Simon Heffer (in the Telegraph) and Anthony Howard (on Radio 4′s Today programme) both today (18 November 2009) poured a deal of scorn (in slightly different ways) on the Queen’s speech. (As in: why is it a good idea to have a nice old lady in a crown reading out horrid Labour’s suicide note, blah blah.)

Very few people bother to defend the old ways. Take how right Tony Blair turned out to be when he thought (one guesses) that abolishing the centuries-old office of Lord Chancellor and the House of Lords as home of the nation’s highest court could be done at a stroke and no-one much would mind.

Charles Moore (and a few old judges) minded, just as he disliked the way the new Speaker of the House of Commons wanted less mummery in the way he dressed. But few others do mind, and most probably more or less approve.

I find this sort of subject tricky. But the issues can have substance, and that is worth pointing out.

(1) The Queen’s speech
The Queen is notionally the head and font of all government, and her presence in the Palace of Westminster amongst her Lords and Commoners reminds us firstly that there are many parties to government and secondly that the nation is different (larger, more permanent) than any particular set of ministers.

(2) The Speaker
The Speaker owes his allegiance (as do we all) to the whole nation and to the state represented by the Crown though he may only do as the House of Commons dictates. He is dressed in a funny way to express his embodying the unchanging dignity of his office (just as a judge is).

(3)
The fact that the Lord Chancellor (ex officio, the most senior judge, and head of the judiciary, and chair of the House of Lords) was a political appointment served the purpose of ensuring that legal matters were at the heart of government deliberations.

(4)
The fact that some of the country’s most senior judges (the Law Lords) occasionally made the House of Lords the most senior court in the land produced the effect that the full might of the state was seen to be at the service of the law.

All of these cases produce fictions, and some might now be thought absurd. It seems that some effects (clothes, wigs, ceremonies) have gone from conferring dignity to evincing guffaws. That’s fair: styles change. It may even be that we can no longer use pretence as a way of bridging rather peculiar understandings – muddles and fudges.

Take the separation of the judiciary from the legislature. On paper, that makes sense and may turn out to work well. But the old way ensured that the tense negotiation between judges and politicians was encompassed pretty well within government. If we feel a need to move on, that’s fine. Nothing stays the same for ever. But let’s at least accept the merits of the old way. Let’s not kid ourselves that we are necessarily going to produce anything marvellous out of our new rationality.

At this writing, 6000 people have looked at the piece on Number 10′s channel. It isn’t by any means the most popular of GB’s outing on YT. Several others have put him up there with Tony Blair’s ratings. He is said to look awful – hopelessly winsome and fulsome. It’s true, he does. But if you look at some other postings, he’s a revelation. Try this one on globalisation. (Here’s the text of it.) He’s funny and sharp and quite clever, just like his fans say he often is in private.

I say “quite clever”: I have looked briefly elsewhere at the evidence as to GB’s intellectuality.

In general, it’s important that politicians should post informal, short material on line. It’s one of the few arenas in which they stand a chance of reaching the young, and do it on their own terms – without the dreaded intermediation of the professional media cynics.

The YT announcement of the MPs’ expenses idea was horribly wrong of course. Let’s list the reasons.

(1) The young audience couldn’t be expected to know how this sort of initiative should not properly come from the PM at No 10. (It isn’t a government matter after all, and this audience were being misled that it might be.)

(2) Hot-foot announcements are the best way to convey the idea that an initiative has not been thought-through, debated, and made consensual. That’s to say: social media are precisely useless for the work GB chose to use them for that day.

(3) The social media are an elephant trap for leaders, from whom – in perception terms – we need dignity above all. YT is never obviously a good vehicle for dignity and is at least a testing one. That’s its downside.

(4) In a classic PR blunder, GB sets off talking uncontroversially and virtuously about how he’d like people to aspire to be MPs the way they aspire to be firemen. And then, having grabbed our attention as a mentor or a senior statesman, he uses the opportunity to play a political game. It’s a cheat.

Still, GB and the rest of us have much more to gain than lose by keeping the PM on YT.

The blogosphere may become a very useful place for governments or parties and the societies they serve. The web is a wonderful place and not necessarily scurrilous and dissident. Barack Obama’s success with social media demonstrates both that the internet is a place where politicians can reach to “the masses” and (less cheerfully) that it is often used for messages which are reduced to simplism.

Just because Gordon Brown’s team completely misread how the web’s informality might play for them, that doesn’t mean that other politicians can’t do well with it. (It’s worth adding that Red Rag would not have worked as intended even if it had successfully launched and been read. I write a bit a bout that at my more personal blog, richarddnorth.com.)

However, political parties ought to be aware that the informality of the web, whilst not necessarily an inevitable problem, can easily be a snare.

The lesson which David Cameron’s team ought to be learning is one that flows from the workings of the New Labour machine from its earliest days. This is that nothing – nothing – can stop the public in the end getting the message about the tone, attitude and style adopted by a party – whether in opposition or government.

It is on open question whether Labour can every recapture its reputation for idealism and public interest. At the moment, of course, it suffers from the public’s belief that Labour is more interested in itself than in the country.

The Tories face three enormous difficulties. One is that they are rightly perceived as a party which believes that its real reason for existence is to govern. That is an unromantic and not obviously idealistic reason for existence. It is not a million miles from Labour’s quite new condition of pragmatism.

Another difficulty is that the Tories are not obviously very superior to New Labour in their mode of operation. Their chief spin doctor is an ex News of the World editor and though he may be talented and public-spirited, it is hardly likely that he is a stranger to the dark arts. What’s more, the Tories seem to be run by a kitchen cabinet of insiders.

But the great difficulty is that at this moment there is very little sign that the Tories are making a concerted effort to demonstrate that they understand this is a field of major concern. Seeming and being straightforward, collegiate, frank and even formal – these are the signs that a party is conducting itself in a way which recognises how corrosive the last few years have been.

This is, by the way, the opposite of trumpeting oneself as “post-bureaucratic”, as David Cameron has been doing, not least in the Spectator.

The most important point is that this is an historic run, in the sense of looking backward. Barack Obama’s campaign has been about the overhang race and slavery has produced in America. Of course it is also pivotal: win or lose, Obama’s run makes it clear that in the American future it will be harder to blame political failure on one’s colour. Still, even if this campaign is changing America, it is the prejudiced past which has dominated this election.

We know this is true because we know that Barack Obama would not have got as far as he has had he been white. Neither white liberals nor the majority of blacks would have warmed to him as a white man. 

There are lots of wonderful elements to a campaign which has energised the young and the black electorates, including (a pessimist might say) a dangerous appetite for the messianic in too many Obama supporters. They want him to be The Change – to be that transformative being who can sprinkle stardust over obdurate reality. We can only hope that the candidate hasn’t fallen for messianism himself. That would bring him into Tony Blair territory.

Obama is an interesting candidate, for sure. He is fluent, cool and easy in his skin. He is steely, ruthless or tough according to your taste. In all these respects he reminds us of Blair. 

But we should not pursue that comparison too far. The essential thing about Blair was that he had a class chip on his shoulder. It was incomprehensible, but it was there. He acted working class. Obama does not seem to be pretending to be anything. He’s not pretending to be from the hood. He’s not pretending to come from a redneck state, as George W Bush did with his faux-Texan identity. And he’s not playing the feel-your-pain card as Bill Clinton seemed to do with his fractured background.

Actually, though, one could say that Obama is pretending to be black and that is something which wits often laid at Bill Clinton’s door. One of the reasons race will change in America is that there’ll be too much mixing up of the races for racism to work well. Like an increasing number of blacks, Obama is genetically half-white. It should be meaningless to ask whether he is white or black culturally, and not much comfort that it is a question more importantly asked by blacks than whites. But I do think it is fair to accuse Barack Obama of having pretended to have found his former pastor Wright’s cast of mind attractive. I think too highly of Barack to believe that he meant it. I prefer to believe that Obama could not resist hoovering up a little more blackness than he felt, or even that he felt the need to live out a blackness which was as near to authentic simplicity as he could find. 

Unlike nearly everyone, I disliked Obama’s race speech in Philadelphia this March. It tried to argue that blacks had to be allowed the awfulness of some of their race-based rhetoric. The speech had two great merits. It worked. And it showed how powerful and awful the legacy of race remains in America. I don’t say Obama was wrong to make the speech, but it remains a pandering effort. It reminded us that the man who has helped knife race as a political issue and to transcend it, could only achieve power by sloshing nonsense over this key issue.

I am ambivalent about the prospect of an Obama presidency partly because it ought to matter that if Obama had been white he would not have been on offer. We would presumably be debating the merits of a Hillary Clinton candidacy. Mrs Clinton would equally have been an identity politics candidate, so there’s some parity there. But Senator McCain would be looking better than he does now. He would have been fighting a routine candidate, not The One.

About three-quarters of the time, Senator McCain has said far wiser and more decent things than Senator Obama. But he has also seemed less steady than one requires of a President. So one isn’t thrilled by the choice to be made between the two men.

I feel much warmer toward an Obama presidency when I consider the following. The whole world, let alone America, needs the US to have a black president at some point and probably right now. Good or bad, blackness will be a hugely valuable factor in an American president at this moment. And I mean abroad as much as at home. The wider non-caucasian world will note Obama’s colour and his middle name. It will help them get over themselves.

It is also hugely valuable that Barack Obama seems like a black man who is less hung up by his race and has given it far fewer political hostages than it is likely another black politician would have managed. 

Maybe merely by finessing America’s race politics in his own brilliant style Barack Obama has shown the smarts and the reserves a president needs. And hell, he may govern much more like a Republican – a sound government Tory – than anyone supposes. He may govern as the kind of Republican we softies always hoped McCain might have been.

We can be sure of one thing. If he lives and thrives long enough, which we must ardently hope for, he will cease to be The One. And that’ll be two good lessons learned. The race lesson is obvious. The lesson that politics is not religion will be just as useful.

ends

Gordon Brown is almost certainly not a great intellect (though he has his fans on that score). He reads serious books, but that proves rather little. According to John Lloyd, Gordon Brown’s thinking is more interestingly of the right than of the left. For a man who wants to get things done, he certainly doesn’t seem very diplomatic. But he may have grasped the right of end of some important sticks. He may be an important figure in the history of 21st Century globalisation.

Gordon Brown is a serious man and seems seriously interested in the world economy. He has spoken rather well about globalisation and the need for open markets, light-touch regulation and the needs of the world’s poor. Several years ago, he developed ideas for how the G8 and others could reduce the debt of the poorest coutries. He has consistently argued for increased state aid flows to the Third World. He has argued for some months that the IMF ought to become an early warning system for the world’s economy. He has suggested that the World Bank become the bank of environmental security as well as economic development. He wants the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank) to bcome the location of international regulatory oversight. 

Actually, there is a good deal of serious doubt that reducing Third World debt has been quite as helpful as supposed, or that increasing aid flows (insofar as it has happened) is all that valuable. In particular, it isn’t obvious that specific Brown proposals from the 1990s on the means of debt reduction have been adopted.

Even now, it isn’t clear quite how original Gordon Brown’s ideas for global financial reform really are. And of course we have no idea how sucessful they will be.

It would be fair to say that Gordon Brown does not seem to have done himself any favours in persuading the rest of the world’s leaders to follow his lead. He seems deliberately at various points to have snubbed his fellow EU leaders and George Bush. 

Still, we may yet come to accept that the “Brown Plan”for dealing with the credit crunch really sprang from his brain and was a success. It may yet emerge that his wider ideas are also really his, and that he steered them into happy reality.

In short, it just possible that this brooding, perhaps paranoid, certainly difficult man had talents which turned out to be hugely valuable.

This site is all about government and in part about the need for politicians to speak truthfully about their role in it. In the modern world, that requires us to unpick personality from policy and phoney perceptions from practical reality. That is why the fantasy premiership of Gordon Brown matters to MBG.

Here’s a good reminder from Sky TV of the unfolding Brown premiership

For a son of the manse, etc, Gordon Brown seemed and seems to have remarkably slight contact with the ordinary standards of truthfulness which in every breath he has told us to expect from him.

Put it this way: with Mr Blair, at least we knew we were getting a theatrical production. We knew what we were getting. Not so with Gordon Brown.

Here was a man who was spun as being above spin. More, he was its antithesis. He was sold as being strong on substance. The narrative his people wove was of a man whose reality was solid, intellectual and serious. He himself inaugurated his premiership as ushering in a new government, of strength and resolve.

The media, always suckers for a change and a narrative, lapped it up. 

For a few months, Gordon Brown was able to seem vaguely strong and silent during a series of crises (a bombing, some flooding and an animal disease outbreak) in which there was a well-oiled state response involving professionals who had no need of much from the Prime Minister. Looking solid was all that was required: a perception management issue.

These were duly spun as masterful performances. There soon followed a series of dents to this story. There were instant initiatives, a U-turn (the 10 percent tax fiasco), indecision (trailed and cancelled general election), prevarication.

We should only be as unkind as necessary. If GB was merely a clunky, unattractive man we could easly warm to him as born that way and so what. But he has allowed himself to be bullied into phoney smiles and an imitation of the touchy-feely which is especially creepy. He is a living embodiment of the wisdom of not pretending to be what one is not unless the performance comes naturally or can be convincing.

We should also remember that Brown has never acquired a reputation for the honesty he trumpets as being his hallmark.

As a dark horse, he need only have kept quiet and delivered solid achievement for others to big-up. But actually, he has always pumped out nonsense about himself and his works. 

Let’s begin with the whole “no more Tory boom and bust” thing. Boom and bust cycles were in much better shape in the last years of Tory government and Brown had only not to mess up that inheritance to have a decent economy. Ditto, independence for the Bank of England. John Major had inaugurated a new openness in the way the Bank’s committee issued its advice on inflation control – all any Chancellor had to do was follow that advice.

Thus leaves aside the deeper problem of whether the tripartite system for financial regulation which Gordon Brown invented has proved fit for purpose. 

In an ordinary politician this lack of frankness would be accepted as normal. But Mr Brown fashioned an image of himself as thriving on a higher standard of truthfulness.

As we were buffeted around in the credit crunch of September and October 2008, Brown repeatedly said that it was a crisis imported from the US. Indeed, it seemed that the UK economic downturn, led by a revaluation of the housing market, was going to be hidden under the US story. Had that worked, it would have been a truly dreadful case of deception.

Of course it won’t work. The degree to which the crisis in the UK financial world was to do with UK government policy will emerge, and Gordon Brown’s culpability with it.

There is plenty of blame to go round, but Gordon Brown won’t escape a share.  

Here’s a prediction. The UK plan which seems to be leading the world in framing what a rescue strategy might look like will emerge as the creation of clever Treasury officials and perhaps of Alistair Darling. Let’s hope Gordon Brown heaps praise on them.

As the plan was announced and huge quantities of tax-payer involvement were put into play, Gordon Brown still seemed to think it was him had worked a miracle. He claimed not so much the high ground as the craggy terrain of solidity:

For savers, for small businesses, and for home owners, we must in an uncertain and unstable world be the rock of stability on which the British people can depend.

This is the first financial crisis of the global age. In extraordinary times, our financial markets ceasing to work, the Government cannot just leave people to be buffeted about.

The next day two Times writers cast quite important doubt on Gordon Brown as The Rock. Peter Riddell, never unnecessarily brutal, said that Brown had a dangerous habit of avoiding any admission of vulnerability, not least in refusing to admit the country was in recession. Camilla Cavendish said she would have more faith in Brown’s claims to know how to regulate world finance if he had managed to regulate UK finances well.

It was interesting that Mr Brown’s main move was to insist that he would be relying less on party political special advisers and more on civil servants. In practice, he chose to surround himself with a cadre of civil servants who had proven themselves to him quite personally, not least whilst serving him at his notoriously closed and cliquey Treasury. It matters a great deal that this may have have compromised them as impartial, apolitical bureaucrats. But it is worth noting that Mr Brown has picked them out, and held them close. That is almost the reverse of what he wanted us to believe. It is the opposite of the ideal whereby it is the Civil Service which deploys its forces, rather than ministers.

Sue Cameron, of the Financial Times, has long made a study of the relationship between Westminister and Whitehall. Here are several of her pieces for the FT which log the almost paranoid clannishness of Gordon Brown’s premiership as it emerged (rather quickly) when he became PM.

Hole at the heart of government
Sue Cameron
FT
2 September 2008

Brown bunker traps Sir Gus
Sue Cameron
FT
4 November 2007

Prowler Brown goes walkabout
Sue Cameron
FT
4 December 2007

Uncle Joe Brown?
Sue Cameron
FT
8 June 2007

Whitehall starts singing the blues
Sue Cameron
FT
29 April 2008

David Cameron was making one of his toga-moment speeches, and no harm in that. He is keen – as all politicians are – to say that government is over-centralised and should be devolved, decentralised and generally returned to civil society, local authorities and The People.

The problem that local authorities attract few voters and spend mostly national money rather scuppers some of that. But the concern here is that the anti-Whitehall bias. DC was talking as though we could have some internet-driven “Wisdom of the Crowd” and that it would be fairer and more efficient than anything civil servants could give us. Here’s a flavour of what he said:

The bureaucratic age

I have described the 20th century as the ‘bureaucratic age’. With huge advances in communications and travel, it became possible to concentrate power in the central state. Wise men in Whitehall had a monopoly of both information and capability…….

At the same time, our national culture emphasised conformity and knowing your place. There was a sense that top-down control was not only practical and efficient, but that it was also fair and moral.

So even after the denationalisation of the economy, the apparatus of civic and social organisation remains firmly under central control. Schools, hospitals, police forces, town councils… all are remotely controlled by central government.

The post-bureaucratic age

I believe that it’s time to abandon that model once and for all. It is not fair and moral, just as it is not practical and efficient, for the state to control society….. Society no longer emphasises conformity and knowing your place…

Democratic control

Why? Two reasons. First, because local democratic control works, well – locally: it allows communities to tailor customised solutions to local problems, rather than having to fit into a national template.

And second – perhaps paradoxically – local control works nationally too. Diversity strengthens the country as a whole. From diversity and competition and picking up tips from each other and making mistakes and learning from them….