In terms of logistics, I would make three suggestions. Given the layout, it’s important that each table isn’t talking amongst itself thereby making so much noise that you can’t hear the speaker. Secondly, there are two breakout rooms. I would like to see the two used for an hour each for anyone to stand up a present an idea for five minutes. Thirdly, I’d like to see it recorded and ideally live streamed. Certainly, the plenary sessions could be on uStream or BlogTV.

—fold—

I start with some of the themes Sunny suggests, and add in some more. This is by no means exhaustive; just some things that interest me.

London

Firstly, I don’t think anyone who can’t beat Ken for the Labour nomination will be able to beat Boris. However, I’m not convinced that Boris will run again; it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion and it seems the main reason he would stay on is that there is no obvious heir apparent from the Conservative ranks, certainly not with with any significant profile. If the competition is between Ken and Oona, I would favour the former on the basis that he stands a better chance of building a broad coalition that goes beyond the Labour party. We will need to develop a narrative on the Conservative administration of City Hall, and I would suggest that it should focus on a lack of big ideas and not making the case for London in Whitehall and Westminster. Boris has also had a few bizarre flights of fancy – Boris Island Airport and the Boris Bus (especially its cost) – while scrapping ideas like Cross-River Tram that would have been beneficial to London.

When it comes to the Mayoralty, I have no idea who the LibDem candidate will be (although Susan Kramer is available). The choice of LibDem candidate may well indicate how London LibDems feel about the ménage à deux and whether they feel the Orange Book tendency has moved their party in a way with which they feel uncomfortable. We will have to determine whether attacking the LibDems for their coalition with the Tories is sensible, responsible and effective, and that may well depend on who the candidate is.

I am plotting an idea to set up a London political podcast. I will do a separate post on that as and when I have settled my ideas, but some of the ideas that have come out on that are important. We will need to look to the growth in Labour councillors and councils to be the starting point of a fightback against the Tories in the capital.

Wales and Scotland

We must avoid making this project too London-centric. Yes, it is being hosted in the capital and London has many millions, but we should look at the other devolved areas in Britain: Wales and Scotland. All three could learn from each other, but they may be particularly useful in working out a tack to take with regard to the LibDems. We also have to work out how we strengthen the progressive position at Holyrood and the Senedd, given that the former has extensive powers and it seems likely that the latter will be gaining similar powers. Alternate centres of power in Wales, Scotland and London may well be able to slow at least some of the damage I fear the current administration will bring.

The West Lothian Question

I think that progressives need to seriously consider the idea of English regions.

There is a lot of talk about devolution, giving power to the people and so on. We need to work out what that actually means. If we regionalised, we would see alternate centres of power. To give them meaning, they need powers substantial powers and we should consider the inclusion of policing, transport, housing, spatial planning and, potentially, health. I feel that counties are too small and too easily controlled by the centre to be able to effectively devise and implement policy.

Regions would mean the main parties would have to have some sort of meaningful regional structure. Much as I hope the regions would be able to stand up to Whitehall, I hope that meaningful regional structures within political parties would weaken the wearisome control from the centre to which so many people object.

I would hope that this would lead to the economic weight of the country shifting away from London and away from financial services and giving parts of England outside of London the opportunity to be something more than vassals.

We have spoken much about the sad state of local media. I merely raise the question as to whether regions would cause a re-alignment of newspapers, radio and television so that there could be meaningful coverage and scrutiny of politics and competition between outlets.

I reject the idea of and English Parliament as an answer to the West Lothian question out of hand (a Parliament for forty-eight million people isn’t much less unitary than one for sixty-one million).

We should emphasise that this would not create an extra layer of bureaucracy. There are already Government Offices for all the English regions along with Regional Development Agencies and Local Authorities Leaders’ Boards. This is about democratising those structures.

Ultimately, I think we have seen a flourishing of the London, Welsh and Scottish blogospheres that is indicative of better relations between citizen and state in those three areas and I want the same for the rest of England. This will mean addressing some of the mistakes and lack of ambition from the failed north-east referendum.

The LibDems

We should pursue a strategy of splitting the Social Democrats from the Liberals/Orange Book in the Lib Dems with a view to one side joining the Tories and the other Labour. We should make it clear that you cannot go into coalition with the Tories and call yourself progressive.

I think we should advocate that the cuts are being implemented too soon; that if they are going to do a zero-budget process, it has to be zero-budget across everything¹; that these cuts are also the political desire of the Orange Book and Tories; ensure efficiency where they are made; oppose the most egregiously unfair cuts; maintain support for industry.

That having been said, we need to work out how we can use social democratically-minded LibDems to control the excesses of the coalition.

Others

• Low pay. We must continue to support the living wage, consider the benefits of a citizen’s wage and ensure that the minimum wage is increased appropriately.
• Europe. As people will know, I am pretty pro-European. However, we should explicitly say that there should be no further integration for a couple of Parliaments to give the Lisbon changes and expansion time to bed down. We could expand to the relatively small countries of the Balkans when the time is right, but we will need to be in an economically strong position to welcome Turkey to the EU when the time is right. It should be made clear that member state of the EU have the right to nationalise, municipalise and deprivatise and that the principles of the free market should not prevent this (although I would retain the state aid prohibitions as they are).
• Co-ops. It strikes me that this is a movement to which we should reach out; surprisingly large, but often very local and potentially powerful for community organising.
• The BNP. We need to consider what’s going to happen next with the BNP and their fellow-travellers. I welcome their thorough trouncing at the recent election and I look forward to Richard Barnbrook being invited to pursue interests of his own choosing by the good people of Barking and Dagenham. However, I have three concerns. One is that we will become complacent about the BNP et al. and that they will be able to regroup. We must keep the pressure on them. A second is that the BNP’s problems may lead to more support for the EDL; while they are clearly not going to get anywhere electorally, they are violent. Thirdly, we need to explicitly oppose and combat the rising populist nationalism that we see in UKIP, sections of the Conservative party, sections of the media and, frankly, amongst people who should know better.
• Women’s rights. We must defend the right to abortion. I feel the likelihood of an attempt at restricting it in this Parliament is high and I feel there is a good chance it could be successful. I feel that we should also be looking at Norwegian-style rules for gender-balance in the boardroom. We should discuss the sex industry and the objectification of women.
• Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t want to belabour these subjects. For the moment, I want to set aside whether they were a good idea or not, and just look at the conduct of the campaigns. It is clear that there were mistakes and shortcomings. We should look at what they were, how they happened and how we stop them happening again. In order to do it properly, we must be able to do it without always going back to the morality of the conflicts. I’m not saying we shouldn’t consider the morality of the conflicts; I’m saying it’s not the only issue.

I’ll probably do something on electoral reform in the coming days.

xD.

1 – Including the NHS and Trident. I am prepared to at least consider that (for instance) industrial promotion is currently more important than (for instance) fertility treatment. I am not saying that is the case, but that we should be prepared to consider it.

The European Commission is calling for a suggested maximum volume to be set on MP3 players, to protect users’ hearing

reports the BBC. One proposal is to have a limit of 85 dB, which can be overridden as far as 100 dB. This is a bit daft for three reasons.

Firstly, it’s a bad idea. If someone really wants to listen to music at an unsafely loud volume – say the front row of a rock concert – that’s their choice. If I want to listen, in my own home, to a popular beat combo at a high volume, but not inflict it on my family and neighbours, that’s my shout. You cannot listen to the Eroica quietly.

See what I mean?

Secondly, it won’t work. It will not be hard to simply remove the offending piece of technology – it’s really not that hard to join bits of wire together. Moreover, the 3.5mm plug is universal. One of its joys is that headphones bought in Taiwan will work on a CD player bought in Tennessee in my living room. This is eBay, currently listing over twenty thousand results for a search within ‘consumer electronics’ for ‘headphones’. In any case, it will just make people who do want to listen to loud music buy portable speakers.

Thirdly, it misses the point. Instead of going after people for damaging themselves, they should do something about annoying others. Specifically, by doing something to stop people playing bad music on bad speakers or bad headphones on the upstairs of the bus or on the train home. It’s really annoying. Encouraging them to go out and buy speakers to they can listen to loud (often shit, often SouljaBoy) music and stick it to the man is just dumb.

They’d have a lot more success if they just put a leaflet in with every pair of headphones sold – prominently, not folded in with the guarantee – saying that listening to loud music can damage your hearing and annoy people around you and here’s a link to the RNID’s Don’t Lose the Music webpage.

xD.

I do wonder, regardless of the merits of the policy, if the UK would have been able to organise it if our government was not merely Eurosceptic but had told the Europarty of Merkel and Sarkozy where it could go, decried the idea of European governments working together. I do wonder how much leverage we’d have at all.

We’re often told that these things don’t work unless everyone does it. Well, everyone’s not going to do it simultaneously, but if most of the EU comes into line behind a policy that is both popular for sticking it to the bankers and may help alleviate the the deficits floating around Europe, it’d be a damned good start.

xD.

1 – IMF, May ’08. Germany, the UK and France’s shares of the EU’s GDP are 19.8, 15.4 and 15.3% respectively, making 50.5% overall.

Not habemus papam, but habemus praesidentem consilium europeum¹.

As you may be aware, I am not the head of government of any member of the European Union, and so I do not have a vote for President of the European Council. If I had a vote, I would seriously consider casting my ballot for Vaira Vike-Freiberga.

Partially, this is because I would like the President to be a woman – there are too many people at the top levels of European politics who have their genitalia on the outside – but mostly because she understands one of big the problems that the EU (and, I would say, quite a lot of EU democracies) has – the feeling of closedness and distance from the citizen. Having an election without the candidates being declared, behind closed doors and with only a few people being able to vote is rather too close to a papal conclave for my liking. If nothing else, a proper election would give us opportunity to have a semi-decent debate about Europe and look at what policies and ideas are on offer.

It’s worth looking at this letter in the FT, published on the 15th, on the subject of gender balance at the top of the EU from Margot Wallström, Diana Wallis, and my favourite EU Commissioner, ‘Steely’ Neelie Kroes.

xD.

1 – I don’t think Latin actually has a word for president other than praestes which has a religious connotation, so this is the accusative present active participle of praesideo, I preside. Corrections gratefully accepted.

The NOP is now regarded by just about everyone as a nasty bunch of anti-Semites (their manifesto includes a line from Mein Kampf – “Jews will be removed from Poland, and their possessions will be confiscated”). It is a Third Positionist organisation.

Jedwabne was the site of a pogrom in which between two hundred and fifty & four hundred Jews were burned alive in 1941. Initially, it was thought that the massacre had been carried out by Nazi troops, but it later turned out to have been carried out by Poles with the assistance of an Einsatzgrup. In 2001, President Kwaniewski went to Jedwabne, in a controversial move, to apologise for the crimes of six decades earlier. One of the people who opposed the apology was Kaminski.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr Kaminski has changed the positions he held in the past, but he cannot and should not deny them. He says that when he was in NOP it was not anti-Semitic; however, it was using the Chrobry sword as a symbol, which had been the logo of the National Radical Camp Falanga that advocated Catholic totalitarianism (as in Spain’s FET y de las JONS). Either way, there is a lot of confusion.

To add to this, the Jewish Chronicle reports that the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, feels he was misrepresented by the New Statesman when

The New Statesman has printed the text of an email from Rabbi Schudrich, that says

I do not comment on political decisions. However, it is clear that Mr Kaminski was a member of NOP, a group that is openly far right and neo-nazi. Anyone who would want to align himself with a person who was an active member of NOP and the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne (which was established to deny historical facts of the massacre at Jedwabne) needs to understand with what and by whom he is being represented.

Assorted others are weighing in – Next Left and Progress – but Will ‘Left Foot Forward’ Straw has five interesting questions for Rabbi Schudrich:

1. How can a former member of “a group that is openly far right and neo-nazi” also be a “friend of Israel”?
2. Has any member of the British Conservative party been in contact to ask you to make this new statement?
3. Has anyone who works for Policy Exchange been in contact to ask you to make this new statement?
4. Has anyone from the Polish Law and Justice party been in contact to ask you to make this new statement?
5. Do you have a view on Michal Kaminski’s statement that: “If you are asking the Polish nation to apologise for the crime made in Jedwabne, you would require from the whole Jewish nation to apologise for what some Jewish communists did in eastern Poland.”

I await the answers with interest.

xD.

DF have published an advert:

After you’ve finished finding the poor photo manipulation (look at the swords…), it’s worth reading the text. In English, it reads:

Headline
NO to large mosques in Danish Cities!
GUARANTEE

Text
As a bolt of lightning from a clear and peaceful Danish summer sky, the politicians in the City of Copenhagen the other day decided to construct a large mosque in the middle of town.
Only the Danish People’s Party Voted against!
The money comes from, among others, the terror-regime Iran, but none of the other parties cared about that.
In three years another giant mosque – on Amager and financed by the dictatorship Saudi Arabia – a reality, if the citizens don’t say stop.
In other Danish towns there are plans*
We give you a guarantee: The more representatives from the Danish People’s Party that get into/are elected to your city council at the November 17th elections, the more resistance against the strongholds of Islamism there will be, also in your city

under the picture
Vote Danish – locally as well

* my correspondent says that this most likely refers to the local-planning regulations, i.e. there are plans which don’t allow for the building of large mosques. But then again, they also don’t allow for large malls either.

The advert also appears on DF’s website under the headline ‘terrorist lairs’.

The Conservatives would not allow the Danish People’s Party (or the Italian Northern League) to join the EC&R group because of their open xenophobia. UKIP seem to have no such problems.

The thirteen UK MEPs sit alongside nine from Italy’s Lega Nord, two each from Lithuania’s Order & Justice Party, the Greek Popular Orthodox Rally and the Danish People’s Party and one each from the True Finns, Mouvement pour la France, the Netherlands’ Reformed Political Party and the Slovak National Party.

My suspicion is that UKIP may become nuttier without a recognisable, charismatic leader like Nigel Farage. I hope they don’t go for the anti-Islam meme that their Danish allies have.

xD.

A tip of the hat to my good friend and all round bad-ass, David Willumsen, for sending me the link and the translation

The totals are 9 for the Party of European Socialists, 12 for the European People’s Party, 1 for the Nordic Green Left, 2 for the new European Conservatives and Reformists and three for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe.

I’ve gone by the party of the head of government. A couple of HoGs are independents, but are listed by the party to which they were affiliated (Bulgaria) or which supported them (Hungary).

xD.

Perhaps slightly more interesting is the European parties version:

If I’m reading that correctly – I’m not quite sure what the difference is between the pink dots and the red dots other than that they’re left parties. The UK Labour Party is the only ‘left’ party in the top right – pro-integration, socioeconomic right – and the Conservatives are slap-bang on the centre line, just below the origin. That would suggest they are to the socioeconomic left of Labour. What it does show is that ‘Europe’ does not break down on any single axis, let alone left-right, and that both Labour and the Tories are somewhat removed from the mainstream of their respective groupings. I seem to be a pretty normal European social democrat, although the fact that I’m pretty Atlanticist doesn’t factor into the equation.

As with all these vote matchers, a pinch of salt is required.

xD.

There seems to be a real chance that the BNP will gain their first MEP at the forthcoming Euro elections because of the proportional system.

It’s essential that everyone turn out to vote for any party other than the BNP. That’s the BNP who are being advised in the Euro campaign by someone linked to the murder of Chris Hani in South Africa; who think that the current H5N1 flu bug originated in Africa rather than Mexico; who described the Archbishop of York as ‘anti-British’ and said that Ugandans would kill dissenters with spears. And that’s when they’re pretending not to be racist.

The election of a BNP MEP would be bad for three reasons.

Firstly, it’s the BNP; while any success on their part is indicative, to some extent, of the failure of mainstream politics, an election of a BNP candidate brings violence and fear in its wake.

Secondly, it will bring more money, in the form of salaries and allowances, the BNP’s way.

Thirdly, it will allow the formation of a slightly ramshackle, ultra-nationalist bloc in the European Parliament, bringing committee chairs, profile and money towards these squalid criminals.

Under the standing orders of the EP, you need one-fifth countries represented to form a group. The addition of the BNP to the Euronat grouping would see them gaining a decent measure of influence over some European legislation.

Do please make sure you vote and do please try to go to one of the Hope Not Hate event.s

xD.