A desperate human being has reportedly been killed in the Channel Tunnel, attempting to make the journey from France to Britain. Sky News tweeted the breaking story:
Some sample replies:
If the intent is to encourage people like me to want to leave the country and never come back – job done.
Yesterday I went to the Social Liberal Forum conference, held at the Amnesty International Human Rights Action Centre in Shoreditch.
It’s the first time I’ve attended an SLF event, and to be honest I was slightly apprehensive that it would be like a more extreme version of Lib Dem conference.
I needn’t have worried. Although as usual I was initially paralysed by my tendency to shyness, as people arrived things quickly warmed up and conversation began to flow. It was particularly good to meet people with whom I’ve previously enjoyed useful and insightful interaction on Twitter or via blogs, such as Nick Barlow and Kelly-Marie Blundell.
Charles Kennedy and Claire Tyler
The day began with a tribute to Charles Kennedy by Naomi Smith, chair of SLF. Unusually, but appropriately, we were encouraged to express our appreciation for Charles through a round of applause, rather than silence. It was a very moving moment and I could see several people in tears – I was on the verge myself.
This was followed by an interesting Beveridge lecture by Baroness Claire Tyler. She argued for wellbeing as the hook on which we should renew our attempts to tackle the “five great evils”, although she readily acknowledged that the terms Beveridge had used – particularly “idleness” and “squalor” were no longer appropriate for today’s political lexicon.
While very sympathetic to the idea of moving beyond GDP as the measure of political failure or success, which has always seemed entirely inadequate to me, I remain unconvinced that “wellbeing” (or indeed “happiness”) is the right concept to build that idea around. Aside from sounding static, it seems too subjective to sustain hard-edged or challenging policy ideas.
Arguing for Liberty
The conference then broke into several different sessions. It was very difficult to choose between the various topics on offer but I eventually settled for the discussion on liberty, philosophy, policy and the campaign. Speaking were Julian Huppert and, at the last minute, Kelly-Marie, although you wouldn’t have known as she seemed thoroughly prepared and assured.
The discussion ranged across many areas but it became focused in the end upon precisely how liberal arguments could, or should, be made. Huppert eloquently insisted that we should marshal a wide range of arguments – especially those that are not important to us, but will chime with other people’s priorities. He gave the example of same-sex marriage and how, in Coalition, Nick Clegg and Lynne Featherstone had argued for the policy on the basis that it would create more marriages in sum – knowing that this would appeal to David Cameron. (Incidentally, according to Julian, this was also why equalising civil partnerships was not allowed through – because it would have a negative impact on the total number of marriages!)
This led to interesting debate, with some people expressing some reservations about the extent to which we should be pragmatic. Huppert also emphasised the need, alongside this kind of messaging, to take radical stands in order to shift the Overton Window and make space for new policies to become mainstream.
I wanted to ask a question about how a party so reduced in voice could achieve this, and whether new outside organisations such as think tanks would be necessary or helpful in doing so – looking to the considerable influence of institutions such as Policy Exchange and Respublica over David Cameron’s tenure as Conservative leader. Unfortunately some questions and interventions in that session were so long that I didn’t have the opportunity!
Reforming Government and Political Pluralism
After the lunch break I particularly enjoyed a fascinating session on “reforming government”. I felt that the title was rather ambitious given the election result, but the insights from Chris Nicholson and especially Daisy Cooper were compelling.
Chris spoke mainly of his experience as a special adviser to Ed Davey at DECC. He occasionally strayed onto controversial ground, at one point suggesting that too rigid a commitment to evidence-based policy could act as a block on action, as it was used as an excuse to push things into the long grass through endless piloting and rethinking. He also seemed to imply that the back bench committees set up by the party during the coalition had been too focused on holding Lib Dem ministers to account, rather than bringing new and neglected policies to their attention.
Daisy, by contrast, chose to focus her comments on how we could argue for reform better. Her central thesis that arguing effectively for change should be based on pointing out how it gives people more power was appropriately powerful, especially when listing the number of areas of society and economy where power is concentrated in the hands of a very few – the big two political parties mirrored by the big four supermarkets, the big six energy firms, the big four audit firms, and more.
This session was followed by a return to plenary. A panel on political pluralism was chiefly memorable for David Howarth’s rather depressing assessment of the likelihood of any kind of progressive majority developing. (Clue: it probably isn’t ever going to happen, mainly because of the inbuilt tensions that dominate the Labour Party, which are being played out in their leadership election.)
Leadership Hustings
The final portion of the day was allocated to a showdown between the two leadership candidates, Tim Farron and Norman Lamb. I declared my support for Tim a long while ago in a rather overlong post on this blog, but I was interested to see the two men set out their stalls live.
I was unsurprised by the divergence in style and content between Norman and Tim. I felt that Norman was trying hard to inject some passion and charisma into his pitch, leaning hard on his background as a campaigning employment lawyer, as well as his family’s liberal history. But ultimately his speech sounded pretty safe, and didn’t seem to differ at all from the others I’ve read during the campaign.
Tim obviously did the same to an extent, but was more keen to be topical. In particular he drew out some specific and strong liberal positions on recent news stories including the migrant situation at Calais and George Osborne’s announcement on inheritance tax. This felt fresh and relevant in a way that Norman’s pitch had not.
I wasn’t able to stay for all the questions, unfortunately, but the way that both candidates listened and responded to the ones put to them gave me confidence that whoever is the new leader will be keen to hear the views of the whole membership.
Conclusion
This was a really positive day and I’m really glad I made it along. As with many new things, I was a bit daunted at first, especially given the large turnout. But the atmosphere was welcoming and positive, and certainly not factional in any way – I heard a real range of views over the day, and everyone was listened to with respect (sometimes too much, if anything!).
I’d definitely recommend the experience to new members, even if you aren’t sure whether you align yourself with the SLF or any other group. It’s a great way to understand what’s important to different people within the Lib Dems and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of people who have been a force for positive, liberal change in society through their activism and campaigning.
The whole day left me more positive about the future of the party and keen to play a small part myself. If my experience is any indication, the SLF should consider yesterday a job very well done.
Having dealt with outros in my previous playlist, this week it’s the turn of the intro to hold centre stage. This week’s collection includes intros that catch you off guard – whether it’s because of a confusing polyrhythm, a shift of tempo, or simply a great bit of instrumentation, one that grabs you by the ears and forces you to pay attention.
The list kicks off with Rope, by Foo Fighters, a beautiful example of that band’s capacity to create a sound that is both complicated
It’s quite dominated by classic rock, but you can’t look past some of these. More interesting choices include the Hollies’ surprisingly muscular hit, Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress), which comes knocking on your door masquerading as something far less catchy than it turns out to be.
On the weekend when it was announced that Van the Man is becoming Sir Van, it’s only appropriate that this week’s Song for Saturday choice is one of his best cuts.
“Caravan” was originally to be found on my favourite Van Morrison album, Moondance. On that studio version, it’s contemplative, even louche; it sounds like a travelling song, rather than a rabble-rouser. There’s some wistful sounding orchestration, and the tempo is considered and moderate. Van sounds soulful but restrained and controlled – when he sings “turn it up – that’s enough” you feel that he means it. And the coda is insistent without ever losing that sense of control.
But I know the song better from the 1976 concert The Last Waltz, famously documented by Martin Scorsese as the farewell gig by The Band. You feel like even Van himself, a famously taciturn, even morose, performer – a malcontent in dark suits – was caught up in the heady atmosphere. The tempo is upbeat, with Levon Helm (one of my all-time favourite drummers, a man whose vocal chops meant he played for the song as well as anyone) driving it with his almost lyrical ride cymbal and hiccuping snare fills. Meanwhile Van’s there at the front, giving it everything, in a kind of weird purple jumpsuit that screams “it’s the 1970s”.
I love the anticipation of the instrumental section around the 3:20 mark. Robbie Robertson picks out a couple of rootsy licks and Van scats a bit. But then, he sings “turn it up” and the song is carried to another plane. The coda in this version is just relentless, building and building until it becomes overwhelming. Van kicks the air, descending into incoherence, and eventually drifts off the stage as if in a trance. You can feel the enjoyment of the entire Band, especially the glee on Robertson’s and Helm’s faces.
An appropriate way to celebrate a knighthood.
No, that’s not the title of a new Harry Potter knock-off – although Andy Burnham has the makings of a put-upon junior wizard with numerous chips on his narrow shoulders. Rather, it’s a response to Burnham’s latest contribution to the moribund Labour leadership battle, replicated below for your viewing pleasure:
Andy Burnham: “We don’t win when we copy the Tories, we win when we’re better than them” pic.twitter.com/FimPPikn98
— TeamBurnham2015 (@Andy4Leader2015) June 8, 2015
Now, there are a number of problems with this. Burnham is clearly making a pointed comment about the attempts of other candidates – particularly Liz Kendall, who he probably sees as his main rival – to move Labour back to a position which could be loosely described as “Blairite”.
As an aside, I personally think that with Kendall leading Labour and Tim Farron leading the Lib Dems, the latter party would have vast acres of space to be a real, vote-winning opposition. Tony Blair’s success is often considered solely due to his brilliance as a winner of elections. But this is a hopelessly simplistic view of history, and one that ignores the fact that a donkey in a red rosette – not a proverbial donkey, a literal donkey – could have won in 1997 given the mess that the Conservatives were then in. So it shouldn’t be taken as axiomatic that moving Labour to the centre and to the authoritarian makes the party more electable.
I digress. Burnham, of course, has also rejected that analysis, although in a number of important ways he has indicated that he does want to move the party to what might be considered more Blair-like positions – if only in their tactical ingenuity rather than in their substance. On immigration and Europe, for example, he is tacking close to the Tories, which I suspect Blair might consider good politics if not good policy.
But the line he is trying to hammer in this tweet is silly. And it’s silly because it actually does exactly the thing he claims to want to avoid. The first statement criticises Kendall for “copying the Tories”. But the second line suggests that the measure of a political party’s success is to be “better” than the Tories.
Without further explication, this is a troubling idea – that the viability or the electoral success of a political party is based purely on competence. I have to say that competence is one of the attributes I look for last in a politician. I tend to think that integrity, compassion and a coherent set of beliefs are far more important. With those attributes in place, I would feel relatively relaxed about entrusting the delivery and implementation of policies based upon them to the apparatus of the state.
The myth of competence, though, has infected the whole of our political culture. The irony of Burnham’s statement is that it is a Tory invention – that politics is primarily about management. The genius of it is that by forcing others to fight on the basis of competence, the Tories ensure that everyone is clustered on their natural territory at all times. I’m not talking about political left and right here; it’s far more about semantics and semiotics than anything else.
I haven’t got time to go further into why this is such a damaging concept this evening – perhaps another time – but Andy Burnham really should give some more thought to the matter. His attempt to paint his rivals as soft Tories would be more successful if he didn’t back himself into the same corner in the process.
I’m beginning a new series of weekend music posts to sit alongside the already well-established and highly-respected “Song for Saturday” tag. Each week on a Sunday I’ll publish a ten-song Spotify playlist around a specific theme, whether that’s to do with geography, style, band members, instrumentation or whatever else takes my fancy.
Today we start with a playlist inspired by my post on dEUS’ Instant Street last week. Having listened to the song back-to-back several times (as my Last.fm library will attest), I began thinking about other songs with extended outros that completely change the feel of the track, arguably elevating it to some new plain, whether of beauty, intensity, or simple excellence.
Without further ado – here’s my list. It features some very long codas (such as Yes’ Starship Trooper) and some very short ones (Alison Gross, the song that rocks the hardest without drums you’ll ever have heard, and is ended by a sudden clash of discordant guitar that still sounds genuinely shocking, at least to my ears). It’s probably also the only playlist where RHCP’s Sir Psycho Sexy is preceded by Karma Police.
What did I miss? Tell me in the comments.
This is a song for those who feel fragile on a Saturday.
Low are a band just weird enough never to be well-known, but accessible enough for anyone who really wants to listen. It’s claimed that they are the leaders of what came to be known as a subgenre called “slowcore”, although they hate that label. I just think of them as a really great minimalist rock band, one that writes songs that take time to creep up on you and steal your heart.
In Metal is the closing track on what I still think is their best album, 1999’s “Things We Lost In the Fire”. It’s a sprawling record, nearly an hour long – and at the pace Low play, it feels that long, although never dull. I saw them perform the whole album live at the Barbican in 2006, as part of the Don’t Look Back series, one of All Tomorrow’s Parties best innovations.
The song is about the child of the two founder members of Low, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, and it even features recordings of the baby cooing, making the “tiny sounds” referred to in the first line. The lyrics are minimal enough to be quoted here in their entirety:
Filling holes with tiny sounds
Shining from the inside out
Picture of you where it began
In metal, in metal
Partly hate to see you grow
And just like your baby shoes
Wish I could keep your little body
In metal, in metal
In metal, in metal
In metal, in metal
The music is lovely and highlights the band’s gift for harmony, as well as showing what can be done with a broad dynamic range and a sense of momentum. But it’s among the most moving songs I can think of. I’m not a parent, but this song makes me feel like one. The sense of bittersweet emotion and love and care is almost overwhelming.
I could hardly say that I knew Charles Kennedy well. I’ve wanted to wait a few days to let the sadness of his passing sink in, and to process just what it is that I loved about the man.
In fact, we only met on a few occasions, and then only briefly, when I was working as a researcher in Parliament. My time in the Palace of Westminster was generally happy, mainly because I was one of the fortunate souls to have a boss that genuinely cared about his staff, and treated them as human beings. Observing other MPs going about their business, I’m afraid to say that many of them simply considered themselves too important to waste time on respecting junior members of staff – often young people – such as me. But on the other side of that coin, they are elected representatives attempting to weigh and reflect the views of tens of thousands of constituents; they are some of the busiest people working in our country. I was forced to recognise that even the apparently lazy ones, such as the MP in whose constituency I had grown up – the safest of Conservative safe seats – were quick to respond to real problems and attempt to deal with them.
Nonetheless, MPs who were at least civil enough to acknowledge your existence were notable by their scarcity. MPs who were kind enough to feign an interest in you, at least for the short period of time you might be in the same lift, or walking side by side through the airy colonnade that connects Portcullis House and the Palace and is effectively Parliament’s pedestrian motorway. Wait there long enough and you’ll see anyone and everyone.
MPs such as Charles Kennedy, who took a genuine interest in you, were – if you’ll pardon the Lib Demmery – gold dust. He made you feel that he had time for you, and he even remembered you subsequently, even if it just meant a small, wry smile as you passed. He was kind. How many people in the public eye could you say that about, with confidence?
I’d call that an unusual mixture of humility and humanity. He had humility enough to remember and honour the value of all human beings. Others pay lip service to that notion; he lived and breathed it.
I first awoke to the fact that I considered myself a Liberal Democrat under Charles Kennedy’s leadership. I had always followed politics with interest but, as I suspect many people continue to do throughout their lives, I always considered it a straight fight between Tories and Labour, certainly throughout the 1990s. I was a fairly well-read child, even in terms of current affairs, but I was only dimly aware of the Liberal Democrats at that time, and even then they were only represented in my mind by the towering but tarnished figure of Paddy Ashdown. I doubt I could have named another Lib Dem besides him until Charles Kennedy’s rise to prominence in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
I marched against that war – the only public protests I have been unequivocal about joining. Given the number of people who were there (perhaps 2 million over two weekends) and the breadth of their backgrounds, the same must have been true of hundreds of thousands of others. For a brief moment, Charles Kennedy’s Lib Dems were the only real opposition to the establishment; it’s often forgotten just how strongly the Conservatives were insisting on a military solution at the time. The Guardian leader reporting on the Parliamentary vote noted this specific curiosity:
A few may even read yesterday’s debate in order to attempt to explain the otherwise inexplicable fact that the Conservative party of 2003 appeared more concerned at such a time to attack the Liberal Democrats than the Labour government.
The fact that Blair was forced to hold a vote at all was largely due to the British people, of course, but it could also be ascribed partly to the courage of Kennedy, as well as the bravery of figures such as Robin Cook. Both men have now died untimely deaths, having spent significant amounts of their adult lives in Parliament.
It should never be forgotten that Charles and the Lib Dems were on the right side of that debate. It is still the defining moment of my political life, the most disastrous foreign policy decision made by a government in my memory, and, perhaps above all, a permanent monument to the failings of a political system that favours patronage, party loyalty and “stable government” over truth, honesty and wisdom.
The impact of the Iraq war still reverberates today in all sorts of ways. It defines UK foreign policy, which has become parochial, insular and tentative. We no longer wield the power and influence we used to wield. We would prefer to debate Trident from the point of view of its narrowly political relevance than from the point of view of international relations and military might.
Standing for freedom, wisdom and sceptical internationalism, and against political triangulation, vested interests and deceit: that is what drew me to Charles Kennedy’s Lib Dems.
I didn’t really know him, but I know the impact he had on me. He taught me that politicians could be really human and really brave; that you could be a leader and still come across as a warm, intelligent, curious person, with real flaws; that liberalism had a part to play in real decisions that had a major impact on real people.
At the top of this post I said that I wanted to process what it was I loved about the man. If it’s anything, it’s this: that he was real.
A belated song for Saturday, it’s true, as today is actually Sunday. But this is a song worth waiting for. For those who don’t know them, dEUS are a sadly under-appreciated Belgian art rock band. They put out three albums between 1994 and 1999, before an extended hiatus which only ended in 2005 with the release of Pocket Revolution. The first three albums showed a gradual progression from lovable but slightly derivative Zappa-Waits-Beefheart devotees to bona fide stars, culminating in the superb Ideal Crash (1999).
Instant Street, the song I’m concerned with here, probably still remains their best known song, and it’s at the core of that album. It’s over six minutes long, which gives you an idea of the band’s ambition, and it represents perhaps their finest achievement, merging the wistful, expansive and accessible with something harder-edged and ultimately quite manic. The first three and a half minutes constitutes a lovely bit of country-tinged rock, dominated by an insistent banjo line, and featuring the kind of lyrics that remain enjoyably enigmatic while hinting at something deeply painful.
Around the 3:30 mark, however, we get a short breakdown before the entry of a sharper lead guitar line, all tight lips and tension, pushing the band into something altogether more urgent. The rest of the song builds and builds and builds until it becomes a juggernaut, rolling onwards until it lifts off and vocalist Tom Barman (what a great name) starts to lose it, murmuring “this time I go…”
It really is breathless, headlong, heady stuff, especially listened to very loud indeed. And it’s equally good live, judging by some of the versions available on YouTube. One of the best is below (watch out for the Stuka-style violin) or you can find the album version on Spotify here.
Never Cruel Nor Cowardly 