What if they organised a conference on political apathy and no one could be bothered to turn up? Luckily for the Fabian Society, their gamble paid off and more than 700 showed up to Imperial College for their conference, Politics Dead or Alive?
The main draw was Robin Cook, who was addressing reform of the House of Lords just days before the votes in the House of Commons. On that Saturday, a reformed second chamber was a real prospect; by Tuesday afternoon it had been kicked into the long grass. Even 72 hours is a long time in politics. Joke of the day: the ippr’s Matthew Taylor wondered aloud in a session on parties and pressure groups whether ‘thinktanker’ was cockney rhyming slang…
Across town, at the Cass Business School, Gordon Brown addressed the Social Market Foundation. The Chancellor’s speech was an epic – over an hour long. Brown’s aides were flagging it up as one of the three or four most important speeches their boss had made. Afterwards, opinion was divided as to what it had been about: new localism? Markets? Globalisation? In fact it was about all these, and more. It was a lucky dip of a speech – everyone came away with something they wanted.
Essential reading for Gordon Brown is How To Join the Euro, by Giles Radice for the Foreign Policy Centre. The Europhile former MP sets out a plan for Britain joining the common currency by 2006, with a decision in October 2003. The pamphlet is dedicated to Roy Jenkins, ‘a great European statesman’.
The ippr makes a helpful contribution to the debate about community regeneration with the publication of Making Sense of Community, by Vicky Nash and Ian Christie. The book surveys three neighbourhoods in Coventry, looking at the impact of the alphabet soup of government schemes on local people’s lives.
At the other end of the helpful scale is Tomorrow Is Another Country from Civitas, the institute for the study of civil society. This pamphlet on ‘what’s wrong with the UK’s asylum policy’ strains hard to avoid being racist, but doesn’t quite manage it. The premise is that, while previous immigration was ‘an invasion of close cousins’ from ‘genetically linked tribes’ and ‘not even the arrival of large numbers of Irish… dented the essential characteristics of the British’, more recent (black and asian) immigration threatens ‘our’ way of life. Reading this is like being stuck in the back of a taxi with a driver telling you that ‘this used to be a decent neighbourhood…’.
The Social Affairs Unit, a rightwing thinktank, has called for the leaders of the Church of England to resign en masse. In Called to Account: The Case for an Audit of the Failing Church of England the Social Affairs Unit blames liberal clergy for the collapse of the Church of England’s attendance figures and its decline as a force in British society. The answer, it claims, is a return to Christian morality, with the stigmatisation of birth out of wedlock, abortion, adultery and homosexuality. And then people would start going to church again. I doubt this pamphlet is at the top of Rowan Williams’ in-tray as he starts his new job.
What are they putting in the water at Demos? Last month they launched a study into outer space called Black Sky Thinking; this month they called for votes for children, cast on their behalf by the mums of Britain. There’s no doubt what policy wonkers is rhyming slang for.