I first read David Goodhart's article on Observer. I found it's intersting because it appears to me he pointed out something that's not often addressed frankly by liberals. Then I read the critism by Trevor Phillips (who is a journalist and now chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality). Fascinating reading.

Horns of the liberal dilemma

The tragedy of the Chinese workers in Morecambe and the simmering arguments about freedom of movement in a newly enlarged European Union have focused attention once again on immigration. David Goodhart, one of our leading liberal intellectuals and editor of the progressives' journal, Prospect, offers a penetrating analysis and a radical prescription for one of the most contentious issues facing us

Sunday February 8, 2004
The Observer

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/sto...1143381,00.html

Just as anxieties about asylum-seekers seem to be fading, along come two events to stir up our acute sensitivity about migration into Britain. The first is the tragedy of the 19 Chinese who died while cockling in Morecambe Bay, providing a glimpse of the shadowy world of illegal immigrants. The second is the tabloid campaign against the Government's proposed 'open door' policy towards citizens of the east European countries joining the EU in May.
Many decent, liberal voices have been raised in protest against the Government's apparent capitulation to this tabloid campaign, which highlighted the large numbers of gypsies who might turn up and claim benefit. There is an even better liberal case for the Government's change of mind. Moreover, the public anxiety about mass migration, while in some cases fuelled by xenophobia or racism, is usually based on a rational understanding of the value of British citizenship and its incompatibility with over-porous borders.

The abstract language of globalisation and universal human rights risks blinding us to some basic truths about our society. The national community remains the basic unit of human political organisation and will remain so long into the future. And when politicians talk about this community or the 'British people', they refer not just to a set of individuals with specific rights and duties but to a group of people with a special commitment to one another.

Membership in such a community implies acceptance of moral rules, however fuzzy, which underpin the laws and welfare systems of the state. It also confers immense privileges - physical security, freedom of many kinds, the chance to flourish economically, free education, free health care, and welfare benefits if you cannot support yourself.

National citizenship is inherently exclusionary. We place our fellow citizens in Bolton before the people of Burundi, otherwise we would be spending as much on foreign aid as on the NHS, rather than one twenty-fifth of the sum. If everyone in the world was entitled to the benefits of British citizenship, as is sometimes implied by human rights law, our schools and hospitals would very swiftly collapse. They would also collapse pretty swiftly if Britain had an open-door migration policy.

We do have such an open-door policy towards people in other EU states, but relatively few citizens settle here because they live in societies at a broadly similar level of economic development. For the billions living on less than $1 a day, a place like Britain represents a kind of paradise, which is why so many people are prepared to risk their lives to get here.

Migration today is different from previous eras in two respects. First, it is a lot easier and cheaper for people in even relatively poor countries to get to the developed world. Second, European countries like Britain have highly developed welfare states which compel their citizens to share their resources with strangers to a degree unimaginable in previous ages.

Such welfare states were established when European states were much more homogeneous - in terms of life-styles, values and ethnicity - than today. Notwithstanding strong class and regional differences, those societies thought of themselves as extended kin groups, 'a family,' in Orwell's famous words about England, 'with the wrong members in charge'.

Fifty years of peace, wealth and mobility, plus two big waves of immigration, has created a very different Britain marked by much greater diversity of values and lifestyles. Some people, especially older people, regret the shift. Most people probably broadly welcome it.

Welcome or not, greater diversity almost by definition eats away at a common culture and feelings of mutual obligation, yet a strong common culture is required to sustain a generous welfare state. This is what I have described elsewhere as the 'progressive dilemma' (see the current issue of Prospect magazine).

The best summary of the dilemma has been given by Tory MP David Willetts: 'If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, "Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn't do?" This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US, you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.'

The progressive dilemma lurks beneath many aspects of current politics: national tax and redistribution policies; EU integration and spending on the poorer southern and east European states; and even the tensions between America (built on political ideals and mass immigration) and Europe (based on nation states with core ethnic-linguistic solidarities).

It is also most painfully present in the debate about asylum and immigration. If welfare states demand that we pay into a common fund on which we can all draw at times of need, we need to be reassured that strangers, especially those from other countries and ethnic groups, have the same idea of reciprocity as we do.

Of course immigrants contribute, sometimes disproportionately, to the welfare state too. But public opinion tends to focus on the relatively small number, both immigrant and indigenous, who take out more than they put in. A recent Prospect /Mori poll asked, among other things, whether 'other people seem to get unfair priority over you when it comes to public services and state benefits?' Forty five per cent agreed that they did. It is a depressingly high figure which shows the anxiety people, especially among lower income groups, have about freeloading.

There seems to be something in the combination of relatively high personal taxation and the inability to see clearly where one's taxes are spent that makes people highly sensitised to being taken advantage of. Public policy sometimes makes matters worse: one of the reasons why asylum-seekers create such resentment is that the system currently bans them from legal work and forces them on to benefit for at least two years - it forces them to be 'freeloaders'.

There was also some good news hidden in our poll. When asked to name who they thought was getting unfair priority, 20 per cent named asylum-seekers and 19 per cent new immigrants. But Britain's established minorities - Asians and black people - were hardly mentioned. Absorbing outsiders into a community worthy of the name - turning the immigrant 'them' into the fellow citizen 'us' with whom we are willing to share - takes time, but it can be done.

It can be less easily done if a majority of people are troubled, as countless polls suggest they are, by the quantity, type and speed of immigration and if they believe that the Government has lost control of the flow of people into the country. That is why the Government is right to review the open-door policy to east Europeans. If hundreds of thousands were to arrive in a short space of time, it would stir up fears about migration in general, cause serious strains on the public services and hit those people at the bottom of the labour market (many immigrants themselves) hardest.

The government, understandably, wants to have it both ways on the migration debate. It wants to stress, rightly, the cultural and economic dynamism that comes with relatively high levels of immigration - and it celebrates the fact that roughly 200,000 legal immigrants come to Britain each year. But the Government is also aware that many of the costs of high immigration fall on poorer, white Britons. David Blunkett has bravely spoken up about the real conflicts that this can lead to and the need to shore up a common culture by better integration of some immigrant groups.

Taking a 'tough' line on asylum and immigration is not just pandering to the Daily Mail. It is a necessary condition of maintaining public confidence in a system of managed migration. How else might popular anxieties be answered? There is a case, as Meghnad Desai has argued, for introducing more 'two-tier' welfare, as is currently happening in Denmark. Certain kinds of migrants (the east Europeans, for example, for a transitional period) could be allowed residence and the right to work but access to only limited parts of the welfare state.

Such a two-tier welfare state might reduce pressure on the asylum system and also help to deracialise citizenship - white, middle-class bankers and Asian shopkeepers would have full British citizenship, while Slovenian temporary workers would not. If we want to combine social solidarity with relatively high immigration, there is also a case for ID cards on logistical grounds and as a badge of citizenship entitlement that transcends narrower group and ethnic loyalties.

Critics of the progressive dilemma thesis point to the fact that public spending and tax levels remain at historically high levels throughout Europe despite the big increase in diversity of all kinds over the past 30 years. That is true, but the sort of long-term decline in solidarity that I fear is likely to take decades to emerge. And if public policy takes no account of the boundaries of people's willingness to share we may wake up in a generation's time and find we have become a US-style society with sharp ethnic tension, a weak welfare state and low political participation.

You do not build a generous country by ignoring people's fears or pretending that they have the same affinities towards, or obligations to, a Slovakian gypsy as they do towards their own families, communities and fellow citizens.

Genteel xenophobia is as bad as any other kind

Some liberals have given up on the idea of a multi-ethnic Britain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1148847,00.html

Trevor Phillips
Monday February 16, 2004
The Guardian

Nice people do racism too. Liberal commitment to a multi-ethnic Britain is wilting. Some very nice folk have apparently decided that the nation's real problem is too many immigrants of too many kinds. Faced with a daily onslaught against migrants it may be understandable to give in to populist bigotry; but it is not forgivable.
Take this, for example: "National citizenship is inherently exclusionary." So no foreigners need ever apply for naturalisation, then. And " ... public anxiety about migration ... is usually based on a rational understanding of the value of British citizenship and its incompatibility with over-porous borders". Straight from the lexicon of the far right. And best of all: "You can have a [generous] welfare state provided that you are a homogenous society with intensely shared values."

Is this the wit and wisdom of Enoch Powell? Jottings from the BNP leader's weblog? Actually they are extracts from an article in the Observer, penned by the liberal intellectual David Goodhart, who I have always suspected is too brainy for his own good. He is just one of several liberal thinkers now vigorously making what they consider a progressive argument against immigration. It goes like this: the more diverse a society, the less likely its citizens are to share common values; the fewer common values, the weaker the support for vital institutions of social solidarity, such as the welfare state and the National Health Service.

There are perfectly good reasons to worry about how we respond to immigration, not least the downward pressure on workers' wages; the growth of racial inequality; and the exploitation of illegals exposed by the Morecambe Bay tragedy. But as Polly Toynbee elegantly pointed out in these pages last week, the answer to these problems is not genteel xenophobia, but trade union rights, backed by equality and employment law.

The xenophobes should come clean. Their argument is not about immigration at all. They are liberal Powellites; what really bothers them is race and culture. If today's immigrants were white people from the old Commonwealth, Goodhart and his friends would say that they pose no threat because they share Anglo-Saxon values. They may not even object to Anglophile Indians - as long as they aren't Muslims.

Unfortunately for liberal Powellites, the real history of the NHS shatters their fundamental case against diversity. The NHS is a world-beating example of the way that ethnic diversity can create social solidarity. Launched by a Welshman, built by Irish labourers, founded on the skills of Caribbean nurses and Indian doctors, it is now being rescued by an emergency injection of Filipino nurses, refugee ancillaries and antipodean medics. And it remains 100% British.

Virtually all of our public services have depended heavily on immigrants. Enoch Powell was forced to admit as much when, as minister for health he advertised for staff in the Caribbean. His new admirers will discover that a rapidly depopulating Europe will have no choice but to embrace diversity.

For the moment, however, the liberal Powellites are gaining support in high places. Their ideas are inspired by the work of the American sociologist Robert Putnam, a Downing Street favourite. He purports to show that dynamic, diverse communities are more fragmented than stable, monoethnic ones. But the policy wonks have forgotten that Putnam's research was conducted in a society so marked by segregation that even black millionaires still live in gated ghettoes.

The prime minister still seems uneasy on the issue. Last week, he wavered uncertainly between backing his robustly pro-immigration home secretary, and a desperately defensive response to Michael Howard's goading that the government was in a mess on the topic.

Oddly enough, this is a place in the arena of world politics where the PM does not stand shoulder to shoulder with George Bush. The Spanish-speaking former governor of Texas recently announced that he would "regularise" the status of millions of illegal Mexican immigrants who had slipped across the border to work. It's the kind of massive amnesty that would send the Daily Express into conniptions.

Even more peculiar, the prime minister appears to be ignoring not only David Blunkett but also his new best friend, the Labour mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and Scotland's first minister, Jack McConnell. London wants more immigrants to keep pace with its booming economy, Scotland wants them to boost its ageing workforce.

Yet the liberal Powellites still seem prepared to confront a Bush-Blunkett-Livingstone-McConnell axis, because they are scared witless by the far right. They hope that by appeasing racism, they'll make it go away. But this is a beast with an insatiable appetite.

The French discovered that too late; the thuggish National Front is now France's second largest party, with one in five likely to vote for them in upcoming local elections. Liberal secularists who joined in the assault on the rights of French Muslims now have to find a convincing explanation for their cowardice, which has also betrayed the freedom of expression of French Jews and Christians.

In Holland, this spinelessness has ended up as straight leftwing racism. The previously liberal Dutch establishment is now pushing an asylum policy so extreme even the Sun was moved to criticise it.

The line up that favours managed migration and diversity - Blunkett, McConnell, Livingstone, Bush and the Sun - share one quality that the PM should envy more than any other at present: they are all popular with the public. Maybe the government ought to pay more heed to this focus group than the ones that see scary foreigners on every street corner.

Perhaps we should also be creating an even more progressive immigration policy, for example offering easier admission to those who will bring their skills to the depopulated regions of the north of England and Scotland. The Americans will next year offer more work permits to IT whizzkids from India than ever before; and before the middle of the century, the world's strongest economy will become its most ethnically diverse. Our own population is still over 92% white; we shouldn't be duped by anxious faint-hearts into becoming an all-white backwater.

There's one last reason the government ought to be suspicious about the advice of liberal Powellites. Minority Britons once looked to them for support. We learned the hard way that they are always totally committed to your cause - until they change their minds. In the immortal words of David Brent: "You have to get 100% behind someone before you can stab them in the back."

· Trevor Phillips is a journalist and broadcaster; since March 2003 he has been chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality

· David Goodhart's essay "Too diverse?" can be read in this month's issue of Prospect

As to the first piece of David Goodhart:
Goodhart could not avoid a logic flaw, as pointed out in the second piece, by supposing that certain value ideas shared among the British society would not be accepted by immigrants, unless they own Anglo background. He was simply speaking about the old 19th Century style slogan such as 'the whitemen's destine'. Nothing new except he may brand himself as a liberal...

Also FYI: Diversity vesus solidarity debate:

David Goodhart's delivery

http://www.thersa.org/acrobat/diversity280103.pdf

there is a fine line to be drwan between a philoshopy and legal reality. here comes the dellima of liberalism - where liberal values could be asprised universally, there undoutely exist the limits as to the materilisation of these utopian ideas under the current international framework of nation state. the human rights claimed by liberlist, as universal and plausible as they are, can only be establised on the basis of citizenship. clearly anybody has a right to work, including the cockle pickers, but where can they claim this right? Would the liberalists look vulnerable if millions of foreign workers fluxed into Dover?

I think some of the questions or fears from the people of host country must be addressed frankly. Goodhart is doing this. Discussing these issues is healthy for the society. If every time those fears are simply dismissed as racism or xenophobia, they just become underground and at some point may lead to extreme and dangerous outcome. I think that's what's happening in Netherlands.

everyone, not only European but Chinese, has a tendency to stress his racial, or more precisely, national, identendy where national interest is involved. Westerners are welcome in China just because of their economic, cultural and political supremacy - would Africans be our popular guests? I do feel the worries raised by Goodhart are legitimate. That's not saying racism is legitimate - it just shows again the limits of human equality and the moral and legal dillema of human being. In this sense, I quite doubt the genienty of universal values.

Migration myths should not scare ministers

Charlotte Denny
Monday February 23, 2004
The Guardian


In 1840, New Zealand's Maori inhabitants had an immigration problem, although they didn't know it. The signing of treaty of Waitangi, in which New Zealand's indigenous population formally recognised the sovereignty of the British crown, was about to unleash upon them a flood of penniless, landless white settlers, economic migrants in the truest sense of the word.
There were no passport checks, no immigration desks at borders in the first great age of globalisation. The frequently observed irony of the second age of globalisation is how keen western countries are to promote free movement of goods and capital and how much less keen they are on free movement of labour.

References to the waves of immigration from the old world to the new in the 19th century are sometimes dismissed as imperial guilt. But history should not be ignored, if only because it puts the current debate on immigration in Europe into perspective.

All the unwelcome baggage migrants are accused of bringing with them into Europe today - crime, deadly diseases, social disorder - was definitely true of New Zealand's white hordes. The early settlers introduced smallpox, prostitution and, most devastatingly, the musket, which disrupted the balance of power between warring Maori tribes.

As Michael King relates in his excellent new Penguin History of New Zealand, the country experienced true mass migration in its early years as British colony.

In 1840, there were just 2,000 white settlers. By 1858 numbers had swelled to nearly 60,000, outnumbering Maori, and by 1881 had reached 500,000.

By comparison, the European Union expects that the accession of 10 new member states this May will result in perhaps 370,000 people a year moving to the 15 existing members in search of work, with perhaps 17,000 a year likely to come to Britain.

"Net migration into the UK will be relatively small compared to the size of the UK labour market and the scale of flows will reduce over time," says the Institute for Public Policy Research in a fact file published today and intended to skewer some of the myths surrounding EU expansion.

"Given that the size of the UK labour market stands at some 28m people, the relative increase of migrants from new members, even at its peak, is actually negligible."

The facts have not stopped a frenzied media campaign which has unnerved the government against opening Britain's borders to workers from the new Europe. Today, David Blunkett is expected to announce emergency measures restricting free access to work that will come into force if Britain is overwhelmed by a wave of east European immigrants.

It is disappointing that the government felt it had to nod in the direction of the right's agenda on immigration. There is no political mileage in it for Labour - the Tories will always have the best pitch as the anti-immigration party, even under the cuddly, new look Michael Howard.

Even more disappointingly, parts of the Left have retreated into a defensive position on immigration, arguing that large-scale migration by people from different ethnic groups threatens the contract of mutual obligation underlying the welfare state.

In part this claim is made through observing that the United States, the most ethnically diverse of prosperous states, has the weakest social safety net while the ethnically homogenous states of northern Europe have the strongest. David Willetts, the shadow work and pensions secretary, has argued that this shows we find it easier to agree to give away our tax money to support strangers who are like us.

But blaming our inherent hostility towards outsiders for the failure of the US to develop a welfare state is dodgy history. The US never had a European-style welfare state, even when it was ethnically much more homogenous than it is today. Most historians of the welfare state agree that America's failure to develop generous social safety nets is because organised labour did not gain a political foothold in Washington.

Britain and New Zealand both owe their welfare states to Labour governments; in New Zealand, Michael Joseph Savage's 1938 administration introduced universal healthcare, generous social security benefits and pensions, several aspects of which were copied by Britain's post-war Labour government.

"Most of us prefer our own kind," says David Goodhart in the latest issue of Prospect, arguing that the progressive left should be suspicious of forming an alliance with economic liberals in favour of greater immigration flows. Judging by how ready people are to swallow misinformation peddled by rightwing newspapers about abuses of the welfare state by immigrants, he is probably correct. Goodhart suggests that there may be a diversity "tipping point" beyond which it becomes impossible to sustain the political consensus backing the welfare state. He says the tipping point lies somewhere between Britain's current ethnic minority population of 9% and America's at 30%. There is no economic evidence, however, that letting in lots of immigrants undermines the economic sustainability of social security transfers; migrant groups have lower unemployment rates than native-born workers and contribute over their lifetimes more to the state than they take out.

Moreover, many are seeking only temporary work in the west and wish to return to their home states when they have amassed savings. For western states with ageing populations, these temporary workers are the perfect solution: they boost the workforce required to support a growing elderly population and then return home before they become dependent themselves. Outlawing immigration has the perverse effect of making it harder for such workers to come and go as they want to.

The real dilemma for the progressive left is how to justify the impact the selective immigration we allow is having on the world's poorest countries, draining them of their scarcest resource: skilled workers. Immigrant workers in the west already send more money home to their families in the developing world than rich countries provide annually in aid transfers.

Another argument advanced against immigrants is that they reduce the wages of local workers. Again, the evidence for this is limited. American economist Richard Freeman says that migrants compete directly only with unskilled workers. In the US, it is only among high school drop-outs that there is any firm evidence immigrant workers are suppressing wages.

Restrictive immigration rules might help this group of local workers but would also force migrants to work illegally, where working conditions are far worse, with knock-on consequences on the legal sector, as the case of the Chinese workers in Morecambe Bay tragically illustrated. That is why the TUC has come out so strongly in favour of free movement of labour with strong employment protection.

Would a fully liberalised global labour market undermine the political consensus supporting the welfare state? It is an academic question, because no developed state is proposing anything like mass migration. But, rather than pandering to the rightwing media, a more progressive response might be to seek to overcome people's mistaken fears about the consequences of migration.

charlotte.denny@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0...1153818,00.html

Our society is complex. Please discuss

Julian Baggini
Wednesday February 18, 2004
The Guardian

I have a confession to make. Much as I would like to share with you my thoughts on the concerns liberals have about multiculturalism, I am not really qualified to do so. The problem is that I am "not extreme enough".
Last week, I was contacted by a researcher for a Sunday morning television show. She was looking for someone to take part in a discussion on whether the hijab should be allowed in schools. Since I had written a pro-atheism book and co-authored a pamphlet against the expansion of religious schools, she thought I might be a suitable candidate.

But as I started to explain that, although there were serious problems with religion in schools, I did not think this was an issue where lines needed to be drawn, I could almost hear a suck of air down the telephone line as the interest flowed out of her. It transpired that she had already spoken to several other secularists and humanists and, like me, none had done the decent thing and provided her with someone to set hard against the pro-hijab discussant they had already booked.

This was no one-off. Several months ago I was contacted by another Sunday morning show to discuss some religious issue or other, and on that occasion the producer explicitly said that the reason for not using me was that I was "not extreme enough".

This is the kind of thinking that hampers serious, constructive debate over the challenges a multicultural society faces. The media almost invariably confuse balanced coverage with having two sides put equal and opposite cases. But if one or both of these positions is held only by a small minority, presenting the discussion in those terms distorts reality and may exacerbate any friction that may already be there.

The reason this matters is that the nature of multicultural Britain is an important and sensitive issue. If we can discuss it only within a framework that polarises opinion, what hope have we got of making progress?

The lazy use of derogatory labels is one symptom of this malaise. One of the least helpful of these is "Islamophobia". The introduction of this term into the lexicon of multiculturalism has, at a stroke, made it much more difficult to draw the kind of careful distinctions a serious discussion needs. It should be obvious that there is a world of difference between disliking a belief system and hating its adherents. "Islamophobia" blurs this distinction, by suggesting that opposition to Islam is just a prejudice, like homophobia or racism.

But most people who object to Islam are not doing so because they don't like the look of its followers. They reject it because they think it is wrong and in its extreme forms - note the qualification - harmful, just as others reject Christianity, and indeed, just as many Muslims reject atheism. Bigotry is not an inevitable consequence of deep disagreements about religion and its role in civic society. Fear of being labelled "Islamophobic" makes acknowledging these differences more difficult.

But even Trevor Phillips, the Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, can confuse legitimate disagreement for prejudice. Phillips was incensed by an article by David Goodhart, the editor of the progressive monthly, Prospect, which raised liberal concerns about immigration. Phillips claimed these were not liberal worries at all, but xenophobic ones. "The xenophobes should come clean," he wrote. "Their argument is not about immigration at all. They are liberal Powellites; what really bothers them is race and culture."

By eliding "race and culture" and presenting them as though they were two sides of the same coin, Phillips tarred Goodhart with the Powellite brush. But this is nonsense. Race and culture are not inseparable. Culture concerns beliefs and practices and we are responsible for what we believe and do. We have no such responsibility for the colour of our skin or ethnicity.

To be against the culture of white slave-owners was not to be racist against whites. To deny passports to anyone who refuses to accept some basic principles about their prospective new country's culture is not prejudiced; to deny it on the basis of skin pigmentation is.

This is not to say that Phillips was wrong in everything he said, or that Goodhart was entirely right. My whole point is that this is a genuinely tangled issue which can't be sorted out if we seek to pigeonhole every opinion into simplistic, assumption-laden categories. Most people are "not extreme enough" for that to work. We need to rise above the school debating society mentality that dominates our culture, from the Today programme to parliament. And that is impossible if we force people into pre-set moulds labelled "for" and "against".



Global difference
Tony Blair must love Oliver Letwin. The shadow chancellor's spending plans show the hollowness of the old gibe that New Labour is Old Conservatism in disguise.

One striking difference between Letwin and Gordon Brown which has gone largely unnoticed concerns their plans for overseas aid. On Monday, Letwin announced that the Tories would freeze the Department for International Development's spending for two years, followed by a 2% annual increase. In real terms, that's a cut followed by an ongoing freeze.

On the same day, Brown was challenging the rich nations to work harder to meet the millennium development goals set four years ago for 2015, which on present trends won't be met until 2065. Brown also kept up his campaign to double global aid to $100bn.

In 1979 Britain's spending on overseas aid was 0.51% of gross national income (GNI). It was clawed back so dramatically under the Tories that even though the aid budget has increased by 93% in real terms since 1997, it is still only projected to reach 0.40% of GNI by 2006.

Why has such a striking difference in policy not attracted more attention? Labour thinks there are few votes to be won from telling people the government has made poor foreigners better off, and the Tories don't want to look heartless by boasting about the cuts they would make. Yet the government persists. The cynics who think new Labour is motivated solely by power could no doubt explain this somehow. The simpler explanation, however, is that cynicism has its limits, even in politics, and there is a difference between the two main parties after all.



· Julian Baggini is editor of the Philosophers' Magazine.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1150274,00.html