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Renewing participatory democracy Multiple Differential Uncertainty
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A Peaceful Week...  For me, this has been a creative and peaceful week. I have been
able to turn away from the negativity of war to four major
creative initiatives -
Workers’ Rights, not Union Rights My prescription for the Labour Party, explored below, would shift its centre-of-gravity away, slightly but perceptibly, from its TU origins - as matters both of policy and procedure. This line disturbed one of my readers Matthew Jenkins, a 26-year-old Young Fabian and Labour Party activist, working in Cardiff. He challenged me..
Reform from
within,
The Labour Party is dwindling numerically, down from its 440,000 peak at the time of the 1997 General Election. Mark Seddon, writing in the Guardian, argues that only the trade unions can rescue the Party from its capture by Tony Blair.
Fighting for Wales The Gower Labour Party cranked into action
this weekend, for the Welsh Assembly elections.
NB for Labour Party Members  Press reports and private E-mails have
covered the agonised processes of resignation from the Labour Party over
Iraq, with
Lord Hattersley asking members
not to resign, and
Zoe Williams
showing why they should. I am with Hattersley: I shall be staying in the Party to
contend for radical internal change -
this is my position.
Try BBC News, the public service website Retail inequity
Congratulations! This time to Patricia Hewitt... It is reported that she is "not convinced" by the case for letting market forces rip, in the community pharmacy sector, in spite of the recent recommendations of the Office of Fair Trading. Open market operation would eliminate pharmacies from many poorer and dispersed communities.
Hit Count for March 2003 Good hit-count figures for March - partly subdued (I suspect) by the ghastly counter-attractions of the Iraqi War but boosted (within the last few days) by the Annette Carson case - this was the hit-counter figure to close-of-play on 31 March... monthly totals 2002 June 65 July 152 September 266 November 386 2003 January 415 February 517 March 554 Follow my August 2002 Russian Tour Diary, now unfolding in splendid technicolor - capacity problems have so far limited the scale of how much I can E-publish, but there is still plenty to read - St Petersburg Novgorod Moscow Tallinn (2) Special Footnote I love the online newspapers, which are my access to the world - share them with me - click through to their Homepages from here - back to top I am sure you will want to keep in touch with what Steve Bell is drawing, in Diary 2002 Now up to date! I have re-structured my Diary to give you a day-to-day means of looking back, throughout the year
Week 14 |
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Police not War
American xenophobia My daughter Katharine has drawn my attention to a truly poisonous American website dedicated to engendering an E-hate campaign against everything French. It is awful, simply awful. But you should nevertheless confront the reality of American public opinion and its fevered state – see Veto La France!. Katharine dipped her pen in suitably satirical ink, and responded. She received a reply...
Was I wrong?
Let me come clean.
For much of last year, I was forecasting that there would be no war on Iraq
at all -
because the economic risks for George Bush would be too great.
Reason and self-interest would, I argued, prevail. I could
not believe that the Republicans would risk the ruination of the American
domestic economy. That is what I said
in August,
and I repeated my
Annette Carson The UK Court of Appeal verdict is now awaited by hundreds of thousands of UK pensioners living abroad, deprived of their Old Age pension entitlement. I fear they will be disappointed. I was challenged this week by the Australians to explain why my former Bar colleague Anthony Lester QC had changed his mind. I gave my own, unvarnished, opinion. Capitalism? Just a misleading illusion… The Marxist Left is crippled by its belief that there is such a thing as "capitalism". It dominates their discourse, captures their imagination, conditions their syntax. Marxists, and the rest of the collectivist Left, have long been tilting at "capitalism", a windmill of their own making. And one consequence is that the Left exaggerates the power of "capitalism". For there is no such enemy. "Capitalism" is a will of the wisp, a syntactical illusion generated by Marx’s obsession with abstract nouns. Did Marx not dream up Das Kapital, the most misleading abstraction of all?
New Party  Greater
clarity is at hand! It transpires that this symbol indeed
adheres to a new national party.
But all the current publicity is being attracted by the
Scottish
People's Alliance. The Scottish Party is competing in the
Scottish Parliament Elections on 1 May, and is attracting Scottish Tory
support and defections. And the Manifesto of the new
Scots Alliance Party is forcing me to formulate my own Policy
Prescription
for the future Labour Party.
School Violence NASUWT (the teaching union) reports, in a new survey of its members, a rising tide of violence in our schools. I say that we must reduce the use of compulsion, finish compulsory education at 15, and allow excluded 13-yr olds to leave mainstream school, without further mandatory schooling. That would change the ethos of secondary education. Think Police!
Scoundrels, if not traitors Tam Dalyell MP was speaking loosely, when he proposed that Tony Blair should be "branded a war criminal" and sent to the Hague. Many obstacles stand in the way, of Blair's arraignment for war crimes, or crimes against humanity - for having launched an aggressive war, without proper legal justification. But it is nevertheless a tragic error of judgment, which many will deeply regret - perhaps they already do. And if James Boswell was right (reputedly quoting Dr Johnson..) many of them are scoundrels - "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel".
America
Try BBC News, the public service website Other recent topics
And read my own Big Theory itself, at |
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New
Growing the informal public
sector - the trading charity Aquaterra Leisure
(of which I am a Director and Trustee) 
Our Assembly candidate Edwina Hart was there - with Martin Caton, our MP -
both stuffing envelopes, planning telephone canvassing, planning
street forays. The Welsh Party faithful turned up in goodly numbers -
although inspired, I suspect, more by Labour's performance in the Assembly
than the Party's record at Westminster... It is high time we were
allowed (..."by London") to have our own
Welsh Labour Party, just like the Scots...
It must be clear that conventional "war" - the waging of a unilateral,
pre-emptive aggressive war, has now become impossible.
Transparency is killing off war. Media coverage,
open democracy, consumer anxiety, sensitivity to civilian casualties - these
all inhibit the sheer ferocity and nastiness that such war demands.
I am keenly aware of the explosion of Police
activity which we are all experiencing. At 130,000, we now have a
larger civil Police force than at any time in our national history.
For the Left, and the civil rights community, this poses a
unique political and intellectual challenge. 
As
Editor, I am retaining this item for another few days before it hits the
Archive. For me, this is a critical aspect of the gruesome learning
process through which we are passing. Is large-scale war practicable, in the modern
world? Could the imperatives of a wealthy society actually preclude
the prosecution of major war? The problem is not the
Armed Forces account - but rather the devastating effect of modern war upon
public confidence in