Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Politics (Page 48 of 57)

The Status Quo of Conservatism

29 December 2007 / / 3 Comments

For various reasons, I’m re-reading Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism. This quote resonated:

[The British Conservative Party] lacks the essential attribute of a counter-revolutionary party – a faith, a dogma, even a theory. A passionate desire to restore the past must rest on a deep attachment – moral, ideological, or theoretical – to the virtues of that past. And this the British Conservative, typically pragmatic and empirical, seldom has. His attachment to the status quo, whatever the status quo may be; and his function is less to reinstate the past than to preserve the present.

I think this is a key reason why I consider myself to be Of The Left – The word ‘Conservative’ means resistance to change… and that’s not me. Indeed, the quote above looks like a slur to my eyes.
Interestingly, though, I sense that it does not look like a slur to anyone who does consider themselves Conservative, or just conservative. Last year’s Christmas reading, The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan, puts the reluctance to change things at the heart of the Conservative mindset.
Sullivan also rejects the need for a core ideology. He celebrates what Crosland condemns, calling the Conservative approach the politics of the doubter. Indeed, that is the distinction between the religious/social Conservatives and the fiscal/libertarian Conservatives, two groups who are becoming increasingly uneasy bedfellows within the US Republican Party (and I suspect the British Conservative Party too). The religious/social Conservatives do seem to wish for a return to an earlier time, which is what makes them so much more worrying than Conservatives of the fiscal/libertarian bent.
None of this, however, allies me with blogger Alex Hilton’s recent suggestion that Toryism is ‘evil’. There’s more subtlety to politics than that, which is why its so interesting, and challenging.

ID Cards and the moral battlefield

23 November 2007 / / 3 Comments

For those opposed to the ID card scheme, it is easy to see the silver lining to the recent news that the taxman has lost 25 million records in the post. While the disappearance of these CDs causes grave concern for the people who’s data has gone missing, the incompetence does undermine the case for ID Cards: “We cannot afford a similar error on the national ID database,” (the argument goes) “… so, lets scrap the scheme”. Tactically, yes, I think it is an argument we in the anti-ID card lobby should be making loudly… but let us never forget that the administration of the system is a practical reason to oppose the scheme, and not a moral or ideological reason. Even if (in some thought experiment world, some Cloud Number 10) the government could 100% guarantee the security of the data, I would still be opposed to the scheme, because the political relationship between citizen and state does not change when the State buys a better computer system. Nor, for that matter, would it change if the cost of the scheme were to rise or fall. Brighton blogger Neil Harding recently changed his mind on ID cards, based on these practical reasons. While his interlocutors crowed at his volte-face, it seemed an empty victory to me. The moral argument was sidelined.
This matters, because arguments for ID cards seem to be made up exclusively of practical reasons. Advocates in Government and the security services play down the costs, and instead cite ‘convenience’ and ‘efficiency’. The moral aspect to their argument – that the cards will offer a measure of safety from terror and crime – is unproven and untested, and has the unmistakeable allure of the post hoc about it.
Meanwhile, here in the anti-camp, the opposite is true. The moral resistance to any change in the relationship between individual and state is conceptually prior to, and transcends, the concern over costs or data-security. If we successfully communicate this to our fellow citizens, we shall win the debate.

Self-Appointed Uber Bloggers, unite in resisting the counter-counter-revolution!

17 November 2007 / / 5 Comments

My post earlier today, regarding when to take up an argument, and when to let it go, was really just a preamble to a response to Neil Clark’s article on Comment is Free (via Sunny at LC).

Anyone who deviated from the official party line – as laid down by a self-appointed uber elite of British bloggers – faced a cyberspace lynch mob, more in keeping with Nazi Germany than a country which is supposed to pride itself on its support for free speech.

For the self-appointed uber elite of British political bloggers, the fact that someone, not of their number, and who did defy their three line-whip on the Iraqi interpreters issue – was nominated – and then won, in a free public vote, the title of “Best UK Blog” in the most prestigious prize in blogging, is too much to bear.

In the case of the Iraqi interpreters campaign, “self-appointed” we may be. The very nature of single-issue pressure groups is that they consist of people who stand up for a cause they believe in, filling a void that is not being filled by other organisations or political parties. We have certainly never claimed a democratic mandate, or to speak for anyone other than ourselves. The campaign gains its authority, and support, entirely from the strong arguments we have made in favour of the Iraqi interpreters.

Neil’s post on Friday matters, and is deserving of a response and a criticism, because he misunderstands, or perhaps misrepresents, the nature of the debate. The outcry that followed his “Iraqi Quislings” issue was not some orchestrated, strategic smear. It was not the fact that he had crossed or questioned the party line that raised hackles. Rather, it was the reactionary and ill-considered manner of his objections which provoked a response. Bloggers from the campaign were right to vigorously defend their stance, and should not be criticised for doing so. It is a shame that Neil now chooses to ignore the substantive points in the arguments, and instead retreat to ad hominems that so readily invoke Nazi Germany. It is odd that someone who has just won a best blogger online poll, should immediately resort to such a discredited line of attack. As Sunny says: bizarre.

Update

Unity, another self-appointed uber-liberal uber-blogger, takes a fisk to Neil’s article. Given my comments above and earlier today, I suppose I should say that I do wonder at the efficacy of ‘fisking’. I fear it will simply provoke more of the wrong sort of debate.

Again, I ask: At what point should the arguments-about-the-arguments be abandoned? To resort to ridicule and satire is slightly frustrating, I feel, because at that point the attempt to convince your correspondent blogger (and their own dedicated readers) will fail.

Call in the Pledge

15 November 2007 / / 4 Comments

The NO2ID campaign is calling in the PledgeBank pledges:

The Identity Cards Act 2006 is now law, and – despite growing opposition, significant delays and rising costs – the new Prime Minister shows no sign of calling a halt to the National Identity Scheme. In 2008, the government intends to pilot fingerprinting and to issue the first ‘biometric residence visas’ to non-EU foreign nationals as a precursor to registering British Citizens.
The legal powers to do these all these things will shortly begin to be applied. Now is the time to call in the legal defence fund part of the pledge.

So, that’s £10 from everyone, please. It should add up to about £110,000 in the campaign coffers.
This campaign could be, I think, a landmark for online political campaigning in the UK. We had some success with the letter-writing campaign for “We Can’t Turn Them Away“, but I think the financial clout that a six figure sum could deliver the NO2ID campaign would be a first for online campaigning in Britain. (Not worldwide, of course. The Howard Dean campaign raised loads of cash in 2003, and Republican Presidential hopeful Ron Paul just raised $4,000,000 in one day).
The worry is that the PledgeBank will not deliver the expected return. Its likely that not all pledgers will cough-up the cash. Whatever percentage fails to do so will be noted by future campaigners. If that is only 1% or so, then that will have a minimal effect. But if the number of dud pledgers turns out to be too high, then future campaigners may begin to make unwelcome economic calculations. If you only expect, say, 50% of pledgers to make good on their promise, then you will actually ask for more money from the outset (in the case of the NO2ID campaign, you would ask for £20 from each of them, instead of just a tenner). In turn, this will reduce the number of people who pledge money in the first place.
In simple business terms, this supply-demand calculation might not be an issue, since one accumulates the same amount of money by the end. But in political terms, it is very much a concern, since the actual number of supporters is as important as the money they raise. So its particularly important the the NO2ID PledgeBank yeilds a high percentage of promised donations. If it does not, then the whole fund-raising model could be undermined.
Can any of the economists in our midst offer a more sophisticated analysis? Indeed, can anyone comment on how successful previous PledgeBank fundraising drives have been?

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