Though Cowards Flinch

He won’t tell me any details, but apparently Paul – yes, you know him, the one who writes on this blog – spoke to none other than Phillip Blond at the Labour Party conference, supposedly – and among other things – about me and my utilisation of the term “epistemic closure” to designate a good portion of the electorate who support the Conservative Party, despite being theoretically very removed from actual conservatism.

Paul has written some blog posts opposing my use of this term, so I can only imagine it was a critical conversation, but at least I got those two fogey’s talking.

Not one to blow my own, it turns out I’m not alone in thinking there is some parity in the Conservative Party and those for whom the charge “epistemically closed” had originally been levelled at by Julian Sanchez – those dreaded Tea Party folk in the US.

Four days ago, Patrick J. Buchanan of The American Conservative magazine – yes my favourite too – labelled Cameron the ‘Tea Party Tory’. (h/t Freddy Gray of the Speccie).

In fact, he goes further than I do. In my writings, I said Cameron is probably a limp-wristed leftie Tory who is able to sleep at night under the pretence he cares for the poor, but in order to be electable in his party, needs to appeal to a certain section of the party, what I call the epistemically closed section.

Buchanan, in fact, says that Cameron’s party’s cuts reflect exactly the ethos of the tea party – small government at a drastic scale.

No doubt as the money talks, Cameron’s soft social Toryism will be piss in the wind compared to the damage wielded by his cust agenda. Perhaps I didn’t go far enough in calling Cameron out for the epistemic closure inside his party.

Background articles:

The epistemic closure of the Conservative Party

Cameron will fail in reviving Conservatism

David Cameron and the Conservative identity crisis

Continuing what seems to be this week’s Economist-watch, there was an article on Cameron’s Big Society ideas, and how, despite myriad flaws with the concept, this part of the Tory manifesto simply wasn’t going to go away.

What the Economist doesn’t note, of course, is that with regard to public institutions such as libraries, this ‘renaissance of voluntarism’ (I kid you note – that’s a direct quote) basically means trying to replace paid experts with ‘volunteers’, to do the same job – thus killing jobs and strong unions in one go, and getting rid, incidentally, of the one way in which anyone other than the government could determine how our libraries are run – by trade union action.

That’s by the by.

What interested me was the way in which the Big Society is presented as regards democratic theory. Everyone knows how representative bodies work. We elect people on the basis of what we think they will do. The Economist presents Big Society as aiming to push one step past this, devolving power to “nano” level.

“Traditionally, [giving powers away] meant beefing up Britain’s important local authorities. But Mr Cameron wants to push power further down, to the ‘nano’ level. This vision sees parents helping to set up new schools, public-sector workers running their own services as co-operatives, and small groups of people volunteering on local projects.”

I would like to take a shot at arguing that this method is far from more democratic than the alternative of strong local authorities. Tory Co-ops and the small groups (or large groups, as Paul has taken to pieces the Tory ‘5000 community organisers‘ policy, billed before the General Election) of volunteers, this blog has dealt with at length. What about the parents helping to set up new schools?

Beyond basic educational concerns (e.g. the integrity of the scientific method, or preventing History relapsing into a paean to Empire, with the concomitant racism), I fail to see that allowing different sections of the community to hive off their children is especially democratic. Certainly in theory it gives a great deal of power to the parents, though as Fiona Millar rightly said in a recent Guardian debate, in reality this usually translates to devolving power to some charity or private provider, with parents unlikely even to be involved in choosing or supervising the headmaster.

But in order to do this, it’s directing resources away from other state schools in the area. So the plan risks creating excess capacity at the expense of other children. There’s also the point that each school has an optimum number of pupils; enough to make economies of scale, few enough to render the school environment safe and manageable. Free schools make this impossible to plan for.

The argument, made by Anders Hultin, chief executive of Gems UK, a private company intending to step into this scheme to start opening schools for profit, is that if the market was allowed to handle the Tory policy, schools would only open in areas with pre-existing demand. I find fault with this argument – demand doesn’t just exist, it can also be whipped up artificially. This is what advertising is for.

So there are ‘externalities’, if you like, to allowing for the willy-nilly creation of new schools (and Cameron’s talk of the actual buildings these free schools might use makes my toes curl). There’s also the more vague externality of permitting further segregation of the school-age populace. Further privatisation of education will be felt in the opposition created between the success of ‘my child’ and the success of every child.

Rather than fix the state system, which should also be much more accountable, via elected school boards and local education authorities, there’s the impetus to simply jump ship. Better education requires more money, intelligently spent, and high-quality teaching. But no more money is being offered and it should be a warning bell that the Dept. of Education is advertising free schools in the same way as Academies: as being exempt from the national collective bargaining agreements with NASUWT and the NUT.

If democracy is the theory that every person should have a say in decisions which affect them, then allowing people to hive themselves into free schools or, or be scaremongered into hiving themselves off, violates that principle. The effects of that decision run far beyond any parents who might be involved, to the whole teaching profession, to the whole of the education system and to whole local areas where allocation of funding must be altered.

In fact, if Academies are anything to go by, and Gove seems to think they’re a useful parallel, then the very parents and teachers responsible for free schools might end up feeling just as excluded.

The leaking of some 90,000 military files, detailing US and coalition prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, presents a stark lesson in the extent to which our government is not accountable for its actions.

Reading the Guardian this morning, there were several key points that contributed to this. The capricious treatment of the relatives of civilians killed by coalition forces is high on my list.

The war logs document that occasionally relatives would be paid some sort of compensation for the death of a family member; in other cases they were ignored or bullied into silence.

Assassination as a tactic employed by our government should also concern us. The matter of its legality to one side, it puts an enormous amount of power into the hands of people who aren’t accountable. It’s done in secret. The only reason we’re finding out about it – or finding out about the number of spectacularly botched attempts at it, often with the cost of many civilian lives – is because someone broke the law to bring us this information.

How can we talk about democracy and accountability when we’re killing people in secret?

Exposé after exposé has documented how the intelligence and PR arms of the military have tried to control the flow of information. The clear evidence of misinformation provided by the activities of US Task Force 373 (and a lesser UK equivalent) surely raises questions about how the people of this country can make an informed decision on the war, which is (according to the democratic theory) supposed to filter out through elections.

It is my firm belief that we cannot trust our government to wage any war – and that therefore we should never go to war so long as government and its executive arms are the preserve of a narrow clique, hedged around with secrecy.

As Duncan points out yesterday, as regards the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of the police (and as is the case in deaths-in-custody or deaths during police restraints too), our media and politicians are all too ready to offer justification and explain away official mistakes, to dismiss the idea of blame and accountability. It’s no different in war abroad than in the policing of political dissent at home.

One of the Trotskyist reasons for opposing an endorsement of Chamberlain’s government and its participation in World War II was that Trotsky and others believed that the British ruling class would capitulate if they could get terms favourable to British imperialism and capitalism. The bottom line was that, despite all the rhetoric about ‘national unity’, the ruling class was out for its own interests and would interpret the national interest however it liked.

We haven’t moved on terribly far from that position.

There’s no doubt that our armed forces are propping up an oppressive, dictatorial, nepotistic regime in Afghanistan; talk of peace with the Taliban surely provides the last kick in the teeth to anyone who genuinely believed the US-UK coalition were invading for truth, justice and the American way. They’re ignoring civilian deaths, condoning assassination and deliberately misinforming domestic media.

Faced with a gap between reality and rhetoric, our governments (whether Democratic or Republican in the US, Labour or Conservative in the UK) have chosen to interpret their original mission statement to suit their immediate needs. Bugger democracy, or women’s rights; a puppet government of whatever political orientation will do nicely. Never mind not moving on from World War II, we haven’t moved on from Lord Auckland.

Whether one thinks in terms of class, cliques, power elites or another system of sociological division, the government is self-interested. Labour quite happily sat on most of these secrets and the Conservatives have, in a stunning display of political cowardice, refused to comment. William Hague simply stayed on message: “We are working hard with our allies in Afghanistan on improving security on the ground, in increasing the capacity of the Afghan government.”

This makes sense. Answering questions about these problems highlights that actually the Tories have been behind the invasions from day one, and might open the door to more serious questions about what the hell we’re doing in Afghanistan at all. Apart from letting Pakistan’s intelligence service try and play the Taliban off against India, or destabilising northern Pakistan and extending the reach of Islamic extremism in Central Asia.

And what can we do about any of this? The answer is not a lot – and that enrages me.

Foreign policy news stories – whether about the use of chemical weapons at Fallujah in Iraq, about the assassination of trades unionists by groups supplied by the coalition, the oppression of women by the same groups or the brazen incompetence of the armed wings of the pro-coalition Afghan government – arrive, have an effect on opinion polls and then leave. Their practical effect is essentially zero.

NGOs like Human Rights Watch will appear in the newspapers to denounce the behaviour of the coalition armed forces. Opinion pieces will be fielded by the political Right to the effect that we’re fighting against an enemy that’s much worse (as though moral relativism is any justification). The majority of people will quietly be disgusted, David Cameron will make some platitudinous remark about troops coming home and the status quo will continue.

Disempowerment doesn’t get much more complete than that.

Today’s budget day played out an old ritual. One man with a red bag of office will reveal what he has decided the nation will spend and how it will raise taxes to finance this.

This is the way it is done, and this is the way it seems always to have been done, ‘democratic politics’ is played out around his decisions. The Labour Party will go into the election on the basis of these decisions and the Tories will oppose them, offering some half revealed alternative package deal.

The voters will, for once, have a yes no decision to make on the package in a couple of months. But what if you agree with some of the buget and not other parts, what if you agree with the level of education expenditure but not the level of naval procurement. What if you would prefer the top rate of tax to be 55% not 50%.

Tough!

Its take it or leave it.

There has to be a better way. If phone voting can be used to decide trivial issues like who should leave Big Brother, why can the public not have a say on the important issues that affect them.

It would be quite possible to put up a website with say half a dozen key questions
Should the top rate of tax go up 5%, down 5% or stay the same.
Should VAT go up by 2%, down, 2% or stay the same.
Should health expenditure go up 5%, down 5%, or stay the same.

Provided that the government had previously decided on the overall level of borrowing it is quite simple to count the votes and decide on a consensus level of taxes and expentitures. I show this in the talk I will be giving to the BCS conference next month.

If such a democratic budgeting system were introduced, and if there were provision for citizens initiatives on what questions were to be included in the vote, politics would change. Campaigns would arise focused around specific changes to the tax system that benefited different social classes.
These are questions that directly affect peoples pockets, and would provide a motivation for greater democratic engagement.

In Germany the new Die Linke programme drawn up by Lafontaine commits to this sort of budgeting.

There would of course have to be all sorts of provisions to protect against fraud, but we know how to make mobile phone voting secure, anonymous and verifiable. The Handivote system is one example.