Novara is a new weekly show that engages with political theory, current affairs and cultural debate. It is hosted by activist and graduate student Aaron Peters on Resonance FM. Discussion ranges from political aesthetics and activism to social history, locating these debates within a topical context relevant for the listener.

Speaking with activists, commentators, academics and the every day men and women who participate and inquire, the show seeks to offer interpretations neglected by the mainstream. Be it talking to a squatter and anthropologist about reform of squatting law or a student and artist about protests against cuts to higher education, the show aims to provide incisive and critical voices about power and social change.

2011 has already been a momentous year in politics both in Britain and the wider world. Despite an abundance of content surrounding such events, original analysis can be hard to find. Novara offers a critical alternative to the assumptions that animate mainstream discussion whilst remaining accesible and germane.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, by Owen Jones, Verso, June 2011. 

Owen Jones has taken on a big job documenting the way most of the citizens of these islands are commonly portrayed. It’s a task long overdue given the changes that have turned “the salt of the earth” into the target of routine abuse by The Sun and Daily Mail, the patronised guests of Jeremy Kyle and the caricatures of Little Britain. 

Vicky Pollard from Little Britain

“Chavs” - a 21st century acronym for those of our fellow Britons styled Council Housed And Violent - have become representative of the feckless “underclass”. They are those who choose benefits over hard work, who prefer drunkenness, obesity and drug addiction to fitness, who elevate racism above decency and single motherhood above respectable family life. They are the people locked well outside the communities of Middle England and those above such communities, to many of our politicians, journalists and commentators they are natives of a foreign land. 

It is easy to forget that 9/11 occurred just a matter of weeks after the riots in the cities of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. From May until July 2001, these cities were rocked by violence reflecting deep tensions between white working-class and Muslim communities. The riot’s longer term impact has profoundly affected the way that the British government thinks about terrorism and Muslim communities. In the ‘Summer of Discontent’, ethnic and racial tensions boiled over because of issues related to the north of England’s urban decay such as social exclusion, isolation and unemployment. The Cantle report, commissioned in the wake of the riots, reported that white working-class and Asian Muslim communities were living “parallel” but totally separate lives. Despite the similarity in experiences, these communities blamed each other for these conditions.

Given David Willetts’ performance over the last year, it is no surprise that academics and students at Oxford University have launched a campaign calling for ‘no confidence’ in the Universities minister, which Anthony Barnett posted about in OK. Having designed a new funding system that is incoherent and unjust and that is likely to be more expensive than the one it is replacing, Willetts is now setting out to undermine even further the very notion that universities should be publicly-funded centres for independent thought and learning. Behind the traditional idea of academic freedom there is a profound understanding that goes back to Galileo of the need for societies to protect autonomous scholarship from the authorities of the time, whether this be the Catholic Church or corporate finance.

The 80 per cent cut in university teaching budgets, the wholescale attack on arts and humanities and, of course, the trebling of fees, signals the determination of the Coalition to open higher education up to the logic of the market. It was disturbing enough back in early May when Willets floated the idea that wealthy students should be able to buy places in oversubscribed universities—a plan he quickly dropped after a public outcry and a humiliating climbdown in front of Parliament—but now we know that he is meeting regularly with American for-profit education providers like Apollo and Education Management Corporation who are lobbying hard to mop up the ‘market’ for students who fail to find a place in the higher education system he has worked so hard to distort. These are precisely the companies currently under investigation in the US for behaving like speculators whose sub-prime mortgages caused economic devastation. We are, if Willetts gets his way, facing a serious assault on our universities.

Recently I took an evening stroll across the Thames to see the Southbank’s anniversary celebrations of the 1951 Festival of Britain. I had spent that day discussing the prospect of a Scottish referendum on independence at the London office of ippr at Charing Cross; I then walked over the river to the Southbank. As someone who identifies as both British and English, what was I looking for? A sense of belonging, after a debate that had set out for me in striking terms the distinctiveness of the Scottish sense of national identity?

Festival of Britain 2011

What I found, as I sipped my pint and surveyed the exhibitions under a canopy of bunting, was a microcosm of the Union and its problems.

The four-month celebration, which reinvents the 1951 Festival of Britain, opened just over a month ago. It was loudly trumpeted by the Telegraph, while Nick Curtis argued in the Standard that, along with the Royal Wedding and the success of the film The King's Speech, it showed a 'new confidence' and 'quiet pride' in 'home-grown' British culture and values. Thankfully, I found not only Handel and tea, but also questions. An open-air Avenue of Portraits, running along the walkway between the Royal Festival Hall (the only permanent structure built for the 1951 festival) and the Queen Elizabeth, features photos of citizens from across the union.

Festival of Britain 1951

The placard states: "In the 1951 festival, they wondered, ‘But who are these British people?’ Here we are asking the same questions. Who are you? Were you born on these islands? What do you look like? Did you come here from another place? What do you believe in? How do others see you?" It hit me that one question was missing: “Do you see yourself as British?”

This article is part of OurKingdom's debate on The Scottish Spring.

We no longer know who we are. That is, the English no longer know who they are. The Scottish do. The unforeseen consequence of Scottish devolution was the transmission of Scottishness from emotional sense to political force. This flowering of Scotland has shone an even greater light on stunted and weed-like Englishness.

There are two basic forms of nationalism - optimistic and antagonistic. The latter is about the rejection of others. It is self-identity through difference. It assigns others negative traits, historical crimes, sinister characteristics. It becomes purely defensive and aggressive. Trainspotting’s Renton gives a good commentary on this type of nationalism:

"Some hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are COLONISED by wankers. Can't even find a decent culture to be colonized BY. We're ruled by effete assholes."

The latest to be called on to prove its bona fides in the UK is the University and College Union (UCU). UCU describes itself as, ‘ the largest trade union and professional association for academics, lecturers, trainers, researchers and academic-related staff working in further and higher education throughout the UK’. If you are to believe recent bloggers it has moved definitively beyond the pale.

Since the near collapse of the international banking sector in 2007-8 many of us have wondered why the news media gave so little warning of the huge crisis coming. Media companies and individual journalists have tended to offer two defences, interspersed with the occasional mea culpa. The first is that no one, including top financiers and politicians, saw it coming, so why should they have? The second dredges through the tea leaves of past coverage to declare that they and others did sound warnings but no-one was really listening. Though they contradict each other these explanations contain grains of truth. Many at the top, who should have known better, stuck to their flawed financial market models and seemed unable to comprehend alternative scenarios [i]. Yes, a handful of journalists, such as Gillian Tett at the FT, did publish their concerns periodically prior to Northern Rock’s collapse in August 2007. 

However, both attempts to exonerate the media obscure the main problem: financial journalism, like financial regulation, over recent decades has been ‘captured’ or neutralised by those it is meant to hold to account. This became increasingly clear to me during two lengthy studies of the UK’s financial sector and its news coverage [ii]. The few dissenting journalists, prior to the crash, were all but drowned out by the uncritical and/or over ‘exuberant’ financial news copy that had become the norm. I am also convinced that the problems of the financial sector were more widely known in City circles than is now publicly admitted. That they were rarely revealed in the media should not surprise us if one accepts the confident statement made by one of my interviewees that ‘the national financial press are written for the City by the City’.

I was well aware when openDemocracy started to serialise The Skinback Fusiliers ten weeks ago that there would be more brickbats than plaudits coming our way. The publishing world had already made it clear that I would wait a long time before it saw the light of day through “the normal channels,” despite the fact that I have had about forty books published, some of which had been nominated for awards. Being a television writer as well, I am used to the reality of auto-censorship (for want of a better phrase) but one lives in hopes that print publishers are a little less afraid of kicking over the traces. Maybe it’s a matter of luck? Maybe not.

One of the great things about openDemocracy/Our Kingdom is the opportunity for engagement it presents. From the first episode there was feedback, and much of it was pretty predictable. A group of military-minded critics – James Parker 797, Sceptical, Ex “Corp” wtf – apparently decided that Unknown Soldier was a sham, and that openDemocracy was spuriously presenting him as a soldier or ex-soldier. In fact, it had been made clear from the outset that the book was a fictionalised account based on hundreds of hours of interviews and contact with soldiers. I had also written an article on how the book had come to be written which clearly stated I was not a military man, although I come from a military family, but that the information I had based the book on came from young men who had served until very recently and who – of course – had experienced everything that went into the work. 

The Association of Political Thought has issued a statement of support for professor Anne Phillips, in response to attacks by Denis MacShane MP on the content of a feminist political theory course taught by Phillips at the London School of Economics. Below is the statement of support in full, with a list of signatories. The Daily Mail have followed up on the interchange with a piece questioning the running of Gender Studies courses at a time of university cuts.

During the debate on Human Trafficking on 18 May 2011 (Hansard Col 94WH) Denis MacShane MP, quoting from the list of essay titles for an academic political theory course at the London School of Economics, accused  a distinguished professor, Anne Phillips FBA, of being unable to tell the difference between waged work and prostitution, and of filling the minds of students 'with poisonous drivel'. Fiona McTaggart MP agreed, accusing Phillips of holding  'frankly nauseating views on that issue'.

Scotland may have changed and by so doing shifted the UK. And all of this has consequences for the English and England.

On the evening of May 15, a small group of Spanish protesters demonstrated in capital city Madrid against high unemployment and austerity measures across the country. Marching towards the city’s main square, Puerta del Sol, a number of the protesters were involved in a conflict with police officers who tried to prevent them from entering. 24 were arrested and taken to Madrid’s largest police station, where they were interrogated by members of a specialist police información unit and held for 48 hours.

Whilst openDemocracy is celebrating its tenth birthday, the public service radio system in the US celebrates its 40th anniversary this month.

NPR (which is how it styles itself) has had a difficult 2011, suffering from a combination of blogger ambush, corporate caution and renewed Republican hostility in Congress.  A smaller and better-rooted organisation than its TV sibling, PBS, NPR offers an interesting contrast with BBC radio: more of that below.

NPR’s current run of problems started last year, when a black commentator, Juan Williams, was dropped after revealing (in an interview with Fox News) that he was nervous of boarding planes along with identifiable Muslims.  A senior manager was also fired.

Then an advisor on fund-raising, Ron Schiller, incautiously fell for a sting in March set up by a right-wing activist, James O’Keefe, famous for the video “gotchas” his Project Veritas plasters online.  Schiller was already preparing to leave NPR, but was lured to a Georgetown restaurant in the belief that he would be offered a $5m donation by a couple of Muslims keen to spread sharia law around the world.

One of the first big strategic decisions made by David Cameron after his election as Conservative leader more than five years ago concerned the United States of America. Cameron claimed to have been taken aback by Tony Blair’s uncritical subservience to George W Bush, so he promised that any government he led would take a more independent stance. Britain, or so he stated, would no longer be “America’s unconditional associate in every endeavour”.

Having risen to prominence as a (possible) intellectual guru for the Labour Party, and as the most public figurehead of ‘Blue Labour’, Maurice Glasman has been variously denounced as a “tool of apolitical centrism”[i], the advocate of a “socially conservative, economically liberal agenda”[ii], and as some sort of fascist fellow-traveller.[iii] Glasman himself urges Labour to attend to the common good through a “politics that brings together immigrants and locals, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and atheists, middle and working classes”. It’s all a bit confusing.

The fact is that “Blue Labour” has created a framework within and against which Labour’s internal debate has been energised. It has done so whilst bringing various factions together (Progress and Compass, The Fabian Society and Soundings) - no mean feat and certainly a break from recent Labour traditions (although the non-involvement of the Briefing left is unfortunate). If only for that reason it is, I think, worth taking time to work out what Glasman is all about. In response to Billy Bragg’s charge that he was ‘economically liberal’, Glasman wrote this: “Resistance to commodification through democratic organisation. That's the position”. So, let’s see if we can understand what he means. 

From Individual Morality to Ethical Institutions 

Maurice Glasman. Image: David Levene

Glasman is what political philosophers call a ‘virtue-theorist’. For him, generalised moral rules make little sense. What matters is the quality of all of our actions in the context of the ongoing collective life of which they are a part; the extent to which such actions both contribute to and are rooted in a form of life in which individuals may flourish. There is a fundamental difference between this and Blairism. For Blairism (as for neo-liberalism in general) the only moral agent is the individual, whom government should help to become self-reliant, responsible, law-abiding. For Glasman the community is also a moral entity; only if it is rightly organised can people flourish.

Across the world, the default trade union position on new technology is Luddism 2.0. Anecdotes abound of a Life on Mars world where trade union officials get their secretaries to print out their emails, or use their computer screens for post-it notes. This luddism is not entirely irrational: technology has a long history of putting people out of work, as well as monitoring and controlling them. Some trade unionists seem determined to avoid entering the 21st century at all costs.

However, the success of new technology in Obama’s election campaign, and more recently in organising student protests and the wave of democracy that has swept across the Middle East during the Arab Spring, is slowly changing attitudes. Some trade unionists have realised that “every tool is a weapon if you hold it right”, as Ani DiFranco puts it.

ICT as tools for engaging a new generation:

Unions in developed countries face an aging membership and struggle to recruit young people. Technology is seen as a panacea for recruiting a new generation of activists, and some union staff are keen to grasp the communications potential of new technology to turn around decades of decline. They have added new technology to their toolbox, and many are experimenting with innovative campaigning websites. Unite and the RCN, among others, have hired Blue State Digital, the company that developed Obama’s online campaign. Unite uses text messaging and phone banks to speak directly to their members to canvass their opinions and develop campaigns and policy.

Vince Cable's fall from grace would be pretty spectacular if he wasn't so thoroughly eclipsed by Nick Clegg, David Law and Chris Huhne. The Lib Dems' once assured and savvy economics spokesperson has proved in action to be a man of bombast rather than substance. His Tory partners in government now pursue policies that he would once have savaged, a predicament made crueller by the fact that his vanity prompted him to fall on his own sword over Murdoch's bid for BSkyB.

But is he more of a piece with them than you may have imagined?  One of the good features of the previous Labour government was its (admittedly cautious and slow) progress towards giving both women and men more 'family-friendly' working conditions, especially on maternity and paternity leave and more flexible working hours. Important as Labour's changes were, they do not necessarily work that well in practice as employers can fairly readily nullify them if they so wish - as Rebecca Asher's new book, Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality vividly illustrates.

Was there state collusion in the killing of Rosemary Nelson, the solicitor who was blown up by loyalists at her home in Lurgan in 1999?

Two very different answers to that question were put forward in the Commons this week, following the report of the inquiry into her death.

For Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson, the report was fundamentally reassuring:

it is clear that just as Lord Saville found no evidence of a conspiracy by the British state, and just as Lord MacLean found no evidence of state collusion in the murder of Billy Wright, so this panel finds no evidence of any act by the state which directly facilitated Rosemary Nelson’s murder.

In contrast, Paterson's shadow (and predecessor) Sean Woodward, regarded the report as damning: