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.

I took away a few things from it all.

- Firstly, I was gratified that the nutty left wasn’t there but that there was a broad range, from government ministers through ordinary Labour party members, trades unionists, Greens, Lib Dems and that they were largely willing to come together for an occasion like this. I did see George Galloway floating around, though, but without any groupies.

- Secondly, there was an acceptance that, the rights and wrongs of high finance notwithstanding, London (and the UK) had been overly dependent upon them and that we would now have to find, ahem, alternative employment. A lot of people thought this could be to do with green innovation.

- Thirdly, a lot of people seem to understand that we have to work to maintain the vibrancy and toleration of our city.

- Fourthly, it wasn’t just the free market ideology that had been hit; progressives needed to re-evaluate their positions, and quickly, in this brave new world.

- Fifthly, there was a widespread feeling that we should work across London, not just focussing on the Mayoralty. That having been said, progressives would have to work hard to remove Johnson in 2012.

Below the fold are my notes and thoughts on the sessions I attended. I don’t know if anyone’s collating these, but it would make sense, if there are future events like this, for something like Liberal Conspiracy to have someone at each breakout session. Some of the other bloggers I saw there include the Tory Troll, Mayor Watch, Boris Watch, Peter Kenyon, Dave Hill, Sunny Hundal and Steve Cowan.

xD.

This is not going to be chronological; if anyone’s that interested, the schedule for the day is here. It’s probably a good sign that for each of the breakout sessions, there was more than one I wanted to attend.

First plenary
Second plenary
First breakout – Learning lessons from London Votes 2008
Second breakout – Transport
Third breakout – Blogging London

First plenary

Ken ‘the once and future king mayor’ Livingstone gave the first talk. He mentioned a generational turning point. There had been a broad, social democratic consensus in the quarter-century following the Second World War. I think that point is debatable; the situation constrained state actions to a great degree, but the effect is perhaps the same. Following that, Friedman et al came to popularity (and a particular mention for mobility of capital being increased) but that era has now passed with the current financial crisis.

In a rather witty remark, Ken said that he was sad Reagan hadn’t seen the collapse of his dream before saying

I expect an apology from Thatcher imminently

The question, then, was as to the new structures that should be put in place. One that drew near-universal applause was that every person should pay tax on money in the country where they earn it and, similarly, corporations should pay taxes on profit in the country where they make them. This would have to be done through global and international agreement, effectively closing off tax havens.

It could not be denied, according to Ken, that the economies of London and the UK would be damaged because of the problems in the City. As a solution, he proposed that London should be at the forefront of the new technologies that we, as a species, need to deal with the serious environmental situation; on this, Ken painted a bleak picture, largely agreeing with the Tyndall centre.

Closing, he mentioned the need for greater support of London’s dynamic cultural centre and a need to recognise the importance of happiness – and so to put in place a progressive consensus for the future of the city.

Second up was the playwright, Bonnie Greer, who started by recalling two huge, generational shifts through which she had lived; the Sixties and now. In both instances, a part of the shift is technological. Then, it was the television, now it is the internet and mobile technology. In both instances, older people colonise the space made by young people who either very quickly adapt or grow up with these new technologies.

Greer went on to say that, soon, most humans will live in cities, which will have consequences for how we view race. Nevertheless, manufacturing will return but it will be high-tech. There will have to be greater cross-generational cooperation as the idea of a passive pensioner changes to that of an active senior who may have retired but still has two or three decades of living ahead of them.

Greer concluded by opining that political parties would more and more be vehicles for charismatic individuals unless they learned to communicate – properly – with Gen-Y, Gen-Z and the Millennial generation.

Next was Eric Hobsbawm.

If I understood Hobsbawm correctly, he argued that the ideologies of the ‘short twentieth century’ – socialism unbound and capitalism unbound – were both, now, bankrupt. The former failed at the end of the eighties while the latter’s thirty year dominance, although we don’t know how severe the current crisis will be, had ended with it. The future, in short, belongs to a mixed economy.

He added that even the left parties of Europe of rich Europe were attached to this free-market fundamentalism, describing Blair and, until recently, Brown as ‘Thatcher with trousers’.

Certainly, the central idea of parties like Labour had not been soviet socialism, but rather that the market would take care of growth and the government of distribution. That position had been undermined by globalisation. It therefore needed refitting, but instead swallowed free market ideology whole. Because of decisions then and the balance of the economy now, the recession will be harder for us.

The question, then, is whether we use old tools like nationalisation. The answer was ‘not necessarily’ as, in something I thought slightly contradicted his opening, Hobsbawm thought we didn’t know how to get out of the current crisis because our leaders are addicted to ‘free market schmaltz’, questioning whether we had really moved away from the idea that profit-making companies were always good; that a large gap between rich and poor was acceptable; that increasing GDP is the sine qua non of good governance.

In order to do this, it was necessary for people to understand that GDP is a means and not an end and that the end – or something closer to the end – would be jobs, house, schools and the like. A good quip: “Poor secondary schooling isn’t changed by the fact that UCL could field a football team composed solely of Nobel prize winners”.

He finished, in his gloomy manner, by saying that climate change would mean a big shift from private to public, bigger than that envisioned by the Government and sooner than we all think. “Time is not on our side”.

Harriet Harman had the unfortunate task of following on from Hobsbawm. I say unfortunate because he really seemed to hold the audience. Nevertheless, Harman did well, starting by identifying people’s presence at the conference as part of a new zeitgeist, related to the real apprehension people felt, particularly about jobs. Although we are in uncharted waters, the Labour deputy leader said that the government would not be like Thatcher about losing jobs.

Something I found particularly interesting was the to- and fro- about Obama. Harman said that not only was Obama not going to fail, but that he had already succeeded in changing both how the world sees the USA and how people see themselves. A large welcome should be organised for him. A later question challenged Harman on this, saying that Obama should be judged on action rather than rhetoric. Harman simply replied that we should support him in building a progressive future – which he was doing – and received strong support from the audience.

Responding to Hobsbawm, Harman said that all tools would be used, and gave a list of what the government was doing to ameliorate the crisis. Specifically, bringing forward capital infrastructure expenditure was mentioned, in contrast to the Tories who wanted to cut those back at the time of a recession.

Harman emphasised the need for coordination of international action and the multiplier effect of states working together and accepted Hobsbawm’s point that a strong economy was a means and not an end. Agreeing with Greer, Harman added that our new economic arrangements would have to be fairer and based on high tech industries; £20m bonuses would no longer be acceptable.

To that end, what Polly Toynbee described as ‘socialism in one clause‘ – the duty on public bodies to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Harman closed by saying that there were those who would exploit the current situation to build racial divisions. At the June 4 elections, it was imperative to work for a high turnout because there is a real chance of the BNP gaining an MEP. Labour would be building on the work of Jon Cruddas (who chaired the session) and Margaret Hodge; Martin Salter would be coordinating that with support from Frank Dobson.

I found it interesting that people listened to Harman really quite attentively. I’ve often seen people shout abuse at any New Labour minister, but the couple that did received very short shrift from the audience. That’s not to say that everyone necessarily agreed, but that they wanted to listen. I assume that Harriet Harman was invited in her capacity as deputy party leader, but it does seem she was acceptable to the assembled.

There was a lot of support from the audience for questions on the need to repeal anti-trades union legislation and in opposition to trades unions’ support for the third runway at Heathrow. Hobsbawm did not directly answer a question on which member of the government could lead the country out of its current crisis, but did say that long periods of effective isolation from normal, run-of-the-mill society at the top of politics did mean that senior politicians lose contact with the ordinary.

Harman liked the idea of resurrecting the ‘Claimants’ Commission’ from GLC days. This, apparently, brought together people who claimed benefits to work out responses to proposed changes in benefits arrangements. A sex worker wanted to ask Harman a question; unfortunately, the one turned into five and the questioner was shouted down, the chair having immediately previously asked people to keep their questions short. The response from Harman was, essentially, that although a small percentage of sex workers freely chose from amongst other options to sell sex, the allowance of that particular market would force a lot of people into it who did not have a choice.

A few closing remarks. Hobsbawm felt that Labour and the unions had sold the traditional idea of a class struggle down the river as they didn’t strike and didn’t demonstrate. Lots of BNP voters thought they were voting for a class struggle; we cannot say that any class struggle is good.

Bonnie Greer said that old left-right paradigms were not working and that the Brits ‘did themselves down too much’.

Ken said that a lot of the questions had been looking backward. The progressive movement was in a weaker position than Thatcher and Reagan had been at the end of the Seventies. They had had a project; ‘we’ need to recraft our traditional ideals.

Second plenary

First breakout – lessons from the London elections

Second breakout: Transport for a progressive London

Third breakout: Blogging London

Mr Davis has forced this election to discuss a single issue – forty-two days’ detention. As I have said before, this may set an unfortunate precedent for challenges to contest a by-election over an issue. Even if not, choosing a representative for Parliament on the basis of a single issue is foolish; many issues will be debated.

If, though, we accept Mr Davis’ premise (and we are forced to do so as he took the Chiltern Hundreds), we see that there is another candidate standing with a similar policy on 42 days. We must look for other ways in which to differentiate them. Consider Davis’ voting record and the policies of the Conservative Party against the policies of the Green Party and it is clear that the best option in this case is a vote for the Greens.

xD.

PS – The full list of candidates is below the fold.

Here is the full list of candidates:

Grace Christine Astley – Independent
David Laurence Bishop – Church of the Militant Elvis Party
Ronnie Carroll – Make Politicians History
Mad Cow-Girl – The Official Monster Raving Loony Party
David Craig – Independent
Herbert Winford Crossman – Independent
Tess Culnane – National Front Britain for the British
Thomas Faithful Darwood – Independent
David Michael Davis – Conservative
Tony Farnon – Independent
Eamonn “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick – Independent
Christopher Mark Foren – Independent
Gemma Dawn Garrett – Miss Great Britain Party
George Hargreaves – Christian Party
Hamish Howitt – Freedom 4 Choice
David Icke – No party listed
John Nicholson – Independent
Shan Oakes – Green Party
David Pinder – The New Party
Joanne Robinson – English Democrats: Putting England First
Jill Saward – Independent
Norman Scarth – Independent
Walter Edward Sweeney – Independent
Christopher John Talbot – Socialist Equality Party
John Randle Upex – Independent
Greg Wood – Independent