Britain’s future: Labour candidates’s view
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Britain's future: Labour candidates respond | openDemocracy - 0 views
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Anthony - nice to see this was picked up by the observer - see: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/constitution/story/0,,2099735,00.html
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Yes, they wanted exclusive first right and I gave it them. What you can see in the paper edition but not on the web, it that they put the story at the top of the page on the right hand column. Positioning is much more than half the story in a newspaper. Its layout tells people what to read. Is it the same onthe web?
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so I let's have a national debate.
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"let's have a national debate" ... this seems to be a today-program, motherhood-apple-pie mantra. what is this national debate? where is it to be had? on radio4?
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see Cruddas below - getting a bit more specific on what a "national debate" might mean
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Benn's remark is rhetoric. Harmann above has thought about the need for mechanisms for ensuring public respect. The issue is a defining one. A wonderful constitution produced from Brown's inside pocket will be scorned as the gimmick of a 'Scot'. A less well worded one that emerges from a South African style process which people feel they 'own' could initiate a democratic process. What matters is not that it is written but how it is written!
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It needs to be relevant to the man or woman in the street as a way of restoring trust in politics.
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is the constitution being asked to do too much. the mistrust of politics has many sources; the real powerlessness of national governments over many of the areas they pretend to rule is one. there is a whole process of resetting expectations that a consittuional convention is unlikely to do. in fact, there is the risk that a constitution will raise hopes that _it_ cannot fulfill, and contribute to the mistrust.
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Gordon Brown has spoken of the need to empower communities at a local level. Should the decentralization of power and money to local authorities form part of any new ‘constitutional settlement’?
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evise but not block
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We need a public debate
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another public debate ... see above. again - who with? how? and what is the outcome of a "public debate" worth looking at this article: http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-edemocracy/idcard_2537.jsp by sara forsstrom, about the Swedish database ... that goes back to the 17th century. Trustworthy states can have databases; so how do we make the state trustworthy? maybe exchanging access to our personal information with access to its private information?
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Britain still being run by a private school elite, study shows | Mail Online - 0 views
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You're Not Fooling Anyone - Chronicle.com - 0 views
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In other words, we have come so far in the American postindustrial meritocracy that everyone has equal access to guilt-ridden feelings of fraudulence.
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Getting democracy into focus | openDemocracy - 0 views
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The one element clear right through representative democracy’s advance across the world has been the centrality of popular rejection of autocratic effrontery, often exhilarating at the time but in retrospect a transitory pleasure. The structure of modern representative democracy (the form of state now called by that name) does not provide a clear model for any community to rule itself in freedom, let alone in reliable serenity and prosperity. What it provides is a practical basis through which to refuse to be ruled unaccountably and indefinitely against your will. Less steadily and on far less egalitarian terms, it also provides a framework through which to explore together what people should and should not attempt to do as a community. Virtually none of the elements of an answer to that question can come from democracy as an idea. Almost all have to be pieced together arduously from somewhere else.
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Crudely speaking, the political appeal of democracy lies in its claim to realise political equality. (So, soberly speaking, does its potential political menace.)
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Greg Mankiw's Blog: Goolsbee on the Business Cycle - 0 views
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Consider the evidence uncovered by Paul Oyer, a Stanford Business School economist, in his recent paper, "The Making of an Investment Banker: Macroeconomic Shocks, Career Choice and Lifetime Income" (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12059, February 2006). Dr. Oyer tracked the careers of Stanford Business School graduates in the classes of 1960 to 1997.He found that the performance of the stock market in the two years the students were in business school played a major role in whether they took an investment banking job upon graduating and, because such jobs pay extremely well, upon the average salary of the class. That is no surprise. The startling thing about the data was his finding that the relative income differences among classes remained, even as much as 20 years later.
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Multiculturalism's civic future: a response | openDemocracy - 0 views
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Nick Pearce objects to my joining those who deny the possibility of state neutrality in relation to culture and identity. He says that I thereby regrettably place myself outside the liberal egalitarian tradition, but then adds that "in reality few believe that the state can or should embody one version of the good life". So, it is unclear to me what the objection about neutrality is.
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Pearce want liberal "state neutrality to identity" - in other words, no preferences for this or that group based just on who they happen to be, where they come from historically or geographically or ethnically etc. Modood goes on to point out that Pearce says that "no one really believes that the state can embody one version of the good life", and Modood thinks this lets him off the first objection. I don't get the argument: a state could be set up to make some types of lives easier than others (eg secular consumerist versus religious) and yet not "embody one version"... of the good life. If there are 2 types of lives possible under a state, one slightly harder to pursue, does that mena the state "embodies the easier version?" And is the answer to this a function of the degree of cost?
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Some critics of multiculturalism worry about "where it will all end", and so deny that multiculturalism is compatible with individual rights, with equality before the law, with civic belonging.
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this seems to me to be the sort of argument: imagine a case where multiculturalism allows something _incompatible_ with individual rights - as in the clitoridectomy example. Then individual rights should trump "culural rights". Now imagine the alternative case where multiculturalism allows something that can co-exist with individual rights. Why is there anything now for the state to do? In other words, where does it ever bite? This must go back to the original question about the _neutrality_ of the state. Only if neutrality is impossible, then there is room for multiculturalism as an organising principle.
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A Basic Income for All | Philippe Van Parijs (2000) - 0 views
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productivity, wealth, and national incomes have advanced sufficiently far to support an adequate UBI. And if enacted, a basic income would serve as a powerful instrument of social justice: it would promote real freedom for all by providing the material resources that people need to pursue their aims. At the same time, it would help to solve the policy dilemmas of poverty and unemployment, and serve ideals associated with both the feminist and green movements.
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in 1999, the Alaska Permanent Fund paid each person of whatever age who had been living in Alaska for at least one year an annual UBI of $1,680.
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By universal basic income I mean an income paid by a government, at a uniform level and at regular intervals, to each adult member of society. The grant is paid, and its level is fixed, irrespective of whether the person is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not. In most versions–certainly in mine–it is granted not only to citizens, but to all permanent residents.
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The idea of the UBI is at least 150 years old. Its two earliest known formulations were inspired by Charles Fourier, the prolific French utopian socialist. In 1848, while Karl Marx was finishing off the Communist Manifesto around the corner, the Brussels-based Fourierist author Joseph Charlier published Solution of the Social Problem, in which he argued for a "territorial dividend" owed to each citizen by virtue of our equal ownership of the nation’s territory. The following year, John Stuart Mill published a new edition of his Principles of Political Economy, which contains a sympathetic presentation of Fourierism ("the most skillfully combined, and with the greatest foresight of objections, of all the forms of Socialism") rephrased so as to yield an unambiguous UBI proposal: "In the distribution, a certain minimum is first assigned for the subsistence of every member of the community, whether capable or not of labour. The remainder of the produce is shared in certain proportions, to be determined beforehand, among the three elements, Labour, Capital, and Talent."
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It was seriously discussed by left-wing academics such as G. D. H. Cole and James Meade in England between the World Wars and, via Abba Lerner, it seems to have inspired Milton Friedman’s proposal for a "negative income tax."6 But only since the late-1970s has the idea gained real political currency in a number of European countries, starting with the Netherlands and Denmark.
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If you really care about freedom, give people an unconditional income at a level sufficient for subsistence. Productivity, wealth, and national incomes have advanced sufficiently far to support an adequate UBI. And if enacted, a basic income would serve as a powerful instrument of social justice: it would promote real freedom for all by providing the material resources that people need to pursue their aims. At the same time, it would help to solve the policy dilemmas of poverty and unemployment, and serve ideals associated with both the feminist and green movements.