I was pleased to see someone had put my 1990 Arena documentary on the history of “Morning Star” onto Youtube. Here it is split into parts 1-6.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

See my piece on Rosa Luxemburg in left foot forward, follow the link:

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/03/womens-history-month-profiles-rosa-luxemburg/

ARMS AND THAT MAN

….BLAIR

…and CAMERON

….

24 February 2011

It is to be hoped that the ghost of Robin Cook is haunting the Prime Minister: his proclamation that Britain has been wrong to back authoritarian regimes, while defending Britain’s arms exports industry deserves a savage quip from the former, late Foreign Secretary.

Cook’s fate confounds the idea that foreign policy is somehow made up as it goes along, framed by personal affinities and pragmatism, enunciated this week by the amiable and clever Conservative columnist Daniel Finklestein on the Today programme.

It was only in the field of foreign policy and international relations that Labour appeared, albeit briefly, radical, democratic and progressive after the May 1997 election victory.

With Cook in the Foreign Office and Clare Short in international development (not to mention Mo Mowlam handling Northern Ireland), the possibility of an approach to international diplomacy grounded in human rights seemed uniquely possible.

That  prospectus was swiftly quashed by Tony Blair. When Cook launched his maxim: an ‘ethical dimension’ to foreign policy – quckly spun into ‘an ethical foreign policy’ – it was unceremoniously binned by Blair.

Read John Kampfner’s shocking account in Blair’s Wars of how Tony Blair and his aide de camp – and mentor – Jonathan Powell humiliated Cook and adopted instead the ‘new imperialism.’

Kampfner explains that Blair went to war five times in six years, and it was that statistic that impelled him to write the book.

Although Cook’s approach – to base foreign policy on human rights – had been cleared with Downing Street, it was not to Blair’s taste.

The tactical difficulties of re-orientating Britain away from arms exports to repressive regimes -  and rupturing the historic intimacies between Downing Street and the arms manufacturers -  gave Blair a weapon against Cook. The Foreign Secretary’s detailed plans for releasing Britain from contractual obligations to dictatorships buying arms from Britain  were scrutinised by Blair’s men.  The scowlers vetted line by line his criteria for arms sales – Cook’s template for a new ethic in one of Britain’s foremost export industries.   Before the year was out the ‘ethical dimension’ faded  and Blair himself promoted the  ‘hug ‘em close’ mantra that sealed a UK-US united, imperial front.

The arms exporters were safe, and supported by the Prime Minister. Wars would be waged. Indecent tyrannies would be re-armed and reassured.

All until 2011 when New Labour’s New Imperialism and the special relationship between the UK and the US, and the West and Israel, began to shudder in the astounding aftermath of the largely secular people’s revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

Downing Street and the White House were scandalously slow to welcome the revolutionary uprisings. The new imperialist rhetoric of humanitarian warfare was suddenly exposed: the West appeared befuddled.

Secular or sectarian, it didn’t matter – Downing Street has sponsored muslimists and their enemies – the specialist relationship has nurtured, funded, armed them all in the name of stability, the cold war, Israel and above all ‘our interests’.

Cameron has been scorned for the arms traders who have been his cohorts during his Middle East tour. ‘Shameful,’ protests War on Want. It is.  ‘Stop it,’ insists the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. Yes!

David Cameron lanced embarrassment by insisting on 21 February that the arms trade ‘is very much in Britain’s interests.’

No doubt he feels comforted by his new friend, the Observer’s   Nick Cohen, who’s commentary on the Middle East uprisings has been, yet again, to rant about muslim clerics – surely the least influential or interesting presence on the streets of Tunisia or Egypt so far. Cohen couldn’t see the heroic and secular wood for his islamist trees.

Cohen wrote in the Observer on 6 February that ‘David Cameron seems to be prepared to stand up for elementary principles. He was almost pitch-perfect in his speech in Germany as he rejected with the required scorn the right’s argument that a clash of civilisations made Muslims and democracy incompatible and the double-standard of the multi-culturalists, who hold that one can oppose fascistic doctrines when they are held by white-skinned demagogues but not when they are propagated by brown-skinned reactionaries.’

How does any of this blether clarify the Western powers’ complicity in hollowing out civil society and radical, democratic political movement is the Middle East, and how they should make amends.

Blair should be ashamed. David Cameron should be ashamed.

Robin Cook is dead. Long live Robin Cook.

February 18 2011

KICK IT OUT

Kick OUT Sexism in football – its been a long time coming, but its moment has finally arrived – marked beautifully by Philosophy Football’s nice new T-Shirt (got one on order!) and a mug.

This is great for those people, like me, who feel oppressed by the way that football takes up all the space, with its rude intrusion into our sitting rooms, the news, kids bedrooms, TV schedules and even the sounds of the cities.

Despite ourselves we know about football because there is no escape from it. So Kick it Out enables us to contribute to the reform of football’s ugly culture.

The Sky row provoked by Andy Gray and Richard Keys giving out yards against women exposed a fascinating cleavage in football culture between the men who love its macho scaffolding and men who don’t.

And it offered men the opportunity to take the side of women and repudiate the grand masters of the ancien regime.

That, of course, was an effect of the curious contradictions in football culture that have been created by women’s presence in a man’s game.

Football was formerly a pleasure put beyond the reach of women in a segregated social space in which men could relish the sound of their own voices singing, soaring over the fence, invading the soundscape of the cities.

For women that exclusivity presented a crisis – be beaten (because we could not beat it) or join it. So, in their thousands, nay millions, women began to play it, watch it, know it, heaven forfend ‘commentate’ on it, manage it and referee it.

That somehow confirmed its warrant in popular culture. But that in turn created a crisis for as football as uniquely a man thing,  as a ‘pageant of masculinity’, as uniquely a man thing, in which men kiss, cry, sing, scream, and in which they harbour hatred and violence, all as a way of being men, and all by themselves.

Women’s presence (plus a few catastrophes caused by total disrespect for fans) encouraged a cultural revolution in the conditions of the sport,  that – no doubt – many men endorsed..

But it had not been echoed by the proprietors of the public game. Lord Triesman complans that it is the country’s worst managed sport.

We could add that even the best of their managers  rely on hapless masculine intuition to sort out the lads. This tradition is exemplified by Sir Alex Ferguson and his treatment of Wayne Rooney.  He assumed that marriage would sort out the lads’ morals, that ‘settling down’  and domestication would somehow keep them off the streets and sort out their sexism.  Ferguson was wrong and he was irresponsible. He gave to the WAGs the problem  he would not, could not address professionally or politically.

The outcome of his strategy has been a tragedy for Rooney and his family, and a ruinous contribution to sexism in the city: everyone knows that girls sell themselves in faux knocking shops.  Football offers its players as commodities in a celebrity market in which both men and women are objectified.

The Sky row takes the crisis to a deeper place: here were men watching from the sidelines, spilling out pious, sexist and above all WRONG homilies about the expertise of a woman actually on the field.

That took the ignobility of their sexism to another level.

It was the moment when women became more than merely an audience, and took themselves into the field, so to say, that the old football fogeys were confronted by a great challenge to the security of their chauvinism.

There have been great wranglings over whether these men were sexist or stupid. They were both. The social media and mass media commentaries and the larger conversations they have joined, have disclosed  a sophistication in popular culture that was traduced by Gray and Keys..

Their behaviour relied on a sense that they had critical mass, an omnipotent fantasy that they were the voice of the people. They were clearly mystified and tongue tied by the discovery that they weren’t.

What would be wonderful would be if the fans – and their alienated friends – kept on creatively crying foul against sexism in sport.

www.philosophyfootball.com

5 October 2010 Prison isn’t working

Two cheers for Ken Clarke. He’s the best available minister for justice. He thinks – before he’s read the Mail, rather than after.
He is interested evidence and what works. So, two cheers for his interest in making prisons places of work, rather than institutionalised indolence.
But will his proposals to get prisoners involved in doing useful work, for the minimum wage, enabling them to save, and to pay recompense to their families and victims address the scale of the problem?
The Howard League for Penal Reform is enthusiastic. ‘This could be the biggest change to the prison system in 200 years,’ says the Howard League.
‘Bringing real work into prisons is the most important reform to the prison system in two centuries,’ comments Frances Crook, its splendid director. The Howard League says paid work, and paying tax is ‘the best way to support victims, families and for the first time, be asked to contribute to the common good. We must get prisoners to take responsibility for their actions and work is the best way to achieve this.’
And she believes, ‘everyone will gain from this new policy. It will enable prisoners (overwhelmingly men) to contribute to families so that we could reduce the benefits bill and this will help to keep families together. It could reduce prison costs as prisoners can pay for the luxuries just like the rest of us have to. ‘
The Prison Reform Trust agrees, ‘Real work for real wages makes sense. This would be a sea change for prisons where currently few work opportunities exist and those in work earn an average ‘wage’ of 8 pounds a week.’

This is a coherent case. But we should also be wary; the PRT is concerned that this will be ‘exploitative menial work.’
Centre for Crime and Justice Studies director Richard Garside also cautions, ‘My suspicion is that this is more about turning prisoners into an exploitable resource and balancing the Ministry of Justice books than it is about introducing greater purpose and justice.’

Waged work won’t apply to the majority of people introduced to the prison system. Around 110,000 people are received into prison every year, two thirds of them are sentenced to 12 months, and, in effect, serve 2 months, then they won’t be available for work or anything else.
Prisons are becalmed by idleness and in-cell televisions, which induce a soporific effect, if they’re switched on half the night. Tired prisoners are malleable, dulled.
Nor does paid labour address the catastrophic under-education of the prison population – the average reading age is estimated to be between nine and eleven.
Access to education among all but ‘juveniles’ is haphazard and increasingly work-oriented. Education must be the best route to employability, but prisons seeking to make cuts are likely to shred their education service and focus on security.
Waged work won’t, however, address the massive problem of mental ill health in prisons.
It won’t deal with the crisis of women in prison. Most shouldn’t be there. The Prison Reform Trust has championed a new network of women’s centres where women live in the community, take responsibility for themselves and their families, gain skills, get out of debt, break addictions and get the support they need.

The women’s centres are instructive: they focus on how women get tangled in the prison system as women.
No justice minister has yet grasped that the criminal justice system is fundamentally about men, as men.
We are to go on locking up thousands of young men at vast expense. A year spend in prison is equivalent to a year at Eton. So lets treat prison as a resource – where young men could go to get real rehab.

HIS WAY

Tony Blair A Journey
Hutchinson
London
September 2010
£25

There is little to be learned from Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey…and yet, and yet…. It is important. Not because it ranks as one of the great political memoirs. It is lite, as you’d expect, a smooth edit, with some of the quality of easy listening. Its allure is its difference from a political memoir written for the politically engaged. Its title is misleading, a journey implies contemplation, development, change. Blair didn’t mature, he degenerated.
It should have been entitled ‘My Way’.
He’s written it for a Des O’ Connor audience as much as for addicts of political diaries. And that’s fine.
If it was an economic decision to by-pass serialisation and go for direct sales, it was also surely a political decision – there is no kiss and tell worth spending money on, not even his portrait of his passionate bonding with Gordon Brown, his partner in the creation of New Labour.
His narrative differs from most political chronicles is in its emotionalism, his candour about the excitement he felt in this platonic amour, the alchemy of men making history.
But his is apparently unaware of how the apparent emotional intelligence is utterly macho – it isn’t unusual for men talk about each other like this; emotional literacy isn’t about being thrilled by the company of other men and showing it.
What he reveals is his admiration for cojones, ‘clanking big ones’. His public persona – charming, easy – and attachment to his wife was misinterpreted as being interested in women and therefore alluring to women. The book marginalises women, however, just as they were sidelined in the birth of the project. He shows how he needs women, likes them and relies on them, but you don’t sense that admires them. The frisson is reserved for men.
Discussing with Alistair Campbell his assault on party rule Clause IV in 1994 – the marque of his leadership – he says Campbell loved the ‘brassiness’ of it. And he discovers ‘something I hadn’t been 100 per cent sure of – he had clanking great balls.’
It is men who excite Blair, dangerous men: Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson. He likens one to an oak battering ram and the other to a stealthy rapier.
Clearly, he thinks this is cool. But it is coarse. The celebrated ‘ballsiness’ of Blair’s boys had dire consequences for the New Labour project. As Prof. Joni Lovenduski, the political scientist, argued: if Parliament was masculinist New Labour’s culture was overly so.
Blair’s blindness extends to the text as history and as polemic: it is bereft of context and a sense of the necessary otherness of others. He offers vignettes of his comrades that are sometimes acute, sometimes quite sweet, but everyone is only a supporting actor, he scarcely acknowledges anyone else’s priorities or ideas. It is as if they only bulwarked a mission designed by him.
The project
On page 90 he spins his political creed, I use the word advisedly, because it is more faith and ‘common sense’ than analysis.
The essential problem of labour in the post war period, he says, was that it had lost touch with its basic purpose – ‘at heart, the individual’.
A powerful state, trade unions, what he calls ‘social action’ – presumably in contrast to political action – collective bargaining, all were ‘a means to an end: to help the individual gain opportunity’, to overcome limitations, imposed by poverty and circumstance.
The purpose was ‘all about opportunity not in general but in particular’.
Blair traduces the post-war Labour project: Labourism was always interested in opportunity in general – hence its great reforms, the welfare state, public housing, comprehensive education.
Blair refracts all of this as merely ‘individual opportunity’. For him that is ultimately realised through discourses of choice and consumption, not through the good society, an egalitarian, democratic, just and sustainable society.
‘The problem for progressive parties was that by the 1960s the first generation of those helped in such a way had been liberated.’ Thus on the ladder of opportunity they didn’t want more state help, ‘They wanted more choice, freedom to earn more money and spend it…’ and they started to resent the freeloaders…’
So that’s the ‘60s is it?
Above all, he says, they wanted a relationship to the state as partners or citizens, not clients. Yes, and those aspirations during the ‘60s animated new social movements, NGOs, radical professionals’ alliances with clients, movements that he precisely ignores, and indeed for which New Labour felt fear and loathing.
He is left inevitably with the private sector as the model of modernity and dynamism and – through consumerism – of democracy.
New Labour was also authoritarian and abject: its lack of rapport with the troubles of the poorest and least protected was expressed in a shift from social justice to criminal justice. (He acknowledges Brown’s gift of the mantra ‘tough on crime tough on the causes of crime’); its relationship to the City was fearful, supplicant, it gave capital the freedom of manoeuvre that it wanted and staunched the opportunities for dissent and resistance and thus for progressive politics.
Blair’s prospectus echoes – more perhaps than he intended – Thatcher’s hapless notion that there is ‘no such thing as society, only individuals and families.’
Which helps to explain why, despite New Labour’s creditable focus on investment in health and education, and most creative of all Sure Start, it never had a strategic and radical approach to planning, the cities, equality, energy, environment, and to children. It had no excuse – these great themes had hosts of champions knocking on the closed doors of Parliament before 1997.
Prosperity by the 1960s was not the end of history; it exposed new and old crises and contradictions – sexism, racism, colonialism, and environmental wreckage. The great liberation movements introduced a new vocabulary of emancipation and ecology – indispensable for renewal of the social democratic project: how to achieve an egalitarian society that is dynamic, democratic, modern, flexible, welcoming, sustainable.
They’re just not on his agenda. And a kind of babble fills his ideological vacuum. There is no theory of exploitation, of power, of democracy.

Life and Death
Princess Diana infatuated him, he even ventures that Diana was somehow the zeitgeist – rather forgetting that she actually was a neglected aristocratic girl who, in the context of her global betrayal by a future king, improvised her way into a modern-ish persona. ‘Whatever New Labour had in part Diana had in whole,’ says Blair. Eh?
His one insight into the Royal Family is offered about the Queen’s disposition towards William and Harry after their mother’s death. She did her duty; she sought to protect them, but ‘first and foremost as princes.’
Reading this book as a republican I have to confess that, though, that although I’m up for any amount of scandal, intrigue and critique, there is something tasteless about Blair’s royal vignettes. He is a royalist, but can’t resist smug chatter that shows he was there, that he knows better.

Northern Ireland
The Agreement that was signed in Belfast 1998 should stand and one of the great achievements of the Labour government. The prize might have been John Major’s. But his government was enfeebled not only by Major’s dependence on the Unionists for his parliamentary survival, but also by the Tories’ historic compromise with loyalism. Had Peter Brooke endured as secretary of state – in my opinion the most creative Tory during the armed conflict – and had Major been secure, the Conservatives might have redeemed their treasonable history in Northern Ireland.
New Labour was well-prepared: Blair’s Secretary of State Mo Mowlam knew the territory well and whether or not its parochial Established like her – and enough of it did – she electrified the people. She was unlike any other British politician before or after. She treated Northern Ireland’s citizens as normal people entitled to her curiosity and respect. And she was on talking terms with the politicians closest to the armed militias. Unsurprisingly, Blair doesn’t have the grace to acknowledge this. It takes 20 pages on the peace talks before he accords his Secretary of State a place.
Then he makes an important concession.
During the final days of talks, when Blair felt stumped by a long document of Sinn Fein amendments and challenges, Mo Mowlam made a proposal. She’d been consigned to the tea trolley while and he and Ahern shouldered the hands of history. But she took the document, swiftly digested it, worked out what was important to Sinn Fein and the IRA, said, Neogiate! They negotiated. ‘It seemed very odd to me but it worked.’ This is an astounding comment from a man whose reputation as a peace dealer was made in Northern Ireland.
He admits that she took ‘an extraordinarily forward position on the prisoners’ – clearly in any armed conflict the prisoners are decisive and symbolic. Mowlam offered a release date. Talks resumed.
The deal caused ructions among his comrades. Alistair Campbell thought it was ‘barking’ mad. But without the prisoners there would be no deal; without the armed adversaries, there would be no deal. This was a great lessons on treaty-making: all the players were present, including representatives of the demonised armed combatants. Deals won’t work without them.
Still, in a drama with some many actors, Blair can’t control his vanity. He wonders, ‘Why on earth did I think it could be settled?’ Perhaps, he might have answered, because so many had already done so much. No. The answer comes: it was his own mission. His aide Jonathon Powell dubbed it, ‘my messiah complex’.

Iraq
Inevitably, we learn nothing new about the war. Blair’s text has been combed by editors and lawyers. So, he’s saying nothing. And yet we can discern and admission that confirms what everyone already knows: by Camp David 2002 he had made up his mind.
As for the war itself and the awful aftermath, he blames International Development Secretary Clare Short, his only surviving critic in his disempowered Cabinet, for the post-invasion mess. And he blames the mass march against the war for just making him feel more isolated. That’s all he’s got to say.
It didn’t make him think.
This tells us so much about Blair’s élan and his decline. Blair is candid about his extraordinary prescience, the sense that he can achieve something beyond the ordinary. He says witnessed his own metamorphosis, ‘I felt on fire, with a passion and a sense of mission’.
These words call to mind an eloquent moment in the diary of Barbara Castle, the Red Queen of old Labour – and an early moderniser. Observing Margaret Thatcher after her election as leader of the Conservatives, she notes that metamorphosis: Margaret was radiant, potent, Margaret was falling in love ‘falling in love with herself.’
Blair’s love affair led him not to triumph but hubris and shame.

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/se/05/football-sexism-wayne-rooney-scandal

Northern Ireland doesn’t need prosecutions – it needs the state to open its books

June 2010

The iconography of Northern Ireland is changing – and with it the official narrative of what that armed conflict stretching across three decades was all about.

The priest Edward Daly waving his bloodstained handkerchief as he escorted Jackie Duddy’s body out of the firing line in the Bogside on 30 January 1972 is the iconic moment.

It now accompanied by another defining image: The look on the face of his sister Kay Duddy, and that handkerchief -  now a  rather sacred relic – that was brought out to the Guildhall to greet the publication of the Saville report.

The relatives of the dead and wounded on Bloody Sunday wore “a look of liberation,” says Professor Christine Bell, one of Northern Ireland’s premier experts on peace processes and transitional justice.

The acceptance of the Saville report by the leaders of the unionist and loyalist parties, and the visit of Protestant church leaders to the relatives, mark a radical change of tone and dialogue.

We have known for three decades what happened, we have always known that there were no guns, nail bombs petrol bombs or grenades in the hands of the casualties. Citizens were shot for being there.

Bereaved families now have it on record. It needed to be said officially. And Saville has now said it. David Cameron’s repetition of those words, ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’, was eloquent and unprecedented.

So, what now? Prosecutions are hardly the relatives’ priority. But the limits of the Saville report – what happened on that day -  produced a political trap.

Blame now attaches not to the victims but the people who pulled the triggers and who ‘knowingly put forward  false accounts.’

Yet everyone knows that culpability lies with their commanders and the context created by the political and military systems.

Prosecutions of 1 Para squaddies won’t take us any closer to those systems. They won’t answer the question: why were paratroopers known for excessive violence positioned to police a banned civil rights march? Which generals and politicians were talking about shooting civil rights leaders? Why was such talk tolerated? Why was there no redress for socio-economic and political injustice in that place?

We don’t need prosecutions and we probably don’t need another public inquiry to answer these unanswered questions, but we do need another part of the process.

If an obvious forum has not emerged it is not for want of trying to imagine what it might be. It is very difficult. But it is only difficult. It is not impossible.

Professor Bell suggests that the British state could just open the books. The paramilitary organisations, too, could open their books. The government could appoint a custodian of those archives and improvise a process of disclosure.

We can’t close the book if we haven’t opened it. Meanwhile, we cannot exaggerate the iconography of joy and the Bloody Sunday Inquiry’s importance in narrating a new national story.

Big society – small state

Marlboro man meets Russell

Within a couple of weeks of the general election Nick Clegg  staked his political reputation on the coalition not scything Britain with the savagery for which Margaret Thatcher was simultaneously loathed and loved.

He will use his authority ruthlessly, he said, to stop the coalition leaving Britain broken.

He had already swerved into a U turn – beckoned by the Bank of England, he signed up to cuts of £6 billion immediately.

His alibi was a contradiction in terms: ‘progressive cuts’,  and the model promoted by Canada and Sweden.

His  best friends should tell him: this stinks. The scythe is savage; it’s meant to be. Public sector cuts will hurt those with the least – the public sector sector workers, a majority of whom are women, who service us, the public.

Innovation will be starved, research will be pruned,  progressive development will be disabled, green shoots will be trodden down.

Clegg will be undone: his reputation will be ruined, because Britain will be broken.

If anyone profits it will be Cameron’s new Conservatism, if only because the cuts will create the context for Cameron’s ‘Mad Men’ moment: the Big Society.

Cameron conjours a dream in which the Marlboro myth of the big country: solitary cowboy on horse between big sky and craggy landscape segues into Up and its heroic little, loveable Russell. Russell’s allure is that he only wants to be kind -  he needs to get another helpfulness badge and who but a curmudgeon could resist him! He is blessed by indefatiguable curiosity and a talent for empathy.

Russell is, of course, a solitary child. Like Marlboro man – who he’ll never become – Russell belongs nowhere. We are reassured that he is a loved child, whose resilience comes from a good mother – but only after we have witnessed his heroism. His valour flourishes up in the air, up, up and away. Away.

Russell, like Marlboro man, is de-contextualised.

They live in places where there is no society.

Cameron, of course, repudiates the crazy Thatcherite mantra ‘there’s no such thing as society…’ But he is mobilising ‘Big Society’ in the service of anti-statism, against the ‘Big State’ as if the state were the enemy of ‘society’.

Cameron’s Big Society is also de-contextualised. It enlists the rhetoric of community activism whilst erasing its history in Britain.

Like many Big Ideas borrowed from the US to animate New Labour and New Conservatism, they are bereft of time, space and history.

Britain has a long history of community activism, but now its civil society is shrivelling. It is neither apathetic nor under-developed. On the contrary, it is exhausted. It has been angry, its anger has flared to little effect and it has become depressed.

Two examples:

1.    if society is a living, breathing form of intelligent life, than what does it do to its spirit to mobilise the biggest ever public demonstration on its streets only to be ignored? More than a millon people marched against the Iraq war and yet had no impact on the parliamentary outcome of Tony Blair’s war misson. That experience can only yield a kind of depression. It isn’t apathy, its angry and its hopeless.

2.    Sure Start, inspired by feminist stalwarts in the Labour government elected in 1997, promised to repair the anomalous lack of good publicly funded child care in Britain. Its emergence depended on these politicians’ convergence with other interests and agendas within the Labour Cabinet. Sure Start was, therefore, always the subject of multiple and sometimes contradictory pressures.

It innovated a novel structure – high quality provision for children plus engagement with parents needs, not just as parents, but as people, in alliance with sturdy professionals. At their best, Sure Start projects were a model of ‘community development’ that sought to empower localities with ‘action ‘research’. That was a template that flourished in the 1970s, and the best of Sure Start brought together ‘action research’ – finding out what people needed and what worked -  while improvising new alliances between professions, parents, children and their localities.

Sure Start was hobbled, however, by Tony Blair’s political interventions that skewed its mission, and by  a reluctance to roll out the programme as a model for universal child care. That left it vulnerable to Tory scepticism.

So, these  are two  examples disrespect for civil society. In the first, the art of active dissent was disabled by the crushing reaction of Parliament to the movement against war in Iraq. It remains a peculiarity of the British Parliament that its indifference has been matched only by so much blether about the need to ‘listen to people.’

In the second, the dialogue between the state as provider, professionals and parents will be destroyed by the Conservatives: the community development model will not be honoured, provision will not be expanded, indeed it will be scaled down to meet the needs of children in crisis not children in general. Children’s services will not, therefore, be allowed to become the hub of community spaces.

So, the community activism template promoted by the New Conservatives will be a way of NOT doing community development. The notion of a community army may skill up neighbourhood champions, but it will not empower neighbourhoods, nor will public and private capital be invested in economic development.

Millions has already been spent on refurbishment in ailing  neighbourhoods since the Tory Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine introduced City Challenge – a bidding competition for urban regeneration – in the 1980s.

Poor communities have been consulted to the point of exhaustion.  Often their homes have been transferred to the non-state social sector. They may or may not be better managed. Regeneration programmes seem to have had minimal impact on unemployment and economic sustainability.

‘Social renewal’ was predicated on the perception of these neighbourhoods as a ‘social problem.’ They stayed poor because social renewal was not matched by sustainable economic regeneration.

Unless Cameron’s notion of a community army is not to be a kind of Dad’s army – a home guard for the poor , bob a-jobbing – the coalition government will have to deliver a matrix of educational and economic investment. The Tories believe, of course, that the market will do it. But why would the market do for Marlboro cowboy and little Russell (not to mention their sisters) what it hasn’t done in Belfast, Glasgow, Tyneside or Hastings or Rhyll for the past 30 years?

Why was the encounter between Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy in Rochdale so achingly uncomfortable?

Not because he groaned ‘bigoted woman’ – he wasn’t wrong; not because the top man hadn’t answered a customer’s complaints – he had; not because he couldn’t spin an explanation of party policy – he had; not because he had failed to manage a conversation with Labour Party kin – he had; That was his problem – he ‘managed’ his dialogue. He answered her, but he didn’t engage with her. He made no concessions. What he, and everyone around him – and many commentators, too, didn’t appreciate was that the white woman in Rochdale also managed: she wasn’t an ingénue, she wasn’t ignorant, had a clear, coherent and unyielding critique of her party that should have engineered equality but decided not to. Her final poignant protest about student fees should have alerted Brown and his comrades to what was exercising Gillian Duffy: this women knew exactly what was different for the working class between now, and then – when her own generation could enjoy ‘great expectations’ but her grandchildren’s generation seems doomed to hard times. Immigration reared up, as it always does, as both bigotry and as a proxy for pitiless disappointment.

The tragedy of the encounter was that he expected her to be grateful, and she was angry about everything.

Babybooming

There’s a spookie tone about Neil Boorman’s latest spiffy idea. Neil Boorman has ideas, he’s a writer and music promoter, and one of his most celebrated spectacles of anti-consumerism was to torch his designer wardrobe (he could have given the stuff away!) and live without retail therapy for a year.

His new bad idea is promoted on WWW.itsalltheirfault.com. You might be expecting the banks to appear somewhere in this blame blog. But they don’t. Instead he targets the babyboomers – people born after World War 2, the generation that was blessed by the National Heath Service, free universal education and mass public housing. It seems they were blessed by everything, and now they are blame for everything. Boorman has launched a campaign to kick out the baby boomers – not because of their age, oh no, but because of their generation.

He recommends the hypothesis offered in David Willett’s book, the Pinch, (see my Guardian Comment is Free blog, 21 Feb 2010).

Willetts, a rare thinker among Tories, argues that the babyboomers are the selfish generation: among their many social felonies, they are spendthrifts who have priced their children out of the housing market. Willetts is wrong – it wasn’t the babyboomers who created the crazy housing market, it was Thatcherism in the 1980s, and every government since. It wasn’t the babyboomers who introduced student fees; who sold off 1.7 million council houses; who created the pensions crisis and left the infrastructure to rack and ruin while the people making loadsmoney went on making loadsamoney.

By a sleight of hand, a political project has been re-interpreted as a generational mission.

Thatcherism, albeit audacious and surgically successful in our dysfunctional electoral system, never actually secured a majority of votes cast. But it tilted the centre of  gravity of English Parliamentary culture to the right. And there – alone in these islands -  it has stayed.

Boorman rehearses the Willetts’ rhetoric. But with more bile. ‘In 650 days time the babyboomers will start to retire, they’ll stop feeding money into the system with taxes and start sucking out of it with benefits…we don’t have the money to pay for them.’

He complains that ‘we are going to be slaves to our parents, working longer hours, paying more taxes, getting further into debt, just to pay for their retirement…’

What should we do with them, then? He doesn’t suggest mass euthanasia, just mass contempt and electoral eviction: ‘Kick them out,’ he says.

So, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher lives, inflaming angry young men with nothing to lose but loadsamoney and their labels.

But do not despair, babies of babyboomers: check out the Green New Deal, read the  Green Party manifesto, www.onlygreen.org.uk – there is another way, it will put the smile back on your face, and hope in your heart: vote Green.