Why nothing should ever be self-evident

I suppose I can understand why we think many issues in modern life should be self-evident but if there is one thing that frustrates me more than anything else about the left-wing it is our progressive tendency to rest on our intellectual laurels, to assume that a battle won is a battle that can be swept under the carpet.  There is often a supercilious ability we have which leads us to assume that anyone who does not agree with us is automatically guilty of a fallacy of thought, by virtue of the fact that they don't agree with us.

Similarly, if there is one thing I admire about the regressive end of the political spectrum, it is their capacity never to forget that each generation requires restatement and reminder of basic tenets and fundamental positions.  In this, they are tireless.  In this, they take nothing for granted.  In this, they are most wise.

We should always remember that ignorance is only a crime and something to be condemned when it becomes wilful and deliberately perpetuated.

I wish I could inhabit a part of the political spectrum which treated nothing ever as self-evident, no one ever as beyond the pale and no innovation as unspeakable simply because it aimed its sights at sacred cows of public and social importance.

The one great and lasting virtue of New Labour was its desire to triangulate thought.  Its great failing and disservice to modern politics was to use another triangulation - that of pyramid-like hierarchies - to impose its very own prejudices, rather than explore and examine those of the whole nation.  If only it had chosen to enable public opinion - much as the Coalition makes out it is trying to do (for what are probably suspiciously rabid reasons, mind; this kind of racist language is, after all, being published on an official government website), but with a rather different intention and ideal - then perhaps New Labour as a project would have become an organic and integral part of British public intercourse.  Instead, the refreshing airs of political triangulation - that is to say, the 21st century freedoms we should have so treasured and which would have continued to allow us to think out of the restricting boxes of received ideology - have, instead, rightly fallen into a righteous disrepute from which no amount of lamentation will ever recover a sadly lost ground.

Simply put, we progressives messed up everything that had been achieved because we were unable to be more humble about our self-evident truths.  We were unable to act with an intellectual humility that would - in other circumstances - have led us to reassert with gentleness and solidarity our beliefs, starting points and dearly held underlying assumptions to each new generation, to each sub-generation, to each community that ever presented itself.

In the brash hurly-burly of modern political debate, we lost sight of the fact that to restate is to be wise, to take for granted is ingratitude unlimited - and that even Sarah Palin may quite fairly be judged a citizen with a right to run for public office.

So it is that I actually like the "Spending Challenge" website as an idea.  What I don't like is what I think it's going to be used for.  I suspect the real political strategy behind the proposal is to expand the envelope of unthinkable thoughts that this Coalition will then be able to float, providing it with the agenda-making watertight protection of crowdsourcing to cover its intellectual backsides, in the busy and single-term going-for-broke approach to governance that is quickly characterising this shabby coup d'etat of incompetents.

I may, of course, be wrong.  This Coalition may, of course, be populated by a score of altruistic millionaires with even more intelligence than money, with even more wisdom than cruel wit.

I may, of course, be entirely unfair about the intentions, motivations and aims of this government.

In which case, let the "Spending Challenge" continue apace.

Only please, in the end, let moderation and good British common sense rule this day - simply in order that we may not have to rue it.

The Guardian embraces Wordpress blogs

Here's a lovely story from Tech Dirt on a move from the Guardian which - at least in my eyes - serves to redeem this curate's egg of a newspaper for its mad and unyielding decision at the general election to go down the Lib Dem road.  More thus:

We've pointed out a few times that The Guardian newspaper in the UK is not just a believer in the value of keeping its content free online, but is also doing a lot of very interesting experiments. As we hear daily about newspapers and organizations like the Associated Press threatening to sue blogs that repost some of their content (even for commentary purposes), The Guardian is going in the completely opposite direction. As part of its Open Platform program, it has created a tool that lets any Wordpress-based blog repost any Guardian article for free. Yes, this is the complete opposite of what most publications are doing. Rather than whining about "freeloaders" and "copycats" and "aggregators," The Guardian has decided to embrace them and take advantage of the situation.

The full story here.

Contrast this with Murdoch's paywall and the current British government's moves to get rid of an unending list of regulations designed to protect us from the excesses of big corporations - and you most certainly have at least one reason to be moderately cheerful.

Knowledge is power.  Sharing knowledge means sharing power.

There is a future which shines brightly ahead of us, if we manage to work out how to fashion it.

No time now, but - perhaps - this evening I will link permanently to the Guardian and advertise this brilliant initiative.  Two requests.  A similar widget for the Blogger platform.  Plus a request to my favourite science magazine, New Scientist, to do the same.  Haven't read it for months.  All stopped when it started telling me I could only read something like five articles a month.

What do you all say, moguls of the print world?  Is there room for more than one Guardian-style online network in this brave new world of interaction?

The coup d'etat Coalition and the detail of disgrace

As I have mentioned before on these pages, the overwhelming stupidity of this Coalition makes it almost impossible for me to know where to begin.  Where a steady balancing economic hand was needed to nurse an unhappy patient out of intensive care, we have - instead - an ideologically driven series of violent acts of vengeance for a decade of socialism by stealth.  The words "support" and "solidarity" are substituted with the political onomatopoeia of "spit on you" and the moral equivalent of a coup d'etat.

I've never felt I lived in an undemocratic country.  I experienced the oppression of Yugoslavia as a child; mostly second-hand through my mother's family and their memories from the middle of the last century, though - on one occasion when much older - I now realise I was being checked out by people I should've been more careful of and who were, in retrospect, plainly looking to see which way I might jump.

But Britain was always different for me.  Britain was like a coalface.  Above and below were strata of unyielding rock but at its essence seams of rich fuel were to be found.  And this rich fuel fed a hunger for truth, fair play and consensus.  Even where our parliamentary system was based on futile name-calling, the committees that grew up around it were full of the great and good, more often than not coached in the meaning of honesty, sincerity and an ingrained sense of public service.

Now I know what it is like to experience a coup d'etat.  Those forces whose collapse two years ago brought our economic system to the point of virtual disintegration are now imposing their morality on the rest of us: their ways of thinking, their Darwinian view of life, their perception that men and women are dogs which eat dogs ... all of that is now being fed into the social, cultural and political framework that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Without wishing to fall into the trap of thinking conspiratorially, my feeling that this is all part of a long-planned act of vengeance is strengthened by the ease with which the Conservatives set up Clegg as the fall guy.  Cameron is clearly appealing to all his constituencies with a greater or lesser degree of success.  Curiously, however, the ire of the more progressive of those amongst us is directed against the lesser of the two evils - that is to say, Clegg and his Lib Dems - for not being even less of an evil than they are.

I have seen this curious tendency, this tendency for ire to focus on the smaller of two blameworthy parties, in my own work context.  Here, dissatisfaction with new contractual proposals seems to have displayed itself in an unheard-of anger against the union representatives rather than a more fairly exhibited unhappiness with the company's approach and intent.  It's almost as if you feel it's safer to kick against the little guys than the big, safer to disengage with the lesser than the greater.

Even when the greater is actually the one truly at fault.

So.  There we have it.  In a coup d'etat, disorientation is the name of the game.  And we are disorientated.  Cameron has his shield in Clegg, Clegg has his sell-by date in the Coalition, the Tories are gaining adepts as their foolish (rather than principled) sheen of libertarianism releases the forces of randomisation ... and all this time all the Labour Party can do is pretend that what the 21st century needs is 19th century pyramid-like hierarchies of leadership, where online communication involves delivery rather than engagement - and differentiation between alternative leaders is still a question of massaging lukewarm messages.

For if we, on the progressive side of politics, in the context of a legally correct but morally corrupt taking by political force of the government of this country, cannot find it in ourselves right now to express a greater sense of indignation than this, then we are, to coin a phrase, "most certainly doomed".

This is most rapidly becoming the worst kind of banana republic.  That is to say, the sort of place where the governments-in-waiting such as those that Cameron and Clegg represented learned not only from Tony Blair and New Labour but also from George W Bush and Florida.

This is awful stuff.

But, mainly, a reflection on ourselves as we show a grand inability to stand back from the detail of disgrace.

A honeymoon of the beloved versus the sadness and expediency of a shotgun wedding

I truly find it difficult to say how I am feeling at the moment.  My ability to comment on what this awful government is engaging in is declining exponentially.  All that is left to me is to point out that - of course - any new government deserves a honeymoon period, but the size of that period is directly related to the care and caution with which its exponents might proceed.

In this case, Cameron has already told us that he'd far rather be a one-term prime minister on a hiding-to-nothing than a true healer of wounds that I think most of us can contemplate the need to face up to and deal with in a consensual manner.

This desire to unpick all the achievements of the previous government simply because they belong to the previous government is one of the worst and most persistently consistent aspects of British politics.  As a consequence, we are now going to get the dirty libertarianism of the vengeful, not the pure libertarianism of the principled.  And this is all because, in place of a honeymoon of the beloved, we have the sadness and expediency of a shotgun wedding.  The baby which will be brought forth will be an illegitimacy in all but legal status. 

Everything this government will do, it will end up doing because it can.

For if there is one thing it will massively refuse to believe in, then that is the elegance, deftness and rightness of healing politics.

Labour now has a reason to look to the future.

The job of rebuilding Britain, after a decade of furious Coalition neglect, will be ours.  But in the meantime, a generation of young and old people will be condemned to relive the years of ideological fury that Thatcher's regime most unhappily exemplified and represented.

Please don't misunderstand me.  I don't - per se - despise or find resistible governments of an ideological bent.  I just cannot stand unimpressively bent governments like this one.  Bent from unimpressive beginning to end.  Bent because they are an example of a wedding of greedy convenience.  These people know they are chasing the short fuse that we have unfortunately allowed them to light.  They know they have so very little time.  And those who act out of desperation, who are aware of their own sell-by dates ... these are the most dangerous figures history can oblige us to follow.

A government which is on a hiding-to-nothing will do and say anything to justify its acts.

Watch, falsely grin - and bear it.

On the subject of "crazy entrepreneurs"

Here's an interesting article on the subject of "crazy entrepreneurs".  Though I agree with most of it, I strongly take issue with the simplistic approach enshrined in the following threadbare soundbite:

"Jobs are created by the private sector not by the public sector. Wealth is created by the private sector not by the public sector.  [...]"

In truth, the situation is far more complex than this, as today's news in the Guardian indicates:

Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015.

The close relationship between public and private which New Labour's period in government exemplifies gives at least a partial lie to the notions expressed by Google's Eric Schmidt.  Working in an intelligent partnership with those who know not only how to invent but also how to innovate, clever governments can do far more for a wider populace than the restricting matrix of venture capitalists and budding Edisons may ever hope to achieve.  We need the brilliantly oddball, that is true - but we also need to be clear that what drives them most is not money but opportunity.  And, on a 21st century planet where everyone's fate is now clearly common, we can no longer take a granular approach to innovation.  Every iPod which is manufactured and sold and serves to add value for Apple obviously has its downsides - downsides which end up affecting us all.

The innovators, like our physicians before them, need a moral framework and culture before we can allow them the freedoms that Schmidt is understandably arguing on behalf of.  Otherwise, they will continue to create at the longer-term expense of future generations.

This is no longer justifiable.

This is no longer enough.

Freedom with responsibility.  Even the crazy can understand that equation.

On the virtual coattails of search (and how it doesn't work any more)

I've been struggling - on and off - for the past month to try and load Ovi Maps 3.0 (the version with free navigation for walk and drive) onto my Nokia E63 smartphone.  Nokia's own integrated software refuses to allow the exercise to take place, whilst resorting to Google has been a most frustrating experience.

The problem with search is that you have to ask the right question.  And, what's more, that question needs to be new.  If you ask the wrong question - or, alternatively put, a question which has already been asked - instead of getting what you're looking for, you'll most likely get what someone else wants you to find.  In an evermore consumer-ridden society, this is generally that thing which makes money for that someone - not, unfortunately, something that means even-handed support.

Search is polluted.  It didn't use to be like this.  In the good old days, when real editors of the Internet helped index utility, massaging of results was a rather more complex affair - far more difficult to achieve.  But now that algorithms depend on links - and there is so much mediocrity out there which achieves visibility by chasing already visible real estate - search has become at most a second-hand experience.  We don't get the best any more.  We get the virtual coattails other people - less wise - are desperate to hang their websites on, in a madcap mission to be the first to chatter noisily.

So, in search, we do have an oracle but - in a sense - it only tells us what we want to know when we know how to ask wisely.  And that, my dear reader, is half the battle.  In a sense, once that battle is properly and usefully engaged, we almost certainly already know - more or less - what the answer will be.

The real power of search, then, is in its teaching us the Socratic skills of using questions to strip truth out of obfuscation.

But we must play our part and persist in the pursuit of that truth.

We cannot sit back and unquestioningly accept the results that algorithms provide.

The virtual world of search is, thus, no different from the real world of curious bewilderment.  It extends our reach - only to confuse our ability to be perspicacious.  Perhaps this is a deliberate wheeze on the part of consumer-driven economies.  To provide us with all the truths any world could expect to hold - but make it impossible to work out where reality lies.

So it is that capitalism disconcerts us all with its apparent ability to reinvent itself perpetually.  For it doesn't actually reinvent at all: simply, it is successful at making us forget.

Such is the power of those who believe we must all welcome their ability to put a price on all our heads.
____________________

If, incidentally, you'd like to install Maps 3.0 on your E63, there is a way.  After a month of searching frustratedly, I finally asked the right question - though for the life of me I can't remember what it was.  So it is that on Nokia's own forums, the oracle has spoken thus.  Free navigation finally seems within my grasp.  Just need to work out now how to stop the system going online to check licences every time I try to get instructions.

Update to this footnote: turn-by-turn voice navigation now seems to be working on my E63, in combination with my external GPS device and without having to access aforesaid Internet.

So am I clever or what?

How staring at goats is a metaphor for the Internet itself (or Web 10.0)

I saw the film "The Men Who Stare At Goats"  (more background here) yesterday for the first time.  I saw it again today for the second.  Today I saw it in the company of my daughter.  Yesterday, I saw it with my wife.  My wife fell asleep.  Not her sort of film.  My daughter, however, a product of two cultures (possibly three), was absolutely fascinated and entranced.

The grand achievement of this film is whilst it makes you laugh at some of the crazier paranoias of military mindsets, it doesn't half make you uneasily aware that there is a far bigger world out there than any one of us has the right to imagine.  And whilst I was watching the film for the second time, I found myself commenting to my daughter that the idea of remote viewing which the film enshrines in its very heart and soul didn't half remind me of what - even in its relatively primitive state - we can now quite easily do with the Internet.  That is to say, find almost anything almost anywhere without leaving the safety of our sitting-rooms.

Just imagine a Web 10.0 for example - today's Internet with a decade's worth of astonishing and as yet unpredicted bells and whistles.  Tactile touchscreens, all-enveloping body suits, voice- and thought-controlled inventions - all at the service of our most minimal whims.

Tools which serve to stretch and extend our reach as a species and sovereign individuals to places we never before imagined.

Just imagine where search is truly leading us.

To find out everything about everyone, wherever we may find ourselves.  For that is where the metaphor that is this film is leading us to.  In this sense, the Jedi warriors of the New Earth Army that are affectionately depicted and amusingly described by the story told will - in an inevitably social media world of ever-increasing circles (more here) - in the end most certainly be ourselves.

But in ways we cannot yet know.  Nor, indeed, understand - or even begin to usefully fathom.

If truth be told, this curious curate's egg of a tale explains with clarity the implications around how the supernatural may empower us to good cause.  Meanwhile, the discombobulating side of living in the technological world we now attempt to usefully locate ourselves in is that even where we pooh-pooh the promotion of such super powers as the unhappy rantings of the moderately mad, we may yet find that human machines, black boxes and infinitely complex devices of the future will provide us with undeniably hard and fast realities that - one happy (or at the very least intellectually engaging) day I am sure - manage to fulfil such bizarre imaginings to the point where the supernatural becomes the mundane and therefore simply one more utility.

On contemplating the lies of rapid gain that lead with inevitability to the falsehoods of productive pain

I've been contemplating the breaking up of that economic contract New Labour forged with the poorer in society.  It was a contract with the devil as New Labour people used the language of aspiration to allow the wealthiest to keep their wealth and feel good about it.  But at the same time, through tax credits and a massive but not excessive re-investment in public services (for these were under Thatcher essentially under-invested public services), some redistribution - which would most certainly have not taken place under a Tory government - was most certainly effected.  Unfortunately, this redistribution was not organic, was not persistent, was not learned or sought after or fashioned from below but - rather - imposed from above in an unhappy command and control manner.

Now we get more of the same as British politics operates true to type and a new government aims to unroll everything that the previous government - which sought no sustainable agreements amongst the political leaders that peopled previous parliaments - attempted, in its wisdom, to force upon a voting public.

Lots of what it forced on this voting public came about because Tony Blair had the gift of the gab.  As simple as that.

And also because New Labour's electoral machine knew how to bring to the fore most effectively such a gift.

Tony Blair was made for the narrative that New Labour developed and sold us.  But in order to sustain that narrative, tools such as tax credits - quick fixes if you like (quick fixes that could just as easily be undone as put in place; and therein lies their Achilles' heel) - were used to generate a belief in that blessed voting public that politics could be convincingly about useful rapid gain.

Without too much data to hand, however, it is my gut feeling that nothing in life which brings sustainable and persistent happiness can be achieved quickly.

Equally, nevertheless, the reverse of the political coin that is what we might term the narrative of productive pain leads me to perceive a self-interested falsehood of monumental proportions.  What Gordon Brown, on the coattails of New Labour, managed to engineer - even in full economic crisis - was the possibility of a soft and shared landing from the conventional wisdom of cyclical capitalism.  "We're in it all together" was the mantra and the expectation.

Something new was on the horizon.  And that something new was a breaking of that conventional wisdom.  It would have turned our whole society upside down.  After saving the banks, Brown could have saved an ameliorating form of capitalism for all our benefits.  And I mean "benefits" in the widest sense of the word.

This is not what Cameron's Coalition wishes to achieve.  On the coattails of economic crisis - as well as Brown's generally unhappy lack of political steam for most of his regime - the Coalition now aims to reintroduce a capitalism of Darwinian proportions, where ordinary workers must kow-tow to the miserable mechanics of a sharply hierarchical governance and power.

As companies develop their ability to empower and free up their workforces and flatten such hierarchies internally and most productively, so governments like the one we now must suffer choose, inevitably, to go in quite an opposite direction: they engender a miasma-like fear in the future (oh, this disgraceful narrative of "courageous decision-taking" so annoys and disturbs me); they shackle the public sector workers, the poor, those with the least time to participate in local and national democracy - those who most need to engage in public debate and fewest resources have to so do.  Thus it is that in reality the most deserving in society will now be caged within an inevitable sadness and loss: both economic and political, both social and cultural.

These people who now run our country only know how to effect quick fixes.  Whether New Labour for reasons I might generally have admired or the Coalition for reasons I can only suspect, they all do so love their damned button-pressing dynamics.

And I do so hate them all for precisely that reason.

An alternative BP

Fascinating expressions and intuitive intimations of ordinary people's reactions to the actions of a company with what appears to be a rather long list of prior violations.  This doesn't half seem like an accident waiting to happen.  More here in this brilliant logo competition which came my way via Slugger O'Toole (though Slugger seems to suggest that the competition is Huffington Post's - which I don't actually think is the case).

Andy Burnham's pitch (and my surprised reaction)

Here's Andy Burnham's pitch to Labour Party members, which - to my surprise, of the three I think I've received to date - is the one I find most chimes with my current mood.  Comments inline.

Dear Miljenko,

I will always be proud of what our Labour Government achieved. But, now, Labour needs to rebuild. Too many people have lost sight of who we are and what we stand for.

To come back stronger, we need an honest debate about the last 16 years. We must bring the wider Labour family back together. Then, we will be ready to set out for this century an inspiring Labour mission that is both true to our roots and speaks directly to the voters that we need to win back.

This idea of an honest debate about the last sixteen years is absolutely spot on.  Paul at Never Trust a Hippy is coming to similar conclusions in a slightly more focussed context here.

This is what I mean by Reconnecting Labour. I have a strong sense of what we need to do and I believe I can give Labour what it needs:

* a Leader that people everywhere can identify with
* a Leader who can put the heart and passion back into our Party
* a Leader who offers a real contrast to the Cabinet of millionaires that now run our country

This last point may be populist - but Burnham is no demagogue.  The country is now being run by a cabinet of millionaires.

I come from an ordinary family and am proud to represent my home area in Parliament. My feet are firmly on the ground and I've never forgotten where I come from. This is why I can give a real voice to the millions of families who fear a Tory Government cutting without compassion, leaving them with no breadwinner or taking away hope from their children.

This goes to the heart of the issue to hand.  Cutting without compassion is what we will get if we allow a government run by high-level decision-makers used to understanding the world through executive summaries to control our futures.

We may not have much choice, of course.  This government may be locked into power for the next five years.  But at least let us ensure the reasons behind our suffering remain clear and visible for all to see and understand.

But I've also got the right experience to lead, having done some of the hardest jobs in government, including Chief Secretary to the Treasury. It was a huge privilege to serve as Labour's Health Secretary and my proudest moment in politics was to bring forward the NHS Constitution which secures our Party's finest achievement for this century.

But there is much more I want to do. My own life experience has shown me that we still live in a very uneven country, where children without connections find it hard to get on and where life chances are determined by the postcode of the bed you are born in. We still live in a country where families on low to middle incomes often find the odds stacked against them. And we still live in a country where older people live in fear of the costs of care.

The second paragraph again describes realities as seen by foot soldiers.  Yet it is coupled with the first which indicates Burnham would be no procedural pushover; that is to say, he would not be lost at sea when dealing with the buffeting storms, the inertias, of civil service machinations and mandarins.

Labour will reconnect with people by bringing forward inspiring ideas to meet the challenges of a new century that are in the best traditions of our Party. That is why I will continue to argue for a National Care Service - free at the point of use - to give older people peace of mind.

My mission is always to break down elites wherever they exist - and that means looking at how we run our own Party too. For too long, we've taken members for granted. We need to listen more. Under my leadership the party, you the members - our MPs, MEPs, MSPs, AMs and councillors - together with the trade unions and affiliates will all play as one team. No more squabbling and turf wars. At times of crisis in the last Parliament, I always put loyalty to our Party first.

This statement is weaker - elites grow up partly, but quite often, because too many people put loyalty to the organisation they belong to before they do to the logic, rationales and realities of a situation.  Burnham had me in his pocket up to this point - but then sort of lost me in a sudden New Labour flurry of command and control-ism.

It is because I have never had any time for factional politics that I can unify our movement.

Yes.  Quite.  We can all agree on that.  But - in reality - how can this be achieved?  Unification around the lowest common denominator or a healthy level of dissonance which leads to true renewal?

And it is by pulling together that we will expose this Government and present the British people with a credible, principled, and more visionary alternative - a unifying force for all those people who want to live in a country with a fairer spread of health, wealth and life chances.

I do not stand for the leadership lightly. I have never had anything handed to me on a plate and have worked my way up from my local branch to the Cabinet table. I now stand to lead the Party I love and have served at every level for 25 years because Reconnecting Labour is my life's passion not a slogan.

Yours,

Andy

Anyhow, and even despite my reservations expressed above, this gently flawed pitch from Andy Burnham has allowed him to leap up my list - and quite curiously sort of made me wonder if we really do need the telegenic Milibands to rule the absolute heights of the political roost after all.