Not anymore

The author of this blog, having been operating largely in real life for the last couple of years, is back on the internet and writing at Better Giants now.

Generation GAP

“It would be foolish to think of arguing that there is no problem looming for coming generations; what I would argue is that somehow the baby – boomers (of which I am one) are somehow at fault.”
                — Radiowonk, @13

This comment was submitted to the discussion on Stephanie Flanders’ most recent analysis of Osbourne’s budget policies. It’s an interesting article on generational economics, following one in which she examined the relative benefits of the boom to the relative costs of the bust from a gender perspective.

Good day

If too long, but I have a stillage full of beer nicely chilling in mycellar. That’s worth taking the time to enjoy.

Further details forthcoming soonest.

Short Term Thinking IV

Clegg made his reputation in large part on his work developing the LibDem alliances in Europe into the most powerful left-wing coalition in Brussels, and Huhne was a colleague of his there. Clegg has done this before.

It was very obvious that neither Tories nor Labour knew how to run a campaign which might end in a coalition, let alone what to do when neither of them won a clear majority. Cameron and Brown, to give them due, both rose to the occasion with a level of dignity and competence I had not been led to expect. But neither the Labour Party nor the Tories had any idea what to do; what you do after elections is either crow or viciously attack your opponent for doing just what you did to the constituency boundaries last time you were in.

The Liberal Democrat campaign, as led by Nick Clegg, shut no doors at all. The conduct of both the leadership and the parliamentary party during the negotiation process has been exemplary, and I don’t believe I’ve ever said that about politicians on this blog. They acted like the guys in the room who knew what they were doing, and they got a much better deal than I could have expected. I say ‘better deal’ and I mean for me, as a non-member who is both personally quite poor and a small-business entrepreneur (these two are integrally related). I also mean for the nation, for several different reasons. I thought they were going to get screwed with their pants on by a vindictive Tory party who have been waiting thirteen years for a chance to savage the ‘liberal elite’. But that’s not what happened.

What happens next is a different matter. It is difficult to see what the LDs will do if the Tories renege on aspects of the coalition agreement; far too many of those who make the front benches will be subject to very intense incentives not to revolt, let alone bring down the government. Are Cameron and co. honest parties here? I don’t know. A similar question could be directed at Clegg and Huhne; will the Orange Book faction of the LDs push the party to the right in power? I don’t know.

Short Term Thinking III

My last two posts provided the primer for a discussion of how post-industrial economies interact with the drive towards a democratic system from our current standpoint of an unplanned constitutional monarchy in which approximately two thirds of the country are not represented by someone they voted for, under any outcome.

Short Term Thinking II

The most salient similarity between the two inordinately long, one might almost say ’19th Century’, regimes that have dictated our lives for the past forty years is the way the markets reacted to them (of course, they pursued unexpectedly similar financial policies). In both cases, they were positioned for their launch into extremism by a very strong economic position they had precisely nothing to do with creating. North Sea oil and gas was almost entirely paid for by Labour and then sold by the Tories, to their own advantage. This also more or less describes the public infrastructure that was privatised, though several Tory governments had helped build that. The Internet and mobile phone booms were not only not helped by New Labour, they were actively and systematically handicapped.

Both regimes exploited the strength of their perceived position as winning teams to orchestrate subtle, and then not-so-subtle, witch-hunts. Bizarrely, in the case of Thatcher’s social services, there was a literal witch hunt. As Reagan was expanding Nixon’s War on Drugs into Wars on other things, Thatcher was declaring war on organised labour, Irish travelers, peace-protesters, environmentalists and the counter-culture in general. And she was winning, because let’s face it, if you smash all the news men’s cameras and if you’re just beating up a gang of filthy hippies and left-liberal wets, why would middle England care? It’s not like your party will ever need the votes of the liberal and progressive middle class. Er, hang on…

Labour, having surfed into Cool Britannia on a wave of BritPop pizzazz, shambled to the right over the War on Terror and then proceeded to abandon the world of rationality all together. Evidence became a deprecated practice, science policy was subjected to political speculation and short-term party interest. The rational but leftist economic inspirations of a young Scottish Presbyterian in the 80s turned into slavish neo-Thatcherite greed in office in the 2000s. The hysterical Christian wing of the Labour Party are just as terrifying as Christina Odone and Nadine Dorries.

Why did I justify typing all of that when I’m lurking deep within the bowels of a pile of boxes significantly higher than my head, moodily smoking and wishing I’d had more than 4 hours sleep at any time this week? Patience, gentle reader, good things come to those who wait.

The last and most significant parallel I need to draw is between Black Wednesday and the collapse of Northern Rock. In both instances of over-long government by a functional dictatorship (full majority in the commons) their term saw the collapse of significant chunks of the Square Mile boom the government had been exploiting to maintain its autarchy. And unlike what usually happens, where a government is lucky to get ten straight years and very lucky to get ten years of a more or less free hand to legislate, in both cases the economic failure actually had been engineered by the incumbents, not the last guys.

Thatcher over-clocked the economy quite deliberately to gain the largest possible advantage from the North Sea, the privatisation binge, and the world-wide economic and financial boom that accompanied the rise of the Tiger economies. Most governments who run their economy too fast with inadequate cooling are safely out of office when the magic smoke escapes. The Tories weren’t, and David Cameron bloody well knows it; he was standing behind Lamont when the Chancellor announced an interest base rate of 15%.

Unexpectedly, Brown’s Chancellorship saw New Labour follow exactly the same pattern. The City was given its head, the communications boom was exploited ruthlessly while its lucrative consumers, mostly under 30, were demonised in Westminster and Wapping alike. The housing market boom was then artificially inflated well beyond its natural term to off-set the horrendous costs of the War on Terror. The Rock did not fall over because it was heavily invested in US sub-prime instruments, it was a home-grown collapse which came about because the government over-clocked the economy until something blew. What blew was Northern Rock.

I would argue that we can in part credit Gordon Brown’s response with saving us some half a million jobs versus the Tory management of the previous recession. Too late, and in the wrong way, but he did try to respond constructively for the country rather than just happily for the city.

The conclusions are three-fold. Firstly, it is clear that there is a natural cycle which is used by financial traders to consolidate their industry (ensure that very very few new contenders ever make it into the Deep Pocket Club). If permitted by government, it is in the interests of our official gamblers to over-inflate, bust, then over-inflate rather than reflecting the accurate market price of a given commodity or instrument. This is because market men make money in the margin (say that drunk): they can only ‘win’ if the market price is not the same as the actual worth. If the price is too low you make money buying; if it is too high you make money selling. If it’s right, there’s no margin for the Monopoly players in rainbow coats.

Secondly, it is clear that our system promotes governmental short-termism. Both of these two over-powered regimes governed in the short-term interest by actively inflating natural booms until they became insubstantial bubbles which, predictably, burst. This is most certainly not the only way to run a county, it’s just the only way that any Briton under 40 has ever experienced. Safe seats lead directly to ministerial corruption; safe majorities lead directly to autocracy and a bitterly divisive national discourse.

And thirdly, it is bad for Britain to have long-term, majority governments. Both times we’ve tried it in the modern era it has permitted those governments to engineer vastly damaging recessions for short term gain. Twice in that time it has allowed the government to engage us in a war of aggression we didn’t want. Both times won the government significant short-term political gains. Letting either the red or the blue teams run the country with an over-all majority guarantees that they will wreck your economy in their own interest at least once.

Our system is designed to produce majority governments, but it has evolved to deliver (in Sir Humphrey’s words) an aristocratic system of government occasionally interrupted by elections. This situation is well reflected in the educational backgrounds of our current cabinet. In vote-share terms, the country is more or less a quarter liberal, a third conservative and two-fifths labour. That is the direct result of two long, autocratic, socially authoritarian regimes both of which shot themselves in the foot while scuttling the economy. The people, as my friend Laurie suggests, have mumbled. They have spent two generations trying out elective dictatorship in the 19th Century model, and it would seem that they don’t like it much.

We’re Off…

to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of pub.

After lots of months, more bureaucratic idiocy than you can shake Michael Gove at and two weeks of stress, distress and uncertainty which I hope never to have to repeat, John Q. has bought a pub and is loading the van tomorrow. Then I’m going out.

I may be some time.

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NB: a couple of articles are pre-loaded but I may not get back to deal with comments for a while.

Short Term Thinking I

The economy (and political map) of Britain have changed radically since 1977. This is not a controversial statement. We’ve gotten collectively richer, while in the process metastasizing tumours of disadvantage which will take not years but generations, plural, to heal. We’ve shifted our economy finally and irrevocably from one based on most people working in manufacturing or primary industry to one where better than two thirds of the country work in service, knowledge or other tertiary industries. We have not evolved adequate union models for an era in which increasing numbers of the under-40s are self-employed and multi-skilled but broke and completely disenfranchised by demographic accidents and a broken political system. And we’ve had two, very long, governments in that time, one Tory and one Labour.

Electoral reform

More or less, the offer from both senior parties to the LibDems depends from the same flawed premise. Both parties are prepared to put AV to the country; neither are prepared to do the same with STV. And I believe the reason why is pretty obvious.

It’s about safe seats. AV is the only one of the alternative systems which preserves them intact. Safe seats are graphably the reason for the expenses scandal. Safe seats allow parachuting of candidates, placing too much power in the hands of central committees over local candidates and parties. Safe seats are wholly counter-democratic. And the LibDems have almost none of them, but the other parties have quite a few each.

For voting reform to matter, it must remove safe seats. Only one system does. Neither large party can countenance that easily. 62% of those polled recently support PR. Therefore neither large party can offer a referendum on anything other than AV, which isn’t PR.

For some more interesting analyses, check out Alix Mortimer and MatGB.

Clegg-iscite II

Some real politics has happened in London, nothing like the scale or reach of the G20 demonstrations last year but arising from the same kind of alliance of grass-roots movements; by which I mean Power2010, Make Votes Count, Unlock Democracy, the Electoral Reform Society, Ekklesia, Compass, Hang ’em, Vote for a Change, and Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the New Economics Foundation… According to the Head Research Otter’s on-the-spot reporting, there were somewhere around 2,000 present at the original rally in Trafalgar Square, and that about a thousand of them fitted into Smith Square to invoke Nick Clegg.

And they got him. It was remarkable in British politics to see a spontaneous demonstration of political intent call out a politician to stand on his steps and speak to them. It rather stunned the BBC, whose coverage has a slight scent of the bewildered about it. It seems to have surprised Mr. Clegg, though he was also pretty chuffed.

When I was young and drunken I used to bait people at Speakers Corner. One of them challenged me to take a turn on the soap-box, and I took him up; for a while, I became slightly addicted to the experience, which was invigorating for a fan of the Pythons and Withnail & I who had reasonable reflexes. But Speaker’s Corner is a safety valve; it is a place where the ignored can go to feel heard, without being heard by anyone who matters. The role it once played in providing a public and adverserial agora for the intrepid Foxes and thundering Burkes to sell their ideas in has been transferred to the Internet.

A bit of a theme of my writing since May last year is that Britain hasn’t seen real politics for so long that the denizens of the Westminster bubble and their clattering commentariat have forgotten what it looks like. A more recent theme has been comparison between the progress towards democracy of my adopted nation, and the slow lurch that way currently occurring in the UK. Well here’s installment 3; this is what real politics looks like. Only this is rather more polite than most real politics; though we may have recently fallen into the slough of complacency, we have a lot of practice at this and we do like good manners.

Con

Were there no other reasons to see this election as an open call for a new system, there is the loss of Evan Harris. I was guessing that this outcome would lead to a second election soon. Now that we need to get Dr. Harris back into Parliament, I’m hoping for one.

Shambles

I’m considering shaving my head and getting a pair of antlers tatooed on it.

I thought I was indulging in black humour when I drew comparisons between the progress of Ghana toward democracy, and the current UK election. I really thought it would look funny later. But now I’m hearing about the kind of shit that used to happen under Achaempong. I’m hearing about police breaking through spontaneous protests of the disenfranchised outside polling booths.

The BBC report that hundreds of people in constituencies spread across London, Manchester, Chester, Liverpool, Bolton and Sheffield have been shut out of polling stations after multi-hour queuing. I fully expect to hear of more. I’m hearing about polling stations that ran out of ballots. I’m hearing about spontaneous protests at polling stations being broken by police.

The Electoral Commission have announced that they will be investigating electoral irregularities. 3 seats have returned and they are already saying this! In 1992, three separate sets of observers were in action; UN, some Swiss hired by the government and some Finns I never found out who hired. Everyone and the BBC agreed the elections were fair. One observer said on air, “If Eastern Europe could run elections this clean I’d be out of a job.”

Not if the returning officers of Sheffield Hallam have anything to do with it, mate. What we have here is students (the group most likely to vote LibDem) being separated from ‘residents’ into a separate queue. They were then processed so much more slowly that ‘hundreds’ (BBC) were turned away without being able to vote.

[ Edit 0040: Here is the 140-character saga of the Sheffield Hallam law student Rak Smith. Disenfranchisement in a modern democracy, tweeted live. I would like to congratulate Raksky for presence of mind and good liberal instincts in making a speech to angry riot police. And I would like to add my fury and support to the pleas of those who have been denied their right to vote. ]

This is scandalous. Leaving aside the convenient coincidence that this is Nick Clegg’s own seat; this is a travesty against one of the longest democratic traditions in the world. Be it conspiracy or not, it is most certainly cock-up, and that’s not bloody good enough.

We suspected that a hung parliament would reveal the bankruptcy of this system. There’s no evidence yet to suggest that the seats will accurately reflect the popular vote, so that is still likely. But it didn’t occur to me that we’d see the kind of voting irregularities we saw in elections run by the Bush regime.

I could never vote in Ghana. I campaigned, but couldn’t vote. And I remember what the polling queues looked like. Hundreds of people standing singing in the sunshine, baking and sweating and grinning their ears off. I remember hearing about violence in Gonja territory, and how fast it was dealt with. People were in jail by the end of the day. I predict now that no-one will go to prison for this. If we wouldn’t prosecute them for the Iraq war we won’t prosecute anyone for this.

BBC, in 2010, report that the police have broken picket lines in two places, where enraged voters who had been denied the chance to vote had blocked the ballot box until it carried their electoral rights within its seal.

The system is bankrupt. It cannot be permitted. I’ve heard calls for V masks in Parliament square. I’m inclined to echo them right now.

Right

The Independent are continuing, in this case once more through Johann Hari, to prove themselves unusual in the UK print media. Hari’s article is a needed one; there were, indeed, five years of slightly shoddy, British-Rail-sandwich Labourism before Blair got handed an excuse for a crusade and the rest of his party leapt caroling into the shark pool. The bit of ‘real Labour’ legislation I tend to cite is the New Deal, which although it had problems, did achieve real effects. Yes, it put my friend for seven months into the power of a psychotic barrow-boy who attacked him with a chair during a tantrum. On the other hand, my friend got seven months in work after two years out and has re-built his life successfully since then. Score one for socialist politics.

There is an argument that says the main difference between left and right wing is that the left believes scoring one success matters.

The gap between Labour and the Conservatives is far too small, but a lot of people live and die in that gap. If you say this difference doesn’t matter, you are saying all these people whose lives have been changed since the sun rose over the Royal Festival Hall that morning in May don’t matter to you. You are saying to the call-centre worker paid five times more because of the minimum wage, the gay couple getting a civil partnership, or the old woman who doesn’t have to wait two years to be able to walk again – that difference in your life isn’t worth a cross in a box to me. Wouldn’t that be a betrayal as ugly as New Labour’s? Don’t these people – the beneficiaries of what we all did on May 1st 1997 – deserve more than a defeated and dejected sigh to protect them from the Tories?

*        *        *

Laurie Penny is usually at her best when impassioned and also right. Many of us are. This post is an excellent example; her injucntion to vote to avoid your children growing up through the kind of schools I did, and the kind of hospitals I did, is well received. But there’s another aspect to the reason one should vote that isn’t in the post. It’s a fucking privilege.

Until this election, when asked the most significant domestic political event of my lifetime I would say “Ghana 1992”. I had lived in a military dictatorship all my life. I could remember Ak-47s from the muzzle end by the time I was five. The economy was fucked (mostly due to corruption and stupid policies in the 1970s, partly due to four years of harvest failure). “They” tried to kill the guy in charge 17 times before I hit ten years old, but he was still there. And in 1992, a decade after promising to fix the economy and then hold free elections, he actually did it. Even the BBC thought so. The country certainly did. The referendum on the 4th Republic passed with over 80% of the vote. Rawlings was re-elected in 1996; they wanted to change the constitution so he could stand a third time but he refused, stepped down, and left the world stage.

The children I grew up with had never hoped for control of their government but they got it. The social and political atmosphere in the villages and on the football fields of northern Ghana was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Jerry Rawlings, the Big Man, JJ himself had got his wealthy ass and his trademark sunglasses into a Land Rover for seven months. He’d driven it round the northern villages, standing in the sun and talking to chiefs and women and people in the markets. By day twelve, his message was simple. Elect me; I’ll fix the damn roads, they’re dreadful, why did none of us know? Because we stayed in the south where the money is. All of my opponents are still there. Elect me; I will build the roads that can bring that money north.

And he did fix the roads, too. And built a telephony system that kinda works. And got the power grid out into the countryside, and …

Because of the greater geo-political and economic significance of the United Kingdom, its slow lurch towards democracy must supercede my smaller and earlier experiences. But I would like to say this to those who have watched and read and talked and still don’t think they’ll bother. We in the West look down on the illiterate, because we have a culture whose success is based on literature. We look down on those who farm their own food on their own land as ‘subsistence’ farmers. But in that illiterate, hard-working, simple tribal village, there wasn’t anyone over 16 who didn’t see the chance to elect the government without getting beaten up as a gift from heaven to every free soul in their nation. No-one failed to be enthused; no-one stayed at home. At church, the people drummed and danced, and held up their ink-stained thumbs and chanted thanks to God for new freedoms. The pastor wasn’t even there, they were just encouraging those still queuing to vote.

Please, vote! Please help me believe that the peoples of the oldest modern state can still see beyond their complacence and become full citizens again.

Please: vote.

Scotsman is grumpy

…when heckled by annoying woman. Film at fucking eleven. Seriously, as of this Gillian Duffy thing? I’m beginning to wonder about this election becoming far too American. Neither she nor the Prime Minister’s brief moment of temper are worth five minutes on News24, let alone all bloody day.

Edit 15:57 In fact, how cynical do we want to be? For the first time in two weeks, no-one is talking about Nick Clegg…

JQP in Amusement

Ah, things are settling back to normal. I disagree with Iain Dale again. It’s a relief to see him return to his natural home among the right-wing FUD-merchants.