This is an open letter to Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Bernard Hogan-Howe. We invite a response, which, if received, we will publish in full.

Dear Mr Hogan-Howe,

I attended your talk at the London School of Economics last night. Amidst the management-speak and froth, a single statistic that you mentioned caught my attention.

“Young black men are four times more likely than others to be stopped and searched under Section 1 [of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984] and eight times more likely than others to be stopped and searched under Section 60 [of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994]”

Alone these are startling words, but I would like to interrogate them a little further. Since the “sus laws” were repealed in the early 1980s, the police have needed “reasonable suspicion” to commit a stop and search under Section 1. But under Section 60 no such demand is made. Under Section 60, where for a specified time and area this law is put into action, any police officer is able “to stop any pedestrian and search him” without reasonable suspicion.

What does all of this mean? Well ultimately that the demand for “reasonable suspicion” is barely keeping the police force in check, but that when Section 60 is invoked something far more worrying is revealed: Police in London consistently believe that more young black men are involved in crime than they have reasonable grounds to suspect. That is, police officers consistently have an unfounded belief in the criminality of young black men, which is significantly affecting their conduct using the Section 60 Stop and Search laws. We can probably assume, too, that what is exposed about the police force by this statistic affects all areas of their work, and their contact with the communities of London.

The Section 60 imposed across London immediately after the riots in August can be seen as a test case. Walking around the streets of Camden, Islington, and Hackney, I saw police officers stopping and searching each and every young black man walking on main streets. As a white 25-year old male I wasn’t stopped once.

You also mentioned last night that you believe strongly in people’s right to go about their business unmolested. But what is clear, from the fact that 90% of stop and searches result in no further action, is that stop and search is being used punitively, and that it is being used punitively not against individuals but against communities of London divided along the lines of race. Every day, young black men in our city are molested going about their business by a racist force whose power to stop and search is being used as a means to harass and abuse young black people.

Where officers cannot, within their powers, arrest or charge young black people in line with their unfounded racist belief in the criminality of young black men, they are using their powers of stop and search as a means of punishment. You may, from your office, not consider it a great attack on personal liberty to be stopped and searched, but when it happens to you day after day, week after week, and on no basis but for the colour of your skin, then it is nothing but harassment.

We welcome a response from you on these matters.

The Coalition partners are at each others throats again. And, as always, there is no need for you to get up from your seat. This time it’s the royal yacht. Cameron and co. believe that the queen should get a new yacht for her diamond Jubilee. Clegg meanwhile, has made headlines by saying that she definitely shouldn’t get a new boat to play with.

We’re becoming used to this kind of coalition playfighting. On all big decisions taken by this government – the decimation of the public sector, cutting in a downturn, remaining intensely relaxed about mass unemployment – Clegg and Cameron stand completely side by side. Aside from the fact that Clegg is a free market Gladstonian, the Lib Dems are utterly in the pockets of their more powerful partners. They know that should the coalition breakdown, they would face electoral wipe-out.

Nonetheless both parties feel the need, from time to time, to reassert their particular political – or more accurately, cultural – identities. As such they try to have a bit of a punch up on issues that are of very marginal importance – like for example the royal yacht.

Last time around it was tax breaks for married couples. Cleggy got to show how very 21st century he was, when he poo-pooed the idea. “We should not take a particular version of the family institution, such as the Fifties model of suit-wearing, bread-winning dad and aproned, home-making mother, and try to preserve it in aspic”, he boldly asserted.

And thus Clegg gets to appeal to the only constituency he has left, namely lightweight metropolitan types – the kind who couldn’t care to much about dreary issues like unemployment, but who know that they hate “Daily Mail Readers”, and who think that Richard Dawkins is a hero.

Time to put this poor man out of his misery.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

So today brings news that former Labour Party official Luke Bozier is defecting to the Conservatives. Many people will be asking “Who the hell is Luke Bozier?”. Those who know of him may ask “Why did he defect?”. Meanwhile, those who’ve read his remarks about joining the Tories will be asking “On what planet does Mr Bozier reside?”.

In explaining his decision to swap sides, Luke tells us where labour has gone wrong:

I became a member five years ago, in the final days of Tony Blair’s leadership. Back then, New Labour was still the intellectual heart of the party. A pro-business attitude and a commitment to revolutionising our creaking public services made sense to me…

…Gordon Brown, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a terrible driver of the New Labour wagon. Most of his three years as leader and Prime Minister were spent defending his own position. As a result, we wasted the opportunity to continue Tony’s reforms and we were punished for it at the ballot box.

I mean, wtf? Clearly there is a debate to be had about why labour lost the last election. I may not agree with those people who believe it was all about the deficit but they do at least have a position which makes some sense. The deficit, after all, was a major issue in the last election. Personally I think the collapse of the economic system over which New Labour had presided, with the consequence that 2.5 million people were left without work, might have been a rather large factor at the last poll.

But to suggest that labour’s great electoral liability was its failure to push ahead with public sector reforms? I mean, really? And this from a supposed strategic genius! I can honestly say that I have not met anyone who stopped voting labour because they want, say, more schools with academy status. If anyone else has I would really, truly love to hear from them. I would, to say the least, be very surprised to encounter any activists who found that bringing choice and competition into the public sector was a big issue on the door steps.

On all sides of the party, there is a tendency for people to believe that the policies they support are also the policies that are necessary in order to win elections. Luke however takes this to a bizarre extreme. If this is the extent of his strategic prowess, then I am more than happy to see him teaming up with the Tories.

Shut the door on the way out Luke. And don’t forget to take out the garbage.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

So Michael Gove wants to make it easier to kick bad teachers out of the profession. In particular he wants those teachers “who can’t keep control or keep the interest of their class” to be moved rapidly into the “firing line”.

As with every single other profession – public or private – there is undoubtedly a small minority teachers who are doing poor job. Yet, yelling about the need to kick out those teachers whose classrooms get out of control betrays a naiveity about the character of many secondary schools, and represents an approach that will hinder rather than help education.

Not a great deal of time has elapsed since I last attended my London comprehensive. And looking back, I can remember passionate, able and deeply committed teachers, who, all too often, were treated despicably by a fair minority of students. I remember many very good teachers who struggled, on occasion, to control their classes. However good they may have been, they were nonetheless dealing with people whose capacity to behave unreasonably seemed unrestrained by habit, morality, or indeed fear of any of the sanctions that teachers had at their disposal.

What message is Gove sending to such students (and indeed their parents)? Well, the message appears to be “if you behave unreasonably, it’s your teachers fault”. Fast -tracking teachers for the sack – when their classrooms become out of control – gives, frankly, the most maladjusted students the whip-hand over those who educate them. The biggest disrupters will be further empowered to threaten their teachers’ livelihoods.

More to the point, it is a fantasy to imagine that dishing out more p45 can genuinely address the problem of out of control classrooms. It is obvious, not least after this summer, that such classroom problems are a manifestation of a more general inter-generational crisis. One does not have to buy into the right wing trash about a decline in morals/collapse of Christian civilisation narrative to be capable of observing this. Frank Furedi is right to argue that, as our activity in society becomes increasingly denuded of meaning, adulthood somewhat loses its point, and that, as such, a general collapse in adult authority is less than surprising.

Does this mean that we should be completely fatalistic about what we expect in the way of classroom control? Of course not. But it does suggest that the costs of Gove’s approach – in terms of the erosion of the educators authority – may greatly outweigh the benefits of getting rid of a few bad apples.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

So the stand off continues. Cameron et. al. are determined that any Scottish referendum should be a straight choice between independence and the status quo. Alex Salmond meanwhile, plans to give voters a third choice. The so-called “devo-max” option, would give the Scots autonomy on virtually every matter other than foreign policy and defence.

Salmond is right to argue that such an option chimes with a substantial body of Scottish opinion. Yet it is also a choice which would necessarily mean a very big change, not only in the way Scotland is governed, but also in the way in which the rest of the United Kingdom is run.

Without a doubt, devo-max would push the West Lothian question beyond its limit. Should Scotland be granted autonomy over nearly all domestic matters, the position of the country’s Westminster representatives would almost certainly need to be altered. They could not continue casting potentially decisive votes on the huge range of English only issues, for which they would not be accountable (since their own constituents would not be affected).

Yet resolving the West Lothian question is more troublesome than many people appear to realise. Typically, we hear calls for Scots MPs to be excluded from votes on English only issues. The difficulty, however, is that we could very plausibly end up with a Prime Minister and a cabinet that  could not command a majority of English MPs, and as such could not effectively govern in England. If the UK were made up of numerous small nations of roughly equal size, this would not be so much of a problem. Yet a PM who could not govern in a territory that accounts for five sixths of the population, would not be Prime Minister in any recognisable sense of the term.

In England the whole system of government that has existed hitherto – wherein the cabinet governs, as long as it maintains the support of a sovereign Parliament, would be turned on its head. We would likely end up with a system more akin to America’s “separation of powers”, where governing happens through the often adversarial interface between the president and Congress.

What this means is that, unlike independence, devo-max is not Scotland’s prerogative alone. If Scotland were to separate, England and Wales could maintain their existing constitution. The territorial extent of the polity would change, but the way in which the polity functioned would not. If, on the other hand, the Scots plump for devo max, things are different.  They would be asking to enjoy a particular relationship with the British state which would be impossible without a reworking of the entire constitution. As such, it is an option which cannot be determined in a Scottish referendum alone, but which clearly requires a constitutional convention of the entire United Kingdom.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Well is this it?

Since Ed assumed the leadership, he has been making noises about the need to “reform capitalism”, and to offer Britain an “industrial future”. And over the last week, Ed, and his shadow business secretary Chuka Ummuna, have made a few headlines by setting out some of their specific proposals.

None of their proposals are particularly awful. Yet amongst the ideas that Ed and Chuka have set out, it is painfully difficult to discern a plan to actually reform capitalism, and to build an economy better attuned to the interests of the majority.

So far, Labour’s proposals focus overwhelmingly upon the pay of bankers and executives. There is the plan to repeat the tax on bankers bonuses, the plan to force businesses to be more transparent about huge executive pay, and the plan to put workers on remuneration committees.

These ideas are all well and good. Yet we are kidding ourselves if we imagine that these ideas are genuinely capable of addressing the crisis facing millions of working people. Common to the economic thinking of both major parties is an exaggerated obsession with incentives and motivations. Cameron and Osborne appear to believe that business can be reinvigorated by offering greater rewards to entreprunership in the form of lower taxes, and that unemployment can be conquered by reducing the “incentive” not to work. similarly, the Labour leadership argue that the financial crisis was primarily a consequence of reckless greed. In their desperation for bigger and bigger bonuses, so the meme goes, bankers took bigger and bigger risks, such that the system eventually collapsed. As such, they argue, capitalism can be made safer by tackling high pay.

This arguement contains a few grains of truth, but no more than that. Bankers bought, en masse, into bubbles which were bound, at some point to burst. Yet this had more to do with the shape of the whole economy, than any desire, on their part, to earn excessive amounts of cash. Of crucial importance was the dearth of opportunities for productive investment. As Robert Skidelsky goes some way to explaining, the decade leading up to the crash saw huge inflows of loans and investment funds from countries such as China. Since this cash could not be profitably invested in industry – which faced insurmoutable competition from rapidly industrialising, low wage economies – it was instead diverted into unproductive speculative assets, that were bound at some point to crash,

Beginning to reverse decades of deindustrialisation is crucial, if we are to reduce the vulnerability of the whole economy to financial fluctuations, and if we are to put finance itself on a less cyclical footing. Rebalancing the economy is also vital, if we are to have a society that meets the needs of more people. As I have argued before, the problem with an economy that is overly specialised in financial services, is that it offers worthwhile and fulfilling work to increasingly narrow section of society.

The more countries trade with each other, the more they focus on a narrow range of goods or services which they flog to the rest of the world in return for everything else they need to consume. Yet human faculties are not so narrowly concentrated. In a nation of 60 million, different people will possess different skills. And yet a highly specialised trading economy can only provide meaningful work for a smaller and a smaller section. And people who would once have been employed making cars, may now instead be employed ferrying around bankers, or making their coffee.

Like every single politician, Miliband has spoken out about his desire to rebuild British industry, and to reduce the dominance of the city. And like almost every other politician, Miliband has offered no sense that he is ready to undertake the kind of bold, transformative measures that would be necessary to even partially reverse three decades of deindustrialisation. Building a more egalitarian economy is not simply a matter of cracking down on bonuses. Nor, indeed, is it simply a matter of higher public spending. It is also about governments actively seeking to alter the whole shape of the economy – not least by redirecting scarce capital – so that it functions in the interests of the many and not just the few.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Cameron’s new year’s speech was a good indicator of how the Eurozone crisis – aka the take-over of Europe by the ECB and the IMF – will look like in the UK.

Eurozone countries have essentially been left with two options in order to boost their bond markets, increase confidence and reel in the debt they need in order to allow the ruling classes to survive i economic terms. There options are to either implement austerity policies now, or wait until the IMF forces them to do so.

Cameron’s UK, spoken of warmly by Mario Draghi in his recent interview in the Financial Times, is excelling in proving to investors that it has what it takes, which translates as the willingness to cash in its assets in times of need. These assets are on the one hand the welfare state (schools, universities, prisons, the NHS, the remnants of the housing stock) but also workers’ rights as a thing in itself.

The two sides of the ‘bureaucratic red tape’ which has been so lamented in the tabloid press, the new ‘politics gone too far’ (taking its seat proudly alongside ‘feminism gone too far’ and the like) are Planning Law and Health and Safety legislation.

We have already seen what attacks on planning law look like. The first elements of planning law came in after WWII as a means to create green belts, a small protection for not only the ‘environment’, but also rural life as it stood, against the expanding forces of urbanisation. While the eviction of the Dale Farm travellers’ site was implemented under planning law, the government has made little attempt to conceal the fact that the changes being made to current planning law will be there to encourage and assist councils in their attempts to not only evict other traveller sites around the country, but also to rapaciously hand those sites over to property developers without the prying inclusion of law or regulation.

The other side to the attack on red tape will be on Health and Safety law, which was originally brought in as protection for workers under the Wilson and Callaghan government in the late 1970s. Through continued membership of the EU (also established under that government’s referendum), the UK was forced to abide by the working directives, themselves based on the European Coal and Steel Community proposals dating back to 1952.

These regulations have indeed been, in Cameron’s words, ‘an albatross round the neck of British businesses’, because they force employers to raise fixed capital costs in order to maintain their status as legal entities. This would usually drive wages down – except the minimum wage prevents this from occurring, as does strong unionisation. Instead, industrialists have to put their prices up – and this is partly what forced industry out of the UK. When commentators complain that in the 1970s the ‘unions got too strong’ etc, what they mean is that workers decided they would rather be healthy and safe than protectionists.

Administration, as has been pointed out on this blog before, is not in itself a bad thing – and while laws and regulations which have been won by the workers’ movement come under attack, this is a time perhaps when we should be proud of, and defend, the ‘red’ in the red tape.

Today white people were left struggling to cope with the consequences of a racially charged outburst from politician Diane Abbott. The Labour MP took to twitter, earlier today, to allege that “white people like to divide and rule”.

Already, there are reports that police officers have been pouring into “white” areas, where they have been stopping, searching and harrassing white youth, on suspicion that they are “conspiring to divide and rule”. Officers are said to be arresting any white males who are caught in possession of Machiavelli’s The Prince.

There are also fears that Abbott’s comments will create yet more hurdles for young people who are already struggling to find work. “Now I dread going to job interviews” said Emily, a young white woman from reading. “I know that whatever abilities I demonstrate, the interviewer will always be wondering whether, if they give me the job, I will end up dividing the accounts department simply so that I can rule over it.”

Police, meanwhile, have defended their decision to shoot an unarmed white man in South East London. “My officers reacted quickly and they reacted well”, the borough commanded said. “They knew that in a matter of seconds, this young man would set them against each other, in order that he could manouver himself into a position of stewardship over them”. “It’s unfortunate, but immediate action was their only option”, he added.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Today has seen a flurry of half-baked articles from the left regarding Diane Abbott’s tweet yesterday: “White people love playing ‘divide and rule’ We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism”. The left, for whatever reason, think that it is important to produce lots of material in defence of the tweet, and against a few spurious arguments that Abbott was being racist. Well ok, of course she wasn’t being racist, but this little episode illuminates with some clarity one of the major problems of left-wing discourse in the UK today: everything is about conclusions.

That might sound like a strange critique, the critique of conclusions, but it is an important one for those of us who attempt to offer negative and critical accounts of the society in which we live, and furthermore, it has consequences for notions of intervention (political or otherwise), and the nature of critique itself.  For much of the left, it seems, politics is a bizarre tombola, in which slogans scrawled on scraps of paper are pulled out of a hat, and the political subject chooses whether or not they agree/like/approve/disapprove/hate/cry. But when this is the case, there can be no possibility of a critique of the hat (or society) whence these slogans came. As soon asa serious critique of society as such is demanded, it is quickly discovered that all of the conclusions drawn from it, whether yours or someone else’s are flawed and awful. And the worst thing that you can do is to draw attention away from this  critique of society by playing the game, and finding the bits you like.

Actually no, that’s not the worst thing, far worse is if you take all the bits you like, regardless of how and why they are produced, and draw lines between them and call it a coherent politics. This can only further obscure any thoroughgoing critique of society. And the fact that one person’s conclusions based on one thing can sound like another person’s based on totally different grounds is to do nothing but to point to the humdrum homogeneity of all political discourse today. It is to say nothing but to point to the fact that the left has failed to escape the suffocating immersion of everything critical in the swamp of ideology. But don’t forget, you can still skim our conclusions-cum-scum from the surface. Beware of this apeiron, comrades.

So this is really a question about what we’re doing in left-wing politics. If we believe we have the answers, and that society as we know it can produce them out of the mouths of morons like Diane Abbott, then we should probably continue as we are. Transformational politics, critiques of society’s total forms, the necessity of accounts of racism that go above and beyond abstract moralism, the necessity of a critical account of history beyond a passing reference to colonialism need something different: a belief that conclusions, if we are to see any, are not likely to be discursive, they aren’t going to look like slogans, or tweets, or any other shit, but will be practical and theoretical engagements with actuality of society and history. The conclusion, in its current state, is capitalism’s greatest form of delusion, it is both the last word and the principle, it is the discursive logic of stasis, or rather the discursive logic of the obliteration of the consciousness of dynamism, of the possibility of actually changing society.

So if you want to waste your time defending the conclusions of politicians, please go back to reading your copy of the Guardian, with all the other dolts and liberals.

Without a doubt, the conviction of Dobson and Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence brings feelings of joy and relief. Having followed the case closely, I am fairly convinced that the pair were guilty of the atrocious crime in question.

Nonetheless, the verdict raises troubling questions about the manner in which our justice system has evolved. As I have argued before, the abandonment of “double jeopardy” is something that ought to worry us. It is precisely because of cases like Stephen Lawrence – where there is enormous extra-judicial pressure for a guilty verdict, in this case to rehabilitate the forces of law and order – that having a check on perpetual prosecution matters.

What makes this issue more pertinent, is that Dobson and Norris were convicted almost entirely upon the basis of forensic evidence. Indeed the first case had collapsed because the main witness to the murder -Duwayne Brooks – had failed to positively identify Dobson and Norris when the pair were placed in an ID parade. The only evidence which mattered, in other words, was that which had sat for decades in the possession of the police, and which only appeared years after the pair were initially cleared.

I would not speculate that the evidence, in this case, was planted. Nonetheless, the guilty verdict, and the basis upon which it was reached, implies that, as citizens, we are now expected to place a huge level of trust in the forces of the state. Rightly or wrongly , we trust the police to take care of forensic evidence until a case comes to court. Such an approach may be less than ideal, but may be nonetheless necessary for the efficient functioning of the criminal justice system. Over such a time frame, a defence team can at least be expected to be vigilant about the handling of such material.

What the Lawrence verdict illustrates, however, is that the balance has been tipped. A man can be cleared in a court of law, after the police have examined the forensics. And yet at any moment over the next 10, 20, 30 years, the police may “find” new evidence on the material that they alone possess.

Personally I would prefer that the double jeopardy principle reinstated. However, if we are going to carry on with perpetual prosecutions, then we must, at the very least, think seriously about what happens to evidence upon the conclusion of a criminal trial,

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net