Anthony Barnett is the founder of openDemocracy.net.

A social entrepreneur of wide experience, Anthony helped launch Charter 88 in 1988 and was its first Director. Generating widespread support he turned it into a movement for the democratic reform of Britain (at the end of the 90s the Telegraph described it as the UK's "most influential pressure group of the decade"). Anthony is also a writer and journalist. He is the author of Iron Britannia; Soviet Freedom and This Time; and co-author and editor of among other books, Aftermath: the Struggle of Vietnam and Cambodia; Power and the Throne, Town and Country and a considerable range of articles and pamphlets covering politics and culture, such as (with Peter Carty), The Athenian Option – radical reform for the House of Lords (Demos, 1998) and the television film, England's Henry Moore. He writes regularly for openDemocracy and contributes to many of its debates.

Recent articles

The global financial crisis exposes anew the flaws of a British polity that resists democratic modernisation. In a sweeping overview, Gerry Hassan & Anthony Barnett declare the United Kingdom state unfit for purpose.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): The arrest of Damien Green, early blogged by Tom (below), included a police search of his office in the House of Commons. Let's assume that there was no political direction or permission, even of an informal kind. This makes it an even more dangerous attack on democracy given that his crime was to expose wrongdoings - as he should. What do the police think they are up to? If the answer is 'just doing their job' it means they have lost any belief in parliamentary democracy. Before we get coldly outraged by this - as we will - we have to ask: is there any basis in the experience of the police for ceasing to believe in parliamentary democracy?

I think there is. The police spent many months and a huge amount of money investigating the cash for peerages scandal. They interviewed the Prime Minister twice, something that had never happened before to a serving premier. The reason is obvious to everyone. Parliament and Downing Street was a crime scene. Peerages were indeed being sold for cash. I recall watching Blair saying (but I can't find the link or the transcript) in a press conference that of course individuals who assisted political parties with large sums might be ennobled and there was nothing wrong with this - provided it didn't take place in the same transaction. The cynicism was transparent.

So there is a very strong and recent experience in the upper levels of the police that politicians get away with breaking the law. Even more annoying, when the police fail to make a case against them stand up strongly enough for a court of law, they are then attacked by the same politicians for wasting public money.

Thus the arbitrary, corrupt and despotic behaviour of New Labour under Blair has now bred an arbitrary and despotic police command. We are reaping Blair's failure to believe in democracy. 

Which makes the widening of the intrusive extension of state powers that we are now witnessing all the more a matter for profound concern. Lacking a deep belief in public values and democratic accountability, as they evidently do, those who use these powers will desire to expand them - if only in order to protect themselves from the inevitable abuses generated by their own all too human incompetance. 

This adds a new urgency to the fight for a principled modern liberty that is exercised by us as free citizens governing our own democracy. We can't just look to 'parliament' to do this.

I am working with Henry Porter (see his blog in Comment Is Free) and others on a Convention on Modern Liberty that will call on all those concerned to debate the issues and what to do next. The event and associated meetings around the country is still under construction. A combined effort is going to be needed.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): This argument heads Britain in the direction of a presidential system - but without an independent legislature:

Parliamentary rules should be changed to allow Lord Mandelson to be answerable to the House of Commons, MPs have said.

The Commons business and enterprise committee said that following Lord Mandelson's appointment as business secretary there had been no one to come to the despatch box to answer MPs' questions on the brief.

In the sixth part of his exchange with KA Dilday, Anthony Barnett realises that Obama's victory was hardly as comprehensive as it seemed. Catch up with part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. 

Dear Kay,

You are right to mull it over. There are big issues to be addressed, from celebrity to Afghanistan not to speak of the recession. But not immediately. I had a shock about 36 hours afterwards. I'd known - I'd put it as strongly as that - since January that Barack Obama could win and that in his case his race would not prevent this. I suppose I must have been too confident that he would. It was only afterwards that I suddenly saw how close it was. Obama needed Lehman Brothers to turn all the "palling around with terrorists" junk into froth.

One American in three did not vote at all! Most Americans did not vote for Obama. He got 66 million to McCain's 58 million votes. Nearly a quarter of the US's 300 million plus population are under 18, still leaving over 230 million of which less than 130 million voted. Obama got the actual votes of barely more than one in four American adults. He and his supporters must do something about the extent of what remains, in effect, a form of disenfanchisement in the USA.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK):  In a brief post in the Times David Lammy MP, the Minister for Skills, who met Obama some years back at Harvard writes about the impact of his election. He says,

In the end politics is not the art of the possible: far from it. It is the art of making things possible.

There is a very important issue here with New Labour. Indeed, Lammy was the first member of the government to engage with the argument about the political class (we reproduced it in OK) and has a broader understanding of this than Hazel Blears. But traditional, Clinton-loving, triangulating New Labour had a very different 'practical' approach. He reports,

I came back from America and told people that I believed the first black president was already waiting to step forward. They thought I was mad.

Who could those 'they' be, I wonder!