The Game's Afoot

So now we have the prospect of 4 months of non-stop campaigning and fighting between the parties in the run up to a general election, most likely held on May 6th.

Just as the Conservatives started to crank up the campaign with their 'We can't go on like this' posters, the giant, gleaming pudge of David Cameron suddenly appearing all over the place on 30-foot wide placards, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, in one of the most spectacularly misjudged coup-attempts ever staged (including the Munich Beer Hall putsch of 1932) managed to wound Gordon Brown again without killing him. He now resembles the black knight from Monty Python's 'Holy Grail' who has had all of his limbs cut off but still refuses to die.

Martin Kettle wrote some useful analysis of the thing in the Guardian, and John Harris wrote an acute but weirdly romantic piece about the need for new progressive ideas and blood on the Left, but as usual the only real insight came from Andrew Rawnsley, whose voice and hairstyle I found off-putting initially but is becoming one of the better and more reliable political commentators. Michael White was gurning absurdly in the Sky studio and at one point summed up his analysis with the epithet: 'Life is a disappointment'. He is more and more like Alf Garnett, in appearance if not in ideology.

Iain Dale and Conservative Home were mainly having fun with the story, as were Will Straw and Eric Pickles. And why wouldn't they? Guido, who has an impressive ability to break rumours and tidbits before anyone else, mainly spent the day attacking Nick Robinson for his dismissal of the rumours of a plot on The Daily Politics (followed a few minutes later by a hasty U-turn), and his sideswipe at bloggers. Robinson was pretty hopeless in fact while things were breaking, but gave a useful summary of the affair by evening.

Alastair Campbell deferred to John Prescott, but you could tell by the tone of the former Communcations Director's blog that he was apoplectic about the whole thing. There's a special note of forced disinterestedness that comes into Alastair's writing when he's really angry about something. It's amazing actually how easy it is to detect. Also, he doesn't understand about websites. His is called 'the official website' and bears his signature. Complete no-nos for seasoned bloggers/web-users. There is almost nothing so off-putting online as someone who regards themselves as special or privileged. The whole ethos is different. Everyone is anonymous, more or less, and everyone's more equal (or at least you should pretend they are, if you want to be popular).

Prescott himself, quite the Web 2.0 bandwagon-jumper, has tried to reinvent himself as a new media campaigner. And to be fair, he doesn't do a bad job. He's got the hang of Twitter, and the use of cheeky emoticons. His video content is crap, but it's not the end of the world. At least it has an immediacy that's quite endearing. It doesn't do his man-of-the-people image too much harm and subtly washes away at the two-jags, two-shags, two-bogs lampoon that was so firmly implanted after the expenses scandal.

John Rentoul in the Independent (does it still exist?) had a good list of PLP members who had publicly admitted disaffection with the PM, reflecting a lot of networking and good old spadework, but not much else.

Anyway, the plot was almost over before it had begun, with a deafening silence from cabinet members supposedly ready to abandon Brown. When they did make statements they, predictably, lined up behind the PM, although some endorsements were very mealy-mouthed indeed. One never felt (even from the outside) there would be enough support in the party for a coup, and the timing of this attempt was disastrous.

It would have been very difficult indeed for any member of the cabinet to come out openly against Brown now, especially after Mandelson seemed to have made peace with him over the election strategy (for the time being). Going into the election, it was always possible for loyalists to accuse plotters of damaging the party, overlooking the wishes of ordinary party members, and indulging in all kinds of high rhetoric about the selfishness of ex-ministers trying to tell current members of the government what to do.

So, where does all this leave us? According to YouGov, the Tories are 9 points clear at the moment, enough for an outright majority, albeit a slim one, and that doesn't take into account the damage caused yesterday (a more recent poll has the Tories 12 points ahead). Of course it is far far too early to tell how this might affect the election, but it can't be good news for Brown unless the fallout from this botched coup makes it more difficult for other plotters to mount a serious challenge further down the line. If I were David Miliband now, for instance, would I risk resigning in the run up to the election, for the sake of a few marginals, or would I wait until Gordon has been thoroughly crushed by the opposition, do as little campaigning on his behalf as possible, and then accept the leadership when it is offered by a desperate and grateful party that has suffered a humiliation at the hands of the Tories? I know what I'd do. Yes, Gordon might survive until the election, but now he's certainly holed below the waterline and can't keep going afterwards, surely, unless something impossible happens.

Forgive me a little diversion. Many people in this country now like to describe themselves as 'libertarians' - because what they think this means is that they are philosophically liberal and anti-authoritarian, and because they believe that markets should be de-regulated etc... They imagine that a libertarian today is what a liberal, in the mould of John Stuart Mill or a Locke, would have been in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth centuries. But I don't think that's right at all. In any case, it ignores more recent writing on Liberty by thinkers such as Berlin and Rawls, which I think has tended to advance the notion of political liberty and freedom in line with developments in sociology and the development of our democracies. Rawls and Berlin acknowledged their own debts to their great precursors, but they made significant contributions which serve to deepen our understanding of what political liberty means.

Perhaps most importantly, they recognise the fact that liberty cannot truly exist without justice, and that justice itself relies on a certain element of fairness - what Rawls describes in his 'Theory of Justice'. The implications of these arguments for liberals are profound because they demonstrate that, in order to hold true to the principles first laid out by John Locke and John Stuart Mill and others, one must also seek to guarantee fairness in society. In other words, it is not enough to remove restrictions from peoples' actions and simply let society and the economy run themselves. Why not? Because, to put it in its simplest terms, if everyone is free to do what they want, some people's abuse of that freedom will prevent others from doing what they want.

Or, to take another example, if you have a given (limited) quantity of something, and you allow everyone to exploit it as much as they want, you will soon see that a small number of people with greater capability/strength/etc... will take the vast majority of it for themselves, leaving others with less than their share. So, freedom (positive freedom) is not really freedom at all because it ends up meaning that only a few are able to do what they want, while the rest cannot. Hence your typical neo-liberal capitalist society in which there are wide inequalities in wealth, access, representation, education, power and opportunity. These inequalities would be greatly exacerbated by some of the measures that true libertarians call for, such as flat taxes, abolition of the welfare state, wholescale reductions in public spending, the rollback of the state (this has other political consequences, as I've described before).

To be true to the ideas of Mill and Locke, then, in our developed societies, one has to incorporate an understanding of the role of justice and fairness in producing liberty and public goods. Many of those who describe themselves as libertarians, are, when push comes to shove, actually liberals, in the mode of Jack Kennedy, or FDR. They aren't libertarians at all. Quite often people don't like the term 'liberal' (in the UK) because they feel it has been tainted by a strain of authoritarian European social democracy/socialism that they despise (probably rightly). The ideal liberal is neither so entranced by the mythical philosophical link between the free market and personal choice, nor so bedazzled by the Gramscian/Marxist ideas of alienation and the detrimental effects of consumer capitalism on social justice that he is either a proponent of radical deregulation of markets and slashing of public spending, or a petty bureaucrat who believes the state should centralise as much as possible to ensure 'equality of opportunity'.

A liberal is, after all, one who wants to find balance between Berlin's positive and negative liberties, a balance that denies as little personal freedom as possible while also ensuring that as many people as possible are given as wide a range of options and opportunities as possible, whatever their background. That is a fine balance, but it is a liberal balance, not a libertarian one. And those who identify themselves as libertarians deserve to be challenged on their interpretation of justice as fairness, to prove that they are not just adopting a fashionable moniker.

Now back to the main thread a minute. There's something different about a party that's about to assume power, and about a young government with a large majority. There's a massive air of confidence, of expectancy, about them, and something odd happens in the national mood as well. It's as if the party and the culture start to reflect each other somehow. Or at least mirror each other. In 1997, there did seem to be a rare convergence between the rhetoric and self-presentation of new Labour, and the projected national self-image, served up to us on tv and in the media. It felt as though the party had either created, or at least successfully responded to, the zietgeist (god, what an awful word). That's not to imply for a second that the Labour party wasn't a totally shallow invention of PR and empty soundbites - it was. But all of that stuff did actually feel as if it caught the mood of the country.

And in 2001 there was a masterful (but also terrifying and terrifyingly cheesy) ad for Labour in the run up to the election which showed a nondescript couple going to the polls, smiling and waving agreeably at everyone they passed on the way to the polling booth. It was nauseating, but it was also a work of genius, because the implication of the message was that it was socially unacceptable to vote for anyone other than Labour. It actually made direct use of the cloying social pressure to fit in, to be normal, that influences so many of our subliminal decisions and gives us so many of our cues. It tapped directly into our anxieties about deviating from that social standard which is arbitrarily imposed but almost impossible to break. And it worked.

What it showed was a ruthless, a tyrannical, cultivation of that sort of common denominator ethic, that 'We Are Normal' feeling, that is such a powerful herder of instincts. I'm amazed that it wasn't more widely used, or more frequently exploited. But it is a difficult thing to pull off in fact, because you have to have some credibility to do it, with the people it's aimed at, and you have to be able to make them feel that kind of class awkwardness that makes them even more paranoid about standing out. The kind of thing that makes middle class girls from St Pauls sound as though they grew up dealing crack in Peckham. It would be very tricky indeed for David Cameron and chums, no matter how convincing their performances on Desert Island discs, to play the same trick.

What's telling for me is that, at the moment, neither party has that sense of being really in tune with the majority. The new Labour coalition has well and truly disintegrated, but you don't get the feeling that the Tories have been able to re-shape the electorate into a large coalition of their own. Perhaps they have and it just hasn't yet started to filter through. There are the first signs - in the way people deploy Cameroonian or even Osbornian rhetoric when talking about Public Sector spending or government debt, or the whole Green thing, which does seem to be an area where the Tories have had real succes in identifying themselves as the party of fashionable ecological reform.

Anyway, that's more than enough of that. The next few months promises to be quite exciting, if like me you are interested in these things.

I have had a cracking week at work. I have been on it. God knows why, but for some reason I'm more alert, more confident and just generally more effective than I have been for ages. Long may it continue. Apart from one small bureaucratic nonsense I've basically sorted out the Literature sector single-handed for the next year. And that was while most people were skiving off at home and whinging about the snow. Slackers. If I carry on like this I'll be able to retire in a few months and move on to saving the planet. Don't hold your breath.