Partly because there has been nothing new to say and partly because comment on British policy in West Asia has degenerated into a political sideshow, a subject for knockabout between two political parties seeking to win an election later this Spring.
Miliband's Compton Lecture
David Miliband's Compton Lecture on March 10th might be regarded as the last serious pre-election attempt by the Government to establish precisely what it is doing in this faraway country before a disenchanted public adds it to the melange of issues that will decide its fate.
Within the first few words, he managed to encapsulate what New Labour stands for and to reaffirm the ideology of engagement - enlightenment values in a transatlantic context.
We have recently thrown some doubt on the viability of the latest iteration of the Enlightenment project as an idealism that can be destructive in its attempts to impose systems on the crooked timber of humanity but Miliband has no such concerns.
He gives three reasons for engagement in Afghanistan. Two of these lodge New Labour firmly in a grand strategic camp in which the national interest is seen as identical to that of its chief ally expressed within an idealist and abstract notion of the 'West'.
Naturally, he cannot walk away from the prime motive for engagement that is presented to the British people - that we have to be there because the West Asian badlands pose a terror threat at home.
What is never said is that our active post-imperial engagement with the margins of the West fuels the very insurgency that might be imported back into the country and that some post-imperial ethnic minorities within the UK are disengaged from the Crown, in part, by such actions.
To the costs of the war must be added the costs of a complex 'soft' power operation to monitor and manage lower income ethnic communities, of an almost comically belt and braces security operation around the country and of trying to outmanouevre the extremists' equally evil twin, the BNP.
If we add to this the divisiveness of the war, popular anger and irritation at security measures, the palpable growth in tension between ethnic communities ... all at a time of economic difficulty ... it seems an expensive way of dealing with a threat which is not entirely proven as to its extent or importance.
Party & Crown
The truth is that a balanced budget and internal social cohesion are regarded as wholly worth sacrificing on the altars of the transatlantic alliance and the 'future of Western power'.
In other words, the tragedy of New Labour is that, after over hundred years of struggle to become the dominant ruling party in the country, it has become the Party of Pitt, Walpole, Wellington and Castlereagh rather than the Party of Paine, Jefferson, Shelley and Blake. It has become the Crown.
It is the Crown (not the House of Windsor but the State) that has determined, for complex historical reasons related to its power and institutional ambition, that the transatlantic alliance, NATO and the West represent a community in which it must have a place or have no meaning.
There is an historic rationale for this (albeit an imperialist one) and, even today, there are sound economic and strategic arguments for good relations with the United States, collective security and the defence of core liberal values in a global setting.
But this is not what is happening here. This is not good relations with the US, it is Alliance. It is not just collective security, it is NATO. It is not just defence of values but promotion and extension of values. The qualitative difference is important and it is proving immensely costly.
The Necessity For Settlement
We will leave you to read Miliband's lecture. You may decide whether to be persuaded or not. What is clear is that Miliband knows that our country can no longer afford the forward policy begun under Tony Blair in the late 1990s and he is looking for an 'exit' without the political costs of being seen to withdraw.
Strip away the tub-thumping, the 'our boys' talk and the attacks on the evils of the other side and what it comes down to is a simple fact.
If the West had more resources (and more support at home) it probably could win eventually but the scepticism of the British public, lack of support from wiser heads in Europe and growing budgetary problems no longer give the Government the option of being in on the kill or leading from the front.
With an election on the way, what New Labour has to do is demonstrate that past investment was worthwhile in support of what will be an American victory - or ensure that it withdraws with dignity and honour long before it turns into a wider West Asian American quagmire.
A close reading of the Lecture tells us just how much Western objectives have changed from the heady days when liberal progressives thought that they could bring their much vaunted Enlightenment values, to Afghan women in particular, through the barrel of a gun.
The British and Soviet imperial histories are used by Miliband to demonstrate that the Afghans cannot be beaten into submission but have to be seduced into "a self-governing, self-policing but heavily subsidised Afghanistan, where the tribes balanced each other ..."
Ay, there's a rub. The British (who succeeded) and the Soviets (who failed) had an interest in heavy subsidy because the troubled country was a chaotic threat to contiguous interests whether the British hold over Indian wealth or Soviet determination to maintain order amongst its ethnic minorities.
The essence of such Imperial strategies was complicity in a protection racket - sufficient funds would be applied to keep the Afghans concerned with topping each other rather than interfering in neighbouring countries. So much for Enlightenment idealism!
But Why Us?
But what on earth is the interest of the United Kingdom, an island on the edge of another continent within a global trading system that scarcely touches these backwoods, in taking part in the levels of heavy subsidy that are undoubtedly at the heart of of Miliband's Grand Master Plan.
Of course, Miliband is not expecting the British to pay, he expects the electorates of the 'West' to pay, that is hard-pressed Americans and Europeans who have far more worries about bailing out Greece than about the baksheesh expectations of Afghan tribesman.
All this effort seems increasingly absurd when compared with the exposure of another island nation with a similar profile, Japan, operating a similar distance from the country concerned and with equal dependence on Gulf oil.
Unless British foreign policy makers are genuinely and insanely concerned with the preservation of neighbouring empires (Russia, China, India) from dissolution regardless of the effects on the national budget, there are only two motives for the expenditure of blood and gold by the Crown.
Neither can be spoken of in blunt terms because, if the British population understood what was being said, there might be a political reaction that could lose this Government its mandate.
Social Cohesion At Home
The first truth is not that terrorism might be imported into British cities from Afghanistan but if Afghanistan is not settled then the destabilisation of Pakistan and so of Kashmir really does threaten to bring sectarian war into British cities - and not necessarily just as Islamism.
What discomforts the British is that post-imperial mass immigration, promoted for economic and ideological reasons, and not discouraged by a New Labour Government that gains significant votes from these communities, would very soon be linked to violent social disorder.
The size and spread of the warring communities and their concentration in the poorest areas of our major post-industrial cities creates a nightmare scenario for the Crown - one where Enlightenment values crumble in a local competition for resources fuelled for profit by radical ideologues.
The link between terrorism and mass migration is one that has not been proved. Discussion has sometimes been silenced as 'racist' - but anyone who watches the push and pull between the poorest communities and their homelands and growing 'ressentiment' amongst indigenous rivals is concerned.
So, for this reason alone, both Crown and New Labour (indistinguishable in their concern for social order) have increased the number of authoritarian tools for social control and have pressed, under security advice, to get the rest of the West engaged in settling Afghanistan before the infection spreads.
When Miliband speaks of earlier British imperial settlements designed to protect British investment in India, it suggests that his settlement is required to avoid the real cost of that massive overseas empire - chaos in an aging urban-industrial structure with low wage populations whose allegiances are obscure.
The Burden Of History
A second 'real' reason for engagement with Afghanistan derives from another burden from history - in this case, recognition of strategic and economic dependence on the US. This is an old story that does not need to be told again here - it is about the necessary displacement of one empire by another.
The point is not that this has happened but that New Labour and the Crown have become the depressed victims of that history. Questions are being raised that directly affect British post-imperial strategy.
First, is the dominance of London as global centre (which is the central economic core of the transatlantic alliance) really in the interests of the British people as a whole?
Equally to the point, have the interests of Crown, City and Alliance become wholly detached from the interests of the nation in the light of the recent economic crisis? This is more salient when we consider the social order questions raised by our decaying urban-industrial infrastructure (see above!).
Our engagement in West Asia would appear to require taxing the population to sustain the interests of Crown, City and Alliance. The economic benefits from that bloc may be regarded as questionable looked at from a council estate in outer Manchester or amongst the small retailers of Guildford.
Second, much as the British like to preen and swagger about their world status, no different of course in this from the French, the question arises as to why we bother when most people are not nationalist in orientation in the traditional way and would much rather the quiet life without ideology or 'service'?
The Crown and conservative authoritarians of all parties may like 'Great Power Status' [GPS] but it is becoming increasingly costly. The tension between the costs of sustaining it and maintaining social cohesion become much more manifest as economic conditions worsen (as we noted some years ago).
GPS is sustained through the same sort of legerdemain that has put New Labour in control of the State through means that undermine the nation. In this case, Britain's 'destiny' as an independent power is being undermined by a determination to seek GPS under the wing of another power.
The Politics Of Confusion
Miliband's Lecture is intelligent and informative but he cannot raise these questions himself because in so doing he would undermine the very basis for New Labour's role which relies both on denial about post-imperial causes of social disorder and on promoting the illusion of GPS.
Afghanistan, far more than Iraq which was just a costly mistake with no long-lasting effects on national cohesion, pulls together all the internal contradictions within the New Labour project.
The desire to build votes on economic growth and full employment has created the conditions for social disorder that owe too much to accidents of history on the North West Frontier while its determination to strut for its right-wing vote on the world stage continues to turn the country into a poodle.
In the long run, Afghanistan can be 'won'. The US might well be able to afford to settle a dowry for peace of sufficient size through its massive security budget but that settlement might be, for the British, a horribly expensive way to invest in maintaining social order in Britain's inner cities.
Many may ask why we lacked the courage to by-pass this war and just take our gold, put it into our troubled communities and save blood not only overseas but perhaps, one day, at home.
]]>A recent book on 'grimoires' by Owen Davies, Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire, is typical of this output. In essence, grimoires are books of magical spells and incantations. They may seem irrelevant to our time and place but this is not necessarily so.
Grimoires & Human Greed
At one level, the history of grimoires is the history of human cupidity. Such books for the bulk of human history have served little purpose other than personal aggrandisement in an age of poverty and lack of welfare provision. At such times, men and women have also had every reason to clutch at straws.
One common theme, from earliest times until quite recently. has been the use of such texts to discover treasure by calling up demons and dark spirits and then binding and interrogating them to reveal its whereabouts.
The Elizabethan magus John Dee's famous graveyard excursion to ask a dead spirit for treasure was not novel. He was in a very long line of 'magical practitioners' who wanted a fast track to wealth - or to sexual pleasure or even just good health and a bit of happiness in a grim world.
The spiritual content of these early modern books is thus minimal despite the attempts of later generations to read back their own spiritual searchings into an often grubby grab for power and money by what probably amounted (no doubt with exceptions) to a succession of charlatans.
Fraudsters, small time criminals and half-educated cunning folk determined on magic in order to prey for profit on the unhappiness of the masses - perhaps an over-simplification but it will serve as a corrective to romantic notions of past sorcery.
The only person in our era to have got this magical past right may have been that inveterate rascal Anton LaVey whose Church of Satan used the tropes of popular 'high' magic to sell a hedonistic mix of Californian-style individualism and cynicism.
This was the same carnival gulling of country folk, in the tradition of medieval hucksterdom, that underpinned the eighteenth century French bibliotheque bleue.
On The Other Hand ...
This is not to say that some of the original sources of the grimoires of Early Modern Europe were not of considerable spiritual importance or that grimoires did not prove vital to the creation of modern alternative spiritualities in providing ready-mades for spiritual interpretation.
The Hebrew cabbalistic tradition and pagan hermeticism as well as alchemy and possibly the tarot - alongside attempts to come to terms with the demonic lore of the religions of the book - were all sincere paths for the exploration of consciousness and alternative realities.
Later, the equally sincere researches of Eliphas Levy, the creation of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the experimentation of Crowley and the 'invention' by Gerald Gardner of Wicca all made use of the conceits of the grimoire in order to explore consciousness and 'spirituality' in new and imaginative ways.
Even between these time poles of sincerity, there are islands of genuine investigation into 'other forces' - Kelley may have been a fraud but Dee really does seem to have believed that he could talk with the angels.
Many others took demons to be really existing creatures who could be bound safely for service without threat of eternal damnation.
Repression & Social Order
The fears of the Church and the authorities were partly of the heretical and partly of new thinking but, on closer investigation, they were also related to the potential for grimoires to be used to separate peasants from their money and to promote unacceptable distance between community and church.
Immense efforts have thus gone into rooting out popular grimoires (including terminal force against sorcerers themselves) over the centuries.
The first relevant book burnings were of pagan writings by the newly assertive and somewhat totalitarian Christian communities of the late Roman Empire (although the Roman authorities were quite happy to burn books that defied state control of religion long before Constantine).
It is little known that book burnings continued in Germany long after the Nazis lost power. Instead of Jewish and liberal books, religious campaigners were burning books of magic.
Indeed, though they disapproved of magic (despite the fantasies of Western propagandists), the Nazis seem far less extreme in this matter than some fanatical Christian Democrats and Protestants.
Americans seem, sensibly, to have seen grimoire production as a branch of fraud, precursors to much modern 'new age' nonsense, rather than as some threat of a more fundamental kind.
What Grimoires Mean
It might be argued that the steady detachment of these texts from educated high society between the collapse of paganism and the destruction of the tolerant society of Muslim Spain, and their later survival out of that context, also detached them from their spiritual meaning and full folk purpose.
It degraded these texts into non-communal individualistic tools of power - personal weapons in life's struggle for ones own interest and against that of others.
Grimoires travelled from Europe into the New World and other Western colonies and back and forward across Europe, their influence linked to such practical factors as the availability of the printing press and the willingness and determination of the authorities to suppress them.
Levels of literacy were key in both permitting grimoires to flourish (they require someone to read them) and defining their acceptability and use.
Once a population got a taste for such books, these texts embedded themselves deep into some communities of migrants and former slaves - most often when literacy was combined with a low level of education and where entrepreneurs were able to provide sufficient cheap copies of 'classic works'.
Magical sub-cultures emerged that were both proponents of sometimes unutterable nonsense and the basis of a culture of resistance to a non-inclusive high culture that had nothing to say to the poor and uneducated.
Becoming Evil
This, one suspects, was very different from the highly cultured world of Toledo in the High Middle Ages where Jewish, Muslim and Christian traditions and thought mingled to create the radical thinking of which the early modern grimoires were but a pale reflection.
The later folk memory of Toledo as centre of dark sorcery came to reflect this cultural debasement of a high intellectual tradition. In successive totalitarian Christian reformations, magic became debased into a presumption of evil when all it really was was a challenge to the Church's intellectual authority.
Manuscripts got mangled, attributed inappropriately, given antiquities that do not stand up to scrutiny. Whether manuscripts or printed books, these texts became systematically degraded from their origins in a tolerant High Mediterranean Culture.
Perhaps some of the more genuine intellectual magicians were still being hunted to extinction as late as the early seventeenth century in Catholic Europe but the printed versions of their texts in the eighteenth century were little more than gobbledy-gook for cunning folk.
There are some wonderful tales of gullible treasure-seeking yokels being thoroughly done over by trickster 'sorcerers' in the chapter on the pre-revolutionary era in France and Switzerland in Davies' book.
Modern Transgressions
Davies' valuable book ends with a review of three 'fake' modern grimoires that have spawned their own intense followings -
All three made use of grimoire lore. Before we get hyper-critical about their provenance, we might ask just how rational the claims of divine authorship of the books of the Bible or the Koran are if we really, really think about this instead of just automatically accepting claims on faith.
From this perspective, the leap of faith made by Chaos Magicians (who are just playing with belief quite knowingly) and Wiccans (who, in fact, are honest that each text is personal and to be recast by every practitioner in the light of their own needs) seems less absurd than that of their rivals.
Even the Satanists have no illusions that LaVey wrote their text. They know full well that Satan does not exist. The point is not to denigrate the religions of the book but to say that 'texts' meet needs and that faith is, truly, beyond reason and that it may be time that secular rationalists learnt to live with this.
Perhaps this may be one clue to the determination of the authorities to suppress the grimoire - in its cack-handed way, the grimoire says that no intermediation is required between the punter and his book. It is a text without an institutional structure to support it.
Grimoires as Rebellion
Any person with the power to interpret a grimoire (or, indeed, the Bible) can decide their own destiny in terms of sex, power and spirit. This is a standing challenge to all established priests, experts and intellectuals. It was the basis of the revolt of the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation.
At its worst, the grimoire is not merely obscurantist but dangerous, but not because it can conjure devils or perhaps give cause in extreme cases to murderous fantasy (of which there are cases) and has a proven history of fraud.
It is dangerous because, in truly ignorant hands, it can block the use of 'good' expert knowledge to deal with 'real' problems of sexuality, power relations, conditions of life, healthcare and spirituality. It is probably why socialists and progressives loathe it as much as any cardinal.
But, at its best, its use represents a revolutionary act under conditions where there is no power for the people, where sexual repression is normal, where conditions are poor and life is short and where religion represents social order rather than personal meaning. It says that ...
We the people will choose our own experts and our own ways of intermediation with life and matter. We will use magic because you have given us nothing or what you have given us is conditional on our acceptance of your standards and your 'morality' without you asking us what we want.
Irrationalism thus represents psychic resistance to the arrogance of the powerful. Magic as resistance will never go away except where it can be decisively crushed under the authoritarian boot of State and Church.
Communism could crush religion - or could it? It has returned in Russia, weakened admittedly, despite years of aggressive Soviet repression.
Magic In The 21st Century
Maybe aggressive repression will be the eventual solution of many liberal intellectuals. Certainly many liberal intellectuals in the West have taken a cynical neo-conservative turn on religion in despair at the masses' inability to be 'rational' but their path seems a price too high in terms of liberty for the majority.
An alternative may be to permit or even encourage a degree of healthy irrationalism within a culture that is based on open communication and general welfare provision, one where grimoires (as symptom) have no cause to be used for fraud or criminality because their function in society has changed.
Under new conditions, they may be used, as they increasingly are being used in the modern West, for fun and for spiritual growth rather than for the assertion of power by the powerless over their material circumstances and the even less powerful.
Davies makes a very profound point - most of us in the West no longer need magic in our lives. Economic development, mass education and technology provide our magic because magic is nothing more nor less than a means of empowerment.
If we see magic re-emerging today (albeit mostly in the spiritual and social sphere), it is because we (or many of us) need it again. The new religions are actively transforming persons and cultures where old systems have failed.
This is a process is likely to accelerate under the influence of the internet. As Davies suggests, magic and grimoires are unlikely to disappear from our culture very soon.
Grimoires: A History Of Magic Books by Owen Davies was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. The interpretation in this posting is wholly that of TPPR and anyone interested in the subject or in Owen Davies' own views should buy the book which was last priced as a hardback at £14.99.
]]>The joke from Radio 4 satirists was that the progeny of a thousand year old Germanic war band was in no position to complain that the Enlightenment was past its sell-by date at two hundred years old.
Does The Prince Have A Point?
But, once we get past the cheap jibes, it may be that the Prince has a point even if he probably does the cause of critiquing the Enlightenment a disservice by questioning the primacy of reason from his highly self-interested position at the top of the traditionalist tree.
What exactly is the legacy of the Enlightenment today? The world before The Royal Society and Voltaire was a lot less prosperous and free than our current world but are we in danger of become intellectually sclerotic at the peak of our liberal establishment's faith in technocratic solutions to human problems?
Many traditionalists (especially in Eastern Europe) point to the Soviet experiment as the epitome of radical rationalism although this ignores the fundamentally irrational religious drives within socialism and its persistent failure to permit critical thinking from below.
The Enlightenment might be said to comprise four fundamental outcomes - the primacy of reason in decision-making, the notion that humans have inalienable rights, the belief in the efficacy of the free market and (based on egalitarian human rights) democracy.
The Early Modern era was, by contrast, deferential and traditionalist, mercantilist and dynastic. There are and have been throughout the last two hundred years those who would want to turn back to this world and some of these have been true conservative revolutionaries.
Some of the disdain of the Prince is scarcely hidden fear. The holistic traditionalism of the Prince is not so very far off the mentality of the non-racial (nobody can accuse the Prince of racism) 'green' elements in inter-war fascism and few at the top of society want opportunity-limiting protectionism.
But the fear of going backwards into obscurantism, tyranny and corporatism means that the liberal establishment has shifted (in a surprisingly short period of time) from being expansive and truly progressive into something close to conservatism - with a neurotic fear of change and challenge.
Questioning Reason
In each of the main zones of Enlightenment triumph (the philosophical, the economic and the political), there are legitimate reasons for questioning their legacy - not to turn backwards but to move forwards.
The primacy of Reason is a good starting point for a critique. All our modern systems may be predicated on reason but the people who work within them and whom they serve have never operated on that basis in practice. If ever they have, the results have been soulless and cruel.
The initial non-traditionalist critique of Kantian rationalism began with the existentialists and continued with the phenomenologists and the post-moderns but such thinking has always been limited to an artistic, academic and cultural elite.
Another track entirely, that of psychology (which we covered in our last posting) initially discovered the irrational as something that could and should be commanded by reason. The higher function would drive the lower functions into, say, art where it could not upset the order of things.
Behaviourism then tried to systematise the command and control of the irrational individual, associated with the optimism of the 'left' rather than with the pessimism of the 'right'.
Today, thanks to the new psychology, we see irrational responses as deeply embedded in the mind, as 'normal' behavioural responses in every sphere of life - not excepting those of the allegedly rational market and the politics of technocracy.
Policymakers are faced with the awe-inspiring truth that, in order to effect rational ends, they must commit to massive levels of social manipulation of flawed human beings, wait thousands of years for evolution to work its magic, hand over society to purely rational AI or accept irrationality as a fact.
Rationalism is now so alien to what it is to be human in fact that we are faced with the same problem that the Communists faced - how to create a 'new humanity' out of a bunch of complicated, intelligent, self-interested but non-rational animals.
The current instinct of authority is, of course, to go for social intervention and to impose rationality 'for our own good'. It is a project doomed to failure as an internal contradiction within Enlightenment thinking because the intervention can only be undertaken at the expense of rights and democracy.
Rights - The 'Noble Lie'
If reason is no longer a reliable tool except in terms of tyranny, other thinkers are beginning to expose the sandy foundations of the philosophy of rights. We now take rights as a 'reality' for granted and then extend them everywhere - to types of human, to animals, even to the planet.
Our own Right2Link campaign uses the language of rights because that is what you do in our modern society. Once you appealed to God but if the Campaign had started by saying that "God commands ... " or "Scripture says that", we would have been laughed out of court.
In fact, rights are not philosophically very soundly based. Rights are claimed by one side or another (whether as freedoms or as radical property rights) as struggles over resources and power.
What the Enlightenment did, based on the idea that the exercise of Pure Reason was something that all persons were equally capable of in theory, was to create initial human inalienable rights that transferred equality before God to equality in society.
In reality, as Nietzche pointed out ruthlessly, the egalitarianism of the Church had enabled a redressing of the balance of power in society in favour of 'slaves and women'.
By extension, the Enlightenment's purloining of equality was cover for ensuring that the baby of humanity was not thrown out with the bath water of revealed religion.
This 'noble lie' then enabled democracy, based on the fiction that each person was equal. Intelligence, attainment, wealth and every other attribute were thrust aside for an essentialism that initially only covered males and then was extended to women under universal suffrage.
Economic struggle (expressed in Enlightenment terms by socialism) could be accommodated within the system. For all the actual irrationalism of German Idealism, it was packaged by Marx and his successors as Scientific Materialism (in other words, as the next stage of the Enlightenment project).
The problem of sclerosis started when, in post-war Paris and then in the universities, the power relations underpinning real inequalities within the egalitarian rhetoric began to be exposed and 'ressentiment' bubbled up from people who felt aggrieved not just economically but culturally.
Cultural struggle resulted in a first wave of resistance to 'reason', which was atavistic and traditionalist and collapsed in a welter of blood and gore in 1945. The second wave tried to appropriate rights for every conceivable aspect of being human - sexual, spiritual, cultural ...
Twenty-First Century Hysteria
As we enter the Twenty First Century, a sort of hysteria of competing rights (indigenous peoples, women's, ethnic, transgender, animal, planetary, alien and AI) has been presented as rational but, in fact, is a drive to appropriate the Enlightenment for every petty power struggle in the market.
At Treadwell's last night, an interesting lecture on HP Lovecraft's relationship with archaeology by Dr. James Holloway closed with the controversy of the Kennewick Man.
His point that the absurdist claims of a self-professed Euro-tribe to the contentious bones had caused laughter in the audience while the equally absurdist but now 'rights'-sanctioned essentialist claims of an indigenous North American tribe did not was well taken.
In short, the 'reductio ad absurdam' of rights theory (which is now little more than sentimental engagement with one side or another in many small or large-scale power struggles over resources) has unpicked Enlightenment rights theory. Rights theory is irrational but useful. Hmmmm. Like tradition then?
On Free Markets & Liberal Expansion
As for our Right2Link Campaign, it too is a power struggle - in this case between an old media culture on the defensive and desperate for revenue and a new media culture whose values are free exchange of information. A 'right' has to be protected or grabbed back from predators.
This brings us to the free market and democratic legacies of the Enlightenment. Systems under threat get aggressive. The Counter-Reformation and the stultifying religion of industrialising Catholic Europe were a reaction to Protestantism, then secularism, then socialism.
Sclerotic contemporary liberalism is becoming militant both economically and politically in the same way. The last decade has seen yet another form of hysteria - the driving of liberal passions away from domestic reform and into reform of foreign nations.
On the one hand, we see a system asserting property rights within massive global free trading arrangements conducted, like ACTA, in secret and in close collaboration between industry lobbyists and technocrats.
On the other hand, we see these same States who are collaborating in regulating the global market seeking collaboration to extend Enlightenment values into lagging or traditionalist cultures overseas.
Liberalism has turned militant. We can hold reasonable fears that somewhere on the borderlands of its militancy, possibly in the Eastern Ukraine or in Baluchistan, some equivalent of the 'defenestration of Prague' may tip us into the blood and horror of another 30 years' War.
The point here is that the Enlightenment as a total system under challenge (as the Catholic Church was challenged as a total system by Protestant rebellion) has to respond not merely as internal sclerosis but through external aggression - or else face the illogic and irrationality of its own nature.
The Real Challenges To The Enlightenment
At this point in history, Enlightenment liberals, raised on Reason and rights, are faced with two 'irrational' facts - that Adam Smith's hidden hand is prone to periodic bouts of appallingly painful 'creative destruction' and that there is no real connection between democratic forms and an educated public.
Former bouts of 'creative destruction' either took place before democracy was fully instituted (if we include female suffrage, this would be from the 1920s to 1950s outside the US) or it did not have the massive scale implied in contemporary globalised capital markets.
The instinct of US federal authorities, states and large corporations is to develop systems of regulation, centred on the property rights of large accumulations of capital. The general result is to enforce a form of class mercantilism against national accumulations of capital and consumers alike.
Economic responses are matched by political responses where very defined political classes, who have risen on the back of sectional and coalitional appeals to the very identity politics that rights theory has encouraged, have no incentive to reform the system that gives them considerable power.
The political class constantly appeal to their 'democratic legitimacy', meaning, in fact, no more than that they have captured control of machines for aggregating votes sufficient to launch them into control of executive authority for set periods of time.
You can see where this is heading. Enlightenment rationalism has not merely destroyed old forms of society (the 'ressentiment' of traditionalists) but it is eating itself up from within.
Rational discourse has ceased to be a critique of the dead weight of irrational traditionalist thought on humanity and become a system of regulatory and social control by small minorities, transfixed by fear of the chaos that is humanity and with an interest in the perpetuation of existing structures of power.
The Prince of Wales is not making this critique by any means. He sees that something is wrong. I suspect the vast majority of us see it. From his perspective, the peculiar perspective of an aristocracy of birth surrounded by a court of like-minded people, the call is for resistance by reviving tradition.
However, there is another, more forward thinking way that recognises the crisis but sees it as one of sclerosis in a system that has long since achieved all the good that it will do in its current form and now needs a further round of critical thinking - and not the gloomy negativism of critical theory either.
Alternative Non-Traditionalist Responses
The starting point is respect for 'rational irrationalism' - that is, that when people make irrational choices this is both a reflection of their true nature and a sign that they need protection from predators (such as commercial interests and states) rather than more manipulation towards rational behaviour.
From there we might restore the notion of 'rights' to mean an expansion of the initial 'noble lie' but away from its appropriation by identity politicians and intellectuals. The expansion would be to move away from any idea of abstract 'rights' to one of the 'right' of a person to make choices that are fully informed.
This shift of paradigm then feeds back into our collective handling of the problems of economic and political sclerosis and this is the hardest struggle of all.
Instead of encouraging persons to embed themselves in invented traditions that will anaesthetise them against the modern world, we should be looking to empowering and enabling persons to take control of both politics and the executive machinery - but in their interest and not that of the technocrats.
And this is where it gets interesting. The liberal technocrats were once the radicals against privilege and agrarian and aristocratic sclerosis. They and the socialist planners have now become the conservatives so that the libertarian right and left have become the liberating revolutionaries.
The system has become so sclerotic that the temptation to go back to conservative revolutionary ways, which are the ways of the traditionalists and the Prince of Wales, may become overwhelming. This would be a mistake.
The future lies, instead, in taking the revolution in the opposite direction, stepping back into the mind-set of economic libertarians like Thomas Jefferson and political libertarians like Thomas Paine and taking a new trajectory that unravels the many accretions to the Enlightenment that have taken place since.
Excessive constitutionalism, excessive legalism, excessive application of rights theory, excessive federalism, excessive idealism, excessive progressivism, excessive essentialism, excessive reification - in an excess of rationalising order, the point of the Enlightenment has been lost.
]]>First, the remarkable 'take off' of the Right2Link Campaign which has touched a nerve in the new economy and set the agenda far more quickly than we had all expected. Follow the Twitter account for the latest news which includes a news on a Clause put down by The Lord Lucas to the Digital Economy Bill.
Second, although we remain cautious about 'recovery', our sister company, Pendry White (which is also handling much of the implementation for Right2Link), has been seeing a surge of activity and this has pulled the As It Happens editorial team into the new business fray.
So, apologies to regular followers, but ten more days of this and we should, with a fair wind, be back on stream ... in the meantime, here are some thoughts on psychology ...
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The picture of humanity that is emerging today from the fast-moving world of behaviourial psychology and from the new cognitive sciences is very different from the 'tabula rasa' model that so long impressed policy-makers, especially those of the Left, often against all the instincts of common folk.
As animals, we come out as a lot less flattering to ourselves than we might have liked but before we go any further, we must state our prejudice - a distrust of science-derived theory being applied too easily to social relations. We alluded to this in our climate change and anthropology postings.
Psychology & The Normal
There is a particular problem that arises out of psychology - the 'science' of psychology is solely a method since no human, let alone collection of humans, can be knowable in the way that inanimate matter or even animals can be known.
Psychology is thus only partially a science. It is a series of experimental probabilities and of 'norms' of highly variable reliability. In this, the science of normal perception seems to be far more reliable than the science of normal behaviour and this should be constantly borne 'in mind'.
The quintessential psychological tool is the Bell Curve. There is a danger that the centre of the Bell Curve is given a normative rather than a descriptive value - that the process of describing the Bell Curve both lessens the 'value' of the rims of the Bell and over-values the 'norm' at its centre.
The 'norm' of Victorian or German fascist or Soviet Communist thinking would horrify our contemporary liberal. The 'good person' in all of these societies would, by modern liberal standards, have been normalised out of existence as we try to normalise out prudes, racists and reds today.
But contemporary psychology, neuroscience and sociology are often funded by the public purse and so are part of the political process. Even contemporary liberalism has its totalitarian aspects. The association of these 'soft sciences' and power needs to be placed under permanent critical scrutiny.
The Psycho-Arms Race
Nevertheless, great strides in understanding the working of most brains in most circumstances have been made in the last two decades.
A picture is emerging of a sort of arms race between the normal person's instinct to take the easy way out in dealing with data, in order to process the vast amounts of it coming into the mind through perception, and organised attempts to manipulate that laziness for commercial or political reasons.
As psychologists uncover the tram-line aspects of most people's behaviour under most conditions, so some, in learning these truths, learn also to resist manipulation and to build relatively independent world-views.
The corporate and political manipulators, meanwhile, create ever-more sophisticated means to manage those who either cannot (for reasons of intelligence or access to information) or will not (for lack of will or excess of comfort) question their situation.
It could be argued that people in the advanced Western societies are falling into three broad classes of person in any one particular situation.
A large majority who are unaware of or uninterested in their own manipulation, a class of manipulators for profit, power or (increasingly 'security') and a minority who see what is happening and either fight it or seek to insulate themselves from the process ('fight or flight').
The last group which is far from small is made impotent by the sheer weight of numbers of the first group although, to be cynical, the weight of numbers depends on that weight being well fed and entertained.
It may be that this is just the normal condition of humanity - as applicable to the Roman Empire as the modern West: a struggling mass, a manipulative ruling class and those who cannot but see how the trick is performed.
Knowing Is Resisting
However, a new factor may be the degree to which an understanding of psychology itself arms the 'rebels' as much as the elites.
For example, the experimental work in the wake of the authoritarian fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, notably that of Stanley Milgram, caused horror rather than emulation and it drove ruling elites increasingly towards 'soft' forms of social management.
At the same time, Milgram's work is known to far more people than just the 'rebels' in society and this has helped them become more resistant to blind authority and command.
Ordinary soldiers are increasingly volunteers from the least well educated and poorest comunities and are less likely to be conscripts for good reason - better educated conscripts are no longer prepared to accept authoritarian claims to knowledge.
Perhaps some personality types pine for a simple world of command and control and military obedience but the cultural norm is (at least in the Anglo-Saxon world) one of a presumption of liberty and questioning to which ruling elites have now had to adjust.
Governments - as in the recent announcement that the British Government will be using military drones against its own population - are thrown back on intense surveillance and on the isolation and marginalisation of the people who are at the extremes of the political Bell Curve.
In addition, fuelled on the centre-left by the post-Marxist interpretations of thinkers like Gramsci, they are more intent than ever on guiding the centre of the social Bell Curve into territories of automatic self-willed compliance with an authority that presents itself as benign, inclusive and liberal.
One suspects that this master plan of social management will last only so long as the population does not grow hungry. It is designed for a world in which economic decline for large numbers of people is small, incremental and steady rather than precipitous or sudden.
Whether this system can remain both effective and benign with a large angry population on the streets is another matter.
The Problem Of The Sociopath
Fortunately, psychiatry and abnormal psychology (in the sense of conditions that cause serious distress to a person) have been de-politicised fairly effectively by the medical establishment's historic compromise with the anti-psychiatry movement.
But we should not be complacent - the sociopath (a biological reality) is in danger of being quasi-medicalised as complaints grow about a 'broken society'.
Sociopaths used to make up marginalised criminality and the highest ranks of the elite, with social order containing them in the levels between the two. Today, social order has partially collapsed leaving far freer rein for the sociopathic personality, especially in the lower ranks of business.
Similarly, sociopathic behaviour by one sexual predator at the expense of others is much easier in a liberal society. The problem of the sociopath preying on communities under pressure has become salient as case after case of child abuse, including by children on children, horrifies the British at least.
The solution - the systematic reintroduction of community and reversal of thirty years of radical liberalism - does not fit the time-scale of electoral politics so clumsy state intervention, weakening civil liberties and a form of 'liberal terror' against problem communities seem likely.
The irony that it is the sociopathic and authoritarian BNP that is emerging to defend beleagured poor communities from a sociopathic crisis is merely an indication of the depth of the failures of liberal governance.
The Rationality Of The Irrational
At the other end of the social is the personal. Contemporary psychology paints a fairly grim picture of our general inability to think or act rationally or altruistically. In fact, psychologists tend to exaggerate what this means.
Given their particular conditions of life, 'irrational' thought or conduct (including delusions and apparently self-destructive behaviour) amongst the disempowered may be wholly rational - a truly rational assessment of those conditions might well lead to despair.
Some of the most interesting recent research is into 'irrational' modes of thinking although the inherited positive value attributed to 'reason' makes us blind to its flaws and accidentally judges the 'rational-'irrational' behaviour of the masses, irrationally, as somehow 'bad'.
The existence of 'group think' as an observable phenomenon encapsulates why New Labour is consistently incompetent in its decision-making.
There is also useful research from the behavioural economists on why we make dumb decisions on investment and cannot seem to get out quickly from a failing situation. Such research should be required reading by anyone active in public life or in business.
Unfortunately, most of the people making the decisions that affect us do not read books like this and it may take a generation before some of this commonsensical material feeds through into the wider public domain.
The Construction Of Memory
Another area of interest is memory. We construct ourselves and our society on narratives of the past. Yet we forget and remember selectively even if different people have different tendencies in this area, whether towards repressing trauma or sensitising themselves through a talking repetition of trauma.
One can see how there would be a natural conflict of interest between these two main personality types amongst Jews in dealing with the Shoah. Some would want to put the horror behind them and create a new life. Others would want to tell the world and get them to understand and empathise.
This happens in families with child abuse histories, even if the 'talking' might be displaced onto other related subjects. In the case of the Shoah, the narrative required by Israel and European guilt forced the pace and gave the edge to the 'talkers'.
Positive Thinking
One powerful tool for transforming individuals has been Cognitive Behaviourial Therapy and we should also not be too dismissive of its happy-clappy cognate, Positive Philosophy.
Critics might say they merely create a better class of delusion but, if our aim is not to sink into the unproductive gloom of critical theory but to live long, prosper, love and be happy, then these practical applications of experimental psychology are wholly beneficial.
It is tough out there. If people can use the discoveries that the mind is malleable and that life can be made more tolerable and even be improved through thinking in a different way and positively, then psychology (so dangerous in the hands of governments and corporations) can be a liberating force.
Indeed, a mentality of positive thinking might, eventually, help direct the mind to thinking not only about how to improve one's own condition but why our rulers are so signally failing to assist in that process. In our current crisis, a 'positive politics' is sorely needed and can only come from below.
Cognitive behaviour therapy seems to be particularly useful for conditions where distress (such as depression) is caused by a negative narrative of life that has been built up in the past for good reason but has become increasingly dysfunctional over time.
Improvements in the treatment of mental illness in recent years have been considerable and are only be held back by lack of resources.
If the £8bn spent by the New Labour Government on the Iraq War had been directed into mental health services and improved community conditions, a great deal of human distress might have been avoided in two nations.
The Complexity Of Intelligence
Another positive development is in the increasing sophistication of psychological work on intelligence. This has two countervailing potential results. The first unnerves liberals but has to be faced - we are not all equal in general intelligence and general intelligence matters.
The 'tabula rasa' view is defunct and not only in relation to intellectual equality but in relation to gender difference. We can safely predict the imminent death of the extreme version of egalitarian ideology (though not that of the equal value of all persons regardless of intelligence).
The countervailing discovery (still uncertain in the detail) is of many different types of intelligence to be found in humanity, painting a picture of complexity of talent that no longer privileges people according to their place in a pecking order of general IQ.
This means that a simple stratified society is likely to be sclerotic. The dynamism of society depends on it being a society of all the talents. This opens up society once again to people who may not be formally highly intelligent but have massive advantages in particular types of intelligence, skills and aptitudes.
It also suggests a society of respect for the potential of everyone rather than obeisance to a privileged exam-passing few.
Respect For Difference
The shift from a stratified world of fixed roles to a tabula rasa world of forcing individuals into an egalitarian straitjacket (often under the malign influence of the behaviourists) is now becoming a further shift from the 'tabula rasa' to a respect for difference.
Nowhere is this clearer than in gender relations where the feminists of the 1970s school have found themselves on the run as society rediscovers the fact that boys and girls are fundamentally different even if you can get very boy-like girls and very girl-like boys where the Bell Curves overlap.
There may be an alchemical truth in the magical position of the hermaphrodite where the curves meet but the real message is that is no longer regarded as helpful for women to strive to become like men.
The model is one not of separate but equal (with all the apartheid implications) nor equal and not separate but of complementarity and difference yet equality in worth and access to resources.
This more sophisticated formulation has been seized upon by younger women (as sex-positive or 'lipstick' feminism) as far more truly liberatory than 'traditional' feminism.
Although the new could not have taken place without the struggle of the old, the new really is based on the science that we have in place so far.
Language too now looks as if it follows Chomsky's model of having innate characteristics even if one can dispute the detail.
Deep brain structures imply profound predispositions in learning, language, behaviour and gender difference - not to the extent of presenting any silly predestination arguments but as representing natural constraints on radical versions of existentialism.
Why Psychology Matters
Brain matter, in short, matters. Anyone who has been at the birth of his child knows that twenty years later aspects of personality present then are present now.
The history of psychology is full of half-baked nonsense - the Rorschach inkblot test, phrenology, simplistic Freudian and Behaviourist ideas, discredited left/right brain theories - and there may be half-baked nonsense in the new ideas but we are moving forward all the time.
Much past experimentation is redundant and even silly so that, as tools for understanding oneself, or for creating a dialogue about personal meaning, Tarot cards and dream interpretation are now as one with the ink blot (and that does not mean that they are not useful).
Freudianism increasingly looks daft in its potty theorising about repressed sexuality but it was a vital stepping stone in exploring the unconscious even if the path best taken was back into neuroscience and into imaginative cultural studies (Jung) and investigation of particular drives (Adler, Reich).
Behaviourism too seems more like an ideology than a considered exploration of the mind but its experimentation in conditioning has proved central to effective treatment of phobia as well as providing further proof in its findings that cruelty and conditioning can debase both child and man.
The new wave of research is taking us into fresh territory with real public policy implications. The tendency to enforce conformity, the use of psychology in the struggle between authority and freedom and the problem of the sociopath are all live issues in contemporary politics.
Of equal importance is a proper understanding of how individuals are pre-set to irrational decision-making, to selective memory and to their talents and gender. The ability to improve lives through behavioural therapies contain the seeds of liberation but also of political manipulation.
]]>All that has happened over thirty years is that the threat of a public sector monopoly over productive capacity has been replaced by a duopoly of power in which innovation and infrastructure have shifted into private hands but provision of services remains state-led.
Decentralising The State
Radical conservatives (including many who purport to be on the centre-left) were moving to change this balance in the boom years before the 'credit crunch'.
This position has gone underground while the public is forced to place more trust in the State as a guarantor of last resort against financial system failures - but it has not gone away. The British public sector is now readying itself not just for spending cuts but for a possible administrative revolution.
Currently, our national administration is operating on a 'care and maintenance' basis because of the uncertainties of the coming General Election.
It may take months after the result is announced to get things started again (if only because new ministers will not rubber-stamp predecessors' decisions). By the time that they do, in the Autumn, the mantra will be cost-savings and cuts, regardless of who is in office.
The current theme, partly dictated by the full employment and votes requirements of the incumbent Government but also by economic strategy, is that capital investment is to be cut but head-count ('front-line' services in the speeches) will be sustained.
This is, of course, absurd in the very long term. It is capital investment that creates sustainable wealth and greater efficiencies (as well as jobs). Having lots of people working within a crumbling infrastructure is tantamount to embedding long term economic decline for fear of short term unemployment figures.
Beyond Cynicism
What can be done about this? The first and most cynical thing to say is that this delay in cuts affecting head-count is only partly to do with keeping the economy going. It is also a determination by an incumbent not to disturb a public sector whose votes will go to it all things being equal.
Another cynical observation would be that one cost, neither truly capital investment nor head-count, that might be cut to buy time is the elimination of consultants (before the election) and the quangocracy (after the election) - just work the existing staff harder. We'll come on to that.
If the economists are wrong and if the IMF manages to hold the line in the outer rim of Europe and we are not faced by a sterling crisis, then, perhaps, just perhaps, the infrastructure of the State and 'frontline services' will hold together and we can go back to business as usual in due course.
Through natural wastage and slow growth, with such a strategy, the State can retain its role in society as something more than law enforcement against the surly unemployed. The remnants of social democracy, which is always civil servants' natural preference, might be preserved.
However, we hold to the view (based on experience) that all institutions have an acute sense of their own survival. The machinery of the State cannot be identified entirely with the people who pay for it and whom it serves. It has a politics all of its own.
State Survivalism
As the months go by, you are likely to see at least three 'survival tactics' emerge that are quite new and are designed to preserve the core of the State against radical decentralisers who have emerged on the Right of New Labour and, above all, in the Tory Party.
The new Tory Parliamentary intake will include many experienced local government 'cutters'. Influential Tory 'intellectual' politicians like Douglas Carswell are pushing hard (with some Liberal Democrat sympathy to be expected) for a significant decentralisation of power.
We have already noted the first 'survival tactic' - the slashing of the use of consultants, in effect a decision to throw the private sector hangers-on who have benefited so much from New Labour approaches to private/public partnership overboard to sink or swim.
The second is to start bringing in academics to 'nudge' the population into acceptance of the value of the State and the third, perhaps most interesting of all, are tentative moves to try to quantify the value of what Government does in preparation for aggressive media and PAC questioning.
Away With Agents & Consultants
Since we are associated with the public relations industry, this might be the place to start looking at signs of what is to come. Government communications are an easy target for a new Parliament of Tory provincials - they represent 'spin' and they cost a lot.
On December 11th, PR Week 'revealed' that the COI was going to undertake a highest-level review of government communications with planned efficiency savings of £650m from marketing and management consultancy spend.
Some of the savings will come from an eventual assault on the quangocracy (123 bodies seem to have been targeted for merger or abolition across Government). The claim is that overall consultancy spending in Whitehall will be cut by 50% and marketing by 25%.
What is perhaps most interesting (especially to those exercised by what the centralisation of gritting roads says about New Labour) is the hint that the COI will become more powerful as the central point for all Government communications efforts, which is certainly logical in terms of economies of scale.
This, of course, centralises the State's effort even further into 'one message' communications. This is a challenge to the Tory instinct for the decentralisation of power, although it might suit the Right to have a smaller State communicating more clearly.
However, before we get too excited, New Labour is not cutting a steady-state marketing capability. The COI spend on PR and news management (according to PR week) in 2008/2009 was actually 50% up on the previous year at £41m so a big slash could merely return it to 2007/2008 levels.
The suspicion of Tories has always been that the relatively recent surge in expenditures on education and health communications was 'political' - designed to increase awareness of New Labour's zone of electoral advantage.
A true cynic (not us!) might wonder whether this was legerdemain. A surge of expenditure in the run-up to a known election year and then newspaper-friendly responsible cuts - back to normal once the vote was in. Surely not!
Nudging Approval
We have already raised concerns in As It Happens and elsewhere about the politicians' new fascination with anthropology and the cognitive sciences. This is a general phenomenon, to be found in Cameron's circle as much as anywhere else.
We have cruelly likened it to the fashion for race politics in the first half of the twentieth century that led to the death camps. It is imperfect science within an undeveloped paradigm seized upon by politicians desperate for a solution to their problems of social order and legitimacy.
In the same edition of PR Week, having announced cuts in consultancy and agency, the COI also announced a new raft of advisers - a planned panel of 'behaviour change experts' (i.e. psychologists, behavioural economists, anthropologists and sociologists) to assist in PR planning.
There are philosophical issues here - should your or my money be spent on systems that try to change my behaviour rather than just require compliance with the law? Should a democratic state be using techniques designed to sell goods and services against its own people?
This is the famous 'nudge' approach to public policy and probably as doomed in the long run as all such theoretical and manipulative interventions into our lives, but we can rant as much as we wish - clearly Government thinks that this is the way forward.
In fact, much of this is benign. There is an obesity problem and behavioural psychology can legitimately be used to change behaviour in the interests of the public (assuming they retain the right to be obese by choice). What we have to watch for is drift into projects that suit them and not us.
The point is that the State is now shifting from simply being the client to agencies who take the cash and communicate messages into a more complex animal that learns how to manage perception of itself and so the skills institutionally to embed itself in society against threats to its legitimacy.
This is a major challenge to libertarians because the main claim against the State at the moment is, in fact, that it is not truly competent (often unfairly so but a widespread perception). Changing perception does not change competence but merely perception of competence.
The COI And Value For Money
We leave the best to last. Hidden away but public domain on the COI 'big thinkers' blog is a paper boringly entitled Payback and Return on Marketing Investment [ROMI] in the Public Sector. It is what it says on the tin and the tin was opened up to consultation within the COI family at the end of November.
We don't propose to analyse it here but it is very significant and very creative. In essence, it is taking the bull by the horns of value in marketing (an old debate that has created a mini-industry of evaluation in public relations for nervous corporations).
It is a pre-emptive strike against Parliamentary scrutiny. Under the current regime, 'spin' is good if the Cabinet office or the Prime Minister's Office thinks it is good. There was no need to evaluate. But things change.
'Spin' is not going to be good if New Labour loses the next election (any post mortem will place the collapse down to a history of public manipulation going back to the mid-1990s) and the COI is going to have to demonstrate quantifiable social benefits to ministers under increasing backbench pressure.
Although all these initiatives relate just to one key Department (the Central Office of Information), their appearance at the end of 2009 in anticipation of new conditions by mid-2010 is neither accidental nor unique to communications.
The threat to the State is not simply sheer lack of funds but also legitimacy under conditions where more funds are being raised from the private sector through taxation for services that are undoubtedly going to weaken through cuts - and this may go on for many years.
The new Parliament, regardless of Government, is going to have a phalanx of cost-cutting anti-statist libertarians in place hungry for decentralisation and placing constant pressure on the State to justify its existence against starving packs of private sector rivals and angry letters from constituents.
Legitimacy & Cuts
These three strategies: bringing business back in-house, using academics to build strategies for legitimacy and demonstrating value to Parliament more quantitatively: are three survival tools of value to public administration in very difficult new times. They are pre-emptive strikes against slash and burn.
One last note - the agencies and consultancies who are about to be pushed out may have little to say in the matter (though they will no doubt be lobbying to get back in when things pick up) but many civil servants are not going to like Mark Cross' initiative at the COI one little bit.
If you are used to making relatively unstressful decisions based on your Oxbridge judgement and keeping your head below the parapet to avoid fairly rare Parliamentary scrutiny, Cross' initative, if it spreads through Whitehall, sounds like a lot of hard work and risk.
The Luddites would be mistaken. It is not just the Tory backwoodsman that the State has to worry about (after all most will sink back into relative laziness or end up on the payroll vote after a while) but the new breed of citizen journalist and blogger.
In the coming decades, the issue is not whether Parliament backs the State but whether the public backs both State and Parliament. Parliament is in bad odor with a written warning in its HR file. The State needs direct public legitimacy if taxes are to be paid and laws obeyed.
And here's a thought that should concentrate minds - what if an enraged and angry electorate decides that not only should bankers' bonuses be clawed back but also 'fat cat' public sector pensions? Unlikely, yes, but Luddites ought not be complacent - the anger out there is palpable.
We should take the current planned cuts with a pinch of a salt and be highly suspicious of government by 'nudge' but the COI's initiative on ROMI should be welcomed and encouraged - in the public interest.
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