Facing the outright fury of the Murdochs for daring to provide a free news website, as yet there wasn’t a set-out policy on how the BBC could be emasculated by the Tories.

Thankfully, Policy Exchange, the right-wing think-tank with notable links to the few within the Cameron set with an ideological bent has come up with a step-by-step guide on how destroy the BBC by a thousand cuts which doesn’t so much as mention Murdoch.

Not that Policy Exchange itself is completely free from Murdoch devotees or those who call him their boss. The trustees of the think-tank include Camilla Cavendish and Alice Thomson, both Times hacks, while Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and who refused to pay the licence fee until Jonathan Ross left the corporation is the chairman of the board.

Also a trustee is Rachel Whetstone, whose partner is Steve Hilton, Cameron’s director of strategy. Whetstone was also a godparent to the late Ivan Cameron. The report itself is by Mark Oliver, who was director of strategy at the Beeb between 1989 and 1995, during John Birt’s much-loved tenure as director-general.
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contribution by Giles Wilkes

A standard attack on Labour is that it has left the government dominating the economy, which spells doom for our future growth. Policy Exchange’s approach to this has been the most uncompromising and (as I shall show) wrongheaded; see this publication, mentioned by the Wolf, and utterly debunked by me.

A state that actually dominated economic production is terrible for economic efficiency. For the UK to grow for 200 years has needed capitalism’s endless, restless search for better ways of doing things. Good ideas get rewarded and prosper– for a while – and bad ideas get thrown out.

Imagine if the development of the IT industry had been all decided in think tanks and Whitehall. We would still be on BBC Microcomputers.

So, are we in a 50%-state economy? Superficially the government spends about £650bn of a £1400bn GDP economy. But does it feel like that? Um, no.

Think about it: the state employs 6 million people, or about 20% of the workforce (h/t John Redwood). Half of the state’s spending is actually transferring money to people so that they can spend it themselves. Government consumption is about 20-25%.
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2009 was the year that left-wing campaign groups independent of the Labour party found their voice and found the Internet.

There have been notable successes for the left blogosphere but in this I want to highlight and point to the top left campaign groups that have made a mark and will continue to grab the limelight in 2010.

Compass
2009 was the year that Compass threw off its shackles as an exclusively Labour-left group and embraced the idea of positioning itself as a broader, more plural left-wing pressure group. As Gordon Brown failed to live up to their expectations, Neal Lawson realised that trying to work just within the party and push from the left was useless when most people on the left were abandoning New Labour in droves.

The Left is much bigger than Labour and that is where Compass want & need to be. They got some stick for inviting Caroline Lucas to the conference rally but I think it was an important watershed.

Compass did well to tap into the anger over bankers bonuses and I hope they continue to develop left wing populism in 2010. They were the most high-profile left-wing campaign group of 2009.
(disclosure: I’m a member but didn’t part in any of the re-positioning discussions)
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Sunny’s busy elsewhere at the moment, so I guess I’d better take on the news that the North London Central Mosque’s libel action against Tory think-tank, Policy Exchange, has been struck out by Justice Eady, leaving the trustees of the mosque facing a £75,000 legal bill just to cover PX’s legal bills.

The case related to allegations made in a 2007 report by Denis McEoin, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, which was withdrawn earlier this year, at the same time as it issued this apology to one of the organisations named in the report as allegedly selling extremist literature.

The Hijacking of British Islam:
Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre

In this report we state that Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre is one of the Centres where extremist literature was found. Policy Exchange accepts the Centre’s assurances that none of the literature cited in the Report has ever been sold or distributed at the Centre with the knowledge or consent of the Centre’s trustees or staff, who condemn the extremist and intolerant views set out in such literature. We are happy to set the record straight.

The key phrase in this piece of news seems to be ’struck out’, which gives no clues whatsoever as to the reason that the mosque’s libel action failed. As yet, there’s nothing on BAILI relating to this case, so whether it failed on a technicality, or because the mosque was unable to put forward a viable case, or even because Justice Eady decided that the mosque has no reputation to defend is anyone’s guess.

I must admit to being a little disappointed that this case failed to all the way to a full hearing, not because I really give a toss about either side winning or losing but because it might have shed just a little bit more light on the circumstances that resulted in McEoin incorporating fabricated evidence in his report. continue reading… »

I have no idea why various policy people get so excited by Philip Blond. Everything he says sends my inner bullshit detector into sirens blaring overload. Even the title of his new thinktank make’s me think of Johnson from Peepshow. ResPublico/ResPublicus, anyone?

Anyway, whenever someone perfectly sensible tries to get their head arounds this stuff, they end up writing a thousand words on the complex inner contradictions and fuzzyness on specifics inherent in the “Red Tory” project, which is a polite Thinktank way of saying it’s a load of old toss.

I have a simpler version. It’s toss, with the sole interesting feature being that it is fashionable toss. Why it is fashionable is a far more interesting a question than what Philip Blond is actually saying.*

I mean read this stuff:

“A new power of association could be delivered to all citizens so that if they are indeed in an area that receives public services in a form that can be identified both by sector and by type and if area specific budgetary transparency is delivered such that each place knows what is being spent on it, then if those services are less than they should be in terms of quality, design or applicability, then there should be a new civil power of pre-emptory budgetary challenge that is given to any associative group that claims to represent those in its area”

Why is it such waffle? Because if it wasn’t, if it was clear and you knew anything about housing, you’d probably say something like, “ah, like a Tenant management organisation you mean? But hold on, arent’ they part of the state that’s destroying society a paragraph ago…” and then you’d go, “ah, this is all toss”.

Which it is. So don’t bother yourselves with it.

(BTW, If the transcript of the launch is to be believed, the one thing that can be said about red Toryism is that it is resolutely, indefatigably opposed to commas. This is not good.)

As someone once said to me – Many things that are provocative are not worth arguing with. Red Toryism is one such.

The Sunday Times yesterday carried news of a civil liberties campaign being launched by the TaxPayers’ Alliance in October.

TPA chief executive Matthew Elliott wants the campaign, called Big Brother Watch, “to become the central hub for the latest on personal freedom and civil liberty – a forum for information and discussion on something that directly affects British citizens in their everyday lives.”

In response, Spy Blog challenges many of the claims in Elliott’s article and asks:

Why exactly should Spy Blog, or anybody else who cares about these issues, support Yet Another Campaign Organisation rather than existing ones like:
• the NO2ID Campaign,
• Privacy International,
• GeneWatch UK,
• Open Rights Group
• the Foundation for Information Policy Research
• Liberty Human Rights.

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On Sunday Peter Beaumont wrote this article in the Observer asking: “What is the Climate Camp in London for?”
He goes on to quote approvingly from Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals (one of my favourite books ever) and then says:

I mention Alinsky because he seems to crystallise many of the failings, not just of the Climate Camp, but of significant sectors of the wider anti-war and anti-globalisation movement which have struggled either to articulate precisely what is their message or who have chosen, literally at times, to pitch their tent at the margins of the political debate.
…
Climate Camp, with its often hazy message and complex inner negotiations, with its indulgent obsession with its own workings, its insularity and the suggestion of elitism of its direct-action hard core, is in danger of becoming about Climate Camp, the institution, rather than about the wider fight to halt global warming. With all its energy and motivation, that would be a shame.

As applicable to Climate Camp itself, those are not criticism that should be dismissed so easily. But I see all this slightly differently. The problem is to assume that Climate Camp is the entirety of the environmentalism movement. It isn’t. It represents an arm of that movement: the more anarchic, activists interested in direct action and publicity stunts.
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Luke Akehurst:

Ordinary hard-working people want a better life for their families and not to be exploited. My guess is very few of them subscribe to limiting the wages of the people at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Tom Harris:

Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy, in particular, accuses me of seeking rightwing adulation by seeking to protect the rich. He’s not entirely wrong. I want the Labour party to continue to win the support, not just of our core vote, but of those Thatcher and Major supporters who switched to us in 1997 and who stuck with us for another one-and-a-half elections.

ComRes opinion polling this Sunday:

A High Pay Commission should be set up to curb excessive pay and bonuses:
Agree 65%
Disagree 31%
- Surprisingly there is little variance among different social groups
- Even 63% of Tories agree compared with 66% of Labour voters and 75% of Lib Dems

—–

So it seems that Tom and Luke’s ideas of what “ordinary hard-working people” and “Thatcher and Major supporters who switched to us in 1997 and who stuck with us for another one-and-a-half elections” might favour isn’t supported by the polling evidence.

That’s not to say that there aren’t good arguments against a High Pay Commission. But the argument that it isn’t popular is not one of them.

There’s a great little project happening in Regents Park at the moment. The Treehouse Gallery is an ever growing collective of artists, designers, musicians and educators, who have constructed their own public space in which to hold exhibitions and events.

I’ve been following the development of the events schedule for a few weeks now, which is steadily filling up with workshops and other events, but I don’t see much in the way of debates programmed. Surely some LibCon readers and writers could get together to argue about something? Localism is a live debate at the moment, and would seem a perfect topic to discuss in a community-made space. CSJ? Fabians? Demos? SMF?

Sunny recently wrote of the danger posed by Red Toryism to the left, following a Compass debate on Left and Right Communitarianism.

He argued that the left was unable to produce an effective counter-argument to Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism. He’s not alone in thinking that the left is in a state of intellectual disarray. It’s a symptom of the collapse of the New Labour project and the vacuum it has left behind it.

This intellectual predicament is nothing new. The Labour Party originally emerged out of Liberalism and developed its own socially conservative brand of communitarian politics – Labourism. It was never distinct enough nor intellectually confident enough to break ideologically with Liberalism. At the heart of Labour remains an unresolved conflictual relationship between Liberalism and communitarianism. This dilemma has tended to dominate the left more widely and kept various forms of socialism on the periphery.
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There are only so many ways round you can ask ‘what does it mean to be of the Left in Britain today?’ before you start to sound like Yoda in the small hours of a party conference booze-up. Nonetheless, yesterday’s launch of Demos’ new Open Left project, spearheaded by James Purnell, threw up some very interesting points.

Purnell believes that left ideology necessitates ‘choice in public services’, which is a tad rich coming from the man who single-handedly purged the welfare state of its last remaining shreds of compassion earlier this year with his intricate schemes for lie detector tests, workfare-style sickpay deals and a punitive scheme for addicts and alcoholics.
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Having failed in his attempt to knife Gordon Brown, it looks like James Purnell is positioning himself as the intellectual driver of the left. The think-tank Demos has given Purnell the space to develop an off-shoot: Open Left.

It’s nice to know Purnell has been thinking about “the left” outside the intellectually bankrupt Labour Party, especially given he tried his best to junk all left-wing ideals while in the cabinet. This is the same minister who: constructed a welfare-to-work programme that didn’t actually work; gave the go-ahead to an unworkable plan to force benefit claimants to lie-detector tests; had this silly plan for alcoholics. Don Paskini also tore apart the DWP’s plans for welfare reform here.

But in the spirit of comraderie, and avoiding the temptation to pour cold water over the project just because its run by James Purnell, here is their website. It features a sort of usual suspects outlining some ideas on what it means to be on the left. Do any catch your imagination? They also have a launch event today at 6pm. (via @josephlaking)

If you watched Ken Loach’s recent film It’s A Free World then this will sound eerily familiar. Busloads of Eastern European migrants lured into England with promises of a fast buck, savings and accomodation, only to discover slave labour.

Today’s Independent investigation focuses on the biggest fruit growers and suppliers to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, a company called S&A that, already back in 2005, grabbed a few headlines (though not enough) over ridiculous working conditions.
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contribution by Tim Finch from ippr

After shooting himself in the foot with “British jobs for British workers” you would have thought the Prime Minister had learnt his lesson. But no, just last week we had a story headlined in The Sun as “Local Homes for Local People”.

It was trailing an announcement by Gordon Brown that the government was going to change the rules on how social housing is allocated. It was made clear that councils were to be given more scope to prioritise the housing needs of local people – in other words, the white working class who deserted Labour in droves in the recent elections.
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post by regular commenter pagar

An IPPR report on defence procurement, published last week, questioned spending on resources used to fight wars against conventional armed forces and suggests a defence strategy concentrating on combating unconventional, terrorist and economic threats.

It questioned spending £10 billion on new aircraft carriers and £20 billion on Trident and says that the UK should stop trying to “punch above it’s weight” in international affairs.
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I wrote last year about a really interesting piece of research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which asked people to decide how much someone living in Britain today needs in order to be able to live on.

They have just released the updated version, Minimum Income Standard 2009. There are some really interesting and important findings:
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an article by Dan

There has been a lot of discussion of a new report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on attitudes towards tackling economic inequality (at Directionless Bones, Left Luggage, Sunder Katwala on CiF, Don Paskini at Liberal Conspiracy, and David Osler). Quoting Alderson at Directionless Bones, one of the key findings of the report is:

People didn’t seem to endorse the idea of ‘equality’ as a general principle as much as they endorsed ‘fairness’.

This is a point that several of the posts linked to above considered, and there has been a feeling that the left needs to find a new way to promote their view of the world to people (which traditionally is based on equality).
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My entirely apolitical buddy Nick – we played in a band together in the early eighties – puts the the fact that I am a socialist down to some inexplicable quirk I picked up while I was a wanky student and he was already doing a proper job of work in a bathroom supplies warehouse.

While I subsequently swanned around doing non-jobs and trying to foment world revolution, he knocked his bird up, secured a council flat which he was then able to buy ridiculously cheaply courtesy of Shirley Porter, climbed the property ladder and eventually established his own bathroom supply business, doing a roaring trade knocking out plush bog seats to the Bishop’s Avenue set at two grand a time.
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This is a guest post by Guy Aitchison

The word “crisis” is perhaps one of the most over-used in the lexicon, but when it comes to the astonishing collapse of political and economic orthodoxies in recent months it rings undeniably true.Is it a "good" crisis? Established modes of
thinking and organisation have been de-legitimated but it's not yet clear that anything radically new or different is going to take their place. Thinkers like Jeremy Gilbert have joined a growing call for new democratic forms to give individuals more meaningful control over their own lives, but so far the response from the political elite can best be described as “reforming so as to preserve”.

Can anything positive be taken from the simultaneous collapse in trust in the political system and the financial markets? How do we build beyond this crisis to secure much better liberty and democracy in the 21^st century?

This Saturday at the Compass conference a panel of thinkers and activists will discuss these questions and more at a workshop on "Radical democracy and imagination: people and power after the meltdown". Come and join the discussion.

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Is the TaxPayers Alliance’s latest report, ‘Could Do Better? Grading the Performance of British MEPs‘, its worst ever?

There’s no lack of competition, but this report is breathtakingly stupid.

MEPs are measured against criteria including “campaigning activity”. This is defined as “their frequency as internet hits, demonstrating campaigning and local activity”. However many times I read that explanation – and despite working as a web designer – I don’t understand it.
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