Boris, the backstop and Captain America

This post first appeared on the Radix blog...

It was watching the final Avengers film with my children that gave me the clue. Sometimes I have spent many of these films in the lovely Worthing tea shop outside the Dome cinema - though I must confess that I quite enjoyed Captain Marvel and Captain America (the fact that there are too many captains here is part of the underlying issue.

So here is my proposition, the Marvel franchise represents an explosion of nostalgia in American culture that I have a feeling explains something of the parallel phenomenon of Donald Trump. In the same way, we - I use the term without irony - have elected a Latin-spouting, Churchill-imitating, harkback to a bygone age as prime minister, with a predeliction for archaic phrases shorn of their original meaning (like 'British pluck').

I have a feeling that the nostalgia represented by the back stories of the Marvel heroes - most of which seem to involve dinners in log cabins in the woods - is only part of the picture. The strange world provided by the 20 plus films - earning £22.3 billion - is rather as ordinary Americans feel: watched over by mysterious heroes, using technology beyond their understanding, yet still threatened.
The 'real' world rarely features in these films, beyond staggered policemen and screaming victims of natural or supernatural disasters.

The last credits of the last film, Endgame, seemed to bear this out, ending the saving of humanity with an extroadrinarily nostalgic piece of music, a 1945 rendition of 'It's been a long, long time' (Kiss me once, kiss me twice etc etc).

Nostalgia as a source of new ideas can be extrardinarily powerful. but without that forward-looking element, it can be, well, a bit masturbatory.

So if Boris' nostaligic package takes us somewhere new, or if other new thinking is stuggling to get out - then I am more positive about him than perhaps I ought to be. Sadly, the empty rhetoric about HS3 and its potential seems to suggest otherwise. Nostaliga can provide the basis for new understading and a critique of assumptions, which we badly need - especially for economic asumptions which are looking pretty threadbare (like the assumption that transport links do anything more than move prosperity about).

I have no problem with hope, though the increasingly cynical - not to say nihilistic and puritanical - left find it pretty intolerable. If Boris Johnson can put some beef behind his hope, he may just win through.

But there is one problem with his ability to do this. If he wants to get through these difficult negotiations with European leaders, he must put forward a credible alternative to the Irish border backstop. So why doesn't he - is it because there isn't one?

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Time for a radical centre alliance to save the planet

This post first appeared on Lib Dem Voice...

“We must be more than a political party or we will cease to be one,” said the great writer G. K. Chesterton, when he was a Liberal. “Time and again historic victory has come to a little party with big ideas: but can anyone conceive anything with a mark of death more on its brow than a little party with little ideas,”

I am writing about the man at the moment and I believe he was right, and especially perhaps in the first of the two sentences.

Nor are we such a little party these days, but the ideas we articulate in public are not yet big enough, and it is what I miss from our leadership election at the moment. Perhaps that is why Andrew Rawnsley claimed over the weekend that it was as dull as a bowl of tofu.

Beyond the resistance to Brexit – not really an idea so much as a rejection of one – there are only a couple; well, two: tackling climate change (Ed Davey) and embracing hi-tech (Jo Swinson). Both are short of the hows and whats that would make either of these big ideas – something to fill the spot for Brexit when it has either happened or finally not happened.

So here is mine, and it is entirely a practical one.

The recent polls put the four biggest parties practically neck and neck, around 20+ per cent. This is a highly dangerous position for the nation because it means, under our hopeless electoral system, that absolutely anything could happen.

I have been a member of the party for forty years last May. I’ve see us sweep up and down dreaming of one more heave. I know we shouldn’t get carried away. But it now seems to me – given the polls and the high ratings of the Greens, that it is now time to forge a one-off alliance of the radical centre for one election only: to save humanity from climate change.

I have little idea as yet whether either Anna Soubry or Sian Berry are likely to play ball or not – though I believe both are persuadable, on condition we prioritise getting their existing MPs back into Parliament and give them a clear run in 20-30 other seats.

I lived through the alliance with the SDP. I’m so aware that this is not straightforward, and that the kind of open primaries – open to the voting public in the other seats – are potentially expensive and unpopular amongst political parties.

I know there would have to be a system of appeals and there are other administrative issues about expressing alliances on ballot papers under existing electoral law.

I am also aware that ignorance about each other’s parties and policies get in the way of such alliances. But I don’t think any of these are insurmountable – and the prize is potentially huge. If you add together our poll ratings as they stand now, and it would put us well within spitting distance of the 30 per cent level when we could not just govern, but change UK politics forever.

But this is where Chesterton’s first sentence is important. None of this will happen unless Lib Dems, Greens and Tigs for Change are first working side by side on the ground, not just through More United, but at ward level – achieving things by campaigning about them in a way that is easier these days when Parliament is as finely balanced as it is now.

Only that can avoid the kind of projecting of our own peculiarities and intolerances onto other parties, the besetting sin of politicians, which so torpedoes working together for people.

The truth is that they are not that different from us. This will need to be an alliance forged locally, relationship by relationship. But if we can be more than a party and achieve that, I believe we can really grab power.

So Jo and Ed – what do you think?

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