The hub of a British revolution?
The office of President of the United States, with its potent combination of symbolic and executive power, has no real equivalent in the United Kingdom, which is one reason why the question of whether there could be a British Barack Obama feels slightly beside the point. Another is that we don’t, at least constitutionally, directly elect our prime ministers.
Interestingly, however, the most powerful directly elected post in Britain - the mayoralty of London - could well be occupied by a black man in four years’ time (and no, I’m not talking about Dizzee Rascal). David Lammy, MP for Tottenham and a higher education minister, looks increasingly likely to run for the Labour candidacy in 2012.
A few months ago, Prospect first alerted the world to the possibility of a Lammy run in 2012, describing him as “Tottenham’s answer to Barack Obama.” While Lammy is, in truth, no Obama - on the one occasion I was in the same room as him, it conspicuously failed to light up - by 2012, with a Labour party presumably languishing in national opposition and in desperate need of a new young star, Lammy’s combination of executive experience and strong roots in a multicultural inner London constituency could make him a very attractive proposition. And if Obama’s star doesn’t wane over the course of his first term, Lammy’s friendship with the president - which he highlights at every available opportunity - could give him that bit of celebrity glitter every mayoral candidate seeks.
At the time of writing, you can get 25/1 against David Lammy as next mayor of London with Ladbrokes. To give you an idea of what good value this is, the firm is offering the same odds against Hillary Clinton winning the US presidency in 2012.
Our cover story this month is an uncompromising attack on Russia’s intelligentsia, the liberals and intellectuals who after 1991, argues Arkady Ostrovsky, were presented with a one-off opportunity to drag their country into the modern world. Instead, they got mired in irony and bad art, and were all too easily seduced by Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist vision of Russia’s future and his exploitation of public nostalgia for Soviet greatness. Communism is dead, and will not return. But the absence of a liberal voice in Russia means that the most powerful force in that country, as the Georgians have just discovered to their cost, is likely to remain old-fashioned belligerent nationalism.
Let us know what you think in the comment boxes below.
Pressing ahead with its plans for the next generation of nuclear power stations, the government has repeatedly pledged that no taxpayers’ money will be spent on subsidising nuclear construction or bailing out debt-ridden energy companies. But, says Tom Burke in the new issue of Prospect, no one should be blinded to the fact that the economics behind nuclear power remain lousy—and the government’s plans will fail. If we are serious about climate change and want to ensure security of energy supply, we need to focus on carbon capture and storage technologies.
Richard Dowden, writing in the new issue of Prospect, argues that the latest round of electoral failues in Nigeria, Kenya and now Zimbabwe shows that western-style “winner-takes-all” democracy is not suited to African states. Competing ethnic and linguistic groups, arbitrary borders—the legacy of colonial rule—and a lack of democratic tradition create an climate unsuited to electoral systems in which one group takes complete power at the expense of others. What is needed instead, suggestes Dowden, is a new, “African” democracy, perhaps one that approaches a form of proportional representation in which all groups are accorded a seat at the top table.
Let us know your thoughts below.
The publication of Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism” manifesto, has made real waves on this side of the Atlantic, with the Tories in particular seizing upon the ideas in the book to show how in touch they are with the latest thinking in social science.
Nudge (which I reviewed a couple of issues ago for Prospect) relies for its insights on the relatively new field of behavioural economics, which aims to move beyond the traditional model of “homo economicus,” or economic man—rational, self-interested, independent—to produce an economics that sits more happily with the findings of researchers investigating the economic behaviour of actual human beingss.
Some people, like Pete Lunn, author of the new book Basic Instincts, think that the rise of behavioural economics marks a revolution in the subject; that the very assumptions of the field are tottering. Others, like Tim Harford of Undercover Economist fame, appreciate the contributions of behavioural economics, but are wary of drawing hasty conclusions from a few laboratory experiments. We asked the two of them to duke it out in the pages of Prospect.
As the dust settles in South Ossetia, what has the Russo-Georgia conflict taught us about the complex politics of the Caucasian region? Russia had plenty of reasons for intervening so drastically in Georgia, of course, including the manoeuvring of traditional power politics and the urge to keep an uppity, restive neighbour in check.
But one aspect that many analysts have missed is the role played by Russia’s southern republics: North Ossetia, of course, but also Dagestan, Ingushetia and even Chechnya. Over the past few years the Kremlin has secured the loyalty of all the governments of these regions, but a continuing Islamic insurgency in the north Caucasus, which remains Russia’s top national security headache, means Moscow is unlikely to miss an opprtunity to keep the southern republics sweet—and found one in South Ossetia. North Ossetia obviously has an interest in defending its ethnic brethren over the Georgian border, but many of the other republics were also happy to see it stuck to the Georgians because of their closeness to the country’s other troublesome region, Abkhazia.
It’s a complex situation—Daniel J Gerstle, a writer and human rights consultant who has spent time in the Caucasus, tries to untangle it for us.
Also this week: as Labour’s fortunes under Gordon Brown continue to decline, Kieran Brett and Michael Macdonnell, former advisers inside No 10, urge the party to embrace pragmatism and to ignore those calling for it to return to its ideological roots. And Duncan O’Leary looks at how the Conservatives are responding to the increasing politicisation of public behaviour.
What’s happened to Policy Exchange? The centre-right think tank that was expected to fulfil the IPPR role of Number 10 in-house tank once the Tories swooped to victory at the next general election has not only lost its director, the controversial Anthony Browne, to Boris at City Hall, it has now produced an eccentric report on the future of northern cities that David Cameron, with one eye on those Labour heartlands, has described as “insane.” PX, as it is known to fans, was under Browne’s watch often accused of being too close to the Cameron project, just as the IPPR was in the early days of New Labour. It’s not clear who’s running Policy Exchange at the moment—Browne’s departure was announced almost a month ago but the organisation does not yet appear to have found a successor—but might this indicate a decision on the think tank’s part to reassert independence as the Tories move closer to government?
In his editorial marking the triumph of Fethullah Gülen in our global intellectuals poll a month ago, David Goodhart described the attempt by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to get the country’s ruling AK party banned as “the most important conflict in Europe.”
Well, the conflict is over and AK has survived. Yet the party’s—and Turkey’s—troubles are far from over, says Nicholas Birch in a web exclusive for Prospect. The old coercive system, which has led to modern Turkey’s history of parties being banned and military coups, may be over, but it is not at all clear what will replace it.
Also this week: Lesley Chamberlain marks the death of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. His accounts of life in the gulag killed off any lingering affection for the Soviet system among European leftists, says Chamberlain, but his own relationship with the motherland was complex and nuanced.
Edward Luttwak’s last cover story for us, a provocative essay arguing that the middle east was of small and declining strategic significance, proved so irritating to so many that it remains one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published, to judge by our website traffic. (It’s also being turned into a book. The film rights may still be available.)
Now Luttwak is back with another dose of far-out contrarianism: George W Bush’s presidency, he argues, far from being the foreign-policy catastrophe almost everyone, left and right, takes it to be, has actually been a stunning success. With the admittedly rather glaring exception of Iraq, Bush’s aggressive foreign policy has successfully rolled back the global tide of jihadism and brought recalcitrant governments in the Muslim world on side. “You’re either with us or against us”—the Bushism most commonly invoked to stand for what is supposed to be the president’s dunderheaded black-and-white view of the world was and remains, says Luttwak, exactly the right slogan and the right attitude.
Please vent your spleen below.
Andrew Keen told me that the one glaring omission from our list of public intellectuals was Arianna Huffington, the Greek-born socialite who is turning the US political media upside-down with her blog-cum-aggregator-cum-celebrity-gabfest the Huffington Post.
I didn’t get it. After all, while the HuffPost may have a readership extending into the millions, and while it may even represent a serious threat to the future of the newspaper industry, how does this make its proprietor—who seems to change her mind more often than John Gray—worthy of the tag intellectual?
But in his portrait of Huffington in the new issue of Prospect, Keen suggests that we may be witnessing the emergence of a new kind of intellectual, one whose influence is measured not in terms of his or her ideas, but by the quality and extent of his or her personal network. And no one has a more powerful network than Arianna. Click here to read his piece in full, and let us know your thoughts below.
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