InMyHumbleEtc

Leader of Manchester City Council Richard Leese has temporarily stepped down after accepting a caution for hitting his 16 year old stepdaugher. I can’t see how he could possibly go back into post after this, but the reaction of the council and the Labour party are really shocking.

According to the details in the press, he hit her in a row, ‘causing a small injury’ to her ear. Assuming he used his hands and not a weapon, I think you’d either have to hit someone very hard, or use your nails to cause a visible injury to someone’s ear. He was held for 20 hours – from 11pm at night to 7pm the next day, which to me suggests the assualt was serious, although this is obviously just speculation.

The council has told the MEN that “We consider this a private matter which we leave up to Richard to deal with with his family”. The local Labour Party line, emanating from Councillor Pat Karney is that “Coun Leese was detained late Monday night following an incident at home. He was released last night with a caution and there is no further legal action pending. This was a private family matter which the family now consider closed.”

To all intents and purposes the Labour Party and the Council are the same thing – Labour having controlled Manchester since some point in the Middle Cambrian, and the underlying assumptions in these statements appear to date from around the same time.

The idea that someone seriously beating their children is a ‘private matter to be dealt with inside the family’ is, for a start, legally nonsensical. As Leese has accepted a caution, he has accepted a criminal assault took place. Criminal behaviour is that which the state deems it necessary to intervene in, and the incident is therefore by definition not private, and so of public concern.

We must be charitable to the Council and say that at least they don’t suggest he should continue to deal with this matter in the same fashion as he did on Monday night, but it’s disgusting that neither Labour nor the Council feel it’s necessary to offer any hint of condemnation. They are basically telling us that their leader hitting his stepdaugher is none of our business, and we should keep our noses out of it.

The philosophical notion underlying this is John Stuart Mill’s division of human affairs into the public and private spheres – one of the cornerstones of liberal political philosophy. The idea is that the state (and society in general) should regulate the former, but have no business interfering in the latter.

There are a lot of problems with this notion – for one it puts business and commerce into the private realm and suggests that wider society has no right to regulate it, even if it involves the creation of globally damaging environmental externalities, exploitation, or business models which collapse causing much wider public harm.

However, the critique that concerns us here stems from feminism. By defining the home as the private realm, classic liberalism provides a cover for domestic violence, sexual abuse and prevents legal sanction on some of the worst horrors that humans perpetrate upon each other.

Clearly we have in general moved on from this position as a society. It broadly agreed that society should intervene in the worst of these cases. But this idea of a public-private dichotomy still underlies much of our political thinking – even if we don’t necessarily name it as such. The Baby P case, and all that follows are part of an ongoing tussle over where the boundary between private and public lies – at what point should society’s representatives intervene, and what are the range of behaviours within which we will allow parents to just get on with it?

This is a contested area, and it is fully of difficult moral grey areas because we are undergoing a process of changing cultural attitudes to this issue. As a general principle, I’m against the state to interfering in people’s lives, but there are certainly greater evils.  On the public-private debate, I’ll just state that dichotomies are always dangerous, and on this issue I am sympathetic to the idea of wider community and extended family responsibility for childrearing – and moving away from a society comprised of atomised nuclear family units, but that’s another story.

What’s significant in the case of the repugnant Richard Leese is that in our collective cultural debate the line has clearly deemed to crossed into the home – the police are given discretion to intervene in cases of violence sufficiently severe to constitute assault, as happened in this case.  The statements from the council and from the Labour party are openly suggesting that to the contrary, this was not an incident of public concern: ‘There’s nothing to see here, please let Sir Richard get on with his family life in private’. No suggestion that what occurred was in any way wrong.

Imagine if Sir Richard had been caught frequenting a prostitute or having an affair. In both cases, no doubt the spin doctors would have also have portrayed this as being a ‘private matter’ – it’s one of the stock phrases – and in those situations they would legally be correct. However, the politician involved would be obliged to do a Tiger and make a show of public contrition for a ‘moment of madness’: assure everyone that it one-off, would never be repeated and that they were a reformed character. We would also expect a prolonged media circus where prurient details are extracted through large payments in cash, stolen or simply fabricated by journalists – all of it justified on the basis that a politician’s sexual conduct has obvious implications on their conduct in office.

Expect nothing of either sort in this case – sex between consenting adults is a different kind of private matter to beating children. No public apology is considered necessary, because we are much more worried if our leaders can’t keep their dicks to themselves than if they beat their kids.

In other cases where politicians have been caught doing something illegal, large or small – such as Harriet Harman’s motoring conviction, the standard form is that press statements contain an expression of regret and acknowledge the authority of the law because isn’t it nice to live in a proper democracy where even the great and the good get their collars felt every now and again.

Again, nothing of the sort here – instead a subtle suggestion that this wasn’t a proper crime because “there is no further legal action pending”, and that as a ‘private matter’ this wasn’t really any wrong as such. Labour do have past form on this – having decided in 2006 to retain the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ for parents accused of assaulting their children. This is against the wishes of all four children’s commissioners, the UK Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. The defence allows any act that would constitute assault on an adult to be allowed so long as it does not leave a mark, thereby giving legal sanction to the modus operandi of many abusive parents.

As I understand it, most of the cabinet ministers involved in this decision were not the sort of people who were so uncivilised as to beat their own children (restricting themselves to colluding in torture, massive aerial bombing and the like), but they had been hit by their own parents, and so were unwilling to take a stance that explicitly condemned it. As a result, our legal regime considers violence upon children by adults who are supposed to protect them to be completely acceptable. This is despite quite considerable public support for a ban on smacking, and evidence that it can do lasting damage. The statements from Manchester City Council, and from Labour are trying to turn the clock back even on this dubious state of affairs by suggesting that Leese’s assault on his stepdaughter is a private matter.

As mentioned earlier, this is an issue where we are undergoing changing cultural attitudes. The next time some idiot tells you that feminism never changed anything, point to the way we have changed our attitudes to the ‘private’ sphere of traditional liberalism and domestic violence. These are very recent developments – child sexual abuse was not part of public discourse 30 years ago, rape within marriage was legal in the UK until 1991*, and until recently the police used to attend spousal abuse calls by with the assumption that both parties were probably equally at fault. Looking at the comments below the MEN story, such attitudes are not uncommon in this case either, despite the fact that one of the parties is a man of nearly 60 and a girl of 16.

In such circumstances, the stance taken by public figures really matters. The Council and the Labour Party in Manchester could have chosen to take a stand and describe Leese’s behaviour as unacceptable and brutish, whereas instead they have insinuated that it is the kind of unfortunate incident that is common in families. By reinforcing such attitudes they have shown themselves to be regressive, and conniving in the acceptance of domestic violence, and deserve to be roundly castigated for it.

*The law was changed by a ruling in the House of Lords, not by an act of parliament. It’s incredible that this was only 19 years ago. According to the Wikipedia article there were three cases where the marital rape exemption rule was used in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but it was only ever used once before then. Presumably cases usually weren’t taken to court because of the rule and prevailing social attitudes. What I want to know is – why the Tories didn’t immediately pass legislation after R v Kowalski in 1988? This is a bigger skeleton in their closet than Section 28 surely?

Sometimes I tear my hair out and gnash my teeth at the complete failure of our media to actually disseminate information. Other times I just get depressed and go back to bed. Did you know that Munir Hussain never relied on self defence or diminished responsibility, but instead claimed to have never been involved in beating the burglar with a cricket bat?

Since he quite obviously did beat the man, and as he failed to avail himself of the defence the law provides for people in his situation, he was clearly responsible for his own guilty verdict. Did you also know that part of the reason for the original sentence is that because of the lock ‘em up brigade,  we have minimum sentence guidelines for violent offences, rather than letting judges…..what’s the word…..judge cases on their merits?

If you didn’t, then I dutifully direct you to Five Chinese Crackers, who has dug out the relevant facts, while the commercial media are jabbering about an imagined case, and politicians are busy making policy off the backs of it:

On one level, it might seem that Cameron has played the tabloids cleverly here, and in the short-term he probably has.  He’s promised nothing that will make any difference and he’s getting praised to the rafters in return – and all in the lead up to an election.  In the longer-term though, he’ll find out about how the tabloids have narratives they need to push next time this issue comes around, which it inevitably will, and the tabloids accuse him of being soft on crime, which they inevitably will regardless of what he actualy does.  He might regret giving them this inch right now instead of using his platform to explain what the law is currently and why it’s fine as it is.  He obviously does think that, or he’d be proposing something more than replacing ‘unreasonable’ with a synonym.

Empty politics at it’s best.  A proposal that does nothing practical in response to papers that got things wrong in the first place, and a total waste of everyone’s time.  I love the news media in this country.  I love the politicians that allow them to pull their strings even more.

The brilliant Flying Rodent, on why we are doomed to disappointment

Whether Chilcot nails Blair’s balls to the floor or not, the war’s defenders are not about to throw up their hands in horror and join in the massive bout of Bodysnatchers-style finger-pointing and howling. There will be no Thank you protestors for being right about this epic clusterfuck after-show party.

A sizeable number of the war’s cheerleaders have cheerfully blown off its horrific consequences, from the Iraqi insurgents’ bloodbaths, through the sectarian death squads and the ensuing civil war and micro-partitioning of the country, by waving their hands and chanting the magical exculpatory incantation, Al-Qaeda terrorists ate our homework!

These people would rather cram their scrotums down their own throats than give an inch to Chilcot, and the odds of say, the Times, running a Sorry we fed you all lies editorial are woeful.

Further, regardless of the outcome, the former PM isn’t going to be clapped in irons, chained to a heavy radiator and thrown into the Thames. He’s going to continue shambling around the world jamming great fistfuls of dollars into his pockets in the full glare of the public eye.

More’s the pity…

via SEMA.

Can anyone see how this one’s going to work out? Answers on a postcard please. Naturally, the Downing Street Petitions Website is not going to hasten the day when our overlords begin drawing up policy that makes sense, but it can be quite a good method of embarrassing them into submission. If there are enough signatures on this petition, the prime minister will have to respond, and I envisage it being quite an entertaining read….

Fantastic piece in the Guardian comment by Bryan Gould, which comes the closest to nailing the demented mix of hubris and boggle-eyed manichaen certainty behind Blair’s commitment to the Iraq war:

Prime ministers who serve a reasonable length of time are always in danger of succumbing to what I call “prime ministerial syndrome” – the belief that, after years of acolytes hanging on their every word, they are infallible. Tony Blair was temperamentally peculiarly susceptible to this condition, exacerbated in his case by his extraordinary ability at that time to persuade the British people of anything he chose. It is easy to see how he came to believe that whether or not the stated reasons for the Iraq invasion were true simply did not matter; the fact that he himself supported the venture was enough.

Why did he support it? He had by this time convinced himself that he was a world statesman, equipped to partner George Bush in a duumvirate which would re-shape the world. Underpinned by a hitherto undeclared religious conviction, he increasingly saw the world in terms of absolutes – good and evil, right and wrong. Like the American conservatives, but for moral and religious reasons rather than misplaced ideological opportunism, he could not resist the chance to strike a blow not only for enlightenment but for his own destiny.

Courtesy of Jonnie Marbles

Definitely worth a read – ‘In defence of Mr Justice Eady‘. Honestly, you’ll be convinced, despite the title. Via Jack of Kent

Yawn. Happy hibernating and all that. I am almost as inconsistent at reading blogs as I am at posting, but I’ve been catching up with my RSS today, and I’m riled. Heresy Corner usually fails to strike a chord with me, and I’m loath to remove it entirely from the RSS, but it’s definitely now on my internal monologue equivalent of a final warning.

The first thing that piqued me about it was the fact the bottom of every RSS article from the Heresy Corner feed bears the sinister warning “© 2009 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved”. Vive la creative commons! – there’s nothing quite like that disclaimer for saying “I’m too good for all this new media malarky – I’m holding out for the book deal”. I’m not really digging the self-styled iconoclasm either, especially not when one of your major targets is the bogeyman fish barrel of religion and ‘superstition’ – edgy stuff indeed. Never mind, I’m aware that my complaints are mostly just a matter of taste, as is the fact that Ghostery shows 8 separate tracking systems on it – there are some much more interesting bits and pieces on there.

However, the snowy weather has not been kind on the Heresiarch’s ability vis a vis incoherent thought. First of all he coughed up a repetition of the UK commentariat’s most tired cliché – ‘Aren’t these weathermen useless’? The meat of the post referred to a comment posted on the Daily Mail website by someone claiming to work for the Met Office, and pulling apart the three sentence description of their methodology therein.  Plenty of blog posts are indistinguishable from typing up whatever ill-informed conversations the author has overheard in the toilets of their local pub, and I generally file such rubbish under ‘ignore’. However, in the context of a renewed right-wing push to discredit climate science, and the accompanying comments by Heresiarch, this banal fare becomes much more pernicious:

Of course. I’m passing no comment here about the climate science, except to say that the more I hear it proclaimed in ever shriller tones that the science is settled, the less I believe it. I used to think the science was settled. I now merely think that there are a lot of people who think that it ought to be settled, which isn’t the same thing at all.

There is plenty to take issue with here, but I shall move on to more egregious matters, pausing only to note that if you really want to blog about the weather, you probably ought to make a bit of an effort to understand it. Things might be a bit more complicated than you realise, hmmm?

The really appalling piece of gibberish from Heresy Corner (think of it as the part of the classroom where they give you a special pointy hat) came on Thursday, in the guise of a ‘Guest Post‘ from ‘The Pedant General’ of Devil’s Kitchen (What is it with bloggers and their pompous nicknames? Hello? We are nerds in our bedrooms – enough with the airs and graces!). It is a horrible example of how little FUD the climate change deniers need to spread in order to stymie public action on complex scientific matters. I bet it takes me longer to counter it (lacking, as I do, immediate access to the correct scientific data, and only a passing knowledge of proper climate science blogs) than it did for it to be written in the first place.

Most of us simply lack the time and specialist knowledge to disprove their bullshit, and for many people climate denial suits their prejudices and political persuasion, and they won’t even seek it out. Think of  the Pedant General as an intelligent human being who has swallowed just enough bullshit from various sources to convince himself that there isn’t a problem, and that the solutions will make things worse, in line with his political leanings.

In a comment on the earlier thread inspired by the Met Office’s inaccurate predictions of a warm winter, Sue R asked: Why are people so keen to deny global warming?

That entirely misses the point.

The fact that we are noticeably warmer than we were 5, 50 or 150 years ago is not remotely interesting. We were and are emerging from a (non-man made) little ice age.

The vital question is whether we are warmer than we were 1000 years ago, and that is very definitely not settled science in any way shape or form.

And… even if we are warmer than we were 1000 years ago (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is denied – the historical record is pretty clear that it was indeed significantly warmer – one reason the science isn’t settled BTW), it is not at all clear whether this change is man-made to any really significant degree.

OK, so first of all – no links, no evidence, just assertion. Cheers. It’s actually extremely interesting if we are warmer than 150 years ago, considering the small matter of industrialisation. But the claim here is that we should be looking at longer terms trends and whether we are warmer than 1,000 years ago. So lets:

Temperature trends in past centuries and the so-called hockey stick

The graph is from RealClimate.org, which is  well worth reading for the extra information, especially the comments (and other pages here, here and here). Basically it shows the reconstructed data on long term climactic variation from various sources and methodologies, and against several computer simulations – it’s Northern Hemisphere data, incidentally.

The different coloured lines show the trends suggested by the different studies, and the grey areas show the different outer limits for the uncertainty on two of the studies (Mann & Jones and Man et al). If we go back to the year 1000 all of them are below the 1961-1990 baseline, with the possible exception of the green line (Mann et al). The green line is crossing the baseline around that point, heading steeply downwards – the previous short spike above the baseline is the only time it rises above it in the whole series.

The outer limits of uncertainty do show that it’s possible that the temperature in the past may have been above the baseline, but the likely trends are universally below the baseline, as are all the other data series, except for a brief spike in the yellow line (Crowley and Lowery) around 1200, and the early progress of the Bauer et al simulation. None of the data trends, or the extremities of uncertainty exceed 0.4 above the baseline prior to the era of industrialisation. Our current position is significantly above +0.4. The long term data does show us emerging from the ‘little ice age’ in the mid 19th century but it also shows a completely anomalous rise beyond previous norms. We are much warmer than we were 1,000 years ago, and the Pedant General is talking bollocks. And before you start, there’s a very good Hockey Stick Q&A here.

And, even if:

• we are warmer than we were 1000 years ago and

• we are causing it to some significant degree

it’s not at all clear that we are really able to influence it the other way

And, even if:

• we are warmer than we were 1000 years ago and

• we are causing it to some significant degree and

• we are really able to influence it the other way

it’s not at all clear that doing so is necessarily necessary. Do the benefits of warmer temperatures outweigh the costs? The historical record suggests that yes, they do. Humans do better when it’s warmer. The numbers dying of unseasonal cold far outstrip those dying of unseasonal heat.

Y’what? Y’WHAT? So “it’s not at all clear that we are really able to influence it the other way”. This witless assertion is so lacking in substantiating information that it’s very hard to dismantle. The mechanism by which CO2 makes the world warmer is such old hat that even I learned it in school. The correlation between CO2 and temperature is very well documented in Ice Core data, and the ‘lag’ is well explained. Essentially, other factors begin warming events (output of CO2 from the earth’s fauna & flora having been fairly static until the age of industrialisation), but this warming stimulated release of CO2 which then droves the warming even further.

Granted, if we don’t reduce emissions soon, the feedback loops (several of which involve the same CO2 release as in no-anthropocentric  warming events),  will reduce our ability to reverse this human-caused warming. But that is an argument for urgent action now, not for prevarication. As for the claim that the historical record suggests that “the benefits of warmer temperatures outweigh the costs” – this has got to be the most stupid claim of the lot. El General really hasn’t taken the time to understand what climate change means, has he? Cimate Change means more increased extreme weather events, disruption of the water cycle and decreased agricultural productivity, not sunglasses and the occasional hot flush. The 300,000-odd estimated deaths a year from climate change didn’t die of heat stroke.

And, even if:

• we are warmer than we were 1000 years ago and

• we are causing it to some significant degree and

• we are really able to influence it the other way and

• doing so is necessarily necessary and

• it’s more cost effective to try adapt the climate itself

it’s not at all clear that this indeed the best use of our money right now. There are (pace Lomborg) stacks of really actually pressing problems that would benefit mankind massively more proveably right now if a tiny tiny fraction of the sums being bandied about were to be devoted to them. Eradicating malaria for example.

Bjorn Fucking Lomberg. I should have known he’d hear from that twat sooner or later. Because of the feedback loops mentioned above, we have a window of effectiveness after which we will not be able to lower average global temperatures by reducing our carbon emissions, and will be locked into a much greater warming event. This means we don’t get to wait around until it’s a bit too warm for our comfort, and then start to do something about the problem.

Lomberg’s major contribution to fiddling while Rome burns involved getting a load of economists into a room and getting them to assess a competition of global projects for the benefit of mankind, using a budget too small to make a difference to global warming. At $50 billion US, it was actually less than half the annual estimated costs of climate change. On the basis of that, global warming was deemed to not be cost effective, never mind what the real scientists said. I don’t think Dante was sufficiently forward thinking to reserve a place for hell for contrarians who look on global catastrophe as a chance to launch a career in denial punditry, but part of me wishes he had.

And, even if:

• we are warmer than we were 1000 years ago and

• we are causing it to some significant degree and

• we are really able to influence it the other way and

• doing so is necessarily necessary and

• it’s more cost effective to try adapt the climate itself and

• this is a better use of our money than any of the myriad other much better uses of our money

it’s not at all clear that the best way to do this is to subborn all our freedoms to a putative world government in the form of the monstrously corrupt UN who will then proceed to tax us all into oblivion in order to give all our money to the most corrupt and incompetent governments on the planet (who are more likely to squander or nick it rather than use it – incompetently – for whatever it was supposed to be for).

I quite agree, this would not be a very good course of action, even when stripped of the demented right-wing hysteria. We need something much more radical – centrally coordinated, but properly democratic and involving everyone. And fast.

Thus, Sue’s claim that “the weather/climate is changing and it is necessary for governments to act upon it ” is a monster fallacy of well known form:

• something must be done (which is denied)

• A is something (A is not shown to be effective)

• therefore A must be done (logical fallacy)

with the added knobs on that

• A must be done by the government.

Or is that akin to being a young earth creationist?

As its been quite well shown that something that tackles climate change really does need to be done, I think it’s not unreasonable for people to look to the existing political authorities to take action. Obviously, what is to be done, and by whom is a proper political debate, instead of this head in the sand bullshit, and I rather look forward to having it. And actually General, you’re much worse than a young earth creationist. They are considerably less harmless.

Approximate time to Fisk: 4 hours. Incidentally, for future reference, these two sites can save you hours of wasted effort with these goons in the future:

• SkepticalScience.com
• Answers to Global Warming Skeptics

A friend of a friend posted this link, to which (I have to confess) I rolled my eyes. It kind of reminds me of when I was at school & ran as an anarchist candidate in the mock elections (fully aware of the inherent contradictions), and was told off by one of my teachers for printing posters with bomb making instructions rather than something along the lines of “property is theft”.

I’m all up for debating about the nature of capitalism, but clinging to orthodox structural Marxism and complaining in high academic language that no-one else understands hasn’t got the left in the UK anywhere in the last 50 years. This kind of thing is very well represented in the workshops at the camp & very good they are too. There was a huge plenary one evening on this year economics, with Marx & everything, and I’d happily lay money that was the largest gathering (outside of a university) where newcomers were introduced to those ideas in the UK in the last year.

Naturally, not everyone endorses them as the only way to analyse our society, and I think the plurality in our movement is directly related to it’s energy & vitality. That said, they are a lot more widely understood than this article makes out, and it’s a bit silly to confuse slogans on banners taken to protests with an all encompassing statement of somebody’s politics. If you do that, you find yourself turning up to a protest with 3000 dense lines of spidery handwriting on a bit of cardboard and looking like a bit of a plonker.

The camp is clearly anti-capitalist, and this is affirmed regularly at meetings, when discussing media and outreach etc. It is also extremely effective at smuggling radical critiques into the mainstream media, for example getting a debate on carbon trading on Newsnight on the back of a “highly mediatised, symbolic” direct action. It does this by intentionally shying away from gems such as “These arguments fail to grapple with the structural processes of capital, instead limiting their critique to a superficial critique of the appearance of contemporary capitalism”.

As with my poster at school, talking about radical ideas in a way that is too far removed from your audience’s frame of reference is not very  radical at all, because they are only understood by the usual suspects. Not using this language is too much of a departure from the one true way for some, and I think it is really important to continually debate how to dance the line between access and co-option, between accessibility and compromising the message. But that debate is continually going on within the climate camp process, and I think that in general our dancing is pretty impressive.

There are obviously some people involved in the movement who are reformers rather than revolutionaries, and the way the camp is organised through consensus decision making means that the group cannot cross the red lines of anybody who is involved. That seems like a pretty watertight defence against creeping liberalism to me.

The charge that the camp didn’t involve radical direct action this year is misplaced – the last time I checked, seizing a piece of land in central London, denying access to the police and organising autonomously within that space to, amongst other things, take down Ratcliffe-upon-Sour power station was pretty radical. Similarly, introducing loads of fresh-faced newbies to actual functioning anarchism in action is infinitely more powerful than writing a long wordy treatise. We had hundreds of people running around on Blackheath practising tactics for outflanking the cops at the Great Climate Swoop, and the police had taken such a hammering about their tactics at the G20 that they allowed it all to happen. People protesting in the SOCPA zone were politely requested to please climb the side of the Treasury by the street, rather than the one by the park. During that week, a whole raft of the most draconian legislation which is usually deployed against protesters was de-facto unenforceable.

This (probably temporary) space for direct action was directly created through the tactics which have been the subject of most soul-searching within the camp – working the mainstream media very hard, doing some police liaison and interfacing with parliamentary committees and HMIC. Again, it is really important that this engagement is continually debated, and if it ever becomes an end in itself then we’ve lost, but my point is, so far the plurality of approaches has been a huge success, not a drawback. We really are stronger together. Who’d have thought it?

I think that as protesters/activists/political radicals/general ne’er-do-wells we are very used to being outsiders, and climate camp having such a large public profile is a long way from what anyone is used to, and this lies behind a lot of the critiques that are directed at it. It doesn’t feel, smell or taste like what people are used to in other situations when they have been ‘fighting the good fight.’ However, if we are serious about tackling the greatest environmental catastrophe in human history with this non-hierarchical method of organising, I imagine we are going to be spending quite a lot of time outside our comfort zone. In fact, if we aren’t, I think we are probably doing something wrong.

If we expect societal change to come out of what we are doing, it would be a mistake to believe that we are going to come out of it unchanged ourselves, with identical ideas, methods and beliefs – as agents of change, we are hardly going to remain static. The way we are organised requires everyone to participate, and there ain’t gonna be any cadres, so we certainly can’t go into it with fixed ideas of how the end will look, or with the intention to control that change – we only get to be participants too. That is certainly going to take us way out of our comfort zone, but I think the way we organise is a powerful bulwark against oppression and domination; it demands that we are reflexive, adaptive and accommodating and it draws out the creativity and agency in everyone it touches.

We are taking on a massive task, and it isn’t going to reward us for prioritising abstract notions of political purity above efficacy. If we are going to tackle the state’s role in climate change, we are going to have to challenge it to live up to some of the ideals it espouses – looking after the worst off in our society, maximising individual wellbeing, neutrally mediating between disputes – and  call it out when it flounders on the inherent contradictions within Liberalism. We need to show the emperor has no clothes so that everyone sees that the disproportionate power of corporations and the wealthy have a stranglehold on these ‘neutral’ institutions, and that we need to end capitalism before it ends us all. At the moment it is looking alive and well enough to saddle us with runaway climate change before it does itself terminal damage, so personally I don’t think we can afford to ignore the institutions of power that exist now – I think we’re going to have to get  our hands dirty and do all sorts of things that we would never have dreamed of. However, considering the timescale we don’t have the luxury of arguing over whose strategy is the best one. At the moment we’re in a quickly descending aircraft, and it’s “press every fucking button on the dashboard” time. We have a commitment to all work together to try and solve this, and that seems like a good starting point, with all of our different approaches and outlooks. Or alternatively we can go our separate ways: you can keep your Marxist dogma, and we’ll keep our revolution, but that seems like a bit of a shame – and our way includes dancing……

And so it came to pass that the Guardian is following my lead & has written what amounts to a political obituary for Gordon Brown. Considering how tooth-achingly long it took the idiot to finally to hit home after years of cack-handedly stabbing Blair in the back, I’m not holding my breath for his final demise. Anyway, I thought this paragraph really summed up the whole of Brown’s premiership.

This week, in the wake of the expenses scandal, he has announced he is considering “a new constitutional settlement”, including reducing the voting age to 16, creating a Bill of Rights and written constitution, completing the reform of the House of Lords and extending the Freedom of Information Act. Brown is full of other big ideas: that climate change and the recession require a new form of international co-operation and a new form of capitalism; that the public’s involvement in British democracy needs to be rethought and renewed; that the world is living through the greatest period of change since the industrial revolution; that today is nevertheless “a progressive age”.

It sounds like a full programme for government, not a weeks worth of announcements. But with the exception of the voting age, it’s utterly devoid of detail. There’s absolutely no way of getting a handle on any of these high-blown phrases, and as such the whole thing is completely meaningless. What the fuck does a ‘new form of capitalism’ mean? Bankers will be forced to wear odd socks when shafting us from now onwards? We’ll abandon floating currencies, but instead of the gold standard, all prices will link back to the wholesale price of plasticine? Instead of a return on your investment, a lifetime of savings will entitle you to free cream cakes through the post and a novelty alarm clock?

Hang on - I can see our new constitutional settlement, but it's very far away. Does anyone have a really long stick

Through my own dazzling inertia, I left a blog post dating from summer 2007 that said how well Brown was doing as as my last word on his premiership for over a year. I was fascinated by how quickly it became a museum piece, and how I’d completely swallowed the media mood music. When I looked back on it, the reason was that the honeymoon coincided with the summer recess, and Brown was just making speeches. There was no detail, no legislative programme. Naturally he’d been preparing to be prime minister his whole life, so it had been long in the planning, and it showed.

When the detail of what he was actually going to do started to emerge, the utter poverty of his thinking was embarrassingly clear. My personal gawd-help-us moment was realising that not only was he not going to take the opportunity to scrap ID cards, but he was going to squander hours of parliamentary time buggering about trying to force through 42 day detention. You’d hope someone might have noticed that his predecessor had rather done the imbecile anti-terrorism measures to death, and had run into the buffers on this very issue. Never mind the election that never was. At that moment I suddenly come to grips with the doom-laden implications of what continuity really meant. It was not a good time.

I don’t actually have any sense of what Brown’s speeches were about during that honeymoon period, doubtless because they were similar in content to the above list – the policy equivalent of MSG – fluff with a passing sense of satisfaction and no substance. I wouldn’t be surprised if several of the same key phrases came up, certainly they smelt like a similar variety of bullshit. There’s something deeply pathological about this inability to translate any of these laudable ideas into something resembling policy. Like the man himself, it all sounds wonderful on paper, but somehow never gets off the ground.

He’s had over twenty years, in politics to rethink the public’s involvement in democracy – a phrase which, incidentally, is so riven with contradictions and the sad truth about British politics that it hurts. Democracy means rule of the people, so our ‘involvement’ in anything worth the name should be pretty fucking clear: we’re in charge. Twenty years of public life and and he can’t come up with a substantive proposal in order to save his own political skin, just a shopping list of meaningless phrases. He can’t even sack Hazel Blears properly. Prick.