by Alex Evans | Feb 7, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
Following up on the unhappy tales of life inside the Brown bunker, Sue Cameron now gives an insight into life inside Fortress Cameron. And, she reports, there’s not necessarily that much to choose between them…
Depressing news for democracy. It seems there is little to choose between the leadership style of Gordon Brown and David Cameron. “Fortress Brown”, says one Tory insider glumly, “is matched by Fortress Cameron.” Both men rely on small cliques and few outsiders – even cabinet or shadow cabinet members.
Mr Cameron’s inner circle meets at 9am every morning. Present are the powerful Steve Hilton, the Tory brand manager, Ed Llewellyn, Mr Cameron’s old-Etonian chief of staff, and Andy Coulson, ex-News of the World editor. Mr Coulson agreed to be Mr Cameron’s spin doctor only if he could attend any meetings he chose. How wise. (I bet Stephen Carter, Mr Brown’s new communications guru, was not quite as savvy.)
Frontbenchers who go to the morning meetings are William Hague, foreign affairs, George Osborne, shadow chancellor, Michael Gove, schools, and David Davies, home affairs and one of the few who dares to dissent.
Usually, I am told, the Tory leader dominates discussions – not least with the shadow cabinet where he employs the simple wheeze of doing most of the talking himself. Margaret Thatcher, say insiders, allowed far more debate. Mr Cameron hates one-to-one meetings.
by Richard Gowan | Jan 26, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
British journalist Jonathan Steele has been getting a good deal of coverage for Defeat, his account of the Iraq war (if nothing else, he deserves a prize for finding an even pithier title for an Iraq book than Fiasco by Thomas Ricks). While I’m all for picking over the bones of US and UK decision-making in 2002-3, I grow more and more concerned that this sort of retrospective analysis distracts readers/voters from wondering what we should actually do in Iraq now, and what options may open up after the U.S. elections. The absence of serious debate about Iraq among the Democrats – and most Republicans bar McCain – was well-described by Noah Feldman in the NYT Magazine earlier this month:
What if the United States were at war during a presidential election — and none of the candidates wanted to talk about it? Iraq has become the great disappearing issue of the early primary season, and if nothing fundamental changes on the ground there — a probable result of current policy — the war may disappear even more completely in the new year.The reasons for Iraq’s political eclipse begin with the unfortunate fact that candidates strive to create feel-good associations, and the war is a certain downer. The film studios could barely get a Middle East movie to break even in the past 12 months (”In the Valley of Elah,” anyone?), and the political image makers have apparently taken note.
“How true,” I thought on reading this over a pint of the excellent Brooklyn Winter Ale in, suitably, Brooklyn. But, after lingering by Lake Geneva for a week, I’m struck by the extent to which Iraq is now simply off the European agenda in a way that is still quite hard to imagine in the US. And that is worrying because, as Feldman acutely observes in the American context, the glimmer of stability offered by the Surge means that there is a real debate to be had about whether it’s time for another go at statebuilding in Iraq:
According to one view, the United States cannot shape the local players into a cohesive order regardless of Iraq’s level of killing. The best we can do is calm the worst of the violence, leave and let the Iraqis sort things out for themselves.An alternative view presumes that state-building has failed so far in Iraq because of the violence. Once the bloodletting has decreased and there are credible negotiators on all sides, a stable Iraq is just barely possible, even if it will never be an exemplar of democracy.
Now, that’s mainly an issue for the Iraqis and Americans, but I don’t think that EU governments (whether pro- or anti-war back in the day) can really ignore it either. As I’ve just pointed out in a new piece that’s both available from EU Observer and on the ECFR website, a renewed decline in Iraq’s fortunes would undo European efforts on Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, maybe even Palestine – so ignoring it isn’t really an option. (Charles Grant has just made a similar argument in a new CER pamphlet). Here’s the nub of my argument, which could be summed up as “start thinking really hard”:
Rather than passively wait to see who’ll be driving Middle East policy in Washington in 2009, EU governments should use the next twelve months as an opportunity to iron out their differences and develop new options on Iraq.Whoever enters the White House next year, the incoming administration will probably make charting a new course on Iraq the central priority for their first hundred days. If the EU is still trying to work out where it stands at that stage, it will find it’s irrelevant soon enough. If it has a package of ideas about what it can contribute – even if it is relatively limited – its initiative is likely to be welcomed, getting relations with the new administration off to a good start.To start outlining what such a package should look like, European governments should now agree to put their differences to one side, and appoint a senior political figure (or maybe two, one originally against the war, one for it) to lead a small “EU Options Team”: a brains-trust of European officials and experts on Iraq, tasked with laying out a menu of potential plans for coordinated EU policies from 2009 on.To ensure that these aren’t just abstract term papers, the Team should have a cell based in Iraq – in part modelled on the EU police and civilian planning teams that have been developing policy in Kosovo since 2006. And to give the Team a sense of immediate relevance, its political chief(s) should also be directly involved in trying to sort out the dysfunctions of EU aid to Iraq.
To be quite honest, even this level of hatchet-burying and deep thinking may still be beyond the EU, but hope springs eternal. My argument is also meant to be an invitation for those who still think we have some obligations and interests in Iraq to offer new ideas – if you go the ECFR version of the piece, you can add a comment, and I’d be a happy junior public intellectual if any Dashboard readers had constructive thoughts to add there.
by Alex Evans | Jan 19, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
So now we’re in a breakout group on how democracies should fight terrorism. Quite a panel they’ve assembled: Shami Chakrabarti from Liberty, David Omand who used to be Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator at the Cabinet Office, author of The Islamist Ed Hussein, Sadiq Khan MP and Home Office minister Tony McNulty.
And there’s a fight! Shami Chakrabarti and Ed Hussein, whom we all assumed would make nice, are kicking the crap out of each other! Ed Hussein throws the first punch by saying that he feels Shami is patronising him – and that she’s a “liberal do-gooder”. Shami not happy about this. She starts by taking the moral high ground, talking about respect and open debate. But then she relents – and tells Ed that “it’ll be a long time before I start taking lessons in democracy from someone whose acquaintance with it is so recent”. And as one, we all go “oooOOOooo”…
by Alex Evans | Jan 18, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific, Influence and networks, UK
Benedict Brogan is off to China with the Prime Ministerial travelling circus, plus various business bigwigs including Richard Branson. But as a sequence of posts on Benedict’s blog yesterday record, all did not appear to be going smoothly as the trip got underway. At 12.27pm , the first indications that all might not be well began to emerge:
Oh dear. Bad enough that Sir Richard Branson has to fly to China on a BA plane, but he’s also fallen out with BAA and Ruth Kelly. There’s been an almighty cock up involving the Dept of Transport’s security guys here at Heathrow, and as a result it’s chaos at the Royal Suite. The business bigwigs were kept sitting in a coach outside the gates for 55 mins. Branson was so cross he called the head of BAA to complain. Mr Brown isn’t here yet, but he may want to have a word with Ruth. This may take quite a lot of in-flight champagne to fix.
But things were about to get worse. 1.13pm, and Brogan is showing that irresistible Daily Mail sangfroid:
It’s not for me to say this trip is cursed, but from where I sit on the PM’s BA charter (fabulous bacon sarnies, do hope Sir Richard likes them) I can see a BA airbus that has just come off the runway due to a lack of undercarriage. It doesn’t look too serious even if it is sitting at an odd angle, but rumour is all flights are grounded. So we are delayed until BAA gets the mess cleared. This is turning into a busy day for Tom Kelly, Tony Blair’s former spokesman, and now head of comms for BAA.
More drama was still to come. 1.35pm:
This gets weirder. The PM’s motorcade was coming up the A4 as the plane approached and at one point his detectives grew alarmed. The suggestion is the stricken Airbus misjudged its approach and nearly took out the PM. I can’t vouch for this, but this trip is getting more eventful by the minute and we’re only now taking off.
Now, fortunately, the intrepid crew are safely ensconced in Beijing, where there’s only one small snag:
For the past three days the Chinese have asked No10 staff to ensure we don’t ask about democracy. It was explained to them that this might not be possible, and sure enough Mr Wen got asked by both Nick Robinson and Tom Bradby why it was taking so long to democratise. I suspect it may take some time: we’ve been issued with a detailed list of what is expected of us, including ” please stand up and applaud when the two PMs enter the venue”. We didn’t, but that may just be because we are fast asleep.
We’ll be watching riveted over the next few days…
by Alex Evans | Jan 8, 2008 | Influence and networks
Amid the general surfeit of apocalyptic language being used about the solvency crunch, climate change, oil prices and various other dark sides of globalisation’s force, there’s one constituency from whom we haven’t heard. Where’s the anti-globalisation movement? Shouldn’t they all be out in the street with drums and whistles, cheerfully dancing the told-you-so in a conga line stretching down the street, smashing the odd McDonald’s window as they go?
Take, for instance, this helpful chronology of the anti-globalisation movement produced by two German researchers. They highlight 1982 as the first year in which a major protest was held simultaneously in the same city as a G7 summit – 20,000 peace activists demonstrated against Reagan’s presence (and the terrorist group Action Directe – remember them? – attacked the Paris rep of the World Bank and the IMF). From there, the noisy and colourful history unfolds just as we saw it, until 2001 and – there ends the history, with the death of a protestor at the Genoa G8 after he was shot by a police officer.
At the time, everyone was stunned. I remember attending a climate change summit just a week or two after the G8, where there was a general sense of disbelief and rage among the activist networks at the conference. The mood was that a corner had been turned; things wouldn’t be the same from here on; it might all be about to get much more dark.
Which, of course, it did, though not in the way that anyone was expecting: obviously, any attempt to figure out what happened to the anti-globalisation movement has to start at 9/11. So here, for what it’s worth, are five starters for ten off the top of my head about what happened thereafter. Corrections, arguments, howls of protest very welcome…
1. Economic globalisation was immediately dislodged from its top spot on the ‘hot list’ of global issues. Throughout the 1990s, a lot of people in industrialised countries felt a creeping sense of worry and insecurity about globalisation. But after 9/11, there was something much more vivid to worry about – with governments painted in a totally different light (front line against terrorism rather than purveyors of policies to help multinational corporations).
2. Protests at summits immediately became much more difficult. The regular schedule of G8, IMF and other summits provided the anti-globalisation movement with much of its lifeblood. But after 9/11, the exclusion zones around summits got much bigger, the protestors were far more at arm’s length, and there was less scope for generating high profile media coverage.
3. The movement became part of the Stop the War coalition – and then the war went ahead anyway. I remember going to one of the early London meetings of the Stop the War Coalition, and noticing (with both frustration and admiration) how deftly Globalise Resistance and the Socialist Worker Party had taken control of the co-ordination committee – and how excited they were at the potential to reach out to a far wider constituency. But the fact that the ensuing protests against the war were so massive, so diverse and broad-rooted, and so completely ineffectual, left many with a profound sense of hopelessness and apathy about what activism could achieve.
4. The movement’s lack of solutions started to count against it. In its earlier days, the global resistance movement’s relativist philosophy worked strongly in its favour. Anyone with a grudge against liberal economics, patriarchy, the scientific establishment or liberal democracy could join in; all that was needed was some kind of critique of Enlightenment universalism. But as time went on, the movement started to suffer from its lack of big ideas for solutions. When there was discussion at all of what should be started (as opposed to stopped – like dams, IMF conditionality, nuclear power, GMOs or whatever), the solutions were either fuzzy (global justice now!) or parochial. Serious proposals for global frameworks for sustainability and justice that might have seemed like no-brainers for the movement, like contraction and convergence, were never endorsed.
5. Protests became harder to organise because of repressive anti-terrorist legislation. As observed here before, even the former head of counter-terrorism at Scotland Yard has said he has “a horrible feeling that we are sinking into a police state”. As Chris Atkins’ film Taking Liberties chronicles (here’s the trailer), anti-terrorist legislation in the UK, as in other countries, has been used extensively by police to counter protest activity much more broadly than just at summit meetings.
So where does the movement stand now?
Some people, of course, might argue that 2005’s Make Poverty History coalition represented a continuation or evolution of the movement. I wouldn’t buy the argument. The anti-globalisation movement was fundamentally a bottom-up exercise – even if organisations like the Socialist Worker Party itched to organise it. MPH, on the other hand, was the opposite. It was organised by a tiny handful of large NGOs, who from the outset worked closely with government. That political strategy made a lot of sense – but it also made MPH something entirely different from the global resistance movement.
Others would argue that the movement has gone virtual, either into the blogosphere (c.f. excitement about the role of the ‘netroots’ in Howard Dean’s presidential campaign last time), or into virtual campaignign networks like Avaaz. Here too, I have my doubts. As I’ve written here before, I’m a huge fan of Avaaz – but again, it’s hard to make a case for it being a direct inheritor of the anti-globalisation movement. It’s too well-organised, too solutions focused to be classed as such.
A third group might argue that the global resistance movement is alive and well, perhaps pointing to last summer’s Heathrow climate camp as proof. This is probably the most credible answer – after all, some of the leading lights of the old movement, like the Wombles (remember them?), were there. But if that is the nearest we get to an answer, then the next question is – is that it? The anti-globalisation movement reduced to just a couple of thousand people at Heathrow?
But here’s the thing: we do need a global justice movement today.
I don’t mean a movement that reproduces all the worst traits of the old anti-globalisation movement, like its susceptibility to hijack by violent nutters, its chronic inability to agree on solutions, its “global bad! local good!” simplifications. But we do need to resurrect the movement’s insistence that nothing can be achieved without grassroots participation being built in from the outset; its daring willingness to imagine different futures; and its sense of fun and theatre in politics.
I have precisely zero confidence that a political system that consists of voting every four or five years and then leaving it to technocrats in between has the capacity to solve the challenges that will come at us over the next few years.
Conversely, it’s abundantly clear that vibrant political participation at local level will be one of the best forms of resilience a community can have in the face of the kind of unpredictable shocks likely to emerge in the same period.
What still needs to be figured out, though, is how activist citizens can aggregate their influence to affect global outcomes for actually solving issues like climate change. Equity and fairness – on a very grand scale – will be at the heart of all of these discussions. Who’s going to argue for it?
