Civil Liberties critics are 'out of touch' says Blair

Fascinating email exchange between Henry Porter and the Prime Minister. Tony Blair attacks his critics and pledges to go much further. He states that he 'would widen the police powers to seize the cash of suspected drug dealers, the cars they drive round in, and require them to prove they came by them, lawfully.' and promises to 'generally harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country.'

Here's debate in full: Britain's Liberties - The Great Debate

'The White Flight to the Right'

Interesting article on the alleged increase of suppport for the BNP amongst traditional working class Labour voters. The piece also suggests how confused and redundant the old notions of Left and Right have become when both Respect and the BNP are claiming to be the traditional voices of socialism.

'The White Flight to the Right'
Michael Collins

Rebuilding a Democratic Left

Interesting piece on Nick Cohen's blog. He has worked with Norman Geras to produce a manifesto for Progressive Politics. A renewal of political debate and values is much needed and welcome. Although personally, I think they are wrong to so narrowly define it as of the left. The best values are universal and beyond party politics.

The race betweeen culture and structure

V. interesting speech by John McWhorter that I happened to find on the American Enterprise Institue for Public Policy Research website. (You know, just a little light reading.)

Although it's specifically about black America it's well worth a look as it raises questions (and possible methodologies) that may apply beyond the scope of McWhorter's discussion.

Winning the Race

Beyond the Crisis in Black America
By John McWhorter

One of the main sources of the stalemate on the race question in America today is that among so many, it is considered a mark of enlightenment to understand that poor black Americans are incapable of playing a significant part in changing their own lives.

Instead, it is thought that external factors--mainly the economy and racism--have determined the fate of poor black Americans and always will. The fancy way of putting this is that black people’s problems are structural, i.e. due to flaws in societal structures. Adherents of the Structural notion are concentrated especially in academia: mastering its tenets is generally thought, in fact, to be a badge of mature insight and moral sophistication.

What especially alarms the Structural crowd is those who lack this purported sophistication, and venture to propose that the black community’s problems are due, at least in significant part, to entrenched behaviors that are not connected to the state of the GNP, how whites feel about blacks, or how level the playing field is. That is, the Structural crowd blanches at the thought that anyone supposes that poor black America’s problems are cultural rather than structural.

They are aware that the Cultural analysis is the more immediately intuitive one, most likely of the man on the street. Therefore, they see all expressions of the Cultural analysis as red meat to the untutored masses, threatening to undo their decades-long attempt to usher the public into what they suppose is precious wisdom only comprehensible via careful tutelage.

This is why Bill Cosby’s grouchy call for poor blacks to take responsibility for themselves was received with such fury by so many in the black punditocracy, even inspiring a book-length disquisition by the University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Eric Dyson. Cosby was exemplifying precisely what the Structural crowd consider backwards and unkind--and heaven forbid, in a very public forum where Joe Barstool could hear it.

This is why so often black people appear to be closed to simple differences of opinion on race. To Structural adherents, the Cultural idea is not just a different viewpoint, but a punitive, abusive one, accusing people of responsibility for problems imposed upon them by The Man. To point to culture in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, then, is to assail a struggling black person who already has enough on his plate because of the eternal, grinding depredations of the Structure.

Indeed, the Structural analysis is commonly expressed amidst indignation, name-calling, and rhetorical language. These are signs that the analysis is based not on sober engagement with the full range of relevant facts and a constant commitment to learning new things and assessing them logically, but on emotion. A purported analysis of race and society that is based on emotion has little chance of corresponding more than approximately to reality, and in my research, I have found it impossible to avoid the conclusion so many others have reached: that the Structural analysis has a grain of truth in it and then some, but that in 2006, poor black America’s main problems are cultural.

Read on.