Articles by Nicholas Barrett

In 2006 Richard Dawkins wrote what might yet prove to be one of the most important books of the 21^st century, The God Delusion. It cut though fantasy and superstition like a knife, before going on to fuel a worldwide culture of scepticism. However, seven years on and Dawkins appears to have become unnecessarily divisive and detached. His seemingly unprovoked tweet, attacking Mehdi Hasan for his belief that the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse, upset bloggers from each end of the political spectrum. Attracting harsh criticism both from Paul Staines on the right and Owen Jones on the left.  So how did the genius behind The Selfish Gene become so awkwardly removed?

The answer to this question may lie in the nature of our own national identity. While Northern Europe maintains an almost non-existent relationship with religion, the ‘god is not great’ debate goes on with acidic passion across the rest of the world, where the political and social power vested in god remains omnipresent and almost omnipotent. In America the church still acts as a harbinger of homophobia and obstacle to education. Meanwhile, it is hard to find a bigger factor in the subjugation of women across the globe then the influence of fundamentalist interpretations of Islam.

It is for this reason that in most of the world, a verbal or written attack on religious belief is celebrated as an act of courageous satire. To us Brits however, this kind of rhetoric can seem highly uncouth. And why shouldn’t it? After all, the debate here is all but over. Religion hardly interferes with our daily business at all. There are sill minor annoyances like the bishops in the House of Lords, Thought for the Day and the Church of England’s near monopoly on our primary school system, but nobody is really getting hurt. Unless the pope happens to be visiting town, the British militant atheist is quite redundant on our little island. And so when some misplaced artillery, from a solider fighting the ongoing battles abroad, hits one of our best journalists, we feel a sporting need to defend him en masse. 

The problem is that while it is very easy to simply brand Dawkins as “intolerant” or simply call him a “bigot,” a highly irrational reality remains and that is that many of us are more interested in protecting a journalist from having his feeling hurt (although Mr Hasan himself seemed pretty unfazed by the matter) then the truth.

On the face of it, Mr Hasan’s belief in the onetime existence of winged horses is entirely irrelevant, as most of his writing appears to consist of highly informed critique’s of Tory government policy.What really concerns me is the idea of anybody who questions religious belief being labelled a “bigot” while absurd delusions like talking snakes, 900-year-old shipbuilders and the virgin birth are respected in the 21^st century. An era in which the ongoing climate change debate should be making the promotion of scientific, evidence-based reasoning, more important then ever. 

As I write this the lettering on the board of the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, normally reserved for film titles, reads “Margret Thatcher Dead LOL.” It is hard to imagine any other politician in the history of Britain provoking so much celebration simply by ceasing to exist and yet almost nobody else would warrant the shear level of praise and admiration that came pouring in minutes after the announcement of her death. If there is one adjective we all seem to be able agree on it is ‘divisive’ and this isn’t just because she was the most influential British prime minister of the last 60 years. 

One thing I have noticed about this divide is age. While the newspapers devoted themselves to tributes, a sizable portion of the anti-Thatcher appeared to be written on twitter by people too young to have experienced Thatcherism directly. This also appeared to be true of the party-goers popping champagne bottles on Brixton high street at 1am on the morning after the night before. I spent the night at a poetry slam in Camden watching young poet after young poet stand up and joke about Maggie “privatising in hell.” It almost seemed as if those with a second hand experience of Thatcher’s Britain were the most verbally hostile. This is probably because we have been told an awful lot about how, in one way or another, Thatcher was responsible for almost everything wrong with Britain today but little about the Britain that Thatcher inherited. 

Granted, from our extortionate gas bills and train fairs to our cynical and destructive financial services industry, she does appear to have left her blue fingerprints on almost everything worthy of our collective anger. But the Britain Thatcher found herself in towards the end of the 1970’s was so far removed from where we are today, that it is almost impossible to understand her motivation without knowing something of that alien island. 

This is a world where the government provided almost everything. They built our cars, they sold our petrol, they sold our heating, our water and even offered to organise our holidays. Just imagine all the irritating private companies, which exist to frustrate us all on a near daily basis, but compressed into one massive bureaucratic behemoth. This I can imagine would be antagonising enough if it worked slowly, but if appeared to work badly and against the interests of the taxpayer, as it did when we suffered rolling black outs, the three day week as well as rubbish and unburied coffins piling up in the street, it would conceivably give cause to some rather radical solutions. 

But don’t take my word for it; I was born in 1991, the same day Bart Simpson made it to number one in the pop charts. If you really want a window into that pre-Thatcher world then look towards Brazil, not the country but the film. Art, thoughtful art at least, usually serves as a revealing barometer of the age that inspired it and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is a perfect example. 

Set in a semi-Orwellian dystopia of ubiquitous litter and inefficient bureaucracy, the film’s luckless protagonist, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) battles against the government department for whom he works while fending off harassment from the box-ticking heating maintenance personnel from ‘Central Services’. All amidst the near-constant disruption of an IRA-like terrorist campaign. However, the film’s real hero is Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro) an illegal hero, wanted by the state, who fixes the heating without asking you to fill in a form. This is played out within a bleak and grey industrial landscape of high-rise council flats and concrete. The fear of this future gave birth not only to the inspiration for Gilliam’s film but also, I believe, gave birth to Thatcher, who, like most politicians, was a product of the habitat she grew up in.   

As for her Iron categorisation on the periodic table, this was probably the result of a backlash against a slow and seemingly self-serving civil service. One of Thatcher’s advisers, Sir Antony Jay, even wrote a sitcom about Whitehall called Yes Minister, which sees the fictional James Hacker MP (Paul Eddington) forced to compromise his political ambitions by a swollen civil service made up of out-of-touch Oxbridge elites. In the series Hacker starts as an idealist but is eventually ground down and by the end he just wants to make government work. In the mean time nothing changes but for the further empowerment of Whitehall’s vested interests. Yes Minister became known as Thatcher’s favourite program and it’s not often that satire is admired by the powerful. In one telling scene Hacker’s antagonist, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne) explains that “if the right people don’t have power the wrong people get it, politicians, councillors, voters…  British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things in life and keep them out of the hand’s of the barbarians. Things like the opera, Radio 3, the countryside, the law, the universities… both of them… and we are that system.”  

Ultimately, the wrong people did attain power. Because instead of reforming the inappropriate elements of our government, Thatcher simply sold them off to the highest bidder. (not Robert De Niro)  As a result the forces that were worth resenting in Brazil remain, hidden behind a wall colourful logos each with a commitment to profit but not necessarily the people they are contracted to serve. But Thatcher, far from being a lone over zealous social vandal, acted as the figurehead, representing a popular distaste for the worse aspects of our badly run, big government. And for all the anti-Thatcher of the 21st century, we must remember that she won three elections in a row, most of us were, at least at the time, at worse willing and at best complicit.

Well probably not, but never underestimate the value of sending a complaint to the BBC. A few weeks ago I did just with regards to The AndrewMarrShow. I had complained after an unflattering story about Tony Blair and an arms dealer appeared had appeared in the Sunday Times. Mr Blair was alleged to have “forced the SFO (Serious Fraud Office) to drop its investigation into allegations that BAE paid billions of pounds in bribes to Saudi royals to secure (a) contract.” Mr Blair was not questioned about this during his appearance on the show, which was broadcast live the same morning as the story. (It was also overlooked during the show’s regualr review of the Sunday papers) This was the response: 

“Dear Mr Barrett

Reference CAS-1908658-4YYCHD

Thanks for contacting us regarding ‘The AndrewMarrShow’ as broadcast on 3 January.

We understand you feltSianWilliams interview with former Prime Minister Tony Blairwasn’tchallenging enough.

Following recent events in Algeria and Mali we felt it legitimate to interview Tony Blair as a former Prime Minister and his role as Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East. We also took the opportunity to discuss a number of other contemporaneous issues such as the EU referendum and the direction of the Labour Party.

We believe high profile public figures such as Tony Blair should be given the opportunity both to explain their thinking on matters of public concern and answer criticisms of it, but equally, political interviewers need to put the questions likely to be in the minds of viewers and look for answers. Across the BBC there can be a number of different interview styles, but the intention is always to be courteous while seeking to test the responses given.

While every interview has its own dynamic and we can always look back at it and consider ways in which it may have gone better,SianWilliams challenged Tony Blair throughout the interview, including quoting a number of comments from his own memoirs.

A transcript of the interview is available here:

http://tinyurl.com/cbvaxl2

That said, we realise you feel strongly on this matter and we’re sorry to read of your disappointment.

We’d like to assure you that we’ve registered your feelings on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily. It ensures that your points and all other comments we receive, are made available across the BBC.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Kind Regards

Michelle Wiggins

BBC Complaints”

One month later and Boris Johnson appears on the The AndrewMarrShow… 

Modern politics is all about framing. Due to decades of public skepticism towards politicians, party leaders no longer wish to be seen as dogmatic ideologues, they would much rather be thought of as pragmatic managers of public life. So instead of trying to explain their strategy once in power, the ultimate aim of 21st century political communication is to establish the differences between yourself and your opponent in way that wont scare the readers of the Daily Mail. This week it was the turn of Ed Miliband to try to define the 2015 election.

With the popularity of the coalition flatlining, it’s worth wondering why he would even bother. Even after David Cameron appeased the Ukip hoards with his promise of a referendum before using the resulting leverage to negotiate an unprecedented reduction in the EU budget, his party are still competing for trust with Tesco’s half-price beef burgers.

However in times of economic and political uncertainty party leaders must prepare for the unpredictable. After all, Cameron himself had a similar lead in the polls, months before the 2010 election, only to end up having to ask for Nick Clegg’s permission to take power. And while the deputy prime minister remains politically toxic, his treasury spokesman is quite the opposite and the sudden ascent of Vince Cable could bring disaffected Liberal Democrat votes home, making Labour’s 12-point lead appear as fragile as the one Kevin Keegan had in 1996.

So how would Ed Miliband ideally like the public to view the next general election? The answer, it seems, is though the prism of living standards and as far 2015 goes it’s looking to be a pretty safe bet. The cost of rent and fuel, among other essentials, are rising much faster then wages, leaving middle and working class families less well off year on year. Miliband will loudly and repetitively echo the words of Ronald Reagan by asking votes if they are personally better of then they were five years ago and for most of us the answer will be no.

Politically, this is easy capital. The coalition will, in all likelihood, continue down the path of austerity. Despite mounting evidence of an economic dead-end, they will press on, too embarrassed to turn back or even ask for directions. Meanwhile life will become increasingly difficult for the majority of the British public as they work harder while effectively becoming poorer. Ed Miliband might be perceived as a political vacuum, but with such limited public faith in David Cameron, the electorate will be half-heartedly sucked into the ideological black hole of ‘One Nation Labour’ even if the final destination is a scientific mystery.

However, once elected Miliband’s arsenal may quickly become an albatross hung about his neck as the nations living standards continue to stagnate. Because for all the bluster surrounding government policy, taxes and budgets, our elected leaders have a disturbingly small amount of influence over the direction of the global economy. Last August, an unsettling paper by Robert Gordon of Northwest University predicted that not only was worldwide human innovation (the source of much of the past’s economic growth) slowing down dramatically but that even if it somehow recuperated, trends including (but not limited to) ageing demographics, increasing inequality and our deteriorating environment, would almost certainly impede the prospect of any long term growth. On top of everything else that long term growth would in itself depend on finding a new means of post-industrial economic growth that is both safer and more reliable then the one that is built on investment banking. Because as Antonio Cavaciuti, an Italian business journalist, told me over a cup of tea last week, “People need to understand that not only is our last period of growth over, it never actually existed.”

In America the recession appears to have passed it’s peak while the worse may too be over for the Eurozone, meaning we may see a very modest economic recovery in the later half of the decade. Despite this, living standards will take a very long time to recover to what they once were (if they ever do) as both the middle class and their disposable incomes diminish. It is for this reasons that attempting to bribe the electorate with promises of evening out the decline in living standards with minor political measures like the 10p tax and the mansion tax, as well intentioned as they are, may prove to be an unsustainable political cul-de-sac. This is not to say that progressive politics has become futile, just that it wont be enough to merely tinker round the edges of our dysfunctional economy. If Labour wants the future to be as fair and as fruitful as the past it will have to involve measures far more ambitious and it might even have to scare the readers of the Daily Mail.

As far as democracy goes, it is a given that if the economy is in the gutter and if unemployment is though the roof, the incumbent is doomed to defeat. No less then seventeen world leaders have been ousted at the ballot box since the start of the global economic crisis in 2008. So for Mitt Romney and his party to miss an open goal in such an overwhelming manner, should be viewed as nothing less then a humiliating failure of competence. So how did Mitt, armed with precisely a billon dollars worth of campaigning power, achieve this awesome feat of failure?

The answer may be down to hubris defined by a dated belief that you can still win the White House by appealing solely to white male voters. The 2012 election was probably the last election in which this strategy will ever be attempted. 2012 also marks the first year in which more then half the babies born in the United States were of minority backgrounds. The parents of those babies are already too large a portion of the electorate for any candidate to ignore and doing so may just have cost Romney the presidency. Instead of reaching out to modern America, the Romney campaign looked backwards, allowing the phrase “self-deportation” to become an ugly part of the Republican message.

A quick look at the crowds at a Romney rally reviled a lot more then it should have about the kind of voters he was targeting. While Obama was seen on a daily basis, speaking in front of an ethnically diverse group that could easily be imaged riding the New York subway, Romney always seemed to look like he had gotten lost at an Eagles concert. It was obvious that the problem was more then just aesthetic when the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies found that only 2.1% of the delegates at the Republican National Convention were of an African American background. Given facts like this, it is hardly surprising that, for a short time, Romney found himself polling at a disastrous 0% among African American voters. 

There are many embarrassing things a presidential campaign can survive. You can spell America wrong on your iPhone app*, threaten to sack Big Bird, hide your fortune in tax havens and even strap a dog to the roof of your car but if you exclude the electorate from your vision of the future it will ultimately ground you. Because in the 21^st century you simply wont be able to reach that future without them.

Obama has modelled himself as a paragon of inclusivity and has always promised to try and listen to every section of American society. His reward is another four years in the White house and as he thanked his supporters he reminded American of “the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.”

If the GOP does not make an effort to become more diverse by 2016 it will doubtlessly suffer the same fate as it has in 2012 and it’s fiscally conservative arsenal will become lost beyond the parties socially conservative minefields.

*I am acutely aware that my articles are littered with spelling errors. However, I would probably do better with access to a billion dollars. 

Amidst the graphic soaked coverage of election weeks, it is easy to forget that these soap operas, much like a Channel Four soap operas, eventually end. When it does finally finish and the champagne bottles are empty the winner and his team will doubtlessly have their fair share of challenges to meet over the next four years. Here are just some of the terms and conditions that come with being leader of the free world.

The grand narrative of the early 21^st century seems already to be the movement of economic power from West to East and managing and reacting to the ascent of China will from now on be a vital aspect of any presidents administration. Mitt Romney has already promised to use his first day in office to brand China as a “currency manipulator.” While this wouldn’t be an inaccurate accusation, a hostile attitude towards China could achieve the opposite of Nixon’s 1972 visit and could effectively put a nation well on it’s way to becoming the world largest economy, back into the cold. With Beijing set to announce China’s new leader this Thursday, a new relationship between the leaders of the worlds two richest nations will without question, have a long-term effect on the fragile global economy. Getting this right will be pivotal.

As well as managing American relations in the Far East, the occupier of the White House will also have to oversee the delicate military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Both candidates are promising to bring American troops home by 2014, leaving two years for them to be judged on the stability of the country thereafter. Whilst ending the longest war in American history sounds like it should be an easy voucher for midterm popularity, the Taliban will be ready to provide some bloody and embarrassing headlines if the operation is handled badly. If the infamous ‘Green on Blue’ attacks by disgruntled members of the Afghan National Army continue, the withdrawal date may have to be delayed even further, to the president’s dismay.

 Even if the Afghan exit is executed without fail, the next administration may find itself defined by its relationship with the country next-door, Iran. Like Afghanistan both candidates are promising the same coarse of action, that they will do whatever it takes to stop Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons and both it seems, will continue to enforce crippling sanction on the country. The difference lies in the tone of the rhetoric. While Obama has remained cautious, Romney has thrown his full support behind Benjamin Netanyahu and even gone as far as to attack the president for not visiting Israel. With Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s time in office coming to an end next year, the situation is difficult to predict, but if Iran were to block the straight of Hormuz it would take a skilled statesman to stop the situation for escalating out of control. So far Romney has proved to be a less then perfect diplomat and still has a long way to go towards being trusted with key foreign policy decisions.

However, despite of all these world-altering dilemmas, 2013’s commander in chief will already know exactly how his presidency will be judged and that is by the state of American economy. Since taking office, Obama has overseen a frustratingly slow rate of growth. In fact it has been so slow that historians will likely remember this recession, not for its depth, but for its sheer duration. The president, be it Barack or Mitt, will be expected to grow the economy and create millions of jobs while wresting with a massive budget deficit. In Europe, austerity has proved to be not only ineffective but to exacerbate the dire economic quagmire. However, because of America’s overwhelming national debt, Congress will be reluctant to allow the president to pay for investment by borrowing more money. So whoever losses this race, if not tomorrow then eventually, will be able to take solace in the face that their life will be a lot easier as a result. 

At the time of writing, New York Times resident psephologist, Nate Silver, estimates the likelihood of a Romney victory to be precisely 25.4%. A figure like this makes Romney look as relevant as Myspace.com but it still leaves a one in four chance of surprise victory. Whether this article becomes a presidential profile or a political post-mortem is yet to be seen, what remains certain however is that the best way to understand Willard Mitt Romney is by evoking an episode of the Twilight Zone, first broadcast on the 1st of January 1960. An episode called ‘The Four of us are Dying,’ which starts like this:

 “His name is Arch Hammer; he’s 36 years old. He’s been a salesman, a dispatcher, a truck driver, a con man, a bookie and a bartender. This is a cheap man, a nickel and dime man with a cheapness that goes past the suit and the shirt. A cheapness of mind, a cheapness of taste, a tawdry little shine on the seat of his conscience and a dark room squint in a world whose sunlight has never gotten though to him. But Mr. Hammer has a talent discovered a very early age. This much he does have. He can make his face change. He can twitch a muscle, move a jaw, concentrate on the cast of his eyes, and he can change his face. He can change it into anything he wants. Mr. Archie Hammer, jack of all trades, has just checked in at $3.80 a night, with two bags, some newspaper clippings, a most odd talent, and a master plan to destroy some lives.”

 In ‘the dimension of imagination’ Arch Hammer had the ability change his face in an instance to impersonate anybody he wanted, a ‘talent’ he used to steal money and women from the dead. If his actions ever caught up with him, he would simply change his facial features on the spot to shirk the consequences of his nihilistic behaviour.

Half a century later (in a dimension far far away) and the political landscape of modern American presents a thorny challenge to presidential candidates. Geographically the United States is as big as ever. Boston is further from Los Angeles then Jerusalem is from London. (Just imagine Ed Milliband trying to sell the same ideas to the people of both Bradford and Bethlehem) Nothing new there you might think, there is after all very little in the way of shared experience between life in Nazareth and life in Newcastle, especially when compared to the American dream; and you would be right. Ideologically however, things are very different. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was like a big bang in the middle of the big tent, scattering the old factions across a new political universe. This would give rise to the planet Tea Party and Romney was Watching. He was watching as environmentalism became as toxic as the chemicals it was trying to control. He was watching, as abortion was reborn as a political issue, as elements of his party swung further to the right then ever before. And he was watching as Obama attempted to unite America with a consistent message and failed. Mitt would not allow himself to make the same mistake and he would do with an old strategy empowered by a new and modern media landscape.

Far from creating a ‘village’ the Internet in America has done the opposite, instead of bringing voters together it has politically segregated the population. The left read the Huffington Post, the moderates read the Daily Beast while the right read the Drudge Report. Television is no different. Since the introduction of cable and cable news the left has stayed loyal to MSNBC, the moderates have watched CNN while the right stay glued to Fox News. Instead of a village America now has dozens of small ideological towns with their own facts and their own priorities. Barack Obama has learned that it is impossible to please them all and this could still cost him the election, that’s why when Mitt Romney strolls into town, he changes his face.

While attempting to steal the cut of a deceased gangster (yes, without knowing it you’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone) Arch Hammer is rumbled and is chased into a dark ally by two trigger-happy henchmen. Cornered, he spots a poster bearing the face of a boxer and changes his appearance to escape with the dead mans money. As he causally walks away and light up a cigarette, Hammer is confronted by an old man; the father of the boxer. He is suddenly faced with the misgivings of his new persona, a man who broke his mothers heart and ruined a young girls life, “things go down hard, you just walk away huh Andy, people get in your way, you just step on them you just kick them away huh Andy?” Hammer’s response is to simply push the old man to the ground and walk away. He had only used the new face to get what he had needed; he had no reason to care about any of the implications that came with it.

Back in our universe Mitt is trying to win an election. As the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt was pro-choice, pro gun control and pro-environment while introducing a health insurance mandate remarkably similar to Barack Obama’s affordable care act. (a.k.a Obamacare) In his efforts to seduce a party on the edge of insanity he has had to reverse his views on all of these beliefs. In doing so he has set new presidents for political duplicity; on several occasions during the 2012 campaign he has altered his opinions within hours to please different news channels. He is now testing to extremes, the old American truism, that candidates must pander to their base while seeking the nomination of their party, before sprinting back to the middle ground in time for November. This year the Republican Party has presented Mitt with a monstrous ideological marathon to complete, and the week after a slick debate performance, Romney looked like he might have just done enough.

Back in the third dimension, (spoiler alert) Arch Hammer finds himself confronted by a detective in his hotel room. As usual he uses his face-altering talents to evade his enemy. But as he walks out onto the street he once again comes face to face with the old man and this time the old man has a gun and Hammer had nowhere to run. Sure enough, life imitated art. Just as Mitt was finally beating Obama in the national polls he too came face to face with the consequences of one of his previous personas.

Richard Mourdock, a republican senate candidate with a shining television endorsement from a Romney desperate to prove that he could be tough on the issue of abortion. And it was Mourdock, who last week, put a sharp halt to the post-debate Romney surge by suggesting the pregnancies as a result of rape were “a gift from god.” If god was handing out gifts, they seemed to have Obama’s name on them, because hours later the polls evened out.

He was Mitt Romney, a cheap little Mormon from Detroit. He was Mitt Romney, who played a liberal from Massachusetts and was loved beyond words. He was Mitt Romney, the conservative from the primaries with money in his pocket. He was Mitt Romney, the moderate who got some of his agony back in a presidential debate. Mormon, liberal, conservative, moderate and now all four of them are lying. Even if Romney does manage to creep into the White House with a last minute miracle, he will always be haunted by the unrealistic expectations he has created by way of his contradictory promises. If his politically polygamous past hasn’t caught up him already, it will inevitably serve to haunt his presidency. 

Mitt Romney’s impressive debate performances and his subsequent political recovery have forced the Obama campaign into crisis mode. However, the president’s only response to the recent Romney comeback seems to be an amplification of the tactic he’s been using all year. That strategy has been to simply talk about the perils of his opponent’s potential presidency while Obama uses his speeches to warn of a Romney lead return to Bush era economics. Romney in turn uses his speeches to remind his audiences of Obama’s poor records on the economy and job growth. America now finds itself watching Obama talk about Romney while Romney talks about Obama without either candidate presenting a clear view of what they would like to do in office.

It’s easy to see why Romney would make Obama the focus of his campaign. Since the Second World War no president has ever been re-elected with an unemployment rate below 7.2% (the current figure is 7.8%). With a flat-lining economy and no specific plan to fix it Romney would love to let Obama’s failures define the race. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign which amounts to little more than shouting, ‘watch out for the misogynistic George Bush tribute act’, feels like a remarkable departure from the 2008 flurry of “Hope” and “Change we can believe in.” Where once America politicians sold competing visions of a better future, they now seem to offer to save the public from two competing dystopias. This year the alleged choice is between Obama’s Greek style budget crisis and Romney’s vagina regulating plutocracy.

For somebody as ideologically promiscuous as Romney this pattern is to be expected but Obama will be sullenly aware that he has come to personify the image of the disappointing statesman that exists in the mind of many Americans; a trap that he may of set for himself. It is said that the United States constitution intentionally creates ‘a strong man in a cage’, because its authors valued individual freedom over presidential power. On the left this has created a cruel cycle of public confidence followed quickly by despondency and the following is how it works. An optimistic candidate promises to use the power of the presidency to improve the lives of average Americans, once elected, said candidate is then blocked by special interests in both congress and the senate. The public then finds itself disappointed by the perceived inaction of the man they elected which acts to dissuade the president and his likely successors from promising further reform and this creates a vacuum that sucks in negativity; culminating in the two competing dystopias of 2012.

Obama quickly found himself unable to cash the check that he wrote during the 2008 campaign. Now, far from adding to the emotional deficit he created on the American left, he seeks simply to distance himself from his rival. The unfortunate truth is that it would be hard for any president to manage, let alone reverse America’s steady economic decline. Over the last 11 years the International Monitory Fund estimates that American’s share of the world economy has shrunk from 31% to just 23% as investment and industry moves east across the world. Subsequently the continued fall of American living standards may be inevitable, whoever wins in November. America will have plenty of time to decide whether it prefers its dystopia red or blue, because with the way things are going they will be hearing a lot more about them.

“Flex is excited to be bringing you a new weekly update on the United States presidential race. Penned by Nicholas Barrett, blogger at The Huffington Post and International Journalism student at City University, London, things are going to get pretty hot around the collar as the weeks count down to the election.”

Since his triumphal debate appearance, the prospect of president Willard Mitt Romney walking into the White House in January has gone from being an almost inane joke to a very serious prospect for a once hesitant David Cameron to consider.

In the last two years the British prime minster has gotten along famously with his American counterpart. Despite having near polar opposite reactions to the financial crisis, the two leaders have worked in tandem on the world stage. It’s fair to speculate that Cameron would be fairly satisfied to see Obama re-elected in November, but how would he feel if he wasn’t? There are reasons to suggest that he might be slightly miffed by a president Mitt.

For many on the right, the idea of Romney and Cameron working together is seductively appealing. Both believe their countries have been spending far too much for far too long and that the only sensible escape from the current crisis is to cut spending to reduce the deficit and to cut red tape to encourage growth and to do so as quickly as possible. Like Reagan and Thatcher before them, they could present a united Western economic philosophy and usher us away from big governments with big debts. Could the timing possibly be any better? There is however a problem and like many of the prime minister’s problems it largely comes down to public image.

Mitt Romney has effectively been running for president since 2007 and in that time he has not only been extensively scrutinised by all corners of the US media but has also simultaneously been forced to please the fringe elements of the Republican Party and he has come of these twin ordeals with deep scars in his reputation. It is now widely known that while Mitt was making millions of dollars though his private equity business, Bain Capital, he was also hiding those same millions in offshore tax havens. As a result, even before he was infamous recorded disregarding 47% of the American public, he already had the highest disapproval rating of any presidential nominee.

All of this will only serve to make the prime minister nervous about the prospect of Romney becoming the face of a ‘special relationship’ that is only really discussed in Britain; where Mitt characteristically humiliated him prior to the Olympics. Cameron, who is already alleged to have condemned the candidate as a man with the “unique distinction of uniting all of England against him”, will also be acutely aware that as Tony Blair’s premiership progressed it was increasingly defined by his relationship with George Bush. Having watched Blair polling in the 70’s under Clinton only to become reviled as ‘Bush’s Poodle’ three years later, the Prime Minister could be forgiven for cringing when Romney deploys his tactless brand of fighting talk against Tehran and Damascus.

While Barack Obama is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a cautious and considerate statesman on the world stage, his opponent has gone out of his way to present himself as a stronger and more aggressive prospect, who has already promised to use his first day in office to “declare China a currency manipulator.” Because Cameron has spent the last two years distancing himself from Europe he will need the special relationship to be as strong as possible and for a man of caution, that means a strong preference for Obama’s re-election.

On top of this Romney is terminally stained by the awkward perfume of elitism, something Cameron is and always has been trying desperately to run away from. Romney, who inherited a fortune from his father, has, for the last few years, been encouraged by his party to strangle the welfare state. By now the prime minister will be sick of this association; it has been hard enough for him to downplay his sketch relationships with Rupert Murdoch, Heather Brooks and Michael Ashcroft without having to smile alongside Mitt ‘corporations are people’ Romney.

Cameron does not wish to be defined by his days in the Bullingdon club, nor would he want to be associated with Andrew Mitchell’s ‘plebs’ or Mitt Romney’s ‘victims’. He would much rather sustain the fading belief that ‘we are all in this together’. Cameron has struggled to present an image of the ‘conservative with a small c’ whereas Romney has promised to be a “severely conservative president”. The last thing David Cameron needs is another public imaged liability and the last place he would like to find one is on the lawn of the White House.

When news broke that the European Union had won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for its contribution to “over six decades to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”, it was greeted by ridicule and derision; and not just by the right-wing press. While the cynicism is made easy by daily dispatches of rioting Athenians, from a historical perspective the achievements of the EU appear worthy of applause.

So why does Britain remain one of the few European nations where those who look favorably upon membership are outnumber by detractors? There are probably a lot of factors, but one of the most important might be the coverage (of lack thereof) in the British media. Because we only ever seem to regard the EU and it’s parliament in the quality press or on television when there is some kind of crisis, the public, bombarded by negative tabloid coverage, is oblivious to 99% of what goes on there. Meanwhile the Westminster soap opera remains ever present and this could be a key reason why the British feel detached from Brussels and Strasbourg.

In 2002 the Pew Research Center published a study showing that the news habits of the American public had hardly changed following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Despite the tragedy and its worldwide ramifications, interest in foreign coverage was almost the same as it had been in the year 2000. Then the researches looked into the reasons for the public’s apparent disinterest and described what they found on the Pew website:

“The survey offers powerful evidence that broad interest in international news is most inhibited by the public’s lack of background in this area, overall, roughly two-thirds (65%) of those with moderate or low interest in these stories say they sometimes lack the background information to keep up.”

The findings suggested that the less the public is told about an issue the less likely they are to follow it. Under-reported issues become complicated story-lines we’re expected to occasionally pay attention to and staying up to date is harder if the public is unaware of the stories background. Its almost like trying to understand a television series like Breaking Bad by only watching every fifth episode. Naturally our interest is diminished over time and this causes news editors (who are usually under-staffed) to focus less and less attention and resources on the issues making the public less and less likely to be interested and the whole cycle become a self fulfilling prophecy.

With almost no serious coverage of the European Parliament the British public could be forgiven for regarding the EU as the massive generator of wasteful projects, inane legislation and bureaucratic gravy portrayed in the tabloids. When this is coupled with the ongoing eurozone crisis it creates a cocktail of pessimism and resentment ready to be exploited by euro-skeptics across the continent.

If the story of our age is the gradual shift in economic power from West to East, it is important to that we are provided with a fair view of the EU; collectively the biggest economy on earth. If it takes Nobel Prize to highlight its sizable contributions towards peace, aid, democracy, human rights and equality then it might need better PR. Because with the media currently rigged against it, the vacuum created by a lack of pro-European promotion, will quickly be filled by those who want to see it fall.

In the last few years, popular ’80s pastimes like rioting, mass unemployment and listening to Simple Minds have returned.

Since Nick Clegg tactlessly abandoned a “pledge made with the best of intentions” in 2010, campus politics has doubled-down in its taste for the militant. It’s hitting – or, rather, vandalising - student unions across the country regardless of traditional political bias. If the realm of student politics was intimidating before, it’s practically repulsive to most of us now.

The past has seen two spikes in post-war student activism. In the ’60s, when the idea of a real revolution was a semi-serious prospect, and the ’80s, when Thatcherism challenged the identity of higher education as part of the welfare state. Between Maggie’s departure and the beginning of the global financial crisis, both students and the public at large displayed a somewhat diminished interest in political involvement.

Did a booming economy deliver a notional satisfaction? Did the war in Iraq create a notion of helplessness? For whatever reason, we simply didn’t get involved as much as we once did. Then in 2010, the coalition, eager to cut a deficit caused by excessive government borrowing, forced prospective students to adopt the economic model it said had failed: building a future on a mountain of debt. All over the world, the next generation were being asked to foot the bill and the result was a political awakening that would eventually lead to the Occupy movement and beyond.

I first encountered this curious little college sub-culture at my Freshers’ Fair in 2009, when a couple of morose and remorseful looking emissaries from a then moribund Labour Party attempted to annex my lapel with a little red sticker. Opposition has since reinvigorated and empowered the left, but the student protests in 2010 and 2011 were a first time foray onto Parliament Square for many.

However noble their cause and humble their means, within their ranks are those who ruin it for everybody with tediously dogmatic interpretations of feminism, socialism, environmentalism and so on. Many thoughtful and intelligent students are repelled from the left by ideologues who espouse uncompromising views with little or no tolerance for anything else.

Unfortunately, with intelligence comes compromise. As the latest generation of freshers begin to politicise they will, if they are doing it properly, begin to notice the limits of their politics. For them, to stand next to Karl Marx Jr and Lenin the Third is embarrassing, even immoral.

Many within the much-needed anti-austerity movement still insist on divorcing themselves from reality with signs reading “no cuts”, as if the best way to win an economic argument was to prove you had no idea what kind of mess we are in. As a result, the student-led left isolates itself from its only resource: interested, well-intentioned, professional learners.

The problem of certitude was described well last week by an ageing Bill Clinton, who said: “The problem with any ideology is that it gives you the answer before you look at the evidence. So you have to mold the evidence to get the answer that you’ve already decided you’ve got to have. It doesn’t work that way.”

It’s for this reason that a fundamental approach to anything can have regressive consequences, especially to student politics. Luckily in Britain, unless you happen to be a prince trying to get though London traffic, it can be relatively harmless. But the dogmatism of student socialists and tiddler Tories is not so alien to that of the Nigerian body politic, where only last week 32 students were shot following disputed student union elections.

So where can a pragmatic political moderate seek asylum? There is a place where you can engage, explore and experiment with ideas as independently as you wish- and you’re looking at an example of it right now. While terms and conditions do apply, almost every university in Britain has one or more student newspapers open to comment and feature writers. As well as a student rag, most universities come fully equipped with a radio station and because most students use them as a platform for an unimaginative tribute to Radio 1, a show dealing with real world issues can really stand out. If you’re lucky it might even be listened to.

Great things can be achieved by members of political parties working together, but those same structures transcribed to a mass of students desperate for identity can also create a black v. white stalemate. When ordinary people omit their voices from politics, those of absolutism quickly replace them. In British student politics we’ve already lost ground, but should never be afraid to be vocal and always stay curious. 

On the 17th August, all three members of the punk band Pussy Riot were imprisoned for singing “banish Putin, banish Putin” inside a Russian Orthodox cathedral. But this ruling, which was widely believed to have been decided by Putin’s United Russia party, was not the strangest thing that happened in a Moscow courtroom that day. At precisely the same time, another judge upheld a decision to reject 102 applications for Gay Pride celebrations in the city of Moscow.

The verdict comes a few months after officials in St Petersburg announced a draconian ban on “gay propaganda”, a law demanding that anyone guilty of “public action aimed at propagandising sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism, and transgenderism among minors” pay a fine in excess of £100. 

The growing trend of homophobic legislation could be a reaction to the unprecedented numbers of anti-Putin protesters who have been descending upon Red Square in the wake of December’s dubious legislative election. Since then, United Russia have attempted to affirm the party’s popularity amongst the rural population, a valuable demographic in the world’s largest country.

In the past, all this took was a topless photo shoot of Putin in the great outdoors, wrestling a fully un-sedated bear. However, with the popularity of United Russia waning, they have recently edged even closer to the Russian Orthodox Church, a denomination that blesses Putin’s missiles with holy water and has been known to defrock priests who side with his political enemies. It is now said that United Russia and the church have all but merged into a single moral authority. 

After the revolution, homosexuality was legalised until 1933, when an increasingly paranoid Stalin criminalised it in an atempt to win favour with the socially conservative leaders of the church. Homosexuality was forced underground for sixty years and was classed as a mental disorder until 1999. A mere ten years later, a Moscow Pride march was broken up by riot police shortly after the city’s mayor had ironically labelled them as “Stalinists”.

Since the demonstrations began, Putin’s support has plummeted, not just in Moscow but in the countryside too. Recent polls documented in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs show that from the borders of Belarus to the Sea of Okhotsk, he is increasingly being judged as an autocrat who has overstayed his welcome. The chaos of the early ’90s that created the appetite for a strong and strident leader seem like a lifetime ago - and Putin knows it. However, if his party can strike a divide between the headland and the supposedly out-of-touch Muscovite middle classes (a stereotype with which he hopes to pigeonhole the protesters), he might be able to cling on with a slender manufactured mandate. 

Russia’s post-Soviet constitution demands an American-style separation by keeping the church apart from the state. The shadow of the nation’s history means that the steady erosion of this divide is now casting a shadow over all persecuted sexual minorities.

Written for The Angle

When Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his potential vice president it led to a rare moment in American politics because it seemed to please both parties. The republicans were understandably excited to see a passionate and ‘intellectual’ fiscal conservative on the ticket to eclipse the embarrassing political inconsistencies of their candidate and democrats were relieved for the same reason.

Paul Ryan believes himself to be a ‘Randian hero’, on a mission to force Americans depended on government spending to stand on their own two feet. He is brazenly proud of his ambition to cut fast and cut deep into the welfare state while cutting taxes for the very wealthy. Like the British conservatives, he expects the private sector to automatically blossom if the public sector is dismantled and because of this his budget proposals amount to the failed economic policies of George Osborne on steroids. His is hardly an original philosophy on the Washington landscape but in the current post-occupy political climate it stands out in stark contrast to the presidents platform of government-investment based growth. This is why some democrats are thrilled by his appointment; it has given them an opportunity to clearly define themselves as the saviors of the American welfare state by painting their opponent as its potential executioner. In the few days since the Ryan pick was announced, left leaning pundits have seized upon the chance to re-frame the election as a referendum on the future of Medicare, the government subsidised healthcare plan for senor citizens that might soon find itself under Paul Ryan’s axe of austerity.  For many on the left this has been viewed as a chance to re-brand an election that might have been a referendum on the presidents all too hollow record of reform. One popular liberal radio host even described Ryan as a “gift to progressives”, in reality it is anything but. 

While the media were speculating that Romney might have chosen a highly divisive running mate to divert attention from his suspiciously opaque tax arrangement, another of the summer’s political trends was being forgotten. For the last two years Obama’s overriding problem with re-election was the widely held perception that he had failed to live up to his 2008 promise to deliver hope and change. It had rattled him when his supporters failed to reappear during the 2012 midterms so as the 2012 election approached the White House began to appease the progressive supports they had disregarded for most of their time in office. This started in May when Obama began publicly supporting gay marriage and continued in June when he announced that he would be reforming America’s infamously dysfunctional immigration policy. After three and a half years of compromising he was finally, it seemed, working for the people who had elected him. However the emergence Paul Ryan and his ominous economic manifesto may have granted Obama a licence to instead, run an increasingly negative campaign without the pressure to offer any real reform for the future. Announcements of progressive legislation can now be shelved in favour of foreboding speeches reminding the American public that senior citizens will be safer if Romney and Ryan are kept as far away from power as possible. Political evasion of this kind is nothing new; in 1996 Bill Clinton was able to win re-election without employing the progressive ambition of his 1992 campaign. By evoking a fear that Bob Dole’s political allies intended to privatise Medicare he was allowed to return to the White House with diminished expectations of social reform.

Paul Ryan’s arrival is not a gift for progressives, it is a mandate for presidential complacency. No matter how tempting it is to spend the next two months raising fearful awareness of the damage that could be made possible by a Romney/Ryan White House, American progressives must bare in mind that if they forget to remind Obama of his responsibilities they may find themselves once again disappointed in victory.

Whilst living in America, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) derived great pleasure by reminding the American conservatives, who had become his allies following his support for the war in Iraq, that if they really were the enemies of big government then they ought to be avid supporters of secularism. He had spent the later years of his extraordinary life fighting religion and promoting humanist ideals, two very rare hobbies for a supporter of George W Bush. The day after Christopher Hitchens died in December of last year, David Cameron gave a speech in Oxford to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. In the speech he declared that “We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so… the Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today”. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams was present at the speech, only a month after he had very publicly described the coalition governments welfare cuts, specifically the £500-a-week cap on benefits per-family as “profoundly unjust”. This had come shortly after the prime minster had dismissed the Archbishop’s calls for a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ on financial transactions.

Strangely, the views of Rowan Williams weren’t mentioned by the Conservative Party co-chairwoman, Baroness Warsi, when in February she complained that religion was being “sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere”. Instead she cited the lack of God’s name in the texts of the European Union constitution as an “astonishing” example of what she describes as “militant secularism”. The problem is that the Conservative government has consistently ignored the views of religious leaders who oppose the government’s stringent austerity measures, probably because the morals of the Bible are roundly regarded as being much less important then economic growth.

Only last month the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brian described the prime minister as “immoral” and told him to do more then “just protect (his) very rich colleagues in the financial industry”. He too urged David Cameron to reconsider a Robin Hood Tax and he too was brushed off by Downing Street. It is becoming increasingly clear that the advocacy of religious values in the public sphere by senor conservatives is little more than posturing. The virtues of faith-based politics is recommended to the public but not adopted by the politicians who are selling it to us. The British government has made its mind up and decided that economic growth is the priority, even if that means the voices of religion being sidelined, marginalised and downgraded. So why do they bother to emphasise the importance of the religious perspective in the first place if they have no intention of paying any attention to it themselves?

Across the Atlantic, where faith and politics have been, for a while much closer in comparison to Britain, the US Republican party has seen a similar philosophical collision take place. Back in April, republican representative Paul Ryan, the author of an austerity-heavy budget, (which is expected to be implemented if Mitt Romney wins the presidential election) was set to give a speech at a catholic university in Washington D.C. But when we received an open letter from a group of almost 90 catholic bishops, theologians, priests and university staff. Here is an extract:

“we would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few. As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has wisely noted in several letters to Congress – “a just framework for future budgets cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons.” Catholic bishops recently wrote, “the House-passed budget resolution fails to meet these moral criteria. In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favourite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.“

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) who was recently described as the “the new right’s version of Marx”, has become a patron saint of the American right. During the infamous Tea Party rallies of 2009 and 2010 when signs reading, “Rand was right”, “atlas is shrugging” and “who is John Galt” frequently referenced her work. John Galt is a ‘Randian hero’ of the book Atlas Shrugged, an Ayn Rand novel first published in 1957 and one she personally read out loud to a young and impressionable Alan Greenspan. By the 1990’s Atlas Shrugged was voted the second most influential book in America, first place went to the Bible. The conflict of affection that exists between the two books amongst the American right is nothing new. Back in 1966 Ronald Reagan claimed to be “an admirer of Ayn Rand” but fifteen years later when Reagan came to power, Rand expressed doubts about her fan in the White House, writing, “I do not approve of Mr. Reagan’s mixture of capitalism and religion.”

Three decades later and Paul Ryan’s response to the same problem was a philosophical retreat towards Jerusalem. Hardly surprising given that Christianity has acted as an ideological republican safe house ever since Jerry Falwell politicised the evangelicals in 1980 and told them to vote for god by voting for Ronald Reagan. Thirty years on and Paul Ryan needed to make his loyalty to God as clear as he could, but instead of going to the confessional box he decided go to the press and give an interview to National Review:

“I reject her philosophy… It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.” 

However it wasn’t long before numerous contradictory quotations surfaced. During a speech he delivered to a meeting of an Ayn Rand fan club called the Atlas Society back in 2005 Ryan had said “the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand and the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” This was the first of many quotes in which Ryan attributes his political identity and motivation to the Russian author.

The real tragedy regarding Ryan’s abandonment of his political heroine is that the outcome that any rational person studying her work would come to is that her animosity towards religion was (pardon my choice of words) the least objectionable thing about her. Rand was foremost a logician, a cold an calculating rationalist who, prior to the popularisation of game theory and the widespread misinterpretations of selfish gene theory, (Richard Dawkins insists that he has always voted on the left) believed altruism to be irrational. Man she said should live for himself instead of being held back by the weak. She was a devout individualist and was even known to have admired murders because they lived for themselves. In the critically un-acclaimed but staggeringly popular Atlas Shrugged the artists, entrepreneurs, industrialists, inventors and writers vanish from a state controlled (“collectivist”) society to go on strike. As they hide in a remote outpost the country falls apart before they emerge to create a new (“objectivist”) world build upon “the virtues of selfishness”. The book became popular with the republican proponents of a growing trend of libertarianism within the American right and this happened at precisely the same time the party was successfully seducing the evangelical vote. Somehow the Christians didn’t seem to notice or to mind the contradiction at the heart of Ronald Reagan’s political message.

Fast-forward three decades and it seems that the penny has finally dropped as highly influential religious leaders are beginning to notice the disparity between the deconstruction of the welfare state and the values of the Bible. David Cameron, who had ended 2011 by espousing the importance of Christian values, soon found himself using a “financial privilege” to force though a £26,000 benefits cap on state benefits because it had been so roundly rejected by the bishops sitting the House of Lords, by the second month of 2012. Meaning he has now publicly acted to circumvent religious morality; presumably the morality the bishops were placed in the lords to represent.

Perhaps it is fair to say that Cameron doesn’t really consider religious values unless he has been asked to give a speech defending their importance. Perhaps like almost every other issue, it’s simply the lip service that matters. In a way it reminds me of Pascal’s wager; the idea that one should stay safe by maintaining an otherwise irrational belief in god, just in case it turns out to be true. Because while almost nobody will cast a vote just to defend secularism, a few or even many might vote to defend a nations supposed Christian identity. As Christopher Hitchens wrote last year, in one of his last articles for Slate “religion in politics is more like an insurance policy than a true act of faith. Professing allegiance to it seldom does you any harm… and can do you some good. It’s a question of prudence” and that might just be the one defining link between fiscal and social conservatism; a simple and universal application of prudence.

In the wake of the post-budget “omnishambles” and a “disappointing” slide back into recession, the Conservative Party has not only plummeted in the polls but has also been divided by accusations of arrogance and elitism directed towards David Cameron and George Osborne. In response to this it appears the Prime Minister is willing to appease the backbench detractors in his own party by putting off moves to legalise gay marriage and reform the House of Lords. George Osborne said this was because they wanted to concentrate solely on the economy, as if we have a government incapable of rubbing its belly and patting its head at the same time.

On it’s own, a political retreat might simply seem like a cowardly move, especially from the leader of the Iron Lady’s old party, but on a wider perspective, pandering to the right could be politically disastrous. After all, if the recent local elections have proved anything, it’s a lack of public confidence and support for the government’s extensive programme of cuts to public services. And now it’s become clear that Britain is not alone in its resentment of austerity. Across the Channel, the socialist candidate Francois Hollande has stormed to victory by positioning himself firmly against government frugality, while Nicolas Sarkozy desperately attempted to woo the support of those on both the cultural and economic far right in a pathetic attempt to remain in power. Hollande has been branded a moderate but despite the Eurozone crisis he has promised to employ and extra 60,000 teachers and has pledged to tax French millionaires at a rate of 75%. During the television debate prior to the national vote, Hollande clarified his position by turning to Sarkozy and saying, “I protect the children of the republic, you protect the privileged”. Not only did this comment catch the mood of the French public but it also seems to reflect the attitude of both the British public and a few Tory backbenchers and this is why the British Labour Party would do well to follow suit, now.

It seems likely that the Tory cabinet will this week exacerbate their ‘out of touch’ image by using the Queens Speech to reaffirm an economic policy that has driven the country back into recession. All while intentionally neglecting gay marriage and Lords reform. For this reason Labour must present themselves as a credible and substantive alternative to the coalition. As it stands they are the least unpopular of the three main parties and that simply isn’t good enough, because even if the British public elect a Miliband simply for not being David Cameron, a new empty suit will do nothing to inspire a much needed wave of economic and public confidence.

The deterioration of support for the coalition coupled with the elections in France and Greece has shown that voters throughout Europe are developing a new appetite for government investment. Even across the Atlantic Barack Obama is framing the upcoming presidential election as a choice between investment and austerity. This is quite remarkable considering that only two years ago Gordon Brown was voted out of office after campaigning on the same message. Now it seems the feelings of European voters are changing, probably because austerity simply hasn’t worked anywhere. 

In Britain we have found ourselves in a strange place where, as Rafalel Behr has pointed out in the New Statesman, the Tories and LibDems appear to be losing but Labour isn’t winning. They have been quick to oppose many of the cuts, the increase in tuition fees and the unpopular re-organisation of the NHS but they have been reluctant to promise a repeal of any of them. Now we know that the widespread discontent with the ‘cut the state and watch the growth’ mentality of the right, can be tapped into for political gain. Ed Miliband can now stand up with confidence and tell us how he would invest in the economy and how it would help while asserting a message that if Cameron is too scared to deliver on gay marriage and Lords reform then he will. Because while the Conservatives seem to be ideologically handcuffed to the failed economic policies of the past, Labour are free to redefine themselves as a party that is in touch with people in both Britain and Europe. But if the relative success of Obama’s growth plan and the ascent of Francois Hollande don’t inspire Labour to breakaway from its economic caution, what will?