Two new, perfectly contradictory currents are just now beginning to course through the British body politic.  How they will fare - if they will, indeed, survive to develop at all – cannot be known with any degree of certainty.  Both hold the potential to change this island’s politics.  But only one can fundamentally change the future that is mapped out for us today.

Much the more advanced of the two is strictly elitist in conception, in a liberal-political sense.  It cares nothing for the opinions of the people, has no connection to them and is desired by none of them.  Yet it claims democracy as its ultimate value.  It aims, then, only to capture the imagination of men of power and influence, to seduce their minds with a grand, global objective requiring the commitment of our diplomatic resources, our treasure and, if necessary, our sons’ lives.  That objective, if you have not already guessed, is to carry liberal democracy beyond its present confines and into the world.

We are, therefore, talking here about naked, unabashed neoconservatism.  All references by its supporters to other, more native political traditions are simply an illusionist’s trick, a stratagem to get around the negative, particularist associations of neoconservatism and to appeal thereby to a confused, post-Blairite centre-left.

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Thanks to Michael R for the link to this example of wonderfully wayward feminist politics in Norway.

The new coalition government in Oslo said it was considering introducing a law which would require 40% of boardroom posts to be filled by women.  Norway’s previous government drew up the law, which it threatened to apply if companies failed voluntarily to meet minimum quotas by 1 July this year.  Only a fifth of Norway’s 590 publicly listed firms comply with the quotas.

“It’s not going fast enough,” said Karita Bekkemellem, Norway’s minister for family and children.  “I don’t want to wait 20 or 30 years until sufficiently intelligent men finally appoint women to the boardrooms.”  She added: “I wish to establish, from January 1 2006, a system of sanctions which makes it possible to break up companies.”

... a spokeswoman for Ms Bekkemellem said introducing the law could be the only way to of ensuring equality in the boardroom.  “It is a question of power,” the spokeswoman said, insisting that several surveys had found that companies where both sexes were strongly represented on the board were more profitable.  “For a woman to get in a man must get out.  It is not difficult to find qualified women.”

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A key distinguishing feature of humanity is its communication ability.  But what exactly is communication as opposed to manipulation?  How does communication arise?  What are the conditions for its continuation?  There have been a number of attempts at simulating the evolution of communication but till the simulation described in this article was run, none of them combined migration, climatic variation and the prisoner’s dilemma.

The simulaton is schematic but suggestive that migration can eliminate the very genetic capacity for communication and replace it with pure manipulation.

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It is still strange to my ears to hear how the British economy - three decades ago the “sick man of Europe” – is spoken of as a model the rest of the continent should emulate.  It is doubly strange, in fact, since just about any degree of confidence in modern Britain flies in the face of our general experience of daily, abject cultural defeatism.  If it isn’t the anguish of Anglican liberals we have to endure, it’s another crazy anti-racism campaign.  Or we are bleeding with guilt after a crazed axe murder.  Or we are binge drinking into the middle of the night while Old Father Thames is brained on crack.  Or record numbers of children are growing up without a father, whilst marriage has become just too tiresome for the modern couple …

The list is long.

Still, when British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stands up in Strasbourg to tell the European Parliament that “Without significant changes I see little prospect of a deal”, one has to raise a couple of patriotic cheers, however weakly.  One has also to acknowledge that, actually, this is nothing knew.  Straw is simply sounding the latest charge across some very old battle lines.  Our liberalising economic agenda for the EU is all of a piece with Napoleon Bonaparte’s supposed observation that, “L’Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers.”

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Have you ever read an article which begins well but then takes a disastrously wrong turn?

There’s an article being praised amongst some conservative groups here in Melbourne, written by Augusto Zimmermann. Augusto hails from Brazil but is undertaking his Ph.D in law at Melbourne’s Monash University (he appears to be of German descent). Augusto is an obviously intelligent young man, who appears regularly in the Christian conservative press.

His latest article takes aim at Victoria’s religious vilification legislation. Augusto begins by noting that the legislation contradicts the Western legal tradition by disallowing the truth of a statement as a defence. That’s why two Christian pastors could be prosecuted under the legislation for accurately quoting parts of the Koran to a private church gathering.

Augusto then criticises the idea that the legislation will help to create a “multicultural democracy”. He argues that not all cultures are equally committed to democracy, and that democracy and the rule of law might not be preserved if Australia “eventually decides to reject its own culture on account of multiculturalism”.

Augusto’s article then reaches its high point when he observes that,

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A little good news is needed now and then. The pioneer spirit is still alive. As a person somewhat responsible for the resurgence in technology prize awards, I have a few things to say about Burt Rutan’s capture of the Ansari X-Prize by being the first to fly a man to space in a reusable craft twice within a week. He follows the great technology pioneers Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, both of whom came to prominence during similar fair contests: The Guggenheim Trophy and Orteig Prize respectively. (From these exemplars some might now see a reason the powers that be shy away from fair contests—contests where they can’t really control who wins the prizes—and it was left to an Iranian family, the Ansaris, to fully fund the X-Prize.)

A speech by Burt Rutan before the National Space Society is worth a view (requires QuickTime ). He repeatedly and angrily declares his embarrassment at the risk averse culture that has strangled the pioneer spirit since the feats of the 1960s—nearly 40 years ago. I’ve got my issues with his speech but we clearly agree that something went horribly wrong with the pioneer spirit subsequent to the 1960s. The turning inward of the human potential has resulted in the halting of human progress upward and outward with aerospace technology being bureaucratically and monotonously scaled up for jumbo jet transportation. The result is the sort of danger warned of by Charles Lindbergh in his 1939 Reader’s Digest article “Aviation, Geography, and Race”: a sea of humanity threatening our race which is, after all, a global minority. Indeed the technological exemplar of this era has been driven by the rise of finance to preeminence—the inward-turning microelectronic revolution. The unintended side-effect of this revolution you see before you now as a website, but it is small consolation for the damage to our pioneer spirit.  As we were warned by Henry Ford the great struggle of the 20th century was creative industry vs global finance.  Global finance has dominated the past 30 years or more. Perhaps men like Burt Rutan can lead us out of our malaise and realize the human potential.  If so it may be due to prize awards like the Ansari X-Prize that give men even younger than Burt Rutan a chance to make a name for themselves purely via their own grit and gifts.

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“... today’s IFOP poll of the candidate likely to make the best president of France is headed by Mr Sarkozy on 61%, 10 points up on last month. Mr Villepin is on 53%, and the leading Socialist, Jack Lang, on 45%.”

Somebody explain this to me, please?  Is it a case of “vote early, vote often”, as the Irish used to say?  The single transferable vote?  Too much Volnay with lunch?

And they haven’t even added in Jean-Marie yet.