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In Yellow Peril | Why won't Lynne Featherstone admit the truth? they want to know, amongst other things...

On her "blog" (actually just a website - what sort of blog is it that doesn't allow comments?)

Er, actually, yours, most of the time. I would say that three quarters of my attempts to post a comment on Yellow Peril I get some kind of error along the lines of:

Error
You are not allowed to proceed with this request.
Spam

But you know, over there at Yellow Peril they seem to have an unhealthy obsession with Lynne. It's pretty tiresome really. What's it all about? Glynis not give you enough attention as a child Kinnockkid?

There's often talk about the "younger generation" who have only ever known Tony Blair in charge in their political memories. Well, in a way that applies to me too. Of course at forty, I have more political memories than that (including writing, at age 11, to someone called Williams who was in charge of schools at the time, or so I thought, to complain about the discipline regime at my private preparatory school!), but I only really got involved in party politics after the 1997 General Election.

So far as I am aware my family had always voted Liberal. They were part of that Scottish cohort who were not in the Kirk (Tory party at prayer) and were not Catholic (who it was always said were instructed by their bishops to vote Labour), but Gospel Hall Brethren and so in that non-conformist set that gravitated in Scotland to the Liberals.

But, at public school, self interest put me off ever wanting to vote Labour (who would, we were all told, close down private schools) and, whilst my early career in the City was unashamedly inspired by the Thatcherite loads-a-money era, I could not stomach voting for a party that treated me as a gay man as inferior (don't argue with me here, they did, and as recent opinion polling amongst their members shows still do at heart). I had the great misfortune, at my second voting General Election, to live in the constituency of that odious woman woman Jill, now Baroness, Knight, author of the hated Section 28.

Despite all the promise of equality from Labour, I actually contacted Millbank during the 1997 campaign, the first in which I had gone so far as to actually read party manifestos, to ask whether Labour party policy of repeal of section 28 and equalisation of the age of consent were specific first term promises and was told they were not. So that settled me on joining the Lib Dems. And for a year and a half I was just that, a "sleeping" member, paying my dues (albeit at the rate of the minimum annual subscription per month in order to salve my conscience at not actually doing anything active!).

Whilst there was a certain feeling of relief that Labour had routed what had become a moribund and corrupt government, and some smiles at the "New Labour, New Britain" agenda, little did I know that the reign of Tony Blair would lead me to a deep loathing of national politics, the notion of the nation state even and crucially the role of an individual claiming to "lead" and "speak for" an entire nation of sixty million different opinions. The size of that first, and indeed second, majority, silenced real political debate as surely as a one party state would have done. Only the House of Lords, which I loathe as an institution, seemed willing and capable of opposing anything, and their days were numbered.

I am hard pressed to name anything I think Blair has done in his ten years that was done voluntarily and with good grace and for the better. Age of Consent and Section 28 were both changed in the end, but reluctantly, after European Court intervention in the case of the former and after unnecessary delay in the case of the latter. Devolution for Scotland and Wales was good, but in reality all but predated Blair in the form of the Scottish Constitutional Convention. Wealth inequality has been up and down, the Big Brother state has moved on apace, there feels like there has been just as much massaging of figures, and certainly more spin than ever before, and little if any feeling of a real ideology behind it all. I've never felt before that politics was merely a cynical exercise in winning elections to perpetuate one's own power at almost any cost.

At the same time I have flirted with Trots, and then "seen the cat", respectively looking for the small government option - either anarchist in the former case or "geo-libertarian" once I had had my eyes opened, precisely because, like nobody else before him, the smarmy, spinning, unassailable man at number ten had put me off government entirely. Two books that kicked off that search for a personal ideology are "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism (Intelligent Person's Guide Series)" (Conrad Russell) and "The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics" (Michael Rowbotham). And now not even the Lib Dems can adequately express my radicalism for economic and constitutional reform, to end protectionist monopoly and elected dictatorship respectively.

So it's good bye and good riddance Mr Blair. I'd rather you didn't take any international man of mystery jobs that would mean me continuing to see your smarmy git face on my television or newspapers ever again. In fact, maybe you'd consider going to Mars for a while. Thank goodness nothing, not even conversion to Rome, can bring you a plenary indulgence any more, and there remains a chance that you will be brought before some authority you might recognize at some point in your future, to answer for your actions.

Technorati Tags: political obituary, tony blair

Since everyone else is having fun watching the US midterms and blogging about them, I thought I'd add my tuppence worth.

I am supporting Bernie Sanders for the Senate for Vermont.

Bernie pretty well started the Community Land Trust movement in the US many years ago when he was the socialist mayor of Burlington. Since then he's been the state's only congressman for fourteen years (it's so small - only the population of Oxfordshire - that they only get one). So he's a pretty sure fire bet. No Dems run against him and the Republican's a sure fire loser.

His brother, Larry, is a Green party county councillor in Oxfordshire and a member of our board at Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts.

It's the safest money you can put on tonight I'm sure...:)

Spot the odd one out in the image below. All four species coexist in large numbers. They all work together to defend the collective against predators and to provide for their mutual needs. They all look and behave as if they are being controlled by some mastermind at the top of a hierarchy.

But in fact it is only the humans (top right!), the one with the largest and most complex brains, the only one, so far as we know, to have developed some kind of moral sense, the only one to have created sophisticated communications technologies between each other, the better, one would have thought, to co-ordinate our actions when required, the one with free will, and the one that has devised fantastic markets that transmit information and resources around the world at blistering speeds. Only humanity seems to have collectively decided that they need some self-centred egoists at the top of an wholly artificial hierarchy to take instructions from.

Many will no doubt say that "our leaders" put themselves up for public approval, scrutiny and not infrequently ridicule in the name of "public service". But for me, whatever their supposed good intentions I cannot think of an example, at least in national politics, of someone who does not seem to want to accrete power to themselves, or, and this is even worse, to an amorphous blob called "their party".

Only "their party" (presumably with them in charge) can solve the nation's problems. Is it logical, for example, to say that only the Tories, if only they had power, can deliver "small government"? Isn't that an oxymoron? Only the people, reinventing power structures for themselves as required, can create "small government". A party in power trying to deliver "small government" is, well, a party in power, by whom we, the citizens who put them there, or not as the case may be, are ruled as absolutely as any ancient tyrant, or so it seems, between elections.

So, when Nick Clegg calls on the other party leaders at Westminster to join him in promoting a Constitutional Convention to look into the future of the British political landscape he risks the political equivalent of asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. He looks with some approval at the previous process in Scotland, yet that did not even look, it appears, at the question of whether government was even needed or not.

A friend of mine has a theory of the evolution of markets through human history:

• Market 1.0 - was decentralised but disconnected, and 'market presence' required the physical presence of buyer and seller, typically in local and regional exchanges.
• Market 2.0, which has now reached its zenith, is centralised but connected, with market presence through intermediaries such as Exchanges or proprietary Alternative Trading Systems (ATSs).
• Market 3.0 represents the final evolution of markets: decentralised but connected, with market presence being through a 'network presence' on a dedicated market network.

And, if this analysis is right, since the power dynamics of human society are closely related to the development of markets - with for example wars, metaphorical as well as actual, to corner markets or access to resources, still going on in "our name" - so politics, over and above any consideration of public disengagement with the current system, needs fundamental change to cope with Market 3.0. Indeed, one could argue that Market 3.0 is a state in which coercive political intervention is not only unnecessary, but counter-productive to the common good.

As ever, there are many vested interests in all this. Market 2.0 required the creation of huge, often now global, corporate behemoths and their political protectors, at first mercantilist and now corporatist. Market 3.0 offers the potential for real mass democratization of markets, the trading equivalent of devolution, and with it wealth creation and distribution. Where government once tried to ensure access to markets for their national corporate behemoths, it will in future have to try to ensure access for all of us. And in doing so, undermine its more familiar role of making decisions for us. Protecting our ability to participate rather than wielding power over us by them deciding who can participate.

There is certainly a core of liberalism in Clegg's invitation, but if we're going to have a "Constitutional Convention" - something for which the opportunity will come once in a generation at best - then it has to start with as close to a blank sheet as possible in respect of the future role and accountability of government. I'm afraid I for one don't have confidence that that insular political establishment can be open enough (even if you do add to the mix a few churchmen or "community leaders" - all self selecting beneficiaries of the current system to my mind). The political establishment exists currently in order to gain and hold power. They don't represent us, so much as persuade us with clever marketing that we agree with what they want to do. And if any such convention turns out not to produce the radical reform required now, it could go either way - popular rejection of government and politics and a vacuum in which real tyrants could wield power or ever more illiberal government trying to fight a rear-guard action in order to maintain their own relevancy. Neither are particularly appetising outcomes.

Why am I a member of a political party then if I hate them all so much? Well, for all my loathing of the power of government and its wielders, I hold out hope that there is one party whose history and core ideology can break that mold. Personally, I think Liberal Democrats would be better setting out our own stall - we have the closest to a blank sheet in terms of recent power wielding at least - of radical reform, and let the people decide. Asking the cosy consensus themselves to join in will, well, perpetuate that cosy consensus and risks persuading the rest of us that what comes out the other end is in our interests, or, again worse, the "best that can be agreed on". It won't be, if it is stitched up within the political establishment itself and its extended family of hangers on. A plague on both their houses - let us get on with it and set out to persuade the British public that our way is best for the future, to give us the power to implement such a radical shift of power away from politicians and back to the sovereign individual.

Further to the previous confusion over who is going to stand in for Vince Cable tonight at a Labour fringe event on taxation policy and transport funding it turns out that organisers have managed to get none other than the next leader of the Labour Party, John McDonnell to champion the new Lib Dem tax plans at the event.

Eat your heart out Evan!