Talk:Daniel Finkelstein

I have a few pictures of these geeks if you think they should be included — I'll do a few more entries and leave it like that so I can go back to Stevenson and prepare the talk on Demos

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Before working for the Conservative Party Daniel Finkelstein was Director of the free market think tank the Social Market Foundation for three years. http://www.ukdpc.org.uk/biogs.shtml

Later this month, The Times's comment editor Daniel Finkelstein, the Sky News political editor Adam Boulton, a top Google executive and others will discuss how the internet will change politics.

Let's face the truth. We have boy scout politics and the cleanest politicians in the world. Most of the time we have trouble even scaring up a proper sex scandal. I remember it being front-page news when the MP for Finchley went to bed with his research assistant and didn't sleep with her.

Certainly, trust in politicians is at a record low. Ask the next person you meet whether they admire MPs and its 100-1 on that they'll say no. Helena Kennedy has been receiving a respectful hearing for her proposal that we replace decision-making by MPs acting as representatives by, er, citizens acting as representatives. As if MPs weren't even worthy of being thought citizens any more. I've lost count of the times I've heard someone argue that the solution to a given problem is to take the politicians out of it and replace them with so-called independent people. But it is not corruption that is to blame for the decline in trust. For all that people think (wrongly) that MPs are on the take, it is not dirty tricks and financial shenanigans that have brought politics low. It is, and I real-ise that this is hard to take, the opposite. The signal that there is something wrong with British politics is that there is so little corruption and too few real scandals.

But there is a price to pay for such an attitude. And it is this price that leads me to say that lack of corrup-tion is a signal that something is wrong in British politics. The price is a stultifying uniformity, a requirement that every maverick like Mitterrand be controlled entirely by the party machine, a centralisation of power on clean machines to keep out the Kennedys, a system in which the crooks are kept out by keeping out every-one. There are no independent campaigns to speak of, and few powerful offices outside Whitehall. A scandal involves someone departing from the party briefing sheet.

I am not for toleration of corruption. Not even of a stolen postage stamp. But as the police limber up to knock on the door at No 10, I hazard this: it's not corruption that's destroying political life, but our unwilling-ness to gamble on freedom.

Eshun had three guests: Lionel Shriver (peppy, honest and engaging as ever, but dressed somewhat dis-concertingly in a majorette's uniform and a pair of black gloves, like a burglar)' Daniel Finkelstein (full of bonhomie and good sense) and Julia Hobsbawm.Ms Hobsbawm was an interesting choice. Her career in PR came to an end last week and, if her performance here was anything to go by, so did her career in television.

When attempting to speak, she became tangled in the English language like a scarf in a spoke. She called immigration "a most difficult political potato", she said that during 9/11 "thousands of terrible, dreadful lives were lost"' she even spontaneously made up a new verb: "documdramering". This was surprising given her pedigree - one imagines Hobsbawm pere (the Marxist historian Eric) would have been stricter on linguis-tic precision than most - but there is nothing like a few malapropisms for enlivening a chat-show programme.