Tom Griffin (London: The Green Ribbon) Some of the proceedings from last week's Inside Devolution 2008 conference at the Constitution Unit are now available online.

They included a fascinating roundtable discussion on the performance of the devolved governments over the past year: Iain MacWhirter, Martin Shipton, and Robin Wilson provided insightful analyses of the political situation in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, respectively. (Audio here)
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Just to get on the plane back to Japan, and then I see this news on Gryphon's blog.

DEEP star and former champion, Hisae Watanabe has announced her retirement through her management. She will send a message to her fans in the coming days. She lost her championship belt last May to Miku Matsumoto.

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/gryphonjapan/20080531

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Jon Bright, now enjoying a New Labour Free stay in Madrid, wrote a hilarious post about the many roles of Tony Blair, for whom the illusion of grandeur is a mere ante-chamber to his ambition. Jon called it He'll Save Every One of Us. It followed my own predictable reaction to the announcement that Blair was going to teach faith and globalisation at Yale'. Now we have a quick summary of his university course in Time Magazine as Blair launches his Faith Foundation in New York having just belted back from Bethlehem, doubtless via the grand country house he has just acquired outside London.
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Vron Ware (London, author): It has become fashionable now to deride multiculturalism as 'over', disastrous, etc, but I still think it is important to try to write a more complex and faithful history of how things have developed in this country, with all the mistakes, successes, and other consequences. I don't see how we can have a constructive, political discussion about where we want to go in the future without this - and that applies to all the component parts of the UK, not just England.

For those paying attention throughout the 70s 80s and 90s, it was clear that that successive governments were avoiding taking a principled position on questions of racism and exclusion, whether in relation to housing, education, equal opportunities, national identity and so on. What has happened since the 2001 riots in mill towns, and particularly since the London bombings, is that 'multiculturalism' appears, with hindsight, to have been a coherent ideology sowing the seeds for the conflicts and crises we have now. This both obscures the rich ways that people have muddled along together in particular places, and gives the adjective 'multicultural' a bad name (although it still functions as a default for 'mixed', diverse, etc). It also masks the endemic racism that allowed certain places to practice segregation either by default or by bad planning.

A great change has happened over the last fifty years that has created a country that will never again be homogenous in the way it once was. Maybe it's better to stop talking about 'multiculturalism' altogether and find some different ways (and words) to make that recent and contested past useful in our current debates.

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One day workshop: Teaching and Training Tips for Librarians will be held on 23 July 2008, at the University of Huddersfield.It is organised by CILIP Yorkshire & Humberside Branch and Career Development Group Yorkshire & Humberside. Sessions include: Crosswords, library bingo and quizzes: getting more active learning into our teaching; Creativity in Teaching; Enquiry Based Learning; Lesson Planning.
For a booking form contact Andrew Walsh, a.p.walsh@hud.ac.uk University of Huddersfield, Computing & Library Services, CSB, Queensgate, Huddersfield, HD1 3DH.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Kristianstad, Sweden, May 2008.

Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography started up over a decade ago (it's now in version 71!). A more recent useful resource from him is The Google Book Search Bibliography, and Version 2 is now available. "This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it." Go to http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm

Jane O'Grady (London ): A new magazine that will uphold glorious values and art-forms which are (to the terrible loss and danger of all humankind) being increasingly despoiled, criticised and allowed to wither - what, at any time, could be more timely?

Prospect Magazine, which was started 13 years ago with a similar purpose to Standpoint, has been instrumental in promoting just such a redemption from iconoclasm and relativism, because its editor, David Goodhart, really tries to work with and not just against modernity. What worries me is whether this new magazine will do so, judging by many of the attenders of the excellent launch party, held in the luxury of the covered courtyard in the Wallace Collection.

Standpoint wants to stand as a citadel in defence of Western civilisation. But isn't the true beating heart of conservatism the wisdom of knowing how to move forward even while attempting to be fixed in the same point? I hope that Standpoint doesn't simply preach to the smug, scared defenders of Western orthodoxies: they are in the citadel already. The magazine needs to use the politically ambivalent, the unallied, and the New Ex-Left – like Nick Cohen - and even, why not?, good writers who are still on the left, but troubled - Steven Lukes, Helena Kennedy. Provided they are genuinely grappling with the current multiculturalist and establishment views, and are really trying to find a ground for their feet.

Admittedly Nick Cohen is the television critic, and it is excellent news that Bishop Nazir-Ali is writing about about how Christianity’s demise in Britain creates a vacuum likely to be filled by Islamic dogmatism. He is impressively erudite (it was exhilarating to talk to an Anglican bishop so well-versed in Averroes, Aquinas and Dummett).

But there was also a depressing sense of people who had simmered for ages in pans of sour resentment, and who emit embarrassingly juvenile Daily Mail platitudes, and of dark-suited young men huddled together, wary of women and their own sexuality. Michael Gove's speech assumed that everyone was in the same old den of banditry, and when he used Posh Spice’s skirt as an analogy, presumably to demonstrate knowledge of youthful mores, he only succeeded in being as vulgar as the skirt itself.

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Earlier this week, openUSA attended a lecture by Sidney Blumenthal at the RSA, where he plugged his new book, The Strange Death of Republican America. Blumenthal, a regular openDemocracy contributor until he took up an advisory position on the Hillary Clinton campaign, is an erudite and measured commentator on American politics in addition to being a committed Clintonite. Speaking fluidly without notes, Blumenthal charted the rise and demise of political conservatism, which grew from the ashes of the Nixon years in 1968 only to wither under the second Bush administration in 2008 (George Packer's New Yorker essay - blogged on openUSA - examined the same ascension and decline of the right).

"Nixon's dream of an unfettered presidency" was brought to its limits by Cheney, who inherited the ambitions of the Nixon era and turned them into 21st century reality. Yet, Bush's disastrous tenure has left the Republican vision in tatters. During the Reagan years - the zenith of American Republicanism - the American public was deeply suspicious of government. Attitudes have now changed. The country expects more from government and sees it as part of "the solution" rather than simply as the cause of "the problem".

Blumenthal finds in this shift the "aspect of an epic coming to end." But does the end of the conservative era, when a Republican agenda achieved social and political dominance, herald the dawn of a more liberal one? This is less clear, though Blumenthal certainly suggests that the moment is ripe for a Democrat - he believes Hillary Clinton - to steer the country in a different direction, away from war and economic crisis.

Pundits on both sides of the pond see parallels in the sinking of New Labour (and the associated rise of David Cameron) and the demise of the Republicans. The comparison rings true up to a point. The Bush years precipitated a Republican downfall largely without the aid of the Democrats, who consistently played petty politics and failed to articulate a clear alternative political vision. On the other hand, Cameron deserves some credit for reinventing - or at the very least repackaging - the Tories.

It is always tempting to suggest that politics are cyclical, and that falls coincide neatly with rises, but one doesn't necessarily follow logically from the other. Come November this year, the Democrats will have a commanding majority in the Congress and may well control the executive. Institutional ingredients, check. Moral message and political vision, still missing. Can the Democrats see the forest for the trees of electoral success?
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Developed as a concept, The Handwrench was created by Paul Julius Martus, a designer with strong fabrication and building skills from Grand Rapids, Michigan' The wrench allows you to tighten any nut using the adjustable finger, while showing off your manhood at the same time in a very disturbing way' I think I'll just stick with my Craftsman tool set, thanks'