Former Europe Minister Caroline Flint appears "dressing" the front covers of most national newspapers today, as the latest lady to have stabbed the Prime Minister with her "stiletto". In her resignation letter, Ms Flint complained that Gordon used his senior female colleagues as "window dressing". Surely not, there must be some mistake !
In fact, this may well be history's verdict on the "Blair Babes" : "window dressing". For New Labour has never really embraced "Gender Politics" : "Parenting Politics", yes, and pay inequality between men and women, to a certain extent, but the power relations between the genders, no way.
Perhaps the Blair Babes - now rather more mature - have only just realised this. It should, therefore, come as no surprise to them that the woman to a have gained most from political events of the last week is no less than Mrs Ed Balls, or Yvette Cooper, as she prefers to be called : the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
Sorry Girls ! - or should that be New WAGS : Women Against Gordon ?
Saturday 6 June 2009
Tuesday 3 February 2009
New Labour as Social Pedagogue
From Analysis: Social work - Social pedagogy: fad or the future?
Children & Young People Now 12 December 2007
"The government plans to fund pilot programmes next year that will evaluate the effectiveness of European-style social pedagogy in residential care.
But, as Sarah Cooper discovers, just deciding on a definition of social pedagogy is a job in itself..."
When I heard the term "Social Pedagogy" for the first time today - New Labour's many social policy initiatives tend to turn me off - it was a real Eureka Moment ! The term "Social Pedagogy" seems to encapsulate so much of what, for people like myself, New Labour is all about : endless hectoring on various trite social themes.
The sad truth is, of course, that social workers (of all sorts) are currently in short supply in those places where they are most needed.
Children & Young People Now 12 December 2007
"The government plans to fund pilot programmes next year that will evaluate the effectiveness of European-style social pedagogy in residential care.
But, as Sarah Cooper discovers, just deciding on a definition of social pedagogy is a job in itself..."
When I heard the term "Social Pedagogy" for the first time today - New Labour's many social policy initiatives tend to turn me off - it was a real Eureka Moment ! The term "Social Pedagogy" seems to encapsulate so much of what, for people like myself, New Labour is all about : endless hectoring on various trite social themes.
The sad truth is, of course, that social workers (of all sorts) are currently in short supply in those places where they are most needed.
Friday 23 January 2009
An Early Deconstruction of the New Labour Project
"The welfare state had been Labour's greatest achievement, then savaged and weakened under Thatcher. Its deconstruction was to be New Labour's historic mission. The two-tier society, corporate greed and the privatisation of need were inevitable corollaries. This was glossed as "modernisation". Who could possibly be against it? The linguistic operation - generating a veritable flowering of Third Way waffle, double-talk, evasions and spin - was critical to the whole venture". Stuart Hall (2003)
The above quotation is taken from an interesting article @ http://evatt.labor.net.au/news/244.html
The above quotation is taken from an interesting article @ http://evatt.labor.net.au/news/244.html
Tuesday 20 January 2009
How too much "Construction" led to "Meltdown"
"'When she was nine or ten', Elena recalls, 'my parents spent their evenings writing brochures, which they said were on 'questions of Party construction'. For a long while I thought the Party built houses'"
Extract from "The Whisperers - Private Life in Stalin's Russia" By Orlando Figes
Having spent some 6 years reading Geoffrey Hosking's excellent book on "Russia and the Russians" - which I shall reflect on more fully some time - "The Whisperers" seemed an obvious continuation of my journey, if not exactly into the Russian "soul", then something similar.
I would now, however, like to quote from Hosking's account of the 1998 Russian banking crisis.
"To cover its persistent deficits the treasury issues bonds (GKOs) at attractive rates of interest, which found a ready market both at home and abroad. They kept the government afloat, and also enabled it to persuade the International Monetary Fund that it was solvent and deserved generous loans to finance its economic reform program. In August 1998, however, the elaborate balancing act came to an inglorious end. Unable to fund its soaring GKO obligations despite a large recent IMF loan, the government declared that Russia was defaulting on its debts. Overnight, most of Moscow's large banks became technically insolvent, the wealth of the "oligarchs" was sharply reduced and the new middle class lost much of its savings. Real wages fell by 40% over the next six months, the rouble declined to less than a third of its previous exchange rate, and the proportion of the population living below the official poverty line left from around 20 percent to more than 35 percent."
In the light of recent history, it should, therefore, come as no surprise that last weekend's Observer newspaper's business section should carry an article headlined : "Russians hoard cash as fear of crisis takes hold"...."after the government devalued the rouble five times in six days", nor that the cash in question should be dollars ! The article continues that in a letter published in the newspaper Vedomosti :
"Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev yesterday joined a chorus of influential Russians criticising the handling of the economic crisis. ' Resources are directed not so much at protecting the interests of the majority of citizens as at saving the assets and property of a narrow circle of influential businessmen'.....Olgarch Alexander Lebedev, who is buying the Evening Standard, was also a signatory".
Mention of the London Evening Standard, of course, brings things closer to home, and I now want to return to one of this nation's favourite topics : housing. It so happens that the same edition of The Observer quoted above, also carried a selection of articles published in The New York Times. Recalling Tom Wolfe's great novel "Bonfire of the Vanities", one of these articles is entitled : Housing Policies Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire. An extract from this follows :
"....The global financial system was teetering on the edge of collapse when President Bush and his economic team huddled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House for briefing that, in the words of one participant, 'scared the hell out of everybody'...
Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, 'faced with the prospect of a global meltdown' with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed..."
Whilst it may indeed be largely a consequence (and a very serious one too !) of United States housing policies, it is wrong, in my view, for former President Bush to bear so much of the blame for the global financial crisis, although the United States and, countries like Britain, might well do so. For much of what has transpired has its roots not in the Bush administration, but in that of Clinton : whose affordable housing ideology , incidentally, has also been at the core New Labour policy.
So - to invert the confusion surrounding the real work of Elena's parents in The Whisperers -have the United States and British Governments also in truth been engaged in an ideological construction which has gone very badly wrong ? The irony is, of course, that most Russians still, I think, enjoy greater security of housing tenure than we in the "Old West".
Barack Obama's new chief of "Housing and Urban Development", Shaun Donovan, please taken note; and US planners please sort your own very big problems out before telling people over here what to do !
Extract from "The Whisperers - Private Life in Stalin's Russia" By Orlando Figes
Having spent some 6 years reading Geoffrey Hosking's excellent book on "Russia and the Russians" - which I shall reflect on more fully some time - "The Whisperers" seemed an obvious continuation of my journey, if not exactly into the Russian "soul", then something similar.
I would now, however, like to quote from Hosking's account of the 1998 Russian banking crisis.
"To cover its persistent deficits the treasury issues bonds (GKOs) at attractive rates of interest, which found a ready market both at home and abroad. They kept the government afloat, and also enabled it to persuade the International Monetary Fund that it was solvent and deserved generous loans to finance its economic reform program. In August 1998, however, the elaborate balancing act came to an inglorious end. Unable to fund its soaring GKO obligations despite a large recent IMF loan, the government declared that Russia was defaulting on its debts. Overnight, most of Moscow's large banks became technically insolvent, the wealth of the "oligarchs" was sharply reduced and the new middle class lost much of its savings. Real wages fell by 40% over the next six months, the rouble declined to less than a third of its previous exchange rate, and the proportion of the population living below the official poverty line left from around 20 percent to more than 35 percent."
In the light of recent history, it should, therefore, come as no surprise that last weekend's Observer newspaper's business section should carry an article headlined : "Russians hoard cash as fear of crisis takes hold"...."after the government devalued the rouble five times in six days", nor that the cash in question should be dollars ! The article continues that in a letter published in the newspaper Vedomosti :
"Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev yesterday joined a chorus of influential Russians criticising the handling of the economic crisis. ' Resources are directed not so much at protecting the interests of the majority of citizens as at saving the assets and property of a narrow circle of influential businessmen'.....Olgarch Alexander Lebedev, who is buying the Evening Standard, was also a signatory".
Mention of the London Evening Standard, of course, brings things closer to home, and I now want to return to one of this nation's favourite topics : housing. It so happens that the same edition of The Observer quoted above, also carried a selection of articles published in The New York Times. Recalling Tom Wolfe's great novel "Bonfire of the Vanities", one of these articles is entitled : Housing Policies Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire. An extract from this follows :
"....The global financial system was teetering on the edge of collapse when President Bush and his economic team huddled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House for briefing that, in the words of one participant, 'scared the hell out of everybody'...
Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, 'faced with the prospect of a global meltdown' with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed..."
Whilst it may indeed be largely a consequence (and a very serious one too !) of United States housing policies, it is wrong, in my view, for former President Bush to bear so much of the blame for the global financial crisis, although the United States and, countries like Britain, might well do so. For much of what has transpired has its roots not in the Bush administration, but in that of Clinton : whose affordable housing ideology , incidentally, has also been at the core New Labour policy.
So - to invert the confusion surrounding the real work of Elena's parents in The Whisperers -have the United States and British Governments also in truth been engaged in an ideological construction which has gone very badly wrong ? The irony is, of course, that most Russians still, I think, enjoy greater security of housing tenure than we in the "Old West".
Barack Obama's new chief of "Housing and Urban Development", Shaun Donovan, please taken note; and US planners please sort your own very big problems out before telling people over here what to do !
Tuesday 4 November 2008
Good Days To Bury Bad News
"A good day to bury bad news" was how a young New Labour advisor on transport policy described the events of 9.11.2001 in an email. Her subsequent departure from office was remarkably swift, compared to the perpetrators of later media-related blunders. However, this kind of comment very much sets the tone for political/media values during the Blair and Brown Governments. In fact, it is precisely the lack of values in the relationship between politics and the media which has been one of the most disturbing features of New Labour in office.
I was reminded of this deficit the other day when former spin doctor supremo Alistair Campbell was given air time on BBC Radio 4's cultural programme "Front Row" to promote his new novel, "All in the Mind", and describe his various nervous breakdowns and depressions. The interview co-incided with the row about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand : a pair of overpaid mediocre twats in my opinion incidentally, but hardly worth all the fuss. Mark Lawson, the interviewer, suggested to Campbell that this row was the biggest to have hit the BBC since the media furore about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the related death of United Nations weapons inspector Dr David Kelly in 2003. Excuse me, but am I living on the same planet ! To compare the Ross/Brand nonsense with the WMD/Kelly story was rather more obscene, I would suggest, than Russell Brand's answerphone message. I can only imagine that there must be something about Alistair Campbell which causes derangement in other people.
As it happens, many other important and newsworthy items occurred whilst the politicians and the Media were gorging themselves on the on the Ross/Brand business, particularly on the economic front. But, thanks to the co-operation of busily-complaining Jo Public, whipped up by the popular press, here were more good days to bury bad news; and not least the information that the British Government knew about the problems of the Icelandic banks long before it invoked anti-terror laws - instead prudent financial regulation - against them.
I was reminded of this deficit the other day when former spin doctor supremo Alistair Campbell was given air time on BBC Radio 4's cultural programme "Front Row" to promote his new novel, "All in the Mind", and describe his various nervous breakdowns and depressions. The interview co-incided with the row about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand : a pair of overpaid mediocre twats in my opinion incidentally, but hardly worth all the fuss. Mark Lawson, the interviewer, suggested to Campbell that this row was the biggest to have hit the BBC since the media furore about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the related death of United Nations weapons inspector Dr David Kelly in 2003. Excuse me, but am I living on the same planet ! To compare the Ross/Brand nonsense with the WMD/Kelly story was rather more obscene, I would suggest, than Russell Brand's answerphone message. I can only imagine that there must be something about Alistair Campbell which causes derangement in other people.
As it happens, many other important and newsworthy items occurred whilst the politicians and the Media were gorging themselves on the on the Ross/Brand business, particularly on the economic front. But, thanks to the co-operation of busily-complaining Jo Public, whipped up by the popular press, here were more good days to bury bad news; and not least the information that the British Government knew about the problems of the Icelandic banks long before it invoked anti-terror laws - instead prudent financial regulation - against them.
Tuesday 16 September 2008
1984 as a "Manual for Government"
From http://www.politics.co.uk/ - Tuesday, September 16 10:55 am
Civil rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti launched a scathing attack on Gordon Brown's record at a Lib Dem conference fringe event last night, saying he used George Orwell's book 1984 as "a manual for government".
The Liberty director warned the prime minister had failed to become the change voters expected during his honeymoon period and that he was now struggling in the polls as a result.
"Democracy is sometimes about hiring and firing governments," she told politics.co.uk.
"If you've been in power for a long time people feel like a change and sometimes you have to be the change or the change comes."I think Mr Brown got a honeymoon because people thought he might be the change. He could dump some things like ID cards, not run away with pre-charge detention, say sorry for Iraq, maybe?
"These things don't cost any money but they show a great amount of humility. You might be the change or the change comes upon you."
Ms Chakrabarti railed against the incremental increases in surveillance and unregulated use of CCTV cameras, saying the George Orwell novel 1984 was "supposed to be a warning, not a manual, for government".
"We know what we're up against: the terrible idea that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. It does matter. Imagine a society where privacy doesn't matter: no dignity, no intimacy, no freedom of thought, no free speech."
She said Orwell's book captured the way in which language was used to subvert important values, including the 'war on terror' in particular.
"The moment you call it a 'war on terror' you're asking people to surrender their freedoms because they're living in a permanent state of emergency," she finished.
"I'm not prepared to wait for 50 years."
Civil rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti launched a scathing attack on Gordon Brown's record at a Lib Dem conference fringe event last night, saying he used George Orwell's book 1984 as "a manual for government".
The Liberty director warned the prime minister had failed to become the change voters expected during his honeymoon period and that he was now struggling in the polls as a result.
"Democracy is sometimes about hiring and firing governments," she told politics.co.uk.
"If you've been in power for a long time people feel like a change and sometimes you have to be the change or the change comes."I think Mr Brown got a honeymoon because people thought he might be the change. He could dump some things like ID cards, not run away with pre-charge detention, say sorry for Iraq, maybe?
"These things don't cost any money but they show a great amount of humility. You might be the change or the change comes upon you."
Ms Chakrabarti railed against the incremental increases in surveillance and unregulated use of CCTV cameras, saying the George Orwell novel 1984 was "supposed to be a warning, not a manual, for government".
"We know what we're up against: the terrible idea that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. It does matter. Imagine a society where privacy doesn't matter: no dignity, no intimacy, no freedom of thought, no free speech."
She said Orwell's book captured the way in which language was used to subvert important values, including the 'war on terror' in particular.
"The moment you call it a 'war on terror' you're asking people to surrender their freedoms because they're living in a permanent state of emergency," she finished.
"I'm not prepared to wait for 50 years."
Monday 8 September 2008
Student Politics, Think-Tanks & Other NerdSpeak
On his recent return from a trip to Ukraine (and single-handedly sorting out the problems of The Caucasus, no doubt !), British Foreign Secretary David Miliband was keen to draw attention to the views of Ukrainian students and think tanks (and very interesting I'm sure they are too)! In doing this Mr Miliband also drew attention to the what I imagine are the cornerstones of his own worldview : student politics and think tanks. Now if New Labour were a student political party, or for that matter, a think tank, I wouldn't have a problem. It's when it involves itself in the real world, that problems start to occur.
Take those of poor Alistair Darling for instance. Only a few weeks into his new job as Chancellor of the Exchequer last year, and his first briefing on the Credit Crunch was a newspaper article in the Financial Times which he picked up whilst on holiday in Majorca. Now what are political advisers, civil servants and the like employed for but to provide this kind of information to ministers new to their jobs, I wonder ? My own impression is that many/most(?) are so stuffed full of NerdSpeak (of the kind Mr Miliband regularly communicates through) that dealing with real matters of great national and internation significance is nigh-on impossible. Discuss
Take those of poor Alistair Darling for instance. Only a few weeks into his new job as Chancellor of the Exchequer last year, and his first briefing on the Credit Crunch was a newspaper article in the Financial Times which he picked up whilst on holiday in Majorca. Now what are political advisers, civil servants and the like employed for but to provide this kind of information to ministers new to their jobs, I wonder ? My own impression is that many/most(?) are so stuffed full of NerdSpeak (of the kind Mr Miliband regularly communicates through) that dealing with real matters of great national and internation significance is nigh-on impossible. Discuss
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