In the Times yesterday they focused on the forthcoming Queen’s speech and the likelihood that it will kick off a massive political tussle over the coming months.

See the features here and here.

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian at the weekend penned an article calling for Labour MPs to do the honorable thing and force GB to step aside.  There is a strong feeling in the Labour Party that the election may not be winnable with a new leader but the party is likely to suffer a crushing defeat if he remains in power.  Toynbee suggests that it’s still all to play for if a new person gets in.  See the article here.

Personally I have accepted that barring disaster David Cameron will be PM from May 2010 onwards, and that Labour should start preparing for life in opposition.  At the moment there is no sense of what will happen next and the worry is that the party will lose direction.  It’s happened before.  Think Labour after 1979, or the Tories after 1997.

In considering the state of democracy in the USA it is useful to consider who controls economic and political power and whether this group is really any different from the one that dominated during the foundation of the country in the late eighteenth century.

I would say that there is a strong argument to suggest that a wealthy, white, male property owning and professional class forms an elite grouping in modern America to a large extent and that this is really no different from the conditions that operated at the Philadelphia convention.

Yes there have been advance by minority groups, but not to the degree which would suggest an even distribution of power.  Blacks and women, for instance have made great strides, witness the development of a black middle class, and how female students now outnumber and outscore their male counterparts at university.  But the proportion of people from these groups far outnumbers the number of places they occupy at the top table.  That there are no elected African Americans in the US Senate is a far more accurate measure of the levels of political equality achieved by black people than Obama’s presidential success.

And there is the issue of class.  In the article consider what has happened to median earnings over the past 30 years, and what help the federal government have provided for the millions of new unemployed and juxtapose this with the assistance given to Wall Street.

Ultimately power is dispersed more evenly in modern America than has historically been the case, but only if we discount the effect of the superelite.  What does that say about America and the tools and processes available for citizens to change things? 

So says GQ magazine (of all places) in their much anticipated DC power 50.  Believe it or not this was one of the buzz topics in the American capital when I was over there recently.  Hardly surprising in the most power obsessed city on earth. To paraphrase Michael Heseltine who was commenting on the ranking order of seats in Cabinet, everyone says it doesn’t matter to them, but of course it does.  Terribly.

Anyway, an interesting way to spend 20 minutes flicking through the slideshow...here