Robert Sharp

Almost as soon as I echo the question “who are you writing for” then a prime example appears in the pages of the Observer Woman magazine.  Rachel Cooke calls those obsessed with motherhood “boring, selfish, smug” and cites this piece of evidence:

Let me give you an example. The other morning, while I was thinking about writing this piece, I logged on to one of the dozens of websites now devoted to all things baby-related. The discussion subject of the day - email us! - was the funny ways kids mispronounce words. Really. To which I say: new mothers, by all means, tell your own parents, or a close friend, about how your son said the word “bottle” and made it sound like “bottom”. But don’t be incontinent. Don’t tell the entire world. Telling the entire world will make people, and not without reason, think that you have lost your mind.

Cooke’s false lemma here is to equate putting something on the internet, with, OMG, TELLING THE WORLD!  Confessing something in an Observer column could be described in that way.  Participating in an online discussion, while (technically) available for everyone to see, is something quite different.  It is participating in a community, based around a shared interest.  If the sites are appropriately labelled (and if they are called Alpha Mummy, Mumsnet, Babble, and MumsRock, then I would suggest that is the case) then the real mystery is why anyone without a child would go anywhere near them.  They are narrowcasting, not broadcasting, and joining a discussion there does not equate to “telling the world” or the self-centredness that Cooke implies.

The Internet, with its millions of users and trillions of pages, carries fan and hobby sites for absolutely any human activity one can imagine, including knitting, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and foot fetishists.  They might appear obsessed, but then any highly specialised conversation seems that way to an outsider.  Since we only come into contact with these people when we see them online, we do not credit them with any other interests, other than what we read of their online thoughts.  So it is with the parenting sites mentioned above:  They are populated by a self-selected group of people, with a narrow remit to talk about one subject.  They are not representative of a wider trend, any more than the so-called Dummy Mummies Cooke has apparently encountered at London social events.

Plenty of my friends now seem to use Facebook as a place to post pictures of their babies.  Does that mean that they are obsessed?  No more so than all my childless mates, who only ever post images from their holidays, or of weddings.  We choose to only record certain things, tiny slivers of our lives.  Thank God they don’t post pictures of themselves on the train, or worse, on the bog.

The Convention on Modern Liberty has invited its attendees to post video responses to the messages that their key speakers have created in support of the project.  I’ve had a go, and created an archetypal ‘head to camera’ YouTube video:

My take is to highlight the problem of small, minor liberties being taken away without comment. If we guard against the loss of these, then the large incursions onto our freedoms, the kind that bring about a totalitarian state, will never happen. But those freedoms are also valuable in themselves.

I am slightly uneasy about saying that the large infringements, such as the 42 days detention laws, or the existence of Guantanamo, are somehow ‘abstract’. Some might see this as an insensitivity to those who have fallen victim to such state-sponsored action… and that may indeed be the case. However, my aim in making the video (or rather, making the point) was to provide a persuasive argument that may convince people that remain ambivalent, rather than a place to show anger, solidarity, or both.

I think that feature has come to be the tone of this site over the past, say, twenty months. I’ve found this is less a place to rant, less a place for me to find catharsis… and more a place to push an argument into new places. If it appears to some people that I have missed the point, then there’s a chance that the argument wasn’t intended for them in the first place.

The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu gave a speech to the Smith Institute last week, ‘Regaining a Big Vision for Britain’, as part of their ‘Reinvigourating Communities’ lecture series. Its available to view via Policy Review TV:

He outlines the Big Vision of the Beveridge Report, and the influence of William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury of the time, in the development of the Welfare State. The Big Vision, Sentamu argues, was built on a distinctly Christian ethic and conception of humanity. Now we need a new vision, which leaders must articulate, so that we can all once again pull together to realise the social and economic changes required to mend our fractured society.

Archbishop Sentamu clearly believes that the Church of England has a role to play in articulating, and providing moral leadership, on this new Big Vision for Britain. But I see some pitfalls along the way. First, he acknowledges that communities and families are the blocks around which a society should be built. But the Church’s conception of these building blocks is very traditional: Communities built around a parish, a place of worship, or at least a shared location; and families in the hetrosexual, nuclear sense. It comes into friction with the non-traditional versions of these same building blocks: communities built online, say, or homosexual couples. Its not clear to me how Anglicanism can claim particular expertise in building these new groups into a grand coalition that will move us forward.

The Archbishop also repeats his analysis of how the policy of multiculturalism went too far in favour of minority cultures, at the expense of any respect for the idea of Britishness (this is something I have taken issue with him before). He asserts that if we want integration, there must be a strong, broad, primary culture available to integrate with! This is fine, but I do wish that the Church of England would apply this insight when managing its own multicultural issues, as found within the world-wide Anglican Communion. The British approach is supposed to be a core principle of the Communion, yet many of its constituent Churches have, in recent years, seemed to reject that approach. If the Church of England cannot provide a common moral vision for the world-wide Anglican Community, why should we suppose it would be any better at providing one for 21st Century Britain, diverse, modern and glorious?

Meanwhile…

… over at the Secular Right blog, Heather MacDonald writes on the phenomenon of “Drive-Thru Religion”, and how the rise of secularism does not seem to have resulted in a country-wide a descent into Sodom and Gomorrah:

Only a quarter of Americans attend church weekly. Yet moral chaos has not broken out; society has grown more prosperous as secularism expands. Empathy with others, an awareness of the necessity of the Golden Rule, survive the radical transformation of religious belief, it turns out. Perhaps because a moral sense is the foundation, not the result, of religious ethics.

(Via teh Dish). Applied to the British case, perhaps the values of the Anglican Church have arisen due to the values of British culture, and not vice-versa. Given that the Church of England grew out of the reformation, and the freedom of non-conformism was a hard fought for political fight, that analysis seems more accurate to me. Its not a binary argument of course, but it seems to me that Archbishop Sentamu is on uneven ground if he is claiming the great social achievements of the past century to be a product of the Anglican approach, even if William Temple did have an hand in the Beveridge Report.

Writing in the Observer, Henry Porter advertises the convention, to be held on 28th February at various locations throughout the United Kingdom.

But this is no awayday for MPs, because in some sense the convention is a challenge to a parliament. For a brief moment, we will be airing the issues that haven’t been heard in the Commons this past decade, because Labour has all but anaesthetised the business of the chamber to push through its laws.

The website is now tested and live at www.modernliberty.net.  Please tell your friends, spread the word, and buy a ticket.  That other site of mine, LiberalConspiracy, is a supporter too.

There’s a recently concluded debate over at the Liberal Conspiracy about ‘feeding the trolls’, that is, engaging with commenters on the blog who are just there to provoke an argument. I think there is a distinction between proper trolls, who are actively seeking to waste their own time in order to waste others’, and other people who simply have a wildly differing worldview. In the case of the former, it is rarely worth engaging. But in the case of the latter, debate can sometimes be helpful. It all depends on what kind of conversation you want to have, and on the Liberal Conspiracy, it is often impossible to talk about something at the level of detail you desire, if you are arguing first principles with someone else (be it a troll, or bona fide member of the seething classes).

Sometimes, I wonder if the mainstream media aren’t trolling. Today I spotted this headline from the Daily Mail, and feel confident that it has been written to waste my time.

Human Rights: Straw To Get Tough

Exclusive - Minister tells Mail how he’ll reform ‘Villiain’s Charter

Its not that I do not disagree with the idea of labelling the Human Right’s Act a “villiain’s charter”.  Its just that attempting to engage with it - especially on a blog - is a bit pointless. Its not as if they are making some kind of technical or categorical error that a plucky blogger might tease out and add to the debate. This article is speaking a genuinely different language. I have been silent on the ‘Baby P’ issue, because the debate was of this highly toxic, divisive type. Others gamely engaged with the trolls, so to speak, but there comes a point where its down to someone with a little more profile that bloggers to take up the political fight. This is why people often end up criticising political allies, for relatively trivial reasons, apparently missing the wood for the trees. Its not that we’ve lost our moral compass, just that we’re angry that other people are not speaking up for us in the places that matter.

As to the substance of the article, I’ll merely note again that it is the hated and the vulnerable who have their Human Rights violated first. The Declaration of Human Rights was created precisely to guard against populist tendencies in governments. They’re inconvenient, but then so is the task of retaining our humanity in the face of violence and antagonism.

For those with a fatigue for this sort of thing, I highly recommend a visit to the ‘Taking Liberties‘ Exhibition (no, not that Taking Liberties) at the British Library. It has the Magna Carta and other declarations of Rights and Freedoms penned by various men and women from around these isles.

The exhibition set me thinking about the Damian Green affair (something else that seems so divisive that there is so little common ground between the warring parties that debate seems futile). Whilst I personally don’t believe that Jacqui Smith ordered the police into Mr Green’s office, and I do not believe that the Speaker, Michael Martin, colluded in the warrantless searching of the Tory MP’s office, the outcry itself seems like a healthy thing to me. It is good that there is an ‘awkward squad’ barrage of questions every time there is any hint of impropriety. Far from us living in a Stalinist State, as some alledge, it is the indignant calls to account which prevent us sliding into one.

Update

Heh - I wrote:

its down to someone with a little more profile that bloggers to take up the political fight

Ask and it shall be delivered unto you.

The Sun crows over the Shannon Matthews case:

The prosecutor said cops recovered at [Michael] Donovan’s flat a copy of The Sun from March 11, with the headline: “£50,000 for Shannon. Sun ups reward to find lost girl.”

Police also discovered a copy of the Daily Mirror which had been ripped up and dumped in a bin.

Its bizarre that The Sun should choose to delight in this little factoid, because it draws attention to a few rather negative interpretations:

• “The Sun is paper of choice for evil scheming child abductors”
• “The Sun falls for trap set by evil scheming child abductors”

or worse

• “The Sun’s dubious track record inspires evil scheming child abductors”

Karen Matthews and Craig Meehan pose with a 'Sun' branded reward poster, February 2008

Now the paper’s editors will no doubt suggest that by offering their reward, they were merely acting as good citizens who just wanted to see Shannon found safely.  However, the crass branding of the reward poster, which they gleefully reproduced in today’s paper, shows that their motives were altogether more commercial.  Not content with merely reporting the story, they insisted on influencing it.  They delighted then, and they still delight, in the part they played.  But the shocking truth is, by quickly fulfilling the plotters’ prophecy and advertising a reward, they inspired the kidnappers to keep Shannon hidden for longer, thus prolonging her ordeal.

Of course, if Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan are found guilty, then they will be rightly condemned for their actions.  They have free will.  However, blame is not a zero sum game.  We do not live in a vacuum, and the media can send signals which inspire others to act in negative ways.  Usually, violent films, rap artists, or computer game producers shoulder the criticism.  When they are put in the spot-light, these groups usually cite free-will, but also agree that they should act responsibly, that they should add caveats and warnings to their art, and that it should not be marketed to the vulnerable or easily impressed.

I note that this contrite and defensive attitude is nowhere to be found on the pages of The Sun.  They have fuelled this case, sparked a sales bonanza, and will surely do it again the moment they are given another opportunity.

And next time - mark my words, there is always a next time! - it is likely that the disappearance will be genuine.  Another pair of worried parents, bamboozled into supporting “The Sun’s Campaign” to find their child, followed by a period where they themselves come under suspicion.  Its a winning formula for The Sun, and not one politician will call them on it.

Cross-posted at the Liberal Conspiracy, please comment there.

Barack Obama campaigns in Virginia, 17th October 2008. Photo by Dave Elmore

I’ve spent all week batting away careless cliches from good friends and colleagues, declaring that all Americans are stupid, and we can’t trust them not to make a mess of things on Tuesday.

George W. Bush has been a terrible poster-boy for a complex country, and his two election victories (or, as I prefer to style it, one victory, and one “victory”) have persuaded us that most Americans are right-wing evangelical neo-cons. Of course, the country is more diverse than that, and many have indulged in thoughtful debate over the issues.

Plenty of conservatives have been endorsing Obama. Here is a New Yorker, The Cunning Realist, cautiously backing the Senator from Illinois:

It worries me that too many Obama supporters believe one person can snap his fingers and solve this country’s daunting problems. Hope is a great thing. But as the economy has imploded in recent months and the desperation out there has become palpable, the size of the crowds and the hope that surrounds Obama have made me a bit uneasy. I don’t mean hope in the traditional “government will fix things” sense that the Democratic Party represents - we all know what will happen to the size of government if Democrats control Washington, and we can thank George Bush for setting a fine example - but hope in a more poignant, human sense. Where is the line between hope and inevitable disappointment, between faith and unrealistic expectations? Maybe we’ll find out.

This is the other, more founded worry that I’ve heard over the past few days (weeks, months). That Obama will inevitably be a disappointment, that he will turn out to be “just like all the others.”

This really all depends on your definition of the terms, which affects whether the prediction is trivially true, or blinkered pessimism.  Perhaps you define the bending and breaking of promises, and all the compromises a President must make on any given day, as evidence of a betrayal?  In that sense, President Obama will undoubtedly disappoint. However, to govern is to choose, and it would literally impossible for him to fully satisfy the demands of his base, both on economic decisions and the social/cultural aspects too (for one thing, his base is very broad and will disagree amongst themselves on many issues).  A competent and sober Obama presidency will undoubtedly deliver less than the idealistic, liberal supporters would demand.  For the sake of unity, perhaps that is actually a good thing.  Crucially, I would say that if expectations are confounded, that would be the fault of the crowds doing the expecting, and not President Obama.

In other ways, I think it is palpably absurd to say that Obama will be just like other politicians.  He ran very different Primary and General Election campaigns to any seen before.  He has taken a strong stand against “dumb wars” and the Human Rights abuses that have sullied the American Government’s reputation at home and abroad.  In this case, it is by no means obvious or to be expected that a President Obama would eventually, inevitably disappoint.  Quite the reverse - hoping that he will maintain some integrity on this point seems quite a rational and practical expectation, given the evidence of his approach that we currently have available.

The contrast, remember, is with George W. Bush, and John McCain.  Obama is neither of those men, and therefore, on some level, it is impossible for him to disappoint!  Certain worlds that are possible in an Obama presidency are not possible in a McCain presidency, and vice-versa.  For a left-leaning, liberally minded soul, that should be a source of great comfort.

Even though expectations are ridiculously high for Barack Obama, I would suggest that if anyone can actually deliver on the promise of postive change, it is “that one”.  He recruited and unprecedented number of campaigners to his banner during the two year campaign, and has inspired them enough to maintain momentum and financial donations right up until the present day.  If he is clever, he will use this army of enthusiastic volunteers to win the cultural arguments, and to provide the succour and strength to the rest of the country during the austere times that surely lie ahead.

Sure, Barack Obama cannot change the world all by himself.  The point is, he’s not by himself, is he?  I will be judging him by what tasks he sets his activist base after the election.

Text messages from the Obama Campaign keep the activists active. Photo by David Erickson

Like Conor at the Liberal Conspiracy, I can’t really get behind this clamour for a windfall tax on oil companies. I would love to have a dig at Big Oil, but something grates.

Its not that I am like Tim Worstall, who has barrels of faith in the market to sort the problem out fairly. Oil extraction and distribution is a sort of cartel, not a free market. In any case, such a market takes time (maybe measured in decades or centuries) to do its ‘thing’, and in the meantime it is probable that excess profits will accumulate while everyone else is suffering from a recession.

No, my problem is that arguing for a windfall tax is surely another way of saying that you want to change the rules retrospectively.

Economists often argue that to change the rules, and to impose a windfall tax, simply breeds uncertainty in the market, and cause the oil companies to under-invest. Its an irritating argument against taxation, because it has an air of a threat about it: “don’t tax us, or we will mess up your economy”. In the case of a windfall tax, which everyone (even the oil companies) assumes will be a very rare occurrence, it is less believable than (say) the case of top-rate tax-payers. So I can see how the campaigners might discount this economic argument.

But leaving aside the economic risks that a windfall tax entails, surely changing the rules is simply wrong wrong wrong, no further discussion required? Imposing some kind of law (in this case, a tax law) retrospectively is the stuff of wild-eyed dictatorships, surely. Windfall taxes are short-cuts. An easy, lazy solution to a complex situation.

Play by the rules… and if you feel you must change the rules, do so only at the start of the game. If we percieve a problem with the way our country operates, its fine to legislate so that it doesn’t happen in the following tax year. Nationalise the oil companies if we must, or tax them at 99%. Whatever. Only this: we must to legislate for the future, not the past.

There’s a familiar saying, which goes something like “you can judge a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable”. Well, an alternative might be that we should judge ourselves by how we treat our most despised. The oil giants are certainly some of the most resented institutions in the country, but to subject them to anything other than the rule-of-law is not, I would suggest, cricket. Compass should leave the oil companies with this year’s profits, and get busy lobbying for a law that would redistribute future profits. That’s the right way a democracy should approach this problem.

Update 3rd September

The only counter argument that has piqued my interest has been that a large portion of the oil companies profits have arisen because of preferences in the system of allocating carbon credits via the European Emmissions Trading Scheme. However, while this is a definite argument for going after excess profits, I’m not sure it justifies doing so retrospectively, as a windfall tax would.

When we think about blogging and the development of human interactions through the web, it is easy to assume some kind of historical determinism.  The Internet is one huge sandbox, with new blogs and campaigning sites being launched all the time.  Most peter out (I’ve been involved in a couple of those myself) but others persist, and grow.  This trial-and-error approach suggests that we are at least inching towards a more sophisticated and empowering blogosphere, which exercises more influence over politics and therefore the direction this country is headed.

The Blog Nation event earlier this week raised some of the key issues that the Liberal Left needs to answer in order to become more effective online:

• Are we campaigners or pseudo-journalists?
• Will it suffice to form ad hoc coalitions to fight single-issue campaigns, or should we be forming a more formal and wider coalition to try and affect a broader cultural shift?
• In order to be effective, do we need to promote the rise of super-blogs or power-bloggers to rival Guido Fawkes?  Do we need a figure-head like Barack Obama around which we can coalesce, or can a leaderless network build momentum on its own?

As I crouched in the front row of the event, rubbing my temples and trying to think of answers, the following thought occurred to me: What if this is all there is? By which I mean, perhaps it is impossible to become much more organized.  I refrained from articulating this thought at the time, but it did seem a deft, if nihilistic way of avoiding giving an answer to some of the questions posed, above.  Perhaps there is no historical determinism to any of this, and we are not destined to develop anything significantly more efficient than what we have now.

Now I don’t know whether I really believe things to be so hopeless, but if its true it may not be such a bad thing.  Rather than grandiose ideas of the blogosphere become some kind of Fifth Estate, perhaps we should aspire to nothing more than another tool for the people to use in checking the power of the elite (both elected representatives and others who hold positions of influence).

Of course we should ask how existing bloggers and activists can work better together, but that is just oiling the machine, rather than inventing a new one.  A more important focus is to try to increase access to the new information and opinion that is appearing online.  Just as increasing literacy strengthens democracy and promote equality, so computer literacy can strengthen it too.  So, my suggestion for the next open source campaign - introduce one relative, friend or colleague to blogging each month.  This need not mean forcing them to set up their own blog.  Instead, just a gentle explanation of the power of RSS, and the suggestion that they bookmark one - just one - of the fine sites listed on the right.

Cross posted at the Liberal Conspiracy

Photo by indrasensi

“Did you inhale?” A cliché of modern politics. Ever since Bill Clinton’s bizarre admission of not-quite-drug-use, that question has become a staple of sniggering journalists everywhere. Meanwhile, “Yes I have and yes I did” has become the boilerplate response for those politicians eager to demonstrate their flawed, human side.

Such admissions are possible because currently, the morality of such individual choices barely gets discussed. “It’s a choice I made when I was young” is the limit of the debate. The transgression is framed as a purely internal, moral choice of the individual. In a liberal, tolerant society, this is not matter for public discussion. (If it were, then another example of tweaking your reality, drinking alcohol, would be dragged into the debate too, and no one wants that). Instead, cannabis use becomes a simple public health issue. The recent furore, in March, was concerned with whether cannabis use can induce psychological problems, and therefore whether class B or C is an appropriate designation.

But there is another argument against cannabis use: It is part of a highly unpleasant and criminal supply chain. For every eighth of hash or bag of weed you buy and smoke, there is a chance that you are lining the pockets of some gangster. Sure, your local dealer is probably a gentle sort, but there is no guarantee that somewhere along the line there is not a more dangerous character who is trafficking in other things too. Heroin. People. It is noteworthy that when a politician is asked about his or her past drug-use, the question is the anodyne “did you inhale?” when it should be “did you know where it came from?” Few of them would know the answer, and “I knowingly contributed to the problem of organized crime and the exploitation of the vulnerable” is a very different mea culpa compared to the usual “I did things when I was young which I now regret.”
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