Exclusive Prospect poll of "wavering" MPs

Faced with characteristically impatient questioning by John Humphrys this morning, David Miliband said of his brother Ed: “I am happy to say he is the best man to lead Labour into the next election.” The comments, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, may have been forced by Humphrys’s grilling. But it appears that despite the media speculation about Ed’s performance in recent months, David was right when he added that Ed “will lead Labour into the next election.” That message is echoed by some—limited but illuminating—exclusive private polling among Labour MPs by Prospect.

The only practical threat to Ed’s leadership would be if Labour MPs begin to worry enough about losing their seats at the next general election to move against their leader. We know from his decision to stand against his elder brother that Ed is deceptively ruthless and unlikely to stand down voluntarily. And we know that historically, the Labour party fails to oust its leaders in the brutal way the Conservatives and, lately, the Liberal Democrats do. Instead, Labour takes a curiously sentimental attitude towards under-performing leaders.

In judging Ed’s survivability, then, it is certainly necessary, if not wholly sufficient, to test the temperature of the parliamentary party.

Labour MPs make up one third of the electoral college that decides the Labour leadership, alongside party members and the trade unions. In the final round of the contest in 2010, Ed Miliband famously only won the union section of the college, gaining 59.802 per cent to David’s 40.02 per cent. The elder brother won 54.405 per cent of Labour members’ votes, and 53.436 per cent of the MPs’ votes. Ed received 45.594 per cent of the members’ votes and 46.566 per cent of the MPs’ votes. This meant that overall, 140 Labour MPs ended up voting for David and 122 ended up voting for Ed.

David ended up with 49.35 per cent of the overall vote; Ed won with 50.65. Such was the closeness of the result that had three more MPs put David ahead of Ed, David would have become leader.

The 122 are made up of people who put Ed before David in their choice of up to five votes, in order, for the contenders: Diane Abbott, Andy Burnham and Ed Balls as well as the Miliband brothers.

Avoiding those MPs who were so firm in their support for Ed that they voted for him only, leaving the rest of the ballot paper clear, and those who are now on the payroll, such as whips and shadow ministers, Prospect called half of Labour MPs who ended up voting for Ed: the potential waverers.

In almost all cases using direct mobile numbers, we asked the potential waverers, under conditions of anonymity: “If you were voting today, would you still put Ed Miliband ahead of David Miliband?”

Of the 61 MPs we asked, 15 MPs said yes, 8 refused to comment and 39 failed to call or text back. Of the 15 who answered in the affirmative, one said he “fully” backs Ed, one said Ed is a “good leader” and one said she supports Ed “in 2010, now and forever”, adding, however, that she doesn’t “take anything for granted” when asked if Ed was “safe” as leader for the full parliamentary term.

Of the eight who declined to answer, four said they do not answer such surveys, three said “no comment” and one merely laughed. Five of these said the poll was “unhelpful” or “scurrilous.” The broadly positive response by Labour MPs came, it should be said, in the wake of Ed’s perceived success in forcing Stephen Hester of RBS to give up his one million pound bonus. Such leftist populism may lead to spikes of support among MPs as well as the public, as occurred when Ed led the charge against Rupert Murdoch last summer.

Whether Ed will stand a chance of breaking through with the electorate and positioning his party so it stands a chance at the next election, remains to be seen. Much will depend on the long-term success of his new fiscal policy, the starting point of which, to the anger of the left, is an acceptance of all the government’s cuts. The forthcoming budget on 21 March provides Ed with a major test, and Ed should be praying that Ken Livingstone beats Boris Johnson in the London mayoral election in May.

But Ed has already survived criticism following some ineffective weeks as leader of the Opposition, and it is clear from talking to Labour MPs consistently through the past year that Ed Miliband is, for better or worse, almost certainly safe in the job.

Even the only credible alternative, David Miliband, now appears to agree with that.

Novelist Rosie Dastgir reflects on immigration in Switzerland and in London's east end

I arrived in London from my home in Brooklyn, New York last week, for the launch of my first novel, A Small Fortune. The book is a tragi-comic tale about a British Pakistani patriarch called Harris (after the tweed) who loses control over his unruly extended family.

I took a taxi from Paddington, and found that my cabbie was an east-ender, eager to know my business in London. When I told him about the book, set partly in Whitechapel, where I used to live he said that loved the title. “Is it about gangs, then?” he enquired. “The Krays? That type of thing?”

“Not really, no,” I replied. I didn’t admit that it was about Pakistani Brits; nor did I mention my own Muslim name or Pakistani father. I’m wary of such things after 10 years in the east end, where I was once stopped by an old white man, who congratulated me on my baby, saying, “So nice to see a white face round here.”

The cabbie was a cockney from Bow, he told me, though he’d moved to Kent. He began a mournful tirade on how the east end had been ruined by foreigners. We’re flooded, he moaned, they don’t mix in or talk to you. “It’s all just become a big mix,” he said, contradicting himself.

I’d just heard that fear expressed the week before when I’d spoken on a panel on multiculturalism at the Open Forum in Davos. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party politician on the panel tried to explain why it was not fair on the Swiss to have their schools flooded with foreigners; they don’t speak the language, he said, and they drag down standards. He was gently but firmly booed by the audience of Swiss locals.

Everybody fears the flood, it seems—whether the Biblical flood, the flood of information, or the so-called flood of immigration. The last fear is as present in east London as in the alpine villages of Switzerland. In my novel, Rashid, a struggling minicab driver and estate agent who drifts into radicalism, fails to overcome it.

In Davos, I’d given out my newly minted card at parties and to people I’d talked to on shuttle buses. At the end of my ride, I wondered about handing it to the cabbie. When he looked at my name, would he see that I was the very thing he feared, the incarnation of the mix? I decided to tip him instead.

Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune is published by Quercus Books

Wislawa Szymborska was Poland’s fourth winner of the literature Nobel but she could have been my great aunt

When Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel prize for literature, I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The announcement of the prize always falls like clockwork in the middle of the fair, each October. I’d not heard of her. A better-informed Dutch journalist, the late Michael Zeeman, wrote out her name for me.

Just over two years later I interviewed her in Krakow, a visit I recalled vividly when I heard the news of her death last Wednesday. Szymborska rarely gave interviews. I’m certain she eventually agreed to meet to me only because it was for The Times—surely, for an idiosyncratic east European poet who spoke no English, the most famous newspaper in the Anglophone world.

I also believe The Times features section had no idea what it had commissioned. The piece printed, respectable enough, told barely a third of the story. And it nearly didn’t happen.

A Polish writer friend of mine had good contacts in Krakow. One of them was Szymborska’s young assistant, Michal Rusinek. I met him during my first visit to Krakow, from Berlin by train, in early 1999. He turned out to be punctilious, scholarly and fluent in English. He reminded me of a monk.

Fax correspondence followed. I’d return in March and Rusinek thought that’d be fine, but on the 8th he faxed that Szymborska was going away. “I guess you will have to write about her without talking to her.” I groaned but persisted by email (at that time quite new to me).

An opportunity to go back to Krakow arose in April. On 31 March, Rusinek e-mailed: “Good news for ya! WS has agreed.” Five days before the date set for the meeting, he gave me the address: Piastowska Street, a couple of kilometres north-west of historic Krakow.

Rusinek and I took a taxi. The name on Szymborska’s door was someone else’s. An odd addition awaited us: an interpreter, called Magda Heydel. Magda was a student friend of Rusinek’s, who could do with an extra zloty or two. He was doing her a favour. And it was Szymborska who paid her, not The Times.

It was 11 am and Szymborska produced a bottle of brandy—a totally surprising detail which I’d quite forgotten until, last week, I looked again at the article. It explained the bare data of Szymborska’s life: born in 1923, family somehow remaining in tact during the war, communist beliefs solid until the mid-1950s but returning her party card in 1966, her poetry of course; but the thrust of it was about the Nobel’s invasion of her privacy. She loathed being recognised.

She smoked like a chimney, had bright eyes and a full mouth, and rather beautiful hands. She didn’t talk much of literature but did state, in answer to a question I can’t remember, that the world’s greatest plot was that of Sophocles’s Antigone. Her flat was plain and the loo seat raised a smile: it was laced with a pattern of barbed wire.

She was Poland’s fourth winner of the literature Nobel but she could have been my great aunt. You don’t encounter quiet greatness like hers often. She signed my copy of her Poems New and Collected, which, again, I’d forgotten before looking at it, just now, for the first time since 1999. I shall do her the honour of re-reading every single one of its 280 pages, and be reminded of how acerbic and luminous a poet she was.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: not your regular US indie film

Martha Marcy May Marlene
On release from 3rd February

This grippingly creepy tale of cult trauma begins like a regular kind of US indie film. On a Catskill mountain farm, healthy, attractive young people in simple work clothes are doing chores in the “magic hour” of sunlight so familiar from Terrence Malick’s films. But to the beautiful Martha (played with subtle grace by newcomer Elizabeth Olsen), this seeming idyll is revealed to be anything but heavenly.

Renamed Marcy May or Marlene, she has been recruited into a cult run by psychopath Patrick (John Hawkes) who drugs the women and forces himself on them. Martha escapes, getting her sister Lucy to bring her to the Connecticut lakeshore house she shares with her husband Ted. In her sleep Martha returns to the horrors she’s experienced; and when awake she reacts bitterly against her sister’s rich lifestyle—yet at the same time she fears that the cult may come for her.

Director Sean Durkin skilfully builds audience discomfort and apprehension through surprise. He infuses the film’s intimations of violence with a subtle dread that reminds one not of Malick but of that sly Austrian master Michael Haneke (Caché, The White Ribbon). Go and shiver.

Debt-fuelled consumption is a bit of a Ponzi scheme. We should borrow to invest

Debt is bad. We all know it. It brought on the financial crisis. Our governments need austerity. We need to stop living beyond our means. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Sebastian Mallaby suggests in today’s FT that Mitt Romney should come out against debt and bring American capitalism closer to a pay-as-you-go model. Sounds sensible. Does he have a point?

Actually, I don’t think he does. Mallaby’s conventional, sober opinion is worth refuting. He forgets the fundamental role that increased levels of debt have played in stimulating the economy for over a generation. We are seeing high unemployment today not because debt is rising, but because it is decreasing. The private sector, both here and the US is paying down debt incurred during the boom. Without all that borrowing, the collapse of 2008 would have come much earlier.

Ever since the 1980s debt has been the world economy’s essential engine of growth. That is because debt stimulates demand and without demand, the economy collapses, along with employment. Policymakers know this well. Any slowdown from 1987 up to the present day was met by immediately cutting interest rates, to allow more debt-fuelled consumption.

In 2007, this economic model, based on easy money, asset price inflation and ever increasing levels of debt fell apart. Instead of blithely rolling over loans, banks called them in. Households and firms stopped borrowing and started to pay down what they owed. The consequence was the subsequent Great Recession.

This should be enough to tell us that the private and public deleveraging Mallaby recommends would be disastrous, causing more unemployment and destroying any prospects of growth.

It is all a bit confusing. The cause and the cure of the disease seem to be the same. We got into this mess as a consequence of high debt levels but deleveraging will make things worse. What is to be done?

The problem, perhaps, is that the boom was fuelled by borrowing used to fund consumption rather than investment. An investment creates a cash flow with which to repay the debt. Debt-fuelled consumption on the other hand is a bit of a Ponzi scheme; you need to borrow more just to pay off your loan. This worked for thirty years. Low interest rates and increased borrowing raised asset prices, which created paper collateral that convinced banks to keep lending more.

Perhaps the solution is increased borrowing for investment rather than for consumption. Unfortunately, today the private sector has little reason to invest. Why borrow and create more capacity when demand is stagnant, when we already cannot sell all we produce? Thence all the cash sitting idle in corporate coffers.

The previous macroeconomic era is dying; the new one hasn’t yet been born. Austerity isn’t working, debt-fuelled consumption has run its course. We need a rethink. I would suggest, as a first step, we take advantage of extremely low borrowing costs to fund public sector investment in infrastructure and education. These investments will make Britain stronger ten and twenty years down the road and increase employment today.

Jonathan Franzen signs a book—in hard copy—for a fan. Photo credit: renaatje

Jonathan Franzen’s recent rant against e-books is reminiscent of a scene is his latest novel, Freedom. College student Jessica Berglund accuses her father’s assistant Lalitha of not understanding how young people communicate—they’ve moved on from email to instant messaging and texts. Lalitha, at age 27, is now too old to get it, claims Jessica. When it comes to e-books, it seems that it’s Franzen who just doesn’t get it, although I wonder if he simply takes pleasure in stirring the pot.

Franzen believes the permanence of printed books preserves the author’s vision for posterity. I like printed books because they wear and age. They’ve lived a life and are the more beautiful for it. But these days I prefer to buy novels as e-books and music or films on iTunes. That’s because I have long run out of shelf space. Certainly, e-books in their current form have disadvantages but they have clear benefits too. My mother, for example, has set up her Kindle for large print. When my e-reader broke, I bought a new one and it had all the e-books I’d already bought on it. The device is nothing more than a facilitator.

E-books’ chief advantage is distribution. Some books don’t move enough copies to justify keeping them in print (or for booksellers to keep them in stock). E-books don’t require significant storage space, just a few megabytes on a server. Large computing platforms can reduce the marginal cost of storing and distributing digital media to almost nil, meaning it is no longer bad business to carry less popular items. Franzen should try buying American paperbacks outside his own continent. I once ran a book club in the Middle East; we had to ship most of our paperbacks from Amazon UK.

Books are worthless if no one can read them. Mass distribution keeps titles alive long beyond their lifespan in the public consciousness. Google is busy scanning rare, out of print books (some out of copyright, others not). Project Gutenberg hosts free, out of copyright e-books—many of Amazon’s free e-book classics derive from the hard work of Gutenberg’s volunteers. Incidentally, Project Gutenberg is named after the inventor of the printing press, which transformed the sharing of knowledge and from which Franzen has benefited. There were, no doubt, plenty of medieval Franzens, who believed there was no substitute for a good handwritten parchment kept in few expensively-maintained libraries.

Franzen may want us to buy his paperback because he wants to be remembered, to have us possess something that is forever Jonathan Franzen. For an author’s ego, e-books may feel more transient: I can click a button and suddenly Freedom is replaced by another writer’s work. But e-books won’t kill off printed books because both formats have their distinct advantages.

The magic of a book lies not in the print on the page, it lies in their words. In Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, the state is almost successful in its plan to destroy all books. However, it fails to reckon with someone preserving their contents in his memory. I read Freedom on my Kindle. If Franzen really believes what he said, he shouldn’t have let his book be available on it.

Nobel peace laureate Leymah Gbowee spoke of women's unique role in bringing about peace

Earlier this week, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) held an event at which speakers debated the motion: “Women’s empowerment and sustainable development—have we failed?”

Leymah Gbowee, the 2011 Nobel peace prize co-laureate and Liberian peace activist, spoke illuminatingly about the crucial role women play in times of conflict. She highlighted the unique ways in which women facilitate peace in times of war.

Firstly it is women who provide basic services, in the form of food and shelter, to those internally displaced by civil war. It is also women who negotiate and secure safe passage through checkpoints set up by rival factions. And, thirdly, women negotiate peace on behalf of their communities by identifying and validating those that are members of the community. Women carry out these roles in the face of the constant threats of kidnapping, rape and murder.

The paradox of war is that women find themselves empowered during times of conflict to the same degree that they are disempowered in times of peace. When conflicts end, Gbowee explained, women are dismissed as underqualified and so excluded from formal peace negotiations. She has called for recognition of the valuable experience of women during times of conflict. Her efforts as an activist involve encouraging female participation in elections.

The fact that conflict affects men and women differently has only recently begun to influence the peacekeeping and development efforts of foreign governments and NGOs. The constant threat of rape directly inhibits the ability of women to carry out their peace-facilitating roles. Gry Larsen, the Norwegian state secretary for Foreign Affairs, spoke at the debate of the importance of gender-appropriate post-conflict strategies.

Making development and aid projects gender-appropriate often involve simple considerations of logistics, management and communication. Placing food stores, medical tents and toilets, for example, closer to communities, along well-travelled routes or in open spaces significantly reduces the risk of rape. And information relating to when and where fresh aid supplies will be delivered allow women, who most often collect the aid, to arrange safe travel.

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Mitt Romney's presidency would not differ much from Obama's

Outspending his main rival 5 to 1, Mitt Romney won a significant plurality in Tuesday’s Florida Primary and so regained momentum in the race for the Republican nomination. We are entering a lull in the campaign, with only a few states voting in February. The next big test is Super Tuesday on March 6th, by which time Romney hopes his vast stores of cash and our sense of his inevitability will bring him decisive victory.

Mostly, I am glad. Romney would make a better president than any of his rivals. Consider the bombastic Newt Gingrich (hated most by those who know him best, one of his Republican House colleagues said “If he is the smartest man in the room, leave the room”), the anti-gay rights Rick Santorum (google his name and the first thing you see is that his opponents have turned “Santorum” into a synonym for a frothy by-product of anal sex), and the libertarian Ron Paul (cuter than the others but actually even more loony). Unlike them, at least Romney’s presidency would not make us long for the days of the sagacious and wise rule of George W Bush.

Gingrich would send America to the Moon, and to war with Iran. Santorum would criminalize homosexuality and try to eliminate non-marital sex. Paul would shrink the government to Jeffersonian levels and so drive unemployment to over 20 per cent. Romney would protect the financial sector and bail out the banks. Oh, that is what Obama did.

Romney, remember, as Governor of Massachusetts created the insurance-based health reform that was the model for Obamacare that all the Republicans rail against. Although at the margins Obama and Romney are quite different, their reaction to the financial crisis would probably have been almost identical. Despite the rage on both left and right, and despite their own rhetoric, both likely candidates inhabit the “sensible” middle.

Plato feared democracy because it gave power to the mob. He needn’t have worried. In both Britain and the US, the wide differences between the two leading parties often are more symbolic than real. Most of David Cameron’s austerity policies were first proposed by Gordon Brown. On a practical, budgetary level, (and the budget, after all, is “the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies”) a Romney presidency probably wouldn’t differ all that much from an Obama presidency.

Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it means we have a technocratic government in which both parties strive to serve the interests of the nation. Maybe it means both parties know they have to woo the middle and so merge towards the centre. Or maybe, as a wise woman said, it means, “If voting could change anything, they would make it illegal.”

Deciding whether Goodwin should lose his knighthood seemed to be an open and shut case. He was among those responsible for the biggest corporate loss and public bailout in British history, and in this country he more than any other person has become synonymous with the iniquities of capitalism. Goodwin’s knighthood for “services to banking” looked about as reasonable as an honour for Jean-Claude Mas in recognition for his services to the plastic surgery industry.

But though it seems a no-brainer, I can’t help but reach the opposite conclusion—that Goodwin absolutely should have kept his knighthood. The clamour to dis-honour him has the familiar whiff of hypocrisy about it. When Labour knighted him in 2004 they were reflecting widespread approval of his business practices, and the entire political and financial establishment’s view of him as the golden boy of British banking.

The recent U-turn is symptomatic of a political culture in which conventional wisdoms too frequently go unchallenged. We saw the same about turn during the phone hacking scandal, when politicians of all parties, who had spent years bowing and scraping to Rupert Murdoch, were suddenly falling over themselves to condemn his empire.

Goodwin should have been allowed to keep his bauble—as a permanent reminder of the short-sightedness of the British political and financial establishment. In calling for his knighthood to be shredded, politicians have dishonoured themselves most of all.

We should look to two of the 20th century's great thinkers in widening the science and religion debate

The science and religion debate in Britain is often framed around Christianity and atheism. But what began as a Western conversation has increasingly become an encounter between science and all the major systems of thought, especially the Hindu tradition with its rich and varied range of philosophies. This was the subject of a lecture I delivered recently at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, organised by The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion as part of its programme of research seminars.

The clash of belief systems is illustrated nowhere better than in the encounters between Albert Einstein, and Bengali poet, artist and Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore, who met four times in the 1920s and 30s. As they talked, the crux of their disagreement was that Einstein believed “truth is independent of our consciousness … For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.” But Tagore had different ideas: “Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance, and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if the mind were naught.”

Tagore believed that “relationship” is foundational to reality and that a table has no meaning apart from collective human consciousness and God, who was inextricably bound up with it. Einstein, on the other hand, wanted “bedrock” for several reasons which included the “shifting sands” he attributed to quantum uncertainty (Heisenberg had just elaborated his Uncertainty Principle).

The discussion between the two of them was the culmination of a century in which science had been assimilated into educated Indian society. During this period several Indian scientists had received Nobel Prizes for science and Tagore had received one for English literature.

Recalling this exchange, and the context in which it occurred, can give us an important perspective on today’s most pressing issues. The Western science/religion dialogue must broaden to take into account views and methodologies more characteristic of other traditions such as those of the Hindu and Buddhist religions of South Asia. As the global role of India—and its important scientific community—continues to grow, it is important for familiar debates to become less Western-centric.

Dr David Gosling teaches ecology at Cambridge University. He is author of The Indian Tradition: When Einstein met Tagore.