On the border of science & politics

By now I’m sure everyone has formed their opinion on the Professor Nutt vs. Alan Johnson drugs debacle. On the one side you’ve got the screaming hordes of Daily Mail believers (I hesitate to call them readers; that might imply they could use that skill to read other media that might occasionally dabble in actual science), and Alan Johnson, claiming that Professor Nutt’s voicing of his conclusions require him to be sacked from the drugs advisory committee, and on the other a significant part of the UK’s scientific community, who are condemning Johnson for sacking an advisor for apparently providing him with advice with which he disagrees.

There’s an important underlying point here, which has been missed in the raging debate over the future of Government scientific advisors, and that’s the relationship between scientific knowledge and political debate. While every party has been quick to reaffirm how important science is for policy making, the Tories have affirmed Johnson’s decision and called Nutt’s expression of his views in terms of ecstasy being relatively safer than horse-riding ‘particularly ill-judged’. Their use of this phrase is telling.

Ill-judged in what sense? Certainly not in a scientific sense; Nutt’s judgement of the risks attached to particular activities is borne out by evidence. Politically, of course, it is a poorly judged comparison – the general public are much more happy to accept certain risks as being palatable than others, and therefore anyone willing to claim that commonly-held impressions of risk are incorrect is likely to cause an adverse reaction amongst the voting public. This is politically trivial.

However, this is not the sort of contrast being put forward by Johnson. He has specifically stated that he disagrees with Nutt’s ‘views’ – as though scientific judgements hold to the same standard of knowledge as political judgements. Since they both cover different domains of knowledge (public opinion and biological fact) and relate to those domains in very different ways, the meaning behind Charles Clarke’s comment about the drug classification system being hopelessly confused becomes clear: while Johnson perceives the classification system as a reflection of public opinion about the potential dangers attached to particular drugs, and thus as a means of representing both action on those drugs and a tool to discourage their use, Nutt perceieves the classification system as representing biological risk. These two approaches are incompatible.

Different standards of knowledge are at work here, and a liberal state requires some means of distinguishing between them. Instinctively, I want to say that science should always have primacy, but in the case of drugs there’s another standard of knowledge and type of judgement to consider, which is moral judgement. Johnson shares the moral judgement that ‘drugs are bad’ with much of the electorate, contributing to the political judgement he has made in this case. This is, again, a different domain of knowledge to scientific judgements, which cannot say which actions are right and which are wrong. Similarly, moral judgements cannot say which drug presents the most biological risk. They can, however, say which type of biological risk is the ‘worst’, and so it is internally consistent for Johnson’s system of morality to keep tobacco legal and cannabis illegal, if he judges schizophrenia to be a worse risk than lung cancer – even if this appears nonsensical.

The drugs advisory council clearly believe that scientific judgement should trump moral judgement in this case, because certain risks can be demonstrably worse for an individual – an individual with schizophrenia is, at least, not dying in the same way that someone who contracts lung cancer may do. However, despite this apparently being a scientific judgement, it is in fact a moral one: it states that death is worse than schizophrenia as an outcome. There is no scientific reason to prefer one to the other without a pre-made value judgement, because scientific knowledge merely indicates how the world is, rather than how it should be.

This presents a problem for liberals. Any form of political decision requires a moral judgement – even something as obvious as cutting waste requires the moral judgement that waste is bad. But part of the reason why I was attracted to liberalism was its clear inspiration from the scientific method: freedom to express opinion and freedom to engage with the economy represent a testing of ideas & plans against the world rather than the judgements of society’s rulers, similar to how scientific hypotheses are tested to determine their veracity. Debate is meant to produce the ‘correct’ outcome, but ‘correct’ is never specified beyond the moral judgements of everyone in our society. This means that science does not have primacy in a liberal state, rather the average of the moral judgements expressed by its citizens as represented by its government do.

Professor Nutt’s judgement about the risks posed by particular drugs is correct. Alan Johnson’s moral judgement about the relative ‘badness’ of the risks given by particular drugs is, in my view, wrong. But in a liberal society primacy is not given to scientists merely because they are scientists, but to the moral judgements expressed by elected representatives of the people. Johnson was correct to sack Nutt for expressing a minimal moral judgement about the status of scientifically incommensurable risks (i.e. schizophrenia and death) – this being the extent to which one could describe his ‘views’ as, well, views. I actually wrote this article intending to express the opposite opinion, but the logic of different domains of knowledge in the context of our society has forced me to change my mind.

Liberal Interventionism and the blasted Afghans

It is doubtless the case that the recent law passed by the Afghani parliament will cause more cries of, “Why the devil are our boys being killed on behalf of a bunch of barbarians?” Make no mistake, this law is truly barbaric – anyone who really entertains the suggestion that putting one sex in such a position of power over the other can be excused as a matter of culture has no regard for any humanity beyond their own kind.

However, it also represents the classic liberal dilemma – a democratically elected government rejecting liberal norms to reflect the wishes of its constituents. While it is clear that the Afghani President, Hamid Karzai, is making this move to shore up his support amongst the Shia population of Afghanistan and counting on the West being too concerned with the Taliban to allow him to get away with it, it’s been claimed that it runs counter to the Afghani constitution itself.

Except it doesn’t. Article 131 states , “Courts shall apply Shia school of law in cases dealing with personal matters involving the followers of Shia Sect in accordance with the provisions of law.” This new law only applies to the Shias, and while the constitution does provide for equal treatment of women before the law, I would anticipate that any effort to seek judicial review (which is currently not possible in Afghanistan in any case) would founder on this matter. The Afghani constitution also requires that any law does not conflict with the rules of Islam, and a very specific law targetting a specific type of Islam would probably fall under this purview.

So, what the Afghani Government has done is most likely legal, if repellent. How should the West respond? Does this mean we should withdraw our forces and let the barbarians fight it out amongst themselves? This latter position has been advocated by other Lib Dems. I suspect that the main impetus towards it thus far, apart from the illiberal nature of the Afghani Government, is that the war has been incompetently prosecuted by Labour – a summary of which is in my response to the Payne article.  We can’t do anything about Labour’s mishandling the military for now, so let’s consider other options a future government might take.

1) Withdrawal, and abandoning the Afghanis to their fate. This will result in human rights abuses and most likely a long civil war in which many people will die. It’s also a war I’m not convinced Kabul would win – although the Afghani army has improved, it’s no match for the tribal forces without the West’s help.

2) Continuing our current strategy of shoring up Karzai’s government while attempting to defeat the Taliban. As has been pointed out, this may take upwards of 40 years, and given the weakness of the current constitution and its attached judiciary, may not in the end produce a liberal state regardless.

3) (As you may have guessed, we’re coming up to my preferred option in my capacity as a Swivelly Chair General) Identify the flaws in the current Afghan state and use our forces in the country to supplement them.

What do I mean by that? Well, I’ve previously touched on the idea that the state is not the be-all and end-all of service provision, or indeed the only foci of power within a country. We need to get away from the idea of identifying a nation with the apparatus of its state, and consider it more as its collective of people.

In this case, part of the problem with the Karzai government is that its judiciary is notoriously weak and corrupt, and that the legal system tends to take an age to reach a decision. This has been part of the reason for the success of the Taliban, who are much more efficient at providing justice to the citizens in areas under their control – Afghanis have been known to go to Taliban representatives to settle disputes in Government-held areas, rather than to the courts.

My suggestion is that we stop protecting the Afghani Government and leave it to its own devices. If it is effective at representing the will of its people, it will withstand the Taliban thanks to the popular support being an effective representative will engender. However, I’m not suggesting we leave Afghanistan. I’m rather suggesting that we divert our military resources to protecting the infrastructure and institutions that will comprise the foundations of a liberal state – the schools, the roads, the power & water supply.

We provide military courts in areas in which Afghani Government justice is inadequate, and guarantee the rights of all children, male and female, to attend school and live within a legal system that recognises these rights. We do not require children to attend school, but we step in when they are denied the choice or intimidated into not doing so. We do not require Afghanis to use our courts, but we step in when they are denied the choice or intimidated into not doing so. We will stop the Taliban burning down schools, but we will not prevent families from sending their children to madrassas. Our aim will be to prevent the removal of those choices by the Taliban, not to enforce them on the Afghans. We will have achieved victory when every child in Afghanistan has not only the right to attend school, but the freedom to do so. We will have achieved victory when every Afghani woman has the freedom to exercise equal rights to every Afghani man. We will not require these rights, we will merely enforce them when they are taken away.

In essence, we will create a parallel legal system within Afghanistan. We will give the Afghanis the option of a liberal state, and leave it up to them to choose. After all, if we believe that liberalism is the way ahead, surely we must believe that others will believe it too.

We can’t do this everywhere, but the current situation in Afghanistan is down to our intervention, and is therefore our responsibility.

Seriously, The Left, shut up about the state. There IS an alternative.

Over Hyde Park, the weather appeared unable to make up its mind. The blazing sun was interrupted by showers of hail, seemingly depending on who was on stage at the time. Whether this counted as some sort of divine disapproval was uncertain, as the hailed-on speakers took it as an opportunity to praise the crowd for braving the weather. And indeed ‘brave’ was the right word – unlike many of these protests I’ve been to, most of the crowd looked like they were unused to mud.

This was the ‘Put People First’ march, whose clarion call was ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’. Given the diversity of groups under its banner (154 separate organisations at current counting), the lack of specificity in how these goals were to be achieved was probably inevitable. There was a clear consensus on who was to blame for them not being achieved, however, and at the top of that list were the bankers. There was also a clear consensus on who would provide the means to achieve those goals – the leaders of the G20.

Flash forward to Wednesday, and the agenda of the G20 protesters becomes even less focused. Now it’s about simple anger at a banking sector collapsing in under its own hubris. Change is demanded – but what change?

In Hyde Park, only Mark Thomas actually used the word socialism, and only to condemn Labour for not believing in it. Even Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, limited himself to condemning government incompetence. The focus of the grand anti-capitalism protests – Seattle, Genoa, May Day – has always been on actions the protesters are demanding from the state, or from international organisations. It has never been as a coherent ideology, which has meant their efforts are frequently (and correctly, in today’s case) painted as simple anger with the system. The classic of this has always been the banner which states, ‘Let’s overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nicer!’

That anger has always been with the state in its role as an agent of change – in essence, it presupposes that the state is the sole agent of change within society. It comes from a statist viewpoint, even if it never describes itself as such. The actions demanded by Put People First are exclusively about what the state can do to mitigate the financial crisis.

At this point, I imagine a lot of you are going, ‘Well, duh, the state has all the power.’ This is wrong. One of the worst aspects of socialism is the disempowering impact it has on the individual; jobs, justice and the mitigation of climate change are on this viewpoint something that can only be provided by the state. The left has been talking the talk of socialism for many years without actually believing it, and it has been left without a coherent ideology of its own.

The original pre-9/11 anti-capitalist movement took its inspiration from the excesses of capitalism as detailed by the investigative journalism of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, the work of people like Naomi Klein and John Pilger. These were not political treatises, but rather exposes of the dubious nature of many of the monoliths of corporate world. Again, the language was the same, to do with the actions of states against the villainous corporations. It was moral indignation in a socialist framework, with the meat of the socialism part taken out.

Now in this crisis of capitalism the left has been reduced to merely demanding more government power over the economy, when it was precisely the government’s mismanagement of the rules of credit that brought us to our current predicament. There is no coherency to the movement, beyond the indignation we have seen previously.

The root cause of this indignation has been claimed to be the structure of the corporation itself as a legal entity. Because shareholders do not manage a corporation, and because the managers of a corporation only have a responsibility to create profit for the shareholders, at no point within its structure is there a place for moral accountability. The manager who employs sweatshop labour can claim that he or she is compelled to do so by the duty to create profit for the shareholders, and the shareholders can claim that since they do not control the actions of the corporation, those actions are not their responsibility.

We have seen this in the banking sector. The enormous bonuses given for producing short-term gains were a direct consequence of the duty of the directors to maintain the profitability of their bank and maintain the share price of the company. Therefore the long-term interests of the banks (and therefore the economy based on them) were sacrificed for short-term profit. And yet, no-one is morally responsible.

It is this structure, rather than capitalism itself, which I argue has been the root cause of the anti-capitalist protests over the past two decades, and to which the left must propose an alternative.

Thankfully, we need not look far, as an alternative has been in existence for hundreds of years. In Principles of Political Economy, JS Mill argued for the institution of limited liability partnerships in which every worker would contribute a share of the capital. Today, we call those co-operatives. And they work, and work well, across the world. Indeed, I bank with one. The Co-Operative Bank has been one of the few high street chains to come out of the credit crunch entirely intact. Unlike a corporation, the members of a co-operative are collectively responsible for its actions, as they are involved in both its financing and its day-to-day running. They are the progressive left’s answer to corporatism.

But this leads me to the most important part of this argument. Co-operatives can be set up in law already – there is no need to lobby the state. They create jobs, they lift people out of poverty and are generally environmentally friendly. The only remaining element necessary for change is not the state, but you. Do you want to put a stop to corporate excess? Then find others who feel the same way you do, and compete against those corporations.

The left needs to accept that the agent of change in society is no longer the state, but the individual. The state has a role to play in enabling the founding of co-operative businesses, in terms of providing education, training and start-up loans – but it already does that. Those on the left who wish to see the demise of the corporate system need to stop lobbying the government, and engage with the rest of the population, to tell them that they can co-operate to get themselves out of poverty, and no longer have to rely on provision by the state. Socialism is not the answer – working together at the individual level is.

As I write this, the windows of the RBS branch on Threadneedle Street are being broken. RBS can afford to lose a few panes of glass. But if the 35,000 people who attended Saturday’s protest started banking co-operatively, that would be a different story entirely.

The Racist Narrative

Out canvassing in Clerkenwell, in a towerblock. I knock on the door of a white woman in late middle age, who doesn’t seem particularly pleased to see me. This is nothing new, canvassers are used to being greeted with low level suspicion. I begin my spiel, and ask a few questions about issues affecting the local area.

“Well,” she began, and her eyes darted across the hallway to the door opposite, which a black woman talking loudly into a mobile phone had just entered. “You wouldn’t like it if I told you what’s wrong around here.”

“From your tone, I’m sure I can guess.”

“You know, my daughter, who’s got two little girls, can’t get anything. And Them across the way never do a stroke. That door just bangs all day long”

In Islington, whenever anyone who lives on an estate is talking to someone associated with politics and says something about ‘getting anything’ they mean social housing. It later transpired that her daughter did indeed have ’something’, which was a one bedroom flat. But since she had two daughters of her own, she wanted more.

I did some further digging. She had voted Lib Dem all her life, up until the last election. She didn’t want to tell me who she’d gone for. But, she said, “I bet you can guess.” And I could. In Clerkenwell, and the rest of old Finsbury, the socialist vote is divided between Labour and the Independent Working Class Association. The IWCA is, in essence, a communist version of the BNP. They employ the same standard of thuggish activists and are only missing an additional ‘W’ from their acronym to sum up what they represent. They do have something else in common with the BNP, and that’s their narrative.

Right now in the campaigning world there’s a lot of people still having Obamagasms over the way in which the candidates have conducted themselves in the US presidential elections. I’ve written about this before, but what seems to have been missed in all the fuss and bother over the narratives of the main parties is that the far right has been using this approach for some time, and it’s been effective. We’ve missed this for several reasons; partly because the things they say on the doorstep don’t get back to us in the way that their campaign literature does, but also because mainstream politicians have a well justified loathing of the BNP and what they stand for. We don’t want to believe that they’re capable of using the same political tricks as lovely Obama.

But they have, and what they’ve done is very clever – in a rather sickening way. The narrative goes like this. The bourgeoisie brought foreign workers over to undercut the wages asked for by British workers. The foreigners are now taking the jobs and the resources (e.g. housing) that should be going to people from round here. When you complain to the Government, they say you’re being racist. But racism is something invented by the bourgeoisie to stop you complaining about Them coming in and taking our jobs and houses. Only the BNP/IWCA are telling the truth about what’s really happening.

It’s a classic Marxist analysis of power; the bourgeoisie are using social ethics to control the working classes. If it’s made immoral to complain about resources being given to Them, then the working classes can no longer do it.

Of course, this is ridiculous. Distributing resources on racial lines is immoral however you cast it. But it’s a narrative that can be seductive for those whose lives are directly affected by inadequate social resources. When someone mutters darkly that there would be enough housing for your daughter to have a place that’ll fit her and her kids if They weren’t here, you’re more inclined to agree if you’re a Clerkenwell grandmother than if you’re a suburban teacher. And it is true that if They left there would be enough social housing in London for the white working classes.

The fact that that social housing wouldn’t be there in the first place if not for the additional wealth brought in by importing workers is neither here nor there; macroeconomic arguments have little relevance for the grannies of Clerkenwell. And outright condemnation of those espousing the racist narrative does nothing except play into the hands of the racists; it’s what results in the response “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Try living down here,”on the doorstep.

I still do not think that the BNP will ever be a major party. But, at present, we are not countering the racist narrative. We need to do better.

ConfBlog#1: The Phantom Menace

“It’s a shit ‘ole”, said the taxi driver. “What?” I replied. “It’s a shit ‘ole, that hotel you’re going to,” he replied. ”You’ve been conned, mate.”

This was not an auscipicious start to the Lib Dem Conference season. The taxi driver had complained about Lib Dems being tight-fisted bastards all the way from the train station, so I confirmed his prejudices by refusing to tip him. I had been dropped outside a hotel that resembled every seaside guesthouse since life first crawled from the oceans. It had awnings, and strange mannequins of fishermen in the windows. I approached the front desk, where the owners, who appeared to be husband and wife, were having a blazing row.  

“Err, hello?” I politely enquired. They stopped rowing for long enough to confirm my booking and take my card details. My card was declined, which I was rather expecting seeing as I didn’t have any money. I had been building up to my most sheepish smile just for the occasion. “Is there any way I could pay at the end?” I enquired of the wife. “This is the only card I have on me. No idea why it’s not working.” “No,” she replied. “We always take payment upfront.”

The husband then said, “It’s alright, pay at the end if you like.” “THAT’S RIGHT, JUST OVERRULE ME WHY DON’T YOU!” came the response from the wife. While the row erupted I took the key from the rack and snuck upstairs. The room was clean and didn’t appear to have anything else living in it, which is all I really want out of places to sleep. I headed off to the conference centre.

Bournmouth International Conference Centre may be a bit excessively named, unless the world has more reknown floating around than I have until now realised. It was hosting the first training sessions of Conference, and I was due to attend a session on messaging. Messaging in a campaign context is now a little behind the times; it’s all about the narrative you communicate to voters now. Indeed, the ossification of the Campaigns Department in this regard has been noticed by the Bones Commission, the internal body that recently produced a report on party reform. It recommended reducing the powers of the Chief Executive, Chris Rennard, who is at present responsible for much of our campaigning, and instead handing them over to a body much more easily controllable by the leader. This was, it said, to move the party away from merely being a leaflet delivery cult.

The Campaigns Department’s reaction to this threat to its previously unchallenged authority has been to rebrand itself. It’s got a pretty new half-bird logo, uses lots of single words as slogans (and doesn’t capitalise them, just to be modern), and still pumps out the same material into its training sessions.

But different parts of the reforms coming out of the Bones Commission and the Leader’s Office are going different ways. The Make It Happen initiative, which involves lowering the overall tax burden, has proven particularly unpopular. Indeed, during a long liquid lunch one of my contacts from another part of the party told me that there was going to be an effort at rebellion against it during conference. However, these being Lib Dems, this revolt is likely to take the form of leaflet distribution. After all, to do otherwise would be to violate the founding principles of the Cult of the Focus.

Ladele and all her works

Like many people in Islington, I’ve been following the saga of Lillian Ladele and Islington Council with interest. When the news reached the general public that Ladele’s appeal against her dismissal had been successful, we were inundated with many offers of support, both from individuals and from organisations such as the Nation Secular Society, amongst others. All viewed the case as being a setback for the acceptance of gay marriage in the UK, not without reason – the Christian Institute, which funded Ladele’s suit, is claiming this as legal recognition for religion-based prejudice.

We have confirmed that we’re appealing the decision. This is quite a complex issue – the grounds on which we lost the appeal were not necessarily those that the Christian Institute would like to believe, but rather that the management’s original handling of the case fell below the standards that an employee could reasonably accept. However, mishandling a case does not mean that the grounds for her dismissal do not still stand, and so our appeal may have a good chance of success.

Since the appeal came to court, a prominent case involving religious principles has been heard which may have bearing on this issue. The right of a Welsh Sikh girl to wear her kara in class has been upheld by the courts, on the grounds that the kara is an indispensible part of her faith. This stands in stark contrast to the ruling that a Muslim girl in Luton was not permitted to wear a jilbab in class. The difference here appears to revolve around how intrinsic a particular manifestation of religion is to that particular faith. In the case of the Sikh, the kara is specified within scripture as something a Sikh must carry. In the case of the Muslim, the jilbab is not specified within the Koran as something that a Muslim girl must wear, the Koran only specifying the much weaker constraint that women must not dress ‘immodestly’. Since mainstream Muslim opinion in the UK does not appear to hold that anything below the jilbab is immodest, the court found against the girl.

This has bearing on the Ladele case, as these are examples of the courts ruling on what can be properly considered to be a necessary part of a religion – in essence, the courts doing a form of theology. Now, this is where it becomes very interesting indeed. While there are parts of the Bible that clearly condemn homosexuality, there are also parts that seem to describe homosexual relationships. That’s not to even mention all the exhortations in the New Testament to look after those who are the worst off in society, who everyone else passes by.

I realise that having a judge in essence state, “I think what God meant to say,” may seem a little unpalatable to some people, but since there’s a legal precedent for this, I suspect that’s what will eventually happen in the Ladele case. The reason why this has to be the case lies in the Bible itself, specifically in chapter 9 of the Book of Genesis, the infamous Curse of Ham.

This isn’t God turning all of his enemies into vacuum-packed meat slices, but rather a curse placed upon Canaan by Noah. Essentially, God turns Canaan black because he slept with his mother. This has been used in the past to justify all sorts of racism. And that’s why it’s crucial here. An individual’s interpretation of scripture cannot outweigh that of the courts, otherwise a Christian colleague of Ladele would be entitled to refuse to work with her on the grounds that, as a black person, she has been cursed by God. Without a reference to mainstream religious opinion, the Bible permits most forms of discrimination.

However, quite frankly, given the current furore within the Anglican church over gay bishops, who knows what mainstream opinion is any more?

The BNP and the tide of history

‘The Social Democrats haven’t a hope of winning a general election, [because the unemployed and low-paid] make up 40-45 percent of the entire country’s workforce. Certainly under the present electoral system, they will provide Labour with a solid 200-seat base.‘

Tony Blair, August 1982

And so Labour believed back then, even though the election of 1983 took them perilously close to undercutting that 200-seat base. This notion of a ‘base’ of support was what made the formation of New Labour possible – pragmatically, abandoning the interests of your core supporters in order to attract more support from other demographics would seem to be electorally suicidal. But if that core support could be relied upon to vote Labour regardless, then abandoning those principles which run counter to the interests of the demographics whose votes you are seeking would be a wise step. Assuming, of course, your only goal in politics is the attainment of power.

Now, of course, Labour’s support is collapsing across the entire spectrum, and the loyalty of that ‘base’ is rapidly evaporating. In many respects, it’s surprising that it lasted as long as it did – eleven years in which a supposedly socialist party presided over a massive widening of the income gap is eleven years in which the interests of that ‘base’ were only serviced perfunctorily. Many of the voters who previously would have been Labour loyalists are now supporting the BNP, the Lib Dems, or even the Tories.

The rise of the BNP has caused an awful lot of anguish, but it is in no way surprising. After all, the BNP are a socialist party with an emphasis on nationalism (sound familiar?), and so can legitimately claim to be standing up for at least the short-term interests of the white working classes. They have thereby provided that particular demographic with an alternative, and they’re taking it. Why should the working classes listen to middle-class moralising about the importance of free trade, the market and allowing immigrants to work here when they see no return for themselves? You can’t sell an economic theory by talking about GDP growth, people need to be given something real.

While the Lib Dems are offering long-term solutions to help close the income gap, none of the main parties is putting forward the same sort of short-term massive state intervention that would make a real difference to the lives of these people now. There is no easy market-based solution here – low-skilled workers are simply economically unproductive given the UK’s position in the global economy. There are far fewer significant quantities of natural resources for them to extract, or factories willing to pay the higher wages required by UK employees. State intervention would merely prolong the inevitable.

Nonetheless, this has not prevented calls from within the Labour Party for a return to collectivism and to the party’s roots. Labour is currently caught in a quandary: its old voters are beginning to desert it for a party which partly resembles its former incarnation, while its new voters are deserting it for a party that resembles its present incarnation. Which way to turn? Either field is contested. But surely returning to its previous values would at least give it the security of Blair’s abovementioned 200 seats?

This is not the case. Employment patterns have shifted throughout Labour’s time in power. Examine the graph below.

Over the last fifteen years, the population of the working classes as a percentage of the workforce has declined. This trend is likely to continue in the near future – as I mentioned before, there is simply little call for low-skilled work in the current British economy. Even if Labour did manage to revive their support, relying on a shrinking demographic as a springboard back to power – not to mention a demographic that will be fought over with the BNP – is a foolish move. Thus, I suspect that they will make some cursory moves to the left in an effort to regain some of their heartland support, but retain their market ideology so as to not lose all of their new voters.

This will also affect the BNP. No matter how well they do, since they find their support in a shrinking demographic they can never wield the influence to bring about the changes they seek. For this to happen would require a massive expansion in Britain’s manufacturing industry, which is extremely unlikely even with higher oil prices making it more appealing to produce goods closer to home.

But what do we Lib Dems do about this disaffected demographic? What principled approaches can we take to improve their quality of life? As yet, I am uncertain. I am currently working on this issue with a colleague, but have yet to come up with a solution. I begin to suspect that the answer may lie in high tech industries that require low skilled workers for the production processes, as in biotechnology. But even still, answers on a postcard please.

The Ghost in the By-election Machine

The Liberal Democrat campaign in Henley was textbook. It included some of the best literature I’ve ever seen, including an exemplary magazine crushing the Tory’s claims to be a defender of the greenbelt. We had a large army of volunteers out canvassing and delivering throughout the weeks preceding polling day. Our election day operation itself was so well-manned we were able to knock up people who we had no canvass data for, but appeared likely to be our supporters. But, in the end, we were only able to achieve a swing of 1.84% – a swing that, arguably, was more likely to be caused by Labour voters switching to us than necessarily a product of our campaign.

And this has been noticed. So what happened? Out of the five by-elections since 1997 that have resulted in a change of control, the Lib Dems have won four – and the only one we didn’t win was Crewe & Nantwich, less than a month ago. Indeed, the swings we have managed to achieve in more recent by-elections have been down from the heady highs of 2003 and 2004. The last time we managed a swing of over 10% was at the Bromley & Chistlehurst by-election in 2006.

So what happened? While, naturally, the Tory revival played a part here, it’s not the full story – the Tories only raised their share of the vote by 3.4% compared to 16.9% in Crewe, while Labour’s share fell by over 10% in both cases. Previously, we would have expected a lot of that vote to go to us, but it seems to have been divided between us, the Tories, and the BNP. While the issue of Labour voters going towards the BNP is for another day, it’s worthwhile asking what was so different about this election in terms of our capture of the Labour vote. Why didn’t we get more?

To anyone on the ground familiar with our campaigning tactics, the answer would be obvious. The Tories stole everything we’ve been doing in by-elections since 1997, and with their greater money and resources, did it better. They had a magazine, Good Mornings, polling cards, localised newsletters, the works. Their literature had clearly had more spent on its production, and while ours was designed more effectively, theirs had a tendency to look more professional. I suspect that this professionalism played a big part in increasing the efficacy of their literature relative to ours; a leaflet with higher production values indicates a more serious party in the minds of the voters, and not appearing serious is something we can ill afford.

This isn’t just true in Henley – across the country, Labour and the Tories are copying our tactics, sneaky buggers that they are. They’ve started producing imitations of the Focus local newsletter, started campaigning more on local issues, and actually begun to work harder for their votes. They’re doing this because they realise that otherwise that these are votes we’ll be able to take. It’s a good reflection upon our efforts that the public are now more likely to get a better service from their elected representatives, even if the larger parties had to be terrorised into doing it. However, it leaves us with a campaigning quandary: if the Tories and Labour are stealing our thunder on local campaigning, one of our most important selling points is gone. We have a reputation for being effective local campaigners, and this is partly why our share of the votes for Council elections is consistently higher than that of national elections – usually at least 3-4%. If we lose that, where do we go from here?

There are multiple approaches currently being put forward. One of the most popular is to shift the strategy for our campaigning away from ‘messenging’ towards ‘narrative’, as advocated by Neil Stockley. This would involve ensuring our candidate at by-elections has a good story to tell, giving the voters an emotional involvement with his or her campaign. It’s analogous to Obama’s primary campaign: presenting oneself as an outsider bringing hope and change to an ossified political system is very emotive, regardless of its truth. While this will doubtless be effective, every party will contain sufficient Obama-watchers to make it likely that all of a sudden everyone will be bringing hope and change in 2010.

Another approach is to rethink our literature radically, and start taking more tips from the world of advertising. This would involve amplifying a brand – whether it be the party or a candidate – with extremely emotive phraseology and photography. An example is for the front page of a leaflet to consist of a big picture of a happy family with the tagline, ‘Because your family is priceless’, with more information inside about how only the Lib Dems can guarantee your family’s continued prosperity.

I suspect that this would certainly gain us votes, but would require significant volunteer management to ensure that all of our people went along with this – patronising and manipulative advertising techniques are not what our membership in general signed up for, regardless of how effective they are.

The approach I would like to suggest is the following. During the debate about detention without trial for 42 days, several polls were published that found that while the public was in favour of liberty as a principle, in particular cases they were more likely to be in favour of surrendering it for increased security. Other research has emphasised that the public are frequently in favour of our economic policies and the principles behind them – they simply don’t vote for us because they don’t think we can win. What this demonstrates is that where we’ve managed to overcome the credibility gap, or indeed during a by-election where it’s less relevant, targeting literature about relevant principles to relevant demographics could be extremely effective. Our candidate will have the value over and above the opposition of not only being a strong local campaigner, but a strong local campaigner who believes what you believe.

This will naturally only be successful if we can weave into the campaign’s overall narrative, potentially using the advertising techniques mentioned above. Talking about a candidate’s background and how he or she has come to their principles could be devastating – it’s the sort of thing that would work very well in a magazine. It gives us an inbuilt advantage over the Tories and Labour in the current climate, as it’s not clear at all what either party stands for.

Naturally, its success is dependant on its effective implementation, and it is possible to object that we talk about our principles already. But the point is that we rarely do it in any kind of prominent way – while the principles inform the electoral machine, they’re rarely produced by it. We can’t afford this any more. If the Tories and Labour have caught up to us, we need to be one step ahead.

Zim

You know what’s disturbing? Finding out that someone who does the same job as you has been brutally murdered for it. Crazy as it may sound, I’m really against people getting killed for giving out leaflets. I’m against other people getting horribly killed of course – it largely goes without saying – but as I’ve found to be the case with both everyone else and myself, we just simply care more when there are similarities between ourselves and the victims. We tend to do so in an unspoken way, though – witness the stories about Mugabe’s initial land grab, back in 1997. Why was this newsworthy? Many other post-colonial African nations have done or are doing something similar, but somehow they don’t seem to merit the same level of attention.

I suggest this is because of Mugabe’s deliberate strategy of targeting the white-owned farms only, rather than all the larger landowners, many of whom were black. Thus, the press could report on a very simple and easy to sell story of white people having farms taken away by black people. And, like it or not, a story about people we very visibly are similar to being attacked by people we aren’t similar to is gruesomely fascinating. It’s not racist to find it thus, it’s analogous to the same stone-age instinct that makes us more concerned with the wellbeing of our families than with others. It only becomes racist when you cease to accord moral value to all of humanity, and begin to blame all black people for the actions of others. However, what it does do is sell newspapers.

Again, like it or not, people found this story viscerally interesting, and papers that carried it sold more copies. Publishers noticed this, and continued to carry more stories about Zimbabwe. However, there’s a movement which seems to believe there’s some sort of conspiracy behind this, as though the British were building up moral support for the claim that Africans can’t govern themselves, in order to resurrect the Empire. You get comments like this one on Comment is Free, bewailing the fact that there’s so many bad things happening in Africa that the excessive focus on Zimbabwe is ludicrous. It’s not. It’s the market doing what it does. It’s just that no-one seems to want to talk about why people like the story. Funny that.

Marching on one’s stomach

What with people still being shot in Tibet, it seemed only appropriate to attend another protest on Saturday. This time, instead of staying in one place and being angry, the cause was due to march from Park Crescent to Trafalgar Square whilst being righteously indignant.

I was feeling rather full of cold, but resolved to go along regardless in case I missed an interesting riot. I did manage to miss the start of the protest, and had to walk hurriedly after the riot vans to make sure I found it again, protests being surprisingly easy things to lose. I caught up with it on Regent Street, and attempted to sidle in.

It’s remarkably tricky to join a protest in midflight without looking suspicious. You start off on the edges and slowly saunter towards the centre as it marches along, all the while slowly increasing the volume of your chanting in order to fit in. One of the things I like about the Free Tibet movement is that it’s small enough for everyone to loosely know everyone else, and indeed I met someone I hadn’t seen for seven years in the middle of the four-hundred-strong throng.

There were speeches at the end, telling the marchers about all the terrible things that were happening in Tibet, exhorting them to write to their MP and indeed MPs saying we were all very good for coming out and doing this marching. I never thought I’d hear myself cheering on Kate Hoey, but some things do transcend party divisions.

At the end of the speeches, the Tibetans in the crowd started singing their national anthem, while the white people looked on in an encouraging and slightly mystified fashion. The sonorous sound of Tibetan singing filled the air, and in my mind I was back in the temple in Sonada at sunset, watching my monks spin the wheels of Dharma. Snow began to fall, and for a moment, Trafalgar Square became a little piece of the Roof of the World.

In other words, YOU SHOULD’VE BEEN THERE.

Anyway, why is all this happening? I think an analogy would be helpful here. Izzard teaches us that a more authoritarian Church of England would force its adherents to choose between tea and cake or death. In many ways, that’s a lot like the situation in Tibet.

Bear with me while I squeeze metaphors to make a mildly amusing analogy work. In the 1950’s in China, the Tea Party, fresh from victory in World War 2 and over the Kuomintea, turned their eyes to their mountainous neighbour to the south. Despising the Tibetan practice of making butter tea with yak’s milk, the Chinese invaded and imposed both the Tea Party and Collective Cake Baking on the Tibetans, believing them to superior. While previously most baking in Tibet had been very small scale and mostly on the back of a horse, it had, at least, been under the control of the Tibetans. Deprived of their tea and of their cake by the Chinese they chose death, which the Chinese gave to them in abundance.

Once the rebellion was over and the Tibetans’ Tea Master had fled, the Chinese continued to choose death on behalf of an awful lot of Tibetans, particularly during the Teabag Revolution. It eventually became apparent to the Chinese that Collective Baking wasn’t producing cake in enough quantities to satisfy their own people, let alone rival the mighty bakeries of the West. They began to gradually import the Western notion of Free Baking, while making sure demand for the typically associated idea of One Man, One Cup was repressed.

To facilitate this, across China and its conquered territories the ideal of having one’s cake and eating it was promoted. More and more Chinese began to bake for themselves, and the bakeries of the West started to eye China’s iced buns with relish.

In Tibet, the Tea Party still retained control, and any butter tea that was drunk was done so only under its auspices. The younger generation of Tibetans, knowing little of butter tea, lusted after the cake the Tea Party promoted. But there was a problem. The Chinese still considered all Tibetans to be fundamentally butter tea drinkers, and thus quite unsuitable for eating cake. They could help in its baking and perhaps even catch a whiff as it came out of the oven, but they would never be allowed to eat it.

The Tibetans were once again faced with a choice. They could not drink their tea, and they could not have any cake. Their only remaining option was ‘Or Death’. And so they chose it. But they chose it in different ways. The recent protests can be divided into two stages, in accordance with who took part. The ones that chose the tea, frequently the monks and the older Tibetans, took part in the initial peaceful protests. The Chinese very rapidly chose death for them, as this is the year of the Great Tea Dance, when the Chinese hope their bakery will be accepted amongst the great bakeries of the world. The younger Tibetans saw this, and in their anger at not having cake and, indeed, not having cake where their ancestors were once free to drink butter tea, took out their anger on those that did have cake. And so the Chinese chose death for those too.

To claim that all Tibetans seek a kind of Himalyan Arcadia, as many Westerners seem to, is to grossly oversimplify a nation of many different people with many different desires. Many young Tibetans seek economic success – and why should they not? We cannot keep an ideal of Tibet as a kind of spiritual playground, a last bastion of adventure – that sort of thinking led to our invasion of it. It is worth fighting for Tibetans to be able to have tea, certainly – but it is also worth fighting for them to have cake.

What happens next? The Chinese are still giving the Tibetans death, and I suspect that for a while yet the Tibetans will have chicken rather than choose the other. But the Chinese have still removed the other choices from the Tibetans, and the Tibetans will never be able to live peacefully without those choices – not for the all the tea in China.