6 JUNE 2014 ISSUE
100 DAYS TO SAVE THE UNION: THE BETTER TOGETHER CAMPAIGN FIGHTS BACK
ALISTAIR DARLING INTERVIEW: “ALEX SALMOND IS BEHAVING LIKE KIM JONG-IL”
Plus
PAUL MASON ON THE RISKS AND REWARDS OF THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION
JON HOLMES, GARY LINEKER’S AGENT, ON FIFA AND THE UGLY SIDE OF THE BEAUTIFUL GAME
IN DEFENCE OF METROLAND: BRYAN APPLEYARD ON LOATHING AND THE SUBURBS
RAFAEL BEHR: IT’S TIME FOR DAVID CAMERON TO STOP VACILLATING ON EU MEMBERSHIP
FREE SCHOOLS AND FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: HELEN LEWIS TAKES ON MICHAEL GOVE AND THE DfE IN COURT
MARY BEARD: LAUGHTER IN ANCIENT ROME WAS NO JOKE
SADIQ KHAN ON LABOUR’S SUCCESS IN LONDON
WIPE-CLEAN RATIONALISM: JOHN GRAY REVIEWS KENAN MALIK’S NEW HISTORY OF ETHICS
THE NS CRITIC AT LARGE, MARK LAWSON, ON THE RISE OF THE PLAYWRIGHT POLLY STENHAM
JOHN BURNSIDE ON ROSE-TINTED MEMORIES OF TEENAGE LOVE: “THE OLDER I GET, THE HAPPIER MY CHILDHOOD BECOMES”
COVER STORY: BETTER TOGETHER CAMPAIGN FIGHTS BACK AS ALISTAIR DARLING CONDEMNS ALEX SALMOND’S “NORTH KOREAN” TACTICS AND A NATIONALIST “CULTURE OF INTIMIDATION”
New Statesman editor Jason Cowley meets Alistair Darling in Glasgow to find out how the Better Together campaign is fighting back with just 100 days to go until the Scottish referendum on independence.
Cowley finds the Better Together leader in a bullish mood. Darling condemns Alex Salmond’s “North Korean response” to Scottish voters about the English influence on their political culture, and compares the First Minister’s behavior to that of Kim Jong-il. Darling tells Cowley he wants to take on Salmond in a televised debate, despite the “culture of intimidation” created by Scottish nationalists.
Darling: Salmond is behaving like Kim Jong-il
“He said on the BBC that people voted Ukip in Scotland because English TV was being beamed in to Scotland. This was a North Korean response. This is something that Kim Jong-il would say. And this is the same BBC for which we all pay our licence fee, and we all enjoy the national output as well as the Scottish output.”
Darling on the “culture of intimidation” created by the nationalists:
Cowley finds the Better Together leader very much preoccupied with Salmond’s rhetoric and positioning. Darling considers the tone of SNP campaigning repellent, and condemns the climate of fear created by the swarm of co-ordinated online commenters known as “cybernats”:
“When I started doing this two years ago I didn’t believe you’d be in a situation in a country like ours where people would be threatened for saying the wrong thing,” Darling says. “Business people keep telling me that it is happening as a matter of fact. They say to me, ‘We’d like to come out and support you but . . .’ It’s not just the cybernats and what they do and the things they call our supporters. People in business are frightened to speak out. I was speaking to a senior academic who told me that he’d been warned by a senior Scottish nationalist that if he carried on speaking like this, it would be a pity for him. It’s a real, real problem for us. We ought to be able to express our views without fear of the consequences . . .
“I haven’t been threatened – they wouldn’t threaten me – but if you are a member of the public and you are trashed for having your say, what do you do? You stop it. No one wants to live in a country where this sort of thing goes on. A culture has been allowed to develop here. This is not a modern civic Scotland.”
Darling v Salmond: “It’s not too late. I challenge him to a debate”:
“[Salmond] wants to turn it into a contest between Scotland and England, which is why he wants a televised debate with David Cameron. That should not happen. I want to debate him. I’m ready to. But he’s refusing to enter into discussions with the television companies – STV, the BBC, Sky and Channel 4. It’s all being cut very fine. It’s not too late. I challenge him to a debate.”
PAUL MASON: WHAT WOULD KEYNES DO?
Remembering John Maynard Keynes’s seminal 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”, Paul Mason, economics editor of Channel 4 News, considers how few of Keynes’s assumptions about the future have come to pass. Today’s world, he writes, has confounded Keynes’s prediction that rising wealth would bring about equality. The revolution in information technology has transformed society, Mason argues, but in ways that even economists are struggling to understand:
Keynes imagined a future where rising wealth led to falling inequality. Instead, economic wealth has grown more slowly than he imagined but physical and information wealth has grown faster and begun to detach itself from the value system. The moment is coming where we have to recognise this and redesign society as boldly as Keynes’s generation did in the mid-1940s.
I think a modern-day Keynes would be obsessed with how to decouple work from income, production from price, organisation from ownership. We know what he achieved in practice: a workable system that revived global capitalism. But he also dreamed of something better than a system based on the pursuit of money.
Amid the pressing challenges – Eurofascism, repression, stagnation, political mistrust – the true Keynesian thing to do is to imagine a humanist future based on abundance and freedom, and explore what tools we have that might make it come about. There is no better time to imagine it.
JON HOLMES ON FIFA AND THE UGLY SIDE OF THE BEAUTIFUL GAME
Gary Lineker’s agent Jon Holmes is not surprised by the current scandal over Fifa’s decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. However, Holmes argues that there is no reason “for the British authorities to look smug”:
Not only have they failed to take any credible kind of stand against the alleged auctioning of the World Cup, but our own game is increasingly consumed by questionable governance and takeovers by a self-serving elite that considers itself above the law and, by virtue of its colossal wealth, immune from attack . . .
The FA was happy to play the system for all its worth in its campaign to stage the 2018 World Cup. David Beckham was sent to woo Jack Warner, the long-serving Fifa executive committee member who resigned from the federation while suspended pending a bribery investigation, and the BBC was pressured to withdraw a documentary exposing Fifa corruption. Both the Prime Minister and Prince William were cajoled to add their lustre to the fruitless, expensive folly.
HELEN LEWIS: TAKING ON MICHAEL GOVE IN COURT
Helen Lewis prepares to attend a first-tier tribunal to support Laura McInerney, an education researcher who has been locked in a freedom of information (FoI) battle with the Department for Education (DfE).
McInerney asked the DfE to publish the applications made by everyone who wanted to open a free school, and the letters accepting or rejecting them. The department refused on the grounds that it might lead to copying of applications or embarrassment of applicant groups.
After a year and a half of ever-higher appeals ruling in Laura’s favour, the DfE still refused to release the information. Michael Gove told an education select committee that he would do “everything possible” to stop it. “I do not think that people who made applications on the basis that those applications would be treated in confidence, and who may, if they have been unsuccessful, expose themselves to the risk of intimidation, should be exposed to that risk by my actions,” he told the Labour MP Pat Glass on 18 December 2013.
Here’s the thing: I’m looking at one of the original free school application forms right now and at the end it says: “Please note, all information provided on this form will be published on the Department for Education website . . . Submission of this form will be treated as consent, from both you and anyone else whose personal data is contained in this form, to the sharing of this information, as set out above.” It even mentions that the applications will be subject to FoI law.
Lewis argues that this “small, technical fight in a dusty courtroom” has profound implications for our ability to hold governments to account:
I’ve been involved only tangentially up to this point and my role in the court case is to be Laura’s “FoI friend” because she’s representing herself. (I will be passing her notes like they do in Judge John Deed. If she’s lucky, some of them may even be relevant to the case.) But the process has made me remember something that Ben Goldacre – who is also running a campaign for transparency; in his case, the publication of all clinical trial data – once said: “It seems to me that a lot of the most important stuff in this world has a large tedium shield erected around it.”
RAFAEL BEHR: TIME FOR DAVID CAMERON TO STOP VACILLATING ON EU MEMBERSHIP
In his final politics column for the New Statesman as political editor, Rafael Behr argues that David Cameron is running out of time to show that he is serious about keeping Britain in the European Union:
Cameron doesn’t want to be remembered as the prime minister who lost Britain’s EU membership by accident but his attachment to the project is plastic. It yields under pressure from anti-Brussels hardliners. Every precedent of his nine years leading the party suggests that if he felt his security as leader depended on making yet more concessions to the Brexit camp, he would do it . . .
If the Prime Minister is serious about keeping Britain inside the EU, he would stop indulging the idea that Europe is a conspiracy perpetrated by other countries against Britain. He would defend Brussels institutions and their founding principles and support, without queasy caveat, the idea of free labour movement. He would push back when his MPs nudge him towards the exit. He would declare that Conservatives do not believe “out” at all costs is a sensible position. He would, in other words, alter the trajectory of his party. He does none of those things and it is almost impossible to imagine him doing them before the election. Afterwards it may be too late.
*Read the Politics Column in full below*
Plus
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