Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Debate (Page 7 of 27)

More thoughts on the Tahrir Square 'think-tank'

11 February 2011 / / 4 Comments

One protester made a helpful explainer for President Mubarak. It says "Mubarak leaves. Yes: Parliament dissolves. No: Protests, disobedience. strikes." Photo: Al-Jazeera English on Flickr, creative commons.

One protester made a helpful explainer for President Mubarak. It says “Mubarak leaves. Yes: Parliament dissolves. No: Protests, disobedience. strikes.” Photo: Al-Jazeera English on Flickr, creative commons.


My earlier idea about publishing the thoughts of the protesters in Tahrir Square seemed to cause confusion. Sunny said:

@robertsharp59 so, er, we’re publishing blogposts by people within the square…after the event is over?

Well, that was not quite the intention.  The blogposts I have read from people ‘on the ground’ in Cairo and elsewhere seem to focus on the movements of the security forces and pro-Mubarak counter-protests, or other ‘in-the-moment’ stories.  The use of the word ‘think tank’ to describe the discussions taking place within the square caught my eye, because it implies discussions of policy and new political structures: More forward looking, and less reactive.
It may be that such discussions and ideas have already found their way online, but I’ve not seen many, and in any case they are scattered around the web.  Such ideas that are coming out are filtered, either through journalists or by experts who are not part of the protests.  These reports and analyses are valuable, of course, but I think primary accounts would have a certain value at this precise political moment.  As The Bee said

@robertsharp59 @sunny_hundal Would be really good to get the view from the inside & not “retold” by someone else

(More thoughts in response to my idea on The Bee’s website, which awesomely is in English and German.)
On Facebook, Sophie Mayer was enthusiastic, and reminds me of the We Are Iran project.

I see something on the model of We Are Iran crossed with a conference proceedings… Would be an amazing record of a moment and an opportunity to organise ideas and information. Oh for a mimeograph!

Update

A couple of PEN members may be putting this together with their contacts in Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Libya!  Get in touch via the comments if you would like to help.

Update 2

Someone did it.

Political Correctness Jumps the Shark too?

11 February 2011 / / 1 Comment

Following my post earlier this week about Failed Multiculturalism Jumping the Shark, I was all-eyes when Alex Massie has suggested that using “political correctness” as an insult may have gone the same way:

First, let’s note that “politically correct” is a degraded insult these days. If jumping the shark hadn’t jumped the shark itself I’d say that political correctness jumped the shark long ago. Disparaging those who disagree with you as “politically correct” isn’t an argument, it’s a way of avoiding argument. Look at me, it says, and see how brave I am to stand alone against the tide. Here I must stand for I can do no other. Unlike the soft-headed simpletons who prefersome sort of lemming-like approach that makes them feel warm and fuzzy. Alternatively, perhaps “politically correct” is just another word for fashionable these days.

If either of my readers are not au fait with the term Jumping the Shark, here’s all you need to know about the phrase.

Multiculturalism Jumps The Shark

7 February 2011 / / 8 Comments

Union Flag, by Adrian Clark on Flickr

Union Flag, by Adrian Clark on Flickr


Or rather, “State multiculturalism has failed” jumps the shark.
David Cameron had made a speech about multiculturalism this weekend.  When I heard news reports about his remarks, I thought to myself that this was probably nothing new.  I have only just got around to reading the speech today, and unfortunately, I have been proved right.
Cameron argues for the need to separate the concept of Islamist violence, from mainstream, peaceful Islam.  He complains about public money being given to ‘gatekeeper’ organisations who claim to speak for all Muslims.  He argues for a definition of identity that can encompass all British citizens, regardless of their faith or origins.
Over at Liberal Conspiracy, Sunny Hundal points out that these are issues that we thrashed out long ago, and a sensible consensus has already been reached.

I vehemently attacked “state multiculturalism”, as Cameron did yesterday, back in 2006. At the time there was a problem with the government funding “community leaders” to deal with integration and counter-terrorism. There isn’t now. Organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain haven’t received state funding for years.

Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society is equally scathing:

David Cameron said next to nothing new yesterday. Breathlessly briefed and largely received as one of his most important speeches as Prime Minister, I struggled to spot an original thought that he hasn’t been habitually been expressing for more than five years, from equating Islamist ideology with Nazism when running for Tory leader in 2005 or his frequent attacks on state-sponsored multiculturalism. Repeating himself as Prime Minister on the international stage gives it a certain status.
Cameron’s core narrative claim – that “muscular liberalism” must now replace decades of a lily-livered refusal to articulate our shared values – does depend upon one very silly founding premise: that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and David Blunkett, John Major and Michael Howard, and presumably Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit too, were rarely or never willing to articulate shared British values. This is patently absurd.

The Prime Minister’s suggestion that we forge a shared British identity is embarrassingly behind the times.  The 9/11 terrorist attacks kick-started the debate.  Wars in the Middle-East and terrorist attacks in Europe have kept the discussion spinning.  Entire books have been written, published and reprinted during that time. Billy Bragg’s Progressive Patriot is one that springs to mind: it deals with far right extremisim, and how British people reconcile the fact that we all have (at least) two flags.  Kenan Malik’s From Fatwa to Jihad is another obvious example, where state multiculturalism is impressively critiqued.
David Cameron’s speech is soooo 2005.  This isn’t leadership.  He needs some new ideas… and some new speech writers who can articulate them.

The cowardly fudge behind the rhetoric of Control Orders

7 January 2011 / / 0 Comments

I was at the Nick Clegg speech earlier today. He took aim at Labour’s pretty poor record on civil liberties, suggesting that the previous governments were more systematic and less casual than prominent ex-Ministers would have us believe. (Full text of the speech is here).
Although there were some fine words on Libel Reform and some interesting proposals on Freedom of Information, most of the discussion in the speech itself, and in questions afterwards, was on control orders and curfews. Clegg refused to outline how these might change, but did say that those who want to see them abolished completely “will be disappointed”.
There was one phrase that Clegg used which is particularly grating on the ears. This was when he said that there were people who ‘we know’ are planning atrocities, but we do not have the evidence to convict them. It stood out, because David Blunket had used precisely the same formulation during his pre-emptive retort on The Today Programme this morning, and I am sure the current and previous Home Secretaries have taken a similar line.
This line of argument sounds tough, plausible and savvy. The speaker gets to burnish his or her credentials as a realist. However, it is a stance that rests on very shaky moral ground. Control orders are a form of pre-emptive detention, and the argument which justifies them is exactly the same as those used by authoritarian governments around the world, when they detain their political opponents.
Moreover, it is a rude and obvious short-circuit of the very basic legal principles. If a Minister ‘knows’ that someone is a danger, then they should be charged and convicted. If there is not enough evidence to convict, then neither politicians, the police nor the general public get to use the word ‘know’ in their rhetoric. There simply is not the epistemological certainty for that kind of claim, especially not in the context of political arguments. A control order is an extreme form of accusation, and Deputy Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries must not be allowed to make such ‘accusations’ and leave them hanging.
As the Home Secretary conducts her review of control orders in the coming months, look out for examples of this rhetoric, “we know, but we cannot convict.” It is a half-formed argument, a question not an answer. It is a cowardly fudge for those who do not want to make the tough decision: do we let these suspects go, or do we allow phone-tapping evidence to be admissable in court? This is the issue at stake, and the phenomenon of control orders is simply a clever device for punting the decision. If Nick Clegg is really serious about restoring civil liberties to British citizens, then he and his Prime Minister need to stop using bad rhetoric, and start making tough choices.

On Benefit Fraud

13 August 2010 / / 1 Comment

Now then.  Dave Osler has an interesting post about benefit fraud over at Liberal Conspiracy.  Apparently, only 1% of benefits paid by the state are wrongly claimed.  That still amounts to a billion pounds, but is obviously less than the billions spent on bank bailouts.
Crucially, it is also much less than the amount of benefits people are legally entitled to, but never actually claim (approximately £10.5 billion, points out woodscolt in the comments).  Double crucially, it is a fraction of the money lost to tax evasion (£30 billion).  Yet in our political discourse, it is benefit cheats who are blamed for the horrible amounts of money the government wastes.  Could this be because diddling benefits is a poor person’s game, while tax evasion is a middle- and upper-class pursuit?
During the election campaign, I recall more than one political debate I had with friends and passers-by, on this problem.  Like immigration, the issue is incredibly muddled.  People often equate benefit-fraud with the separate issue of the state giving people too much in benefits. A story about a woman who steals £60,000 from the state in a benefit fraud is equated with the story of a man who claims housing benefit of £2.1m a year to live in Kensington are seenn as somehow part of the same problem.  However, they are problems of a completely different order – The first is a case of someone breaking the law, who should be (indeed, was) caught and punished.  The second is someone acting perfectly legally and in their own interests, within the system operated by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.  We solve the first case by investigating criminality.  We solve the second problem by forcing the borough into building more and better social housing (if indeed you consider humanely housing a group of refugees to be a ‘problem’).  Housing policy, and the level of benefits paid to those not in work, seems to me to be an ideological argument, where Labour and the Tories have very different views.  Meanwhile, everyone agrees that benefit fraud is wrong and must be stopped.  Public discussion on benefit fraud doesn’t always make this clear… and the Left loses the argument as a result.

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