We *could* suspend Article 50 and launch a constitutional convention on the Irish model, running for 2 or 3 years. EU membership would be debated in the context of deepening political, economic and cultural democracy across the UK.
We can devise a confederal approach to the nations, toothy local and regional democracy in England, an end to the Oxbridge chumocracy, #mediareform, a public banking system, land reform - against a background of reinvestment outside of the financialised core.
Labour hasn't managed to recreate the traditional political education functions of the Party, much less the spaces for mutual education and empowerment that are needed. A convention would be chance to figure out in detail how we want to live together.
Active citizenship, underpinned by explicit political rights and institutions derived from those rights, is alien to most people in the UK. But it is the only thing that will save a Westminster government intent on radical change.
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In his latest explainer @garyseconomics touches on a key issue, the lack of seriousness in the media about how successful economic reform would need to organised. We need high-level, widely shared, discussion of what we've been doing since 1979 ...
... where it has led us, and we need to change our political economy to improve living standards for the majority against a background of geopolitical instability and climate change. But post-2008 the media prefer to believe one weird trick will be enough to appease the gods.
Again, we could have public media that organises and manages just such a debate, that tests all kinds of propositions against the evidence in a way that is compelling and enlightening to the citizenry, who themselves participate actively and directly in the process. But we don't.
🧵Highly paid BBC presenters who express astonishment at the very idea of taxing wealth aren't doing much to dispel the widespread perception, well documented in Ofcom's audience research, that they are 'out of touch with ordinary people.' ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/res…
From 2028 the BBC will operate under a new 10-year Charter. It's important that we have a broad and deep debate about its structure and operating assumptions before then. As the public lose confidence in the wider establishment there's a danger that the BBC will go down with it.
For example, the 2024 British Social Attitudes Survey talks of 'a stark decline in public trust' in the UK's governing institutions: a full 45% of us 'almost never trusted' politicians to put the nation's interests first.') natcen.ac.uk/publications/b…
FWIW, some thoughts on the influencer and the party / Stephenson and the left conversation. There's bound to be tension between the dynamics of the attention economy and the needs of political projects. Individuals empowered by platforms can rapidly build vast audiences.🧵
Those individuals are not tied to collectives, and are only really vulnerable to the platform owners (which can snuff them out, or promote them, at will). They can embrace left-adjacent themes and drop them as opportunities present themselves. (I am old enough to remember ...
... Russell Brand jousting with Paxman and being courted by Miliband in 2015.) But the left's response has to be to build collective agents that are themselves capable of reaching large audiences by dint of convening large numbers of individuals as rule-bound plural subjects ...
In the new NS podcast the team discuss a focus group in Sittingbourne and Sheppey, made up of Conservative to Labour switchers. One presenter, the one who doubted Corbyn had much of a personal vote in Islington, was "a bit taken aback at how punchy and disappointed they were."
It's striking that a political journalist needs to go to a structured focus group to find out what people outside Westminster are feeling. But I suppose this reflects the existing balance of power: voters are a background feature in a drama with only a handful of speaking parts.
Marr noted that politics outside Westminster was different, and that Burnham and Sarwar are more interesting and self-assured than most Cabinet members. But the podcast was 100% Westminster-brained, in that its premise was that 20224 Con-Lab switchers were key.
In my self-appointed capacity as a purveyor of lukewarm takes I have now read That Article. What stands out is the intense focus of the Labour right on media and communications ... 🧵 theguardian.com/politics/2024/…
McSweeney seems to have understood that trusted independent left media posed an existential threat to the right's attempt to regain control: if members understood who the Labour right were, and what they wanted, the game would be up.
According to @AnushkaAsthana "they took aim at news websites they considered to be either alt-left or alt-right, including, perhaps not surprisingly, the Canary." She says their campaign had a material impact on that outlet, forcing them to become "much leaner."
Politicians can say anything to a nodding journalist, no matter how insultingly stupid and misleading, as long as they use a mind-numbingly banal analogy from daily life to do it. Nation's credit card? Sure. Under the bonnet? Yeah, sounds about right.
A great deal of media culture consists of projecting their own inability to grasp basic concepts onto their audiences: rather than explain how parties interact with the state, which would require thought, they happily go along with framing that is simple, familiar and wrong.
Haha, the public don't care about x! (when x is something that's extremely important, that can only shore up oligarchic power in a formally democratic system when people have no idea what x is, and only have brain dead analogies to go on when they turn to the media to find out.)