Change4Life

The Change4Life campaign promoting behaviour change to reduce childhood obesity is being launched. The television adverts begin tomorrow, and can be seen on the BBC website.

This is the movement for change which Alan Johnson announced in his Fabian 'progressive manifesto' lecture on obesity last summer, in response to the Foresight report on obesity.

One controversial issue is the role of food corporations. Richard Watts worries about the wrong signal being sent, but the Guardian reports the counter-view from Liam Donaldson that those companies who commit to being involved will face greater pressure and scrutiny if their products and actions seem to contradict this.

I have just signed up for an action pack, though what would be immediately useful would be advice on how to persuade a nearly three year old to eat anything at all. Read more...

Change4Life

The Change4Life campaign promoting behaviour change to reduce childhood obesity is being launched. The television adverts begin tomorrow, and can be seen on the BBC website.

This is the movement for change which Alan Johnson announced in his Fabian 'progressive manifesto' lecture on obesity last summer, in response to the Foresight report on obesity.

One controversial issue is the role of food corporations. Richard Watts worries about the wrong signal being sent, but the Guardian reports the counter-view from Liam Donaldson that those companies who commit to being involved will face greater pressure and scrutiny if their products and actions seem to contradict this.

I have just signed up for an action pack, though what would be immediately useful would be advice on how to persuade a nearly three year old to eat anything at all. Read more...

The necessity and impossibility of Middle East peace

The international civil society campaign Avaaz are running a petition for international pressure for a comprehensive ceasefire in Gaza, which has collected over 180,000 signatures in no time at all, and at least 20,000 more since I signed it earlier today.

Petition to the UN Security Council, the European Union, the Arab League and the USA:
We urge you to act immediately to ensure a comprehensive ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, to protect civilians on all sides, and to address the growing humanitarian crisis. Only through robust international action and oversight can the bloodshed be stopped, the Gaza crossings safely re-opened and real progress made toward a wider peace in 2009.

Just a fortnight ago, I was arguing for the importance of a unfashionable, dogged insistence on the possibility of a just peace settlement in the Middle East. It is because that seems far too optimistic at the end of this week that I stand firmly by it.

There is a human tragedy unfolding in the civilian deaths, claustrophic fear and humanitarian emergency of Gaza under siege, while there is great fear and insecurity among Israelis under rocket attack too. There is also a recurring political tragedy here.

The only hope for the Middle East is politics. A political resolution would be one where each of the sides assert their own values, identities and interests - and recognise the values, identities and interests of their adversaries and neighbours.

This failure of politics is, at root, a failure of empathy. This has always been, as The Observer's David Astor wrote on the eve of the 1967 war, a tale of two wronged peoples which has developed, over four further decades, into an epic tale of two competing, incompatible histories too. The political tragedy proceeds in large part from the refusal of that central fact. Each side nurses and extends its historic and contemporary grievances, its mistrust and its fears and only hears when, in response, the competing grievances, fears and mistrust are rehearsed once again, the excuses, evasions and lies of a refusal to face the (other) facts.

It is well known that these competing claims about past, present and future are mutually incompatible; yet we have long known too the broad terms on which they can and must be reconciled if they are ever to be reconciled at all.

To be clear: this is not to argue that the rights and wrongs are always and everywhere of equal measure and magnitude. They will not be - in any particular episode, or indeed in the conflict as a whole. But this does mean recognising that this very human instinct to make a reckoning and keep the score (or rather, perhaps, to argue endlessly about not just the score but the absence of agreed rules or referees) is a large part of the tragedy of the Middle East.

It is this instinct which assists every conflagration in feeding this politics of mutual fear: an insular, partial politics defined by its refusal to countenance what a politics which recognised the interests of the other too would demand.

The particular tragic failure of Ehud Olmert's premiership is that he has recognised this so clearly - indeed, at times, talking with the urgency of a recent convert to the necessity of peace - and yet will be remembered by history as a war leader, and almost certainly a failed one at that. As Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post wrote this week of Olmert's final failure:

Israel's new battle with Hamas in Gaza means that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be remembered for fighting two bloody and wasteful mini-wars in less than three years in power ... The saddest aspect of all this is that Olmert, a former hard-line believer in a "greater Israel," was more committed than any previous Israeli prime minister to ending the country's conflicts with Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians.

So too, as international diplomatic and public opinion hardens against the nature of the Israeli response, including among traditional staunch allies, Israeli opinion becomes more entrenched. Where is the Israeli peace movement? They are marginalised. Note how narrowly and tactically David Grossman puts the case for a cessation, combines an assertion of the rightness of Israel's actions with its enlightened interest in restraint.

Who gains? In Israel, electoral calculation hangs heavily over this conflict. Yet it is difficult to see that Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak or Amir Peretz will gain most from the hardening of Israeli opinion. History suggests it will be the right - Binyamin Netanyahu - who can offer an authentic hardline politics. If this turns out to mean seeking a military solution to the question of Palestine, it is a task surely doomed to fail.

We can know rather less of what is happening inside Palestine. Hamas chose to provoke an escalation and got what it wanted: the fearful hypothesis must be that opinion will harden and polarise too, both towards Hamas, and towards the rejectionists within it. Hamas has deeply strained relationships with Arab states yet analysis in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper and from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz agree that the crisis has seen Hamas and other non-state actors win some key diplomatic battles by bringing Arab public opinion to bear on governments who would support a regional settlement with Israel.

These developments may change the role of outsiders in the conflict where both the mistrust and the disparity of power among the principal actors makes external engagement imperative in making a fair settlement possible. I recommend Daniel Levy's Prospects for Peace blog - a project aimed at informing a US audience, from The Century Foundation and the New America Foundation - for its analysis of the choices facing the incoming US administration. Levy notes, dissects and rejects, what he sees as an emerging consensus among US opinion formers about the necessity and impossibility of a peaceful resolution:

If the emerging Washington consensus is to be believed, then here is the Middle East peace conundrum waiting to greet the new Obama administration: Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more than ever a strategic priority for the United States, but it also seems more difficult to achieve now, perhaps even unattainable in the foreseeable future.

Levy argues that waiting for the conditions to improve will prove futile, and calls on the US to act with the Quartet and Arab League to "show tenacity and bold ideas – in framing the solution, bringing in previously excluded actors, creating mechanisms to implement a deal (such as international forces) and utilizing the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative".

The core principles - the support for Israel's right to exist and for Israelis to live in peace and mutual security with its neighbours, within the 1967 borders; the necessary support to make a viable Palestinian state a possibility and reality, so that it can hold and fulfil the rights and responsibilities of a full member of the international community; and the need to embed this in a regional agreement with broad international sponsorship - are clear. The most difficult questions - Jerusalem, equitable land swaps, refugees - are resolvable, given the will to settle them politically.

It should follow from this that civic outsiders who wish to play any constructive role should resist the temptation to become partisans in the conflict. Neither side is short of cheerleaders to offer vitriolic attacks on the claims of their enemies, or to engage in the politics of blame, boycott and ostracism, which is likely to prove counter-productive in this context if directed at any constituency whose engagement will be necessary for a settlement.

The only constructive external civic contribution likely to do more good than harm is to seek to offer solidarity to all of those seeking to develop the mutual empathy on which a settlement depends, particularly to citizens' efforts to keep open pressure for peace from below (of which the OneVoice movement is one example) at a time when this becomes more difficult.

Even as the chances of a political resolution diminish - and for how long, nobody can tell - the central truth put eloquently by
Daniel Barenboim in The Guardian today is that the only resolution to the crisis will be a political one. Read more...

The necessity and impossibility of Middle East peace

The international civil society campaign Avaaz are running a petition for international pressure for a comprehensive ceasefire in Gaza, which has collected over 180,000 signatures in no time at all, and at least 20,000 more since I signed it earlier today.

Petition to the UN Security Council, the European Union, the Arab League and the USA:
We urge you to act immediately to ensure a comprehensive ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, to protect civilians on all sides, and to address the growing humanitarian crisis. Only through robust international action and oversight can the bloodshed be stopped, the Gaza crossings safely re-opened and real progress made toward a wider peace in 2009.

Just a fortnight ago, I was arguing for the importance of a unfashionable, dogged insistence on the possibility of a just peace settlement in the Middle East. It is because that seems far too optimistic at the end of this week that I stand firmly by it.

There is a human tragedy unfolding in the civilian deaths, claustrophic fear and humanitarian emergency of Gaza under siege, while there is great fear and insecurity among Israelis under rocket attack too. There is also a recurring political tragedy here.

The only hope for the Middle East is politics. A political resolution would be one where each of the sides assert their own values, identities and interests - and recognise the values, identities and interests of their adversaries and neighbours.

This failure of politics is, at root, a failure of empathy. This has always been, as The Observer's David Astor wrote on the eve of the 1967 war, a tale of two wronged peoples which has developed, over four further decades, into an epic tale of two competing, incompatible histories too. The political tragedy proceeds in large part from the refusal of that central fact. Each side nurses and extends its historic and contemporary grievances, its mistrust and its fears and only hears when, in response, the competing grievances, fears and mistrust are rehearsed once again, the excuses, evasions and lies of a refusal to face the (other) facts.

It is well known that these competing claims about past, present and future are mutually incompatible; yet we have long known too the broad terms on which they can and must be reconciled if they are ever to be reconciled at all.

To be clear: this is not to argue that the rights and wrongs are always and everywhere of equal measure and magnitude. They will not be - in any particular episode, or indeed in the conflict as a whole. But this does mean recognising that this very human instinct to make a reckoning and keep the score (or rather, perhaps, to argue endlessly about not just the score but the absence of agreed rules or referees) is a large part of the tragedy of the Middle East.

It is this instinct which assists every conflagration in feeding this politics of mutual fear: an insular, partial politics defined by its refusal to countenance what a politics which recognised the interests of the other too would demand.

The particular tragic failure of Ehud Olmert's premiership is that he has recognised this so clearly - indeed, at times, talking with the urgency of a recent convert to the necessity of peace - and yet will be remembered by history as a war leader, and almost certainly a failed one at that. As Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post wrote this week of Olmert's final failure:

Israel's new battle with Hamas in Gaza means that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be remembered for fighting two bloody and wasteful mini-wars in less than three years in power ... The saddest aspect of all this is that Olmert, a former hard-line believer in a "greater Israel," was more committed than any previous Israeli prime minister to ending the country's conflicts with Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians.

So too, as international diplomatic and public opinion hardens against the nature of the Israeli response, including among traditional staunch allies, Israeli opinion becomes more entrenched. Where is the Israeli peace movement? They are marginalised. Note how narrowly and tactically David Grossman puts the case for a cessation, combines an assertion of the rightness of Israel's actions with its enlightened interest in restraint.

Who gains? In Israel, electoral calculation hangs heavily over this conflict. Yet it is difficult to see that Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak or Amir Peretz will gain most from the hardening of Israeli opinion. History suggests it will be the right - Binyamin Netanyahu - who can offer an authentic hardline politics. If this turns out to mean seeking a military solution to the question of Palestine, it is a task surely doomed to fail.

We can know rather less of what is happening inside Palestine. Hamas chose to provoke an escalation and got what it wanted: the fearful hypothesis must be that opinion will harden and polarise too, both towards Hamas, and towards the rejectionists within it. Hamas has deeply strained relationships with Arab states yet analysis in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper and from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz agree that the crisis has seen Hamas and other non-state actors win some key diplomatic battles by bringing Arab public opinion to bear on governments who would support a regional settlement with Israel.

These developments may change the role of outsiders in the conflict where both the mistrust and the disparity of power among the principal actors makes external engagement imperative in making a fair settlement possible. I recommend Daniel Levy's Prospects for Peace blog - a project aimed at informing a US audience, from The Century Foundation and the New America Foundation - for its analysis of the choices facing the incoming US administration. Levy notes, dissects and rejects, what he sees as an emerging consensus among US opinion formers about the necessity and impossibility of a peaceful resolution:

If the emerging Washington consensus is to be believed, then here is the Middle East peace conundrum waiting to greet the new Obama administration: Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more than ever a strategic priority for the United States, but it also seems more difficult to achieve now, perhaps even unattainable in the foreseeable future.

Levy argues that waiting for the conditions to improve will prove futile, and calls on the US to act with the Quartet and Arab League to "show tenacity and bold ideas – in framing the solution, bringing in previously excluded actors, creating mechanisms to implement a deal (such as international forces) and utilizing the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative".

The core principles - the support for Israel's right to exist and for Israelis to live in peace and mutual security with its neighbours, within the 1967 borders; the necessary support to make a viable Palestinian state a possibility and reality, so that it can hold and fulfil the rights and responsibilities of a full member of the international community; and the need to embed this in a regional agreement with broad international sponsorship - are clear. The most difficult questions - Jerusalem, equitable land swaps, refugees - are resolvable, given the will to settle them politically.

It should follow from this that civic outsiders who wish to play any constructive role should resist the temptation to become partisans in the conflict. Neither side is short of cheerleaders to offer vitriolic attacks on the claims of their enemies, or to engage in the politics of blame, boycott and ostracism, which is likely to prove counter-productive in this context if directed at any constituency whose engagement will be necessary for a settlement.

The only constructive external civic contribution likely to do more good than harm is to seek to offer solidarity to all of those seeking to develop the mutual empathy on which a settlement depends, particularly to citizens' efforts to keep open pressure for peace from below (of which the OneVoice movement is one example) at a time when this becomes more difficult.

Even as the chances of a political resolution diminish - and for how long, nobody can tell - the central truth put eloquently by
Daniel Barenboim in The Guardian today is that the only resolution to the crisis will be a political one. Read more...

It's the economy, Darling

This is my editorial from the new year edition of the Fabian Review on the theme of fairness in a recession.

---
Shrill cries that the government had “abandoned the centre-ground” with plans for a new 45p top rate of tax on earnings over £150,000 showed just how detached the media classes can be from the country about which they pontificate.

Indeed, only 17% of the public occupy the mythical ‘centre’ which opposes the measure while 72% support the new top rate. With clear majorities in favour in all regions, classes and income groups – and among on Conservative voters too – it is difficult to identify many other policies with a broader ‘one nation’ public resonance.

Rumours of the death of New Labour are exaggerated. But New Labour was Labour too: the party of the windfall tax, anger at ‘fat cats’ and a penny on national insurance to find billions for the NHS. To talk tax at all was taboo for some but Fabian gradualism kept open arguments about equality, redistribution and progressive taxation, helping to shape the fairness argument which could define Labour’s public argument by what it is for, and not just by what it is not.

Political parties will naturally compete to occupy the centre-ground: the point is to shift it too. Like a flash of lightning on a dark night, the politics of the pre-budget report illuminated central choices in British politics. After a decade in which political cross-dressing has been in fashion, we had the novel sight of the main parties stealing back their own clothes, with clear differences over spending, whether to borrow in a recession, and what government should do to protect citizens.

Yet this greater willingness to articulate the big political arguments still faces a competing instinct, on both frontbenches, to blur the differences. How often did you hear any Cabinet minister making a principled fairness argument for the new top rate, or any shadow minister willing to express an opinion about it at all? (Tellingly, the Opposition have quietly briefed that they have no plans to reverse the move: another example – from the minimum wage to civil partnerships – of how Labour at its boldest does most to entrench change).

Gordon Brown is making the political weather after a turbulent year. 2009 will be a year of enormous challenges: the economic crisis will dominate while it is also the make or break moment for a global post-Kyoto deal on climate change.

Progressives, emboldened by the new Obama administration, can win the battle of ideas. But this will depend, above all, on more confidence in articulating the necessary case for government action.

‘The state’ is unpopular as an abstract idea. But, when it comes to the action which governments can take – such as protecting home-owners from repossession – the concrete calls are almost always for government to do more. That is why neither Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan were ultimately able to significantly shrink the state. It is much less popular than it sounds.

Do not expect the right to concede the language of fairness. What must be tested is what – if anything – they want to do about it. This is a central argument to be won in the year ahead: that fairness doesn’t happen by chance.

* The Fabian Review is published on January 7th, and previews the Fabian New Year Conference 'Fairness Doesn't Happen by Chance' on January 17th. Fabian members will receive the Fabian Review in the post. Non-members can get a copy by joining here or can order a copy through the Fabian office Read more...

It's the economy, Darling

This is my editorial from the new year edition of the Fabian Review on the theme of fairness in a recession.

---
Shrill cries that the government had “abandoned the centre-ground” with plans for a new 45p top rate of tax on earnings over £150,000 showed just how detached the media classes can be from the country about which they pontificate.

Indeed, only 17% of the public occupy the mythical ‘centre’ which opposes the measure while 72% support the new top rate. With clear majorities in favour in all regions, classes and income groups – and among on Conservative voters too – it is difficult to identify many other policies with a broader ‘one nation’ public resonance.

Rumours of the death of New Labour are exaggerated. But New Labour was Labour too: the party of the windfall tax, anger at ‘fat cats’ and a penny on national insurance to find billions for the NHS. To talk tax at all was taboo for some but Fabian gradualism kept open arguments about equality, redistribution and progressive taxation, helping to shape the fairness argument which could define Labour’s public argument by what it is for, and not just by what it is not.

Political parties will naturally compete to occupy the centre-ground: the point is to shift it too. Like a flash of lightning on a dark night, the politics of the pre-budget report illuminated central choices in British politics. After a decade in which political cross-dressing has been in fashion, we had the novel sight of the main parties stealing back their own clothes, with clear differences over spending, whether to borrow in a recession, and what government should do to protect citizens.

Yet this greater willingness to articulate the big political arguments still faces a competing instinct, on both frontbenches, to blur the differences. How often did you hear any Cabinet minister making a principled fairness argument for the new top rate, or any shadow minister willing to express an opinion about it at all? (Tellingly, the Opposition have quietly briefed that they have no plans to reverse the move: another example – from the minimum wage to civil partnerships – of how Labour at its boldest does most to entrench change).

Gordon Brown is making the political weather after a turbulent year. 2009 will be a year of enormous challenges: the economic crisis will dominate while it is also the make or break moment for a global post-Kyoto deal on climate change.

Progressives, emboldened by the new Obama administration, can win the battle of ideas. But this will depend, above all, on more confidence in articulating the necessary case for government action.

‘The state’ is unpopular as an abstract idea. But, when it comes to the action which governments can take – such as protecting home-owners from repossession – the concrete calls are almost always for government to do more. That is why neither Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan were ultimately able to significantly shrink the state. It is much less popular than it sounds.

Do not expect the right to concede the language of fairness. What must be tested is what – if anything – they want to do about it. This is a central argument to be won in the year ahead: that fairness doesn’t happen by chance.

* The Fabian Review is published on January 7th, and previews the Fabian New Year Conference 'Fairness Doesn't Happen by Chance' on January 17th. Fabian members will receive the Fabian Review in the post. Non-members can get a copy by joining here or can order a copy through the Fabian office Read more...

Democracy returns to Bangladesh

The first General Election for seven years has resulted in a landslide victory for the Awami League, led by former prime minister Sheikh Hasina. The much delayed election ends two years of emergency rule by a military caretaker government.

As Time reports, competing ideas of Bangladesh were a central issue in the election campaign, with the Awami League campaigning on restoring the vision of secular democracy in the majority Muslim country against the emphasis on the need to "Save Islam" from the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), in office from 2001 to 2007, which campaigned in alliance with four Islamist parties. The Islamist Jamaat-i-Islami party suffered a significant setback, being reduced from 17 to 2 seats in Parliament - though it ought to struggle, given its role not in opposing Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971, including support for military atrocities.

The Times of India echoes most Bangladeshi media reaction in believing that this is a moment for 'cautious optimism' in South Asia.

The Awami League is credited with favouring inter-community harmony within Bangladesh and a foreign policy based on regional and international cooperation. It is important that Bangladesh, which has been vulnerable to forces of religious intolerance and seen the rise of terror outfits, be led towards social stability and economic prosperity. Muslims across the globe, from Indonesia to Turkey, have embraced democratic political systems in growing numbers. Bangladesh's return to this fold scores an important goal for democracy.

But the scale of the victory - with the Awami League and its allies holding more than 260 seats in the 300-seat Parliament - is causing concern, particularly as both major parties have poor recent records since 1991 when it comes to political polarisation, nepotism and corruption, with incumbency having led to crushing political defeats at the hands of the voters.

Bangladesh's Daily Star newspaper, celebrating the results, offers this warning to the victors:

People of Bangladesh have spoken, loudly, clearly and decisively. And it is not the first time that they have done so. For those who are stunned by the extent of the defeat of the 4-party alliance please remember the election of 2001. The then ruling party, the Awami League, was reduced to 62 seats. If that can be the verdict of the people at that time, then why can't the present results be considered the same?

BNP's devastating defeat is AL's most severest warning. The later must not forget for a moment how our people punish, and most severely so, when ruling parties fail to keep their promise to the people and live up to the latter's expectation of them. Two third's majority has always been a curse to those who got them. That is truer still if the victory is even bigger. The victors of yesterday's election must bear that in mind every moment of their coming five year tenure. More on that later. Today, we only celebrate people's victory over the corrupt.

Read more...