Ok, perhaps he’s not wrong about everything, but Reuben wrote an article yesterday with which I have several significant disagreements. My main problem with his assertions stem from this cringe-worthy little paragraph:

In places like Cambridge – where they grabbed a seat last time – they seemed to get the vote of those who treated voting as an exercize [sic] in political self expression, or a parade of their moral conscience, rather than a practical attempt to determine the future. You know, those self indulgent tossers opine, with great moral gravity, “I couldn’t possible vote labour”. With a change of government on the cards – and at a time when politics will really save people of [sic] fuck people – I expect people to really, actually vote for who might form the next government – i.e. Labour or the Tories.

Whilst Reuben is right to say that the Lib Dems, perhaps unfairly, capitalised on an anti-war vote which will be far less pronounced in this election, I believe he is gravely wrong to characterise people who refuse to vote Labour for moral reasons as “self indulgent tossers”. Aside from being patronising, he is missing out on the bigger picture. Firstly, if we ever want the political system to change, and for long-term progressive reform to take place, we cannot afford to blindly follow a system which forces us to choose between the lesser of two evils. Politics should not be about who we don’t want to run the country, but about who we do. It is not, in my view, wrong to vote Labour in all cases. There are some very good Labour MPs and candidates out there who, despite the transgressions of their party, despite the wars, the privatisations and the systematic crackdown on civil liberties, deserve the support of left-wing activists. Nor, in all cases, is tactical voting a bad move. However, by telling people that they must vote Labour simply to keep the Tories out, we blunt a powerful tool for reforming the political system. Moreover, we reinforce the sense of disenfranchisement that is precisely the problem with politics at the moment – a sense of alientation in which people perceive they have very little choice in who runs the country and that their views are not being represented in a so-called representative democracy – a disenchantment which, far more than immigration figures and tabloid scare stories about asylum seekers eating our hamsters, has led to the rise of the BNP. As George Monbiot told me in an interview with The Third Estate last year: “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.”

Secondly, Reuben’s thinking relies on a similar faith to Tony Benn’s, that New Labour is a transient thorn that can be plucked if socialists re-join the party and work for change from within. I respect this view, but in translating this to a call to back Labour in an election regardless of circumstance, I think it only exacerbates the problem. New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very middle class architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes, whilst internationally it will continue to follow a line that is dangerously neo-conservative confident that as long as they remain moderately better than the Tories domestically, their left-wing supporters, who turned up on every demonstration opposing invasions and ID cards, will continue to put their cross in the right box come election time. Yes, you heard it here first folks, the Iraq war was Reuben’s fault! This is precisely why moral decisions must play a part in deciding who to vote for. This is why cold pragmatism gives everything we have struggled to resist in the last decade an easy ride. It’s not self-righteous to say I can’t, in good conscience, vote Labour. It’s just self-aware. Nor is it a matter of placing my own morality above the good of the many. There are a great many Iraqi orphans who would agree with me. By voting for who I want to run the country, rather than who is most likely to run the country, I am thinking of the bigger picture.

So you see, this is why Reuben is wrong about everything. Also, and this is perhaps the most fundamental point of all, whilst kids up and down the country were running round the playground playing ‘It’, Reuben was playing a game called ‘Had.’ I rest my case…

Following our review of his new film, Starsuckers, we caught up with BAFTA-nominated director, Chris Atkins. Atkins made his name with the much admired Taking Liberties, a documentary on the erosion of civil liberties in Blair’s Britain. His latest offering, which premiered this year at the 53rd London Film Festival, is an exposé of the cult of celebrity and media misinformation. Talking to him about celebrity, media and politics, we found out why he finds Tony Blair a terrific liar and just why Simon Cowell would be a terrifying Prime Minister.

The Third Estate: So tell us about your new film.

Chris Atkins: In PR speak: it’s a romp through all the reasons we’re hooked on fame and then an expose of the people who are dealing it to us. I think that’s what I settled on. It a thesis led movie. I wanted to look at why we’re attracted to something so blatantly harmful and to look at the real reasons behind that from a scientific point of view. Then to look behind the curtain of the media, not celebrities themselves but the institutions and individuals who profit from it.

The Third Estate: I was thinking about that. There struck me as being two strands to the film: why we’re affected by fame and how the media manipulate us by abusing this knowledge ― but I wasn’t always clear on the connection. It seemed to have a lot of targets – the public are a target for being gullible. Celebrities for being stupid. The media for doing several things wrong – not reporting hard news, creating a myth of celebrity, giving into PR on the one hand but toppling governments on the other…

Chris Atkins: Yes, it’s a complex, messy area, so to paint an honest picture, you need a complex messy film. My last film, Taking Liberties, people seemed to get more, although Taking Liberties wasn’t a particularly honest picture. It was an argument about how the government, specifically Tony Blair, had taken away our liberties. But that isn’t the case; it’s a very simplified image. In Starsuckers I wanted to be more honest. The problem is it’s very complex. I wanted to build up a thesis to say there are a group of individuals holding the cards here. They pretend they have our better interests at heart but they don’t. That’s the core of it really.

The Third Estate: You do believe there’s almost a cabal of individuals then?

Chris Atkins: No, it’s not in the standard conspiracy theorist sense at all. It’s more of a kind of attitude than a secret society or anything as clear cut as that. A contract should exist between the media and the public. The public trust news media to have their interests at heart ― and they fundamentally don’t. They don’t care about the public; they don’t really care about the truth. And I say this as an insider: I’ve worked in the media for twelve years and we certainly don’t give a stuff about the public. We give a stuff about our wallets and having a jolly good time. Which is fine if you’re honest about it. But if you’re not honest about it, which most of the news media isn’t, they still have this facade of requiring trust and they don’t repay that trust.

The Third Estate: Much of the film reminded me of an aside in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent where he talks about sports programmes as being a deliberate irrelevance people get sidetracked into so that they aren’t more politically engaged. But isn’t the truth about celebrity less sinister? Isn’t it simply cheaper to report, a by-product of an economic shift in the media?

Chris Atkins: Absolutely. It’s all economic. Well no, it’s initially economic, without question. It’s cheap, it’s reliable, it’s not controversial and it sells papers. People watch it for the reasons we list in the film and it starts delivering that media to us in a very predictable and affordable way. It’s almost replacing content. When you talk to commissioners the first thing they ask is what celebrity is in this television programme ― before they ask you what the programme is about. The celebrity is more important than what they’re surrounded by. That’s a wholesale shift in the way the media is generated. That’s happened in the last five years in both commercial channels and sadly the BBC as well. Yes, it’s initially commercial but once it starts being used for political reasons, for charities and activism, it starts becoming a real problem. It’s not just – here are some entertaining people doing some entertaining things – yes they’ve completely devalued truth in news – some people don’t seem to have a problem with that, I do – but when that moves into the political sphere, good causes, charities ― you’re in a whole heap of shit. Because what people are basically saying is that when celebrities are involved, truth doesn’t matter. Those are the dots we try to join together.

The Third Estate: I was just wondering; you say five years ago ― I’m sorry I’m looking at your Taking Liberties poster – and I’m reminded of the Gilligan affair. Was that perhaps the turning point for news reporting?

Chris Atkins: It certainly was a turning point, but I don’t see that it sits immediately inside this argument. Still it was a turning point on both sides. Gilligan didn’t check his facts. He went out on a limb, made something up. One thing out of 99 other things that were rock solid and they pulled him apart on it. I always look at Gilligan whenever I tempted to guild the lily, which is extremely frequently. So our Live 8 sequence – everything in that is bullet proof – because every night you think Gilligan: the entire argument could be pulled apart by one loose fact or slip of the tongue.

The Third Estate: Which reminds of the question I meant to ask at the start – how are the lawsuits going?

Chris Atkins: We’re in Private Eye this week. We’re front of media news. We had two Guardian front covers that doesn’t mean anything – Private Eye ― front of media news… We haven’t been sued by anyone this week. The whole Carter-Ruck thing was absolutely hilarious. At the time I was half-laughing, half-screaming. They shot themselves in the foot on various levels, one they’re wrong in law, two they managed to pick the world’s most unpopular law firm to initiate the injunction and three, most importantly, they managed to get the timing of the screening wrong. So they started trying to bring an injunction, not realising the press screening had already begun. We had to tell them ‘that’s happening now, 250 journalists are watching your client who’s 50 foot high in a Leicester Square cinema at this moment in time. The cat’s slightly out the bag.’

The Third Estate: So you’re not allowed to reveal anything that was bleeped out during the Max Clifford sequence?

Chris Atkins: No, absolutely not. For two reasons – one is obviously a libel point of view. I can’t back it up. I don’t know if it’s true or not. It’s Max rambling. Secondly, more importantly, I don’t want the film to become a source of celebrity gossip as we are critiquing sources of salacious, celebrity gossip. We would have been quite rightly burned by the critics if we had. The purpose of that sequence is to show what Max Clifford is prepared to do to protect his critics, which is contrary to the chubby nice guy image he portrays in the media.

The Third Estate: On matters litigious: you take a small shot at the Press Complaints Commission…

Chris Atkins: I’d hoped it was as big a shot as I could, but…

The Third Estate: Sorry. I noticed that one of your contributors, Nick Davies, was in the news recently. The News of the World has just beaten off the story he published in the Guardian about their phone tapping techniques after a PCC investigation?

Chris Atkins: Well they would, wouldn’t they? An organisation controlled by newspaper editors comes down on the side of newspaper editors.

The Third Estate: So would you support a state run PCC?

Chris Atkins: No, I’d support an independent run PCC. We manage to have these for all sorts of things; we have an independent police complaints commission. We’re about to have something independent for MPs and banks. Why not for the Press? Why can’t you and I do it? This is what the newspapers are terrified of. The PCC is purportedly there to protect the public from the press. It’s not. Everyone knows it’s not. It’s there to protect the press. As always the public suffers. You have newspaper editors winding up to tell you how scared they are by the adjudication of the PCC and reporters on the ground flatly contradicting that. We’ve not heard anything from the PCC about the revelations in the film and I think that proves our point.

The Third Estate: Going back a bit: you mentioned the character of the film. A lot of the character of the film comes from your voiceover, which is slightly grating – the kind of voice that you associate with voices that are deliberately patronising you.

Chris Atkins: Yes, that was actually deliberate.

The Third Estate: I guessed, but I was wondering whether you were trying to anger your audience into reacting? What was the thinking?

Chris Atkins: It’s a fair point. People have said he’s patronising, he’s glib and annoying and yes that was all quite deliberate. Whether I would make those deliberate choices again, I don’t know. What I was trying to do was create a Tony Blair. I needed a central villain. I didn’t want it to be about any one media corporation; or about Rupert Murdoch or Viacom or Max Clifford. I wanted it to be about all of them and none of them. So I created a satirical, ironic entity to bind them all together. He’s not there to be liked. There’s an artistic question opened up as to whether that’s a sensible thing to do: to have a central narrator you’re supposed to hate. That happens all the time in literature, in fiction. I’ve never seen it done before in a doc. Some people like the concept, some people absolutely hate it. I had a situation where I was trying to pull together a thesis about something most people believe they know a lot about. If I was to present it in a straight way – ‘I’m Chris Atkins I think celebrity culture’s bad’ – that would be absolutely ghastly. Who am I to tell people not to trust the media? So I wanted to turn it on its head and make it flippant. The voice encapsulates the editor of The Sun, the editor of the BBC News website when he puts up an article on Cheryl Cole rather than a news article.

The Third Estate: After the press screening, you mentioned that the material for the film lacked a top or bottom and I was wondering if, say, a Marxist had come along they would say ‘Well there is a bottom, it’s embedded power structures etc, etc’ but you’re not heading down that line?

Chris Atkins: When I said it didn’t have a top or bottom, I felt that was more to do with a creative film making problem. We had ten points in the thesis so it was deciding in which order do they come? Actually the order is quite straight forward. It’s where the fuck do you start, where the fuck do you end? That’s what I meant. In terms of ‘embedded in power structures’ ― celebrity is the face of capitalism. That’s a given. It is a mechanism for selling and giving an illusion of contentment. I believe all the arguments we gave on how celebrity is a means of control are essentially reheating the same argument that capitalism and money are a means of control. So yes I would concur that it has a starting point in the ability of those with power to control those without.

The Third Estate: A section of the film talks about celebrities in the Lithuanian parliament. I was just wondering if you could comment on that part of the film, and whether the true message of the film isn’t that people should be wary of celebrities entering politics, but that socially conscience people need to turn themselves into celebrities in order to affect change?

Chris Atkins: I think we just need to treat celebrities as dangerous. Just as 20 cups of coffee in a day is dangerous. Celebrities have a place we need to be extremely wary of allowing them to move spheres. I know that’s stating the obvious, but it’s happening a lot. In Lithuania you had a situation where, in young democracy, which at the same time was discovering new media – it was in a sense natural that entertainers quickly entered politics. Reality television was a massive success there, partly because voting was new to them. Voting for politicians and voting on reality shows seemed similar and in fact became one and the same thing. It became natural for celebrities in reality shows to stand for government. So they formed a party, became part of a government coalition and it’s a disaster. Their popularity rating has gone through the floor. It’s a kind of metaphor for what could, and I think may well, happen in the West. Consider the poll among young people taken recently about who they’d most like to see as Prime Minister: Simon Cowell came top of the list.

The Third Estate: That’s terrifying.

Chris Atkins: So people say, well it’s crazy ― those crazy Lithuanians, but it is happening here. Once you put celebrities into this sphere, damaging things happen. But nobody in the media questions it. The media are trained to be nice to celebrities and not question them. When we got our passes to film on red carpets, we were briefed not to ask celebrities anything challenging. So when they go into politics, with the level of scrutiny politicians receive, there’s a fundamental contradiction.

The Third Estate: So your message to celebrities would be to stay out of politics?

Chris Atkins: No, celebrities are irrelevant to the whole thing. If I was a celebrity being paid five million pounds a movie with people telling me I was brilliant every day, I would think I could change the world. That’s natural, the human mind does that to anyone. It’s called Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. I don’t blame the celebrities from thinking they can stop wars. That’s just natural; they’re cretins. The problem I have is when the media doesn’t challenge that. It doesn’t stand there and go ‘hang on a fricking minute what the hell is Angelina Jolie doing in Iraq?’

The Third Estate: To play devil’s advocate there’s an argument which I think is well expressed in a Kundera novel – there’s a march in Cambodia against land mines. An American actress goes along with what are mainly a group of French academics one of whom challenges her ‘what are you doing here? This isn’t a beauty parade.’ The actress replies that it is her social duty. Without her, the academics aren’t going to attract any attention to the problem and so she has to be seen there.

Chris Atkins: That’s a common argument. The problem again is the media. Why do the media only cover something if there’s some airhead blonde fronting it? Why don’t they cover it anyway? The celebrity is like a band aid, a much deeper problem with our media. For the celebrity to say I alone can change this problem is again part of this Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. This happened to Tony Blair a lot – my being somewhere will change things just by my presence. I’ve worked with actors for a decade. That’s how they feel, as if they’re the centre of the universe. It’s natural for them to get on a plane once a year and go somewhere a bit cold and pretend they’re making a difference. The problem is where the media follow in droves and repeat their banal state-the-bleeding-obvious points without question, but don’t go there when the celebrities aren’t around.

The Third Estate: If God is dead, Communism is the God that’s failed, we don’t believe in progress any more, Capitalism is on its knees and the American Dream has turned nightmare – isn’t celebrity all we have left to believe in? What’s the alternative?

Chris Atkins: God knows. I certainly would concur there’s a deep seated need for it to the extent it’s genetic, that we have behavioural urges to congregate around strong figures. In terms of what we do instead? When you have a world evermore mediatised and celebrity is the best way of delivering it; celebrity is here to stay. I think we need people to be more honest or more responsible. If the media said ― what you’re about to read is harmful and very little of it is true – I would have no problem. But we’re coming to a stage where media corporations are as powerful, if not more powerful, than governments.

The Third Estate: Which is strange when so much of the media is shrinking.

Chris Atkins: Well it is and it isn’t. Traditional structures are falling apart and in a sense all that remains is celebrity driven entertainment news. That’s doing well. Hard news is falling by the wayside and we’re left with a homogenised celebrity entertainment ether, which is everywhere but says nothing.

The Third Estate: Someone at the premiere asked a question about whether you’d prefer a weaker media – and argued, going back somewhat, that Anthony Eden, for example, would simply refuse to answer questions he wasn’t interested in. Surely that’s not preferable?

Chris Atkins: No, I’m not sitting here saying the media’s a terrible thing. Certainly from a political perspective we have this fantastic scrutiny, so that Twitter and blogs are able to protect the Houses of Parliament from a bloody law firm. It was absolutely astonishing. I was in the Guardian when all that kicked off. The whole Little Brother thing, the way people can take photographs of police beating newspaper vendors ― of course the media can protect us and scrutinise those in power more than they ever could. I would be the last person to try and roll any of that back. But it also means that the News of the World, with all the terrible ghastly things it does, hides behind the freedom of speech argument. It’s used as a shield for all kinds of illicit practices.

The Third Estate: I was struck by the Eden comment because, although he may have ignored the press, he ultimately fell on a lie. By comparison Blair lied continuously, and was caught out lying, but he survived. Doesn’t that suggest there’s too much competing media perhaps – the cacophony argument?

Chris Atkins: Well no, Blair just lied better. He used the media better. He changed how Downing Street briefings were done, by using that fantastic tool of celebrity PR – access. If you toed the line, ran the report the way the government wanted you to, you would get photos of Tony and Cherie. But if you didn’t and you ran an article asking ‘Where the fuck are these weapons of mass destruction?’ you’d be shut out of the briefing. No copy and as a journalist you’ll be in shit. That’s why Blair could get away with everything. It was a Max Clifford technique – there’s very little difference between Max Clifford and Alistair Campbell. Both in getting things written they want written, and stopping the publication of things they don’t want to see. It’s a celebrity PR trick.

The Third Estate: I can see some media commentators arguing that perhaps we don’t mind having liars at the top, culture has shifted. Rather than the media leading the public up the garden path, the media is simply reflective of contemporary mores.

Chris Atkins: Personally, I don’t want to think that’s true. Maybe it is true, in which case it’s a sad state of affairs if we’ve become desensitised to the idea of liars in office. I like the idea people trusted Tony Blair and that trust was simply misplaced. But people can get very angry: look at the row over MPs expenses. That was unheard of, certainly in all the time I’ve been watching politics. They were fiddling just a few grand.

The Third Estate: Compared to the bankers.

Chris Atkins: Compared to the bankers billions, yes. But I think it was more about trust and honesty than the money. Yes, it’s very annoying it happened in a recession – but literally more got written about that duck house than about RBS. We as people want to trust our leaders. We get very angry when our trust is abused. Celebrity reporting, PR spin coming from the world of entertainment into politics, brings with it this unbearably toxic effect.

The Third Estate: Where should people go for their news?

Chris Atkins: I get asked this all the time. I don’t have any particular answer. It’s interesting how many news outlets just recycle newswire. I’d say cut out the middle man, go to PA and Reuters. But I really don’t know. Hopefully out of this catastrophe in news people will come who want to invest in investigative journalism. Journalists who take their time to generate copy and charge for it, so that people go to those suppliers in a way that people go to a good brand. A lot of brands are in trouble at the moment. I read the Guardian but they run a lot of PR nonsense as well ―they ran our stories! Not that there wasn’t news value in that but we were essentially trying to sell our movie. Ultimately I don’t have a good answer.

The Third Estate: Why have you chosen to put this documentary into cinema ahead of television?

Chris Atkins: From our point of view, there’s no way this would be made for TV. Look at TV docs ― Dispatches: reporter in a taxi shouting at the camera. Panorama: Jeremy Vine shouting at the camera. Investigative journalism in television is pretty much dead. Certainly making a stand and taking on something as powerful as the tabloid press wouldn’t be thought of. Television makes things like Jeremy Clarkson going on a wine tasting course or Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, except he’s only a hundred miles away from the actual fighting. If you want to do something ballsy and revelatory in Britain it has to be done for the cinema. Then once it’s been out in the cinema, we’ve got our 4* reviews and people have tried to sue and failed, television comes sheepishly crawling in saying this is far more exciting than anything we’ve put on this year. Please can we buy it from you and start it with a big caveat saying ‘this is nothing to do with Channel 4, we’ve just bought, we didn’t make it, this is not our opinion’. That happened with Taking Liberties and will happen with this.

The Third Estate: You’re selling to Channel 4 rather than the BBC?

Chris Atkins: Yes. The BBC feature quite prominently in it. No one else picked up on this, but in fact the guy who commissioned the Live 8 documentaries, we feature as Bob Geldof basically rewriting history, is Richard Klein. He’s head of BBC 4. If we were going to sell to the BBC, he’d be the person buying.

The Third Estate: What would you say to people who want to make this kind of film?

Chris Atkins: Well you can’t ― that’s the problem. You can’t go to the BBC because they were part of it. Richard Curtis is a god at the BBC. Look at Comic Relief. People at 4 buy stuff from Brook Lapping which is Bob Geldof’s company. They’re all mates. It’s part of the problem. When you start to do something that criticises the media it becomes almost impossible. You need them to help. You say ‘there’s this oil company I want to doc on’, they say go ‘ahead here’s some cash’. You say, ‘there’s this media company I want to examine’, they say ‘my wife works there’. You have to lock the doors and do it independently.

www.starsuckersmovie.com

Guest post by Tendai. N

Philosophy has an unfortunate reputation outside the world of philosophers. And even people who understand themselves to be philosophers are often poets more than anything else. One reason for this is a lack of understanding about what philosophy is, and does: there’s a belief that philosophy is the name given to a Sunday afternoon’s pot-addled meditations; or the name given to “what you feel strongly about”.

To make my starting assumptions clear, I suggest the following description of philosophy. I take philosophy to be a form of inquiry, whose method0logy is based on rational argument, logical rigour, and the ability to absorb counterexamples. A philosophical claim, like a scientific one, is capable of verification or falsification, and possibly capable of observation. You can have good philosophy without speculation about what’s behind the universe. That’s so 19th century. Philosophy, in short, is something you do, not merely something you read or feel.

Foundations of good political philosophy

On the face of it that would sound like an ideal method for arriving at political positions: reason, logic, and general applicability are attractive characteristics for a political idea. But obviously political and moral philosophy (two sides of the same coin) runs into unique problems. The most glaring difficulty is that they relate to the choice of values. Individual lives are incommensurable, so many of their values are incommensurable too. How, then, do you justify telling somebody what to want to do?

The weakest attempts to persuade on those lines make reference to such vague and made-up things as “duty”. I’m not being flippant in calling duties “made up”, but I’m drawing attention to the problem of treating what are essentially social fictions, as things that were ‘read of universe’. To paraphrase one philosopher I admire, “we are not conscripts in the army of virtue, we are volunteers”. In other words, the only reasons that enjoin action are personal ones. We are not in all cases, to be required to act as though we were not ourselves. It is, after all, a requirement of liberty to only make minimal demands on the will of an unwilling other.

One attempt to get round this is to presume that we all want to be rational. But cognition is not magnetic, rationality is not normative – I may well have no reason to want to be rational. I’m not going to stop smoking, drinking or eating copious amounts of shortbread because it’s rational to stop. Reason is only applicable in so far as it allows for your chosen goals, and, possibly, in selecting those same goals. But I imagine 70% of our lives have nothing to do with reason, and don’t need to.

OK, we might say, then “do as we say because justice requires it”. This seems a stronger argument for requiring action. In our societies, with their rigid and uneven allocations of power, unpredictable shifts in those allocations, there is a “something for everyone” appeal in a good theory of justice. In the absence of perfect future knowledge, justice as a value is basically in everybody’s best interests. Regardless of their respective weaknesses, I think this is something Cohen, Rawls and Nozick address with exceptional insight.

Objectives of good political philosophy

So we at least have a way, in principle, of arriving at a scheme of values. Should political philosophy stop there? The trouble is that a programme of values may take no account of where it must operate. And this is one point on which many philosophers who dabble in politics fail miserably, and a key reason why they are not often taken seriously.

One of the reasons why Marx, Hayek and Dworkin are so successful in gaining influence on institutions and their agents, is because they take into account (and give an account of) how institutions in society work, and make decisions. There is a tendency in ideological discourse to speak as though our “duties” trump the social mechanisms that will allow us to fulfil them i.e. “moral duties are more important than the law”. They may or may not be, but that offers no advice on how to achieve those ends in a law-constrained society.

For political philosophers to be taken seriously, they must not only prescribe values impartially, but they must also understand what it takes for an official or institutional agent to take and implement a decision: that to close Guantanamo Bay one must overcome a mountain of paperwork, and the resistance of unwilling institutions. Norman Geras, in my opinion, is an example of the sort of philosopher who does this well. This practical aspect of political philosophy is, I think, too often ignored by philosophers and intellectuals. If they can give useful analysis on these sorts of issues, then they become infinitely more useful.

Conclusion

I don’t think philosophy is merely opinion – it’s not an alternative form of self-expression. And philosophers should resist the temptation to use it as a prop for their personal inclinations. I won’t name names, but the left suffers from political commentators who do just that. This is often coupled with an unpalatable cynicism and contempt for society, the West, and the politically uninterested. It causes liberals to be taken less seriously, and is a waste of intellectual energy better used in providing workable ideological and practical programmes.

As a liberal I am perhaps naturally inclined to the rational. The magic of reason is in reducing the risk of error, and the time spent being held back by error. To this extent, philosophy can be a powerful ally to those in power. And that’s at least one good reason to do political philosophy well.

Marking 30 years of the London Review of Books, The Third Estate talks to Senior Editor Paul Myerscough and attempts to condense three decades into three thousand words

On Friday the London Review of Books will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a bumper length edition and the launch of the magazine’s online archive comprising no less than 30 million words in 12,000 essays by more than 2,000 contributors.

I started reading the LRB the year after I left university, while working in Hong Kong as a secondary school teacher. With no marking to do, few lessons to teach and no extra-curricula activities to oversee, my timetable might have been gratifyingly blank but for the school’s draconian (at least as it seemed to me at the time) working culture. Teachers, when not in the classroom, were forbidden from leaving their desks in the staffroom, much less the school, during working hours. It was bad form to turn off your computer or to use it to play videos or computer games (though such programmes were far beyond the capabilities of my laptop which wheezed whenever asked to load so much as a picture or the bright, gurning dragon school logo on the screensaver). ‘You have to appear to work at all times’ an experienced TEFL teacher had counselled me, ‘which is why I choose a desk at the back of the room. They can’t see the screen that way.’

But I couldn’t get my desk moved and with the Head of English seated behind me I had to be careful what I looked at. Too long surfing the BBC Sport’s website inevitably led to the questions like, ‘Hey what you doing?’ or ‘Hey, Lazy, you want do some marking?’

Mercifully at some point I stumbled upon the LRB’s website. It remains one of the best presented and easy to use sites on the net and, wondrously, it had no slow to load, easy to condemn, pictures. Reading the LRB I looked like I was working. Sometimes I even felt like I was, but not too often. Plus I learned stuff, stopped reading my father’s Spectator, made ill advised friendships with people like Salman and took my first steps towards apparently continuous, unemployability…

To mark 30 years of LRB, I spoke to Senior Editor, Paul Myerscough, about where the magazine stands politically, how significant political essays can be, whether he’d noticed any changes to government policy following articles written in the magazine, the sensitive issue of ‘snark’ and whatever happened to Christopher Hitchens.

The Third Estate: So how are you marking the 30th Anniversary?

Paul Myerscough: It’s an occasion when you roll out the people who are seen as your key contributors. We have pieces by Hilary Mantel, Andrew O’Hagan, John Lanchester, a huge piece by Jacqueline Rose on honour killing, Jeremy Harding and so on. It’s an occasion to show the kind of writing resources we have available.

Early next year there will be a series of lectures at the British Museum by Neil McGregor, Frank Kermode and Rory Stewart. We are about to launch the archive, the whole 30 years online. Next year we’ll have the anniversary of our independence from the New York Review Books. We started out as an insert and became independent after six months.

The Third Estate: The archive must have been very time consuming and expensive to organise so why have you chosen to put it up now?

Paul Myerscough: In a way all magazines of any status seem to be doing this, and quite right too. Technology and culture have brought us to a point where I’m not sure that any magazine or periodical can be excused for not doing it. I think you need to be able to trace the history of a publication―not least as a matter of pleasure: it’s such a lovely thing to go back through the history of a magazine to see how it’s contributors have changed, how its thinking might have changed―if a magazine can be said to have a consistent line of thought―and to build a cross reference, in so many ways: across personalities, across historical periods, across places to tease out a paper’s identity. If you can do this with the Economist, or the TLS or the Guardian, or the London Review of Books, then an archive seems to be indispensible. Magazines no longer live in the present moment. They live in the past too. We want them to do that, especially during an age in which information is processed incredibly quickly. Magazines now seem to be engaged in curation.

The Third Estate: That idea reminds slightly of Jonathan Franzen’s essay on the social novel, where he suggested the novel was incapable of keeping up with the contemporary world. There’s seems to be more reportage in the LRB nowadays and I wondered whether it sees itself as filling a gap which novels about contemporary events might have covered but aren’t able to any longer―or whether it may be facing the same problem as the social novel, that it can’t keep up with the 24 hour news cycle?

Paul Myerscough: It’s certainly true we have more reportage than we used to. We have more long essays on political and cultural subjects. We do think of ourselves as responding to an absence elsewhere―but the absence is not of coverage so much as simply of depth. It’s the length of the LRB articles that make things possible. Some of the broadsheets do a very good job of commentary alongside news, but they always have to compress it into spaces of no more than a thousand words. And that necessarily forces them into certain modes of speaking, certain ways of presenting an argument. What the LRB and some other magazines do is give their writers space to breathe. This makes certain kinds of argument possible. To take one example it makes historical argument possible, so when Ross McKibbin writes for us on politics he’ll very often set Labour thinking in the context of Labour thinking over the past ten, twenty, thirty years― sometimes fifty or a hundred years. It’s very difficult to do that except in a gestural way at a shorter length. What I think we’re doing is making available an old journalistic mode; the long 19th century essay. So your reference to the social novel may not be a coincidence. There’s something about the length that makes it possible to examine the social in a way that we tend to identify with the 19th century essay or novel, and that doesn’t fit very well into the other sources from which we get our news.

The Third Estate: It seems to be having more of an impact―I noticed Rory Stewart’s article got picked up recently and I wonder how much you consciously try to influence the news agenda.

Paul Myerscough: OK, where did you see it picked up?

The Third Estate: BBC Newsnight, and I’m fairly sure the Daily Mail ran a long extract.

Paul Myerscough: Possibly, possibly. I have thought about this… getting picked up: where you can expect to get picked up? I don’t think any of us imagine, do we, that Barack Obama after an eighteen hour day at work goes to the West Wing and reads the New York Review of Books? We don’t imagine either that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown do, even though both have written for the LRB in the past. Are their advisors reading magazines? I’m not sure how far down the chain you have to go before you get people, young people probably, in lower levels of government, who are reading everything. But that process of filtration begins at that lower level and gets honed and honed until at a senior level you really can’t expect to be having an impact in that sense. So you have to rely, as you say, on other media sources. It’s in those places you hope to make an impact. Even then it’s initially disappointing. When you’ve being doing this for a while, you just have to be sanguine about it. It just doesn’t happen very often. It happens with Rory. Rory is a prospective Tory MP, already a very significant figure in his own right, one of the few authoritative voices on Afganistan we have in this country and so it’s not surprising when he makes a statement in the LRB that it will get picked up by other sources. It would get picked up wherever it was. But what happens when Gareth Peirce writes about the al-Megrahi case for us? She publishes her essay and you think my God, this surely has to be answered at some level―and nothing happens . The Independent reprinted it in entirety, but it just doesn’t make the same sort of impact. You want to cry that it doesn’t, because in a sense the case she’s presenting is so extraordinary that it can’t be addressed in a culture in which there’s consensus: every time al-Megrahi is referred to he is the Lockerbie Bomber―and that’s in news sources. So what happens when you have piece that says he didn’t do it, actually it was someone else? You can’t really expect that to be picked up at―except that it’s Gareth Piece, the most respected defence solicitor on miscarriages of justice this country has. So I think you have grounds to influence whoever by publishing it. All you can really do is put these things into the public sphere and hope that they get picked up. Very often it doesn’t happen.

The Third Estate: It seems to fall on one side of the mass civilization, minority culture side of the debate. Does it consciously pitch itself there or is that an inevitable consequence of the way it’s written?

Paul Myerscough: No, it’s not done consciously. You have a magazine which if you set out to publish long reviews and essays on a full variety of subjects you do so hoping to bring―not a seriousness, though often that―but a depth, an angle, an originality and a style―and you’re doing that with 70,000 words per issue―then you really can’t expect very many people to engage with that. It’s a real demand, a demand which we don’t expect a lot of people, younger people in particular, to meet any more. Which, again, is why the archive has been made available online, why, also the blog. You have to find new ways of presenting the mode of thinking in technologically more accessible forms. The paper will always be there for people who want to read. We’ve always made quite a lot content available for free and that’s helped our traffic and helped us put our major intervention pieces up there in a way that helps them circulate

The Third Estate: Perry Anderson wrote in the introduction to one of the LRB’s anthologies that ‘the style of the writer comes before the importance of a subject or the affinity of a position’ is that true?

Paul Myerscough: Did he say that so concisely? That’s interesting. I’m glad we got Perry to do that knowing that Perry will not bend himself… It’s an accusation that’s been made of us. But it’s not true of course. Yes, we try to publish writers who are as stylish as possible in the field they write about. But the point of the style is not as some sort of decorative accessory and if the style is obfuscatory, that is a disaster. The point of being a stylish writer, of being a good writer is to bring alive the subject you’re writing about, the idea you’re trying to convey, in such a way that the reader is carried along with them. When you’ve got an essay of three or four thousand words, you’re hoping the reader will find their way to the end of a piece. Most people are going to give up on a piece that long unless it is well written. Style is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Style has to be in service of content. Maybe we used to publish articles like that, not anymore.

The Third Estate: Has that changed since 2001, since 9/11?

Paul Myerscough: In a way you’re speaking to the wrong person. I joined the paper the week after and was interviewed here the day after 9/11. You can imagine what the interview was like, essentially an editorial meeting on how the event was going to be covered… I don’t think it was a watershed for the paper in terms of its political thinking, because you’re able to go back to the beginning of the paper, certainly back to the Falklands and the Miners strike, and see very engaged political coverage of the news events of the day. Of course it had already been involved with Israel, Palestine so in terms of its thinking, coverage and way of doing things―no 9/11 was not a watershed. But it was in the kind of attention given to the paper, turning people’s eyes towards it, both in terms of people newly admiring and also newly suspicious.

The Third Estate: I think at this point I’m going to ask about Christopher Hitchens. He hasn’t written for the LRB since 9/11 and his last two books weren’t reviewed particularly favourably.

Paul Myerscough: At the level of reviews that’s not by design, we almost go in the other direction. I’ll come back to Hitchens I don’t want to avoid that. The Believer, a magazine in the States, launched a good few years ago with a manifesto against ‘snark’, which said they would avoid ‘snark’ and as one of their examples of ‘snark’, they chose a particular review published in this magazine by James Wood, of a Zadie Smith novel. Now we just don’t commission people to write that kind of review. That kind of review very rarely appears. Of course occasionally someone will write a piece that is deeply negative because, when they get the book, they feel that way about it. But we really don’t set people up. So if Hitchens has had negative reviews from our contributors it’s absolutely not because we’ve decided to give Hitchens a kicking. And we absolutely don’t want to because there’s actually quite a lot of love for Hitchens here. He wrote many wonderful pieces for this magazine. On certain subjects we wish we could still have him but over the question of 9/11 and American foreign policy, in relations to Iraq and attitudes towards Islam, I think at that time, it became more difficult for us to carry his articles. They wouldn’t have sat very well in the London Review’s pages.

The Third Estate: With the editors or the readers?

Paul Myerscough: Well, I suppose people will always want to ask about the relationship between the magazine and its editors. Contrary to what many people think this is not the kind of office where it’s understood what kind of line the magazine will take before we do anything, there is no consensus on many things. None the less, in the way that any magazine has a more or less defined political identity, the LRB is not the Spectator. Clearly it is left-of-centre. Clearly it is more interested in talking about certain issues in one way rather than another. We actually crave finding people who disagree with us, who present their arguments cogently and coolly, in the same kind of prose we hope our writers consider political issues. We often don’t find that our opponents do that. It’s quite hard to find rightwing thinkers who write in a way we feel we can publish, when we do we will publish them; Edward Luttwack for example and Ian Gilmour. A lot of our writers simply wouldn’t identify themselves as coming from the left. I’m not even sure some of our writers on British Politics would identify themselves as being from the left. But, Hitchens, it wasn’t so much his position (although I doubt it was one anyone here would have agreed with) but it was also the case his writing seemed to us rhetorically enflamed in a way that offered―more heat than light.

The Third Estate: Are there any personal favourites coming out in the archive?

Paul Myerscough: Quite a lot of pleasure will just be clicking on a name and seeing what they did. One of the pleasures for me will be going back to particular events. So, go to 1984 and see what the LRB had to say about the Miners Strike, go to 1982 and look at the Falklands War, go to important moments in the recent history of Israel and Palestine and see what Edward Said had to say about them. Or to take an example that leaps to mind, look at an article that by someone few people have heard of, Norman Dombey, about the state of the Iraqi arsenal before the Iraq war and find out just how many things he said came to be true in the light of events. But there’s so much it would be quite an obsessive job to get a grip on the whole 30 years.

The Third Estate: I have a not entirely formulated question on how the LRB sees itself as promoting more sophisticated literary fiction. Do you worry that its message is getting trampled out by things like the Tesco Top 40 or Richard and Judy’s book club?

Paul Myerscough: No, I think we’d always sit on one side of that. Part of the point of opening a bookshop was to give a spatial possibility for people to curate their reading in a different way. What the supermarkets and Richard and Judy do in terms of selecting and producing a kind of hierarchy of books has little to do with what we do. These days we don’t publish negative long reviews. We publish at most two novel reviews an issue, fifty in a year. We get sent fifty novels in a week sometimes. So there isn’t much point reviewing novels which you don’t think deserve the reader’s attention. You try to pick the ones that have a chance of being good and send those out to get reviews. It’s hard, you’d actually like to be reviewing literature in translation more, you’d hopefully be making your novel coverage more abstruse, not less. Making it less tailored to the British publishing market. It is still interesting to have reviews of the latest novels of major figures writing. Even so we aren’t going to review every novel by AS Byatt or Martin Amis. You go back to these writers every so often, to see whether there’s a good revisionary account to be made. In the end you hope to be able to say you have given some attention to most of the writers who people might want to read. But it’s hard finding as much space as you would like, never mind finding the writers you want to write about them.

The Third Estate: Was it a good year for the Booker Prize? Does the prize have too much influence?

Paul Myerscough: It was a good year for us in the sense that Hilary Mantel won. Hilary has been writing for us for a long time. Just because of that prejudice it was easy to think they’d made the right choice. There are all sorts of prizes which are given disproportionate amounts of attention in different fields. The Turner Prize would be one for example. But again it’s a similar situation to supermarkets. The Booker Prize is a matter of the logic of publicity and sales. Its impact is massive in that area. Look at the statistics about the sort of difference it makes to be on the shortlist on the one hand and to win on the other. It makes thousands of percent difference. We used to carry ‘Shortcuts’ in my early time here. James Francken would read all the Booker Prize shortlist novels and write a short article going through them. We haven’t done that in recent years. We’ll pay attention to the individual works but we don’t prioritize. You have to exist on one side of the prize culture and the mainstream. You either have to give an original take on the things everyone else is paying attention to or you have to pay attention to texts no one else is paying attention to. We try to do both.

JW Arble’s pick of the LRB archive

About a year ago I went to one of London’s more fashionable theatres to review the premiere of a play with impeccable credentials. It was the first translation of the work of a hip young German playwright: both production and direction were trendily minimalist, the weighty setting (Dresden during and after the War) was married to an intricately organised time scheme, the older characters all swore or flashed, the younger ones came with heroine pallor and pouts, the packed audience swam with jewellery and hemp. Unfortunately the play was morally evasive, emotionally insipid and crushingly dull.

Theatres are rarely short of well meaning but strangely anaemic productions and though I’m always tempted towards the grand hatchet-job (‘further evidence of an enervated culture’ the magisterially pompous line I long to sign each review off with) there are a few good new plays each year that put the lie to such critical miserabilism. In the main however―especially in what should be serious theatre―something seems to be going wrong. As such, I’m tempted to suggest, if not a manifesto, a clarification of what constitutes good theatre.

Actually there isn’t really all that much to say. The error most poor productions make is in misunderstanding theatre’s advantages over other art forms.

So first what theatre is not: theatre is not about spectacle. During Zorro the Musical caped men leapt between high luminescent scaffolding, swung out on ropes over the audience and frequently hit each other with plastic swords. The activity was frenetic, the lead soon became a gurning puddle of sweat and yet for the most part the stunts looked silly, even when genuinely dangerous. The night I went you could hear restless schoolchildren in the audience. Theatre can’t compete with Peter Jackson, 30 takes, 20 camera angles and a month in a CGI editing suite. Then again it couldn’t compete against the circus trapeze artist or even with watching the local football team, and yet bizarrely some directors go on trying.

Nor is theatre about storytelling. And it’s certainly not about ‘characters’. Try reading ‘Death of Salesman’ or ‘Pygmalion’ without considering the social critique and you’re soon trapped in a world of nauseating sentimentality. Bernard Shaw knew this, which is why he added the sour epilogue to later published editions.

Not that theatre can do social critique any longer either. Philip Roth pretty much had it right in the 60′s when he described “American reality” as a thing that “stupefies… sickens… infuriates and finally… is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents…”. Rolling news killed the social novel on both sides of the water; and killed social theatre with it.

So what’s left? Well, it may be too cute to claim ‘the medium is the message’ but in effective theatre reality, imitation and fantasy slop into one another constantly. It’s disorientating, but unlike with books or film, the audience have no real power of veto (you can’t walk out of a play without becoming part of the drama, nor you can sit there without being a kind of voyeur, instead you’re both trapped and implicated).

So far as I can tell the resulting maxim should announce that theatre is principally about confrontation; about the immediate clash of embodied ideas (or better still ideologies) ―and that it’s about taking sides. Entertaining drama is more politics than art. Forget this coping stone and your play will crumble.

Guest post by Guy Aitchison

It is time for those who want a new politics to work together for change

With the party conferences over and MPs returning to Westminster today following their 82-day break, now seems like a good moment to reflect on the crisis that engulfed the political class during the early summer months and how they have responded.

At the height of the Great Expenses Scandal party leaders made a great show of telling us how they knew exactly what was wrong with our political system and how to fix it, competing to outdo each other with ever-more radical constitutional solutions to voters’ loss of trust in the system.

Gordon Brown promised far-reaching democratic reform, informing us that he was a long-time fan of constitutional campaign group Charter 88 and making noises about a “a written constitution”. David Cameron called for giving “power to the powerless” and talked of fixed term parliaments and new powers for constituents to recall MPs. Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, pointed out that he had long distinguished himself with calls for reform of a “rotten” Westminster system and demanded that an urgent list of constitutional changes be made in “100 days”.

At the time, some in the commentariat were asking what on earth constitutional reform has to do with abuse of expenses. But the impulse to respond to public anger with proposals to re-distribute power was the correct one. It involved the recognition that anger over expenses was about more than simply duck houses, moats, dry rot, and other abuses, however petty or extravagant: it was symptomatic of a much deeper disconnect between the public and politicians that has been building for years.

For a long time, people in the UK have been switching off from formal politics. Voter turnout at the last two general elections in 2001 and 2005 was at a historic low of around 60%. This disengagement doesn’t arise from apathy or satisfaction with the status quo, as the Power Inquiry, which carried out the largest ever investigation into people’s attitudes to British democracy several years ago, concluded. It arises from feelings of powerlessness and a sense that parties and politicians are all the same.

Public outrage reflects a much deeper sense that our political system is dysfunctional and in crisis and that our insular and self-serving political class just don’t give a damn. How else to explain disastrous decisions like the Iraq war executed with total contempt for popular opinion, the vicious attacks on our civil liberties, the pathetic surrender to the banking system, and the total failure to face up to the challenge of catastrophic climate change? The disjuncture between what needs to happen on the big challenges we face and what our closed political system will permit is massive.

What is to be done?

Several months on from this crisis, as we enter a new parliamentary term with a general election in sight, any small hope there briefly was that the managers of our stale two-party system would bring about change has been disappointed. The political class are once again hoping that voters’ anger and disgust will give way to disillusionment and resignation allowing them to keep the whole sorry show on the road a while longer.

I was at the Labour and Tory party conferences, in the main hall and at the party fringes, and you could almost hear the sound of brush strokes sweeping the crisis and the earlier promises of change under the carpet.

Brown’s speech to the Labour conference offered a cowardly mixture of fudges and half-measures that will please no one. The Prime Minister promised a referendum on electoral reform – but not until after the next election and even then only on the Alternative Vote system which wouldn’t move Parliament any closer to being proportional. He talked of a new right for constituents to recall errant MPs – but only when voters are given permission from their political masters on high. And one hundred years after Parliament decided to reform the Lords, Brown committed to “remove the hereditary principle” from the second chamber, re-stating Labour’s position in their manifesto of twelve years ago.

David Cameron’s speech to the Tory party conference was a master class of rhetoric promising a lot but offering little of substance. He clearly wants people to think that he “gets it” when he says that the expenses crisis “reflected something deeper…the sense that people have been left powerless by big government”. Spot on! But apart from some vague references to “decentralisation”, “transparency”, and “accountability” there was nothing on how he plans to reform a political system which, by his own admission, is “broken”.

These paltry offers to the electorate confirm that we simply can’t trust politicians to deliver the reform that’s needed. With less than a year until the next election, all of us who want a new politics should focus our efforts on ensuring that the next Parliament is a reforming one.

This will not be easy. It’s almost a law of nature that once politicians take power they are reluctant to give it away.

We need an intelligent and demanding citizens’ movement organising outside the parties and the formal structures of political power, calling for change and holding politicians to their promises.

It is with this goal in mind that the Rowntree Trusts have launched Power2010, a unique campaign that will give everyone a chance to have a say in how this country should be run.

In the first phase of the campaign, Power2010 is asking the public for their ideas for how we change politics. Everyone is encouraged to get involved and contribute their own ideas by going to the website at www.power2010.org.uk.

All the ideas submitted will then be considered by a panel of randomly selected citizens drawn from across the UK who will decide a list of options to be put to the public vote.

The five ideas that receive the most votes will become the Power2010 Pledge, which candidates of all parties will be asked to commit to at the next election – in public meetings, on the door step, by email and letter; as often as possible by as many people as possible.

It is time for those who want a new politics, one that is open, honest, and responsive to the needs and interests of the public, to work together for change. If we join forces and act now we could get a reforming parliament and a new politics out of the next election.

Guy Aitchison works for the Power2010 campaign. Before that he was deputy director of the Convention on Modern Liberty. He blogs at openDemocracy’s UK blog, OurKingdom.

It’s that time of year again. The silly season has ended, Parliament is getting ready to return from recess and, with swine flu beginning to look like a fuss about not very much and the worst of the recession said to be over, the British media is beginning to turn its attention to the party conferences. The buzzword this year is cuts. Labour, Tory and Lib Dem alike are at pains to explain how best to slash the country’s budget deficit, walking a tightrope of public expectations over a media circus. Against the fanfare and furore of the big three scrambling to shore up their support, however, there’s one party that often goes overlooked. On the back of their best results in twenty years, the Greens are on the rise and optimistic about their chances. Coming out of their last conference before next year’s general election, I caught up with their leader, Caroline Lucas MEP, and grilled her on the big issues, from the party’s future to their more controversial policies and just why she disagrees with James Lovelock.

“There was a very positive mood at conference, and there’s a great sense of determination within the party,” she says. “We’ve demonstrated pretty conclusively that in some places we can take on the big three.” Re-elected for a third term in the European Parliament in June, Caroline Lucas is widely tipped to be the Green Party’s best chance of winning a seat at the next general election and she now believes they are on the brink of a Westminster breakthrough.

But if the party has learnt anything in its long, hard slog to the spotlight, it’s that optimism is a double-edged sword. Similar predictions were made about a Green breakthrough in Brighton Pavilion in 2005, but despite a strong result, it never materialised. “We’ve made five years’ more progress on the ground since then,” Lucas tells me. “We came first in this year’s Euro-elections, not just in Pavilion, but across all three Brighton and Hove constituencies.” In Brighton Pavilion, the party now has the majority of the councillors and they won a majority of the votes in the most recent local elections. In the Goldsmid by-election in July, Alex Phillips’s convincing win stripped the Conservatives of overall control and tied the Greens with Labour as the second largest party on the council. “Basically, the Brighton Pavilion Green team is stronger than before, much more experienced, and very well organised.”

If Lucas’s predictions are anything to go by, she may not be sitting alone in the House of Commons next year. “It’s certainly possible that the next parliament could include two or even three Green MPs,” she says. “The party’s deputy leader, Adrian Ramsay, is leader of the opposition on Norwich City Council. The Greens hold a total of twenty city and county council seats there, where we held five last time around.” Norwich and Brighton are not the only areas the Greens are targeting however. “In Lewisham Deptford, our candidate, Darren Johnson, is currently the chair of the London Assembly, and he’s widely respected in London, not least in Lewisham, where he’s a borough councillor.” Five years ago, Lewisham Greens had only one councillor. Now they have six. “We have candidates who are leading Green politicians in their communities, with the experience and the vision to make effective MPs,” Lucas says.

Amidst mounting concerns over the economy and the environment, the party has seen a surge of support in recent years. But even with their share of the vote going up by 44%, more than any other party, the Greens failed to achieve their two basic goals at the European elections: to increase their number of MEPs and to stop the BNP. “Those goals were two sides of the same coin – in most cases, for the Greens to win the last seat in a region would serve the purpose of denying it to the BNP,” Lucas points out. “Of course it was extremely frustrating to get within about 1% of trebling our number of seats.” In the North West, where Nick Griffin scraped in by the skin of his teeth, the Green Party’s committed anti-racist campaigner, Peter Cranie, fell short by just 0.3% of the vote. “It’s hard to say what we could have done very differently, other than that more resources would almost certainly have enabled us to win seats in the East, North West, South West and Yorkshire and the Humber. But we gained 1,000 members during the six weeks of our campaign, which provides us with a great foundation for the next elections.”

It has often been said that the only thing holding the party back from mainstream success is the first-past-the-post electoral system. In an interview with The Third Estate just before the Greens gained over 1.3 million votes in the European elections, Peter Tatchell argued that under proportional representation, they could expect to gain as many as 40 MPs. I ask Lucas, whose support for electoral reform has always been as strong as her opposition to fascism, how she would answer those critics who argue that PR would bring about just as many BNP MPs. “If the BNP started winning seats under first-past-the post, would we suspend democracy to stop them getting elected?” she replies. “Of course not. I deplore their racism, ignorance and lies. However, I believe the best way to challenge them is to address the factors which drive individuals to vote for far right parties. If we treat the disease, the symptoms will go away.” Lucas argues that to exclude the BNP from the democratic process would be to set them up as martyrs who can claim the system refuses to deal honestly with the issues that concern their voters. “Some people vote BNP out of racism and intolerance. But probably far more vote for them out of a sense of serious disenchantment with the big three parties. There appears to be so little real difference now between Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, because they all talk the same and share the same core agenda. A lot of people feel let down by politics, feel their voice isn’t being heard, and some of those people will vote for an extremist party in protest. Inclusive, proportional elections would be one of the ways to help engage people in the political process.”

There was a time when the Greens themselves might have been considered an extremist party. An historic perception of them, the faintest traces of which persist to this day, is of  a single-issue party for beardy organic farmers and firebrand eco-warriors. “The Green Party has never been a single issue party!” argues Lucas. “We’ve always been a party of social justice, and believe that equity has to be at the heart of a sustainable society. We’ve also always made the case that the best way to protect the environment is to transform the goals and direction of the economy to make it genuinely sustainable.” Often, when the media has discussed party policy, it has tended to be linked to environmental stories. Lucas believes this is changing. “We finally seem to be succeeding in getting the media to pay more attention to our economic policies – for instance, with this year’s million-jobs manifesto, geared towards tackling the recession and the climate crisis at the same time. And I hope that in the run-up to the general election, the media will play its part in communicating the alternative political choices on offer, rather than just following the main three party leaders around. Then the differences between the Greens and the big three would become blindingly obvious.” Here that buzzword comes up again. Cuts. “While they talk about cutting services and tightening belts, we’ll be arguing for low-carbon investments that will create jobs, keep tax revenue coming in, and fund frontline services.”

One thing Lucas believes is helping them to better communicate their message is their decision to do away with the old system of a male and female principal speaker. Last year she was overwhelmingly voted the party’s first ever leader. “Most people like to be able to put a face to a political party,” she says. “So I believe that having a single leader with a clear, recognisable presence in the media allows us to communicate more effectively.”

After decades of fighting, the Green Party finally seems to be entering the mainstream. And after decades of dragging their heels, a consensus has emerged amongst world leaders that urgent action is required to tackle climate change. Does it encourage Lucas that the major parties are adopting increasingly environmentalist policies? “I’m not sure which has been more frustrating: the slow progress in this area, or the extent of the greenwash,” she says. “Yes, there’s now a consensus that we need to tackle climate change, and yes, the big three parties do go out of their way to appear green. But so much of this is rhetoric, and even now there is so much more that they should be doing.” Lucas points out that in 1997, Labour claimed to be the first green government, despite their weak climate targets and inadequate policies for meeting them. “Although some progress has been made, even now they still have the wrong targets and inadequate policies for meeting them, and they’re still building roads and expanding airports.”

The Greens have commendably been ahead of the times when it comes to scientific thinking on climate change. They were banging that bongo long before the band joined in. Some of the main criticisms of the party, however, have been for its broader scientific policy, most notably from Frank Swain and Martin Robbins who kicked up a pre-election storm by taking the Greens to task on GM food, embryonic stem cell research and alternative medicine. “Just because the Greens are sceptical about some scientific developments doesn’t make us ‘anti-science,’” Lucas says. “I have yet to see any convincing evidence that GM crops are anything other than unnecessary and damaging – or that many of the forces behind them have anything other than morally dubious motivations.” But what about the argument that, in the right hands, GM can be used to tackle hunger for the poorest people in the world? “When will GM crops be ‘in the right hands’ if they’re developed to increase dependency on the multinationals who own the seed patents? The issue here is about control of the food chain. There’s tremendous potential for greater organic food production, and there’s plenty of evidence that ecologically designed agriculture systems, using permaculture principles for example, can significantly increase the productive capacity of the land.”

Evidence, however, is key to the criticism of Green policy. In a follow-up article, Martin Robbins argues that in seeking to ban GM and embryonic stem cell research, the evidence necessary to ascertain safety can never be produced under a Green Party model. Robbins, who points out that the party believes experiments on human embryos could have harmful unforeseen outcomes, asks how you can ban something on the basis of unknown consequences, particularly when research into embryonic stem cells is vital for treating numerous conditions. I put the issue to Caroline Lucas, who has twice been named Observer Ethical Politician of the Year. “There are no easy answers,” she says. “Personally, I remain concerned about the associated health risks, the commodification of eggs and embryos, and the potential exploitation of women. Increasing research suggests that there are a number of promising alternatives, for example adult stem cell research, and umbilical cord stem cell research. These tell a growing number of success stories, without the problematic issues associated with embryonic stem cell research.”

The third criticism of the party’s scientific policy is its opposition to attempts to regulate alternative medicines. I ask Lucas if a more rigorous approach is needed to unproven remedies. “A balance must always be reached between the right of the individual to free choice, and the duty of society to protect us from the consequences of unwise choices,” she says. “I support the idea of a regulatory agency with responsibility for natural medicines, including nutritional supplements, medicinal plants and herbal remedies, essential oils and homeopathic remedies. I also believe that where people have found such remedies to work well for them, they should be given the freedom to continue taking them.”

If there’s one issue on which the Green Party has never been anything but utterly transparent, however, it’s the pressing need to save the planet from the worst human excesses. “The Green Party’s position is that we must adopt whatever targets are necessary to avert the worst consequences of climate change; to argue for these policies internationally and to lead by example. We believe that the current science demands a 90% UK reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030, with significant year-on-year cuts starting straight away.” Lucas is a strong enthusiast for the 10:10 campaign, launched earlier this month. “We believe there are huge spin-off benefits from emissions-reduction policies, ranging from much better public transport to warmer homes and a more stable economy, along with the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs. So a post carbon economy isn’t just possible, it’s highly desirable.”

One area of contention within the party, however, is on the question of nuclear power. James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, who points out that global warming is much further advanced than IPCC models and Stern have suggested, has come out in favour of nuclear power as the only green solution in the time we have left. “I find it sad and ironic that the UK, which leads the world in the quality of its Earth and climate scientists, rejects their warnings and advice, and prefers to listen to the Greens,” Lovelock argues. “But I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.” Wrongheaded or not, Caroline Lucas is not about to drop her objection to nuclear energy anytime soon. “Nuclear power simply won’t deliver big enough emission cuts, fast enough,” she says. “Even if we doubled the amount of nuclear in this country, we would only save about 8% in emissions reductions, and not until 2030 at the earliest. Nuclear is also hugely costly, and carries major safety and security risks. The bottom line is that there are much cheaper, quicker, safer and more effective ways of making bigger reductions – energy efficiency, renewables, decentralised energy, combined heat and power, better public transport – the list goes on.”

Lucas agrees with Lovelock on one thing, however. “Climate change needs to be seen not just as an environmental issue, but as the greatest security threat that we face. We need to put the economy on something like a war footing, and introduce far more urgent action.”

Is it too late to save the world?

“No, I don’t believe that it’s too late, but we definitely need to be taking far more radical action than we currently are if we are to stave off the worst effects of climate change.”

If there’s one person who can convince us to take that action, it’s Caroline Lucas. Parliament magazine MEP of the Year in 2008, recipient of the RSPCA’s Michael Kay Award for outstanding contribution to European animal welfare, one of BBC Wildlife’s top conservationists, Vice President of the European Parliament’s Permanent Delegation to Palestine, and perhaps soon to be MP for Brighton Pavilion, Lucas is certainly hard at work. But if she succeeds, one thing’s for sure. The future’s bright. The future’s Green.

www.greenparty.org.uk

Guest post by Holly Robbins

Celebrating its tenth birthday this year, (The People’s Republic of) Shambala has everything a festival-goer could possibly desire – without being the size of a small town (yes, I’m talking to you Glastonbury). Set in the grounds of a manor house in Northamptonshire and playing host to around 10,000 punters, Shambala’s organisers have managed to create an atmosphere that encourages free thinking, boundless energy, and an obscene amount of dressing up. With an exhilarating mixture of music genres – from political punk and folk through to thoroughly danceable klezmer and Balkan-influenced music – and a strong focus on DIY, crafts and direct action politics, it’s hard not to feel like a part of something bigger than yourself, just for one weekend.

When I sat and thought about my experience of Shambala, I realised that the music is never really the main focus as it is with a lot of larger commercial festivals. The line-up is not released prior to the festival, and only a few bands would be considered even vaguely ‘mainstream’ – namely Zion Train and the King Blues. That’s not to say the music isn’t worth seeing; we discovered a lot of fantastic independent artists over the weekend. It’s hard to over-emphasise the variety of sounds that play at this festival; some surprising favourites included Los Desterrados, a band that mixes the music of the Sephardic Jews with some Balkan and folk elements, Dub Colossus, heavy dub with a powerful brass section, Boy, an incredible four part female acapella group, and Hatty Hatstar, a folk singer and accordionist who got the whole of the Rusty Garden audience joining in enthusiastically with Windmill in Old Amsterdam (‘I saw a mouse!’ ‘Where?’).

The musical highlight, partly because of the wonderful atmosphere, was one of the final acts of the festival – Hakuna Pesa playing on the tiny Lakeside Stage (did I mention there’s a lake?) when the festivities on the main stage were winding down. Lots of bewildered people, desperately clinging to the last remnants of the weekend, were drawn like moths towards this glowing corner of the field to dance like maniacs for the last hours of official music. Hakuna Pesa definitely provided a great beat; a world-influenced ska-punk band that sounded much like The Aggrolites’ eccentric English cousin.

Shambala turned Holly (left) into a man. No wonder she's sticking up for Caster Semenya

Something that makes Shambala different from the rest of the jumble of festivals around today is its strong sense of politics – its own as well as the wider issues. If you’re after inspiration and a kindred spirit to chat to then Rebel Soul is your place. Apart from politically conscious musicians (Bristolian Clayton Blizzard being a good example), they hosted talks on issues such as food production’s effect on the environment, the recession, pharmaceuticals, and Palestine. The organisers of Shambala hold a ‘Parliament’ on Sunday, asking people to comment on their ‘green credentials’ and how the festival is run. Anarchist newsgroup SchNEWS also have a strong presence. Next door is the Permaculture area, which runs workshops on useful skills for sustainable living in the modern world. Practical skills are a bit of a theme for Shambala; the craft workshops are a massive part of what makes the festival unique. Wherever you look, adults and children alike are engrossed in making placards (for the ‘protest’ themed carnival on Saturday), creating wallets out of scrap leather, felting pictures, carving spoons, or even joining the Shambala Knit-In. One woman spoke to me enthusiastically (perhaps drunkenly) about the willow basket she’d woven earlier in the day. She showed me pictures of it on her phone.

The unexpected highlight for me was Wandering Word – the spoken word stage – and the Wandering Word poets’ showcase at Rebel Soul. This was never somewhere I really explored the last couple of years, but after a bit of miserable weather I found myself in their yurt, and the talent in that tiny space truly blew me away. Kate Tempest’s poetry left me lost for words, so I’m just going to suggest you to look her up (find ‘Cannibal Kids’ on youtube) and go see her perform if you can. I imagine she’s the first former MC to be compared to William Blake. But that’s just a guess. Wandering Word also hosted Boy (mentioned earlier), the charming young storyteller Stanley Wilfrid Mertenns, and many other wonderful poets. The perfect place if all the bright lights and painted people are just getting too much.

Shambala this year was a world of surprises. Have you ever seen a full set of crayons barn-dance? Now I have. Been on a walk with a herbalist? Seen a shaman on a blow-up rodeo bull? From the circus acts accompanied by the brass section of Smerin’s Anti-Social Club, to the People’s Front Room, from the healing field (with cake) to the Mind’s Eye Cinema showing independent films through the night, Shambala is an extravaganza that encourages adults to act like children, children to learn and grow, and everyone to dress up and join in. It’s clear every year – although the festival is always growing a little – just how much love and attention to detail the organisers give to making this festival so special. There’s handmade bunting on the stages. There’s free hot tubs. There’s a cock drawing workshop. There’s the most fun you can reasonably have in one weekend without hurting yourself.

Nick Davies is the award-winning investigative journalist, writer and documentary maker who recently broke the story of the News of the World phone-taps. Last year, he published the bestselling Flat Earth News, an exposé of the systemic falsehood, distortion and propaganda current in the mainstream global media. The book won plaudits from critics across the political spectrum and is frequently referenced across the vast and nebulous blogosphere. We caught up with him to find out whether his views had changed in the last year, what he thinks of James Murdoch’s recent attack on the BBC and how he answers critics who feel, in attacking the media, he may be letting politicians off the hook.

The Third Estate: Could you tell us what you consider to be the essence of good news journalism? What are a journalist’s responsibilities?

Nick Davies: A journalist’s responsibility is to be honest, i.e. to attempt to tell the truth. He or she may fail: by simply not being able to find the truth with the time and resources available; or by making ‘an honest mistake’ and publishing in good faith something which turns out to be false or distorted. The unmovable responsibility is to attempt to tell the truth. And sometimes, with the wind behind us, we succeed.

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The Third Estate: Your book Flat Earth News ended with a very downbeat assessment of the state of the media in Britain, concluding:

‘I’m afraid that I think, in trying to expose the weakness of the media, I am taking a snapshot of a cancer. Maybe it helps a little to be able to see the illness… but I fear the illness is terminal.’

Since then we’ve seen the expenses scandal dominate the news for months. Was this an example of good of investigative journalism, and if so, has it made you any more optimistic for the future?

Nick Davies: The book argues that good journalism is very ill, not that it’s dead. There is a steady trickle of good stories still being constructed by journalists who manage to get the time and resources to do their jobs properly. The MPs expenses is an example, but there are others. As to the future, that depends on whether or not we can find a source of funding which will allow for a revival of the sick profession. At the moment, the business model is failing: circulations are falling and advertising income is plummeting. As and when the credit crisis passes, we will discover whether the business model picks up or whether, as I suspect, it will not. Even if it does pick up and starts to generate profit again, it will have to cope with the problem of its corporate owners extracting that profit for shareholders and executives instead of investing in journalism (which is the core of the problem described in Flat Earth News.) In the absence of effective funding from the traditional business model, ie from selling papers and carrying advertisements, the search is on for some new source of funding. Can we find a way to charge for online news? Can we find a way to divert advertising back to news sites? Will government step in with some politically safe form of funding, a kind of licence fee for news media? Or, or, or. If there is no solution to the funding problem, there is no future for good journalism.

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The Third Estate: James Murdoch is scarcely a darling of the left, but does he have a point about the dominance of the BBC – especially as regards online news? Is the BBC damaging newspapers or is it our last best hope for responsible journalism? Would it be a good thing if the BBC started funding local newspapers?

Nick Davies: Murdoch cares only for Murdoch. His attack on the BBC is something which his father has been engaged in for decades, long before the BBC had a website. He wants to kill off the competition. And he will grab at any available argument to try to justify it. We have to defend the BBC because it has a funding model (the licence fee) which works. In terms of journalism, we need the BBC in two different senses, first as a news organisation which, for all its failings, still has a culture of honesty; and, second, as a tool which tends to keep other, commercialised news organisations a little more honest.

It is breath-taking to hear a Murdoch blaming the BBC for damaging newspapers. Nobody in the history of journalism has done more damage to newspapers than Rupert Murdoch. He will say he has invested millions, but he has done that in the pursuit of profit and power and repeatedly, horribly at the expense of good journalism.

Compare the BBC as a source of honest journalism and for its impact on others, with the Sun as a source of repulsively dishonest journalism which has dragged the entire UK popular press down market. Look at the damage they have done to the Sunday Times, once arguably the best newspaper in the world.

If Murdoch has his way, television news in this country will be reduced to the level of Fox News in the US – poisoned by politics and riddled with commercial judgements, a genuine affront to decent journalism. Please don’t let’s get suckered into playing his game.

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The Third Estate: Your reports of the News of the World’s bad practice met with some mixed responses from people who would usually seem to be allies – I’m thinking particularly of Julian Assaunge’s (administrator of Wikileaks) email to his subscribers:

‘…the Guardian, in seeing an opportunity to attack a journalistic and class rival, has been doing its level best to castrate British Journalism by tut-tuting in article after article about the News’ alleged sourcing improprieties; a tabloid newspaper doing investigative journalism! Journalists skirting the law to expose the truth! The long suffering of British billionaires-and Royalty! And did we mention that the News’ is owned by Rupert Murdoch?-so, um… you know, the enemy of my enemy and all that! The Guardian’s coverage is disproportionate. It is moral opportunism. It is an excuse to mention tabloid stories in a broadsheet. And it is dangerous. The result be will a publishing climate and probably legislation aimed at keeping the British public in the dark… the real scandal is not that some British papers used private investigators to find out what the public wants to know. It is that more did not. It is that the News’ was extorted out of a million pounds because the relevant British legislation does not have an accessible public interest defence for the disclosure of telephone recordings. Until it does, despite the risks, journalists who take their forth [sic] estate role seriously are obligated not to take the legislation seriously.’

What would you say to this line of argument?

Nick Davies: I hadn’t seen this guy’s comment. I think he’s wrong, on at least two major points. First, the News of the World may claim to be acting in the public interest, but it certainly is not. It is acting in the commercial interest of its owner, drumming up sales. There is a massive spectrum of activity which needs to be covered by journalists working in the public interest – anything at all to do with policy, incompetence, fraud, waste or corruption in central govt, local govt, corporations, trade unions, NGOs, EU, Nato; tax avoidance and evasion; the arms trade; the environment; poverty and inequality; health and education and criminal justice. The list is huge. Ask yourself: why does the News of the World week after week fail to cover those areas but choose instead to define ‘public interest’ in terms of the private lives, especially the sexual aspect of the private lives, of celebrities? And I think you will see that this is commercial interest not public interest.

The second point flows from that – that for the first time in human history we have an industry whose primary purpose is to harvest the private lives of people in order to generate profit. This is an industry which thinks nothing of planting a hidden camera to record a man having sex with prostitutes; of breaking into confidential data bases, tapping telephones, hacking voice messages, snatching photographs to grab the private material which it can sell. If the organs of the democratic state try to engage in that sort of activity, we insist that it is a) regulated by legal procedure, and b) supervised by bodies who can ensure that those regulations are adhered to and can handle complaints. And yet the media – which submits itself to no kind of popular vote – considers it has the right to proceed without regulation or supervision, simply pushing aside the law as though our privacy meant nothing. Our friend from Wikileaks is confusing the invasion of personal privacy (illegitimate) with the penetration of official secrecy (legitimate).

Underlying his misunderstanding, there is a good point, which is that the British media is trapped by all kinds of legal restrictions which, compounded with its commercial obsessions, mean that it frequently fails to penetrate official secrecy. By all means, let us reform the laws to allow more real journalism in the public interest. But don’t confuse that with the News of the World’s obsessive searching through the dirty underwear of its targets. To put this whole argument another way: I’ve been a reporter for 33 years and never before have I written stories which have provoked complete strangers into coming up to me in the street to shake my hand and say well done.

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Our time with Nick Davies was limited and clearly further questions could be asked (not least regarding internet journalism and the place of blogs like The Third Estate in the new mediascape).

The real significance of Nick’s ongoing work seems to me to lie in a passage he himself quotes in Flat Earth News. It’s taken from It’s the Media Stupid, John Nichols and Robert McChesney (Open Media 2000).

‘The type of political culture that accompanies the rise of the corporate media system worldwide looks to be increasingly like that found in the United States; in the place of informed debate or political parties organising along the full spectrum of opinion there will be vacuous journalism and elections dominated by public relations, big money, moronic political advertising and limited debate on tangible issues. It is a world where the market and commercial values overwhelm notions of democracy and civic culture, a world where depoliticization runs rampant, and a world where the wealthy few face fewer and fewer threats of political challenge.’

Is this true? Tell us what you think.

For more information on Nick’s work go to www.flatearthnews.net

Good to see some habits die hard in the Jewish Quarter of Krakow

Bush's visit to Europe in 2003 inspired demonstrations across the continent

Pracownicza Demokracja (Worker's Democracy) is a small group affiliated to the International Socialist Tendency. Their Anti-Capitalist Weekend looked decent.

 Pracownicza Demokracja

Various bits of graffiti, including 'stop lukashenko', referring to the Hitler admiring President of Belarus.

An Iranian run shop in Krakow expresses solidarity with the demonstrations. They run this blog: www.glosiranu.blog.pl.

 www.glosiranu.blog.pl

A tribute to a proletarian hero