For those who, like me, find their attention wandering somewhere between the coxless fours and the javelin, there’s some good news. John Fox, one of ECFR’s cadre of China-watchers, has just launched an Olympian blog, which will give a daily political spin on the games. Unless he is transfixed by the dressage events.
There are many things to say about the story that David Miliband and Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary, would consider teaming up to run the Labour government once Gordon Brown has been ousted.
Personally, I’m torn between believing the story of a Mil-Mil alliance; and believing it to be Brownite spin to discredit a Miliband putsch. But what I find most interesting is not the did-he-or-did-he-not part. For the venom with which the idea has been greeted is, I think, the real story and what says most about the state of the Labour party today.
Even the mere suggestion that the former Health Secretary could return to government seems to discredit Miliband’s prime ministerial bid in the eyes of many Labour MPs.
But what did Milburn do to deserve the opprobrium? Was he sacked for failing to control his department? No that was Charles Clarke, a man still respected in the Labour Party. Did he lead an unpopular war? No that was Geoff Hoon. Was he born to privilege? No. He was raised by a single mother, cut his political teeth fighting for shipbuilding and steel jobs on Tyneside and worked in a Marxist bookshop called Days of Hope.
Milburn’s horrendous crime is to be known as a Blairite. With former Cabinet colleague Stephen Byers, he could always be counted on to defend Tony Blair and was often linked with criticism of Gordon Brown. He handled Labour’s 2005 election campaign, which led to tensions with Brown. But perhaps worse for the Old Labour stalwarts, Milburn has continued to champion of “the modernising, centrist approach” that Blair personified:
Taxes should be cut, especially for the low-paid. We should sharpen the drive to get many more people off benefit and dramatically improve help for first-time buyers to get onto the housing ladder.
The astonishing fact that these ideas – and the person who champions them – are seen by some in the Labour party as undermining of David Miliband’s ambitions tells many voters that despite Brown’s words and work, the Labour party itself is making a dash away from the centre and the Blair legacy.
Jim Pickard at the FT’s excellent Westminster blog has been wondering whether David Miliband really has the common touch. “Will the public warm,” he wonders, “to the former policy wonk who – despite shedding the previous Mr Logic image – is still best known as an intellectual?”
In seeking to answer that question, he turns to Gideon Rachman’s profile of Miliband from earlier this year. “Here,” he proffers, “is one extract:”
“Amartya Sen is a brilliant man,” remarks Miliband. “I think his argument that there is a fusion tradition – a liberal tradition that is concerned with social justice – is right. And I admire his work on capabilities, and on freedom as capability.”
Hmm: is that really all that nerdy? It’s not as if Miliband is the only Cabinet member who’s into Sen: so are Gordon Brown, Douglas Alexander, and Hilary Benn (who quoted his views on freedom at length in his preface to DFID’s third White Paper). David Cameron turned out to be a fan too, when he made his first big speech on development back in 2006.
Here’s a profile of Sen from back in 2000 by Meghnad Desai in case you haven’t made the acquaintance of this excellent writer; his book Development as Freedom can’t be recommended highly enough.
Although all the attention lately has been on food prices and the effect of their sharp rise for inflation, development and security, the rises seen on food have been as nothing compared to some of the increases seen on fertilisers over the same period.
A briefing by Andrew Dorward and Colin Poulton, published in June by the Future Agricultures consortium, gives chapter and verse. Between May 2006 and May 2008, here’s what prices did for selected key foods and fertilisers:
Cotton – up 29%
Beverages – up 41%
Wheat – up 61%
Maize – up 108%
Rice – up 185%
Urea (a key nitrogen fertiliser) – up 160%
DAP (a major phosphate fertiliser) – up 318%
The underlying causes cover both sides of the supply / demand line. On the demand side, there’s the basic fact that the need for fertilisers is soaring as a result of higher food prices and demand for crops as biofuels.
On the supply side, energy costs are a huge factor (especially in the case of nitrogen fertilisers); some fertiliser exporters (like China) have imposed export controls; and in the background, there are capacity limits to increasing production, especially for phosphates – a point that has the peak oil crowd already thinking hard about the concept of peak phosphorus.
None of this, needless to say, is good news for farmers, who according to the paper find themselves hit twice: once on the affordability of fertilisers when purchasing them, and then again (given food / fertiliser price differentials) on their profitability when using them.
Dorward and Poulton argue that in the short term, it’s still worth developing country governments’ while to subsidise fertiliser use, even if the rates of return are lower – and that donors need to step up fast with additional financing (a proposal that the World Bank signalled its openness to in its ten point plan on food). Dorward, Poulton and the Bank all agree that the question of getting them to the right place – fast – is as important as the question of who picks up the bill.
In the longer term, the paper suggests, the focus needs to be on more integrated soil fertility management with greater use of organic materials [i.e. compost and manure] together with smarter use of inorganic fertilisers – an area of work that the big agricultural research institutes like CIMMYT are already focusing on heavily. Moving towards more integrated soil fertility management already makes sense for reasons of environmental sustainability. If fertiliser prices fail to fall in the longer term, these areas of research are also going to be one of the critical front lines in feeding 10 billion of us.