David Boyle's Blog, page 92

We need to be able to 'conquer unemployment' again

Mark Pack has written a characteristically intelligent newsletter about the current positioning of the Lib Dems,  around the idea of being a moderating influence on both sides.  As he says, this has the advantage of being patently true and a good description of an effective junior coalition partner.  But there is something about the combination of efficient economy and social concern which doesn't quite cut it as a political message.

Yes, it describes the effective position of the Lib Dems and the Liberals before them, just as it provided the message for the most successful of the SDP political broadcasts in the 1980s.  What it fails to do is to explain what the connection between the two objectives is.  It looks like compromise.

There are two reasons why, as Liberals, we should not be content with this as a narrative for the party.

First, it is the very opposite of a big idea.  It may carry conviction among voters temporarily, but what it will not do is provide the party with the intellectual engine it needs to WIN - or to attract the activists of tomorrow, and the people who are prepared to devote their lives to cajolling the Liberals into power.

The second problem is that the words' efficient economy' covers up the basic problem which is that, not spending too much and being 'sensible' with the economy does not do justice to the traditional Liberal position on the economy.

It doesn't do justice to the emerging industrial policy that Vince Cable is presiding over.  Nor does it do justice to the idea of a small-scale economy that can revive local fortunes from the bottom up, as Danny Alexander is beginning to develop.

The truth is that the Lib Dems badly need a central organising economic idea.  They have survived for too long now on a bundle of issues around fairness and civil liberties, which - although important - are not winning reasons for government.

David Lloyd George, whose 150th birthday is coming up, used the slogan 'we can conquer unemployment' in the 1929 general election, using the ideas of John Maynard Keynes to provided it with its intellectual underpinning. Until the Lib Dems can say that again, they will just be a glorified pressure group.

Is the Hobbit quite 'real'?

The novelist Umberto Eco was an early adopter in the great debate about authenticity.  After a trip around California, constantly being urged to look at strange three-dimensional versions of  Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper - all hyped as 'better than the real thing' - he wrote an essay called 'Travels in hyper-reality'.

Since then, the world of hyper-reality is all around us.  It is in the catwalk models we are supposed to look like, the doctored photographs on the front of magazines, and especially in the cinema.

I have just been to see Peter Jackson's film The Hobbit, which is a little long - though the dragon is rather fabulous - but the portrayal of the Shire, home of Bilbo Baggins, has definitely been given the hyper-real treatment.  The colours are altered to make it more lush than real.  They is something sugary about it that sticks in the mouth.



Perhaps it is contradictory of me to demand that the portrayal of something as mystical and fantastical as The Hobbit should be real, but I am not so sure.  The Shire was rooted in Englishness, and intended to be, and there was a hint of idealised Englishness about it.  Yet it was very down-to-earth kind of Englishness, not the kind you expect to be shot through some schmaltzy green tinged lens.

Also, we have to take into account Tolkien's own views on authenticity:

"The notion that motor cars are more 'alive' than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious... for my part I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley Station is more 'real' than the clouds and as an artefect I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven."

But none of this suggests that everything Tolkien wrote needs to be served up to us as a caricature of itself.  I find I can''t believe it that way.

The real issue about Leveson

I have a feeling that, whenever people talk about reaching a compromise between different Liberal imperatives - as Nick Clegg has about the Leveson Enquiry - it often means that we have missed the key Liberal point entirely.

I don't know whether Leveson included much on press and media ownership.  The political debate has been entirely over what balance between state, legal and self regulation there should be, with everyone wanting versions of pretty much the same thing.  But the real evil is not there: it is the hold that the Murdoch press managed to have over politics because of the extent of their media dominance.

If the ownership of the media was more diverse, Murdoch would have had less of a strangehold over national debate.  This is not an issue about state control of the press.  It is an issue about monopoly.  Until we introduce some anti-trust powers over media ownership, we will be back right bang into the Last Chance Cafe all over again.

On being booted

Well, my small but significant electorate have spoken (dammit!) and I am no longer on the federal policy committee for the Lib Dems.

Since I am almost silent now, while I'm carrying out an independent review for the government, and I am a pretty loyal supporter of the party leader, I'm not terribly surprised.  But I've been on the FPC now for fourteen years, so it will be a bit of a wrench coming to terms with not being there any more.

But good luck to my heirs and successors, may they make brilliant, innovative policy (and may they ask my advice occasionally!)

But finding myself on the losing list yesterday has made me think back over the past decade or so and wonder whether I ever really made the best use of my position.  Perhaps more recently I helped with a couple of decisions which I am pleased about - the wording on banks in the party's last election manifesto, which made its way into the coalition agreement.  Also some of the latest policy on sustainable jobs, which I believe is important and new.

But apart from that?  I have been wondering about this.  Part of the problem is undoubtedly realising how to behave effectively when all you see as a party policy maker is a succession of policy documents flying past.  Part of the problem is that they do just fly past, and you know how difficult it is to make any of them memorable or effective.

That is the major problem for politicians now, and in all parties.  Media scrutiny demands that they should be measured and tentative; the circumstances of the times demand that they should be bold.

So if I have attempt to stand for this election again, I will have to be a great deal more focussed.  When it comes to the overwhelmingly important task - providing the Lib Dems with an absolutely distinctive and effective economic policy, then it's No More Mr Nice Guy!

The real origins of Bush House

[image error] So Bush House has shut up shop for the first time since 1941.  Sad.  But one thing you won't hear from the BBC is the true origins of the headquarters of the World Service, because it lies in a revolution against their authority at the height of the war.  Frustrated by the bureaucracy of the BBC, the director of the BBC European Service led a kind of coup that made his broadcasts semi-independent of the BBC controllers. 
Noel Newsome was one of the most extraordinary broadcasters of the century.  The BBC never forgave him, kicked him out after the war and never mention his name in the official histories of the period.  He is a reminder that, the great days of BBC broadcasting - the voice of freedom from London broadcasting to occupied Europe - was actually done outside BBC control.
In the first few weeks of 1941, Newsome forged an alliance with the diarist and junior information minister Harold Nicolson, whose concern was to keep propaganda outside the control of Hugh Dalton, the economic warfare minister.  "We'll give you Kirk," Duff Cooper said to Newsome over lunch with Nicolson and, as part of the deal they hammered out, Noel was given as 'advisor' the senior Foreign Office official Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick. It would then be just a short step before Kirk took over completely as Controller (European).
Avuncular and with a small black moustache - not completely different from Hitler's - Kirkpatrick was known to everybody as 'Kirk'. He was a diplomat's diplomat, and an expert on Germany: he had been Chamberlain's interpreter - much to Kirk' disgust - as he signed the Munich agreement in 1938. He was about to become the interrogator of Rudolf Hess, and, unlike his BBC predecessors, he was absolutely clear what he wanted. He embarked almost immediately on an enjoyable feud with Sir Stephen Tallents, who was then the BBC's rather distant Controller (Overseas), having made a name for himself as PR man first for the Empire Marketing Board and then for the Post Office. Kirk was a ruthless political operator, and by October Tallents was out.

Kirkpatrick also saw his role as allowing Newsome to do what he wanted, pioneering his own form of propaganda at the BBC, which was primarily about culture, history and getting the truth out first.  But the part of his job which lasted longest was finding Bush House, which had been built as the headquarters for the American advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, and which Kirkpatrick managed to requisition within a few days of his new role.
The European Service was then based at the former ice-skating rink in Delaware Road, Maida Vale, which had a glass roof.  So Newsome's assistant Alan Bullock (the future historian) was sent as an advance party to their new headquarters at Bush House.  It was not a moment too soon: the Delaware Road studios took a direct hit a few weeks later.
Once the European Service had arrived at Bush House, the maze of corridors and lifts were filled with nationals from every country in Europe, from all the countries which Hitler had invaded. In the labyrinthine corridors, Newsome presided over a miniature Tower of Babel gathered around the Bush House microphones, with all the bizarre disadvantages and petty irritations which that entailed - broadcasting on what was by then two networks for 24 hours a day.  Upstairs was Dalton's Political Warfare Executive (PWE).
Sitting in the vast canteen in the basement, open round the clock, you could catch a glimpse of Jan Masaryk, who would later exit from the first post-war government of Czechoslovakia through a Prague window in 1948, possibly at the hands of the communists.  Or of Dick Crossman of PWE - known as 'Double Crossman' by European Service insiders - whose cabinet diaries so shook the establishment a generation later.  Or of James Bond's creator Ian Fleming, waiting impatiently for his broadcast in German. Or Jacques Duchesne, already a French national hero for his popular European Service programme Les Francais Parlent Aux Francais.
This was then the biggest broadcasting operation in the world. And drawing up in their taxis outside were an array of Europe's crowned, soon-to-be and almost crowned heads - General de Gaulle stooping out of the his car door, hotfoot from his headquarters in Carlton Gardens. Generals Sikorski or Montgomery, ushered in with uniformed assistants. Even occasionally Winston Churchill himself, pondering his radio diatribe in awkward French.  They would arrive along the wide streets leading to the Aldwych, with its boarded up shop windows covered with imaginative murals, along the white painted kerbs for the black-outs, the missing stumps which used to be iron railings, and the posters for Wills Capstan Cigarettes.
Or from the other direction, perhaps, past the shell of St Clement Danes church, bombed six times in the Blitz - its Rector died of grief, they said - and on its blackened walls a poster shouting 'HIT BACK with WAR SAVINGS and STOP THIS'. Then on past the newly-built Gaiety Theatre and the Aldwych underground station, where ENSA were playing concerts in the evening to entertain people sheltering from the raids. Or past the Aldwych Hotel, where senior European Service staff disappeared in the evenings for a quick drink, before returning to watch the hand over to the Night Shift at 8pm.
This was Bush House, and in many ways you could say that it was the very beginning of the European Union, but that is another story.  I'm sorry it has finally been handed back.See more in my tongue-in-cheek history of the BBC in Eminent Corporations.

Save us from a re-run of Blair-style 'growth'

There is speculation in the newspapers that the Blair and Mandelson Show is poised to make a re-entry into mainstream UK politics, to make the case for that phenomenon they call 'growth':

http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2012/05/16/back-to-the-90s

The shape of community plans to come

The new planning framework promises that communities with their own local plans, setting out local pirorities, will inherit the eart.  We'' see how that happsn in practice, but the good news is that reallygood local plans are beginning to emerge:

http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2012/04/30/making-localism-work-for-the-new-economics

My history of allotments, FREE

Just for a couple of days, they are selling my latest e-book about the lost history of the allotments movement for free on Amazon.

Can you sell something for free?  Well, probably not - it is being given away.  You can download it onto Kindles but also onto ordinary computers:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Eighth-Created-Allotments-ebook/dp/B007J99YZ2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331512061&sr=8-1

The English and money

There is no more conservative nation on earth than the English when it comes to money (the Scots by comparison are real money innovators; remember John Law).  So we miss out on radical thinking about money and its creation. 

This is the first part of a two-part article I wrote for the online magazine Stir about how to heal the discnnect between money and real wealth.  The trouble with the English, or at least those that rule them, is that they have forgotten there is one...

http://stirtoaction.com/?p=1447

More strange stories from the dangerous history of allotments

Now up on the Spectator books blog: why did Dig for Victory die out so fast?

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7749073/the-scramble-forallotments.thtml