I’ve had feedback on my blog recently, which has been encouraging, but also surprising as I’ve not attempted to publicise it in any way at all. It is still very much in development, and I’m in learning mode. The link to Zen is clear, the focus on principles behind actions likewise. It’s also though about identifying agenda – as far as possible the real agendas, not those swayed by hobby-horses or circulation or vote generators that press or politicians may pick up on.

One such is the debate over anti-social behaviour.

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What follows is hardly a rigorous examination of our criminal justice system. That would be way beyond my competence. But it is about identifying the real agenda we should be working to.

Louise Casey (the government’s neighbourhood crime tsar – what a title) recently urged the government to deal more quickly and effectively with anti-social behaviour, following the Fiona Pilkington case.  She also argued that people wanted a ‘public justice system’ not a ‘criminal’s justice system’, and the Times leapt in with the argument for more prison places, a favoured theme of the moment, with the promise that 5,000 more places will be found and more prisons built if the Tories come to power.

While we all want an end to violence and loutish behaviour on our local streets, we have to ask just who will be incarcerated? Will ASBOs become prison sentences, as seems likely? Prison is an appalling place when it comes to rehabilitating (which however angry we are has to be the real aim), with inadequate schemes within prison, and little support or hope for prisoners (despite good intentions) when they get out of jail. And little prospect especially for longer-serving prisoners of their finding any job that pays a decent wage. Prison is vital as a punishment and a deterrent, but it also all too often guarantees recidivism.

The government are criticised for not building more prisons, but so too were the Tories before them. Prisons are always seen as a low priority, and I doubt if that will change when and if the Tories find themselves in charge of the purse strings.

What we’ve heard recently has been far too much focused on retribution and too little on ensuring criminals are rehabilitated. There’s a dangerous element of populism in Louise Casey’s comment.

Orange jackets, making certain that offenders are denied anonymity, are one small but important step toward making sentencing, prison and community, more effective.  This is where the discussion needs to be. Hope, skills and opportunity are what offenders need to escape the vicious downward spiral in which they’re trapped, and jail simply doesn’t give it to them.

Arguing that victims’ rights come second to offenders’ rights assumes a false dichotomy.  Retribution is all very well, but what victims and society need far ahead of anything else is the assurance that criminals won’t offend again. Society’s and offenders’ interests are one and the same.

As always, we have to define the right agenda.

I note that Libby Purves argued in a recent Times article that the ‘age of free-ness must end’.  Her views tie in remarkably closely with mine, only I have to say that you’d have heard them first reading this blog. There is one additional argument she makes that I like: it is as she says the young who are most reluctant to pay for content, but they are the same kids who want to work in the media or the arts, and they’ll find there’s not much paid-for activity there. Or (and she doesn’t make this point) they may want to be an academic, but find that knowledge is less rigorous and literally cheaper, or a publisher, and find that there’s no such item as a book or even an e-book. They may all of them ‘change their minds – at least when they start looking for a job’.

One other thought.

Our minds are a knowledge store and in our student years that’s enough, but there’s a time a few years later when we like to put down waymarkers (copies of the books we read) and like to have hard evidence on our shelves of all that we’ve absorbed, or indeed might like to absorb. I’ve been wondering if that process would apply to the current student generation, and my hunch is that it will. In this case even e-books aren’t enough, it has to be the real thing, and that in the aftermath of all the e-book and digital talk at the Frankfurt Book Fair is a relief.

Looking at the Tory conference my first thought was, what a mess. There are policies but the philosophical framework isn’t there. Cameron and his allies have a trust-the-people vision, a notion of from the bottom-up accountability, which they think will work better than top-down regulation, and it has merit as an hypothesis, but as a philosophy of government it’s dubious. Maybe all they are expecting is a re-balancing, and they don’t deep down see it as a solution, but either way it doesn’t add up.

My second thought, well, it is a philosophy of sorts, passionately promoted by Cameron in his conference speech. If you’re going to trust the people, then they need to take responsibility for their lives. Is it really the Blair/Brown approach that’s reduced the sense of responsibility at all levels of society, or has it more to do other long-term factors, not least the impact of  affluence? Maybe Cameron thinks that the more he focuses on crisis and the broken society, the more he’ll shake us out of our torpor, but the likely result will be more heckling from the comfort of our TV chairs, and very little action.

The Cameron approach looks especially pernicious in healthcare, where devolving control down to the front line, and expecting the frontline to operate on minimum bureaucracy (for which read management), seems to be the main policy.

In education, devolving budgets down to schools, and allowing schools to rebuild and refurbish as they need, rather than rebuilding whole schools using money that comes from winning bids under the Building for the Future programme, makes a lot of sense. So too does giving power back to schools and teachers to run their schools in the best interest of their pupils. If that means excluding more children to ensure that the great majority have the best possible conditions for learning, then so be it. But we also get talk of devolving down to parents, which is puzzling. It will be interest groups not parents who want to start new schools, and there will be huge disruption.

Trust the people … on Europe, the leaving of which or partial separation from would cause massive disruption (do we want to be an island that much, cut off in every sense?), on security, building more jails, when they are so clearly dysfunctional, on defence, when Hague wants quarterly reviews which will run up against the importance of the long-term view in military strategy. 

In all these areas there’s a middle common-sense ground, which is open for the Tories to grab, but in their enthusiasm to set themselves apart they are in danger of over-positioning, over-defining, and leaving themselves too many hostages to fortune.

Why a mention of Simon Heffer? Simply because as a Telegraph columnist he’s widely read and influential.

I can’t imagine he would feel comfortable with Amartya Sen. (It helps to read my last blog before this one!) Heffer’s philosophy focuses on free markets and individual responsibility, with few concessions to individual rights. He is a conservative in its most literal and uncritically Anglocentric sense. His philosophy may not be mine, but it has substance and a long history. 

He’s the polar opposite to supporters of capability theory, where every individual has positive freedoms including the ability to take part in economic or political activity. Such freedoms require positive intervention by the state, of a kind anathema to Heffer.

Capability is about fulfilling ourselves as human beings but there’s something missing in what I’ve read on the subject to date, something that takes us to the heart of the problem faced by Western democracies, and that is a reference to the importance not just of participation in politics but of balanced debate.  Too often these days the shrill and the vituperative squeeze out reasoned argument.

I read Heffer’s beautifully balanced appraisal of Polanski’s arrest a few days ago, and then by contrast another piece (the title of the article ends with the words ‘the last gasp of the charlatan’) on Gordon Brown’s speech to the Labour Party conference. ‘Cynicism’, ‘pretending’, ‘rubbishing markets’, ‘disgusting act’ all tripped off the keys in his first paragraph. Later on we had ‘phoney smiles’, ‘charlatanry’ (again, this time Mandelson) and then we had a comparison with Goebbels. From a long-time writer for the Mail, famous for its dalliance with Hitler, that was a bit rich. It was also nasty.

It is key to the debate that must be at the heart of our ability to engage in political action that we show respect for other individuals and parties, however much we disagree. We can then debate issues, rather than engage in grandstanding. Where there’s real corruption or dishonesty we can highlight it and we’ll be listened to.

Heffer does huge damage by making his attacks so personal, and one only has to read the unpleasant comments on the Telegraph website to realise he carries a multitude readers along with him.

Curiously, alongside Heffer we have Mary Riddell as a Telegraph columnist, with her measured comments on Brown and Labour. She could indeed be writing for the Guardian, and it does mean that Telegraph readers get another point of view. And whipped up by their cheer-leader, many of them hate it, and hate her. Brave lady.

Politics can be rough, and get personal, and you don’t get involved unless you can take it, indeed enjoy it. But too much animosity and it impacts on debate not just in the political but in the wider community. Therein lies the danger.

Zen is about the everyday. Daily life practice , as it’s called, being mindful every moment of the day, is at its core. Zen is all about how we understand ourselves, and how we respond to others. Politics by definition is about a bigger picture, seeking to benefit people en masse, and philosophy about a wider picture still, how we define the principles that underpin our actions.

Zen and politics for some wouldn’t be an easy combination.  For me it’s about principle, how principles derive from daily life, and how those principles then play out in the wider world.

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The attempts by various political leaders and commentators to find a philosophical core for their thinking, using the October issue of Prospect as a platform, make interesting reading. What they highlight is the disjunction between theory and practice, how hard it is to move from the abstract to the realisation.

Many on the centre and centre-left come these days from the same starting-point, Amartya Sen’s capability theory, and there’s no reason why the centre-right shouldn’t buy into it to as well. We’re not talking of equality of income, or of opportunity, but something more personal, more in tune with our own time, the freedom  ‘to achieve what we are capable of’. It could be argued that freedom from the burdens of a centralised state, at the heart of the current Tory message, is just such a capability.

Both James Pannell and Gordon Brown (no Tories in this issue) outline policy programmes which are similar, highlighting how close in approach the two men are. A shame then that Pannell resigned in a death or glory moment. Time out from government has certainly given him the opportunity to catch up on his political philosophy reading.

Not a bad thing. He focuses in his piece on liberty, power and democracy – all vague terms, all capable of multiple definitions. They need to be re-defined for each generation, and for each country. How can we advocate liberty and democracy to Islamic and third world leaders when we don’t have a clear focus on what they mean in our own countries?

As a starting-point we need humility, and the understanding also the even the grandest principle is only a hypothesis. Not only are all definitions inadequate, they are also transient. Socialist aspirations to equality of income seem largely irrelevant to our own time. And now we see happiness as a measure coming up on the rails. It’s good to discuss it and make access to quality of life central to our beliefs, but, again, how on earth do we define it?

If that’s not enough to ponder over, there’s the difficulty is how you translate theory into practice, and both Brown and Pannell try hard to conjure policy out of principle. Policy statements all too often look very lonely out there, without a context.

Pannell derives three goals for our time from Sen: the freedom to choose our way of life, the power to achieve it, and democracy as public discussion. This in summary requires guaranteed jobs, a less centralised education system, responding to need, and everything from parliament initiating laws, American-style, to communities getting together to take local decisions. And much else besides.

Brown  also argues for a similar notion of freedom (the same hymn sheet here) and he claims many of his policies as Chancellor were Sen-inspired, including Sure Start. But it’s evident his experience as PM in the last few months has shifted the focus from a typically New Labour top-down approach to talk of  ‘a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the state’, and specifically people wanting a greater say over how they are governed, and that means institutional reform. That said, it would be crazy to think that measures on economic growth, the public finances, families and communities, climate and social mobility (Brown’s choice of headings) can be other than top-down. You don’t get such measures through by protracted debate, and the PM still talks of ‘the positive power of an enabling state’.

I don’t think Sen as economist and philosopher any more than politicians could have anticipated the last few months. Capability may be an aspiration, but especially among the Tories accountability has become the watchword, much easier for the public to relate to. Instead of targets and bureaucracy, we will have full disclosure of performance, and accountability based on that. In Cameron’s post-bureaucratic state managers and middlemen, whether in health or education, are dispensable. Hence the confidence that so many can be culled.

How Cameron can really make a political philosophy out of this, connect an aspiration to one-nation social justice to across-the-board cuts, we shall have to see. Are so many jobs worthless, or if not worthless overpaid? A business can shed staff by refocusing its business on fewer core activities. Government (any party that wants to be elected, quite apart from considerations of morality and justice) can’t do so. And can so much shedding be done without creating chaos?

Politically we are in interesting times, and philosophically too.

My very first blog, read by thousands, remembered by millions, was entitled Going Slow. See below if you didn’t read it the first time.

Why am I re-posting it? Well, the HuffnPuffington Post, the internet newspaper of Arianna Huffington, famous talker and socialite, have just named Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slowness, which inspired my blog, as their first-ever book of the month over in the USA, and they are rabbiting on about how wonderful going slow is. So I thought I should be quick off the mark with my riposte.

Going slow is a state of mind, not just a brief relaxation. But the author thinks Arianna is wonderful, so maybe I should. There are now apparently at least a hundred slow cities. We know about slow food (in the cooking I think, not the eating) and there is apparently a Slow Sex movement underway, which may lose out just a little on the excitement, but I guess we’ll all have to try it out.

If you want to read that original blog …. scroll down, then hit Previous Posts, and scroll down again.

The Sun has come out for the Tories. Which won’t surprise us, and it’s about time they switched. Labour and Murdoch were always strange bed-fellows. But the timing is criminal. It’s intended to distract and destroy and undermine consideration of issues. They claim it’s a response  in part to Brown’s lack-lustre speech at conference but that’s drivel. It’s long-considered, long-planned, the moment calibrated and calculated.

In short, it’s anti-democratic. We had the Telegraph hyping and spinning out expenses stories to maximise the damage to MPs credibility just before the local and Euro elections and that clearly had a big impact on the result. Now we have the Sun trying to torpedo Labour.

Why shouldn’t newspapers do this? Simply because in a mature democracy we need debate, and we need all sides (especially the major parties) to be able to advance their ideas and see them properly debated. With the press is the hands of a very few and very wealthy magnates who are in there just because they want to manipulate the process (to any of altruistic mind I apologise)  then it’s just not going to happen.

No-one raises the issue because they daren’t, they’re employed by one of the papers, they don’t want the flak because there is no-one out there who will support them.

At the moment it’s a downward spiral. As had been said this morning, news sources are now much more varied, so that is something of a balance. But the big media still set the mood.

In my last blog I argued that there’s a yawning gap between free and quality. Blogging is free. Magazines, books, print cost money. So too I argued should online, if we want quality. 

So why should anyone read what I blog? I need to add to the worldide online debate, add value to the debate. The value I get in return may be recognition and kudos and no more, and that for inveterate bloggers is great. No-one expects to make money from blogging, and no-one does.

But let’s not confuse debate with content and research, with the substance on which the online debate depends.

If that’s where I want my contribution to be I need to give it time, and time is money. Bear in mind that all the content I draw on as a blogger has a cost – news, research etc – although it may be several times removed from that original cost. If all we rely on is second hand, then we move further and further from the source and the truth. We’re in a dangerous world.

News-gathering, research, the investment of time and hard-won skills, all cost money.

If I want to take my reading as well as my writing more seriously I know where I’ll look. And I’ll pay.

Blogging is about debate, and it’s wonderful. But it’s starting-point, like a good dinner-party conversation (or maybe a monologue!), no more than that.

I’ve just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece, Priced To Sell, on the proposition that the future according to silicon is free.  Gladwell’s starting-point:  the Dallas Morning News proposed licensing its content to Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader. Amazon wanted 70% of the subscription revenue, leaving the Morning News just 30%. What’s more  ‘Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it on to anyone else they wanted’.

‘Information wants to be free,’  is the old mantra, which Chris Anderson in his book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price considers to be as much a law as the law of gravity.

A few comments.

The curious thing is that out there not only the hardline bloggers and but also the panicking publishers (do books, newspapers, have a future?) seem to believe it. Yes, we all love free, and there are good experiments to prove it. But free is also a fad. We quickly grow tired of free. We learn not to trust it, and we realise as do shoppers the world over that free and quality, quality of content and quality of choice, don’t readily go together.

There’s another downside to free. It overwhelms us. We want guidance. Where can we find the good stuff? All those bloggers out there want to be heard, but we quickly find they add nothing to the debate, and if they do have something to say it’s lost, because they are operating outside those time-honoured structures which allow us to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. (OK, among the chaff has always been wheat that got missed. But that’s another issue.)

‘Free ,’ as Gladwell puts it, ‘means never having to make a judgement,’ and that would be (already is) a nightmare world. He also pours scorn on the idea that because the information can be free all the technology that delivers it will be free as well. Information is only a small part of the cost.

Put simply, quality information, information which answers your specific interest and needs, information that you know because of its source (publisher and writer) to be high quality, will cost you more. Technology may streamline delivery and make it possible to identify ever-smaller markets, but it won’t remove the need for quality or for selection.

So, let’s turn it round and re-phrase.  ‘Any old information wants to be free, quality information wants to carry a cost,’ and that cost is the payment for the quality that guarantees the information is worth reading. In this new age it’s taking time for practitioners in the publishing world to work out what that cost will be, as online competes with paper, and e-ink with the real thing.  But the hard truth is now and will be: if you want serendipity and distraction at the end of a hard day, check out free. If you want something to challenge you, to stimulate, entertain rather than titillate, to add quality, then you’ll pay, and pay willingly.

Why are we still putting up with all this talk of free? Ads on a website will generate enough revenue… Amazon is only a staging-post on the route to free…. and all that. For once I’ll support Rupert Murdoch. He’s doing the right thing charging for the Times Online. In this case it’s online and print sharing the same cost: online needs to contribute its full share.

Quality has value. Free is a parasite and no parasite has any value, any real existence, unless there’s a host..

Question Time on BBC 1 has become a good reason for going to bed early. We get the same issues that have been debated all week debated again, the same arguments, conveyed with that deeply unconvincing  passion that’s required of politicians and commentators these days.

Digby Jones insists there was no link between trade and Al Megrahi’s release in discussions with Libya, but he is concerned that an issue of such moment could be left to a Scottish minister to decide. It would be worse if Brown wasn’t involved.  Either way relations with the US were damaged. Digby Jones was an accidental politician, and it showed. His was a wise and common-sense approach. The exception.

Michael Heseltine sees not so much damage to the special relationship, and more a confirmation that such a thing doesn’t exist, which is mischievous. The term has as many different meanings as there are politicians and people. Given history, language, shared experiences links go deep, the special relationship is almost a default position but in terms of economic and strategic consideration we are only one of a number of partners – Germany, Japan and of course China. At least it was said with humour.

From the Lib Dens we had ‘astonishment’, and from Harriet Harman we had blather – assertions that convinced no-one. If Digby Jones was the exception these two were the rule.

What we have so much of now is taking sides, rather than a debate about issues, recognising shades of grey, sincere decisions that go wrong, misreading of indications. The Zen approach recognises that all arguments are tentative and personal, that everything changes, the view one week can be very different next week. It recognises how far the world falls short. It inculcates humility and wisdom.

My specific contribution here would be to argue that the surer and more assertive you are and want to be, the more cautious you should be. Certainty involves emotion, and emotion clouds the mind. It’s all too easy to rejoice in having answers, and the security that comes therefrom. A questioning mindset on the other hand allows us to keep an open mind, and be more aware of the others’ points of view.

Karl Popper argued against certainties, from Plato to Marx, in The Open Society, and for progress made through an ongoing and never-ending process of learning, of trial and error. In our time we find certainties underpinning the neo-con proponents of a market economy and US-style democracy. For them the only definition of a liberal democracy is an unfettered market economy, with no room for that other favoured and much more nuanced contender, social democracy.  For a few years the neo-cons in the USA and their certainties have called the tune in US policy. No more.

There will always be cycles in such matters, as we move toward certainty and the comfort of certainty (the end of history, the end of economics in the pre-2007, pre-crash days), and then back toward an open mind, toward learning and change, and humility. I was going to say toward insecurity as well, but that’s the point of this piece.  For certainty gives an impression of security, but given the impermanence of what it disguises it is fragile and liable to suddenly implode. Open minds on the other hand may appear unsure and vacillating and yet it is open minds that allow balanced debate and decision-making, and that has to be our highest goal, more than the decisions themselves.

If we get how we debate the issues right, then we will get the decisions right – or as right as we ever will.