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Update Monday evening: Well that was jumping the gun a bit, wasn’t it? I’ll leave this post up as a reminder that I can get it spectacularly wrong as well as right.

In thinking about selection of the next Speaker of the House of Commons today, my thoughts immediately turned to the career of Earl Warren, the legendary US Chief Justice who served from 1953 to 1969. Prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court Warren had been Republican Governer of California in the 1940s, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate in 1948 and had run to be the Republican candidate for US President in 1952, eventually withdrawing from the nomination race in favour of General Dwight Eisenhower, apparently having been promised appointment to the Supreme Court.

Eisenhower made good on a deal and Warren became Chief Justice in 1953. Warren was a Republican and as Attorney General in Califonia had a reputation for being tough on crime and had vigorously supported the notorious policy of internment of Japanese citizens during the Second World War. Eisenhower fully expected to have appointed a conservative Chief Justice, saying “he represents the kind of political, economic, and social thinking that I believe we need on the Supreme Court…. He has a national name for integrity, uprightness, and courage that, again, I believe we need on the Court”.

As it turned out the Warren court was one of the most liberal (in the American sense, meaning left-leaning) in history. Among its landmark decisions were

- Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which banned the segregation of public schools;

- Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which required that certain rights of a person being interrogated while in police custody be clearly explained, including the right to an attorney (even now referred to as “Miranda Rights”).

- Loving v. Virginia, (1967), which allowed inter-racial marriage, over turning the Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

During the turmoil of the civil rights movement and the counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s, the Supreme Court under Earl Warren was a thoroughly progressive force, radically reinterpreting the US Constititon for the modern age. President Eisenhower is said to have considered the appointment of Earl Warren as “the biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made.”

Although they are the pinacles of different branches of government in different countries and constitutional systems, there is one key similarity between the post of Speaker of the House of Commons and the US Chief Justice. They are essentially ‘for life’ appointments. It is extremely rare that for the Speaker to be removed from office. Hapless Michael Martin was only the second speaker in the history of Parliament to be forced to resign and the House is extremely unlikely to repeat the performance with his successor. The upside of for-life appointments is that the holder of the post is absolutely free to do what he believes to be right. The downside is that the holders of for-life posts can ‘go native’ and if they do, there’s very little that can be done about it.

Eisenhower chose Warren because he thought he would advance a conservative agenda in the Supreme Court. It is said that the campaign by the Labour whips to have Margaret Beckett elected Speaker is because they expect her to be a loyalist who will resist the clamour for root and branch reform of Parliament: changes that are likely only to reduce the formal (and informal) powers of the whips (both government and opposition) to exert control over MPs and run the business of the House. It’s said that Mrs Beckett is the only canditate who has not to endorsed plans to remove the powers of patronage from the Whips’ Offices — so that MPs, rather than party whips, would choose the chairmen of select committees.

It’s fair to say that since 1997 Margaret Beckett has shown herself to be a Labour loyalist and a ’safe pair of hands’. She has at various times under Blair and Brown been appointed as ‘Minister for the Today Programme’ and has performed well in this role. It’s true that as Foreign Secretary, she appeared to lack interest in international affairs and didn’t gel with the Foreign Office mandarins, but apart from that, most observers would say she has been among the most competent of Labour cabinet ministers. Observing her countenance in recent years, it’s very hard to think that she backed Tony Benn against Denis Healy in the extremely divisive contest for deputy leader in 1981.

Re-elected to Parliament in 1983, having lost her seat in 1979, she moved from the hard left towards the reformist centre-right of the Party and became a core member of a reformist ’slate’ in the shadow cabinet elections of the late 1980s and 1990s that comprised those who would become the core of the cabinet of Labour’s first term. The success of this slate is among the proudest political achievements of Nick Brown, the current Labour Chief Whip, and leading backer of Beckett for the role of Speaker. I worked for Nick as a parliamentary researcher (1994-97) and a Special Adviser (1999-2001). It is said that Nick began pushing the idea of Beckett as Speaker quite some time ago and that the recent Ministerial reshuffle freed her to run for the job.

Their political friendship probably dates from 1994 when Nick ran her (doomed) campaign for Leader of the Labour Party. I don’t think she really ever expected to win but having served as acting leader for three months after the death of John Smith she thought it was the right thing to do to run for the job and believed it was important that at least one of the candidates was a woman. When Tony Blair was elected Leader, Mrs Beckett was appointed shadow Health Secretary and Nick her deputy (a posting he occasionally referred to as ‘the gulag’). As a junior staffer on Labour’s health team for 12 months I was able to observe Mrs Beckett at close quarters. I found her incredibly civil, very well-organised and possessws of a thoroughness bordering on the forensic. She didn’t suffer fools and I can say that I’ve never met someone as gifted at running brisk and efficient meetings. As Nick once put it to me, ‘a class act’.

I remember one time when I did have a little bit of an argument with Mrs Beckett, at a dinner at Labour party conference. I had recently recently returned after two years in the United States at UC Berkeley, and was lamenting the near-dicatatorial powers of “the Crown in Parliament’ and arguing for greater powers for the legislature. She argued that at general elections the British people elect governments and governments ought to be able to get their programmes through parliament. It is an intellectually coherent position and, from the perspective of a Minister of the Crown, a very ‘loyal’ one too. Intellectual coherence and loyalty are two of Mrs Beckett’s strongest suits.

It is obvious to me that Mrs Beckett has the sharpness of mind (and of tongue) to command the respect of the House in way that Michael Martin never really could. She also knows right from wrong, which is not something that could always be said of Speaker Martin. Speaker Beckett could be relied up on to broker a solid cross-party deal on expenses and to clean up the current mess.

But the most important question is this: in the role of Speaker, would Mrs Beckett show her first loyalty to Government or to Parliament? At things stand, it’s a minority view, but my intution tells me it will be the latter. If she is keeping her reformist powder dry, it’s because she knows that before anything, she has to get herself elected. As a Minister, though undoubtedly a safe pair of hands, she never really ‘branded’ any new policies as her own. It’s hard to look at any of the achievements of the last ten years and say “that’s what Margaret Beckett did”. She lacks the ego to indulge in so-called Legacy Shopping (which, on balance, is to her credit) but she’ll be very much aware that becoming speaker is always a final job for a politician. Active at the highest levels in politics for more than four decades, this will be her last chance to leave her mark. If the Labour and Tory whips are thinking that Mrs Beckett is a ’status quo plus’ candidate who will be good enough to sort out the expenses mess but ultimately will not seek to reassert Parliament’s role in the governing of the country, they could be in for a surprise. They woud do well to remember Earl Warren.

Last week I ruffled a few feathers with a post about the sorry state of Labour and the internet. One of my main points was that Labour seemed to be drawn into a battle of the blogs and was neglecting investment in a responsive email campaign. Thomas Gensemer, founder of Blue State Digital, the firm which helped run Barack Obama’s online campaign for the US Presidency, gave a talk a couple of days later at City University. He made the same point. Hopefully City will publish a video of the talk before too long. I watched it live on the web stream and it was compelling. Click on the image below to watch the talk.

Gensemer really understands this stuff. If only someone in the Labour Party did too.

It’s taken thirty-six years but last week it finally happened. I found myself - however I might wish for it to be otherwise - agreeing with an article in the Daily Mail. It was a stingingly accurate critique of the Labourlist group blog which has been online for a while now but was ‘launched’ last Thursday.

Labourlist is not something that I would normally spare much thought about. I’ve been happy to drift away from the day-to-day dogfights of British politics since I stood down as a Special Adviser at the 2001 General Election in an effort to reclaim my life and start up some of my own projects. But I have found something sickly compelling about the way Labourlist has unfolded into a tragi-comedy that reveals more than it should about the troubled relationship the Labour Party has with the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. Four of his predecessors have been killed while in office and there have been near-miss assasination attempts on six others. There have been abortive or ham-fisted attempts on their lives of a further five Presidents. President Obama has, by my reckoning, at least a one in four chance of facing the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Each month the Mayor of London faces a grilling from the London Assembly, a kind of Mayor’s Question Time. It lasts up to a few hours and there is a webcast of it. But the image quality is spectacularly bad:

I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about ‘faceless officialdom’. It’s only recognisable as Boris Johnson by his trademark shock of blonde hair. And this is not just a one-off error, ALL the GLA webcasts are like this, with the faces blurred out like they used to do when represenatives of Sinn Féin were on the TV. You wouldn’t know it, but here is my representative on the GLA Val Shawcross chairing the Transport Scrutiny Committee on 9 September 2008:

Compare London’s foggy blur with the very clear feed of Prime Minister’s Questions:

The Mayor’s Question Time ought to be a showcase event for democratically holding to account the man who runs the world’s greatest city. You’d think they could set up a half-decent camera, and give its lens a wipe every now and then, wouldn’t you?

Make no mistake, I thought Gordon Brown’s speech today at the Labour Party Conference was his best for a decade. With all the pressure on him from the economic downturn, flatlining opinion polls and the machinations of rebel Labour MPs, he did a great job of balancing the essential elements of a good Leader’s speech: the personal story, a couple of mildly self-deprecating jokes, ‘fessing up to past mistakes and shortcomings, relating a single big theme (fairness) to real life situations, giving the opposition a good thrashing and generally helping the party feel good about itself. But one phrase that struck a strange note with me: ‘new age’ - a concept so central to the overall message that it even features in the speech’s notional title: “A Fair Britain for the New Age”. I thought I’d investigate. Read the rest of this entry »

In a post earlier this week, I referred to my ‘weekly diet’ of podcasts and I thought it was only fair to open up the larder. I have been podcasting the radio show I present since May 2005. Initially I didn’t know what podcasting was or how to do it. A kind listener explained and helped me set it up. For a long time I harboured suspicions that it was just something for the early adopters out there and was never going to go mainstream. That was until BBC Radio 4 issued an edict that presenters had to say the word ‘podcast’ every thirty seconds. In the past 6 months I’ve become a true convert, particularly on a three week solo cycle-camping trip in France, where spoken-word podcasts were regular evening listening. I’d add that not owning a television set also helps free up time for radio and podcast listening.

Just like blogs, there are a thousand awful and pointless podcasts out there for every one worth listening to. There’s also this thing called podfade, in which a podcast starts off really well then becomes less regular, less interesting before it runs silently into the sands of the presenter’s own guilt and self-loathing. In other words, not every podcast stays the course or lives up to its early promise. Then again, there are podcasts that get better with time, usually amateur productions in which the presenter(s) get more comfortable in the role and find their niche. In short, a lot of filtering, and scratching and sniffing is required. Beside the iTunes Music Store podcast area, a recommendation from a friend is probably the best way of finding out about what’s good.

It’s clear that not all of these are strictly speaking podcasts, rather radio broadcasts which are subsequently made available as podcasts. I don’t see that as a disqualification. So here goes, you can read the list after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Credit crunch, sub-prime mortgage, collateralised debt obligations… Obscure terms that now feature in everyday pub chatter, even more so after this week’s spectacular events involving the collapse of investment banks, unprecedented interventions by governments and a looming global economic downturn. But can you, hand on heart, say that you understand what the credit crunch really is, and where it came from and who’s to blame?

Fear not, for the brilliant radio series This American Life aired a superb hour-long documentary that tells the story of the US sub-prime mortgage bubble and bust as I’ve never heard it told before. From the people who were there, from the Wall Street bankers at the very top to the no income no asset borrowers at the very bottom. And all the middle-men in between. It’s a very human story of hope, greed, hubris and self-delusion.

The Giant Pool of Money show is highly recommended, not just as an explanation of the core cause of the seismic events of this week, but as an example of public service documentary radio at its very best. And it’s not just me that thinks so, according to the programme-makers it’s been listened to online by more than half a million people. It’s still available to listen again online. If you need any convincing, check out the first five mintes, on the link below:

Update 1: The success of The Giant Pool of Money has apparently led to National Public Radio launching a new podcast and blog about the global economy, called Planet Money. It’s presented by Adam Davidson from NPR (who worked with TAL’s Alex Blumberg on The Giant Pool of Money). Both men rank up there with Evan Davis of the BBC in terms of talent at explaining what the hell is going on out there in the miasma of global financial markets and relating it to real day-to-day economics. In just its first week the show has already featured some excellent guests and if they keep up this level of quality, Planet Money will find a regular spot on my weekly diet of podcasts.

Update 2: This American Life aired a second excellent collaboration with NPR the other week, this time dealing with the banking bail out. Listen over here.

The London Festival of Architecture goes from strength to strength and this year runs from 20 June to 20 July.

Along with the exhibitions, talks, guided walks, debates and parties there is a series of excellent architectural podwalks produced by Ruby Wright. I did one about my neighbourhood, entitled ‘Backstreets of Southwark’. It was featured on BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme on 14 June.

The walk passes both cutting edge and utilitarian architecture, secret pocket parks, an unconsecrated boneyard where 15,000 people lie buried, the wine bar where local magistrates go after hard day on the bench, the remains of the debtors prison where Charles Dickens’s father was banged up in 1824 and much more.

It’s about 2 miles long and starts and finishes at Southwark tube station, on the Jubilee Line. A map of the route (including a GPX trace) is over here.

Download including various file formats (128kb MP3, 64kb MP3, Ogg Vorbis) from here.

The confirmation of Barack Obama as the presumptive Democratic Party candidate for the 2008 presidential election is a historic moment in the history of black America. Previously I’ve posted audio recordings of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign in 1968 and Spiro Agnew’s vice-presidency. Now seems like a good time to turn to the record collection to remember the first black man to have run a major US city or to have been seriously considered for a presidential ticket: Carl B. Stokes. Read the rest of this entry »