Professon Fred Halliday has written an analysis of what he believes to be the twelve worst ideas in international discourse. On some of his points, I agee completely, on others, he is completely off base. I seem to recall thinking that when I studied his theories properly, but that was a few years ago now.
Written a lot about Europe in the past, I think I’ve found and tagged most of the old posts but have probably missed hundreds. One of the subjectst that comes up time and again is that, while I don’t like the EU as it currently stands, I like it more than the current alternatives, and truly believe it can be reformed and improved. I share this view with James Clive Matthews, who has written an excellent post on the need to take the long view and broken down his philosophy on Europe and Britain’s involvement:
10) Most individual nations are simply too damned small to have much chance of surviving on their own in the long term. Throughout history, the general trend has been for states to grow larger and larger, until some kind of limit (either geographical or geopolitical) is reached, because the larger the area you cover, the more versatile your production and the more self-sufficient you can be. - This is my primary reason for being pro-EU: I simply cannot see how a country as small as the UK (or, indeed, any European country) can survive on its own in the longer-term. Just as I see national identity being formed largely from negatives, so too is my pro-EU stance.
This is, largely, my primary reason for support as well, Britain gave up the Empire before my father was born, and joined Europe before I was born.
When you vote, do you vote Expressively, or Rationally? Most party activists and committed partizans will vote expressively, and assume that voters do likewise. However, many voters will vote rationally, seeking to maximise the impact their vote will have on the result. It is this tendency, that most activists find hard to relate to, that leads to the phenomena referred to as “tactical voting”. Still with me? Good, let me explain…
Well, Alex has finally got it working. Labour Home is launched, to compete with Conservative Home and Liberal Review. It looks ok, and it’s something I thought was lacking awhileback (even mentioned it’s lack in a thread at B4L). He’s also got a team of writers lined up. Shame that one of them seems to have both a poor grasp of economics and a very weird definition of liberalism.
How could I resist linking to this? Jonn Elledge:
conspicuous displays of British patriotism are most likely to come from boozed up sports fans and UKIP politicians. Perhaps this is the biggest challenge to liberal patriotism: our national icons have been hijacked by the right … None of those things of which Britons are supposed to be proud relate to my experience of this country. John Major’s warm beer on the village cricket green sounds suspiciously like a world that vanished decades before I got round to being born … I’m not saying that there isn’t much in Britain’s history to be ashamed of: Suez, Dresden, and the fact we unleashed both the concentration camp and Jim Davidson on an unsuspecting world, to name but four.
He goes on to list a few of the things that he is proud of. As a flag waving liberal socialist, I guess I ought to contribute a few ideas as well. How about…
Scottish electoral mechanics are always interesting to watch. South of the border, most seats are either safe or two-way marginals. Three-way marginals are rare, and tend to disappear over the course of a few elections, the third party squeeze / ratchet effect caused by Duverger’s Law means that it becomes “irrational” as the economists put it to vote for the third place or below candidate. Yet in Scotland? They not only still have three way marginals, they also have some 4 way marginals.
So Gordon Brown is calling for a something like a Britain Day.
OK, so I’ll stick my neck out and say that Gordon Brown has just had a good idea. Well, perhaps not the day itself, which will probably just devolve into ‘going down the pub’ day, but a good idea in that the fact that Brown is interested in talking about British identity and multiculturalism shows that at least he is concerned about the issue and might like to do something about it.
However, a Britain Day could be a good idea if we don’t let it devolve into something pointless.
Right, when I decided I wanted to run a blog, I knew I’d need at least one other person involved in order to keep it going. Having a pretty good friend who I agree with on most issues, who happened to be completing his Masters Degree in Critical Global Studies (which is posh for Political Theory/Philosophy) and a good writer was fortuitous, getting him to agree to post stuff here was cool.
So, on the grounds that I post so often his stuff gets swamped (and sometimes people credit me for the entire blog anyway without noticing the byline), I though, given that I’m feeling all grotty with a cold, I’d do a summary for his stuff.
Rule 1 of blogging: quoting yourself incessently is bad. Rule 2: Letting someone else take credit for something you said is worse. In a comment to this post I said:
You’re not alone… Representative democracy is an essential tool for a tolerant society, direct democracy leads to great thinkers drinking hemlock at the whim of the populace.
And, to answer Paulie’s question, as far as I know it’s original. And no, you can’t steal it ;-) Use it freely though.
So, Dave wants me to join him does he? I appear to be his target audience, a sometime LibDem who believes it’s more important to defeat NuLab than to continue the old rivalries. He’s saying the right things, I remain to be convinced if he’s doing them. But, well, I’m not convinced that joining his party is for me. Scratch that, I refuse to consider it. He wants an end to petty point scoring in politics? Fine, let’s talk. Openly, honestly, and with a perspective on both history, the future and on how things work.
On a purely entertaining level, I like Boris. On a political level, sometimes I read him and agree with every word, othertimes I disagree vehemently. Sometimes, like today, I chuckle at his attempt to play partizan, and note that he, like many others, completely misses the point:
I am slapping a preservation order on Charlie Kennedy, and listing him as a Grade One landmark of our culture
Are the LibDems left wing? Right wing? In the mythical “centre ground”? Boris thinks that the party having disagreements over policy is evidence of doublethink. No, not really Boris, it’s evidence of the party being a broad church coalition.
This is what I get for not clicking on the profiles of everyone that posts comments here. Random chance, was looking at one of my older posts and saw some comments from ‘Chris’, so I click his profile. Torquay it says. That’s where I live. There’s another political blogger in this little backwater. I look at his front page, he’s coherent and argues his cases with research and examples. I think I disagree with him on virtually everything except books (I prefer Pattern Recognition to Neuromancer if we’re talking Gibson), but he has but up a nice riposte to my and Paul’s posts on Demos a few posts down. I’ll try to write up a decent reply to him, and finish of my response to Martin’s article (Martin, never meant that to be the only post on your list, just the first). Oh, and reply to some of Ken’s comments; incidentally, have now, finally, added Ken to the blogroll, apologies for not doing so sooner Ken, especially given the contributions you’ve made here, thought out comments that I disagree with fundamentally are always welcome. I’ll be reorganisng the blogroll when I’ve got time, it’s got a bit big and clunky; I need a ‘friends and allies’ and a ‘favoured enemies’ section at the top.
In the meantime, I have another post to write on the story of the day, then I need to sleep, my downstairs neighbour had a party last night, and I got about 3 hours sleep, eyes not staying open. Chris? Where’s your local, might as well meet for a drink…
Some good feedback so far on our Europe post, and some good, constructive comments. In one of them, Martin ask us to critique his list of objections as well. Martin’s first problem:
1) No demosThere does not exist a single group of people in respect of whom the EU could be a democracy.
It was this that prompted me to ask Paul to write up some of the theory behind a Demos Well, I’m going to add to it, this time with some practical examples.
Talking about Demos is never going to be an easy topic. The idea of the European Demos is one which has been floating around for a good number of years, although by and large nobody seems to really understand it, myself included.
The idea of Demos is usually tied up with the German terms Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft, which relate to differing ideas of community and community association. Gemeinschaft is the very tight, communitarian style of social understanding based around family and personal relationships, Gessellschaft the wider, shared understandings idea, somewhat like a company model where individuals are very different but pull together for the common good. Obviously the parallels here can be drawn between communitarianism and cosmopolitanism, although the terms are not perfect corrolaries. Neither Gemeinschaft or Gessellschaft really speak about political involvement, more simply a state of mind amongst certain people.
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