many episodes of social unrest on the British mainland have had high population turnover as a contributing factor. Long-time residents saw their communities changing before their eyes and didn’t who their neighbours were; newcomers would be sent to areas they didn’t know, alongside people whose culture and language they didn’t always share.

Whilst most communities were (and still are) open-minded enough to adapt the changes around them (no thanks to you know who), those areas with acute social exclusion and economic inactivity would regard their new neighbours as competitors for resources that were already – are already – in short supply. Even then, bonds were (and still are) built over time: the ‘newcomers’ stick around, form relationships and embrace the community around them; the long-time residents begin to work and socialise and relate to the people they might once have treated with mistrust. Solidarity grows.

None of this is meant to diminish the problems afflicting some of Britain’s housing estates; rather, it’s meant suggest that the introduction of arbitrary fixed-term leases could make matters worse.

If we know that a high turnover of population can erode the bonds which hold communities together, it is not far-fetched to conclude that a policy which leads to residents constantly moving on could erode those bonds further. If that happens, we should expect greater mistrust, dysfunction and social unrest in deprived communities. Like they need that right now.

I really don’t want to be one of those people who brings out the ‘Big Society’ as a ‘gotcha’ to thrash the coalition with each time they announce questionable policy.

But a ‘Big Society’ is no substitute for an understanding of how society actually works.

David Cameron famously admitted that “there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state”. He was right on both counts. But if his coalition continues to act as if State and Society are two entirely separate entities, he will never ‘unbreak’ the Britain he inherited.

For decades his well-heeled Sheffield Hallam constituency – home to farmers, doctors & lawyers, owners of factories & steel works – had loyally returned Conservative MPs, and even as the red flag was hoist above City Hall, Patnick remained a stubborn voice of opposition.

If Sheffield really was a breakaway republic, his Hallam constituency would’ve been a fringe rebel enclave – blue to the bitter end.

(Image by incurable_hippie)

Of course, demographics, lifestyles and party loyalties have all changed significantly since then; the Conservative vote has collapsed since 1997 and its current Lib Dem incumbent enjoys a generous majority. But whilst the make-up of the constituency might’ve altered since Patnick’s days, there’s still a sense that it’s as estranged from the rest of Sheffield as it was in the 1980s. As Jonathan Raban noted in the New York Review of Books:

‘These Lib Dem gains reflected the rise of a younger, modern, middle class of people who traveled widely, valued their membership in the European Union, balanced their fear of statism against their university-bred ideas of social justice and fairness, and were keenly protective of their own personal liberties and civil rights. Sheffield Hallam might have been their capital-the young families in renovated old houses, new Audis, Priuses, and Smart cars on gravel driveways, the restaurants, boutiques, and health food shops along Ecclesall Road. Lozenge-shaped Lib Dem placards proclaimed “Winning Here,” and so they were, but the annoying smugness of that phrase seemed part of the character of the place. Sheffield Hallam knows, rather too well, that it’s where the winners in South Yorkshire live.’

Image by Brett Patterson (Flickr)

To his credit, Nick Clegg never sought to present himself as just the MP for a few affluent suburbs on the Derbyshire border. In the general election campaign he would talk about ‘my city of Sheffield’ and contrast the life chances of a child born in the impoverished parts of the city with one born in the comfort of his own constituency. He didn’t merely seek to speak for his constituency, but for Sheffield as a whole, and it was an approach which won his party respect, votes and seats.

Just a few months after polling day, Clegg may now be starting to understand how it feels to shuffle in Irving Patnick’s shoes. Whilst a coalition with the Tories might have been received badly enough in a city where they remain an endangered species, the long-running controversy over Sheffield Forgemasters is where the most hurt and mistrust is felt.

It’s a city which is deeply proud of its past and eager – sometimes over-eager – to return to the days when its steel production was of world renown. Knowing that it was one of the few companies in the world capable of producing those reactor components only compounded that pride, and the cancellation of the loan which would’ve made it possible was welcomed as warmly as a boot to the gullet.

But it was once the story assumed national significance that the greatest damage was done. With contradictory accounts emerging from Forgemasters, Clegg and the coalition, plus the news of a Tory secretly lobbying for the loan to be scapped, conspiracy began to take the place of where a straight story should’ve been. Cries of ‘betrayal!’ were soon replaced by whispers of Tory sleaze, and Clegg started to be spoken of as their barrowboy.

To say that Labour exploited Clegg’s discomfort is an understatement. When Jack Straw chose Forgemasters as the focus of his first PMQs, he did so not because it was a matter of national importance or even a particularly current news story. No, Straw chose that topic because it could embarrass the Deputy Prime Minister and his party across the North. It was a rather unsubtle attempt to ‘prove’ one of Labour’s most longstanding critiques: that a liberal party cannot represent the interests of the working class; that Labour remains their only home.

(Image from Liberal Democrats)

The daunting challenge for Lib Dems in the years to come is to demonstrate how that impression is wrong. Voting and constitutional reform may both have great democratic importance, but they’re not nearly as high a priority for the party’s voters as they are for its activists. The fear must be that, in the midst of the coalition’s spending cuts & tax hikes, Labour holds aloft both their push for an AV referendum and the Forgemasters fiasco as emblematic of the party’s self-interest & subservience to the Tories. It is not without reason that some members fear that council & Parliamentary seats across the North are now extremely vulnerable.

As an MP, Clegg’s seat is almost certainly safe; it would take an almighty revolt to reverse Sheffield Hallam’s long history of voting against the grain of the city. But what is much less clear is how many of Clegg’s regional colleagues will still have jobs after the next election, and whether the prize of finally being able to sit in government has come at the cost of the demise of northern liberalism. For a politician, there are few worse things than being alone.

The controversies Gove has been embroiled in since May have been entirely unforced errors; it is not beyond a Secretary of State to publish an accurate list of which schools will/will not see their building projects completed, nor is it beyond his ability to give a realistic estimate of how many would take advantage of his invitation to become academies.

The truth, as we now know , is that most schools in England & Wales didn’t await the Academies Bill with the same breathlessness Gove had when he rushed it through Parliament.

Whilst it’s still probable that eligible schools will become academies at some point, the implication that over 1,000 would do so before September always seemed rather staggering.

But the relatively small number of actual applications for Academy status is something the DoE could and should have predicted. It can take some schools months just to change something as superficial as a school uniform.

With a matter as significant as a long-term change in a school’s structure, funding & accountability mechanisms, those thinking about applying will have needed to be meticulous in their preparation.

They would have had to consult not just with governors but with teachers, parents, pupils and, yes, those maligned local authorites they’re meant to be desperate to escape. They most certainly couldn’t have proceeded with the same haste as the Education Secretary might’ve wanted.

Moreover, the rewards for schools to become Academies by September weren’t nearly as great as Gove might’ve imagined. By the time he made his invitations, many schools had already set their budgets for the next academic year: they already knew their resources, class sizes, staffing levels, the subjects they would offer and the targets for their own improvement.

In this context, the additional freedoms & resources offered by Academy status would’ve made little difference, so why rush into an arrangement which would have enormous consequences for pupils, parents & teachers?

Gove’s mistakes thus far haven’t been errors of policy, but of process. Of course parents want increased standards across the school system; they want it to be easy to get their kids into a good school close to where they live, and they’re willing to accept reform if it might make that wish a reality.

But parents also value some measure of stability, certainty and reliability; they don’t want to be confronted with erroneous, ever-changing lists of scrapped school building programmes and they don’t want to hear wild overestimates about how many schools which will convert into academies.

It normally takes a good few years for the full effect of education reforms to be accurately measured & evaluated. If he carries on at this rate, Michael Gove will have lost the public’s trust before he’s even lost the political argument.

With such scant exciting, homemade music, the New Musical Express – that dogged tribune of indie culture – gazed across the Atlantic and started to embrace the explosion of R&B and hip hop. They wrote reverently about Timbaland & Missy Elliott, made The Neptunes the epitome of cool and even gave Destiny’s Child their front cover for a week.

Sadly, the NME’s experiment in open-minded eclecticism was short-lived; sales dwindled and the paper couldn’t afford to offend its musically conservative readership for any longer. It wasn’t long before the magazine reverted to type; excitedly announcing a ‘New Rock Revolution’ and chasing skinny trustafarians around the sidewalks of New York.

The mistake the NME made was in believing it could break the stubborn insularity of its audience.

(Image by missquitecontrary)

Does my right hon. Friend find it bizarre-as I do-that the yoghurt and muesli-eating, Guardian-reading fraternity are only too happy to protect the human rights of people engaged in terrorist acts, but never once do they talk about the human rights of those who are affected by them?

- Labour MP Kevin Hughes

If you start to break it then people aren’t going to go. I’m sorry, but Jay-Z? No chance… I’m not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It’s wrong.
- Noel Gallagher

Pop tribes often seem sealed off from the rest of the cultural landscape; they talk only amongst themselves, in their own language, and define themselves as much by the inferiority of other genres as by the self-evident superiority of their own.

Political tribes operate in very similar ways. Each shares its own folk heroes and hate figures, writes in socially-accepted shorthand (NuLieBore! Tory Scum!) and generally accepts that any decision or utterance made by the other tribe is either misguided, deluded or malicious. The tribe is both a social circle and a comfort blanket of shared assumptions.

However, just as identifying with one pop tribe will give you a fairly shallow, one-dimensional music collection, political tribalism can be similarly self-defeating. Many of the defences of New Labour’s punitive populism were made as appeals to working class authenticity. On matters like crime, immigration, welfare, drugs and civil liberties, liberal criticisms were often dismissed as an indulgence of an out-of-touch middle class.

Whether it was Jack Straw slamming the ‘Hampstead liberals’ or Blunkett deriding ‘airy fairy libertarians’, the insinuation was clear; Labour’s liberal critics were unserious, self-serving, moneyed dilettantes with little connection to the ‘Real World’. It often felt like the party didn’t even want our votes; we just didn’t belong in the tribe.

None of this was an issue until Labour discovered that its tribe was no longer big enough to win elections.

Throughout its thirteen years in government we heard various appeals from within the party to ‘reconnect’ with the middle or working classes, the unions or big business, but precious little about reconnecting with those social liberals who fled over its excessive anti-terror legislation, its treatment of asylum seekers, its abject prison system, its criminalisation of the young or its lie detectors for the jobless.

The question for whoever wins this turgid, listless leadership election is how far they are prepared to go to win these people back. Can the party’s rhetoric be shunted in a more pluralistic, inclusive and liberal direction? Will they support Ken Clarke as he tries to weed ‘prison works’ out of our political lexicon?

Will they applaud Nick Clegg for securing a commitment on the detention of child asylum seekers? Will they revert back to a drugs policy based on evidence rather than fear? Or will the tribal instincts be so strong that they bark at and barrack the Liberal Democrats until any rapprochement is impossible?

But though the main responsibility for this rapprochement is necessarily Labour’s, there’s also a question to be raised of those who want the party to change but don’t want to get their hands dirty. Do we have any integrity to demand change of a party we didn’t exactly feel inspired to vote for, much less campaign for? Do we have any credibility in making those demands outside of – and often ignorant of – the local and national structures within the party?

Why should our voices have prominence over tens of thousands of long-suffering, dues-paying members? It’s a centuries-old question of whether structure or agency best describes our social behaviour, and it’s not a question which will be resolved in a blogpost.

One theory about why the NME’s short-lived eclecticism failed to lift its circulation is that not enough people believed its change was real. Sure, they saw a more diverse range of artists on the cover, but maybe they suspected it was all artifice; that deep down it would remain the same stubborn tribune of indie fandom that it has always been. Perhaps the tribe’s reputation preceded it.

That’s not something the Labour Party can allow to happen. There are now millions of us for whom the only experience of democratic socialist government was the administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They both fell short of adequate.

The task of the next Labour leader is to imagine and articulate a political culture which is better than the one we have lived through, and which their predecessors bequeathed. They need to prove that their tribe (their tent, their church) can be larger, broader, more open, responsive and diverse than anything we’ve seen to date.

This isn’t about changing to win; it’s about changing what it means to win. That’s the difference between being the leader of a political movement and merely settling for manager of a political tribe.

Responding to heckles from the audience, Sunny suggests Miliband’s critics have missed the point:

Sure, New Labour did use a lot of negative language, but it’s naive to assume people won’t talk about “benefits cheats” just because the Labour government didn’t. The Daily Mail cannot be wished away. And so I’m assuming New Labour simply made the calculation that sounding harsh on benefit cheats in public would convince the public something was being done about them – and keep faith in the system. Because once that faith goes, then the system goes.

In many respects, Sunny is absolutely correct.

We shouldn’t have any trouble believing that New Labour’s punitive approach to the long term unemployed – from threatening them with homelessness and forcing them into workfare to giving them breathalisers and lie detectors – was anything less than pure political opportunism, designed to win a few favourable headlines and deflect the charge that they’re soft on ‘scroungers’.

Some of us having been saying this for years, and the fact that most of these proposals never made it past the pages of the tabloids is a testament to how ineffably unserious they were.

But if we’re to accept that such tactics were born more out of calculation than conviction (which is hardly the most most stirring defence, is it?), we should then consider whether those tactics worked. So did New Labour’s frequent admonishments of the long-term unemployed succeed in convincing the public to, as Sunny puts it, “keep faith in the system”?

Not so much. Over a period which saw remarkably consistent growth and increased national prosperity, both the British Social Attitudes survey and the Rowntree Foundation found a hardening in the British public’s attitudes to unemployment, poverty & welfare.

In 1996, the BSA survey found that 78% of respondants agreed that the government had a responsibility to provide a decent standard of living for the unemployed. By 2006, that number had fallen to 55%.

At best, Labour failed to arrest an inexorable decline in the public’s faith in the benefits system; at worst, its calculations actively fed on this lack of faith to the point where the public has become far more receptive to the idea of Tory cuts.

This doesn’t mean that we need to ignore those good things Labour has done, nor dredge up its misdeeds at every opportunity; there will be a new leadership team before too long, and they don’t bear responsibility for every mistake made in 13 long years.

But when the past approach seemed to win very little respite from the crowd that cries ‘Shameless!‘ at the first sight of a Job Centre – and lost them a huge amount of goodwill in the process – perhaps it’s time for people like Miliband to stop reaching for face-saving justifications.

Instead of trying to score points off the long-term unemployed, these ex-ministers must now talk about how they would assist & empower them. And instead of devising tabloid-pleasing scams, they should explain how they would prevent the millions who’re being left behind from being added to the human scrapheap.

We could even forgive him one last grumble as he adjusts to opposition and find his ‘prison works’ mantra consigned to the dustbin of social policy.

But then when you look around at how other ex-ministers have attacked coalition policies you’ll see a rather unsightly pattern emerge.

First, here’s Alan Johnson’s view of the coalition approach to crime:

The Home Secretary’s primary duty is to keep the public safe. She can do that or pursue the half-baked libertarian agenda cooked up with the Lib Dems. She can’t do both.

Then there’s immigration. After hearing that Britain won’t insist on an English test for asylum seekers who’re fleeing for their lives, Phil Woolas reacts with disgust and warns of Afghans on the back of lorries:

Former Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said: ‘This ruling means that a British man who marries, say, a Brazilian girl who can’t speak English will not be able to bring her into this country. ‘But an Afghan who gets here on the back of a lorry and successfully claims asylum can bring his Afghan wife, children and grandparents in – even if they don’t speak English.

Then, if you’re not already angry and afraid, here’s Johnson again to double down on the fear factor:

The coalition Government has been accused of “creeping complacency” in the face of the threat of terrorism, by former Home Secretary Alan Johnson.
The Labour MP said he is concerned a shake up of police powers and counter terrorism laws could leave the public more vulnerable to extremists.

See the pattern yet? Whether it’s on prison reform, crime, immigration or terrorism, the approach of Labour’s ex-ministers is to attack the government from the right. Now, maybe this can all be excused as tactical point-scoring and an attempt to cause mischief among a discontented Tory back bench.

Maybe it’ll shave some of the varnish off the coalition’s credibility and win a few easy headlines with the usual suspects. But, as Sunny rightly points out, all it says to the rest of us is that the Labour Party hasn’t changed at all.

For those of us who might once have been inclined to support the party – even join it – Labour still has an awful lot for which it should atone. We haven’t forgotten the threats to make the unemployed homeless if they don’t get a job, using breathalisers to check they’re not too tanked-up to work or lie detectors to check they’re telling the truth.

We haven’t forgotten 42 day detention, ID cards, Yarl’s Wood or the ‘hit squads‘ of supernannies who were meant to sort out our ‘feckless ‘unemployed.

We haven’t forgotten how cynical, punitive and populist Labour’s social policy could be, and these desperate attempts to attack the coalition from the right and just for the sake of it suggests that Labour is content to act exactly the same way in opposition.

Of course, this might all change with a new leader. Until the election is concluded, the shadow cabinet is acting less like a credible alternate government and more an attack dog without a head; a new leader could bring about a more empowering, less authoritarian approach to government.

What it does show, however, is that Labour’s problems will not be solved just by changing the person who wishes to lead it; it will also require a significant change in the attitudes of some of its senior politicians.

In the wake of the deal between the Tories and Lib Dems, Labour activists began proclaiming that they were now the only left-wing alternative in Parliament. If they want us to believe that, it would help to stop attacking the government from the right.

In his inglorious time in government, Straw’s Labour Party oversaw a record rise in the prison population, dangerous levels of overcrowding and a disastrous early release scheme which completely battered public confidence in the courts.

He ignored British and European law on prisoners’ voting rights, fed us policies packed with pure populist junk and blithely suggested that those who complained simply didn’t care enough about the victims of crime.

So it’s entirely fitting that in his well-deserved stint in opposition, Straw has taken to the Daily Mail to warn once more of the middle-class liberal ‘hand-wringers’ who’ll soon fling open the prison gates and try to cure hardened thugs with hugs & therapy.

As Straw tells it, crime only began to fall in the mid-90?s because of the draconian sentencing regime imposed by Tory Home Secretary Michael Howard. Labour continued his ‘good work’ for the next 13 years and have declining crime rates to show for it, at the small cost of a massively expanded prison population.

Now, thanks to an ‘alliance’ between Ken Clarke and 57 Lib Dem MPs, all that good work threatens to be reversed, replaced by liberal ‘hand-wringing’ (a phrase he uses four times) and ignorance of the true cost of crime.

He is, of course, being utterly disengenuous. The speech given by the new Justice Secretary was not the result of some Rasputin-style whispering from Liberal Democrats, but a continuation of Tory policy which existed before there was even a prospect of a coalition.

It was the Tories’ ‘Prisons with a Purpose’ paper which suggested they were finally ready to ditch the ‘prison works’ dogma of Howard and raise the profile of rehabilitation as a means of reducing crime.

The reason Straw invokes some liberal conspiracy is the same reason the Lib Dems have been invoked as boogeymen by numerous shadow ministers in recent weeks – in the hope that they can turn ‘liberal’ into the new ‘tory’.

There’s still much uncertainty in the coalition’s plan for penal reform, and what happens in the criminal justice system is inevitably influenced by the state of the economy and the availability of housing & jobs for newly-released prisoners.

Change of policy, even from the rotten one they inherited, might not necessarily mean change for the better. But what sets the coalition apart from Labour, even at this early stage, is the intention of getting the prison population under control.

For Straw, leaving government with a prison population of over 84,000 is almost something to be proud of; for Clarke and the coalition, it is a problem which needs to addressed.

But we should, perhaps, save a few meagre words of thanks for Straw as he whinges into obscurity, for he leaves us with clear dividing lines between his departed government and its successor.

We can either long for the return of the ‘prison works’ dogma of Howard & Straw, which led to massive overcrowding, early prisoner release and an inexorable rise in the prison population, or we can hope that a more pragmatic, rehabilitation-focused regime will replace it and help bring that population under control. I know which side I’m rooting for.

As a voter who’s long felt left behind by Labour, who’s unimpressed by the wet flannel liberalism of Nick Clegg and who remains underwhelmed by parties on the electoral fringe, this election has often felt like a choice between “the lesser of who cares?”.

For me, the prospect of voting this May – a task I might have once grasped with enthusiasm – seems like a tawdry chore, with each party appearing like a cheap imitation of my own values.

Still, after a good few months of dismayed dithering and yawning, I finally came to a decision about how I’m going to vote in this election:

I won’t.

Here’s the thing: 6 years ago a British prisoner called John Hirst went to the European Court of Human Rights demanding that our government give him and his fellow inmates the right to vote. The court ruled that our blanket ban violated the Human Rights Act, and ordered the government to make the necessary changes.

Naturally, the government has deliberately dragged its feet ever since; issuing objections and obfuscations at every turn, and getting no closer to changing the law than the establishment of some weak-willed ‘consulation exercises’.

This was fine for the first five years, but now the election has brought the matter into sharp relief. After ignoring repeated warnings that the General Election must not take place without the ban being lifted, in December the Council of Europe suggested that the election may breach the European convention on human rights. The council repeated that claim last week, along with the notice that, unless the law is changed, tens of thousands of prisoners would be within their rights to sue the British government.

As it stands, the coming election promises to be the first in modern history where tens of thousands of British citizens have illegaly barred from casting a ballot. Whatever crimes these men & women may have committed, however dubious their character, can we really claim to be tough on those who break the law when we are happy for the state to break its own laws in order to punish them?

For me, the answer is an unequivocal ‘no’. I cannot, in good conscience, exercise my legally-guaranteed right to participate in the democratic process when tens of thousands of Britons are illegally deprived of theirs. For that reason, I will be staying at home come election day. Not out of apathy, nor out of a lack of available alternatives, but as a small protest against a big injustice.

Instead, I was startled by yet more troubling allegations about the conditions at Yarl’s Wood. To add to the reported mistreatment of children and the four week hunger strike, the Observer has now obtained testimonies from people inside the facility that guards have been beating women:

Jacqui McKenzie of Birnberg Peirce said: “I have spoken to a client of mine in Yarl’s Wood and she has seen the bruising herself from the incident on 8 February. There is an atmosphere of real tension there.”

The images of the bruising show the injuries allegedly sustained during the incident by Denise McNeil, a 35-year-old Jamaican, who claims she was hit by staff and, since the disturbance, has been moved to London’s Holloway prison.
…
Meme Jallow, 26, from Gambia, who has been inside Yarl’s Wood for seven months, said: “A girl called Denise was by the windows. One officer took her and hit her by the face.”

Another hunger striker, a 37-year-old from Nigeria who asked to remain anonymous for fear of her asylum case being unfairly reviewed, said: “The security went outside and used shields like they do when there is a war. That is what they used to smash one of the women who was outside.”

Nothing new will be gained by me just restating my belief that Yarl’s Wood should close immediately, with an apology offered to all who’ve been mistreated in these publicly-funded, privately-run quasi-prisons.

Instead, I wanted to guage the opinion of Labour members/voters/activists – the grassroots blog-writers and door-knockers who are the best face of an otherwise haggard-looking party.

When I learned the existence of these centres back in my more idealistic youth, it was a discovery which began my gradual estrangement from the Labour Party. I did not want to be a part of any political party which, when in government, incarcerated asylum seekers, particularly when the motivations for doing so seemed deeply craven.

Though I may have moderated in the intervening years, that remains my view. Furthermore, whilst I cannot generalise to the rest of my generation, when your formative political experiences are of a state acting punitively towards society’s most vulnerable, you may be less inclined to regard the state as a potential force for good.

I realise, of course, that there’ll be plenty within the Labour Party who’re equally opposed to Yarl’s Wood and its ilk, and I’m sympathetic to the argument that you can only change a party from the inside. What I’m curious about is whether there is any scope for change.

Is this the kind of issue which enrages local activists? Are there enough of them to demand a change of approach by the party leadership? Will we ever hear a Labour leader complaining about the treatment of asylum seekers rather than excusing it?

Can Labour get any more liberal on this issue, or I expect this squalid status quo to remain, and get over it?

You can see shades of this frustration in the backlash over Luciana Berger’s selection as Labour’s candidate for Liverpool Wavertree. Ms Berger is hardly at fault for being young, for harbouring a desire for public service or for possessing qualities which have made her appealing to London’s Labour hierarchy. She may, indeed, prove to be an excellent MP.

But what I read in the exasperated responses to her selection is a refrain I’ve heard many times in & around the Shankly Gates: was there not a single person, in a city of over 400,000 people, who could’ve done as good a job? The city expects an Emlyn Hughes or a Jamie Carragher – someone who, at some level, can understand & relate to the culture & traditions of the people they serve.

In my experience, scousers are no more insular than the inhabitants of any other large town or city. But they do possess a distinctive history and culture which they are deeply proud of and enjoy sharing with the rest of the world. They deserve – like every constituency in the country deserves – an MP who can recall this rich history, revel in its traditions and understand the hopes and fears of the people they wish to represent.

Really, this post isn’t even about Luciana Berger; a similar piece could’ve been written about David or Ed Miliband, Ed Balls or Yvette Cooper.

But her selection will only increase the sense that Labour regards the role of MP as some glorified graduate trainee programme, and sees constituencies as regional call centres, expected to dilligently enact the faxed dictats from central office.

One argument made by opponents of proportional representation is that it would remove the link between an MP and his/her constituents, yet they never stop to recognise that, thanks to the centralising of political parties, this link is already reaching the end of its tether.

Perhaps the defeat of Ms Berger would send a symbolic – but important – message from Liverpool to London that the days of carpetbagging must end if Labour is to re-establish itself with what was once its heartlands.

Ms Crook wrote: ‘Alan Duncan said that the slogan “prison works” was repulsively simplistic. Anyone in politics should work to improve society and there was no more useful target than offenders.’
[...]
Ms Crook added: ‘He said, “Lock ’em up is Key Stage 1 politics.”’ Key Stage 1 is the first part of the primary-school curriculum studied by children as young as five.

To which the Mail has helpfully editorialised:

Suggesting that an old-style tough Tory approach to crime is worthy of a five-year-old will infuriate the party’s grassroots activists.

Well, if they’re going to act like five-year-olds…

Regardless of the bruised feelings the ‘lock ‘em up’ brigade will have today, Duncan is entirely correct. What’s more, it is reassuring to see that there are figures inside the Tory hierarchy who are prepared to defend their policy on prisons from the punative populism apparently favoured by David Cameron’s inner circle.

The spat within the front bench over the ‘prison ships’ proposal gives further evidence of something I’ve mentioned before. For quite some time now, it’s been apparent that there exists a real tension & contradiction in Tory justice policy, and one which will need to be resolved if the party takes power.

On the one hand there is the thoughtless, tabloid-fawning opportunism practiced by the likes of Chris Grayling. Under this ‘Key Stage 1 politics’, there is no sentence too punative, no cure but incarceration, and the only area where the conservatives would envisage more state spending is in the building of more prisons.

These are contradicted by a policy for prison reform which is, by and large, excellent. Their ‘Prisons with a Purpose’ paper, influenced heavily by outside experts and the fine work done by the Centre for Social Justice, is a thoughtful, well-informed engagement with the problem which rightly concludes that the purpose of the prison system should be reformation rather than revenge.

These conflicting instincts in Tory policy cannot coexist with each other in government because being progressive on prison reform will require restraint on sentencing which the would-be Home Secretary seems incapable of practicing. Even if he did, he would have to restrain not just his own instincts, but the reflexive vengefulness of the Tory tabloids and grassroots.

Sadly, I don’t hold out much hope that this conflict will be settled on the side of reform, but I may always be proved wrong. Until I am, Alan Duncan deserves praise for standing on the right side of an unpopular and perpetually losing battle.

In a post which implicitly supports euthanasia, Goldsmith contrasts the seemingly lenient sentence given to a convicted paedophile with a seemingly harsh sentence for a woman who ended the life of her beloved but brain damaged son.

The problem, you see, is those pesky “sanctimonious liberal commentators” who “will argue that the mark of a civilised society is its willingness to apply justice in the face of public opinion. For them, this mother is a law-breaker, just like Sweeney, and she should be punished as such”.

Now, if I was going to write about how two court cases reveal what an uncivilised country we are, I’d probably think twice before accusing anyone else of sanctimony.

I think I’d also take the time to ponder what a liberal commentator’s reaction to these two stories would actually be.

You see, liberals are fond of liberalising things, and last time I checked, the criminal justice system hasn’t seen all that much liberalising in the past few decades.

Indeed, there are quite a few ’sanctimonious liberals’ who would go so far as to say that there shouldn’t be a custodial sentence for mercy killings, providing certain conditions are met. So under a more liberal system, the mercy killing escapes jail and the paedophile is still banged up. Am I missing something here, or is that not exactly what Zac Goldsmith is angling for?!

Seriously, I can understand why some folks have a reflexive urge to bash their opponents at any opportunity; it’s just a shame that this one couldn’t engage his brain before doing so.

For a few years we were quite happy with Dairylea in our sandwiches, until we discovered that Dairylea was cheese, and ‘Mum, we don’t like cheese!‘ We went our separate ways after that: Jon took a shine to ham & tomato ketchup; I developed a thing for Bernard Matthews turkey slices, which she sprinkled with salt and sprayed with barbeque sauce.

But it was always the deserts which caused the most angst. Did we want Wagon Wheels or Chocolate Rolls? Jam Tarts or Fondant Fancies? Yoghurt or fromage frais? How do you keep yoghurt cool without resorting to an ice pack which’ll make your sandwich soggy?

Were it not for love, my mother wouldn’t have bothered. Each tacky little Tupperware box we carried to school was an expression of devotion, and that she constantly evolved the menu to serve our fickle tastes was a sign that she wanted to send us to school with something from her to us.

Those who’re interested in reforming the British diet often make the mistake of talking about food as nothing but a clump of calories & carbohydrates, sodiums and saturates.

Using the vast breadth of information about how our bodies work and what’s in the food we eat, they’ll explain the benefits of eating A, or why B should only be eaten only in moderation. From this information, they expect us to make well informed, healthy, rational choices.

Except that few of us look at food in such narrowly functional terms. Food can also be deeply personal – teeming with memory and emotion.

I knew that black forest gateau was my favourite desert the moment I found out that it was grandad’s favourite desert. It’s also a fiercely stubborn habit: 15 years later, I still eat the crusts off my turkey sandwich first.

My worry about the healthy eating lobby is that when they see that we’re not making the same self-evidently healthy, rational choices as they recommend, they feel the need to try a little harder, maybe see if a bit of state coercion will do the trick.

That’s probably the surest way of getting people’s backs up and encouraging them to switch off entirely.

Some are going to reject all this nutritional advice in its entirety. Others will follow it obsessively. But I’m reasonably confident that most of us try, where possible, to incorporate it into our lives, so long as we possess the cultural & financial capital to do so, and it doesn’t detract from the pleasure of eating.

But it seems to me that all these people can do without eliciting angry, defiant responses, is just put the information out there and let the rest of us decide what to do with it. Parents, in particular, have quite enough on their plates.

———
Picture by amanky (Creative Commons

Because I’m not particularly interested in the substance of Kuperman’s argument (there are already some excellent rebuttals by the likes of Marc Lynch & Matt Duss), I’m instead going to note Stephen Walt’s reaction. For Walt, this is but the opening salvo of a concerted campaign to pressure President Obama into taking military action. He warns that opponents of this action should start refining their arguments now because the march for war may soon become a deafening din.

Now, Walt does occasionally overstate things, but it’s still true that for as long as the diplomatic wrangling continues, the media will continue to give space to those who’re keen to tell us what to bomb when (not if) it all fails. So I think it’s worth reflecting on what kind of shape our side of the debate is in, and to be honest, I think we could use some work.

There’s definitely a tendency to blithely assume that advocates for military action are just raving mad Bush-era leftovers who never stopped to acknowledge how their rabid war-mongering has diminished both America’s economic prosperity and its effectiveness as an international actor. Whilst that’s true in many cases, although the pro-bombing crowd has the weaker argument, it could still have the winning argument.

First, opponents of military action should acknowledge that the negotiations/sanctions tactic might fail & that Iran might succeed in developing a nuclear deterrent. When people like Kuperman accuse us of ‘appeasement’, it’s partly because we write as though negotiations will end the diplomatic stand-off. That could happen, but I’m not betting any money on it.

So we should write with the assumption that Iran could one day have a nuclear deterrent, and that even if that day came, bombing would remain a bad idea.

To do this, there are four arguments: that a strike would have negative consequences for the US & its allies; that it would stoke massive instability in the region; and deal a damaging blow to whatever remains of the green revolution.

The fourth argument is that Iran is a rational player in international politics, and that building a bomb doesn’t mean they will use it. That last one’s going to be the toughest for folks to accept.

If a country like Switzerland was in the process of building a bomb, there’d be few people flinching with fear. Sure, that’s partly because the Swiss are friendly, democratic & secular, but also because we assume they would adhere to the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction.

In contrast, one of the consequences of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror is that it’s left the impression that Muslim states, societies & citizens have such a reflex for martyrdom that the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction has no weight. If this were true, then being hit with a retaliatory nuke would be a glorious event for it would further the jihad and bring the Iranian dead closer to Allah.

If people believe that the Iranians are prepared to use a nuclear weapon against Israel – or anyone else – then they’ll be much more amenable to the idea of making the first strike. The way we win the public debate is by demonstrating that whilst Iran may have a vile regime, it’s not being led by suicidal lunatics.

Sadly, I fear that might not be an easy argument to win.

There are, as far as I can see, three ways the West can deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The first is to negotiate a peaceful settlement wherein Iran is only able to ‘go nuclear’ for the purpose of heating the stoves in Tehran. This has been the policy since President Obama was inaugurated; it has seen its share of successes & setbacks and it may well end with Iran having a nuclear weapon.

The second possibility is to impose sanctions with the hope of either materially crippling Iran’s weapon-making capability or hoping that internal dissent would eventually topple the government.

The problem with this is that you’ve got to get China and Russia to play along, and whilst the Kremlin’s stance on sanctions has softened, I wouldn’t expect them to agree to any sanctions regime which would satisfy the ‘get tough’ brigade. There’s also no guarantee that it’ll stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon anyway.

And so the third possibility is military action.

This could conceivably stop Tehran’s ambitions once and for all, but would also serve to rally a previously disgusted public around its government.

What’s more, we simply do not have the resources, will or public support for anything other than a few finger-crossing bombing raids based on the available intelligence. And how good was our intelligence in the last war of choice?

Critics of the current policy towards Iran are entirely free to characterise the Obama administration’s position as being one of quivering vacillation if that’s what they truly perceive.

But by trying to frame this as an argument about what is ’soft’ or ‘tough’ you give the impression that there are simple solutions and any repercussions of our new ‘toughness’ will only be felt by the Iranians. This is simply a fiction.

The truth is that there are no guaranteed ways of persuading a paranoid & cantankerous crank state that it has no need a nuclear deterrent, especially when it has spent most of the past decade feeling threated by countries with nukes of their own.

‘Getting tough’ isn’t a policy; it’s a slogan, and one wielded enthusiastically by those who’re either too timorous or entrenched to consider all points of view. That’s something we can do without.

The decision by Swiss voters to outlaw the construction of minarets strikes me as regrettable on three grounds.

First, it is at odds with that other guiding Swiss principle, localism: issues of this kind ought surely to be settled town by town, or at least canton by canton, not by a national ban.

Second, it is disproportionate. There may be arguments against the erection of a particular minaret by a particular mosque – but to drag a constitutional amendment into the field of planning law is using a pneumatic drill to crack a nut.

Third, it suggests that Western democracies have a problem, not with jihadi fruitcakes, but with Muslims per se – which is, of course, precisely the argument of the jihadi fruitcakes.

Hannan’s last point is surely the most important. Whilst there may have been a few Swiss voters who voted for the ban solely out of aesthetic antipathy, I suspect they were somewhat outnumbered by people who voted because they are suspicious, wary or even scared of their Muslim countrymen.

If a number of amateur bloggers can speculate that fear of Muslims led to this vote, you can be pretty sure that Swiss Muslims have gotten the message, too. And therein lies the problem; othering often leads to more marginalisation, segregation, exclusion, distrust and bitterness than existed before. Those are pretty ripe conditions for political and religious extremism to fester, and so the proponents of the ban are actually succeeding in compounding a problem they supposedly wish to reduce. So they’re either dishonest or deeply daft.

I’m not going to claim that there’s some silver bullet for achieving greater social & cultural integration, and I’m not going to pass myself off as any kind of expert about extinguishing militant theism. But I do know that neither of those aims are going to be achieved by winning small-minded & petty restrictions on what religious buildings look like.

However, if you’re John Coles, Ace Reporter for The Sun, your response to that question goes a little something like this:

Oh, my day was GREAT! I went on Facebook and stalked a 24 year old that nobody’s ever heard of. THEN, out of revenge for his Dad’s ‘zany’ statements about drugs, I publicly humilated him in a national newspaper!

Yes, the minds of tabloid journalists operate a little differently to the rest of us.

image by Beau Bo D’Or

So how did Coles’ intrepid cyber bullying increase his readers’ understanding of the world? Well, we’ve discovered that Steve Nutt either smokes weed or roll-ups (or maybe even both!); we’ve found out that he sometimes makes risque & inappropriate jokes to friends; we’ve learned that he has a sister who once drank booze at 16, and a brother who was once NAKED! In Sweden!

So basically, what we can deduce from all of this is that Professor Nutt has raised what appears to be a completely ordinary, unremarkable family, who just happen to have had the misfortune of being related to a scientist The Sun didn’t like.

Not that you’d get that understanding from the ‘article’, of course, because Coles tries his level best to portray Steve Nutt as a potentially disturbed, spliff-smoking terrorist sympathiser, and his siblings as raging, out-of-control hedonists who like alcohol and.. erm.. Scandinavia.

Let’s just set aside the observation that ethics at this newspaper seem to have been completely abandoned, and instead just take a moment to sigh at how poisonous the issue of drugs has become. Not only can a well-credentialled scientist get the sack for trying to explain that science, but his family can be harassed and humiliated for no other reason than politically-motivated revenge.

I really wish Murdoch would hurry up with his plan to charge people for reading his papers; the day when I don’t have access to this vindictive garbage can’t come soon enough.

* * * * * *

I don’t suppose there are many dignified ways of being sacked by your employer, but ‘Death By Bar Chart’ must be one of the least savoury ways to go. In his lecture to the Centre for Crime & Justice Studies, Professor David Nutt included this rather inconvenient illustration of the level of harm caused by a range of dangerous substances:

As you can see, Nutt’s table had alcohol and tobacco ranked as more harmful than a whole host of intoxicants, including cannabis, LSD and ecstacy. From this little illustration, a sprawl of tabloid stories was spawned and the government’s chief adviser on drugs had unconsciously secured his own sacking.

Given his stormy relationship with the Home Office, the sacking itself had an eye-rolling inevitability to it, but when you read the careful, methodical and rather unremarkable content of Nutt’s lecture, you’re really left wondering what all the bloody fuss was about.

It really is tame stuff. At no point does he call for legalisation, or even decriminalisation; he reminds his audience of Britain’s international obligations, and the role he played in securing extra funding for prevention campaigns & rehabilitation centres. Sure, there’s criticism of this government’s wrong-headed decision to reject his advice on cannabis classification, but he did so in an inquisitive, systematic way; even going so far as to produce a chart showing how advice from science was competing with pressure from many other parts of the body politic:

It’s the lecture of a man who is realistic about the social stigma of illegal drugs, particularly in the mainstream media, and is just frustrated by our inability to compare the harms of consumption with the harms caused by other, completely legal activities. And whilst this might come across to some as an implicit argument for decriminalisation, I’ll let the good professor speak to that.

I think we have to accept young people like to experiment – with drugs and other potentially harmful activities – and what we should be doing in all of this is to protect them from harm at this stage of their lives. We therefore have to provide more accurate and credible information. If you think that scaring kids will stop them using, you’re probably wrong. They are often quite knowledgeable about drugs and the internet has made access to information extremely simple. We have to tell them the truth, so that they use us as their preferred source of information. A fully scientifically-based Misuse of Drugs Act where drug classification accurately reflects harms would be a powerful educational tool. Using the Act in a political way to give messages other than those relating to relative harms undermines the Act and does great damage to the educational message.

In other words, young people can spot the bullshit being fed to them by our Majesty’s expenses-gobbling ex-potheads, and if you really want to have a more effective, mature drugs policy, you need to reform the Misuse of Drugs Act so that it accurately reflects harm. That’s actually a little too moderate for my liking, but would still be a dramatic improvement on the current mess we have.

For me, this sacking reflects just how hysterical this country has become in the drugs debate. I could accept and support Professor Nutt’s removal if he was shown to be a bad scientist or was misleading the public. But a government which sacks a scientist because it simply don’t like the science is operating out of such irrationality and fear that it doesn’t even deserve science advisers in the first place. Sadly, I suspect that’s what has happened here.

Channel 4 News update

That said, everyone’s heard at least one horror story about a teacher who’s been the victim to a malicious allegation. It does happen, and more can be done at school, local authority & central government level to ensure that good and safe teachers are protected from career-destroying fairy tales. Ending the atrocious policy of isolating accused teachers from contact with their colleagues would be a good place to start.

So it’s not like I’m ambivelent to or dismissive of a problem which does prey on a lot of teachers’ minds, and the general thrust of Jenni Russell’s piece on the topic is generally correct. Still, it is a Jenni Russell piece, and so every article must contain at least one moment of eye-watering idiocy:

Classrooms are becoming more difficult to manage because the policy of inclusion means that children with emotional, mental or physical difficulties are being put into mainstream schools without the extra support they need to cope.

Whether Russell is basing this on any actual evidence is unclear, but unlikely.

For a start, when the DCSF asked researchers to look into the outcomes of inclusion (pdf), they found no evidence – none – of any relationship between inclusion policies and educational attainment. This means that whilst inclusion does not positively affect levels of achievement in a school, nor does it adversely affect it.

I’m also at a loss to understand what ‘extra support’ for support children with social, emotional & behavioural difficulties teachers are being deprived of. Every school in the country has someone responsible for organising provision for children with special educational needs, and they will often work with pupils, teachers, parents, social workers & psychologists to help each child achieve their best level of learning. Could there be more support? Sure, but we’d all have to open our wallets a bit more.

Admittedly, what we have now is an imperfect situation; it’s always going to be imperfect when you have finite resources but an infinite number of potential problems. But I think it’s worth remembering where we were before the policy of inclusion, which Russell blames for getting ‘violent’ teachers sacked.

Before the journey towards integration and inclusion, most children with special educational needs were educated separately and as a result suffered castigation and humiliation. This meant that kids without English as a first language wouldn’t interact with their English speaking peers; that vulnerable kids would grow up lacking the confidence to fully participate in society; that children with mild disabilities would be mercilessly taunted as ’spackers’.

If Russell wants to reverse this policy, shes’s welcome to go & vote for whoever will promise to do just that (the boys in blue might be a good bet). But the least she could do is be a bit more honest about what inclusion is, what it does, and that ending it won’t make teachers, pupils or the wider society any better off.

The body responsible for writing the curriculum – the QDCA – spends more than one hundred million pounds every year – and after hiring an army of consultants, squadrons of advisers and regiments of bureaucrats they still wrote a syllabus for the Second World War without any place for Winston Churchill.

I guess it’s always possible that he’s right. Maybe there’s some secret document doing the rounds, written by scores of ‘unaccountable quangocrats’ which does indeed remove Winston Churchill from the history curriculum. But it would have to be a secret document, because when you hop over to the QCDA’s website, you’ll actually find quite a few references to Britain’s Greatest Ever Tory.

He’s mentioned here, here and here, in these guidance notes for teachers and, rather inconveniently for Mr Gove, in this rather unwieldy PDF (p22):

A world study after 1900: A study of some of the significant individuals, events and developments from across the twentieth century, including the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and their impact on Britain, Europe and the wider world.
[...]
Examples for 13: a world study after 1900 Individuals: Winston Churchill; Adolf Hitler; Joseph Stalin; Benito Mussolini; Franklin Roosevelt; Mahatma Gandhi; Mao Zedong; Martin Luther King.

So what obscure document have I dredged up for this snidey little ‘gotcha!’ post?

A little thing called the National Curriculum.

Now, I don’t really expect Michael Gove to have read the damn thing – I haven’t even done that myself yet, and I’m expecting to teach. But I do think it’d be a nice if he stopped telling other people who haven’t read it that hundreds of millions of pounds are being squandered to remove Churchill from classrooms.

This isn’t to say there’s uniform agreement on Sir Winston’s prominance in history classrooms, and I happen to think that people should be able to disagree in good faith without being accused of being either elitist or practicing ‘dumbing down’.

Nor should it detract from the points in my earlier post that developing skills should take greater prominance over factual recall.

But I would hope that the least we could expect from a wannabe Secretary of State was having a decent fact checker on his staff. Perhaps we should set it as homework.

On arriving at the DCSF, he’ll hopefully be informed that most schools do, in fact, have school uniforms, that classes are often set by ability and that for all the horrid neglect of Winston Churchill in history lessons, kids are at least not being taught that WWII was won single-handedly by a smilin’ Joe Stalin.

Take this list of topics Gove wants kids to be taught in history lessons. All our Greatest Brit hits are on there: the Roman invasion, 1066, the Bill of Rights, the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Reform Act, both world wars (with particular emphasis on the awesomeness of a former Tory PM!) and something rather vaguely called “Modern history to the present”.

Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with having knowledge about these or any other areas of British (or even – gasp! – non-British) history, and it’d come in extremely handy if your son or daughter ever wanted to work in a museum or on Time Team. However, the emphasis here is on what is taught, when it should really be about what is learnt.

A few years ago, former Ofsted chief inspector Mike Tomlinson produced a report offering a vision for quite far-reaching reform of 14-19 education in which GCSEs and A-Levels would be replaced by a range of different diplomas. The suggestions were mostly ignored by the government but for two key areas: a range of diploma lines would be rolled-out (albeit very slowly), and the whole curriculum would pay much greater attention to developing skills.

It is this ’skills agenda’ which is currently writ large on the education landscape. Under greater competition from developing economies than ever before, Tomlinson was just one of many people to identify the need for children to develop a generic, transferable set of personal, learning & thinking skills which could equip them to thrive in a jobs market that none of us can predict. The accumulation of knowledge is still important, but developing a child’s innate ability to acquire knowledge for themselves is equally vital.

These aims aren’t ‘fashionable nonsense’ dreamt up by an ‘educational establishment’ hobbled on ‘political correctness’; they were devised with the express wish of sustaining – nay, revitalising – the economic competitiveness of UK PLC. Does the Conservative Party not share these aims?

It’s important to ask these questions because Gove’s attack on educators was so broad, so uncharitable and so hyperbolic that it acted as though the past 10 years have been nothing but a long line of ‘fashionable nonsense’, ‘political correctness’ and miserable failure.

I suspect that Gove’s apparent intention to revisit the flawed old practices of the past will be met with even greater resistance than he currently expects. He may find, as another history-bound Tory might’ve said, that the teachers are not for turning.

Meanwhile, The Guardian’s CiF ran a series which asked “can western feminism save Muslim women?” To this, The Heresiarch acidly replies:

No. Western feminism is too bogged down in its own limitless self-regard, arguing ad nauseam about the evils of sexually stereotyping adverts, or why female bankers don’t get quite such enormous bonuses as their male equivalents, to care about anyone else. Least of all the millions of subjected women living in conditions they cannot begin to understand.

Now, I have a huge amount of respect for Heresiarch (as well some for Clive James, and a little for Cohen), but this kind of statement reminds me of the folks who run around lazily claiming that hip hop’s only about violence and misogyny. Sure, there’s plenty of hip hop which is violent & misogynistic, but if you think that’s all there is, then you’re clearly not listening to enough of it.

Equally, if you’re comfortable dismissing western feminism for being “bogged down in its own limitless self-regard” or, as Cohen does, for ‘turning a blind eye to misogyny’, then there’s a pretty good chance that you’re just not paying enough attention to feminism.

For this characterisation to be true, we would have to ignore the western feminists who run Women for Women International, the Feminist Majority Foundation, or the Global Fund for Women, and ignore all the work they do in Muslim countries. Similarly, we would have to ignore the feminists who’ve campaigned to help the women of Afghanistan, support those protesting for democracy in Iran and end the practices of stoning & ‘honour’ killing.

Once we’re done ignoring the western feminists in aid organisations, NGOs and pressure groups, we’d then have to ignore the scholars who’ve written books about these issues, the activists who’ve actually visited Muslim countries and the innumerable bloggers who regularly post in opposition to oppression, or in support of the brave women who fight against it.

And once we’ve ignored all these different writers, bloggers & organisations who do exactly what Clive James & Nick Cohen claim feminists aren’t doing, then we finally get to the main (and oft-repeated) charge against feminism: that it has failed to show sufficient support for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch writer who endured some of the most unimaginable cruelty in Somalia and then faced a fatwa for daring to write about it.

Now, it’s true that Hirsi Ali has been met with some mixed reactions, and her that writings have encountered varying amounts of support & opprobrium. Some have felt uneasy with her comparison of Islam to fascism; others felt that her dogmatism would alienate Muslim women from the feminist movement. Additionally, many of the people who embraced Hirsi Ali during her meteoric rise were the same people who spent every other op-ed concocting new moral justifications for the war in Iraq, whilst slavisly supporting a Republican Party which stood squarely opposed to women’s reproductive freedom, either in America or abroad.

But feminists were able to discuss women’s oppression in Islamic states quite independently of what they thought about Ms Hirsi Ali; there’s been plenty of debate (if one can be bothered to look) amongst feminist writers about how to approach the issue, and because feminists aren’t one monolythic block, the responses happen to vary. Some warn against cultural imperialism, others against cultural relativism, but they have at least been talking about it, trying to understand others’ points of view, and sharing stories with each other of both the cruel injustices and the small victories won. In any case, what does seem clear is that the development of feminism in Islamic countries is going to look very different from how it developed in the west.

Of course, in both Clive James & Nick Cohen’s pieces you’ll find a few deferential hat-tips to women who’re on the ‘right side’ of the issue; James doffs his hat to Pamela Boone & Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, whilst Cohen mentions Katha Pollitt, Joan Smith & Laurie Penny. But by holding aloft a few token feminists, they imply that these are the exceptions; marginalised outliers in a field full of women who’re oblivious to the suffering of Muslims. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The voices are many, widespread and longstanding, and just because neither Clive nor Nick has noticed doesn’t make it untrue.

First, we argued that it was a fantasy to believe these raids would do anything more than briefly reduce its ability to toss rockets into Israel, and that there would be no prospect of either destroying the group, or fatally weakening its grip over the Gaza Strip. But more importantly than that, we also insisted that it was a mistake to think Hamas’ defeat would end Israel’s security problems.

Whilst there’s always a (very slight) possibility that Hamas could implode or that the people of Gaza will eventually turn to the more moderate & cuddly Fatah, given the amount of poverty & raw despair in the territories, it’s far more likely that whatever did replace the militant group would be even more extreme, more reactionary and more likely to render peace between Israel & Palestine as impossible.

We’ve seen some evidence of that in recent days, as a deadly shootout between members of Hamas and a militant splinter group demonstrates that some of the alternatives to Hamas are even uglier.

Jund Ansar Allah, the group at the centre of the violence, has become increasingly critical of Hamas in recent months, has demanded the imposition of Sharia law and has even – and somewhat presumptuously – declared Gaza an ‘Islamic emirate’.

Whilst both these groups share the same self-defeating hatred of Israel, their ultimate aims are very different. For Hamas, the primary goal is the creation of an independent Palestinian state. For Jund Ansar Allah, it is the violent imposition of Taliban-style stone age religious subserviance. If there’s one thing the Gaza Strip doesn’t need right now, it’s a group which attacks Hamas for being too liberal.

One of the naive hopes people had about isolating Hamas was that when Palestinians were able to see how little the group was able to achieve, they would soon return their support to a group like Fatah, who Israel and the international community felt they could do business with.

Instead, the dissatisfaction with Hamas seems to be leading some Palestinians towards the more extreme factions. Jund Ansar Allah was only started in November and now claims to have over 500 soldiers. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s enough to give both Israel & Hamas significant security concerns.

I can understand, of course, the reluctance people feel about negotiating with a group which doesn’t recognise the state of Israel, but if it seems that Hamas is currently the best of an extraordinarily bad bunch, it may be better to talk to them than one day confront a much fouler beast. After all, Israel, Hamas and the United States do all have one thing in common: nobody wants to see Gaza become a stomping ground for Al Qaeda-inspired lunatics. As grounds for peace go, it’s not much, but it’s a start.

But it’s not just Webb’s rich life story which makes him interesting; he’s also won admirers for the kinds of issues he works on. Whilst widely-regarded as conservative, Webb is one of the few politicians to speak out about the vast inequalities of wealth in the United States, even going so far as to speak of ‘class struggle‘. He’s also started trying to raise awareness about America’s broken prisons, and is proposing reforms to the criminal justice system and drug laws which might lead to fewer people rotting away in jails.

But it’s Webb’s mission to Burma which will stand as the most significant moment in the Senator’s short legislative career. As the highest ranking American to visit this vile dictatorship in 10 years, there’ll be much comment in the next few days over what might have been achieved, what could be achieved in the future and what this reveals about the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

The first superficial signs seem positive. The release of Alan Yettaw, the man arrested for trying to meet imprisoned democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, was described by his own lawyer as ‘impossible’ prior to the meeting, and yet he will soon be back on American soil and subject to the barrage of media offers which will follow. Additionally, in meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, Webb achieved what even the U.N. Secretary General has not yet been able to.

But the longer-term consequences are much harder to predict. Just as President Clinton was criticised for having his picture taken with Kim Jong-il, so critics of the Obama administration will claim that this trip threatens to legitimise one of the most repressive regimes on the planet. Exiled Burmese democrats have already warned that the meeting will be manipulated by the military junta for propaganda purposes, and I’m sure they’re right. Furthermore, there does seem to be little ground for compromise with a regime for which brutal suppression of human rights is the primary means of self-preservation.

Yet it’s not entirely clear to me that there was any realistic alternative: successive sanctions regimes have failed, the state remains able to trade with its neighbours and, crucially, the dictatorship retains the quiet support of the Chinese. Also, in the context of President Clinton’s trip to North Korea, a similar outreach to the junta was perhaps inevitable. Given the rumours about Burma’s collusion with the Koreans to obtain a nuclear weapon, it seems sensible for Washington to have at least established some form of diplomatic contact. In the event that Burma did join the nuclear club, the voices for dialogue would suddenly become much louder and more numerous.

At the moment, we can’t see Webb’s visit to Burma as anything other than an experiment which has yielded one small success. It remains to be seen how much further the United States is willing to go to engage with either Burma or North Korea, and whether either of those states will be able to make the kinds of concessions that American diplomacy demands. What is clear, though, is the extent to which the Obama administration is committed to trying the kinds of diplomatic overtures which haven’t been considered by the foreign policy establishment in a very, very long time. With so few alternatives, our only recourse may be to hope that they’re right.