Boyle and Calder on communities

The latest pamphlet in the Liberator series Passports to Liberty was on sale at the Lib Dem Blackpool Conference, if only on the last day. It contains the essays "Spin" by Adrian Sanders MP and "Cohesive Communities" by David Boyle and (hem, hem) Jonathan Calder.

"Cohesive Communities" was first written for the party's Federal Policy Committee and approved for publication as a policy development paper. But Cowley Street never showed any great enthusiasm for publishing it and it was eventually overtaken by preparations for the general election and the subsequent policy review.

But surely if FPC approves something it should be published at once?

What a sweet, innocent child you are! Run along and play.

Anyway, here are some extracts from the essay.

Recent research, particularly in the USA, has pinpointed cohesive communities as the key missing ingredient to a whole range of intractable policy issues that are undermining the ability of governments and their welfare systems to struggle on. The biggest and most expensive study in the history of criminology, carried out by the Harvard School of Public Health and which reported recently, found that by far the most important influence on local crime is the willingness of neighbours to act for each other’s benefit – and especially for the benefit of each other’s children.

***

Our Liberal Democrat embrace of liberty, equality and community echoes the Jacobin slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Perhaps the idea of ‘fraternity’ is irredeemably sexist, but it does convey a warmth and spontaneity that are often absent from ‘community’ as it has been understood by governments of either Labour or Conservative. Certainly, they are absent from the idea of community held by New Labour communitarian theorists.

***

The increasing dependence on professionals at neighbourhood level has led both to the exhaustion of public services and the increasing powerlessness of their clients. The truth is that the successful operation of teachers, doctors, police and social services depends on working as equal partners both with clients and with their neighbours – all three have a critical part to play in any successful regeneration. This basic truth, and the resources that it represents, have been increasingly forgotten as politicians puzzle over why their spending on public services are so ineffective, and as even the community development sector finds itself expecting and achieving very little from the local population.

Simon Titley reviews this latest number in the Passports to Liberty series in Liberator 305. He makes Adrian Sanders' essay sound an enjoyable rant, and writes of "Cohesive Communities" as follows:

Besides outlining the problem - basically "giantism" as the enemy of local communities - the authors suggest a number of practical steps to achieve their vision. This is precisely the sort of thinking needed to put flesh on the bones of the Liberal Democrats' Meeting the Challenge policy review...

Given the fundamental importance of cohesive communities to major public concerns such as the delivery of public services and fighting crime, however, this thinking deserves to become a cornerstone of Liberal Democrat policy.

To order a copy of Passports to Liberty 6 send a cheque for £3.50 (payable to Liberator Publications) to: Kiron Reid, 48 Abbeygate Apartments, Wavertree Gardens, High Street, Liverpool L15 8HB.

You can find details of my earlier Passports essay "Defending Families" here.

We are not Old Labour in exile

There is a strange asymmetry in the average Liberal Democrat's attitude to the two other parties.

We positively glory in upsetting Conservatives. If someone got up during a debate at a Lib Dem Conference and said we should not support civil liberties in case the Daily Mail and the Tory Party attacked us, he would be howled down. And rightly so.

But our attitude to Labour is very different. Here is Paul Holmes, chair of the Lib Dem parliamentary party, writing in today's Liberal Democrat News:

Those who talk of "breaking up the NHS" need to explain in detail what they mean, although the damage is already done in terms of Labour leaflet writers. Decentralisation and local accountability would be in tune with Liberal Democrat core values. But the headline writers seized upon hints of cut-throat competition and USA style personal insurance (whatever other title it is dressed up in).

Liberal Democrats love to describe themselves as "radical", but for many there seems to be an unstated assumption that to be radical means to be like the pre-Blair Labour Party.

Why is this? In my Liberator review of the Orange Book I suggested that:

for most of the twentieth century liberalism was in decline and socialism was seen as the ideology of the future. It was not surprising that some liberals concluded that the way to prove that liberalism was still relevant was to show that it had anticipated socialism or was really a form of socialism too.

We need to be more confident in liberalism and to enjoy outraging socialists as much as we enjoy outraging the Tories. Our policies should emphasise individual liberty and local democracy to an extent that scandalises the Labour Party.

Perhaps the philosophical differences between liberalism and socialism are harder to appreciate if you do not remember Labour before Blair. And these days Liberal Democrat policy is closest to New Labour on precisely those issues which are central to New Labour's view of the world. I am thinking of childcare and antisocial behaviour.

But ultimately, what is the point of having a separate Liberal Democrat party if our policies do not annoy Labour politicians and journalists?

Lord Bonkers' latest diary

Lord Bonkers latest diary has now been posted on his website:

I had dinner with Oaten the other evening and he insisted on drinking mineral water throughout the meal. The wine waiter came up to ask “Still or sparkling?” I gave Oaten an appraising look and replied: “Still, I am afraid.”

There is an honourable tradition of politicians funding candidates from opposing parties, if they are strapped for cash themselves, to ensure a fair, democratic contest. I myself had a lot of innocent fun in the 1920s by putting up the deposit for a number of Socialist candidates in rural seats and then encouraging the local urchinry to pelt them with rotten vegetables, dead rats and so forth. It will be a sad day indeed when such public-spiritedness is driven out of British politics.

Autumn has come to Rutland. Flocks of hamwees sit in the rowens and flocks of wheways sit in the horwoods (or it may be the other way round – I was never top in Nature Study), girding their feathery loins for the long flight south.

Lord Bonkers writes in every issue of Liberator magazine.

Labour delegates cling to Blunkett

Martin Bright, the New Statesman's political editor, has an article on that magazine's Labour Conference blog. He provides a useful link to the David Blunkett is an Arse site, and discusses delegates' reaction to his recent NS column on Blunkett's "idiosyncratic" attitude to the truth.

He is right to defend himself, complaining that:

Sometimes Labour activists seem to believe the job of a left-wing journalist is to bolster the Labour Party and protect it from itself.

But he overeggs it when he writes:

In truth, though, Labour politicians have to be able to bear a greater degree of scrutiny because we expect more of them.

This seems to me typical Socialist self-romanticising. No one is asking ministers in the present government to be better than anyone else: we are just asking them to behave morally.

New Labour's emphasis on "sleaze" in the last years of John Major was chiefly a means of disguising how few policy differences they had with the Tories. But having made individual politicians' personal morality a central concern of British politics, they had better learn to live up to the claims they made for themselves before 1997.

More life in Blair's Britain

More news from Brighton:

Security at Labour's conference has been attacked as "mad and over the top" after an MP's camera was seized and pictures deleted.

Great Grimsby MP Austin Mitchell is furious at what he believes is the unnecessarily tough security at the Brighton conference centre.

He was approached by stewards as he took pictures of delegates queuing to pick up their passes.

Life in Blair's Britain

The BBC has smuggled this story out of Brighton:

The Labour Party has apologised after an 82-year-old member was thrown out of its annual conference for heckling.

Walter Wolfgang, from London, was ejected from the hall after shouting "nonsense" as Foreign Secretary Jack Straw defended Iraq policy.

Police later used powers under the Terrorism Act to prevent Mr Wolfgang's re-entry.

Blackpool rocked

Don't miss Simon Titley's masterly blend of invective and analysis.

Let's hope the Liberal Democrat Conference never visits Blackpool again. More cramped quarters in Harrogate, Southport or Scarborough would be infinitely preferable when we are looking for a Northern venue.

Kitchy kitchy coo? You're nicked

It's hard to resist the outcry about Calderdale Royal Hospital attempting to ban visitors from cooing at babies. The Daily Mail - the only place to go for stories like this - reports:

Staff in one of the wards have put up a display of a doll in a cot with a message saying: "What makes you think I want to be looked at?"

Channel 4 news adds:

Cards were handed out to visitors stating: "Respect my baby" and underneath, as if written by a baby, are the words: "My parents ask you to treat my personal space with consideration."

Why have they done this? The BBC quotes Debbie Lawson, neo-natal manager at the hospital's special care baby unit, as saying:

"We know people have good intentions and most people cannot resist cooing over new babies but we need to respect the child.

"Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me."

A story somehow typical of 21st century Britain. Note three things.

First, it is true that other people poking and clucking over your baby can be annoying. (I take the reference to the possibility of infection as a later rationalisation of this policy, though there may be something in it.) Yet the assumption made by the hospital authorities is that mothers are incapable of making this clear to visitors or passers by themselves. Instead we must have standardised regulations imposed on all.

I am with Belinda Phipps, chief executive of the National Childbirth Trust, quoted by the BBC report:

"Calderdale Royal Hospital needs to treat mothers as grown ups. Mother should be able to say what she wants to happen with her baby."

Second, note the extraordinarily sententious tone of the signs used to advertise this policy: "What makes you think I want to be looked at?" (Incidentally, how could a baby sensibly be said to want or not want to be looked at?) "Treat my personal space with respect." It's halfway between North Korea and those signs people put in cars when they are carrying children. The thought that looking at babies can give people pleasure is nowhere allowed for.

Third, note how easy it is to talk nonsense when you introduce the notion of rights. Babies, we are told, "are little people with the same rights as you or me".

It is certainly not true in law that babies have the same rights as adults. They can't buy a drink in a pub or drive or own a shotgun. Indeed, it is hard to see that it makes sense to ascribe many rights to a baby at all.

You can say that they have a right to kind treatment, but it is hard to see what that adds to saying that it is wrong to be cruel to babies. Later on, you could, I suppose, give children the same right as adults to decide what time they go to bed, but that would hardly be in the children's interests or anyone else's.

When rights enter the conversation our culture seems unable to make sensible distinctions between adults and infants. You would hope that, of all people, a "neo-natal manager" would have a clear idea of what babies are like, but apparently this is not the case here.

The TV camera always lies

Nothing in television documentaries is quite what it seems. Not even in the best of them, such as 49 Up which I wrote about the other day.

Remember the little boy in the Yorkshire Dales in 7 Up, trudging off to school in his wellingtons like an extra from Whistle Down the Wind? His brother was recently interviewed in the Bradford Telegraph & Argus:

"I was only a year old when the first programme was made," said Andrew.

"But I was told later about some of the TV people's antics such as getting Nick to 'walk to school' (he actually went on a bus), a journey which went past a scenic local landmark for the purposes of the film, though it meant going in completely the wrong direction."

Lib Dem blogger interviewed

The egov monitor site has an interview with Lib Dem blogger and Kingston councillor Mary Reid. She gives her views on e-democracy:

One word of warning – it is all too easy to try to control citizen participation through top-down government-led activities. Whilst I believe it is very important for councils to offer a number of communication channels, in the end what really matters is whether they listen to people and respond. Governments cannot control grassroots activity, but they can provide fertile ground in which it can flourish.

Next week, a councillor from Yorkshire on ee-democracy.

Why spin doctors don't matter

It was the media what won it, argues Simon Isledon on The Liberal. He blames the party's press officers for the way stories about dissatisfaction with Charles Kennedy's leadership dominated coverage of the Liberal Democrat Conference.

I wonder. It is true that the party's press operation has often left a lot to be desired. One of the reasons that members of the Liberator editorial collective appear in the media so regularly during conference week is that there are lots of journalists wandering around conference, desperate for someone to explain what is going on to them. We are happy to oblige.

But one of the characteristics of our age is that we overestimate the importance of people like press officers in politics. Take Alastair Campbell. In the years before New Labour won its first election he acquired the most colossal reputation - part bully, part magician.

Yet when he acted as press office for the British Lions rugby tour earlier this year no one praised his efforts. They were either ignored or slated. No one said: "The team lost all three tests horribly, but I thought the press operation was first rate."

Similarly, Campbell acquired his reputation in the years running up to 1997 because it was obvious from a long way out that Blair was going to win. Therefore political journalists had to establish good relations with him and his future cabinet ministers. Therefore Campbell had great power over them.

So stories about people having doubts about Charles Kennedy did not feature in the press because of failings by Cowley Street staff. They featured because a lot of people in the party do have doubts about the current leadership.

I am afraid press officers are just not that important.

Thoughts on the Blackpool Conference

My article from today's Liberal Democrat News.

Armchair Conference

Viewing this year's Liberal Democrat Conference from a distance has its compensations. You get to see the party as other see us. And better, you don't have to visit Blackpool.

Adrian Sanders described it as "a sad place that has lost its heart". It is not alone in that amongst seaside resorts, but things have always been on a larger scale in Blackpool.

Some see the widespread dislike of the town as snobbish. But the British seaside is struggling because the working class has grown more affluent and expects higher standards. Which is a thoroughly good thing.

Tom McNally, the town's most famous son, made a game attempt to defend Blackpool on the Today programme. It's an important piece of social history, he told us.

But then so is Dartmoor Prison, and you wouldn't want to spend a night there either.

* * * *

The more parties shape their conferences to suit television, the less interested television becomes. There is still coverage, but you rarely get to listen to the debates for any length of time. Instead there is endless speculation about what will happen next and a succession of interviews with MPs.

The question that has dominated the press this week is: "What do the Liberal Democrats stand for?" As every MP interviewed gives a list of policies rather than articulates a distinctive philosophy, no one is much wiser

Nor has it been clear what the conference as a whole stands for. We have come over as being more certain about what we are against.

Take the debate on the post office. Norman Lamb's proposals were referred back, despite his cautious attempt to revive the Liberal dream of workers owning their own businesses.

That's fine. But under the current arrangements sub post offices are closing daily, often taking the accompanying small shops with them. What is the Liberal Democrat answer to this? Nothing anyone read or watched this week will have told them.

Equally, there are all sorts of important questions about the future of the European Union. Should Turkey be allowed to join despite its human rights record? Where do the boundaries of Europe lie? Does the EU exist to further free trade or defend us from it?

Monday's debate generated a lot of heat - Ostrich! Xenophobe! Recount! - but nothing in the media gave the impression that it engaged with these issues. If anything, conference seemed to cling to the certainties of the past.

* * * *

The heroine of the week was Sarah Teather. She spoke up for local democratic control of public services and proposed scrapping the absurd Standards Board for England.

And Ed Davey got lots of attention by calling for a house system to be used to "break down large, soulless concrete comprehensives". This was chiefly because he presented it as the system used at Harry Potter's Hogwarts.

A clever piece of spin. But you don't have to be a wizard to see that the real question is why we create large, soulless schools in the first place.

The purpose of Sure Start

Last week I wrote about the Birkbeck College report on the government's Sure Start scheme. In particular, the way Polly Toynbee and a Guardian leader writer used it as evidence of the need for Sure Start to be expanded, even though it found few signs that the scheme was having a positive effect on the development of poor children.

On the Spiked website Jenny Bristow suggests that this is not really the point of Sure Start:

Sure Start's aim is not to transform the fortunes of poor children: how could it, when the one solution to child poverty - giving parents more money - is conspicuously absent in its approach? Its aim is gradually to transform the relationship between the family and the state. In this sense, it doesn't matter what the evaluators find out about child development; it is the evaluation itself that is important.

The Sugarloaf Pippin and the Tower of Glammis

The Shropshire Star has another of its popular "lost apple variety rediscovered" stories today.

This time there are two involved. No wonder the paper says the finds "have caused a stir among pomologists".

The case against agricultural subsidies

KickAAS - Kill All Agricultural Subsidies - points us to an article on the Globalization Insitute's site advertising its new report:

Green and Pleasant Land says that the CAP - rather than being the saviour of the countryside - has been an environmental disaster, creating pollution with no economic benefit, and requiring more chemicals and energy use than had market forces been allowed to run. By encouraging the pre-emptive use of antibiotics, it threatens to create antibiotic-resistant diseases. It imposes costs on taxpayers, consumers, other industries and the environment - for benefits described as "trivial".

They are right, and this is another opportunity to add a plug for Graham Harvey's book The Killing of the Countryside.

This is not a cheap anti-EU point. The British government was paying out enormous farming subsidies for 30 years before we joined the Common Market.

But it does show the need for the Common Agricultural Policy to be reformed. Which is why I would have voted for Vince Cable and Nick Clegg's motion on Europe if I had been in Blackpool this week.

A history of Liberalism and music

Tonight sees the highlight of the Liberal Democrat Conference in Blackpool: the Glee Club. Party members will gather to sing political songs and enjoy the occasional turn from the great and the good.

To enjoy the Glee Club to the full you need a Liberator songbook. And this year's songbook has an introduction by my old friend Lord Bonkers. With his permission I reproduce it below.

I have long been a lover of music. I recall visiting the Aldeburgh festival during the East Coast floods of 1953 and enjoying a recital of British folk song. Just as Peter Pears was giving "The Bonny Earl o' Moray" both barrels, the sea overwhelmed the coastal defences and flooded the concert hall. In the resultant confusion I had the presence of mind to straddle a double bass that floated past and paddle myself to safety (accompanied by Benjamin Britten on the piano).

Nor am I alone amongst Liberal Democrats in my enthusiasm. One thinks of Susan J. Kramer and her Dakotas, of Andrew "Boy" George and of Lembit Öpik who, as a tribute to his patronage of the nascent Estonian rock scene, is known in every Baltic port as "Öpik of the Pops".

Other Liberals have been immortalised in song. Who does not know the jazz classic "It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got That Ming"? Then there is that candid tribute to the member for Southwark North and Bermondsey by the 1910 Fruitgum Company: "Simple Simon Says". Above all, there is the delightful Miss Sandy Denny's performance of the traditional air "The Lowlands of Mulholland".

So at the Glee Club, when you buy your songbook from one of those amusing young people who produce Liberator magazine and treat yourself to a foaming pint of Smithson & Greaves Northern Bitter from the bar, remember that you form part of a living tradition of musical Liberalism.

Libby Purvis on Ritalin and ADHD

Make that Libby Purves.

BBC Radio 4's voice of astringent good sense has an article in today's Times on the subject:

it is reported that prescriptions of the drug Methylphenidate - commonly sold as Ritalin - have risen sharply in a decade. Last year in England there were 359,000, the vast majority to children under 16. This is a mind-altering drug, described by its most bitter opponents as "prescription crack"; in the United States 6 per cent of all children take it. Here it is less than 1 per cent, but rising fast: for this is the cure-all for the fairly newly defined condition of "ADHD" - attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

She is as concerned with this as I am, and takes a similar line to the one I took in an article in OpenMind a couple of years ago.

The only thing I would question is the implication behind her:

sometimes I wonder whether future generations may not look back at our habits and shudder in their turn.

I hope they will do just that. But if they don't, our habits are still wrong.

Beware of what Popper calls "moral futurism" - the belief that what comes later must necessarily be better. Whether it stems from a belief in Liberal Progress, in Divine Providence or in Marxist metaphysics, it is mistaken.

Cricket blog, lovely cricket blog

While cricket fever lasts and you can still see children playing informal games in the park, let me plug The Surfer.

It is a blog which offers a digest of the cricket articles from around the world, and is run by the excellent Cricinfo site.

Lib Dem blog scandal latest

Yesterday I wrote about Paul Leake's resignation from the Lib Dem group on Durham City over attempts by the party leadership to censor his blog.

Paul writes his blog as part of the ReadMyDay project, and Geoff Wigley is its "weblog coach". ("Come on, type faster! How much do you want it?")

Geoff writes about Paul's experience on the Civic Leadership Weblog Project site. He notes:

My state legislative client, Ray Cox, knows that some of his most avid readers are members of the opposing party, scouring his blog for words that can be used against him. So he's careful, but not to the point where it cramps his style. To my knowledge, the Minnesota Republican Party has never tried to interfere with his blogging.

"The Liberal Democrats: less open than the US Republicans." It's not an inspiring slogan, is it?

Sholto Byrnes on the Lib Dems

An e-mail arrives from The First Post, suggesting I read their article on the Liberal Democrat Conference. As the article is by Sholto Byrnes, who has occasionally reported the thoughts of Lord Bonkers in the Evening Standard and Independent diaries, I was happy to do so.

Sholto writes:

Far from being a time for the Liberal Democrats to congratulate themselves, this is a moment when the party must ask itself the question to which it has never given a satisfactory answer: what on earth does it stand for?

Fair comment. You can read the full article here.