by David Steven | Jul 29, 2008 | UK
Take a two-party system. Drop it into a multi-connected, media frenzied world. And what you get is a system with two steady states and dramatic swings between the two.
When you’re in, you’re in big time. Everything goes your way. But once you’re on the slide, it’s a one way trip to the wilderness. This is the world of disruptive politics – where it can be better to lose well, than even to try to win.
Disruptive politics has one imperative: to change the terrain on which political battles are fought. The disruption results from the opponent’s inability to react. He fights the old battle and is utterly hapless as a result. You know what he is thinking, can predict how he will react, and anticipate his every move with ease.
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair had instinctive mastery of disruptive politics. Neither was an intellectual colossus nor did they emerge from a vacuum. But, somehow, they had the skill to weave the threads of what was possible into a cloth that had a magical power to mystify their opponents.
The game was up for the Tories when Blair announced he was ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ Yet many Conservatives still believed they could win the 1997 election. They simply didn’t believe that Blair was who he said he was or believed what he said he did. They were still in denial four years later, fighting ‘Phoney Tony’ – their own chimera – rather than the real Prime Minister. Thatcher had previously bewitched Old Labour just as successfully.
In the US of the 80s and 90s, Reagan and (Bill) Clinton sowed similar confusion. For two elections, Democrats fought a George Bush of their own invention. Next Hillary battled an Obama who didn’t exist. Now McCain is doing the same thing. Obama is a flip flopper. No, he’s a lightweight. Wait, did I tell you the one about him ignoring the troops?
It took Margaret Thatcher’s fall to snap the Labour vanguard out of its trance. The second Gulf War has had a similar effect on the Tories. It’s like a return to sobriety – time to rebuild in the cold light of day. The Democrats, meanwhile, were saved by a Deus ex machina. The candidate from nowhere who will, I believe, win convincingly in November and should go from there to a resounding victory in 2012.
So where does this leave the Labour Party? Has it lost both this election and the next one? Well, that depends on what it tries to do now.
Faced with a superior force, the most important thing is to control the manner in which you lose. (Think of how an effective insurgent melts away when a conventional army marches into town – all the better to regroup and seize back the momentum when the time is right).
Should Gordon Brown step down (and I have no opinion on whether he will or should), then the overriding focus of his successor should be to take the party into opposition in good shape.
That means:
- Calling a general election as quickly as possible (while you’re still in a honeymoon period).
- Aiming to win the campaign, even if there’s little chance you can win the vote (you want to go into election day on the up).
- Arriving on the opposition benches with momentum on your side and morale high.
What you shouldn’t do:
- Hold onto power to the bitter end (by which time the press are already speculating about your successor).
- Lose the campaign and the vote (doing worse than the pundits predicted).
- Arrive in opposition fit only to tear yourselves to pieces for the next five years.
It’s a tough course to take and one that will need selling to the party faithful. After all, the faithful would often prefer to die in a ditch than live to fight another day.
by Charlie Edwards | May 16, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, UK
I’ve got a short piece about organised crime on the Guardian’s blog Comment is Free. From the intro:
The annual report from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, published yesterday, is a mix of self-congratulation and spectacular underachievement. While the rhetoric from politicians has been to get tough on organised crime, the reality is more humbling: we still don’t have a clear idea of the scale and nature of the problem. Read the rest here
Pretty much everyone is unhappy with the agency. Sean O’Neill, The Times’ Crime Editor has been trailing the publication of the annual report for the past week. According to his sources police officers have been leaving in ‘droves’, while the agency’s hit list has been shelved. The allegations were swiftly dismissed in a letter to The Times by Bill Hughes, SOCA’s Director General. He is now having to manage some internal strife at the Agency and has rounded on some officers who have chosen to take their problems to the media and not the management (which is odd given the top heavy nature of the organisation).
Elsewhere Alison Saunders, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Organised Crime Division is arguing that expectations of Soca had been too high at its inception. She has a point. Meanwhile the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are standing back and basking in the Government’s and the Agency’s incompetence and ineptitude.
by Alex Evans | Apr 25, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
A civil servant friend told me yesterday that the Cabinet Office has just issued guidance that all senior civil servants (that’s deputy directors and upwards) are now allowed to blog, publicly, in their own names, about the issues that they work on.
Fascinating if so – but not surprising, given the approach being signalled by Tom Watson, the Minister for Transformational Government. Here’s a speech he did at the end of last month on information and government, which is required reading (a minister who’s heard of Clay Shirky! swoon!).
(There’s also an amusing anecdote in it about him making a speech in which he observes of open source that “One, nobody owns it. Two, everybody uses it. And three, anyone can improve it.” – whereupon
Two days later a political opponent sent out an email laying claim that in fact they are the ‘owners’ of these new ideas. I was accused of plundering policies from the Conservatives.
The irony that laying claim to the ownership of a policy on open source was lost to the poor researcher who had spent a day dissecting the speech. He’d been able to do so easily because it was freely available on my blog, a simple tool used for communicating information quickly and at nearly zero cost without the requirement to charge for access.)
But back to the intriguing question of blogging officials. How would it all work? Watson has posted a first stab at some principles on his own blog – here they are:
1. Write as yourself
2. Own your own content
3. Be nice
4. Keep secrets
5. No anonymous comments
6. Remember the civil service code
7. Got a problem? Talk to your boss
8. Stop it if we say so
9. Be the authority in your specialist field – provide worthwhile information
10. Think about consequences
11. Media interest? Tell your boss
12. Correct your own mistakes
…which, as people in the comments section of his blog generally agree, seem like not a bad starting point.
by Charlie Edwards | Mar 17, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
This Wednesday the British Government will publish the UK’s first ever National Security Strategy. This is a big moment for Gordon Brown and comes with great expectations. Don’t be surprised if there is no Minister on the Today Programme discussing the strategy’s pros and cons on Wednesday morning – this will be Gordon Brown’s opportunity to kill lots of birds with one mighty strategic stone (so lets hope he does wait and announce it in Parliament).
Dignity and gravitas will ooze from every pore of the front bench as Brown steps up to the dispatch box and announces the strategy. MPs from all sides of the House will nod and mouth their agreement. In the gallery sketch writers will pen columns for Thursday’s newspapers about how important Parliament is. For a brief moment the Government will look in complete control of its destiny – polls will even show the Labour party jump ahead of the Conservatives.
Some British newspapers are already trailing the announcement. The Telegraph suggests that ‘a national security council will be created, staffed by senior politicians including, potentially, individuals from other parties, intelligence and military chiefs, and scientific experts.. and that Paddy Ashdown has been suggested as a possible leading opposition figure with the experience to be invited to serve alongside senior Government ministers’. The Guardian points to the fact that ‘officials were divided about how broad they should paint the security threats facing Britain, and whether they should include such issues as social cohesion, for example,’ while The Times believes that a ‘group of veteran specialists will advise Gordon Brown on all aspects of national security, ranging from terrorist strikes to pandemics’. Finally the Financial Times writes that Sir Paul McCartney has been ordered to pay his estranged wife Heather Mills £24.3m.
Below are some thoughts ahead of the publication of the UK NSS.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jan 26, 2008 | North America
Yesterday, in the context of writing about the government’s new Counter Terrorism Bill, I was discussing why MCarthyism had never made real inroads in the UK during the 1950s. Today, what should drop into my inbox but an NY Times review of a new book aiming to rehabilitate Senator Joseph R McCarthy. David Oshinsky – himself a previous biographer of McCarthy – writes:
A full-throated defense of the senator is now in the bookstores. Written by M. Stanton Evans, a conservative journalist whose roots stretch back to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, it carries a title, “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies” (Crown Forum, $29.95), that well explains its thesis. But “Blacklisted by History” is drawing significant attention on the political right, where the reviews have ranged from gushing (The Weekly Standard) to scathing (National Review). If nothing else, Evans has forced his movement friends to look again at McCarthy. For conservatives, the crazy uncle has finally left the attic.
So what can we expect to read about if we buy the book?:
Evans buys into the heart of the McCarthy conspiracy — the belief that leftist elements in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations created a foreign policy to advance the spread of world Communism.
How else could one explain the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe or the fall of Chiang Kai-shek to the army of Mao Zedong? “Who lost China?” propelled McCarthy to the national stage. Along the way, he described General George C. Marshall, the nation’s most respected military commander, as a Communist dupe; urged Secretary of State Dean Acheson to seek asylum in the Soviet Union; purposely confused the names of the convicted perjurer and likely Soviet spy Alger Hiss and the 1952 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (“Alger — I mean Adlai”); and called Harry Truman a “son of a bitch” who made his key decisions in the midnight darkness while drunk on bourbon.
McCarthy blamed the fall of China on “a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” Evans not only endorses this conspiracy but actually expands it to include “the Eastern, internationalist faction” of the Republican Party, “with ties to Wall Street, large corporations, big Eastern media outlets and Ivy League establishment.” To Evans, the conspiracy passed from president to president — from Roosevelt and Truman to Eisenhower and even Nixon, a former McCarthyite, who “would fall off the teeter-totter, landing with Henry Kissinger in Red China, thereafter pushing on into the mists of détente with Moscow.”
Okaay…
