Links I Liked

 1. Heads or Hands?

It’s interesting that we should get 2 new books in a single month challenging one of the basic principles of our times – namely meritocracy.

That they should appear just as we began to notice the paradox of the “essential workers” (nurses, dustbin-men) earning a pittance whilst the “symbolic analysts” (in Reich’s famous phrase) sit on their backsides and rake in millions is nothing short of prescient.  

The Tyranny of Merit – what’s become of the common good? is philosopher Michael Sandel’s attack on the principle which, he argues, has led to hubris amongst the victors and humiliation amongst the losers. In 2009 Sandel delivered the prestigious BBC Reith Lecture for that year – on “Markets and Morals”

 David Goodhart is unlikely to receive such an invitation (although under the present Johnson government anything is possible). His work is too challenging – if not distasteful - for well-endowed liberal cosmopolitans. He does, however, have my respectful attention.   

In his just-published Head, Hand, Heart – the struggle for dignity and status in the 21^st Century, Goodhart dares to question the emphasis on the importance of university education which became such a shibboleth in the 1970s….- unlike the more sensible Germany….who have always prized and honoured practical skills and had a strong vocational training tradition.

 2. Germany as Exemplar?

I have this past week been working on an article about the Sofia street protests for a guest post the first part of which will appear tomorrow (Tuesday) on Boffy’s Blog - and then on this one.

The article asks what progress central and eastern Europe has or has not made in the past 30 years…starting with a quote from a famous little book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” written in 1990 by the anglo-german academic and liberal statesman, Ralf Dahrendorf – to the effect that the development of effective civil society would take 2 generations (viz 50 years)    

 Dahrendorf was a brilliant Anglo-German intellectual who, more than 30 years before his “Revolution in Europe”, had written a revisionist take on “Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society” (1959 Eng trans) with which I was very taken just as I was starting my political sociology course.

A few years later he wrote a highly provocative analysis of his country - Society and Democracy in Germany (1967 Eng trans) – which argued that Germany could only then be called a “modern” society…..Nazism had at last broken the deference to authority which had until then been the country’s defining feature - this a mere 2 decades after Germany’s “Stunde Null”. The book caused quite a controversy both within and outside Germany. Geoffrey Eley was one British historian who disputed the analysis and went on to write an entire book about The Peculiarities of German History (1984)

 I’m reminded of all this by the release of yet another book about Germany - Why the Germans do it better – notes from a grown-up country

In the 1960s it was France and its planning system that many of us admired….it took another decade before we realised that the German Federal and training systems and worker representation on Boards were healthy features worth studying more closely.

It’s difficult to remember that the UK was the object of universal admiration if not envy – whereas it is now seen as a bit of a Banana Republic. Just look at the latest post on Chris Gray’s Brexit Blog – the descent into political insanity

I suppose one lesson is that all fortunes fall and rise – no one should ever give up hope on their country?

 3. Political Hubris – why we need to think seriously of Democracy by Lot

The idea of Citizen Assemblies has always impressed me – this article gives some recent examples.

It was Robert Michels’ Political Parties – a sociological study of the oligarchic tendencies of modern democracy (1911) which had alerted me in the 1960s to the insidious slide of political leadership - and made me so sympathetic to the German Greens attempts to control its leadership.  

 Pat Chalmers is one person with a vision of a different way of doing things. Author of Fraudcast News – how bad journalism supports our bogus democracies he has been campaigning for Democracy by Lot for some years.

After the recent UK and US experience of political leadership – which has allowed so-called leaders to run amok, I am at last persuaded that we do need to look seriously at this idea. We could start with this article….  

Collapse of an honourable profession

Politicians are – and have long been – a good scapegoat for a society’s problems. 

Spineless and avaricious…So what’s new?

Well, quite a lot actually. Fifty years ago, politics was important in Europe at any rate – ideas and choices mattered. 

It was actually almost an honourable profession – people like Bernard Crick argued thus in 1962 in a classic and highly eloquent “In Defence of Politics” which probably played some part in my own decision to go into (local, then regional) politics in 1968. (Daumier clearly had a different view of politicians in the early 19th century - which is why I've been using his caricatures to head this series of posts)

After a couple of years of community initiatives and three years of chairing an innovative social work committee, I found myself playing for 16 years a rather fascinating but unusual role – nominally the Secretary of a ruling group of politicians (responsible for some 100,000 local government professionals), I was actually trying to create a system of countervailing power - of advisory groups of councillors and junior officials challenging various conventional policy wisdoms; and of community groups in the huge swathe of poor neighbourhoods of the West of Scotland -  trying to demonstrate what “community enterprise” had to offer. 
Political studies had been one of the key parts of my Master's Degree - so I was aware of the literature about democracy (such as it was then) - and, more particularly, elites (Mosca; Pareto; Schumpeter; Lipset; Dahrendorf; Michels - interestingly none of it british!). 
But it was the experience of representing a low-income neighbourhood in a shipbuilding town which showed me the deficiencies of actual democracy and the reality of bureaucratic power. The local, working- class politicians who were my colleagues were pawns in the hands of the educated, middle class professionals who ran the local services. As a young middle class graduate, I saw an opportunity to challenge things - using my social science words and concepts - if not knowledge! 
I had been inspired by the community activism of people like Saul Alinsky (and also by the early years of the American War on Poverty) and indeed wrote in 1978 two 5,000 word articles for Social Work Today (on multiple deprivation; and community development). The latter critiqued the operation of democracy and appeared in a major book on community development.

Straddling power systems was not easy (part of the important balancing process I have spoken about) – but, because I was seen as honest (if eccentric), no one could unseat me from the post (for which I competed every two years - from 1974-1990) as Secretary of the ruling Cabinet and Group of 78 Regional Councillors.

I was also lucky also to have access in the 1980s to various European working groups – and get a sense of how politicians and officials interacted there. And, most of the time, still an academic. I was in the middle of a complex of diverse groups – political, professional, local, national and European. It was the best education I ever had!

But by the late 1980s I was beginning to see the writing on the wall – Thatcher was privatising and contracting out local government functions – and abolishing any elected agency which tried to stand up to her. Greed was beginning to be evident. Thereafter I have watched events from a distance. I left British shores in late 1990 and became a bit of a political exile! 

Despite my unease with Blair and the New Labour thing, I was still excited by their arrival in government in 1997. And able to draft, even in the early 2000s, papers which extolled the apparent openness and creativity of British policy systems. 

But most of it, I now realise, was sheer verbiage and spin. Yesterday's post summarised the key points of the 1995 paper which superbly analysed the various phases political parties have gone through to reach their present impasse.

George Monbiot’s 2001 book “The Corporate State – the corporate takeover of Britain” - exposing the extent of new Labour’s involvement with big business - was my first real warning that things were falling apart; that the neo—liberal agenda of market rather than state power was in total control. And a wave of urbane, smooth-suited and well-connected young wannabe technocrats powering through the selection procedures.

The scale and nature of political spin – not least that surrounding the Iraq war - destroyed government credibility like a slow poison. 

The global debt crisis and bank bail-outs shattered the myth of progress. 

And then the media made sure to rub politicians’ noses in the petty excesses of expenditure claims. 

Both political parties haemorraged members – and then electoral support.

There are still some lone voices prepared to defend the political class - but it is a pointless task.

The political party as we know it has exhausted its capital – but still controls the rules of the game. They decide the laws; who is allowed to run; what qualifies as a party – with how many nominees or voter threshold; with what sort of budget; and with sort of (if any) television and radio coverage…

Parties should be abolished – but it is almost impossible to do so because they will always come back in a different form…….

I’m just looking at a book which focuses on the fringes of the European party system – the populist parties – and which does a good job of setting them in the wider context.

We have governments that no longer know how to govern; regulators who no longer know how to regulate; leaders who no longer lead; and an international press in thrall to all those hapless powers. Political parties no longer represent, banks no longer lend……Current political and social conditions are paradoxical: as citizens and individuals we live lives that reflect the fact that we have more information and more access to information than ever before – while at the same time we have a great deal less certainty about our futures, both individual and collective. We are, some would argue, increasingly living in conditions of ‘radical uncertainty’. …..

Uncertainty returns and proliferates everywhere.’ As a result, one of the key variables that needs to be factored into how we understand both demands and mobilisation on the one hand and policies and institutions on the other is anxiety.Not the niggles and worries of everyday life, but rather the surfacing of deep turmoil in the face of an uncertain future whose contours are barely perceptible and thus increasingly frightening.

And, though the condition of radical uncertainty might have existed, objectively, in the past, it existed at times when there had been no experience or expectation of the predictability of the future beyond that imagined in the context of religious or magical beliefs. No experience of the desirability and possibility of controlling our fate. Radical uncertainty in a world in which everyone has come to prize autonomy and control is a different proposition all together 

The digital revolution provides an impetus for the transformation of populism from a set of disparate movements with some shared themes and characteristics into something that has the force of a political ideology. The accelerated quality of political time and social media’s capacity to broadcast failure and dissent mean that the digital revolution gives populist movements a steady supply of political opportunity that reinforces its coherence. ...

And in the face of the rather colossal set of forces and transformations that fuel populism’s growth, curbing its destructive potential is about more than fiddling with an electoral manifesto here and changing an electoral strategy there. Those things need to be done, but they are minimum survival tactics rather solutions. The problem is the manner in which populism as an ideology is capable of marshalling the uncertainties and anxieties that characterise our era and responding in ways that provide the illusion of reassurance. Illusory though it may be, it fills that gap between the expectations of redemptive democracy on the one hand and the lacklustre manoeuvring of panicked policy-makers on  the other. A gap otherwise filled with uncertainty and anxiety becomes  filled with populist reassurance.

Political Parties as Parasites

It was in Bulgaria where I first encountered the phenomenon of proportional voting which has become such a dominant feature of Europe’s political system. Two colleagues on my project were at the same time local councillors – but not elected. They had simply been put on the party list. 

Grounded as I have been in both the political theory and practice of accountability, they were not real politicians. They owed their position entirely to their party bosses (which they could as quickly lose). 

More to the point, they had not campaigned and sought the votes of local constituents; nor held “surgeries” to hear people’s complaints and problems and thereby get a sense of public feelings. I do realise that there are a variety of PR systems available, including the mixed -member system - but my basic point stands.

In various countires I have used a diagram with a quadrant – to show the 4 very different pressures (audiences) which good politicians needed to have regard to – the local community; the party; the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered; and their conscience.

Politicians differed according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these quadrants. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – eg populist; ideologue; statesman; maverick. I tried to suggest that the effective politician was the one who resisted the temptation to be drawn into any one of these roles. 

• The "populist" (or Tribune of the people) simply purports to gives the people what (s)he thinks they want - regardless of logic, coherence or consequences. 
• The "ideologue" (or party spokesman) simply reflects what the party activist (or bosses) say - regardless of logic etc. 
• The "statesman" (or manager) does what the professional experts in the appropriate bit of the bureaucracy tell him/her - regardless of its partiality etc
• the "maverick" (or conviction politician) does what they think right (in the quiet of their conscience or mind - no matter how perverted) 

Each has its element of truth - and it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership 
All this came back to me as I read a paper (from 1995) which, looking at the relationship of the political party to both society and the state, nicely tracks the historical trajectory of the politician. First “grandees” (above it all); then later “delegates” (of particular social interests), then later again, in the heyday of the catch-all party, “entrepreneurs”, parties, the authors argued, have now become “semi-state agencies”. The article has some simple but useful diagrams showing how the three entities of political party, society and state have altered their interactions and roles in the last century.

     

We are told that proportional representation gives citizens a much stronger chance of their preferences being expressed in the final makeup of a Parliament. 

But that fails to deal with the reality of the party boss. 

Politicians elected for geographical constituencies (as distinct from party lists) have (some at least) voters breathing down their necks all year round. 

Not so those from the party lists who only have to bother about the party bosses who, in the past few decades, have got their snouts increasingly stuck in the state (and corporate) coffers.

The classic mass party is a party of civil society, emanating from sectors of the electorate, with the intention of breaking into the state and modifying public policy in the long-term interests of the constituency to which it is accountable. The "catch-all" party, while not emerging as a party of civil society, but as one that stands between civil society and the state, also seeks to influence the state from outside, seeking temporary custody of public policy in order to satisfy the short-term demands of its pragmatic consumers. In short, despite their obviously contrasting relations with civil society, both types of party lie outside the state, which remains, in principle, a neutral, party-free arena…..In the third model, parties are less the agents of civil society acting on, and penetrating, the state, and are rather more like brokers between civil society and the state, with the party in government (i.e. the political ministry) leading an essentially Janus-like existence. On one hand, parties aggregate and present demands from civil society to the state bureaucracy, while on the other they are the agents of that bureaucracy in defending policies to the public….. 

Looking at the three models as a dynamic rather than as three isolated snapshots, suggests the possibility that the movement of parties from civil society towards the state could continue to such an extent that parties become part of the state apparatus itself. It is our contention that this is precisely the direction in which the political parties in modern democracies have been heading over the past three decades. 

(We have seen a massive) decline in the levels of participation and involvement in party activity, with citizens preferring to invest their efforts elsewhere, particularly in groups where they can play a more active role and where they are more likely to be in full agreement with a narrower range of concerns, and where they feel they can make a difference. The more immediate local arena thus becomes more attractive than the remote and inertial national arena, while open, single-issue groups become more appealing than traditional, hierarchic party organizations.

Parties have therefore been obliged to look elsewhere for their resources, and in this case their role as governors and law-makers made it easy for them to turn to the state. Principal among the strategies they could pursue was the provision and regulation of state subventions to political parties, which, while varying from country to country, now often constitute one of the major financial and material resources with which the parties can conduct their activities both in parliament and in the wider society.

The growth in state subvention over the past two decades, and the promise of further growth in the coming years, has come to represent one of the most significant changes to the environment within which parties act……subventions which are generally tied to prior party performance or position - whether defined in terms of electoral success or parliamentary representation – and therefore help to ensure the maintenance of existing parties while at the same time posing barriers to the emergence of new groups.

In a similar vein, the rules regarding access to the electronic media, which, unlike the earlier printed media, are subject to substantial state control and/or regulation, offer a means by which those in power can acquire privileged access, whereas those on the margins may be neglected. Again, the rules vary from one country to another, and in some cases are clearly less restrictive, and less important, than others; nevertheless, the combination of the importance of the electronic media as a means of political communication, on the one hand, and the fact that these media are regulated by the state, and hence by the parties in the state, on the other, offers the parties a resource which was previously inconceivable.

This is one of several posts I intend to produce to deal with the widespread public unease with and distaste for democratic politics as currently being practised globally.

Bulgarian Hopes

I was ashamed to find myself responding cynically at the weekend to Bulgarian friends who had expressed surprise at my lack of recent comment on the continuing Bulgarian protests and standoff. They’ve lasted a year - and had the President suggesting last week making voting compulsory.  
“No protest movement ever achieves anything” I announced in worldly tones.

“Any momentary progress is immediately clawed back – or numerous distracting stratagems (like war) brought into play” I might have added.

Shame on me! To forget and thus to denigrate the power of the working class efforts of the 20^th century - or those of present-day Chinese – or of the social movements of the last quarter of the 20^th century in Latin America (against fascist murderers and corporate America) – let alone the mass protests in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany which led to the breaching of the Wall; and the “hopes of spring” in North Africa in recent years.

Of course it always seems to be a question of one step forward – and three back. But since when did we expect life to be easy?

The Feudal class is always with us – rubbing our noses in it……..looking greedily for opportunities for exploitation. Here we are, 25 years after the Fall of the Wall – and any serious retrospective would have to make it a disastrous call. People’s lives have been seriously blighted – and moral corruption seeps through everyone’s veins. Little wonder that more than half of the population in all the countries of central and Eastern Europe regrets what was let go…..

Gene Sharp has been one of the most quoted champions of the change process (after, that is, people like Gandhi; Martin Luther King; and Saul Alinsky. 

The American Sharp has come late to stardom - see the latest version of his From Dictatorship to Democracy  His work has clearly been useful to the activists of the various Occupy movements globally.

But can we really separate process from content?  A lot of foreign cash has actually gone into supporting these “revolutions” and the hand of corporate power is clearly evident in the agenda of privatising public resources which is now being pushed by the European Commission as part of a wider and scandalous WTO effort. 

The Violence of Non-violence is an article which suggests that this is an inevitable consequence of Sharp-like emphasis on process. And this is certainly borne out by my own experience 20 years ago in Romania when I took part in several weekend schools for young politicians. The young Americans leading these courses put all the emphasis on developing electoral skills, on marketing – and absolutely none on policy issues.

The Bulgarian protests will be a year old next week. They started over anger at the hiking of electricity prices and led quickly to the collapse of the Government but were fuelled by disgust over the behaviour of the political class as a whole. In the past few months, students and academic staff seemed to take a more prominent role in these protests and I don’t know how much the thinking has changed in the past year. A year ago I wrote that -

On the political side, demands have gone even further to seek an overhaul of the political system in Bulgaria. They have made clear that the system has to be changed in such a way that when the next party comes to power, it can no longer behave the way all governments in Bulgaria have for the past 24 years. There have to be checks on political power and mechanisms to prevent collusion between politicians, private economic interests and organised crime. Protesters are currently calling for a Constituent Assembly to be formed to change the constitution and develop mechanisms of direct involvement of citizens in government matters. There have been proposals of specific measures to be taken such as: cutting the number of members of parliament to 240; stripping them of immunity; establishing procedures for early dismissal; establishing 50 percent citizens' controlling quota in state institutions.
In short, a new system has to be established in which elected officials do what they are elected to do, and citizens are close enough to them to make sure they do it.

The idea of a Constituent Assembly smacked to me of the French Revolution but comes, Iunderstand, more from the Icelandic aftermath to its financial crash and utter loss of faith of the Icelandic people in its system of government. A Constitutional Council put a new constitution to a referendum at the end of the year - but it does not contain the radical proposals which Icelandic citizen groups suggested The Bulgarian proposals seems to draw on the work of the Icelandic citizen associations but Bulgarians should be aware of the limitations of the Icelandic process - and of the basic fact that constitutional debate and new settlements cannot be rushed if the people are to have any trust in the outcome.

Ivan Daraktchiev is the brains behind the Zaedno website (it means "Together" in Bulgarian) which gives one angle on the issues from someone who is Bulgarian but has spent most of his recent life in Belgium. He has just uploaded a key paper - The Revolution within Democracy - onto the English part of the Zaedno website and a comprehensive statement of the requirements of a radically different type of constitutional settlement can be found on page 6. To many it will seem utopian - and I hope to do it justice in a future post.

Ruling a Void

OK - the last 2 posts gave the 10 golden rules for corrupting the political class – at least according to Anthony Jay the highly successful scriptwriter of the "Yes Minister" television series of 35 years ago.

The question is whether these in fact give us the basic reasons for the “hollowing out” of British (and European) democracy……during that period. 

Voters and citizens no longer consider that parties and politicians represent their concerns – they vote in decreasing numbers and with increasing cynicism. 

Let’s remind ourselves that Jay identified the following stratagems for the powerful to retain power  -

• Centralise revenue
• Centralise authority
• ensure the Prime Minister is captured
• Insulate the Cabinet
• Enlarge constituencies
• Overpay MPs
• Appoint rather than elect
• Ensure that civil servants are permanent – but Ministers highly temporary
• Appoint more staff
• Keep state affairs secret – whatever the laws about Open Government may say

I’ve read a hell of a lot about democracy during this period. You might indeed say that its been my bread and butter since, between 1970 and 1990, I got my cash variously from state coffers - a combination of Polytechnic and local government sources - operating as a local government politician and writing about the various efforts to improve its practice.

My (much better) fees since then have come overtly from commercial sources – but all of the companies I have worked for since 1991 have been under contract to the European Commission. And the focus of my work in the last 20 years has been the building of the capacity of local and central government systems in central Europe and Central Asia…….Its ironic that the democratic models we held up to those “transitional systems”  for emulation proved to be disintegrating even as we spoke……Talk about hubris!

I find it curious, first, that I seem to have been the first to upload Anthony Jay’s piece – and therefore to subject it to analysis. The academics who write about democracy (and there are thousands!) clearly view the satire as beneath their dignity….

But Jay score 8 out of 10 in my reckoning for his analysis – I would fault only his points about staffing. Civil servant contracts have actually become highly contractual – and also the subject of fairly severe cutbacks. But the fact still remains that it is the senior (rather than junior) staff who have been laughing all the way to the bank…….with inflated salaries and pensions.  

The question remains, however, whether his points (however satirically meant) actually capture the true reasons for the collapse of political legitimacy? 

One point, for example, commonly made in discussions is that the political class has now become younger and very incestuous – moving quickly from academia into think-tanks and positions as aides to politicians before themselves becoming politicians. In short, they accumulate favours and networks which make them highly dependent and malleable….. And they use a managerial language which not only alienates but reflects a consensual ideology about the limits of state action enshrined in “neo-liberalism”.

Peter Oborne is a British journalist who wrote a critical book on this subject in 2008 called The Triumph of the Political Class. A month ago he enthused about a new academic book about the “hollowing of democracy” and it is to his views I want to devote the rest of this post. The basic question about the reasons for the degeneration of politics will be continued in future posts.

Every so often one comes across a book, a poem or a work of art that is so original, perfectly crafted, accurate and true that you can’t get it out of your head. You have to read or look at it many times to place it in context and understand what it means.In the course of two decades as a political reporter my most powerful experience of this kind came when a friend drew my attention to a 20-page article in an obscure academic journal.Written by the political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair, and called “The Emergence of a Cartel Party”, it immediately explained almost everything that had perplexed me as a lobby correspondent: the unhealthy similarity between supposedly rival parties; the corruption and graft that has become endemic in modern politics; the emergence of a political elite filled with scorn and hostility towards ordinary voters. My book, The Triumph of the Political Class was in certain respects an attempt to popularise that Katz and Mair essay.

Several months ago I was shocked and saddened to learn that Peter Mair (whom I never met) had died suddenly, while on holiday with his family in his native Ireland, aged just 60. However, his friend Francis Mulhern has skilfully piloted into print the book he was working on at the time of his death. It is called Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, and published by Verso. In my view it is every bit as brilliant as the earlier essay.The opening paragraph is bold, powerful, and sets out the thesis beautifully: “The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.” 

The first half of Mair’s new book concentrates on this crisis in party democracy. He tracks the sharp fall in turn-out at elections, the collapse of party membership (the Tories down from three million in the Fifties to scarcely 100,000 today, a drop of 97 per cent) and the decay of civic participation. Mair shows that this is a European trend. All over the continent parties have turned against their members. Political leaders no longer represent ordinary people, but are becoming, in effect, emissaries from central government. All of this is of exceptional importance, and central to the urgent contemporary debate about voter disenchantment.

However, I want to concentrate on the second half of Mair’s book, because here the professor turns to the role played by the European Union in undermining and bypassing national democracy.He starts with a historical paradox. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 was in theory the finest moment for Western democracy. But it was also the moment when it started to fail. Mair argues that political elites have turned Europe into “a protected sphere, safe from the demands of voters and their representatives”.This European political directorate has taken decision-making away from national parliaments. On virtually everything that matters, from the economy to immigration, decisions are made elsewhere. Professor Mair argues that many politicians encouraged this tendency because they wanted to “divest themselves of responsibility for potentially unpopular policy decisions and so cushion themselves against possible voter discontent”. This means that decisions which viscerally affect the lives of voters are now taken by anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than politicians responsible to their voters.

Though the motive has been understandable, the effect has been malign, making politicians look impotent or cowardly, and bringing politics itself into contempt. The prime ministers of Greece, Portugal and Spain are now effectively branch managers for the European Central Bank and Goldman Sachs. By a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.In a devastating analogy, Mair conjures up Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French thinker who is often regarded as the greatest modern theorist about democracy. Tocqueville noted that the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy fell into contempt because they claimed privileges on the basis of functions that they could no longer fulfil. The 21st-century European political class, says Mair, is in the identical position. To sum up, the European elites have come very close to the abolition of what we have been brought up to regard as politics, and have replaced it with rule by bureaucrats, bankers, and various kinds of unelected expert. So far they have got away with this. This May’s elections for the European Parliament will provide a fascinating test of whether they can continue to do so. 

The European Union claims to be untroubled by these elections. A report last month from two members of the Jacques Delors Institute concluded that “the numerical increase of populist forces will not notably affect the functioning of the [European Parliament], which will remain largely based on the compromises built between the dominant political groups. This reflects the position of the overwhelming majority of EU citizens”. I wonder. In France, polls suggest that the anti-semitic Front National, which equates illegal immigrants with “organised gangs of criminals”, will gain more votes than the mainstream parties.

The Front National has joined forces with the virulently anti-Islamic Geert Wilders in Holland, who promises to claim back “how we control our borders, our money, our economy, our currency”. Anti-European parties are on the rise in Denmark, Austria, Greece and Poland. These anti-EU parties tend to be on the Right, and often the far-Right. For reasons that are hard to understand, the Left continues enthusiastically to back the EU, even though it is pursuing policies that drive down living standards and destroy employment, businesses and indeed (in the case of Greece and Spain) entire economies. In Britain, for example, Ed Miliband is an ardent supporter of the European project and refuses even to countenance the idea of a referendum.

Like Miliband, Peter Mair comes from the Left. He was an Irishman who spent the majority of his professional life working in European universities in Italy, the Netherlands or Ireland. And yet he has written what is by far and away the most powerful, learned and persuasive anti-EU treatise I have come across. It proves that it is impossible to be a democrat and support the continued existence of the European Union.

His posthumous masterpiece deserves to become a foundation text for Eurosceptics not just in Britain, but right across the continent. It is important that it should do so. The battle to reclaim parliamentary democracy should not just belong to the Right-wing (and sometimes fascist) political parties. The Left and Right can disagree – honourably so – on many great issues. But surely both sides of the ideological divide can accept that democracy is still worth fighting for, and that the common enemy has become the European Union.

The painting is Daumier's "Belly of the Beast"

The hollowing out of Democracy

Re-reading Denis Healey’s memoirs brought home to me how puny and spineless (“hollowed out” is perhaps the appropriate phrase) our current politicians now seem – compared with the generation of Healey and his friend Helmut Schmidt (who celebrated his 95th birthday just before Christmas). How has such degeneration happened? It was that question which prompted me to look again at Anthony Jay’s essay “Democracy, Bernard? It must be stopped!” and to reproduce parts of it yesterday. 
I was also prompted (by Healey's mention of "politics as a vocation") to look again at Max Weber’s classic talk on “Politics as Vocation” delivered in the heat of revolutionary Germany of 1919 - and to discover that a major talk on this subject was given just a week or so by the Head of a British Think Tank. For the moment, however, let me finish with the excerpts from the satirical piece from the Head of the Civil Service about the tactics for castrating the political process

5. Enlarge constituencies.  Our present electoral system derives from the 1832 Reform Act. It was a very dangerous system. The average number of voters in a constituency was only about 1,200, which meant that an MP could personally know virtually all of them. This meant that, if he was liked and respected locally, he would be re-elected, even if he disobeyed the whips and voted in accordance with the demands of his constituents and his conscience rather than the instructions of his party. This severely weakened the Prime Minister's control on which the system depends.But, since then, we have contrived, in the name of democracy, to increase constituency sizes to 50,000 or 60,000, so that no MP can be elected on voters' personal knowledge of him. They vote for the party, and if the party does not endorse him, he will not be elected. His job, therefore, depends on the Prime Minister's approval and not on the respect of his constituents; a splendid aid to discipline. Equally, we have increased the typical urban constituency ward to about 25,000, with some four councillors. Since one councillor to 6,000 people might have led to an undesirable independence of thought and action, we have arranged matters so that a group of four councillors jointly represent the whole ward, so that householders are unlikely even to know the name of their democratic representative. They, therefore, vote (the few who take the trouble) according to their party preferences, thus reinforcing the hold of the national parties on local government.

 6. Overpay MPs.  Even when MPs depend on the party machine for re-selection and re-election, some are occasionally tempted to step out of line. This risk can be significantly reduced if rebellion means not only loss of party support but also significant loss of income. Few will risk forfeiting the now generous emoluments and allowances of an MP and reverting to the humble salary of a school teacher, social worker or minor trade union official simply on a point of democratic principle. It is, therefore, our duty to encourage all increases in MPs' pay

 7. Appointments, not elections. Parliament, of course, has to be elected, but, as we have seen, this causes little problem so long as the government maintains its firm central control of the MPs. The system, however, is deeply flawed: it can substitute craven capitulation to the ignorant and irresponsible mob for sensible control by a cultivated and experienced elite.It is our duty to resist this with all our strength. The preservation of civilised values in a country of some 60 million people cannot be entirely discharged by a few of us in Whitehall: much of the task has to be delegated to people such as BBC governors, the ITC, the Arts Council, the Commission for Ancient Monuments, National Heritage, the Fine Arts Commission, magistrates, the Bank of England and a host of authorities, commissions, councils, tribunals, regulatory bodies, agencies, working parties, advisory committees and quangos of every description. The only sensible way to fill all these posts is by government appointment, so that proper care can be exercised in their selection and so that the incumbents, when chosen, will know to whom they owe their new eminence, while those hoping for such posts (as with honours and peerages) can be trusted to behave responsibly in the hope of favours to come. 

8. Permanent officials, rotating ministers. The task of preserving a cultured and enlightened nation requires continuity. That continuity must rest with those of us who know what we are fighting for and fighting against. It cannot possibly be entrusted to politicians. We have, therefore, built an excellent system of a few transient amateur ministers who are coached, informed, guided and supported by a large department of permanent, experienced officials who enable them to take the correct decisions.You have now served our department for 30 years; your present minister has held his job for 10 weeks and cannot, on average, expect to be there for more than another 12 or 18 months if he has any ability. If not, there is no problem. You will, therefore, I am sure, be able to prevent him making any foolish popular decisions before the music stops and he scrambles desperately for an empty chair. Furthermore, our electoral system ensures that when the populace becomes dissatisfied with the system, they can be deluded into thinking they are changing it by replacing one lot of inexperienced amateurs with another, leaving the professionals to continue uninterrupted, and relieved of the burden of the few ministers who were starting to understand their job. The new arrivals can quickly be helped to realise that the purpose of government is not to carry out the will of the electorate, but simply to secure its consent to the measures proposed by its betters. 

9. Increase the number of public employees. “Public ignorance is our ally".Any government must employ staff, if only in the Armed Services, the police, the judiciary, the Diplomatic Service and the Exchequer. But those basic functions on their own cannot justify the level of taxation and degree of control that we need to fulfil our historic function. We, therefore, need to increase the number of public employees whenever the opportunity presents itself.
There are three reasons for this: it increases the volume of government revenue, it extends the area of government control, and it enlarges the pool of voters who have an interest in preserving the system that employs them. 

10. Secrecy. One of our greatest allies is public ignorance. It is, therefore, imperative that the minimum amount of information be disclosed to the press, parliament and the public. Our success is based on the principle that no information should be disclosed unless there is a good reason why it should be.From time to time, opposition parties press for a freedom of information Act, but oppositions become governments and it does not take long for a government to discover that real freedom of information would make their job impossible. It is, however, a good idea to pass the odd freedom of information Act, so long as its provisions do not actually free up any important sensitive information. It is significant that the only party that has consistently argued for real freedom of information has not held office since 1915. 

Beyond this, I can only point you towards the breathtaking achievements of our colleagues in Brussels. To be frank, I do not see any prospect of our rivalling them. Their commissioners, like our permanent secretaries, do not have to endure the ignominy of grubbing votes from the plebs, and, unlike us, do not have to pretend to be subservient to a political master. 

Being answerable to 15 ministers from different countries, most of whom are hostile to each other, and would be even more hostile if they could understand each other's languages, gives them almost complete independence of action. They have also ensured that only the Commission can bring forward legislation, thus avoiding the tedious, irritating and ill-informed ministerial scrutiny we have to endure drafting Bills. 

And since the European electorate speaks so many different languages, it is impossible for genuine European political parties to form, thereby making any serious danger of democracy quite inconceivable.
Obviously, success on that scale is out of our reach, but we can look on Brussels as a guiding star which we must follow, even if we know we cannot land on it.

What hope for democracy?

The castration of democracy by corporate power has been a recurring theme in my blogs – and I did on one occasion even suggest that the lack of fundamental policy differences between parties made us little different from Communist China

And this time 2 years ago I gave a link to a book, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy by David Shearman, without appreciating that its critique of liberal democracy and its apparent inability to challenge corporate interests has the authors arguing in considerable detail for a more authoritarian system of government. Naturally the book has been useful to those denying climate change – allowing them to claim that climate change is a plot by fascist big government.   

M Greer ( as a "peak oil" writer) seems to have been one of the few to subject the book’s argument to a more serious analysis

It’s worth glancing back over the last decade or so to get a sense of the way this book fits into the broader process by which climate change activism ran off the rails. In 2001, despite fierce opposition from business interests and right-wing parties generally, it was very much in the ascendant, and some form of regulation of carbon emissions looked like a done deal. Opposition from the White House and well-funded think tanks notwithstanding, the movement to limit CO2 emissions could have become the sort of juggernaut that extracted the Endangered Species Act and a flurry of other environmental legislation from another conservative Republican administration thirty years earlier. That it did not was, I think, the result primarily of three factors.
The first was the astonishing political naivete of the climate change movement. Most of the leading figures in the climate change movement are used to the very different culture of scientific debate and simply have no notion how to address the very different needs of public debate in society that does not share their values.
This latter point leads to the second primary factor in the failure of the climate change movement, which is the extent that it attempted to rely on the prestige of institutional science at a time when that prestige has undergone a drastic decline. The public has become all too aware that the expert opinion of distinguished scientists has become a commodity, bought and sold for a price that these days isn’t always discreetly disguised as grant money or the like. The public has also been repeatedly shown that the public scientific consensus of one decade is fairly often the discarded theory of the next. When you grow up constantly hearing from medical authorities that cholesterol is bad for you and polyunsaturated fats are good for you, and then suddenly he medical authorities are saying that polyunsaturated fats are bad for you and some kinds of cholesterol are good, a certain degree of blind faith in the pronouncements of scientists goes out the window.
The mental whiplash caused by sudden changes in scientific opinion, each one announced to the public in terms much less tentative than it generally deserves, has played a larger role in hamstringing climate change activism than most of its supporters may find it comfortable to admit.
 I’ve come to think that a third factor has played at least as important a role in gutting the climate change movement. This is the pervasive mismatch between the lifestyles that the leadership of that movement have been advocating for everyone else and the lifestyle that they themselves have led. When Al Gore, after having been called out on this point, was reduced to insisting that his sprawling mansion has a lower carbon footprint than other homes on the same grandiose scale, he exposed a fault line that runs straight through climate change activism.
I long ago lost track of the number of times I’ve heard people in one or another corner of the activist scene throw up their hands in despair and describe the task of organizing people to seek some form of change or other as being like trying to herd cats. In point of fact, herding cats is one of the easiest things in the world. All you have to do is go to the place you want the cats to go, carrying with you a can of tuna and a can opener. The moment the cats smell the fragrance of the tuna, they’ll come at a run, and you’ll have your herd exactly where you want them. Now of course that strategy assumes two things. It assumes that you’re willing to go to the place you want the cats to go, and it also assumes that you have something to offer them when they get there.
That sums up what has been one of the most critical problems with the climate change movement: it has been calling on the world to accept a lifestyle that the movement’s own leaders have shown no willingness to adopt themselves, and thus have been in no position to model for the benefit of others. That’s left the movement wide open to accusations that it means its policies to apply only to other people – accusations that have not exactly been quelled by the efforts of various countries, the US very much included, to push as much of the burden of carbon reduction as possible onto their political and economic rivals. I trust I don’t have to spell out how such suspicions will be amplified by Shearman’s cheerleading for exactly the sort of authoritarian politics in which some people’s carbon footprint would inevitably be more equal than others’.

For a wide-ranging discussion of the relationship of democracy to climate change see here.
And Stephen Holmes - the political scientists who focuses on post-communism - has written a very thoughtful piece on the reasons for the current disillusionment with democracy. It is quite remarkable to find an American writing in these terms -

To understand why citizens today, throughout the world, cannot easily control politicians by democratic means, we need to look at the way in which various extra-electoral forms of dependency of politicians on citizens have recently been eroded. To oversimplify, we can say that the citizen-voter has leverage over ruling groups only when he or she is also a citizen-soldier, a citizen-worker, and a citizen-consumer. The few are willing to share power and wealth with the many only when the many voluntarily cooperate with the few in their war-making and profit-making. When volunteer armies with high-tech weapons replace citizen levies, one of the main motives for elite interest in public welfare is substantially weakened. The flooding of the labour market by a low-cost Chinese workforce has also reduced the interest of the American and European capitalist class in the health and education of American and European workers. Taken together, the disappearance of the citizen-soldier and the diminished status and clout of the citizen-worker have considerably reduced the leverage which the citizen-voter can bring to bear on society's top decision-makers. This erosion has become a total destruction in the case of Russia, where the hydrocarbon bonanza (sold to foreigners) has liberated the ruling elite from citizen-consumers as well. 

the demise of the citizen

I’m not a technical geek – so it was a bit of a surprise when I realised a couple of months ago that the information and references I receive when I google are in fact personalised to me on the basis of a personal profile the google machine has built on me from my internet activity. New York Review of Books has just published an interesting, wider review of the role of Google.

In this part of the world, an individual citizen is remarkably free from the sort of social controls on development we are used to in northern europe. Houses spring up without any sort of municipal approval; and of, course, two factors make it difficult to develop such a system here. First the municipal officials simply don’t exist to make it work; and, initially at any rate, any attempt to develop a planning system would be totally corrupt. People would simply buy the required permissions. The British planning system can, of course, sometimes go too far, with even minor adjustments to one’s home requiring protracted negotiation. But noone, as far as I am aware, has even suggested abolishing the system. Most citizens accept that the protection of the "greenbelt”; public parks; historical features; some element of aesthetic propriety are worth a little bit of bureacracy. I was appalled to learn that all of this could be thrown away by the coalition government in Britain.

The recent coverage of the Murdoch family and empire has focussed on the minutiai of who knew what. We must not lose sight of the fact that this is an empire which has successfully controlled government agendas and made a mockery of democracy.
And a good "take” on the current US crisis – and, again, how it has exposed the lack of any democracy in that country can be found on Real Economics.

New perspectives on democracy and the global financial crisis

Just as my watering poor eyes are beginning to tell me that I should be dramatically cutting back on the time I spend in front of this screen (and blogspot helped by going offline for 36 hours!), good internet articles seem to be increasing. In the last hour, I’ve encountered several fascinating pieces.
First the good news. I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person who has felt unease at the exploding number of indices of good governance and democracy. Open Democracy has just sent me their latest batch of thought-provoking articles – one of which by Jorge Heine puts the issue very clearly Another article on the same site introduced me to a new democracy manifesto which at last moves the focus away from the West.
And Anthony Barnett – the driving force behing the Open Democracy site (which I have now rather belatedly added to my links) – also has a good piece on the manifesto.

Democracy is spreading and it will be with us to stay. That is the good news. The bad news is that, through some sleight of hand, this powerful idea that has mobilized so many people and so much human energy around the world, has been turned by some into a highly parochial, procedural version of what self rule is all about. It is the specific political practices of a few (ironically) self-appointed countries around the world, mostly in the North Atlantic, that have come to be defined as setting the tone and the parameters for what democracy is and is not.

Globalization, by spreading the idea of democracy, has helped to liberate people from many a dictatorial yoke. But globalization also embodies the danger that a ‘one-size fits all’ model of democracy be imposed from abroad and from above. an upsurge of efforts to categorize, classify and rank countries around the world according to a variety of ‘democracy indexes’, which purport to tell us how democratic any given country is.

And this is not a mere academic exercise. Real-life consequences flow from it. Funds are disbursed, loans are approved or rejected and countries are suspended from international organizations as a result of these rankings. One of the great paradoxes of all this is that movements and governments that empower people and bring large numbers of the formerly disenfranchised into the political realm are often the targets of these self-appointed ‘democracy policemen’.

A number of countries in Latin America, like Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and others have experienced this treatment. New leaders, new constitutions, new rights for the hitherto marginalized aboriginal peoples have brought about enormous changes in these countries in the course of the past decade.

Bolivian President Evo Morales is the first Amerindian to be elected head of state in the Americas. Lula was the first trade union leader to become president of Brazil. Rafael Correa has brought political stability to Ecuador and a willingness to stand up against the oil majors to defend his country’s rights.

Yet, far from being welcome as major architects of the deepening of democracy in South America, some of these leaders are often demonized as populists by this fake international consensus about what democracy is and is not.

I was going to say that the bad news is that a special poll for the Labour parties of Sweden, Germany and UK (all of whom lost power recently) has revealed the extent of the distrust in these countries for these parties (despite the global conditions in which they should be thriving). But, as the poll reports a lack of faith in the ability of governments to stand up to vested interests (just 16% believed they could in the UK, 21% in Germany and 27% in Sweden).

That could actually be good news. If a significant percentage of the public understand that the parties have in fact sold the pass and cannot stand up to corporate interests, this could pave the way to stronger political demands. However it is not easy to overcome fataliasm. 29% in the UK were scepticical about the ability of government-led action to improve societies, with and 27% in Germany questioning whether governments can be an effective force.
It’s time parties which purport to be left use arguments and facts such as the following

And another post from Real World Economics reminds us of the strong report on the global financial crisis which came from a UN Commission of Experts (helped by Joseph Stiglitz) in September 2009 which had suggested the establishment of a panel of experts modeled after the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This summer the UN is to decide whether it should implement this. Should there be a panel? And if so what would its function and structure be? The last thing the world needs is yet another glossy report with yet another take on the financial crisis. And why bother if such an effort gets mired in UN bureaucracies and is not fashioned into a voice that would have traction with governments across the world?

The UN is the most legitimate and among the most qualified global bodies to weigh in on the global economic system and it would be ridiculous for it to sit on the sidelines. The UN has economists and experts in numerous global agencies such as UNCTAD, DESA, UNDP and beyond, as well as regional efforts such as ECLAC, ESCAP and others. If the UN does not weigh in, the only other options are the G-20 and the IMF. The G-20 as an institution does not include more than 170 countries in the world, and the IMF has a very poor track record on analyzing, preventing, and mitigating financial crisis. The UN is looked to for balance.

We very much need a meta-analysis of the global state of understanding on the causes of financial crises and measures to mitigate them, with the goal of making suggestions for reforming global economic governance—as recommended by the Stiglitz Commission. The UN has the track record here. The UN has already created two (while not perfect) efforts on climate change and on agricultural development. The IPCC is a body that analyses the state of climate science and its impacts, and the Intergovernmental Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge in Science, Technology, and Development (IAASTD) analyzed the state of knowledge on agriculture from the perspective of fighting hunger and poverty in a manner that can improve human health and environmental sustainability. 

What would an inter-governmental panel do? Like the IPCC and the IAASTD, an Intergovernmental Panel on Systemic Economic Risk would perform a meta-analysis of the state of knowledge on the causes, impacts, and implications of financial crises. This would not be just another report; rather, like the IPCC effort it would be the “report on the reports” where eminent persons make sense of the thousands of peer reviewed articles and agency (UN, IMF, etc) assessments that have been done. This would synthesize the similarities and spell out the differences in thinking about these issues to help policy-makers make better decisions about reform.

One of the volumes would look at causes and impacts, while another could serve as a clearinghouse for financial regulatory reform efforts. Nations and regions around the world are reforming their financial systems but there is no single place to catalogue and make sense of these new regulations. This is important for investors and policy makers as they seek to maneuver in a post-crisis world. It will also help stimulate policy diffusion whereby innovative regulation from one country can be applied to another.

If such an effort gets bogged down in UN processes it will be doomed to fail. Like the IPCC and the IAASTD the effort will need to have relative autonomy from the standard UN process. It should also engage with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The IAASTD has a Panel of Participating Governments (governments of all participating agencies) but also has a 60-person “Multi-stakeholder Bureau” that formally advises the plenary. Thirty of the members are governmental officials, 30 are from civil society, the private sector, and academics. Furthermore, IAASTD has seven cosponsoring agencies: the FAO, UNDP, WHO, UNEP, UNESCO and yes even the World Bank.

A UN panel on the financial crisis could model itself on IAASTD to some extent, having some of the governmental officials in a stakeholder bureau come from Central Banks and Finance Ministries, and having the sponsoring agencies be among UNCTAD, UNDP, UNDESA, some of the regionals, such as ECLAC, ESCAP, and the IMF, and World Bank.
It seems clear that at present the UN is not weighing in with a clear voice on the reform of the global economy. This is a pity. The world’s most powerful leaders and the press that follow them have found solace in the G-20 and the IMF, which are not delivering either. The UN is among the most qualified and certainly the most legitimate bodies to deal with the truly global nature of economic crises and their development implications. It started off better than any other body with the establishment of the Stiglitz Commission. Let us hope the UN is up to the task of following through on the Commission’s recommendations. The health of the global economy depends on it.

The painting is another Nenko Balkanski - which I came across on Thursday in the great Kazanluk municipal Gallery. It's of the painter's wife - and is quite similar to a painting in the Smolyian Gallery.