‘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 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.

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.

Thanks to a minor operation, I suddenly find myself with a great deal more free time, part of which I have spent catching up with the slow decline of Gordon Brown’s mental health, and by extension that of the Labour Party as a whole.

It’s fascinating, it really is. In any form of company, a chief executive who spent his time dealing with complaints from individual customers would be seen as a pathological control freak. The minor PR benefits in no way make up for the time lost by someone meant to be providing strategic direction to the organisation, in this case Britain. And this has supposedly been released in an effort to make Brown appear more human? If this is his most human caprice, I fear what else may be lurking behind the doors of No. 10.

More worryingly, the Prime Minister’s reality disconnect appears to be spreading to the rest of his party. Draper writes that “…sure, Brown has made mistakes but that the main source of his unpopularity is that people blame him for the economic downturn. He is hoping that he will receive reciprocal credit for any subsequent recovery. In the meantime something akin to mass hysteria has gripped the nation.” Draper asks us to believe that, instead of one man in an incredibly stressful job who has been described by members of his own party as ‘psychologically flawed’ cracking under the pressure, the rest of the nation has gone mad.

Leaving aside the amusingly ironic way in which Draper attempts to use Freud to transfer the blame for Labour’s current poll ratings from its leader to the public, this is something I’ve seen elsewhere in the Labour Party too. A couple of weeks ago, while out guerilla campaigning, I met my opposite number in the Islington Labour Party, and had a long chat about the London election. Even taking into account the slight mental disturbance generated by meeting a Geordie who introduces himself as your nemesis, the poor boy seemed entirely incapable of processing why Ken had lost. The combination of high taxes and allegations of corruption didn’t appear to be featuring on his radar at all. And it appears to be the same with Draper.

Labour hasn’t just been making mistakes. It’s been making fundamental miscalculations. It’s been holding down public sector wages to lower inflation - while at the same time allowing the tax on fuel to rise along with the price, giving Brown additional funds but simultaneously contributing to inflation. I am not convinced that the public blame Brown for the economic downturn - but I am convinced they blame him for making it harder for them to live with. And yet Brown still manages not to see it. The 10p tax band removal was a classic example, one that should’ve been flagged up as obviously against the interests of their core vote as soon as it came up - but it didn’t. Again with the relative lowering of public sector wages. Nervous Labour MPs have started forcing him to take account of these concerns on particular issues, but still there appears to be no change of direction from No. 10, no even slight admission that the current approach is not working.

The problem is, as many commentators have said, that Brown is psychologically incapable of admitting his mistakes. And he is passing this on to the rest of his party, in a real example of ‘Crowd Behaviour’, as Draper puts it. Is it possible to have an entire political party sectioned?

WE WON! We won! Not the election of course, but rather the fight to save Essex Road Post Office from the ravages of a Labour Government bent on ruining anything of benefit to the poor & vulnerable. A concerted effort involving the local community, our PPC Bridget Fox and the Lib-Dem run Council had produced an agreement with Royal Mail Ltd. to allow a franchisee to take it over.

This was a tremendous victory for Bridget. She’d campaigned for over a year to keep it open, and had gathered thousands of petition signatories and organised hundreds of people into protests. I’d taken pictures of lots of them and put them into exciting leaflets. And so we marched down Essex Road early on Wednesday morning to proclaim our victory before the media.

Unfortunately, Labour had had the same idea. The local MP and champion pie-eater Emily Thornberry had been given a roasting in the press over the hypocrisy inherent in voting in favour of post office closures in Parliament while simultaneously campaigning to keep an Islington branch open. A few minutes after we arrived a rather aggressive man in a red t-shirt appeared and started shoving a piece of paper with ‘Emily saved the PO’ scrawled on it in marker pen into the faces of passers by. We took advantage of this by introducing Lib Dem Councillor Emily Fieran-Reed to the same passers by. He then scrawled on the reverse ‘Local MP saves Post Office’, and given that an awful lot of Islington residents think that Bridget is already the MP thanks to our campaigning and Thornberry had chickened out of turning up, was again quite amusing.

More Labour activists showed up, and after an initial period of studiously ignoring each others’ existence we started to exchange accusations of lying. I nearly got into a fight with the aggressive red t-shirt, although to be fair he did become distinctly more aggressive after I tickled him to get him to lower the sign. It all got rather ugly. The lady from the Gazette took pictures of each set of politicos, then one of the avowedly ‘neutral’ people, which was quickly swarmed by Thornberry’s lackeys. So I pushed into the middle. Unsurprisingly, the neutral photo was used.

Politics shouldn’t have to be like this. Instead of coming together to celebrate a victory for the community, we spat at each other like children fighting over a toy. This is especially a shame, as one of the Labour activists was quite pretty. But it leads to an interesting question: would the Post Office have been less likely to be saved if two separate groups of people hadn’t been quite so determined to beat the other in terms of campaigning? Demonstrating that your party is better equipped to represent local people is a big spur to activism, and I am not convinced that either party would have put in quite so much effort if everyone had agreed to share the PR spoils equally. But then, that’s why socialism doesn’t work, isn’t it?

Selling pre-packaged opinions is part of my trade. You know when you’re at a dinner party and the political discussion is at the level of assertion - when people are merely repeating sentences at each other without any form of engagement? Well, that’s what I do. I sell those sentences, those forms of proto-opinion that are far too common around the dining tables of Britain. How does it work? It depends on three factors: the relationship between an opinion and a person’s own interests, the form in which the opinion is received and the number of times it’s repeated.

Of these factors, repetition is by far the most important - people can be persuaded to act against their own interests if they hear the same opinion frequently enough without anything to counter it. Just look at my aunt - a former left-winger in the grand Grant clan tradition now, after ten years of repeated exposure to the Daily Mail, believes immigrants are taking over the country and there’s a Muslim waiting in every shadow.

I find the process of opinion-forming fascinating, and this election has provided many wonderful examples of the art. By far the best-conducted campaign has been by the Evening Standard - the form and content of their opinion-forming has been simply superb.

For example, the Standard ran an analysis of Paddick’s policies about a week before the election. On his plan to switch the management of the Tube to a concession model, the paper wrote: “This would only add another level of bureaucracy. The unions would have a fit.”

In the mind’s ear, you can hear people repeating those sentences back to you across the dining table. It doesn’t matter that they don’t have anything to do with the policy, it only matters that they’ve been associated with it. This is the end goal of politicians’ soundbites, the focus of the messaging of our literature - to lend the listener or reader an easily embedded opinion. It’s about identifying whose interests will be best satisfied by which opinion, then using an appropriate form to transmit it repeatedly. But this is a game played at every level - every single person has their own interests and their own need to communicate them with others. Unlike what some Marxists would have you believe, the populace are not generally docile and receptive to the opinions of the intellectual elite. They’re players too.

Now that I’ve given a explanation of what I’m talking about to those of you who don’t spend all their time trying to mindfuck the voters, what went wrong with the Lib Dem campaign in London?

The slightly glib answer is that we were heavily squeezed between Boris and Ken. But why did this have to be the case? Are there things which could have been carried out differently which may have changed the final result? I don’t believe we ever could have won - but we could have and should have polled higher than we did. What went wrong?

Put simply, I think we failed to take into account the role of particular interest groups in this election, and the way in which our opponents were able to portray them as being uniquely under threat unless they cast their ballot for Boris or Ken. ‘Opponents’ doesn’t just refer to our political opposition - there were multiple political actors who had influence over this result. Let me give a couple of examples.

A large part of our vote comes from slightly better off public sector employees - people like teachers, junior managers and their ilk - the sorts of people who don’t fully agree with Labour’s policies, but aren’t vicious enough to vote Tory. During this campaign, the workers in the many and varied quasi-public sector organisations nominally under the control of the Mayor - like Transport for London and the London Development Agency - were told by UNISON, PCS, and the other unions that if they didn’t vote for Ken Boris would embark upon a purge as soon as he entered power. We had a significant number of people who may have otherwise voted for us with a strong economic incentive to vote for Ken. How did we attempt to counter this? We did nothing - indeed, we allowed our opponents (see above) to portray our policies as almost as damaging as those of the Tory party.

The rise of the BNP during this campaign also cost us votes - but it did so invisibly. This is because of a separate under-the-radar campaign ran by various interest groups and sponsored by the Daily Mirror. In Hackney, two tabloids paid for by the Mirror were delivered to nearly every address. While ostensibly politically neutral, this tabloid was full of scare stories about the implications of the BNP coming into power. Since not being ethnically cleansed is a pretty fucking good incentive to vote, the combination of this campaign with the newspaper stories about the BNP backing Johnson meant that all of a sudden an awful lot more black people had a big reason to vote than last time. This came out in the results - Jeanette Arnold’s vote doubled since last time. What did we do to try to take some of these additional voters for ourselves? We talked about the importance of the police not excessively focusing on young black men - which, while important, rather missed the issue.

We were thus abandoned by a lot of our traditional support, and failed to capitalise on the increased voter turnout. This is because our campaign was insufficiently sophisticated to take this into account. Focusing on crime was important to overcome what has traditionally been perceived as a weak issue for us, and indeed we started getting the signals that this was working (people calling us up to tell us to stop just talking about crime). The problem was, we started getting these signals two weeks before election and didn’t start diversifying our message to take this into account.

I would argue that what we can take away from this is twofold. Firstly, we must resist the temptation to retreat to our comfort zone and focus exclusively on the local interest groups in council wards that we can already deal with. We will never win big if we do that. Secondly, one of the roles of the London campaigns department must be to identify these London-wide interest groups and develop a strategy and materials for targeting them. In essence, we need to find ways of doing street letters on a far bigger scale - partly through media work but also through ground war operations co-ordinated across multiple boroughs.

There are, of course, lots of other reasons why we didn’t win - two prominent personality politicians turned the contest into something more presidential, which Brian as a newcomer had a difficult job to break into. But the lessons we can learn from this contest will help us do better next time.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to accept that someone he’s admired from afar simply isn’t as magnificent as he believed. That for all their marvellous qualities, their all-too-human weaknesses render them so disappointing that he must turn his back on them, and pray silently for their redemption. That’s pretty much how I felt when I found out that Konnie Huq was going to carry the Olympic flame. How can one so pretty, and I’m sure in possession of other qualities, support the repressive Chinese regime? Needless to say, I was distraught, and felt I had to make a stand against attractive people being in favour of tyrants. So I braved the first snows of April and took to the streets along with thousands of others to protest the arrival of the Beijing Olympic Flame into London.

At Queensway the protesting bourgeois triplet of myself, Mark and Hannah got our first glimpse of the Olympic flame. Some poor young television presenter was separated from an angry crowd of Free Tibet protesters by a slender metal fence which did nothing to deflect the cruel barbs of, ‘Shame on you!’ and ‘What about human rights?’ that were flung her way. At one point she cowered away from the crowd while she waited for the relay team to arrive carrying the flame, hiding the torch between her legs to deflect the crowd’s ire. I nearly felt sorry for her, but this was tempered by the fact that she was supporting a dictatorship for self-promotional reasons and claiming it was all about the sport.

We pursued the flame via the Tube, with a brief pause for cappuccinos (one has to maintain appearances, even at a protest). It was much quicker than running while pursuing a torch, after all. However, I was somewhat caught out upon climbing onboard; a nice Christian gentleman had offered me his seat next to my companions and had started to move over. At that moment the train started with a jolt, and while my right hand futilely groped for a post that was several feet away I was thrown back into the gentleman’s lap.

While I extricated myself and apologised to the terrified looking chap who clearly thought he’d just been violated, the whole carriage burst into laughter, and Mark and Hannah reassured me that they would never let me forget this. I believe them.

At Bloomsbury Square, the torch was hidden from view and the athletes cowered inside the canopy of the official buses, as though that would stop us yelling out their shame. A special burst of shame was reserved for the float of the official sponsor, Samsung, who had cleverly decided to put dancing girls into the middle of a very angry crowd of protesters. The tone of the shouting changed to, ‘Shame! On so many levels!’

It was as the torch hit Whitehall, however, that the lack of organisation on behalf of the, well, organisers became apparent. The metal fences meant to separate the procession from the angry people hadn’t been brought in sufficient quantities to cover the route, and so we ran out into the street, pursuing the mob of sinister Chinese security forces surrounding the torch. The police reacted by linking their arms and forming a circle around the Chinese, like some Orwellian version of the Gay Gordons.

Running and dodging the police along Whitehall was exhilarating, and it spurred the previously peaceful crowd into new heights of non-violent protest. Banners were bashed on the sides of buses, and the screwed-up-coffee-cups that symbolised the angry bourgeois was thrown over the police line onto the torch bearers. This inspired a certain amount of brutality on the part of the police; Mark received a vicious kick from a copper wading into the mass of people, and one policeman forced his way into the crowd by driving a motorbike through it, nearly running Hannah over until she was yanked out of the way. The chap in front of us wasn’t so lucky, and had his leg crushed beneath the copper’s wheels.

When the police started manhandling people off the road, I urged us back before things got nasty. The torch was away, and Brown had demonstrated his cowardice in front of the Chinese by greeting it. So we did lunch.

However, when leaving the restaurant we found that the tables were turned. The imported Chinese demonstration had taken over the street, and five of us now stood alone in a Whitehall full of reds. So I started shouting ‘Shame!’. It seemed to be only the proper thing to do.

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.

I had originally intended my first post on this to be a sweepingly epic analysis of Lib Dem campaigning strategy as viewed from a philosophical perspective, but events have forced me to write about something people might actually want to read instead. Lucky for you.

Yesterday I was driven to attend a protest outside the Chinese Embassy (or, given the police cordon around the embassy itself, outside the Royal Institute of British Architects) by my anger at the violence of the Chinese crackdown on the Tibetan protesters. For me, this is a very emotional issue - seeing people who look remarkably like some of my friends from Samdrub Darjay Choling being beaten up by the police brings the protests to life in very visceral way. This holds true for many members of Students for a Free Tibet, which I discovered at Edinburgh University to be a support group for people who’d spent their gap year with Tibetans.

This connection caused SFT to leap into action as soon as the scale of the Chinese crackdown became apparent, and many events are taking place over the next few days - more protests, hunger strikes and other arrows of the left-wing quiver. But there was a very real need to do something now, and so I dragged my intern to Portland Place.

Protesting, though, is very odd. You agree to meet a large number of people in a particular place to be angry about something. The anger isn’t going to lead to violence, but after a certain amount of milling around people feel the need to do something, and so the chanting begins. I’ve always been uncomfortable with chanting, partly because it makes me feel like I’m participating in Naziesque groupthink, but also because I feel a compulsion to analyse each chant to make sure I agree with it. This is the product of too many marches wherein the Palestinian group has started yelling, “Death to Israel!”, and I’ve begun to worry about our choice of protesting allies.

Luckily, the Tibetan chants tended to be quite nice, and mostly focused around telling the Chinese they should be ashamed of themselves. Inasmuch as one can measure the success of a peaceful protest by the amount of police presence it attracts, we scored six riot vans and one chopper on the Excessive Force scale. There were candles and Tibetan flags, women carrying small dogs and babies, and people in yellow vests. It wasn’t a threat to national security.

The Chinese thought differently though, and had stationed a black-clad photographer on the roof of the assembly to take stealthy photos of the individuals in the crowd for future visa-refusal reasons. Unfortunately for him he forgot to switch off his flash, making him look a bit silly.

I thought it went well. But what does it all mean? Protests don’t make a difference, do they? Not in absolute terms, no - our protest will not lead to the withdrawal of the Chinese from Tibet via a direct causal link. But to look for this is to really misunderstand the nature of this sort of campaigning. Like everything else in this managerial age, it’s about working the odds. This occurs in several ways:

1) Awareness Raising. Large protests generate media coverage, and attention from passers by. This small amount of knowledge about how people feel about a particular issue is unlikely to directly sway the judgement of a particular person, but will become a factor - no matter how small - in their feelings about which way they vote, or the stance they take in political discussions. If there was some way of measuring such things, I would anticipate a (very) small rise in the average positive feeling towards the Tibetan Human Rights movement across London over the next few days, which is directly attributable to the protest as separate from the media coverage of the events in Tibet.

2) Affecting the protested. Seeing many people opposed to what you’re doing has an unavoidable psychological effect on all but the most psychotic. A small wedge of doubt may over time build up in the minds of employees which, with other contributing factors may cause one or two to actually leave government employee and become trampolinists, or something similarly less repressive.

3) Maintaining campaign morale. The last may be the most important. Group activity encourages its members to continue to identify with the group, and thus carry out more actions related to its success, like letter-writing or petitioning. More people are likely to become active in the campaign as a consequence of the protest than would otherwise be the case if it hadn’t taken place.

So, in summary, protest good, Chinese government bad. I plan on analysing the latter in my next post, but in the mean time it largely speaks for itself.