Willetts was introduced – with an explicit appeal for reasonable discussion – and the man himself took the stand.

But as he began speaking, he was immediately interrupted. A single individual – whom I shall not name – began shouting.

His every line was immediately repeated by 20-30 or so others. Thus began a long, ponderous series of declamations, bizarre poetic allegories, and varying denunciations of Willetts, his Government, the future of education, and everything in between.

Willetts could not get a word in edge ways. The tension in the room was dramatic. It felt like it went on and on. Shout then chant, shout then chant. What was probably only 7 or 8 minutes was experienced as 30.

When the “speech” from the floor was over, the instigators began chants of “Willetts Willetts Willets, Out Out Out”, and surged forward. They took the stage. Willetts had already left. The event was abandoned. A hundred or so other people were forced to exit without being able to voice their opinion or take part in the public debate they were invited to attend.

I left the hall angry, disgusted and embarrassed. And I write as somebody who took part in the Cambridge Occupation last December, and has attended several recent protests against the Government’s cuts. I’ve been through my fair share of kettles and marches to get to this point.

This “action” was organised by Cambridge Defend Education. CDE claim to be upholders of free speech and democratic fairness. Yet they presumed to speak on behalf of myself and every other person in that room, whilst disregarding our rights, opinions, concerns and beliefs entirely.

CDE will no doubt claim that having a debate with Willetts was pointless anyway. As we all know, this Government has already decided what they are going to do, and public engagements are largely cosmetic PR exercises. So what, exactly, could be achieved by disrupting it so completely?

Firstly, it greatly offending and irritated all of those in the room who were not privy to CDE’s unilateral decision. The result was the wasting of their time and making them feel marginalised, and in many cases also very angry. It’s hardly a good strategy for winning friends.

Secondly, it allowed Willetts to leave Cambridge being able to claim that he’d tried to engage openly, but that irrational, unreasonable, selfish students had prevented any constructive dialogue. Anybody who thinks that this ‘action’ was a victory against Willetts is living in cloud cuckoo land.

There’s a considerable irony here too. One of CDE’s stated complaints about Willetts and his Government is that it is so sure of its own convictions they ride rough-shod over the opinions, concerns, rights and needs of others. And yet that is exactly what CDE did tonight.

It was a show of disguised selfishness; the indulgence of a self-satisfied moral superiority fraudulently passed off as bravery on behalf of others. Others were never consulted, engaged or allowed to speak for themselves.

A video of the ‘protest’

Its use and justification must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, with reference to myriad factors such as likelihood to succeed, ability to justify harm to victims, long-term advantages gained, greater evils averted, and so on.

But certainly not all instances of political violence fit this model. When the so-called “Black Bloc” of anarchist militants attacked stores on Oxford Street yesterday they were not part of a (para)military organised hierarchy with a leadership exercising strategic-tactical judgement – still less the militant wing of the 250,000 peaceful marchers congregating in Hyde Park.

For a start, we must distinguish between the actions of opportunistic vandals, committed anarchists, young enthusiasts caught up in the moment, and those goaded and provoked by police tactics (if any of the above indeed turn out to apply).

When UK Uncut protestors launched their non-violent direct action against Fortnum and Mason, they can hardly be held responsible for the spontaneous vandalism that enthusiasts in the assembled crowd promptly launched.

Personally, I would have preferred an entirely peaceful protest. Not because I’m opposed to all political violence (I’m not), but because yesterday’s outbursts were unambiguously counter-productive, and predictably so.

By contrast, my strong sense is that if the student movement had remained entirely peaceful at the end of last year, it would certainly have achieved absolutely nothing. The broken windows at Millbank and the riots in Westminster attracted levels of attention that peaceful marching never could have. And importantly, I believe that the student violence did not lead to the same outcomes that purely peaceful protest would have (failed to) achieve.

By contrast, Saturday’s march needed something entirely different. It needed the other face of protest: the face of hundreds of thousands of ordinary, reasonable and respectable people calmly registering their disapproval. As Paul Mason has noted, if you can get your entire workforce out to a Saturday demonstration, this means something. The scale of yesterday’s protest, quite obviously not made up of the “usual suspects”, would have been very powerful just because of its sheer size. If only it had been the main news story.

Instead, much coverage was given over to actions initially started by the “Black Bloc” idiots. I call them idiots because that is exactly what they are. Either they like to smash things just for the thrill (in which case they are Basic Idiots), or they are so politically deluded they think throwing paint bombs at TopShop will light the fuse of revolutionary explosion (in which case they are Advanced level Über-Idiots). Whichever camp of idiots yesterday’s Black Bloc thugs fell into, they did the anti-cuts campaign huge damage.

By distracting attention to the loudly spectacular and meaningless away from the quietly awesome and meaningful they ruined it for everyone. Except the Tory Party.

Yet, crucially, there is more to say. For although the actions of the Black Bloc started the trouble – as Ryan Gallagher has noted – it is undeniable that many others quickly joined the violence without premeditation. Likewise the kids who stuck it out in Trafalgar Square, or who angrily confronted police outside Fortnum and Mason, cannot be dismissed as merely extended members of the Black Bloc.

Rather, they were the people who don’t any longer see the point of maintaining peaceful protest if the opportunity to descend into confrontation arises. And at a certain level they have my sympathy, for two reasons. Firstly, my generation learned quite spectacularly in 2003 that even enormous peaceful demonstrations of over a million people can make precisely zero difference. Tony Blair invaded Iraq, and didn’t give a flying damn what any of us thought.

Secondly, anybody who has been on even a handful of protests – especially in London – knows full well that the police do not hesitate to use violence, and frequently instigate aggressive confrontational situations amidst previously jovial and peaceful atmospheres.

It is significant and telling that so many recent protests have seen flare-ups of violence. The Black Bloc has been around a long while now and they cannot alone explain this. A better explanation is that many people – especially the young – are angry, justifiably untrusting of the police, and contemptuous of the old (failed) channels of political expression. As the cuts really start to bite, their numbers must surely increase.

So whilst I regret yesterday’s violence – if I could have had my way, there would have been none at all – I can understand why these outbursts of wider political violence are happening. And they do not make me optimistic about the future.

—-
A longer version is at Bad Conscience here.

It is accompanied by a picture of Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Here are some passsages:

What do you call a government that embarks on the biggest upheaval of the NHS in its 63 year history, at breakneck speed, while simultaneously trying to make unprecedented financial savings? The politically correct answer has got to be: mad.

The scale of ambition should ring alarm bells. Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, has described the proposals as the biggest change management programme in the world—the only one so large “that you can actually see it from space.” (More ominously, he added that one of the lessons of change management is that “most big change management systems fail.”)

Of the annual 4% efficiency savings expected of the NHS over the next four years, the Commons health select committee said, “The scale of this is without precedent in NHS history; and there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world.” To pull off either of these challenges would therefore be breathtaking; to believe that you could manage both of them at once is deluded.

Like all the other structural reorganisations of the NHS, this one aims to improve health outcomes. What’s lacking is any coherent account of how these particular reforms will produce the desired effects, a point only underlined by the prime minister’s attempts to justify the reforms earlier this week.

On GP commissioning:

Whatever the eventual outcome, such radical reorganisations adversely affect service performance. As Kieran Walshe wrote, they are “a huge distraction from the real mission of the NHS—to deliver and improve the quality of healthcare” that can absorb a massive amount of managerial and clinical time and effort. Even the earliest days of the transition have proved disruptive, with employees of the doomed primary care trusts and strategic health authorities choosing to jump ship rather than to go down with it.

With an estimated one billion pounds of redundancy money in their pockets, many of the survivors are likely to be employed by the new GP consortiums in much their same roles. It raises the question: if GP commissioning turns out to be simply primary care trust commissioning done by GPs, aren’t there less disruptive routes to this destination?

It ends:

Given their scale, securing these efficiency savings should take priority over the massive upheaval proposed in the new bill. For the time being, we agree with the King’s Fund that those GPs who are successfully involved in practice based commissioning should be given real rather than indicative budgets for some services and their performance monitored closely.

All other proposals should be kept on hold, pending an evaluation of whether this iteration of GP commissioning can bear the responsibility that the new bill seeks to place on it. If it turns out that it can, then the full introduction of the government’s ambitious health reforms will have been delayed a few years. If it can’t, then the country—and its government—will have got off lightly.

When what is essentially the official mouthpiece for British doctors is expressing this kind of alarm at government policy, it indicates that a dispositionally conservative body is very out of step with the present administration.

Which reinforces a point I’ve already made: that this is a government of radicals, led by some most unconservative Conservatives.
–

Hat-tip to Stuart White

Let’s trot through the big ones, that we actually know about.

1. The stupendous Lib Dem betrayal on tuition fees. From categorical pledges to oppose all fee rises, to backing a lifting of the cap to £9,000 a year. Quite spectacular, and utterly impossible to hide.

2. Further down the list and marginally less egregious: Cameron denouncing as “Labour lies” any suggestion that the Tories would restrict bus passes for the elderly, cut the Winter Fuel allowance, or get rid of the pension credit. After promising to protect all these things on national television, the Coalition has done the exact opposite.

3. There’s also the general category of systematic dishonesty about the NHS. The Tories explicitly promised not to touch “frontline services” and to protect the NHS before the election. They are now instigating massive back-door changes. Changes described by “seriously concerned” leading healthcare experts as “unnecessary risks” which are “damaging” and “potentially disastrous”.

4. Less enormous (but by no means less important) lies that may have escaped your attention include: pledges from Cameron and Clegg to end child detention for those seeking asylum in Britain which have been totally reneged on, and the recent joke of the departure of Control Orders by the front door and their immediate return via the side window.

5. Oh, and the emergence of a video showing Cameron claiming he wouldn’t cut EMAs. And pledges to protect school funding from cuts, but instead playing jiggery-pokery with the accounts to disguise reduced funding beneath the veneer of a hollowed-out pupil premium.

6. And Tory promises to protect child benefit.

7. And the building of a massive snooping database both Liberals and Conservatives promised they wouldn’t pursue.

I’m sure there’s plenty more.

I’m not going to bore you with some sop that it Pains Me Dearly to see such dishonesty and untruth in our political class. Politicians lie (often by unavoidable necessity), and being a Tory/Tory-lite Coalition, this bunch lied even more than usual in order to get their paws on power.

What concerns me, however, is the sheer scale and audacity of the Coalition’s reneging on earlier promises. I know the standard line is that none of this is done joyfully, but is the necessary price to pay for “Labour’s deficit”. (Or even more ludicrously, that this is all the outcome of “coalition policy” produced by party compromise, thus wholly divorced from any pre-election pledges.) But fewer and fewer ordinary voters will believe this (if any still do), and such justification will increasingly have traction only with the already-converted.

The real problem is that systematic large-scale dishonesty in politics is corrosive. The present government’s flagrant disregard for its own promises threatens to undermine even the minimal levels of trust Britons place in their political system. If this goes too far, there’s the very real risk that lying and dishonesty will become normalised. And that spells trouble.

Because if voters conclude that all politicians are lying mendacious bastards who just say one thing and do the other, then it eventually becomes acceptable for politicians to be lying mendacious bastards who just say one thing and do the other. As voters become disillusioned and resigned, all political sides play the same dirty game because only suckers remain honest. It’s a downward trajectory from there. And where do you end up? Well, basically, you end up in Italy. Which is not a good place to be.

So whilst I’m not surprised that Nick and Dave are presiding over a pack of lies dealt by a pack of liars, I do wish they would lie a little less – or at least, a little less obviously.

Thanks to Guy and Paul for helping to assemble and source the compilation of lies in under 30 minutes.

Accordingly, Elmer is to go on criminal trial for breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws.

One thing you can expect to hear around the build-up to this case is that Swiss banking secrecy was enacted to protect Jewish assets from the Nazis during the 1930s.

This was the line repeatedly deployed in 2008, when US authorities unveiled systematic complicity from Swiss bank UBS in assisting American tax avoidance.

It would be nice for the Swiss if it were true; providing some sort of vague moral justification for the systematic undermining of the laws and revenue authorities of other states. But it’s not true.

From Treasure Islands, the new book by Nick Shaxson you should all read:

A pervasive story now exists that Switzerland put bank secrecy into place to protect German Jewish money from the Nazis. This myth dates back to a bulletin in 1966 from the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (today’s Credit Suisse), and Swiss bankers have wielded it to great effect ever since. American officials negotiating a new tax treaty with Switzerland at that time lodged an official complaint after being frequently lectured about the supposed origins of bank secrecy as protection for Jewish money. A Swiss Federal Council report in March 1970 officially endorsed the story, and this was backed up in 1977 by a lurid book by a former Geneva newspaper editor outlining the fabulous story of Gestapo agents infiltrating Switzerland to worm out Jewish bank details. The problem with the story is that it’s not true

Amid the Great Depression, Swiss farmers’ and workers’ movements began in 1931 to clamour for more control over the banks. Bankers feared state inspection of their hitherto closely controlled financial domain would risk secrets leaking out, and they pressed fiercely for a new law, to make it a crime to violate Swiss bank secrecy. By August 1931, the highly-influential right-wing daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung was attacking government oversight of the banks, and in February 1932 a top banker sent the government draft legislation with a clause making it a crime to violate bank secrecy.

It was the French scandal [revelations that up to 4 billion francs were being lost to Swiss-facilitated tax evasion schemes] that October, however, which really spurred government into action. A new banking law was prepared and an official draft was ready by February 1933, just eighteen days after Hitler came to power and long before he had consolidated his grip on the German state or even gained control of all of Germany’s intelligence services. The Swiss law finally adopted in 1934 for the first time made it a criminal offence punishable by fines and prison to violate bank secrecy, and was almost unchanged from the original draft. In Germany the death penalty for having foreign accounts undeclared to the Third Reich only appeared in 1936. Even the Swiss Bankers’ Association has no records of the supposed activities of Gestapo agents coming to Switzerland to squirrel out information about Jewish money.

Of course, even if it were true that Swiss banking secrecy was originally adopted to protect Jewish assets (which it wasn’t), that wouldn’t justify the facilitation of tax avoidance and evasion today.

Instead, using of the legacy of the holocaust to provide cover for illicit financial skullduggery simply compounds the distasteful nature of what the Swiss tax haven operation involves.

Incidentally, Treasure Islands continues to pick up excellent reviews. Having started it over the weekend, I can confirm that it’s a cracking read. You should buy it.

Update: a video from the press conference

Which brings me to Edward Woolard. There’s no doubt Woolard was an idiot at the precise moment he threw that fire extinguisher off the top of Milbank.

Yet whether he is an idiot through-and-through is a different matter.

Certainly the national media branded him a thug in its instant witch hunt. But in truth, none of us know whether he was simply seized by a one-off moment of immature madness. Either way Woolard is paying dearly.

32 months in jail, at the age of 18. His life prospects in tatters, and a family no doubt heartbroken.

You may think he deserves it. Not simply to act as a deterrent to other acts of idiocy, but also to reflect that he could have killed somebody. And the authorities also had to send a clear message for their own purposes.

But two and a half years in jail is a long time. Especially for not killing anybody, in an unpremeditated single act of stupidity. I can’t help but find it excessive.

And that’s partly because I keep thinking: “that could have been me”. When I was 18 I did something very, very stupid too.

Angry and frustrated at the world generally – and heartbroken because the girl I was head-over-heels about decided she preferred her boyfriend after all – I got into a drunken fight one Friday night. Except I’d also been doing some amateur Thai boxing. And I hit the guy in the sort of way that you don’t hit people, even in organised amateur fights. Because you can kill them.

Needless to say I didn’t kill anyone. But if the angles had been a little different, the impact a little more, his alcohol-levels a little higher, it’s very possible I might have. A moment of madness, and I could have killed a man. And gone to prison for 20 years.

But I’m lucky. My moment of madness didn’t go that way. I’m free to pursue a successful and comfortable life. As I sincerely hope the guy I struck 6 years ago currently does.

Incidentally, PC Simon Harwood is lucky too, after he struck Ian Tomlinson without warning and pushed him to the ground at the G20 protests. Harwood never saw the inside of a dock, and the Crown Prosecution Service decided this particular bobby wouldn’t even stand trial for assault.

No such luck for Edward Woolard. I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

This is not, however, because of some ideological disenchantment. Neither is it due to dissatisfaction with Ed Miliband’s faltering start, or the Party’s lamentable response to the Coalition.

The truth is, I’ve done nothing for Labour since the 2010 General Election. I’ve not even bothered updating my CLP membership since moving to Cambridge. And the basic reason for this is that I intensely dislike political campaigning, and party-political activities.

I find knocking on doors at best boring, and at worst utterly unpleasant. This isn’t so much because I’m averse to meeting the general public, as that I’m averse to looking them in the eye and lying. Like when they say “Labour has a rubbish policy on Trident/ID cards/immigration/the 10p tax”. Or “Gordon Brown is a crap Prime Minister, I’m not putting him back in power”.

And I’m supposed to sit there and pretend that they’ve got it all wrong. Because The Party is fantastic and if it wins everything will be sunshine and kittens.

Likewise, away from the doorsteps I find the experience of party-politics pretty nauseating. The herd mentality in particular is stifling. It’s like being stuck with a bunch of football fans who only want to talk about their team and how great it is – apart from the heretics and traitors trying to ruin it from the inside, of course.

That, and the constant, compulsory mantra about how awful and evil the other teams/parties are.

The fact is, to stay active in grass roots party politics you have to enjoy this. Or at the very least, be able to engage in it whilst not contantly battling the urge to shove pins in your eyes.

Of course some people are able to so partake and nonetheless maintain good judgement, political sense and basic moral principles not determined by party policy. Don Paskini is the outstanding example here, though Chris Brooke gets a mention too. But these types are, in my experience, very rare.

But furthermore, those that go on to be seriously successful – to head local councils, become MPs, or even government ministers – have to invest enormous amounts of time and energy in this world of perma-propaganda, dogma, and tedious tribalism. So they, too, must find the entire process in some way satisfying. Or else they’d go off and do something else. Like make money, or save the whales.

Sure, these individuals will possess moral values and principles, of varying degrees of coherence and sophistication. But what drives many is the appeal of politics as a participatory activity. They do politics because politics itself is how they like to spend their time: propagandising, disseminating and tub-thumping for their chosen tribe.

Which this leads again to the conclusion that there’s something very misguided about conceiving of politics as being fundamentally an exercise in applied ethics. And that any political theory maintaining otherwise will be quite seriously deficient.

Last week he delivered a seriously confused lecture on how raising university fees and slashing higher education budgets – as well as abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance – will boost social mobility.

He also had the audacity to suggest that opponents to the Browne review haven’t understood it, because if they did they’d know supporting Browne’s proposals is unquestionably right.

Call me elitist, but I can’t help thinking Cambridge professor Stefan Collini possess the analytic acumen to analyse the Browne proposals and come to a valid – hostile – conclusion. Ditto the numerous distinguished academics recently condemning the report in a letter to The Telegraph.

Yet, Clegg was already back up on his patronising high horse, insinuating that student protestors themselves are a threat to more equal university access.

Recall too his earlier response to the Institute For Fiscal studies condemnation of the Comprehensive Spending Review as deeply regressive. Namely, to accuse the independent and highly respected IFS of using the wrong (i.e. non-Cleggist) understanding of regressivity in the tax and benefit system.

A pattern, it seems, is emerging. One that has precedent.

By the end of Tony Blair’s time in power – particularly after the full nightmare of Iraq was under way – he had clearly descended into a world of fantasy.

One in which the Mesopotamian Adventure had been a triumphant success. Where Britain was safer – despite the heightened risk of domestic terrorism. Where the Middle East was stabilised – despite increased Iranian bellicosity and justified regional paranoia. Removing Saddam was A Good Thing; those who didn’t agree were moral hypocrites merely using Iraq as a beating stick.

For Blair, this was clearly a psychological coping mechanism. Living in his world of fantasy, he remained the champion of Goodness and Light. Outside that world he was the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Nick Clegg appears to be treading a strikingly similar path. The problem, he insists, is students and an unreasonable public. He correspondingly shut-outs the fact he has systematically betrayed his party grassroots and (former) principles.

These are men who, as Max Weber put it so well, lack the true calling for politics; a calling which depends upon taking self-reflective responsibility for one’s actions. They parse the maxims:

The world is stupid and base, not I. The responsibility for the consequences does not fall upon me but upon the others whom I serve and whose stupidity and baseness I shall eradicate.

They are “windbags who do not fully realize what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensation”.

Our position is that people have a right to engage in lawful and peaceful protest, but there is no place for violence or intimidation.

No doubt the PM sincerely believes this, as regards the actions of protestors. More troubling is the extent to which “violence or intimidation” is employed overtly by the police.

Yesterday I took part in the anti-cuts protest in Cambridge. Starting with a demo and city-centre march, the protests began in good spirits with a calm and pleasant atmosphere. At least a thousand people attended the march, and a considerable number of them were from local sixth form colleges protesting against the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance.

Most of the rest were students at Cambridge University. There were also a handful of lecturers in attendance. And best of all, school children in uniform with their teachers.

After the main march, about 500 students climbed over railings and occupied the grounds of the Senate House building on the King’s Parade road. Occupations, of course, are a long-standing method by which students attempt to force university authorities to pay attention to their demands.

After discussion, students decided to attempt to occupy the inside of the Senate House building. As students walked slowly en masse to attempt to gain entry, the police blocked their approach and drew batons. From there the situation rapidly deteriorated. Baton-strikes were very quickly made by the police. But this simply had the effect of heightening tensions dramatically.

Of course, the situation is difficult and we should try to see both sides. The police were seriously outnumbered at first, and it was clear that some of them were very scared. Others, however, obviously relished the confrontational nature of the situation, and were taking delight in striking students whilst shouting “Fuck off”, “Get fucking back” and “Fuck you”.

Unsurprisingly, this did not make the situation calmer. Rather a fight mentality quickly descended, as angered students pushed harder to gain entrance to the building. Given how tense the situation rapidly became, it was quite impressive that most students continued to shout “stay peaceful” and did not give-in to the temptation to hit back at the police.

The same cannot be said, however, for those officers who allowed the situation to escalate further by (for example) shouting “I’m going to get you” at students near the front, and in some instances closed-fist punching them. Don’t believe me? Watch the final frames of this video [unfortunately you'll need a Facebook log-in to watch; hopefully this will be sorted out in due course and I'll embed directly here].

The media talks a lot about “hardcore anarchist” groups “infiltrating” peaceful protests and “hi-jacking” them to start violence. It does not talk anywhere near enough – if at all – about the role of the police in creating confrontational and aggressive situations.

Tuesday’s Guardian revelations – that British troops systematically employed torture methods that violate the Geneva Convention – makes the picture darker still, even if only by adding detail.

One consequence of the latest revelations is that they demonstrate the nonsense-thinking behind the original case and “justification” for war.

A central plank upon which the Mad Mesopotamian Adventure was floated was the claim – made tacitly or overtly – that this would be a new kind of war. Our troops would not be invaders but liberators; warriors of peace welcomed by grateful Iraqis.

Connectedly, what came to be known as the “Decent Left” in the UK criticised those who refused to back military action. The Decents chastised what they claimed were the gutless faux-principles of an anti-war left which wouldn’t put its cruise missiles where its mouth was. Somehow the Republican Party – with Tony Blair in tow – would negate the logic of all previous conflict and be back in time for Christmas.

We now know for sure that it didn’t work that way. Abu Ghraib, for a start, was no aberration. “Our” side did profoundly horrible and nasty things for the fundamental reason that profoundly horrible and nasty things are constituent features of all wars – and they are perpetrated by all sides, albeit in varying degrees in varying places and times.

Chris Bertram is thus right when he says:

During an earlier phase of discussion, when those advocates [of war] were still unapologetic, but whilst the slaughter was well underway, we were treated to numerous disquisitions on moral responsibility: yes there is slaughter, but we are not responsible, it is Al Qaida/the Sunni “insurgents”/Al-Sadr/Iran…

Well the latest Wikileaks disclosures ought to shut them up for good (it won’t, of course). “Our” side has both committed war crimes directly and has acquiesced, enabled, and covered up for the commission of such crimes by others. The incidents are not isolated episodes: rather we have systematic policy.

But we can and must go further. The latest revelations are much more than just a reminder that the advocates of war were wrong in this instance. They drive-home a fact about war that should never have been forgotten in the first place: that war is always, and by necessity, hell.

The next time a Bush (or a Blair) comes offering “humanitarian” war of liberation, we would do well to remember such a basic fact. Iraq now sadly confirms an already long-established judgement of history: that “humanitarian war” is inevitably oxymoronic. Even if some wars, very occasionally, have to be fought regardless.

With that in mind, remember where you were today. The 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review may become a date historians return to.

Much of Britain’s post-war history can be summarised – simplistically, but with some accuracy – as follows.  After the devastation of global war, and the realisation that unchecked economic and social strife leads to the violent recourse of desperate extremist politics, west European nation states erected new social settlements both to rebuild shattered economies and polities, and to serve as prophylactics against the politics of extremism.

During the 1970s the social settlement in Britain underwent extreme strain for complex reasons, but in particular due to economic difficulties of both domestic and international origin. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister, and the first phase of a radical re-settlement began.

The position of organised labour within Britain was crushed, and the role of private enterprise was drastically increased. Deregulation of finance and industry expanded the scope of market provision, and contracted the role of the provider-state. However the core of the post-war social settlement – what we loosely call “the Welfare State” – was left essentially intact, although modifications were made to the way it provided services, reflecting moves towards a general market-default.

From 1997-2010 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour put the Thatcher project on hold, but did not reverse it. If anything the role of private enterprise in particular was expanded. Although core components of the welfare state – in particular education and healthcare – saw enormous increases in spending from 2001 onwards, this was undertaken within the framework of accepting the Thatcherite re-settlement on the economy as a whole.

Although laudable efforts to reduce poverty were undertaken – with some considerable successes – socio-economic inequality increased, as the marketisation of everything continued apace.

From May 2010 onwards, what can be described as the second phase of the Thatcherite resettlement began. Under the banner of massive fiscal retrenchment – justified (rightly or wrongly) as a necessary response to the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis – the Conservative-LibDem Coalition has proceeded to instigate massive spending cuts which are fundamentally over-turning the post-war “Welfare State” and attendant social settlement.

Indeed, it is worth noting what has already been pushed through since spring 2010.

Whilst Michael Gove’s highly ideological free schools programme, and parallel withdrawal of ordinary state school funds, has attracted much attention it has simultaneously distracted from the massive reconstitution of the NHS being conducted by Andrew Lansley (arguably without democratic mandate). Universal child benefits have already been withdrawn.

The affordability of higher education for all may be finished as the LibDems U-turn on one of their oldest electoral promises. The system of state benefits has come under severe attack from Chancellor George Osborne, as dramatic welfare caps are introduced.

And reports ahead of the CSR going official indicate that the Government already expects at least half a million new unemployed from public sector redundancies alone.

And this is only the beginning, the warm-up; the light shavings of the razor before the axe falls proper.

As John Gray has explained so well Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are Thatcher’s ideological children. They see this as the only way, for they have known no other way.

And thus, it may very well come to pass that 20^th October 2010 will be noted by future historians as the day the British social settlement completed the change of direction begun in 1979, entering new – and as yet, uncharted – waters.

So remember where you were. Your grandchildren may want to know.

Apparently, the UK loses £4.6bn educating the children of migrants. Except that figure looks rather shaky when you learn it includes as immigrants anybody who happened to have a foreign-born parent. (So despite having British citizenship, because my mum is French MW count my vast and on-going British education as a pay-out to immigrant families!) As if that method wasn’t bad enough, the Office of National Statistics claims not to know how MW obtained any figures on parent birth place to begin with. Further demolition can be found here.

I admit: different day, same risible nonsense from MW. What actually animates me this morning is Sunny’s gunning for the BBC over its failures to report the MW nonsense as such.

Certainly, the BBC’s reporting in this instance is lamentable. And Sunny has long been drawing attention to its failures over climate change denial and its tendency to give equal space to “sceptics” when the evidence is all one way traffic in the other direction.

But I feel Sunny is too one-dimensional in his condemnation of the BBC, and picks poor strategy in response.

I’m not denying that the BBC should do better when reporting on nonsense from MW and their ilk. But let’s think about why the Beeb might fail to properly scrutinize right-wing immigration gibberish in particular. Namely, that it is currently having the squeeze put on it by the Tory party, and the threat of that squeeze has been on-going for several years. Indeed it arguably started under Labour, when accusations that Blair and Alistair Campbell had “sexed up” the Iraq War dossier landed the Beeb in serious hot water with Number 10, with the temperature turned up by the Mail and News International.

With a ferocious Murdoch clamouring for privatisation, and a Tory party whose MPs and grass-roots broadly believe the BBC is a base-camp of socialist revolution, you can see why the news wing of the BBC might be predisposed to attempt to appease its opponents by sometimes channelling their political agendas, even if only by laziness.

Now, I think this is a bad idea. The agenda against the BBC is so deep-running that nothing will ever be good enough to halt it except full-scale demolition. My point is that the real blame lies not only, or simply, with poor journalism and poor editorial oversight, but with the entire situation in which the BBC finds itself.

Correspondingly, I find Sunny’s outraged condemnations – “The BBC’s reporting has become a joke”; “you wouldn’t get the BBC report pointing that out either, because they can’t actually be bothered to ask some basic questions.” – frustrating. All the blame is laid at the BBC’s door, and they are correspondingly slammed from the left as well as the right. (I won’t even get into Sunny’s long-running claim that the BBC is a “right wing” media institution, a claim I find to be based on the mirror-image cognitive bias which motivates right-wing criticism that the Beeb is a communist bastion).

I just can’t see this strategy of slamming the Beeb as incompetent being helpful. When institutions – like people – come under attack, they tend to hunker down, take cover and put up the defences. Reform often does not follow, because self-protection takes priority.

Whatever its failings, the BBC is still a far better news and broadcast institution than anything that will replace it should the free-market Murdochites get their way.

It would be much better if leftists put their energy into exposing the hypocrisies of other far more scurrilous media outlets, and of the risible “think” tanks like MW (and puppet campaign groups like The Tax Payers’ Alliance) than slamming the BBC, without thinking about why the BBC ends up making the bad calls it sometimes does.

A cap system that will reduce income, housing and council tax benefit is going to affect a lot of people’s lives. You can read various good analyses here, here, here, here and here. Personally, I’m still reeling from the extent of Osborne’s assault on those receiving state support, disgusted at his fig-leaf excuses about preventing people seeing benefits as a “lifestyle choice”.

But one thing strikes me about these reforms: how cavalier and unconservative the Conservative Party is now being.

As we heard from Adam Smith the other week, politicians should always bear in mind the law of unintended consequences. Changing A with the intention of bringing about B, might inadvertently also cause X, Y and Z – and the end results may be far from pretty.

Think, for example, of an imposed cap on housing benefits. One group I bet Boy George hasn’t thought about who this might affect is battered women. As Hopi Sen tweets:

“Another point on welfare cap. Emergency housing is expensive. Say you leave abusive partner with family, need rehousing, what then?”

Now, I don’t know for sure if it’s the case that women trying to flee partners will now find it even more difficult to leave abusive households (on top of, y’know, the fear of being tracked-down and murdered, which is a common and very real fear in a country where one woman a week dies at her partner’s hands). But it seems likely. I would sincerely like to know if George and Team have factored-in the impact on all similarly vulnerable groups, in every possible permutation of possibile outcomes. My guess is not, because it’s impossible. But they are going ahead regardless. What bold and brave steps our leaders take for us.

Or consider what’s happening here at Cambridge University. Anticipating huge government cuts over coming years, the University has drastically increased the number of fee-paying graduate students admitted. The University Colleges have apparently been ordered to accept this – regardless of whether they have sufficient accommodation or teaching resources available.

On the flip side, the new Coalition immigration cap is causing havoc for overseas students. Many now find themselves struggling to secure entry to the UK, with knock-on effects for the University bureaucracy who are struggling to cope with the myriad resultant problems. I would imagine that many, if not all, universities in Britain are in the same position. The knock-on effects for both UK higher education and – in the longer run – the whole economy simply cannot be fathomed.

These are just two particular illustrations. There must be hundreds more.

What intrigues me, therefore, is the disregard for the radical change that must now surely arise – with unknowable, unforseen consequences. Michael Oakeshott, possibly the greatest modern conservative philosopher, would surely be appalled. Oakeshott likened the running of a state to the sailing of a ship cast adrift on a boundless ocean.

The ship could be sailed safely only by the use of tested practical wisdom, and that came only from experience which demanded only gradual and organic change. By contrast, theoretically-driven sojourns – i.e. the pursuing of politics by way of abstract ideology – were more likely to sink the ship than keep it afloat.

Frederick von Hayek, however, wrote a famous article called “Why I am Not A Conservative“. This fascinating essay contains much to think about, but one of its central messages was that Hayek, under the right circumstances, would accept anti-conservative change if it brought about the small-state libertarianism he believed best for all.

George Osborne, it would seem, is not a conservative either.

For the first half of last night’s broadcast, Cable repeatedly got it in the neck.

But rather than seeing Cable as a traitor, I would urge a little more nuance. There has been no Jekyll and Hyde transformation. The same exceptionally laudable politician remains – but circumstances dictate he play the devil.

Let’s assume – as seems most likely – that Cable meant all he said pre-May 2010. Like most Lib Dems he assumed he’d never get near power and so could say whatever he liked. Including the truth, something mostly off-limits to those expecting a hand in government. All that stuff about controlling banks, protecting the economy from over-zealous cuts, the myth of pain-free “efficiency savings”, clamping down on tax avoiders and evaders? He almost certainly meant it all.*

But now Cable finds himself not only in government, but subordinated to a dominant Tory party that is acting just as manically as it promised before being elected. A Tory party demanding exactly the opposite of much of what Cable previously advocated.

And at this point, questions of personal integrity arise: should Cable – as a man of purported decency and integrity – consent to working with a rabid Tory party inflicting cuts that will cause widespread social and economic pain?

The answer, I think, is “yes”. Certainly, Cable himself might prefer not to be doing this. That he’d rather have “clean hands” and not be personally responsible for any of the Coalition’s overly-vicious cuts. But the fact is, whatever Cable does now his hands can never be clean.

If Cable were to walk from the Coalition, there would still be consequences pinned to him. For a start, he is the only high-profile non-Conservative member of the Coalition apart from Nick Clegg (now so close to Cameron as to be effectively Tory). Without Cable, the Lib Dems would likely lose even the paltry influence within the Government they currently possess.

And yet, he continues. Not, I would suggest, because of any lust for power. But because Cable exhibits Max Weber’s “calling for politics”.

That is the marking of a “truly moving” politician, who has the “calling for politics”. There is nothing impressive about Tory ideologues cutting spending with glee, complete with disregard for the pain this will cause.

There is, however, something tragically moving about Cable’s position. He deserves your personal respect, even if your political condemnation flows regardless.

I predict that this experience will break Cable; that he will leave office disillusioned and wracked with guilt about what he’s found himself complicit in.

And therein lies another tragedy: that apart from the self-pityingly vainglorious, there is a way in which politics can only break good people.

—

*In fact I know he did (and here’s a disclaimer) because I did a little bit of work for his office during my 2009 Parliamentary researcher odyssey.

My contempt for Catholic teaching in particular crystallised in compulsory Religious Education class, around three experiences. The first is of a teacher telling my class that contraception was a sin, the rhythm method wholly reliable, and that any girl who had an abortion would definitely go to hell.

The second was the same teacher remarking that if people only had sex within marriage then “aids wouldn’t be a problem.” And then replying to my complaint that this was hardly appropriate insight regarding (say) non-Christians in Africa, that this was simply “their problem”.

The third was a different teacher telling my class that “condoms don’t work” because the AIDs virus is “smaller than the micro-holes in a condom membrane”.

But I also received a piece of genuine wisdom from a more reflective – if still very much Catholic – teacher at the school. I can’t remember what I was whining about in an attempt to disrupt the lesson, but the teacher in question stared me down and said: “Paul, you need to realise that belief in God, and the Catholic Church, are two different things”.

And she was completely right. Whilst I have many reservations about Christianity, believing in Christ as Saviour is a very different thing to following the dogmas and dictates of an institution like the Catholic Church. Because that’s what it is: an institution. And as an institution, it is capable of doing fucked up things, and drawing its members into webs of horror.

As it happens, I’m temporarily back in Merseyside this month. And it’s disappointing – though perhaps not surprising – to find Patrick Kelly, Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, defending Pope Benedict and blaming systematic paedophile abuse on anybody but the Church:

Archbishop Patrick Kelly told the BBC that the work of other organisations dealing with children should be examined.

He said that most child abuse “occurs within families”.

Archbishop Kelly said: “It’s also worth asking similar groups who worked with young people what were they doing in those same years?

“Other groups were working with young people and we’ve found that the question of child abuse, above all, occurs within families – You know that as a fact.

“According to what others were doing at the same time, I’m afraid we were so ignorant we did not know about the addictive nature [of paedophiles].”

The Archbishop said: “Nobody has been so rigorous in dealing with that terrible issue as [Pope Benedict] has. He has insisted that procedures are in place.

Given that Benedict XVI stands at the heart of a global cover up of decades-long sex abuse, and the continuing protection of abusive priests – in a week when a major paedophile scandal within the Belgian church has been hitting the headlines – Kelly’s lack of remorse speaks for itself.

So I’d like to take this day, when the Pontiff visits our aggressively atheist shores, to remind Catholics that belief in Christ is not the same as the institution of the Catholic Church. If you, as a good Christian, are disgusted by discrimination against women, denial of gay rights, paedophile-enablement and protection, and millions of avoidable deaths – there is a choice.

In an environment of cuts across the wider public sector, we face a period where disaffection, social and industrial tensions may well rise… We will require a strong, confident, properly trained and equipped police service, one in which morale is high and one that believes it is valued by the government and public.

Or as the Guardian headlined it: “Police: We can’t take care of cuts protests if you cut us”.

The warning is clear. In order to secure a basic minimum of stability, the coercive power of the state is needed to repress those elements so desperate and disadvantaged they’ll risk life and limb by rioting in the street. So make sure the police guarantee that basic minimum, by giving them loadsa muneh.

But I’m not a police officer. I’m a self-appointed representative for academic arts and humanities funding. Let’s consider just one practical benefit of this study, by applying two basic analytic tools.

The first is familiar to historians: a basic knowledge of, and ability to critically employ, the facts of history. The second is familiar to trained philosophers: the argumentative dilemma (i.e. impaling your opponent on one of two argumentative horns by logically forcing them to pick between two unacceptable options).

Bringing these tools to bear, let’s examine another of Superintendent Barnett’s utterances:

From the massacre in 1819, that took place not so many miles away from here, to the current day alcohol-related disorder, history teaches us that there will always be widespread threats to the public peace

1819 massacre, you say? Near Cheshire? Why, Mr Barnet can only be talking about…er, the Peterloo Massacre. Here’s what Wikipedia (hardly a byzantine source available only to crusty scholars) says of that event:

The Peterloo Massacre (or Battle of Peterloo) occurred at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, England, on 16 August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000–80,000 gathered at a meeting to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. [...]15 people were killed and 400–700 were injured. The massacre was given the name Peterloo in ironic comparison to the Battle of Waterloo, which had taken place four years earlier.

So, the example a top police officer gives of “professional” policing of public protest is a massacre in which mounted officers killed innocent citizens. Lovely.

This was certainly not part of a transparent and obvious ploy to get the News of the World/Met Police phone-hacking scandal off the front pages.

In turn, the irony of a party which recently appointed a big-time tax avoider to a senior role – and which has turned a blind eye to a practice costing the UK many more sums than benefit “scrounging” – was quickly lost on everybody.

But Gideon Osborne’s announcement is interesting because it heralds – or at the very least confirms – the death of an idea. And not just any old idea.

One that had an enormous impact on the 20^th century, insofar as it shaped the post-war economic and social consensus and helped guarantee that liberal capitalist democracy would be a superior state form to fascism and communism.

I’m not an economist (by any means), but I have read John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. This passage gets to the heart of things:

Obviously, however, if the classical theory is only applicable to the case of full employment, it is fallacious to apply it to the problems of involuntary unemployment — if there be such a thing (and who will deny it?). The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring.

Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry. Something similar is required today in economics. We need to throw over the second postulate of the classical doctrine and to work out the behaviour of a system in which involuntary unemployment in the strict sense is possible.

A core part of Keynes’ subsequent analysis was that unemployment is a function of aggregate demand. Which basically means: if the economy is buggered, then there won’t be enough jobs for all those willing to work.

Fiddling around at the margins – say, by reducing unemployment benefit – will not make a significant difference. When there’s no jobs, there’s no jobs. Accordingly, the government should do something to sort that out, namely by stimulating demand until private enterprise benefits from the upward swing and expands to fill the vacuum.

Yet this idea is apparently as dead as a dodo. The Chancellor of the Exchequer stands up, and with a straight face says he’s going to cut benefits to force the able-bodied into work. At a time when there simply are no jobs to be had in many parts of the country. When public service cuts are destroying those that do exist.

40 years ago, policies aimed at securing full employment were a basic commitment expected of all governments. Now, Gideon says starving the poor will ensure they jump into jobs.

The words “neo-liberalism” and “paradigm shift” get horribly, misleadingly and unhelpfully over used. But my golly do they have some traction today.

Obviously, I’m not important enough to have not read them in advance. But nor will I be reading them when they are published. And it’s not just because, as Dave Osler notes, they will contain nothing new (except, perhaps, new lies).

It’s because the title of the book tells us everything we need to know already.

Originally entitled The Journey, Tony’s explanation of how he got everything right will now be called A Journey. This is entirely appropriate. If TB had stuck to the definite article, it would imply that his premiership was somehow singularly important; an event or happening that was central and incomparable.

But that’s never the way Tony saw it. Just as ambitious young politicos view internships at Westminster as stepping-stones to greater things, so Blair saw being PM of the UK. A Journey is thus far more appropriate, leaving the door open, as it does, to future adventures.

But, appropriately enough, “a journey” still carries the messianic overtones suitable for the memoirs of a man permanently assured of his own righteous certainty. The notion of “a journey” is long-established as a trope of religious self-discovery; from Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus, to the “journey” of Christ espoused by contemporary evangelicals in particular.

For a man who not only felt the hand of history on his shoulder, but whose very public flirtations with Catholicism left little to the imagination regarding who he fancied he had a hotline too, “a journey” is, again, entirely apt.

Yet there’s also an entirely appropriate shallowness. Although “a journey” carries vaguely religious overtones, it also screams of superficiality, of a longing for profundity which is conspicuously absent. Typically, those who opine about the importance of “undertaking a journey” are fairly uninteresting individuals more preoccupied with proving they live lives of spiritual depth than actually doing so.

The sort of people who are drawn to new age spiritualist nonsense, and “believe” in Chinese medicine. Or who, for example, partake in a Mayan “rebirthing” ceremonies, covered in mud, and praying to giant lizards.

Furthermore, “a journey” succeeds in capturing perhaps the most outstanding of what we might call Blair’s “deep” political failings. For Blair, what mattered was always, precisely, the journey. It didn’t really matter where he was going, or for that matter where he was taking the rest of us. Sure, overtures were made about the importance of invading other countries, or of involving the private sector, or of endlessly spying on the citizenry.

What mattered for TB was the fun of the trip. Like a compulsive globe-trotter who doesn’t care where he ends up so long as he gets the thrill of take-off, Blair never gave too much thought to where exactly he was headed.

What mattered was always that he, Tony Blair, was having a nice little journey. And if that phrase now sounds hollow and lilliputian – especially given the facts of recent history – that, too, is entirely appropriate.

Image from the excellent Beau Bo D’Or

Which is a shame, because tribalism is an important and usually indispensable part of politics. We’d all do better to recall that it has its virtues as well as vices, even if they are often born of necessity.

First, let’s recall what politics is: competition between two or more groups attempting to secure outcomes which the other side not only opposes, but frequently thinks are morally wrong.

Sure, some politics is more consensual; where everyone agrees about what must be achieved, but groups disagree about how to bring it about. But that is the exception, not the rule.

As a result the left clusters into various groups – the Labour Party, the Green Party, the pre-2010 Liberal Democrat Party, etc – who amongst other things aim to oppose the perceived morally unacceptable policies of (most especially) the Tory Party. The same works for the right, who have the BNP, UKIP and Conservative parties to oppose the left, and usually Labour specifically.

Of course, being part of a political tribe carries a price. It means having to support – or at least be associated with – policies one may not agree with. Grassroots members of the Labour Party know this better than anyone, right now. Those who did not support Tony’s Murderous Mesopotamian Adventure, the assault on civil liberties, or the continuation of market-orientated Thatcherite reforms know that being of the Party isn’t always easy-riding. And there’s no denying that tribalism can lead to irrationality, pettiness and poor decision making.

But those who have stuck with the Labour tribe will largely have done so because they think that the Labour Party still offers the best way of opposing Conservative policy, and offering a realistic alternative. Much of the motivation lies in believing that much Tory policy is immoral, and wanting to stop it or reverse it. The organised Labour tribe offers a possibility for achieving that. Political tribalism is, therefore, an ineradicable part of politics. It should in turn be welcomed insofar as it allows us all to organise on a mass – albeit imperfect – scale, to advance rival moral ends.

Which brings me to the case of Alan Milburn, ex Labour MP and arch-Blairite, who has taken a job advising the Coalition on social mobility.

Clegg and Cameron have been gleefully dolling-out rhetoric about overcoming tribalism and working together. Which is all to be rejected, for the simple reason that it’s dishonest. Appointing Milburn was a stunt designed, in part, to undermine Labour during slow-news August.

More importantly, Cameron and Clegg are currently doing a very good job of squatting in the centre ground of British politics, inherited from New Labour. The rhetoric of non-partisan anti-tribalism works well here, because the whole gambit is to be a political offering of “something for everyone”. Whilst this is electorally clever, it also covers up the extent to which the so-called “centre” of British politics has been decidedly the centre right ever since Blair decided to sit there from 1994 onwards.

So when Milburn decides to advise the Coalition, he’s not engaging in anti-tribalist non-partisanship. Quite the opposite. He’s joining their tribe; the centre-right face of a now dominant Tory Party, which currently holds power instead of a Labour Government.*

And on those grounds, Alan Milburn should be ejected from the Labour Party.

Then again, as Hopi Sen points out (and Gaby Hinsliff bemoans) there’s no need to get hysterical about this. Screaming for Milburn’s blood will only inflame a bored media in the middle of the silly-season.

So Labour should wait a few weeks for the agenda to have firmly moved on – and then give Milburn the boot. Honest, virtuous, decent tribalism demands it. And while they’re at it, get rid of Frank Field too.

–
*Because as I’ve said previously, the Lib Dems are so invisible in this government you’d be hard pressed to know it’s a coalition at all.

At its root this approach prioritises an issue which is taken to be the fundamental problem of politics: that of controlling, limiting and ordering violence between individuals and groups so as to allow peaceful relations to exist, and human achievement to flourish.

For Williams the modern liberal western state is a particularly successful – though by no means unproblematic – solution to this basic problem. The modern state, via army, police and other controlled institutions successfully monopolises legitimate violence within a given territory (to borrow Max Weber’s famous definition).

However Williams was acutely aware that the state, although in successful cases the solution to the fundamental problem, can and often does become part of the fundamental problem, with disastrous consequences. Some modern examples can be plucked from thousands to illustrate: Mugabe’s reign of terror in Zimbabwe; the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia; Pinochet’s neo-fascist thuggery and murder in Chile.

We in the democratic post-war West are generally very lucky. Our states broadly desist from becoming part of the fundamental problem, and out of the liberalism of fear great social achievements are made possible in the safe-space of non-violence modern states guarantee.

But sometimes things go wrong.

Most of the justifiably outraged comment on the CPS’s decision to exonerate the police over Ian Tomlinson’s death focuses on the insult and injury to Tomlinson’s family, and (the evident lack of) police accountability. I’ve no intention of undermining any of that.

But I do want to draw attention to what might be termed the underlying political philosophy of what’s gone wrong here.

The CPS could have decided that police in riot gear attacking innocent people for no reason is a manifest instance of the state becoming part of, rather than the solution to, politics’ basic problem.

Accordingly the CPS could have moved to atone for the attack on Tomlinson by seeking to hold Harwood to account in a way which would show that the British state does not license hostility against its citizens, and that the attack on Tomlinson was a regrettable unlicensed rogue incident. Similarly, by seeking the prosecution of Harwood a meaningful attempt to (re)build a relationship of trust and respect between the state and its citizens could have been undertaken.

Instead the CPS, coolly and in retrospect, decided to effectively support Harwood’s actions and in the process has served to retroactively license them and have the state claim them as its own.

It’s obvious that Britain is still a vastly safer and more desirable place to live than all those times and places where the state has wholesale become the problem and not the solution.

But here’s the rub: although it is a cliché one of the hallmarks of civilisation and advanced, desirable society is firstly that the state does not attack innocent citizens. But secondly – and just as importantly – in cases where such attacks do take place they must be retrospectively disowned, apologised for, and meaningfully regretted. Measures must be taken to prevent their repeat occurrence, and justice must be delivered to victims and survivors.

By refusing to prosecute, the CPS has effectively degraded the relationship between the British state and its citizens, and done so by official mandate.

And thanks to the CPS’ decision Britons should consider themselves living in a land that is less civilised and desirable than they might otherwise have thought.

Not, however, that all this should actually come as a surprise. Britain already possesses a long and ignoble history of unaccountable violence and murder of citizens at the hands of the state’s agents. The liberalism of fear, indeed.

I’m talking about Undercover Boss, which followed Kevan Collins – Chief Executive of Tower Hamlets Council – as he became “Colin” and met people doing frontline services in his borough.

It was remarkable.

There was Chris, who delivers meals on wheels to the elderly. She used to stay for a cup of tea and a chat, but now finds it hard because cut-backs mean she has more deliveries in fewer hours. It breaks her heart – especially at Christmas – because most of the elderly are alone and she is the only person many see all day. Yet she meets them all with a smile, a kind word, and a parcel of food which literally keeps them alive.

There was Malachi, who works with those about to be made homeless who desperately need help. He’s only on a temporary contract, but he would like to do this permanently and gives it his all. “It’s important to treat the people who come in with respect” – he says – “because after all they are human beings, and it could be you on that side of the counter one day”.

Or what about Tim, who works in pest control. Not a glamorous job, killing rats. But Tim does it and he does it well, seeking out the holes and drains that are off his beat but also the real sources of infestation. “A private company wouldn’t do this extra bit” he notes off-hand, “they just go for the profit”.

Shazz works the Whitechapel street market – where he grew up as a kid – daily ensuring the regulations are kept to. But in his own time he and some friends have been designing plans for the Olympic area renovation, which they have dreams of putting forward. They’d like to look back and know they’ve made their area a better place.

Even Del and Mark – the somewhat overzealous community enforcers who hand out £40 fines for dropping fags down drains – hit the streets every day for 10 hours. They try to bring order to one of the most socially deprived, and sometimes chaotic, boroughs in the country.

Which got me thinking: if there is a “Big Society” it looks suspiciously like it resides in places like Tower Hamlets Council and its frontline services.

The Conservatives tell us that the state gets in the way. That by hacking away with enormous spending cuts spontaneous voluntary work will make Britain into a modern Shangri-La. Well Channel 4 neatly showed what a load of bullshit that is.

The ‘Big Society’ is already here. It’s Chris squeezing a few extra minutes to chat to a lonely pensioner. It’s Tim going the extra mile to keep people’s homes vermin free. It’s all the countless other unsung heroes we never hear a word about. Professionals providing public services, adding the human touch that makes the extra difference.

But the Big Society is under-resourced, over-worked and operating above-capacity.

If Dave and Co.’s rhetoric was anything more than a front for an ideological agenda, they’d be getting ready to reverse that. Instead, they’re deciding to make it worse.

And despite the Fund making noises that Ireland will not default on its debt, its credit rating has just been downgraded regardless.

As the New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan put it:

Ireland, of course, cut like crazy to appease the gods of the bond markets but evidently it didn’t work out for them. Please note Mr Osborne.

But the Lib Dems need to look in the mirror too.

That Ireland has just had its rating cut blows away the fig leaf which has so far been covering the ConDem cuts: that severe retrenchment of public finances is essential if Britain isn’t to lose its AAA credit rating and see the cost of borrowing soar in the long term.

This talk was always highly dubious in itself – not least because Britain’s situation was always far healthier than Ireland’s (or Greece’s) – but it now looks ridiculous. Plus there is the very real risk that cutting too hard and too soon will cripple economic recovery.

Yet all we’ve had out of the Lib Dems is a front bench minister resign over financial impropriety, and a welcome but ultimately timid and non-committal suggestion of a graduate tax. In truth, you’d be hard pressed to know this was coalition government at all.

The downgrading of Ireland’s credit rating should now serve as a moment of reflection for the Lib Dems regarding their future path. I see three options:

1. Use greater influence within the coalition to rein-in the Tories
2. Quit the coalition and have no more to do with the Conservative assault on public finances
3. Remain in the coalition and continue to facilitate the Tory programme.

Option 1 looks an obvious non-starter; as junior partners the Lib Dems appear to exercise virtually no significant influence over the Tories.

The problem with 2, of course, is that whilst it might be highly principled the Tories will quickly accuse the Lib Dems of destabilising the country. They will then have a good chance of returning a Conservative majority in a fresh election which the Lib Dems (and Labour) probably can’t afford to fight anyway.

But as for 3, the long-term risk is that when the Tory cuts really start to bite the Lib Dems will take the flak as the enablers of a vicious programme which hurts ordinary people’s lives.

So although Ireland should be a prompt for Lib Dem soul-searching about the bed they’ve chosen to make, whether or not they continue to lie in it may end the same: that they are held accountable for making possible a political programme of pain that wasn’t even their own.

[A]s a Minister I was incredibly encouraged by the example set by the England fans, I mean not a single arrest for a football related offensive and the terrible problems that we had in Heysel and Hillsborough in the 1980s seem now to be behind us and I think, you know, there is small grounds for encouragement there even though obviously we are very disappointed about the result.

Anybody with even a basic knowledge of English football will know that what happened at Hillsborough had absolutely nothing to do with hooliganism.

That Hunt was shadow secretary for the same office during last year’s 20th anniversary Hillsborough memorial services is an even greater indictment of his callous ignorance.

But could there be something more going on?

Economists and psychologists frequently employ the concept of cognitive bias.

It’s worth asking whether any are at work here. I can think of 3 possibilities:

1. Not only is Hunt ignorant about the history of English football, but he is predisposed to think of football as a yob sport where trouble is usually caused by yobs. Given that 44-year-old Hunt would have become socially aware in the 1970s and 80s (when English hooliganism was rife), this explanation is very plausible.

2. Hunt, as a conservative, is predisposed to trust figures of institutions and authority over the masses in need of control. This means he is more likely to assume that fault lay with yob crowds than with police authorities.

3. Hunt is extremely privileged and has grown up and worked amongst similarly privileged people, likely to have low interest in football and low interest in a disaster that affected working class Liverpool fans. Accordingly, he’s never been in a social situation whereby 1. and 2. above could be adjusted, or his ignorance about Hillsborough corrected.

Number 3 will, of course, set the cat amongst the pigeons. But I suspect there’s something to it. Having grown up lower-middle class and attended a normal state comprehensive with lots of working class kids, it is unimaginable to me that someone could not know the truth about Hillsborough. Yes, I grew up on Merseyside. But in Southport there were as many Manchester United as Liverpool fans. And for crying out loud, by Mum knows what happened at Hillsborough and she’s French and doesn’t like football.

Of course, we musn’t be deterministic. Plenty of people have privileged backgrounds and manage to care about those less fortunate than they. Harriet Harman, for all her faults, stands as a good example.

Equally, sometimes people from working class backgrounds can’t wait to join the elites and dump on those they’ve left behind. Hello David Davis, hello Norman Tebbit.

And believe me, I know how irritating it can be to have your (perceived) class background used against you. Just ask Captain Swing.

But all that having been said, does Jeremy Hunt offer proof of what I and many others were saying about Double Dip Dave and Boy George before the election? That class matters; that being a millionaire Bullingdon Boy will affect the way politicians see – and attempt to influence – the world around them.

Everyone will pay something but the people at the bottom of the income scale will pay proportionately less than those at the top. This is a progressive Budget.

Leftist sources have predictably responded by claiming this is not progressive at all. The New Statesman here has a fairly standard example too.

But part of the problem lies in the very term “progressive”.

As I’ve pointed out in detail, “progressive” is a stupid word to use in politics because it doesn’t mean anything. When leftists say they are “progressives” they’re saying nothing of substance, whilst vaguely implying that they are in favour of nice fluffy things like helping people, and the environment, and being pro-gay, and pro-women’s rights, and, y’know, stuff.

The basic aim is to attempt a differentiation from the political right without having to commit to anything of substance or principle, and hoping that vague feelings of warm fuzziness will guarantee support.

But because there’s no content behind the term “progressive”, there’s nothing to stop the Conservatives – or for that matter the Lib Dems – appropriating the word for themselves. And that’s exactly what they have done previously, and did yesterday.

This has (at least) a two-fold effect.

Firstly, by dressing the budget in the cotton wool of “progressive”, The Coalition could easily spin deeply regressive taxation changes and ideologically driven public sector cuts as being equitable, fair and representative of an “all in this together” austerity.

Secondly, because the left – and Labour especially – has shied away for so long of talking the language of being the left – of equality (rather than mealy-mouthed meritocracy), of redistribution, of the state as an agent for social justice (rather than just bank-bailouts and surveillance policing) – responses to the Tories become flat-footed and lose the initiative.

Slipping into the specifics of policy (about cuts, about VAT, about child benefits) is already too late. As the old saying goes: “in politics, if you’re explaining you’re losing”. The initiative is duly lost to the ConDem side, which simply has to reply that this is what a progressive budget looks like in these hard times. We’re all progressives now, after all.

Words matter. The British left needs to have a long, hard think about what kinds of words it wants to carry on using about itself, and whether it might not rather stake out some clear, commitment-filled ground that The Coalition can’t happily squat in for political advantage.

A good start, incidentally, would be to stop chucking around two other over-used terms. Instead of merely saying we need to control the “discourse”, and construct better “narratives”, it’s time to come up with the discussion to fill that discourse, and the story to go into that narrative.

By any normal standards it was a remarkable result for a squad in which only 3 members play overseas.

Indeed cheer might be taken from the fact that the 0-0 draw between Portugal and Ivory Coast was probably one of the worst world cup games ever, suggesting that North Korea might produce a surprise upset and qualify for the knock-out stages.

But this of course remains unlikely. And for the North Korean players the prospect of failure comes with far greater consequence than normal sporting disappointment. You see, it’s reputed that leader Kim Jong Il likes to send under-performing players to work as slave labourers in coal mines.

Which raises the question of whether this sort of approach can possibly work. What we have is a fairly rudimentary case of incentive structuring: as well as disappointment and letting their nation down, the North Korean players are faced with the prospect of imprisonment, hard-labour and death. Will this (dis)incentive make them play better?

Nonetheless, and for example, we might want to talk about whether North Korea’s international squad are incentivised to play better by the threat of hard labour. On the one hand, it might be that they are indeed propelled by their fear to give their all. On the other, the “incentive” might be counter-productive: fear is distracting, and can lead one to make mistakes through poor judgement.

Alternatively, the whole thing might be irrelevant whichever way the incentives work: North Korea are still North Korea, and no matter how hard they try they’ll never be as good as Brazil in second gear.

But all that misses another, much more important, point: that “incentivising” players this way appears plainly wrong. It doesn’t matter if it works, because it’s a horrible thing to do and no morally well-functioning person thinks otherwise, ceteris paribus. Similar things can be said for the reputed torture of Iraq’s national team whenever it lost a game under the management of Saddam Hussein’s son, himself the torturer-in-chief.

But then, as Quentin Skinner is always keen to remind us, context is important: maybe sometimes hard-labour incentives should be welcomed. Step forward, the England squad. Perhaps the threat of a penal colony would be just the ticket for a team stuffed with petulant, lazy, over-paid, immature whinebags. Perhaps the prospect of a lifetime mining uranium without protective equipment would sort out the Gerrard-Lampard incompatibility, whilst electrodes to the testicles might encourage Shaun Wright-Phillips to learn how to cross the ball.

But again, the “incentives” – and whether they work or not – aren’t really the point. The true virtue of so-incentivising the England squad would be the intrinsic worth of torturing the feckless bunch of over-paid, useless donkeys who can’t even beat the USA.

And you can therefore see, I’m the sort of moral hypocrite who wants to make allowances for authoritarian communist dictatorships, whilst pouring vitriol and violent fantasy upon our Brave English Boys. Furthermore, that probably makes me a moral relativist. And shock-horror, I’m also an academic (well, sort of). Lo, behold! In one short blog post I have exemplified everything Nick Cohen, Francis Wheen and David Aaronovitch hate.

You have to admit, I’m good at multi-tasking.