xD.

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.

H/T The Wardman Wire.

xD.

Firstly, it is in our strategic interest for two reasons. I will look at the morality and legality later, but it is enough to say that many states and people, friendly, neutral and hostile, regard both Guantánamo as immoral and the UK as very close to the United States. By acting to expedite the closing of Guantánamo, we are acting to right a perceived wrong. It also improves our standing within the EU and NATO if we can demonstrate an ability to act as an effective link or broker between the western and eastern sides of the Atlantic. I would add that there might well be (although I do not know this for a fact) people who would be repatriated to, say, Bosnia-Herzegovina. While I do not wish to impugn Bosnia-Herzegovina and am using it just as an example, I do not believe that it, or many other states, have the state-capacity to effectively monitor these people. If we look slightly more widely around the Balkans, the apparent ease with which people evaded the ICTY, I believe the point is proven. In the long-term, taking in detainees here is more secure than leaving them in limbo or Ruritania.

Secondly, it is expeditious. Whether Mr Dale likes it or not, President-Elect Obama has made it clear that Guantanamo is to be closed. As I mentioned, we are seen as close to the US in foreign policy terms. One of the big problems with Guantánamo was the lack of clarity as to what was going to happen to people held there. We now have a resolution; however, we will have to accept people who do not have an immediate connection to the US for a few reasons. One is that some states will not accept people who have a prior or stronger connection to them. We can exert more moral pressure on them to accept people from Guantánamo if we show how much we are doing; in any case, it will not work for everyone. There are some states that it would be wrong to ‘export’ these people to; they are those states that would torture them. They would go from a frying pan to a rather hotter fire and many of the problems we face because of Guantánamo would be reinforced.

Thirdly, it is morally right. Guantánamo was an abrogation of rights, poorly implemented and conceived, that took away some of our moral high ground and constitutes a serious threat to habeas corpus in the USA. Its closure rectifies at least some of those issues. Moreover, the USA is our friend and ally; if it seeks our support on this, given that the costs are minimal and the benefits great, I would have hoped it would have been a no-brainer.

If I may refer to the title of Iain’s post – “Guantánamo is a problem made in America” – I would contend that the problem may have been made there, but that does not relieve of us our obligations to justice and due process, or to our ally, or the effects its existence and the method of its closure may have on us.

In short, it is both morally right and in our strategic interest.

xD.

1. There will be an attempt to ‘test’ Obama militarily within his first year of office
2. There will not be a General Election in the UK
3. There will not be a go-ahead for the third runway at Heathrow
4. Al Franken will win the election recount in Minnesota
5. Russia’s attempt to form an equivalent of Opec for natural gas will fail
6. The pound will reach parity with the euro for a brief time before recovering by the end of the year; it will not fall to the level of the chocolate coin.
7. Tim Pawlenty will gradually build up a more public, bipartisan profile with a view to a presidential run in 2012
8. Some of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay will still be in a state of legal limbo as the USA will not prosecute and their home countries will either not accept them or not give guarantees as to their security
9. Boris Johnson will attempt to take credit for the 2009 Stock tube trains on the Victoria line
10. I will be married!

Do please consider yourself tagged if you’d like to come up with some predictions.

I will confess to being stumped for a little while and so searched the internet for some ideas and came across a particularly hilarious set of predictions from the ‘Psychics and Mediums Network‘ and they are almost as vacuous as mine:

1. There will be an assassination attempt on Barack Obama
   (UPDATE: Looks like this one may have happened before the 2009 date predicted. There was a neo-nazi assaination plot foiled on 27th October 2008. Note that these predictions were posted on the 9th October 2008)
2. There will be serious tensions within Europe as the Euro free falls with both France and Germany threatening to leave.
3. Gordon Brown will be forced out of office and an early election will be called.
4. A number of C of E bishops and senior ecclesiastical leaders convert to Catholicism simultaneously threatening to undermine the very existence of the church.
5. There is a world wide rekindling of socialist ideals and a major swing back towards communism in Russia.
6. There will be a major terrorist attack in Dubai
7. There will be a serious pollution problem in France – possibly in Paris with the contamination of the River Seine. Also a dam will burst in the Far East – maybe China.
8. Britain sees many of its top companies go bust and in particular holiday firms, aviation companies and the building companies.
9. Victoria Beckham will become pregnant with a long awaited daughter. And Jordan will announce she’s pregnant too.
10. There will be a knife attack on a top celebrity

I will be following those predictions through the year. I’d very much appreciate it if anyone who comes across any other predictions or is making some of their own could post a link in the comments. One link per comment to avoid the spam filter would be appreciated.

xD.

Setting up the Afghan government was never going to be enough, either. The international community needs to rally round and provide development support to build the institutions that will allow Afghanistan to run itself. A successful part of that has been the establishment of the Afghan National Army, which (I believe) now takes part in more than two-thirds of missions conducted under the ISAF or OEF banners. More work does need to be done, for instance, on the Afghan National Police. It is worth mentioning OMLTs (Operational Mentor Liaison Teams, or Omelettes), which remain attached to an Afghan unit after it has been set up and trained to provide ongoing training and advice.

NATO went into Afghanistan under an Article V¹ commitment to prevent further attacks, on the US in particular, launched from Afghan territory by al Qaeda with the complicity of the then-government. The conflict was and is increasingly characterised by asymmetry; while there have been some ‘pitched battles’, insurgents are increasingly avoiding such conflicts. Instead, they are going after development work precisely because it is that work which wins hearts and minds and helps to develop the structures that Afghanistan needs. A good instance is the delivery of a hydroelectric power turbine to produce electricity for on the order of two million people. It took five thousand troops to safeguard its passage precisely because the Taleban were so determined to stop it arriving.

While the higher echelons of the Taleban are under pressure, local groups are able to maintain opposition. This is largely because they use aggressive means with no regard at all towards loss of life, Afghan or otherwise. It is worth remembering, though, that a couple of years ago the Taleban were talking in terms of defeating the Afghan government in some parts of the country. They have failed. While the situation is not necessarily what I’d describe as ‘good’, the Taleban are being defeated as a coherent force.

As I said at the beginning, there was never going to be a military victory in Afghanistan. What military force can do is allow and support the autonomous developments needed for Afghanistan to run itself and thus prevent further attacks like 9-11.

xD.

1 – Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, aka the Washington Treaty, runs:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

Full text of the treaty at Wikisource.

PS – I draw your attention to the disclaimer at the bottom of this page.

Read into it what you will; however, it seems likely that there will be problems. Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg has raised the possibility of the Czech Republic boycotting the games. There will likely be a large security build-up for the games, very close to a trouble spot. As well as Russophiles, there are Abkhazians who remain at best wary and at worst hostile to Russia. Sochi, on the Black Sea, is in a strategically important position, near the Crimea, that Russia eyes. Certainly, it’s one to watch.

xD.

Lovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, respectively the President and General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions (ZCTU), were being charged with ’spreading falsehoods prejudicial to the state’. Those falsehoods are, in fact, criticisms they made on May Day of Mugabe’s government and telling the truth about the violence today in Zimbabwe.

The TUC, the UK equivalent of ZCTU, and ITUC, the international version, organised a mosaic depicting Lovemore and Wellington made up of faces of trades unionists from around the world. You can see it at WeAreZCTU.org. There are also tools to spread the word, add your support and to lobby for justice. There are model letters to send there as well.

xD.

As we know, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president of Iran, has said that he does not believe there are homosexuals in that country and he seems determined to make that the case by exterminating LGBT people there.

It is not often I agree with Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem MP for North Southwark & Bermondsey who has spearheaded the campaign to let Kazemi stay in the UK, but in this instance I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiments:

“As I have argued over the last 18 months, the Home Office should not send gay and lesbian people back to countries where they will be at risk of persecution, torture or death.”

To have this sword of Damocles hanging over your head does no credit to the UK, particularly where there is such an obvious and serious risk of death. It is worth quoting a piece from the BBC News report on Kazemi:

“Iranian human rights campaigners believe more than 4,000 gay men and lesbians have been executed since 1979.”

and from a speech given by Peter Tatchell on IDAHO, the International Day Against Homophobia.

“At least two gay Iranian asylum seekers have committed suicide in UK in the last five years, after being ordered by the Home Office to return to Iran. Israfil Shiri, aged 29, burned himself alive. Hussein Nasseri shot himself in the head. Both chose suicide rather than suffer deportation and probable execution by Iran’s ayatollahs.”

I hope that this precedent is observed in future and that similar situations are resolved without such delays.

xD.

Certainly, Sweden is the only country of significant size above the UK, although a lot follow immediately after it. Nine through nineteen are Netherlands, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark, Austria, Andorra, Germany, Iceland, Switzerland, Portugal and Australia. I am tempted to say that it proves that things are well in the UK. Unfortunately, the information the Times gives us is just a ranking, with no index or, crucially, variance for each datum. It might be that the UK does well as a whole because of London, but that the rest of the country is not doing so well, or somesuch. It would be interesting to see data for the EU as a whole as well as for individual US states. Nevertheless, it seems that some of the microstates are doing extremely well. That is fine except that they seem to be doing well by acting as tax loopholes for the EU.

xD.