Crisis after crisis from Greece to Calais and the Mediterranean have dented the Left's belief in a European future - but they show internationalism is needed more than ever

The agreement between Greece and its European creditors has sent ripples spreading outwards across the continent. Greece, despite its comprehensive referendum rejection of austerity, has nonetheless been forced to accept harsh terms and without debt relief will still face more trouble in the long run (Smith & Stewart, 2015).

That forced capitulation has dented the belief of the Left, and of the radical Left in particular, that it can challenge and overcome the dominant neoliberal austerian narrative. That feeling of powerlessness has clearly shaken the Left's commitment to a future in Europe - though there are those such as Caroline Lucas who are argue that reform, not surrender, of the EU is still the way forward.

In Spain, Podemos - the radical Left party seen as equivalent to Greece's Syriza - has suffered from a slump in the polls (Nixon, 2015), while the mainstream Left, across Europe, is stumbling. Even Denmark's Social Democratic government, under Helle Thorning-Schmidt, has fallen (BBC, 2015). That leaves just eight EU countries with Left-of-Centre governments (Nardelli & Arnett, 2015 - including Italy and France.

There are those who have begun to argue, in the UK, for a 'Lexit' campaign, focussing upon a Left-wing scepticism towards the European project (Jones, 2015) - on a campaign critical of 'European' austerity politics.

The trouble with that assessment is that it ignores how 'Europe', and its institutions, have simply been the vehicle, rather than the originator and pusher, of the neoliberal agenda (Chessum, 2015).

"European project has been used by capital, and national governments which represent that capital, to make the poor pay for the economic crisis, and to bring down left wing governments where they seek to prevent this. With European politics at a crossroads, it is vital that the British left focusses on the real task at hand – building a radical political alternative that can challenge these forces – and not just on building an obsession with fighting the super-structure of the European Union."

National, social and fiscal conservative governments have used their positions on the European Council - the assembled representatives of the EU member states - to roll out their austerian economic scheme (Lucas, 2015).

"With the European council made up of ministers from each member state, it often simply reflects the prevailing currents in European politics. The imposition of austerity in Greece – forcing a population to pay the price for a crisis they didn’t cause – is simply an extension of an economic logic that spans our continent."

Caroline Lucas has argued that simply lashing out the EU itself isn't enough and isn't directing the blame where it really lies (Lucas, 2015). Lucas argues that the aim should be, instead, to reform the Union.

Amongst Europe's mainstream Leftists too, there are still those who are arguing for more European integration. Pier Carlo Padoan, Italy’s finance minister, wants new movement towards EU political union to be seen as the solution to the problem of national conservative member-state governments using the EU to impose their terms on Greece (The Economist, 2015).

That 'stay and fight for reform' mentality has been also been picked up by anti-austerity Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn (Watt & Wintour, 2015). After being pressured to make his position clear on Europe, Corbyn said that Labour should work with European allies for reform.

In a Europe where the dehumanisation of migrants and refugees (Elgot & Taylor, 2015) and Far-Right rhetoric (Mudde, 2015) are on the rise, the answer cannot be to retreat. For the Left, walking away means giving up on internationalism and solidarity.

Instead, the priority must be to reclaim Europe. To reform its institutions, around internationalism and humanitarianism, and return to Europe a spirit of coordination and cooperation - an energy that desperately needs to felt, all across the continent, from Greece to Calais and the Mediterranean.

As Labour divisions fuel fears of a 1980s SDP-style split, it's worth noting that Tony Blair could have prevented this crisis

Tony Blair at Oslo in 2011, in his role as Middle East Envoy. Photograph: Jonas Gahr Støre og Tony Blair via photopin (license) (cropped)

As, probably, a rather dramatic over reaction, it has been suggested that the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the new Labour leader could lead to a split in the party. His election to power representing the party's Left-wing, it is said, could lead to another breakaway akin to that of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 1980s.

That split was led by Centre-Right, liberal and pro-European members of Labour, known as the Gang of Four - namely David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers. That group left to form a new centre party, the SDP, in response to the rise of a Left-wing faction under Tony Benn and Michael Foot, when they found themselves unwilling to follow an overbearing Right-wing faction under Denis Healey.

The formation of the breakaway party almost saw Labour drop to third in the popular vote when the SDP, in their alliance (which later became a merger) with the Liberals, took 25% of the vote in 1983. But there was a time when such a split may not have been so bad of a thing for the Labour Party, for socialists, for trade unionists or for British politics.

In the 1990s, Tony Blair came to power in the Labour party and began his 'modernising' project. So strong was his position, he was able to rewrite fundamental elements of the party constitution to allow himself greater freedom of means in achieving the party's democratic socialist ends - his so-called Clause IV Moment.

At its peak, Blair's 'Third Way' New Labour held 418 seats in the House of Commons, had the support of the Liberal Democrats and benefited from the defection of a good number of moderate Conservatives. Only a few steps shy of completing this project, Blair stopped short. Blair could have created a new, broad, Centre party - a UK Democratic Party - that might have absorbed Tory and Labour moderates alike into a new, more progressive, establishment party. Instead, he left Labour in no man's land.

Labour have become a party of professional, pro-establishment, besuited politicians, who won't give up their connections trade unions and Left-wing politics even as they preaches Right-wing economics to an electorate turned cold. The hypocrisy inherent in falling short of a full transformation, by trying to have it both ways, has seen the party's idealistic Left-wing base fragment, scattering into a hundred different parties. The party is bleeding away its identity.

It does now seem as if progressives - of all stripes - may have been substantially better off had Blair, in fact, succeeded in his attempt to modernise the Labour Party into a moderate, centrist, democratic party. Not because Blair's professional Centrism offers a particular boon to progressive politics, but rather because the waters of the Labour Party's identity would not have become so muddy.

The socialists and trade unionists of Labour's left might have become a consolidated rump, a solid, united, party that could have kept together the various disparate socialist parties. It might have been a strong and idealistic voice, alongside Charles Kennedy's Liberal Democrats, to the Left of Blair's Centrist democrats - a loud progressive anchor, like Sinistra Ecologia Liberta in Italy, to the Left of their own Democrats, or as the SNP have sought to cast themselves.

Maybe Blair's democratic party would have had the courage to introduce proportional representation - ultimately reducing the Conservative to a Far-Right rump, powerless in the face of the support for the Centre and Left. Maybe there would not have been two elections with Labour scrambling ever Rightwards in their desperation to avoid losing power.

Blair's failure to follow through, along with his more controversial decisions, helped to lay the foundations of the Left's fragmentation. Left-leaning voters, who want to vote 'true to themselves' (Freedland, 2015), have found themselves disillusioned or cast adrift as first Labour and then the Lib Dems sought the Centre-ground in the hope of getting into power.

Yet the progressive parties can still recover. Labour remains the largest Left-leaning party and would need to be at the heart of any recovery. Labour's various factions, if they could work together under a new leader, would be the central pillar of Caroline Lucas' proposed progressive alliance for 2020 - which will likely be the best hope for the Left's election chances.

A pact would need to put electoral reform at the heart of its campaign and aim to confine the iniquities of the UK's political system - that force the creation of these alienating big tents that prevent truly representative elections - to the past. From that point on, the Left could be true to itself. There could be multiple parties, of socialists and liberals, greens and radicals, without each hurting the election chances of the other.

It might end the stifling of legitimate political voices, that denies voters the opportunity to make clear their priorities. The Left could still then work together in government, in the spirit of co-operation and consensus for the common good, to ensure that we do not again have a government of narrow interests ruling on just a third of the vote.

Labour's woes continue as the party splits over welfare cuts - where is their unifying idea?

The Labour Party is in the midst of an identity crisis. Two election defeats seem to have completely sapped the party of self-belief and bold ideas and now the party is divided over the merits of the Tory Chancellor's cuts (Perraudin, 2015).

Labour are struggling to come up with a convincing alternative narrative to the one George Osborne is using to bulldoze his way through the public sector. That struggle is pulling the party apart into distinct factions.

Yet a big internal squabble might actually be, in the end, rejuvenating.

The factions in that fight a pretty familiar. There is the New Labour mainstream - a majority of which seem to be more Brownite than Blairite, following the school of Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband. These are the moderates and modernisers, represented by Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper in the leadership race.

To the Right of the mainstream modernisers there is a faction that has gone under several names, Blue Labour and One Nation Labour in particular. This is the wing of the party, represented by Liz Kendall in the leadership race, that wants Labour to embrace working class conservatism, along with the Far-Right themes of anti-immigration and clampdowns on welfare.

It is also clear that there is a small but significant number of Labour MPs, at the moment with Jeremy Corbyn as their ringleader, who are significantly to the Left of the Labour mainstream. They have stood here against welfare cuts here and Corbyn's leadership campaign has firmly embraced the broader anti-austerity movement.

How this division is healed will depend upon a lot of factors, internal and external to the party. But it is a state of affairs that must ultimately be settled. Labour's determination to be a big tent has largely suppressed or alienated voters on the Left, driving many of them away - particularly in Scotland.

If the moderate or Right-wing faction wins out, how much longer will its Left-wing remain bottled? If the Left-wing wins out, will the mainstream fall in line?

In the face of these issues, there are predictions that Labour faces an extended stay in the wilderness (Moss, 2015). One of the few ways back would encompass a major change of direction: embracing the proposed progressive pact in England and embracing electoral reform that can ensure representative government, showing that Labour is finally working to work co-operatively with others on the Left.

Yet for many progressives, who would have been taking hope from Caroline Lucas' progressive alliance proposal (Lucas, 2015), there will have been an ironically collective sigh of despair when Labour's tendency to give in to populism struck again - this time in the form of Harriet Harman (Wintour, 2015):

"We cannot simply say to the public: you were wrong..."

Why not? What exactly is the point of an opposition party, many on the Left will be asking, is if it isn't going to oppose?

If the party are just going to argue for the same policies as the Tories, differing only on who is better equipped to administer them, then are Labour and the Conservatives anything more than two squabbling factions of essentially the same party?

And if the party is just going to be a reflection of popular opinion, then does it even stand for anything? Where is the belief, the ideology, the theory?

That only produces an image of a Labour Party more interested in power than standing for something. It wants to build trust through sycophancy, not through ideas, theory, facts and reason.

While in the US, Bernie Sanders is proposing a push of support for trade unions, worker-owned co-operatives and the living wage (O'Hara, 2015), Labour are getting themselves in a political twist over whether or not to support Conservative cuts to welfare set to have a disastrous effect on the poorest (White, 2015).

Labour's next leader has to find a way to navigate these splits, these contradictions and the party's overall idealistic emptiness (Hawkins, 2015). There are internal rifts to heal and the Centre-Left of the political spectrum filled with alternatives to navigate. The leadership race itself, with its warts and all exposure of the party's factions is a helpful start in the process of reconciliation.

For the external matters, co-operation is surely Labour and the Left's best hope of opposing the Conservatives on big progressive issues like human rights and electoral reform. For the party's internal struggle, the answer can only be found by digging deep. By looking for the roots of what unites Labour supporters of all stripes and all those allied to the socialist and democratic movement.

To, humbly, get the ball rolling, here one word that offers a place to start: Justice.

Liberals have liberty. Greens have sustainability. With these words, and the ideas they represent, they can construct coherent tests for any policy. Labour seem to lost their connection to a simple and fundamental idea that would underwrite social democratic and democratic socialist analysis, and so their ability to construct a meaningful and consistent narrative.

The new leader of the Labour Party, to be announced in September, has to reclaim a unifying idea - like Justice - if they are to lead the party back out of the fractious wilderness.

George Osborne's appeal for progressives to back his 'reforms' cover an attempt to dismantle compassionate social security

An old branch of the Job Centre in London. Photograph: DSC_0107.JPG via photopin (license) (cropped)

In The Guardian on Sunday, George Osborne made an appeal to progressives and Labour Party MPs to get behind his welfare 'reforms' (Osborne, 2015).

"We are saying to working people: our new national living wage will ensure you get a decent day’s pay, but there are going to be fewer taxpayer-funded benefits.... I believe this settlement represents the new centre of British politics, and appeal to progressive MPs on all sides to support us."

Yet even as Osborne attempted this appeal to 'moderates' with his new 'Centre', Conservative ministers were floating policy ideas that made it clear the party is not content to settle for just the latest round of austerity cutbacks.

While it has become abundantly clear that austerity is the long term economic plan that the Conservative leadership has taken pains to remind us of, ad nauseum, the ambitious extent to which that plan would be extended was not.

As far back as 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron was telling guests at the Lord Mayor's dinner that austerity measures would, in the end, produce a 'leaner' state permanently (Watt, 2013). The first Conservative budget, divorced from the Liberal Democrat obstructions, then arrived with a prelude from Cameron, announcing his wish for a 'higher wage, lower welfare, lower tax' society (BBC, 2015).

But even the budget, with its cuts to welfare - which have been variously criticised as driving divisions between the old and the young (McVeigh & Helm, 2015), between men and women (Watt & Perraudin, 2015), and between the rich and poor (May, 2015) - only mask a more fundamental change being pursued.

There is a project under way to comprehensively deconstruct the welfare state and the principles upon which it was founded. From the NHS (Campbell, 2015), to welfare (Mason, 2015), to even the post office (Macalister, 2015) and public broadcasting (Perraudin, 2015), the public sector is faced with being stripped back and undone - with tax funding for services being replaced with fees charged to the 'consuming' individuals.

The big question is why? Looking beyond the temptation to suggest a colourful variety of reasons involving detached selfishness and collusion with vested interests, what ideological and theoretical motivations are there to dismantle the systems of social security?

The word that comes up, again and again, is dependency.

From around the 1970s, modern conservatism began to form itself around the long abandoned ideas of classical liberalism, absorbing its priorities of laissez-faire, that is non-intervention, and meritocracy. Those principles are used as the theoretical underpinning of a low tax, low regulation and low equality modern conservative economic system, that acts as the social framework for advancing certain deeply ideological values.

The stated aim is to encourage self-interest, or greed as Boris Johnson championed it (Watt, 2013{2}), while discouraging dependence. It is in particular dependence which these modern conservatives see as the danger inherent to systems of welfare and social security.

The practical application means divorcing the state, acting on behalf of society and particularly of its richest members, from the responsibility of securing the wellbeing of the individual members of society - passing that duty off onto the individuals themselves. Through this means, neoliberal conservatives aim to drive individuals to self-interested action, where their productive work directly links to their social security and makes them wholly dependent upon themselves.

What they do not seem to grasp is that the idea of paid work, in the form of productive labour - with success and wealth marked as the result individual character, and failure and poverty as likewise the result of a personal fecklessness - is a deeply moralistic and ideological viewpoint of how society should function.

The facts do not bear out these moral and ideological beliefs. If you are born poor, the statistics say you will likely remain poor (Harrison, 2013). Whatever merit based rewards that the market might offer are suppressed or distorted by very real social conditions. Liberties and rights become privileges far out of reach for most individuals, who are reduced to factors of production competing with each other for survival.

So busy are neoliberal modern conservatives in trying to avoid dependency (George & Wilding, 1994) - and an escalating collectivism that they fear it would lead to - they ignore, are blind to, or outright disavow, the necessity of facilitating opportunity, for competition to actually be fair and so produce meaningful outcomes, or facilitating justice, where members of community are fairly supported and rewarded for the competitive exploitation of what ultimately belongs to the community.

Neoliberalism also undermines two important factors in any progressive state: social cohesion and the principle of universality. Through progressive tax contributions that pay for general use public services, society is bound in a common obligation (Peston, 2015). A portion of what is made by the individual through the exploitation of other individuals and of community resources, is used to fund care and support for the whole community.

The public sector, from healthcare to education, represents the individual members of society pooling their funds to provide a universal service. Everyone, who can, pays in and everyone benefits, regardless of their bank account, from freely accessible services. Communities, and society at large, are brought together on the basis of compassion, acknowledging the inherent value of one member of a society to another - with each member benefiting from the education of another and from their wellbeing, healthy and free from poverty.

Neoliberalism is neither post-ideological nor centrist. It carries very definite social aims that are focussed squarely upon the destruction of this consensus. In its place is put a highly moralised version of earning a living, where working for pay - however degrading and insufficient - is no longer a necessary sufferance, which radical reforming governments attempt to alleviate, but the focal point of an individual's life and a  marker of their worth (O'Hagan, 2012).

At a time when people are talking seriously of abolishing poverty (Ban Ki-moon, 2015), are rolling out trials of the basic income (Perry, 2015) and discussing the possibilities of a post-capitalist society based on abundance (Mason, 2015), George Osborne is trying to implement a system designed to entrench the old world - and he wants the help of progressives in rewriting that script.

But whatever iniquities the welfare state may have, including its cost, what is there to consider progressive about coercing people into paid employment, however degrading, with the threat of impoverishment? The classical liberals of old were left behind by the modern liberals (1928), who moved on to say:

"We believe with a passionate faith that the end of all political and economic action is not the perfecting or the perpetuation of this or that piece of mechanism or organisation, but that individual men and women may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

Dignity and self-esteem come from autonomy - which is a far throw from a life lived supported by the ever insecure low pay scraped together from working in poor conditions for exploitative employers. The austerity agenda will not achieve them for any but the very few.

Tory government back down on Foxhunting exposes the lie of the stable majority

For now at least, the Foxhunting ban remains. Photograph: Fox Grooming via photopin (license) (cropped)

In response to the SNP making clear that it would opposed a relaxing of the laws on foxhunting, the Conservative government has withdrawn the vote it set on the issue (Mason, 2015). A vote had originally been scheduled for Wednesday (BBC, 2015), with the government accused of attempting to bring back foxhunting by the back door (Mason & Brooks, 2015).

The Conservative response in the media will likely be to cry foul on the SNP involving themselves in 'English affairs' (Mason & Brooks, 2015{2}; Jenkins, 2015). But the reality is that internal division is what has stopped this vote from going ahead - divisions that expose the lie of the stable majority.

With a majority in the Commons, the Conservatives should have been able to pass their 'relaxation' of the law. However they faced opposition from both backbenchers, and even ministers, within their own ranks (Helm, 2015).

Foxhunting is just the latest issue to expose the lie of majority rule, with a fragile Conservative government facing constant risks of internal rebellion. What is particularly notable, is that it is the more moderate Conservatives who are causing them so much trouble.

Under the Coalition, many of the more extreme Tory policies never even saw the light of day. The issues on which moderates are rebelling - including a threatened withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights Convention (Watt, 2015) and misrepresenting Britain's relationship with Europe (May, 2015) - were all options opposed and suppressed by the Liberal Democrats.

In fact, most of the struggles Cameron's Ministry have faced over their first two months in office have, seemingly against expectation (Cowley, 2015), come opposition from their moderate wing. The moderates seem to be working overtime to make up for the absence of a liberal influence in restraining the reactionary Far-Right.

Is it possible that they now feel that they took the Liberal Democrats for granted? Are they maybe beginning to regret the electoral strategy of directly assaulting their former coalition partners?

The compromises of the Coalition served the Conservatives well in allowing them to portray themselves as reasonable and responsible. Foxhunting is one of the issues that could undo all of that very quickly and return the toxicity to the Conservative 'brand' (Platt, 2015; Gosden et al, 2015).

Between the toxic nature of extremism and the internal factional divisions, here, exposed, are the flaws of majority government. Handed a virtual five year dictatorship - as long as they can keep their numbers together - there is nothing but self-restraint to prevent parties veering into their own extreme corners, and alienating the usually large proportion of the population who did not vote them into to power.

That power is on display in the matter of foxhunting, which the Tories apparently plan on returning to again in the autumn, once they have introduced their plans for Evel - English votes for English laws (Mason, 2015). The majority party hasn't gotten its way, so it is changing the rules.

Even if you accept the inequality of majority rule on the basis of 36% of the vote - and less than 25% of all eligible voters - internal divisions afflicting the Conservatives show that the system reflects no unanimity..

With electoral reform there might at least be a more honest exploration of beliefs through smaller parties, than found in squabbling big tents. There would also be hope for governments that would be based on a compromise that is representative of the views of broad parts of society - not simply imposing the will of a loud minority on everyone else.

The fiscal politics of Osborne and Merkel are a retreat to the Nineteenth Century - fortunately we find Oscar Wilde there reminding us why we need to resist

In The Soul of Man, Oscar Wilde warns against impertinent attempts to tyrannise over the lives of those to whom support is extended. Photograph: Oscar Wilde via photopin (license) (cropped)

When looking at the harsh terms laid before Greece, as the conditions for the aid it needs (Traynor et al, 2015), it's hard not to draw comparisons with five years of budgets authored by George Osborne and welfare policy managed by Iain Duncan Smith.

The Osborne-Duncan Smith approach has been to make harsh cutbacks in funding for welfare and offer harsh terms of compliance for receipt of what little is available  (Stewart & Wintour, 2015; Malik, 2013). Greece has been offered much the same austerian deal by European leaders, headed by Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel.

After all of the poverty and destitution, with support shrinking under the weight of austerity cuts, there came one more indignity: conservative European leaders demanding that Greece effectively surrender its fiscal sovereignty. The proposal seems almost like something out of Victorian England, where the charitable would offer, as Oscar Wilde describes:

"a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives."

France's Socialist President Hollande apparently spent considerable effort trying to wrangle a deal out of Chancellor Merkel, only for the deal that emerged to be something unlikely to achieve much more than incite further resistance - as seen by #ThisIsACoup trending on twitter. Italian Premier Matteo Renzi, of the Centre-Left Partito Democratico, has also been open in his opposition to austerian attempts to further humble or humiliate Greece (Ekathimerini, 2015).

However, there were others who did not want to extend any assistance at all and appeared more favourable to Greece being shown the Eurozone door (Traynor & Rankin, 2015).

Between the UK Conservative Party, and its trimming away of social security, and the conservative leaders of the Eurozone, there seems to be more concern for a kind of narrow and ideological fiscal rectitude than for the alleviation of suffering, for either individuals or communities. A society where freedoms reduced to a framework within which we must compete for dignity. It's like the nineteenth century conservative-liberal French Premier Francois Guizot has returned.

When challenged by radicals over suffrage being restricted to a propertied elite, he responded with the words "enrichissez-vous". That is, "enrich yourselves". (Rapport, 2008). That social attitude seems to have returned, throughout Europe. It says: there is the ladder - your rights, liberties and hopes are at the top, as privileges to be attained - if you want what is enjoyed by the elites, climb and put yourself on their level.

That ideological composition can only function on an assumption that humans are equals, with failure as the exposure of a weakness of 'moral character' - all of which, of course, precludes incapacity or plain disagreement. The historical interest that the democratic Left has taken in equality of outcomes, and the liberal Left has taken in equality of opportunity, is not the result of people being equal. It is because they are not - and nor is the world in which they live.

As such, the Left has tried to resist these conservative narratives, where money comes first and limited support is only offered with conditions (Williams, 2015) - though often not resisted enough (Wintour, 2015), at least by the standards of Oscar Wilde:

"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue."

Europe and its spirit of internationalism and co-operation has been taken hostage. Austerian national conservatives have subsumed its values beneath fiscal conservatism and the 'national interest' (The Guardian, 2015).

Not only in Greece, but in the UK and the rest of Europe, the Left need to find an answer to the power of the politics of austerity. Part of that will be reclaiming Europe as a coordinator of positive, co-operative and democratic movements. The rest will be rising above rivalries to co-operate in pursuit of an alternative, one that puts the common good at the very heart of any fiscal plan - instead of leaving it on the periphery to be handled and fed by the invisible hand of the market.

Liberal Democrat Leadership Election: Who's who and what do they stand for?

The Liberal Democrat leadership election is the first step to recovery for a party whose voice is being missed in the campaign to protect human rights in Britain.

After the party's electoral collapse in May, the Liberal Democrats have run an accelerated campaign to elect a new leader to replace Nick Clegg. Voting will come to an end on 15th July and the results will be announced the following day.

Clegg's resignation has, dramatic as it was following the party's disastrous election night, been seen as a long delayed inevitability (Wintour & Watt, 2015). Ultimately, the decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives seems to have been something from which the party could not recover.

And yet, early indications suggest that the party nonetheless possesses an enduring appeal. Their presence is already being missed in the defence of civil rights and liberties (The Guardian, 2015), and council bye-elections are already being won (Steerpike, 2015).

However, their collapse has raised a question within the party, one that has importance for all of the parties across the Centre-Left (Kettle, 2015). Is the response to the election loss to move Left and embrace more idealistic positions, or to move Right and try to win voters away from the Conservatives directly?

For the Liberal Democrats this has been distilled into the nominated candidates. The candidate representing continuity with Clegg, seen as the Centrist and Centre-Right wing of the party which is concerned with being a practical party of government, is Norman Lamb. The more Left-leaning candidate, which in the case of the Lib Dems means embracing its campaigning and grassroots tendencies, is Tim Farron.

Norman Lamb

Norman Lamb served in the last government as a Minister of State for Care and Support, a position he pursued with a personal passion. He has made a point of vociferous campaigning on issues of mental health, and was deeply involved in the party's aims of putting mental health onto an equal footing with physical health (Lamb, 2015).

Lamb is very much the designated heir of the Centrist liberal faction that took the party into the Coalition - something reflected in the endorsements he has received, which include Clegg's closest supporter and former party leader Paddy Ashdown (Lindsay, 2015). Little can symbolise that more distinctly in the minds of voters than the fact that Lamb voted for the Coalition reforms to tuition fees (BBC, 2010).

So far Lamb has argued that the party should not retreat to its comfort zone (Lamb, 2015{2}), a sentiment likely reflected by those in the liberal centre. Yet, at the same time he argued for new ways to tackle economic inequality that are not based on old models of redistribution - singling out mutuals and social enterprises as things that liberals 'instinctively' support.

Tim Farron

Tim Farron remained aloof of the government during the last parliament, during which he served as the party president - a position from which he was often a voice critical towards the coalition (Greenwood, 2015). As might be expected, he voted against the coalition tuition fee changes (BBC, 2010).

The MP for Westmoreland and Lonsdale has received the endorsement of the party's more radical, campaigning, Left - including former leader David Steel, who was very critical of how the Coalition was handled (Steel, 2015) - and the leaders of the Welsh and Scottish Lib Dems (Perraudin, 2015). He also, notably, has the endorsement of both The Guardian and the New Statesman (The Guardian, 2015{2}; New Statesman, 2015).

Farron's main distinctive positions came up in the debate between the candidates at 2015 Conference of the Social Liberal Forum group (Lindsay, 2015{2}). He displayed his openness to liberals increasing taxes to fund public services and expressed a willingness, should he become leader, to not get into conflicts with the party conference policy making processes. Farron has also stressed his intention of rebuilding the parties grassroots and so increasing party membership 100,000 by 2020 (Farron, 2015).

Quiet establishment man or the problematic firebrand?

Voices in the social liberal and liberal centre wings of the party have their own reasons for leaning either way. Those in the liberal centre argue that there is value in the consistency of remaining in the Centre, from which the party's only opportunities to make its policies a reality will come through coalition with the Conservatives or with Labour (Tall, 2015).

For social liberals, however, there were important things ignored by the party leadership from 2010 onwards (Howarth, 2015; Smith, 2015). They argue that the leadership abandoned the radical Left-of-Centre causes and ideals, upon which they had been elected, in favour of a Centrist coalitionism - built around stability, unity and the embrace of a Toryism-lite - for which they had no mandate and were duly punished.

The Guardian has argued that there is a need for a figure who can lead a 'charismatic insurgency' (The Guardian, 2015{2}). But there are also warnings against the danger of traumatised parties electing 'feel good', comfort zone, candidates (Kettle, 2015). That need for a comfort zone candidate may factor in if there is felt to be a strong need to distance the party from the previous leadership and its direction.

One way of ensuring that distance could be embracing the rebranding of the party, with talk going around of a possible name change. Changing the name of the party could be a powerful moment upon which to hang the interviews and coverage that would make clear how the Lib Dems have heard their critics and responded (Withnall, 2015). In that case, Tim Farron's detachment from the Coalition would seem to make him the more ideal candidate - and he has certainly floated the idea of a fresh start (Farron, 2015{2}).

Yet there remain lingering reservations about Farron, in regards to his seemingly anti-liberal personal stances on a number of pressing social issues from abortion to gay rights (Birrell, 2015). With the party desperately needing to regain trust and a consistent identity, his own inconsistency could well factor against him and the party.

Though Farron might suggest that these personal standings should have no bearing, it is hard to escape an overriding feeling that there is also a decision to be made between the candidates' different characters: the quiet and practical, though establishment, man or the problematic firebrand. It's as if liberals are once more being faced with the spectre of siding with Asquith or Lloyd George. A more easily unifying figure would have been preferable, such as Jo Swinson - who would surely have been a leading candidate had she retained her East Dunbartonshire seat.

Rebuilding trust

In The Guardian, back in 2006, the late Charles Kennedy argued that:

"Fewer people are joining political parties, yet single-issue pressure groups continue to flourish. Mass international movements - from opposition to the war in Iraq to last year's Live 8 - demonstrate how great issues and principles can still motivate on a huge scale. But somehow our current political culture seems unable to accommodate and address such concerns...

...The danger in all of this is that if sufficient people conclude that there is nothing in the conventional political process for them then they may opt for more simplistic and extreme options on offer. I remain an optimist. But across the mainstream political spectrum there is a candid recognition of the danger."

For Liberal Democrats, and liberals generally, this has become a matter of great importance. Regardless of who becomes party leader, their first task must be to regain political trust. That means carving out a distinctive position that the whole party can comfortably adhere to and, importantly, campaign on. It means opening the party to working with others for electoral and political reform and encouraging a progressive alliance, even if only informally.

From a pragmatic point of view, those will likely remain the priorities - for the moment at least. Anything else might simply lead to a division that would strip the party of any credibility it has left, which means that neither candidate is likely to pick a fight with the supporters of the other. As a result, the issues that arise between the Centre and Left strands of liberalism are likely to go unresolved in the present. This election will instead be about who leads, rather more than to what they lead the party.

Osborne Unchained: Don't be fooled by the living wage announcement - social security still faces dire Conservative cuts

It is particularly telling that, despite the Coalition government having announced the UK's annual budget back in March, George Osborne has seen fit to alter course only three months later. With the Conservatives now holding a majority in the Commons, unshackled from the influence of the Liberal Democrats, they were presented with the chance to drastically change the British state.

In the run up there were a number of changes expected. In what has been considered Osborne's determination to stop workers being dependent upon the state and, instead, dependent upon their employers (Wintour, 2015), it was believed that cuts to housing benefit and tax credits would be large parts of delivering his promised £12bn of welfare cuts (BBC, 2015; ITV, 2015).

Alongside criticism for considering the cuts to tax credits - condemned as punishing working people (White, 2015) - Osborne was also under pressure from both Labour and voices in his own party, such as Boris Johnson, over the top rate of tax (Mason, 2015). Johnson in particular has argued to cut the top rate as an incentive to businesses to introduce the living wage (Syal, 2015).

The big question would be how Osborne would go about tackling the big challenges of low pay and the high costs of housing.

Osborne's budget

In Osborne's actual budget announcement, he claimed to be focussing on the Conservative mantra of turning a 'low wage, high tax, high welfare' economy into a 'higher wage, lower tax, lower welfare' economy, and his announcements contained some big surprises (BBC, 2015{2}).

The first part of the budget was ensuring the government had enough money. Osborne announced policies aimed at closing some tax 'loopholes', including borrowing Labour's plan to end non-dom status, and the introduction of an extra surcharge on banks. But at the front of his speech,  Osborne stressed that the financial situation was bettered by higher than expected tax receipts and public sector asset sell-offs.

That was followed by measures that were supposed pay for themselves. Conservative manifesto plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m was included, to be paid for by ending pension tax relief for the wealthy pensioners. Premiums are also to be reformed for drivers, to raise funds for investment in the roads infrastructure.

Add to these the reform of certain taxes and the ending of certain subsidies, like tax credits for those on middle incomes, and the cumulative effect is a lot of tax rises. Those moves made room for the Conservatives to continued with the Lib Dem policy priority of raising the personal income tax allowance - £11,000 from next year and rising.

Yet those moves should also be a indication of how excessively ambitious the scale of cuts planned by the Conservatives had been. In addition to the scaling back of tax credits and subsidies for the better off, there were more restrictions on rises in pay for public sector workers and student maintenance grants are to be replaced by more loans.

Osborne's headline £12bn cuts to welfare were also there, with more cuts for under-21s, working benefits frozen for 4 years, including housing benefits, and the benefits cap being lowered  per household. That was in addition to a cut to tax credits that at first will affect mostly those on middle incomes, and then later those on the universal credit,  by reducing the amount you earn before the credit will be taken away.

Then came the big finish. One big - and fairly obviously Conservative move - was the cut in corporation tax - to 19% and falling. That constitutes a significant reduction in what big business is expected to contribute to the costs of society. That policy could only be in this budget with something to offset it. That comes in the form of two key policies, that are the Conservative response to the two main problems facing ordinary people.

The first of those is the fulfilment of the party's manifesto promise to expand housing association right-to-buy - as the Conservative way to address the cost of housing and the low numbers available out on the market.

The second was Osborne's pomp and ceremony, saved for the last, announcement of the introduction of a national living wage - which serves as the response to low wages.

The reality

Osborne's original plan had been for deep cuts to both spending and taxes. The reality has been deep cuts met by a net total of tax rises - seemingly accepting the arguments of austerity 'lite' and to an extent anti-austerity parties. So the Chancellor has already turned toward a partially different course.

But the two big problems facing most people - low wages and high housing costs - that had to be addressed, still represent a big difference between the Conservatives and their opponents.

The Conservative solutions seem to involve twinning the policies tackling the two big problems with attacks on the safety nets. Conservative rent-to-buy in social housing increases housing in private markets by raiding the social reserve and Osborne's plans to shift the burden of maintaining people on low incomes to their employers, comes twinned with the reduction of welfare support.

The Conservative approach means is to, theoretically, drive down prices in private housing markets by an increase in competition achieved by converting more social housing into private. The second part is to increase personal incomes by reducing personal taxation, which in turn means reducing public spending on high spend areas like welfare.

In addition to that second point comes the big change in the Conservative narrative which was the introduction of a national living wage. However, Osborne's announcement covers up the fact that the Conservative version of a 'living wage' doesn't actually substantially increase wages above the projected rise in the minimum wage - estimated to be £8.23 by 2020 (Ashworth-Hayes, 2015).

That could be an indication that, after all of the cuts to welfare, the Conservatives may well have realised just how hard the burden would have fallen onto people on low incomes. After subsidies like tax credits have been subtracted, it may well be seen that what has been, in effect, a small increase in the minimum wage, may only be an offset for what has been taken away.

What was the alternative?

The big question is always going to be: what was the alternative?

On the two big issues - low pay and housing costs - both could have alternatively been tackled with positive government interventions.

On housing, most parties committed, in the run up to the 2015 election, to the building a large numbers of new houses. With a large social housing reserve, run with more efficiency and lower rents, supplemented by more housing available for rent and purchase - regulated by the kinds of proposals made by Labour and the Lib Dems to make rental more secure, such as help-to-rent tenancy loans and taking action on letting agent fees - there was room for a different approach. An alternative that still placed the burden to be fair on the private sector, while keeping positive, facilitating and liberating welfare safety nets strong.

On low pay, the Conservatives have confirmed the principle of a living wage by including it, and have certainly marked down a small increase over the minimum wage, but they have not matched the recommended levels, and Osborne has introduced it alongside cuts to supplemental welfare. Going further to tackle low pay by matching recommendations would have been a better start, but there would still be more to do. Work is too often, too short term and too uncertain, and getting more so as the economy turns towards labour 'flexibility', and the safety net is being worn too thin.

The effect of these two is compounded for under-21s, who face disproportionately heavy cuts to their access to working age and housing benefits, and students face even more debt as the student maintenance grants are replaced with more loans.

Even if the Conservatives succeed in building a 'stronger' economy in this way, they will have done so by making the society - that the economy works through and depends - more fractious, more uncertain and less secure. The Conservatives will have bought their economic success at the expense of social security.

Jurassic Park is still the king of the dinosaur movies as Jurassic World fails to match its strong feminist overtones

Photograph: IMG_4881 via photopin (license) (cropped)

Jurassic World always faced a gigantic task in trying to emulate the screen success of its predecessor. Jurassic Park was a groundbreaking movie. The clever classic threw maths and science, an appreciation for nature, botany and ecology, and palaeontology at a popular audience, and fully trusted them to be excited and inspired.

The male lead Alan Grant was a grumpy and unsociable Dinosaur expert. Dr Malcolm, the 'cool' character, was a mathematician and the unorthodox voice of reason. John Hammond, the park's creator and 'villain' such as there was one, was a likeable, charismatic and ultimately very human, billionaire philanthropist.

The Dinosaurs were not monsters but animals, which inspired a gleeful awe from the protagonists. The antagonists were neither the Dinosaurs nor the limited number of 'villains' - who amounted to nothing more than wild animals or flawed humans, respectively - but rather human hubris before nature and the creeping abstract concept of chaos.

But above all else, Jurassic Park gave us a pair of strong female characters: Dr Ellie Sattler and Lex.

Lex, Hammond's granddaughter, doesn't let being a frightened child reduce her to a mere passenger. She faces her fears to outwit predatory dinosaurs and protect her brother. Then she uses her own technical skills, as a self-designated hacker, to proactively help get the park's security systems back online.

Dr Ellie Sattler, meanwhile, was the female lead and an expert in her own right, a palaeobotanist who took immediate command of the situation when she encountered a sick Triceratops. With intelligence and dry humour, she openly and unashamedly calls out sexism on at least two occasions while being unapologetically maternal in wanting children. She is also the one to call out the quixotic philanthropist Hammond on his delusions, showing her growth from being 'overwhelmed' by the marvellous dinosaur island to being frightened but resolved. She acts on her own initiative in emergency situations and is strong and dependable.

Then, we have Jurassic World. In comparison, it was just a monster movie. A dumb but entertaining movie that falls well short of its predecessor's high standard. Worse, however, it has been derided as openly sexist (Shoard, 2015; Battersby, 2015).

The core of the problem is centred on how the female lead is treated. She is a stereotype of a woman made 'unnaturally' cold by being out of her 'natural' element, who warms up by being exposed a strong male and the need to nurture and protect children (Fitzpatrick, 2015). Even being allowed a couple of instances of action movie heroics do little to redeem her from the painful stereotype. She's a smart professional who still gets ordered around by men and ignores expert advice; she's capable and informed but behaves with astonishing naivety; and makes some absurd choices, including remaining in breakneck heels in dangerous situations.

All of this, and some of the other rather bizarre plot choices, tend to overshadow what could have been a fascinating renewal of the message of the original movie. Jurassic Park was all about chaos emerging from order, as small events escalate beyond the human capacity for control (Oltermann, 2015). Somewhere in Jurassic World are messages about our short attention spanned consumerism and a very timely reminder of how easily our human constructed structures can be undermined - but it all got lost or buried along the way.

The biggest and most mystifying question is how Jurassic World, made twenty-two years after Jurassic Park, managed to be so much less progressive than the original. It was an entertaining but ultimately problematic movie that failed to break any new ground and so, in the end, will be largely forgetten. Even over twenty years later, the original Jurassic Park will still be the one viewers reach for a smart and entertaining movie.

The referendum in Greece is asking a deeper question about dissent: do we have to conform in order to belong?

Protesters gather on Syntagma Square in the centre of Athens. Photograph: Syntagma sqr @ 3-Jul-15 via photopin (license) (cropped)

Last week's deadlines for Greece to secure the money it needed, to pay what was due to its creditors, came and went without a deal (Traynor et al, 2015). Even with the deadlines being pushed back, and the future of the Eurozone in the balance, no agreement was found.

Without alerting his European creditors first, Prime Minister of Greece Alexis Tsipras, of the Radical Left Syriza party, subsequently announced his intention to hold a referendum on whether Greece should reject or accept the austerian terms to which Greece have been expected to conform (Traynor, 2015). It was a decision that has been treated as controversial by those who reject his party's anti-austerity agenda.

But this referendum stands for even more than whether to say no, or say yes and submit to austerity. The big question that will hang over the whole referendum concerns the right to dissent.

Syriza's election victory, on a manifesto that promised an end to austerity has already been opposed by Europe's economically conservative elite (Lapavitsas, 2015). Pressure has again now been exerted by them to ensure a result favourable to their priorities at the referendum (BBC, 2015).

This struggle between Greece and its creditors - between their conflicting ideological aims - forces us to ask whether, in order to belong and take part, must we always toe the same narrow line as everybody else, or do we have the right to disagree and yet remain?

There is a strong feeling on the Left think that, as far as the Right are concerned, the answer they're receiving is no. Voices on the Left have criticised Eurozone policy towards Greece as an ideological crusade designed to inflict humiliation upon a country for deviating from, and posing a threat to, a particular political script (Williams, 2015). The Left have also faced opposition within Greece, where former Prime Ministers have joined the Yes campaign (Smith, 2015).

Meanwhile there has been support from the Left for the difficult game that Alexis Tsipras and his finance minister Yanis Varoufakis are playing (Elliott, 2015), presenting themselves as reasonable, responsible reformists. Back in 2013, Tsipras made clear his wish to save Europe, to reform it back onto its old path of democratic co-ordination and co-operation (Horvat, 2013; Tsipras & Zizek, 2013).

Even with the referendum looming, Greece's leaders have continued to try and squeeze out a negotiated deal (Rankin, 2015). As they have struggled to find a deal, there has been a show of support even in the UK, which has seen anti-austerity protests in solidarity with Greece and the creation of a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a bail out (The Guardian, 2015; Feeney, 2015).

There have also been efforts to demonstrate the theoretical validity of Syriza's position of opposition to austerity, by exposing the failures of the austerian approach (Fazi, 2015). Even the IMF, one of Greece's creditors, has admitted that the debts of Greece are unsustainable without greater support and, effectively, and end to the pure austerity approach (Khan, 2015).

In the face of these arguments, there have been the first signs of a softening towards the hardship in Greece from their major opponents, represented by the German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble who said that Greek people would not be left 'in the lurch' (Hooper, 2015).

However, compassion in the face of suffering is one thing - and important. But tolerance and acceptance of difference is also essential. Greece has a right to dissent that has not been respected - a right to refuse the conditions with which it has been presented and yet remain a part of the Eurozone, and the European Union.

Underlying this referendum will be the question of whether the European powers will respect the democratic will of the people of Greece should there be a no vote - and austerity be again rejected. If that decision is respected, then there may yet be hope for Europe. It might still become a truly democratic place, with the necessary space for dissenting and alternative voices.

Cameron's plans for English Votes on English Laws represent Conservative determination not to decentralise power

Photograph: Palace of Westminster from across the river via photopin (license) (cropped)

The Conservative government's plans to introduce English Votes for English Laws where announced today by Chris Grayling, Conservative leader of the Commons (Sparrow, 2015). After a Prime Ministers Questions session yesterday which saw the Prime Minister David Cameron face a barrage of questions from SNP MPs on the matter (BBC, 2015), the Conservatives can not have been expecting a warm reception today.

English Votes for English Laws, under its pretty unfortunate acronym Evel, is a proposal to limit Scottish MPs in their ability to vote on matters that would affect England only, due to those areas having been devolved to the Scottish Parliament (Wintour, 2015).

But what it seems to be, above everything else, is an attempt by Conservatives to forestall Britain's shift towards a federal system, where power would be devolved away from the centre at Westminster - and the more proportional voting systems would likely follow.

Late last year, Cameron promised the devolution of further powers to Scotland, including tax raising powers (Wintour, 2014), but at the same time stressed his intention to pursue the idea that legislation affecting only England should only be voted on by English MPs.

Some, particularly within the SNP, have complained that such a stratification of MPs, with different voting powers on different legislation, would create mounting difficulties (Mason & Perraudin, 2015). Furthermore there has been outrage at how the government is attempting to rush the plans through without the scrutiny of the full parliamentary process (Mason, 2015).

At PMQs, Cameron stressed that his plan for Evel did not involve creating a two-tiered system of MPs, but was the equivalent for England of the devolved decision making already in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (Sparrow, 2015).

That opinion exposes an oddity within the British system. In essence, it labels Westminster as, de facto, the English Parliament, to which the other nations seem to simply be invited to attend when matters affecting them arise.

This determination to maintain this particular political system, forcing answers to constitutional questions to fit within Britain's deeply centralised system, even when they will produce unbalanced ways of handling legislation (The Guardian, 2015) - in this case by handing a veto to English MPs - looks to be a sign of just how uncomfortable the Conservative Party is with the clear changes taking place within the UK's political system.

Instead of embracing positive changes to the British system, for which there is mounting support (Mortimer, 2015), the Conservatives have determined instead to pursue a system that alienates those parts of the country who already have some partial federalism, while trying to rule another 50 million people directly from Westminster.

Embracing federalism, based around the regions and nations of the UK and allowing Westminster to evolve into a federal parliament, would be a much neater approach.

Following a close comparison for Britain, as Canada would be despite its smaller population, federalism would allow power to be devolved neatly to provincial assemblies representing the North, the Midlands, the East, the South and London. These could sit comfortably alongside those of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, much as Ontario or Alberta sit alongside the quite vociferously distinct Quebec. By reforming along such lines, the confusing dual-purposing of Westminster might be avoided in the process.

Britain already has a complex multi-level political system, of regions and county councils between Westminster and local authorities, long in need of reform. Streamlining that system along federal lines would be a huge step forward that would ensure that, above all, people have the right to a government representative of them and their distinct provincial needs, while avoiding constitutional snarls that are only likely to lead to more alienation and division.