Political dilemmas: even harder than you may think

One reason this blog fell into disuse in the autumn of 2010 was that I had formerly employed it to pontificate quite a bit about politics. But it’s not been a good last few years for politics... and I’ve lost a bit of fight for the subject (for which, inter alia, I like to blame Ed Miliband.) That said, in the autumn of 2010 I also got onto Twitter, and became accustomed every morning to reading political opinions, long and short, with which I agreed, and found to be more robustly and eloquently expressed than my own. (And I didn't even have to pay for them - talk about a guilty pleasure.)

The stuff I don’t agree with, meanwhile, I find I mostly haven’t the will to tackle. I was a bit nettled last week, though, by this New Statesman piece from Rafael Behr – and not, you understand, solely on account of the gruesome photo that tops it off.

It gets underway well enough, seeming to be a piece on Labour ‘recoiling from the whole spectacle of government on a shoestring’ – a problem on which Hopi Sen has been doing some hard thinking for a while. Behr further ventures that the British public ‘do seem grimly reconciled to the idea that politics, which used to be about favours bestowed from the Exchequer, is now about pain selectively inflicted’ – a debatable point, but one that Janan Ganesh also makes quite a lot.

However this is what Behr’s piece winds round to (with my emphases):

"There is a caricature of Labour’s public-sector debate that pits the frugal, reforming idolators of Tony Blair against spendthrift, reactionary disciples of Brown. The distinction is increasingly meaningless. Orthodox Blairites are a rare and neutered breed and even they accept that Balls, for all that the Tories paint him as Brownism incarnate, is wedded to budget discipline. The real tension is both subtler and more profound. It is between the need to defend Labour’s legacy of investment in public services and the impulse to imagine different ways of effecting social change. It is the dilemma of how to rehabilitate the abstract principle that government can be the citizen’s friend while also attacking the current government as a menace to society. It is the battle between Brown and Blue shades of Labour which remains unresolved, because Ed Miliband is personally steeped in both."

You could nearly imagine Miliband a brooding colossus, astride two great clashing ideas... In fact what Behr describes at the end there is not a ‘dilemma’, not by any definition. A dilemma is a choice between two more or less equally undesirable options: it’s what politics is mostly made out of. But for Labour it is a perfectly pleasant and natural thing – the usual day’s work – to offer itself as the citizen’s good angel, while pointing out that the other lot all have horns on their heads.

I suppose if you accept Ed Ball’s conversion to fiscal toughness, and also feel that his 5-point plan for growth is what the Coalition really should have been doing since 2010, then you could also take a view that Labour has progressed from its recent and rather backward stint in government (and from its nominal leader in that ‘moment’) and is now in ‘profound’ contemplation, even if only about new ways to keep on saying the things it's always liked to say. But if the unfinished Thoughts of Chairman Brown and the pamphlets of Blue Labour are really all that Ed Miliband has to mull over for inspiration then I can't see that this current version of The Party is engaged in any kind of dialectical process at all.

Gimme Shelter

I’m no right-winger, you understand… (Uh-oh, you might think, there’s a pretty ominous start to a post.) But nor did I consider the ideas of the Right to be axiomatically the Devil’s work. Following the lead of my literary hero Norman Mailer, who famously reckoned himself a ‘left conservative’ I try to use both sides of my head in an argument, and to resist the sanctimony by which some on the Left persuade themselves that all human history is class struggle, one in which they are – axiomatically – on the side of the poor and oppressed, whether or not required to match word by deed.
I can’t say exactly how hard we should be cutting in the light of this grim shortfall between tax revenues and public spending, but – since it seems likely that the cost of housing benefit for people of working age has risen by £5 billion over the past five years, i.e. roughly mapping the hopeless reign of Gordon Brown – then I’m quite sure that reform of housing benefit entitlements along the lines of what the ConDems have proposed is commonsensical and overdue, with a necessary cap on accommodation provided in the private rental market, as opposed to publicly-owned housing. As such, I now seem to be of the party of Max Hastings and the Daily Mail. Eh bien.
I’m quite certain the public purse has to assist key workers to live near their place of work. And people who are put out of work need to be given a hand with their rent for a reasonable period. I’m not some Chinese martinet seeking to cap families at exactly 1 Child. But I absolutely think people should act on their estimate of how many kids ‘they can afford decently to rear’ (cf. Hastings - 'decent' is a favourite Mail word, used as if they invented decency, but there's no reason we should let them own it.) Where six-figure sums have been paid annually to families of 6-8 kids, this was extravagant before and cannot continue. I don’t make light of the fear of mass evictions from Central London: one expects this cut to bite. But however harsh the ‘correction’, I understand there will be an emergency fund for true hardship cases. Otherwise, as Hastings puts it, ‘most of us take for granted the necessity to move home if our circumstances change.’ Indeed we do.
I can’t tell how Ed Miliband’s riposte to Cameron played in the chamber but to me, and to many others, I expect, he sounded just as John Rentoul puts it, conveying “the wrong message to the country, which simply cannot understand why so many billions of taxpayers’ money is poured into such a badly-designed benefit that undermines work incentives, profits landlords and keeps property prices higher than they would otherwise be.”
In other news, I am happily of the same mind as Hastings in respect of Polly Toynbee’s worth as an inverse barometer in any political argument, though he makes his point in a gratuitous manner, marshalling assertions the truth of which I can’t verify:
"There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Polly Toynbee and her kind in their concern for Britain’s underclass, though the charge of champagne socialism sticks pretty hard on anyone who, like herself, owns a villa in Tuscany and educated her children at private schools."
Similarly, readers will know I’m with Hastings on the profoundly annoying Boris Johnson, whose sickly coveting of David Cameron’s job rolls on unabated. Please, someone, tell me London can cough up a better prospect for mayor than the Bounderby-ish Johnson or the alligator-blooded Ken Livingstone.

How the World Looks From Manhattan

I am in New York City this week, once more on the trail of Sean Penn and Paolo Sorrentino’s film This Must Be The Place. NYC is, as ever, a marvel, and just the same, only different... a world city, defining of America and yet not wholly American. My New York Times this morning was gratifyingly slim and manageable over breakfast, and full of interest, to wit:
1. Government expenditure: A big deal, naturally, Republican candidates for the Senate unanimously pitching from a platform that deplores ‘runaway federal spending’, but very shy (or else full of drivel) on the ‘What I Would Cut’ issue (other than taxes, the extension of the Bush-era cuts clearly dear to many GOPers.) I am relieved, in one way, to be off the scene as George Osborne displays his axe in the Commons today. And while resistant to any ideological formulation of the beauty of small government (and seconding Hopi Sen’s abhorrence of lectures on welfare dependence from trust fund babes) – as a freelancer I approve of Robert Peston’s tough-mindedness today on the public sector’s needful adjustment to how the rest of us manage our anxieties.
2. Democracy in Action: the standard of candidacy and debate in the contests for the US Senate seems shockingly poor, at least as far as the media is reporting it. In particular a woman called Christine O’Donnell, running for the GOP in Delaware, is setting the bar strikingly low. The ‘race’ for New York Governor is also descending into farce, judging by a Monday night hustings in which the minor candidates were given so much room to be minor that the main Cuomo-Paladino contest, vaguely defined already, got no clearer. Lest we get smug in the UK, I suppose the real lesson, for the millionth time, is that we surely get the politicians we deserve.
3. Ghost towns: A ‘new town’ in a district of the city of Ordos, China, is reported to be near-deserted, a product of boom times but waiting still to be populated by consumer-citizens. Having seen the high-end ‘ghost estates’ of Dublin recently, a vertical version of the empty luxury high-rises by Newcastle Quayside, I certainly feel the power of this metaphor.
4. China All Over: ... but economically China’s every move, micro or macro, is being scrutinised intensely, of course. Its announced raising of interest rates has a thumping feel to it, as does its widening embargo on mineral exports to the West. Reporting has a cagey feel to it. I must read The Economist this/next week...
5. That Hi-Tech Lynching, Redux: The 1980s beckon us once more... Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, a Tea Party stalwart, is chasing Anita Hill again for an apology. Anita Hill is being very cool, in every sense, as the Times reports. (‘I thought it was certainly inappropriate...’ – Virginia Thomas’s request, that is...)
6. Gays in the US military: With Don’t Ask Don’t Tell seemingly erased, the TV news as well as print has had much of Dan Choi, an articulate young Asian-American previously discharged from the Army who yesterday, attended by umpteen reporters, sought readmission at the Army recruiting office just up the road from me at Times Square. Looks like he might have made it...
7. The decline of movie one-liners: The NYT arts section has it that Hollywood screenplays no longer offer widely quotable and cherishable dialogue in such profusion. But their ‘classic’ examples from Dirty Harry and Forrest Gump don’t have me lamenting in O tempora manner. Nor ‘Release the Kraken!’, from the remake of Clash of the Titans, parts of which I watched on the flight over, none of which seemed to me to surpass the pleasures of Ray Harryhausen’s hand-animated original.
8. Ryuichi Sakamoto: apparently the great man played a piano recital on Monday night, would I had been there. Though Steve Smith’s elegant review speaks of Sakamoto’s ‘curtains of white hair’ and ‘a decorousness better suited to a fern-throttled piano bar.’ But the audience apparently sighed with pleasure, as would I hearing the opening notes of the theme from The Sheltering Sky...