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Renewing participatory democracy

My Little Red Book

A New Socialist Settlement

Bevan
Re-visited 

Multiple Differential Uncertainty

Week 24  Sunday
6 June 2004

Editor  The ways of the Web are weird and wonderful.  After several months of "steady" hits on the hit-counter, interest in LivePolitics has suddenly spurted, to generate the highest monthly total ever!

January     1267
February   1223
March       1115
April         1109 
May          1576

There is no obvious "explanation", merely a wave of various hits from everywhere. That eclipses the previous monthly high of 1409 in September last year.  It's a dramatic departure from recent months - let's see if it continues!  Thanks for your continuing support and interest  rwe

Our
Collapsing "State"

I think our very form of "State" is disintegrating.  By that I mean the top-down, military model of a “Command State”. That is the form of unitary state which characterises Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States, and which we are trying to create in Iraq.  

Leftwing politics has indeed been conditioned by this model of the State.  Yet while concepts of national "territory" remain strong, our models of The State are getting decidedly fuzzy, even triggering the awfulness of the UKIP.

• This is a serious issue.

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"Go Nuclear!"
says Cobber Mike

writing from Australia, where the uranium comes from... prompted by Lovelock is Right, below..

Dear Roger 

I agree with you. The adoption of nuclear power for electricity generation is inevitable. The principal opponents of nuclear power are the oil companies. They are stuck with billions and billions of dollars invested in facilities and unused hydrocarbons. They will not abandon these for any reason on earth. The greenhouse crisis - the increasing problems of greenhouse gases, the instability of oil supply, the ferocious politics associated with oil supply - none of these will mean a fig to the owners of the oil industry...

...I think that this issue will only be settled by the onset of such serious climatic and economic crises that the general public sweeps the Greens and the oil companies aside in a panic over jobs and heating costs.  Fortunately nuclear power stations can be built relatively quickly.

Yours, Mike Davis

• Read Mike's full letter

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with acknowledgment to: South Wales Evening Post

That's me, at the top-left of the picture - at the inauguration of a new refugee support service in Swansea.  The service is much in demand, but for all the wrong reasons.  The legal-aided solicitor service is collapsing, with many applicants left without representation for key appeal hearings.  My own actions, in stepping in such circumstances as a McKenzie Friend, without fee, is legally problematical, and it seems I could be prosecuted for doing so. And although I try to register as an Immigration Adviser, I cannot secure in the market place the £250,000 insurance cover needed for official Registration. 

• It is a sad, unjust, jungle - inhabited by many vulnerable people.

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Lovelock is right

I have always felt guilty about my support for nuclear power generation.  But the famous Gaia scientist James Lovelock CBE FRS (now 84) has now dramatically endorsed the case for a rapid expansion of nuclear power -

"We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources.  Civilisation is in imminent danger".

I well remember attending, almost surreptitiously, a meeting at Blackpool Labour Conference in the mid-Nineties on The Case for Nuclear Power organised by the Power Workers' Union.  It was addressed by that great and courageous advocate of "nuclear" - Tam Dalyell.  It was held at 9.30 am on a bleak rainy Sunday morning, and there was an audience of only half-a-dozen in a dismal hotel-room, including me.  Tam had driven overnight, from Scotland.  All the New Labour luminaries (from Tony Blair to Stephen Timms...) were in Church.

I consider that the right course is to confront the undoubted technical problems still besetting spent-fuel disposal.  We must phase out the burning of fossil fuels as a top priority.  Battery-driven cars can be powered by ample supplies of nuclear-generated electricity.

• You should throw away your sandals and your hair-shirts, and think nuclear

What do you think?  Drop me a line

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Compassionate
Liberal Camden

I am delighted to report the courageous radical position of London's Camden Borough Council. Since 2001, the Council has been committed to the legalisation of cannabis and Ecstasy - and is now seeking Home Office permission to provide heroin injection facilities. Our feeble MPs remain in a dead funk about advocating any move towards the legalisation of drugs.  Camden Councillors have shown the way.

"We believe a regulated legal market in these drugs would eliminate criminal profit," said a Council spokesman, "and reduce the risk of injury or death from badly formulated or wrongly administered drugs".

• Plain speaking,
  enlightened liberal thinking.

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Rowe Evans Rampant

No relation, you understand.  But a legal action in Sumatra which demonstrates the key role of law, and of the Courts, in sustaining the very structure of modern  international capitalism. 

The three pillars of capitalist success (private property, contract law, and the manipulation of artificial personality) are all on parade, in the Rowe Evans case.  The case is poised to go to the Sumatran Supreme Court of Appeal.

• Watch "capitalism " at work...

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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 to let it go

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Can there be anyone left cold by the sight of great ships?  The Royal Mail stamps for May mark the launch of the new Queen Mary..  Great ships bring out the best in everyone.

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The Fabians are a great, enlightened Left-Wing political community some 7,000-strong - and we have many skills among our number.

• Join the Fabians, right here...

PS  If, without joining, you would like to be added to the monthly Fabian Update e-mail list, just e-mail Fabian Research

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Special Footnote

I love the online newspapers, which are my access to the world - share them with me - click through to their here -  I have added the English-language China Daily ... and I now offer you the leading English-language Indian paper The Hindu. 

They are all just a click away.

• Guardian
• Daily Telegraph
• Independent
• The Times
• New York Times
• Le Monde
• Die Welt
• Moscow Times
• China Daily
• The Hindu

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I am getting battered, on the Swansea hustings..

This week has been hard, both physically and emotionally.  This is not an easy time to be carrying the Labour banner - much as I enjoy canvassing. My campaign as Labour Candidate in the City Council Elections, is to seize a Tory-held seat, within the Mumbles bailiwick of my birth, for Labour.

But it is hard to lose lifelong Labour voters, both over "Blair" (never a favourite with the egalitarian Welsh..) and over Iraq.  The same forces inhibit any conversion from LibDems, and the Tory vote is holding.  Blair is no longer a vote-winner.  I try to redress the balance by pleading my own actions in joining both the great anti-War marches, in September 2002 and February 2003.  But to no avail.

• There are many Labour voters (I would guess, 20% in Swansea) who are determined to "give Blair a bloody nose", and hasten his departure from office.  Those voters would probably not desert, at a General Election - but this time 'round, they are licensed to strike...

• Labour has shot representative politics in the foot, with one aspect of postal voting.  This week, I have frequently been met with the doorstep response - "No good talking to me, I've voted already".  John Prescott sure knows how to demoralise the troops...

Hockney
is my darling!

David Hockney struck a blow for smokers, writing in The Guardian this week.  And he triggered a cloud of support and opposition.   

I share Hockney's distaste for the illiberal, authoritarian approach of the public authorities to smokers.  As for “public smoking”, I agree that buses and coaches should be smoke free.  But I see no reason why there should not be smoking carriages on trains – health authoritarianism has run wild there.  I accept that restaurants should be smoke free – but pubs should retain the freedom to smoke.  The British pub is an important social institution, open to all and now welcoming to all.  Everyone could be given the choice whether to eat in a smoke-free restaurant restaurant or in the more informal surroundings of a pub.  There should be choice.  The Irish have got it spectacularly wrong.

• But I fear that the current outbreak of authoritarianism has more fundamental roots. The challenge to us all is to trace the sources of this new nastiness, and to counter them.

Licensed by law,
to plunder

Cobber Davis also draws our attention to the obscene record of expropriation found in US corporations - see the Daily Misleader.  Bush's favourite Chief Executives continue to exploit and despoil their own companies - quite legally!  That's because our politicians fail to use the levers of power that are open to them, by the radical reform of company law: check out Tame the Corporations.

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Susan Greenfield  Scientist? Politician?

Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE, Director of the Royal Institution, who delivered this year's Bronowski Lecture, is undoubtedly a scientist.  But as a science lecturer, she has formulated the most marvellous manifesto for the individualist cause.  Just read this...

"While it may appear that the cyber world is beginning to merge with reality, human beings must continue to be seen as individuals.  After all, no two persons have the same personality: no two people can judge exactly what the other is thinking.  Your brain is evolving and changing every moment that you are alive, so you are not the same person as you were five years ago, one year ago, six months ago or even a minute ago. 

"It is this individuality, along with personal experience, that creates our identity.  Your imagination is the most marvellous thing, and more authentic than the artificial film or the cyber world around us. As computer chips are more readily able to read our thoughts and minds, as human beings we must treasure our imagination, and the individuality that defines each of us."

• And - I would add - design our social and political institutions accordingly.

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Civil Rights
Continental faultlines

When it comes to civil rights, British is still best.  I know that sounds complacent, jingoistic, even reckless (in the light of David Blunkett's awful civil rights record at the Home Office).  But remember that I have lived in both France and Germany, and had legal training in both countries.  So let me explain.

British civil rights sensitivities are developed in ways poorly understood on the Continent.  We are far more sensitive to the physical practicalities of "civil rights", of personal freedom in a quite literal sense - unlawful detention and imprisonment, unnecessarily violent or intrusive Police behaviour, abusive crowd control, wrongful entry to private property.  This is a practical and honourable tradition.

Why do I raise this subject with you, this week?  Because of Brussels pressure to introduce random breath-tests, in pursuit of drunken drivers.  We resist random testing, because of its blanket extension of Police powers, over every moment of our mobile lives, every traffic movement.  Our instinct is to resist an unnecessary extension of intrusive Police powers.  For the EU administrators (lacking our traditional sensitivities) random breath-testing seems a no-brainer, an obvious method to be deployed "in the cause" of sobriety. 

Yet we resist, because of the adverse side-effects of extending Police powers. 

• And we are right.

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Webmasters unite!  These are this week's Missing Persons, taken from The Big Issue.  If you recognise anyone, contact www.missingpersons.org or ring 020-8392-4592 - and this is surely a free service which volunteer Webmasters could offer more widely - put the idea around!

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
The originating content of this website is my own work, and subject to my copyright. But on one condition only, I hereby give my consent to its unrestricted reproduction for any purpose: the condition is that its source is subject to proper acknowledgment, giving my name, my assertion of copyright, and the name of this website as its source, namely: www.warrenevans.net - is that a deal?  Roger WE