Chris Bertram

Alan Dershowitz never disappoints, does he?

bq. It is a close question whether “civilians” who agree to participate in the breaking of a military blockade have become combatants. They are certainly something different from pure innocents, and perhaps they are also somewhat different from pure armed combatants.

I like that “perhaps”, as if it might turn out, after further legal cogitation by the professor, that torpedoing or bombing the convoy would be a legitimate act.

I’m sure I’m not capable of putting the point better than Flying Rodent:

bq. Let’s say you were a cartoonish, Ahmadinejadesque lunatic fixated on destroying Israel. How would you go about achieving your goal?

Read the rest.

I know, a second successive post linking to Stuart White at Next Left, but his analysis of “Orange Book” liberalism and its distance from egalitarian liberalism is deadly accurate, especially regarding David Laws (Chief Secretary to the Treasury and former VP at JP Morgan). Laws may not be a libertarian, but he may be the closest thing to it in the British political mainstream: certainly more Hayek than Hobhouse:

bq. Reading someone like David Laws, for example, there is at times a clear sense that the free market produces a distribution of income and wealth which is a kind of natural or moral baseline. It is departures from the baseline that have to be justified. Laws and other Orange Bookers are of course not libertarians, so they are prepared to allow that some departures – some tax-transfers/tax-service arrangements – can be justified. (This is the sense in which they remain social liberals, albeit not egalitarian ones.) But the presumption, for Laws, is clearly for ‘leaving money in people’s pockets’. This presumption runs completely counter to one of the basic claims of contemporary liberalism as developed in the work of such as Rawls, Dworkin and Ackerman.

White is quite right to say, of course, that egalitarian liberals also have serious difficulties with Labour on account of its dreadful record on civil liberties. But my sense is that quite a lot (though not all) of that record was the result of channeling the permanent agenda of the Home Office (note the way in which the Tories, in power advocated ID cards with Labour opposed, with the position reversing some time after 1997).

The Lib Dems (for it was their policy and not the Tories’) have axed the Child Trust Fund, which, as Stuart White points out over at Next Left, was one of those rare policies directly inspired by the egalitarian liberal theorizing of the past forty years. (h/t Virtual Stoa). (To discuss, head over to Next Left).

So we have a reasonable range of would-be Labour leaders to choose from now: two Milibands, Andy Burnham, Ed Balls, Diane Abbot and John McDonnell. For US readers I should explain McDonnell – deputy to Ken Livingstone in the old GLC days – has no chance and Abbot almost none. Which is a pity since at least she’s refusing the distasteful dog-whistling on immigration that is central to the Burnham and Balls campaigns. There’s a good piece on the issue in the Guardian by John Harris (h/t MoN). Harris goes a bit easy on Miliband E’s for my liking – and that’s even though I’m backing EM myself.

The Times has an “obituary for J.A.G. Griffith”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7130873.ece , whose _The Politics of the Judiciary_ was required reading for a whole generation of students of politics and law. A sad loss, and especially at a time when there are renewed signs of judicial activism against the trade union movement in the UK.

British Tory-lite deputy-PM Nick Clegg, has announced a very limited programme of democratic and civil-libertarian reform in the following terms:

bq. I’m talking about the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great reforms of the 19th Century. The biggest shake up of our democracy since 1832, when the Great Reform Act redrew the boundaries of British democracy, for the first time extending the franchise beyond the landed classes. Landmark legislation, from politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests. Who stood up for the freedom of the many, not the privilege of the few.

Over at The Virtual Stoa, “Chris Brooke asks”:http://virtualstoa.net/2010/05/19/its-exam-season/

bq. If you were marking examination papers on nineteenth century British political history, what mark would you give someone who described the 1832 Reform Act in these terms?

Indeed. And see especially, Ted Vallance’s response in comments to Chris’s post.

The struggle of the suffragettes for female emancipation, the extension of the franchise after WW1, all are as nothing compared to Clegg’s plans to curb CCTV cameras and biometric passports ….. An elected second chamber, sounds good. Electoral reform – subject to a referendum in which the dominant party in the coalition will campaign for the status quo. Talk about overselling yourself.

There are two upcoming events in memory of G.A. (Jerry) Cohen, who died last year. The Philosophy Department at University College London, where Jerry taught from 1964 to the mid-1980s, is holding a reception at 5pm on Thursday 17 June at 19 Gordon Square (“details”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/ ) and two days later, on Saturday 19th June, there will be a memorial service at at All Souls College Oxford, where Jerry spent the remainder of his career ( 2.15pm in the Codrington Library). Myles Burnyeat, John Roemer, T. M. Scanlon, and Philippe Van Parijs will be
speaking at the All Souls memorial.

I’m grateful to commenters Lemuel Pitkin and Bill Gardner, who pointed me towards Rodrik’s trilemma the other day. In his latest Project Syndicate piece, Rodrik represents the trilemma thus:

bq. economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable. We can have at most two at one time. Democracy is compatible with national sovereignty only if we restrict globalization. If we push for globalization while retaining the nation-state, we must jettison democracy. And if we want democracy along with globalization, we must shove the nation-state aside and strive for greater international governance.

Possibly for pedantic reasons, I’m not all that happy with this formulation. After all, national sovereignty is pre-eminently a legal concept and democracy might be defined merely in procedural terms, and it isn’t at all obvious why regular elections, legal sovereignty and globalization would be incompatible in the way Rodrik suggests. However, there’s a more careful version in his 2000 paper “How far will international economic integration go?” (J. Econ Perspectives 14:1) where the trilemma is expressed as being between international economic integration, the nation state, and “mass politics”, where the latter refers to

bq. political systems where: a) the franchise is unrestricted; b) there is a high degree of political mobilization; and c) political institutions are responsive to moblized groups. (p.180)

In the 2000 article, Rodrik discusses Friedman’s “Golden Straitjacket” where “mass politics” is the disappearing bit:

bq. the shrinkage of politics would get reflected in the insulation of economic policy-making bodies (central banks, fiscal authorities, and so on) from political participation and debate …. (p. 183)

Cue Stephanie Flanders on the UK’s new Office for Budget Responsibility.

So how will the new Tory-Lib Dem coalition work out? Here’s my prediction. The Tories are supremely political, and they will be looking for an opportunity to go to the country again and secure an overall majority for themselves before they have to implement voting reform. Easier said than done, of course, if you are in the middle of implementing unpopular spending cuts. But Europe could provide an issue: pick a fight with Brussels over “British sovereignty” and force the Lib Dems to take a pro-European stand and bring the coalition down. Then have the election on the single issue of Britain versus Europe. Result. The Lib Dem vote collapses as those who oppose the coalition’s record vote Labour and (Labour supporters, burned by Clegg this time, refuse to vote tactically again).

Some of the British papers are giving publicity to an analysis by the Electoral Reform Society purporting to show that the Alternative Vote system (which Labour is offering to the Lib Dems now, and the Tories are offering a referendum on) would have made little difference. Specifically, the claim is that actual result of 307/258/57/28 (C/L/LD/Oth) would translate as 281/262/79/28 (with STV giving you 246/207/162/35). But this is a completely static analysis, since it presupposes that matters like candidate selection would stay the same under both systems. This is surely wrong: under AV, the main parties would have an incentive to select candidates who would appeal as the second choice of the eliminated parties. This would often mean a convergence to the centre (on the assumption that the Lib Dems stay third, which they might not) but it might mean the selection of Tory candidates who would get the votes of eliminated UKIPers.

Just about every article in this morning’s _Financial Times_ seems to include a paragraph or two about how governments need to “deliver” debt reduction, to satisfy the markets, investor expectations etc. They then typically note that said investors are anxious about whether democratic politicians can “deliver” the austerity measures that the markets “require”. So here’s the question: how long before the _Economist_, the Murdoch press and similar give up on democracy on the grounds of its incapacity to “deliver” firm government? We’ve been here before, of course, in the 1970s, when the _Economist_ and the _Times_ backed the Pinochet coup in Chile. Of the PIIGS, only Ireland has escaped dictatorship in living memory and some of the southern European countries still contain contain authoritarian rumps (with special strength in the armed forces and law enforcement). My guess is that we’ll be reading op-eds pretty soon that raise the spectre of “ungovernability” and espouse “temporary” authoritarian solutions. Maybe such columns are already being written? Feel free to provide examples in comments.

I spent part of yesterday at the local May Fair where, in addition to the stalls selling plants, vegetables, antiques, books, etc, there were representatives of all three of the main political parties and the Greens. I was struck by my own emotional reaction to the various politicos: loathing towards the Tories and indifference towards the Greens and Lib Dems. I felt at home talking to the Labour people even when telling them that their candidate’s main pledge (not to support an increase in student fees) made no sense at a time when my university is shedding jobs, unless they were also planning an increase in funding from general taxation – which they aren’t. So I felt they were my people, still, after years of NuLab, Mandelson, Iraq, and so on. Then there’s Gordon Brown. Plainly a disaster as a politician: either stiff and technocratic or, when he tries the human touch, an embarrassment. I’m still glad he was PM when the banking crisis struck, though, and not George Osborne David Cameron.

But here’s the decisive thing for me. We all know that the next few years in the UK are going to be tough and that the volume of cuts that each party would make are about the same. Where there is a difference is in the distribution of the pain. If the Tories are in power it will fall on the very poorest and most vulnerable. The Lib Dems will be better than that, but they too will appease their middle-class base. A Labour government will still hurt the most vulnerable but less so. Labour aren’t going to win, but it would be very very bad if they came third. Their base, again, composed disproportionately of the worst-off, would become still more marginalized. So share of the vote counts too, even in a first-past-the-post system. I’m voting Labour.

I’m expressing the views above on the general election in a purely personal capacity, of course.

That’s enough on libertarianism … now for something completely different.

I’ve taken up photography quite seriously over the past three years or so: a welcome distraction from other aspects of life, a source of great satisfaction when I get something right, and the occasion of new friendships (both off and on line). In one sense, photography in the digital age is easy, and it wasn’t hard for me to get to a level where I was producing pictures that I was very pleased with. But it some ways it is too easy, because you skip a proper understanding of why things are the way they are, because each additional picture is costless you can just shoot away and not worry as much as you should about technique and composition. So I’ve been shooting film more and more, and thereby discovering some things about the art and about myself.
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