Well done, Pullman, Horovitz, Morpurgo and Fine

I must say, I cheered when I read about Philip Pullman and his friends, and their brave stand against the government’s latest child protection database horror.

I absolutely endorse what Pullman says. Like CRB checks for people working with children, this kind of database simply gives the illusion of safety, and by doing so makes people less vigilant. In fact, like so much New Labour regulation, it punishes, frustrates and molests people who comply, but makes it easier for those who don’t – the real fraudsters or paedophiles – to slip through the net.

It is also a brave stand they are taking. It isn’t easy to defy the combined weight of the Sun, the NSPCC and the government, and only people of Pullman’s stature can risk it.

This is the real point. Very slowly, we are constructing a new kind of tyranny here, of suspicion and anonymous informants, which presses most heavily on non-standard families – on anyone who lives their lives a little differently. Who opts out of the school system, for example, or who has unusual approaches to fidelity or marriage.

By doing so, and by transforming professions like social workers and health visitors into checklist gatherers – policing those who stand out – we are creating a gulf between the professionals and those they are supposed to help. No wonder my new local Children’s Centre is almost completely empty.

This is a recipe for child protection failure. It will make more Baby Peters considerably more likely. I also find it increasingly scary, a new tyranny that Liberals everywhere need to challenge – not just because it is tyrannical and intolerant, but because it is supremely ineffective. How can it successfully protect children if every parent, and every adult who works with children, comes under suspicion?

I’m a member of the party’s federal policy committee, and as such am sworn to secrecy about debates there. But this week, we did briefly have a discussion about child protection, and I took my courage in my hands and said what I’ve repeated here, though I was even less articulate than usual. People listened politely and that was that.

Within five minutes of the meeting finishing, no less than four other members of the committee had come up to me and said they agreed with me.

To be fair, they none of them said they agreed with everything I said. But I thought about it afterwards and wondered whether the subtle tyranny was sharper than I’d realised. I’m sure none of them were too intimidated to agree with me in public – we all know each other, after all – and yet none of them did.

That’s why Pullman and his friends are brave, but not brave enough to go it alone. They knew they had to announce their defiance as a group.

The prize for cultural ignorance goes to Hampshire

The real motive power behind fascism isn’t racism or monopoly power or any of the other aspects that scare us about the BNP. Those things will never inspire the nation – or not our nation anyway. The power lies in its romanticism. Fine within limits, but when the authoritarians team up with the romantics, the imperialist dreamers, the folk historians and the cultural snobs, then you’ve got trouble.

I believe that is why the European nations which dumped their empires and their monarchies during the 20th century nearly all flirted with fascism at some point. Monarchies are safe conduits for this national romanticism. They render it harmless.

The point I’m trying to make in this roundabout way is that folklore and history is important politically. When it is misused, it encourages extremists and nationalists. When it is suppressed, it encourages them too.

So imagine my surprise, when I arrived at Danebury hill fort in Hampshire on Midsummer’s Day, an important Iron Age site, to find a notice from the county council explaining that this was the summer equinox – and setting out an absolutely bizarre outline of traditional midsummer beliefs and rituals.

Kostrub? Surely there was no celtic deity called that, I asked myself. Baked larks called zhaivoronky? I don’t think so.

I concluded that Hampshire County Council was so staggeringly ignorant of our national heritage that they had muddled it up with somebody else’s. A quick look on the internet confirms it. The county council’s notice was taken word-for-word from a website called ‘Spring Rituals’
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/pages/S/P/Springrituals.htm

As you can see from the address, it is taken from the Encyclopaedia of Ukraine. What does this mean?

All hail the Chelsea Barracks victory!

I don’t buy all this nonsense from the architects about Prince Charles.

It is an irony that it takes someone’s inherited influence to rein them in, to provide any space for ordinary people to comment on the buildings the property world seeks to impose on people. But it is the same irony that it takes the House of Lords occasionally to stand up against government tyranny. We could do with more of that kind of irony, if you ask me.

Lord Rogers’ assertion that somehow only qualified architects are allowed to take part in the debate about what buildings go where is tyrannical nonsense. In short, Prince Charles’ victory over the Chelsea Barracks site is only a victory in Round One, but it is a victory for democracy.

It is also a blow against the creaking assertions of Late Modernism. It’s ideological certainty. It’s tyrannical contempt for human scale. The truth is that the insidious alliance between architects and corporate power, in this case oil power, is not a good combination to decide on the future shape of London's skyline, the one we all have to live with.

The accusation from the RIBA (Remember I’M the bloody architect) is that Prince Charles’ interventions leads to bland design. It may do, but there is nothing as bland as the glass towers that are springing up across London – despite Boris Johnson’s promises to the contrary. The Chelsea Barracks site has been described by locals as a 'new Berlin Wall'. It was to be one of many bland bastilles for the future.

But they are something worse than bland. They demean people. They give a sense of unbridled and unchallengable power, and are intended to. Their contempt for human scale is part of the process of tyranny: they impoverish us all.

Why this is going to be the last ever Labour general election campaign

I know this is heresy, but I’m starting to feel sorry for Gordon Brown. Politics has a habit of projecting the worst kind of horrors onto those it appoints as fall-guy, and it’s certainly tough in human terms watching it happen.

That said, I believe we are seeing the demise of the last Labour government in history, and possibly the last general election platform by the Labour Party. It has no organising idea, there is no great policy debate between the plotters that might allow it to regenerate in intellectual terms, there is nothing left apart from vague and discredited management-speak. After the election, it will split three ways: Old Labour (to join the fringe lefties), New Labour (to splinter in turn into two factions: Managerialist and Lib Dem) and Brownites.

That puts the Liberal Democrats on the frontline. They are all that stands in the way of permanent Cameronian rule. All that stands also to prevent the slow mutation of the Far Right. We have to hammer out a platform that is angry enough, radical enough and new enough to fill that vacant opposition space.

I know this is irritating of me to put it like this, but I don’t believe that we can do that by trumpeting the usual ‘technocratic dross’ (I quote a senior member of the parliamentary party), or the same old Fabian mush that has allowed the BNP to get a foot in the door.

No, what’s going to make a difference is radical localism, real community politics, genuine handing power back to people, and a whole new approach to public services which chucks the whole massive edifice of factory call centres, IT bureaucracies and monster schools and hospitals into the nearest scrapheap – pointing out, on the way, that it has been such a feature of New Labour and Conservative rule.

We might also say, if we’re honest, that that hugely wasteful and expensive edifice – the real explanation why our services don’t work – also lies behind so much of the frustration among the white working class, and which seems to have led 6.5 per cent of them to vote for a party that blames minorities.

The truth is, of course, that the minorities suffer just as much. Worse, in fact, because they have to be supplicants to the Kafkaesque abomination we know as the government’s immigration service.

Bring back Paracelsus, all is forgiven

Blimey, I am so fed up with the positivists – those puritanical creatures who disapprove of anything that doesn’t fit their stringent ideas of academic proof. Evidence-based, of course, but only very narrow kinds of evidence actually count with them.

Now here is the poor old vice-chancellor of Westminster University being hammered in public for the temerity of running a course on homeopathy:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23701268-details/University+calls+halt+to+degree+in+homeopathy/article.do

Now, I happen to be someone who has found homeopathy very helpful, and I’ve tried a lot of complementary therapies – some of them not very successfully, sometimes disastrously. But I’m not one of those people who is happy to be maintained in my chronic condition for the rest of my life by the NHS, at great expense to the taxpayer. So searching seems to me to be not just worthwhile, but a moral obligation.

Maybe that means I deserve to be berated by the positivists for dealing in ‘mumbo-jumbo’, but I don’t think so.

What is fascinating to me is that the leader of this bitter reproach this time is the editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald. Go back five centuries or so and you found a very similar stand-off.

On one side, the doyens of ‘approved’ medicine, backed by the reactionary forces of the Church. On the other side, the new protestant upstarts, barefoot healers ministering to the poor, and taking their inspiration from people like Paracelsus: calling for a ‘chemical revolution’ using pills and medicines instead of bleeding and shifting the humours. No guesses whose side the Catholic Herald would have been on back then.

The emerging great revolt

It is getting stranger, this expenses business, and even rather frightening – and, heavens, I’m only self-employed. I have to charge myself expenses. But I have been thinking about one aspect in the past few days, and it's this.

There is no doubt that the public is very engaged in the expenses story. I keep on overhearing conversations about it on public transport. But the mood seems to be dovetailing with a powerful shift which I’ve been detecting increasingly over the last few months of defiance and revolt against New Labour.

Only today there was the threat by one Steiner School to close down rather than implement the government’s technocratic early years curriculum. "I'm not prepared to struggle on month after month hoping a petty bureaucrat will say this school can continue as it is,” said the head of one of them in the Times Educational Supplement. “I'm not going to kowtow and have children on computers.”

Add this to the list. The police authorities that have rejected government targets. The primary school heads refusing to implement Sats. Something is stirring, and it is important and exciting.

I also think it began with Nick Clegg’s brave and inspirational statement during the leadership election in 2007 that he would refuse to carry an ID card. That was the catalyst it seems to me, but how will this mood dovetail with the public rage at politicians? That’s harder to call, much less predictable and a little nerve-wracking. A bit of populism is urgently needed, but it can be unpredictable, after all.

Time to break up the banks

Judging by the Today programme this morning, we may be moving into a different phase of the financial crisis. The opportunities for serious reform of the system may slowly be slipping away, and I’m frustrated that the party is still peddling what seems to me to be the wrong position on the banks.

Yes, we are calling for a UK version of the Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment banking from high street banking. That seems to be a bare minimum.

But the basic proposal is that we should use the government’s partial ownership of the banks to force them to lend more locally. We urgently need to face up to the fact that this hasn’t worked, won’t work and actually can’t work.

The UK banks are now so consolidated, and so focussed on the speculative economy, that they can no longer provide the kind of local lending infrastructure that we so desperately need – and which the USA has and which northern Europe has too. There is no local lending expertise; decisions are done according to formula, so in a recession, of course all their IT systems block the loans and tighten up overdraft conditions. They are not designed for that any more.

So for goodness sake, before we go any further, let’s take a distinctive Lib Dem position: break up the big banks, force them to disgorge the building societies they swallows, split them up regionally to rebuild our local lending infrastructure.

That is the way we can rebuild a real local enterprise culture – so we don’t have to rely on the next bubble just to fling us back into the delusion that we are wealthy.