Food

Lemon Risotto

There are a lot of useful additions to this recipe, but it’s worth trying the original before rushing to fill a gap you might personally find does not need filling.

Prep 15 min
Cook 30 min
Serves 4

60g butter
2 tbsp olive oil
2 shallots, peeled and finely chopped
1 stick celery, finely chopped
Salt and black pepper
350g risotto rice (arborio or canaroli)
100ml dry white wine or 50ml dry vermouth
1-1.25 litres vegetable stock, simmering
1 large unwaxed lemon (zest and juice)
75g mascarpone or robiola
60g parmesan, grated

In a large, heavy-based frying pan or enamel-based cast iron casserole, warm half the butter and all the oil over a medium-low flame then gently fry/ stew the onion and celery along with a pinch of salt until soft and translucent – this will take about seven minutes. Add the rice and stir until each grain glistens – you want them to become partly translucent and to smell slightly toasty.

In another pan on the back of the stove, keep the stock at a simmer.

Raise the flame, add the wine or vermouth and let it bubble and evaporate for a minute. Start to add the stock, ladle by ladle, stirring continuously while everything bubbles at a lively pace, allowing each ladleful to be absorbed by the rice before adding the next. Add the lemon zest after 10 minutes. Continue until the rice is tender but with a slight nutty bite, and the risotto is soft and rippling. This can take anything from 17 – 25 minutes depending on the rice you are using: keep tasting.

Pull the pan from the heat and, using a wooden spoon, firmly beat the remaining butter, mascarpone, parmesan, two tablespoons of lemon juice and a generous grind of black pepper into the rice. Cover the pan and leave to rest for one minute. Beat again and serve.

Additions to consider: mint, globe artichokes, fennel

Political, Rants&Rambles

Representation

If you don’t go to university, if you’re not a “professional” who speaks for you in political terms? Who even knows what you want or what your aspirations might be for yourself and for your kids?

In theory, in a democracy, the majority should influence — some would even say determine — the distribution of income. In practice, this is not the case.

Over the past few decades, political scientists have advanced a broad range of arguments to explain why democracy has failed to stem the growth of inequality.

Most recently, Thomas Piketty, a French economist who is the author of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has come up with a straightforward answer: Traditional parties of the left no longer represent the working and lower middle classes.

In a January Power Point presentation, “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right,” Piketty documents how the domination of the Democratic Party in the US (and of socialist parties in France) by voters without college or university degrees came to an end over the period from 1948 to 2017. Both parties are now led by highly educated voters whose interests are markedly different from those in the working class.

The result, Piketty argues, is a political system that pits two top-down coalitions against each other:

In the 1950s-60s, the vote for left-wing (socialist) parties in France and the Democratic Party in the US used to be associated with lower education & lower income voters. It (the left) has gradually become associated since 1970s-80s with higher education voters, giving rise to a multiple-elite party system: high-education elites vote for the left, while high-income/high-wealth elites for the right, i.e., intellectual elite (Brahmin left) vs business elite (merchant right).

Changes in the structure of the electorate emerged in force during a period of unprecedented upheaval in the 1960s, when a combination of liberation movements — committed to civil rights, women’s rights, sexual freedom, the student left, decolonization and opposition to the Vietnam War — swept across Europe and the United States.

In support of Piketty’s argument: In 1996, according to exit polls, the majority of voters who cast ballots for Bill Clinton were what demographers call non-college. That year, his voters were split 59 percent non-college to 41 percent college graduates. Twenty years later, the majority of voters for Hillary Clinton were college graduates, at 54.3 percent, compared with 45.7 percent non-college.

Exit polls show substantially larger numbers of college-educated voters than the surveys conducted by American National Election Studies. But the ANES data also shows a sharp increase in the percentage of voters with college and advanced degrees supporting Democratic presidential candidates. In 1952 and 1956, for example, the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson, got 29 and 31 percent of the college-educated vote. In 2012, the most recent year for which ANES data is available, 53 percent of those with at least a college degree voted for Barack Obama.

One of the most important of Piketty’s conclusions is that constituencies that feel unrepresented by the new partisan configuration will be drawn to populism.

The Piketty report is a significant contribution to the growing collection of studies analyzing the inability of democratic forces to adequately counter inequality.

Five years ago, Adam Bonica,  a political scientist at Stanford, published “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?” Economic theory, he wrote, holds that “inequality should be at least partially self-correcting in a democracy” as “increased inequality leads the median voter to demand more redistribution.”

Starting in the 1970s, this rebalancing mechanism failed to work, and the divide between the rich and the rest of us began to grow, Bonica, Nolan McCarty of Princeton, Keith T. Poole of the University of Georgia, and Howard Rosenthal of N.Y.U. wrote.

They cite five possible explanations.

  1. Growing bipartisan acceptance of the tenets of free market capitalism;
  2. Immigration and low turnout among the poor resulting in an increasingly affluent median voter;
  3.  “Rising real income and wealth has made a larger fraction of the population less attracted to turning to government for social insurance.”
  4. The rich escalated their use of money to influence policy through campaign contributions, lobbying and other mechanisms; and finally,
  5. The political process has been distorted by polarization and gerrymandering in ways that “reduce the accountability of elected officials to the majority.”

In the five years since their essay was published, we’ve seen all of this play out; in the case of campaign contributions in particular, the authors provide strong evidence of the expanding clout of the very rich.

In recent decades, there has been a large increase in the number of people who contribute to political campaigns: In 1980, there were 224,322 individual contributions, the four authors write, and by 2012, that number grew to 3,138,564.

On the surface, those numbers would seem to suggest a democratization of campaign financing. In fact, as the courts have steadily raised the amount an individual can contribute, megadonors have become all the more influential.

The share of contributions donated by the top 0.01 percent of the voting age population grew from 16 percent in the 1980s to 40 percent in 2016.

In other words, if money buys influence over policy, the top 0.01 percent bought nearly triple the influence in 2016 that it purchased in the early 1980s.

Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. who has stressed the power of economic elites to set the policy agenda, voiced some skepticism of Piketty’s analysis. In an email, he wrote that what Piketty found can be explained in large part by racial hostility, the adverse effects of globalization on white manufacturing workers, and the decline in social mobility:

It’s not a new thing. This is what George Wallace and Ronald Reagan were about also. Its current reincarnation is almost surely due to the fact that both globalization and technological changes have left behind vast swathes of the country. But why have these people found a home in the Republican Party, not in the Democratic Party? That’s less clear, but if I were to make a guess, I would say that this is related to the fact that economic hardship does not work by itself. It needs to tap into other grievances, and in the US context these have been related to pent-up hostility towards blacks and immigrants (and perhaps their own albeit slow upward mobility). If so, it is natural that it is the Republican Party, with its southern strategy and more welcoming attitude towards soft racism, that has come to house this discontent.

Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale who writes extensively about inequality, praised Piketty’s work but noted that he and others

have argued that the Democrats were cross-pressured by rising inequality because they wanted to maximize campaign cash as well as votes and because they got most of their institutional support from a coalition of single-issue groups. This cross-pressure, in turn, contributed to their weak attempt to maintain the allegiance of the white working class.

Like Acemoglu, Hacker argues that the Piketty analysis does not place enough emphasis on race:

It doesn’t seem very fundamental to Piketty’s story. Yet it’s impossible to deny that the realignment of the parties around race created the opening for the GOP to gain the support of white voters — especially downscale white voters — by exploiting resentment of racial and ethnic minorities.

Dean Baker, a co-founder of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, was the sharpest critic of Piketty.

“I’m not sure this analysis is all that useful,” Baker wrote me.

I see Piketty is missing the way in which markets have been restructured to redistribute income upward and to take away options for reversing inequality and promoting growth in ways that benefit low and middle income workers.

Piketty, in Baker’s view, “sees the market outcomes as largely given and redistribution just means tax and transfer policy.”

Baker argues that correcting inequality requires adoption of a much broader policy agenda. Citing the argument in his book “Rigged,” Baker calls for radical reform of exchange rates, of monetary policy, of intellectual property rights and of the financial sector as well as reform of the institutional protection of doctors, dentists, and lawyers and of corporate governance rules that now allow “C.E.O.s to rip off shareholders.”

Baker is not optimistic about full-throated economic liberalism in the Democratic Party.

“Because the party has largely supported an agenda that redistributes upward, they have lost much of their working class base,” he wrote in his email to me:

The friends you keep matter. The speeches that folks like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama give at Wall Street firms are not a good look. The banks don’t hand you huge honorariums if they think you are going to take their money and put them in prison.

There is “an ongoing battle,” Baker continued,

in the Democratic Party as well as in most of the left parties across Europe. There are those who would like to accept inequality and focus exclusively on issues like gender equality and anti-racism. I would never minimize the importance of combating gender inequality or racism/nativism, but if that means ignoring the policies that have led to the enormous inequality we now see, that is not a serious progressive agenda.

If Democrats must adopt a broader agenda to counter inequality, Piketty’s study is indispensable. He demonstrates that the highly educated constituency currently controlling the party has been ineffective in protecting the material interests of the less well off.

For one thing, the well-educated leadership of the left is thriving under the status quo. The economic gains of those with college degrees — now, remember, the majority of the Democratic electorate — are shown in the accompanying graphic. From 1988 to 2012, the inflation-adjusted income of college graduates increased by 16 percent and for those with advanced degrees by 42 percent.

In contrast, those with some college but no degree saw a 1 percent increase; those with a high school degree saw a 0.3 percent income growth; and those without a high school degree saw their income decline by 13 percent.

There is no question that the Democrats’ loss of non-college white support has deep roots in the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. The fight for equal rights for African-Americans resulted in the full-scale regional realignment of the South toward the Republican Party and turned once solidly Democratic precincts in working class sections of Chicago, Boston, Milwaukee and other major cities into partisan battlegrounds.

These upheavals have left the party of the left ill-equipped to tackle not only inequality but economic mobility more broadly and with it the pervasive decline of much of what has become red America.

This in turn raises the question: Can a party split between an upscale wing that is majority white and a heavily minority working class wing effectively advocate on behalf of a liberal-left economic agenda? The jury is out on this question, but the verdict could very well be no.

Travel

Yakushima, Japan

At the end of the Kyushu peninsula in Japan, about as far south west as you can go, is the city of Kagoshima, end of the bullet train rail pass. It’s also the jumping off point for the ferry to the sub-tropical Yakushima.

Yakushima Island Views

Yakushima (屋久島) is one of the Osumi Islands, 504.88 km2 (194.94 sq mi) in area, with a small a population of 13,178, mostly hippies. We crossed t the island by 2hour hydrofoil, but there is also a ferry, a slower car ferry, and flights to Yakushima Airport  (3 to 5 times daily from Kagoshima, once daily from Fukokoa and once daily from Osaka).

Yakushima
Yakushima lighthouse

To drive in Japan, you need an international drivers licence, which we’d not realised – next time we’ll take one and hire a car there.

Yakushima

In 1980 an area of 18,958ha (46,850 acres) was designated a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve. 

Yakushima

It is the largest nesting ground for the endangered loggerhead sea turtle in the North Pacific, though we were slightly too late in September to see the main baby turtles race for the ocean and my family were all too squeamish about the “circle of life” death run that involved to actively hunt out the few remaining sites where turtles could be found.

Yakushima Forests
Yakushima

 Yakushima’s unique remnant of warm/temperate ancient forest has been a natural World Heritage Site since 1993. In the Wilderness core area (12.19 square kilometres (3,010 acres)) of the World Heritage Site, no record of past tree cutting can be traced.

Yakushima

The island is visited by 300,000 tourists every year.

Yakushima

The bedrock of the island is granite, and as such it hosts no active volcanoes. It has an area of approximately 504.5 square kilometres (194.8 sq mi) and is is roughly circular in shape.

Yakushima

It feels like a mountain rising straight from the ocean bed and many of the tourists who visit do so in order to walk the circumference of peaks at the centre of the island.

Yakushima
Yakushima

That was never going to be us – we settled for some leisurely day trips and hunting out watering holes including some of the numerous hot springs to be found here.

Yakushima
Yakushima

Yakushima contains one of the largest tracts of existing  Nansei Islands subtropical evergreen forests, and endangered habitat ecoregion.

Yakushika

The only large animals indigenous to the island are red-bottomed macaques and a variety of sika deer (yakushika).

Red Bottomed Macaques
Yakushima Macaques

Yakushima is famous for its lush vegetation. Whilst most of the island has at one time or another been logged (dating back at least to the early Edo period), it has been extensively replanted and reseeded since logging ended in the late 1960s, at which time a conservation regime was established.

Yakushima Cedar

In addition to this secondary forest, there are some remaining areas of primary forest, composed mainly of a variety of Japanese cedar, known as yakusagi (屋久杉), the best known single example of which is named the Jōmon Sugi (縄文杉), as its age is estimated to date to at least the Jomon period of Japanese history, 2300 years ago.

Yakushima

In addition, the island lists over 50 varieties of endemic flower, as well as a number of endemic trees.

Yakushima Cedar

Yakushima has a humid sub-tropical climate with hot, humid summers and mild winters. It is also Japan’s wettest place, where in Summer the locals say it rains “35 days a month”.

Yakushima forest

There are drier periods in autumn and winter, and when we visited it was dry throughout. It is the southernmost place in Japan where there is snow in the mountains, often for months, while the ocean temperature is never below 19 °C (66 °F)

Yakushima waterfall

And none of these very wonderful facts happens to be the reason we visited because yakushima is also the inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki‘s film Princess Mononoke.

Yakushima
Yakushima

It is one of the most beautiful places on earth that I have visited, and I’ve visited many places.

Food

Sheet-Pan Crisp Tofu and Sweet Potatoes

Sheet-Pan Crisp Tofu and Sweet Potatoes

INGREDIENTS

  • 1 (14-ounce) package extra-firm tofu, cut crosswise into 4 1-inch thick slices
  • 2 tablespoons oil, plus more as needed
  • 2 tablespoons tamari
  • 1 ½ teaspoons honey
  • 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon rice wine vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon cornstarch
  • 4 medium sweet potatoes (about 8 ounces each), cut lengthwise into 3/4-inch wedges
  • ½ teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
  • ¼ teaspoon black pepper
  • 4 scallions, cut into 3-inch pieces and thinly sliced lengthwise
  • Large pinch of sugar
  • ½ cup cilantro leaves
  • Hot sesame chile oil, or red-pepper flakes, for serving
  • Salted, roasted nuts, for serving (optional)

PREPARATION

  1. Heat oven to 200C. Arrange tofu pieces, cut sides down, on a clean kitchen towel or paper towels. Cover with another kitchen towel, and place a flat cutting board on top. If your cutting board is lightweight, stack a few cans or a skillet on top to weigh it down. Let tofu drain for at least 10 minutes (and up to 30 minutes), then transfer to a cutting board. Cut strips into 3/4-inch pieces (1-inch thick), and transfer to a medium bowl.
  2. In a small bowl, whisk together oil, tamari, honey and 1 teaspoon vinegar. Toss half the mixture with the tofu, then toss in cornstarch. Arrange in a single layer on a rimmed sheet pan.
  3. On a separate rimmed sheet pan, toss together potato wedges, 1/2 teaspoon salt and pepper. Arrange in a single layer; do not crowd the pan. If they don’t all fit, arrange extra wedges on the pan with the tofu.
  4. Bake tofu and potatoes until browned, 35 to 40 minutes, flipping them halfway through. If the tofu sticks (and this is likely), use a thin metal spatula to carefully loosen each one before flipping. A small offset spatula is perfect here.
  5. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, combine scallions, 1 tablespoon vinegar and a large pinch each sugar and salt. Let sit while tofu and potatoes roast.
  6. To serve, toss tofu with some of the reserved tamari sauce, to taste. Serve with potato wedges, topped with scallions, cilantro and a drizzle of hot sesame chile oil or sprinkling of red-pepper flakes, and more tamari sauce. Sprinkle with nuts if desired.
Travel

Nagasaki

Heading relentlessly west from Tokyo, through the countryside, through Osaka and Hiroshima, eventually if you keep going as we did, you reach the city of Nagasaki.

Nagasaki (Japanese: 長崎, “Long Cape“) is the capital and the largest city of the Nagasaki prefecture  on the island of Kyushu in Japan.

Nagasaki tramlines

It is an easy city to get around with plentiful, reliable and safe tramlines.

Nagasaki tramlines

It became the sole port used for trade with the Portuguese and Dutch during the 16th through 19th centuries.

Nagasaki backstreets

There are many possible reasons for wanting to visit, not least the memorial to the atomic bombing of the city, similar to Hiroshima. During WW2, the American atomic bombing of the city made Nagasaki the second and, to date, last city in the world to experience a nuclear attack (at 11:02 a.m., August 9, 1945 ‘Japan Standard Time (UTC+9)’).

Nagasaki
Nagasaki Dragon

The Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki region have been recognized and included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Part of Nagasaki was home to a major Imperial Japanese navy base during the First Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War.

But for us, the main reason was to try and get a feel for the early life of European traders who were segregated away from the Japanese population into ghettoes, both for work and for life.

Even the fact that the European ghetto lies up on top of the hillside is mitigated by a covered outdoor escalator and/or a outdoor life that will take you up to the top of the Gardens.

Covered outdoor lift, Nagasaki
Glover Gardens
Glover Garden interior

Glover Garden (グラバー園, Gurabāen) is a park in Nagasaki built for Thomas Blake Glover, a Scottish merchant who contributed to the modernization of Japan in shipbuilding, coal mining, and other fields.

Glover Gardens

In amongst other western style houses, stands the Glover Residence, the oldest Western style house surviving in Japan and Nagasaki’s foremost tourist attraction.

It has the bonus of being located on the Minamiyamate hillside overlooking Nagasaki harbor. It was built by Hidenoshin Koyama and completed in 1863 and is now designated as an Important Cultural Asset for Japan.

Glover gardens

From the coffee shop located in one of the historic buildings there is a wonderful view of the harbour.

Because although it’s major city, with a population of around half a million, it still feels very human in scale, surrounded by hills around a beautiful natural harbour.

Outside of Glover Park you can still find the remains of Dejima, a small artificial island originally located in the bay of Nagasaki but now incorporated into the city itself.

Dejima, Nagasaki

Dejima was built in 1634 to house Portuguese traders and separate them from Japanese society by digging a canal through a small peninsula.

Dejima, Nagasaki

The Dutch were moved to Dejima in 1641 and during most of the Edo period the island was the single place of direct trade and exchange between Japan and the outside world.

Dejima, detail
Dejima, detail

Dejima was abolished after the Treaty of Kanagwa  in 1854 and the island was later integrated into Nagasaki city through land reclamation.

Dejima

Nagasaki feels as though it is one of the few Japanese cities to have been foreign influenced in any way, not just the existence of the European ghettoes but a real and vibrant Chinatown.

Chinatown, Nagasaki
Chinatown detail, nagasaki

As well as the relics throughout town of it’s European past.

Nagasaki
Nagasaki

Like all Japanese cities it feels incredibly safe and secure for tourists even at nighttime.

Nagasaki

Nagasaki Gallery:

Food

Nut Roast

I decided to revisit some old recipes, starting with a Cranks nut roast from my very first vegetarian cookbook, now more than 30 years old. My daughter was not keen.

Apparently nut roasts are still a thing, especially for university students but she’d never eaten one she’d actually liked.

The Crank recipe I remember was based on mixed nuts, mainly peanuts, which doesn’t work for me now that I’ve developed this allergy, so I ended up making it with a mixture of hazelnuts and cashews and to liven it up, I stuck it in my smallest bundt tin.

Cranks Nut Roast (Serves 4) 

  • 1 Medium Sized Onion
  • 25g (1oz) Butter or margarine
  • 225g (8oz) Mixed nuts, i.e. Peanuts, walnuts, cashews etc.
  • 100g (4oz) Wholemeal bread
  • 300ml (1/4 pt) Vegetable Stock or water
  • 10ml (2tsp) marmite
  • 5ml (1tsp) Mixed Herbs
  • 1 tomato & grated cheese (optional)
  • Salt & Pepper to taste
  1. Chop the onions and sauté in the butter until transparent.
  2. Grind the nuts and bread together in a liquidizer until quite fine.
  3. Heat the stock and yeast extract to boiling point, then combine all the ingredients together and mix well – use double the amount of stock if not adding a cheese/tomato layer.
  4. Turn into a greased shallow baking dish (or bundt tin) level the surface, sprinkle with a few breadcrumbs, and bake in the oven at 180°C (350°F/ Mark 4) for 30 minutes, until golden brown.
Cranks Nut Roast

It doesn’t photograph well but tasted fine enough, with an onion gravy or cranberry sauce (nut roasts can be dry) if not brilliant so I’ve decided to play around with it until it’s better.

Though my daughter was worried it would be heavy and dense, she actually found it surprisingly light and everyone liked the inclusion of a layer of tomatoes and grated cheese in the middle.

But ideally it would be lighter and have a bit more flavour, so instead of breadcrumbs, I’m considering adding some red lentils cooked in vegetable stock with added miso. Some chopped capers could be added to the cheese/tomato layer as well.

If that’s not enough umami then obviously cheddar could be added to the red lentil mix when warm, maybe with an egg beaten to add air, in which case I’d probably go for a layer of cooked spinach in place of the cheese/tomato mix but let’s start with some red lentils

Rants&Rambles

Grief

My friend died.

We visited on the Friday after our trip to Japan to catch up with him and the wife he loves so much and cares for and as we were leaving he jumped up out of his chair and said “See you next week” as he often did.

The call arrived Sunday afternoon. He had died suddenly, waking unwell that morning with a doctor called just too late, if there ever was a chance to save him from the aneurism.

And I have never cried so much or felt such loss, such absence.

He was someone who made my life brighter and lighter and now he’s gone. I have just begun to understand my loss.

And to all of those well-meaning people who tell me how good I have been for visiting an old man, as if our friendship were an act of charity, your suggestion makes me incandescent with rage.

My grief is for my loss, mine.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Crimes & Misdemeanours

A recent article in the Times newspaper looked at the Labour strategy in the recent election.


Hidden from staff, this version was updated 15th Nov and leaked by a trade union (1/5)

It reveals that despite polls Labour targeted 60 seats and defended just 26

The list includes Tory seats with majorities of more than 5,000 like Stourbridge, Dover and Gloucester

Echoes Murphy’s claim that Labour would reject polling. “We ripped up those rules,’ she said. (2/5)

View image on Twitter

It included Labour’s secret list of target seats for the election It reveals Murphy and Milne, policy makers and shakers for Labour, fought a “deranged” offensive campaign focused on Tory Leave seats

View image on Twitter

Hidden from staff, this version was updated 15th Nov and leaked by a trade union. It reveals that despite polls, Labour targeted 60 seats and defended just 26. The list includes Tory seats with majorities of more than 5,000 like Stourbridge, Dover and Gloucester Echoes Murphy’s claim that Labour would reject polling: “We ripped up those rules,’ she said.

Unsurprisingly this kamikaze strategy resulted in just 1 win (Putney) out of the 60 seats targeted and multiple losses in undefended seats, as the so-call Labour “red wall” crumbled.

View image on Twitter

Some seats targeted appear to be political – for example Labour continued to target Luciana Berger in Finchley and Golders Green but it did not prioritise Ruth Smeeth in Stoke on Trent North . Similarly with several Corbyn sceptics abandoned as resources were marshalled elsewhere.

View image on Twitter

The source for the article said that the campaign was based on three motives:

– disprove the defensive approach of 2017

– show that Lab support concentrated in non-Remain areas

– internal politics, change complexion of PLP “Unite are behind this,” they say

With the largest defeat in generations it certainly seems to have provided a clear answer to all of the above.

View image on Twitter

A defensive strategy would most likely have resulted in another second hung parliament, not a win but certainly not a loss for Labour.

The sources for the article were clear that the Labour leadership was warned but chose to keep this document as their central strategy, refusing to develop a new plan.

“Murphy and Milne are responsible for the most catastrophic defeat in almost a century.”

London

But…

Turns out no matter how long you have known them, one of the questions people always ask at this time of year is but what are YOU going to eat for Christmas, as if being a vegetarian somehow excludes you from the Winter feast, or from building up a tradition.

The answer is always the same: juts what you will have except for the dead animal.

We have a porcini, chestnut pie with a cranberry glaze as the centre piece, but all the trimmings are much the same as any other family i.e. roast potatoes (using a combination of olive oil and sunflower) brussels sprouts with chestnuts. carrots, parsnips, sage and onion stuffing. We have bread sauce, cranberry sauce and, this year, an onion gravy.

Even so, each year the tradition changes ever so slightly. Turns out there is always something I didn’t know , that out of politeness (seems unlikely given my family) or changing tastes they all have waited until this year to share.

Turns out no one actually likes chestnuts.

Turns out that 2.5kilos of roast potatoes is about the limit for a family of four.

Turns out 300g brussel sprouts is much too few for our family of four.

Turns out onion gravy really is a treat with the porcini pie, much better than the mushroom gravy.

Turns out that pureed parsnip with a very large parmesan crumb is just what the grown ups want but not the kids, though since they don’t actually eat the parsnips anyway, they probably shouldn’t have a vote.

And pancakes really are the best Christmas breakfast. They just needed a bucks fizz or two to make sense.

The only unanswered question is whether church at 8am actually works better than the 10:30am matins. It should be straightforward but my favourite ex-church warden was so speedy with her responses that the whole service felt like a race through to the end which did for an kind of religious serenity.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Labour’s Big Challenge

Ex-PM Tony Blair made a speech after the recent General Election which basically summarises the challenge for the Labour party.

*****************************************************************

This Election was no ordinary defeat for Labour. It marks a moment in history. The choice for Labour is to renew itself as the serious, progressive, non Conservative competitor for power in British politics; or retreat from such an ambition, in which case over time it will be replaced.

The Election can be analysed in conventional ways – and here it does not take political genius to work out what happened.

I feel deeply for those good Labour MPs and candidates who lost through no fault of their own and the thousands of Party workers and volunteers who, as I know well, are the backbone of the Party.

Of course, Brexit was an issue. It was a Brexit General Election – which was why it was a cardinal error for Labour ever to agree it. But an already difficult situation was made impossible by the failure to take a clear position and stick to it.

I take very seriously the argument that we ‘deserted’ or ‘disrespected’ our working class voters by reopening the referendum result.

But the problem with this position, is that there was no way of uniting the country over Brexit. Britain is deeply divided over it. Now that Brexit will happen, we must make the best of it and the country must come together.

But until the Election settled the debate, as unfortunately it has, if Labour had gone for Leave it would simply have alienated the half of the nation that opposed Brexit; as well as the vast bulk of Party members

Post Election polling shows that between 2017 and 2019, we lost only a small number of voters who were Leave and all the way through we had more than double the number of Remain voters. The biggest percentage fall in Labour voters between 2017 and 2019 was amongst young people, probably dismayed by the ambiguity over a Brexit they detested.

What we should have done, following June 2016, is accepted the result, said it was for the Government to negotiate an agreement but reserved our right to critique that agreement and should it fail to be a good deal for the country, advocate the final decision should rest with the people. Ultimately, we might have lost the most ardent Brexit support, but I believe, with different leadership, we would have kept much of our vote in traditional Labour areas, whilst benefiting from the fact that even in those areas, the majority of those voting Labour, were Remain.

Instead we pursued a path of almost comic indecision, alienated both sides of the debate, leaving our voters without guidance or leadership.

The absence of leadership on what was obviously the biggest question facing the country, then reinforced all the other doubts about Jeremy Corbyn.

What is important is to understand why his leadership was so decisively rejected.

This is not about Jeremy Corbyn as a person. I have no doubt he is someone of deeply held and sincere beliefs, who stayed true to them under harsh attack.

But politically, people saw him as fundamentally opposing what Britain and Western societies stand for. He personified an idea, a brand of quasi revolutionary socialism, mixing far left economic policy with deep hostility to Western foreign policy, which never has appealed to traditional Labour voters, never will appeal and represented for them a combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude that they found insulting.

No sentient political Party goes into an Election with a Leader who has a net approval rating of – 40%.

The takeover of the Labour Party by the Far left turned it into a glorified Protest Movement, with cult trimmings, utterly incapable of being a credible Government.

The result has brought shame on us. We let our country down. To go into an Election at any time with such a divergence between People and Party is unacceptable. To do it at a time of national crisis when a credible opposition was so essential to our national interest, is unforgiveable.

Anti-Semitism is a stain. The failure to deal with it, a matter of disgust that left some of us who voted Labour feeling, for the first time in our lives, conflicted about doing it.

So, at one level, sure let’s have a period of ‘reflection’; but any attempt to whitewash this defeat, pretend it is something other than it is, or the consequence of something other than the obvious, will cause irreparable damage to our relationship with the electorate.

Let us demolish this delusion that ‘the manifesto was popular’. The sentiment behind some of the policy reflected public anxieties, but in combination, it was one hundred pages of ‘wish list’. Any fool can promise everything for free. But the People weren’t fooled. They know life isn’t like that. And the loading in of ‘free broadband’ run by Government was the final confirmation of incredibility.

So, Messrs Johnson and Cummings had a strategy for victory, and we had one for defeat. And I noted the cockiness of the Johnson visit to Sedgefield to rub salt in the wound!  But I would like to see their strategic brilliance measured against a team other than one whose striker was directionally oblivious, its midfield comatose, the defence absent in the stand chatting to a small portion of the fans and its goalkeeper behind the net retweeting a clip of his one save in a 9-0 thrashing.   

For the Labour Party the choices are stark, starker than it realises.

It is gearing up to fight an ‘ultra Thatcherite’ Tory Party.

But Boris Johnson also understood that the country can’t be united over Brexit. So, his strategy is to do it and then treat it as an uncomfortable fact of life but not one defining the Conservative Party. He will adopt centre ground rhetoric on everything other than Brexit and possibly even on that; expect to see some former rebels back in the fold and the Lords; and having turned Brexit from a Tory problem into the nation’s problem, expect the tenor of the debate around Brexit to change.

His challenge will be formidable not least on the new trade deal and the threat to the Union, quite apart from delivering on all those promises to Northern former Labour voters.

But most people would not bet against 10 years of Tory Government.

The first rule of politics, however, is there are no rules of inevitability.  

Labour can keep with the programme and positions of Corbyn with a new Leader. In which case it is finished.

Or it can understand that it must recapture the Party from the Far left, make radical changes and begin the March back.

But the biggest necessity is understanding the challenge didn’t begin in 2015. It is rather the culmination of political and socio-economic changes over the last half century and the circumstances of Labour’s birth more than a century ago.

This is a moment where either we use the lessons of defeat to build a progressive, modern political coalition capable of competing for, winning and retaining power; or we accept that the Labour Party has exhausted its original mission and is unable to fulfil the purpose for which it was created.

As the 19th Century Industrial Revolution gathered pace, the Whig Party became the Liberal Party and the effective alternative to the Conservative Party. The Liberal Party suffered the stresses of Home Rule for Ireland and the cleavage between the Radical elements represented by Chamberlain and the more conservative remnants of Whiggery and then later still had to cope with Chamberlain’s departure from the Party and shift to a populism combining support for the working class and Imperialism; but it was the main instrument of social reform and could still win the election of 1906 and govern up to and through 1914 and the outbreak of World War 1.

 A competitor appeared: the newly formed Labour Party born out of the Labour Representation Committee, a trade union based organisation designed to bring true representatives of the working class into Parliament; and socialist.

In time, the Labour Party took over as the main alternative to the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party retreated to minority status.

So, Lloyd George a great Liberal reformer and Clement Attlee a great Labour reformer ended up in different parties.

 But the division in progressive politics had long term deleterious consequences. In the last century with the Labour Party and Liberals separated, Tories have been in power much longer than the Opposition, including winning 8 out of the last 11 elections, whereas in the years of Tory/Liberal Party competition, the Liberals were ahead .

The Labour Party became reliant on traditional working class organisations and constantly pulled towards a socialism which blunted at crucial moments its appeal to the aspirant working class. It had its Liberal wing represented by the likes of Roy Jenkins, but it was always viewed with some suspicion.

The traditional left and right of the Party – Bevin and Bevan – were themselves often uncomfortable bedfellows, but they united around: Labour as a Party of Government, Parliamentary not revolutionary politics, pro NATO and the Transatlantic Alliance, and within the mainstream of European socialist and social democratic politics.

Then there was a third strand of leftist politics which derived from Marxist/Leninism and was an early thorn in the side of the Labour leadership. From the beginning, the leadership shoved this strand to the fringe of Labour politics. It mounted an assault on the Party’s commanding heights through Tony Benn in the 1970s and 80s, but it was repulsed under Michael Foot who supported Denis Healey against Benn and moved to expel the Militant Tendency.

Throughout this time, something else was happening. The economy and society were changing. The middle class grew and those instruments of collective power like unions lost their industrial base.

And as the State also grew, in size and authority, it became clear that though it was a means of social progress, it could also be a vested interest, and the limitations of the State in an era of individual choice and increased income became more apparent.

The trade union and industrial base became hollowed out. The Labour Party structures had shown themselves vulnerable to infiltration. The values remained strong; but the offer to the People weak and outdated.  

New Labour was an attempt to reunite the Liberal and Labour traditions of progressive politics. Both traditional left and right of the Labour tradition were expressly included, symbolised by me and John Prescott; but the Far Left was back to the fringe.

A study of Labour history showed that in the 20th C it had governed only intermittently. The longest unbroken period of power was 6 years. Never had the Labour Party won two full successive terms.

So, the Party programme was reshaped around an appeal to aspiration as well as social justice, to business as well as unions; culturally it was strong on defence and law and order but also socially liberal.  

We won three successive full terms and governed for more than twice the length of any previous Labour Government.

The Party reached out beyond tribe but didn’t neglect its traditional voters.

It placed itself firmly on the side of the victim, not the criminal.

On the side of the working class who believe you must earn what you get.

On the side of the patient and pupil interest, not the producer interest.

It championed investment in public services but matched it with reform to ensure this money was spent wisely.

It explicitly rejected the anti-Western worldview of the far left and was on the side of people who were patriotic about their country.

It was not – for all the caricature since we left office – a project of the metropolitan liberal elite.  It assembled a new coalition of traditional working class voters, aspirational voters who had previously turned to Margaret Thatcher, and it fused together the progressive vote that had been split in the previous century.

The extraordinary thing is the Labour Party’s desire to re-write its only period of majority Government in half a century in negative terms.

We did not ‘neglect’ those traditional Labour heartlands in some appeasement of the middle class. We made the largest ever investment in schools and hospitals in those communities; re-distributed wealth through tax changes and tax credits; cut pensioner and child poverty; took the homeless of the streets; and through Sure Start, the Minimum wage and a host of other programmes helped those who needed help most.

And we kept their support. In 2005, in Sedgefield, my majority was almost 20,000. In Bolsover, it was 18,000.  In Scotland we had 41 of the 56 seats, including two with increased majorities over 2001. The support we lost was mainly amongst the middle class especially over tuition fees and Iraq.  

The point is not to go back to the policies of New Labour, but to understand New Labour’s place in Labour’s history, so we better understand how to forge Labour’s future; and to set it within the history of progressive politics in Britain where Labour sits, but not in sole occupation.

This defeat is seminal. We cannot afford to repeat 1983, moving crab like towards reality. You know the narrative. Among the far left, ‘we won the argument’ it’s just for some inexplicable reason the British people having accepted we were right, decided to vote for the other guys.

Among others, it is: many of the policies were really popular, but too many of them, our leadership was a problem but did inspire a lot of people, it wasn’t that we were too extreme but we allowed ourselves to be portrayed that way, we now have to stand with our communities in the assault which will be mounted upon them by the Tories etc. etc. plus a bit of we need to be with  working class communities against the ‘liberal London elites’ sort of populism.

If we go down this line, it will be 15 years more of Tory Government.

The country won’t tolerate this. There are people disenfranchised in our politics today, angry at the way the country has been let down by its non Conservative opposition, and feeling hopeless. And for the country, there is a generation of smart, capable, politically conscious people who will never be Tories but have no place in Parliament because of the state of the Labour Party and whose talent is therefore shut out.

Two things must happen.

First, there should be a parallel debate in and out of the Labour Party about the future of progressive politics, how it is reconstructed and reshaped into a winning coalition. This should include Labour, traditional left and right, the Lib Dems, those disenchanted with both main Parties and those not at present engaged in any Party. It must be a Big Tent debate, open and frank.

Second, we need urgently a new policy agenda for progressive politics. At the heart of it will be understanding and mobilising the Technological Revolution, the 21st C equivalent of the 19st C Industrial Revolution. It will mean a complete re-ordering of the way State and Government is conceived and organised; huge focus on education and infrastructure; new ways of dealing with generational poverty; a recasting of corporate governance and responsibility; a stimulus nationally and internationally of the science and technology for environmental change; and very specific measures to connect communities and people left behind by the changes driven by globalisation.

We need policy for the future. Radical but modern. The agenda of the Far Left is not progressive; it’s a form of regression to an old Statist, tax and spend programme of the 60s and 70s.

I understand why for some it has real attractions. It speaks to the intense feelings of marginalisation and desire for radical change.

It is a cry of rage against ‘the system’.

But it isn’t a programme for Government.

To win power, we need self discipline not self indulgence; listening to what people are truly saying, not hearing only the parts we want to hear; understanding that you can’t play with passion alone, but require strategy, preparation and professionalism; winning the intellectual as well as political battle.

In 1983, after my first Election, having been out on the doorstep for several weeks listening to Labour voters telling me that they were voting Labour despite the state of the Party rather than because of it, I attended a meeting in my constituency organised by the Far left, still strong after the Bennite surge, entitled ‘Learning the Lessons of Defeat’ or some such.

Dennis Skinner was the main speaker. At the outset, the Chairman urged us to be honest. Naively, I took this instruction literally. I did speak honestly. I said we were way out of date in our thinking, were far too left, seemed like we were living in the era of black and white TV, in an age of colour, and so on.

I was heard in silence. Right after me, came Dennis, who tore me limb from political limb.

I came out of the meeting in shock. My very wise agent John said to me: ‘you were the only person talking sense, but in future learn to say it better.’

By 1994, when standing for the leadership, I had learnt to say it better. I chose my ground carefully. I didn’t unnecessarily offend.

But, no one doubted where I stood.

The Labour Party is presently marooned on Fantasy Island. I understand would be Leaders will want to go there and speak the native language in the hope of persuading enough eventually to migrate to the mainland of Reality.

But there is a risk that the only people speaking the language of Reality to the Party are those who don’t aspire to lead it.  

Unfortunately, 2019 is much worse than 1983.

Then was our second defeat; now is our fourth. The country is different. Politics is different. The country is less fixed in political affiliation. Politics moves at speed accelerated by social media.

We don’t have the luxury of the Slow March back.

We can correct our historical and contemporary weaknesses; or be consumed by them.

But that choice is unmerciful.  

And before us, NOW.