Facebook and real panto

What does facebook have in common with pantomime? I suppose it is that when you get something wrong, it is in front of 200 people.

It has been a real pleasure to play the character of Simple Simon in this year's Hallam Players panto Jack and the Beanstalk, alongside Nick Clegg and Richard Allan and many other talented locals.

So I discover the hard way, during the final show of the run, that, having met one's co-star on stage that forgetting a line can sometimes give the next line added comic poignancy. "I'm awfully glad we bumped into each other" I said to her. Then a pause... under my breath... "I'll remember why in a minute". The prompt came to the rescue: "My name's Simon". Ah, yes, I am introducing myself. "My name's Simon. People think I'm simple. But I'm not really." I'm afraid to admit that after having forgotten my own name, it was difficult to deliver the rest of the line with conviction, or a straight face.

Ah well, worse things happen at sea. So I was talking to another member of the cast at the after show party about Mitch Benn, and how he admired Tom Lehrer. "Tom Lehrer?" "I'll send you a link to something on YouTube."

Of course sending links by email is so 90s. No I'll post it on your facebook funwall. Well that was the plan. Actually I posted it on the facebook funwall of all my friends.... [Update: actually maybe I didn't. Notifications, right, that's just spamming some feed that tells other people that I have sent someone, not them, a video. What will they think of next.]

I will get back to Reinventing the State at some point.

Greenpartywatch: Anarcho-communists ... wooo

Nicholas Blincoe turns up again with a fairly bizarre article on the Greens. The Tories, it seems are quite green because they are mates with some of the right people and some of the Green Party's founders were of a barking right wing bent.

I agree of course that the Lib Dems are greener than the Greens, when we consider what might actually work. Blincoe is even lighter on the detail here, and this is not really why I bring this up.

Réponse de resistance goes to Green blog the Daily Maybe. He quotes Blincoe on the new Green Left faction

"Their anti-capitalist, anarcho-communist ideas, found in their founding manifesto, the Headcorn Statement, make them the Wombles of green politics."

And here's the rebuttal:

Sounds alright doesn't it?

More greens queue up in the comments to endorse the sentiment.

I'm not going to rehash the arguments again - they are in this blog's history. But there is something tragic about what should have been the pre-eminent environmentalist political party being side-tracked into flawed and failed political ideology. Mind you Marx would never have stomached their irrationalism.

Blincoe meanwhile seems to attach some significance to the formation of the Green Left faction in 2006, as if this was anything new. "The Way Ahead" was formed in the early '90s, (the 1890s?) with much the same agenda. These groups are not born out of a change in the party's ideology, but out of a frustration the vanguardists have with the rest of the party not being able to articulate a non-communist position without sounding pro-capitalist. That sounding remotely pro-capitalist is such a no-no indicates where the party as a whole is at, and has been at for a decade.

As for being entryists... no, to be an entryist you must have an agenda that the organisation you are joining does not already share.

Reinventing the State Chapter 20: To be a Briton - The Citizen and the State

William Wallace gives us a fine essay on the history of Britishness and of our relationship with the state. I have little to add or oppose, apart from bemoaning his occasional use of "economic liberals" as a swear word. I might complain that references to Roosevelt's post-war international order may leave me wondering which Roosevelt - I think he means FDR.

And, topically, to his list of emancipated religious minorities - Catholic and dissenters 1829, Jews 1858 - I might add atheists: it was 1886 that radical liberal Charles Bradlaugh was finally permitted to take the seat that he had been elected to in 1880 and several times in between.

Anyway, not being entirely qualified to nipick the content, I will at least endorse the conclusion.

The sense of national community still needed to support democratic government and redistributive welfare can be maintained only by a transmitted commitment to shared institutions and values, rooted in shared understandings of their origins and rationale. Those shared institutions, values and understandings are at present confused, even contested. It is a Liberal task to clarify them.

Well perhaps endorse with one qualification. I am not convinced that disagreement over the origins of our shared values is necessarily a problem. I submit that the belief that respect for human rights and tolerance arise from the Judeo-Christian tradition, can co-exist happily with the belief that those values arise from the Enlightment and the casting off of religious shackles: so long as we agree that these are values we support.

Reinventing the State Chapter 19: Tackling Terrorism: A Liberal Democrat Approach

In this chapter, Nick Clegg

"seeks to move beyond the infantile stand-off between those who see terrorism as an expression of multiple grievances and those who regard any engagement with extremists as a form of appeasement, towards a policy of 'critical enagement'."

In a nutshell he nails the two wrong positions between which this debate is typically polarised. While grievances make good recruiting sargeants, this is about ideology - we face terrorist threats from those who reject democracy, human rights, gender equality, the non-violent contest of ideas, constrained government, the liberating potential of science and the separation of church and state. While some on the left would like to blame it all on the USA, I will suspect that they are not too committed to these values themselves. The right (eg Melanie Phillips), often happier to recognise the ideological angle are shown no mercy:

"But winning an ideological battle is not possible if the battle is not joined in the first place. That is why it is so curious that those who have rightly sought to delineate the nature of the ideological threat have then advocated a highly introverted strategy in which the sole purpose of public policy appears to be to ignore, exclude and ostracise those individuals and organisations who might provide some insight into the threat we face."

So, we should assert liberal values and not lapse into relativism. Liberalism is what the terrorists are trying to destroy: belligerent political rhetoric and 90 days detention in Siberia, are short cuts to giving them victory on a plate.

And here is the challenge:

"how to divorce the widespread grievances of large numbers of large numbers of British Muslims from the activities of Islamist extremists, in order that the former can actively help to expose and defeat the latter"

Some key elements to our response to this challenge are laid out. We must engage with specific communities, not "the Muslim community" which does not exist as a single entity.

We must engage with 'fence-sitters', and listen to their grievances.

"An unholy alliance of Tony Blair's stubborn refusal to admit any errors in his decision to invade Iraq, and the breathless accusation of appeasement bandied about by hardline commentators against anyone prepared to acknowledge ommunity grievances, has led to a self-defeating defensiveness in government. Instead, a self-confident government should have the strength of purpose to listen, and where justified, refute the ... grievances of many mainstream Muslim communitites."

And we should recognise the divisions, typically generational, within some Muslim communities: that young men in particular are most at risk of radicalisation, and we might look for ways we could help community leaders (and parents?) deal with this challenge. This is perhaps my only question mark on the whole chapter - I am a little wary of deference to community leaders, it seems to deny the huge diversity of views within any community, and may reinforce a position of authority that might not be popular or deserved. But it would have been a digression for Nick to have gone into this.

These three themes, and another three I didn't mention "are by no means exhaustive". But they add flesh to the policy of critical engagement, indispensable to starving extremists of the support of their non-violent neighbours.

Nick goes on to talk about more structural issues, MI5, MI6, the police, an integrated border force and securing the ports. All good stuff we should be familiar with. And finally, under the heading of legal reform, rather than ever more draconian detention without charge, Nick advocates reforms to give us an effective process without abandoning judicial oversight. The threshold test allows a suspect to be charged in the expectation of further evidence coming to light. Post-charge questioning would remove one of the obstacles to charges being brought early. Admission of telephone intercept evidence would bring us into line with almost the rest of the world. None of these are simple quick fixes; each must be done with care. But they show that there is scope for increasing the effectiveness of the fight without trampling on liberty.

"In the past the government has appeared to hasty in side-stepping due process in a rush to meet the terror threat, whilst overlooking a host of practical reforms... As the national debate on terrorism matures, our aim should remain steadfast and simple: to protect both our lives and our liberties"

Reinventing the State Chapter 18: Rebuilding Trust in the Criminal Justice System

Where the Orange Book focusses on offenders and the tough love of training and work, Tim Starkey barely mentions this and talks instead about the system.

So we hear about policing, anti-social behaviour, community justice, and honesty in sentencing: all good themes. But we should not leave behind the earlier themes under Mark Oaten's cloud, whether he wrote the chapter or not.

That said, there is nothing wrong with this chapter. Posturing on toughness should not longer be allowed to get in the way of effectiveness. ASBOs should be more of a last resort. Victims of petty criminals who are up for it should be entitled to face them and see them face the music and make restitution. Honesty in sentencing is better than micromanaging the judges. Etc, etc.