Progressive London conference - liberty, justice and the Obama way

27 January 2009

Very late (I have been stressing over my first ever tax return since Saturday) here is my report from the Progressive London conference on 24 January.

General impressions first:

1) It was packed, which was excellent, not least for catching up with lots of fine, fine ‘progressive' people.

2) ‘Ken's coalition of the good' has always been billed as very London-focused -aimed at creating a co-ordinated opposition to the Johnson administration. However, it seemed that mention of the B-word was quite rare on the day, especially in the main hall plenaries. Instead, the electoral focus seemed to be on Cameron, the Euros and the next general more than anything.

3) There was also lots of talk about the threat of the BNP at the European elections in June - now followed up by a CiF from Jon Cruddas. I was very happy to see that, for reasons covered on my Politics page.

4) There were too many heart-of-the-Labour-government speakers for my liking, but it was quite nice to see Cruddas bossing Harriet Harman in one of the plenaries (and to dream!).

5) Ken Livingstone is still a great politician, and looks extremely well for his enforced 8-month break from the front line. He also seems to have renounced his love affair with financial services, and even said "we don't have to compete with Mumbai". Not what I heard during the election campaign but, now he's closer to my own views on creating a balanced London economy, that can only be a good thing.

To get down to the meat of the day, here are my impressions of the sessions, in a not very consistent level of detail...

Barack Obama never said ‘All I need is a shit hot website'

First off, I went to a packed session called ‘What we should learn from the election of Barack Obama'. I'm afraid I didn't learn much from this, despite the presence of Seth Reznik from Obama's Blue State Digital webteam. This may be down to my already detailed studying of the web aspects of the campaign and the 10-minute time limit per speaker, so I can't blame him alone for that.

I did learn that Dawn Butler MP, despite having Obama's blessings on her office wall, could tell us nothing useful about the subject of the session, and cannot appreciate at all what web 2.0 is supposed to be about. She repeated the phrase ‘pushing our messages' an awful lot, and let slip that Labour's pre-election strategy will be all about ‘post-leg communication' (this bit of whipspeak also means ‘pushing our messages' and refers, apparently, to telling people how brilliantly all the government's new laws have worked out for everyone.)

To be fair, Bob Worcester from MORI did provide the handout of the day at this session - a very useful rundown of the US results, with details of the swing between 2004 and 2008 across each state and a range of sociodemographic groups.

He was keen to tell us how the figures don't back up one of the big assumptions about the campaign, and show that turnout wasn't a whole lot higher among young people (18% of voters, vs 17% in 2004), although the swing in this group was higher than average at 12.5%.

With an overall 5% swing to the new president, the key groups turning around more sharply, according to his analysis, were the young (as mentioned above), first-time voters (with a 16% swing), those on incomes above $200,000 ( 17% - and interesting, in that they know to expect higher taxes) and Hispanic/Latino voters
(13.5% - and also interesting, as conventional wisdom states that these groups won't support black candidates).

‘You sound just like Jack Straw'

For the next morning session, I chose the ‘Civil Liberties and Justice' discussion with Helena Kennedy, Pav Akthar, Lembit Opik and Deborah Littman, chaired by Bruce Kent.

This was worth the entrance fee alone. Deborah from London Citizens (whose astounding powers of on-the-ground community organisation I saw first-hand in last year's election) was first to speak and used her first few minutes to critique the previous session.

Her experience and insight told her that the focus on ‘using the web like Obama' misses the point about the main impact the web had on the US campaign - i.e. principally to get a lot of very inspired people off their computers, meeting each other locally, and working together on the ground.

This is forgotten too easily by most who witnessed the US election only via the medium of the interweb. She believes, rightly, that the community campaigning side was a far more crucial aspect of the liberal victory than our obsession with which technology got these people together.

New Labour seems particularly in danger of making this mistake, with the websites Go Fourth and Labour List both launching/relaunching around now with ‘Obama style' ambitions. Deborah's speech was a warning that, if they think they can win the next election by using fancy web tools - without a real sense of change and new ideas - to make up for the dissolution of their activist base, they will end up very badly burned.

The session then moved on to look at the new Mayor's promised crackdown on knife crime, via a huge increase in the use of stop and search powers to pull knives out of the pockets of hoodies (to paraphrase Boris). Pav Akthar, a Labour councillor from Stockwell, was particularly clear on the danger of creating social divisions with this tactic. He has been searched half a dozen times in his ward, and audience members reported young people they knew being searched on a weekly basis.

With 150,000 S&Ss carried out across London in the past 8 months, and 95% of these finding nothing at all, he summed up well how many people out there are feeling victimised by this policy, with potentially dangerous consequences.

Civil liberties is the specialist subject of both Helena Kennedy and Lembit Opik, and I felt a little bit privileged to hear both of them put strong moral cases against using either terrorism or knife crime as an excuse to cut down our freedoms.

Kennedy made clear her view that terror legislation (used to authorise stops and searches, and to restrict protests) inevitably "leaches into other areas of our lives and contaminates policing".

She was also on excellent form when a young hack clever-arse from the audience suggested that liberty was some kind of middle class luxury that victims of crime or terrorism couldn't afford for us to enjoy. Her relentless torrent of put-downs was a fine thing to witness, but the best bit was when the venerable Labour peer said she was very disappointed to hear him ‘sounding just like Jack Straw' - he he.

Vague title means lists not arguments

For the afternoon, I went along to the ‘Green Cities' session, featuring Tony Juniper (new Green candidate for Cambridge), Darren Johnson AM, Nicky Gavron AM (former Deputy Mayor), Charles Secrett (former FoE head) and Bairbre De Brun (Sinn Fein MEP on the EU climate committee), all chaired by Mark Watts, Ken's backroom climate supremo who made practical many of the green policies we saw in the former mayor's second term - along with the Green AMs, of course.

Unfortunately - and only thanks to my copy of the conference programme - this is about all I can remember of this session. A vague title like ‘Green Cities' is never going to focus a debate and, with five speakers each given 15 minutes, there was barely any time for the audience to contribute.

Instead, I digested my big lunch and tried to concentrate as each speaker presented a shopping list of very good things we should be doing, or should not have stopped doing.

As a result, I'm ashamed to report that I barely wrote down a thing. My notes consist exclusively of Bairbre de Brun mentioning that the European Structural Fund can now be used for retrofitting energy efficiency measures in buildings (of interest only to free insulation geeks like me), and Darren being very fired up about Boris cancelling all the Green Party's programmes.

Which, in a roundabout way, reminds me to encourage you to nominate Councillor Andrew Cooper for ‘Politician of the Year' at this year's Observer Ethical Awards here: https://www.global-research.net/oea/

You don't have to say why on the Observer's form, but if you're wondering why I'm keen to see him on the list of finalists, watch the YouTube video about his free insulation and renewable energy projects in Huddersfield here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sReuce620Yo&feature=channel_page

The same scheme is now on the verge of becoming part of Scotland's budget - thanks to Green MSPs pushing for it with Andy's help. Votes due this week to see if millions more people will benefit, with everything on a bit of a knife-edge according to this Telegraph report.

Other reports from Progressive London here:

Jim Jepps (who went to completely different sessions to me)
http://jimjay.blogspot.com/2009/01/progressive-london-general-thoughts.html
http://jimjay.blogspot.com/2009/01/progressive-london-power-democracy-and.html

Dave Hill on Ken in the main hall
Dave on Jenny on Boris

Labour Home

Lib Dem Voice

Comments:

Rayyan
Posts: 7

Learning from Obama
Reply #1 on : Tue January 27, 2009, 13:38:28

Thanks for the report Sian. I would've made the same comment as the London Citizens person at the Obama session. Labour doesn't get it. The technology Obama used was secondary to what he used it for: as you say, to get people organising. But even more important than what people did was the reason Obama inspired them to do it: because he promised the change they wanted and needed.

There is no way Labour can run a "change" campaign in 2010 because they will have been in government for 13 years! In <a href="http://tinyurl.com/6jdnmr">this piece</a> that I wrote ages ago I also point out that a major part of Obama's success was his ability to inspire: I cannot name one member of the Labour Party that has displayed an ability, let alone a willingness, to inspire people.

Labour's online efforts have been pathetic so far. Labour List has been shown up by <a href="http://www.labourist.org">Labourist</a>, and LabourSpace is a complete misunderstanding of what the net is good for: you go to all the effort of making a video, planning a campaign, getting others to "digg" it up, and then whoopee doo - it is "brought to the attention of senior ministers"! I.e. it will be tossed into the bin reserved for anything from the public.

The internet has the potential to open politics up. But Labour doesn't want to open politics up. All it cares about is holding onto power past 2010.