Category Archives: Politics

Books Politics

An essential political read…

January 19, 2014 – 9:09 pm

Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience by Stein Ringen

I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but interesting thoughts. The author brings the perspective of being a head of ministerial research and assistant director general in the Ministry of Justice in his native Norway, and of the United Nations in New Work, and has lived and worked in Britain, France, Germany, the US and Sweden, as a political journalist and management consultant. He aims to answer the questions “how can a government dispense necessary rule, and how can the population protect itself against excessive rule.” He’s also very interested in the US, by no means convinced that it is still a democracy, but I was most interested in the British side.

p. 198-199
Britain is not going to get a government better set to rule than New Labour in its good years. But it was unable. America is not going to get a more worthy and able president than Barack Obama. But his promise was ground down by a system that took revenge. No doubt, there are other dysfunctional democracies to pick on, but these are the ones worth confronting. It is right to say that they are dysfunctional. Policy is not made, or if made not in the service of the public good, or if in the service of the public food not implemented. It is right to say that they have gone dysfunctional Until recently, these were normal democracies. In Britain, the constitutional system declined from “order” to “mess” after the 1970s..
In Britain … “what needs to be done is far from revolutionary. The agent of reform is Parliament, which has the power to reform as it wishes….

1. The House of Commons should establish itself as an equitable partner to the government in political decisionmaking and should exercise effective scrutiny in legislative and budgetary decisions. …
2. Political funding should be redesigned to prevent the consolidation in Britain of an overpowering politico-corporate complex.
3. Local government with serious autonomy and responsibility should be constituted as a counterweight to the concentration of political power to London.

p. 201 “First, the necessary funding of parties and campaigns should come from the public purse and all other forms of political money should be considered corruption in law, be it from businesses or unions, from individuals, or from candidates’ own means. This would both provide the funds that are needed and break the link of transgression between the seekers of office and the givers of money. Taxes are what we use to fund public goods. Democracy is a joint matter that we should pay for jointly and equally…. My suggestion is to institute an annual survey of voters to record the distribution of preferences for the allocation of the public allotment to pay for politics … a practical, effective and inexpensive way of putting economic power into the hands of voters.”

p.202 “The British should be given the benefit of some of that ‘municipalization’ that Quinton Mayne found had served the Danish people so well. Local units – municipalities – should be small, there should be more of them, and they should have more power and responsibility. British democracy has too few elected representatives, fewer proportionally than any other democracy in Europe. There are too many Members of Parliament in London but too few elected representatives throughout the country. There is no counterbalance to the concentration of political power in London and Downing Street.”

P. 105 “Do-something pressures come down on governments with relentless force. It comes from their own ambitions. Governments want to do good and are desperate to be of consequence. It comes from their constituents. The moment they are in office, those who have put them there line up to get them to take up their particular causes. It comes from pressure groups. Every cause has a group working for it, and poling on the pressure for government action is what pressure groups do. It comes from the press, day in and day out exposing problems that the government is not up to dealing with. And it comes from the country. Through the government’s window, the society it is responsible for governing looks like a catalogue of problems that cry out to it to be solved… No single government can do all that much. There are infinitely more problems out there than any government can take on, never mind solve. Often there are no solutions to even problems that are obvious, known and grave… Government must chose what problems to take on and they must do that by asking what is practicable and solvable. This is difficult – it really means deciding what problems to neglect – and the pressure and temptation to do more than is manageable is enormous. “

p. 107 “In Scandinavia, the routine is slow decisionmaking… [they] have a high capacity for producing necessary decisions and doing so in time … when the Norwegian parliament in 2009 adopted a comprehensive pension reform, it was the culmination of a process that had started in 2001. … The process towards decisions of this kind follows a fixed procedure that is prescribed in written regulations and establish conventions and which it would normally be unthinkable, except in an emergency, to deviate from. … a problem is identified that calls for some kind of public policy action or reform, and the government gets a nod from the parliament to start planning towards a solution. It appoints a committee of study, usually made up of experts and some constituency representatives (typically of employers and unions) with a relatively precise mandate, to undertake a study of the issue and propose solutions. The committee will typically work three to four years and produce a comprehensive report, heavy on factual study, along with a joint proposal or majority and minority proposals. The next step is for the relevant ministry to distribute the report to interested parties throughout the country in what is known as “a hearing round” with a note of guidance on matters it in particular wants views on. The government will then produce a white paper to parliament based on the committee’s reports and inputs from the hearing round, with a more or less precise outline of the action it thinks should follow… In the parliament the white paper goes first to the relevant select committee, which works it over in detail and prepares a report, which will form the basis of a first plenary debate, again with more or less precise proposals or outlines for action. The parliament then holds a debate, more on principle than on detail. It may at this time bury the matter, but that would be highly unusual. … The report of the select committee and inputs in the debate, with or without a vote or votes, will be taken as instructions to the government for the preparation of legislation. That will take another year or two and culminate in what is known as a ‘proposition’ to the parliament. … again goes to the relevant select committee which works it over and prepares a report, which again is the basis for the parliament to hold a debate in plenary, no culminating in a vote or series of votes to pass legislation. … at any time, a multitude of processes of this kind are in motion at different stages of advances … Most … will not be interrupted by a change of government… in the case of the pension reform, the process started under a minority labour government, was carried forward under a minority centre-right coalition, and was finalised towards legislation under a majority centre-left government. …. Decision making is well prepared solid and participatory, so that in most cases a reasonable consensus has been worked out, which will lend legitimacy to the eventual legislation.”

p. 23 – New Labour “never managed to articulate anything like a clear project of purpose for itself… never able to get down to the necessary prioritising. They slipped up on the first rule of strategy, according to the management guru Miichael Porter: that a sound strategy starts with having the right goal. Therefore they also failed in the ultimate rule: that the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. … inherited a system that Mrs Thatcher had been relentlessly centralising. It was easy to make policy, but there was not enough order to prevent bad ones and not enough obedience to implement good ones … they continued to centralise and condemned themselves to ever harder effort for ever less gain.”

p. 58 “I have argued 1. That the problem is obedience, 2. That governments are up against others who are always reluctant, 3. That the final challenge in good government is implementation, 4. That the turning of power into performance depends on fairness and restraint, 5. That a settlement of order depends on institutions that bind governments and push followers into compliance, and 6. That such institutions reside in culture as much as in rules … governance is also, and always, a people business. Sitting on power does not do governments much good… Power can at best and only sometimes control reluctant others, but not on its own get them into a settlement of willing cooperation. Government can in only limited ways get their will by commanding. For the most part they depend on persuading. What governments need to muster if they are to be effective is authority and leadership. To shore that up, they will want the magic of legitimacy attached to themselves and their doings.”

p. 97 “orders are of two kinds, commands and signals. These are a governments only tools, however powerful it may look. While commands are heavy handed and commanding something ministers can do with success only occasionally, it is the politics of signals that is the great constant in government action, and normative governance – informing, educating, inspiring, leading – that is the secret of the art of ruling. But once you are into the delicate use of signals, into spin, which you cannot avoid, you are susceptible to overdoing it. You cannot make yourself authoritative without spin, but unless you are very surefooted, that same spin will make you look ridiculous.”

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Environmental politics History Politics

Definitely worth reading: The Village (Marinaleda) Against the World

December 27, 2013 – 9:46 pm

The Village Against the World is an affectionate, but not hagiographic account of the development of Marinaleda, with a strong focus on its leader Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, a farming community in Andalusia, southern Spain that over three decades transformed itself from being a landless, poverty=stricken peasant community with 60% unemployment, population 2,700 to being a land-owning, communally run community with its own farm, processing plant, bar and much more. One of its achievements is a community that is to be eventually of 350 homes; the Andalusian regional government provides the building materials, the villagers build the homes themselves and pay 15
euros/month mortgage

Hancox is realistic about its special nature “for centuries, Andalusian day labourers have settled in … tidily-sized pueblos, rather than in big cities or isolated cottages … and this has forged a unique spirit, an ultra-local micro=patriotism,… a thriving collective personality develops of its own volition, independent of
trends outside”.

But this is no ordinary pueblo – it’s as politically sophisticated as they come. Hancox tells the story of how the village went on hunger strike to demand land, since earlier occupations had come to nothing, sometimes violently, since police can’t beat up someone for not eating. Topping it was a letter from the villages’ children, some of whom had joined the hunger strike, apparently entirely on their own initiative, to the young crown prince of Spain. Political genius.

But … “Before the land seizures, before the collective farm, before economic democracy, before virtually free housing, before the assassination attempts, before the supermarket raids, before utopia, came organisation… in 1976 the field workers’ union, the Sindicato de Oberos del Campo was founded and soon after the Mirinaleda chapter formed … a union for day labourers, focusing on direct action, with a broadly anarchist philosophy. … at that time Spanish law prohibited voting in union elections until you had worked for the same employer for more than six months, ruling out 98% of the 500,000 Andalusian field workers, severing an entire class from labour organisation.” (p. 73)

What they acquired was part of an aristocrat holding of 23,000 hectares of land … were planted with labour-light dry crops like cornand sunflowers. “The Marinaleda proposal was to sow crops that created substantially more work, like tobacco, cotton or sugar beet, and to create secondary industries for processing them. This, they argues, would instantly lead to a 30 per cent reduction in unemployment in central Andalusia.” (p. 79)

“It was land reform from below, not above, delivered by direct action, and always pacifist ; their rule was to leave when evicted (although this did not prevent countless lawsuits for trespassing, roadblocks and other related incidents.) They fell into a routine whereby the Guardia Civil would evict them every day at the same time, around 5 or 6 pm, when they would go peacefully and walk back to the village. They following morning they would walk the 10 miles back again, flags held high. In the summer of 1985, in the blistering heat,
they made the same journey every day for a month – taking only Sunday off.” (p. 97)

“In 1991 they were finally granted El Humoso’s 1,200 hectares, the Duke of Infantado was quietly paid off by the regional government… In Sanchez Gordillo’s reading … it was the first time in 5,000 years
that the Andalusian farm labourers had been given the land that was rightfully theirs.”

Well worth a read … an extract.

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Books Environmental politics Science

Looking back four billion years, with a very foggy picture…

December 27, 2013 – 8:17 pm

(A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics)

The early evolution of life on Earth is a subject I’ve always found fascinating, but it’s a couple of decades since I last revisited the subject in any depth, and having read Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History by Donald E Canfield I now know that pretty well everything I’ve ever read or been taught on the subject was wrong. The idea that gradually algae spread around the earth, pumping out oxygen in a steady-growing stream, well it simply isn’t true.

It’s not surprising my teachers were so wrong, for as I read in Oxygen, a big breakthrough in understanding early life on Earth came in only 1999, when a colleague and friend of the author, James Farquahar, found some highly unexpected results on a study of sulfur isotopes, in Archaen rocks aged from 2.3-2.4 billion years ago. That led to the conclusion that at this time there’d been interaction between UV light and sulfur dioxide gas from volcanoes. Today, that’s absorbed by ozone, of course from oxygen. Further studies on the form some molybdenum takes in rocks of this age from some parts of the world, however, show that in some places there was free oxygen – what’s come to be known as a “whiff” of oxygen.

What was happening was that by around 2.5 billion years ago, the production of oxygen by photosynthesis more or less balanced the consumption of it by volcanic gases. Sometimes the balance shifted one way, so the oxygen disappeared, sometimes the cyanobacteria were beating the volcanoes.

It was between 2.3 and 2.4 billion years ago that “the great oxidation event” (GOE) changed that. Quite what caused it is still up for grabs. Canfield has a favourite, not evolution of cyanobacteria but a less active mantle, as it gradually cooled, cutting the production of reducing gases. Seems entirely plausible to this interested amateur.

But the GOE wasn’t entirely even – it was Canfield suggests concentrated in the atmosphere, the oceans remaining anoxic and rich in sulfide, with more sulfur being weathered from the land through oxidative weathering of sulfides. This is now known as the “Canfield Ocean” – yes after the author, we’re in seriously expert hands here.

Related to that is the likelihood that for much of the Earth’s “middle ages” atmospheric oxygen levels were much lower than today’s. (Any time machine travellers would need to take oxygen cylinders.) The author’s theory is just 10% of today’s levels, others suggest 40-50%.
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Books Feminism History Women's history

Early modern women healers – a further blow to traditional views

October 26, 2013 – 9:17 pm

First published on Blogcritics

The traditional view of women healers of the medieval and early modern period has been that they were marginal, distrusted figures, at risk always of being cast as witches, enjoying little or no respect, if some fear. It’s a view that modern scholarship is gradually overturning. I was fascinated when I was reading about early modern England to learn of the respect with which midwives were held, and how, particularly in London, they were subjected to rigorous training and a strict licensing system that involved testimony from women they had attended in childbirth.

Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany by Alisha Rankin is a further piece of the story, showing how a wide cast of noblewomen enjoyed considerable respect for their medical knowledge, not just from their peers but also professional physicians, with whom they operated in general in concert, rather than competition.

Indeed the final chapter in this book, focused on Elizabeth of Rochlitz, who had a modest reputation as a healer, but here is studied most as a patient, provides a fascinating Insight into the actual experience of being treated for illness in early modern times.

Physicians – classically trained in book learning dating back to classical times, and with a traditional contempt for empirical evidence (although Rankin suggests that was fading) – tended to prescribe regimens, particularly diets, to match what they saw as the underlying problems of the patient, rather than treat particular symptoms. Barber- surgeons dealt with wounds and at least some of the time dressings. pharmacists, including the gentlewomen described here, were the true scientists of the time, testing and trying herbal and chemical treatments, sharing and comparing them.

Elisabeth – it is a sad story, suffered more than a decade of illness, which she resolutely refused to allow to be diagnosed as “the French disease” (syphilis). Rankin maintains her professional uncertainty in saying we can’t be sure, but given her father and brother died of it, this seems highly likely. There was of course stigma attached, which Rankin says may have been one reason for refusing to accept the diagnosis, but another may also have been her dislike of regimens- one suggested to her involved giving up garlic, onions, mustard, horseradish, spices, smoked protein, all food fried in butter, beans, lentils and sauerkraut, and wine. Quite a lot to ask of an aristocrat, even a minor one.

Instead, she put her faith in herbal remedies, aqua vitae (distilled strong liquor – which certainly must have made the patients feel better) and a barber surgeon’s plasters of egg white, honey, saffron and flour. (Which might actually have done her some good.)
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Books History Politics

European food, from hard tack to Oyster Ketchup, Roquefort to fish fingers

October 24, 2013 – 9:49 pm

First published on Blogcritics

The Food Industries of Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (edited by Derek J. Oddy and Alain Drouard) is a dry collection of academic articles that is written in what is often the dullest possible prose. So why am I telling you about it? Well because the subjects are so fascinating that they overwhelm the format and, while encouraging skipping to the narrative bits, are well worth hanging in for. It also has a broad pan-European view that’s quite unusual and illuminating.

We begin with the start of industrial food production – somehow it’s unsurprising it’s a war that provides the impetus, or rather the Napoleonic Wars. Britain needed salt beef and hard tack to feed its navy, and suppliers started to gear up for the bulk production.

But for products more recognisable today, it’s the last four decades of the 18th century that advertisements for branded pickles and sauces started to appear in the London newspapers. “John Burgess, for instances, offered West India Pickles, Cayenne Pepper, Bengal Currie Powder, Japan Soy, Lemon Pickle, Oyster Ketchup, Shallot Ketchup and Devonshire Sauce.” These were, if not exactly reserved for the wealthy, certainly not reaching far down the social scale, in part because they were designed to go with fish or meat, households in which animal protein consumption was increasing.

Popularity of a new flavour led to mass production. There’s a lovely example of Elizabeth Lazenby who in 1793 was given a fish sauce recipe by her innkeeper brother, Peter Harvey, so she could support her family. She manufactured and sold it from Portman Square (you wouldn’t want to try that now), and when she retired Harvey’s Sauce (why are women’s names never preserved?) delivered her a substantial annuity of £300 a year. The brand continued, becoming Lazenby Pickles, operating from 1808 from a Southwark factory, where they remained until 1926.
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Books Feminism History Women's history

Sex, love, marriage, a complicated story…

October 21, 2013 – 10:18 pm

First published on Blogcritics

Reading The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution, which covers relationships, courtship and marriage from 1920 to 1970, with a particular focus on the period around the Second World War, is a powerful reminder that marriage has never been a fixed and stable structure, but has changed regularly, certainly with each 20th-century generation.

Author Claire Langhammer relies chiefly on individual accounts, often painfully frank and honest, looks into the guidance of “agony aunts” and other media reports, and occasionally official reports and studies, to conclude that over the total period of her study there was a significant shift from marriage as primarily an economic relationship – breadwinner support traded for the creation of a comfortable home –  towards a more “emotional”, demanding relationship even during the Fifties, which she suggests relationships were much less stable than we commonly suppose, meaning that the freewheeling Sixties were not marked by more demand for continuing love, but rather the transition of marriage into the late teens and early twenties, a reflection both of increasing wealth and less need to save for marriage, but that also that this was seen as an essential, normal step into adulthood.

Langhammer quotes a 1959 survey showing that a quarter of working class brides were teenagers on their wedding day; more than three-quarters were under 25. A telling item in the initial Boyfriend magazine in the same year tells the story of a young woman determined to do something with her life – transform and modernise her aunt’s cafe, which interferes with her love life. But eventually she finds a man who also wants to run a cafe, so they settled down together.

And particularly as the ideology of love and marriage going together, indeed being essential, spread, many of the same tensions and concerns we recognise in relationships today emerge.

One painfully honest ‘case history’ from the Mass Observation Survey from 1949 tells of a 19-year-old woman who has sex with a 24-year-old merchant seaman – although only after he reassures her he’s using a condom. “I agreed then. I didn’t want to but I liked him and he wanted to. He said: ‘You can’t be in love with me unless you will do it.”
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