The latest incarnation is perfectly timed to counter Labour’s nicked campaign slogan (we were fair first!). People will apportion far more of their attention to a bit of scandal than to a plain vanilla campaign launch. The timing is being followed up by the story being divided into tasty, bite-size portions, ready for thorough digestion by the media (new and old alike).

Anyway, it’s just speculation with no solid evidence, but is this the first shot in a negative campaign running up ’til the election? Isn’t politics nice.

I like Article 11, paragraph 4, but I’m annoyed with it as well. Why am I annoyed? I’m annoyed because I signed a petition calling for the EU to raise its carbon emissions reduction targets from 20% to 30%; while that’s all well and good (why not head on over to the petition yourself?), it could be so much better if I was signing the form of petition found in Article 11: a citizens’ initiative.

A bit of digging revealed that the European Commission has consulted on implementing the initiative, and will be drawing up a regulation this year, before actually unleashing this little bit of direct democracy in 2011. I know it takes time to make laws, and it isn’t a job to rush, but Lisbon has been around for ages, surely the fleshing out of the text of the article* could have happened sooner?

*4. Not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the European Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties.

Article 11, paragraph 4, Treaty on European Union

The problem with a referendum is that it doesn’t work unless the voters are accurately informed about what they are voting on. It works for issues such as devolution, where people are familiar with the question; it doesn’t work with arcane, indecipherable, and soporific matters like electoral reform.

Oh well, it was nice for a while to think we might get an ever so slightly better system.

But how much danger does Palin pose? Considering that the audience for her speech were paying $500 to attend the conference, I’m guessing that they aren’t totally representative of the entire ‘low-tax-small-government’ group; though if those attending are what is hideously termed ‘thought-leaders’, they don’t need to be completely representative. Scott Brown’s election to the Senate was another sign that there might be a shift back to the comfort of conservatism.

I’m not hugely familiar with US politics, but I watch enough of The West Wing, read enough newspapers, and know enough about the generic game of politics, to conclude that Americans aren’t necessarily turning Republican, rather they are reacting to the perception that President Obama hasn’t lived up to expectations. This isn’t an original idea of my own, but Obama needs to do something populist but sensible, while keeping up the dull, but essential, work of governing. In short, he needs to remind people of the idea of “Hope” from his campaign. But as I said, US politics is not my forté.

Still, there is more to hope for next year than simply the alleviation of economic problems. Something that marked 2009 with a great big grimy smudge was the success had by the far-right, especially the British National Party in the North West and Yorkshire, where the good Lancastrians and Yorkshire-folk are now represented in the European Parliament by fascist MEPs. The problem though, is not that people are thinking horrible things about anyone who is a little bit different, but that they have little alternative but to think that. I firmly hold the opinion that the vast majority of the BNP’s voters are not nasty people, but simply forgotten people. Every major political party has neglected these constituents, and every major political party has been on the back foot in the debates on the far-right’s core issues.

I’m not just talking about immigration and racism, the BNP, with its new, clean image (laugh if you want, but not everyone is a liberal lefty with a built-in disgust of the BNP), champions a distortion of traditional values and morals that are just similar enough in image, though little else, to the traditional values that used to form part of British society in the ‘50s. Guess where the political mainstream is (and I include the green movement in this)? Nowhere is the answer; Mr Cameron might make some inconsequential moves to offer financial incentives to getting married, and Mr Brown and Lord Mandelson might talk about Britishness in a few speeches, but the debate on values, morality, and the question of what it means to be from Britain has been firmly grasped by the likes of Mr Griffin.

Morality has, of course, traditionally been the realm of the Church. I think the best way to describe my attitude to religion would be “actively agnostic”: I don’t currently believe in any particular god or religious structure, and I don’t think it is really possible to prove the existence of God, or even of gods, but I would never say for definite that these things cannot exist; I might one day be struck with a spiritual revelation, leading to a belief of the religious kind, so it would be foolish to keep a closed mind. The advantage of this convenient fudge is that I can do stuff that atheist can’t do, while not feeling guilty for being half-hearted as an apathetic agnostic might: in short, I can go to the Watchnight Service at St Giles Kirk on Christmas Eve, and pay attention to the sermon, without a Dawkinsian complex of any kind. In this particular sermon, the Minister took the time to praise Atheists and decry agnosticism: to paraphrase him, atheists present worthy opponents in debate, whereas agnostics are responsible for the downfall of society. I’m sure he didn’t mean to present such a sharp message, but I think it goes back to what I wrote about the far-right’s grasp on debates. For a debate to be had properly, all sides must be confident enough to make pronouncements on all ideas. Bad ideas must be exposed for what they are, and good ideas must be brought forth on sturdy legs.

In the Green Party, and indeed, in all major political parties, we need to grasp the debate and say what we think about Britishness, morality, and all the other issues which are held so tightly in the fists of fascists. We need to truly talk with all of the electorate, and we need to realise that the way that we can prevail in our political ambitions is through honest and fair discourse, not through aggressive confrontation with English Defence League, or by sneeringly mocking the BNP.

For all the apparent futility in the campaign to push Rage Against The Machine’s Killing in the Name to the Christmas number one spot (sure, the profits from sales of the song went to the same musical multinational that McFabricated’s profits would have gone to, but did anyone notice that the Facebook group used to orchestrate it also managed to raise over £90,000 for Shelter?), it did raise my hopes for 2010, simply because it demonstrated a desire for a more honest and less fake way of doing things. If we can keep that spark of dissatisfaction with plastic society, then I’ll be a lot more confident that debate can be had, and perhaps even the statistics presented below might have nudged towards improvement in the next edition of this special post.

Here’s to 2010, an honest, argumentative, real, and better year!

Click here for an archive of past new year posts.

All throughout the Copenhagen Conference, I was trying to remind myself that a week or two before the whole thing started I answered a question in my economics class on whether anything seriously significant and actually useful would come from the Conference with a resolute “not a chance”. I was trying to remind myself of this to keep from getting my hopes up: Obamaesque rhetoric and the occasional positive news story from the Danish capital are too easy to grasp on when you think the need for a strong and binding agreement is as important as I think it is.

I’m glad I did this, because my conclusion after the leak of the ‘Danish text’ (though I can hardly claim the credit for this conclusion, I almost certainly copied it off some commentator in a newspaper or blog) that we’d mess around this time and procrastinate the decision to a comfortingly distant point—and one which naturally had nothing to do with four or five year electoral cycles—, seems to be fairly accurate. When I wrote the bulk of this post, I hadn’t had much time to digest the news from the COP15 (I was having an adventure by choosing the very best day to take the train from the Netherlands to Edinburgh), but I did see the following which I quote from the BBC News web-site,

“However, he added that the deal was not enough to prevent dangerous climate change in the future – but nonetheless was an important first move.”

Bali was the “important first move”; the EU’s Energy and Climate Package was preparatory legislation; Barcelona was the end stages of negotiation! Right now, all I can see is that when we finally get ‘round to having another set of negotiations for proper and legally-binding action to tackle climate change, we’ll come out of it saying that we have laid the groundwork for co-operation and further discussion.

If we talk because that is what is easy, then we are cowards.

I’m being cynical about human nature, but are we seriously going to wait until things get really bad before we even start to do anything to fix what is one of, if not the, biggest problem facing humanity right now? It’s almost enough to make me want to turn to revolutionary socialism just so that I have a political black hole to throw all my energy into; and anyone who knows me, knows that if something is driving me to the socialists, it must be getting to me a fair bit!

You know that you’re close to hurting powerful and not completely innocent interests when something that should otherwise be honest, scientific, and above board, takes on an air of sleaze. I am of course referring to the leaked emails I covered on this blog the other day, and the leaked draft ‘agreement’ from the Copenhagen Conference, aka the “Danish text”.

I had a read of the text (linked to below), and while I’m not certain where The Guardian got some of its claims from—clearly my abilities in reading international legal texts are not up to scratch, an especially fun thing to learn when I have a moot European Court of Justice on Friday—, the document is very far from what I would have hoped for from the Conference.

Dealing with just a couple of specific points: first, the document repeatedly uses the phrase, “poorest and most vulnerable countries”; what does this mean? It seems like either a recognition that those who will be hit hardest by climate change will be in the “poorest and most vulnerable countries”, and so deserve urgent and special assistance in their efforts at adaptation and mitigation; or alternatively, and rather more cynically, it could be a way for developed nations—foreseeing the inevitability of their assisting developing states—to keep the number of countries to which assistance must be afforded, to the bare minimum. Say I’m cynical about this if you want; I’ll explain why in my next post, though you can probably already guess.

The second thing I wanted to specifically pick out just now was the means by which this draft text came to light. The document wasn’t released into the open by its authors, it was leaked by someone. How can there be any form of trust between developed and developing nations at the Conference, if one side goes off to secretly write a draft text that it will try to force through with a smile from Obama and, no doubt, a generous helping of ‘diplomacy’ from all in “the circle of commitment” as The Guardian reports the authors are apparently called? As I recall the President of Brazil repeatedly stating in a report on climate change from sometime around 2004, and I paraphrase slightly here, “a tonne of carbon emitted in Bogota has the same impact as a tonne of carbon emitted in Chicago”. Yes, developed and developing countries will feel climate change in different ways, and both have different capacities for mitigation and adaptation; developed and developing countries have to meet as close to being equals as they can though: we’re all in this together.

I have a feeling I’ll be returning to the “Danish text” fairly soon.

Link to the Danish text

It’s been a funny couple of decades. The first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the radical unbalancing of the world’s balance of power were a bit like that feeling you get when the lights are suddenly switched on after watching a film in the dark; a brief moment of bewilderment, scaled to international politics and spread over a decade. And then in 2001, we realised where we were and what was happening. People said 9/11 changed everything, it didn’t, but it did let us know that everything was changing.

The old and comfortable wisdom that international politics consisted solely of states and a few of their instruments such as the UN or the EU, with multi-national companies lurking somewhere nearby, vanished; along with it went the notion of a world with two carefully balanced superpowers. Ours is now the age of the ‘non-state actor’ and the stage these particular actors tread on is a multi-polar world.

More concerning for Europe is not the actors or the stage, but the play being performed. The challenges which determine this script are rather large: climate change, energy security, economic crisis, and development of the poorest states.

We used to be able to say that the West would use its globally dominant position to ensure that any moves to deal with these problems would be to our favour in some way. Multi-polarity has done away with this. If we take a poor and corrupt developing state with lashings of oil and other valuable natural resources, and put it in the global marketplace that it funds itself in every day, who is it going to sell its stuff to: a country demanding assurances on human rights and other popular liberal concerns, or a country which will pay the same or more and not ask any awkward questions about the sanctity of ballot boxes at the last election, or the destination of the money being paid? The very same goes for development aid and assistance.

I’m not a pessimist on this; the influence of the EU and the US won’t decline too much, but it will be joined by a competing model of international policy. There is something to like in this competing model: it uses trade in a way which has the capacity to make a lasting difference. Of course the mode of its application by the likes of China is abhorrent to liberal democracies—or at least, it should be. I suppose we have to look on the bright side of things and make the best of the new order of the world. Adapting our overseas aid (by which I mean Europe’s aid in totality) and investment policy to offer more incentives to developing states to swallow the poll of reforms to reduce corruption and further human rights. Focussing on our close neighbours and making sure that we ‘do’ development properly will go a long way to securing a safe position for Europe in the diverse world we now live in.

This post is already a tad too long, so I’ll leave the energy security and climate change problems to some future posts in this theme.