When Gordon Brown moves up to the dispatch box on Monday week to deliver his “No, Not Yet” message on the euro he will find it very hard to persuade investors, other European governments and pro-European members of parliament and campaigners that the Government has a serious European policy.

Every single independent analysis of the economic case for joining the euro seems to point to an extraordinary degree of convergence – and the Treasury analysis is expected to show that our economy is already closer to the European average than many countries that are already in the eurozone. And so the decision not to join looks like a political one, rather than one motivated by economic concerns.

And after a six-year diet of warm words and vague commitments, none of these constituencies is likely to be satisfied with assurances – particularly from a government that is irrevocably associated with spin, and is currently reaping the rewards of its over-claiming on WMD in Iraq.

Finding a credible message is of paramount importance. This is not just to save the pro-euro campaign, Britain in Europe, which will face financial collapse if there is no clear plan. It is vital to reassure investors in Britain (who have come here in part because they were persuaded by the Prime Minister’s commitment in principle to join the single currency) and our European allies whose support we will need to win in debates about the Constitution on the Future of Europe, debates about European Economic reform. After the events of the last few months we have very little political capital left with them. So what will the Government need to do to show it is serious?

First, it needs to give concrete and credible reasons for saying “not yet” – and show that its recent Zen Buddhist detachment of merely assessing convergence has been replaced by a practical pathway to actively pursue Euro entry. Whether it is reforming the Growth and Stability Pact, the workings of the ECB, looking at the structure of the Housing Market or managing the Exchange Rate, the Government must come forward with achievable strategies for reform. The key is not to hide behind things beyond the Government’s control.

Most importantly the Government must put a stop to its inference that France and Germany need to have greater labour market flexibility before we can join the euro. This is both illogical – as our relative flexibility would be a source of comparative advantage to us – and destructive – as it furthers the falsehood that all other Eurozone economies are basket-cases in spite of their higher productivity and greater wealth then the UK. This will only make winning a referendum even harder.

Secondly, the Government needs to put nuts and bolts measures in place to show that it is serious about preparing for the euro. The key confidence-building measures would include introducing legislation paving the way for a referendum; establishing tax-breaks for small and medium enterprises to cover the cost of currency changeover; publishing a consumer code of practice and setting up price-monitoring mechanisms to ensure that traders do not take advantage of the change-over to hike prices. As Giles Radice has pointed out in his recent report How to Join the Euro, the Prime Minister should chair a “Euro Strategy Group” with representation of the Chancellor, Deputy Prime Minister and other senior cabinet ministers to oversee the preparations for changeover.

Thirdly, the Government needs to actively start to make the case for the euro, and stop the rot that has been allowed to set in while eurosceptics have been given free reign. The five tests have been an armlock on the debate, preventing political figures from even mentioning the euro. It was never realistic to expect Business to organise a political campaign for hearts and minds – or to give the task to junior ministers outside the cabinet. The government give the impression that they think that the support for the euro cause is in the lap of the gods – an exogenous force that they can neither predict nor influence – rather than something that their decisions directly affects.

We’ve now had six years in which the Government have banged on about the need to reform continental Europe’s economies, the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon model, and the faintheartedness of the French. In the last two years support for the EU has continued to fall: the measly 33% of the British public who thought that EU was a “good thing” in the 2001 Euro-barometer poll has now fallen to 31%. Those politicians who felt that the introduction of notes and coins in the Eurozone would smooth the way to an easy referendum victory must now face the reality that they cannot win by stealth – arguments must be made with passion, political risks taken and careers put on the line.

But ultimately nothing will change until pro-Europeans stop being so cautious and moderate. To make progress Pro-Europeans must start to change the calculus of risk – both for the political class and the public. The Government need to know that they will pay a political price for staying out. At the moment they face a choice between a ferocious mauling from the tabloids or the genteel irritation of the Yes camp. It’s no surprise that they take the line of least resistance every time. If business started to come out an attack Gordon Brown’s record as chancellor and his myopia on Europe, if Pro-European MPs made it clear that they will not vote for a leadership candidate that has thwarted Britain’s chances of joining, and if cabinet ministers threatened to quit over the issue with the same passion as their opponents – then it would not be so easy to bow to the Sun.

And the public debate also needs to change so that people realise that there will be a price to pay for staying out. At the moment, the status quo of remaining outside the Euro seems to the public like the safe option, whilst joining a new currency seems like a leap in the dark. There is no major problem in the public discourse for which the “Euro” is a solution. This might change if the public knew that foreign investment has been in free-fall since our decision to remain outside. In 1998 Germany received 9.4% of Foreign Direct Investment into the EU, and Britain 28.3%. In 2002, Germany is set to attract 18.1% and Britain only 5.1%. Stark facts like these must become a mantra for Ministers, even if Brown’s reputation for economic management loses some of its sheen. If Britain moves from being seen as a ‘pre-in’, likely to join in the future, to a permanent ‘out’ then the proportion of investment will fall still further.

Above all the Yes camp needs to shake itself out of self-pity and despair. Like John Major’s beleaguered pro-Europeans, they’re beginning to feel that they’ve been two-timed too many times. The danger is of returning to the paralysis of ‘wait and see’. If the Government remain unwilling to invest real effort in changing the political climate and the pro-Euro lobby remains defensive and weak, then the issue will die of neglect. The euro debate could go the same way as Tony Blair’s earlier ambitions for electoral reform and a Lib/Lab pact – and it will become the received wisdom that Britain will never join.

· Mark Leonard is Director of The Foreign Policy Centre (www.fpc.org.uk ) and writes a monthly online commentary for Observer Worldview. The pamphlet How to Join the Euro by Giles Radice is published by The Foreign Policy Centre.

Rachel Briggs
Travel Advice Launch Event Speech

Introduction
The matter of FCO travel advice has never been more important. The appetite for overseas travel continues to grow – there were 60 million trips overseas in 2002 and there are 15 million British nationals living overseas. Alongside this, as we all know, the threat from international terrorism remains real. The tragic events in Bali reminded us of the fact that terrorists can strike anywhere and affect ordinary Britons enjoying themselves on holiday as much as diplomats and dignitaries.

In the wake of the Bali bombing, FCO travel advice has been the focus for much scrutiny. Apart from questions raised in the media, a number of official reviews have also taken place. In December last year the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report into the incident said: “We believe that the whole issue of FCO travel advice, its purpose, target audience and presentation needs to be examined by the FCO as a matter of urgency.” And the Foreign Affairs Select Committee has also been hearing evidence on the subject.

As a result, the FCO has carried out a large-scale review into its travel advice. At the risk of pre-empting James Watt, it is fair to say that the FCO has taken these criticisms on the chin and has worked hard to make changes. Sir Michael Jay, Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the FCO recently commented to the FAC, “There is, as a result of the terrorist attack in Bali…. And other terrorist attacks since then, a clear recognition that travel advice in the context of our consular work has to have a higher profile than it has had in the past.” These firm words have, importantly, been matched not only by reform and change, but also by increased resources and personnel.

But, while the FCO has done much to improve the content and presentation of its travel advice, much more remains to be done on its dissemination strategy. Unless the FCO can get its information and guidance out to those who need it its impact will be minimal. My report, Travel Advice: Getting information to those who need it was written last Summer, and while much has happened since then – both on the threat side and response from the FCO – the basic argument of the report remains unaddressed.

In what follows I would like to point up four key issues that the FCO must address if its travel advice is to have a sizeable impact on the safety and well being of the traveling public. Firstly, the FCO must think more clearly about its target audience. Secondly, it must be more creative in its use of key networks for dissemination and consider how it could work with, not just the travel industry where much has already been done, but also other networks, such as employers sending workers overseas on business or the aid community. Thirdly, the FCO needs to develop ways of measuring the success and impact of its travel advice in keeping more people safe. And finally, while the threat from international terrorism is important and has most certainly not gone away, the FCO must be careful of not to over-emphasize this at the risk of obscuring the range of other threats to travelers, such as crime and health risks.

Target Audience
The target audience for the FCO’s travel advice is, of course, the whole of the traveling public. The advice is aimed at keeping Britons traveling or living overseas as safe as possible.

As I started by saying, in 2002 60 million trips were made overseas. The public is traveling for a variety of reasons: holidays, business, aid delivery and independent travel and exploration.

Depending on the reason for travel, the place being visited, the extent to which the individual is autonomous or has help from a tour operator, employer or other organization, and their perceptions of risks, the needs of the individual will differ greatly, and the content of travel advice must reflect this. I don’t want to dwell on the issue of content now, though. The FCO has done much to strengthen its messages; to ensure its advice is accurate and helpful; and that there is clarity and consistency between information sources. I would like to stress though that where these risks differ between groups the FCO should be looking for ways to communicate these differences to the relevant groups. A memorandum submitted by the FCO to the FAC on 31st January 2003 stated: “We need to be careful about accusations of picking and choosing between groups; and of implicitly offering a better service to some.” This misses the point. What we need is better travel advice for ALL and this means tailoring it to the needs of individual groups. Giving information about all risks to all travelers may actually result in confusion rather than better preparedness.

A more fundamental question that the FCO must consider is the most effective way of reaching its target audience: the whole of the British traveling public. Is this best done through being the public interface with individual citizens? Or, given what I have said about the need to target advice more selectively according to need, should the FCO seek instead to reach travelers through a network of organizations well linked to the different travel groups?

This brings me onto my second point about the need to use networks.

Networks
For each group of travelers there are a series of organisations that are both well connected to them but who also have a genuine interest in their safety and well being. For tourists there are tour operators and travel agents; for business travelers there are employers; for aid workers there are aid agencies, and so forth. These organizations, if networked into the FCO, could take on some of the responsibilities for re-packaging and disseminating information.

In some ways, the FCO has started this process. As part of its Know Before You Go campaign it has signed up partners who commit to disseminate the FCO’s advice wherever possible and spread the clear message – know before you go, be prepared. But the list of partners is skewed towards the tourist end of the travel spectrum. At a recent meeting of the FAC, Dickie Stagg, Director of Information at the FCO, went so far as to say, “We can’t succeed in sending our message to the public except through the travel industry.” The FCO should expand its range of partners.

The FCO should also work with them to develop materials that will meet the specialist needs of each of the groups. Information and materials currently available for partners remains general rather than tailored.

Of course, there will always be those individuals who do not fit into such a network or slip between travel groups, and for that reason it is vital that the FCO maintain the central information and advice point it has. But there is much more potential for the FCO to work with organizations such as tour operators and companies to decentralize as far as is sensible and feasible the re-packaging and dissemination of advice according to special needs.
Measuring Success
As a service provider, it is vital the FCO understands the extent to which its travel advice is effective in keeping Britons safe when traveling and living overseas. The FCO does not have a clear idea of the extent to which its travel advice is reaching those who need it. The report from the Intelligence and Security Committee commented, “The Committee is not clear how many travelers actually read the FCO travel advice prior to embarking on a trip nor do we know how many people actually follow it.” There have been attempts to track use, although they show disappointing results. In a survey commissioned by the FCO and published in January 2001 just 2 per cent of those questioned had consulted the FCO or a consulate overseas. The Foreign Secretary stated to the House of Commons in December that the FCO travel pages generate 670,000 unique users per month, which is 8.4 million per year. Even if each unique user equated to one overseas trip it would mean that the site is being accessed in just 14 per cent of trips. If the FCO extends its work through specialist networks as I have suggested, it is even more important that it collate accurate information about the extent to which these networks are delivering.

It is also important that the FCO measures the impact of its advice in keeping people safe. Towards this end, it would be useful for example for embassy staff to collate more information from those who do fall into trouble about what has happened, why, whether they consulted advice, and if not whether the incident could have been avoided if they had done. Some of this happens informally at present, but the FCO needs a systematic method of collation. Like any service provider, the FCO should understand its market and work aggressively to remain the market leader.

Beyond Terrorism
Finally, a word of caution. Since September 11th, but particularly since the tragic events in Bali, the FCO has stepped up information about the threat posed by international terrorism. This is right and proper. But it is important that these messages do not obscure advice about other threats, such as crime, health and accidents, which continue to blight hundreds of thousands of trips each year. The FCO has recently changed the structure of advisories, with safety and security coming immediately after a summary at the top of the page, and terrorism being the first sub-category in this section for all countries. While the information contained is sensible and acknowledges the varying degrees of threat, I fear there is a danger of over-emphasising terrorism and diverting attention away from the plethora of less critical threats that should be a greater concern for travelers. Striking the right balance between panic and preparation is vital, although I do concede that this is easier said than done in practice.

Conclusion
To conclude, I welcome the improvements that the FCO has made to the content of its advice, which will no doubt bring benefits to those using it. But the FCO now needs to concentrate its efforts on ensuring that its travel advice is reaching as wide an audience as possible.

Issue 05, Summer 2001

Drugs policy in the western world stands out as a story of continuing, almost unmitigated, failure. While other problems – from unemployment to youth crime – have proved amenable to serious debate and imaginative solutions, drugs policy sometimes appears frozen – a victim of an unhealthy cocktail of acute public anxiety, simple nostrums, tabloid bile, and political opportunism.

Yet drugs policy could be about to become interesting. The Anglo-American tradition of drug policy that has shaped the response of industrialised nations for a century now stands at an impasse. On one side stand the advocates of a continuing war on drugs. For them psychoactive substances are intrinsically a bad thing. Almost no price – in money or civil liberties – is too high to pay to stop the traffic of drugs or their sale by immoral dealers to misguided consumers. On the other side stand the advocates of treating drug addiction as a disease, a problem of health rather than law enforcement, who pour scorn on the prospects of curbing availability of drugs and point out that no society in human history has abjured all use of psychotropic substances. Their argument is that – as with alcohol – the best we can do is to provide help to those individuals who cannot control their own use.

Neither camp has much to be proud of. Running in parallel, these twin strategies have failed to prevent a steady upward trajectory of the number of problematic drug users. The most recent figures show, if anything, that the situation is becoming more acute. In 1998, nearly three and a half thousand people died from drug-related deaths in Britain, a rise of 19 per cent in four years, and only the latest in an ever increasing death toll. Seventy per cent more problematic drug users have presented themselves for treatment in the last five years for which figures are available, and the largest ever cohort of 20 to 24 year olds (55%) now report having used illicit substances at some point in their lives.

The prohibitionists have a particularly bleak track record: there is not a single piece of evidence to show their interventions work. Given enough investment of resources seizures can grow impressively, but the quantities of illicit drugs hitting the streets show an unerring ability to keep pace – at an estimated ratio of about ten kilos reaching the streets for each one that is seized. In the US the oscillations in drug use and related crime have more to do with demographic factors, shifting fashions for particular drugs and generational cycles of attraction and revulsion. The one certainty is that drugs policy itself has had little if any positive effect. Moreover, although governments are beginning to be more selective, to date the patterns of police behaviour and arrests have given purveyors of hard drugs the easiest ride. More than 90 per cent of drug offences in the UK, for example, are for possession and three quarters of those involve cannabis. Both here and in the US the war on drugs has been a resounding failure. Rarely in the history of wars have so many achieved so little at such a high cost.

The treatment world does at least have sound foundations. The National Treatment Outcomes Research Study which was conducted through the Nineties and is the largest ever of its kind in the UK, concluded that ‘treatment works’, though its authors were quick to stress this headline comes with many caveats and is no cause for complacency. By its nature, treatment – advice, counselling, prescribing and alternative therapies – succeeds in attracting those whose drug use poses the greatest health and social problem. Recreational users by contrast rarely perceive themselves to have a problem.

Treatment can reduce harmful behaviour, improve physical and emotional health, and cut drug-related crime. But its ability to transform the features of a person’s life that led to dependent drug use is doubtful – it’s not uncommon to find clients who’ve been round the treatment loop a dozen times, and typically around two thirds of treatment fails – if you count abstinence from uncontrolled use as your goal. Just as important for the future, the treatment providers have also made no in-roads on the cohort at risk of debilitating use. An honest end of term report card might read: ‘could do better’.

European drug co-ordinators know they sit on one of the most dysfunctional areas of government policy and many are developing interesting new approaches which are taking them ever further away from the American tradition. The Swiss are taking the idea of addiction-as-illness to its logical conclusion and experimenting with large scale heroin prescribing for users to inject in authorised shooting galleries. Unthinkable in the UK in the current climate, public referenda in the cantons to be affected by the trials returned a two thirds majority in favour of the initiative. By contrast, the Portuguese government is proposing bringing addicts in from the cold with a far-reaching decriminalisation of drugs, including heroin. In the UK such radical moves remain off the agenda; instead we have settled for a more conservative ‘balanced approach’, which essentially involves matching higher spending on law enforcement with higher spending on treatment.

The advent of a more open approach to policy in Europe is to be welcomed. But it still represents little more than tinkering, founded on a fundamentally limited conception of the problem. At root, problematic drug use and serious supply are still treated by clinicians and criminologists respectively as symptoms of personal pathology. This is despite the fact that since the 1980s, the profile of dependent drug users in the UK has taken a profound shift and now correlates overwhelmingly with the socially excluded on the sharp end of growing socio-economic inequalities. Many of the consumers of what is, after all, the world’s third largest industry do not suffer much damage to their lives, or chronic addiction. But for those whose lives are damaged, all serious analyses of the epidemiology of their use suggest that a wider public health approach which encompasses the full range of tools of social policy is more likely to work than punitive legislation and isolated arrests.

The good news is that there are clues to a happier way forward. They can be found by looking not to the west but to the south. In Asia a new generation of more holistic, enterprising models of drug treatment (brought together in the Forum network) are attempting to address the structural issues, as well as the personal ones, that lie behind their clients’ difficulties. Their central insight is that sustainable progress depends on dealing with all of the different factors – ranging from the physiological to the social – that can cause addiction. Specifically that means helping drug users to find new networks of support; providing them with skills and jobs, and revitalising the communities they come from as well as helping them to fight physical and emotional dependence.

Where this is done effectively there is a double dividend – on the one hand reducing the risk of relapse, and on the other stemming the flow of new users. For projects working in areas of cultivation there is a third dividend too, as poor farmers find alternative sources of income and thus cut the supply to the cities and international drug rings.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of these new organisations – such as Nai Zindagi in Pakistan, Mukti Sadan in India, or Pink Triangle in Malaysia, is that they see themselves as economic enterprises, as well as social or health ones. By creating jobs for their clients they have also found a way to generate income for themselves – through everything from reconditioning cars and building environmentally friendly houses, to selling condoms to sex workers and running light industry. As a result they are highly cost effective – particularly if the long run costs and benefits are taken into account.

Some of these lessons are beginning to be learnt in Europe. The UK government has just launched a programme of job creation for drug dependents. Outfits like the Merchant’s Quay Project in Dublin and Kaleidoscope in London combine treatment with education, jobs and resettlement, and the more thoughtful policy experts are starting to acknowledge that this is one field where holistic approaches are a necessity rather than a luxury.

Sadly, the prosperous north has rarely been good at learning lessons from the south, with isolated exceptions like the Grameen Bank which has now been copied in cities all over the western world. However much the US model fails, and however many billions continue to be squandered, there is always a long queue of experts, pundits and commentators eager to advocate its virtues. When it comes to drugs, even the most highly educated sometimes appear happy to leave their critical faculties behind and cling to the child’s view of the world as a simple battle between the good guys and bad guys.

Ends

Rowena Young is Development Director at Kaleidoscope, the only one-stop drug treatment agency in the UK. Her publication, From war to work: drug treatment, enterprise and social inclusion, will be published later this year. Email: r.young@can-online.org.uk

Issue 05, Summer 2001

The European project was always about more than coal and steel. Even when the ink was fresh on the Schuman plan, it was the dream of democracy in Europe that stirred war-weary politicians from Paris to Bonn. And for those on the outside looking in, democracy is still the European Union’s greatest prize. Former dissidents like Vaclav Havel have spent their entire lives coaxing their compatriots to meet the standards exacted by the EU. Yet within the EU’s borders, perceptions are very different. The Union is vilified as an anti-democratic bogeyman. Wry commentators point out that it would not be allowed to join itself: it fails the democratic criteria set for its own members.

For all the speeches, web-sites and glossy promotional campaigns in its name, European Democracy has languished from neglect over the last fifty years. It has become the catechism of European Integration: often invoked on red-letter days but rarely considered in any detail. But all the evidence shows that unless democracy becomes a grand projet of its own, the whole European edifice will start to look decidedly rickety.

The Danish “Nej” last September showed that the pro-Europeans have to allay fears that Europe is anti-democratic if they are to have any chance of winning the referendum on ths Single Currency. If people feel that the EU threatens their sovereignty and freedom, it doesn’t matter how many crèche facilities, inward investment and secure pension rights they are promised. As Tony Benn points out, a good dictator is always going to be seen as worse than a bad parliament.

Encouragingly, Europe’s political leaders seem aware that they need to answer big questions of democratic legitimacy – and fast. They have looked up from the small print and asked what kind of EU a new generation should create. The last twelve months has seen an unusually creative outpouring of long-term thinking. German Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer deserves thanks for prompting this overdue period of reflection. But his much-publicised vision of a more federal Europe, while a welcome catalyst, draws precisely the wrong lessons from the post-war period.

His call for the EU to become a federation of states would bolster Euroscepticism by confirming suspicions that the EU is a threat to national democracy. With Euroscepticism on the rise, a crisis of confidence in European institutions and a revival of regional and local identities, the streets aren’t exactly filled with agitators crying out for more federalism.

But the biggest problem with this kind of federalism is that democracy itself is changing. Turnout in elections is falling across the EU and cynicism with mainstream politics is on the rise. Yet Europe’s federal architects are still borrowing designs from the age of silk breeches and periwigs. They turn to 18th century models of democracy for their inspiration, calling for an ever more powerful centre made up of commanding Presidents and powerful Parliaments. They fail to acknowledge that making Europe popular will require a different kind of democratic revolution:

First, member states should create a Commissioner for democracy charged with gathering best practice from around the world, exploring how IT can be used to develop forms of governance that are more responsible for citizens, re-examining the roles of the Committee of the Regions and Economic and Social Committee, finding ways of improving accountability on European issues at a national level, and promoting good democratic practice across member states and EU institutions.

Secondly, there needs to be a cultural shift to focusing on outcomes rather than processes. Within Europe many of the things that voters want – lower crime rates, increased prosperity, a cleaner environment – depend on common action. But the gulf between what people expect from the EU (solutions to cross-border problems) and what they get (CAP) is much more damaging than the formal democratic deficit. The EU must flesh out the idea of government by objectives as well as directives, which started with the employment targets set in Luxembourg, and set itself timed objectives in the areas that matter most.

Third, the debate about subsidiarity must be transformed. To restore trust in the EU it needs to prove that it will act only where it can add value to the efforts of nation states. In a political culture wedded to grand statements and rhetorical flights, this requires the clearest signal that the EU has changed. One controversial measure would be altering the text of the preamble to the Treaty of Rome so that it no longer commits the EU to “ever closer Union”.

And in practical terms the principle of subsidiarity should be altered. Each layer of Government must earn the right to govern by proving that it can do it best. There are many things that the EU should be better placed to do than the nation state, such as the delivery of overseas aid, but it is failing. Europe needs to move beyond the federal model of allocating exclusive responsibility for different tasks to different tiers of government by function and explore how we can set shared objectives centrally and see the different tiers of government working together to achieve them.

Fourth, pro-Europeans must find ways of mobilising the power of the “European average”. It is a provocative thought, but it is possible a European statistics office could do more for political accountability in Europe than a directly elected European Parliament. Access to comparative European figures on prices, taxes, economic performance and public services has vastly increased accountability for national governments. The reason the recent fuel crisis sparked such animosity was not just the level of prices consumers faced in the UK but the fact that British consumers could see that they were paying above the European average. The fact that people see their national policies within a broader context is creating a genuine competition for policies across Europe. So far the competition between government has often been seen as regressive on the centre-left: people have talked of the dangers a Dutch auction on corporation tax and social protection, or interest groups picking issues off, one at a time, like fuel tax.

But the European average could be tremendously empowering. The single market for companies meant that uncompetetive industries had nowhere to hide. The task of the centre-left is to transform European Governance into a progressive quest for the best policies: the finest hospitals, the most creative schools, the most efficient measures against crime. To do this we will need to find better ways of sharing good practice. The European Commission should have a role in this, but we should also reconfigure national embassies and diplomatic services to systematically gather information on successful policies and feed them into domestic departments. Data needs to publicised in a progressive way: measuring the European Average so that people can assess policies across the board and understand the trade-offs that need to be made rather than picking issues off one-at-a-time

We must also reinvent representation to deliver competition between policies. Instead of seeing EU politics as an appendage that can be confined to the European Parliament, we need to ensure that the cut and thrust of political debate animate all EU institutions. The biggest challenge is reforming the European Council so that it can give political direction to the whole EU system. The Council is the EU institution with the most influence and legitimacy because it contains Europe’s best-known and most powerful political leaders. Institutional change such as replacing the six monthly rotating Presidencies with one that can deliver leadership for a longer period of time would enhance its credibility. Strategic direction could be established by a new Council of Europe Ministers with deputy PM status which would meet monthly in Brussels and co-ordinate the work of the different Councils of Ministers. But the biggest change will be cultural: focusing on providing leadership rather expending its energies on day-to-day horse-trading.

Finally, we must explore direct democracy. Because the EU will never have a single government or president that citizens can vote out, we should consider supplementing representative politics with forums of direct democracy. In the long term, we could explore Simon Hix’ s idea of holding Europe-wide referenda giving citizens the chance to overturn an existing piece of EU legislation, or to put a new legislative issue on the agenda in policy areas of EU competence. The mooted European People’s Panel in which policy-makers in both the EU’s institutions or in national governments can draw upon to test public attitudes to what the EU’s priorities should be, and how service delivery can be improved from the point of view of the user should also be investigated.

These are just a few ways of reframing the democracy debate. They all try to develop thinking that is appropriate for a network of nation states in an age of globalisation and the internet, rather than trying to force Europe into the straitjackets of 18th century states.

Mark Leonard’s publications on Europe include Network Europe, The Future Shape of Europe and Making Europe Popular.

Mark Leonard: This is the first in a series of seminars which is going to form the backbone of the Global Britons Programme, a year long research project which aims to revisit the notion of Britishness and explore what an inclusive British identity means in practice for political cultural and public institutions. During the course of the next 6 months we are going to be holding similar forums in the Midlands, London, in Scotland and in Wales. And at the end of that process, and of a process of research a report will be published in 2002, which tries to draw some of the lessons from each of these events.

This programme is taking place on the 50th anniversary of the Festival of Britons and in the shadow of debates which have been very fractious and important over the last few years about devolution and about asylum, about Europe and more recently the experiences in towns such as Oldham and Bradford. The title and the form of this programme reflect the need for a different approach to the celebrations in 1951. The idea behind the tittle is to start with the people who inhabit Britain rather than the institutions, to put the spotlight on the nation and regions of Britain rather than simply seeing it as a London based phenomenon, and also to try to define the values and the qualities that will allow Britons to thrive in a global context, rather than trying to define some kind of homogenous unchanging identity for a centralised nation. But these events aren’t meant to be abstract debates about British identity, they are meant to bring together practitioners from all sorts of different works of life to discuss how diversity and identity can be looked at in practical terms, and what it means for politics and politicians, for schools and academic centres, religious organisations, for the arts world for broadcasters and the media, and for public, private and voluntary sector and for policy makers as they go about their business.

This seminar is very much a collaboration between organisations form different parts of the country and from different walks of life, between Aurora, the BBC (who are kindly sponsoring this and also playing an active part in thinking about these issues as one of the institutions that carry and promote Britishness, one of the most obviously British institutions), The Foreign Policy Centre and the Stone Ashdown Trust.

The idea behind this really, is to try and move away from a lot of the soul searching and nostalgia and some of the more fruitless attempts to define what the British genius actually means in the abstract, and to look at what it means in practice. It’s based on a very firm belief that this shouldn’t just be questions for the seminar room or the academic paper, because they have a real impact on our decision and policies in specific situations, but should be based on the idea that we are not actually going to be able to settle many of the most important policy questions of our age – from adoption policy to joining the Euro, from school curriculum to whether we should send troops to Kosovo, from immigration rules to news programming. Until we’ve resolved many of these basic questions about what it means to be British, what our attitudes to diversity are and how we actually go about adopting those concepts in practice. I think it goes beyond even important questions, which have occupied a lot of media attention, such as asylum and immigration, or whether we need a Northwest Assembly. It is about creating a framework through which very very important questions about distribution, representation can be resolved, and for that reason will hopefully form the bedrock on which almost all policy decisions and policy discussions are based, and a lens through which these things are seen.

That’s why I think it’s particularly important that we do have a national debate about it, because often what happens is different groups will have debates and discussions amongst themselves and this is something which is a shared discourse, which everyone takes part in. Yasmin’s written very eloquently about how, certainly in multiculturalism debates, it tends to be people from so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ often talking to themselves, with white people seeing themselves as a homogenous block that doesn’t need to engage with these issues, rather than actually exploring the diversity within those communities and the questions which arise between them.

Andy Griffee: I guess the first thing I’d like to do is apologise for my job title: ‘Controller of BBC English Regions’. It’s hardly a job title that resonates with concepts of democracy, diversity and open-mindedness. However any temptation on my part to believe it signifies anything at all is quickly undermined at home, where my children call me the Fat Controller. And my wife who is actually moving house today without me, she’s moving house on behalf of us but without me, refers to me as the remote controller.

First of all let me say this, that there’s never been a better time to be the Controller responsible for two and a half thousand staff working across 40 BBC local radio stations and 11 television regions that the BBC runs in England. Why? Quite simple because we have record high audiences for a start. Each week on average 32million viewers, that’s almost 60% of the population, tune in to watch their BBC regional television news programme. The BBC regional news at 6.30 is the most popular news programme on British television, that’s national or ITV. And even here in the Northwest, so-called ‘Granada Land’, Gordon Burns and BBC Northwest Tonight, will occasionally get more than a million viewers to one of its evening programmes at 6.30 and always beats its Granada rival. In local radio, we also have much to celebrate. One in five of the population tunes in to the BBC local radio station each week. BBC local radio’s share of the total radio market is now 12%, again a record high, all the more dramatic when you consider the explosion in the number of commercial local radio stations.

BBC local radio credits that success frankly by investing in intelligent news and speech about the places that people work, live and play. There was a newspaper society survey only last month that said that the vast majority of the British population live, work and play within just a 14 mile radius of their home. BBC local radio strives to give each community an outlet to express its views simply by picking up the phone. That often makes us a crucial lifeline for everyone in the community when major news affects their lives. I believe BBC radio came into its own in the last year partly because of the three ‘f’s, floods, fuel and foot and mouth.

One farmer’s wife in Shropshire wrote to me, calling her local radio station the only sanity in a time of gossip and muddled media hysteria. Now, I am drawing your attention to that unprecedented popularity for BBC local radio and BBC regional television, not to gloat, well a bit, but to actually suggest that it’s evidence of something quite real that is happening amidst all the sound and the fury of the current debate, the debate that we are involved this afternoon about Britishness, about Englishness, devolution, diversity, and sense of identity.

After the events of last week, the world seems quite terrifyingly small. We have global terrorism, global alliances, global technologies, multinational giants whose commercial best interests lie in producing more of the same for as many people as possible. And yet as the terrible news came in from America last Tuesday, I know so many people who just instinctively reached out for the comfort, contact, and the connection of their friends, families and communities. I think, perhaps, this explains why the popularity of our local programmes and services is so high at the same time that the forces of globalism seem so strong. Tom Peters describes global and local as flip sides of the same coin, saying that as people feel increasingly bewildered and powerless in the face of such global forces they will reach out for and renew or rediscover the values of their local networks. And you cannot begin to reflect those global networks unless you truly value, nurture and cherish those things that fundamentally make people different. So we cherish the differences of voice, the differences of accent, language, faith, geography, and the distinctive culture or attitudes. Because as a local broadcaster it defines us, and it defines our audiences.

Political devolution has of course given shape to some of the larger national differences within the UK, and as the British Broadcasting Corporation we had to decide how we were going to respond to those constitutional changes, in the event BBC devolution was perceived by the BBC as an opportunity rather than as something to be feared or resisted. The BBC spent 22 million pounds more on a package of new programmes and services, which would report, analyse and interpret the Scottish parliament and Northern Ireland and Welsh assemblies. We also sensitised all of our staff to the new and complex division of governmental responsibilities with special road shows which went to every corner of Britain as well as to every corner of broadcasting house and television centre. These also proved of enormous help in taking staff on a journey, which now sees network programmes doing much more to reflect the new UK to audiences across the UK.

In places like Scotland too many people thought the BBC was too Londoncentric. And before you say it, yes, in places like the Northwest too many people still think the BBC is too London centric. but I personally believe that the devolution genie is out of the bottle. Devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland hasn’t just re-awakened a vigorous debate about Englishness but has been happening in parallel with the growing importance of regional development agencies, the arrival of the first elected mayor of an English city, and I am sure the eventual arrival of regional assemblies.

The BBC must respond to this devolution as well. How? Briefly, well first the BBC will continue to fulfil a distinct role as a national broadcaster by providing the part of the glue which binds Britain together. This actually means doing better at reflecting the diverse parts of Britain back to the whole, and that’s why more BBC television drama is being set here in the north of England. Mersey Beat is the latest example, Linda Green comes to air very soon. There are a lot more northern dramas in production and in planning. It’s also why our new factual radio production unit is now to be based in Manchester by the end of the year aiming to make radio 4 a lot less Londoncentric.

The second distinct role for the BBC is an international one. As one of the few British institutions which has world wide reputation which brings great credit to Britain, not least via the BBC World Service and its 46 language services. But the third distinct role for the BBC is of course, its Britain’s most extensive local and regional broadcaster. Apart from our current record high audiences, that’s why its’ a great time to be Controller BBC English regions. My 186 million pounds annual budget was enhanced this year by a further 12milion pounds. That money has enabled us to begin rolling out as many as 50 new local on-line sites, Manchester being one of the first. Down the road in Blackburn we’ve opened our first centre and mobile zone, new facilities that provide education and training in digital technology to anyone who wants it. The pilot has been so successful that nine other local stations in the north of England are going to get one too.

We’ve doubled the length of our late evening regional new bulletin at 10.30, and we’re launching more local radio and TV services in many parts of the country. As being part of this national debate about identity, next year, every single one of our 40 local radio stations will be putting out their own special documentary series called Sense of Place. We have many other expansion plans in the pipeline for BBC local and for north of England, but as the DG himself is going to be announcing during these during the coming weeks, I will refrain from talking about them now.

Finally, last week Tessa Jowell gave approval for the BBC to develop the BBC Asian Network into a national digital radio station. This station began as a tiny service out of Radio Leicester just five years ago with a handful of staff and a meagre budget. For me its growth and success into becoming a network station epitomises the fact that we have responded as no other broadcaster has to challenge of major changes in the structure of the UK. But more importantly perhaps we have recognised the need to invest more in reflecting the true richness of life and culture in every community. Thank very much.

Andrew Miller: One of the things that disturbs me tremendously as an expatriate Londoner, somebody who moved to this area in 1977, is how remote this 200 miles makes us, and as Mark said, this taking place as we are on the 50th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, it makes me sort of think a little further because a that time I lived outside of Britain and didn’t move in back into the UK until 1959. So as a young teenager I found may of the people that grew up in my parent’s hometown in Ealing and Southall in west London were culturally part of Britain, where I was the outsider. So subsequently as a young man living on the south coast of England, did I ask myself whether I was British or not? Well it didn’t cross my mind. There was a presumption that I guess comes with years of living overseas, but in an environment where Britain was a colonial power, course I was British despite the fact I’d live outside the country all of this time.

When I first moved to the Northwest in 1977, it was a huge cultural shock because I just realised how different parts of Britain were and I’d been active in politics at that time – a dozen or so years – at the time I would have said quite unequivocally there is no need for any of these daft regional assemblies ideas, Britain is a single homogenous nation … is it heck? You have to travel around a bit to realise not just how diverse it is, but how disadvantaged some of the regional players are in terms of some of the important debates that will confront us the next few years. I suppose returning back to my opening remark I would fail the Tebbit test, because when I first came up here I found myself supporting Portsmouth as a football club and Hampshire as a cricket club. I don’t do that too loudly these days, but it makes me reflect how young people in particular, want on the one hand to retain their roots in the background and the culture they were brought up in, but at the same, time absorb and become more and more part of the society in which they live. And are the two mutually contradictory? No they’re not!

One sees some difficulties when cultures start to mix and I was just thinking of my youngest son. I remember Eddie’s first day of primary school in the Northwest, he’d done one term of school on the south coast of England and he talked with a very heavy Portsmouth accent at that time. And so he had this very heavy southern accent, went to school on his first day, came home absolutely full of tears. Nobody in his class could understand him. There he was a five year old having difficulty communicating, and yet it’s not about how children play, how they start to develop a shared identity and so on, but it’s how they make that first connection. And somewhat later I remember my daughter in France solving this problem, at the time when she spoke a little bit of French and the children with her spoke a little bit of English, they solved this problem of playing games at night by inventing a game called bilingual scrabble. Children can make things work and become part of a single group, but at the same time retaining their chosen cultural identity and languages.

As a young person I suppose I saw a curious side of Britain, as I said it was mostly based upon Britain as the principle Commonwealth player at the time in the Mediterranean. I didn’t really experience some of the worst sides of the British psyche, the white British psyche should I say until I moved to the Northwest. I remember my first few weeks in Liverpool I was staying at a hotel and the landlord couldn’t quite understand, when he was talking to me, why it was I had enjoyed myself the year before quite so much living in Stoke Newington. And I realised at the very early stage of this conversation that the roots to his observations were clearly racist when eventually he said to me ‘didn’t you have any real problems?’ I said no, I didn’t have any problems because my brother-in-law with whom I was living is 6 foot 6’ and comes from Barbados. The fellow never spoke to me after that and it seemed to sort of solve the problem. But it just struck me as extraordinary in the centre of Liverpool, a city with an extraordinarily rich cultural diversity, with a Chinese population in particular, that goes back in time longer than the Irish population.

I do get concerned by the use of some language. I have written down two words that deeply concern me in terms of last week’s tragic events. On the one hand the use of the word ‘holy war’ and on the other hand the use of the word ‘crusade’, an abuse of the English language on both parts if I ever heard them.
We’ve got to find ways of communicating with people on issues of the macro level and at the micro level in a way that avoids the complications that can emerge if we don’t get the language right because I think, if I can just finish on this point, I think that we’ve got to make sure that the forces that on the one hand attract some of the neo-nazi group and the forces that attract some of the fundamentalists groups are kept at bay. And we will only do that by engaging with people, making sure that their needs and aspirations are fully met.

Anthony Wilson: First of all I get confused by language as well. I think there is an implicit confusion right at the heart of this. I am going to ask this – Which word are we using? British? Or English? I am using the word English. Are we English or British?

Michael Woods the TV historian has a very lovely book at the moment, full of delightful essays on Glastonbury, and other things English, in which he makes a very specific point: now that the Welsh and the Scots have devolution we are English again. First of all the Michael Woods book is fascinating. I’m English. I know that as well, I too have always felt I am English and I’m going to talk about knowing yourself in the same way that this region of Britain absolutely knows who it is and what it is. I’ve never felt Scot, or felt Welsh, I feel English, and I think suddenly we have to come to terms with that. We need to decide at a meeting like this whether we are talking about Britain or about England, and by my concept of England I also mean what I call ‘New English’ or something, which is precisely revelling in the multiculturalism of my region.

This isn’t about tribes and emotional things. For example, I am always interested in the fact that the British public or the English public don’t want the Euro. Nevertheless, the British who went to Europe for the weekend found it very useful how to ask prices in Euro because they didn’t have to work out or look in the currency chart.

It has long occurred to me that if you ask the British public ‘Do you want monetary union?’ they don’t give a toss. Monetary Union is not a problem for the British public, but loosing the word ‘pound’ is. The only person other than me I have ever heard say this is actually Michael Woods in his book. Have we ever asked people if we had monetary union and we had a thing called a pound, and the pound and the franc were exactly the same value, would you have a problem with it?

So I am talking about the emotions of regions and the emotions of tribes and how it all works. I have spoken about knowing who we are. The Northwest of England knows exactly who it is where it is, where it is and what it is. There is slight confusion because North Wales is part of England’s Northwest. However we know exactly who we were and where we are. England’s Northwest is all the people who live in this area on this side of the Pennines, on top of it you’ve got the Lake District and at the bottom of it you’ve got the nice life land of Cheshire where all the rich buggers live.

We know exactly who we are, our identity is engrained in all of us who were brought up here, and I’m sure infiltrates into anybody who has been here more than a few months. The Northwest doesn’t have to invent itself; it is here already in some completeness. Now, I always like a quote from Sir Bob Scott who I sometimes don’t get on with, but on this occasion I’ll remind myself again what a wonderful speaker he is. And he used to always say there are two kinds of cities in the world; there are those in countries where the capital is not the main town, and there are cities in countries where the capital is the main town.

If your capital is Ottawa, then Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver can thrive. If your capital is Washington, then New York, Chicago, LA can thrive. If your capital’s London, then you are screwed in my humble opinion. This is seen to be an emotional thing. When we read our newspapers, and our newspapers are national, (it’s a joke), national newspapers. The news from the art galleries, which art galleries are in our national newspapers, etc, etc, etc which is the most important gallery in Britain? The Tate Modern. Where do you get all these ideas from, where it was all experimented with, The Tate Liverpool. Anyone know that? Anyone say it? Of course they don’t. We live in this kind of situation. Now when I thought about that, I also had this truly emotional tribalism on my part. Like the need to actually be aggressive towards the South was somehow, I felt purely emotional and was okay, until one night about 4 months ago, in the theatre over here, directly under our feet, very wonderful small theatre, The Guardian arranged a conference to discuss the report on the North-South divide, and hey guess what? It still exists. It’s about poverty up here, and not so much poverty down there. Shock horror. It was bit of a shock since we obviously have had wonderful regeneration in our northern cities, which we are very proud of. The report basically was saying, yes, our city centres have undergone lots of regeneration, really happening, bar culture, you know Manchester bars have shiny floors. But. The report said, you drive those roads, you drive a couple of miles out of those wonderful city centres, and there is real poverty and real problems.

I came along to talk about the report and made one of the gaffs, for which I am famous and stupid, in that I sat opposite Professor Brian Robson, Vice Chancellor of Manchester University, and he said what do you think of the report, and I said well saying that it is still dismal up north is typical of these bloody southerners. Now I actually agree with the report, but began like that. And Professor Robson said; ‘It’s my report’. Well I retreated very quickly into my shell, but having done my research and read the one page précis of the report, on the metro coming here, I spotted in paragraph five a most extraordinary paragraph, and that paragraph was about France, and the actual report was about five pages. And when I arrived with quotes from Bob Scott, I would often use the example, and not if you live in a country where London is the capital, I would usually say; If you live in a country where Paris is both capital and main city, and you live in Lyon, you’re screwed. But guess what this report in some detail says? It shows that over the last 30 years, GDP per capita in the regional cities of France has grown slightly more than that in the very high profile and very happening city of Paris. And that to me was a shock. So in my embarrassment at accusing Brian Robson of being a bloody Southerner I said ‘excuse me sir could you tell that very weird statistic, I was shocked, is that actually…I am sure it’s true, but isn’t strange.’ He said, ‘It is strange, and it’s central to our report. I said ‘so why, why do we have a growing poverty gap with the Southeast of England and our capital city, and why don’t the French?’ And he said it would almost appear to be entirely because of the serious commitment to devolution of power, and because of the existence of mayors, those two things. I’ve always thought my feelings were emotional and tribal, and to hell with those people down the bottom of the M1. They are actually not emotional, they are practical and real. And we as individuals are impoverished by the divide of power and the concentration of image and impact on our centralised country, on our centralised state of London.

If I talk about real devolution for one moment, real devolution is not assembling a very large bunch of the great and the good. I despise the great and the good, they are Britain’s last great disease or England’s last specialist disease. The people themselves who are the Great and the Good, some of them are my dear friends, they are wonderful individuals, wonderful people who, on their own in businesses and companies have achieved great things. You put them round a table in a committee and they are the dead hand on British culture. It’s a simple fact of life, it doesn’t exist. However, it exists in Scotland and Wales, it’s our problem, it’s doesn’t exist on the continent. I was overjoyed when Mandelson lost out because of the Dome. Mrs. Thatcher had done her bit to distance herself from the great and the good culture, and when New Labour came to power, they had two choices. And the choice was to snuggle right up to the old Great and the Good, and that to me was a dreadful thing. It was the Great and the Good – because I met them – who built the Dome – the most ridiculous waste of effort, time and money.

I want to say one or two more things. To get this regional government, which is so obvious, we have to fight, and there’ll be many people fighting against real regional government. When government is out of office, wonderful are theories of giving away power, of devolution. As soon as they get power, it becomes a lot harder. I always said the Scots and the Welsh got under the gate before it closed. I think the gate is partially closed, I know that Blair and his people are making statements about devolution (no money for it); I’ll believe it when I see it.

A second force to fight against will be some of our regional MPs. Not all of them I hope. Power is intoxicating and it is very difficult. And even that one area of having mayors, which no one doubts is one of the prime reasons why the regional cities and the regions of France have not declined into a poverty gap with the big boys in Paris. In some of our cities, not this one, the one just across the way there, we are not allowed to talk about mayors. Delightfully in Liverpool they are much more intelligent, they really discuss mayors, they have meetings about it until you get the feeling about it that those guys over there figured out what our guys over here are doing, which is: don’t mention mayors because you will loose out as well. Why on earth would you be allowed to discuss mayors, if the mayor is not going to come from the present ruling group in a particular city?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: I think one of the first things I want to say, and this is not in anyway patting ourselves on the back, is that a group like this is rarely seen anywhere discussing these themes, and I think we should be extremely appreciative. We are more or less equal in terms of gender. But also, quite remarkably, suited, extremely distinguished, powerful white men are seating side by side with a whole range of women, I guarantee, quite a lot of them will never have actually exchanged real ideas.

I am going to take on a few of the points made, and also explain why Global Britons came about. I, for the last five years, have been on a kind of journey trying to work through what is happening to Britain, what is happening to all of us, where we’re headed, and what some of the pitfalls are, and how what seems right at one moment on this journey through a changing country that we now inhabit, and ours is not the only country that is changing. What seems right at a certain time in our development actually becomes a terribly difficult problem and an obstacle just a couple of years on.

I was at the IPPR four years ago, and I wrote a book called True Colours, which was a very sort of simple book in some ways, looking at how politicians had singularly failed since 1948 particularly, to inform, enlighten, engage with the British population, so that fifty years on from the Windrush, and that was of course not the beginning of immigration – you know ever since Francis Drake went out on that boat in search of spices and sex and whatever it was that drove the Brits out, this country diverse from that day – but let’s take ’48 as the beginning of the most recent massive change, that politicians throughout that period had played games, had not engaged with, had not consulted either with white or with black Britons, and that the failures we now see are entirely due to that complete and criminal neglect on their part – cowardice and a peculiar kind of self-interest.

That was book number one, but as I kind of looked at it more, I began to realise almost as the book was written and published, we were already on to a different landscape, where it was no longer enough just to talk about multiculturalism, that since devolution was being discussed and coming to fruition, the whole landscape was changing, and old multiculturalism, the way we spoke about it, and the way it had become a kind of solution in some ways to this problem of the strange people who arrived with Windrush and thereafter, people who one could never actually understand, and therefore we had to kind of give them a little space called ‘multiculturlal spaces’, that that was also outliving its usefulness and was creating a new set of problems. So when I came to The Foreign Policy Centre, one of the first things I did was to write a short pamphlet called After Multiculturalism, which deals with many of the issues that have been raised very eloquently, which were very much to do with knowing ourselves, knowing yourself as an individual, the multiple alliances and identities that we all have, the emergence of an English identity, and you know I was very pleased that Anthony brought that up because one of the first things I wrote about three years ago was; let us look at the English, let the English look at themselves. And by that I do not mean myself, I do not think of myself in English, I don’t want to be English, I have no problems with the English developing their own identity, I feel very comfortable being British because I think for me and you know this is my view and of course other people may disagree, that the British identity has become some kind of canopy identity many of us like Bedouin tribes are trading under that canopy. I think that for me feels most comfortable.

So I completely agree that the emerging English identity has got to be encouraged and that it’s completely and utterly wrong that every time the English talk about wanting an identity, liberals, particularly down in the hated South, start panicking and saying that they are all going to turn out to be football hooligans. I think that is childish and probably extremely unwise.

The whole problem it seemed to me with the multicultural discourse in the 21st century is this: that it assumes that there is a thing called the nation, and I can’t remember which one of the speakers said we are in the business now of building a new nation, but that nation is largely white. And if you are not white you think that all whites are the same, they are all privileged, all powerful and they all have an identical set of attitudes. A couple of them may marry one or two of us, but actually when the chips are down the whites are kind of this homogenous lump. Whereas the rest of us are different, very different, delighting in our differences all the time, dancing our dances, having our separate schools in this very strange country called multicultural Britain, very far away from the centre, somewhere in the fringes, really, you know, playing marbles in the ghetto and not interfering with the nation. I think that’s terribly unhelpful for everybody because I don’t believe it fair anymore to talk about a white identity for all the reasons we’ve heard described so eloquently. Nor is it useful to talk about our cultures in terms of non-white Britons as steadfast, standing still, enclosed, so precious that we cannot surrender any bits of it, needing to be preserved in some sort of extremely expensive vinegar. I think we have to be very careful of that kind of thinking, because of course policies come out of that, damaging policies come out of that. I have been in a huge quarrel with Ken Livingston recently because he’s simply defrosted his anti-racist policies that he put into a freezing compartment whenever he was last in power. I have a lot of admiration for Ken, but I think when it comes to his race and culture in politics he just took the freezer top away, box out and defrosted it. He has simply not understood how London is now a very different place from the place he knew.

And so there is talk about setting up these black cultural centres in London in places such as Tower Hamlets. Excuse me, why should my son who is twenty three, who grew up here, went to Edinburgh, why should he go to a place deliberately designated for him as a black cultural centre? Why should that be the assumption? He may want to go there, he may not. He may want to go to the national theatre and is happening quite a lot, not enough, a little bit, you know see Chekhov but with a very integrated cast, that is what he might want to see. Pray, what is the political sense in going to a place like Tower Hamlets which we all know about, just kind of became at one time like Oldham now is or Burnley – a symbol of deprivation and separation. What’s the point of having an arts centre in a place which is deprived and angry, which has so many white people of various sorts who do feel let down by the new economy and so on, placing a black arts centre in the middle of such an area. How many minutes before it’s going to be vandalised, how many hours before people are going into are going to be resented. Why can we not have, as somebody said, I can’t remember was it you? A sense of place. Build a sense of place and localities, a shared sense of space where you can of course, like I said, excel in trading your differences, exchanging ideas, getting together on some projects and separating out on others.

I think it is extremely important to move beyond the idea of multiculturalism of the traditional sort and think about another place, and that completely bring us to the regional assemblies and identity issues. But here I then pause because I am not overly romantic about the idea of regions and local politics unless people are extremely self-aware. You know there was this great romance about Scotland and the Scottish parliament, and I’m delighted that the Scottish have found their nation again, and incidentally I must congratulate the BBC for the way they handled that whole change and how very subtly the way Scotland and Wales began to be reported and described completely changed from the way it was a year before devolution. You know it is depressing when you look at Scotland today from where I stand. You have a wonderful new parliament, which is all white. The very fact that everybody including left-thinking liberals was enthusiastic about this devolution in Scotland is no reason not to be very critical.

In this country how can it be that the Welsh assembly ended up being all white? I know that they had Shirley Bassey singing away when it was opened, but that doesn’t seem for me good enough really. There are other problems. I mean, I think the Yorkshire identity is a very interesting one. The pride is remarkable, but that pride, if it is part of an ancient Yorkshire pride, which is often you know: I’m a Yorkshire man, I speak my mind, which I often hear from some of the worst columnists who attack me in the papers, I don’t’ want that kind of pride thank you very much whether it’s Yorkshire or Pakistani. Those are damaging and extremely dividing things that ought not to be encouraged. I think there is a danger of overly exaggerated ethnic identities for the same reason. I am delighted there are so many black and Asian women in the audience because of course whenever anyone talks about ethnic groups or religious groups the only people they’re ever speaking to – and forgive me the gentlemen from these communities in the room – it is always the blokes who are out there speaking on our behalf. The whole of Burnley happened, the whole of Oldham happened, did you see anything about what the women were thinking? Did any woman tell you how she was feeling as a Muslim in those areas? So it’s like when the aliens land, take me to your leader, as long as we remain aliens there will this idea of take me to you leader and the leader will always be middle-aged, self-selected and a bloke who doesn’t speak to the women.

I think there are great dangers of an exaggerated, and a very old-fashioned sense of what community means. Out of all the European tribes the English have been the most promiscuous culturally and sexually. They now have the highest rates of mixed race love affairs any where in the western world. They also love curry. They’ve made it their national food. No other European tribe had ever done that. But the problem with that is of course because it’s been so porous; the reactions against diversity are also ugliest in parts of England. It’s almost as though things have gone too far. And we do have to take these things extremely seriously. So I don’t believe that the solution is going to be only in devolution, I don’t like this idea of the four nations either, thank you very much because it puts us down the ladder again into fourth class, fifth class citizens. I don’t think one should talk about a four nation country, we are much more complicated than that. Yes let’s encourage a sense of place, let’s encourage localities, let’s encourage regional identities, but always as a censor for changing region not an ancestral blue heart version that we are getting increasingly in Scotland or the ‘I’m a Yorkshire man’ that you might get in Yorkshire and other places.

I still feel incredibly committed to the idea of Britain. It’s ironic these days, more black and Asian people are more proud to call themselves British than a lot of English people, Scottish people and Welsh people. So just as the white Britons are disengaging from this identity, the old children of the empire are kind of grabbing it. We really love this Britishness I must tell you, we love the flag these days, which is so ironic and very interesting in how history produces something like the empire and a relationship like a kind of good and bad marriage which has brought us here, which made people go there, and in the end that Britishness maybe, will be fought for hardest by people like myself who feel that it is this canopy identity.

I’ve had a very interesting experience this week, and some of you will be aware of it, I was on the infamous, actually, I thought one of the most brilliant Question Times last week, and have had an extraordinary time since then, both good and bad, over 1,000 e-mails saying it was a wonderful programme from all sorts of people. But a lot of very unpleasant reactions too. The unpleasantness of the reactions have been fascinating. Underneath the objections was this idea that Question Time, Any Questions, and some of these key programmes belong to white Britain. This is where the white Good and the Great sit and talk in a nice English way, to polite English people. It is not a place where somebody like me sits on a panel, and certainly not a place where women in hijabs start expressing emotional things. For God’s sake where is the country going? And I thought that was such an interesting event because it goes back to what I started to say right at the top, that if we believe we are making a new nation, and that that nation demands of us equal participation, we need to be equally self-critical and I mean extremely self-critical. For instance about some of the ways the Muslim community has behaved, is in danger of behaving, otherwise we will fail in the enterprise, and we will get many more Oldham and all sorts of other splits because we would have generated this idea that every community be it English or Scottish or the groups in Northern Ireland has an absolute right to behave badly because they you know they’ve got these cultural rights.

So really the final point is that I think the British Identity is even more important as we develop the localities, regions, and devolved Britain. Also, because all of us non-white Britons in this room – I’m sorry the terms are awful but there are no other easy terms – are changing everyday single day of our lives. There is no way any of us can believe that we can maintain a kind of thermos flask of something called culture. Everybody, even my 80yr old mother has changed more than any body else in our family. Since she started watching Coronation Street on the day she landed, her values changed. I am not exaggerating. She has bought Bob Geldoff’s picture and put it next to Allah on her wall. Those are the two people she most admires. And therefore the idea of us being in cultural pots also is ridiculous. All of this will inevitably require a real thrust to make us more equal, to give us all access to power and influence and to demand of us a kind of loyalty to citizenship culture rather than these funny little cultures that we’ve been made to be committed to thank you.

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE

Cllr Abdul Razak: I’m quite confused really at the opening remarks by everybody on the panel. I’ve got a leaflet in front of me that says Global Briton. Everyone’s talking about regional devolution. I don’t understand where all this is coming from. Up until the point I came here, I thought I was quite well within myself. I’m of Pakistani origin, I live in Britain and that’s my identity. What I’ve heard so far is: you are not only of Pakistani origin, but you’re English, you’re not quite English, but you have to be British as well. What do I contribute towards that Britishness? Hmmmm… I have this particular cultural value here, that’s nice, but I’m also asked to take on board more. What about the English or the British cultural values, how do the two things intermingle? So what I’d actually like to say here is if you’re going to talk about multiculturalism or multicultures and then you’re looking at English as well, then further devolving that into English regional or northwestern regional issues, how are you going to encompass everything in that? How are you going to take that all on board?
YAB: Right any other points? Thank you.
HB: Hilary Burrage from Hope Streets in Liverpool. I think, young people can say so, young people define themselves by activity and interest as their elders do. My daughter is in Amsterdam today, she was in Helsinki last week. She works with people of every possible ethnic origin and or genders in fact in a professional capacity in a team of that sort. I think those identities are as strong for young people, in other words for the generation that is growing up as other identities are, such as having a mom who comes from Winchester. And perhaps that encompasses every single one of us in this room, in one way or another professional teams, action teams, arts teams, informal teams, because of the way people can expand their communication far greater than before and in far different mixes of identity. I think we should welcome and encourage that alongside our own local needs and regional needs, which are also critical.
YAB: Can I just say one thing, I was going to, at the end of the seminar talk about the global side of it. I’m not neglecting that, but returning the point about the young people that you’ve made; there was an MTV survey and another survey I think last year of young people across Europe and what was very alarming is that, I’m sure what you’ve said is true, is that young British people came out most xenophobic, and most non-internationalist out of all the other young Europeans. So I think I’m sure in some ways what you’re saying is true, but some of the evidence we’re getting is that it’s not necessarily so.

PANEL

AW: I’m just aware that while I talked about regionalism and the rest of it, history of politics, everything, the global dimension, these seem to based around their emotions and wanting to be parts of families, and our life and everything that means anything to us is a series of serial families. I’m absolutely aware that Manchester vs. Salford, Manchester and Salford vs. Liverpool, Manchester, Salford and Liverpool the northwest vs. those buggers on the other side of the Pennines. And there’s this row of serial families from which we all take strength. The more dis-empowered we are, the more we take strength from the wrong family groups, the wrong gangs where we find solace and whatever else. What I’m very much aware of is when we talk about post-multiculturalism, is that it is movie called East is East which was made just outside these windows here. And in it, it had that vision of the revolt of young kids, ethnic kids against the family traditions. I wonder whether we all felt at ease with the fact that somehow that was the way it was, you know the McDonalds and drink and everything else would seep in and everything would be cool, and the walls would fall down. But what we find I think is that we all need families, and the more needs we have inside ourselves emotionally the more we find them. In some way in the last 10 years maybe more walls are going up, walls that make us feel good inside but then create the distinctions. I don’t have any answers to this, I’m just responding to that. But even the events at the World Trade Centre have to do with people who feel parts of families and how they experience that. I am just wondering my own little personal obsession in the region where I come from, that I want the England’s northwest to part of a region of Europe, whether there are thoughts of other families that might take away some of the families who fight against other families, just thoughts, if one could construct that or if is even possible within the emotions that human beings have.

Andrew Miller: If I may answer the question from the councillor, I think it was a perfectly sensible question. But the answer is that we need to just reflect on how rapidly the world’s changing. In the early 70s I was part of a campaign against Britain joining the European Union. By the mid-80s the effects of globalisation whether we like it or not had impacted Britain’s economy to such a degree that it would have been crazy for us to try and reverse and become an independent island state ever again. By 1988, places like Estonia right across the whole Soviet Empire, suddenly had thrust upon them the merits of otherwise of the western world. Despite the fact that the Right would claim that it was..that brought that the Soviet Empire, it was actually the power of modern communications that had more influence on real people’s desire to reach out and grab things that we take for granted in Britain. So the world is changing, it’s changing very rapidly and as a consequence we need to find the units that work in practical sense to match some of the advantaged that I’ve certainly seen in other parts of northern in Europe, in nations that are either a slightly smaller size or in some of the regions of France or the Lander in Germany. To just touch on the point that was made by our last speaker. I don’t think it was the case that Scotland and Wales slipped under the gate, unfortunately the political process, you and I as part of the political process failed to convince the Welsh in sufficient numbers that he assembly was a good idea. They are now beginning to realise that actually it was a good idea, the tide is slightly swinging back towards, say, a more positive yes but had there been a bigger yes in Wales I think we would have seen the role of the northeast and northwest much closer towards having a serious devolution debate here. I hope to see it come, and I say my principle in this huge rapidly moving, global entity that we live in, we need to find a unit that will practically work to deliver things for the people that we seek to represent here in the northwest.

ML: I think your point is right, that we are grappling with all sorts of different identities and I think Tony’s point earlier that a lot of those identities aren’t about place but there are different types of communities which are about what we do, what our values our, what our emotions are, there are all sorts of communities which could have completely disembodied and which are virtual networks etc. They are an important identity, but as these things go on, national identities, regional identities do become more important, because they are some of the only ways of creating the social glue, of having progressive politics which actually takes care of people who are left out, who start within auspicious beginnings, and which allows us to have institutions which do deliver for people, which re-distribute wealth, and which create a measure of social justice.

But in order for those institutions to exist and in order for us not to shatter into ever smaller tribes, we need to see identity as a constant battle-ground almost, a site of conflict, and it’s something to be engaged in. One of the things I think is really positive is that the centre-left within the UK has actually come to that realisation. Orwell used to complain that the English left were suckers for anyone’s nationalism but their own. And that they’d support any sort of liberation cause anywhere in the world, but were desperate not to engage in discussions about Englishness or Britishness. I think that’s a caricature but it’s quite a fair caricature of the way that liberals and the left have treated it. I’ve often had a sense that even in family that they’d rather sort of close their eyes and hold hands and hopefully wake up in a world where we’re all global citizens and internationalists, and there were not any types of nationalism or national identity. Of course that’s not true, and if the left and progressive voices disengaged from those discussions, other people will forge those identities and they will be identities that are not inclusive, which are defined by the Tebbit Cricket test or other sorts of hoops which people have to jump through. There will be negative and exclusive and will not deliver the sorts of things that we’re talking about.

That’s why I think it’s so important to have these discussions. One of my worries about the government for instance is that it’s very good on Britishness. Tony Blair is one of the first leaders of the Labour party to really take national identity seriously, to try and create a new set of myths, a new set of narratives which are about values, which are about the sorts of things we can all unite around, but which don’t exclude people. So it’s a very different sort of patriotism that he’s expressing. But there’s a certain defensiveness when it comes to different kinds of identity. For example the English identity is a debate where the government refused to engage in. If anyone mentions the idea of Englishness, they all say it’s nonsense, no one feels English, Scottish, Cornish, Welsh possibly, you know those are real identities, but Englishness isn’t a real identity. It is for some people, it isn’t for other people. But refusing to talk about it isn’t a solution. I think there are incredibly powerful reasons not to have an English parliament, and I’ll argue with anyone about whether we need an English parliament or not, but I think we have to have the same debate about Englishness that we had about Britishness and define that as an inclusive identity, which is about values, about other sorts of myth, rather than an ethnic identity. I mean apart from the fact that it would be a completely hopeless cause to try and turn it into an ethnic identity, given how promiscuous English people have been through out the ages. I think it’d be negative, I think the discussions you’re having about Northwestern identity are at another level. I think that fight has to be fought at every single level and that’s something which I think we need practitioners to engage with, so you have a debate which is about reality, about real choices, about ways of distributing things and that we cut through a lot of the myths which sometimes actually result in completely unfair and cosmetic decisions, which have been part of a lot of the old debates about identity, and where the left has actually often ended up supporting completely regressive and counterproductive policies in the name of social justice or multiculturalism.

JH: Jim Hancock, political editor of the BBC in the Northwest. If I could make a contribution on some of the detail about regional devolution and where we are or where we aren’t and tie it in with what we are talking about today in terms of diversity, because Tony has talked in general terms about his desire for mayors and regional government. I would just like to, as far as I can give you my perspective on it, tell you where we are on those two subjects and then maybe later on in our discussion we can actually find out whether people, particularly those from the diverse communities, actually care about it. One of the things I think these mayoral debates and regional government debates have completely lacked is contributions from the diverse communities in the Northwest as to whether they see it as valuable or not. In terms of mayors, the debate was basically being shut down in Manchester by a pact between Labour and the Liberal democrats. They were both opposed to the concept, formal consultation took place, there was a tiny response, and the issues died. Even more alarming in Liverpool which was at one time seen as…
AW: Tell the truth Jim, tell the truth, they announced in the Town Hall that 97% of Mancunians were not interested in mayors. And then some asked if they did a massive survey, and then people did a survey to find out if anyone had been surveyed, and no one had been surveyed, no one even knew it existed. They announced this on the front page of the evening news. The most thing disgraceful they’ve seen in years.
JH: In fact, the survey was allegedly done by people separate from the Town Hall. That is the position. In Liverpool where we saw it as being a pioneering concept, a democracy commission, a colleague of mine here, working very hard in a private capacity, once again very small turn out, no sign of it. Some people, Peter Killfoil said the powers – and this I think is crucial to this whole debate – the powers weren’t going to be there for the elected mayor, and that the boundaries were wrong. Moving on briefly to regional government. I think what many people who are advocating it are talking about is real power for a regional government, that is powers coming down from the government office Northwest, which presides over this region from their offices, which you can see in the Sunday buildings. They govern the Northwest, but those are the powers that would come down to regional government. There actually is, though you may not realise, a consultation at this time. If you feel really strongly about it, you can go to Carlyle on Friday and join the other twenty people who will turn up for a consultation. And I’m not saying this in a mocking way. I’m just telling you that this is actually going on at the moment. And my question perhaps to Andrew (Miller) at some point is, what has happened to the devolution agenda by the government? It seems to have ground to a standstill. This is my final point. I absolutely agree with Tony that what we do no want from a regional government is a regional government of the old faces of political parties, and I think some radical thinking would have to be done, like reserved places on these regional assemblies for particular interest groups. Now a final challenge is, if the government really do believe in this, why don’t they legislate on it. I mean we don’t legislate on laws to do with the home office and tax and all that sort of thing. If this is right for this country, let’s have legislation on elected mayors, let’s have legislation for English regional government, but it’s just something I am interested in hearing from other people as to whether anyone cares about it, because at the moment, those two concepts are going into the dust.
YAB: Right I’m going to actually be ruthless, and say we probably need to break up and discuss these details on the tables. I’m going to read out what we thought would be interesting to discuss at each table, and maybe people can choose which ones are most relevant to what they do.

· Is there any sense in talking about British identity, the shift towards regional, devolved, local and ethnic identities? Will the irreversible thrust of globalisation mean that this is a hollow can?
· Is there any point in thinking about an identity anyway? Linda Colley, the very fantastic writer and thinker thinks that we should just be talking about citizenship.
· Is it easier for regions and newly devolved nations to see themselves in Global terms rather than as uneasy and uncertain nations?
· The same question can be asked about the EU. Scotland seems to be easier about the EU, and Britain seems not to be. Is there a problem with the nation-state?
· How can the story of the nation, regional locality change in global terms without surrendering all that is unique about the areas and the people?
· Is protectionism needed to keep the balance? Do people in positions of power need to be thinking about interventions, projects, and deliberate policies to ensure that which is unique and the result of any important evolution is not swept away and ensure also that there is no perilous fall back into a frightened kind of conservatism?

Britain can be described in many ways. Each story brings with it implications for education, the arts, local government and culture. We could reinforce the myth that this country is an indomitable island-race that has an uninterrupted continuity and homogeneity and that all that has happened has become a threat. Or, the story could be of a place made and re-made through the arrival of various war-like or ambitious or dispossessed people, each wave adding another layer of interest, value, conflicts and challenges. Each will produce its own imperative, its own policies. The new internationalism of globalisation is not a wholly positive development. The tragedy in America is one example. When you have links worldwide, and you take up one set of grievances, and you can actually operate as a worldwide organisation through the Internet, you can see the dangers of that kind of globalisation. So I think we shouldn’t become too romantic. Neo-nazis know the importance of that kind of globalisation too.

Finally a quote from Gordon Brown, is it easier said than done? The quote is:

“As the Tebbit cricket test and the Stephen Lawrence case illustrate, there are those who would retreat from an expansive idea of Britishness into a constricted shell of right-winged English nationalism. My vision of Britain comes from celebrating diversity, in other words, a multi-ethnic and multinational Britain, as I understand Britishness, has been outward looking, open, internationalist, with a commitment to democracy and tolerance”.

FEEDBACK

1. Politics and Political Institutions: We’ve been discussing politics and political institutions and how we can involve people. I think at the end of the day if I was summing it up I would say that while there are people like me who are anoraks obsessed with structure and that sort of thing, the consensus was this: any question of devolution, elected mayors, issues like that had to relate to what services people wanted delivered and work from that basis. So find out what people want, how their services are not being delivered properly and work from the grass root up, and then see what institutions are appropriate to that sort of top down approach. In fact in many cases politicians are causing the division between people and people have got to come together for themselves and identify with each other rather than politicians dividing people.

There has to be talk about winning arguments or there is at the moment always talk about winning arguments and not enough about persuading people. One member of the group said in actual fact in this country, it’s extremely difficult to have consensual politics. Not only between parties, which perhaps one could not take much exception to, but even within political parties, that the dialogue has become very non-consensual.

We did discuss this need to define mechanisms to deliver services and then go for it, but then there was another view that it is difficult for people, unless the consultation mechanism was extremely sophisticated and well presented to actually bring people together. They need to be affected for it, otherwise it just becomes a dialogue of the middle class. An observation was made that single issue organisations like for instance, Friends of the Earth, have been very successful in enthusing people, getting members, campaigning, and that has been marked contrast to political parties. There was a feeling, in terms of more consensual politics in Britain that an opportunity had been missed with House of Lords reform to actually accurately reflect our diverse community.

We obviously, as I am sure other groups would have done, came to discuss the whole question of apathy in this country. It was felt that where areas have actually received urban aid money or single regeneration, that in those wards there was some evidence that there was a higher participation in politics than areas where less money had been spent. Rather than become discontented and involved, that sometimes communities where there is deprivation just turn off completely, and where if one begins to work with communities and reform you actually do generate aspirations for more involvement.

2. Media, Arts and Culture: Islam UK was an undertaken on the BBC especially in its regional and local broadcasting recently, and there was appreciation and welcome for it as an exercise. It was of great benefit, but the programme should really have been broadcast at more appropriate times, not between 2 and 4 in the morning. But there was also a need to build upon it, it was all a bit rather about having Islam UK as an exercise, as a sort of benchmark for the BBC to say, yes we recognise this large and important and indeed growing community but the question some colleagues posed was ‘what next?’ How do you build on it? How do you take that on?

There was a short discussion about radio phone-ins, in which some callers with more atavistic attitudes weren’t challenged enough and that presenters should do more to do that. One colleague expressed a fear that multiculturalism could degenerate into separatism and in the broadcasting sphere we had a chat about whether programmes which were designed for specific ethnic minority groups were really the best way ahead, and whether perhaps we should introduce these sort or programs into the main stream output, and not sort of put them in little broadcasting ghettos. Andy Griffee made the point that the old Reithian values of informing, entertaining and educating, upon which the BBC had been built over the last 70 odd years should be added to a fourth value, which was connecting. And finally there was an agreement that as broadcasters, the media should really stress and reinforce what w e have in common and not focus on that which divides us, so often and so much.

YAB: I think the connecting point is crucial. Since there are so many people in the BBC here, would the BBC have the nerve, to ever do a very challenging programme on Islam, which wasn’t just talking about what is wonderful about Islam? I’m a Muslim, and I’m very happy about that. You know there is quite a lot that we Muslims are worried about, about what’s going wrong within our own. Is there nervousness about that? I was on the nation programme yesterday in this really open debate, but I know that within the mainstream BBC there’s nervousness that you mustn’t be at all controversial know, you mustn’t offend.
Response: Example. The level of coverage that false marriages have had is unprec

DANGEROUS DATA
by lury.gibson (Adam Lury and Simon Gibson)
(Bantam Press, 2001, pb, £9.99, ISBN 0-593-04741-9)

Arthur C. Dogg is a new type of detective – a data detective. He doesn’t
stake out motels, tap phones, or even leave his room. The disembodied
cyber-narrator of this gripping yarn relies on the information that he can
‘mine’ from the internet. Dangerous Data is a zeitgeist book that goes to
the heart of the dilemmas of life in an information society: where the
average person exists on 2000 databases, is filmed on 300 closed circuit TV
cameras a day, leaves a trail of data with every purchase she makes, and
risks being ‘googled’ by potential employers, partners or neighbours.

The book’s innovative structure is a testimony to the end of privacy. The
left hand page just contains the raw data that Dogg accesses – legally and
illegally – from phone bills, credit card records, company databases and the
electoral roll, while the right hand page has Dogg’s interpretation of the
facts. Through his analysis of this disjointed data, Dogg manages to piece
together an intrigue of drugs, sex and suspicious deaths.

Dogg is ready to deal with the age of DIY identity where people
self-consciously transcend the identity that comes with class, age or
gender, to create new personas. The apotheosis of this movement is the
“identity tourism” of the internet where people will assume different
personas behind the cloak of anonymity which the web provides. But although
we may not realise it, this construction of identity has become the primary
characteristic of our everyday lives. Today we literally are what we buy
or, as Dogg puts it, “every purchase is a confession”. The brands we choose
are the building blocks of our new selves. This can have a profoundly
democratising effect: “You don’t have to wait two generations to be accepted
anymore.. You can do it in an afternoon.”

Dangerous Data is cleverly constructed and manages to get the reader to turn
the pages through a fast-paced thriller but it is far from a high-tech
detective story. It is splattered with big questions: “Who are we?”, “How
much do we want to know?”. Dogg dives fearlessly into the heart of some of
the most troubling philosophical questions and undermines many of our
cherished beliefs. 20 years after 1984, he blames Orwell for making us fear
the wrong enemy: ” We could see who the bad guys were, we thought. And we
fought against them, hard and tough. Freedom of Speech. Free press. Open
Government.”

But our defence against Big Brother has been so successful that we have
undermined our freedom by making privacy impossible: “the
future is worrying because everything can be known. Everyone’s secrets”.
Instead of fearing a predatory state we must fear our neighbours, colleagues
and friends who can track our every move: “It’s fine to have stats on people
you never meet. But it’s not fine to have facts on people you know
intimately. Not fine to have them on your husband or wife, your lover or
your sister. Because these facts may not match your internal version and
it’s too hard to change that picture. Too painful”. The information society
marks the end of the stranger. Instead of living in a mass society where we
can drown in the anonymity of the crowd, we returning to the claustrophobia
of a small village where everyone knows everything.

Dogg calls this “the new Fall”. Just as Adam and Eve had to deal with
physical nakedness, so is our society peeling back layer after layer to
expose our innermost secrets. This leads Dogg to the surprising conclusion
that “a little censorship doesn’t harm. It stabilises.”.

Dangerous Data is an improbable achievement: a detailed explanation of
complex policy issues in the guise of a detective story. Its narrative
clearly and evocatively tackles issues that think tanks or universities –
too often trapped into linear thinking and formulaic investigation (moving
straight from challenges to the sign-posts for a New Jerusalem) – fail to
pin down. But by forcing the reader to live through these dilemmas Dangerous
Data spooks us into questioning some of our most basic assumptions.

Mark Leonard

A longer version of this review appeared in The New Statesman. The Foreign Policy Centre publish Fever by lury.gibson next year.

Successful corporations have changed from ‘financially viable producers and purveyors of goods and services’ into vast profit-needing institutions that, almost coincidently, deliver goods and services. Extraordinary facts about this historic transformation have been turned into apparently mundane truths. Consider their size. It has become almost passé amongst opinion leaders to point out that 51 of the 100 largest economies in the world today are corporations, or that the top 200 corporations have sales equivalent to one quarter of the world’s total economic activity. We seem to accept as normal that General Motors has annual sales equivalent to the GDP of Denmark, and the annual sales of Sears Roebuck’s are comparable to the total annual income of over 100 million Bangladeshis.
Global corporations, for better or worse, dominate the political economy of developing countries and super-powers alike. Their investments underpin the capital base of many emerging economies, and their donations are essential to ever-more-costly political campaigns. Not surprisingly, these mega-institutions are accused of sapping the means – and perhaps the will – of national governments to represent their citizens’ best interests. The effect of this, it is claimed, has been to drive down the floor by cutting public spending, privatising public assets, exploiting often severely curtailed public services for private profit, and drawing back from any regulation that constrains business activities.
Our attitudes towards corporations is neurotic, to say the least. Corporation’s point out that people continue to buy their products, work for them and invest in them. But it is also true that these same people are savagely cynical about corporations – they really do not like them. It is this combination of antipathy and dependency that lays the foundations for explosive contradictions in the relationships between business and society. The events of 11th September have shone a spotlight on attitudes towards the West around the world. Though not the motives for the terrorist attacks, some of the negativity directed at America around the world is rooted in people’s sense of anger and frustration at the corporate expansionism that they feel lies outside of the control of communities or governments. This is why the demonstrations from Seattle to Genoa cannot be dismissed as isolated incidences by a few unrepresentative crazies – as many of our mainstream leaders would have them seen. Both demonstrations and terrorism are visible edges of deep fractures in national and global social contracts.
Companies are responding, whether by virtue of their enlightened leadership, or the brute force of market pressures. At the first base, the corporate community responds by arguing that it is ‘doing its job’ by creating economic wealth. After all, they argue, over three quarters of international investment in developing countries – the lifeblood of economic growth – comes from private sources. It is certainly true that anti-corporate views typically under-value the positive income and wealth gains that can accompany globalisation. However, this social and economic case for globalisation is fair game for researchers as well as street demonstrators. A recent study by the Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research, for example, suggests that the economic growth rates of the majority of developing countries, and many human development improvement rates, had worsened during the period of accelerating globalisation (1980-2000) as compared to earlier periods.
Until recently, corporate citizenship was in its first generation, largely a defensive exercise in reputational spin, often involving ‘bolt-on’ philanthropy unrelated to a company’s overall operations and impact. But some companies are evolving towards the second generation of corporate citizenship, linking explicit social and environmental aims to their core business strategies, to their brand-building and relationships with consumers, to the productivity of their employees and their relationship with Government.
The dilemma is that the second generation of corporate citizenship – however enlightened and evolved individual companies may become – will not deliver the gains needed to put a meaningful dent in the facts: nearly one in three of the world’s workforce are unemployed, 1.2 billion people live on less than US$1 a day, and 840 million people are more or less permanently hungry. Neither will it reverse the facts that half the world’s original forest cover has disappeared, and overall the Earth’s ecosystems are said to be degrading at about 3 per cent a year.
A third generation of corporate citizenship is needed where the corporate world supports national governments and the international community in re-writing the global rules of the game. Without this third generation, those businesses honestly seeking to contribute in addressing serious social and environmental challenges will find themselves short-changed in the markets as consumers become cynical in the face of a manifestly worsening situation. This in turn will encourage the financial markets to retain its short-termist attitudes, further pressurising companies to abandon potential long-term win-win corporate citizenship strategies.
Of course, the critics of corporate citizenship are absolutely right in arguing that it can be superficial, or at least wholly inadequate. In its worst form, furthermore, corporate citizenship can be a deeply conservative safety value that offsets the pressure for much needed structural change in markets, the ways of the business community, and the role of government.
Where I part ways with these critics is that I do not think that such outcomes are a sine qua non of corporate citizenship. The results of corporate citizenship are not pre-determined – as both its strongest advocates and its most vehement critics suggest.
Corporate citizenship has evolved in an essentially ad hoc manner, largely driven by the vision, enthusiasm (and occasional naiveté) of people ‘just trying to get things done’. This has been fine to get going. Indeed, this bedrock of gifted amateurism goes some way to explaining the leadership role taken by the UK in the field of corporate citizenship. However, such a fragile base is inadequate as corporate citizenship reaches its current scale and potential significance. The point has come where it is important to step back and ask some basic questions as to where this is all going.
The forthcoming pamphlet for the Foreign Policy Centre, Third Generation Citizenship, explores the public policy dimension of corporate citizenship in asking, and seeking to answer, several fundamental questions about the role of business in society.
Corporate citizenship to date has delivered a number of significant changes in practices and outcomes, and is likely to continue to do so. But there is no clear set of rules and expectations about what a multinational corporation should do in any particular case. There is little point in blaming Nestlé for the impact on the South African economy of a collapse in gold prices, Monsanto for the level of HIV/AIDS across the African continent, or Credit Swiss First Boston for the state of Britain’s railways. The fact that Nike trainers cost, say 30-50 times more than the labour costs of production does not really tell us how much workers in their supply chains can be paid given, for example, the pressures from the financial markets. Did BP – given its leadership in fighting global warming – really have to make such a large contribution to George W’s presidential campaign as part of its US license to operate?
What can we realistically expect from individual corporations? It is hard enough to map out what seems fair for individual businesses to contribute. But it is quite another thing to suggest that the business community be required philosophically, institutionally and legally to play a role in the delivery of public goods. What explicit responsibility should business have, for example, to secure reasonable livelihoods for a community’s citizens, to raise education levels, combat violence on the streets or to join the struggle against racism? Should the limits lie where profitable opportunities exist, essentially the current approach to public-private partnerships? Or does businesses’ growing political and economic weight bring with it a need to rethink their responsibilities?
There has already been some movement down this path. Some companies now set carbon emission reduction targets linked to inter-governmental agreements. In the Netherlands, high-level agreements between the state, business, and labour set national targets for addressing long-term unemployment that are then translated into operational targets for each participating company. However, in the main, even the best of corporate citizenship does not explicitly link social and environmental performance to public policy goals and targets. To do so would take us into the third generation of corporate citizenship, where business takes on and is accountable for public policy objectives as a legitimate element of the business.
The enhanced role of corporate and civil society is often framed as being accompanied by a shrinking role for the state. At the extreme, argue some, we are facing an irrelevance of traditional government in a borderless world.
Actually, the reverse is the case. The role of strong government is all the greater where business forms an important mechanism for delivering public goods. Indeed, the more we rely on diverse institutions to deliver public goods, the more (not less) do we need over-arching stewardship that democratic and accountable government provides to ensure that it all adds up to the right level delivered in the best way to the right people.
The challenge is therefore not whether but how governments should engage in securing businesses’ contribution to achieving public policy aims. It is clearly not possible to focus purely on national legislation in enhancing the contribution of business. Such a focus would lead to an outflow of mobile capital and a loss of competitiveness for relatively captive capital (particularly smaller businesses) that nevertheless faces international competition. At the same time, an approach that merely exhorts business to ‘do the right thing’ does not have a significant impact
A third generation corporate citizenship strategy provides a key element in overcoming this apparent policy double-bind. Firstly is the fundamental principle of corporate citizenship, that business has a legitimate and necessary role to play in the effective delivery of public goods. The implications of this would be profound. Contrary to the current view expressed within the Company Law Review, for example, it would imply that business requires a broader regulated framework. Government must pursue this at national, European and international levels if there is to be any hope for third generation corporate citizenship to be taken seriously within the corporate boardroom.
Second is the principle of competitive citizenship, where government needs to do far more to enhance the competitive gains from corporate citizenship. It is simply not enough to sponsor awards for good companies. There is no reason, for example, why the corporate tax regime should not reflect the government’s interpretation of good corporate citizenship. Similarly, there is enormous scope for orienting government procurement to such performance criteria. The long-standing objection to this as running contrary to ‘value-for-money’ does not stand up to serious scrutiny for any government committed to ‘joined-up-thinking’. Similarly, the objection that such policies would be inconsistent with international agreements either remains untested, or underpins the case for taking this agenda onto the international stage.
Third is the principle of public accountability and disclosure. The growth of public-private partnerships has opened up a major democratic deficit, and there is growing evidence that this is not offset by adequate performance of these partnerships. The shortfall here does not lie, in the main, with the business community. Rather, it lies in the archaic and totally inadequate mechanisms for ensuring public sector accountability in its dealings with business. Public accountability needs to reflect the new reality of public bodies being increasingly empowered and indeed cajoled to enter into arrangements with parts of the business community. The activities of politicians and civil servants need to be more visible, as must be the basis for their decisions. Service shortfalls and cost-overruns associated with privatisation, inadequate regulatory oversight, or inappropriate partnership arrangements need to be published and those responsible penalised.
Fourth is the principle of standardisation. The Government is supporting work in this field, such as the SIGMA initiative of the British Standards Institute, Forum for the Future and the Institute of Social and Ethical AccountAbility. However, there is a need to accelerate such work and bring closure in agreeing a basic framework for social, environmental and overall sustainability accounting, auditing and reporting that will underpin tomorrow’s equivalent of today’s Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. This need must ultimately be met at an international level. Government should use the advent of the European Commission Green Paper on Corporate Social Responsibility to promote European-level initiatives, and also take this forward as a pre-requisite to any serious progress in the sphere of international trade and investment.
Fifth and finally is the principle of global accountability. If competition and trading rules are to be set globally, then it surely follows that so should the rules under which corporations define their social and environmental performance. The case of General Pinochet, arrested in the UK for alleged human rights abuses in Chile, sets the precedent that should now be applied to all businesses. The US does not seem to have a problem extending its own jurisdiction to global dimensions when it comes to matters like Cuba. Similarly, the OECD convention on foreign corrupt practices opens another route for establishing global rules for global corporations. Interestingly, there is real potential for support for such a move from those companies that have invested most in corporate citizenship. Nike’s CEO Phil Knight has called for global, mandatory social audit standards for all corporations. But irrespective of the level of such support, the Government can and should take a lead in promoting mandatory, global business standards as a pre-condition for any further liberalization of international trade and investment.
There is a need to move to the Third Generation of corporate citizenship. Without this move, current leadership successes – although admirable – will whither as public cynicism grows in the face of escalating and all-too-visible social and environmental problems.

Dr Simon Zadek is currently Acting Chief Executive Officer of the Institute of Social and Ethical AccountAbility. This article is a personal contribution based on his recent book, ‘The Civil Corporation: the New Economy of Corporate Citizenship’ (Earthscan), and a forthcoming pamphlet from the Foreign Policy Centre and AccountAbility. More information at www.zadek.net.

GEORGE ORWELL: ORWELL AND POLITICS
(Penguin Classics, 2001, pb, £7.99, ISBN- 0-141-18518-X)

Since his premature death from tuberculosis nearly fifty years ago, George Orwell has become an archetype, a universal symbol of the fight against totalitarianism and political cant. This new edition, Orwell and Politics, places him back where he belongs – in the murky politics of England in the thirties and forties. Those monumental essays are buried between anxious letters to friends, book reviews for long-extinct left wing journals and snatches of personal diaries. The book is replete with period detail: constructing the Anderson Shelters and complaining about the National Loaf, digging for Britain and fitting the gas-mask.

A more jagged and cussed Orwell emerges from the one appropriated by the Left (as the master documenter of urban poverty) and the Right (as a Cold War Warrior). He is ever alive to an awkward truth, a complex question or an unpalatable political choice. Even those who share his beliefs on the evils of Empire or the failures of capitalism are excoriated for failing to see the consequences of their radical solutions. Though he passionately wants Britain to shed its Empire, he acknowledges that a retreat would leave India “incapable of feeding itself” and vulnerable to invasion from Japan. Glib voices on the left who argue that an independent India would quickly become prosperous and create a vast-market for British shoe-makers are also slapped down – in Orwell’s world there are no pain-free choices between money and morality.

His socialism seems as natural as breathing, an inescapable, practical reaction against a hidebound ruling class. England is a “blimpocracy” in which the products of public schools dominate all positions of authority. Talent that could make a real difference is elbowed aside by placemen who are “quite incapable of leading us to victory”. But if Conservatism makes him angry, the “Pansy Left” leaves him apoplectic. He sees most socialists as effete and self-indulgent: “frivolous people who have never been shoved up against much reality”. In the thirties he characterises them as armchair Generals demanding blood sacrifices that others will pay. Later, more culpably, they are cowed and silent in the face of Stalinist repression – even when the evidence is irrefutable.

But he also sees much of the Left’s analysis as hopelessly simple-minded. The subtle and quirky gradations of the English class system mock their attempts to lump the world into “bourgeois” and “proletariat” categories. This was not only inaccurate, it was stupid: their constant baiting of the middle-classes prevented the creation of a powerful political movement. The patriotism that ran “like a connecting thread” through Britain had no place in their worldview.

When railing against imperialism he also refused to ignore inconvenient facts. Though Indian Justice is a “huge machine to protect British interests” he acknowledges the “high traditions” and fair-mindedness of the Indian Civil Service. The Police may occasionally harass those selling the Daily Worker in Hyde Park, but those who argue that they are no different from the Gestapo are just ignorant. Temperamentally, Orwell was unsuited to the kind of philistinism that would denounce Eliot and Joyce as “bourgeois” whist celebrating the mind-numbing tracts of the Left Book Club.

Some of this volume feels like sifting through yellowing newspapers, too pre-occupied with old debates to be of interest to casual readers. The essays that will be reread show off his journalist’s eye for the killer line, the memorable image that invest a cause with moral force. In A Hanging he describes a condemned man stepping aside to avoid a puddle on his way to the gallows. Nothing better describes the wrongness and incomprehensibility of cutting a life short in full tide. The degradations of Empire for both the colonisers and the colonised is brilliantly described in Shooting an Elephant. An autobiographical piece dating from his time as a policemen in Burma, he is forced to kill a rampaging elephant to appease a baying mob. The colonial master has to put on a display of machismo to avoid being laughed at. As he ruefully notes: “when a white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys”

Orwell is at his weakest when he tries his hand as a soothsayer. During the late thirties he is suspicious of the Khaki wearing left who want a confrontation with the fascists. He is still looking for signs of a mass anti-war movement in 1938. Throughout the early war years he predicts Britain is “bound to be defeated” without a socialist revolution. At times, he echoes the Communist line that a European war is an imperialist sham to “extend and maintain our possessions” at the expense of the working classes. Later, when he produces a list of grandees who cosied up to Mussolini, his criticism seems a touch sanctimonious.

It has become a kind of pointless literary parlour game to guess what Orwell would think of modern Britain. We can guess at a few answers. He would be relieved to find a more meritocratic, footloose society where birth counts for far less. But his belief in a kind of folk-wisdom, the decency and respectability of the majority might have taken a battering. He hated the fripperies of the rich, so how would he respond to our age of consumer abundance and mobile phones? Whatever his radical politics, his views on personal morality were orthodox. How would he react to a saltier, more hedonistic world of all day drinking and sexual liberation?

Doubtless he would still be taking on euphemism and evasion wherever he found it. Instead of the language of Marxism, it might be the language of Therapy that earned his scorn. The kind of platitudes that Sinn Fein spokesmen specialise in – a mixture of sociology, managerialism and menace – would be marked out for special attention. Similarly, South West Trains, who prefer to apologise for “any inconvenience the delayed service may have caused to you”, rather than say sorry, would be a prime target. One thing is certain – no one would be safe – especially those most secure in their own righteousness.

Rob Blackhurst

ORNAMENTALISM
by David Cannadine
(The Penguin Press, 2001, hb, £16.99, ISBN 0-713-99506-8)

Not race but rank was the guiding principle of the British imperial mission, argues David Cannadine in his latest work, Ornamentalism. More than imposing white domination, the British ruled by making the unfamiliar familiar and homogenising the heterogeneity of the ‘vast interconnected world’ by applying the same class-obsessed principles dominating British culture and society.

The caste system in India, the pashas of Egypt, the rulers of Malay, the sheikhs of the Middle East and even the tribal lords of Africa were seen as “comfortingly familiar” structures for British rule. Far from extirpating or even discrediting them, the British allied with their colonised counterparts, gave them their slice of the pie, lavished them with pomp and ceremony, garnered them with medals and titles and worked through them to administer these vast territories.

While high on this summer’s press reading lists, Cannadine’s wittily argued account has been met with some discomfort. Fellow historian Sunil Khilnani pokes fun at Cannadine for taking seriously the ridiculous “dressing up and kowtowing” of the “empire’s exotic menagerie”, while Richard Goff has gone as far as accusing him of “shifting imperial guilt”.

What makes it hard for liberal critics to stomach is not only that Cannadine’s remit extends no further than “those who dominated and ruled the empire” but that at no point does he chastise the imperial elites. Ornamentalism is in fact at its best when recording the splendour of palaces and courts in distant lands, the grandiosity of their Jubilees, the luxury of dress and the intricacy of the honours system. The selection of pictures which populate this beautifully presented book vividly portrays the bizzareness of the period – bewildered local chiefs in full Imperial regalia, massive Indo-Saracenic castles, the tented extravaganzas of New Delhi and a Nigerian sarong commemorating King George V’s Silver Jubilee.

Despite the lack of chest-beating, Cannadine does set out the deeply flawed nature of the Imperial project, one which was so stagnant and self-deceived that it was overtaken by the social revolutions taking place in the colonies themselves. These saw the emergence of a colonial middle class which was nationalist, liberal and educated and which scoffed at their pomposity. The irony though, he observes, was that the British themselves were “the agent of the great transformations that in the long run would help to bring about the subversion and termination of the whole imperial enterprise”.

Phoebe Griffith

YUGOSLAVIA AS HISTORY: TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY (Second Edition)
by John R. Lampe
(Cambridge University Press, 2000, pb, $24.95, ISBN 0-521-77401-2)

As Neville Henderson, British ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1933, once wryly remarked, “It is easier to say Yugoslavia than to make it”. The last century saw two attempts to build a Yugoslavia, the unified state of the South Slavs. Both failed, the last one amidst a series of bloody conflicts whose horrors we are still living out.

Faced with the puzzle of explaining conflict and tensions extending into 21st century Europe, Western commentators encouraged what quickly became the received opinion: that Yugoslavia was a country doomed from the start, a historical aberration made possible only through the Serbian domination and oppression of minorities, and whose bloody end was an inevitable consequence of “age-old” ethnic antagonisms. In the second edition of “Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country” John Lampe invites us to adopt a different approach and to consider the history of a unified Yugoslavia that was once the aspiration of members from all its ethnicities – not just of imperialist Serbs.

Lampe’s argument that it was in no way doomed to failure is convincing. His account balances fairly between explaining the sources and features of its peoples’ separate identities, and highlighting the emergence of a real and often overlooked Yugoslavian identity, reinforced after the war by Communist rule and widespread acknowledgement of Tito as its leader. A valuable primer for those who always meant to read up on Yugoslavia and didn’t know where to begin.

Lucy Ahad

RIGHTEOUS VICTIMS: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999
by Benny Morris
(John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2000, hb, £25, ISBN 0-7195-6222-8)

Both Israel and the Arabs have constructed a justifying narrative for their current bloodstained policies. For the Arabs Israel stole their land, for Israel the land came to them via proper international procedures and wars of defence. As Morris makes clear in this scrupulously fair and balanced book, neither side’s story is wholly accurate, although he seems to incline towards an amended Zionist point of view. This is particularly significant coming in the wake of post-Zionism, a movement in which leading Israeli academics and pundits have sought through revisionist histories to debunk the traditional Zionist interpretation of history and which has succeeded in the minds of many in undermining Israel’s right to exist.

Zionist history was far from wholly accurate, and it needed revision but the pendulum swung too far, as is often the case in initial periods of historical revisionism. Morris has revised revisionism and produced a much fairer account.

He arrives at the unsurprising but beautifully documented conclusion that there were tragedies on both sides, cruelties on both sides, but that Israel’s existence is justified and something the Arab nations must get used to. Indeed the whole of Morris’ approach is contained in the title. It is often argued that Jews, as victims of the Holocaust made victims of the Arabs. As Morris make clear both sides were to an extent righteous and to an extent victims.

Ben Elton

GANDHI’S PASSION: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi
by Stanley Wolpert
(Oxford University Press, 2001, hb, $27.50, ISBN 0-1951-3060-X)

The failure of the historic summit between India and Pakistan has been another reminder of the enduring animosity that has existed between the two countries since the partition of South Asia in 1947. It was never a more appropriate time for the world to be reminded of the life and legacy of that most radical of pacifist socialist reformers: Mahatma Gandhi.

Drawing parallels in his title and introduction with the non-violent sufferings of Christ, Wolpert focuses in this rigorous and sophisticated biography on the beliefs which underpinned Gandhi’s political struggles. The cause of Indian Liberation (swaraj) was, for Gandhi, a “religious movement” for which he fasted and courted suffering. The achievement of political objectives was only possible and legitimate if it emerged through grassroots social renewal – what Gandhi called the “Uplift of All” in which Muslim-Hindu unity and the inclusion of India’s “untouchables” were as important as liberation from colonial oppressors.

Wolpert’s rigorous analysis does not shy away from the less well considered sides of Gandhi’s personality: the touches of vanity in his extreme asceticism and the irrational puritanism which caused him to mourn the marriage of his children and the birth of his grandchildren. Moreover, it was perhaps his strange superstitions, such as the belief that all disease was caused by sin, which alienated him from friends and potential allies such as Nehru and Jinnah and weakened his cause.

However, these facets of Gandhi’s philosophy illustrate what Wolpert outlines as the principle lesson to be learnt from the life of Mahatma Gandhi – that politics needs a moral vision. Albert Einstein wrote in response to Gandhi’s assassination words relevant to a new generation of Indian leaders: “If present day India were to reconsider the teaching of their greatest statesman, they would certainly show that this country still has much to teach the rest of the world”

James Walters

MARGARET THATCHER VOLUME ONE: The Grocer’s Daughter
By John Campbell
(Pimlico, 2000, pb,£7.99, ISBN 0712674187)

Everyone knows where Margaret Thatcher learned her politics. As with Lincoln’s log cabin or Joe Kennedy’s pep talks, the story is wearisomely familiar: market economics inculcated in the corner shop, a suspicion of public spending learned from her Alderman father, and Victorian fastidiousness taught at chapel. John Campbell’s biography of Thatcher covering the years up to 1979 deconstructs these folksy roots to reveal her in a succession of more complex guises: a Thatcher with far more ambivalent attitudes and instinctive caution than the swashbuckling cartoon.

For all the platitudes about her childhood, this bright and ambitious teenager couldn’t wait to get away. But if Grantham was deadening in its provinciality, then wartime Oxford was a hostile and snide world. She was a misfit, her Samuel Smiles philosophy mocked by her boarding school contemporaries. As with Nixon, this early condescension at the hands of the “liberal elite” stayed with her for life. Her response was the only one that would allow her to pursue political ambitions: she found financial backing through marriage and became an archetypal home counties wife – wearing Penelope Keith hats, sending her son to Harrow and adopting the kind of strangulated vowels normally confined to Pathe news reels. Traces of her Lincolnshire past were expunged. It was only when as Leader of the Opposition she was recast as a brassy heroine for the tabloids that the “grocer’s daughter” legend was born.

In her junior ministerial jobs at the Department for Social Security and later as Education Secretary, she kept her right-wing credentials largely hidden. She even intervened to save Wilson’s Open University from closure at a time when most Conservatives distrusted its egalitarian overtones. There are no hints before her premiership, either, of the anti-Europeanism that would help to destroy her premiership. When the Macmillan Government announced its intention to join the EEC, Thatcher mounted arguments on sovereignty which would do Britain in Europe proud: “it is no good being independent in isolation if it involves running down our economy”. Perhaps someone should send a text to the Bruges group.

She even deployed arguments familiar to today’s pro-Euro enthusiasts. If we didn’t join the Common Agricultural Policy at the beginning then others would set the terms. Most startling of all, she harried Callaghan in 1978 for failing to join the European Monetary System. This, according to Campbell, was rooted in national pride. If there was to be European integration, then Britain should lead it.

Despite its perennially fascinating subject, The Grocer’s Daughter can be hard to digest. Thatcher’s staggering work rate – developed while she was still at school – left no time for any kind of private sphere at all. She seems never to have had any close friends, no spontaneity, no hinterland, no memorable incidents. There is a void in these four hundred pages where a three dimensional life should be.

Rob Blackhurst

3 million British people will this year clamber on a cross-channel ferry and take boxes upon boxes of wine, beer and cigarettes back to England’s leafy suburbs. It stands to reason: the average tax on a bottle of wine is 4p in France and £1.16 here.

This is a headache for Gordon Brown in a number of ways. Each of these trips will cost the British exchequer £450, not including the costs of policing and closing down the black market which has resulted: 80% of the rolling tobacco now consumed in the UK is contraband. According to the Tobacco Alliance, 8000 small tobacconists have been put out of business as a direct result of the EU’s single market policies.

And yet, what can the government do? It’s all very well for the Cancer Research Campaign to call for a further 20 pence worth of taxation to go on a packet of Marlboro Lights. But if the consumers of those cigarettes have the ability to pop over the Channel to replenish stocks from a friendly Belgian tobacconist, then, as a policy option, it has more symbolic than substantive benefit.

The ‘booze cruise’ is just one example of the competition that the European single market has delivered. But this is not competition between companies for consumers: it is competition between governments. Gradually, in certain areas, a single market for governance is developing, within which consumers have the ability to choose between the services (i.e. the taxation, regulation and other regimes) offered by different governments. Another example is education, where, despite the EU having limited competence in the area, there are now 360, 000 students yearly from EU countries who have, for various reasons, chosen the British education system rather than their own.

Among the reasons for the rising importance of this model are the growing use of the Internet and the greater ease of finding information about comparative data in a common language (English). Personal Internet usage is increasing by 51% year on year; almost all EU governments and many civil society organisations now offer an option to view their sites in English.

Further, the ability of consumers to choose which system to use when purchasing goods and services will increase dramatically on January 1 next year: as purchasing becomes possible using a common currency and with no built in transaction costs, so businesses and consumers can shop around for the best bargain for a given product. Economists are predicting enormous increases in cross-border shopping, as the ability of manufacturers to hide behind differential pricing fades – for example, the 37% difference in the prices of identical branded goods in Germany and Spain is unlikely to survive. The single e-marketplace developed by the Internet will exacerbate this effect. This will not only impact on businesses: it will also impact on the governments which have developed the regulatory and fiscal environments within which those companies operate. As PWC puts it: “demand for price competitiveness will augment the pressure for convergence of indirect taxation levels across national boundaries.” This effect will hit the UK as well: the DTI has written numerous factsheets explaining what the effects on companies will be, but it will find its own options circumscribed by the same effect.

Whatever the feelings of the more prurient Conservatives, the European Union has changed patterns of behaviour: it has opened up British borders, both political and psychological. Increasingly, also, it pits the British Government against other EU governments in terms of their ability to deliver key services, and gives a touchstone against which our national government’s competence in certain areas can be judged.

One example of how Europe has changed the British political discourse can be seen in the Prime Minister’s commitment to raise health spending to the EU average before 2005. In the past, it was perfectly possible for successive governments to manage the NHS in isolation: without comparative statistics, it is easy to pass off inadequate performance by claiming that circumstances constantly conspire, and that it is simply impossible to do better. In fact, to give just one example, the UK spends less than almost all other EU countries on health as a proportion of GDP. Increasing awareness of these discrepancies has led to a political commitment from the government, and changed the language of politics in the UK – in Bournemouth at their party conference, the Liberal Democrats committed to raising spending on all public services to the European average.

The European Union has not only created a set of institutions, a host of legislation and a culture of communication amongst elites, it has also changed the ground rules for consumers: and generally for the better. But it is a different sort of political space than that envisaged by the Utopians, who see homo europeus taking a deep interest in the five yearly elections to the Strasbourg Parliament or feeling a twinge of affinity when faced with the twelve stars and the Ode to Joy. It is a political space which is largely mediated within national frontiers, where comparability to other European benefits and systems opens out national political discussions. Gordon Brown’s ability to act on cigarette taxation is not circumscribed by any harmonising legislation coming out of the European institutions: rather, it is contextualised by the fourteen other EU systems which, in some senses, compete with it.

At this level, the plaintive laments by the European elite that citizens are failing to engage in the EU process seem rather detached from reality: even if, particularly in the UK, people are not using their European votes, they are using their national votes, usually without realising it. The development of this political space could actually be the key to democratising Europe, in terms of giving a powerful argument for the European Union’s utility: and a powerful example of a European identity that is not constructed around institutions and constitutions, nationalist-style, but demonstrates instead the utility of a European network of co-operation and competition. The central institutions need to rethink part of their role, in order to become the impartial providers of information that can launch citizens into national political activism; and national governments need to restrain their national instinct to control, regulate and ‘spin’ the flow of comparative information.

However, the development of greater policy competition also needs to be regulated with a certain amount of care. The fuel tax protests, where consumers were turned into political activists by the provision of exactly this type of information on the relative price of fuel in France and the UK, points to the danger. Here, the relative levels of taxation were very different: but so, also, was the structure of that taxation. The French charge autoroute tax: the British do not. There is a danger that this form of policy competition can turn into a Dutch auction, where governments bid each other down on these costs, and general level of service goes down. In the market for policies, some kind of cartel has to operate. But it must be a cartel which does not restrict the potential benefits of a single market for governance.

The development of the process of open co-ordination and the plethora of scoreboards, objectives, peer-review processes and benchmarks which have appeared as a result are the EU’s first response to this. Governments are committing themselves openly to certain objectives, and are being held to account, mostly by other governments, for their success or failure in delivering these targets. The process, slowly, is opening itself out: the Barcelona summit in March 2002 will see the next round of adjudication, and civil society organisations are expressing more of an interest than before: for example, the CBI’s response, on behalf of British business, looks as though it will be more far-reaching than in 2001. However, even with the Lisbon process, there is a real ‘technocracy gap’, in that the process demands a high level of knowledge before people or organisations can participate. Equally, the specific targets and benchmarks which have been set are vague, and worded in such a way as not to cause too high a level of embarrassment to any member state. Thirdly, where the Commission does hold national governments to account for their commitments, as it did when criticising the Irish budget earlier this year, its comments come out of context, and add to the usual impression of a power-hungry centre trying to tie the hands of directly elected national politicians. Finally, national governments are very reluctant to call attention to their own failure to deliver any of these targets; and, for political reasons, other governments are reluctant to criticise each other openly.

The key is to provide this information in such a way that civil society organisations, activist groups and individuals themselves are able, simply and easily, to measure the performance of their government against the commitments it has made, and against the performance of other governments in the same area. This will be a major part of a Foreign Policy Centre project over the next year: among the ideas which might be considered are the following.

First, the Commission could ensure that policy outcomes are directly comparable between member states. It does this already to an extent, through the Eurostat service. However, often national indicators are non-comparable, and measure things differently. National governments should be encouraged to overhaul their national accounting and audit rules so that figures can be compared as best as possible.

The Commission’s role should be to provide a space, most easily on the Internet, where all figures about the comparative effectiveness of governments is reachable. This should be designed for the consumer or the small NGO rather than around trained operatives – the current Eurostat site requires a degree in Information Systems Management to navigate. The figures contained here do not need to be only Commission figures: the OECD, the WHO and a host of other organisations pull together these figures. It should be the Commission’s responsibility to ensure that they are presented fairly and without prejudice.

Second, the Commission can be responsive. A rule could be introduced that stipulated that a petition of a given size (say 30,000 signatures) or a European Parliament request should lead within three months to the publication of comparative figures on any subject. National ministries would have a legal, and enforceable, obligation to respond within a given timeframe.

Finally, the Commission should not take on the role of critic. It should leave this to civil society organisations, to national governments themselves, and, most importantly, to the European Parliament. The Parliament, as an elected body with a view over the EU as a whole, should be in the perfect position to take critical positions on the relative performance of national governments as judged against objectives. It also, with a restructuring of its working practices, has the capacity to deliver in-depth reports on national-level implementation of commitments. Third, this role plays to the strengths of the Parliament as a body which shares power between political groups, and does not have any single group with an absolute majority: as such, no government party can ever be sure of a majority vote. Also, the Parliament is supposed to hold the executive to account: within these policy areas, the executives are actually based at national level rather than European level.

Playing with statistics may seem a small thing. But it will bind together the fifteen or more separate governance systems into a directly comparable area, can develop a ‘political space’ which can add dynamism to the national political process and engage citizens at national level where conventional politics can not. Who knows? The booze cruise might be the key to engaging Europe with its citizens.

‘A consumer’s Europe’ and ‘Policy Competition’ are research projects within the Foreign Policy Centre’s Europe Programme. We would welcome any feedback on this initial article to tom@fpc.org.uk.

The cynics among you – if there are any such people at a party political conference – would expect me to say “yes”. And so, I hope, would those of you who have some knowledge of the inside workings of companies such as ours.

In fact, I go much further than the question put to this meeting implies. Not only can companies be good global citizens, but they must be; it is in their interests to be, and very, very many are, to great effect.

What do we mean by being a global citizen? With the advent of world travel, fast electronic links and global markets, the world has shrunk – you have heard the phrase “global village” – and it is now effectively a community in which large corporations should act as citizens, with the same types of duties and responsibilities that individuals carry in society. I refer to communities in the broadest possible sense, embracing both the immediate community where a business is located and also the diversity of cultures in the context of which a business operates.

Being a good global citizen, from a corporate point of view, means taking a complete approach to the way in which we do business. Whilst our initial raison d’être is to make profits and to be able to pay our employees and shareholders, modern companies simply cannot afford to be purely mercenary in their mission. We have to embrace diversity; we have to be sensitive to the different cultures of our colleagues and customers, and also pay heed to the environments in which we operate on a global basis.

Taking account of our employees’ needs as individuals, the fragility of the communities in which we work and the responsibilities of our suppliers’ work practices as well as our own, are vital steps in becoming a good global citizen. But the crucial aspect of such an approach is not to view these policies as bolt-on extras, added to appease current opinion, or to boost customer ratings; on the contrary it is essential that companies actually embed such good practice into their daily operations and strategies.

At Six Continents (like many other companies) we started several years ago formally defining corporate values to encapsulate the ideal of the way we want to operate into the business. These values include “Behaving with integrity”, “Valuing and trusting our people” and “Respecting our communities”. And we genuinely pride ourselves on our relationships with the communities where our hotels, restaurants and bars operate, with the support we give to our customers and our employees in their local areas. We’re also proud of our environmental record, ensuring that we manage energy and water in a pro-active way. Our environmental initiatives extend from energy-saving measures, to beach clean-ups and children’s events, covering not just the big cost-saving areas, but also very many smaller initiatives which are actually very important to local communities. In addition, we’re looking at how our employees feel about the issues close to them – we have engaged in “stakeholder” consultation (employees, suppliers, customers, shareholders) for our community affairs programme, we work actively to retain our Investors in People accreditation and we’re promoting diversity.

But in these difficult times there are more challenges ahead to which we all need to rise. Putting good practice in place is important, environmental initiatives are essential and listening to and understanding our stakeholders is vital. It’s tempting for companies to let these things slip when we’re faced with the financial costs of recession and economic problems. Now is the time for more global cooperation, not less. Companies will have to exercise more corporate global citizenship, more engagement with their communities and more cultural tolerance.

Our company delivers international services to almost one hundred countries, across diverse cultures, different languages and many ethnic and religious bases. We need to respect all of these through the values of the organisation, reflected in the quality of the service, and in the motivation of our diverse staff in providing consistently high quality to our customers.

Good practices should not be mere window-dressing, ticking boxes or paying lip service. They must be embodied into the values for which a company is prepared to stand. At Six Continents we’re keen to learn and put best practice into action, but what I think is most important is that we remember that we still have further to go. It’s great to point to our achievements, but there’s no shame in identifying areas which we can improve upon. And the benefits of the impetus from focused and well-recognised benchmarking organisations such as Business in the Environment and Business in the Community, the FTSE4Good and Dow Jones World Sustainability Indices, in which we actively participate, is that we can now start to measure our achievements, and our shortcomings.

I hope that the new attention being paid to corporate social responsibility can continue despite the particularly difficult current political and economic pressures. Because not only can companies be good global citizens, but in my view, companies wishing to be successful in the medium to long term have no option but to be.