Anthony Barnett (London, OK): My good friend Tom Nairn is back from his regular sojourn in Melbourne but has come down with the flu, whose symptoms this winter seem to be particularly vicious and lasting. Gasping down the phone he promised to write a piece about what he thinks Brown will do next. He is convinced that he will seek to win power without a proper election, by creating a government of national unity. If you will excuse the pun, this will cash in on the crisis. The inclusion of Vince Cable seems to be critical to the success of such a master-stroke, to be orchestrated by Mandelson, aka "Bobby". I was meditating this scenario when, blow me down, Vince wrote his pitch for just such a stitch-up in the Mail on Sunday. After he attacked David Cameron by name for "moral indignation several years too late", but sent a signal by not criticising Gordon Brown. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Frank Capra’s classic Hollywood movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, is going the art-house cinema rounds.  It is a gloriously schmaltzy movie in which George Bailey (James Stewart), a thoroughly decent man is brought so low by a malevolent small town capitalist that he contemplates a Christmas-time suicide.  However a portly guardian angel intervenes and shows him how badly Bedford Falls would have turned out without his good deeds.  The cinemas are trumpeting James Stewart’s performance in what they describe as a “sentimental testament to homely small-town moral values”.  Sentimental it is, but I think its values are rather more universal.  The film belongs to 1946 and is in a sense a reflection on America’s experience of recession in the 1930s and the public values that imbued the New Deal era. Out of duty George Bailey has taken over a mutual building society that builds decent homes for local people who would otherwise have to rent the capitalist’s unfit housing.  So here are values of mutuality and social concern.  The portrait of the town bereft of Bailey’s good works is a garish neo-liberal nightmare in which everyday goodwill is extinguished in a society driven by greed and suspicion.  I don’t want to over-egg the movie’s commitment to anything more than entertainment, and public policy in the US has certainly turned decisively away from the film’s values, homely or universal.  But there are themes here for the UK as well as the US as we both enter a recession that is going severely to challenge our societies and what remains of our postwar values.

Arthur Aughey (University of Ulster) reviews Irish Protestant Identities Edited by Mervyn Busteed, Frank Neal and Jonathan Tonge, Manchester University Press 2008 pp389 + xvii. In his careful response to the scholarly papers he concludes with a lesson for Gordon Brown that devolution, especially to Northern Ireland as it is now, has proundly altered what it means to be British - and that this can no longer be defined by the 'centre'.  This book of twenty-five chapters is a selection of papers presented at a conference organised by the British Association for Irish Studies held at the University of Salford in September 2005. An additional commissioned chapter deals with the fortunes of the two major Unionist parties since the Belfast Agreement of 1998, in particular tracking the transition of the Democratic Unionists from opposition to the ‘Trimble-Adams Pact’ to miraculous support for a Robinson-McGuinness Executive. Appropriately, the book retains the diversity of the papers’ subject matter and, in keeping with recent academic convention, there is no attempt to identify either the ‘mind’ of Protestant Ireland or its ‘character’. It is not the singularity of tradition but the plurality of experience which the editors try to convey and they do so successfully. One of the merits of the book is that it deals with Protestantism in southern as well as Northern Ireland and also considers the impact of Protestant migration to North America and Great Britain, along with the influence of the Orange Order in Scotland and England. It cannot provide a complete picture, of course, but it does provide a more subtle and honest one. This is to be welcomed since Protestantism in Ireland and specifically in Northern Ireland has often been the subject of crude stereotyping. Irish Protestant Identities, along with John Bew’s new study, The Glory of Being Britons (Irish Academic Press 2008), will be an indispensable source of reference for anyone interested in the history, politics and cultures of Irish Protestantism.    Read the rest of this post...

The main biographer of George Orwell never became a global figure like his subject. But Bernard Crick, who has just died at the age of 79, was a strange influence on New Labour and like many political thinkers on the left around the world, he struggled with the fate of socialism and its relationship to democracy. Here, Sunder Katwala, the current General Secretary of the Labour Party's oldest and most distinguished pressure group, the Fabian Society, lays claims to Crick's legacy of sharp engagement combing intellectual overview with practical (or potentially practical) politics. And in a brief comment openDemocracy founder Anthony Barnett differs in his estimation.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Twenty years ago this month, the New Statesman published Charter 88. Today, Charter's successor organisation Unlock Democracy is publishing a series of essays looking back at what has been achieved and what still needs to be done. Unlocking Democracy: 20 years of Charter 88 features contributions from leading campaigners, academics and politicians including the three main party leaders: Anthony Barnett; Geoffrey Bindman; Gordon Brown; David Cameron; Douglas Carswell; Louise Christian; Nick Clegg; Deborah Coles; Simon Davies; Brice Dickson; Peter Facey; Zac Goldsmith; Katherine Gundersen; Nick Herbert; Simon Hughes; John Jackson; Helena Kennedy; Helen Margetts; Bhikhu Parekh; Trevor Phillips; Alexandra Runswick; Helen Shaw; Trevor Smith; Alan Trench; Stuart Weir As Unlock Democracy notes, there have been major democratic reforms in the two decades since Charter 88, including Devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Human Rights Act, and the Freedom of Information Act. Yet the Charter's central goal of a written constitution remains unachieved, and the War on Terror has presented a new challenge to civil liberties. Read the rest of this post...

The ideas of a great 17th-century English Christian radical can still subvert power  

An MP's trauma has a personal meaning for openDemocracy's chair

The global financial crisis exposes anew the flaws of a British polity that resists democratic modernisation

Labour's surprise victory in the Glenrothes by-election bespeaks a new fluidity in Scottish politics, argues Gerry Hassan.

In an OK essay marking the US election, Gerry Hassan looks at how past presidential elections have played out on this side of the Atlantic.

Black and Asian candidates are making real - if slow - progress up Britain's political ladder too

Some may now hail the legacy of Enoch Powell's British nationalism, but his pessimistic vision was a recipe for greater strife, argues Sunder Katwala.

Washington and London's bailout plans are a lesson in democracy too

Britain's Parliament should reject an anti-terror proposal that dishonours all its citizens

Globality shrinks great-nationhood. The "big lads" are in trouble. Time to phone home...

A failing European social-democratic party chooses a new leader. Can he deliver? 

The other September 11th, the Chilean coup of 1973, may offer a clue to the current malaise of Britain's Labour Party.

The "think-tank" model no longer works for progressives. Why, and what next?

Scotland's leader has exposed the limits of nationalism as a response to neo-liberalism

In the latest contribution to OurKingdom's Labour after Brown debate, Jeremy Gilbert argues for Labour without neoliberalism.

Jeremy Gilbert, Anthony Barnett and Geoffrey Bindman extend OurKingdom's debate on the future of social democracy.

The Church of England has survived a test. But the arc of history still poses it a larger challenge

A Conservative politician's campaign for civil liberties offers democrats a historic opportunity

A vigorous contest between two leading authors over nation, diversity, agency, racism, change

How the "top secret" classification of security documents corrodes the trust of their protectors

Ireland's rejection of the European Union's "reform treaty" exposes a democratic deficit in Dublin as much as in Brussels

The British government's latest anti-terror proposal dishonours all citizens

A university colleague's arrest over downloaded research materials reflects a climate of fear

Boris Johnson's election demonstrates a wider public distaste for the very idea of politics

A lively London market offers a fresh view of the old story of England as a "heritage in danger"