David Nikel

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): An interesting situation is developing in Scotland, where the SNP minority government is trying to get its budget through the Holyrood parliament. Last year's spending plans got through because of Labour abstentions, but that may be less likely this time around.

Finance Minister John Swinney has said the government would have to resign if the budget falls. That would give Labour the opportunity to put forward its own leader Iain Gray as First Minister. However, it might mean an election if he could not secure a majority. As The Scotsman notes, that prospect may hold fewer fears for Labour than it did during the SNP's honeymoon last year. 

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Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Writing in the Irish Examiner, David Trimble's former advisor Stephen King compares the Irish Troubles with the current events in Gaza.

The difference between the situation today in Gaza/Israel and in the 1990s in relation to the IRA should be blindingly obvious. The republican movement was looking for a way out of its self-destructive and counterproductive violence; Hamas believes it’s on a roll towards its ultimate aim of a Jew-free Palestine on the whole territory of Israel.

One of Jerusalem’s key objectives in Gaza — supported quietly by Arab governments — is to inject some realism into Hamas, just as the British and Irish security forces did to the IRA. We should recall it was not a short process: it took years, decades in fact. And even then, the IRA had to observe a unilateral ceasefire before they could join talks: the RUC, gardaí, British army and the Irish defence forces were scarcely confined to barracks.

Tony Curzon Price

Today was pretty Gaza-dominated on the site again. Over in the forums, Gaza-related threads are getting very long and heated. Just asn an example, Iron Mike posted this one on Hamas being the blame for the war, and it now has 110 replies. I think that Avi Shlaim's devastating history of Israel's post-1947 treatment of Palestinians should be read by all those in that thread. It is very powerful to hear this story told by "someone who served loyally in the
Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of
the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders."

We published on the economy too. Godfrey Hodgson celebrates the return of the economically powerful state, while Simon Zadek sees the hope for real accountability in capital allocation mechanisms. Simon links the solution of the financial crisis and the environmental crisis: both are failures to hold the powerful to account for all the consequences of their actions. I hope Simon is right. I feel that the solutions may be less technocratic than he seems to suggest---redesigning incentive systems is unlikely without a firm purpose, and that needs a strong, positive vision to take hold. On that, we could do better.

 There is a very moving story of vision in Jane Gabriel's interview of legend film-maker Theo Angelopoulos. He is interesting on the riots ... but also on the optimism of his own generation: 

"
I belong to an older generation, a generation that believed that
change was possible, that it was possible to change the world, that it
was possible to open up a new path. My generation believed that it was
possible not only to dream of a new world, but also to turn dreams into
realities. It didn't happen. I think we are all carrying the shadow of
disappointment and failure. "

 But read to the end. It is brimming with hope.

We have a huge amount of good material coming in. That's one thing crises do -- send thinking people to write. We don't have the capacity to transform all of it into publishable material. Hat tip to the volunteers in the publishing network without whom output would slow to a trickle!

Oh ... and yesterday's intruder on the Gaza box. He's now written suggesting some writers we might like to commission. That's an improvement in method :)

Tony Curzon Price

Back on the Front Page rota. During the long Christmas break, we had the "Best of" taking up the right hand side and occasional pieces on the left hand side. The crisis in Gaza started before we had planned to start active, disciplined publishing again. Paul Rogers wrote an analytical, clear and devastating assessment of the security aspects. The piece has attracted a great deal of commentary - polarised but serious.

Over the week-end I set up a Diigo group to collect must-reads on the crisis. I emailed the openDemocracy staff suggesting they add material to it. I added a few other people to the distribution list whom I thought would be doing some interesting reading on the crisis. I told everyone that whatever they tagged in the group would be reproduced in the "Gaza" box on the top right of the page.

Fine ... it all seemed to be working v.well. Until this afternoon, when I received a shocked email from a loyal reader: "I am writing to share my surprise (and disgust) at the fact that opening open democracy.net today to access a (fantastic) article about climate change I discovered a “gaza” tab on the right listing no less than 5 posts that are 100% pro Israel. Open Democracy had shown better balance than this in the past and I am deeply disappointed."

When I went to the tab, I indeed recognised none of the articles there. A bit of digging and I discovered that a certain Michael Bremmer had joined the diigo group and was posting this very unbalanced material. I have no idea who Michael Bremmer is. I tried a little sleuthing to see if I could figure who had let him into the group -- there was no simple way to tell. I presume that at some degree of remove, my email inviting a small number of trusted readers had somehow made its way to Michael Bremmer who immediately spammed the Gaza box. I think I fixed the leak and the box is now back to being something I am happy with.

Thank you to our concerned reader. Many eyes make light work, as Wikipedians know. The episode also made me realise how rapidly I could come to a sense of violation --- someone unwelcome had sneaked in and  left an illegitimate trace on the site. My heart goes out to all those who have had treasured domains hacked or otherwise taken away from them. 

Laurie Elks

(Laurie Elks): This is the second response to the series on consultation that Democratic Audit is editing on ourKingdom.  Laurie Elks is a former member of the Criminal Cases Review Commission and author of Righting Miscarriages of Justice?: Ten Years of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, about the work of the Commission.  Previous articles in this series include Taking Consultation Seriously by Andrew Blick and Emily Hamilton, and Nuclear Consultation: Public Trust in Government by Paul Dorfman.

The Quashing Convictions[1] consultation was issued by the Home Secretary, John Reid, in September 2006 as part of the government’s agenda to rebalance the criminal justice system to favour the rights of victims over suspects. The consultation averred that following the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 it had been too easy for the guilty to overturn convictions at appeal on the basis of legal technicalities.  
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Gerry Hassan and Anthony Barnett

In an extract from: 'Breaking Out of Britain's Neo-Liberal State' published as a Compass Thinkpiece today, and based on their original openDemocracy essay in OurKingdom, Gerry Hassan and Anthony Barnett identify seven key steps towards the renewal of British democracy.

1.  We need to identify “the official future” – the mantra of globalisation wherever it is – nationally, internationally, in the public and private realms, and critique it, defeat it and supplant it;

2. The world view of the bloviators – the Floridas, Gladwells and others  – who have offered themselves as voices and apologists for the winners and the global order, needs to be seen as part of the problem, along with the damage they have done and their role in legitimising the “new conservatism”;

3. Public discourse has to be reclaimed from the neo-liberals, whether first wave, second wave, instrumental, personal or unwittingly. Government and public agencies need to fundamentally rethink how they conceive and think of policy, the language and values in documents, and whose voice and interest such processes are serving;
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Statement by Israeli Women's Organizations

We women's organizations from a broad spectrum of political views demand an end to the bombing and other tools of death, and call for the immediate start of deliberations to talk peace and not make war. The dance of death and destruction must come to an end. We demand that war no longer be an option, nor violence a strategy,  nor killing an alternative. The society we want is one in which every individual can lead a life of security - personal, economic, and social.

It is clear that the highest price is paid by women and others from the periphery - geographic, economic, ethnic, social, and cultural - who now, as always, are excluded from the public eye and dominant discourse.

The time for women is now. We demand that words and actions be conducted in another language.

Ahoti- For Women in Israel
Anuar- Jewish and Arab Women Leadership
Artemis- Economic Society for Women
Aswat- Palestinian Gay Women

Bat Shalom

Coalition of Women for Peace

Economic Empowerment for Women

Feminancy: College for Women's Empowerment

Feminist Activist Group - Jerusalem

Feminist Activist Group - Tel Aviv

International Women's Commission: Israeli Branch

Isha L'Isha- Haifa Feminist Center

Itach: Women Lawyers for Social Justice

Kol Ha-Isha- Jerusalem Women's Center

Mahut Center- Information, Guidance and Employment for Women

Shin Movement- Equal Representation for Women

Supportive Community- Women's Business Development Center
TANDI - Movement of Democratic Women for Israel

Tmura: The Israeli Antidiscrimination Legal Center

University against Harassment - Tel Aviv

Women and their Bodies

Women's Parliament

Women's Spirit- Financial Independence for Women Victims of Violence

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Today's Daily Mail brings us Peter Oborne's take on the emerging theme of a government of national unity:

Of course, the Prime Minister does not envisage an alliance with David Cameron's Tories. However, he is seriously toying with the idea of bringing the Liberal Democrats into a possible coalition. Private discussions  -  all, of course, totally deniable  -  are taking place secretly.

Against this fascinating background, I can reveal that special favours are being offered to the Liberal Democrats. First, there are signs of a deal being thrashed out between Downing Street and the LibDems over the appointment of the next Commons Speaker.

Big Think

Baghdad’s infamous Green Zone quietly slipped into Iraqi hands on the first day of 2009. The US embassy is moving to its new fortifications nearby and the hallmarks of American culture that sustained American troops–from Starbucks to Pizza Hut–have been re-exported. But as the US military relinquished control of the huge swath of Euphrates River frontage they have occupied since the spring of 2003, questions remained over how Iraqis will govern from the new Green Zone. Though the national security situation has improved dramatically, and is now completely under an Iraqi mandate, some analysts say insurgents will surely test the zone’s new owners. Big Think looks back on the history of the American-controlled Green Zone with three items: an excellent critique of the zone from the counter-insurgency experts at Small Wars Journal last May; the International Republican Institute’s 46-page “Visitor’s Guide to Baghdad’s Green Zone” (removed from centcom website but available at Wired); and a vivid account of Baghdad’s chaos in 2006 by Time correspondent Aparisim Ghosh. With the occupation in the process of being dismantled, at least militarily, conflict experts can begin to wade through the sea of analyses--spurious and valid--that pave the way to the history textbooks. A good starting place might be the comments of Michael Walzer, Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies. He spoke to Big Think about applying the theory of a just war to the Iraq debacle.

Zoya Rouhana writes from Beirut:

Dear friends,

Women in the Arab countries have been desperately striving to achieve gender equality and overcome the results of hundreds of years of oppression. However, this struggle is rendered obsolete in the face of the escalating violence that some countries have been witnessing, particularly Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon.

Women's fight to achieve gender equality becomes futile when women's lives and the lives of their children and families are threatened, when their basic rights, the right to live, to be secure and to have access to the basic living needs, food, medication, and housing is violated.

It is very urgent for the global feminist movement which believes in eradicating all kinds of violence against women to take action and to exert pressure on all governments to force Israel to end the collective punishment, the massacres and the large scale violence and destruction that it is inflicting on the Palestinian population, especially in Gaza.

It is time for the human rights movement in general, and the women's movement in particular, to call for the immediate implementation of the UN resolutions related to finding a just and peaceful solution for the Palestinian people, especially those that call upon Israel to end its occupation of the Arab territories and give all the Palestinians their right in self-determination

Zoya Rouhana

Director, KAFA (enough) Violence & Exploitation

Beirut, Lebanon

Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): My good friend Tom Nairn is back from his regular sojourn in Melbourne but has come down with the flu, whose symptoms this winter seem to be particularly vicious and lasting. Gasping down the phone he promised to write a piece about what he thinks Brown will do next. He is convinced that he will seek to win power without a proper election, by creating a government of national unity. If you will excuse the pun, this will cash in on the crisis. The inclusion of Vince Cable seems to be critical to the success of such a master-stroke, to be orchestrated by Mandelson, aka "Bobby". I was meditating this scenario when, blow me down, Vince wrote his pitch for just such a stitch-up in the Mail on Sunday. After he attacked David Cameron by name for "moral indignation several years too late", but sent a signal by not criticising Gordon Brown. Read the rest of this post...

Lyndall Stein

I was on my way to an exhibition and the sales yesterday - seeing the headlines on a poster about demonstrators at the Israeli Embassy, I changed my plans.  Only a small but furious crowd , no one I knew, no banner or posters identifying who anyone was, all united  by our righteous anger at the cruel and barbaric bombing of Gaza.

It is a strange and lonely place, to be of Jewish origin in such a situation, thinking of friends and family living in Israel, who also question the hubris and violence of their government. Difficult  also when one of the young men started shouting ‘Nazis!’, but he stopped when I quietly suggested that it was not a good slogan.
It is not difficult to understand his visceral rage and youthful urge to hurl the worst of all insults, and not difficult to understand why the boy wearing a combat jacket was clutching a home made catapult,  after the arrests and assaults the day before, it seemed best to just tell him to put  it away and warn him of possible trouble ahead from the police.

The media were out in force, they focussed on the young and angry , we the elderly and middle aged had gathered by now - alongside the miracle of London’s magical mixture ,veiled, unveiled old and young punky and respectable , Islamic men in long robes and an elderly Jewish man in a tweed hat who spoke with passion of the special responsibility that Jews carry - not to be merely spectators to barbarism and his urgent need to come and protest, he had a warm exchange with a young man by his side explaining why it was the Israeli State that must be condemned not the Israeli people.

It was bitterly cold but as I turned to leave I saw the amazing veteran Tony Benn, a retired British MP, who passionately opposed the dreadful war in Iraq, and has become a beacon of progressive thinking in the UK, at least 25 years older than me out at an edgy demonstration, in the freezing cold, an inspiring model for all of us -young and old.

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): As a footnote to Neal Ascherson and John Horgan's excellent obituaries of Conor Cruise O'Brien, I thought I would post an extract from a document that I came across in the National Archives a while ago.

In April 1975, M. F. Daly of the British Embassy in Dublin wrote a letter to the Foreign Office entitled Conor Cruise O'Brien and Republicanism. It concerned an Irish Times article in which O'Brien argued that the attitudes of Ireland's Fianna Fail government at the outset of the Troubles in 1969 had paved the way for the emergence of the IRA:

Perhaps the most sensible comment of Dr O'Brien's article was made in a letter to the paper on 1 April which, while agreeing that Dr O'Brien had "brilliantly" analysed the way in which Fianna Fail had virtually cornered the Irish market in nationalism and used it to gain and maintain power, said that the tradition of a violent undemocratic republic had existed in Ireland long before Fianna Fail. The latter had embraced it, but at the same time had defused it, and that far from being responsible for the revival of such a tradition, Fianna Fail, had done much to tame the beast.However, like all tamers of wild animals the party was constantly in danger of being devoured by its charge.

openDemocracy

We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.

Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.

This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally.

Let's do so.

John Berger

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Frank Capra’s classic Hollywood movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, is going the art-house cinema rounds.  It is a gloriously schmaltzy movie in which George Bailey (James Stewart), a thoroughly decent man is brought so low by a malevolent small town capitalist that he contemplates a Christmas-time suicide.  However a portly guardian angel intervenes and shows him how badly Bedford Falls would have turned out without his good deeds. 

The cinemas are trumpeting James Stewart’s performance in what they describe as a “sentimental testament to homely small-town moral values”.  Sentimental it is, but I think its values are rather more universal.  The film belongs to 1946 and is in a sense a reflection on America’s experience of recession in the 1930s and the public values that imbued the New Deal era. Out of duty George Bailey has taken over a mutual building society that builds decent homes for local people who would otherwise have to rent the capitalist’s unfit housing.  So here are values of mutuality and social concern.  The portrait of the town bereft of Bailey’s good works is a garish neo-liberal nightmare in which everyday goodwill is extinguished in a society driven by greed and suspicion.  I don’t want to over-egg the movie’s commitment to anything more than entertainment, and public policy in the US has certainly turned decisively away from the film’s values, homely or universal.  But there are themes here for the UK as well as the US as we both enter a recession that is going severely to challenge our societies and what remains of our postwar values.

Big Think

A year after his first conversation with Big Think, Paul Krugman sat down with us again recently to look at the state of the US economy. Twelve months hence, things have not improved. Krugman described the economic fragility during his first conversation last December as a "near recession," an observation that is now a forgone conclusion. Krugman's sober critique of the market has won him wide respect among economic thinkers, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in October for his work dating back to the 90s. A congratulatory White House dinner followed during which Krugman said "everyone was on their best behavior." Krugman is famously critical of the Bush administration's economic policy and deregulation in general. The next administration is reportedly reaching out to Krugman for his macro-economic acumen, and there's even been speculation over Krugman is being tapped for a post under Obama, but, as Krugman put it to us, bureaucracy is not his strong suit. In a recent New York Times column, Krugman instructs Americans that the next bubble--housing, dot com or some other incarnation--is not coming anytime soon, and they should instead prepare for as much as a year of "economic hell." He struck a similar chord when he broke down depression economics in his second interview with us.

Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): In an uncharacteristically generous (mostly) response to Harold Pinter's death which attempts to make some necessary moral distinctions, Nick Cohen also writes this about opposing Saddam Hussein and the Iraq war.

I understood that he [Pinter] wanted the annihilator of the mountain people of Kurdistan to be left in power for good as well as bad reasons. I still could not and cannot understand, however, why he and all the liberals and leftists like him did not oppose America while supporting Kurd and Arab Iraqis who wanted something better than the Baathist gas canister or al-Qaida suicide bomb.

Most liberals and leftists did support the Kurds and Arab Iraqis. There was an ongoing debate about this in openDemocracy, for a start. Indeed, support for them led us to opposing the US invasion. It was a good judgement, not a moral betrayal. Cohen himself first opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and then savaged everyone who came out against the US invasion of Iraq as mindless anti-Americans. Today, supporters of the war who change their minds are regarded as wise while those who were wise are still tossed into a bucket with a casual dismissal. As John le Carré put it in his contribution to the oD debate at the time

Where’s the hurry? Iraq is a vile dictatorship, and Saddam is a monster who sits on the world’s second largest oil reserves. But there is ample time to consider how to unseat him before we plunge into this predatory and dishonest war. Leave the UN inspectors there. Convene Iraq’s neighbours. And consider for a moment where the will came from to make this war in the first place.

Arthur Aughey

Arthur Aughey (University of Ulster) reviews Irish Protestant Identities Edited by Mervyn Busteed, Frank Neal and Jonathan Tonge, Manchester University Press 2008 pp389 + xvii. In his careful response to the scholarly papers he concludes with a lesson for Gordon Brown that devolution, especially to Northern Ireland as it is now, has proundly altered what it means to be British - and that this can no longer be defined by the 'centre'. 

This book of twenty-five chapters is a selection of papers presented at a conference organised by the British Association for Irish Studies held at the University of Salford in September 2005. An additional commissioned chapter deals with the fortunes of the two major Unionist parties since the Belfast Agreement of 1998, in particular tracking the transition of the Democratic Unionists from opposition to the ‘Trimble-Adams Pact’ to miraculous support for a Robinson-McGuinness Executive. Appropriately, the book retains the diversity of the papers’ subject matter and, in keeping with recent academic convention, there is no attempt to identify either the ‘mind’ of Protestant Ireland or its ‘character’. It is not the singularity of tradition but the plurality of experience which the editors try to convey and they do so successfully. One of the merits of the book is that it deals with Protestantism in southern as well as Northern Ireland and also considers the impact of Protestant migration to North America and Great Britain, along with the influence of the Orange Order in Scotland and England. It cannot provide a complete picture, of course, but it does provide a more subtle and honest one. This is to be welcomed since Protestantism in Ireland and specifically in Northern Ireland has often been the subject of crude stereotyping. Irish Protestant Identities, along with John Bew’s new study, The Glory of Being Britons (Irish Academic Press 2008), will be an indispensable source of reference for anyone interested in the history, politics and cultures of Irish Protestantism.  
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Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I never knew Harold Pinter, but I met him. He was funny and disconcerting. The first  time was at his and Antonia Fraser's house in Campden Hill Square for a meeting of what was known as the June 20th group. This was a gathering of left literary intellectuals which began in 1988 as an attempt to put some backbone into the Labour Party as led by Neil Kinnock. It was hosted by Pinter and John Mortimer, the latter a true Labour man. I spoke to them about Charter 88 which Pinter had promptly signed but which John Mortimer refused to support. I became a regular attender of the group which was scorned by the media for its well-heeled committment to socialism and the underdog. But it had a serious intent of providing a more self-confident hinterland for Kinnock to draw upon. He declined this, to the lasting weakness of Labour, in my view (but that's another argument). There was a bite and irony in Pinter's observations except when it came to politics. I recall sitting next to him when he assurred me with his characteristic intensity that Thatcher and her work was "fascist". I listened politely but couldn't accept the description however odious her polices were. Later we invited him and Antonia over to our flat in Covent Garden. I mainly recall him sitting in the armchair and pronouncing, "this is a pad". It made me laugh then and still does.

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Gordon Brown may have rediscovered Keynes and his nerve, but the politics of his government remain rooted in what has always been old-fashioned as well as neo-liberal about New Labour.  There is a tendency in commentary to attribute this to Lord Mandelson’s re-birth; he may or may not be the Darth Vader of old – let’s wait and see –  and some have seen a turning towards what we can loosely call “the public”, but he clearly reinforces Brown’s own impatience with anything that stands in the way of “growth”.

There is also a pervasive sense that the government has lost the traditional values that Blair used always to assert remained at the heart of New Labour – by which I mean a sense of communion with “ordinary people”, and especially the working and workless poor.  Brown’s abolition of the 10p tax rate shook many people’s belief in his government’s commitment to social justice and it has clearly not been restored, despite his insistence that his bold economic response to recession is designed to protect ordinary people’s lives and jobs.   
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David Erdos

David Erdos (Oxford, CSLS): The Convention on Modern Liberty scheduled for next February 28  has the potential to be a defining moment for the UK.  The ad hoc team putting it together have assembled an exciting array of prominent figures allied to all the main political parties and to none.  More important, the Convention will examine many pressing issues facing us in the area of human rights and executive power. Nevertheless, I am troubled. Those creating the Convention seem to have conceptualized the issue of privacy/data protection so that only one aspect of it is given any emphasis.

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Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Two key figures from Barack Obama's election campaign visited London last week, offering advice for progressives about what they can learn from Obama's successful use of new media on the road to the US Presidency.

The prospect that Labour might replicate Obama's formula has been greeted with scepticism both by those, like Guido Fawkes, who have contributed to the right's perceived ascendancy in the British blogosphere, and those like Sunny Hundal, who are contesting that dominance.

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): It is very odd in a culture which hides behind pragmatism and custom actually to base an enterprise on principle, and especially if that enterprise is all about democracy.  Democracy in Britain is what governments, or civil servants, or even special advisers, think and do, a backdrop to an informal political system from which the media benefit so much that they do not question it.

It is being grounded in principle that singles Democratic Audit out from other organisations and academic institutions that analyse or campaign on democratic issues in the United Kingdom.  When we created Democratic Audit way back in the early 1990s, we decided that it was not good enough to add to the “whinging, whining and wanking” that Neil Kinnock then, and our political class always, resent about challenges to their hegemony.  We would subject the UK state to comprehensive analysis over time, based on the two basic principles of democracy and the mediating values that derive from those principles.
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Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Democratic Audit's new report on the Constitutional Renewal Bill, Beating the Retreat (previewed here by Stuart Weir) was the starting point for a Westminster seminar on Wednesday which brought together parliamentarians, academics and campaigners to consider the government's retreat from constitutional reform.

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Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): This is my full - and brief - entry in the Prospect roundup of people's"most under-rated" events  of the year  (from politics to books). It was touched up (and hardly for length reasons) or rather down and this weakened the point about democratic republicanism.

Underrated: One huge policy process and one book. 

Our old Empire state is being transformed into a database state through a process officially known as the Transformational Government programme which has never been debated in parliament or by a select committee. It trades on a modernisation of subjecthood that transforms traditional deference into electronic tagging.

How can this be stopped? David Marquand's history of Britain's democracy since 1918 is a wonderfully written account of how we got to this situation and points to the only way out: democratic republicanism. If you have heard little of either it goes to show how underrated they are.

Catherine Reilly

Catherine Reilly (Dublin, Metro Eireann): So the Lisbon Treaty will be put to the Irish public again, but are our faces bovvered?

In an everyday context, news that Ireland must vote again on a sweetened-up treaty would be a major talking point, with aggressively-contested radio phone-ins and copious media coverage, as we again prepared to bask in Europe’s spotlight.

But everyday contexts have  been made redundant. The economic situation is rapidly deteriorating and the Government is spooked. Lisbon talk is limp, and even the release of precise information on the potential detail of Lisbon Two may not enliven debates to expected levels.
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Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): This exchange in which Gordon Brown replies to Bernard Jenkin MP who was Shadow Defence Secretary at the time of the Iraq war shows how deep a problem we have. I saw it thanks to Tim Montgomerie running it in Conservative Home. His point is that Jenkins scored a home run on how British forces have been militarily defeated and are being replaced by the US. But i was struck by the first part of the answer:

The Prime Minister: "I agree very much with the first part of the hon. Gentleman’s remarks—that the removal of Saddam Hussein will be seen in history as a decisive act that made possible a democracy in Iraq...

With two-party collusion on the 'success' of the decision to invade and the Lib-Dems nervously not wanting to be positioned as unpatriotic, the political class (including most of the media who went along with it) will never admit that the unwashed who took to the streets were wiser and more far-sighted than the British elite. Of all the criminal and sleazy corruptions of British politics this was the greatest and it will continue to reverberate. The words of Blair's instruction to our Ambassador should be inscribed over the door of No 10, where they were spoken: "We want you to get up the arse of the White House, and stay there". And here is an Xmas competition: how long will it be before both Conservatives and Labour agree that "history" will see this as a "decisive act" that undermined traditional democracy in this country?

Tony Curzon Price

Denis Dutton at Arts & Letters Daily featured Theo Hobson's very interesting Milton piece and we got the spike in readership that comes from Denis' selection. I have written about the ALDaily effect, over here in relation to the unbundling of editorial roles that is happening all over publishing. If you go to the comments on the Milton piece, the 15 from Sunday are, I assume, from amongst the followers of Denis' recommendations. They are articulate, intelligent, opinionated---just the sorts of readers we love to have. Thanks, Denis!

Our own unbundling had a slight hic-up today. First, I spent a good part of last night restoring 2 new computers replacing the stolen ones. (Digression: my laptop had a Time Machine on an external hard-drive in the house. I got a total clone of the computer that was stolen in hours. Selina's had key files backed up on Mac's iDisk which was much less smooth restoring. Of course, iDisk is somewhat safer in that it is off-site. The lesson is that we should always be backing up both on and off-site, both complete mirrors and critical files).

Then there was a big ModernLiberty planning meeting -- exciting things happening there, more news soon. And finally our twice weekly physical group get-together... So it was great that the publishing team got  Sophie Roberts'  piece on the disappearances of civil society and opposition figures in Zimbabwe. She tells the history of Zimababwe's first post-colonial "dirty war" againstZapu-supporters and analyses disappearance as a tactic of putting people in a place that is beyond law. People disappear, and, this way, so too does accountability.

Tomorrow -- the traditionalism of the French Socialist party, three scenarios for Somalia ...

Tony Curzon Price

I added the Polymeme feed to the front page the other day. Polymeme was created by openDemocracy author Evgeny Morozov. It is Evgeny's own semi-automated news aggregator, and I had found myself selecting so many of Evgeny's stories in my "The World" entries that I eventually saw the web logic of this -- why not  spread the energy and just give Polymeme its own slot.

Evgeny has built a database of a huge number of sites and blogs which he has categorised into broad subject areas. Every day, his machine discovers which stories are being referred to by several of these sites. He then does a manual cull for the most interesting ones. The result is a very interesting and distinctively personal selection of news stories.