Afghanistan could become Obama’s Vietnam, if it isn’t already. Al Qaida, the Taleban and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalyse have never been in ruder health. By John J Kelly.

Drone bombing insurgents, much less civilians, will not win the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, which has now spread to Pakistan, enabling the possibility of a nuclear-resourced Taleban. Former Pakistani SIS head, Lt-Gen Hameed Gul has been allegedly blacklisted as terrorist himself by the UN for advocating dialogue with moderate elements of the Taleban and for stating the obvious. Gul was and is no angel. He masterminded US support for the Mujaheddin, who later became the Taleban, at a time when the US were primarily concerned with pissing off the Russians - but he is right to state that Afghans see any occupying force as a prime enemy, and thus that the US and Britain are as bad as the Russians in their eyes. Warlords expediently unite to repulse foreign occupiers. Invaders cannot and will not win a conventional war against guerillas in hostile terrain, fought against a backdrop of justifiable civilian outrage at ‘collateral damage,’ without huge attrition. Afghanistan could prove as costly to the US and its allies as it was to the end-of-empire Soviets. The only ‘winners’ are those who stand to gain from fanning the flames of Islamophobia and keeping the US committed to a bellicose policy.

Mission Accomplished. Democracy has triumphed. Mahdi Army rules OK.

Even if we acknowledge that US Middle East policy is modelled on the Keystone Cops, it is extraordinary that absolutely no lessons have been learned from history, or benchmarks taken from the Iraq farrago, where not only has the ’surge’ failed to establish peace or a democratic mandate - civilian casualties have largely returned to pre-surge levels - but the entire 8 year multi trillion dollar misadventure has left the country infinitely worse off whilst empowering clan-led militias. Some, such as the Mahdi Army, are bent on establishing a version of Shiite fundamentalism and general extortion along the way. Others are simply motivated by the opportunities of corruption on a grand scale in a failed state. Al Qaida, the Taleban and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalyse have never been in ruder health.

Afghanistan, arguably the epicentre of the original problem, has fallen off a cliff. Puppet President, Pashtun warlord Hameed Karzai, whose credentials stem largely from his Mujaheddin past and US links stemming from the anti-Soviet insurgency period, has a brother Ahmed Wali Karzai who allegedly controls the largest syndicate in a country which supplies 93% of the world’s heroin-grade opium - infinitely more damaging to the West than the export of Islamic fundamentalism. On his chaotic watch a violent variant of rule of law is enforced in Taleban-controlled districts and US bombs are directed at his enemies while corruption is endemic. According to the New York Times: “Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.” (Bribes Corrode Afghans’ Trust in Government, New York Times, 1/01/08).

Ashraf Ghani. All he is saying, is give peace a chance. And stop stealing from the people. And give the stage over to civil society, not war and criminality.

I’m no expert on Afghanistan, but I know a failing state, and I know a man who knows a lot about both. I have a high personal regard for Ashraf Ghani, Finance Minister of Afghanistan from 2001-4, founder of The Institute for State Effectiveness and co-author, with Clare Lockhart, of ‘Fixing Failed States. Dr Ghani, a previous candidate for the role of UN Secretary General is also a member of the UNDP Commission of the Legal Empowerment of the Poor. As Finance Minister he was widely credited with restoring the country’s pillaged treasury to some form of accountability before he fell out with Karzai. Though highly connected, he is anything but a warlord, which admittedly has a downside of reducing his chances of success unless he has strong international support (not based on military threats). He has also urged a pragmatic dialogue with moderate elements of the Taleban, and has been fiercely critical of the vast waste of aid money on consultants and NGOs, which has not endeared him to the Powers that Be. But he has everything to play for. Last November, before Dr Ghani entered the fray, a poll gave Karzai a 25% popularity rating. ‘Nobody’ with 22%, came second.

Transparency International rate the Karzai administration as the fifth most corrupt government in the world. Last year only 40 billion Afghanis (approximately USD 800 million), were reported as revenues. In March this year the Finance Ministy estimated that 2/3rd of the government’s annual revenues, amounting to USD 1.6 billion, were ‘lost’ to waste and corruption, indicating potential annual revenues of USD 2.4 billion USD. According to Ghani’s campaign team: “the Karzai government has repeatedly expressed its inability to increase the salaries of civil servants, teachers or address the needs of the disabled, widows, and other vulnerable segments of our society. Lack of financial resources and dependence on donors who are unwilling to support these expenditures has been used as an excuse.” Ghani’s economic platform is based upon the simple expedient of establishing fiscal propriety and using the $US 1.6 billion additional revenues currently lost through corruption and waste to provide salaries and services to the most vulnerable groups of Afghani society. The extremist Taleban elements, meanwhile, draw power from the fact that there is seemingly no alternative between fanatic relgious law upheld by voilence or corruption and criminality, again upheld by violence. Ghani represents a thinking middle path.

According to Dr Ghani: “Citizen awareness of the cost of corruption and mobilization against it has been critical to promoting good governance from the early 20th century United States to Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa. We must address corruption as citizens. When citizens can count the cost of corruption on their wellbeing, and the loss of opportunities for their children and grandchildren, then they can transform their individual frustrations into a collective force for change.”

Bombing wedding parties in the name of the war on terror, propping up drug lords and radicalising a ferociously independent population by settling an army of occupation among them has proved a recipe for failure and misery for the past 35 years or more, not to mention several centuries. Afghanistan could become Obama’s Vietnam, if it isn’t already. Powerful people in the US and elsewhere would be delighted for that to happen, the same people, dare I say it, who convinced Bush to focus his misguided efforts on Iraq. While it is highly unlikely that the Afghan elections in August will be fair or democratic, Ashraf Ghani represents a better than outside chance of establishing a civil society and saving the US and Britain from another humiliating misadventure in the neo-colonial Great Game, which we shouldn’t be playing in the first place, to the detriment of world peace and the enrichment of arms dealers, drug dealers and fundamentalists of all stripes. He deserves a fair go, and so does Afghanistan.

John J Kelly

Thus reader John Poole unearthed Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell’s speech upon dissolving the UK Parliament in 1653, which could be recycled as and when the current smelly rump parliament is dissolved - in a vat of Draino, perhaps?

“…It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money. . . . Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth? . . . . Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d; your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse the Augean Stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings, and which by God’s help and the strength He has given me, I now come to do. . . . I command ye, therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. You have sat here too long for the good you do. In the name of God, go!”

Oliver Cromwell’s speech of 1653, explains how and why England briefly officially rejected Parliamentary democracy and became a dictatorship. He awarded himself the title ‘Lord Protector.’ We currently have 7 unelected Lords in the UK Parliament itself, including ‘Lord’ Mandelson, representing himself, whose deputy is an unelected Prime Minister who believes he saved the world.

It used to be difficult to shut Tony Blair up, especially on the subject of Iraq. Remember his epic war speech to Parliament, when the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was repeated more than 15 times? Now he only speaks for $400,000 a pop to neocons or lectures the Pope on theology. He might yet have to do some serious unpaid explaining, maybe even from the dock, but the question is, how, when and where? Thus provides the answers. By John J Kelly.

Match that, Cameron. Gordon's got a hard hat and two pairs of brown trousers, more than the army had when they were sent into Basra.

In the past week the clueless yet relentlessly authoritarian UK government scaled new heights of ineptitude and plumbed new depths of contempt for public sensibilities. Announcing the long-awaited Iraq War enquiry on a timetable that would ensure its publication only after the next election is one thing. Appointing five government/Whitehall stooges to hold said enquiry, at least two of whom were responsible for the policy and strategy which led to Britain’s involvement in the war in the first place is another. Claiming on national radio, as did Blairite Foreign Secretary, ‘banana boy’ Miliband, that ‘every secret service in the world’ thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that ‘if you’re looking for a conspiracy, you won’t find one’ gives a further clue to the ‘outcome’ of the enquiry. Announcing that this epic search for truth would be held in secret on the twisted logic that this would ensure that those questioned would feel more inclined to tell the truth on the precondition that nobody would be held accountable sums up the depths of degradation into which the current government has sunk our ‘democratic’ system. Had enough yet? Well think again, there’s more.

The familiar excuse that the enquiry needed to be held in camera ‘in the interests of national security’ was a spin too far for the men in black glasses and the men in nylon khaki. It is an open secret that the spooks felt hard done by at being blamed for the amateurish and deeply mendacious ‘dodgy dossier,’ lifted from a PhD student’s C grade essay and allegedly sexed up by Alastair Campbell, which Blair brandished as his ultimate casus belli. (Had they been involved, the document would at least have been spellchecked).

Every security service in the world thought this was Yellow Cake Uranium when in fact it was a deadly weapon of my image destruction.

Though Austin Powers (aka John Scarlett) was the source of the Yellow Cake Nigerian uranium nonsense which Bush used as part of his ultimate casus belli, this appears to have been a combination of wishful thinking and routine incompetence, rather than politically-motivated mischief. ‘In the interests of national security,’ we might never know whether the sources and judgment of the UK security services were corrupted (think Mossad) and its advice overridden (think Blair/Campbell) in the haste to rush to war and support the carpet bombing of tens of thousands of civilians and cause an insurgency which took the death toll to more than 100,000, not to mention the turkey shoot of over 22,000 Iraqi soldiers in the first glorious ‘victory week’ of an engagement which has lasted far longer than WW2 and Vietnam.

The British army, justifiably angry at having held their tongues after holding Basra for five years with cheap equipment, clown cars, mail order uniforms and armour that wouldn’t pass muster at a girl guide’s paintball party, then ridiculed by the US for leaving the place in a mess - ie. with lots of Iraqis left alive - also declared themselves off side. With (Sir) John Chilcot, a dab hand with the Persil, cf the Butler Report, at the helm, Professor (Sir) Lawrence Freedman (co-author of Blair’s 1999 Chicago ‘Humanitarian Intervention‘ speech and alleged architect of the government strategy on engagement in Iraq) riding shotgun and three other sockpuppets to make up the numbers, there was little chance of a fair hearing. Faced by a mutiny led by General (Sir) Richard Dannatt and dark, professionally deceitful Oxbridge twats turning against their lords and masters, the government executed a partial U-Turn (which could yet become a full one).

How, or why, did they ever think they could get away with another cover-up? God told them to do it. In today’s Observer, it is alleged - and predictably denied by this Pinocchio government - that Brown was asked by Tony Blair (through Mandelson, one presumes) to hold the enquiry in secret, for fear that he (Blair) would be tried in the court of public opinion. Well, yes he would, should and well might be, except that a more appropriate and less biased place might be the International Criminal Court at the Hague, where the tribunal would not be stacked with Blairite cronies.

Meanwhile, Thus has thought long and hard as to how to drag the truth of the situation out of Blair and his fellow alleged war criminals. Since it was also revealed this week, in the first of a series of leaks designed to soften the impact if and when they are later confirmed, that while Blair had not authorised the use of torture by UK forces or agencies, he had not stood in the way of other countries who chose to use it, we have our answer! Hold the enquiry in Morocco. Transport can be arranged. After a professional application of waterboarding, a spot of Binham Mohamed on the Old Man, electric shock therapy and constant repetitive exposure to loud music - may we suggest ‘Things Can only Get Better? (Thus passim) - we won’t need any high fallutin’ experts to tell us who did what and when. After all, as any Blairite will tell you, torture works. It formed the basis of much of the intelligence gathering behind the War on Terror, after all.

Not long ago, in a country far away, the world held its breath as a tightly-fought election drew to its climax. The popular democratic candidate appeared to have won, but at the last minute, 25 key votes from the electoral college of a state run by the candidate’s brother assured victory for the son of the president before the last one. Victory was achieved by deliberately disenfranchising the voting rights of a poor ethnic minority predisposed to vote for the democratic party and by claiming that the ballot papers of others were spoiled by a technical anomaly. The bad guy, a fundamentalist puppet of amoral neo-conservatives with a history of warmongering and a vested interest in weapons of mass destruction, took over the country.

The suffering population of another country on another continent was bombed into the stone age in pursuit of its oil, under the pretext of freeing its people and establishing democracy. Torture and illegal detention became the norm, as a ‘war on terror’ was pursued to the detriment of the lives and liberties of large parts of the planet, justified by a systematic disregard of international law. Breathtaking abuses of trust, enacted in the name of liberalisation, destabilised and pillaged the global financial system. Armed and supported by that great nation its Middle East client state annexed territories, built concentration camps, killed thousands of civilians, invaded a neighbouring sovereign state causing billions of dollars of damage and ensured the election of a fellow neocon hawk by murdering over 2300 men, women and children, fanning the flames of despair, hatred and fundamentalist terror. Eight years later, with thousands of its own soldiers dead and wounded, fighting another unwinnable war of aggression with a busted economy and its international reputation in tatters, it was time for another election. This time the good guy won. Or did he?

I’m not talking about Iran.

John J Kelly

Alistair Darling has demanded further £15bn efficiency savings through more IT-led front-office/back-office public-service designs. In the accompanying Treasury report, these totals are justified by ‘proxies, assumptions and estimates’, not evidence. Indeed, the evidence points firmly the other way; the further industrialisation of public services will inevitably lead to higher costs and worse services. By John Seddon. A version of this article appears in Public Finance, June 2009.

The folly of industrialisation began in the private sector. Advances in telephony led companies to centralise telephone work in call centres, taking advantage of lower labour costs; first building call centres in low-wage areas of the UK and latterly outsourcing them to lower-cost economies. The result, most often, was an unanticipated rise in the volume of calls. Instead of seeing this as a signal, managers responded by adding more resources and further specialising work (hence the growth in IVR – ‘press one for this and two for that’). Similarly, the allure of further ‘back-office’ economies – optimising use of resources by de-coupling the customer from the service itself – led them to create IT-dominated designs which sorted and routed work through processes dominated by service-levels and standard times. Again, the volume of work grew. Again the signal was ignored and similar tactics, further specialisation and outsourcing obviated any understanding of the real problem.

Service industrialisation represents the pursuit of lower costs through economies of scale. Yet higher costs ensue. The most evident cause is ‘failure demand’ – demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer, who then has to call again, creating extra work. In industrialised financial services organisations 40 to 60% of all work coming in may be failure demand. In police forces and local authorities it is usually higher.

Failure demand is an easy concept to understand – if we delivered services that worked, we would have less demand and thus more capacity – but to the wrong mind-set it becomes a ‘lever’ to reduce costs. Hence NI 14: ‘avoidable contact’, guidance for which obliges local authorities to measure and report it for publication in a national league table. This is management by fear, which encourages managers to engage their ingenuity in under-reporting; no one is engaged in solving the problem.

 Removing failure demand requires understanding and eliminating its causes. And these lie in industrialisation. Managing workers’ activity, standardising work, increasing specialisation and outsourcing on the basis of activity costs are the primary causes. Advice UK has documented the disastrous effects of these designs in the public sector, where the failure of DWP and HMRC to provide primary service throws high levels of knock-on failure demand into local authorities, RSLs, advice agencies, legal services and the courts. It is a lesson on the folly of managing costs.

It has been impossible to obtain evidence of the impact of back-office initiatives in local authorities, usually on grounds of commercial confidentiality. Yet we see regular controversy in the media, and informal sources provide evidence of heavy investment - £6m in one county - with no return. Claims for improvement usually cite lower transaction costs, which may be true, but are irrelevant, because the true costs of service are in end-to-end flow, not transactions.

Private-sector organisations that have learned this lesson design their services against customer demand. They ‘smarten up’ rather than ‘dumb down‘ putting workers in control of a system designed to serve customers and requiring managers to work on the system. This means getting rid of all arbitrary measures (targets and budget-based measures) and instead deriving measures from the purpose of the service from the customers’ point of view. The consequences are large improvements in productivity (400% is not unusual), massive improvements in service and transformation of employee morale.

Local authorities that have pioneered this approach in the public sector (for example Stroud) achieve improvements that make Gershon targets look derisory. Ironically, Stroud appeared in an Audit Commission report promoting greater use of back offices (Stroud has none): the Commission, like the authors of the Treasury report, won’t let evidence get in the way of their narrative and ideology.

The Conservative Party promises to sweep away the bureaucracy of public-sector control. It is an urgent necessity. The current push for further industrialisation should be halted and reviews of the current debacles should provide knowledge to prevent further failure. Stopping doing the wrong thing will save a fortune, but we also need policies that encourage people to do the right thing. That in turn will require that responsibility for performance is given to local leaders. Free from the need to comply they will have the opportunity to innovate.

John Seddon is author of: “Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: the failure of the reform regime and a manifesto for a better way”, Triarchy Press, 2008. www.thesystemsthinkingreview.co.uk

Tony says Gordon must go and I agree, says fat Charlie

Last Sunday BBC political commentator Andrew Marr asked Gordon Brown whether he would consider stepping down as PM if it were the majority view of the Labour Party that it would be in its interests for him to do so. Characteristically, Brown replied “No.” He had a job to do, cleaning up Parliament and saving the economy. Today, his options are somewhat more limited. Twice-disgraced and tainted by the expenses scandal, ‘Lord’ Mandelson is Deputy Prime Minister in all but title. His job is to save what’s left of the Blair Reich. Olympics Minister (yes, that’s her job), the stupid but thick-skinned and loyal Blairite Tessa Jowell has rejoined the cabinet, in another move designed to show that there is no room for corruption in the Brown government.

In a last throw of the dice, Vinny Jones might gain a peerage and join the Cabinet

Tessa was an enthusiastic proponent of the murky and barmy Blair supercasino scheme. Her ‘estranged’ husband, David Mills, will serve 4.5 years in an Italian gaol (see comment below) for abetting Blair’s friend, Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, in corruptly abstracting and offshoring Fininvest assets. She apparently didn’t notice that he paid off their £340,000 mortgage with a bribe, claiming she was too busy to notice. Mr Mills, a friend of Formula One supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, also allegedly facilitated the notorious £1 million loan to New Labour early in the Blair First Reich, which saw tobacco advertising on racing cars exempted from the ban on sports promotion. Who will be next to rejoin this cabinet of fools and fouls - Vinny Jones, perhaps?

This morning it was ‘revealed’ in the Murdoch press that Peter Mandelson had exchanged emails questioning Brown’s leadership credentials with none other than ‘psycho’ Derek Draper (Thus passim). Ahead of grisly European Parliament election results, Charlie Falconer, Blair’s ex-flatmate, lawyer, ex-Lord Chancellor and New Labour Illuminatus, pronounced that it might be in the best interests of the party for Gordon to vacate 10 Downing St. Tessa Jowell followed through with the observation that Gordon loved the party so much that he would always step down rather than damage its prospects. Characteristically, Brown nixed this twitter with a defiant speech to activists repeating that he he had no intention of stepping down. So there you have it. Open war. Brown’s staunch allies (Mr and Mrs Balls, Fagin McDarling and the cleaning lady) are menaced by Blair’s Orcs, who have risen from the dead and are now pissing out from inside the big tent.

Brown will step down. It is even conceivable that Mandelson will try to take the reins ‘on a temporary basis’ while a leadership squabble takes place (Thus passim). Never mind the polls, the bookies are offering a measly 6/5 on Brown leaving office. A general election is inevitable, which Thus predicts the Tories will win with a majority of between 240 and 280 seats. Labour will possibly fall to third place behind the Lib Dems. Having lost control of all the UK county councils - while Tory Boris Johnson rules the GLC -  a blue Reich will descend, too comprehensive by half for democracy or even for sound decision-taking by the Tories - look what happened after the Labour landslide.

That’s all she wrote, except to repeat that in order to avoid the Blair/Brown problem, Cameron needs to ditch George Osborne if he expects to have any chance of tackling the inherited economic nightmare. Ken Clarke would make a good war Chancellor. That much said, today’s ‘email evidence’ confirms that hapless toff Osborne told the truth when he claimed that Mandelson, then an EU Commissioner, had ‘poured poison into his ear’ about Gordon Brown aboard Deripaska’s yacht last year, where he and Mandy were guests at James Murdoch’s birthday bash. The Murdoch press chose to spin against Osborne on that occasion. Today they put the boot into Brown. Time to write the memoirs, Gordon. Make them brief. Nobody will read them.

John J Kelly

Women are window dressing in the Brown government, as this picture of Peter Mandelson in weekend attire clearly shows

After 13 months of manufacturing decline and with unemployment heading towards 3 million,  the unelected British PM has promoted the equally unelected Business Secretary, ‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson, to First Secretary of State in a clear signal that his ‘democratic renewal’ measures mean exactly the opposite. Mandelson, who is really calling the shots at the fag end of this ruptured government, wanted the job of Foreign Secretary but David Miliband, who led a failed coup against Brown last autumn, refused to move. Meanwhile, fingers-in-the till Chancellor, Alastair Darling remains in his post because Brown’s choice of replacement, smeary Ed Balls, would have catalysed a full scale revolt. Blairites James Purnell and ‘Europe’ Minister Caroline Flint resigned in high dudgeon, the latter claiming that women were seen as ‘window dressing’ in the Brown cabinet. Ms Flint had posed as a vamp in a red dress in the (left-leaning) Observer Magazine fashion magazine the previous month. Both she and Purnell have serious questions to answer about the creative use of their members’ allowances.

As for women as window dressing - Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary also ‘resigned’ on Thursday. We first highlighted her part in the arrest of Conservative MP Damian Green (Thus passim) as a cover-up for her own abuse of second home allowances several months ago (Thus passim). In the hail of muck and bullets, the passing of Tony McNulty, Employment and Welfare minister, went almost unnoticed. The surveillance society and anti-transparency cheerleader McNulty, who allegedly gouged over £60,000 by claiming mortgage interest relief on his dad’s house (Thus passim) also played a leading role in the diversionary firestorm which saw disgraced Speaker of the House Michael Martin authorise the attack on Damian Green (for uncovering widespread manipulation of immigration statistics) all those months ago.

Back to window dressing. We’ve got an economy to fix. Who better to do it than Brown’s close personal friend ‘You’re fired’ Alan Sugar? He can break the news to the millions who will lose their jobs, perhaps even to Gordon himself. Promoting him to the House of Lords and parachuting him into the job of helping Mandelson sell what’s left of the business sector into the hands of Billy Big Time ‘oligarchs’ who turn out to be short of readies when the bill arrives displays perfect synergy. Both are preening fantasists. Sugar’s manufacturing legacy is terrible: Amstrad PCs, clock radios, rebadged video recorders and plastic phones that didn’t work, mostly manufactured in Asian sweatshops and assembled by monkeys in Neasden. Amstrad shares recorded a record loss in the 1987 stock market crash, when people suddenly woke up to the fact that they were unlikely to make money on products which would represent poor value if you found them in a Christmas cracker. Sugar’s resurgence came as a result of hosting a ‘reality’ TV gameshow, ‘The Apprentice’ where he breaks every rule of employment law and encourages barrow boy antics as a way of doing business. It is difficult to project the true horror of this man, so for the benefit of non-UK readers, here is an insight to his management strategy and business ethics, presented in cruel and unusual fashion by CassetteBoy. This is New Labour’s role model of a business leader. There is nothing more to add.

Except that Gordon got one thing right. Sugar is five times as popular as he is. CassetteBoy vs the Bloody Apprentice has so far had 550,000 YouTube viewers. The equally compelling Gordon Brown has only attracted 116,000 viewers. Joking aside, the country needs a General Election, not because Brown is a monster (he is) but because New Labour and its infighting, self-aggrandising, authoritarian second-raters have impaired democracy beyond recognition. It won’t get one without a fight for precisely that reason.

Former Labour Party Leader Michael Foot's heart was in the right place. Unfortunately, the rest of him was assembled at random

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is the most unpopular leader of the Labour Party ever, a singular achievement given the horrorbags who preceded him. His 21% approval rating beats the previous liability incarnate, Michael Foot, who scored 24% in 1982. Foot was a principled Fabian, idealist socialist toff in the Orwell mould but his donkey jacket, mad stare, scary hair and CND badges earned him the nickname ‘Worzel Gummidge’ and made him unelectable in the Brave New World of image and soundbite. Brown, a charisma-free zone, has not acquired a popular soubriquet, though Private Eye style him as ‘Supreme Leader’ in a nod to the stagnation, authoritarianism, denial and corruption of the Brezhnev era, which preceded the collapse of the Soviet system.

Little man on a big stage. 'Good Evening Sheffield. I'm a tosser. Alright?'

Foot’s Old Labour image was the catalyst for ‘reforms’ which saw him replaced in 1983 by ‘Welsh Windbag’ Neil Kinnock, who never used one word where 20 would do. Kinnock, a former Tribune left winger, redhaired, freckly, pointy-featured, with a deep grating voice and tweedy demeanour, projected an uneasy persona which vacillated between pint-drinking man of the Welsh valleys and hopelessly aspirational metrocentric hipster. The latter was the invention of his Director of Communications, Lord of the Flies, Peter Mandelson, who rebranded Labour as a European-style social democrat party, ironic, since Kinnock and Labour had hitherto violently opposed European integration. Trounced twice by Thatcher, Kinnock was nevertheless odds-on to defeat ‘Grey Man’ John Major in 1992, who, (like Brown) was an unelected stand-in following Thatcher’s ousting. However, he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with the toe-curlingly hubristic 1992 ‘Good Evening Sheffield’ rally and speech. This inauspicious beginning was nevertheless the New Labour Nuremberg. Unprecedented spin, media manipulation, luvvies for Labour, pop anthems and feelgood bourgeois materialism would follow in an epidemic suspension of disbelief. Blair would realise the illuminati dream of a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie fuelled by media manipulation, sustained by fear and fuelled by financial chimaera.

The Blair witch project. Now he's trying to become President of Europe, helped by his lovely friends Berlusconi and Sarkozy

But not for a couple of years. Sensible John Smith replaced Kinnock, who fled to Europe on the EU gravy train with his wife, Glenys and is now a ‘Baron’ for services to irrelevancy. Smith, although worryingly Scottish and a lawyer - a harbinger of the plague of Jocks to come - was a grounded, humorous, intelligent leader, who was not physically repugnant. Unfortunately he died of a heart attack in 1994, leaving the door open to the dreaded double act of Brown and Blair, stage-managed by Mandelson and his Iago, Alastair Campbell. Blair served ten years, set the tone for institutional kleptocracy by enriching himself in the housing boom and memoirs market, sucked up to George Bush then skipped town leaving a legacy of three wars (two of which are illegal) untramelled immigration, Islamophobia, madcap expansion of public spending with little to show apart from the Millennium Dome, crippling tuition fees for students, an undeserving, tax-avoiding oligarch class, widened gap between rich and poor, the worst recession for sixty years, national debt at its highest ever levels, ubiquitous state surveillance, abuse of police powers for political ends, a cowed media, widespread corruption and unemployment set to exceed 3 million. Brown was his ‘prudent’ Chancellor. When he assumed the mantle of Prime Minister, he declined to legitimise the post with an election. 

It was obvious after the first term that the New Labour project was a get rich quick scheme for a grotesque politburo of social-climbing chancers and mountebanks. Had the Tories put up a half-decent opposition as opposed to fielding gargoyles such as William Hague, Michael Howard and Iain Duncan-Smith, the free ride might have ended earlier. We would not have avoided the global recession, but we might have halved our exposure to its worst effects. Corruption amongst MPs would not have been any less, but the democratic deficit might have been less pronounced. In truth, it’s hard to tell, since both parties now occupy the soggy centre and their policies are largely indistinguishable. 

Now, as New Labour faces the final curtain, Gordon Brown, saviour of the wurreld and its banks and a major player on the global stage (Widow Twanky?) may be forced out of office by cohorts of his own larcenous claque. Alan Johnson, Health Secretary, is tipped to take over as leader, presumably on the basis that it would be a waste of time to bother to find anyone good ahead of the election, which Labour will lose by a country mile. Labour are thus proposing to run the country with yet another unelected Prime Minister, completing the shredding of any semblance of democratic principle and practice. When Brown goes, which will be very soon, there should be a General Election, and whoever gets in should enact a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Further urgent reform is needed to reverse the undemocratic ‘reforms’ to the House of Lords, which have replaced a crowd of unelected hereditary peers and a few life peers, many of whom were geriatric, drunkards, mad or a combination thereof, and thus as difficult to control as a herd of cats, with a stacked deck of unelected politically-appointed gurning lickspittles. Then there is the small matter of getting the country out of the mire and back to work. For this to happen, Cameron will need to find a proper Chancellor as opposed to George Osborne, and some policies, as opposed to soundbites. He’ll be wearing the Brown trousers, god help him, an odorous proposition. Serves him right for being a Conservative, like most of New Labour.

John J Kelly

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them . . . Stick to Facts, sir!’  Gradgrind, in Hard Times, by Charles Dickens.

We have never had greater access to facts, yet according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, only 34% of the worldwide public trust news media, a figure down from 46% last year. The percentage falls to 28% in the UK, which boasts the world’s the highest per capita spend on media, yet is outside the top 20 in terms of trust in its information providers. These facts - or, more accurately, statistics - presented at the recent Editorial Intelligence /Reuters Institute/Edelman  panel discussion, merit an article in themselves (on its way). We are certainly living in sceptical times, but, more worryingly, there appears to be a direct and accelerating correlation between the amount of information thrown at our citizens and their capacity to believe it. The blatant professional manipulation which has become a hallmark of politics and, to a marked degree, of business reporting, has corroded our faith in the media itself.

Lies are arguably less dangerous than the manipulation of empirical truth. Facts, and notoriously, statistics, can be partially and selectively presented and juxtaposed to persuasively justify unreasonable scenarios, especially if ‘emotional intelligence’ is set aside in the grim pursuit of ‘empirical reason’ - more or less Dickens’ core argument against Utilitarianism. It is no coincidence that John Stuart Mill is a Blairite poster boy in an age and a country where facts are ostensibly in oversupply yet trust in government, and especially the media, has rarely, if ever been lower. Thus said, I love fact and favour empiricism over hypothesis, but believe that the currency of fact itself has been debased. The most telling facts have a thusness which does not require deep analysis. You can take them or leave them, but if you allow them to speak for themselves, they resonate of their own accord. Here’s a random selection from last week’s UK media, mostly aggregated by Ten, one of my favourite websites. Make up your own mind as to what they imply:

• A third of all UK MPs employ members of their close family, some of whom receive as much as £40,000 a year of taxpayers money. BBC

• 69% of voters think Gordon Brown has handled the MP’s expenses scandal badly, 23% think he has handled it well; 55% credit David Cameron with handling the issue well and 35% badly. (ICM/Guardian poll)

• Seven Speakers of the House of Commons were beheaded prior to 1560. (Guardian)

• More than 50 employees of the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) earn more than the UK Prime Minister. (Thus)

• Elizabeth 1 had a plaque in her Whitehall Palace bedchamber that read: The fall of Rome was due to three things: self-interest, hidden hatreds and youthful council. (TEN)

• Confidence among business professionals rose to -28.2 at the end of March, from -45.3 at the end of the previous quarter. (Institute of Chartered Accountants)

• UK home repossessions in Q1 rose by 50% on the equivalent period in 2008. (Council of Mortgage Lenders)

• The number of women giving birth over the age of 40 has more than doubled to 26,419 in the past 10 years; greater equality means more women choose to spend their 20s and 30s pursuing careers while higher mortgages mean others have put off having a family. (Mail)

• Pringles have been designated a crisp, despite Proctor and Gamble, its owners, arguing in court that it is only 42% potato - it now owes HMRC £100m in back taxes. (FT)

• 275 million people are now using Facebook - it’s growing at a rate of 500,000 per day - which accounts for 4.1 per cent of the world’s online time. (T3)

• The CEO of BT may receive a £680,000 bonus despite the firm reporting a full-year loss of £134m, announcing 15,000 job cuts and a 50% cut in its dividend. (Ten)

Thanks again to Ten. 

John J Kelly

This article, originally published on ProPublica, deals with the Obama volte-face on holding prisoners without charge in Guantanamo Bay. It’s a long piece, but not as long as the sentences already served and, by all accounts, about to be extended, to several people who have been denied the right to a fair trial and held in breach of international law, whatever their alleged offences. Thus doesn’t agree with the premise of detention without trial, but, contrary to received opinion, President Obama does, according to author Chisun Lee, who argues that the issue revolves around how to legitimise the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without the inconvenience of proving their guilt or complicity in conspiracy to attack the United States, in a continuation of Bush/Cheney policies and the ‘War on Terror’ to which Obama declared his opposition on inauguration.  

President Barack Obama’s support for preventively detaining terrorism suspects undoubtedly surprised some of his longtime backers. Holding prisoners at Guantanamo, without the certainty of trial or release, was a defining feature of the previous administration’s counterterrorism policy – and some of its fiercest critics expected Obama to change the policies. But the possibility had been percolating for months. With his pledge in January to close the Guantanamo prison within a year, Obama set off a fierce, mostly under-the-radar debate among legal experts about whether it will be possible to meet the goal he announced yesterday: to build “a legitimate legal framework” for imprisoning terrorism suspects indefinitely.

The question affects more than Guantanamo. The fates of 169 detainees there remain undecided, according to Obama’s numbers yesterday, and administration officials have suggested that they will be unable to prosecute as many as 100. But the legal status of thousands more held by the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas also hangs in limbo, and any detention policy will have ongoing effects as the fight against al-Qaida continues. Here are some of the key issues facing the architects of a new preventive detention system, or, as it’s sometimes called, a “national security court”:

President Obama said yesterday that some suspected terrorists “cannot be prosecuted.” How could that be – haven’t there been plenty of previous cases involving terrorism?

Yes, there have been. A significant number of people have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses in federal trials, including several accused of acting on behalf of al-Qaida. From September 2001 to May of last year, the government won 145 convictions against terrorism suspects, according to an analysis by former federal prosecutors for the progressive legal nonprofit, Human Rights First. That’s not to say it’s easy. The criminal justice system was built to safeguard the rights of defendants. Prosecutors can’t win a case without enough admissible evidence. Sometimes, as in this week’s arrest of four suspects in New York, investigators have tape-recordings of the alleged illegal activity. But more often than not, they depend on witnesses. They can’t use testimony obtained through abusive interrogations. And intelligence agencies are typically loath to collaborate with a public prosecution that puts their sources on a witness stand.

Recent court filings by the Obama administration in cases challenging the legality of Guantanamo detentions offer a glimpse of possible hurdles to prosecuting an accused terrorist. Criminal defendants have the right to see information in government files that could help show their innocence, so prosecutors have a duty to search for all plausibly relevant documents to turn over. Officials said in the filings that evidence about the Guantanamo detainees tops 1.8 million pages, total. All of those would need to be searched for exculpatory information. A test query for several detainees yielded between several hundreds and tens of thousands of “hits” each.

Isn’t detention without trial illegal on its face?

Not necessarily. The traditional laws of war permit preventive detention of both enemy soldiers and hostile civilians until the end of the fight. Standards like the Geneva Conventions require humane treatment of these detainees. Holding aggressors without any intention of trying them is a time-honored right of fighting nations. Why? In wartime, combatants are supposed to fight – so, fighting itself is not a crime. Fighting dirty – for instance, purposefully killing innocent civilians – is prosecutable as a war crime. But even then, there’s no right to a speedy trial, and the captor nation can take its time deciding when or even whether to press charges. It has long been accepted that a nation at war has the right to protect itself by keeping enemies from returning to the battlefield, without having to invest resources or risk public release of military secrets in full-blown trials.

Every trial risks the possibility that a defendant could be acquitted or receive a moderate sentence. Under the laws of war, governments don’t need to take that risk.The possibility that convicted terrorists could win relatively quick release isn’t just theoretical. Of the three military commission convictions so far at Guantanamo, two resulted in sentences of, essentially, time served. One of those convicted was Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, for providing material support to al-Qaida. He was sentenced last year to five-and-a-half years in prison – six months more than time served – and now lives free in Yemen, in a case where the government had sought life imprisonment. A detention system premised on the laws of war would permit Obama to keep his promise of yesterday: “We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security.”

So is the United States at war with terrorists?

A trickier question than it might seem. Terrorists don’t wear uniforms or rush to a battlefield. The front, many argue, could be anywhere – a hotel room in Albania or an alley in Manila. For its part, al-Qaida declared war on the United States in 1998, shortly before its operatives blew up American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Obama has expressed no skepticism on this point, saying in his speech: “We are indeed at war with al-Qaida and its affiliates.” He was able to say so because Congress, which has the constitutional power to declare war, issued the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force after the 9/11 attacks.

That means some terrorists can be held indefinitely as prisoners of war, according to David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor long associated with civil liberties causes. Cole recently stunned the progressive legal community by supporting preventive detention for some detainees in a Boston Review essay. Cole explained in an interview, “You might not have evidence that would satisfy the criminal-conviction standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but perhaps you have very good evidence that a person was a fighter for the Taliban. Should we just release him to go back to the caves and start shooting at U.S. soldiers, just because we don’t have sufficient proof to convict him of a crime?”

Retired U.S. Army Major General John Altenburg, who until resigning in November 2006 had the task of deciding which Guantanamo detainees would be slated for military commission trials, said the Bush administration’s “arrogance and naiveté” about public perception had tarnished the otherwise valid notion of detaining terrorism suspects under a wartime rationale. He said in an interview, “What the previous administration did was allow critics to define the terms of the debate to be the terms of domestic criminal law. So the public is reacting with, ‘What about their lawyer? What about their right to a speedy trial?’”

In fact, Altenburg said, the al-Qaida detainees are not entitled to a speedy trial any more than German prisoners of war in World War II were.

If wartime detention is OK, and the U.S. is at war with terrorists, then why does the nation need a new detention law?

This appears to be as much a question of political support as one of legal reasoning. Obama said yesterday that he’d seek a law spelling out procedures for preventative detention for reasons of political legitimacy. He said he wanted to avoid his predecessor’s “ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism.” Earlier this week, top Obama aides invited the most ardent opponents of preventive detention, including the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, to a two-and-a-half-hour meeting. Although administration officials have not publicly discussed that session, some guests were startled by the argument that the president already has sufficient authority to preventively detain terrorism suspects. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said afterward on a conference call with reporters that there was a “surprising misapprehension about what the laws of war permit.”

The legal authority that courts have recognized for the current military detentions of “enemy combatants” is the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which doesn’t even mention detentions. If captives are moved to U.S. soil, they’ll likely be able to invoke greater legal protections than they’ve got now, according to a January analysis by Congressional Research Service lawyers. Possibly, some will even be able to seek political asylum under immigration laws. Long-term preventive detention would therefore require a new law and possibly amendments to others.

Part of the legal puzzle has to do with trying to apply traditional laws of war to the “novel” type of conflict that is terrorism, says Harvey Rishikof, professor of law and national security studies at the National War College. It’s just harder to tell who’s a combatant – and therefore detainable as a POW – and who’s a criminal suspect due for trial, because terrorists are “stateless actors” eschewing uniforms and avoiding battlefields. Attorney General Eric Holder hinted at the complexity of the “battlefield” question as it applies to terrorist combatants at his confirmation hearing. “There are physical battlefields, certainly, in Afghanistan,” he said. “But there are battlefields, potentially, you know, in our nation. There are cyber battlefields.” He went on, “There’s a battlefield, if you want to call it that, with regard to the hearts and minds of the people in the Islamic world.”

Major General Altenburg said, “I personally think the battlefield has to be beyond the ground of an Afghanistan, because al-Qaida is everywhere. Now, there’s no [court] holding anywhere that says that is the law of war, because again, this is unprecedented.”

How would preventive detention of terrorism suspects work?

The closest the public has gotten to a legislative blueprint for preventive detention of terrorism suspects appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain. They called for a “uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge,” who would decide the challenges to the legality of detention that the Supreme Court has said are a detainee’s right, and “an annual interagency review” to determine whether a detainee continues to threaten national security and should be held. The senators are expected to be influential voices as any new policy develops.

But before looking at the procedures, policymakers will have to decide who will face detention. The Bush administration initially claimed that it could indefinitely detain anyone the executive branch deemed an “enemy combatant.” The courts trimmed back that sweeping view, saying that the authority was shared with Congress and subject to judicial review. The question is especially acute for terrorism detention, says Harvard law professor and former Bush official Jack Goldsmith, who with Neal Katyal – then a Georgetown law professor, now Obama’s principal deputy solicitor general – was one of the earliest proponents of a new legal regime for terrorism suspects. Because this enemy doesn’t wear a uniform and, to the contrary, takes pains to blend with civilians, identifying candidates for military detention is harder. But since the end of this conflict may similarly be hard to know, there’s a risk that wrong decisions could harm innocent people for a very long time, Goldsmith warns.

One way to get lawmakers to seek utmost accuracy in any detention system, said Goldsmith at a recent Brookings Institution forum, would be to apply it to U.S. citizens as well. “The threat of terrorism can come as easily from a U.S. citizen,” he said. He noted, though, that the idea “is controversial and probably a nonstarter.” It could also be struck down by the Supreme Court, where there are some strong views that citizenship comes with special constitutional protections.

Cole, the Georgetown law professor, stressed that only detainees fitting a classic war-captive profile – members of an organization against whom Congress has authorized the use of military force, who deliberately act or plan harm in order to advance the military goals of the enemy – should be considered for preventive detention. Other terrorists, he said, “should be dealt with through the criminal law.” Broadening the field, he said, would be “a first step on a slippery slope of a broader use of preventive detention for other crimes.”

Some opponents of preventive detention say it’s Orwellian that such a system would imprison a person based on future dangerousness. But, says Cole, even if “we can’t predict the future,” it is possible to measure whether there is “a substantial risk that someone will engage in future dangerous conduct. Waiting for a wrong is not adequate.” Such judgments are made all the time, he said, in civil commitment proceedings, bail hearings and immigration decisions. He said that the key was to focus the inquiry narrowly, not on suspects’ character or beliefs, but on “whether they pose a risk of returning to the battle.”

Retired U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, who as a military lawyer represented Hamdan in his commission trial, worries that a preventive detention option will allow inaccurate judgments of dangerousness. He said that, after hearing all the evidence, “military [jurors] didn’t view Mr. Hamdan as a substantial war criminal.” But someone like Hamdan would be a prime candidate for indefinite detention over prosecution, he said: “The indicia of his criminality were extremely low, but his proximity to bin Laden was extremely high. The adversary system helped show how Hamdan was not dangerous – the question is, whether a national security court would allow that.”

Crucial questions will have to be answered about what burden of proof the government would have to meet to put someone in preventive detention. In civil trials, the prevailing party has to win by a preponderance of the evidence – meaning it’s more likely than not that the party is right. The criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is much higher. Cole advocates that preventive detention be permitted if the government shows “clear and convincing evidence” that the detainee fits certain dangerousness criteria – the current standard for deciding whether an ordinary criminal suspect can be released on bail.

Proponents agree the government should have to periodically renew its case for detaining a person. While wartime detention permits imprisonment until the end of hostilities, no one assumes that it will be clear when hostilities with al-Qaida and its affiliates have ended. Holder said at his confirmation hearing that he could see such reviews happening annually.

Any new system will also have to build in rights for people facing detention. Should they have lawyers of their own choosing? Can hearsay evidence – the testimony of people who don’t have to show up in court and answer for themselves – be accepted against them, as it is under certain exceptions in ordinary court proceedings? Should detention hearings be open or secret? Federal courts are permitted to seal documents or close sessions in cases involving classified or other sensitive information. The presumption, however, is that the courts are open. Goldsmith said preventive detention proceedings should also be presumed public, calling it “essential” to establishing legitimacy here and abroad.

Finally, there is the question of who will decide. The Supreme Court has said that a neutral decision-maker is required to ensure due process for detainees. One of many criticisms of Guantanamo’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals – instituted by the Bush administration and still in effect today – is that the decision-makers are subordinates of the very military commanders who claim the detainees should be held as enemy combatants. Most current proposals for a new detention system say independent federal judges should make the final call.

Perversely, Web 2.0 has become synonymous with an American mythology of freedom. But information technology works best in small well-organised political units with high levels of social protection. So there is every reason to believe that the net works best with another notion of freedom - the security of knowing that failure will not have catastrophic consequences. The risk-taking and entrepreneurial culture of the wild web frontier is more likely to occur where there is a social safety net to catch you if you fall. By Daniel Taghioff

Watch Jeff Jarvis talking to a room full of Guardian Journalists. You will see a curious thing (in part 2). Here is a guy standing in supposedly the UK’s, if not the world’s, leading left-of-centre newspaper, talking about ‘flexibilising journalism in the new link economy.’  In plain English, he is advocating that journalists - including Guardian hacks - will have to work with absolutely no safety net, no pension, no social security, nothing in this newest world order. They all sit and nod sagely. This may be because it all seems so inevitable, a future which flows naturally from the nature of the technology. Does it have to be that way?

Four out of five countries with the most personal computers per-capita are small, with strong social safety nets. The fifth is the US, the most technologically advanced nation on earth, and the clear exception that proves the rule. Whilst America is built around what Isiah Berlin might call “negative liberty” that is freedom from constraint and interference (though not from health insurance companies it seems) most other civilised countries also put an emphasis on the sorts of positive freedoms that arise from the collective, or in other words the ways in which a supportive state makes it possible for its citizens to realise their potential. And this is not all about the bend-over-and-hold-your-cheeks politics of flexibility.

Turning to entrepreneurialism  - would you rather risk all to start a new business in a place like the US where if you lose everything you may end up, literally, with nothing, no health-care, no decent schooling for your kids and so on? Or would you choose a society where, if all else fails, the state (or strong social networks)  will take care of you? This is precisely the kind of free-thinking and risk-taking that the internet is supposed to foster, but do we want innovation to derive from desperation, as in the India of Adiga’s White Tiger, or be nurtured by a confidence in the system? The list of countries with the most new businesses per capita is full of small to medium sized countries with strong social safety nets, or small Asian countries with very high levels of social cohesion.

So should we expect technology, on its own, to make the world a better place - a web-2-opia? It is clear that the foundations of freedom are not manufactured by businesses, but created by well-run, uncorrupt states. Neither the UK nor the US, whose anglo-saxon definitions of freedom are singularly defined in economic terms, are notable examples. So the future of the web, like the future of religion, the future of finance and the future of the environment, is increasingly unlikely to conform to the American dream.

But for how long? On 19 May, the Tory motion to freeze any increase in the BBC licence fee was defeated by 334 to 150 votes in the House of Commons. The compulsory tax of £11.62 per month on every household with a TV or radio, enforced by highly democratic ‘we know where you live’ threats to prosecute evaders, will increase to £11.88 per month. Hardly a sum to break the bank, and still good value, compared to a Sky subscription, we might say. The Tories had argued that in a deflationary economy, any increase was unwarranted and that the BBC was a bloated, bureaucracy-heavy, anti-democratic termite hill built on a dungheap of overpaid, over-rated elitist smartarses who deserved to be gassed like badgers.

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham tells BBC's Jonathan Dimbleby that government approval of the licence fee increase in an election year was entirely coincidental.

OK, they didn’t quite phrase it like that, but the backstory is that the BBC’s ‘liberal’ culture has traditionally manifested itself in bias against the Conservatives. Ironically, When New Labour swept to power, empowered by the support of the Murdoch media empire, it set about taking control of state communications in classic Stalinist fashion, starting with an exponential expansion in the number of government-salaried PR flaks. Led by the boorish Alastair Campbell, they intimidated, bullied and bored the BBC into a parody of independent broadcasting. Early into Labour’s Reich, many BBC apparatchiks felt about as comfortable as Irish kids in a Christian Brothers care home. When BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan claimed in 2003 that the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ Dossier, the pretext for the UK to go to war in Iraq, was ’sexed up’ by Campbell, the government went to war with the BBC. Gilligan’s source, UN weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, was hounded to suicide and Campbell made it his declared intention to ‘fuck’ Gilligan and the BBC. The resulting ’sexed-down’ Hutton enquiry exonerated the government and led to the resignation of Gilligan, BBC Director General Greg Dyke and Chairman Gavyn Davies. New Labour poodle Mark Thompson replaced Dyke. The BBC, or at least any pretence to independence, was indeed fucked. 

This man, the highest paid recipient of state benefits, received£6 million, equivalent to half the BBC film budget, in 2008. Life is beautiful.

Unless you were in management. Dyke’s predecessor, Blairite John (now Baron) Birt, hobbled the corporation with wasteful and demoralising layers of neo-Soviet bureaucracy, schizophrenically linked to ’streamlining’ attempts to create a neo-commercial ‘internal market’ culture. Instead of making programmes, producers and editors held the coats of outside contractors who charged ‘market rates’ - cost plus a profit - often to do exactly the same thing as inhouse staff. In a bizarre conceit of ‘competitive pricing,’ the BBC started paying market-leading fees to random ‘talent’ like Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton and their production companies to make formula chat shows, on air up to five nights a week. Professional interrogators such as Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman now command over £1 million per year to broadcast polemic to minority audiences. Everyone, apart from the audiences, has benefited immensely.

In a mirror image of commercial media, the pyramid scheme was sustained by ballooning growth in executive salaries and infrastructure. As commercial stations succumbed to market forces as viewing figures and advertising revenues declined despite an economic boom, the BBC, with £3.2 billion guaranteed revenues from a captive taxpaying audience, has expanded more or less any way it chose. 

The BBC never tires of proclaiming itself as the envy of the world. To the degree that it maintains an undemocratic right to broadcast, based upon compulsory subscription, this may be true, especially if you are a journalist in the free market. It broadcasts some excellent, worthy factual and documentary content, consistently good comedy shows and panel games and has a great website. But does it efficiently deliver value and relevancy? Morale, especially amongst its creative staff is generally low. And, dare I say it - of course I will - its news output is often partial, patchy, and hopelessly unrepresentative. This morning on the posh channel, Radio 4, we heard another non-story about MPs’ salaries, a small piece about Congress resistance to Obama’s Climate Change Initiatives and Guantanamo travails, a longer piece about Madeleine McCann, an even longer piece about the alleged demise of the dormouse from Britain’s countryside and the earth-shattering news that a couple of WH Auden’s embarrassing odes to Soviet Communism, used as subtitles for an obscure propaganda film, lost for 50 years in the archives of the British Film Institute, have been uncovered - and found to be crap. Mostly twaddle, not news. Commercial channels may be no better, but they rely on subscription revenues and advertising, not state coercion, for their right to exist. Their audiences vote with their wallets. When the Tories return to power, a Great Terror will descend upon this monument to Birt/Blair/Brown Stalinism. The chatterati will wring their hands, but the proles will hardly notice. Telly is telly, especially when it becomes digital wallpaper. It doesn’t have to be that way.  

John J Kelly

This morning The Telegraph reported that Conservative MP Sir Peter Viggers would stand down at the next election, at the request of David Cameron, having claimed over £30,000 in gardening-related expenses, including £1600.00 for a floating duck house. Some wags wondered whether it fell under the MPs’ second home category. Another Tory grandee, Michael Fallon, MP, overclaimed £8300.00 in mortgage repayments. Financial News pointed out that both, as members of the Treasury Select Committee, have been fierce in their criticism of the lack of governance, excessive salaries and expenses of executives of failed UK banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, Northern Rock and the financial sector in general. More pertinent, the Treasury Select Committee, a cross-party group, is tasked to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of HM Treasury, with all of its agencies and associated bodies, including HM Revenue and Customs, the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the Royal Mint. 

The good news is that so far only two of its 15 members have been found to have only a sketchy knowledge of accounting and principles of sound governance as regards the use of taxpayers’ money, so we should all feel safe that our watchdogs are beyond reproach. Now, back to Tony McNulty, Minister for Welfare and Employment, (who voted strongly against a transparent parliament) and Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who votes against transparency of any sort. These staunch allies of Gordon were in the frame long before the general mayhem erupted. Why has Brown not acted in the new spirit of hang-em-high and why have we heard nothing about the domestic finances of Mr and Mrs. Balls? I leave it to you to join up the dots.

John J Kelly

While the stench of corruption dissipates, like the fear of swine flu, because we’re all bored now and the Tories are just as culpable, there is a serious danger that Brown and his larcenous mates will get away with it. This vile jelly must be nailed to the wall. Let’s have an election - or a riot - maybe both?

Has prolonged exposure to the George Bush approach to the democratic process affected his rational cortex, or is the UK Prime Minister completely hatstand?

Any hopes of reform of the British Houses of Parliament under the glassy stare of Gordon Brown were dashed yesterday with his schizophrenic rebuff to the Opposition leader’s call for a General Election. The unrepentant Labour leader said that the government was too busy addressing the crisis in the economy and the MPs’ expenses scandal to hold an election, and that he didn’t want to see the Tories bringing in public spending cuts. I’m no shrink, but there is more than a hint of psychosis here. Brown’s policies exacerbated the crisis in the economy, largely through massive public sector overspending. At least three of his Cabinet Ministers - Blears, McNulty and Smith  - have patently ‘made mistakes’ on a serious scale with their expenses. McNulty, whose department deals with benefit fraud, may well have misappropriated £60,000 all within the rules, of course. (Thus passim). None have been disciplined. Several more Labour grandees, including former Prime Minister Blair, Jeff Hoon, Alan Milburn and various backbenchers, have defrauded the taxpayer to a greater or lesser extent, whether or not it was ‘within the rules.’

The Speaker of the House, the loathsome Labour-inclined Stalinist, Michael Martin, tried to use the police to intimidate The Telegraph and stop further revelations (Thus passim). He was deposed, under pressure from Tory Doug Carswell, Nick Clegg, Leader of the Lib Dems and others. Few detractors were Labour (pace Kate Hoey). In fact, he was warmly applauded from the Labour benches when he made his unapologetic announcement of resignation, no doubt helped by a chat fron Obergruppenführer Brown.  Though the Speaker’s role is supposed to be independent, another New Labour innovation has been to decimate that illusion. (For our foreign readers, this may sound tedious - it is - but this guy was only the second person to be forced from the office, technically the second highest in the land, in over 300 years). This constitutional crisis, and the most widespread outbreak of sleaze since the Rotten Boroughs, happened under Labour, led by an unelected Prime Minister. In the ‘reformed’ House of Lords - now stacked with mostly undeserving unelected representatives, this time chosen by Labour rather than birthright - two Labour peers, Taylor and Truscott, were suspended yesterday for offering to take cash bribes (Thus passim).

If there were an election next week, despite the despicable behaviour of certain Tories with regard to expenses (confirming that the epithet ‘The Stupid Party’ still applies in some cases) polls indicate that Labour would face a wipeout. According to the British Polling Index, support for Labour has fallen to its lowest level since polls began in 1943. 23% of voters support Labour – compared with 45% for the Tories. 17% support the Lib Dems. In a general election, this would translate into a majority of 220 for David Cameron, beating Tony Blair’s 1997 victory by 41 seats.

The country needs an election. Labour delusionally think the populace will quickly forget about the small matter of corruption in high office, the manipulation of the police and security services to political ends, the fawning obeisance to George W Bush which caused so much tragedy and mayhem and the legacy of the largest national debt of all time. The danger is that we’re tired of hearing about MPs’ expenses, but it should be noted that Brown has effectively done nothing about it outside soundbites, and what he has done has been in the wake of Tory initiatives. On their performance in opposition and the evidence (or lack of it) of their economic policies as presented to date (George Osborne is not good with numbers), the Tories don’t deserve to win a huge majority, but they will. This in itself is bad for whatever democracy we have left. But Labour sure as hell deserve to be consigned to oblivion for the atrocities they have perpetrated. It’s also entirely possible that Gordon is a nutter. On these grounds and because I can’t wait for the Tories to get in so that I can revert to type and start kicking them, I commend David Cameron’s petition for a General Election. It will cheer us up no end to see the Browns moving house. No doubt somebody else will pay for it.

John J Kelly

Hold the front page - on second thoughts, don’t bother. There won’t be one to hold much longer. That bloody web thingy has eaten our journalists. Everything we hold dear - the right to be told what to think by poker-arsed blowhards in the pay of Illuminati kingmakers, fed and watered by PR lizards in the pay of big business - has been stolen by . . . . Market Forces.

60 million oiky bloggers, ranting on about whatever takes their fancy are about as welcome in the Press Club as crowd surfers at Glyndebourne. Very few, if any, are paid. Yet if only friends and family sneak a glance, they command a daily audience of 1 billion, dwarfing conventional media. Their crazed jibber-jabber, plus the content which, lemming-like, paid-for news periodicals put up for free on their own websites, is aggregated and distributed free by Google, consequentially the world’s most profitable advertising medium. Like medieval scribes after Gutenberg invented the printing press, professional hacks face a long period of silent contemplation unless someone works out a way to ‘monetise’ online news and comment. 

The chatterati have belatedly awoken to the enemy at the gates, and have realised that in as little as five years their weekends will be ruined. No more vapid travel and lifestyle sections, ‘how to spend it’ supplements, random ‘careers’ articles scarcely serving as a pretext for pages filled with public sector non-jobs and fantasy financial planning advice pages doing the same for the benefit of kleptocratic investment funds. What will they carry under their arms to that charming sidewalk cafe to sit in half-rimmed glasses eating croissants avec du buerre, assuming Left Bank insouciance? It’s just not the same in an internet cafe - terrorist types in plywood cubicles and no coffee, much less macchiato. At a pinch they could carry Airbook Macs to Starbucks, but that would risk being mistaken for geeks. Some will have to let the butler go. Have you tried ironing a laptop? 

Unless we act now, this poor man could go broke

But there are serious consequences to the decline in the economics of generating ’serious’ news. A Senate Committee on Capitol Hill on May 8 heard David Simon, creator of The Wire, the chatterati’s favourite cop series, intone that ‘citizen journalists’ were overwhelmingly parasites, not creators, of news and opinion, with neither method, respect for fact nor investigative rigour. If newshounds are no longer trained, fed and watered by oligarchs or P+G advertising budgets there will be no more brave men, women and unpaid interns striding through the jungles of Cambodia or Baltimore with cameras slung round their necks (or surveillance equipment) sniffing out wrongdoing or writing travel features. With no news, parasite bloggers will have nothing to rant about, the argument goes. Well, enough already with the Bernstein and Woodward. We all know that without the Washington Post, there would have been no Watergate enquiry. We also know that if nobody pays Dave Bloke of the paparazzi we won’t see another snatch shot of Britney in the shower. Without Professor Brainiac and the WHO we will all be dead before we know that 500,000 of us should be dead by now of Swine Flu. The media is itself parasitical. Now there are ticks on the ticks.

Reuters Institute of Journalism have published a report called ‘What’s Happening to our News?’ which you can download here, the subject of an important and pivotal Editorial Intelligence debate in London last night. You can download a podcast here and make your own mind up, which, incidentally, demonstrates why the web enriches, rather than restricts, the impartial and free flow of information, opinion and debate. My name is John. I am a blogger. Get with the programme, saddos.

John J Kelly