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Renewing participatory democracy Multiple Differential Uncertainty
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050523
Make sure you have not missed the previous edition Check it out And the one before that? Other recent topics highlighted here
Week 21 Monday Old men are dangerous France is this week heading for a crisis, courtesy of two old men - Jacques Chirac and Valery Giscard d'Estaing. If the EU Referendum is won, it will only be a sliver of a majority, and the crisis will be less severe. But the crisis is the product of political ineptitude, and the vanities of two old men. 
Giscard d'Estaing, Constitutional Committee Chairman and octogenarian in search of a lasting personal legacy, has been the real problem. He persuaded himself that the constitutional amendments needed for EU expansion amounted to a revolutionary new "Constitution". They do not: they are routine, pedestrian changes, for the most part renumbering the paragraphs of earlier treaties (see my January/05 view). But the hype carried the day: French voters now clearly believe that a revolution is in prospect - that there is some kind of English conspiracy afoot, to sink the European Union (the wrong kind of revolution), and both Right and Left are united in the Noniste campaign. 
The vain and patronising Jacques Chirac compounded the problem by underestimating French misgivings about the EU, and believing uncritically in his own power of persuasion, which old men regularly do. The upshot is that, by his style, his tactics and his seedy manoeuvring he has succeeded in alienating large number of French voters who do believe that revolutionary changes are afoot - but moving in the wrong direction, towards a minimalist Blairite state model! Hence the problem...
Whitsun Rebellion 
In a debacle not unrelated to the French Referendum crisis, the French stayed away from work en masse last Monday, which was the French Whitsun Bank Holiday Monday. Why was that unusual? Because Raffarin's Government had unwisely asked the nation to work that day, to pay taxes and release funds needed to finance improved home-care for old people living alone. In the 2003 Summer heat wave, many thousands of the elderly had died of the heat, abandoned at home by their holiday-making families. The Government had no reserves to improve geriatric services, and asked for "the nation" to contribute one day's taxes to the cause. 
The result was a raspberry. That is simply not an acceptable governmental technique. It was a massive misjudgment by the Government, just as the French Government has misjudged the EU Referendum. But the underlying problem is that French are obsessed with micro-managing the working-day, the working week. They are the ones who passed a law to restrict the working-week to 35 hours. They are pressing the UK to introduce a compulsory 48-hour maximum week. In this matter, I am with UK, and the Blair Government. I think the managerialist French, of both the Right and the Left, are wrong. Micro-management does not work, in the regulation of business or employment. I do think that current UK prosperity has much to do with "flexibility" in the labour market, and that socialists must find other ways of countering the uncertainty of contemporary society, of the economy. That is why I am out-of-step with many of the TU Left. Intervention at the level of the individual transaction, at the level of speicific contracts, goes too far. If I want to work a 65-hour week (as I always have done, personally) I should be free to do so.
... Drop me a line Creaking Census
Asylum Justice Things are moving fast, at my new charity, Asylum Justice. We have expanded the Swansea Saturday "surgery" to a full 10.00/5.00 day, and we are planning a full surgery-day in Cardiff on Fridays. My first new volunteer lawyer, an experienced Level One Immigration Adviser, helped me out on Saturday. I am receiving offers of volunteer support for the Cardiff centre, which will probably have to serve Newport as well. It is not yet clear what use the Home Office will continue to make of South Wales dispersal facilities, and that is making the task of innovation more difficult. If you can help, either in South Wales or in your own home town or city - then please - please... Damascus Road
But the 2005 Result has convinced me that our voting system no longer delivers legitimacy to our Government - and that is deeply disturbing. Low turnout and multi-party participation is eroding the very legitimacy of government upon which civic order depends. I am not particularly concerned with "fairness" in a traditional playground sense: in the past, a logically unfair system has worked pretty well.
Amnesty! 
Last week's news from Spain showed the way ahead for the UK. The Guardian reported that Spain's Socialist Government had granted an immigration amnesty to 700,000 illegal immigrants, who had been living and working clandestinely in Spain. "We can feel very satisfied", said the Labour Minister Jesus Caldera, "almost 700,000 jobs brought out of the black economy - that represents 80/90% of all such jobs held by immigrants to Spain" Officials stressed that more than a million people (i.e. including family members) would no longer have to hide from Police or labour inspectors. I wish that had been the UK. Our Government should grant an amnesty to the 250,000 failed asylum-seekers now surviving in the UK, some literally stranded by international events. They are in a worse position than the Spanish immigrants. In a smaller country, their work-ban is strictly policed. They are virtually imprisoned by poverty in their bare Home Office accommodation, living on £38-worth of State luncheon vouchers per week, and no legitimate cash. My Labour Government should end this scandal, these indignities deliberately inflicted by the State. .... drop me a line
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Key principle Public Primacy >>> Blair's too old-fashioned >>> The Power of Private Property >>> Wrong man for Pope >>> Corporate Kleptocracy >>> Drop the school-leaving age >>> Countering Fundamentalism >>> Against Unreasonable Inequality >>> "Corporate Manslaughter" fallacy >>> Abolish Wrongful Dismissal >>> Adjustment Pay for every worker >>>
.... drop me a line
Lottery 
Punters will in future decide where their money will go. In a remarkable failure of will by a democratic Government, Labour has authorised punters' referendums, to decide the destination of Lottery surpluses. I favour the development of alternative forms of democratic participation, but this move is unwise. It will be bad for innovation, preferring established causes. "Populism" drives our public life down to the lowest common denominator of political discourse. And that favours nobody but the extreme Right...
Keep the books... The campaign of
LIBRI, the public libraries charity, is clearly hitting home.
Burmese welcome
One of David Blunkett's unsung victories, as Home Secretary, was his cooperation with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to accept an experimental annual quota of 500 refugees. Not "asylum-seekers", but those whose refugee status had already been established by the United Nations (UNHCR). This points the right way forward, for the international administration of refugee issues, and Charles Clarke should put all his weight behind it. This week, the first 51 "UN" refugees arrived from Burma to settle in Sheffield, David Blunkett's home city. To the eternal shame of the British, only two local authorities (Sheffield and Bolton) have so far had the political courage to welcome these oppressed refugees into their midst..
Kindred Spirits
I have just received a plea for funds from Refugee Action, and I shall certainly contribute - check out their website. They are providing a wide support service for refugees, although not operating in South Wales. My hunch is that my new charity Asylum Justice will have several points of overlap with them. I will be seeking to make common cause.
I have recently come across more evidence of his onshore career. He became a respected Secondary School Headmaster in Assam - and was invited to join the Royal Cabinet. So, in spite of my own lack of political success, it has been shown that I do have illustrious forbears - a Minister in the Assam Cabinet, no less.
This Indian tombstone Nepal tombstone suggests a ripe old age: if Sarah was 35 in 1891, he must have been over 80 when he christened me, in 1936... And he went back to Nepal afterwards. Family rumours used to abound about his having two wives "when in India", but the new evidence does not support that. Web Mining New selection, this week! As web-logging proliferates, a new form of modern history becomes possible. I can now give you an insight into what was "in the news" for the matching week, one two, and three years ago. This is how the world looked to me, in at the end of April -
050523
Make sure you have not missed
Week 21 Monday
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Created by GMID Design & Communication COPYRIGHT
NOTICE |
Work
has already started on the 2011 Census. But the 10-year Census formula, invented in
1801, no longer
fits our needs. Like the French, we should switch to taking a 10%
sample Census every year. The French also started in 1801, with a Census
every ten years, but they have now abandoned that. The modern welfare state requires much more sophisticated
population data that the minimal wartime State of 1801, and our figures
need regular, authoritative, updating.
I
surprised myself, last week. At our local Labour Branch meeting in
Mumbles, when we were picking over the Election results, I announced my
conversion to electoral reform.
I
have always been a traditional first-past-the-poster, wedded to the
single-member Constituency. I have refused to have any truck with
the PR people. And I still distrust the term "proportional
representation", because I think it misses the point.
And read my Big Theory itself, at 
Having
discovered this remarkable NASA website, linked with the Hubble Telescope
and the NASA Mars exploration vehicles, with its current photographs from
outer space, I am reluctant