A manifesto

I suspect that some, perhaps a preponderance, of my readers are not of my political persuasion. So you might well disagree with the following. But with an election less than a year away, I wanted to write down the core of the manifesto I would propose if I had a big say in a political party. I don't, thankfully, and this is nothing like the platform any of the parties will contest the election on. But I still think the exercise is interesting.

The rules I set were to write down no more than two sentences in ten different areas. In no particular order:

• Education. Abolish the charitable status of private schools, and fold academies back into the ordinary state school system. Abolish student grants and increase university funding, including research funding, very substantially.
• Transport. Abolish road tax, increase petrol duties significantly, and eliminate the special treatment of airlines, including VAT on airline fuel. Invest substantially in carbon efficient transportation infrastructure including trains, buses and cycle networks.
• Taxation. Simplify the personal and corporate tax system, impose draconian penalties on any form of avoidance, and remove the non-dom status completely. Eliminate UK-linked tax havens such as Cayman, Jersey and Bermuda by forcing them either to join the UK tax code or removing their protection.
• Energy. It is too late for fission, so invest heavily in renewables and in energy saving. Push hard for fusion because if we can crack that one, energy becomes a non-issue.
• Defence. Cancel the expensive toys like the Trident replacement. Provide the ordinary soldier with the resources they need, like body armour and IED-proof vehicles.
• Foreign Affairs. Engage more positively with the EU. Revive Robin Cook's ethical foreign policy.
• Constitutional Reform. Introduce proportional representation and a fully elected House of Lords. Disestablish the Church of England and secularise the state, recognising the rights of believers and non-believers equally.
• Finance. Break up the majority state owned megabanks, Lloyds and RBS. Make capital requirement proportional to size to encourage a diverse system of banks that are not too big to fail.
• Liberty. Cancel the id cards project and other big database projects. Enact legislation to protect our historic liberties and roll back both state and private surveillance and data gathering.
• Industrial Policy. Develop a comprehensive policy across education, development aid and innovation support to encourage manufacturing and export-based industries, especially outside the South East. Reduce financial and other services as a percentage of the total economy.

Deprogramming Obama

A nice slant from Salon: the president is a prisoner of the cult of neoliberalism.

Keep your enemies close?

The news that Obama has recently had a meeting with two of his fiercest critics, Krugman and Stiglitz, does him credit. I think there is more to it than the title of the post: it suggests maturity that Obama is willing to listen to different views. One can't imagine Gordon Brown, for instance, being so open minded. Leaders who encourage diversity of opinion are likely to end up better informed than ones that don't, and to make better decisions as a result. I'd like Krugman and Geithner to do a job swap, of course, but at least Krugman isn't crying unheeded in the wilderness.

Years and years - a riff continued

Charles Butler, looking at the same Jonathan Hopkin post I talked about earlier, comments:

We may find the right wing to be insufferably and unacceptably stupid since the time that the same Ronald Reagan took office, but the left has descended into the ethical black hole of defending only a restricted number of vested interests.

Would that he were wrong. But he's not. For me, one of the reasons that Thatcher got and kept power was that she challenged the entrenched interests that the left was in thrall to in the 1970s, notably the unions. (The unions of closed shops and entrenched employment rights for the few, that is.) If the general perception is that the Left is pandering to this kind of selfishness again, then it will be out of power in the UK for as long as it was in the Thatcher years.

The failure of the left

Jonathan Hopkin makes a good point:

Almost as distressing as the collapse of the free market model of free-wheeling finance is the failure of the Left in the West to say anything very much about it.

So far so obvious, and so depressing. But Hopkin insightfully contrasts this failure to an earlier triumph.

Karl Polanyi's masterpiece 'The Great Transformation' interprets the rise of Nazism and Fascism as a response to the threats free markets posed to the livelihoods of the masses. Only after the catastrophe of war did Western governments discover a way of providing protection without foreign aggression or the scapegoating of ethnic minorities. 'Embedded liberalism' (as John Ruggie defined it) involved liberal trade between nations under stable exchange rates and capital controls, with welfare provision inside the nation state to insure workers against social risks. This model was a triumph, delivering growing living standards and social equality for the best part of half a century. But the moment it ran into trouble the assault began, and the various components of embedded liberalism have been steadily dismantled over the past couple of decades.

We need to put embedded liberalism back again

Now this is interesting. First is embedded liberalism the only solution? It seems rather overweaning to me to suggest that it is. But is it one solution? Well, it certainly worked before, if that is any guide. This kind of macro-political debate is exactly what we need: so why are parties of both the Right and Left so anxious to avoid it?

Don't say he did not warn you

David Davis, writing in the FT, sets out Tory policy:

The first stages of an austerity regime, involving pay and recruitment freezes for the entire public sector, will be controversial and uncomfortable.

It is likely that this will be policy for the next government, and it scares me rigid.