Europe is one of the issues we talked about way too much in the bad old days.  But there is a progressive and compelling case against membership of the Single Currency and it was put quite nicely by the peerless Paul Krugman in the New York Times last week.

In his piece, he suggested that the plight of the Spanish economy is largely brought on by its membership of the Eurozone.  To quote Krugman:

“So what happened? Spain is an object lesson in the problems of having monetary union without fiscal and labor market integration. First, there was a huge boom in Spain, largely driven by a housing bubble — and financed by capital outflows from Germany. This boom pulled up Spanish wages. Then the bubble burst, leaving Spanish labor overpriced relative to Germany and France, and precipitating a surge in unemployment. It also led to large Spanish budget deficits, mainly because of collapsing revenue but also due to efforts to limit the rise in unemployment.

If Spain had its own currency, this would be a good time to devalue; but it doesn’t.

On the other hand, if Spain were like Florida, its problems wouldn’t be as severe. The budget deficit wouldn’t be as large, because social insurance payments would be coming from Brussels, just as Social Security and Medicare come from Washington. And there would be a safety valve for unemployment, as many workers would migrate to regions with better prospects. (Wages wouldn’t have gone up as much in the first place, because of in-migration).

The point is that this has nothing to do with a spendthrift government; what’s happening to Spain reflects the inherent problems with the euro, which now more than ever looks like a monetary union too far.”

I have always been surprised that the progressive left have been taken in hook, line and sinker by the Euro argument.  This is, after all, the same body that Nye Bevan described as “a vehicle for rapacious capitalism.”  In effect, the Euro has taken away many of the key economic instruments that Governments used to have and the Spanish Government is finding its hands tied by Euro membership.  At the same time, the single currency has locked national governments into neo-liberal policies around debt and deficits, with insufficient scope given to policies aimed at tackling unemployment.  The levels of unemployment in Spain, Ireland and Portugal, robbed of national policy levers and thrown into a one size fits all monetary policy, make a very strong progressive case against the UK ever joining a single currency.

I have blogged a few times about the increasingly rightward drift of the US Republican Party.  Even I was surprised by this poll, by the Daily Kos and Research 2000 of 2000 self identified Republicans – showing how far to the ideological fringes the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt had moved.

Some of the key findings of the poll (with my italics) are:

• 39% say that Barack Obama should be impeached.  Correct me if I’m wrong but the US Constitution says that impeachment should be a punishment for high crimes and misdemeanours.  Seemingly, this sub-set of GOP supporters believe that Obama should be impeached for having the temerity to disagree with them and win an election.  Frightening.
• 42% believe that Obama was born outside of the United States.  The conspiracy theory, with some fairly offensive undertones, that Obama wasn’t born in the US has a shocking amount of credibility with GOP supporters.  Is that any surprise when the likes of Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN, gave this absurd idea such airtime?
• 63% believe that Obama is a Socialist.  That is plain daft – although the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannitty seem to parrot this ridiculous line on a nightly basis.  Anybody who thinks that Obama is a socialist clearly doesn’t have the faintest idea about political philosophy or Obama’s platform.
• 21% believe that Acorn ‘stole’ the last election, with another 55% ‘not sure’.  Another absurd conspiracy theory given a silly amount of airtime by Fox News.  For Glenn Beck, Acorn is almost an obsession.
• 53% believe that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama. I find it hard to understand how anybody could hold this view.
• 23% believe that their state should secede from the USA, with a further 19% being not sure.  Speechless.
• 55% believe that openly gay men should not be allowed to serve in the military and 77% believe that openly gay men should not be allowed to teach in ‘public’ schools.    77% believe that creationism should be taught in schools.  31% believe that contraception should be outlawed and 76% consider abortion to be ‘murder’.  It is hard to understand how anybody with broadly socially liberal views could sympathise with a Party in which these views are so broadly held.

Despite recent electoral victories (largely due to the lingering level of unemployment), the Republican Party urgently needs to re-engage with the centre ground if it is to have any hope in 2012.  It needs to consider that the conspiracy theories and extreme social conservatism repeatedly parroted by Beck, Hannitty et al might motivate the base but they will not win elections.

On a side point, the Bill O’Reilly interview of Jon Stewart is a must watch.  I particularly like the lines that, “they [Fox News and the GOP right] have taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao” and “you [Bill O’Reilly] are the voice of sanity at Fox News…that’s like being the thinnest kid at fat camp.”

The result in Massachusetts was a bad blow for the Democrats.   A previously solidly blue state turned into a relatively easy GOP win can only be described as a poor result for Obama, almost a year to the day since the inauguration.  Obama needs to come out fighting after this setback and the previous setbacks in Virginia and New Jersey.  For too much of the past year, the Obama team have allowed an increasingly hysterical Republican right to set the idea and to use the language that frames the debate.  The Obama team need to change this before the mid terms.

Drew Westen, the author of the excellent ‘Political Brain’ makes an excellent point in the Huffington Post today.  He says that:

“It is a truly remarkable feat, in just one year’s time, to turn the fear and anger voters felt in 2006 and 2008 at a Republican Party that had destroyed the economy, redistributed massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the richest of the rich and the biggest of big businesses, and waged a trillion-dollar war in the wrong country, into populist rage at whatever Democrat voters can cast their ballot against.”

On the economy, despite having inherited the biggest economic mess of any US President since FDR, Obama is rapidly being blamed for a perceived failure to rapidly turn round rising unemployment.  And lets be clear, it is worries about jobs that have driven people to vote GOP in the past few months.  He is being blamed for a perceived cosiness with Wall Street, as opposed to Main Street.  As Westen says, Obama has not successfully painted the recession as Bush’s recession in the same way as FDR managed to term the depression as ‘Hoover’s depression’.

Take healthcare.  The US is in dire need of healthcare reform.  30 million Americans are uninsured.  Reform was a fundamental plank of Obama’s election victory.  Despite this, all of the language around healthcare has been dictated by the Republican right.  Phrases like ‘death panels’ and ‘socialised healthcare’ are designed to scare.  Given that only a few months ago, a large majority of Americans were in favour of a public option, never mind the watered down option that emerged from the Senate, it is astonishing that the Democrats have managed to have the issue turned against them.

In the past twelve months, the Republicans have spared no piece of rhetorical exaggeration as they denounced Obama.  From Palin through to cheerleaders on Fox, such as Beck and Hannitty, the right in American politics has grown hysterical and utterly attack minded.  After years of the GOP governing for a small minority of Americans, the Republicans have been thoroughly populist in their opposition.  At the same time, Obama and the Democrats haven’t fought back.  They have abandoned the populism that made them such a powerful force in the last electoral cycle.  They have allowed the Republicans to frame the debate and shift the debate increasingly rightwards.

Obama needs to take the fight back to an increasingly narrow and increasingly right wing GOP.    He needs to rediscover the populism and the passion that fuelled his campaign.  The Republicans have deserted the centre and that will probably do for them in 2012.  But Obama needs to take back control of the agenda.  And this has to start with the State of the Union address.

George Osborne and William Hague have been in Afghanistan this week; it’s important that potential Chancellors as well as Foreign Secretaries and Prime Ministers understand the implications of their actions (particularly relevant in light of the revelations Geoff Hoon is expected to make this week about Gordon Brown’s treatment of the armed forces).

The general approach that the Tories would take to Afghanistan’s reconstruction – exploiting the dual expertise of the Territorial Army’s personnel in particular – seems to me to be a sensible way forward. One thing that does worry me a little though is the last section of this article:

“Senior military officers have been calling for a stabilisation brigade, having grown frustrated by what they see as the failure of aid agencies to rebuild the economy in Afghanistan.

“In private, they complain that development officials spend too much time and money on civil society initiatives, rather than investing in local infrastructure and jobs.”

I do not believe this can be an either or question. Of course infrastructure and jobs are the only sustainable way for a country that has been ravaged by sanctions, war and deprivation for decades to return to anything approaching normality. I think we’ve seen in Iraq what happens when, for example, electricity supply is still demonstrably worse for most people five years after they were assured they were being rescued from a tyrant. Or if you were an Afghan, your only potential source of income was the Taleban offering you money, wouldn’t you be tempted?

But as we’ve seen in Northern Ireland this week, functioning institutions and a healthy civil society are the things that pose the real threat to those who wish to spread terror. So it is absolutely imperative that, at the same time as the basics of electricity, water, banking, business and general infrastructure, we continue to focus on supporting the development of national institutions. They have to develop with the grain of the nation concerned – it would clearly be ridiculous to expect any country with no history of any sort of democratic activities to be able to instantly run a fully clean election, for example. But part of what makes institutions function properly in favour of those they are supposed to serve is the very fact of practicing. So – for example – the more elections that are held, the more people understand how they are supposed to work and how the contract between voters and elected representatives works.

In Britain, we are hugely fortunate that most of us, most of the time, are able to rely on the institutions that bind our communities together – things like the NHS, the BBC, or even (dare I say it…) the Houses of Parliament and the monarchy. But we’ve had hundreds of years of practice, and of evolution. None of it was perfect when they were first established. They are constantly evolving in accordance with current requirements and expectations.

Melanie Reid’s brilliant article about the way that snow is bringing out our inner Tories is instructive here – in many (most?) cases, there’s an attitude of ‘we just have to make this work ourselves – and we’ll help other people along the way’. Which is exactly how civil society gets stronger and stronger.

Unusual snow across all of Afghanistan is, to be fair, unlikely. But giving up on helping the Afghans to build their own institutions means that they will be unable to realise their potential to do it themselves.

I’m still dipping in and out of Chris Mullin’s excellent diaries, ‘A View from the Foothills’.  I’m in the middle of the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003, and what jumps out is just how often the argument of ‘if you knew what I know…’ is made.

Today’s poll in the Independent on Sunday has an interesting supplementary question about Afghanistan, as well as good news on voting intention and the NHS.  It asks respondents to agree or disagree with the statement, ‘All British forces should be withdrawn from Afghanistan as quickly as possible’.  60 per cent agree, 33 per cent disagree.

‘As quickly as possible’ could mean anything at all, and ‘British forces’ are one thing, but does the question mean that other NATO members should stay? Leaving aside these quibbles, I think we can probably assume that the intention is that troops should withdraw in the very near future, whether or not they have achieved what it was they were sent there to do.

Hmm. There’s another problem. Have we ever really come to a conclusion on what they are there to do? I’ve heard remove the Taliban, restore democracy, rebuild a shattered nation, help ensure Pakistan doesn’t descend into lawlessness, ensure human rights, ensure women’s rights, ensure children’s rights, clean out opium production… the list goes on, I’m sure I’ve missed some out.

I’m not getting into the rights and wrongs of action in Afghanistan, but I want to pose a question. How does a government, which clearly has access to more information and wider expertise than the average citizen, make sure that it doesn’t just metaphorically pat us on the head and say ‘I know best’? What measures should a government use to decide what to make public? Should there be an assumption that, for example, Cabinet minutes should be published unless an application is made to keep them secret?

Given all the information available around the world, with the example of the wisdom of crowds and with the old adage of many hands making light work, is it sensible to expect greater transparency from governments? Or will the very fact of easier access to some types of information make governments more likely to try to restrict access?

I don’t know what the answer is; but what I do know is that the more information anyone has, the better decisions they can make.  The question is, where do you draw the line in letting go?