How should we vote? By 'we' I mean all of us who are democrats: women and men who treasure liberty, regard our fellow citizens as our moral and political equals, want honest government, honourable leaders and an economic policy not motivated primarily by the urge to make Britain fit for global finance. My answer: coordinate our voting to achieve two things: 1) defeat Brown and Mandelson, 2) frustrate Cameron and Company's desire to take their turn at exercising the monarchical power of the UK's 'to the victor the spoils' electoral system, that Labour tragically failed to reform.

We should "hang" the two main parties.

The New Statesman has given me the chance to spell out my view. I assess the character and New Labour roots of the Brown-Mandelson government under the headings of global capitalism, inequality, authoritarianism and deception. I look at the weakness of the opposition.  Gerry Hassan in an email cheerfully described my solution as a makeshift, DIY popular front: of Lib Dems, nationalists, Greens, independents along with Labour and Tory MPs who have had the gumption to rebel and even Farage.

It is not the Statesman's view. And it is great to see some audacious editing and a willingness to open up the space for debate and argument (including David Marquand's disgareement). Please comment on the New Statesman's website when the article goes live and meanwhile buy it for yourself.

My name is Denny de la Haye, and I'm running for Parliament in Hackney South and Shoreditch. My manifesto is a little unusual... I'm proposing that instead of having my own policies, I will hold online polls to determine how I should vote in Parliament (there are three exceptions, which I'll talk about a bit later).

I've been involved in politics since I was a teenager, but never with party politics. I've always been part of campaigning organisations instead, trying to get parties and politicians to notice and care about the issues that affect me. As long as I can remember I've wished I could vote on issues, instead of voting to select a representative.

As the Internet, and particularly the web, has grown in popularity and functionality, its application to this idea is obvious. I believe that we're now in a position where it should be feasible to let people make their own decisions on the issues they care about, instead of devolving their responsibility to a barely-accountable representative who has to toe a party line in most of his or her votes.

Do we have to cut our national debt? our deficits? how fast? This is becoming one of the election issues - as opposed to leaders' wives - that is actually being aired.

Anthony Barnett on OK got taken to task in the comments for intuiting his way to the economic sense of the different parties comments on the deficit, and Rosemary Bechler's defense (in a comment) was an outright rejection of Micawberism.

So here are some very basic clarifications.

One of openDemocracy's key projects is to strengthen the global public sphere by “bringing people and ideas together". The most vibrant, successful and scaleable of our activities of the past year has been to bring together published web content with live meetings: authors with micro-audiences; groups that meet regularly to discuss material published on openDemocracy. These decentralised initiatives powerfully create a culture of serious deliberation extending into a social sphere what the web has already initiated.

I have a post up on the Left Foot Forward blog looking at the leaked proposals to abolish the Lords and replace it with an elected "Senate":

How should reformers greet the government’s proposals, leaked to the Telegraph last weekend, to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected “Senate”? The full details of the plans are not yet known, but justice secretary Jack Straw is expected to propose a senate of 300 elected members who must be resident in the UK for tax purposes and can be ejected via a US-style “recall” ballot.

They will serve terms of 15 years with a third of the senate elected at one time, by a proportional voting system, on the same day as elections to the Commons. The Conservatives have condemned the planned announcement as a pre-election manoeuvre designed to present Labour as the party of “reform” and cosy up to the Liberal Democrats in anticipation of a hung Parliament, whilstLib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne accused the government of a “deathbed conversion”.

As with Labour’s last-ditch plan for an AV referendum, it is hard not to agree about the cynical nature of the timing, especially given Labour’s 13 years in office when they had all the opportunities they needed to reform the Lords.

Arundhati Roy is an inspirational writer and campaigner. Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize she is perhaps now best known for activism on issues of social justice and economic inequality, in her home country India but also worldwide. Philosophy Football have turned Arundhati's vision of another, feminised world into a T-shirt. Available from www.philosophyfootball.com we have 5 to be won in our March competition.

What was the name of Arundhati Roy's novel which won the 1997 Booker prize?

To enter email your answer with name, preferred T-shirt size and full address to admin@philosophyfootball.com No purchase necessary to enter, entries close 31 March 2010.

Congratulations! To Naveen Kumar, Rosanne Purnwasie, Bronwyn O'Keefe, Alex Rhys-Taylor and Paolo Riva. All winners of a Free Nelson Mandela anniversary T-shirt in our February competition, also available from www.philosophyfootball.com 

I blogged recently (here and here) about Labour's wretched attempts to politicise the storage of innocent *ahem* "un-convicted" people's DNA, flaunting their violation of the European Convention on Human Rights as one of the top reasons to vote for them. Gordon Brown had accused civil libertarians who protest against keeping innocents' DNA on criminal databases of playing into the hands of rapists. And just when you thought the party couldn't sink any lower, this was swiftly followed  by a campaign video, blogged by Tom Ash, telling us burglars will vote Tory thanks to their opposition to Labour's DNA hoarding. (And to think ministers, like Michael Wills and Jack Straw, accuse the civil liberties lobby of being shrill and scare-mongering!). 

Now, via Alan Travis, we learn the government is planning to ditch a compromise with the Tories on DNA retention in the criminal and justice bill in order to make it an "election issue" and try and split the party.

I just listened to Nick Clegg on the BBC's World at One. I felt he was trying to be honest about the financial crisis the UK is facing. I don't understand what the deficit is we are all supposed to halve, who it is owed to, what it was spent on. I have a feeling that Labour's plans are not as Neil Kinnock put it in a letter to the Guardian, well "measured" and the Tories, I feel, are positioning not levelling.

Nina Simone must have been spinning in her grave. Her magnificent, impassioned  voice is now but a soundtrack to David Cameron jogging. This was not the only thing that jarred in the highly–trailed profile of the Tory leader, not so much being grilled but marinated, by Trevor McDonald.

This programme made by ITV in which Sam Cam, the wife and “the weapon” would finally talk was meant to do what exactly? To reassure us women that Dave is not perfect? That he makes a mess while cooking just like other men? That he is a policy–free zone?  It’s hard to say but after Brown was uncomfortably prodded open by Piers Morgan, the Tories clearly felt the need to stoop equally low.

Brown’s interview with Morgan is a sign of the times. Brown the grumpy, shouty bear was goaded and cajoled  by Morgan into showing  some  kind of emotion. It was not enough for us to know that he suffered when he lost a child, it was felt that we needed to see actual tears, some indication that Brown is recognisably human. His wife, an ex-PR pro remember, was there to remind us of Brown's softer side. She functions to normalise him. We may think is a raging sociopathic control freak but look he has feelings after all!

The Future of the Left is one of those perennial subjects that run through time memorial, from the crises of how to deal with Nazism and fascism in the 1930s, to the problems of Stalinism in the 1950s, affluence in the 1960s, and Reaganism and Thatcherism in the 1980s.

On Friday I contributed to a panel discussion on this subject which also included Tariq Ali, the historian Tristram Hunt and Chris Mullin MP and was chaired by journalist Ruth Wishart. This was part of ‘Aye Write’, Glasgow’s successful and vibrant book festival, now in its fifth year, and took place in the Mitchell Library in front of a packed audience of 450 people.

This showed an eager interest in the subject and any conclusions, and the first part of our discussion was dominated by ‘big’ subjects, the legacy and debris of New Labour and the collective hangover from neo-liberalism, but became much more passionate and controversial later on.

According to A. J. P. Taylor, in 1934 Oxford University Press commissioned its History of England series on the basis that ‘England’ was still “an all-embracing word”. It meant “indiscriminately England and Wales; Great Britain; the United Kingdom; and even the British Empire” (A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945, OUP 1965). Looking back from the 1960s, AJP still believed this to be the appropriate historiographical perspective to take, and in private correspondence he made this very clear. “I am obsessed with England”, he wrote to his editor G. N. Clark in 1961, “to hell with Scotland, Northern Ireland and still more the Empire!!” (A. J. P. Taylor to G. N. Clark: 20 May 1961, Clark Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS Box 30.). One wonders if he thought Ireland even worth sending to hell.

Taylor never sought to conceal his Anglocentrism. He revelled in it. But having penned the fifteenth volume of the History of England series, he was far from being alone in assuming that England – its people, economy, government and monarchy – provided the central storyline for the history of these islands. The assumptions of English dominance inherent in J. R. Seeley’s famous lectures on The Expansion of England have resonated across the last century of historical writing. In fact, although a follow up series to the one begun in 1934 was commissioned by OUP – with the first volume appearing in 1992 – the editors still plumped for the title New Oxford History of England.

Professor Brian Harrison’s Finding a Role? The United Kingdom, 1970-1990 is the latest volume in that series, and – as the title implies – the story of the United Kingdom is central to the period in question, covering as it does the beginnings of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the development of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and the entry of the UK into the EEC in a supposedly post-imperial age. Harrison’s book provides an admirable synthesis of the cultural, social, economic and political history of the period, but this is not ‘four nations’ history. Although the constituent parts of the UK do feature, England remains the central reference point.

For many professional historians then, England has, and often continues to be the primary historical mover and shaker in the history of these islands, and hence by implication the history of the expansion and contraction of the British Empire.

I went to launch this evening of Keith Ewing's important new book Bonfire of the Liberties and the Institute of Employment Rights new booklet Ruined Lives on blacklisting in the UK construction industry, also written by Ewing. I was expecting the usual drinks party. But no, it was a serious meeting of trade unionists at the NUJ headquarters. We heard from Henry Porter, who I find it hard to disagree with. He talked about the expansion of what he called "State patrolled space" and how each one of us is being made to feel that both we and everyone else are persons who may "harbour bad intentions". (Or, as John Berger

One of the really insistent questions raised throughout the Convention of Modern Liberty one year ago was the one Anthony Barnett signalled in his opening invitation to participate: " What is the problem to which the database state and the surveillance society is... the solution?"

I made this the first real article in the CML book because it struck me that the rest of the book (and the event itself) is really a set of different attempts at an answer, coupled with some early exploration of what to do about it. Anthony kicks off with a list of potential candidates. Helena Kennedy puts it differently - "What do they put in the water in the Home Office? ". Simon Jenkins asks what happens to perfectly reasonable liberal types when they get into high office... etc. etc.

Maybe Simon Jenkins gets close to the truth with the shocking passing reference to the fact that, 'We now apparently spend more money on surveillance equipment of all sorts than on arms." If you have quarter of an hour this week, I recommend that you listen to this aptly named, undersung BBC 4 radio programme called Thinking Allowed on the theme of "military futurology" while it's accessible.  

Today, it is all too easy to call yourself a ‘politically engaged person’ and to walk around without a care for the fact that a general election is on its way with no sense of a contradiction. The televised cross-party debates are set – not that anyone is looking forward to watching them – and the papers are publishing daily pre-electoral polls – not that anyone is at all inspired by any of the three horses in the race.

It appears evident that the coming UK election lacks the excitement or intensity of last year’s stateside whirlwind. Without even the pretence of a British Obama it is tempting to write off mainstream politics as irrelevant, and take a ‘none of the above’ position; this would achieve nothing beyond feeding a pervasive anti-political cynicism.

How is it that the President of Britain's new Supreme Court has been quoting the Book of Deuteronomy in reaching an important judgement?

I have been involved with equality law in Britain – law which seeks to restrain unfair discrimination - for example by those who control the allocation of employment, housing, education, and other benefits and services since I was appointed legal adviser to the Race Relations Board in 1965.

Since then we have had a lot of piecemeal legislation – hopefully soon to be consolidated. It has extended the law against discrimination into new areas: gender, disability, sexual orientation, and, recently, religion.

Many major problems of interpretation have been resolved in the courts but new and unforeseen ones always continue to arise. Issues of race remain the most intractable form of discrimination and the recent extension of the scope of equality law to religious discrimination has exposed this. It raises very important and interesting larger questions as the secular processes of the state collide with religious practise. These issues can be intensely divisive in our increasingly pluralistic society.

The recent Jewish Free School (JFS) case, one of the first to be decided by the Supreme Court in December 2009, exemplifies many of these issues.

In 2003, two people were stopped and searched outside London’s Excel Centre and prevented from attending a peaceful protest against the arms fair taking place inside. Journalist Pennie Quinton was forced to stop filming despite showing her press card, and Kevin Gillian was stopped for 20 minutes when riding his bike.

Together with pressure group Liberty, the pair refused to accept this horribly commonplace police interference and challenged the government over the legal basis for this stop and search – Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

The case went through several defeats in the domestic courts, but in January 2010 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the use of Section 44 violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to privacy.

...according to this Labour attack ad:

So much for the right having a monopoly on anti-crime populism. As for the actual merits of the attack - where to start? Well...

1) 'Even the Daily Mail' concedes that "just one in 350, or 0.3 per cent, of the 1.3 million crimes solved by police" can be credited to the DNA database.

An OurKingdom conversation: Michael Wills > John Jackson > Michael Wills > this post

I can quite understand why Michael Wills is upset about John Jackson's note on his struggle to move the democratic agenda forward with a government which is alternately hostile and indifferent and under a Prime Minister who blows hot and cold, hot and cold, on all the issues. My guess is that he is a genuine democrat who has been given a very uncomfortable and impossible brief.

However, the whole enterprise was flawed from the very beginning. In the July 2007 governance paper the spelling out of the problems was ducked which weakened the proposals for dealing with them. I said as much in a meeting Michael Wills - held with reformers in an attempt to get us on board and support the initiative.

It is no good saying that progress is slow and incremental on constitutional reform in the UK - my god, we know that too well - when nearly all Labour's reforms since 1997 have been predicated on preserving the power of the executive more or less intact.

All right, freedom of information has largely escaped the built-in safeguards for executive hegemony and Scotland has proved to be an evident model for reform at work. But Wills draws attention to the disgraceful pledge for a referendum on the two majoritarian electoral systems on the assumption that it is a good thing. I differ from that view; the public are not being offered a genuine choice which should be the principle of all referendums. The government has simply controlled it by fiat and offered only the prospect of straight AV because its leaders believe that the parliamentary party can live with it at a pinch (though my guess is that those MPs who fear AV are being quietly reassured that it will never happen).

How can any democrat possibly favour a referendum which denies the people a full choice of the alternative systems that exist, including AMS as in Scotland and Jenkins's AV Plus? It is an abuse of power that would be all the more serious if it were not also a botched stitch-up.

Power2010's campaign to bring change to UK politics is stepping up a gear.

With just a few weeks left until a general election is announced, it's time to call out those MPs who have consistently stood against reform of our democracy preferring the corrupt, top-down politics of the past.

If we want a reforming Parliament and a new politics out of the next election we need to ensure the people who want to represent us take seriously the need for change.

That means identifying who the main culprits are amongst sitting MPs.

You know the ones. The dinosaurs in Parliament who tell us reform isn't needed, whilst clinging to their perks and privileges; the MPs who never miss a chance to vote away our civil liberties, whilst telling us it's for our own good.

Apologies to those of you who have commented in the last twenty four hours and seen your comments disappear. We have had a rare site-wide technical mishap which means that many of the comments from the last day have been deleted. Commenting from now on should be fine so please do continue to leave comments. Many thanks for your patience.