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

openDemocracy/Russia was created last year. Two new articles on Abkazia demonstrate why it is a brilliant initiative. The idea was that English readers around the world should be able to learn at first hand the vitality and intelligence of Russia’s free voices and that Russians should be able to participate directly in the growing (we hope) democratic discussion that is global in its interests and concerns. Alas, it has taken the crisis in the Caucasus to confirm how much this initiative is needed. openDemocracy has always resisted the clichés of received ideas and the imposition of worn out worldviews while seeing itself as a platform where minority voices and opinions (even if they too have their clichés and evasions) can be well published and debated when the current is against them. oD’s exceptional coverage of the Caucasus predates the present interest and will continue after it. Others have drawn attention to the analysis and the seeking for human based conceptual frameworks in new essays by Ivan Krastev and Mary Kaldor, I’m just going to draw your attention to Zygmunt Dzieciolowski's encounter with Sergei Bagapsh the President of Abkhazia and then an article by Inal Khashig, editor of the Abkhaz newspaper Chegemskaya Pravda, who states that argues the West's endorsement of Georgia's claims has merely ensured that Abkhazian independence is a fact. Zygmunt writes in the tradition of his late Polish compatriot the celebrated Ryszard Kapuscinski. It’s a journalism of the main facts and the telling details, threaded with an awareness of history and place so that the reporting is rooted in time without being fatalistic or sensational. He brings to life the “soft voice” of President Bagapash, his willingness to delay catching his flight to Moscow to talk with co-editor of openDemocracy Russia, his wariness of and desire for independence from the Russia that has just saved his statelet but was only recently also imposing sanctions on it. One detail I didn’t know that comes across strongly in both Zygmunt’s report and Kashig’s insistent article. The West’s participated in preventing medicines including antibiotics from being imported by Abkhazia after it broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s. This abuse of humanitarian principles turned everyone who remained into a potential martyr. When Russia let in antibiotics it made a moral gain (whatever the cynical calculations behind it) that western media coverage seems completely oblivious of. This is the kind of significant detail that openDemocracy Russia brings to our understanding of the Caucuses.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): There  was a short, strong overview of the threat of an authoritarian, corporate cash cow database state by A.C. Grayling in yesterday's CiF. It reinforced the alarm set off by No2ID's Phil Booth in his excellent OK post. I particular liked Grayling's raised eyebrow over Seimens of Germany who are "already supplying 60 countries with a device that monitors and integrates data from phone, email and internet activity". Apparently its system is notorious for throwing up "huge numbers of false positives". I like that phrase "false positives". I suspect it will run and run, as in "We are all false positives now!"

My only objection was to Grayling's stirring conclusion,

We need to stop this assault on civil liberies going further, we need to roll back the attritions they have already suffered, and we need a rock solid written consitution to protect us from those who aim to make us all suspects in the gaze of the unblinking universal eye.

He should know better than that. No constitution, written or unwritten is "rock solid", nor is ever meant to be. Of course he is spot on to see that to roll back the surveillance state we need to constitutionalise our governing settlement. But this is in order for it to be lived in a democratic fashion, not to be set rock solid. Simply to change the governing culture we have to show everyone that our values are rooted in popular sovereignty encoded in a democratic constitition. This is the precondition for stopping the mandarins treating us as colonialised natives. But the constitition that results will be flexible as well as principled, an aid for us to better govern ourselves, a step on the road to emacipation and freedom, not a rock-like fixed point that we will have to bow down to. 

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Tom Griffin spent a long time finding Stephen Glenn to write a post about the Lib Dem leadership contest. I'm afraid Tom didn't get as much warm support from me in his search as he should have. Eventually, he found Stephen and we ran this story by him on the battle to lead Lib Dem Scotland. It seemed to me that Tavish Scott was the least interesting of the three candidates, if he is indeed standing for continuity of a forlorn strategy. Today they have announced the outcome of the ballot: it seems that Scottish Lib Dems have voted for the hole into which they are digging. Could this be true?

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I just heard a clip of Brown being interviewed in Beiijing on the BBC 8 o'clock news. He used an extraordinary formulation about his future. The presenter said that, asked about his prospects of still being PM when the Olympics came to London in 2012, "He said it was up to voters to decide if he was in No 10 in four years years time". But he didn't. In the actual clip that was carried the unnamed interviewer said,

You must be absolutely desperate to still be Prime Minister in 2012 that must keep you awake at night

And Brown laughed with his somewhat forced, I saw that coming and have decided in advance to to laugh it off laugh, and replied,

That's for the public. That's for the public.

He then changed the subject as fast as he could, i.e. immediately:

I think er, everybody is looking forward to 2012. Look, the next four years I think for Britain are going to see more and more young people getting interested in sports.

The formulation, and it seemed to me to be a deliberate one that he repeated rather than corrected, of "the public" deciding is very much not about voters. The "public" is a contrived entity that only decides things through opinion polls, the press and media, and perhaps canvassing returns. To say that "the public" will decide means not putting the matter to the vote. It felt to me like a clear signal that, if he concludes that 'the public' will not re-elect him, Brown will not stand.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Following my post about the fabulous call to modernity, fraternity and Britishness by Borders and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, we are launching OK's summer limerick competition. The limerick must begin with:

"I met an eloquent lady in Edgbaston."

and end with:

"if we only put our minds to it."

As I report, Byrne writes about how he met "an exceptionally eloquent lady from Edgebaston" who convinced him that all we needed to to so sort out Britain for the best is to: "put our minds to it". The Minister describes how he was immediately convinced.

The winner will get a free copy of The Athenian Option. Competition closes Saturday, 30th August.