This Is Not About Civil Rights

Jack Hunter writes:

The 20-something me would consider the 30-something me a bleeding-heart liberal. Though I still hate political correctness, I no longer find it valuable to attack PC by charging off in the opposite direction, making insensitive remarks that even if right in fact were so wrong in form. I’m not the first political pundit to use excessive hyperbole. I might be one of the few to admit being embarrassed about it.

This embarrassment is particularly true concerning my own region, the South, where slavery, segregation, and institutional racism left a heavy mark. I still detest those on the left and right who exploit racial tension for their own purposes. But I detest even more the inhumanity suffered by African-Americans in our early and later history. T.S. Eliot said, “humankind cannot bear too much reality,” and it is impossible for those of us living in the new millennium to comprehend that absolute horror of being treated like chattel by your fellow man, or being terrorized by your neighbors, because of the color of your skin.

Books, memorials, and museums will never be able to adequately convey such tragedy, at least not in any manner remotely comparable to the pain of those who lived it.

The debate over gay marriage has been portrayed as the civil rights struggle of our time. I’m generally a supporter of same-sex unions and hold the same view as President Obama—I’m personally for it, but believe it should be decided at the state level. I find it legally objectionable that those in longstanding same-sex relationships do not have the same inheritance, tax, and hospital-visitation rights as straight couples. Whatever the courts or states decide now and in the future, I hope this changes.

That said, gay marriage is simply not on par with the black civil rights struggle. Not even close.

When a group of mostly black protesters stood before the Supreme Court to defend traditional marriage last week, some pundits and social-media commentators wondered how people who once fought for their own civil rights could deny them to others.

For one, these black protesters were Christian. Many American Christians are opposed to gay marriage, and people of faith have as much a place in this debate as anyone else. It is amusing how liberals who preach “diversity” are always surprised when it produces frictions or contradictions, which many on the left found last week in black Americans who oppose gay marriage.

But for these African-American followers of Christ, there were no contradictions.

Race isn’t everything.

I have gay friends who are married. The states in which they reside might not recognize their unions, but their friends and families do, and they generally live their lives in peace. No one is turning water hoses on them. They are not being attacked by police dogs. There is no Bull Connor or Ku Klux Klan. They are not being lynched en masse, drinking at separate fountains, or being ordered to the back of the bus.

This is not to say that gay Americans who wish to have the full benefits of marriage afforded to heterosexual couples don’t face adversity. That’s a major part of the current debate. But it is to say that any hardship they face can’t compare to what black Americans faced 50 or 150 years ago.

There have been instances during the gay-rights movement that arguably could be compared to the black civil rights struggle, like the Stonewall riots of the 1960s or Matthew Shepard murder in 1998. Suicides and other problems related to public attitudes about homosexuality have also unquestionably been a horrible ordeal. Still, with the possible exception of the mistreatment of Native Americans, there has been nothing quite like the systematic exploitation and institutional degradation experienced by earlier black Americans.

My purpose here is not to belittle the fight for gay marriage, only to note that those who keep attempting to draw a reasonable comparison to the struggle of African-Americans are in many ways belittling the black experience in the United States.

I've Found My Tribe

Tim Stanley writes:

There’s a great post doing the rounds on Facebook that deserves to be distributed by missionaries in the streets. It’s written by an American called Max Lindenman and it seeks to answer the question “Why I am a Catholic” in 200 words or less. The Telegraph’s good manners prevents me from reproducing his language exactly, but his conclusion is that he did it because “I’m a screw-up”:

After earning a degree and a half from a third-rate university, I figured I’d never lead a life that fulfilled me, either materially, sexually, or intellectually. And yet, some escapist part of me thinks I’d have fit in just dandy at Versailles.

In the Church, I network with smart people who have tried to introduce me to philosophy, theology, and the works of all sorts of writers … Living simply and asexually, though not necessarily ideal, is no mark of dishonor. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting some nut who walks around fully convinced he is living at Versailles, the Escorial, or in Middle Earth.

In other words, I’ve found my tribe.

Here’s why I stay Catholic: Whenever I find myself wanting to walk out the door, some inner voice tells me, “Nah, stick around. It’s just about to get interesting.” I like to think that’s the voice of God.

This speaks to me. There’s often a presumption – because of our line on sexual morality – that Catholics are prudes and bigots who wouldn’t know a good time if it booked them a room for two with Monica Lewinsky at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The reality is quite the opposite. Catholicism is a community of sinners seeking grace, taking strength in each other’s company – a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous for screw-ups. As such, I’ve never known an environment more compassionate and comfortably eccentric.

I converted to Catholicism not because I was full of religious chauvinism or intellectual conviction but because it offered hope to someone who was very alone. I was burnt out and mostly drunk. I had struggled to find a church that would help me; all of them seemed either compromised or hopelessly idealistic. Slowly I was drawn into the Catholic community. Here was a place where monks drank beer, priests smoked like chimneys and filthy jokes were at a premium. It wasn’t hypocritical, just human. And behind the humanity was a concern with encountering the divine – made possible by a very practical, step-by-step approach to salvation. Go to Confession, make penance, take Communion at Mass, buy the priest a pint afterwards. As soon as I understood Catholicism, it became second nature. I converted and my soul was saved. I suspect that my life was saved, too.

Since then, I have never once doubted the Truth of the Church’s teachings, but I have struggled to be faithful. If I skip Mass it’s usually because the petty minutiae of the rest of my life distracts me. Things go wrong, hope is lost and it feels like Jack Daniels is the only man who understands me. But something wonderful always draws me back. A few weeks ago, I visited my favourite priest in his rectory. I saw the light glowing under his kitchen door, tasted the smell of Marlboro Reds on my tongue and heard a babble of mad voices discussing what’s wrong and what’s right about this Argentine Pope. I opened the door and walked in to love, knowing that I was returning home to my tribe. The tribe of screw-ups.

Happy Easter and may God bless you and your family.

Postliberal; Post-Labour?

Michael Merrick writes:

Told you we were winning. Post liberalism is not just a prediction, it is a reality. And like all political realities, it started years ago. Particularly among a group of Labour supporters, fired up by the outflanking of a certain Red Tory, who for years had had to suffer the indignity of having the door slammed in their faces by those who claimed to be on their side. (Some of course take it back much further - to our parents and grandparents before us.)

As I wrote back in 2009, at root this was a clash of cultures. Labour were fretting over losing that very constituency whom they had for years sneered at and harassed. For too long Labour could not permit the legitimacy of dissenting views, labeling as extreme or bigoted that which was neither extreme nor bigoted. In declaring a whole way of thinking out of bounds, Labour lost the ability to speak in the language of those who were abandoning them - and if language is the limit of our thought then it came as no surprise that when they tried to speak, a great many concluded they had little relevant to say. The once rich tones of the Labour chorus had become a shrill, castigating shriek.

Yet this narrow political puritanism seems to have succumbed – under the guise of pluralism new (old) voices are once again being heard. Though long neglected, those voices have wisdom to share which reaches down into the very roots of Labour philosophy, into the very beginnings of the Labour movement.

To his credit, Ed Miliband recognises this. Indeed, he is the only leader of the three main parties perspicacious enough to grasp the wider change taking place. For all Cameron's easy meedya ways, he's not really a man of the people. For all Ed's awkwardness, he is at least trying to be. As I argued here, postliberalism also means post Party politics, since 'if politics really is on the cusp of a post-liberal settlement as many insist, then the common existence of liberalism across the political spectrum means that it is also on the cusp of post-party politics, since the post-liberal response also finds expression across the political spectrum.'

For which reason, it was cheering to hear Ed Miliband acknowledge precisely this in his One Nation Q&A session in Carlisle yesterday, recognising that for a left-wing movement to grow then its roots needs nourishing from below, not yanking up from above, and that means bringing in those who have long been left out in the cold. If we take him at his word then Miliband seems willing to open up the windows, to allow the winds to blow through and mess things up a little. Quite how messy he is willing to let things get we are yet to see, and it is undeniable that a significant part of the party hierarchy will rush to bolt those windows shut once their own papers start flying about. Yet for the time being the Labour party is being open, and from that we all benefit.

We caught a glimpse of this at the Q&A event, where that socially conservative core, that always did sit at the heart of the Labour tradition, reared its head – we heard questions on pornography, on the sexualisation of society, on gambling and on the freedom to choose to be a stay at home parent. And we also heard encouraging answers - to these and numerous other issues. Mainstream caricatures of the bogeyman 'liberal Left' always have exploded when thrust upon those outwith the parochial lens of the commentariat and professional politicos. Yet this widened focus, one that courts the labour movement rather than just the professional Labour Party, is one that Miliband has begun to employ, and he's not shy in telling people that that is exactly what he is trying to do precisely in order to revitalise that movement which he currently leads. 

For those of us who have long urged an opening up of the airwaves, there is much about which to be heartened, though of course there is no question that we will get it all our own way. As Maurice Glasman acknowledged in this programme regarding the importance of Catholic social teaching to the Labour movement (that such a programme even needed to be made rather says it all), rehabilitation of old voices will include an element of conflict, and it will necessarily be piecemeal - there will still be those who screech 'bigot', and reject everything we say on precisely those terms. Nonetheless, change is happening, and the Labour Party are at least, on the surface of it, trying to change.

Don’t get me wrong, I did not agree with all that was said by Ed Miliband. Responses to certain fundamental questions struck me as uninspired and uninspiring and I would dearly love a Labour leadership comfortable with critiquing the free market fundamentalism of liberal economic (/social) systems. There is no false optimism; more, it is the recognition that we are gradually allowed to speak. And even be listened to. In so doing, Ed Miliband has begun to pull the rug from underneath those very people who think he is their man - I'll stand alongside and cheer with them as he does so.

Farewell, Fond Friend

Owen Jones writes:

Nothing is more gut-wrenching than watching a close friend dying in front of you. And I mean beyond close: a friend who brought you into the world, helped raise you, and was there whenever you were most desperately in need. So, spare a moment for our National Health Service. Time of death: midnight, 1st April 2013. Cause of death: murder.

That this will strike many as hyperbole is because the assault on the NHS is one of the most scandalously under-reported issues in modern British history. Newsnight actually devoted a piece to scrutinising the privatisation of an institution once described by Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson as “the nearest thing the English have to a religion”. Only two years too late, then. Frequently, the attack is presented on the Government’s own terms: as the simple devolution of power to doctors and patients. Cuts of up to £20bn by 2015 are spun as “savings”. And who can disagree with “savings”?

A charitable explanation would be the sheer complexity of the Tory assault. The Health and Social Care Act is more than three times longer than the legislation that established the NHS in the first place. When I asked journalists adamantly opposed to the Tory plans why they had failed to adequately cover this travesty, they sheepishly responded it was too complicated: it went over their heads. Cynical though it may be, that so many of those running our glorious “free” media are covered by private health insurance should not be ignored either.

From today, strategic health authorities and primary care trusts are formally abolished. Some £60bn of the NHS budget is now in the hands of clinical commissioning groups, supposedly run by GPs. This is a sham, though one which turns local doctors into human shields for the privatisers. In reality, the vast majority of GPs will keep on doing what they do already – looking after patients – while commissioning will be managed by private companies.

It’s worse than that. Under the Government’s Section 75 regulations – even after they were revised after huge political pressure – all NHS services must be put out to competitive tender unless the commissioning groups are satisfied a “single provider” can deliver that service. But as the British Medical Journal has asked, how can they “be sure there is only one possible provider except by undertaking an expensive tender?” Indeed, were they  to refrain from doing so, they would risk a costly legal battle. As over a thousand doctors and nurses warned last month, the regulations will “force virtually every part of the English NHS to be opened up to the private sector”. A free-for-all in the English NHS beckons.

As Dr Lucy Reynolds, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, puts it, “the public sector will shrink away, and the private sector will grow”. All NHS hospitals will be forced to become foundation hospitals, laying the ground for them to be pushed into the private sector. That process is happening to my own local hospital, the Whittington Hospital, which is selling £17m worth of assets and faces 230 fewer beds and 570 job losses. Let’s be clear what it at stake: services, people’s health and even lives. As Professor Terence Stephenson of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges put it last week, doctors’ warnings had been ignored, and “unnecessary competition [would] destabilise complex, interconnected local health economies, in particular hospitals, potentially having adverse effects on patient services”.

And a warning from a leading member of a profession not known for overstating a case: patients could be “in danger from complications” from a fragmented NHS. Resources will no longer be distributed on the basis of need: the rules of the market now rule supreme. “It’s chaos, really,” says Brian James, until recently chief executive of the Rotherham Foundation Trust. Small and medium-sized hospitals will be “bankrupted by the market and more will be pulled into the big teaching hospitals”.

The great sell-off of our NHS is already well under way. Virgin Care now run more than 100 NHS services across the country, from radiology departments to GP clinics. Last year, they were given a £100m contract to run services in Surrey, and a £130m contract to run key NHS services for young people in Devon. Not that you’d know, of course: services run by the profiteering vultures circling ahead operate under the NHS logo, hiding privatisation from public view.

Just where is the opposition? Labour, the mother of the NHS, is hobbled by its own record. Although it injected desperately needed cash into our health services when last in power, New Labour helped  to lay the foundations for this Tory offensive. Former Labour Health Secretary Frank Dobson once condemned government plans to contract out commissioning, “with private companies handing work to private hospitals... If that wouldn’t amount to privatisation, I don’t know what would.” But that was 2006, and it was Tony Blair  in office. The disaster of New Labour’s Private Finance Initiative – the equivalent of buying public services on a credit card – has left hospitals saddled with debts of £79bn. Hospital trusts face bankruptcy as a result.

Labour’s own health spokesperson, Andy Burnham, has commendably pledged to repeal the Tories’ NHS Act. But let’s not forget that the last time they were in opposition, Labour pledged to renationalise the railways: on assuming office, it was deemed politically impossible. That must not happen again, and pressure must be brought on the Labour leadership to reject their own past.

The Tories didn’t have the guts to put their proposals before the electorate. Despite its flaws, the NHS had record levels of public satisfaction before the Tories began systematically dismantling it. You need only look to the US – where their inefficient market-driven system consumes twice as much of GDP as our NHS – to see the superiority of publicly-run healthcare. New Labour’s own privatisation doubled the cost of administration in our NHS.

It was Nye Bevan who said “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it”. It is with huge regret that I must say that – however much faith we have – we did not fight to save it. The NHS has been killed, murdered, assassinated by a Tory government. The question now is – do we have enough faith to bring it back to life?

How The NHS Ends

In the Telegraph, let the reader understand, Max Pemberton writes:

Today is a landmark in the history of the NHS. I have no doubt that social historians will look back and define events in relation to this day; we will come to view things as pre- or post-April 1 2013, in the same way that we currently think of before or after the establishment of the NHS. Today the Health And Social Care Act – in other words, the Coalition’s highly controversial NHS reforms – comes into effect. So how will things change for those who rely on the NHS?

It will not be obvious initially. People will get sick, see their GPs, be referred to specialists, be admitted to hospital or discharged, have blood tests and X-rays, and book appointments with physiotherapists and speech therapists, etc. There will be births and deaths. But, beneath the surface there will have been a dramatic shift in the way that healthcare is being delivered. Its impact should not be underestimated.

Preparations began nearly a year ago, when the Bill became law. As a result, primary care trusts (PCTs) began to disband and hand over power to new clinical commissioning groups (CCGs). As of today CCGs are responsible for commissioning the work – that is to say, treatment – undertaken in the name of the NHS. They will be responsible for organising and paying for care, and deciding who will provide it. For the first time in NHS history, the majority of treatments will be put out to tender: private organisations will be competing to win contracts to provide NHS healthcare.

When the original legislation was passed, there was a clause – Section 75 – that stated that the Government would issue further details on the regulations governing private sector involvement in NHS care at an unspecified date. Those of us who attempted to draw attention to this vital lack of clarification were dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorists, convinced that rampant privatisation of the NHS was imminent.

But the NHS reform Bill, as first published, was like a jigsaw puzzle with crucial pieces missing, the pieces that would reveal exactly what was being planned. It wasn’t until a few weeks before the law came into effect that those missing pieces became available, when the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, quietly announced the new regulations and attempts were made to push them through parliament. What was now clear was that the regulations effectively forced CCGs to put all services out to tender to the private sector and forbade them to favour the NHS as the provider.

After a public outcry and criticism from the House of Lords at the way the Government had slipped in the Section 75 regulations at the eleventh hour, Hunt had them hastily rewritten. But most experts agree that there was no meaningful change. GPs are allowed to keep some services within the NHS, but only in particular circumstances, such as when no private sector provider comes forward to bid. Everything else is up for grabs. It will take time for this change to slowly spread throughout our healthcare system, but it will.

And we should all be worried. Competition on a small scale already exists in the NHS for certain services, such as breast-cancer screening, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, where these contracts have been put out to tender. I have seen first-hand what it can result in: the bureaucracy, the waste of time and resources, as bids are entered, assessed and contracts issued. I have seen, too, the way that services are, invariably, awarded to the lowest bidder regardless of quality, and I have seen how organisations that win these contracts will maximise profits by employing under-trained, cheaper staff, and replacing doctors with nurses, and nurses with auxiliaries.

Last month I was working in a drugs service in the Home Counties. Some agencies, such as those providing drugs and alcohol support services, were opened up for competition by Labour years ago. This particular service was taken over by a non-NHS organisation last year which made a bid considerably lower than what it was then costing the NHS to run it. They did this by reducing the medical input and replacing the majority of nurses with “drugs workers”, many of whom were dedicated and thoughtful, but were not medically trained.

This organisation is only paid for addicts whom they successfully wean off heroin. It receives £3,000 per patient if they abstain for three months, then a further £5,000 if they are still drugs-free a year later. So each patient is worth about £8,000 to the organisation – but only if they stay off heroin. And this is at the root of the problem. I saw a homeless patient who had had several failed attempts at detoxing. He was injecting five bags of heroin a day (about £50 worth). He was incredibly frail and I knew that if he continued, he would soon be dead. To make matters worse, he was injecting into his groin because he had no usable veins left in his arm, running the risk of an infection that can result in amputation of the leg.

I reasoned that although it was unlikely we would cure him of his addiction easily, it was worth trying to engage him in treatment and get him on a prescription for methadone. We would be able to reduce the amount of heroin he needed to take – this, in turn would reduce the amount of crime he committed, the number of needles left lying around, the frequency of injecting. He might even stop using heroin altogether and we could maintain him on methadone while we tried to help him get his life together.

The manager of the clinic, however, was clear: they wouldn’t get paid for this approach as he wouldn’t be regarded as detoxed. Discharging him back on to the streets was the solution. I was horrified: if I discharged him from the service, we were sending him to certain death. There was no NHS service to refer him to because this organisation had taken over the entire contract for drug services in the area. I was staggered that there was no NHS help available to this man. This is just one example of what happens when services go out to tender.

You might think that, well, you’re not a drug addict so why does this matter? This will never affect you. But you’d be wrong. From today, this is the model that is being rolled out across the whole of the NHS. So, say for example you need a knee replacement. The provider commissioned to deliver this by your local CCG will have stipulated in the contract what work it will undertake and how much it will get paid. This is fine if you’re a straightforward case. They do the operation, you’re discharged and they are paid the set fee. But what happens if your knee operation is more complicated?

What if your knee joint has twisted and is now deformed (it does happen), which means the surgeon has to avoid damaging the nerves that run down your leg? All of a sudden, the provider won’t turn such a tidy profit on your knee replacement. This is outside of the terms of their contract. So they reject you and discharge you back to the care of your GP. And what then? There’s no longer an NHS to pick you up because this private organisation has taken over knee operations in your area. So where do you go? Suddenly my heroin-addicted patient being told there’s nothing anyone can do doesn’t seem so far removed from your own situation.

In the new NHS, everything will be about payment by results, because this is all the private contractors are interested in. All “clinical encounters” have to have an easily definable, objectively measurable end point. But what about chronic conditions? Or treatments where the chances of success are low and complications high? This is what saddens me: what were once the NHS’s strengths – resources, expertise and the united focus on the patient – are being replaced by a fragmented and atomised service, bound not by a duty of care but by a contract and driven, not by what is best for the patient, but by the cost of the encounter. It will be a slow, insidious creep but it’s coming. Be prepared. This is the way the NHS ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

Britain Signs Away Her Democratic Rights

Henry Porter is getting there:

We seem like a progressive, liberal society. The majority of us support gay marriage; we extend greater understanding to people with disabilities, especially those who overcome their disadvantages in competition; we tolerate eye-watering smut about sex and bodily functions from practically every comedian on television. And we have become a much more diverse society, which, while not universally tolerant, allows people to rub along in their day-to-day dealings with remarkably little friction.

Compare life today to three or four decades ago, when the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, caused outrage by being only the second person to utter the word fuck on television (after Kenneth Tynan) and offended an entirely different group of people by referring to gay men as "queers", in his 1982 editorial about section 28, the law that forbade local councils from promoting homosexuality.

Tolerance of gender, sexual and racial differences is certainly much greater today. But can Britain be described as a more liberal society after a month that has seen all parties support legislation that will effectively license the press, and a second bill introducing secret hearings in civil cases pass through the Lords, with Liberal Democrat peers whipped to oppose amendments that were designed to support open and natural justice? I'll come to the Lib Dems later, but the short answer is no.

Things are happening that would have been unimaginable to democrats across the political spectrum 30 years ago. Personal rights have expanded and tolerance undeniably has increased, but at the same time we are behaving as though liberty were a limitless resource that can be endlessly compromised without loss to the individual, or to the sum total of rights that define our free society. It's approximately the same kind of negligence as you find in countries blighted by uncontrolled development, where more and more of the natural landscape is sacrificed to progress, until there is no real countryside left, and very little that the people could do to get it back.

During the Labour years, there was a general project, formed by an all-powerful administration, to chivvy, watch and curtail the behaviour of the British people. Today we have a more dangerous political consensus that is selectively undermining important rights, and this will have an impact on the way we are governed in the future.

The press behaved appallingly but also criminally. The Guardian exposed the criminality, while here we did the maths on Rupert Murdoch's deplorable effect on British politics and the political discourse. In other words, a free press that had nothing to fear from fines or a charter that will, whatever anyone says today, be subject to change. It seems not to occur to the royal charter's supporters that the very people who were so easily contaminated by Murdoch's influence – ministers and privy counsellors – will be the ones who could tighten controls if things get rough between the government and some newspapers, just as in two fading democracies – Argentina and Hungary.

On the justice and security bill, I will only say that it is astonishing that it went to the Lords last Tuesday for amendments that would have made a secret hearing closed material procedure a measure of last resort and give greater discretion to judges, only for them to be opposed by Liberal Democrat peers. It is sad, too, that these same individuals talk about bringing the press under control and do not necessarily blanch when you raise the government's plans to collect the information from every email, phone call and internet connection, which are currently being redrafted.

That the Liberal Democrat party lost or betrayed its principles so quickly in government is, I suppose, to be expected, and I have to confess to very little surprise when I read Nick Clegg's weaselly speech on immigration, which seemed to proclaim tolerance yet contained the subsonic message of rightwing dog-whistle politics. With every day that passes, he looks more and more like a member of Blair's second administration home affairs team.

The problem is that as the liberal voice is all but disappearing from parliament we have a generation of leaders in their 40s who will seem almost indistinguishable to future historians. Clegg's betrayal of liberal values was simply part of the process of his becoming a member of the pragmatic, basically non-ideological, homogenised governing class, which on these issues of liberty moves in lockstep. Apart from a few individuals such as David Davis and, on the press, his fellow Tories Peter Lilley and Jacob Rees Mogg, the liberal and democratic arguments are rarely being made in parliament. That is new.

Politicians are the products of society. They have changed because we have changed. We are more liberal in one sense, less in another. We have become liberals of the consumerist age, keen on personal choice and the expression of individuality, yet with little understanding of the way freedom is maintained from generation to generation: of the importance of conventions such as a free press and open and natural justice in underpinning a free society.

Today, we applaud John Stuart Mill's emphasis on self-development – "the importance, to man and society, of a large variety of types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions". But we seemed to have forgotten the other vital idea contained in his tract On Liberty. "The only purpose," he wrote, "for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

In one sense, we are less serious than we used to be, perhaps too readily satisfying ourselves that if Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle can recite their mortifying garbage on TV, we live in a properly open, liberal society. At any rate, discussion of these issues seems unusually hard to find, particularly on the BBC, and that is because we have forgotten that proper liberal politics is not the product of some flaky political sect but a response to unrestrained power of governments in the lives of individuals.

In his book Towards the Light, the philosopher AC Grayling recalls what the Athenians said to the citizens of Melos before they massacred them and sacked their city. "You know as well as we do that right is only in question between equals in power, for the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Liberal politics is about trying to bring about that equality of power between people and government. In supporting the press charter and the justice and security bill, the Lib Dems failed that cause.

Until There Is A New Counterculture

Paul Morley writes:

Congratulations to the Rolling Stones on the announcement of their summer wedding to the Glastonbury festival, held one month before their lead singer turns 70. It is a marriage made in performance heaven, for those who believe, or creepy hell, for those who think the Stones on stage is more grotesque than beautiful burlesque.

Those who are uncomfortable with the grand old men of the 60s playing the festival that represents idealistic spirit are missing the point. This inevitable royal pop marriage between the well-branded greatest rock'n'roll band in the world and the greatest festival shows us how the energy of rock has transformed into something often pleasant and fun-filled, but it is not where you should be looking for whatever the new is. Festivals are the rock generation's equivalent of cruises, the convenient place to go to sample various preserved delights, obscure sites and classic monuments and celebrate ancient rituals from a safe distance.

As much as Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis always coveted an appearance from the Stones, they would have, until the last year or two, looked wrong at Glastonbury, because they were too corporate – debauched representatives of a mundane entertainment state. Glastonbury is now a major territory in that entertainment state and the great Pyramid performances the equivalent of formal state parades. It is now wrong for the Stones not to play at Glastonbury, where those of whatever age attend because they want the best views, the most treasured experiences, in the form of the all-time greatest hits and the historic bands. They don't give a damn that the Stones should not be there because of ancient, snobby critical concerns they had sold out. They would not be convinced by the thought that the clichés of rock and its sentimental support system now form the oppressive orthodoxy.

Compared with this year's other Glastonbury headliners, the Arctic Monkeys and Mumford and Sons, the Stones, perversely, have the real youthful, warrior edge. For better or worse, they are old men playing young music, not young people playing old music. The Monkeys and the Mumfords are the dutiful archivists; the Stones are the bloody archive, using their appearance on the Pyramid stage to help refine their own legend. They are also the most conceptually pure, as ludicrous as it can be to watch 70-year-old men romp through songs about lust, ambition and sexual triumph that are becoming as much songs about the wretched dying of the light.

The Stones at Glastonbury confirms how the 20th-century babies born between, say, the early 40s and the early 60s, the baby boomers, remain in control of the pop culture they invented and reinvented between the late 50s and the late 70s, even as the record industry and traditional media, business and television approach extinction. The boomers have turned out to be like cockroaches surviving all sorts of cultural catastrophes and even their own apparently allotted life span. Thirty-five years ago, the punk generation thought they had got rid of the Stones. I saw them in concert 40 years ago, and they seemed old then. I told Mick Jagger to his face in 1980 it was time to give up, because it seemed culturally vital that the new was allowed to prosper, to deal with dangerous new political forces, and the Rolling Stones seemed spent artistically and therefore a drain on unconventional, unprocessed versions of the energy they released in their prime.

His attitude then was along the lines of: you must be mad. This isn't about youthful rebellion, about forging fluid, collective identity; this is about smoke-screened showbusiness, a competitive, hyped-up masquerade of pose, illusion and self-belief for the general relief of pent-up tension. It's business, you fool. We provide a service that is ultimately beyond fashion.

As things turned out, he was right.

The Stones have come back like the royal family; ruthless manipulators of people's desires, shielded and amplified by social media, thriving in an age where fame is a new church and spinning, sensationalising publicists have taken charge. They belong now as much as they did in the 60s. The Stones have lurched through difficult times and occasional near exile all the way into the security of the current vintage period, which promotes their once dead corny imagery and cocksure approach as rock's indestructible classic house style.

Spoilt by all the immediate access to abundant pop culture, to a near infinity of packaged sensation, the current generation, unlike the boomers, have no need to strain forward and chase new forms of freedom that react against previous stultifying values. They are trapped inside a world of their parents' making but, unlike the stale, broken world the boomers inherited, this one supplies them with purpose-built, easily accessed pleasure and escape. It numbs any appetite to develop new ways of opposing the system, of inventing a disobedient internet-era counterculture that would make the old counterculture look as quaint and wasted as it actually is.

That the Stones are still so visibly functioning is not just because the arrogant, clingy baby boomers, with their domineering cultural presence, have so much power they block anything dangerously new. It is as much the young vintagers, the kids and grandkids of the boomers, the V generation, who have allowed them back in.

The new generation of teens and post-teens are blocked from generating novel, disruptive cultural space by the stubborn boomers. They are crowded out by older generations wanting to have fun until they die, stymied by a succession of reforming pop revolutions and media sensations that led only to more and more award ceremonies and greatest hits anthologies. They are bankrupted by the boomers' self-indulgent spending, let down by the boomers' complacent inability to anticipate the revolutionary consequences of the computer world, flustered by constant electronic distraction. The only way for a new generation to take control of what comes after this decaying period of pop culture is to conceive a dazzling cultural hybrid – perhaps involving computer coding, self-branding, comic book abstraction, architecture, a profound reconfiguring of rock's dissolving moral and social vigilance and a mutating speed of thought – that reverberates from the world as it is now, on the edge of collapse, not as it was then, recovering from collapse.

The mistake is assuming any potentially new youth-driven counterculture will resemble ones from the past, when rock music was the main element. Any 21st-century outburst of rebellion will not resemble the rock that is now formally collected at multiple festivals the world over in the way that the Stones did not resemble silent movies.

Meanwhile, those thousands gathered at the Glastonbury resort to witness the marriage ceremony between the bandy, rocking grooms and the blushing bride will have a very special time. Hopefully the pair will unwittingly inspire a post-millenial, post -vintage generation teenager to look at this freakish combination of epicurean pop festival and ageing dandy rock band and fully understand that if they want to radically represent the shape of their mind and the shifting world around them, they cannot possibly use rock music, which now only refers to its own echoing history. The Stones at Glastonbury will be both wedding and memorial service. Jagger, though, the bulletproof dark prince of the boomers, will somehow emerge with plans for the next 30-odd years.