Letters

Political oxymorons are the new black— "libertarian paternalism" under Thaler and Sunstein, "progressive conservatism" under Blond. I had trouble with the first and am having even more trouble with the second. Demos, where Blond is now based, has always been the place where easy oppositions were explored and ultimately dismantled, generally for the better. But on this occasion, I suggest this is an oxymoron best left alone.

My problem with progressive conservatism is not whether we can make it happen—it's whether we really want to buy into such a distorted notion of progress. It reeks of nostalgia for a form of working-class solidarity that was swept aside by the welfare state. While the welfare state has generated perverse effects, the "philosophy of entitlement," as Blond puts it, isn't one of them. Instead, the welfare state allows people to feel secure enough to thrive despite the vagaries of the market.

Blond's argument is a distortion of civic republicanism, offering organic solidarity and a reassuring blanket of civic duties to bamboozle us. But re-read your Rousseau folks—civic republicanism is about emancipation, not subjugation to frightened little communities, the likes of which Rousseau abhorred. All this talk of "remoralising" markets, "relocalising communities," and "recapitalising the poor" has the tin sound of so much loose change in a Victorian coat-pocket.

Demos is asking the right questions. But we have to find the right answers.

Catherine Fieschi
British Council

Philip Blond responds:
17th February 2009

Catherine Fieschi would do well to examine the philosophy she advocates. The frightened little communities that she fears are exactly those to which a belief in Rousseau leads. Geneva's most famous son abhorred communities that would not accept the general will of the majority. Historically, such views underpinned a popular leftism that ultimately trampled the few and the different, for the sake of the manipulated many. Fieschi dismisses the role of civil power as a parochial paternalism. But intermediate institutions are the only genuine protection for individual freedom against the type of state that Rousseau helped inaugurate. The civic reality of dispersed power and the lived experience of a democratised good are a better political alternative to the ruinous legacy of Rousseau and Marx.

Fieschi represents a failed middle-class leftism, which cannot admit its own part in the destruction of working class life. It remains attached to statism, at least in part out of guilt towards those whose voices it silenced. Everything I am arguing for is about restoring genuine power, control and capital to communities and ordinary people. The left should support such moves, not wallow in nostalgia. Otherwise, dismal state welfarism is the only future the poor can look forward to.

Phillip Blond
Demos

A new protectionism?
9th February 2009

Philip Blond tells us that "a 10 per cent increase in the amount of council money spent locally would mean an injection of £5.6bn into local economies." Yet unless all that 10 per cent were diverted from goods and services provided from abroad, the same amount of money would simply be shuffled around in a different pattern. And how would "local" be defined between a district council and the county of which it forms part? How also would value for taxpayers' money be assured under this new form of protectionism?

Harvey Cole
Winchester

Moral sense
3rd February 2009

The articles by Phillip Blond and Jonathan Haidt (February) pose closely related questions. Can liberalism provide us with a set of common values and a sense of social cohesion without lapsing into anomie and relativism? For both writers the answer is that, without some infusion of conservative/communitarian ideals, it cannot. However, this ignores the progressive liberal tradition—alluded to but precipitously dismissed by Blond.

The real answer lies in enhancing opportunities for social participation. Reducing working hours (by accepting the working hours directive), increasing the minimum wage and giving the long-term unemployed the uncoerced opportunity to do paid community work, with training thrown in, would be a start. All of these measures would empower individuals and enhance community cohesion in equal measure. They would, for example, be a real help to families in ways which would not make the worst off any more dependent on the state. They would also appeal to the liberal "moral senses," as Haidt calls them, in ways no right-communitarian could coherently object to.

P Badger
Barnsley

Burying mistakes
28th January 2009

Sue Armstrong (February) is right, but too understated, about the damage done by the slipshod 2004 Human Tissue Act. It was a populist response to the shock-horror in the press about Alder Hey. The task of good government is to protect us from that folly, not exploit it. New Labour have repeatedly displayed their ignorance of science over the years: from mad cow disease to foot and mouth to the escape of pathogens from government laboratories.

When I was a student I recall consultants regularly taking their team to the pathology department to find out what had killed their patient. A brave thing to do, since they risked being exposed as ignorant. Flip remarks about doctors burying their mistakes are all the easier today thanks to this bad law. How much work will now have to be done to undo it?

Martin Rosendaal
London NW5

Drooling excess
25th January 2009

I have seldom read such a wholly uncritical piece of writing as Julian Gough's profile of Clive James (January). Surely it does harm to Prospect, Clive James and the author to indulge in such drooling excess?

If James is indeed the equal of Seamus Heaney, why is not even one of his poems quoted in its entirety as proof? It strikes me as odd that Prospect should pride itself on being a critical forum of debate—and then give over a page and a half of space to an article so ludicrously over-larded with praise. James can do no wrong, it seems. Everything he has touched has turned to gold. He is tantamount to a literary colossus. If this is indeed the case, why have we heard so little about it until more than a thousand words are poured forth by a dear old friend?

Michael Glover
Editor, the Bow-Wow Shop

All shall have prizes
29th January 2009

May I correct Amanda Craig's facts on the Man Booker Prize (Letters, February)? As the rules clearly state on the website each publishing imprint may enter two (not one) titles, to which is added any previous winner and any author with a shortlisted book in the past ten years. Additionally, publishers may submit up to five titles—each with a letter of justification from the novel's editor—for the judges to consider as "call-in" titles. (Last year's jury called in ten titles.) And there is a failsafe clause that allows the judges, if they spot something worthwhile that has not been submitted, to call that in on their own say-so. That happened in 2007 and the novel in question was one away from the longlist. As for Amanda Craig's assertion about judges not reading the books: I've have administered the Man Booker Prize since 2005 and sat in on the two previous years—that's 35 judges in all—and in that time I have a suspicion of only one failing to read all the books.

Ion Trewin
Literary director, Man Booker Prizes

Bazalgette is wrong
30th February 2009

Peter Bazalgette (February) is missing the point. He is surely right to praise outlets like Tate Media and Philosophy Bites. They are exciting innovations. But the whole point of public service broadcasting (PSB) is to introduce important work to millions of viewers and listeners. I was first introduced to the Russian revolution by an ITV documentary, to Freud by a Horizon drama-documentary and to Pinter by a television play. Most people have never heard of the narrowcasters Bazalgette mentions, and wouldn't know how to access them even if they had. That is why champions of PSB like Jeremy Isaacs and Melvyn Bragg are right to say that it should be for the many—for schoolchildren, the poor and the elderly—not just for the well-educated and wealthy who know about the Tate or can find philosophy sites on the internet. The only important debate in television today is about how to fund public service broadcasting aimed at large audiences. Anything else is a cop-out.

David Herman
London NW6

Huntington ignorance
11th February 2009

Eric Kaufmann's article about Samuel Huntington (February) reminded me of when I met Huntington at a conference in 2000 in Singapore. A week earlier he had made a short visit to Jakarta. I put to him that Indonesia's liberal Islam was about as different to its middle-eastern variant as Scottish protestantism was to South American Catholicism. I suggested that you could no more speak of any Muslim "civilisation" than you could a Christian civilisation or a western one.

He bridled, suggested that I hadn't understood his book and added that he wasn't an expert on Indonesia. But how can it be possible to identify a "clash of civilisations" between the west and Islam while knowing little about the largest Muslim nation? Surely any theorist of international relations—especially one who professed to identify widespread cultural traits—must have an in-depth empirical knowledge of the cultures under discussion? If not, Huntington's whole theory becomes little more than the universalistic academic blandishment that he claimed to so abhor.

Daniel Gay
Edinburgh