Archives For November 30, 1999 @ 12:00 am
Scotland voted on Thursday to remain within the United Kingdom – with 55% and 2,001,926 voting ‘No’ to Scottish independence, while 45% and 1,617,989 voted ‘Yes’ – after more than two years of heated debate, but also on the back of a late pledge by the three main Westminster parties to grant Scotland greater devolved powers as part of the UK. The pledge, signed by David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Ed Miliband and published on the front page of the Daily Record at the beginning of the week, promised ‘extensive new powers’ to Scotland.
More devolution for Scotland in the case of a ‘No’ vote was always on the agenda, but the scope of these late-promised powers is a matter of debate between the three parties and between the parties and the SNP. The Scottish Parliament at Holyrood already legislates for Scotland’s health and social services, education, housing, transportation, agriculture, fisheries and forestry, environment, arts and sport, tourism, and economic development. The Scotland Act 2012 – which amended the Scotland Act 1998, which established the devolved Scottish Parliament – additionally gave Scotland’s Parliament the power to raise or lower the rate of income tax by 10p in the pound, uniformly across all tax bands; as well as some other minor powers relating to taxation and law and order. However the Act is not due to be fully realised before 2016, and is now likely to be superseded. At the moment the Scottish Parliament can alter the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound.
Maximum devolution for Scotland – ‘devo max’ – would imply allowing the Scottish Parliament to legislate on everything except foreign policy and defence. It is clear that any move to extend Scotland’s powers will fall some way short of this. So far, discussion around the pledge for extensive new powers for Scotland has centred upon three issues. The first is greater still Scottish authority over taxation. The SNP would like complete control over taxation within Scotland, including absolute control over income tax rates, corporation tax, and air passenger duty. The Conservatives appear ready to give complete control over income tax rates; while the Liberal Democrats would offer this and more. Labour, however, seem willing to allow the Scottish Parliament to increase tax rates as they see fit, but not to unilaterally cut the top rate of income tax.
Secondly, the pledge vowed to consolidate Scotland’s authority over its NHS. This is against a background of gesture from Westminster threatening cuts and further privatisations; but also in a context whereby the NHS in Scotland apparently faces a funding gap of £400 million. Thirdly, and related to the issue of the NHS, is the promise to retain the Barnett formula: a mechanism for allocating public expenditure levels in the United Kingdom’s four nations, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Based on population, the Barnett formula has resulted in Scotland maintaining a significantly higher expenditure per capita than England: as it stands today, Scotland spends £1,623 – 19% – more per head than England on public services.
Embellishing a timetable established several weeks ago by Gordon Brown, David Cameron announced yesterday morning in his post-referendum speech that Lord Smith of Kelvin – a former BBC governor, and chairman of the organising committee for Glasgow’s 2014 Commonwealth Games – will oversee the process towards greater devolution for Scotland. The timeline is short: detailed proposals are to be written up by October, and they should pass consultation by November before a draft bill is published in January. Any legislation will not be passed until after the general election in May, and the continued implementation of the Barnett formula is likely to prove a sticking point within the UK Parliament.
The promise of greater devolution for Scotland has brought a surge of attention to the West Lothian question, and the proposal for ‘English votes for English laws’. In short, the question – first raised back in 1977 by the West Lothian MP Tam Dalyell, in the build up to the failed Scottish referendum of 1979 – asks why Scottish MPs can vote on English laws, while English MPs cannot vote on Scottish laws as they have no access to the Scottish Parliament. The proposal suggests that where legislation only concerns England, only MPs from English constituencies should be allowed to vote.
It is easy to go back and forth over ‘English votes for English laws’. Superficially, the proposal sounds eminently reasonable; but when you realise that two of its main proponents over the past weeks and months have been Conservative MP John Redwood and UKIP leader Nigel Farage, suspicions grow in the mind as the body is immediately beset by revulsion. On the other hand on Thursday night, as the referendum results filtered through via the BBC, Ming Campbell – former Liberal Democrat leader and current MP for North East Fife – agreed that, with more powers promised to the Scottish Parliament, an end to the ability for Scottish MPs to vote on English laws is not only inevitable, but logical and fair.
In fact, the proposal was part of the Conservative manifesto for 2010; but the coalition government determined to set up a commission to investigate rather than act. The McKay Commission reported in March 2013, broadly supporting procedural change; but averring that ‘Under the Commission’s recommendations, no MPs would be prevented from voting on any bill, and the right of the House as a whole to make final decisions would be preserved’ and ‘Our proposals retain the right of a UK-wide majority to make the final decisions where they believe UK interests or those of a part of the UK other than England should prevail. We expect that governments will prefer compromise to conflict.’
English laws – as opposed to UK laws – would in theory cover the areas of health, education, transportation, and culture. Foreign affairs, defence, energy, and basic welfare provision and pensions are prominent among the realms which would then remain the concern of the UK Parliament. But with greater devolution for Scotland when it comes to taxation, it is unclear to what extent England might be allowed to set its economic policy independently from the rest of the United Kingdom. This is an intractable problem with the concept of ‘English votes for English laws’, because it is arguable that given the population of England and the size of the English economy, the decisions it makes economically will always have a disproportionate impact on its partners north and west of the border.
With Scotland voting to stay part of the UK and the focus turning to the West Lothian question, what also show through upon analysis are both the strengths of the union between Scotland and England, and the divisions within English society. ‘English votes for English laws’ is a populist proposal, and might well appeal to the vast majority of the English population. But it is hard to see how, in practise, it would benefit vast swathes of the country.
In the 2010 general election, Scotland returned 41 Labour MPs to the House of Commons from 59 contested seats. This amounts to 69% of Scotland’s seats won by Labour. In the North East of England, Labour won 25 from 29 seats. In the North West, Labour took 47 seats from a possible 75; and in Yorkshire and the Humber, they won 32 seats from 54. This means that in the north of England, Labour won 66% of seats. Yet in England as a whole, the Conservatives won 298 of 533 seats; giving them an election victory – although not a majority – in the United Kingdom with 307 seats out of 650.
When it comes to politics, the north of England is ideologically and economically closer to Scotland – and to Wales, where in 2010 Labour took 26 out of 40 seats, or 65% – than it is to London and the South East. However it is without its own parliament, and without the benefits brought about in Scotland by the Barnett formula. It suffers from a lack of representation in parliament and from a shortage of investment in jobs and in cultural life. And it seems perverse that one of the consequences of the close referendum in Scotland might be the further diminishing of the north. If ‘English votes for English laws’ becomes implemented – which may not require the passage of any new legislation – then the viewpoint of northern England will be increasingly marginalised as it loses the effective balance provided by Scottish MPs, and sees Labour struggle to attain a majority on English-only issues of legislation.
Other problems are posed by ‘English votes for English laws’. Would this change require a separate parliament building, which would be the preserve of English MPs and English matters of debate – and if so, where would an English Parliament be located? Otherwise an English Parliament could simply sit in the Commons on a rotational basis: sitting two or three days a week, with the UK Parliament sitting the rest of the time. Alternately, the UK Parliament could remain intact, with Scottish MPs even allowed to debate English laws, but voting limited to English politicians.
On Thursday night, the Times political columnist Daniel Finkelstein raised the notion that, more than an English Parliament, such a fundamental change to legislative procedure could require an English executive – a vast and unwieldy undertaking, which would have wide-ranging ramifications for governmental ministers and the civil service. Labour are advertising a constitutional convention to consider the future of political process in the United Kingdom, reluctant to accept ‘English votes for English laws’, especially as David Cameron seems set to bind further Scottish devolution to the enactment of the proposal. Meanwhile on Thursday night, Labour MP Jim Murphy took a pleasantly contrarian perspective and asked, given the breadth of powers enjoyed by the Greater London Authority, whether London’s MPs should also face a limited role when it comes to legislating for the rest of England.
This argument in particular raises the potential solution of greater devolution for England’s regions. The manner and the terms of such would be difficult to agree upon. Would the present tiered system of local councils remain; would a powerful layer of government emerge at regional level, between Westminster and the local councils over England’s nine regions; or would the concept of city-regions, experimented with in Manchester and Leeds, be spread out across the country? The powers handed over would be open to dispute. And where ‘English votes for English laws’ would seemingly benefit the Conservatives, there is the view that greater devolution for the regions would play into the hands of Labour. Any shift in powers could be complemented by a more representative voting system. But to accept that the strength of feeling shown in Scotland extends throughout the UK requires significant devolution to the regions – and the development of a genuine localised politics, a process which appears both viable and necessary in today’s globalised, interconnected world.
Edward Snowden’s revelations concerning the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency began to be published on 6 June, when The Guardian, and the journalist Glenn Greenwald, unveiled details of a secret court order obliging the telecommunications company Verizon to give to the NSA – on an ongoing basis – the metadata of all those telephone calls made by customers using the Verizon network. The NSA, according to The Guardian, has been engaged in storing this metadata indiscriminately and for periods of up to three months. The following day, the newspaper disclosed the existence of the NSA’s Prism programme, which allegedly allows the NSA direct and unfettered access to the servers of major online service providers – including Google, Apple, and Facebook – enabling the agency to view and store individuals’ online transactions, search histories, and the content of posts and emails.
The NSA and the US government have sought to obfuscate, and to argue that what access they do have to the content of communications is legal, requested through the requisite channels and properly overseen. Yet the legal proceedings involved are undertaken by a closed Fisa (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance) court, with parties legally obligated to provide information, but legally restrained from revealing even the existence of court orders; never mind any details concerning courtroom proceedings and the information they have been legally bound to give. The service providers implicated in Prism and in other NSA programmes have therefore made muddled and contradictory statements – many initially denying all knowledge of Prism – but have ultimately remained somewhat muted regarding the nature of, and the extent of their acquiescence to, these relationships with the security agency.
Snowden’s identity was revealed on 9 June in The Washington Post, by Barton Gellman; and across The Guardian the following morning. The Guardian and the Post, Greenwald and Gellman – the two men with whom Snowden met, in April and in May, after communicating with the documentary film director Laura Poitras; and to whom Snowden passed on the classified NSA documents – have published additional details and further disclosures over the course of the following two months. Several weeks ago, on 31 July, The Guardian exposed the NSA’s XKeyscore programme. XKeyscore allows the NSA’s analysts to search, without warrant, their vast databases of stored information containing everything from internet users’ email contacts and messages, to their log-in data, browser history, and social media activities. It is suggested that around 1.7 billion communication records – emails and phone calls – are stored by the NSA each day; while the content of communications takes up so much space that it is only held for three to five days, noteworthy data can be saved for longer through additional databases. More, via XKeyscore, an individual can be targeted for sustained internet surveillance, with the justification for such a measure the simple matter of clicking an option from a drop-down menu.
Meanwhile, after making requests to more than twenty countries for political asylum, on 1 August Snowden was granted temporary asylum in Russia, for a period of one year. Two weeks ago, the encrypted email service Lavabit – which Snowden is believed to have used while stationed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport – was shut down: a decision made by its founder, Ladar Levison, who has stated that keeping the service running risked making him ‘complicit in crimes against the American public’. The implication is that Levison has been served with a court order, and pressured either into handing Snowden’s data to the government, or into passing on the data of all Lavabit’s users. However, Levison is legally prevented from explicating his decision and the chain of events which led to it.
Under US law – tied up with the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable and unwarranted searches – it is illegal to intercept, search and store the content of the communications of US citizens without an individual warrant. The secrecy of the Fisa court which issues these warrants, and the court’s orders preventing those involved with its proceedings from speaking out, make it largely unknowable to outsiders and difficult to trust. The Fisa Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008, which was renewed last December for a period of five years, has made it easier for the NSA to work beyond the apparent dictates of the law: it authorises the NSA’s mass collection of the data of foreign citizens, but also allows data to be collected that is sent between foreigners and US citizens; and allows NSA analysts to search the content of communications in order to check whether individuals are in fact American or otherwise. In short, the NSA’s programmes and the FAA make it inevitable that a significant volume of US data will be swept up alongside a tremendous volume of foreign information; then allow this data to be used and stored for up to five years. More, the criteria for determining whether a citizen is within the US is far from strict: citizens may be presumed foreign if there is no evidence confirming them as citizens of America.
Still, programmes like XKeyscore were set up to collect data on such a scale, with searches requiring such little justification, that even these loose legal limitations are routinely bypassed. In the midst of public concern and a range of academic and political responses – the Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, was one of several in Congress to label Snowden a ‘traitor’; while the 39th US President Jimmy Carter called the revelations beneficial and lamented ‘America has no functioning democracy’ – the US government and President Obama have denounced Snowden and sought his return to America to face trial. Obama’s second term risks being overwhelmed by the fallout; despite the positives of his presidency, for instance in the realm of healthcare, and disregarding hesitations and obstructions over Guantanamo Bay, his presidency is falling into disgrace owing to his strident actions against press freedom and whistleblowing, which are essential facets of any democracy.
One may view the type of surveillance carried out by the NSA as necessary – validated by a war on terrorism which is nebulous because it is new, and requires new technologies and flexible laws both pushed towards their perceived limits. If the argument that the government would not abuse such stores of data seems naive, and if the sentiment that only those with something to hide have cause to worry seems not only trite, but lacking in intellect, decency and any sound sense of privacy, still there are more considered opinions which would ease if not dismiss concerns: for instance, the stance that privacy on the internet can be so little guaranteed that it cannot be expected; that data collection is par for the course when it comes to email servers, social media and multimedia sites, which rely on targeted advertisements for the vast majority of their income; and that with so much information so readily available and unsecured it is inevitable that governments will take a share. Nevertheless, Edward Snowden’s revelations have exposed programmes the extent of which few even inside politics understood; which do raise essential questions concerning the privacy of individuals, the violations of technology, and the relationship between major companies and the state; and which bring into focus potential abuses of the law as it stands, the arguably undemocratic use of court systems, the deceptions of those in government, and a lack of oversight within the NSA, from politicians, and also by the press.
Last week, Obama announced a series of reforms which, he hoped, will give the public the same confidence in the NSA that he professes to possess. These reforms – including a proposed change to Section 215 of the Patriot Act – focus on the NSA’s collection of phone data rather than internet data, and aim to give the impression of greater accountability. A ‘civil liberties and privacy officer’ will be appointed by the government; a lawyer will be appointed to argue against the government at the Fisa court; and a group of external experts will review the government’s intelligence and communication technologies. Given that the NSA’s methods and the Fisa court system are so convoluted, so secretive, and so determined to persist, it is difficult to see these reforms as anything more than superficial. The Fisa court will remain secretive, and the NSA’s programmes will continue to exist with the same scope and remit and with the same capabilities and legal allowances as before.
A series of documents unveiled by The Washington Post on Friday show just how often the NSA has broken American privacy laws since 2008. In fact, since the FAA was implemented, privacy violations have increased year upon year. A leaked annual audit from May 2012 lists 2,776 violations, which the NSA and governmental figures describe as ‘compliance issues’: the argument is that the majority of these transgressions were not deliberate, but this does not mean that the data collected – which includes both metadata and content – is not searched and kept. Further documents reveal that the guidelines given to NSA analysts advise them to fill in oversight forms with as little ‘extraneous information’ and as generically as possible.
Alongside issues of privacy, legality, government authority and oversight, Snowden’s revelations also call into question if not the existence, then certainly the nature of the nation state. Within the United States, it seems that concern has centred upon upon the illegal collection of American data, the potential misuses of this data, and the NSA and the government’s deceit. Less heed has been given to the flagrant immorality of an American security agency spying indiscriminately, on a gross scale, and without legal impediment, upon foreign citizens. This has caused some distress in Europe, particularly in Germany, with numerous articles relating the German attitude to surveillance to their experience of the Stasi during the period of the German Democratic Republic. Within the European Union, Germany is the country which the NSA spies upon most, collecting an average of 20 million phone connections and 10 million internet records each day. Angela Merkel’s Chief of Staff, Ronald Pofalla, advised the German people that, ‘The NSA and the British intelligence agency have assured us they uphold German law in Germany’, but this says nothing for the profusion of German data which travels to the systems of service providers based elsewhere.
Yet whilst the NSA engages in the mass surveillance of German citizens, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, has admitted to also using the XKeyscore programme since 2007. Cooperation between the BND and the NSA, with specific regard to the sharing of telephone data, has even brought the allegation of German complicity in US drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The broad scandal which has ensued is affecting Angela Merkel’s campaign for re-election, with polling set for September; in response, Merkel has attempted to share the blame for any BND wrongdoings with the opposition Social Democrats.
The picture in the UK is similarly murky, with the intelligence agency GCHQ – the Government Communications Headquarters, responsible for providing signals intelligence – partly funded by the NSA, and working towards its ends. The GCHQ endeavours to ‘exploit any phone, anywhere, any time’; admits privately to the deceptive nature of its work; and stresses as a ‘selling point’ the UK’s relative lack of privacy legislation. Indeed, Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian – in the aftermath of the nine-hour detention at Heathrow Airport of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner – published on Monday a piece suggesting that prior restraint (otherwise known as pre-publication censorship), ‘near impossible in the US’, is an option being pursued by the UK government; and describing how two GCHQ officers oversaw the destruction of Guardian hard drives containing Snowden’s disclosures. The government reportedly warned Rusbridger that the Guardian would have to hand over the Snowden data or else face its destruction, telling him, ‘You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more’. Both the UK and the US governments have admitted being kept abreast of – though not authorising – Miranda’s detention; but the White House says it is ‘difficult to imagine’ the US government engaging in the destruction of hard drives.
The reality seems to be one where nation states use their ill-defined status as such, their existence within borders which they pledge to secure, to profess a concern for the rights of their own citizens – with the implicit extension being that the rights of the rest of the world barely count and can be summarily dismissed. This use and abuse of the concept of the nation state is one which is echoed when it comes to defence, armaments, and immigration. While professing outwardly a concern for their citizens, at least while they persist within their own borders, governments secretly bind themselves to one another in an endeavour to spy on the very same. So despite the FAA making it easier for the NSA to work round American law; despite programs like XKeyscore allowing NSA analysts to search American data on the thinnest of pretences; still what vestiges of the law remain and what oversight is carried out make it just as well for the NSA and the American government to obtain data on their own people from intelligence agencies overseas – from the British and the Germans, for instance, who can obtain and store as much US data as they please. These transactions work both ways, and extend across the globe; including to New Zealand, which has just passed a contested law bolstering domestic spying.
While Snowden has revealed the secret and duplicitous methods by which governments would erode the privacy of individuals, there is a correlate in the UK in David Cameron’s openly expressed plan to bolster the legislation concerning online pornography. Cameron announced last month – after a sustained ‘Block Online Porn’ campaign in the Daily Mail, begun in April 2012, and absurdly posturing as a ‘fightback for decency’ which would ‘protect Britain’s young from a vile and insidious social menace’ – a series of measures, meant to curtail the viewing of online pornography which he stated is ‘corroding childhood’. Alongside the establishment of a single secure database of illegal images of children – questionable in itself given the government’s record when it comes to overseeing data – and more powers for the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, three key measures were highlighted. Internet service providers will be required to ask clients to ‘opt-in’ if they want access to online pornography, with all pornography filtered unless users actively choose to be able to receive it. The possession of ‘extreme pornography’, including pornography depicting rape, is to be made illegal. Lastly, ‘horrific’ search terms will be blacklisted, with service providers obliged to prevent these terms from producing any results.
Many have cited the difficulties in implementing such filters accurately, and without also preventing access to non-pornographic material; whilst Tumblr has offered a recent demonstration of the potential dangers that come with the excessive blocking of search terms. The criminalisation of the possession of ‘rape porn’ also appears difficult to justify. Professionally produced ‘rape porn’ involves consenting adults, and it may be difficult within the realm of pornography to always distinguish between it and types of BDSM. More, it is unclear how any ban would sit alongside some of the depictions of rape in mainstream movies and across other artistic endeavours. The argument that depictions of rape in pornography are solely or predominantly for titillation, demeaning for its practitioners and debasing the public, while other artistic depictions always treat the matter more conscientiously, seems a dubious argument at best, especially for a government that would seek to avoid nuanced understandings.
There is perhaps a case for a strong public debate on the effects and the availability of pornography. Evidence that the ready availability of internet pornography constitutes a ‘corroding’ influence appears so far slim and inconclusive. Any debate would have to consider a broad range of interconnected issues: historical attitudes and behaviours; the ready availability of professions which pay well and do not demean their practitioners; how pornography or the delimiting of pornography affects social relations and both sexually motivated and non-sexual acts of violence; and so on.
However, Cameron’s proposals have not come in the wake of any extensive or sensible debate. Ostensibly focusing on the safety of children, the proposals have been framed so as to shame any viewer of pornography – conflating separate issues and with confusing legislation outlines which seem to link child abuse or else child neglect with all viewing of porn, and which cast the users of porn as deviant. Rather than being presented as a fact of society which may be thoughtfully navigated, discussed, and used or not used, pornography has been cast as an infiltrator, an attack upon society, upon the body and the home: in his speech outlining the proposals, Cameron advertised filters as ‘One click to protect your whole home and to keep your children safe’ (incidentally, Cameron’s speech included nine variations on his patronising invocation, ‘let me be clear’). Far from suggesting balanced and concerned parenting, this seems a hands-off, detached approach. The insidious lack of clarity in the proposals has resulted in some assuming they’re going to be presented with this simple option: Do you or do you not want access to rape and child porn?
There is controversy over the precise nature of ‘opt-in’ or ‘default-on’. It has been argued that what internet service providers offer will not change at all, and that ‘default-on’ is nothing but ‘political sleight-of-hand’. Cameron’s proposals do not seem to indicate any new internet infrastructure, or any new technology which the government may use or misuse: the filter system which providers already utilise will remain in place; with the blocking of search terms remaining, for the moment, the provision of search engines like Google and Bing. The wider issues are the facile move to establish a public and political discourse in which the government dictates how people are to live; and the move to establish an open legal precedent for government meddling in internet activities. In contrast to the secretive and underhand work of the intelligence agencies, this is the second prong that would skewer privacy.
These are some of the thoughts I have had, and some of the connections I have made, regarding the attack in Woolwich on Wednesday, in which a man died after being attacked with a machete. Two suspects remain in hospital after a confrontation with the police. My considerations relate more to the reporting of the attack than to the nature of the attack itself; mine is really an attempt to analyse and philosophise the aims and the rhetoric of the reporting.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This epigram – from the French ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, authored by the critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr – may encapsulate war and warmongering in general, which often seems the continual search for a common enemy, and which has only increased in scope and persistence in the age of the nation state. Yet its play upon the concept of time gives it particular pertinence for me here, and when it comes to terrorist attacks and the War on Terrorism.
The attack in Woolwich was quickly depicted as a terrorist attack; and quickly conceived as demonstrating a new type of terrorist activity in the United Kingdom, owing to its up-close nature and the bold and bloody use of a machete. Keith Vaz, the Home Affairs Select Committee Chairman, called the attack ‘totally unprecedented’; defence experts described it as a ‘departure’ from previous attacks, marking ‘a new round of terror threats in this country’. At the same time, in David Cameron’s press conference upon the attack – given in Paris, alongside François Hollande, whom the Prime Minister was visiting for a scheduled meeting – he stated ‘We have had these sorts of attacks before in our country’, before concluding, ‘and we never buckle in the face of them’.
Thus the Woolwich attack has been portrayed as both new and not-new, something appearing for the first time and something in a process of recurring. Involved here is a sort of emptying out of time which calls to mind Anthony Giddens’ The Consequences of Modernity. For Giddens (the theoretical architect of the ‘Third Way’ in politics), a phenomenon of modern life is ‘time-space distanciation’, whereby time and subsequently space are made ’empty’ in that they are made distinct from any grounding contexts: with the mechanical clock and the standardised calendar, we can know the time without reference to nature and our specific locale; and with such developments as the telephone and improvements in travel (and now again with the internet), we can interact with people without being physically with them, and increasingly conceive the world in a way unlimited by what we see immediately around us.
Time-space distanciation ‘connects presence and absence’; it relates closely to ‘disembedding’, which Giddens defines as ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time and space’. In short, disembedded social relations are those no longer embedded in local contexts. Giddens relates two types of disembedding mechanisms: symbolic tokens – for instance, money – which are accepted as possessing value regardless of when they are used and by whom; and expert systems, where – lacking the requisite knowledge ourselves – we rely on the expertise of professionals. Giddens elaborates how the faith we place in expert systems relates to and becomes trust.
As disembedding allows us to operate without the restrictions that were once imposed by time and space, it offers us much in the way of opportunities. More, disembedding is crucial to our functioning in an increasingly complex world – our trust allows us to accept things and practices as real, even if we lack knowledge of their structure, development and coherence. Yet disembedding comes also with dangers, one of which is the acceptance of expert systems which are not expert, but contain flaws or deceits.
When it is stated that the Woolwich attack is both something new and emerging and at the same time something old and persisting, we lose our sense of the specific interaction and the contexts from which it actually emerged. The endeavour is to make us lose our grounding, and to increase our fear: an ambiguous and perverse fear that something will inevitably happen at any moment. This sort of rhetoric is typical in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, and typical of the war on terrorism: there is frequent talk of phases and new stages, with speculation regarding repeat attacks, copycats, and the spiralling of incidents which may prove not to be one-offs. In the process we are encouraged to give ourselves over to expert systems, in this case to politicians and defence experts. One of these, Jonathan Shaw – former head of counter-terrorism and head of cyber security at the Ministry of Defence until last year – has written a piece for the Evening Standard advocating that the intelligence services be allowed to monitor the public’s internet activities; promulgating the ‘snooper’s charter’ which Home Secretary Theresa May is reportedly keen to revive.
Vague and unhelpful definitions and categorisations.
With the vacuum which is a product of a lack of concrete information, distanciated from the individual occurrence by the leading rhetoric of the media and politicians, meta-narratives and broad categorisations move in. In the case of Woolwich, as in the case of many of the attacks which come to be considered terrorist, these categorisations are twofold. Firstly, the attack is categorised as a terrorist attack. This is understandable with regard to Woolwich, given the recorded public pronouncements made by the two suspects; that they were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and making political statements (‘This British soldier is an eye for an eye…Remove your government’) led government sources to describe the attack as terrorist within ninety minutes of its first report.
Still, what defines a terrorist attack seems somewhat open to interpretation. A simple definition would suggest that it is any attack which is meant to provoke terror, and which carries a political motive. Yet there is no internationally accepted legal definition of what constitutes terrorism: attempts to arrive at a consensus have faltered upon differences of opinion regarding which political motives should be included in a criminal law definition, and which political motives – for instance, motives of self-determination – should not.
The second problem of categorisation is an extension of the first, and it is that where acts are categorised as terrorist, they tend also to be categorised as belonging to a particular terrorist group or organisation. In the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich attack, by late Wednesday evening, even supposedly liberal news sources were proclaiming the perpetrators’ association with al-Qaeda. The Guardian based their connecting of the organisation tenuously on one suspect’s reference to ‘our land’, calling the attack ‘the first al-Qaida inspired attack to claim a life on British soil’ since 7 July, 2005, and terming the suspect’s claims ‘jihadist’. The BBC’s Home Affairs Correspondent wrote a piece balanced in so far as it distinguished between jihadists, political Islamists, and Muslims, and sought to interpret the typical justification for jihadist attacks; yet the concept of the piece was similarly based on an unestablished connection with al-Qaeda, the piece stating that the ‘long-feared attack’ may be rooted to ‘the heart of al-Qaeda’s violent ideology’.
It has since emerged that one of the two suspects, Michael Adebolajo, attended meetings of the Al-Muhajiroun organisation from around 2003, though the extent of his involvement with the group remains uncertain. Al-Muhajiroun claims to be a purely political organisation, focused on promoting Islam and declaiming the state of Israel; but it has links to several people convicted of terrorist activities. The organisation was banned by the National Union of Students in 2001, for disseminating hate literature; and was banned by the government from the UK in 2005. Hours ago, a friend of Adebolajo’s, Abu Nusaybah, alleged during an interview for Newsnight that Adebolajo was approached six months ago to work for MI5, but declined; Nusaybah was arrested on BBC premises shortly after making the allegations.
Other problematic terms, and parallels in Boston.
There are other problematic terms. Referring to suspects as having been ‘radicalised’ takes away their agency and dehumanises them: the phrase evokes Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of ‘machine men with machine minds’, which is evocative and interesting psychologically, but which is neither clear nor balanced news reporting. It is not a rhetoric otherwise used by media outlets; ‘radicalised’ would not be used even for those political leaders who some outlets accuse of leading their countries into illegal Middle Eastern wars. The UK terrorism threat levels are also vague, with the raising of threat levels inciting fear and substituting for substantive information.
There are clear parallels and extensions to be found in the recent Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath. The decision to charge the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, with use of a weapon of mass destruction is far from straightforward. A weapon of mass destruction originally referred to a chemical weapon, but now the term has no internationally authoritative definition; to be charged with the use of such can subsume an indiscriminate mixture of more specific offences. Theoretically, the phrase arguably implies a level of indiscriminate destruction greater than that carried out in Boston. Again, the term appears more politically than technically descriptive.
Where broad categorisations are so readily made, so condemnation tends to be broad and absolute. That such an attack is inexcusable and ultimately cannot be justified may be so, but this doesn’t mean that it can’t be better understood; it may surpass the sense many have of what is moral, but there remains a logic which impels such attacks and which cannot be dismissed in the face of the actions of Western states, who have engaged for much of the period since the Second World War in global programmes of regime change, arms dealings, and military action.
Finally Social Media to the Fore!
The Woolwich attack is remarkable in that the two suspects remained on the scene of the crime; with Adebolajo readily, and even casually, with a London accent, being recorded on phone camera by a witness as he made his politicised remarks. Another video has surfaced showing the two men charging towards police officers when these arrived, which resulted in the suspects being shot and detained. That the suspects remained in place and spoke so freely to witnesses meant that information about the attack, and its declared motives, rapidly spread across social media.
Both the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, initially responded to the attack via Twitter: Cameron tweeting ‘The killing in #Woolwich is truly shocking – I have asked the Home Secretary to chair a COBRA meeting’; Miliband tweeting ‘Shocked by appalling events in Woolwich. Whole country will be horrified by what has happened’. Later into the evening, the English Defence League gained a significant number of Twitter followers as they attempted to utilise social media to arrange a series of protests.
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Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity (Polity Press, 2010)
With her funeral passing easefully enough last Wednesday morning, the inclination to join those voices contending the legacy of Margaret Thatcher is strong. Severe criticism of Thatcher in the week and a day that passed between her death and her funeral was limited in the mainstream press, and significantly restrained amongst the political classes. David Cameron cut short his European tour and gratuitously recalled parliament for a day intended to serve purely as tribute to her, and it largely did so, with a flurry of fond Conservative reminiscences; though of the Labour MPs who attended – around half of Labour’s total of 255 – a small number, Glenda Jackson prominent, stood to censure her time in power, along with some of the several DUP and SNP MPs.
Of the numerous official statements political figures made on the day of her death, Ken Livingstone and Neil Kinnock lamented the effects of her premiership, and George Galloway was more vociferous but marginalised. Serving Labour politicians, and Labour leaders from Tony Blair onward, were sympathetic. Blair was boldest, arguing that she changed the political landscape of the world, and admitting his Labour government had retained some of her policies. Ed Miliband and his predecessor as Labour leader, Gordon Brown, typified the stilted tone struck by most: the former stating that, though he disagreed with much of her politics, he respected her ‘political achievements and personal strength’; the latter similarly praising Thatcher’s ‘determination and resilience’, the ‘strength of her convictions and her unwavering belief in Britain’s destiny in the world’ – adding that he was pleased he had been able to treat the Lady by inviting her to Downing Street during his time in office.
The idea was heavily promulgated that any criticism was undignified and unacceptable, as one must not speak ill of the recently deceased. Labour MP Tom Watson said, ‘I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today’. This thought was echoed a week later by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres – a friend of Thatcher’s – who gave the address at her funeral, and put it that, ‘Lying here, she is one of us, subject to the common destiny of all human beings’. Chartres’ address has been widely praised, and it sought to humanise Thatcher through a focus on her Methodist Christianity; her moral rather than explicitly political values; and via a pleasant enough but fairly banal recapitulation of her response to a letter from a nine-year-old boy – a tale fitting for any Sunday homily.
However, though many of the parliamentary tributes sought to evoke a similarly human figure, it remains that a great deal of the business around Thatcher’s death – the rhetoric, led by the Conservatives, which was forwarded as entirely fitting and acceptable; and the events, the impromptu parliamentary session and the ceremonial funeral – was undeniably political, ideology masked as commemoration. David Cameron stated in his first interview upon her passing that ‘The real thing about Margaret Thatcher is she did not just lead our country, she saved our country. And I believe she will go down as the greatest British peacetime Prime Minster’. These lines – that Thatcher ‘saved our country’ and was ‘the greatest British peacetime Prime Minister’ – were ones he repeated throughout the day. Ian Duncan Smith, former Conservative leader and current work and pensions secretary, said of Thatcher, ‘Watching her set out to change Britain for the better in 1979 made me believe there was, at last, real purpose and real leadership in politics once again’.
With such statements brazenly upholding and acclaiming Thatcher’s political values and her political legacy, the attempts to restrain and limit even the most fervent criticism were patently absurd, if not insidiously immoral. The words and acts of Thatcher’s supporters were neither confined to nor resting upon her humanity, but celebrated her politics. So those who disagreed with her politics, however strongly, should have been permitted to make the opposing argument. Otherwise those in power are rewriting history, sending Thatcher off from this world bathed and profiled in a light coming only from one side; and attempting simultaneously to manipulate the present political spectrum to their own ends. The recalling of parliament and the granting of a ceremonial funeral, with military honours, were themselves political and politicising acts, exceptionalising Thatcher (Cameron argued that her funeral plans had been established by the previous government; but implied he had amended these plans in whatever ways he saw fitting).
The endeavour to halt any untoward word attained the realm of farce in the headlining debate over The Wizard of Oz song, ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’. The song – originally from the 1939 film – rose quickly in the UK music charts in the days after Thatcher’s passing, its popularity rooted in an online campaign to propel the song to mark her death. The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail expressed outrage at the song’s rising chart position; arguing that to air it would be to hand a ‘propaganda victory to left-wing agitators’, politicising the charts and ceding to those seeking to denigrate Thatcher. The Sun found two of the three surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz, and stressed their ‘fury’ at the way the song was being used.
With the song at number two in the charts by the week’s close, BBC Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper felt forced into a decision: writing that he found the campaign ‘as distasteful as anyone’ and that ‘in the middle of this furore is a grieving family’, he argued he had reached a ‘compromise’ by determining to play only seven seconds of the 51-second song on air, accompanied by a short news report explaining why the song was present. Yet surely the only impartial thing when it comes to the top forty of the music chart is to play the top forty of the music chart, uncensored, unfettered by explanation. The arguments that the charts shouldn’t be in tow to minority groups, and that music shouldn’t be politicised, seem to neglect the nature of the music business; of mass marketing by major labels; of all songs which achieve their success as representatives of specific groups, or as viral sensations; as well as ignoring a rich history of political music, and the referential and re-contextualising nature of the art form.
After all of this, what is the political legacy of Margaret Thatcher? Primary among the global responses to her death was Barack Obama’s statement, in which he called Thatcher ‘one of the great champions of freedom and liberty’. The Economist chose to summarise her in a related way, with the cover of its 13 April edition carrying a picture of Thatcher beneath the headline, ‘Freedom fighter’. The notion of Thatcher as an international combatant for freedom is contentious, and rests on her willingness to engage with the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev, which undoubtedly served to help bring about an end to the Cold War. After leaving office, she spoke against Serbian aggression, in support of Croatian and Slovenian independence. These things must be contrasted with her open and covert support for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and for Augusto Pinochet in Chile; her opposition to sanctions against South Africa during apartheid, and her declaring Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress a ‘typical terrorist organisation’; and her efforts – and expressions to Gorbachev – against the reunification of Germany.
The Economist‘s emphasis on Thatcher as ‘freedom fighter’ implicates, as much as international affairs, her economic liberalism. Citing a quotation by Abraham Lincoln, beginning ‘You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong’, which Thatcher supposedly carried about her wherever she went, The Economist depicts ‘The essence of Thatcherism was a strong state and a free economy’. Yet the short and long-term results of Thatcher’s economic policy are as much fought over, and as open to vastly differing interpretations, as any other aspect of her politics.
Influenced by Friedrich Hayek – whose The Constitution of Liberty Thatcher once produced and declared the defining text of her form of Conservatism – and adopting the monetarism of Milton Friedman, drawn through her guide Keith Joseph, Thatcher’s economic policy at the beginning of her government sought first and foremost to lower inflation. To control the amount of money in circulation, she increased interest rates; and cut subsidies to industry, spending on education, and spending on housing. Summarising her achievements, The Economist notes that, owing to these policies, under Thatcher ‘The inflation rate fell from a high of 27% in 1975 to 2.4% in 1986’. This was relatively short lived: by 1990 and the end of her leadership, inflation was up, at just under 10%. More, the focus on lowering inflation had significant and lasting repercussions.
The Housing Act 1980 gave tenants the ‘Right to Buy’ their council houses at vast discounts: from 33% up to 50% for those who had lived in their council home for twenty years or more. This was certainly a populist policy, and won Thatcher significant working class support. James Forsyth in The Spectator argues that the policy evinced Thatcher’s pragmatism; that, taking only the right bits from Karl Marx, she created a new class of property owners; but it is debatable whether the policy provided long-term security for the individuals concerned, much less for the country as a whole. Home ownership rose from 57% to 67% as £17.6 billion worth of council house property was sold by the government between 1980 and 1990. That amounted to 1.34 million properties; while in the same period, fewer than half a million new council homes were built, Thatcher’s restrictions upon local councils – who she viewed as left-wing, distrusted, and increasingly controlled – preventing them from spending the proceeds of house sales on new builds.
The legacy of this has been an ever-greater shortage of social housing. The lack of available housing has seen house prices rise: the average house price doubled from just over £20,000 when Thatcher took over, to around £55,000 when she left office; and after falling slightly through the middle of the 90s, it rose rapidly through the 2000s so that the average house price today stands at £160,000. The ground was laid for the significant growth of the private rental market. The Housing Act 1988 shifted the balance of power in private rental agreements from tenants to landlords, who were allowed to charge as they liked. With those who would otherwise take social housing having to rent on the private market, susceptible to its high and ever-increasing rents, Thatcher’s housing policy is considerably responsible for the huge increases in the state’s housing benefit bill, which the present Conservative-led government uses to vilify welfare.
Thatcher was content for people not to work. The Economist describes how, for the generation of politicians after the Second World War, ‘full employment became the overriding object of political life’; so that when Edward Heath attempted a more free-market approach to the economy in the early 1970s, rising unemployment – which briefly passed the 1 million mark for the first time – saw him quickly backtrack. After the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79, by the time Thatcher won her first election, unemployment was at 1.3 million. Her early spending cuts saw this figure rise sharply: by 1981, there were 2.7 million unemployed, street protests, and 364 leading economists criticised her economic policies in a letter to The Times. By 1982, unemployment passed 3 million, and stood at 13% – up from 5.7% in 1979.
The unelectability of the Labour Party and national sentiment after the Falklands War enabled Thatcher to nevertheless sweep to a second term in 1983. It was at this point she began her privatisations: of British Gas, British Telecom, and British Airways. The sale of these nationalised industries brought in £29 billion; and in another populist move, the public were encouraged to buy shares in the newly privatised companies, though this resulted in no lasting change in the balance of share ownership across the country, with individual share ownership continuing to decline.
There were some areas which Thatcher would not touch or struggled to affect. She would not contemplate the privatisation of the railways, reportedly stating ‘Railway privatisation will be the Waterloo of this government’. John Major’s government enacted the difficult and still-contested privatisation of British Rail in 1993. The rewording of Clause IV by Tony Blair in 1995, detaching the Labour Party from a commitment to nationalisation, marked a break with the party’s past and with its divided 1980s. Blair’s Labour government embarked upon the privatisation of facets of the NHS and state education, through much-criticised Private Finance Initiatives, whereby public infrastructure projects are funded with private capital – the interest rates private providers demand, allied to the mismanagement of projects, often leaving the taxpayer with an extortionate bill over a prolonged period. Under Andrew Adonis, Blair’s minister for education, Labour also began their academies programme, enabling schools to become independent of local government control. In their leading piece on Thatcher’s death, entitled ‘Mrs T’s unfinished business’, The Spectator discusses Keith Joseph’s inability to pass significant school reform in the early 80s; and argues Michael Gove is successfully bringing to fruition in education the seeds sown by Adonis.
Alongside these privatisations, Thatcher’s second term saw her biggest battle with the trade unions, which came in the form of Arthur Scargill, the National Union of Mineworkers, and the miners’ strike between 1984-85. Thatcher won the battle, in so far as the miners returned to work, the NUM leadership was shorn of authority, and the government’s public spending cuts were consolidated. The Economist highlights this as ‘a battle for the right of management to manage over the arbitrary use of union power, and her victory broke the unions for good. From a British perspective, it was the most important thing she ever did’. It notes that ‘The number of working days lost to strikes fell from 29m in 1979 to 2m in 1986′.
It seems clear that the unions had too much power and were striking far too often; and Thatcher’s achievement here was important. Her privatisations and her triumph over the trade unions drastically improved the country’s overall productivity, and helped secure her a third term in 1987. Moreover, the decline in overall manufacturing output that is often assumed as part of Thatcher’s cuts has perhaps been overstated. Statistics show that manufacturing output – after falling during the recession from the early-to-mid 80s – had risen from its 1980 level by 1990. Unemployment remained above 3 million until late 1987, then fell over the next three years, to 1.7 million in late 1990; though this was in conjunction with the aforementioned rise in these years of inflation. The truth seems less that manufacturing declined under Thatcher, more that the focus in manufacturing shifted from heavier to lighter industries; falling only as a proportion of the GDP, as non-manufacturing industries, notably the financial services sector, grew and took up space. Manufacturing in the UK experienced a more severe decline under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
The problem regarding Thatcher, the miners, trade unions and manufacturing concerns the divisive nature of Thatcher’s battles: her emboldened, sometimes belligerent rhetoric; and the way that the closure of mines and other changes in manufacturing had a disproportionate impact on northern communities. During the miners’ strike, Thatcher notoriously said, ‘We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty’. Characterising those striking as ‘the enemy within’ stoked anger and contributed to a deep-seated resentment, which grew as former mining communities were forgotten, left without work.
The Spectator‘s leader admits, ‘When pits and factories closed, ministers imagined that men of a certain age – who could not be expected to retrain – would sign on to benefits and wait for retirement. A one-off cost. Instead, welfare dependency moved in as industrialisation moved out, and it continues to blight each new generation’. The response to this, according to The Spectator, is that people on incapacity benefit should be forced to do whatever work they can; and that the country must be persuaded this is being done ‘to save lives not money’. It seems dismissive to depict the demise of a way of life as ‘a one-off cost’; contemptuous to presume that lives will be saved by propelling people into a vacuum of underpaid, intellectually and physically stultifying menial labour. The ramifications of Thatcher’s policies devastated communities in the north; and made the Conservatives a party of the ‘rich south’, no longer a national party, making it difficult for them to attain a parliamentary majority.
In the realm of taxation, Thatcher broadly worked towards two goals: she lowered direct taxes, preferring methods of indirect taxation; and her tax changes systematically favoured the wealthy. Early in her first term, while increasing interest rates and cutting spending, she almost doubled the rate of VAT, from 8% to 15%. The top rate of income tax was cut from 83%; initially, in her government’s first budget, to 60%, then in 1988 to 40%; and the investment income surcharge – which had, in the mid-70s, put the top rate of tax on investment income at 98% – was altogether dropped. The basic rate of income tax was cut in successive budgets from 33% to 25%.
Domestically, Thatcher’s Community Charge – the infamous poll tax – did much to undermine her premiership. The poll tax sought to replace the rates system of taxation, according to which local government was funded by taxes people paid depending on the nominal rental value of their home. The rates system thereby implicitly linked taxation and wealth – those with higher value properties paid more in local government tax. Yet the rates were difficult to evaluate and there was no upper limit, and Thatcher was eager for an alternative. The poll tax instead levied a flat-rate tax on every adult. Thus a father earning a minimum wage, living in a cramped home with his family, was required to pay the same to his local government as a millionaire living alone in a mansion. The tax was implemented first in Scotland in 1989, then in England and Wales in 1990, to demonstrations and riots; it proved difficult to administer and enforce; and was soon dropped by the subsequent government.
The Big Bang of 1986 was the deregulation of the financial markets, which strengthened London’s position as a major financial capital and saw the boom of the financial services sector. Economic liberalism did not extend to liberalism elsewhere: like her counterpart in America, Ronald Reagan, Thatcher was unable to ‘roll back the frontiers’ of the state. Public spending took up the same proportion of GDP in 1990 as it had in 1979, with the cuts to education, housing and industry offset by rises in spending on law and order, employment, health, and social security. Power was centralised, both in her person and in Whitehall, as it was taken away from local councils.
She did lower the national debt markedly, from 44% of GDP in 1979 to 27% in 1990 – but this was only made possible by the exceptional revenue afforded the government through the sale of industries and council houses, and from taxing at 90% the extraction of North Sea oil. Oil revenues, which barely registered in the 70s, gave Thatcher’s government close to £100 billion during the 1980s (estimated at around £18 billion per year when adjusted for inflation). Without this flow of oil, there could have been neither the reduction in the national debt, nor the tax cuts for the rich. Even with these things, GDP – though more stable – rose only marginally throughout Thatcher’s leadership when compared with the previous decade. The year-on-year average rise in GDP across the 70s was 2.55%; in the 80s, it was 2.79%.
The anger which had built towards Thatcher amongst miners and teachers; which had developed in much of the north; which was felt by many of the working class, who hadn’t benefited from her tax breaks; which anger became an outpouring in response to the poll tax: this was not what ultimately brought about her demise. This owed instead to anger from within her own party, ostensibly concerning Europe. Thatcher was not single-mindedly opposed to European integration. In fact, before becoming Prime Minister, as leader of the opposition in 1978, she had been critical of the Labour government for failing to sign to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In 1986 she agreed to the Single European Act, which bound the countries of the European Common Market (or European Economic Community, the precursor to the EU) closer together: the first major revision of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, it set a date of 1992 for the creation of a European single market, and codified the integration of foreign policy among member states.
On the other hand, having campaigned for it since 1979, in 1984 she secured a rebate from the EEC for the UK, amounting to two-thirds of the difference between the UK’s European contributions and receipts. This rebate amounted to £700 million when first obtained, and continues to be worth around £3 billion a year today. As the 80s progressed, Thatcher became more confrontational on European matters – both against fellow European leaders, and in opposition with members of her Conservative party.
The Westland affair in 1986 saw a fallout with her Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, which Thatcher even feared might end her leadership. Thatcher and Heseltine disagreed over how to save the Westland company, Britain’s last remaining helicopter manufacturer, with Thatcher desiring a merger with an American firm, Heseltine with Italian and French companies. After correspondence was leaked casting Heseltine in a poor light, he resigned his position, criticising the lack of collective cabinet responsibility. Then came a speech in Bruges in which Thatcher theatrically decried proposals for an EEC with a new federal structure – condemned by Thatcher as an attempt to impose a ‘European super-state’. She moved against joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism, even as her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, fervently encouraged her to set a date by which to join. Though she finally agreed to join in October 1990, her refusal to set a date, and her vehemence in European debates, had alienated some of her closest ministers.
Perhaps there is a sense in which Europe became the battleground, magnifying upset within the party at Thatcher’s increasingly authoritarian and dismissive leadership style. More, the Conservatives had fallen well behind the Labour Party in the opinion polls over the preceding eighteen months. On 1 November, Howe – Thatcher’s initial Chancellor and the longest-serving member of her Cabinet; who was at the time Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons – resigned from his roles. Issuing at first a careful, considered letter of resignation, Downing Street in response downplayed his differences with the Prime Minister; and so he was compelled, on 13 November, to give a resignation speech in the Commons. His withering speech evoked, by means of a cricketing analogy, Thatcher’s attitude towards her ministers on Europe: ‘It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain’.
The following day Michael Heseltine announced a challenge upon Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative Party. Thatcher won the first ballot over Heseltine, but not by the 15% of votes required to prevent a second ballot. With speculation that Conservative MPs were ready to switch allegiances, Thatcher finally considered her position untenable and chose to resign. In the subsequent round of the leadership election, John Major entered the fray, and was so close to obtaining a majority ahead of the other candidates – Heseltine and Douglas Hurd – that they withdrew. Major was thereby appointed Prime Minister on 28 November.
David Dimbleby closed his narration of Thatcher’s funeral on BBC One with more emphasis on her political strength: she was, he said, ‘a figure who imposed her will on this country’. Aside from the debates over her policies, her political and economic philosophies, the practicalities of her battles with the unions and in foreign affairs, Thatcher – as the longest serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century, and because of her lasting impact on politics, and her shifting of the political spectrum to the right – is central to any contemporary debate on leadership. What do we want from our political leaders? How should we vote for them? Is the traditional theory of incumbency – where an incumbent is presumed to have a strong advantage in any election race – changing where leaders are concerned?
It is arguable that imposing their will is precisely the opposite of what a premier should do, and of what we should want from them. Thatcher can be said to have made the role of Prime Minister more presidential, developing a cult of personality around herself; utilising sound-bites and the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi; neglecting parliament and, far from being first among equals, increasingly filling her cabinet with yes-men, abusing those who would dare to disagree; and doing all of this without the set of checks and balances inherent in the US system of government. Yet she receives relatively little censure for this enlarging of her role, because she is considered the epitome of a conviction politician, and convictions are admired, and the UK consistently desires strong political figures.
This is expressed in the distrust and resulting apathy there is in the country towards electoral reform, which is perceived as weak and European, leading to coalition governments of the general sort widely loathed today in the shape of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition. In many ways it seems that coalitions are misunderstood, that their basis in compromise is antipathetical to the the public – two separate mandates cannot, of course, be implemented at one and the same time. The arguments that the Liberal Democrats, in choosing to enter a coalition with the Conservatives, have been able to amend and mollify and insert some policies; and that without them a minority Conservative government would have sought, and probably won, a majority in a hastily arranged subsequent election – these are seldom heard and little accepted.
Elsewhere, The Economist‘s leader posits that ‘Tony Blair won several elections by offering Thatcherism without the rough edges’. Like Thatcher, Blair stands accused of acting more President than Prime Minister. Yet his leadership carried a different strain. Whilst a strong leader in terms of political effects, election results, and world stature, Blair is viewed – owing much to Iraq, and with the convictions he does espouse held with suspicion and readily dismissed – as the adverse of a conviction politician. As a result of this there appear fewer ready to fight his corner (Blair, incidentally, in the week of Thatcher’s death, was published in the centenary issue of the New Statesman advising on the future direction of the Labour Party). With the phenomenon in the UK’s recent political history of two such large but controversial leaders, who each led three-term governments; and now the novelty of the present coalition; it is interesting to consider how the politics of leadership in the UK will be shaped over the coming years.
culturedallroundman 