One of the more curious and largely unnoticed effects of the colonisation of British ‘popular’ culture by US-style glossy celebrity magazines - think ‘Hello’ and ‘OK’ - has been the almost complete demise of a one-time staple of celebrity reporting, the ’soap actor attacked by idiot who thinks Corrie/Eastenders/Emmerdale is real’ story.

Not so long ago, no meaty soap storyline would be complete without the villain of the piece giving an interview to the tabloids detailing the amusing story of how they were accosted by a mad pensioner the week before in Tesco’s and publicly castigated for their character’s misdeeds.

Sadly the ‘mad pensioner assaults soap actor’ stories has almost disappeared appeared from our news stands, although its basic premise - a complete inability to distinguish between fiction and reality - does appear to be making a comeback in the guise of ‘Mad Frankie’ Field’s latest missive (in the Torygraph) in which he seems to be experiencing this very problem, albeit on the strength of having recently read Dickens.

Here is a real test for Gordon Brown in his intent to pass power back to the people.

Okay…(???)

The Blair Government has resolutely refused to back the simple reform I have been advocating which will give communities the power once again to police their own neighbourhood.

Whoo - a ’simple’ reform that Blair didn’t back? Christ how dumb could it be for the Home Office not to at least try and float it to see how much laughter it generated?

A local community has a right to go into court and ask the magistrates to bring before them an offending yob. The magistrates can issue a warrant, but, even if the whole community is in court demanding action, the magistrate has no power to enforce the warrant in what is deemed a private action.

And the little matter of evidence, Frank?

More to the point who exactly is them in this case - the magistrates or the local community?

This sounds a hell of a lot like mob justice, so much so that one half expects Frank to continue by demanding that the ‘offending yob’ be dragged on a hurdle to the town square and placed in the stocks, where the local peasants, sorry, community can throw rotting vegetable at them to their hearts content…

…except that they couldn’t - throw rotting vegetables I mean - not these days. Not without getting a fixed penalty notice for littering (and one for not recycling as well, the way things are going).

The law needs to be changed so that magistrates can rule that the request for immediate action is a public matter. The police would then be required to enforce the warrant. The aim would be to bring the perpetrators of the disorder before the court that day.

Sorry?

So the drill is that a mob of angry peasants, sorry, the local community can ship up at the local magistrates court - would they be allowed torches and pitchforks for the full effect, do you think? - and on the strength of… of what exactly?

What evidence are they expected to present, if any, to justify the issuing of a warrant?

So far as I can tell, the evidential requirement here is at best hearsay and at worst just the assertion that ‘well he’s a yob M’lud’.

Are cries of ‘Burn her! Burn the witch!’ an optional extra? And would communities need to appoint their own ‘Yobfinder General’ or would these be provided by the local council?

Acting swiftly will often nip in the bud actions that, if allowed to fester, will only get worse. Such a reform would also devolve power back to what often are the grandmothers of a district.

Norman Stanley Fletcher. You stand accused of the heinous crime of not giving up your seat on the bus to a pensioner. How do you plead? Guilty or Guilty as hell?

If we’re going to devolve power back to the ‘grandmothers of a district’ why stop with the summary power of arrest - we can always save a few quid by abolishing professional midwifery at the same time.

This one simple reform would also end the intolerable position whereby working-class people on the end of yobbish behaviour have to plead their case for action through middle-class intermediaries, such as youth justice teams.

Frank, its’ got fuck all to do with youth justice teams and everything to do with stuff like due process, the presumption of innocence, evidential requirements, Magna Carta and habeas corpus - trivial things like that!

The rise of yobbish behaviour is the flip-side of the breakdown of families. Who in the community can play the role of the surrogate parent? The only people who can do this are the police.

You what?

They ought to have the power, like a football referee, to issue warnings and then, if the warnings are ignored, to impose the restriction on the behaviour there and then. The offender would have the freedom to go to court, but, hopefully, bad behaviour would again be nipped in the bud. This way, most young offenders will be kept out of the criminal justice system.

Oh suppose the upside is that he’s not suggesting that we skip the whole court thing and go back to old style summary justice… a clip round the ear from the local Sergeant.

But again there is this curious little tradition we have in this country - the one which doesn’t permit the police to serve as judge, jury and executioner.

Scratch what I said about Frank losing the plot in Dickens - pretty much most of what he’s suggesting went out of fashion not long after Shakespeare.

The man’s mad, I tell you. Absolutely fucking Dagenham*

*That’s three - or was it four - stops past Barking on the tube, in case you didn’t know.

Still, look ont he bright side. At this rate it won’t be too long before we can celebrate a political first…

…as Frank crosses the floor to become the first Monster Raving Loony Party MP.

If they’ll have him.

…

Oops, almost forgot. Frank’s tops his piece off with this gem…

We need to move to a leaving certificate that would allow young people to move into work as soon as they have basic skills. These young people should then be able to draw down later the value of the education that currently fails them.

Basic skills for what exactly?

Speaking personally I had as good, if not better literacy and numeracy skills than a fair number of people entering the workforce, today, at 16, pretty much by the time I was seven or eight years old, so would that mean, under Frank’s plan, that I’d have been stuffed up a fucking chimney at the age of eight to earn my keep on a vague promise I could get a bit more education later on?

Curiously enough, there was this thing we had in Britain right through from feudals time right up until the 1960s/70s that used to do a fair old job of getting the young and non-too-academically inclined out of school into gainful employment, something that employer (mainly) used to provide.

As I recall is used to be called ‘learning a trade’ and was something that people - including my dad - did by becoming an ‘apprentice’ - for younger reader’s I should point out that it’s got fuck all to with appearing on the telly with Alan Sugar.

If Frank’s so keen on bringing back a few old ideas, why not take a look at that one - it would pretty well for, oh, several centuries at least.

Unlike some  - and that’s not a set for a dig, Neil - I have to confess that I’m entirely sanguine when it comes to the manner of Gordon Brown’s ascension to the leadership of the party.

Yes, a contested leadership election would have been much more consistent with the party’s democratic traditions, but in the absence of credible challengers from any other wing of the party I really can’t see that John McDonnell’s failure to make the ballot actually makes that much of difference in the grand scheme of things.

Sorry, but in terms of party democracy, there are much more important things to tackle.

We need to rebuild and reinvigorate the grass roots membership of the party, and more importantly, do so in a manner that enables us to construct a meaningful relationship between party members/activists and our elected representatives.

What has done most to damage party democracy during the Blair years is the all too obvious mistrust that the Blairite wing of the party has harboured towards the constituency section and the grassroots membership, which has been perceived throughout as a repository of dangerously off message left-wing ideas.

One only has to look at the position paper put out by Hazel Blears in support of her challenge for the Deputy Leadership to see this in action. She devotes three pages of the document to outlining her views on ‘Building the Labour Party’, which is, itself, rather an odd turn of phrase to use when referring to an 100+ year old organisation, and much of what she has to say concerns itself with the suggestion that CLPs should mutate into community development NGOs and the value she perceives in semi-detached networks such as the Labour Supporter’s Network - one has to wonder quite what the membership figure for LSN are at the moment, I’ve never seen any published.

One of the more telling comments in her paper is this:

Our activities will be transparent – local communities will be encouraged to take part in selecting candidates, in helping with elections, in discussing policy, and in debating with local representatives and ministers.

Okay, so a bit of help on the doorsteps come election time is always welcome and one cannot quibble with consultations on policy and between local communities and elected representatives at any level, but taking part in selecting candidates? Is Hazel suggesting that prospective councillors, MPs and MEPs should take part in US style local primaries as part of our internal selection procedures?

This seems little more than a variation on the same old frustrating theme we’ve heard from the Blairite camp over the last 10 years - the one in which CLPs and activists cannot be trusted to select their own candidates without being watched over by the party machine for fear that we might put forward prospective councillors, and especially MPs who, heaven forbid, might show a disturbing and unwelcome propensity for doing things like ‘thinking for themselves’.

Such concerns might have has some foundations in fact back in 1995/6 but are things still still the same today, but for the odd isolated pockets of what, for want of a better word, one might call the ‘Old Left’ tucked away in a small number of Labour heartland constituencies?

I don’t think it is.

If one looks at the evolution of the Bloggers4Labour network over the last couple of years - and its worth noting that on its own this network is far more extensive that anything the Tories can put up - one has to say that there’s little evidence to gleaned from it to suggest that the grassroots of the party are firmly in the grip of the old-style left wing. Centre-left, certainly, and to some degree to the left of the Blairite wing of the party but by no means to a degree that would advocate or support dragging the party out of the centre-ground towards where a significant part of the labour movement stood during the early 1980s.

Bloggers may not be entirely representative of the grassroots as a whole, but if one looks at the B4L network one finds pretty much all strands of Labour opinion represented amongst its members and, more to the point, one finds finds a clear will to engage seriously in politics and policy to a far more extensive degree that one tends to find in the loose blogging ‘collectives’ associated with other parties.

The shift in emphasis from presentation to policy that’s expects to come with Brown’s ascendancy to the leadership is one that I suspect will suit most Labour bloggers down to the ground - not because we’re all ‘Brownites’ but simply because there is a genuine appetite within the Labour Blogosphere to discuss and debate real politics and the nitty-gritty of policy-making.

Yes, in all probability- well, certainty - the course that the parliamentary party will be charting towards the next general election will already have been set by Brown and his aides/supporters and will start to unfold over the talismanic ‘first hundred days’ as Prime Minister - so, in that sense, the lack of a contest has deprived us of chance to debate policy.

But so what?

Many Labour bloggers have done little else but talk about policy over the last couple of years and what matters in the long run is whether or not any of the debates, discussions and ideas that have been spawned, developed and thoroughly worked over come to work they way into and influence the ongoing development of Labour policy beyond the first raft of Brown-led initiatives.

There may have been little or no scope for party members to try an influence policy at this stage, but that’s not that much of an issue. The transition from Blair to Brown was always going to be a evolutionary rather than revolutionary move with no real prospect of  the party moving significantly to the left - for all the Blairite-wing seem content to hold this up as their favourite bogeyman. What we’ll see from Brown is a continuation of many of the policies that have been developed over the last 10 year - and rather more emphasis on some of the successful economic work that been rather downplayed under Blair. Some of the more idiotic and ill-thought out Blairite ‘initiatives’ - one can barely consider the policies - will fall by the wayside. If nothing else Brown should move quickly to rein in the Home Office and put an end to dumb-ass press release Friday’s by placing a much steadier and more diplomatic hand on the policing and security tiller.

But most importantly of all, irrespective of the detail of policy, what I’m looking for from Brown is something that I think he can deliver that Blair never could due to his lack of real roots in the party, a sense that Labour’s policies in government belong to a distinctively Labour narrative understanding of the world of the kind of progressive society that the party wishes to create and support in future. Blair, whose approach to political theory and philosophy amounted to little more than treating the massed canon of progressive (and sometimes not so progressive) thought as a political pick n’ mix counter to shore up ideas rooted in little else but shiftless tabloid populism, could never deliver such a coherent narrative thread.

Brown, who has real roots in the party and comes from a solid Presbytarian background as influential, in its own way, as Welsh Methodism has been in the development of the Labour movement, should be capable of providing just such a narrative thread and I think it vital that he quickly establishes such a narrative, which will go on to inform and shape future policy development and, to a considerable extent, the kind of input into the policy-making process that might stem from activists.

With that firmly in mind, the absence of a wide-ranging policy debate tied to a Leadership contest is not something I see as a drawback - it may well be beneficial in the long run for the party to have avoided such a debate, which could easily have proved divisive had it taken place without the benefit of understanding the kind of Labour narrative under which that Brown intends to take the party forward.

Getting back to Blears and questions of engagement with the grassroots - and to give her a little credit as well - she does suggest a need to beef up the role National Policy Forum - with the usual unedifying caveats about measuring ‘representation’ in terms of population demographics - which would be a welcome innovation. But again, the emphasis rests firmly on engagement through defined hierarchical structures and in closed and carefully managed environments what to suit, overwhelmingly, the interests of the PLP, rather on direct engagement in the kind of freeform discussions and debates that routinely take place amongst bloggers. Its all very well talking about trying engage the ‘facebook generation’ but to do that effectively politicians have to take a leap of faith and talk to us inhabitants of the electronic frontier on out terms and within our established social mores - which inevitably means facing off with the MSM and fighting back against the established media culture which, for too long, has done little else but prevent politicians engaging in open and constructive debate and promote a dumbed-down political culture obsessed with trivia, personalities and scandal to the exclusion of meaningful public and political discourse.

Blears tops off her position paper with this:

Tomorrow’s Labour Party will be a focussed election-winning machine. But it will also be a sociable, enjoyable, fulfilling place to be for its members. It will reflect the full diversity of our communities. Voluntary activity will be rewarded by personal development as well as communal benefit and social progress. The Labour Party will be a modern party at ease and at home in modern society, and ready for whatever the future may hold.

Enough with the bloody managerialist misson statements already, lets just stick to something along the lines of…

The Labour Party is a progressive, democratic socialist, political party that exists to promote social justice and equality for all.

Simple. To the point. And does what it says on the tin.

For reasons lost in the mists of alcohol, I get the occasional e-mail from the Lib Dems telling about the all wonderful things they’ve been doing (yawn!), the latest is which comes - apparently - from the Emperor Ming himself…

I am shocked that the Labour and Conservative front benches in the Commons have joined forces to vote for a special exemption for MPs from the Freedom of Information Act. This brings Parliament into disrepute.

Liberal Democrats have led the opposition on the floor of the House of Commons and I have decided to launch a national petition so voters can show to the House of Lords (who debate the bill next), Gordon Brown and David Cameron how they feel.

Please visit www.ourcampaign.org.uk/foi to sign our petition and lobby a member of the House of Lords. Please also forward this email to your friends and colleagues.

Thank you for your support.

With best wishes

Ming Campbell
Liberal Democrats

Shocked, eh?

Follow the link, and you’ll find that Ming has a few suggestions as to how we can help defeat the bill.

1. Lobby a Lord

2. Link to their campaign website - they even have a nice animated gif for this purpose.

3. Help the LD’s to advertise - by donating money to the them…

4. Sign the petition on their website…

Sadly suggestion no. 5 doesn’t make the LD’s list…

5. Turn up in the House of Commons and vote against the fucking thing…