Guardian obit here. Someone told me that the official assigned to Harry Perkins in A Very British Coup was modelled on him, but that may be apocryphal. This isn’t:
At the GLC Stonefrost worked with Labour and Conservative leaderships. During the moderate Labour administration of 1973-77, he had to negotiate with central government and the City to avoid any risk of London following New York into a financial mess. Then he ran the GLC’s finances for the radical Conservative leader Sir Horace Cutler.
But his work during the years of Ken Livingstone’s leadership, from 1981, allowed him to demonstrate his extraordinary capacity to run a big institution at a difficult time. Not only did he allow Livingstone to pursue his brand of politics within a legitimate budgetary framework, but when it came to the campaign against abolition of the GLC by Margaret Thatcher’s government, Stonefrost generated charts showing how unworkable the post-abolition world would be. His best effort was a “spider diagram” with hundreds of lines from London government organisations to each other, showing how abolition would create fragmentation and chaos.
At the height of the Thatcher v Livingstone struggle, Stonefrost’s officials pulled off an audacious stunt by manipulating the government’s complex local-government finance system so as to suck in £200m of additional grant after the end of a financial year. Worse, other authorities ended up paying for the shift of resources. The manoeuvre was wholly legal and very clever. It is hard to think of any other finance chief who would have had the ingenuity or confidence to do such a thing. Moreover, the government was left fuming with rage at seeing its own financial weaponry turned against itself.
One of the greatest municipal civil servants of his generation. No wikipedia entry.
Larry Solum has just posted an update of his Legal Theory Lexicon entry on Distributive Justice. I keep telling (graduate and undergraduate) students that they need to look at the Legal Theory Lexicon as their first stop for just about any concept that Solum covers. Its really an amazing resource. A decade ago you’d have needed access to a very good library to get hold of something half as good; now, anyone might come across it just by browsing.
The Cognitive Disability conference at which Michael spoke (and to which he referred here) is now available as a podcast (more or less) in its entirety here. Some of the podcasts come through rather slowly, and, annoyingly, because I heard that it was so much fun, I can’t get the final session to load. Still, Michael’s talk comes through fine.
I know, I know, Holbo is random pop culture guy, but you seem to be the best candidate for CTer with (at least prior) affection for “Take Marx… Take Jesus… Take Hope.”
That’s probably right (and I like the gentle suggestion that I am the not-popular culture guy, or, as one of our readers said to me, the “archaic lower-middle-brow British culture” guy). I even saw the Housemartins once, which given my record of attending live popular music events demonstrates remarkable affection (none for 15 years, and only about 10 which didn’t involve Loudon Wainwright III or Richard Thompson before that). I’ve even got all their albums (well, both of them).
But, I thought, is there a song for today? Sitting on a Fence?; Get up off our knees?; Heaven Help Us All (introduced by Peely)?; We’re Not Going Back? (The Christians among you are bound to recognise the sentiments in Sunday isn’t Sunday — I have a “Antidisestablishmentarians for Obama” button, which I got because I figured it announced my membership of a vanishingly small minority group.. My friend told me I was being elitist. “Why, antidisestablishmentarianism is a non-elite view, here”; “Yes, but only elitists know what it means”. What can you do?)
Take your pick. And, sure, the world will be a little bit better tomorrow, but not enough better that you can’t make it better still.
Update: Doug K nominates Caravan of Love. I could go with that.
No doubt if I had more time I’d find the right answer to this question, but I’m lazy and/or pressed for time, so here goes. For quite a while now the polls which include Nader and Barr show a significantly bigger distance between Obama and McCain than those which exclude Nader and Barr. I thought I understood why, but when my 12 year old asked me to explain my explanation was so bad that not only did it collapse as I tried to articulate it, but it also disappeared (I no longer remember what my supposed understanding was). Why is it? Barr seems to get about 1%, and Nader 2-3% when they are included (both numbers seem remarkably high to me, but what do I know?). Could it be that Nader, as well as Barr, is drawing mainly from McCain (protectionist Republicans who are either too racist to vote for Obama or too sophisticated to believe he’ll be a protectionist?). Or is there some technical explanation that I don’t understand?
Just to be clear, and to head off the accusations of partisanship that the previous post invites, I am usually about as willing to think well of sensible Republicans as of sensible Democrats on education policy. Nor do I mean to criticise McCain for supporting choice. The reason I say it indicates he has no ideas is that everyone is pro-choice now (“we are all pro-choice Georgians!” could be Senator McCain’s slogan); the issue is just what kinds of choice. Choice through the housing market, choice within public school districts, magnets, charters, etc… And, as Laura says:
Vouchers aren’t going any where. Anybody who talks about them really has no clue about the realities of the politics of education.
Vouchers are a very small part of the picture and the only people who doubt this are leftists who see vouchers as some sort of cunning plan to privatise the whole of public schooling. In the next decade, even if McCain were to become President, we might possibly see the emergence of 5 new voucher programs (but I doubt it would be that many, frankly). For readers who care about my own views, not only am I an unenthusiastic supporter of several voucher programs, I’ve even written a whole book expressing my support for school choice (despite the complaint of one prominent academic reviewer I shan’t name, who presumably didn’t bother to beyond the first couple of pages, that I oppose it). Vouchers are a band aid, and I don’t mean that as an insult; I use band aids myself, they’re handy when you have a small cut, and are better than nothing when you have something more serious. But they are only a band aid, and that is the sensible thing to say about them. In policy environments where more comprehensive interventions are not going to happen (Milwaukee in the early 90s, DC in the mid 2000s), sure, go ahead, give vouchers a try (and design the programs so that we can actually study them and figure out what the effects are). But understand that vouchers are at the margins of urban schooling, let alone of the larger policy environment, and talking about them as if they were something else displayed McCain’s lack of interest in education.
Still, I can’t resist correcting McCain on two points.
After McCain refrained from saying anything about NCLB at the Republican convention Laura challenged me to write about McCain’s education policy. So I dutifully tried, but found it hard not to seem more partisan than I actually am. However, I had a good look at both candidates’ websites, so I was more or less unsurprised by McCain’s answer to the final question in last week’s debate. (Just in case that sounds like a complaint that it was not until the final, rushed, question in the final debate that education was asked about, it isn’t: I can’t imagine anyone’s vote hinges on what a presidential candidate says about education; given how little influence presidents have over what happens in schools that is probably sensible; and anyway all candidates have proven extremely adept at not answering questions).
My wife commented the other day that Sarah Palin has the rare talent of being able to make complete gibberish sound like it means something (a combination of that odd wink, and the modulation of her voice). As usual, my national chauvinism got the better of me: we, the British, have the finest exemplars of that skill, and Palin seems like an amateur to me. Two words: Idle; Unwin.
When my 11-year old tires of the young adult novels she is forced to read (is it really necessary to give pre-teens a diet of child-abuse, divorce, gore, death, and suicide?) she skips to Alan Coren’s Arthur books, long out of print, but marvelously funny. Coren’s been gone for nearly a year, now, and here’s rather sad but loving tribute. Hearing Sandi Toksvig talk about him made me look around for old obits; and I found this lovely account of the funeral by Simon Hoggart.
The Spencer Foundation has just announced the second of its major strategic initiatives: on civic learning and civic action. Here’s the announcement, and here are the application guidelines. Please direct queries to the program administrator (whose contact details are at the bottom of the guidelines page).
Ingrid’s post below (plus a couple of other events) prompted me to look for G.A. Cohen’s new book: Rescuing Justice and Equality (UK) is apparently already out in the US despite being published on November 1st. I bought several copies (so my students can read it with me), and hereby promise that I’ll have some sort of review here in January (January, because, unlike Richard Arneson, I need time to review books that haven’t officially been published yet).
For the (numerous) PG Wodehouse fans at CT, here’s a link to the first episode of Marcy Kahan’s dramatisation of Psmith in the City. It’s excellent: Kahan captures the feel of the text, without making it too wordy or quaint. And timely too (though I doubt there are many people currently in the City or on Wall Street who are starting work at 10, clocking off at 5, and feeling oppressed by such barbaric work hours).
Obituaries here and here. I should say upfront that I never met Camejo, but we had many associates in common. The people I knew who had been expelled from the SWP around the same time regarded him with something like reverence; in fact it always seemed to me that he was the one person who could have led the various layers of people who were expelled into some sort of alternative grouping. Perhaps he thought that would have been a bad thing to do; if so, perhaps he was right. He preferred to put his efforts (and his not inconsiderable financial support) into a wider range of (admittedly only somewhat) broader efforts. After expulsion from the SWP he worked for Merrill Lynch; and after being expelled from there he was a major figure in the socially responsible investing movement. According to the wikipedia article, he participated in the 1960 Olympics on the Venezualan yachting team.
We were talking about him over dinner last night and, finding out he was a socialist, my 11-yr-old said “oh well, then he’d have supported Obama”. My response: “I wouldn’t bet on it”. Merrill Lynch outlived him by a week. I’m sorry that he’s gone.
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) is apparently already out in the US despite being published on November 1st. I bought several copies (so my students can read it with me), and hereby promise that I’ll have some sort of review here in January (January, because,