Author Archive for David Goodhart

Do we need a Europe treaty anyway?

Published
by
David Goodhart
on December 13, 2007
in British politics and Europe
. 3 Comments

Was Gordon foolish not to sign the EU treaty along with the other heads of state, as almost everyone seems to think? I’m not so sure. When British people are pressed to think through what they want out of Europe, a sensible majority grudgingly accept the benefits of the single market and the need to pool sovereignty on some things - but what the British have always been allergic to is the supranational aspects of EU symbolism, precisely those things on display in Lisbon today. So for Gordon to distance himself from the pomp and ceremony while still signing up to what is valuable about the EU may be populist, but it is not completely unreasonable.

In any case, it turns out that the whole premise of the treaty was false. The EU is not suffering from gridlock as a result of enlargement, as many predicted; indeed, if anything, it is working better now with 27 members than it did when it had 15. This is not what either Eurosceptics or Europhiles want to hear; the former never accept the EU might be working well, and the latter are wedded to the logic of “gridlock” as a justification for the latest round of institutional reform. That is why a remarkable report by Helen Wallace, the noted pro-EU academic at the LSE, got so little publicity earlier this week. Wallace points out that of the EU decisions that are subject to complex co-decision rules, the number that went through on the first go actually rose from 34 per cent in 2003 to 64 per cent in 2005 (easing to 59 per cent in 2006), after the first wave of enlargement. Moreover, about 90 per cent of EU decisions continue to be made by consensus and the number of pending cases at the European court of justice is falling. Even the arrival of Romania and Bulgaria is failing to screw things up.

Think Tank of the Year Awards 2007

Published
by
David Goodhart
on October 11, 2007
in British politics and Prospect affairs
. 2 Comments

Last night was the seventh Prospect Think Tank of the Year awards ceremony. About 150 people filled the Great Hall at King’s College in the Strand, London, for the occasion. We’ve come a long way from the small room in Blackpool where the prize was first awarded in 2001—but by chance the winner was the same, the Institute for Public Policy Research—the big centre-left think tank.

ed-balls-prospect-awards9.jpgThe think tank “Oscars” try to combine a hard-headed, appraisal of the year in the tanks with a celebration of the sector—not always successfully, as many think-tankers tell us every year. The truth is that it hasn’t been a vintage year in the British think tank world—as Lisa Harker, one of the new joint directors of the IPPR, admitted when collecting her prize from Ed Balls (see left—Harker in the think tank of the year tank top [credit: David Tett]). In the absence of any groundbreaking work this year, we awarded both prizes—the main award plus the international think tank of the year award—to two previous winners, the IPPR for the main award and the Centre for European Reform for the international prize. Both were in the nature of long-service awards for consistently strong and important work.

But if the running has been made anywhere this year, it has probably been on the centre right—as David Walker, chair of the judges, said in his summation of the “year in the tanks” (read the full text here). Policy Exchange, the heavyweight rival to IPPR on the right, and last year’s winner, had another strong year in 2007.

Think tanks have seldom been an important source of “headline” political ideas—naturally enough, these usually come from politicians themselves. Think of inheritance tax (George Osborne), social housing (Jon Cruddas) or the private equity loophole (the GMB union plus the right-wing press). But their ideas and research do still matter, and sometimes catch on long after they first emerge—think of the sudden interest in citizens’ juries, a Demos idea dating from the early 1990s.

The next 18 months offer a big opportunity for the main political tanks of centre-left and centre-right. As the last few weeks have shown, it is not at all clear what the Brownite “progressive consensus” is. For years Ed Miliband, Douglas Alexander and others have been chiding the Blairites for their conservatism—but then the first major economic acts of the Brown administration are to reduce inheritance and capital gains tax. The centre-left tanks should be helping to fill the policy vacuum. Similarly, on the centre-right, the Tories now need distinctive policy detail to capitalise on their Cameron-led revival.

One area that none of the mainstream think tanks have paid much attention to is finance and the City of London. One third of all corporation tax is now paid by the financial services sector, which is forecast to become even more dominant in the next few decades. There are big long-term questions here, especially for the centre-left think tanks—is it, for example, possible to pursue social democratic political goals in a finance-dominated economy?

(Runner-up in the main section was the Liberal Democrat-connected CentreForum, and in the international section Chatham House.)

Our man in Bournemouth

Published
by
David Goodhart
on September 26, 2007
in British politics
. 2 Comments

My annual 24-hour visit to the Labour party conference did not go according to plan, but it could have been a lot worse. Buoyed by the news that the Daily Telegraph had named me 89th most influential person on the British left (Yes! Bizarrely ahead of real lefties like John Pilger and even the head of the Fabian Society), I jumped on a train to Bournemouth on Monday afternoon. I was looking forward to speaking at an IPPR fringe event on multiculturalism at 7pm, going to the Guardian/Observer party at 9pm, hanging around enjoying the political chit-chat, sticking my nose in at a fringe event or two on Tuesday morning, listening to Gordon Brown’s first speech as leader on Tuesday afternoon and then getting a train back to London. But even before I got off the train I discovered that part of my plan had unravelled—Gordon had already delivered his speech. Tony Blair always spoke on Tuesday; why did nobody tell me Gordon was switching to Monday?

getattch1.jpgWhen I got to my bed and breakfast to drop my things and prepare my five-minute contribution to the fringe debate, things looked as if they were going to unravel rather more—I opened the envelope with my conference pass in it and discovered the picture on the pass was of my brother Daniel Goodhart, who works as a cameraman for the German TV network ZDF and who also had a conference pass (see right). Someone in the Labour press office must have picked out a picture from the D Goodhart file without noticing there were two of us. I rang Daniel straight away in case he was still in Bournemouth and could vouch for me if the wrong picture prevented me getting into the secure zone—alas he had already gone back to London. I slumped in a chair and watched the gushing coverage of the Brown speech on the BBC Six o’clock news.

Fortunately the police officer checking passes into the secure zone did not look closely at mine and waved me through. I found my way to the Tralee Hotel, which was a jungle of competing fringe events. I complained to anyone who would listen that more has become less on the fringe. There are far too many events with far too few people attending them; Labour should rationalise the system by insisting that each think tank is only allowed two events a day. But someone from the SMF explained to me that this would wipe out half the think tanks in Britain. “You don’t understand, this is where we make our money,” she said. The scales fell from my eyes. Every event on a dreary specialist subject in a faraway hotel attic attended by nine people is sponsored by three companies which have each put up, say, £5,000—giving a net profit for the event of £14,500. The big companies are happy to spend their money this way—it’s simple, and in its way public-spirited—and the think tanks are happy to survive for another year at the cost of one over-hectic week.

The IPPR event—with the MPs David Blunkett and Parmjit Dhanda, Mori’s Ben Page and me—was reasonably well attended but otherwise unmemorable. (We did have quite an interesting brief debate about the use of school buses to enforce integration in the US, and I ventured that it had been a disaster for the Democrats—to be quite honest I’m not sure if that is true, but nobody contradicted me, anybody care to now?) The rest of the evening was spent in a pleasant alcoholic haze. I remember arguing with Jon Snow’s sycophantic characterisation of Gordon Brown as a giant intellect compared with the empty vessel that was Tony Blair. And cadging cigarettes off the delightful Lauren Booth, who turns out to know rather a lot about the middle east (as much as her brother-in-law?). I also remember an interesting debate with Martin O’Neill (Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan) about what equality could possibly mean in the relationship between England and Scotland.

On Tuesday I experienced (or rather re-experienced) the death of the political speech. I watched a re-run of Brown’s speech from the day before. It was not really a speech at all—there was no argument, no analysis; it was a political positioning exercise for the Brown brand. Nothing wrong with that in principle, although it is a shame that a serious intellectual like Brown cannot make a serious speech. Blair’s conference speeches were miles better—yes, they were often theatrical, but they did also generally have some argument within them, some attempt to persuade his own party of the rightness of some reform or other. The demise of inner-party democracy and a leader who is at peace with his party, like Brown, means that there is no reason for argument at all.

I did see the David Miliband foreign policy speech at lunchtime on Tuesday. By his rather lacklustre standards, it wasn’t too bad. There was lots of meaningless rhetoric and a few statements of the obvious about how democracy cannot be built via the military, and how the motives of Britain and America are perceived negatively by young Muslims around the world. The Guardian described this as a brilliant and daring break with Blair’s foreign policy. But come on David, it must be possible to combine pressing the right soundbite buttons with a bit more intellectual ambition.

John Grays I have known

Published
by
David Goodhart
on June 28, 2007
in British politics and Inside Prospect
. 0 Comments

There are two John Grays. There is the pragmatic realist of vaguely centrist views who I sometimes talk to at parties. Then there is another Gray, who writes apocalyptic books about the follies of modernity, and for whom everything is painted in the bleakest of colours. Alas, much of Gray’s political journalism seems to be written by the latter.

I have not read Gray’s new book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, sympathetically reviewed by Anthony Dworkin in the new issue of Prospect. Judging by the review, the book contains plenty of Isaiah-Berlinian good sense on utopias, in which “clashes of interest among individuals and social groups, antagonism between and within ideals of the good life, choices among evils—these conflicts, which are endemic in every society, are reduced to insignificance.”

What I have read, however, is an extract from the book, published in the Independent last week, on the failure of Tony Blair. The essay is designed to appeal to the disillusioned Labour supporters who trace back almost all of the failings and disappointments of the past ten years to Blair’s alleged “neoconservatism.” But nowhere does Gray define what he means by neoconservatism. Moreover, he makes some quite astonishing claims about the Blair era—that Blair was only concerned, like Thatcher before him, to “reorganise society around the imperatives of the free market.” Has Gray not noticed that the last ten years has seen a huge increase in public spending and the size of the state, a large-scale redistribution of income, significant increases in tax levels, the introduction of a minimum wage and so on? And, according to Gray, the intervention in Iraq was not a piece of hubristic liberal interventionism gone wrong, but a zealous religious crusade.

Gray’s essay is full of such wild and unsubstantiated judgments. These play precisely to the utopianism of a disengaged left—without Blair, the promised land would have been reached!—a left which tends to swing from frenzied political engagement back to political apathy. It is the politics of leftie rock stars and the like, people who care little for the intractable necessary conflicts of the real world that the unsentimental, realist Gray wants us to focus upon.

So despite what sounds like Gray’s anti-Blair leftism, both the essay and the book (judging by Dworkin’s review) seem to end on a deeply conservative, even cynical, note—there is nothing that politics can achieve. Through his sweeping mischaracterisation of Blair as a utopian extremist, Gray seems to absolve us all from bothering about politics at all.

How does Gray find himself in this strange position? I think it is in part the obsession with Blair himself and an inability to capture his rather eclectic, centre-left, social Christian politics. Gray, and many others, just seem to lose their normal judgement when it comes to Blair. I am sure Gray would not mind me revealing a small personal insight into this. Almost every time we have met over the past five years, Gray has bet me that Blair would be kicked out of No 10 within months—and every time I have won. Time to pay up John!

Was Syd Barrett a Tory?

Published
by
David Goodhart
on June 8, 2007
in Arts and culture
. 2 Comments

syd.JPGLast month I found myself at the Barbican for a memorial concert to the great poet/troubadour of English psychedelic rock—Syd Barrett. Earlier in the day, Tony Blair had made his final announcement about his departure date.

Various figures from the bohemian fringes of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Mike Heron and Kevin Ayers, sang songs from Barrett’s Pink Floyd days or from his two haunting solo albums, produced after his mind had been irrevocably damaged by drugs. There were also more mainstream figures who had been influenced by Syd, such as Chrissie Hynde and Damon Albarn (of Blur)—and all the original members of Pink Floyd itself dutifully turned up.

The occasion—organised by the music producer and impresario Joe Boyd—was memorable but oddly subdued. Everyone sitting around me—people who must have been enthusiastically dropping acid in the late 1960s—looked neat and polite; they could have been academics, or even accountants. The only moment when some part of the audience roused themselves was when a nervous looking Roger Waters came on the stage—there were shouts of “Have you got it yet?”—the phrase that Syd shouted at the other Pink Floyd members as he became increasingly dysfunctional in late 1967. Waters is clearly regarded as the villain by some true Barrett fans, the man responsible for moving the band on after Syd lost his marbles. And Waters, rather shamefully, was the only performer not to sing a Barrett song—choosing instead a dreadful sub-Bob Dylan song from one of his solo albums (he performed on his own, of course; the other three members of the original Pink Floyd played separately as a result of the band’s acrimonious break-up).

For me the evening’s only other sour moment was produced by Damon Albarn. Introducing one of the Barrett songs he played, he made a sarcastic reference to his relief at Tony Blair’s imminent departure. No one seemed to notice—or if they did, it certainly didn’t strike a chord. Then it occurred to me that perhaps all these rather respectable-looking people sitting around me had become (like me) moderate social democrats with quite a lot of time for Blair, or even, who knows, even Tories. I can’t help thinking that Syd himself was probably deeply conservative—his love of childhood books and poetry and of English things, and his lack of shame about being middle-
class, suggest a thoroughly well-adjusted child without any desire to change the world. He just wanted to explore himself—and did so too dramatically. Like the conservative philosophers, he saw life as a predicament, not as a problem to be solved. As one of his catchiest ryhmes has it: “The squeaking door will always squeak, two up two down will never meet.”

At the party for the performers after the show, which I gatecrashed, I found myself standing next to Albarn. I said to him that I didn’t think his comment about Tony Blair had been in the spirit of the evening or of Syd Barrett (who would have had contempt for the crassly political). Albarn looked rather stunned and muttered something self-regardingly pop-starish about how “he just couldn’t help being political wherever he was.” I explained to him that Syd was almost certainly a Tory, and tried the line about how he would have seen life as a predicament—but I soon lost my audience and ended up feeling like a jilted Blur fan.

Welcome to First Drafts

Published
by
David Goodhart
on May 30, 2007
in Housekeeping
. 1 Comment

Welcome to First Drafts, the Prospect magazine editorial blog. We are maybe a bit late in the game, but Prospect readers and others will find here a distinctive offering connected to, but independent from, the magazine itself and the rest of the website. We are not attempting to provide a rolling commentary on the news cycle—thousands of other places do that better than we could. Nor are we trying to replicate the particular worldview of an individual’s blog.

So why have we jumped on the blogging bandwagon? Someone once said that Prospect should aim to help people read and understand the news, and that is at least part of what First Drafts will be doing—directing readers to articles or commentary we think valuable, providing guides to the most incisive writers and bloggers, mining our own archive for pieces that shed light on current events, providing a one-stop reference library of useful documents and so on. There will also, of course, be original blog-style comment—taking advantage of the medium’s special combination of immediacy and brevity—as well as overspill and follow-up from the magazine, whether pointing people towards new articles, allowing them to debate particular pieces (like our June issue cover story by Shiv Malik) or providing the background to the genesis of an article.

Other regular features will include an academic spat watch and Tom Chatfield’s “Species of speciousness,” which will mercilessly take writers to task for egregious errors of logic. “Did you actually read the book?” will allow writers to reply to reviews of their books that have appeared in Prospect or elsewhere. Marc Hauser’s reply to Jonathan Derbyshire’s Guardian review of his Moral Minds is our first entry.

Entries will be written by Prospect staffers and some regular outsiders. We welcome and encourage comment, of course, but we are not interested in the name-calling that some blogs seem to specialise in. We remain, after all, Britain’s intelligent conversation—even in the blogosphere.

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