As an election looms,  changing expectations of our leaders leave no place for political characters of the past, such as Winston Churchill and Michael Foot, who died this month. OU Reader in Government Dr Richard Hefferman casts a slightly regretful eye on a new leadership landscape...
 
In an age when political success is defined by becoming the modern and popular, successfully packaged, party leader, Michael Foot, who has passed away at the grand old age of 96, was old school in every sense of the phrase. He first stood for parliament, almost incredibly, in the Monmouth constituency at the 1935 general election. When elected in 1945 he sat in the House of Commons for Plymouth Devonport and, subsequently, Ebbw Vale and Blaenau Gwent, for some 42 years.
 
Foot, Labour leader between 1980 and 1983, was, even at the time of his election, an unlikely party leader. He was thrust, approaching 70, into the job as a moderate candidate of the centre who would hopefully unify an increasingly divided party. Labour, then hopelessly divided between warring factions of left and right, suffered the defection of twenty seven MPs who formed the SDP, and was electorally swept aside by the Thatcher juggernaut at the 1983 general election.
 
Throw back
As leader Foot, while in his own way dynamic and charismatic, was neither young nor modern. He was seen, even in the early 1980s, to be an anachronistic throw back to a bygone age. The modern party leader, unlike Foot, who was a natural conciliator eager to follow, as well as lead his party, has now to be strident, assertive and dominant. This is the style, not of Foot or Harold Macmillan, but of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron. Today’s party leaders have to vigorously, authoritatively lead their party and try to be seen to ‘command’ it. They have also to master the media, in all its modern forms, which was not something Michael Foot was ever able to do. They have always to look and dress the part, which was also something, to say the least, that was never Foot’s forte.
 
Redundant
Foot was, perhaps alongside Tony Benn, one of the last of the old fashioned partisans skilled in the art of the high flown oration delivered at the large, public meeting or the party conference. He was also a past master at the full blown parliamentary speech. Never at his best in the television studio, Foot couldn’t easily master a sound bite, stick to a script, nor merely recite a set of speaking notes. His is, alas, a style of communication which is almost completely redundant; the passionate, extemporaneous fiery speech, which was his stock in trade, is all but a dying art in modern politics.
 
Foot wouldn't have been cut out for modern politics. Nor, it should be said, would Winston Churchill have been. Neither man should be considered diminished as a result. In spite of his unsuitability for modern, marketized politics, Michael Foot was, in his own way, a politician and political writer (and reader) of the very first rank. It was for this reason that he enjoyed friendships across the party divide, was enormously admired, very well regarded and was, in spite being long out of the limelight, someone who was instantly, friendlily recognisable by everybody beyond the age of 40.
 
Picture of Michael Foot by Bob Naylor
 

Dr Dick Morris is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology at The Open University. Here he asks if The Economy is a god for the 21st century...
 
A century or so ago, the oppressive actions of the elite with respect to the poor or less powerful were justified with reference to Divine Law. A god had decreed that this was the way things should be, and eternal damnation would be the fate of those who dared question it. Today, few Westerners would subscribe to such a doctrine, but a new and even more fearsome god can be invoked to support the powerful. That god is The Economy, and almost all forms of exploitation can be justified with reference to it. The NHS, or care for the elderly, “cost The Economy £x million per year” and should therefore be cut back. The Economy cannot support reasonable pensions, higher education, reductions in polluting emissions or indeed almost any public benefit. The Economy has to grow all the time, or the most awful fate will befall us all.

The new priesthood
How do we know this? Well, this new god has its attendant priesthood, of economists, bankers and their ‘financial correspondent’ acolytes. Where the priests of old relied on Biblical quotations to support their claims, this new priesthood uses the unchallengeable force of economic statistics. Chief among these signs and portents is the supposed size of The Economy. If it has grown, then all is probably well. But if that growth is less than a percentage point, or even worse, is zero or negative, then the priesthood has to demand sacrifices of the wider public to placate their god.

GDP’s divine status is flawed
How many of us take the trouble to question this divine status of economic statistics? Yet the whole edifice is constructed on an arbitrary and partial set of indicators, compared to which the original Ten Commandments are almost a model of completeness and logical consistency. The key indicator of the essential size of the economy is Gross Domestic Product, GDP, or its near relation, Gross National Product.  This GDP is the number that has to grow all the time, or the great ogre Recession will appear to destroy us all. Yet what does GDP actually represent, and how is it measured?

The official definition of GDP is the sum of private consumption; total investment (by firms and by consumers buying houses); government spending; and net exports. It all seems very clear and logical, but once we start to look in more detail, a lot of difficulties become apparent. Different sources appear to suggest different items are, or are not, included.

For the UK, there are officially three main ways in which GDP is measured. In theory, all three measures should add up to the same number, but they always differ somewhat, and close inspection of the published figures shows that the numbers quoted also change over time. A figure announced to great fanfare in one week may subsequently (and much more quietly) be changed as more or better data are obtained. There are also some strange anomalies. If there is a serious pollution incident then the expenditure on cleaning up the pollution counts towards GDP. So one way for Governments to ensure growth in GDP would be to encourage regular major pollution incidents!

Hidden biases
We also have problems in the way that components of GDP are interpreted. Although GDP is defined as including Government spending, it is fashionable to regard any spending not instigated by individual consumers as almost inherently evil. So a drop, or lower than expected rise, in published GDP  prompts  commentators to claim that Government spending should be cut “to allow real economic growth”. By-and-large, nobody argues with this bias any longer.

It is also assumed that any expenditures on goods and services, or monies paid out as wages and salaries, are proportionate. Maybe they are, but my feeling is that £1million paid out to an investment banker has a lot less value to human wellbeing than £1million paid out in wages to a vastly larger number of hospital cleaners, nurses or teachers. This topic is the subject of an interesting recent report by the New Economics Foundation, Valuing What Matters.

Growth can’t be infinite
Perhaps the biggest failing inherent in our fetishising of the economy comes from a basic human difficulty in distinguishing between the actual amounts of something, and rates of change of these amounts. Commentators often confuse growth in GDP with GDP itself. How often do we hear the statement that GDP (rather than the quarterly change in GDP) has risen to x per cent this quarter? This confusion leads to another fallacy that, in the long term, may be the most damaging. Growth in which there is multiplication of the current value by a number greater than one,  means that whatever is growing will, in theory, eventually reach a size that is astronomical. So ultimately, GDP must reach a point where the physical manifestations of the measured  transactions are limited by the available resources of the Earth. Yet this inherent limitation is conveniently ignored, and we are constantly told that “growth is good”.

So next time you are listening to a financial pundit talking about the economy, or politicians claiming how much better the economy would perform under their party's stewardship, ask yourself what the numbers really mean. Ask whether the promises of everlasting happiness from everlasting economic growth are anything more than political sloganeering, or special pleading from sectors of the population who are creaming off more of the underlying monetary flows than are perhaps their due. The answers might not be as clear cut as economists and their apologists would have us believe.
 

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University, a door tenant at 36 Bedford Row, and a columnist for The Times. Here, in a post he wrote for The Times, he explains why we should not be surprised to see emotion from court judges...

There are more than a million published judgments in English law, although happily for law students not all of them are on the degree syllabus. Much legal study, though, involves analysing the work of judges. In one sense, judges are the legal system incarnate. So how they behave when acting judicially, and how we expect them to behave, are matters of great importance.

Judges need to be technically excellent lawyers, sound of judgment, impartial and of impeccable integrity. They swear an oath to “do right to all manner of people” in accordance with the law and to judge “without fear or favour, affection or ill will”. What, though, of emotion? Is it unjudicial to display emotion in a court?

Someone whose emotions always collapse when hearing about awful events would be unsuitable as a judge because much of what is heard in many types of case, like family and criminal cases, is very distressing - a regularly emotional judge would attract public anxiety. Conversely, a judge who is so extraordinarily cold-blooded or prone to remain utterly impassive when hearing the most profoundly heart-rending events might lack the common humanity required for the job of judging human beings.

In 2006 Judge Julian Hall was reported as being moist-eyed during a mother’s grieving court tribute to her daughter - a young lady who was killed when her car was hit by a speeding teenage driver. The daughter, Dr Margaret Davidson, 26, a talented and recently qualified doctor, was killed by Nolan Haworth. He was driving with great recklessness, and without a licence or insurance, when he smashed into Dr Davidson’s car causing her horrific injuries from which she died. The journey Haworth was making when he killed her was to court to answer affray charges, charges for which he was also found guilty.

Later, the police officer in charge of the case, said that Judge Hall’s tearful reaction had shocked people in Oxford Crown Court. Other judges, though, have wept in court. In 2000, for example, Judge Andrew Rutherford shed tears at Bristol Crown Court when ruling that he would not be imprisoning a man for killing his wife in a drink-driving accident. Judge Rutherford sentenced the man to 18 months imprisonment but suspended the term, saying that he did not want the couple’s three children to be without their father at Christmas.

We should not be disturbed if judges occasionally weep. In the service of society, judges must preside over cases that entail some of the most agonising, shocking and unimaginably sad events that wrack human life. We ask our judges to be balanced, measured in judgment, and reasonably stoical but we do not ask them to be robotic. We would not want them to be like the old “hanging judge” of whom it was said that you could tell which of his eyes was the glass one - it was the one with compassion in it. If we wanted to be judged by something without human emotions we could opt for computer-brained robots. In the fair application of existing law, there is commonly a margin of discretion to be exercised, and that should be exercised in as human a way as circumstances permit.

Some emotions are easier to guard against than others. If a judge feels he is becoming angered he can always step down for a while to regain perfect composure. In October 2009, Mr Justice Hedley left the courtroom when he became upset by the attitude of two local authorities who had each “abandoned” a sick child to save money. He later said he had adjourned briefly “to ensure that no wholly improper judicial observations escaped my lips”.

Spontaneous tears, however, are more difficult to control than the manifestation of anger. Society, moreover, benefits from having judges who are very occasionally moved to cry or laugh when a deep, visceral part of the human condition makes such a reaction natural. A judge does not cease to be rational or reasoning if his eyes well up. More worrying than seeing a judge who lets tears run down his face when listening to a mother’s tale of fathomless, sobbing, irreplaceable loss, would be seeing such a listening judge sang-froid and unmoved.

The mother of the young woman killed by the dangerous driver later went on national radio and read the victim impact statement that, when she spoke it in Oxford Crown Court, caused the judge to weep. The morning of that broadcast, tears would have flowed down the faces of a great many radio listeners as the mother spoke with control and dignity but with soul-shuddering grief.

In 1975 Judge HC Leon said: “I think that a judge should be looked on rather as a sphinx than as a person.” It is true that justice is best served if judges are dignified and dispassionate but not if they are required to deny their humanity in moments of emotive extremity."

Joe Smith, Senior Lecturer in Environment at the Open University, has been trying to make sense of environmental policy and politics since he was teenage activist in the mid 1980s. Against the tide of media opinion he feels COP15 was an important milestone.

Luckily for humanity the climate change last chance saloon seems to have no fixed closing time. But while most media and policy commentators have savaged the UN and international policymakers for failing to come to a convincing deal I’ve come away from two weeks in the Danish capital holding a glass half full.

dodgy eco-art
Environmentalists whipped up a storm in the months before the conference using phrases such as ‘last chance to save the earth’ and ‘the most important meeting in the history of humanity’. In doing so they presented themselves with a communications headache. The tactic of throwing the rhetorical kitchen sink at COP15 was ill-judged, and has left work to do to regain public and political momentum as they stagger through the rubble of dodgy urban eco-art and the mounds of publicity material that litter the conference centres and squares of downtown Copenhagen.

For those of us that saw this as just one more stage in the four-decade long evolution of environmental politics (note that ‘15’ in the title of the meeting) it felt a little different. This was simply another step on the road in terms of what it means for humanity to take its habitat seriously as a non-renewable resource. But it was a big step: I can see four reasons for taking seriously those posters of cheerful Nordic kiddies that welcomed us to ‘Hopenhagen’.

a modest something
One of the Open University delegation, the leading renewables specialist Godfrey Boyle, attended the first UN environment conference in Stockholm in 1972. That meeting marked the beginning of a formal renegotiation of the place of the natural world, upon which we all depend, within international politics. The meeting was marked by charges from the developing world that the rich world was seeking to ‘pull the ladder up behind them’, and halt economic growth in the South in order that elephants and tigers would still have a home to roam in.

The first reason for hope lies in the fact that just a few years ago it would have been impossible to imagine China, India, Brazil, South Africa and the USA sitting down to even start a conversation about how they would all work to contain and ultimately reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases. And yet these were the parties that tapped out an accord that would give COP15 attendees a modest something to take home. These countries bring very different experiences of the last 100 years to the negotiating table. The full colour advertisement of the American 20th century is one of white picket fences and Cadillacs for all.

Yet for others this was a period of revolutions, ethnic conflict, jarring post-colonial settlements and massive movements of people. Seen in this light the Chinese and Indian achievements of the last 20 years in terms of poverty alleviation and the creation of substantial middle classes are startling. That political leaders from these countries are taking part in discussion of global restrictions on fossil fuel use or the control of sovereign forest resources is even more surprising. However feeble the statements the fact remains that COP15 saw all the key players sit down and take this topic seriously – collectively - for the first time.

scripted and directed
Not as seriously as some mind. My second source of optimism comes from encounters with the YOUNGOs (the UN acronym for youth NGOs), particularly those from the developing world. The last COP I attended was COP 7 in Marrakesh. There were young folks there from indigenous communities in the north and from the developing world, but there was quite a strong sense that they were being scripted and directed (and certainly funded) by northern NGOs. They were part of a staged performance of concern, complete with costumes that would play well with news media picture editors in the context of an important but dull UN meeting.

It was very different this time. I talked with groups from China and South Asia. More networks than groups: many were meeting for the first time, and were indicator species for a much richer ecology of activism, research, learning and entrepreneurialism than I could have dreamed of. All of the young people had really got their head around the science and policy and had a sense that climate change would permeate their personal and professional lives for years to come. They were ambitious, demanding, smart and carefully optimistic.

fortunes to be made
The third source of optimism came from a very different generation and category: BINGOs – that is business NGOs. Again the comparison across time is helpful. Most enviro-business events of one or two decades ago were thick with the odour of fresh green paint. Greenwash is still a prominent: Sean Connery is on a continuous loop on BBC World: ‘The Time has Come… for Green Banking’ (…once more with feeling Sean?).

But there is more edge in the business oriented side events these days. Part of this comes from an acceptance by the suits that the protestors out on the streets have a very, very serious point about the state we are in. That intellectual battle has been won amongst a very large portion of the business community. The presence of around 1,000 companies as signatories on the Copenhagen Communiqué creates vital political space around the issue. But that edge also comes from an emerging sense of a game-changing transformation of the business environment. We’re no longer talking about home insulation and lightbulbs. There are very big fortunes to be made (and perhaps as many to be lost) if Obama and friends really do manage to rewire the political economy of energy. There was a sense that corporations are starting to run some very big thought experiments about how they might operate and profit in a fossil fuel constrained world.

foul-up
The fourth reason this was more Good COP than Bad COP is derived from precisely its chaotic nature. The news reports of 10 hour queues for delegates confirm an almighty foul up on the practical side, and the heavy policing was more club-wielding Viking than furniture-designer Danish. But both the queues and the enormous police presence were some kind of measures of success. Protesters had cycled, trained, walked and, yes, flown, from all over the world to put some heat under the negotiations. Inside the conference centre the UN FCCC had set the table for 15,000 yet 45,000 turned up to dinner. And having organised a UN Conference of the Parties – a formal procedure for painstaking collaborative development of policy amongst all UN member states - the UN suddenly found they had 120 heads of state wanting to roll up and hold a summit alongside (on top of?) the well established policy process (my Open University colleague and former UN FCCC civil servant Stephen Peake expands on the technical nightmare this represents elsewhere).

too easy and too lazy
Those queues were instructive. One day I passed a fascinating if chilly hour with a guy from a US steel firm; a Nepali engineer who is working to get micro-renewables into rural communities, a Chinese campaigner and a British business consultant. On climate change science and policy we all had much more to agree about than not. We also agreed that 20th century institutions were struggling with this 21st century problem.

Too many have promoted a vanity in the run up to the meeting: the notion that this one event would throw up an agreement – a solution – some kind of resolution. Too easy and too lazy. The truth is that we are engaged in a marathon not a sprint. Nevertheless the events inside and outside COP15 suggest that we do seem to be gathering a working global majority in support of a new way of thinking about economy and ecology.

The Chinese government have had a bad press in the wake of COP15, so I’ll give the last word to a Chinese policymaker who suggested that climate change meant that the west’s concern in the last century with individual rights would have to give way to a commitment to collective rights. Perhaps we will need that simple idea to sit at the centre of the next 40 years of international environmental politics if we are to weather global environmental changes without the massive loss, waste and suffering that is threatened.