EcoLogics

And so we come full circle. Last night, in a speech delivered as part of the Scott Society’s Hugo Young Lectures (yet more evidence of the Guardian’s swerve to the Right?), Cameron finally came out and showed his true blue colours, his true face: what we need, he said, is less government, and more ‘social entrepreneurs’, i.e. replacing the tattered remains of the welfare state with a neo-Victorian form of philanthropy.

I will return to this suggestion below. First, a very brief history of David ‘Janus’ Cameron’s progressivism. When I speak of ‘Janus’ Cameron, I refer not so much to the mythological connotation of Janus (in ancient Roman times, Janus was the god of transitions, symbolized by way of gates and doorways), but to its more modern connotation of someone who is two-faced, in the sense of being deceptive. Ever since he managed to get himself elected as Tory leader, Cameron has played a political game that may be symbolized by the image of a two-faced Janus.

When the media limelight has been shining on him, Cameron has been a paragon of conservative moderation, almost to the point of a centre ‘left’ liberalism. Cameron has, in this sense, worked very hard to persuade us that he is a ‘TeePee’ Tory, i.e. a Tory Progressive intent on transforming the Conservative Party from the defender of class-bound privilege into something akin to a ‘broad tent’ party, what this blog describes ironically as the PPP: the People’s Progressive Party. It has often been noted that Cameron has stolen Blair’s clothing, and so he has, in the sense that it was Blair who came up with the idea of swerving even further to right while protesting loudly about the need for more social justice. But whereas Blair and the rest of the New Labour nomenclatura really did force Labour to swing far to the right, Cameron has only paid lip service to liberalism, engaging in backroom deals which, if anything, will push Britain in the direction of a greater authoritarianism than even Blair or Brown have managed.

A case in point, Cameron’s stance on homophobia. In early July, Cameron made headlines when he announced that he was officially ashamed of the Tories’ infamous Section 28, a part of a Local Government Act passed by the Tories in 1988, which stated that a local authority ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.

But just two months earlier, the Westminister commentariat chose to look the other way when, during an unseasonably warm weekend at the very end of May, Cameron flew out to Poland on a semi-secret mission. Having ditched his party’s old alliance on the European scene with the centre-right parties of Merkel and Sarkosy, Cameron went to Poland to seal a new pact with a rag-tag of ultra-nationalist parties, known as the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). The deal was apparently a kind of payment in kind, agreed in the last Tory leadership, during which Cameron bought the votes of the farther-right in the party by promising to axe the alliance with ‘federalist’ centre-right European parties.

The result of this deal with the Tory devils is that Cameron now leads an agglomeration of right, and far-right groups which are explicitly homophobic: take for example the Kaczyński twins, the leaders of the hard-right Polish Law and Justice Party. One of the twins, Lech, is the current president of Poland. The other, Jaroslaw, was the prime minister until the current PM, Donald Tusk, defeated him in the 2007 general elections. Amongst other authoritarian policies, the Law and Justice Party advocates strengthening restrictions on abortion, which is already illegal in Poland except in extraordinary circumstances. They also oppose same-sex marriages or any other form of legal recognition of homosexual couples. Jarosław Kaczyński has been quoted as saying that homosexuals should not be teachers, but that homosexuals ‘would not be persecuted’. He has also stated that “The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can’t agree to it”.

Another member of the same party, Michal Kaminski, is now the formal leader of the ECR. For those who haven’t heard about him, Kaminiski was recently denounced for his neo-Nazi past by the not exactly progressive David Miliband. As if this were not bad enough, the ECR group also includes Latvia’s ‘For Fatherland and Freedom Party’, which helps to organise the annual celebrations in that country of the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS. So in addition to homophobics, Cameron appears to have allied himself with Nazi sympathizers.

The contradiction between Cameron’s perorations about Section 28, and his alliance with the mentioned parties cannot be spin-doctored away. No truly progressive or liberal politician would ever countenance establishing an alliance with the likes of the Polish Law and Justice Party, let alone the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom Party. We have to conclude that the real Cameron—i.e. the social formation that he really represents—is anything but progressive. On the contrary, his claims to liberalism are no more (and no less) than PR fodder for all those who don’t follow politics closely, and who may be conned into thinking that Cameron is what he has worked very hard to make himself appear to be. Of course, any politician must always be something of a chamaeleon, but in this lizard’s case, it is the iridophores—the layer of cells that reflect blue incident light—that predominate.

Alas, until last night, conservatives with a capital or small ‘c’ might well have dismissed this critique as the figment of a left-wing imagination. But during the speech given in the Hugo Young Lecture, Cameron began to lose the face that he has managed to show the mainstream media, and which the media have so happily agreed to show to their audiences. As he turned to look at the people who attended the Hugo Young Lecture, the people will have seen the monstrous visage not so much of Margaret Thatcher, but of a youthful, 21st century British equivalent of Ronald Reagan, the true modern father of Tory slash ‘n burn policies of the kind that have made the United States what it is today. Cameron spoke of paradox in his speech, but the real paradox is that, just when the United States is waking up to the terrible legacy of Reaganite neoliberalism, England, Wales and Northern Ireland are about to re-elect a party that not only was the chief accomplice of Reaganism between 1980 and 1997, but is now set to take this complicity even further to the right.

Cameron’s big idea is that, instead of ‘big government’, we need ‘big society’. (How does a politician change the size of a society!?) ‘The era of big government’, he said in the speech, ‘has run its course. Poverty and inequality have got worse, despite Labour’s massive expansion of the state. We need new answers now, and they will only come from a bigger society, not bigger government.’ At the heart of his proposal is the idea of using ‘social entrepreneurs’. In case you don’t know what this term means, it’s the buzz word for people who have made careers out of engaging in philanthropic activities that blur the line between charity, and business. Cameron singled out one such entrepreneur in his speech: Debbie Scott, the head of Tomorrow’s People. If you visit their website, you will find the philosophy of social entrepreneurship clearly stated from the very beginning: ‘We help break the cycle of unemployment so that people can take positive control of their lives and build a brighter future’–and in the same breath, ‘We also save employers time and money by finding them the right people for the right jobs.’

Ah, so that’s what it’s about—how clever! Social entrepreneurs make their careers by taking over the roles traditionally accorded to the welfare state, and turning them into charitable or so-called ‘social’ enterprises. Put simply, there’s money to be made from poverty.

To the right-wing New Labourites that Cameron is out to seduce, this may sound like a brilliant idea. But it is only brilliant if you fail to consider two problems. First, unlike state entities, such charities are under no obligation to provide universal coverage for their services. They help whomever they choose to help. They are no different, in this sense, from traditional philanthropies of the kind that were the only palliative during the Victorian era. From this perspective, Cameron is inviting us to return to a Victorian form of social justice, where the disadvantaged are helped only if someone takes pity.

The second problem is that, despite Cameron’s efforts to portray New Labour as the party of big government, what he is proposing is exactly what New Labout itself has been doing for the better part of 12 years. Far from simply expanding the state, New Labour has been pouring money into corporate welfarism. It has outsourced more and more state roles to darling donors such as Capita and the failed Carter & Carter, companies which might well describe themselves as being run by ‘social entrepreneurs’. Sandy Leitch’s Review of Skills was coached precisely in the terms of social entrepreneurship, and it its most recent proposals, New Labour is saying that it will even pay private hospitals to get treatment for patients—perhaps even private doctors might now be called social entrepreneurs!

So no, New Labour has not so much expanded the state, as used more and more state money to fill the coffers of private organisations run by social parasites that long ago figured out that there was lots of money to be made by criticising the welfare state, and then fulfilling some of its vital functions for profit—or at least, for personal career or political gain.

The one thing that has slightly—ever so slightly—mitigated New Labour’s hell-for-leather push to privatise has been the fact that the party still depends on the unions for votes, and crucially, for money. In this, the blog’s penultimate post, EcoLogics asks readers thinking of voting for Cameron’s ‘TeePee’ Conservatives: what will mitigate the policies of the party of privilege, and indeed, the party which has seen fit to join up with the likes of Michal Kaminski? If New Labour has been so bad, why should the Old Etonians be any better?

Actually, it’s the other way around: Brown’s government decided to ’suspend’ Galmo Williams’ government after an enquiry—of a kind not allowed in the UK itself—decreed that Williams was involved in acts of corruption. A British governor will now rule the islands on Britain’s behalf for up to two years.

This blogger wonders: if our own prime minister has just been told to return some £12,000+ which he wrongly charged the state—and if a significant number of members of his party are being told to do the same—then where lies our/their moral authority to suspend local government in the Turks and Caicos Islands? Might it not be argued, on the basis of our own government’s practices, that New Labour (and of course the Tories too) are guilty, as the enquiry in the Turks and Caicos Islands put it, of “systematic corruption or serious dishonesty“?

(Let’s not even begin to discuss what the UK is doing in Turks and Caicos in the first place.)

With the benefit of hindsight, the only thing that is really remarkable is that Alan Rusbridger and the rest of the people who run the Guardian held out for so long.

Then again, maybe they weren’t ‘holding out’ at all. Maybe they were always fans of Peter Mandelson, and some of us just hadn’t realised this was the case.

To be sure, in the perpetual logic of juncture that is politics, what leader one supports at any given point in time is, in some respects, not really that important. Far more significant, you could argue, are the policies that you fight for and against, and thereby, the specific actions that you support or oppose.

Indeed, after what seems like a century of Murdochian personality politics—with a promise of far more to come, what with David Cameron having struck a deal with old Rupert and his progeny—individuals and especially their personalities should be neither here nor there. When one focuses on personalities, it is easy to lose sight of what the individuals actually stand for. In such a context, the argument descends all too easily to the kind of character assassination that The Sun, the Daily Mail and other right-wing tabloids excel in. Or, to use a more pertinent example, it condescends to the kind of hagiographic articles and videos that the Guardian has been publishing of late about Peter Mandelson.

*    *    *

Just to be clear: large, or even medium-sized media organisations such as the Guardian are complex institutions. News organisations that try to steer a centre-left, or at least a relatively independent course are particularly complex. Their editors and journalists live, far more keenly than their right-wing colleagues,  the daily contradiction of trying to produce money-making truths. If this has always entailed a certain contradiction for journalists, it seems a particularly glaring one in the times we are living in. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Frank Rich provided withering evidence of the extent to which so-called ‘special interests’ are far from dead in the United States. If someone with the apparent integrity, power, and dignity of Barak Obama is already cutting back room deals with private insurance firms, then what hope is there for journalists working in a comparatively weak news organisation such as the Guardian Media Group, and this in the dying and arguably most corrupt days of the New Labour government?

In fact, it may be exactly the other way around. Against all odds, the Guardian has managed to steer a course that has remained surprisingly critical of what Seumas Milne aptly described as New Labour’s culture of corruption. Three particularly courageous examples of critical journalism come to mind: the paper’s ‘tax gap’ series; its coverage of New Labour’s curtailment of our civil liberties; and the paper’s extraordinary exposé of the Metropolitan Police’s efforts to cover-up the manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson.

These are examples of British journalism at its best. They reveal the continued relevance of a ‘fourth estate’ role for newspapers, and remind us why the robber-barons of the right have been so eager to embrace the Murdoch brand of journalism: a Fox-like, or perhaps we should say Rottweiler-like form of journalism which has, from the perspective of the owning corporations, two functions, and two functions only: to make money by serving up criminality or celebrity tat, and to beat any uncooperative politicians into submission. The combination evidently has worked, if only because the politicians have come to believe that it works; this blogger thinks that the New Labour politicians were protesting too loudly that Murdoch’s return to the Tories—the party he never actually left—would make no difference in the upcoming elections.

So even if one is critical of traditional models of news values, it remains crucially important to have at least some news organisations that still can, and still do engage in ideologically critical reporting that reaches large numbers of people, or at least, large numbers of key decision-makers up and down the country. The alternative is a Fox News Society where having a cousin called John Ellis can mean the difference between winning or losing a presidential election.

*   *   *

Back, then, to Peter Mandelson. As this blog has noted, the Guardian has gone from providing a relatively subtle form of support for Mandelson, to one that can only be described as being emetic: it is so blatantly an instance of propaganda that it makes critical readers vomit. The Guardian is now doing for Peter Mandelson what Fox News did for George Bush.

Perhaps we should simply treat this as a peccadillo that is best ignored in the way that one is forced to ignore, for example, the paper’s advertisements for Mercedes-Benz—a company recently caught out lying about the emissions of its cars—or indeed the many reams that the Guardian devotes to business, or to the promotion of consumption more generally. The contradiction between such coverage and the paper’s allegedly green credentials to one side, it’s probably true that few if any readers are ever 100% happy with everything they find in ‘their’ paper. Some of us have long got used to holding our noses as we’ve scanned the headlines of many a supposedly progressive paper—a good example can be found in Spain’s El País, whose coverage of Latin American affairs now blithely reflects the interests of large Spanish corporations.

Then again, to use a word much liked by post-structuralist scholars in the field of literary studies, news organisations are bound to be heteroglossic, i.e. they’re bound to have a variety of voices, and it’s up to readers to ‘pick and mix’ a menu of views, within the limits of the papers’ more manifest politics, that both echo and inform—or on occasion productively challenge—the own perspectives. The problem with this quintessentially liberal perspective is that Peter Mandelson is one of three New Labour politicians who have done the most to undermine the very conditions that make political pluralism possible in the UK. The New Labour troika achieved, and then kept power for 12 years by besting the Tories at their own game: by concentrating political, economic, and yes informational power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. The geniality of Mandelson, Brown and Blair is that even as they have played a key role in gutting the social policies of ‘old’ Labour, they have pretended that they were still politically progressive. To this day, Mandelson is president of the Policy Network, a think-tank allegedly devoted to progressive policies.

By rehabilitating the twice-disgraced Mandelson, and by becoming his mouthpiece, the Guardian is saying, in effect, that it’s fine to mislead one’s own political base, and fine to be intensely relaxed about furthering the interests of the Robinsons, Hindujas, Rothschilds and Deripaskas of the world. What makes the volte-face, if it is a volte-face, so frightening is that it at once conforms to the worst tendencies of personality politics—witness how the paper has tried to talk up Mandelson’s humour, his clothes, and his allegedly self-effacing qualities—and moves far beyond them: when you decide to back someone like Mandelson, you effectively ensure that the personal becomes the political in the most dangerous of ways.

*   *   *

It is tempting to speculate what could have led the paper to become Mandelson’s rag.

Was it because the editors were pressured by what some might naively regard as the Labour Party’s base? One can certainly imagine that the New Labour apparatchiks have been keen to have ‘their’ paper promote the man whom they now apparently regard, with the desperation that results from terminal political decline, as the last best hope for a party that will soon be consigned to the oblivion of a Murdoch-Cameron prime ministership.

Then again, when one reads about the person who is the chair of the Guardian Media Group, and when one comes across the kind of grovelling comments offered by the paper’s right-wing (people like Michael White and Andrew Rawnsley), it is difficult not to suspect that the Guardian jefatura has not so much ‘learned to love Peter’ as gone from plain love to infatuation.

Or could it be a purely tactical attempt to milk both the love and the hatred swirling about Mandelson? As noted earlier, it’s not easy to produce money-making truths in this day and age.

Whatever the case, the paper’s overt support for Mandelson means that Guardian is now as much a part of the problem as is Mandelson himself. Anyone who reads the paper is aiding and abetting a news organisation that has started to act as a prosthesis for New Labour’s corruption. Insofar as this is the case, from today this blogger will no longer be frequenting, or indeed referring readers onto, the paper.

For those who live on a daily diet of Guardian news, this may prove to be a bit like leaving chips, beer, or perhaps red meat. In the world of newspapers as in the world of diets, there are, however, many substitutes; admittedly, you may have to go to a greater variety of sites for your news, but that is probably a good thing in its own right. The one thing that will really hit the paper is if a significant number of steady readers leave its digital or paper editions, and head for organisations that are unwilling to sell themselves down the river of neo-liberalism. It’s not for this blogger to recommend other sites, most or all of which will have some of their own issues— but at least, you will not be reading a paper whose editors are now sleeping with the proverbial enemy, that is to say, with the oligarchs’ man in Downing Street. EcoLogics refers as much to the Russian or Indian oligarchs, as to the people that Lord Penrose, the Scottish judge that conducted the enquiry into the Equitable Life scandal, described as a ‘self-perpetuating oligarchy‘ (are oligarchies ever anything else?) i.e. the British bankers, insurance men and women, captains of industry, and highest managers who are the New Labour Party’s patrons, and apparently, the Guardian’s preferred readers.

Media Studies is once again under attack by the Conservative Party. If you believe David Cameron, the field of media studies stands as a symbol of all that is wrong in contemporary education. Media Studies is the ‘original’ Mickey Mouse subject, the ‘soft’ alternative par excellence, a pointless subject if ever there was one.

As Media Studies experts in journalism would point out, there is nothing newsworthy in this latest attack—nothing newsworthy, that is, if we stick to the conventional criteria for the word ‘news’. Tory politicians have been attacking Media Studies for the better part of two decades, with anti-media studies hysterias coming and going in much the way that a variety of other moral panics have. The Tories nonetheless know that, when it suits, Media Studies-bashing is likely to mobilise public opinion as much on the right as it is on the left of the educational divide.

The differing, and not-so-differing reasons why Media Studies-bashing is something of a national sport are instructive. Those on the right tend to see Media Studies as a sign of the decay in educational standards. By this account, Media Studies exemplifies a drift not just towards educational ‘naffness’, but towards that evil that is social relativism. For their part, many on the left identify Media Studies with philosophical postmodernism (what many academics would dismiss as a radical variety of social relativism), and assume that anyone doing research in the field (if, indeed, the word ‘research’ can be used to describe someone studying the media) is likely to be wasting precious research grants in order to make much ado about nothing.

Two things unite otherwise different perspectives. First, there is a horror over the perceived erosion of the sacredness of education, and higher education in particular. It is interesting, in this sense, that so little is said by comparison about what is arguably a far greater threat to that self-same sacrality: Brown, Mandelson, Newby et al’s efforts to vocationalise higher education.

Second, whatever their political ideologies, many of the critics tend to be either die-hard empiricists, or hard-core positivists, or amusingly, a mixture of the two. All that really matters in that academic world are empirically-verifiable facts, and facts that can be counted using what tend to be automatically regarded as more ‘objective’ techniques such as surveys and  databases. But of course, as any Tory or New Labour pollster knows, a number can lie far more easily than an epithet can.

This blogger is interested in the contradictions that emerge in what remains an extraordinarily one-sided debate. For starters, the party that specialises in slagging off Media Studies has in its ranks some of the most avid students of public relations, a discipline which some might confuse with Media Studies, and which could itself certainly be accused of social relativism. By this account, David Cameron is a living Media Relativist, if by this we mean an Alan Milburn-like chamaeleon who changes political colours at will to reflect (or deflect) the rising and falling tides of mass-mediated public opinion.

For their part, those who oppose Media Studies as a ‘postmodern’ discipline would do well to reflect on the history of their own discipline. There are few university fields that have not had to fight a struggle to gain the respect of peers in older disciplines, or indeed the seal of approval of the Church or of one or another state institution. Equally if not more importantly, there is no field that can dispense of mass communication, and of mass mediation when it comes to engaging with public opinion both beyond and within the own ranks.

We might note, by way of an extended metaphor, that Galileo Galilei’s success was as much a matter of his heretical theories as it was of his ability to favourably position his work in the Medici court by way of a very astute form of mass communication. As noted by Adrian Johns in his excellent The Nature of the Book, the Medici court identified iconographically with the figure of Jupiter, and so Galileo named his Jovian satellites accordingly in Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger, published in 1610). The ‘Medicean stars’ were the centerpiece of his new book. Some difficulties arose when Galileo was informed that his choice of the name ‘Cosmian’ (after the Medici patriarch, the absolute prince, Cosimo II de’ Medici) would not meet approval. However, a combination of last minute changes, distribution to key princes and cardinals throughout Europe, and the eventual support of the Medici court guaranteed a positive response. Alas, this same logic later worked against Galileo when his ally and patronage broker in Rome, Campioli, fell from grace and so failed to secure a positive reading of Galileo’s later Dialogo Sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems).

This story reminds us of the fact that the politics of mass communication have been a key aspect of academic study for centuries. But it also reminds us of the importance to academia, and to politics more generally, of signs — that is to say, of symbolic forms of the kind that Media Studies engages in academic study. It might be objected that academics no longer have to name their stars after the wealthy, but that would be to miss the more general point. As  Bruno Latour has shown, far from being a quaint matter of naming heavenly bodies in the 17th century, the business of constructing and interpreting signs remains an essential aspect of any form of scientific practice.

EcoLogics thereby suspects that if Media Studies attracts the opprobrium that it does, it is for reasons that are quite different from those bandied about by right-wing politicians, and some left-wing academics.

First, there is, paradoxically, a conflation of what positivists would describe as the subject and object of research. Put more simply, in the minds of some of the critics, the researchers have somehow become identified with what is being researched, and so Media Studies is confused with the media. In the minds of those who both hate and use the media, Media Studies may thus be equated with the unclean.

Second, invectives based on a hate of semiotics (the study of signs) overlook the importance of semiotics to the own field; a contempt of Media Studies may thereby be a way of dealing with what Freudian psychologists have long described as the return of the repressed. We live immersed in, and determined by signs—though of course not only signs—however much we may be dismayed by this fact.

The third motivation for the attack is perhaps the most odious: some on both the right and the left fear that the study of soap operas and reality TV shows, computer games and a variety of everyday forms of communication is a sign of the vulgarisation of academia. The word ‘vulgarity’ would of course never be used in public, but there can be little doubt that part of what is at issue is a class-based politics of distinction: why should academics study popular culture, i.e. the things enjoyed by working men and women?

From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that the UK’s latest educational cri de coeur comes from none other than the Conservative Party—the party which is now trying to style itself as the PPP (the People’s Progressive Party), but whose leading members historically tried to keep working men and women from obtaining formal education in the first place. Funny how history repeats itself: imagine what would happen to politics as we know it today if everyone in the UK was forced to take, as part of the national curriculum, courses that taught them how to be critical vis-a-vis the media…

This blog rarely uses photographic images. But in some of the past posts about David Cameron, EcoLogics has invoked the image of a two-faced politician, a ‘Janus Cameron’ who one day jets off to a hushed-up meeting to establish a European Parliament pact with the homophobic Kaczyński twins (the leaders of the hard-right Polish Law and Justice Party), and another day grandly announces that the New Conservative Party is recanting its hatefully anti-gay stance.

Yesterday and today we’ve seen the two-faced Tories in action again. One moment Daniel Hannan, an MEP of  Britain’s newly self-styled progressive party (perhaps we should re-baptise the Conservative Party as the PPP—the People’s Progressive Party) is slagging off the NHS on Murdoch’s nefarious Fox Television, and the next David Cameron is sending an email to PPP activists, reminding them that the official line is that the NHS is great. Anyone in doubt as to what true-blue Tories think needs to read no further than Damian Thompson’s piece in the Telegraph, aptly titled ‘We Need Daniel Hannan at Westminister, not in Brussels‘.

But now there is an even more ominous sign of what we can expect from the Tories. After three members of the PPP were caught out whining about the tightening of the rules over MP perks, Cameron is making headlines saying that his cabinet members will have to take 25% cuts in their pay. By the Guardian’s account, combined allowances and salary will actually go down from £144,520 to £124,581.50. Ouch.

It’s probably wise to try to ensure that MPs and Cabinet ministers are sufficiently well-paid so that it costs more for companies like BAE to bribe them. Then again, given the three- to four-million jobless figures that are anticipated in the next year or two, this reduction is something akin to a postmodern sacrifice, i.e. it ‘quotes’ sacrificiality.

The true meaning of Cameron’s cuts is anything but postmodern: it is a portent of the savagery with which Cameron will wield his privatising machete to slash and burn the UK’s public services once he becomes the prime minister. Far from wishing to set the British economy on the road to recovery, Cameron’s main motivation will be premised on what we might describe as the Hannan Principle of Politics, in honour of the eponymous Tory MEP. To paraphrase (with a good dose of irony) that old Murdochian line, ‘will the last to leave Britain please turn out the lights’…

British media are reporting today that David Cameron has embarked in what is being described as another major step in the modernisation of the Conservative Party. This time he is offering a public apology for section 28, the notorious legislation which banned the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in British schools. Cameron has apparently condemened section 28 as ‘offensive to gay people’ (EcoLogics would add that it is not just offensive to ‘gay people’) and apparently is even predicting that a Conservative could become Britain’s first openly gay prime minister.

The problem is that this grand prediction, and the mea culpa that goes with it, fly in the face (well, one of the faces) of what Cameron has recently done on the European stage. As noted by EcoLogics in another post, Cameron snuk off to Poland a few weeks ago, where he met with the Kaczyński twins, the leaders of the hard-right Polish Law and Justice Party. Amongst other things, the Law and Justice Party—with which Cameron’s ‘new’ Conservatives are now officially allied—oppose same-sex marriages or any other form of legal recognition of homosexual couples. According to Wikipedia, Jarosław Kaczyński has even been quoted as saying that homosexuals should not be teachers, but also, and somewhat disingenuously, that homosexuals should not be persecuted. He has also stated that “The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can’t agree to it”. How does that sit with Cameron’s mea culpa? Will Jarosław Kaczyński offer a similar apology?

In this as in so many other cases, EcoLogics wonders which way the Janus-faced Cameron actually intends to go. Is he trying to sweeten up New Labour voters, who are hard to the right on economic issues but more liberal when it comes to a variety of social issues? That would certainly explain why he made sure that there were no Tory media to provide extensive coverage of the weekend during which he spent some quality time with the Kaczyński twins…

In future posts, EcoLogics will use a smaller version of the above photograph as a kind of Janus ‘logo’ to signal a post about the many faces of David Cameron. He may well become the next prime minister, but if this blog has its way it may get a bit more difficult for Cameron to be the ally of hard-right wing parties one day, and a liberal the next.

Updated June 3, 2009

Where was David Cameron on the weekend of May 30-31st? You probably wouldn’t have found out by scanning the UK’s press headlines on the Sunday morning because the event he attended seems to have been the object of a news blackout—then again, perhaps the UK’s political editors joined the millions who headed for the beach during what proved to be an extraordinarily hot weekend. Whatever the case, here’s a clue as to Cameron’s whereabouts: he was meeting with the Kaczyński twins.

The Kaczyński twins are the leaders of the hard-right Polish Law and Justice Party. One of the twins, Lech, is the current president of Poland. The other, Jaroslaw, was the prime minister until the current PM, Donald Tusk, defeated him in the 2007 general elections. Imagine that… it’s like saying that if the U.S. had a prime minister, George W. Bush would have been president, and his brother Jeb would have been prime minister. If that doesn’t make you shudder, the following will: according to Wikipedia, Europe’s most notorious twins are in favour of

–allowing the president the right to pass laws by decree (when prompted to do so by the Cabinet), a reduction of the number of members of the Sejm and Senat, and removal of constitutional bodies overseeing the media and monetary policy

–strengthening restrictions on abortion, which is already illegal in Poland except in extraordinary circumstances. They also oppose same-sex marriages or any other form of legal recognition of homosexual couples. Jarosław Kaczyński has been quoted as saying that homosexuals should not be teachers, but that homosexuals would not be persecuted. He has also stated that “The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can’t agree to it”.

–in 2005, the Kaczyński-led government engaged in an action that reminds EcoLogics of New Labour’s transformation of the old Department of Education into two new departments: Children, Schools and Families, and Innovation, Universities and Skills. The Polish government at the time closed down the Office of Government Representative for the Equal Status of Women and Men (Biuro pełnomocnika rządu ds. równego statusu kobiet i mężczyzn), and replaced it with the newly created Department of Women, Family and Counteracting Discrimination of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy (Departament Kobiet, Rodziny i Przeciwdziałania Dyskryminacji MPiPS). What may have appeared to be a purely semantic change, or indeed an improvement from the point of view of social justice, actually masked a profound change in policy towards the right.

Back to David Cameron: Cameron travelled to Poland during the weekend in question to meet with the members of the Law and Justice Party, as well as other parties far to the right of the European parliament. Why was he doing this? A couple of years ago, Cameron decided to ditch his alliance with the centre-right parties in Germany and France in favour of a deal with parties such as Law and Justice.

Apparently the move is a result of Cameron’s wheeling and dealing at the height of the last Conservative Party leadership battle. Fearful that he might lose the contest, he agreed to withdraw his MEPs from the centre-right EPP-ED grouping in the European parliament (1). In that context, the Kaczyński twins’ policies must have appeared to offer a solution to Cameron’s typically New Tory dilemma: on the one hand, he needed, and still needs to hold on to a ‘base’ that is almost rabidly right-wing, especially but not only where European policies are concerned. On the other hand, he needed, and still needs to avoid an association with the kind of Old Tory public service slash ‘n burn techniques if he is to get a substantial number of New Labour votes. Could it be that Cameron can do this by embracing the Kaczyński twins’ ultra-nationalist policies as well as their enthusiasm for a safety net for the poor, and free health services provided by the state?

The funny thing is that Merkel and Sarkosy already stood for right-wing versions of the latter policies (safety nets, free health services). We must thus deduce that Cameron remains happy to take his party further—much further—to the right in his quest to appease Tory Eurosceptics.

In this context, hands up how many people in the UK think that Cameron is a real alternative to New Labour’s authoritarianism. Or, put more sharply, hands up how many people think that Cameron is a New Labour wolf in Kaczyński clothing…or is it a Kaczyński wolf in New Labour clothing? Either way, the slogan ‘Law and Justice’ really does sum it up.

Update June 3, 2009: The Guardian has published an excellent article whose title says it all:
‘Anti-gay, climate change deniers: meet David Cameron’s new friends’

References

1) ‘Exist stage right: the pledge to quit big party alliance that haunts David Cameron’, in Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/29/david-cameron-european-parliament-epp-ed, accessed May 30, 2009.