'Occult' themes are central to much popular entertainment - from the back story of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and comic book adaptations such as Hellboy through to the Goth sub-culture and the imagery in pop videos, largely harmless and fun.

But behind the stylistic use of such material to express a dash of the controlled forbidden in the search for entertainment lies a more serious revival of intellectual interest in the non-rational, the 'hidden' and the liminal and in imagination and subjectivity as guides to life.

Much of this is playful. Some of it has been rediscovered through the workings of the new technologies (an old theme of ours). It has developed, as esoteric studies, into respectable academic communities in Exeter and in the Netherlands.

Why The Occult Now?

This rediscovery of what previous generations would find laughable or even dangerous and demonic needs some consideration as a cultural phenomenon. The subject is far too big for a single posting but some commentary may be useful.

The first observation is that it is an attempt to re-instil some semblance of meaning in the wake of the philosophical destruction of nearly all forms of traditional essentialism and as a means of dealing with the challenge of nihilism in relativism and post-modernism.

The second observation is that it appears to be emerging as a form of psychology. An individual can construct an identity, or perhaps makes more coherent their multiple identities, by creating a bespoke essentialism suitable for themselves existentially. It also has the advantage of not requiring the expense of a therapist or the authority of a priest in times of trouble.

In the past, there were formal structures of learning that built up a religious or even esoteric ideology into which one was apprenticed (much as the great religions do today within stable family and community structures).

Today, the psychological or subjective truth (in the eyes of a good proportion of humanity) that there is actually something ineffable out there requires individuals to make choices themselves about how to respond to that alternative 'reality'.

A science of non-science (or non-sense as the determined rearguard of the Enlightenment and probably Professor Dawkins would have it) has had to emerge as an exploration of 'that of which nothing may be said' (to paraphrase Wittgenstein).

It is required because many people cannot find value in taking the nihilistic or materialistic paths pointed out by any cold and calculated assessment of our position in the world [Heidegger's 'dasein'].

If we do not start out with conventional faith or are constitutionally disinterested in the big questions, then we are soon faced with that 'abyss' first drawn to our attention by Kierkegaard, knowing that one is alone in marching through the wood to the final clearing of death [Heidegger. again]. 

Best not to think on this or to make the thinking one does work for one's survival and pleasure in the world. Best, above all, not to take it for granted that there is no meaning and create one's own meaning through the exploration of what is before us ...

The sense of something 'hidden' behind the veil (the real sense of 'occult') is no more than a rejection of a nihilism that states that there is (not may be) nothing behind that veil - or that whatever it is behind that veil can be understood wholly in terms of a leap of faith into some grand narrative dictated solely by the community at large. 

The consequence is a culture of questing and search that pefectly fits our existentialist times and which fills a gap for many left behind by mechanistic, rationalist and materialist world-views and by the inadequacy of faith-based alternatives.

The New Religions

I am making this more intellectual than it is. The new non-rationalism is not interested in understanding the phenomenon so much as existing within it. 

And for every intense searcher after deeper truths, there are hundreds who just emotionally or playfully or religiously grab hold of the 'memes' of the occult side and enter into the new religions that exist half-way between intellectual occultism and older faith-based cultures.

These new faiths are growing quite fast amongst teenagers and socially marginalised groups but also amongst some solid stable ordinary folk who find they say something important about how life might be lived. 

We must not overplay their size or importance but the fear of ridicule and a certain paranoia about public reaction has meant that the extent of formal or informal esoteric and neo-pagan belief in Western society is probably significantly underestimated. People are still reluctant to 'come out' about an often misunderstood set of views about the world.

One starting point for anyone who might share this interest is Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999). It cannot be recommended enough.

A surprising result of the book - which made it clear that claims of an ancient origin to the new religions (with the exception of induction by consent into traditional shamanism) were just so much bunkum - is the degree to which Wiccans in particular have taken Hutton to their heart. 

The 'newness' of these faiths, including the consciously reconstructed Heathenism of Asatruar, is fully accepted as a fact in terms of form and origin in order to preserve a 'timeless' content in terms of belief.  

Compare the perceptual shift from a scientific world view which had resulted in part from rational debate on the origins of God's Word in the Bible. The debate on 'truth' undermined traditional Christian faith and created the cuddly toothless Anglicanism of today. 

Neo-pagans simply say that the origins of their belief system are no less true for having been created (in one case) out of the fertile imagination of a pensioned civil servant. It would be like a Christian saying that he accepts a claim that Jesus' death was faked but that it does not matter because the message is true. This is faith existentially chosen because it represents a deeper inner truth. Tom Cruise might defend his beliefs in similar terms.

For example, Wiccan and pagan forum members on the internet will often be highly critical of attempts to over-estimate the deaths in the 'burning times' (the European witch hunts), of the unwarranted feminist claims of historians like Gimbutas and, above all, of the ridiculous claims of continuity between modern reconstructions and the ancient religions from which they have been reconstructed. 

This maturity about facts - far from the caricature of outsiders - positions these religions as intimately linked to modernity. They look less and less like reversions to the traditional as time and study progresses. 

Even their interest in folk tradition centres on their being grounded in the contemporary community as local healers or as 'earth magicians', although these claims may eventually be legislated out of existence by severely materialist legislators worried about fraudulent claims on an unsuspecting public.

This flexibility of practice is in marked contrast to what happens when authority gets its grubby little paws on paganism to bend it to its own purpose. The fate of Shinto under the Meiji restoration is an object lesson in cynical inauthenticity for the purpose of nation-building with tragic consequences.

The Cultural Avant-Garde

Another contribution in the Hutton tradition of critical analysis of belief - Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Esotericism by Hugh Urban of Ohio State University (University of California Press, 2006) is also worth referencing here. 

Urban takes the key points in the history of 'sex magick' (not nearly as scandalous today as the nomenclature implies) as separate and successive components of alternative cultural practice. He demonstrates how what was highly transgressive at each stage, fully in defiance of conventional mores, eventually became pulled into the prurient and commercialised mainstream. 

A culture of individual resistance to community culture came to shadow each stage of the development of consumer capitalism. With no intention to do so on either side, radical individual liberation and the market converged, becoming the Western society that we live in today. This is, of course, my over simplification - read Urban's book. 

But the seven case-types he introduces: the sexual magic of the mixed race American Paschley  Randolph in the Post-Bellum era; the discovery of Tantra; the influence of Crowley; the Nietzchean impulse of Julius Evola; the arrival of Wiccan ideas and its links to feminism; the Satanic 'christian heresy' of La Vey; Chaos Magic with its shattering of all points of reference: all these lead (in Urban's analysis) to the 'magical logic of late capitalism'.

From this perspective, we must be entering the 'next stage' and the next stage may be the re-sacralisation and distancing of sexuality in sheer exhaustion at its omnipresence visually as a commercial tool.

But what next politically, if anything - with all barriers down and apparently nowhere further to go. Any belief, any practice seems to be permitted. 

The Politics of Non-Rationalism

An odd book, from 'Jonathan Black', the nom de plume of the head of a Random House imprint, gives a sense of some of the change taking place at the macro-cultural level. 

The Secret History of the World [Quercus, 2007] could be read as a cynical attempt to capture interest in the occult, as an occult attempt to re-introduce the 'Hidden Masters' to the wider public, as a 'sinister' ideological project to undermine the Enlightenment, as playfulness, as an attempt to rehabilitate imagination and subjectivity as equal to rational thought, as an experiment in creating a 'grand narrative' for the esoteric or as genuine attempt to create an esoteric morality based on 'art' (pp 380-1) - or all or part or something else.

The book claims to tell the history of the world from a non-rational perspective based on the esoteric tradition. To any academic historian or scientist, it is absurd from beginning to end but Black cleverly ensures that we understand that he is not making the same 'truth-claims' as these rational experts. His 'truth-claims' are imaginative but no less 'truth-claims'.

'Jonathan Black' appears traditional and conservative to the point of the dark side - his assessment of the French Revolution is negative, straight out of conspiracy theorist Abbe Barruel, he accepts the story of the American Empire as being Masonic in inspiration and he sees the Illuminati as a real plot, leading to the Terror and much else besides.

Yet Hugh Urban, on the other hand, points in the opposite direction - that each stage of the rediscovery of the 'occult' has resulted in increasing radical individualism and liberalism.  How can conservative imaginative traditionalism and radical libertarianism and tolerance be squared? 

Both interpretations could have in common an implicit critique of the collectivist and of the intrusion of the esoteric into political manipulation. While not identical, both interpretations seem to share an 'attitude' that is critical of systems and elites in both the material and 'spiritual' worlds that fail to deliver results specific to their sphere and are supportive of systems and elites that do.

The logic of this is that Governments that govern well, regardless of ideology, and who leave the spiritual world alone are 'good'. 

So, we have an essential pragmatism that dislikes grand narratives and ideology and, ironically, reflects Christ's dictum about rendering unto Caesar. It is a position that separates faith and state and is essentially conservative. A good King is better than a corrupt Republic.

However, the denial of the grand narrative (despite Black's attempt to create one) in matters of the spirit and the primacy of personal choice and free association, tolerance for all paths (including entrepreneurial and sexual) and determination on none suggests a radical libertarian perspective in favour of the individual.

Good governance without ideology and respect for the individual sounds remarkably like the social conservatism espoused by David Cameron and, though there is no suggestion of the British Tory Party as an occult organisation alongside the Illuminati and the Templars, there is a convergence between philosophical scepticism as final fruit of the post-modern revolution and the less-ambitious pragmatic 'Burkean' conservatism of the contemporary Conservative Party.

Why Are The Old Guard So Scared?

It is no secret that Cameron has had to ride rough-shod over his authoritarian Right to get to his current position. If Brown's Government had not gone into melt-down in the early Autumn, it is arguable that he might have been facing some much more serious challenges from the Right.

As it is, Cameron's social conservatism and the rise of non-rationalist thinking are also consonant with other cultural changes encouraged by the new technologies and the instinctively sceptical and pragmatic attitudes of the educated elements in the under-35 generations.

This seems to be a zeitgeist thing and we are moving far beyond our original curiosity about esoteric thinking to seeing it as a symptom of a whole series of converging developments that favour social conservatism at the expense of the psychological rigidities of centre-left communitarianism and the Tory Right.

Authoritarian personalities are anxious. This is not good, they say. The British military is worried, no kidding!  But their analysis is the opposite of ours and comes from within a state system that is worried because it is simply no longer fit for purpose.  They say ...

"An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

The relativism and pragmatism that unnerves them will lead, they think, to a demand for externally imposed certainties. In their dreams! 

This relativism and pragmatism is likely to result in quite the opposite - a demand for a framework of good governance by all means but also a complete abandonment of any attempt to tell the people what to do and what to believe so long as they obey a law that is minded to liberal values.

Collectivist, faith-based and fascist or authoritarian reactions to liberalism and attempts to reverse the trend are likely (especially on the back of the breakdown in the community that has resulted from state failure) but they will have few resources to reverse the 'hegemony' of a culture of libertarianism.

It is almost as if the military are willing order to return and, fearing a British Mussolini [Nick Griffin] or Stalin [Comrade Brown, perhaps], want us all to accept their order instead. Well, British intelligence has not had the best of records and we see no reason to accept this analysis either. The high point of an attempt at statist authoritarian rule ended when John Reid gave up the Home Office.

Good Times Ahead?

In fact, Authority may be very worried about its loss of authority but there is no reason why we should be. So long as authority does not intefere, a degree of self-correction within society is already taking place. 

We have been hitting a cultural, economic and social low point across the West and the existing structures are about to be politically punished. But this is a correction and not a collapse.

Now that the dangerous neo-conservative revolution (with its implicit offer of republican order and vertu) has collapsed, there is probably no turning back from this prevailing ideology of personal liberation within a framework of good governance. 

We have been careful not to call these new trends irrational. They should more properly seen as offering alternative rationalities. Even non-rational as a term is unfair. Non-rational thinking is perfectly reasonable [i.e. rational] once you accept the subjective assumptions underpinning it. But non-rational seems to me to be a reasonable concession to the wider world.

In this context, the threat to liberty now comes not from the Right but from radical liberation activists with their own grand narratives (notably the black-consciousness, gay and feminist elements). They feel that the tide is turning from single identity politics towards a society based on fluid and multiple identities. And this offers a profound threat to their political position.

Old Enlightenment liberals can only accept one set of assumptions based on universal rights and fixed identities and resent the idea that there are many alternaive ways of constructing a world view. And so, paradoxically, it is elements within the Enlightenment Left that are buttressing the New Right in a context of an alleged clash of cultures. 

One final thought. Urban in his Preface refers to the academic prejudice and fear surounding his taking up (even in an academic and objective way) the subject of 'sex magick' as a topic for serious study. He points out the odd combination in our culture of prurience and sniggering and yet the massive availability of sexual imagery in almost every context. 

We might call Western culture adolescent if it was not an insult to teenagers. If the new religions unravel attitudes more suitable to a peasant society before birth control and bring maturity to our civilisation, then this may be no bad thing. It would not be the first time (we think of Jesus) that the margins of an empire have proved its salvation.

www.tppr.co.uk

[Some of this material appeared in an April 2007 posting on Gaia.com: New Religions And Our Civilisation]

It is always a privilege to be invited to the inner circles of a political organisation and watch them debate their future but it also implies a responsibility not to reveal their secrets.

This weekend, I attended the Strategy Meeting of Compass, the left-wing grouping most associated publicly with the Labour Deputy Leadership campaign of Jon Cruddas, MP, but I shall keep faith with my hosts. It is for Compass to reveal its policies and strategies and not a guest.

However, this does not stop me from considering the nature and future of the British Left in the light of the discussion. Does the British Left have a future as we go into a major correction in the global capitalist system and as the Government which it ostensibly supports totters from crisis to crisis?

But first a definition of what we mean by Left in this context. I might best do this negatively, by saying what Compass and its networks are not. They are not revolutionary: Compass is well within the tradition of effecting change through representative democracy. 

It is not a Labour Party claque: although associated with the Party and certainly with the 'Movement' (in effect the trades unions and the traditional machinery of the Party), it reaches out to networks outside the Party and it has members who are not members of the Labour Party

It is not the Hard Left, represented by the Campaign Group in Parliament and increasingly by the Labour Representation Committee [LRC]. And, Europeans please note, it is not defined by any republican or secularist tradition or by a priori Marxist theorising (though these elements may intrude at the margins)

If anything, it is defined by some quite simple ideological commitments to redistribution and against exploitation. It is, in short, thoroughly British in its culture whilst always and fully asserting its instinctive internationalism. 

This 'sensible' Left (not all of which is inside Compass) is one of three main strands of the political centre-left that retain some links with the original Labour tradition (there is, of course, the LRC but there is also the right-wing trades unionism associated with Labour First and another Deputy Leadership candidate, Alan Johnson).

Moderate democratic socialism is an 'eternal' theme in the centre-left.  It has had many names and many Protean identities in the hundred years of the organised political wing of the Labour Movement - but its core is moderate and determined on a more egalitarian society free from market and other forms of 'oppression'.

The weekend showed that this force, periodically driven down by pressure from the harder Left (concerned with transformations beyond political sense) and from the pragmatic Right (concerned with power as a precondition for transformations that never seem to take place), is irrepressible.  No matter what, it bounces back - sometimes against reason and logic.

But I left the meeting, sympathetic but semi-detached as always, with a number of observations about the conditions in which a moderate sensible but idealistic Left can make its mark in the world when faced by forces that are more ruthless, more cynical or more impatient. 

These impressions may help the external analyst decide whether this strand of politics can be more than constant suitor or (at best) junior partner in British governance.

Taking Mr. Cameron Seriously

If there was one thing I came away with, when I left the meeting on Saturday, it is that the intelligent Left takes Mr. Cameron very seriously indeed. 

One of the frustrations of the thinking Left is that it is aware that Cameron is developing a critique of society that has the potential to be more 'socialist' (in the sense of reversing the previously predominant view within the Tory Party that, in Thatcher's formulation, 'there is no such thing as society') than the current prevailing ideology within mainstream New Labour.

I have one reference for you to follow up on this - Alan Finlayson's 'Making Sense of David Cameron' in the March/May 2007 Edition of Public Policy Research. Finlayson lays out Cameronian ideology in a crystal clear manner, with respect for its coherence, and then makes a serious critique of it that is also well worth reading.

The essence of the argument comes down to whether social recovery (and we are in a crisis of social breakdown that requires an attempt at recovery) will come through re-building individual will, in association with other individuals, to 'do something' or by re-building collective institutions within which individuals can co-operate institutionally and according to principles of 'solidarity'.

The worry is that New Labour has retained the authoritarian aspects of collectivism (including its negative attitude to internal dissent) but in the service of market individualism. The Left, on the other hand, is moving in the direction of rediscovering process, democracy and the reconstruction of civil society.

Unfortunately, the latest iteration of democratic socialism is being silenced by its need to appear 'loyal' to a Party just as Cameron is sweeping in under New Labour with a counter-critique that is socially-minded, libertarian (which is what the national culture inclines to in the South) and localist but at the cost of any respect for collective action.

The Dilemmas of Loyalty

The critical centre-left (on the evidence of the weekend) has all the intellectual tools for a re-casting of the New Labour project as one that is more libertarian, democratic, redistributive and potentially popular. Like the European Socialist movements, it has the potential to persuade the wider population all things being equal.

But to assert its message is not just to critique the Tory 'enemy' and ensure clear pink water from the Liberals, it is to attack the New Labour Government whose ideology might share with the Left an opposition to 'pure' liberalism and conservatism but which represents an almost diametrically opposed attitude to power and policy.

The logic of the situation would be for the centre-left to split.  This would be hard to argue against in a proportional electoral system. 

This is not an option for a variety of reasons: the First Past The Post electoral system; the lack of interest in ideas and change within the trades union movement; the inability to gain media and cultural high ground (of which more below); the formidable asset base (despite recent internal disarray) within a highly centralised Party; the difficulty of persuading the regional and petty national elites within the New Labour coalition that they have anything to gain by idealism at a national level; the political neutering of the English as a progressive force ... the list goes on.

It is not only the English who are neutered within a British identity that is now just cover for an interconnected machine of regional elites, it is the sensible Left itself. It cannot move forward without declaring war on its own party or taking up the cause of the English and non-unionised poor and binding the latter into some sort of alliance with the anxious middle classes of the South.  This is precisely Cameron territory.

But the Left cannot attack Cameron directly without either losing its own internal base by supporting a thoroughly discredited New Labour ideology (the fall-back is often to praise measures that are really only of interest to the trades unions and are anti-libertarian) or giving up all hope of 'revolution from within' through consent by alienating the all-powerful Labour machine.

And, yes, it gets worse still. There is no mechanism for seizing power within the Party in any case, even if it 'won' the battle of ideas. The Partnership in Power 'reforms' limited even trades union power to effect policy and personnel changes. The NEC is an anxious cypher and the party's organisation in the country is virtually defunct except as support mechanism for increasingly neutered (that word again) elected representatives. 

There is no sign that the trades unions will do anything to support the democratic socialist Left unless or until New Labour loses an election - when the only prospect becomes another bout of internal bloodletting which the Party might not survive, unless it finds its own charismatic Obama.

It would be beyond a case of a 'Hilary' by that stage. The new Crown Prince, Miliband [D.], would have to do some pretty tough thinking about the value of Blair legacy's in leading a disgruntled party to victory before a distrusting electorate.

Other than contemplating open revolt or the quixotic formation of a new party, the Left seems doomed to trust in some impending 'crisis of capitalism' or other deus ex machina.

None of the federal parts of the Party seem enthusiastic to rock the boat. The trades unions do their usual trick of funding left-wing organisations sufficient to keep them loyal but insufficient to be effective and spread their funds thinly. 

The PLP clearly did not back Jon Cruddas in the Deputy Leadership campaign. There is much work to be done to unite those in Parliament prepared to sustain and make coherent the critiques developed separately by the Campaign group, Cruddas and Kilfoyle (on foreign policy).

The party machine itself is dead set against change and is directed more at squaring things between two factions of New Labour (the so-called Brownites and Blairites) than at a dialogue between centre-left and centre-right. 

The Left element in the original New Labour Project, represented by Hain and the Kinnock network, is discredited in the grassroots while the grassroots itself is unorganised, divided and atomised with no credible mechanisms to put fresh opinion into policy practice without leadership or union patronage.

In the end, since a deus ex machina is unlikely and attacking the Tories head-on and separately from the Labour Party gains little and risks a lot, all that remains seems to be to try the only route left - to argue the intellectual case direct to the public without criticising the Government directly.

A weak but reasonable strategy if you rely on the faith-based incantation of Gramsci's famous dictum that Leftists should be optimistic in their actions even while being intellectually pessimistic.

Politics in a Celebrity Culture

And here we come across two further problems - the language of left-wing politics and the rise of celebrity as the only means to get ideas into the political market place.

Intellectuals and academics are good news for policy formulation but often bad news for communication and practical implementation. Politics is rarely about building a programme out of a priori theory unless you have a secret police force to enforce compliance. Human nature and material facts soon point out the flaws in any rationalist project - and unintended consequences follow.

One of the projects for the Left is to rip out words like narrative, hegemony and discourse and to have the confidence to store its policy documents for power and distil its programmes into as few words as possible. 

Compass, for example, has its brand sorted and its policy documentation is of the very highest standard but it still lacks that persuasive material in the middle ground that can tell the public what it is and why it is good for them. But, at least, the Left now understands that it has a problem.

Similarly policy ideas still need a version of the despised New Labour focus group but not to establish whether they are popular but whether they are credible, workable and saleable. 

For example, one ostensibly good policy idea emerged over the weekend and might have gone flying off into some Manifesto or other except that three or four practical and strategic flaws were easily demonstrable from non-academic experience.

The problem of how to communicate to the public, and to the political class in particular, is central to the problem of the contemporary Left. But even if it mastered the right language, it has to inspire interest and belief in a situation where the originating cultures of the traditional Left have mostly collapsed.

The main barrier to dissident political culture becoming mainstream lies in the delusion that endorsement by a celebrity intellectual (we might call this the 'Will Hutton' delusion) makes an idea effective and deliverable when all it does is place it in the system as a 'meme' where it becomes simplified, gutted and used rhetorically by others rather than as a means of political transformation.

Leftists salivate over an endorsement from Ms. Toynbee and get a sleepless night of rage at the Daily Mail but this misses the point. A strange introvert community of political advisers, journalists, selected academics, hangers-on and broadcasters have developed a collective group-think that creates the illusion of publicly-accountable opinion. 

Listening to the commentariat speak for the people rather than for themselves is showing contempt for those same people, as if an Oxbridge education, a career in the NUS or the ability to write well intrinsically privileged some thoughts on issues of moment for ordinary families and professionals rather than the assessments of the population at large based on practical experience.

This is a culture of columns in the quality media, talk shows, book festivals and intense meetings at the House of Commons where cocky talkers strut their stuff to adoring congregations as if their words were ever going to become action. Power resides elsewhere, including the PLP with its ability to force a vote of no confidence, but still they talk. 

Two developments make capturing the high ground in the political celebrity culture a relative sideshow in the long term. The first is that power decisions have disconnected from this elite increasingly over the last decade and will continue to do so. The high point of the old system was the rise and fall of neo-conservatism in America - pointy heads are no longer useful.

Whatever this or that opinion-maker thinks or says may be noted by the power elite. A sort of transmission belt of mutual regard, patronage, dinner parties and blind ambition makes the two ride in tandem for most of the time, but if the power elite ever decides that the intelligentsia are drifting in the wrong direction they will either ignore them, manipulate them back in line or appeal over their heads themselves to the mass.

The second development is more potential than actual. The construction of social networking tools is moving power back to small groups on the ground. The ideology behind the tools is libertarian rather than traditionally conservative but it does not mean that they are not progressive - but it is still the culture that Cameron's younger advisory network is responding to.

Periodic resentment of the old intellectual elite at the new demotic language of the web, the diana-like emotionalism that emerges in politics (all feeling, limited action), the volatility of public values and the lack of respect for 'high culture' all result in periodic tirades against the new technologies.

The probable truth is that, as newspapers decline (except for the Star on Sunday) and there is no revenue workable model for opinion on the internet, the dominance of the commentariat is probably doomed within a generation.

If the Left is ever going to re-establish its place in the national culture, it is going to have to by-pass the commentariat (who has time to read this stuff other than other intellectuals anyway?) and adopt a populist model that goes direct to the people, especially those under-35s who are ready, in their contempt for the Blair-Brown government, to fall into Cameron's hands and who do not read newspapers.

Looking back to Will Hutton's State We Are In (which is always over-emphasised in 'narratives' of the New Labour victory in 1997) is less useful than considering how the Northern League disrupted Italian politics or how the original organisation of the political wing of the Labour Movement developed in the period from Hardie to Lansbury.

The secret of success for the Left has not changed - discipline, patience, simple messages, identification of needs and, above all, organisation.

Concluding Thoughts

This posting has emphasised the difficulties for the 'sensible' Left, with a government that has got it wrong but with which it has become associated and a challenge to conservatism that cannot be elucidated without undermining its own coalitional partners.

A new party would be logical but facts and sentiment dictate otherwise - at least for now. Capturing power within the Party is now closed off by the post-1996 construction of its machinery.

Of course, there is the dream of capturing ground in a crisis, one in which the elite splits and discovers a ready-made solution on the Left, but the crisis is within and about the Government and the Party far more than it is within and about the nation.

An attempt to win over the commentariat is an exhausting process that is increasingly irrelevant to the exercise of power. The creation of a constituency in the country is ideal but the aggression as well as the resources required to go direct to the masses are not there.

And yet, and yet ... the 'sensible' Left, for all its weaknesses and the unpropitious nature of the conditions in which it operates today, is still the 'only game in town' if you are looking for a long-term credible alternative to the emergence of a successful social conservatism.

The traditional Labour Party died a long time ago. What remains of its more backward-looking socialist left can never win over the English middle class vote. New Labour has descended into becoming a machine for the capture and exercise of power - but careerists and opportunists tend to move on quite rapidly when the machine that sustains them grinds to a halt.

The public finds Cameron increasingly appealing - despite past distrusts - precisely because he is adopting the type of social thinking that Blair promised and failed to deliver and which democratic libertarian socialists would consider normal.  

I have heard life-long Leftists privately tell me that they could see themselves joining the Tory Party if all that Cameron claimed to offer was true. We have also been told that card-carrying Labour people have advised his office in frustration and desperation at Government policy.

The 'sensible' Left has a programme that could pull these voters back out of a foolish flirtation with our modern Disraeli. The problem now for it is to find the right language to speak to the public in favour of collective solutions to social breakdown - and to do so in a way that credibly suggests that a vote for the 'sensible' Left could and would result in change.

It's a tough call ... but, in that battle for ideas, our tip is that Compass is worth watching and, if you share their values, engaging with. If politics was an equity market, we would tip them as a BUY/SELL ON WEAKNESS and their rivals within the Party as SELL.

Above all, if the future is going to be an ideological struggle between this Left and Cameron instead of between the old-style Tories and New Labour, it may even be that we get a fairer, kinder country at the end of it.

www.tppr.co.uk

We have seen a period of intense activity by Gulf-based sovereign wealth funds (increasingly referred to as SWFs): the ADIA [Abu Dhabi] $7.5bn investment in Citigroup; the complex bourse bidding war between Qatar and Dubai in Europe; and the geopolitics that seems to be pushing fund money increasingly towards Asia rather than the West.

Put this together and you see something like a grand plan that contains the elements of a traditional strategy for a protective hedging investment overseas by dynasts but is now (with perhaps the laggardly exception of Saudi Arabia) moving in some interesting new directions.

Even in Saudi Arabia, a debate has started on whether it should change a somewhat conservative approach to the recycling of petrodollars and develop its own sovereign wealth presence overseas.

There seem to be three components in all this, alongside the traditional hedging interest in property assets:

- a) the purchasing of stakes and collaboration rights in critical elements in the Western capitalist infrastructure [trade logistics and transport (especially ports and entrepots), financial infrastructure especially international banks, and the 'soft' zone of leisure and tourism, including gaming, hotels, films and other entertainment];

- b) cross-investment in productive capacity and development within the region rather than outside it - much of it related to a peculiar Arabic form of urban mega-development that makes Milton Keynes look like Ambridge and, of course, to the development of independent financial, educational, cultural and professional services sectors; and,

- c) investment in trading relationships with the rising powers to the East.

This suggests continued interest in London as global hub in potential partnership with Dubai and with other centres (much to the continued irritation of Paris and other rival European centres), but it also suggests that, except as ‘hedge’, investment interest in the trading economy of Europe and the US may diminish rather than increase.

We hasten to add that we are talking relatively rather than absolutely. There will always be interest in the right 'deal' but the prejudice is now not only in favour of the maintenance of the global system (which probably also fits US strategic needs) but in the Indian-Ocean-East Asian complex rather than just hedging political risk with Western assets.

A long term geo-political implication may be that any hopes that a pro-Western Arab world will act as a buttress (virtually on post-colonial terms) against rival Russian and Chinese SWF interests is flaky to say the least.

Europeans in particular are not going to have their former informal and formal empires come to their rescue out of 'sentiment' or because the 'west' is the only game in town. In Europe, Russia now holds a lot of the energy and investment cards.

The Gazprom acquisition in principle of a controlling interest in the Serbian oil sector is, for example, the price that Europe has paid for the expensive business of supporting Kosovan independence and putting 1,800 civil force personnel to create a 'cordon sanitaire' around it.

Europe gets a province, Russia get the pipeline. It is interesting to consider which is getting the better part of the deal.

The one exception to this rapid extension of SWF power into the wider world (which should not yet be exaggerated in terms of scale and whose interventions are often tactical for strategic ends rather than strategic in themselves) is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia, we have noted, has been very laggardly in developing its own formal SWF structures. It is still a moderator of rises to the oil price and it still insists on a peg to the dollar that works against many local and regional economic interests - which may cause major disruption within the GCC if inflation continues to grow.

Saudi conduct, in this context, can only be interpreted as political – as a matter of an alliance of interest with the West to protect the dynastic and the general conservative Sunni interest. It is an important and anomalous part of the system that is, accordingly, vulnerable to political change within the Kingdom.

Saudi 'complicity' with the West cannot be assumed in the long term. Saudis are being daily insulted, very vociferously in London last year but constantly in an American populist context, while the immediate cause to fear US military retribution for terror attacks in 2001 is well past.

The ‘wrong’ sort of President in the US who fails to understand that the Saudis are supportive of the West out of conviction and not fear may get a very rude awakening on the dollar and on oil.

Saudi wealth is historically well embedded in the pre-credit crisis model of Western dominance and it would suffer losses from any change in direction, but the West has every reason to be cautious about contributing to a tipping point where Saudi interests come to lie elsewhere.

Saudi foreign policy is also based on reducing regional tensions through the Peace Process, keeping the Shia contained (whether in the Gulf or Iraq) and eliminating insurgencies both through its support for the West Asian war on terror and its informal but restrained and sometimes conditional support for information-sharing with intelligence agencies elsewhere.

Western support for these principles is increasingly part of the price for Saudi economic co-operation but it is also noticeable that Crown Prince Abdullah has made indirect and direct efforts to sustain contact with Iran, India and China to provide some future flexibility.

Overall, this is yet another situation where traditional Atlanticist thinking, obsessed with Eurasia and Russian dominance and perhaps treating the rest of the world as a playground for Western values in a continuation of the Long War of the Twentieth Century, is completely out of kilter with facts on the ground.

The new global thinking actually requires that Western values be seen in a more co-operative manner in the context of a fairly vulnerable global economic system in which all major players are treated with equal respect rather than just as suitors for Western regard and notice.

A final note may be useful here on the utter failure of the European-African Summit. The Africans left extremely irritated by the patronizing tone (expressed partly by Europeans trying to go over the top in not being patronizing) and European failure to deal with what they consider to be important trade issues. When African leaders were entertained in China, they were treated very differently.

The exclusion of Mugabe, a marker for liberal sentiment in the West, was perceived by many to be a colonialist insult directed implicitly at all African leaders. The contrast is made with China which is not merely offering credit without conditions but seems actively to be attempting to release African states from the cultural ‘bondage’ of Western development aid that comes with disruptive governance conditions.

Africa may seem like a 'basket case' to the West but Africans are genuinely torn between respect for values that imply modernisation and the need to decide their own destiny.  The US often remains respected, Europeans much less so.

With Europe, the issue is seen, by some African leaders, as essentially cultural with ghosts of the colonial past implicitly contrasted with a 'realist' partnership with a fellow victim of attempted colonialism [the Opium Wars are part of the Chinese national narrative] that is now a rising superpower. Comments to this effect have been made from Senegal to South Africa.

It is a theme of As It Happens that the Western foreign policy elite has still not adjusted to the collapse of the settlement of the 1940s. This analysis was not made a priori from some theoretical analysis but has emerged from the facts of the case as we have observed the rapid shifts in the structure and balance of the global system for over a decade.

In some ways, the current economic crisis has merely opened more eyes to changes in the economic infrastructure that have otherwise been taking place under the surface for some years.  Yet it would be a shame if the West panicked about what is still merely a correction.

The West, especially the US, remains a formidable and dominant force in global affairs. All that has changed is that it is now having to share power and that it would do best to manage and control the transition, go with the flow, rather than hold on to what it has got and then see it ripped away with more pain and suffering decades hence.

Some observers are talking about the logic of an eventual US-Chinese alliance to manage the global system, of a Franco-British merging of interests to try to hang on to what declining underfunded influence they have in the world and of a shift in Europe to rapprochement with Russia on the basis of shared interests despite security fears and US disapproval.

All these and more represent dangerous possible trends that we regret to say seem to be far beyond the mental facility of so many of the current foreign policy elite to comprehend. And it is very interesting that some of the best thinking is coming from military and business - even dissident Leftist analysts - than from a tired mainstream political community that long ago lost the plot.

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