Category Archives: Political issues

Who’s Next?

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Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigns as Germany’s defense minister, regrets heeding career advice from Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky

Helen Pidd of the Guardian writes that the now ex-minister was widely tipped as a future chancellor, but I can’t imagine who was doing the tipping. Bavarians don’t get elected chancellor in Germany: a career at the federal level in Berlin (and previously in Bonn ) takes them too far away from the maneuvering needed to put or keep them atop the CSU, while a stint as Minister-President of Bavaria takes them too far away from Germany’s mainstream to get elected chancellor.

épuration, crowdsourced

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I’m not sure what either Ethan Zuckerman or Evgeny Morozov would make of this, but this is quite the revolutionary web crowdsourcing project. Piggipedia is an effort by Egyptian Flickr users to pool their photos from the revolution and identify the plain-clothes cops and private thugs responsible for the worst of the violence, with a view to prosecuting them or failing that, just ostracising the hell out of them. I presume this is also going to be a rare deployment outside China of the human flesh search engine. If sex infects new media like a virus, yadda yadda William Gibson feh, just wait ’til you see how revenge does.

This is not another government initiative

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So the Big Society is going to get one last push. It was felt to need one. Paul Mason (BBC Newsnight’s economics editor) said:

I’m finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the “Big Society” there’s a shrug and a suppressed laugh – yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it’s treated deadly seriously.

Mason sees this as evidence of a “complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young.” As if determined to prove him right, David Cameron comes out with this piece of third term Blair-speak:

For too long, our country has failed to have a proper debate on how we can make our society stronger and give people more power. Now it is happening. And not just in the thinktanks of Westminster and newspapers of Fleet Street. The big society has been a topic of discussion on a wider basis – from being on the agenda at the General Synod to being debated in front of a live television audience.

It’s pretty obvious that the Big Society has had no positive impact at all on people’s lives generally. The potholes on my street are not being fixed by armies of volunteers. I haven’t knocked on my neighbours’ doors in an attempt to get a new district charity up and running, and no one has knocked on mine. We came up with chairs and quiche for the Big Lunch, yes, but that’s something different.

There have been changes, though. Existing charities have had their state funding cut – they’ll have to re-apply for ‘contracts’ – so for those who volunteered to help out with things some time ago, the Big Society is about being told to do less. It’s the same for local authorities. And I think this is the point. British politicians have their pet projects; the Tories especially. John Major had his national sports academy, Blair had his city academies. And I think you could make a case for privatised rail. These things are still going (with the exception of Railtrack, which got re-nationalised). It’s possible that the Big Society bank will still be going in twenty years’ time. ‘Pet project’ suggests harmlessness: it’d be better to describe these projects as exercises in patronage, where the degree of harm is to do with things like size, take-up, and complexity. Sport: harmless; arguably good. City academies: mostly harmless. National rail infrastructure: decidedly bad.

There’s nothing new about patronage, nor is there anything new about the conditions that traditionally attach. The patron must be satisfied that the recipients are deserving: that they won’t go against the patron’s own ideas about how these things should be done. With the Big Society, the patronage avenues – the scope of the ‘charters’ and the ‘contracts’ – have been defined through the obsessions of the Tory press over the last few decades. Schools. Health and Safety. Local Authority social work. Now, some of the right sort of people, with the right ideas, will be allowed to set up their own state funded substitutes. But perhaps they’ll improve things, and should be allowed a chance? Not if you believe that giving things a chance should be a matter of majoritarian decision-making, and at a local level where possible. Without an acknowledgment of the role of local democracy, the attempt to paint the Big Society as ‘localism’ just doesn’t wash. Big Society advocates talk about empowerment but fling mud at the institutions of local representation: they describe elected council leaders as ‘fat cats’ and local authorities as places where ‘power is trapped’. Established charities don’t fare much better: they’re described by Shaun Bailey – Cameron’s ‘ambassador’ for the Big Society – as ‘civic unions’. The attitude looks well entrenched; the main thing stopping Michael Gove doing end runs around local authorities on schools is the constitutional limit to that sort of behaviour. So I think the death of the Big Society is best understood as the death of a rebranding exercise, not as the end of a policy. The erosion of existing local institutions and the establishment of things like free schools will continue until there’s a change of national government.

(Note: the Americans have something similar: the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.)

(And see also this, at Next Left.)

Egypt Links

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Asef Bayat at OpenDemocracy argues that we’re looking at the post-Islamist era, by analogy to Fareed Zakaria’s post-American world, and suggests that the politics of Islam are changing. The jihadis wanted to fight the Far Enemy in order to undermine the Near Enemy. Now it seems that the Near Enemy can be dealt with, and without the jihadis at that. And the Big Two religious political movements – politicial Shi’ism, and Wahhabism – are suddenly much less relevant.

Interview with a crack Egyptian blogger.

Want to know why the Saudis offered to make up the US military aid if Mubarak stuck around? Wonder no more. Here’s an Egyptian blogger’s response to the idea. Note that Egypt has a long standing foreign policy aim of competing with Saudi Arabia as the leading Arab power. About as much help for Mubarak as an endorsement from Binyamin Netanyahu – but then he got one of those, too.

Learn about the Brothers.

Feminism in action in Tahrir Square; an absolute must-read.

The White House seeks advice from…not obviously the right people.

Hossam El-Hamalawy‘s Flickr stream – gripping photoreportage. He’s streaming live video from the march on Nile TV right now.

Reading the Egyptian leftist movement

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This piece is an absolute must read. Interesting questions for discussion: The importance of small businesses, or people who are partly small businessmen, partly workers. It’s probably more interesting to think in terms of the boundary between the formal and informal sectors of the economy. I wonder what a revolutionary leftist movement based on the people Paul Amar described will look like? What kind of economic ideas will it use?

Also, the importance of cybercafes as a stereotypical small business, as well as, well, cafes – places of gathering, free speech, and perhaps a little commerce. Or was it the other way around?

Hossam el-Haramawy is angry as hell and is reporting live from the field. His blog is here, with superb photography from the field.

And for me that’s about it – I know they’re there, and increasingly it’s clear that they’re the backbone of the movement. The Brothers are half-in, the right-liberals lionised by the neocons are there but they’re no mass movement. Who else should I be reading?

this is a public service announcement, without much content

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Since my last post, we’ve had the two biggest mobilisations of the Egyptian revolution so far. So much for petering out, even though people blogging from Tahrir Square on Tuesday were complaining about the n00bs getting in the way. For clarity, what I was expecting was that the mass mobilisation would continue, but that the back channel talks would become the revolutionary main effort, with the crowds in support, validating the delegates’ authority, backing up their claims, providing an ultimate deterrent power in the background.

Everyone’s now beginning to notice the role of trade unionists and labour activism in general. In fact, the April 6th movement itself memorialises the deaths of a group of strikers. It’s part of the revolution’s DNA. Today’s callout was part of a massive strike wave – my favourite was the column of diving instructors from the Red Sea coast who arrived in Tahrir Square with a banner reading “Mubarak! Get out before the oxygen runs out!” This movement is not running out of anything – not numbers, not commitment, not ideas, not humour. If it didn’t set out as an Internet revolution, people certainly thought it would arrive at its first objective that way.

Which brings us to tonight’s bizarre speech. It was a strange kind of event – revolutionaries gathering to await the broadcast of what was expected to be a pre-recorded statement, while live TV watched them, and bloggers commented on it. I went as far as checking flights into Dubai from Cairo – the timings for one Singapore Airlines movement seemed possible, and their service standards suitable. Surely, sayid rais couldn’t be waiting at the microphone for the weather forecast to be over and the programme controller to give him the green light? Eventually, after his now traditional delay, he spoke and said (after a great deal of guff) that he was handing over extensive powers to the vice president but not formally resigning.

This has been seen as an outrageous and ridiculous statement, but it wasn’t that far off what had been discussed over the last week or so – because a vice president who becomes president after a resignation doesn’t take over full powers, but the president can define the powers of the VP or any minister (the Kompetenzkompetenz, in German), Mubarak could empower his deputy to prepare for a real election, and then quit. Of course, if he delegated his full powers, it would be a philosophical question of some interest in what way he was still president.

It seems quite clear that no-one thinks this is enough. Further, both the Army and the NDP have as good as promised to deliver the president’s head tonight. For his part, Omar Suleiman demanded that everyone stop watching Al-Jazeera (and also Al-Arabiya, the BBC, Abu Dhabi TV, etc), the day after the Egyptian air force signallers stopped trying to jam Al-Jazeera’s satellite transponder (on the Egyptian-owned Nilesat bird – not the first time that an Arab government has tried to wreck a satellite it owns to silence them).

The general theme, of both the Egyptian political elite and the Western ones being at least a day and often more behind events, remains very true. The so-called Article 139 solution – delegation, then resignation – has been discussed for at least a week. Tellingly, it was also the Muslim Brotherhood’s favoured option. We’ve not heard anything from them tonight.

(PS, this is the first post on Fistful of Euros covering Egypt that is categorised “Transition and accession”. It’s a while since we needed that one.)

Deference check

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An argument that’s often put forward by people who support the institution of the British monarchy is that the monarch and his or her family are apolitical; that is, they can rise above party politics and lead through dint of example and charisma. An elected presidential figurehead, by contrast, would inevitably be drawn into party politics. Names would have to be put forward; manifestos drawn up. We are better off without any of that, monarchists argue. The monarch and her family are popular, well liked; a force for national unity.

The fact that the occupants of a royal limousine were recently mobbed – and, allegedly, to some degree physically assaulted – surely does severe damage to that argument. The relevant counterfactual is this: if last Thursday that car had contained a figurehead president, would he or she have been mobbed in the same way? I reckon many people will find themselves answering yes to that question. And if that’s what you believe, then I’d suggest you jettison any belief you might have had that a royal family is better at unifying the nation than an elected president would be. At least consider the possibility that a president wouldn’t do worse.

There are some other things to think about as well. The second-in-line to the British throne is getting married next spring. The government wasted no time in deciding that this event should be celebrated with full spectacle: the location is Westminster Abbey; an extra national holiday is planned for the day. It seems very unlikely that a nation would do any of this for a president, let alone his or her grandson: the thinking has to be that the royal wedding will be bread and circuses popular; a unifying event. But will it be? There’s some polling on this. Only one in four thinks that the government should spend any extra money on the royal wedding. Plenty of people think that the monarchy should modernise. The most interesting figure in the Independent’s recent piece on the popularity of the monarchy is that around about two thirds of the D and E socioeconomic groups now say that the monarchy should modernise. I don’t see much bread and circuses potential there, given that ‘modernising’ is code for shrinking the spectacle. And one illusion about the royal family – that it can command at least a minimum of deference wherever it goes – has been shattered. Those who want to maintain the illusion will probably make an effort to show that the paint can throwers were asocial hoodlums, and altogether unrepresentative. I’m not sure it’ll work.

Graduate gilts

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Iain Pears on the proposed changes to university funding in Britain:

Another thing to note is the extraordinary nature of the loans system being proposed, which is that students will be charged at 3 per cent plus inflation for a very long period of time once they hit a certain level of income. This is sheer profiteering disguised as fairness. Essentially, the government will be requiring individuals to issue 30-year index-linked bonds on their own balance sheets, rather than do it itself. A few sums shows what this might mean. For the government will raise the money to advance the loans on a flat rate basis. It will, in other words, borrow the money at about 2.5 per cent, and lend it out at 6.1 per cent, more if inflation increases. While it will enjoy the benefit of seeing its real debt eroded by inflation, the student will not be permitted the same escape route. If only half the total number of students take out a loan of £7000 every year, then that would amount to a transfer from the state’s balance sheet to those of individuals which stabilises over 30 years at about £110 billion. The government would pay a peak £2.75 billion a year in interest for this, and receive peak income of £6.75 billion back, as wage inflation will ensure within 12 years that most graduates earn over the £41,000 benchmark which triggers the maximum levy, and there seems to be no provision for this to be index-linked.

Even Barclaycard would applaud such audacity, not least because there are measures to guarantee this income stream by imposing financial penalties on anyone who wishes to pay off their debts early – a unique and almost feudal arrangement, where individuals are going to be forced to remain in debt, effectively to provide the government with cash flow, for most of their working lives. I know of no other case of a government requiring its citizens to be in permanent debt. The argument that this is just like a mortgage is specious, as mortgages are not index-linked, there are a wide variety of different time periods available, individuals have a choice of which ones to take, and they are secured on hard assets which have traditionally risen in value over time. None of these conditions apply to student loans.

Even if you think it right for students to carry all or most of the cost of their degrees, you surely have to do extra work to demonstrate why a student should pay a graduate tax on top, in the form of an interest rate set three points higher than inflation. And once graduated, why shouldn’t the student loan recipient be allowed to refinance his or her new debt?

An End to Conscription in Germany

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Germany’s Defense Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, announced on Monday that conscription for the country’s armed forces will come to an end in the summer of 2011. The all-volunteer Bundeswehr will have approximately 185,000 persons, down from the current 240,000. That is roughly in line with the current number of volunteers serving.

I wonder whether anyone will say that the change has come too soon, or that preparations have been rushed. That’s because I flagged it as on its way, oh, more than six and a half years ago. Embarrassingly enough, I used the phrase “sooner rather than later” in the previous post, and this qualifies as “sooner” only by the very generous standard usually reserved for EU institutions. Nevertheless, it is a welcome and necessary change, for all the reasons I outlined in January 2004.