Britain's Democratic Deficit

And while I'm on the subject of democracy and human rights I would like to draw attention to our own government's rather sinister double-speak on the issue.

According to Gordon Brown and others, the anti-Olympic Torch protests were a symbol of Britain's vibrant democratic values.

Or something.

The fact of the matter is that the police are using new anti-terrorism legislation to arrest people for demonstrating democratically.

That's right, following the Labour Party's example (when an elderly delegate was expelled from its annual conference for heckling Jack Straw over the Iraq war, under the 'Prevention of Terorrorism' Act) the guardians of law and order are using their powers to suppress dissent.

Much, it must be said, like the Chinese everyone was protesting about.

According to journalist Paul Lewis: "from the outset, police identified anti-Chinese protesters and subjected them to different rules to red-flag waving spectators.

Before the relay had even properly begun, my colleague witnessed police removing T-shirts and flags from demonstrators. At Ladbroke Grove, spectators carrying Tibetan flags were relegated to a pavement across the road, kept apart from a carnival-style reception.

Several protesters were dragged away.

Demonstrators who did not obey police requests to stand in designated areas were repeatedly threatened with anti-terrorist legislationl".

A victory for democracy if ever I saw one...

As Dan Kieran points out in his magnificent call to arms I Fought the Law, Britain is swiftly becoming an authoritarian state. As such, it is definitely a suitable successor to Beijing for the next Olympic Games. And from there, onwards to Sochi, in Russia, bastion of democracy and Human Rights.

And this is what they call progress.

Backdown or Boycott?

I've heard more crap about the Olympics than I can bear in the last week.

I've watched IOC President Jacques Rogge tell the world he was "saddened' by violent protests in Europe and that the Games would bounce back from this 'crisis'.

I've watched BBC reporters deliberate on how Britain can stand up for Human Rights and yet not 'offend' China.

I've watched athletes, from Tim Henman to Steve Redgrave, tell us how we should keep politics and sport separate.

I have seen noone, at least noone in the mainstream press, talk about China's broken promises to the world. Why we should be offended by China.

Tibet is actually a side issue. Even if the protests in Lhasa had never happened the West should still be demanding a boycott.

Not for emotional reasons

Not for political reasons

But because China has never, not once, tried to live up to the legally binding promises it made the International Olympic Committee when it won the bid for the 2008 Games all those years ago.

It signed a contract promising to improve democracy, human rights and media freedom in time for the Games.

No ifs, no buts.

Instead, all three have gone backwards.

Oppression is intensifying. Dissenters are held under lock and key, sometimes even in mental asylums. The international press is barred from entering Tibet and given minders while in China proper.

And just yesterday the governor of Lhasa said that if anyone tried to disrupt the progress of the Olympic Torch on its journey to Mount Everest through non-violent democratic protest they would be severely punished.

China has backed out of every promise it made the international community in return for its month in the limelight. Indeed, in failing to publish the Host City agreement, it is happy to pretend it never made any in the first place.

So I want the world to stop worrying about offending China.

While demanding a boycott now may not encourage change the IOC and the international community must demand that China lives up to its Olympic pledges by the time the Games commence in August.

If the authorities do not live up to this contract, we should boycott the whole event.

Some nebulous form of dialogue with the Dalai Lama will not suffice: that is just diplomatic smoke and mirrors.

We need concrete change. Or they can take their billion pound stadiums and use them as detention camps for all those dissidents. That would show the world what they are really made of.

Casanova Clegg

I couldn't decide if this was an April Fool or if Nick Clegg is simply putting the 'L' back into Liberal.

According to today's Guardian "Nick Clegg cannot be accused of forgetting his promise to make British political life as "open and accessible" as possible".

"In an unusually candid interview [with the men's mag GQ], the Liberal Democrat leader reveals that he has slept with as many as 30 women and considers himself a competent lover, but admits he has received the odd complaint."

I'll be asking for Freedom of Information disclosures on Brown and Cameron next....

Are some things not best left unsaid?

No Cojones

Britain won't have a referendum on the EU Constitution, sorry, Lisbon Treaty after all.

Last night the government and its supporters defeated a loose coalition of Tories and Lib Dem and Labour rebels by 311 votes to 248 to ratify the European Union treaty. The debate will now go to the Lords but is expected pass into law this summer without a hitch.

All parties found themselves in a pretty pickle over this issue, though for different reasons. As Simon Hoggart said in the Guardian

"Labour knows that it should have held a referendum, but won't because it would lose.

The Tories know a referendum would be catastrophic; it would set us back in Europe for years.

And the Lib Dems want a referendum on whether we should stay in at all because they can't think of anything else."

However, although I agree with his overall judgement I dont agree with this analysis.

Lib Dems supported the - in my opinion, rather ludicrous - suggestion that the UK hold a referendum on being in or out of the EU because they had already committed to a referendum in previous manifestos, much like Labour.

They were faced with the choice of letting the issue quietly drop and voting with the government - on the basis that we are the most europhilic party in the UK - or headlining the 'in and out' issue in an effort to move the debate onto different ground.

In the end, Clegg opted for an abstention, after the Lib Dem amendment on a referendum on EU membership was dismissed last week. Yet after ordering a three line whip to ensure party unity he was immediately undermined by 15 pro-referendum Lib Dem MPs who voted with the Tories.

This included three front bench spokesmen including the environment spokesman, Tim Farron, the Scotland and Northern Ireland spokesman, Alistair Carmichael, and the justice spokesman, David Heath. All later resigned. What a cock-up.

This is the angle the press has chosen to focus on. Yet the real reason this vote was such an unmitigated disaster is because, having imposed the whip, the Lib Dems found themselves in a position of undermining the one thing they have long fought for, namely European reform and progress.

Knowing that Labour rebels could swell the Tory ranks and defeat the government line we should have thrown ourselves behind Brown to ensure we carried the day.

Instead, after the much-dramatised 'walk out' from the Commons last week, we sat on our hands during the vote, drawing predictable criticism that the party has 'no cojones' and is simply a standing joke.

Clegg did all this despite overwhelming advice from Lib Dems in Brussels that the party should vote for its principles, namely an effective and reformed EU, instead of micro-managing its members.

Liberal Democrats know that without the Lisbon Treaty in place an enlarged EU will lack the necessary institutional tools to make effective decisions on matters of great importance from counter-terrorism, to energy security, and completing hte single market.

We know that we need to end unanimity in Council, which has blocked essential dossiers and reduced EU influence on the world stage.

We know that extending democratic scrutiny of legislation to all policy areas, including the CAP and the EU budget, is vital to ensuring decisions are made in the European, not just national, interest. And that those decisions are accountable to the public.

Yet we were prepared to play with fire for the sake of engineering a unity which
never transpired.

However Clegg should not take all of the blame for this unholy mess. It was extremely irresponsible for the party to put referendum promises in our previous manifestos, particularly in the current eurosceptic climate, where media misinformation makes having a rational debate on Europe all but impossible.

This naive gesture goes against our party's, not to mention the citizen's, best interests and is simply pandering to eurosceptic populism.

Don't give me the response about giving power to the people and acting democratically. We need to get it out of our heads that referenda are an answer to difficult questions. We were right to oppose a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty because it is far too complex a question for a plebicite.

Complex questions require thoughtful answers, not someone's (however cherished) gut reaction at the ballot box. Resolving complex questions is, indeed, why we bother electing our representatives in the first place, since few of us have the time or inclination to dedicate ourselves to reading the reams of paper required.

For Britain to have a real debate about Europe, it needs to open its eyes and eschew the kind of puerile propaganda that has passed for argumentation over the last decade or so. It is the responsibility of all political parties, regardless of their stance, to ensure this debate is carried out openly, honestly, and fairly.

Protecting Debate: a Right not a Privilege

Think what you will about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the outspoken critic of fundamentalist Islam. Agree or disagree with what she has to say. Refuse to acknowledge her opinions, if you like. Fly into a 'murderous' rage, if you must. But do not dispute her right to live out her life in freedom and security and leave her opinions as a matter for debate, not violence.

Those were my conclusions after listening to the notorious Ms Hirsi Ali speak before the European Parliament today, pleading with MEPs to extend her the EU's protection now that her own country, the Netherlands, is refusing to pay for the round-the-clock security necessary to shield her from would-be assassins.

Europe should not defend her because it agrees with her opinions. It should not defend her to make a statement against Islamic violence. It should not even agree to defend her because of her high profile. It should agree to defend any and all European citizens who, because of their views - however distasteful - are menaced with death.

As Benoit Hamon, the French Socialist MEP in charge of the initiative to extend EU funding to protect her, said, this is not a debate about Islam but a debate about Europe's values, and how it puts them into practice.

By forcing the former MP to choose between a living death in the Netherlands and a fuller, yet less secure, existence in the US the Dutch government has abdicated its responsibility for implementing the European Charter of Fundamental Rights which expressly states that 'everyone has the right to liberty and security of person'.

While demands for an EU protection fund might seem unrealistic at present, it clearly makes sense for EU citizenship to be linked much more closely to citizenship rights, as laid down in the Charter and Lisbon Treaty, amongst others.

With the increase in extremism on both the left and the right of the political spectrum (not to mention amongst those who have no allegiance to Europe's democratic values) it is important to assure citizens that the values Europe likes to voice in theory, are actually available in practice.

In truth, an EU right to protection (whether imposed on Member States or presented as an EU competence) is clearly in the best interests of all citizens. For, as Tom Paine famously pointed out, 'He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself".

Even Ms Hirsi Ali's most virulent detractors might like to reflect on what could happen to them were she to be murdered by a Muslim fanatic. The likelihood is that a shock wave far stronger than that which rocked Holland after the killing of Theo Van Gogh, would reverberate across Europe, making Muslim communities (innocent men, women and children) a thousand times more vulnerable to racial abuse and violence.

Failure to establish the principle of protection in law could lead to two possible outcomes. One, that Europe's prized attachment to freedom of expression would cease to be meaningful, since people would auto-censure through fear of reprisal. And two, that future governments, God forbid, future right wing xenophobic governments of the type promised by the Vlaams Belang or the Front Nationale, could put ethnic minorities at risk of reprisal - without needing to provide protection to those that stand up for minority interests.

Instead of focussing on whether Hirsi Ali is right or wrong in her depiction of Islam - as most people on either side of the secularist/islamist agenda have tended to do - Europeans must be prepared to extend freedom of speech to everyone, however tasteless their views may be.

The debate Ayaan Hirsi Ali triggered will rage on. But it should stay at the level of debate, and not descend into violence. Although her views may not always be 'sensitively' expressed, Muslims would do better to respond to her suggestions through better arguments and clearer questioning, instead of accusations and cries of offence.

For this is simply the first taste of what is to come. Religion - whether Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, or any other ism - is taking an ever more prominent place in political debate across Europe, so it is vital we create conditions where its implications be discussed openly, honestly, and frankly, under the banner of freedom of speech. And if religions can't accept occasional offence, they may have to accept the far greater prohibition of fundamentalist secularism, which would curtail all religious advances into the public realm.

Through their actions shall we know them.

Opening Pandora's Box

Congratulations go to the Archbishop of Canterbury for opening the Pandora's Box of our time: what it means to be a multicultural society.

A lot of fluffy nonsense has been spoken about multiculturalism in recent years, partly through ignorance. For many of those who employ the term prefer to use it as a catch-all for feelgood liberal inclusiveness while overlooking what the logic of applied multiculturalism means in practice.

Wikipedia defines multiculturalism as a "de facto state of both cultural and ethnic diversity within the demographics of a particular social space" - merging it with the concept of pluralism tout court.

Yet rather than simply referring to the existence of diverse cultural groups, official multiculturalism policies "aim at preserving the cultures or cultural identities - usually those of immigrant groups - within a unified society. In this context, multiculturalism advocates a society that extends equitable status to distinct cultural and religious groups, no one culture predominating".

Although this seems a straightforward desire for mutual respect at face value, in reality it is anything but. If no one culture predominates then it makes it very difficult to argue for 'one law for all' as the Home Secretary has repeatedly done.

For Britain's Laws (many of them ancient), as Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has rightly said, derive from Judeo-Christian principles for all the 'secular' spin that is put on them. Thus, in a truly 'multicultural society' they must be considered culturally biased rather than neutral, and thus open to opposition from other communities.

This in turn throws into relief what it means for something to have a universal value. Human Rights, for example, are often claimed to be fundamental and indivisible - acting as the framework around which all legal systems should be constructed.

Yet the concept of Human Rights derives from certain channels of thought which, while not necessarily 100% Western in origin (and here I doff my hat to Amartya Sen's critiques), certainly does not have a universal provenance. Hence one reason that the OIC drew up its own 'Islamic Bil of Human Rights' back in the day.

If we are prepared to admit that multiculturalism entails "equitable status to distinct cultural and religious groups" then our cultural relativism must extend as far as this framework of first principles, if policy making is to be coherent. Which leaves little to nothing that can be deemed suitable for legislation for society at large, based even on the principle of reasonable pluralism.

Of course, there is one further problem with a policy which requires every cultural community to make its own rules - schism and minority viewpoints. Every culture, every organisation, no matter how small, has its renegades, its leaders, and its followers. Thus the question of who makes the rules and who is bound by them is crucial.

Too often, experience across all religions shows that elderly bearded men have the monopoly on this position, giving others little say in writing the rule book. If a completely homogenous group cannot be defined it will be difficult to make legitimate law on all of their behalfs.

Not only is Sharia neither static nor homogenous (as the Archbishop acknowledges) but different schools of fiqh have differing interpretations of what it requires, to which individual Muslims adhere.

Indeed some scholars like Tariq Ramadan believe that even the shariat provisions on which these schools agree cannot be implemented because today's conditions are unlike those of the umma in the time of the prophet - poverty, for example, could be an excuse for stealing while at that time social organisation meant no one was without sufficient food - so the debate is entirely hypothetical.

And then there is the question of dissenters. The Archbishop says that those who decide to pursue justice through Sharia Councils (as in Jewish courts or Somali customary courts) must agree with the punishment meted out or their case will be referred to the Supreme Court.

Yet this is simply one more example of multicultural window dressing which is logically incoherent. If the whole point is respecting the equality of different cultural traditions it is clearly absurd to put British Law on a pedestal.

If the point is giving people choice it could well turn to the advantage of the strong, as it gives plaintiffs the opportunity to pick the version of justice which suits their interests - and pressurise the weak into accepting decisions for cultural reasons, as Earthquake Cove correctly points out in this post.

So we have a choice: either package people as community members and leave it up to their communities to dispense justice - or acknowledge we are all members of one society so we must live under one set of rules which (while open to discussion and debate) must be applied to all, with few exceptions, as is currently the case.

The truth of the matter is that the Archbishop's comments on the place of Sharia in Britain simply reflect what is already happening, since Sharia Councils, like other advisory bodies, seek solutions on non-criminal matters pertaining to their faith which, if disputed, go straight to the high court. That's what he means when he says it is an already accepted part of Britain's legal-political landscape.

What is problematic is not this kind of culturally-sensitive problem solving but the concept of parallel legal systems which is what multiculturalism entails.

No Room To Breathe

I've lived outside the UK for three out of the last five years and every time I return I notice the change.

Everything is monitored. Everyone is checked. Everything and everyone is part of a growing system of government control which has moved beyond traditional parameters of law, order, and welfare provision into the private sphere where it hopes to create and enforce the concept of the 'model citizen'.

Increasingly, there is no more room to breathe in British society. No room to live according to different norms, to espouse different beliefs, or simply exist outside the ever-extending scrutiny of the state.

We live in a country where the fingerprints of thousands of innocent schoolchildren are kept on file by the police, where an electronic snapshot of our lives can be obtained by everyone from the local authority to the Egg Marketing Board - without our permission ever being asked.

A country where the phonecalls of MPs are tapped, where people can be fired from their jobs (or never employed) for 'misconduct' in their private life, ranging from drunken pranks with their pals to an unfortunate facebook photo.

Where ID cards containing all our personal information will so be required to access any public service, at any time. Where nothing we say do or think can be kept private.

It's just a step away from the situation depicted in 'The Lives of Others', which was so well received at last night's BAFTAs. The director claims enough time has passed to critically depict East-Germany's past under the Stasi.

Yet the surveillance state is not in the past. It is alive and well in modern Britain and the film contains a warning of what could lie ahead if Britain doesn't wake up to what liberties we allow our government to take away in the name of the 'common good'. For while the current political climate may still be reasonably open there may come a time when that is no longer the case - and it will be too late to change anything.

Successive Home Secretaries have accused critics of state surveillance for being paranoid, stating that if citizens have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear.

Yet as Dan Kieran points out in his book 'I Fought the Law', even respectable middle class citizens canfind themselves blacklisted, or even arrested, for engaging in the right to protest, whether over the war in Iraq or building a ring road in an environmentally sensitive area.

Isaiah Berlin famously defined liberty as 'an answer to the question: 'What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons'.

Totalitarian regimes corrode the space of negative liberties (where our freedom of action is uninterupted as long as it does not interfere with the freedoms of others) to the extent that all actions (no matter how private) become politicised and fall under the jurisdiction of the state.

That is what seems to be happening in the UK, with the active collusion of many unwitting and 'upright' British citizens. And before you accuse me of being paranoid, let me refer you the following article by Simon Carr in the Independent.

As he says: 'What we have emerging in Britain is a general cultural movement in favour of surveillance. There is a growing sense that society generally and the state in particular should take an active interest in all individual activity. And that this is right, proper and inevitable.

...We're witnessing something like Rousseau's "general will" in a preliminary stage of development. Polls, politics, television, public opinion, the insurance industry, the state sector, they are all combining to exert public "general will" rights over the private sphere.

Laying down an approved way of doing things is one expression of this. "Best practice" it is sometime called. Or "directives" or "targets" or "operational guidance".

The State has a powerful incentive and logic driving it: it is spending so much of our money to help us that it has the right to demand appropriate behaviour in return."

Efficient public spending requires model citizens. So be prepared to conform - or be convicted.

Choosing the Right Way Forward

One of the main purposes of my work is convincing people that democracy and human rights are universally applicable, anywhere in the world. What I write is very black and white - because that is what my job demands. Propaganda isn't propaganda otherwise. However in private I have always -been slightly suspicious of the 'democratisation agenda': partly because it has been hijacked by American neo-cons in their quest for world dominance and partly because of an instinctive dislike of 'universalisms' which I have come to associate with thinly veiled cultural imperialism.

I don't think that makes me a cultural relativist on the other hand. I do not, for example, believe that all cultural practices are equally good. I do believe that better and worse decisions can be made and that in order to know which is which we have to make comparisons.

Yet I am also quite convinced that all cultural practices have a certain validity (that is they 'make sense') within the internal logic that governs every civilisation. Whether we are aware of it or not most of us operate on auto-pilot within our own societies, either conforming to or reacting against the unwritten rules which govern our understanding of right and wrong action.

Living within the parameters of these rules provides us with our sense of normality. We do not question why we behave a certain way, most of the time, nor do we try to justify it in our own terms. And if we are dissatisfied with the rules of the game, we react against them instead of putting in place alternative systems to govern our lives.

A good example would bethe sexual revolution which swept the West in the sixties and seventies where people swept away the suffocating social norms that governed relationships only to replace them with their diametric opposite - with little or no attempt to make sense of this seismic shift from one extreme to the other.

So we all operate within closed cultural systems mitigated only if and when we are exposed to alternative ways of living. In the past this happened rarely - through trade, or cultural exchange amongst the educated elite - but today alternatives to our own cultural norms are increasingly evident and accessible.

Migration, instant communication, the internet, even the availability of cheap foreign travel have all enlarged our horizons. Very few people alive today can claim to live culturally hermetic, homogenous lives. However it is equally true that our understanding of other ways of life remains superficial, even disneyfied.

Eating Chinese food, watching a foreign film, speaking another language, even hanging out with foreign friends, is rarely sufficient to give us more than a window onto another world. It's a bit like showing a photo of a tropical island to someone who has never been there.

They can exclaim at the beauty of the scene, perhaps remark on what people are wearing, eating, or doing, but they will not understand why those things are taking place - why they 'make sense' within the logic of that society . In fact, even if we went to that tropical island, most of us wouldn't understand a lot more about the scene in question - we would see, but we would not see clearly.

For most of us, 'our way' of doing things remains the best way. We view those who dissent from our norms - especially in our own society - on a spectrum ranging from the bizarre, to the suspect, or at worst, downright frightening.

This reaction differs from the reaction conventional people (and I speak as a British person here) have when confronted with an alternative cultural practice which is indigenous in origin, such aspeople acting like Punks, Goths, or whatever.

We are aware of where these practices come from and what they represent. And even if we dont like them we do understand them. What makes unknown cultural norms so frightening is that they don't make the remotest bit of sense to us.

So if a woman is veiled, if a Hindu refuses to eat meat, if an East Asian refuses to loosen up in our company, we don't understand why. We don't understand why these things are normal for the person in question and why any attempt to do otherwise would constitute a painful act of rebellion against their inner instincts.

It's a bit like telling your average British person to stop drinking alcohol, stop watching the football, or start going to church again, when they're an avowed atheist. These are simply things the average person does in today's Britain. They are normal. They are everyday. But are they right?

If we want to understand how best to live our lives we must put our own assumptions in question. While it may be normal for British people to drink to get drunk it certainly isn't in France. So who is right? Surely, when we make the comparison, we have to conclude that the French way of moderate drinking is preferable.

Yet other countries do not have a drinking culture. So which is better - the French way or their way? When we truly compare the effects of living with alcohol to the effects of living without we might well conclude that not drinking at all is essentially better for us even if it is, to our way of thinking, alot less fun.

So when deciding if you want to drink or not you can make a choice. You can say 'do I want to have fun and relax - and take the consequences if I cannot be moderate' or you can say 'to prevent overindulgence and its unpleasant effects on myself and others, I would do best to avoid alcohol'.

One argument derives from personal preference 'I want to have fun', the other from a qualitative, objective fact, which is personal health. As such, the best choice is probably not to drink - even though that goes against what most of us are culturally tuned to believe.

It's hard to make the 'right' choice from within British culture where not drinking is mocked as the preserve of the uptight and self-righteous. But it's much easier to make when looked at from the perspectives and norms of other cultures where the idea that you cannot 'have fun' without alcohol is an alien concept.

So we can see that enhanced cultural awareness can help us make choices and decisions about our own lives - by deconstructing our own norms and exposing much of our behaviour as the result of cultural conditioning instead of personal decision making or logic.

Once we realise this we can start to look for better ways forward. And it is here that I would like to return to democracy and human rights. Many people say that they're Western imports, a form of cultural hegemony that doesn't work for certain civilisations. That we should, de facto, respect every and all decisions made within the logic of other societies.

But that is not the case. As Amartya Sen has pointed out in 'La Democratie des autres' the idea of public debate and decision making is by no means confined to the West. Indeed, even that tradition which derived from the Athenian demos was more thoroughly reflected on in Asia Minor, the Middle East, and India many centuries ago, than it ever was in Western Europe until the current age.

Every society has had its open and closed periods, every society has times of freedom and times of dictatorship. Every society has its successes and failures. The Arab world today is a good sight less developed - both materially and culturally - than it was five hundred years ago when it was by far the most developed, open, and tolerant civilisation in the world. That is why it flourished. And why it has now ceased to flourish.

Realising this, we must be aware that certain practices are - when considered relatively - qualitatively better than others. And of all the worst qualities a society can exhibit, closedmindedness and intolerance must be amongst the worst.

That is why not only concerned foreigners but all Muslims and Afghans should be so affronted by what is happening to Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student of journalism who has been sentenced to death for blasphemy for downloading material on women's rights and distributing it for the purpose of stimulating debate on the Qu'ran's meaning and interpretation.

This is not only wrong because Afghanistan is now a democracy, and democracies allow pluralism, but because - from the perspective of openness and critical debate which allows all societies to move forward - it is illogical to execute someone for questioning norms: even if these are religious norms, and the society in question is a religious society.

For if we question something its truth, or logic, will either be revealed or denied. Truth (maybe not absolute truth, but internal consistency, lets say) can only be established through debate and discussion. And inconsistency - or falsehood - can only be exposed that way. So please, everyone, sign the petition to free this poor man - not because you believe a bunch of secular Westerners are right but because it is the right, and the only, thing to do.

EU Should Stop Being A Schoolyard Bully

Subsidiarity - the principle that government power ought to reside at the lowest possible level - is a concept beloved of Liberal Democrats. However, too many of our elected members are a little vague on what that means in practice.

You see subsidiarity should mean it's the council which handles your bin collection; regional and national government which organises matters like education policy and road building; and the EU which does things countries can't handle alone like combat climate change.

So far, so good. But the problem with power - and the backbone of traditional liberal thinking - is that, if their remit is unchecked, law-makers will attempt to intrude ever further into the realm of the personal. Sunsidiarity should be accompanied by a healthy respect for the limits of the law and the need for smaller government.

Now the EU is a byword for big government and I am more than a trifle bemused by its endless efforts to overstep the mark. When not making laws for the sake of making laws, or making policy on a lowest common denominator basis, it is busy issuing resolutions on areas over which it has no competence, from Foreign Policy to - bizarrely - school uniforms.

The issue? Banning hijab for Muslim school girls across the EU. You see, in a report on Children's Rights to be voted tomorrow at the European Parliament's plenary session paragraph 127 "Urges Member States to ban headscarves and hijab at least at primary school, in order to anchor more firmly the right to be a child and to ensure genuine and unenforced freedom of choice at a later age" which passed in committee with a considerable majority.

Now think what you like about the issue of hijab, especially for under 16's. I personally agree with the logic behind this paragraph, which, according to Committee members, is to ensure young girls get to participate fully in things like swimming and gymnastics without having their parents' preferences thrust upon them - especially important in primary schools where none but the most fundamentalist of zealots could consider a girl to have attained puberty. I'm not sure I like the 'at least' qualification, as it smacks a little of cultural hegemony, but at least it's only a suggestion.

However that is beside the point.

This is a clear cut case of Europe overstepping its mandate and interfering, in a nanny state sort of way, with decisions that can be dealt with perfectly adequately at the level of the school board, let alone local or national government. Surely these are issues which communitites should deal with on their own, in full consultation with local parents, if we are serious about 'integrating diversity', as the jargon goes.

The top down approach of a bunch of privileged, mostly middle aged, white people - however well intentioned - runs entirely against the grain of what is feted as Europe's Year of Intercultural Dialogue. Of all people, Europe's Liberals and Democrats should agree with this. But we're supporting the report anyway, despite murmurings of opposition from the likes of Sarah Ludford MEP. It is definitely time for a policy rethink.

Join the Fight Against 'Inactive Women'

I've long maintained that, despite its ostensible focus on individualism, our society is becoming increasingly one-dimensional and conformist.

One casualty of the capitalist-materialist world in which we live is that the family, indeed, human relations in general, is paid little more than lip service by policy makers who view life exclusively in economic terms.

People are no longer treated as citizens but workers, taxpayers and consumers who matter, if at all, only in terms of their productivity and spending power. Little attention is paid to what other factors are necessary for a pleasant, fulfilling, and ultimately ethical, stay on this planet of ours.

Thus people are educated not so they can gain knowledge, insight, or creativity but so they do not place a burden on the state. Innovation is important not to improve lives but so we can produce more, faster, than ever before. Witness so-called labour saving devices, which, far from giving us more time for leisure and family, simply allow us to spend more hours in the office.

People must keep healthy not so they can profit more from life but so they can work harder. Of course, if they are so foolish as to smoke, or to get old, then they must accept being treated as human trash for which our economy (read society) no longer has any use.

It is clear that the 'government machine' is more interested in perfecting its various systems - the prison system, the education system, the health system - sorry, 'service' - than responding to the real and varied needs of human beings.

This is disturbing because it means that citizens have gone from being the ideological end, to the means, of democratic government. Ministers are more interested in managing the systems in place than rethinking them in terms of what citizens actually want.

That wouldn't be so bad European States claimed to be feudal oligarchies instead of liberal democracies - then we would all understand the deal. But we are simultaneously proferred the illusion of political choice by parties whose policies are little different and no real means of changing anything.

What if I don't want to live in an atomistic, selfish, and material society where consumer goods are prioritised - for example - above social relations and solidarity. What if I don't want to live in a society where I only really exist if I am young, pretty and dynamic? What happens if I don't want to live in a society where the old, infirm, disabled or simply dumb, are sidelined? Where everyone must conform - or be discarded.

No-one is spared this relentless economisation (if that's indeed a word). Witness a recent European Commission press release which pointed the finger at all the inactive women out there who are sacrificing their economic prime to - gasp - raise their children, look after their parents, and get an education.

Not surprisingly, the UK won the war against 'inactive women' before anyone else. That is the predictable legacy of Thatcherite policies that cut welfare for (single) mothers and force children into full-time schooling at the age of three. Compared to our near neighbour Ireland, where 30% of women are 'inactive' due to family responsiblities, the figure in Britain is only 1.9%.

However I fail to see why this should be a blueprint for the rest of Europe to follow. A few more statistics are necessary to see why. Britain has the lowest productivity and job security on the continent - surely no coincidence. British kids are the most depressed in Europe according to recent OECD figures, have the lowest educational attainment in the EU, and are most likely to take drugs and be involved in knife crime.

Perhaps it's time we stopped taking such a reductive attitude towards work-life balance. It is not good enough just to shove as many people as possible into professions. It is also necessary to raise non-dysfunctional children into a society where people can once again learn to take responsibility for their local community, environment, and yes, occasionally, their own family.

Not that this should be too prescriptive. I am a firm believer in the fact that what works for one, will not necessarily work for all. But people should be given a real choice, and a real voice, when it comes to determining the priorities that drive our society, and indeed, their own lives. Forcing all women into the workplace is as violent a violation of our rights as the Victorian practice of forcing us to stay at home with our children.

It's Another Case of Blair versus Brown

People say politics these days is all style over substance. After a decade of Smiler's spin, followed by Blair-lite Cameron, it seemed that what we all craved, what we all longed for, was a little more content. Apparently we overestimated ourselves. But is that such a bad thing?

First Ming the Merciless, the Liberal Democrats elder statesman, went the way of the Dodo because he was deemed too old and uncharismatic to revive the Party's flagging fortunes. Now Brown the Steady, torchbearer of reason and responsible policy making back in the dark days of Tony's wars of religion, has become something of a national liability.

The media cites incompetence. But I'm hard pressed to see how the mistakes of an Inland Revenue underling in Newcastle, or under-funded political rivals, can really be blamed on the Prime Minister, even if he had known about them at some level. And they certainly needn't have spiralled so far out of control.

Gordon Brown's problem is not so much what happened but how he handled it. Tony Blair managed to cause civil war in Iraq, sell honours for cash, and make parents pay thousands for their child's education and he still survived.

Politicians make a hash of things all the time. That comes as no surprise. All the public expects from them, I suppose, is a modicum of sleek professionalism when it comes to handling difficulties. Some convincing spin to lend style, polish, and coherence to even the most preposterous of situations.

Why? Because no one likes to watch leaders losing control of a situation, however much they might enjoy backbiting. Indeed we almost admire it, a politician who can rise to the challenge, shrug off his opponents with a pointed quip, and stare down adversity - even when he is in the wrong.

"Making chaos out of order" as Vince Cable MP described it the other day, is the worst of politics' cardinal sins precisely because it reinforces the public's worst fear that life, the world, and everything, is infinitely more chaotic and unmanageable than we dare admit.

We expect politicians to reassure us with at least the semblance of order, in the same way that we expect political ideologies and manifestos to give us the semblance of choice and control. When either becomes unstuck we are faced with the fact that politics is largely a matter of amateur guesswork rather than the science of government.

So when it comes to the contest between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne I know who I' m going to vote for. Up until yesterday, when I attended the hustings in the European Parliament, I was convinced Huhne was my man. He has ideas, writes well, comes to the point. An original thinker, a new departure, a man capable of reconciling social liberals and economic liberals? So it looked on paper.

In the flesh however, I was struck by the feeling there was no real contest. While Huhne is clearly capable of providing the Party with the intellectual thrust it needs he doesn't seem to have the empathy, engagement, or conviction to sell his ideas - and make others believe in them. It was like he had simply memorised his briefing and trotted it out, with a couple of compulsory 'human interest' stories thrown in, when he was in fact the leading force behind much new Party policy.

Nick Clegg, by contrast, whose Leadership campaign stole most of its ideas from other Members, and who doesn't seem to be at the cutting edge of Lib Dem policy making (if such a thing exists) came across as ideologically involved and believable. He had heart, charisma, humour in abundance. And by combining these with some intelligent, well-balanced responses, managed to win over an audience which had previously seemed quite evenly split.

That is not to say either would be a bad choice. They are both very capable people who, in my opinion, stand head and shoulders above the Iron Chancellor and Chameleon Cameron. But seeing them together in a room reminded me of nothing less than Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. And for all his faults, Blair's decade-long premiership gives me hope that Clegg, rather than Huhne, has the capacity to lift my party from the doldrums and restore its credibility amongst the wider public, just as Blair did Labour's. That's why he'll now get my vote for Leader.

Liberals: Doomed to Defections?

Has Liberalism lost its way? Certainly defections from the Lib Dem to Conservative Camp this week suggest something is amiss´at the heart of liberal democracy. But is the change of heart by Jean Pierre Cavada, chairman of the European Parliament's influential Civil Liberties Committe and Lib Dem Sajjad Karim, indicative of an ideological loss of confidence or simply the fear of electoral failure?

In the case of both men, the temptation to join forces with a revived conservatism just before the elections may simply have been too great. Certainly Saj Karim's distant second place on the Lib Dem list behind Chris Davies MEP was a sting that was hard to ignore. Harder still may be the brute electoral facts. At Lib Dem conference in Brighton his aides talked openly about the unlikelihood of having both men re-elected in 2009 when the party's share of the vote is expected to fall sharply. Cavada, fighting for a municipal seat in the 2nd arrondissement in Paris, clearly feels that Bayrou has lost his way and is putting his faith in the winning side.

But is this the same as idelogical disintegration, as Karim alleges? I think not. It is true that both the MODEM and Lib Dems have found it difficult to steer their parties' priorities of late, but that is due in large part to the opposing currents - and therefore factions - inherent in Liberalism rather than an ideological loss of nerve. Indeed, just as the Labour and Tory parties have undergone periods of introspection in recent years to resolve internal disputes over the place of market liberalisation or attitudes towards Europe, Liberals, who perhaps over-emphasised their unity over the last decade, now need to do the same with regards to the economic/social liberal divide.

Even then, I don't believe the gulf is as big as the media suggests. Huhne and Clegg's appearance on Question Time was memorable, if at all, for the remarkable similarity of their positions which led one viewer to ask 'How can we tell you apart'? The Calamity Clegg incident days later may have been bad publicity but it wasn't really based on policy divergence either, although you could argue that Huhne is the ideological leader and Clegg the follower. If this leadership contest is the sign of a party in ideological crisis, then what standards do we set for unity?

It may not be the best time for Liberals in Europe, with convergence to the centre by both socialists and conservatives squeezing our vote. But that does not mean we are an irrelevance. Our battles will be fought on the issues, the ideological issues, that the other parties neglect or tacitly consent on in their quest for electoral dominance. Whether it is the security state , abdication of human rights , euroscepticism, warmongering, scaremongering over immigrants, or nuclear rearmament beloved of left and right we will be there offering voters choice, where otherwise none would exist.

The Liberal Democrats, whatever their faults, have at their heart an ethos of internationalism, openness, environmental sustainability and respect for fundamental rights that the other parties, whatever their propaganda, simply do not share.