Over the years, Condi Rice has been building a network of well-placed female contacts for discreet chats and soundings, and Margaret Beckett is the newest member. The group includes, among others, India's Sonia Gandhi, Queen Rania of Jordan, Greek foreign minister Dora Bakoyannis, Chile's president Michelle Bachelet and Israel's foreign minister Tzipi Livni. So far so conventional. But it also includes the Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi, who, in a long private session in Rice's office, recently warned that Palestine was sinking into civil war. Ashrawi also briefed Rice on her efforts to develop a third party, independent of Fatah and Hamas.
White paper waffle
What has happened to the language of white papers? Though never exactly documents of beauty, they once embodied the core civil service values of honesty, clarity and attention to detail. At their best—the famous 1944 employment white paper, for example—they constituted major statements about how society should be run, and gave the impression of having been pored over.
Not any more. As part of its drive to shake off its elitist image, the civil service has abandoned linguistic precision. Take the new local government white paper, "Strong and Prosperous Communities." To "Quality Parish Councils" is to be "extended" the "power of well-being." A "streamlined Standards Board" is to be "refocused" as a "light touch regulator." There is to be a "step change in promoting cohesion."
This kind of language is sometimes labelled "Blairite." But it actually has two intuitively contradictory sources: political correctness and the market. The "modernised" civil service must answer to the demands of PC, but it must also reflect the idea that policy should always be tied to tangible economic gains. The proliferation of management speak is hardly surprising, given the civil service's well-documented reliance on consultants. But one result is a seeming inability to discuss the role of government, or the public good, with any confidence or clarity.
Britain's most important Muslim?
Yahya Birt, the 38-year-old son of former BBC boss John Birt, has emerged as one of the key figures in the British Muslim community. The former researcher at the Islamic Foundation is soon to take over as director of the City Circle, an organisation of Muslim professionals. The City Circle has become one of the government's main Muslim interlocutors following the fall from grace of the Muslim Council of Britain (see John Ware's analysis, Prospect online). City Circle is undogmatic and dynamic, it acts as a forum for debate and mentoring organisation, and is expanding its franchise out of London into Birmingham and Manchester. Yahya, who converted to Islam when he was 20, has for years acted as an informal go-between between the British Muslim world and parts of media and government. He has taken a close interest in extremism, and has argued strongly against the government's proposed ban of radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Prospect curse
Last month in Prospect, Erik Tarloff wrote approvingly about Darcy Burner, a Democrat aiming to unseat a Republican in Washington state. At the time of writing, it looked as if Burner was headed for defeat, despite the Democratic landslide. Is this the curse of Prospect? Or does it have to do with the fact that Burner's campaign team found the time to write a long seven-point memo to a small British magazine complaining, among other things, about its failure to correctly identify the make of Burner's car?
Journo wonks
Several months ago we warned that the takeover of Britain's think tanks by journalists would end in tears. The individualistic style of many journalists does not lend itself to the more collegiate think tank world. With Madeleine Bunting's rapid exit from Demos, we seem to have been proved correct. The thesis does, however, remain contradicted by Charles Grant at the CER, Sunder Katwala at the Fabians, Niall Dickson at the King's Fund, John Lloyd's Reuters Institute and so on…
Behind the J-curve
The current buzz phrase in Washington is "the J curve"—the title of a new Francis Fukuyama-endorsed book by Ian Bremmer. The J curve is a graph tracking the relationship between openness and stability. Its main insight is that a state's transition from closed to open entails a dangerous loss of stability (the curve of the "J"). Its popularity at first seems puzzling: isn't this just a snazzy reformulation of the cliché "Things have to get worse before they can get better"? But it's easy to see why it might appeal to hawks. Under this analysis, the disorders in Iraq can be seen as a predetermined blip in the march of democracy. Once the curve has been traversed, stability and democracy here we come.
