Alarmingly, the Democratic party and liberal leaning commentators seem increasingly willing to rest their hopes for 2004 on optimism that President Bush will simply repeat the mistakes and record of his father. Robert Philpot (Progress, September/October 2003) analyses the flaws in Howard Dean’s messages, but the wider worry is that none of the current Democratic candidates has captured an aspirational economic agenda for their own. Without a clear Democrat plan for improving economic outcomes for families across America, voters will ignore the current administration’s appalling record on job destruction and choose the current president as the least worst option. If that choice is made, Democrat strongholds in the mid-west and west coast start to look much weaker, and 2004 has the potential to be a replay of 1988, seeing a visionless Democrat crushed by a negative, but overwhelming, Republican machine.
Sacha Deshmukh, Hampstead and Highgate CLP
Dear Progress
George W Bush’s presidency is clearly on the ropes and, if they get their act together, the Democrats have a real chance to send this reactionary man back to Texas where he belongs. While being aware of diplomatic niceties, Labour needs to do all it can to help Bush’s opponents. It’s certainly one way that the government can go about making the world a safer place.
If proof were needed that the Lib Dems say one thing to get elected and do something entirely different in power, Labour in Islington can point to many incriminating examples, the most recent of which concerns a local school.
During a council by-election in January this year, Islington’s ruling Lib Dems made the pledge that a poorly performing primary school was not heading for closure, but would instead be turned around. Their candidate, a governor at the school, made it part of her platform to keep the school open. She was subsequently elected.
Yet it came as little surprise when it recently emerged that the Lib Dems did indeed have plans to close the school. Despite recruiting six new teachers, and before waiting for OFSTED recommendations to be implemented, Moorfields will be the third primary school to close since the Lib Dems took office. It may, of course, be pertinent that the school site, which would become a vacant lot if the plans go through, is located on the fringes of the City and has a value estimated at close to £10 million.
The people of Brent East, who recently elected Islington Lib Dem Councillor Sarah Teather as their MP, had better beware. If the wild promises of Brent’s Lib Dems are like those of Islington’s, they might end up feeling short-changed.
Dear Progress
With almost 74,000 men, women and children currently in prisons in England and Wales and as many as three-quarters of these having drug problems, the suggestion made by Dari Taylor MP (Progress, September/October 2003) that a system which is at breaking point can deliver high quality drug rehabilitation is risible. Indeed, simply keeping most prisons drug-free remains an unmet challenge.
The worst thing that could happen is that a few good schemes such as that at HMP Holme House encourage sentencers to send yet more people into custody, exacerbating prison overcrowding. The answer to reducing drug-related crime is high quality rehab services in the community and an extension to diversion schemes like drug treatment and testing orders.
Claire McCarthy Policy and campaigns officer, Howard League for Penal Reform
Dear Progress
John Reid (Progress, September/ October 2003) is right to distinguish between values and policies and to champion the cause of ‘revisionism’, but his account of the relationship between ends/values and means/policies is untenable.
It is unhelpful to think of values as ends and policies as means. In a world of incessant change and uncertain prospects, ‘ultimate’ goals are never achieved: values are the stars we steer by, not destinations we may some day reach. As Eduard Bernstein, the father of revisionism, observed: ‘The final goal of socialism is nothing to me, the movement everything.’