Wouldn't It Be Scarier?

This blog is moving

2009-10-02T11:27:00.000+01:00

If you link to my blog, or you have it in a feedreader or a bookmark or anything else, please note, Wouldn't It Be Scarier? is moving to the greener grass of the following address:

http://scarier.wordpress.com/

I also promise that I will start writing some more stuff, so that it's worth you bothering to take note of this.

Conference Timetable

2009-09-18T21:50:00.000+01:00

Well now, inspired by Jennie, I thought I'd post my (insanely ambitious, probably to be completely abandoned when I get there) conference schedule for all your delectation.

Hopefully you can see my Google Calendar above this line. You'll (obviously) need to look at the dates of conference to see what I'm on about.

Anyway, see any of you who are at any of those there.

Excitement

2009-08-29T00:07:00.000+01:00

Look! My name on a scientific paper. Woop!

That is all.

Telephone Fundraising and Sally Morgan

2009-07-10T01:36:00.000+01:00

The Western Morning News reports that Sally Morgan, PPC for Central Devon, sent off an angry email to Cowley Street after she received a fundraising call from the party. She is quoted as writing "Please do not employ apparatchiks to telephone me at home to tell me how well the party did in the local elections only days after I and many of my colleagues lost our seats."

She has, incidentally, since described this as "me blowing off steam to somebody in the party", adding "I am still a parliamentary candidate. I have no argument with the party", so it's probably not worth blowing this out of proportion, although it does raise the question of who passed the email to the local press if she didn't.

What I do think it's worth commenting on is phone fundraising more generally, since I worked for a time recently for a company who do precisely this kind of work for charities (and, occasionally, the Labour party, although I was never faced with the problem of being asked to work on any campaigns for them). NB: I have never fundraised for the Lib Dems, and to the best of my knowledge, the company I worked for never has done.

In my time, I called on campaigns for several well known charities, often on upgrade campaigns. Frequently, as you might expect, I met the kind of irritable response which Sally Morgan has given here. "Why don't you call people who don't already give their time and effort", "Why are you spending my money pestering me for more", threats to cancel altogether, etc. Of course, these are all pretty good reasons to refuse, and very rarely could people be talked round.

So why do organisations bother?

Basically, because it's still a pretty cost effective way of fundraising. I'm sure any members of the party (or of anything funded by its members, for that matter) will be familiar with mailings asking for donations, and with the ease of throwing them in the recycling with barely a second thought. Even cold calling, the returns on are pretty lean pickings. If you carefully select the numbers you call according to any data you might have to suggest that people will be better disposed to you than average people, then you might expect to get about 6% of them to say yes, if you work really pretty hard at it, and don't take no for an answer. If you call your existing supporters, about 40% of them will say yes. It's still hard work, and yes, half the people you talk to will give you a hard time for calling them, but at least the other 50% are nice.

Most charities and other fundraising organisations have rules forbidding them to spend money on strategies that they expect to give them a return of less than ~£3 or £4 for every £1 spent (otherwise, their donors would probably rather they spent the money on the stated aims of the organisation). Bumping up subscriptions from people they already have on board is a crucial part of this, especially since their projections of whether it's worth spending the money to get new donors on board is often based on an assumption that they may well be able to get the person in question to increase after a couple of years. The reasons most charities set a minimum level for Direct Debits of £2 a month is that much less than that and it's barely worth the admin cost of processing it in the first place.

Now, Sally complains that she has been called up and told that the Lib Dems are well placed for the next election, when she personally has just lost her council seat. Leaving the disentangling of the national fortunes of the Lib Dems from Sally's own position as an exercise for the reader, how would she rather the party fundraised? Call people up and tell them "We're going down the shitter, it's all going to buggery, could we have more money?" Of course the party is going to be upbeat in its attempts to fundraise, because that's what works.

And yes, sometimes campaign messages jar with people's own individual experiences. I came across plenty of that. It's easy, when you've got a script in front of you, or have been trained to get people talking about their involvement in the organisation you're calling for, to find yourself stumbling into all sorts of areas that, in retrospect, you'd probably rather you hadn't brought up. Try it with a few donors to cancer charities, for instance, and you'll see what I mean. The problem is, it's important to the chances of people donating (more) to be positive about what their money can achieve, even if their own personal experience hasn't borne that out (and statistically, there will always be such people).

If I'm sounding very positive about this way of fundraising, then I probably ought to mention that after a few weeks working for this company, I was so depressed one Monday morning by the prospect of another week ahead of me that I quit my job that day. This is an enormously draining job to do, and the centre in London which I worked in was typical in having what my employers called "a high caller attrition rate", with weekly training sessions for the next batch of replacements. In the end (and quite quickly, actually), the consolation of totting up how much money I had raised for the charity that day stopped being enough.

I don't especially like this way of fundraising, I particularly don't like the emotional blackmail that is often a part of it, and I wish it didn't work. But at the same time, I would like to congratulate Sally Morgan for doing the right thing here, and blowing off her steam by putting her objections in writing and sending them to the person in charge, not by verbally beating up on the person at the other end of the phone (or at least, I hope she didn't). Quite often, people would deliver the sort of tirade Sally writes in her letter to me personally, for the offense of calling a number I had been supplied by someone else.

So next time you receive a call from a fundraiser and the answer is "no" (and do always give serious consideration to your answer), politely tell them "no" (if you have the time, brighten up their day by having a nice chat to them, and tell them "no" three times, which is how many times they have been told to ask you unless you hang up or tell them your mother died yesterday), and ask for your number to be taken off the database if you don't want to be called ever again. Be nice, wish them luck, and then, if you object to the call, write a really stinking letter to the head of fundraising for that organisation. It will do considerably more good than having a rant at the person on the phone, who, if they bothered to report your irritation to their superiors, would only be replaced by someone else.

Hat tip to Lobbydog, via Guido.

ps. I was amused by the following worldly-wise comment of one "Rob's Uncle" on Lobbydog's blog:

It is a well recognised weakness of the Lib Dem phone fund raising effort that the phoners know nothing about the activism, etc,. of those whom they ring.

Frankly, it's hardly unusual not to know much about the people you are calling on telephone fundraising calls, even for upgrade campaigns. I considered myself pretty lucky if I had any information at all about the person I was calling in front of me; occasionally there was a date when they started donating. Yes, this is something the party could improve, but it's hardly proof of their great deficiency in this regard. Often, the person calling you will not be directly from the organisation in question, but working for a company who specialise in this kind of work, like I was. Even when I was supplied with data, it could often be a few months since the database was sent to my employers, and the information was therefore not completely reliable. The caller who called Sally Morgan, even if they had information about her in front of them, almost certainly didn't know she had lost her seat.

Of course, you could argue that the people who call councillors maybe ought to be Cowley Street apparatchiks, but the problem then is, they aren't as experienced and well trained at phone fundraising as someone who specialises in it. Most of the callers I worked with who had been doing their job for more than a few months were bloody good at it. What tended to make them good at it was being able to hold two contradictory stances at the same time: caring deeply enough about what they were doing to put that across on the phone, and being indifferent enough not to let it get to you that many people you spoke to were just unpleasant in return.

What is the Party Line on AV?

2009-06-09T20:27:00.000+01:00

I've just watched Danny Alexander on BBC News, clearly stonewalling because he didn't have a clear yes or no to give to the question of whether we would be in favour of AV (in the absence of STV, obviously). If any more of our representatives are on news programmes tonight, can the party please provide them with a yes or a no on this question? I really almost don't care what the answer is, but we look absolutely pathetic if we don't know what we are thinking on one of our hobby horse subjects.

How Shropshire Voted... And What It Got

2009-06-07T21:38:00.003+01:00

Well, as I sit here awaiting the trickle of Euro election results, I've been doing a spot of number crunching for my local council in Shropshire, a newly created unitary. You can see the results in the chart below. In light of the reputation of Lib Dem bar charts, I thought I'd go with a pie chart. On the outside, you can see the votes cast, and on the inside, you can see the makeup of the council that those votes produced.

As you can see, the wonders of FPTP have struck again. Thank goodness FPTP produces strong, decisive governments. I would hate to think of a party who attracted under 50% of the vote being rewarded with anything other than a stranglehold over the council.

I will console myself with the knowledge that in Shrewsbury & Atcham, we comfortably pushed Labour into third place, with Labour seeing their share of the vote going down by over 14%. In 2005, the county council elections saw Labour in second place, so this could well be an important development for Shrewsbury. In the rest of Shropshire, the Lib Dem vote is more than three times the Labour vote.

Hopefully, this means that, in four years time, if the Tory administration is unpopular, we will be the natural anti-incumbent vote in much of the county.

Worst Canvassing Experience Meme

2009-06-03T21:40:00.000+01:00

Stephen Tall has tagged me in this week's LDV Weekend Meme, about canvassing experiences. Here goes:

Most Angry

I think that probably has to go to the woman I delivered a leaflet to in Thame, as part of the Henley by-election precipitated by Boris Johnson's quitting as an MP. It doesn't technically count as canvassing, but it's easily the angriest reaction I've had: Scarcely had I withdrawn my hand from the letterbox on the front door, when I heard an incensed, and nigh on incomprehensible, scream to the effect that they did not appreciate my being in their vicinity, swiftly followed by something about the size and weight of a boot being flung at the door from inside. I flinched slightly, and looked around for any clue as to what I might have done to upset this person, but answer came there none. I moved swiftly on, slightly comforted by the sympathetic look from the next door neighbour.

Most Bemusing

The ones who say, in the wake of the expenses scandal, that they aren't voting, seeming to think this is going to do something to clean up Westminster. I could ask them to talk me through how not bothering to distinguish between good and bad politicians is going to make any of the good ones try harder to clean up the system. I could ask them how they think a crisis of politicians being out of touch with the voters is helped by said voters not even trying to be heard. I could ask them whether they think the people who fought in the civil war, or were part of the suffragette movement, sat around whingeing that they didn't feel "engaged" and declaring that they were simply going to sit at home and sulk until such time as they got what they wanted. But of course, it's not really worth it, and I have to be civil and polite to them. Ultimately, I usually just come away feeling that I am simply on a different planet to these people.

Most Depressing

A tie. The obvious answer would be the guy we spoke to a week or two ago, who sounded for all the world like a talking BNP leaflet. I was faintly amused when, mid rant about bending over backwards for Islam / it's a Christian country / etc, my colleague asked said gent whether in fact he went to Church. The answer, you will all be shocked to discover, was no, but he had "Christian views". No, I don't know what that means, either.

But I think probably, I have found the most depressing thing to be those who don't vote; who say, without a hint of embarrasment or apology, that they "aren't interested in politics", who seem to see nothing wrong with abdicating their responsibility as citizens to take even the vaguest interest, as Mark points out, for a couple of hours every couple of years. The imperative to be generally polite to people has been most tested, I would say, in the face of such feckless eejits. I really would rather they told me they were voting Tory, or whatever.

Take Back Power

2009-05-28T13:37:00.000+01:00

Nick Clegg has today launched a rather exciting campaign, Take Back Power. I really do hope it takes off; it frankly pisses all over David Cameron's pledge to "give serious consideration to" a few half-measures. Nick's plan includes:

1. Commitment to accept Kelly expenses reform in full
2. Recall power for MPs suspended for misconduct
3. House of Lords reform
4. Party funding reform
5. Fixed term Parliaments
6. Enabling legislation for a referendum on AV+
7. Changes to House of Commons procedure to reduce executive power

You can sign the petition to support the campaign here.

OK, so I have my reservations about point 6, but compared to the other two party plans, this is by far and away the best chance to clean up our discredited system. Forget trying to use your vote in the european elections to register your anger with Westminster. Get involved with a campaign directly about the issue at hand. It might not be as immediately satisfying, but it'll get more done.

Tory Smears On PR

2009-05-26T22:39:00.001+01:00

...or, Why We Have To Talk Specifics.

A few people, eg. Costigan Quist, Mark Thomson and Neil Stockley, have been arguing for a consensual, compromising stance, most likely involving accepting the Jenkins Commission suggestion of AV+ instead of our preferred solution of STV. Jennie Rigg and Alex Foster offer a more divisive approach, and I would like to add my voice to theirs. Let me tell you why.

It has become obvious why being vague about what we are supporting will not work over the last week. The Tories, opposed as they are to the principle that every person's vote should count for something, have been lining up to smear the movement that has been picking up momentum over the last week. There are three specific lines that I would like to respond to.

1. PR takes power away from people and vests it in party hierarchies.

A lie.

This is an accusation which is quite justly levelled at a certain subset of PR systems: closed party list systems, such as the one that is used for the Euro elections in the UK. The parties choose the order of the list, and the top candidate is virtually guaranteed to be elected, as long as they're standing for a vaguely well supported party. Or, to put it another way, a safe seat! One that is even more in the gift of party patronage than safe seats at the moment! Similarly, since AV+ requires there to be top-up lists, the same problem applies to Alan Johnson's favoured solution. Not only that, but AV+ doesn't even get rid of safe seats on a constituency level. As Jennie quite rightly points out, safe seats are a pretty key feature of what we want to get rid of. It is the link from the immediate crisis to this specific reform, made off the back of Mark's excellent analysis (with a little help from yours truly).

STV, on the other hand, puts as much power into the hands of the people as possible. In effect, it rolls the Tories' proposed open primaries and the general election into one, and throws in proportionality as a bit of a bonus. David Cameron is being straight-forwardly deceptive in making the argument he made today. He knows he is, he knows what we favour (or at least, he ought to), and, as Millennium argues, if this electoral reform thing gets rolling, then he would be an absolute hypocrite not to get on board with any Lib Dem efforts to favour STV, not AV+.

2. The Lib Dems just want PR because they want to always be in government.

A ridiculous line, and one which pre-supposes a parliament which looks more or less like the one we have now after a reform designed specifically to ensure that it does not. In making this claim, the Tories (or anyone else) are assuming that under the new system, the Lib Dems are still the only other main party in the Commons after the Tories and Labour. Why? It seems to me pretty likely that we could see, at the very least, UKIP and Green MPs under most systems of PR, certainly including the ones that we favour. Assuming Scotland remained part of the UK, you'd also likely have a sizeable nationalist contingent. Plenty of people to form a coalition with, even if the few BNP members elected were (rightly) so toxic that nobody wanted to form a coalition of any sort with them.

Ironically, the one system likely to produce the outcome being suggested by this talking point is the one supported by Alan Johnson, AV+. As Lewis Baston noted in a report on AV (pdf) for the Electoral Reform Society,
...life under AV is fairly comfortable for Liberal Democrats. All their incumbent MPs are likely to find their seats safer than under FPTP, and change to proportionality would destabilise this comfortable position. AV also suits Lib Dem campaigning techniques quite well, and the party could reasonably look forward to faster electoral progress than under FPTP in its target constituencies because acquiring second preferences is easier than acquiring tactical votes.
It's easy enough to see how this works: for the most part, it's reasonable to assume that both Tory and Labour voters would put the Lib Dems preferentially higher than Labour or the Tories, respectively. In even vaguely close seats, this would give us a real advantage. It also favours centre parties, and does very little to represent smaller, more niche parties like the Greens or UKIP. If AV (or even AV+) was the system we were advocating, then there would be a lot of truth in the criticism that the Lib Dems just wanted to be in power all the time. As Baston remarked,
It would be understandable if the party settled for AV for a – perhaps lengthy – ‘transitional period’ or ‘national conversation’ rather than move quickly into a more thoroughgoing electoral reform.
It would indeed, and it is to the party's credit that it has continued to favour STV and not AV, when, as Jennie mentioned,
thanks to Chris Rennard, our party is actually best geared up to fighting FPTP elections, and would likely LOSE seats if STV came in.
To see this point, just imagine how many of our campaigning techniques (eg. bar charts) would translate to a proper proportional system like STV. But anyway, the main point is, we should not be the only significant presence after the main two parties under STV (and that's assuming that none of the existing main parties undergo splits or rapid transformations under the new system, which is a game for another time..).

3. PR results in chaos and deals made in smoke-filled rooms.

OK, this one is a bit more difficult, because basically it's true, coalitions must be formed under PR systems, more or less whatever you do. You can still give a government a solid mandate, by having an election for the Prime Minister separately, and tasking them with forming a government, but yes, there will either be a search for coalition partners, or a minority government will have to reach across the aisle for support on individual planks of its programme.

But look at it this way. Politics, the art of the possible, is about coalitions of interests. Always has been, always will be. New Labour is not a natural, cohesive grouping of people; died in the wool trade unionists would rather not be in a party with Peter Mandelson if they could help it. Nor, for that matter, would some of the more foaming eurosceptic types in the Tory party want to be in a party with Ken Clarke. Sometimes, the economic/social liberal distinction rears its head in our own fair party. The point is, FPTP doesn't eliminate coalitions, not really; it just makes people form coalitions before running for election, not after. The political parties are the coalitions, and often the wheelings and dealings are much more murky than they might be under PR. The oft-quoted example is the scrap between Blairites and Brownites which characterised much of the current Labour government's term. How open and transparent was the process which led to most of the policy ennacted over the last ten years?

Under PR, the negotiations are much more open, in that at least we know what each party wants, the news can report on the negotiations (most of the information would likely be leaked from somewhere), and we can see what comes out the other end and draw our own conclusions about what went on. If we don't like the result, crucially, we can vote next time to change the balance of power within that coalition, without kicking that coalition out of power. Under the coalition that was New Labour, we had no such option. STV, uniquely, even lets you do this within parties, by favouring, say, proper Old Labour types over Blue Labour candidates. Under FPTP, change in parties often takes a very long time, and its direction is completely uncontrollable by the electorate.

So, three lazy lines against PR, and three responses. But what do we notice about each of the responses? Crucially, in order to defend the principle of electoral reform from the self-interested, complacent opposition of the Tories, we are going to have to be specific about which system we are talking about. And if we don't speak up for STV now, we are going to be lumbered with a system which is much more open to criticism from those who oppose any form of PR.

It's all very well saying the Tories have nothing to do with it, but at some point, if we want this to go forward, we are going to have to make an argument to the people and win a referendum on the matter. The Labour grassroots don't much care for electoral reform, so campaigning on the ground for reform is going to fall largely to us. It is perfectly reasonable to throw everything we can at making sure we can fight on our own terms, for the system we actually believe in.

The New Mood For Change

2009-05-21T22:48:00.002+01:00

Alix wants us all to have a mass debate about reform.

Oh, go on then. Here's my starter for ten.

As the Guardian noted recently, Rahm Emmanuel's view that one shouldn't waste a good crisis is every bit as applicable to our current political crisis as it was to the credit crunch. But even for a crisis as big as the one in which we find ourselves, there is too much possible reform being touted to sensibly address it all. It is going to be necessary to pick and choose our immediate priorities.

My thinking on this subject starts with this thought: I wonder whether this might be a "bottoming out" of cynicism in politics. Let's not kid ourselves, this isn't a storm that has blown in from nowhere, wrecking once-sound edifices in one fell swoop. The public has been fed up with politics for some time now, and in particular, the growing sense that politicians are "all the same" has been increasingly poisonous to people's will to engage. It needn't be its current incarnation, "all the same, just in it for the money", it has also been "all the same, hardly a policy difference between them", "all the same, promise everything, deliver nothing" and "all the same, it's all spin and lies". This crisis, I suspect, has been so quickly seized upon as the time to clean up politics more widely because it happened at about the right time. The downward trajectory of public faith in politics has been on such a prolonged downward trend that, had it continued much further, the system would have become completely untenable. People sense that - and by that, I mean political people who think about these things.

If we are to make appropriate use of the reform momentum, any reforms must not stifle the appetite for further reforms. They should be things that have an obvious benefit, and are perceptible to the public in as short a time as possible. If people sense that all that is happening is technocratic faffing, it will not have the desired effect of nurturing any green shoots of optimism that might have appeared.

For a start, what the public wants, anecdotally and from polling data, is for more heads to roll. Every party should be quite trigger happy with the deselection process before the next election, and appropriate investigations should take place into those cases which look to have been fraudulent. If other reforms feel like a substitute for these actions, they will only make people more cynical. As has been noted elsewhere, it's quite difficult for the Lib Dems to lead on this, because none of our MPs have done anything heinous enough to warrant the kind of synthetic fury with which David Cameron has greeted revelations of moat cleaning and duck islands. Nonetheless, some movement has been welcome; Lord Rennard's announcement today is timely, and it'd probably help if a few MPs stood down at the next election.

But assuming we manage to get past this first, most important, most basic (and lets face it, least interesting) first step, what next? The sense that things are not simply going to carry on as normal will only be challenged by something that people care about. Secondary legislation, for instance, is all very well, but if the reform is to something you have to explain what it is first, it's not going to get anyone all that excited.

Of course, the obvious thing to reform is the interface between the political system and the public: voting. It might not surprise anyone to hear a Lib Dem call for electoral reform, but it really is the most obvious reform here. We have been banging on about this for so long, precisely because it is one of the most effective things we can do to hand power back to people, which is exactly what they want. The Lib Dem preferred solution is STV in multi-member constituencies, for well rehearsed reasons that I won't go over in tedious detail here.

(Incidentally, while we're at it: we should under no circumstances change to any kind of messy, bodge job like the Jenkins Report-recommended AV+ system. It would only give reform a bad name, and stop any recovery in participation in the democratic process in its tracks.)

The Conservatives, so far, have advanced open primaries as a way to re-invigorate democracy. Well, OK, I can see how someone could have watched the US elections and decided that some primaries would make life exciting, but can we really see it being quite as interesting when it's the contest for Labour candidate for Colchester? Having said that, if a move to STV is as effective as I hope it would be in getting people more involved, then I might just imagine open primaries attracting enough attention to be worth doing for constituencies that are rather bigger than those we have at the moment. That, though, would be a secondary reform. STV would remove safe seats (so long as parties cannot deliberately limit the number of people who can stand for them in a given constituency), and with it the sense that a vote can be "wasted".

The other thing which would force the political class to engage with the public more is reform of political party funding. Personally, I'm in favour of state funding of political parties, for the simple reason that it removes the issue of people with more money to spare having more influence. I'm not dogmatic about that, and other solutions might help. Limits on donations would be a start.

An elected House of Lords is, of course, right, but somehow it doesn't seem like the biggest priority right now. Yes, there've been scandals about peers taking cash for ammendments, but there already are rules against that, and they've suffered the consequences. The Lords is, frankly, not the biggest problem we have with our legislature at the moment.

Which brings me to the last thing: the divide between parliament and the executive. Personally, I'd quite like an executive who aren't necessarily drawn from the legislature (like the USA), but in the absence of that, could we just have an STV election for Prime Minister, with the leader of each party standing? That would remove some of the downside to PR systems that people always bang on about - the PM would have a strong mandate to lead, but they wouldn't necessarily have an overall majority in parliament.

As I believe Simon Jenkins observed some time ago now, one of the biggest problems we have in the UK is that we get very worked up when we're arguing about PR vs FPTP, because some people want a proportional legislature, and some people want a strong, decisive executive. Essentially, we're talking at cross purposes. A single party executive and a proportional legislature would allow for both, albeit that the executive would have to build sufficient support for its legislation (no bad thing).

So, that's more or less my programme of reforms:

1. In the immediate term, some heads must roll after due process.
2. We should move to multi-member constituency STV after a referendum at the next election. Failing that, the Tories' open primaries plan wouldn't be a terrible idea.
3. Political party funding should be reformed.
4. The business of the first parliament elected under STV should include wider constitutional reform, including what becomes of the Lords, and thoughts about reforms to the relationship between parliament and the executive. While they're at it, they might as well write it all down, too.

Any questions?

Open Primaries: An Alternative Answer?

2009-05-19T14:03:00.000+01:00

Looking at the Tory talking heads on the news this morning, it appears that, in an attempt to head off electoral reform at the pass, their response to the public wanting a way to chuck out their MP at the ballot box is.... open primaries, USA-style.

Well, it'd be a start. The difference between that and multi-member STV, of course, is that is retains the idea of a party safe seat, but it does indeed allow the public to chuck out one particular person. It's not, actually, as bad an idea as AV+, which I think would just give electoral reform in general a bad name. But it's not great. If this gained a bit of momentum, though, and turned into a wholesale debate, along party lines (Labour: AV+, Tory: Open Primaries, LibDems: Multi Member STV), then obviously we'd be in the right, but if it came down to it, we should probably support the Tories over Labour (assuming the policies I posit above, of course).

Explaining Michael Martin's Exit

2009-05-19T13:44:00.002+01:00

Nick Clegg can feel today that he has played an important part in a real move forward for the House of Commons, with the departure of Michael Martin now forthcoming. However, listening to comments from the public on today's Daily Politics and yesterday's Five Live Drive, it's also clear to me that the public doesn't share the view of many in the commons that this is an important step.

To those who follow politics, the case against Michael Martin requires no explanation. But I suspect that in their rush to do something to clean up the system, many of our politicians have allowed themselves to forget that most members of the public don't really know what Martin has done, and if nobody makes the case to them, it would be very easy for them to conclude that Martin is a scapegoat, as his apologists have been claiming.

The sense that the Speaker is a figurehead, and therefore ultimately responsible, is the most immediately obvious reason for his removal, but it's the wrong one. It's not a general principle that has led to his downfall, it is a very specific record of opposition to opening up the Commons to scrutiny. No, Michael Martin doesn't bare complete responsibility for this, we in the Lib Dems ought to ask questions of our own representative on the Members Estimate Committee, and those MPs from the Labour and Tory parties who voted down reforms should reflect on their own role in all of this.

But that doesn't mean the Speaker hasn't shown himself, in the stances he has taken protecting MPs from too much scrutiny, and being primarily concerned with maintaining their privacy rather than in opening up Parliament, to be, as Nick Clegg put it at the weekend, a "dogged defender of the status quo". Just ask any of those MPs who have been trying to get more of these details out in the open, like Norman Baker, how helpful Michael Martin has been. The Speaker made his attitudes clear in his outburst to Kate Hoey and Norman Baker a few days ago. Anyone with much political sense who watched that should be in no doubt that the Speaker is no scapegoat.

What needs to happen now, though, if the tide is not to turn against Nick Clegg, is that firstly we must continue to make and defend the case against Michael Martin, and not give way to the temptation to leave him alone now he's going. Those who want to paint us as political opportunists won't stop pushing their scapegoat line, so we shouldn't either. Secondly, we need to be visibly moving forward in cleaning up other aspects of this problem, perhaps deselecting Ming Campbell and Richard Younger Ross (that's up to their local parties, of course). I wonder what the outcome of the Federal Exec meeting was, after the mutterings about Chris Rennard....

Beware Phantom Reformers

2009-05-19T01:01:00.000+01:00

Polly Toynbee (no, wait, keep reading!) wrote a mostly-right article yesterday contributing to the effort to examine the link between the electoral system and the sense of entitlement and corruption that has been revealed at Westminster in the last two weeks. She quotes, towards the end of it, the evidence which Mark has noted of a relationship between an MP appearing in the Telegraph for their misdemeanors and their having a larger than average majority (ie. a safer seat). Incidentally, I have done some number crunching for Mark, which he writes up here.

One thing bothers me about Polly's article, though. She writes:

Make Votes Count, the Electoral Reform Society, Compass, Unlock Democracy and an array of reformers of many kinds are now determined add a referendum to the next election. If not now, the Conservatives will certainly never offer one. Alan Johnson came out again yesterday for PR – reviving Roy Jenkins's electoral plan that Blair shelved. Other Labour voices are breaking out. This will be the real test of each MP's sincerity: will they clean up politics, or just brush the surface mud off the present system with a lick and a promise?

The Alan Johnson quote she refers to, by the way, comes from the Independent, where yesterday he said:

I believe that we need to overhaul the political system and that we should complete unfinished business by discussing again the Jenkins review and consulting the British people on proportional representation, which gives greater power to the electorate.

Now, lets just stop and think about this for a moment. If what Polly, Mark and I are suggesting is that, to quote Polly,

Seats where parties can run a donkey in a red or blue rosette breed complacency and tempt corruption. Nefarious practices thrive in any dark corners of politics unchecked by scrutiny or competition. Time for a constitutional revolution.

... then how does the Jenkins Report help us with this? The system it suggests, AV+, is, I would suggest, every bit as likely to produce safe seats. I'm not the only person to think so, either. It is widely thought to be one of the disadvantages of AV+ in comparison to STV; indeed, it seems likely that this is one of the reasons Jenkins suggested it in the first place - getting MPs to vote for STV would have been like getting turkeys to vote for Christmas.

So a wider movement towards electoral reform is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but can we keep a wary eye on anyone who suggests reviving the Jenkins report is a solution to this current crisis. It isn't. Safe seats must go, as Polly so rightly suggests. I hope, then, that she would argue against AV+ every bit as eloquently as she does against FPTP.

Question for Daniel Kawczynski MP

2009-05-15T21:26:00.000+01:00

Daniel Kawczynski, my MP in Shrewsbury & Atcham, has posted this rather self-righteous video on the Telegraph's Right to Reply section.

Not for him the grubby business of the London property market, oh no. It's hotel stays all the way for Daniel. Not just any hotel stays, mind you, but specially negotiated-down hotel stays.

Except, here, elsewhere on the Telegraph's site, we read that fellow Tory backbencher Stephen Crabb flipped his home so that his primary residence was... half of a flat he shared with Daniel Kawczynski!

The MP then designated a room in another flat, rented by Daniel Kawczynski, a fellow Tory backbencher, as his main home.

How odd.

Daniel, why do the Telegraph think you had a flat until (at least) pretty recently, when we all know you're so keen on thrifty hotels?

Telegraph Expenses Story: Odd Priorities?

2009-05-12T23:09:00.001+01:00

So, the Lib Dem day of reckoning is here, and nobody seems quite sure how to react. Jeremy Paxman has just delivered himself of the opinion that some of it is "pretty small beer", Alix isn't happy, Mark Littlewood thinks it's all going to be OK, and we await Nick's reaction.

What strikes me about the Telegraph story, though, is that they lead on Andrew George's daughter using his flat, when they claim to have accusations to make against Nick Clegg, surely the highest profile target. Tucked a few paragraphs into the article is the following:

Nick Clegg, the party leader, claimed the maximum possible on his second home allowance and exceeded his budget by more than £100 at the same time as he was calling for the reform of the system. He has now promised to repay a phone bill that included calls to Colombia and Vietnam.

OK, that sounds embarrassing. So why wasn't it the lead story? Something tells me that if the Telegraph had lead on this and therefore had to explain the details of these accusations in more detail, they wouldn't quite add up to what they're suggesting. I just don't see why else they wouldn't have lead with this.

I mean, come on, I've hardly even heard of Andrew George, and I'm a politics geek and party member. Why lead on this man's expenses, unless you haven't really found anything very exciting elsewhere?

PMQs: Does Brown Have A Point?

2009-05-06T19:33:00.000+01:00

Watching PMQs today, you would have had to be almost comatose not to have picked up on Gordon Brown's main point of rebuttal against the Tories: that they weren't talking about the issues. Of course, it's a convenient way for him not to answer awkward questions about his own leadership, but it has to be said, the man has a point. PMQs today had what seemed like more than its fair share of throughly pathetic, Westminster-village questions.

The Tory questions today included (and I paraphrase, here, but you get the idea):

Cameron: You're shit, and you know you are.
Bullying in the Workplace! Arf!
Look, an online petition for you to resign!
How are you doing on the whole setting out your vision thing?
Will Hazel Blears's article be dealt with in "the usual way"? Titter.

But it certainly wasn't all coming from the Tories. Labour MPs are often to be found offering fuckwittedly craven softballs to the leader, on the glorious achievements of Her Majesty's Government. Today's included:

Rother Valley's unemployment is not yet as bad as it was in 1997. So no worries, keep up the good work!
Tell me all about your plans to exclude tips from the minimum wage.
Let me tell you about my local football team, Brighton & Hove. They wunned at the weekend, you know...
Swindon borough council is run by evil Tories. Would you like to join me in denouncing them?
Please can you confirm that the £300m available for higher education building projects might include the plan in Blackpool to build, well, a higher education building? Just to clarify.
Please will you give a meaningless, open ended commitment to do whatever you can to save jobs at General Motors factories?
Please agree with me when I say that the government is brilliant, and creating 1000 jobs in Gloucester docks.
Would you care to join me in attacking the Tories, who might cut police in Greater Manchester. ps. We're building some new stuff in Bury, wooo!

There were, to be fair, some non-pathetic questions from the two biggest parties. From the Tories, we had:

Will the Gurkhas vote be binding?
Compensating the fund for Christie hospital for losses in Icelandic banks.

And Labour MPs offered:

Will you secure a report to the house on the government's actions to tackle child trafficking?
Will you meet with me to discuss illegal gangmasters in the construction industry?
What's going on with the trouble at Stafford hospital?

And then we have today's Lib Dem questions. Nick Clegg tackled Gordon on his big speech about children and education, in a similar manner to Cameron, only Nick had a point about an actual thing. Here's the run-down of our questions:

Clegg: Education and young people.
Low returns on savings offered by bailed out banks.

That was it for us. Today also saw the DUP doing some special pleading for Northern Ireland, and Plaid Cymru asking about Trident.

So after all that, what conclusions can we draw? Which parties have made a good use of the opportunities that PMQs present? Here's a little summary:

Labour: 11 questions, ~3 of them with much substance to them.
Conservatives: 12 questions (6 from Cameron), 2 of them with much substance to them.
Lib Dem: 3 questions (2 from Clegg), 3 of them with much substance to them.

That's a success rate of

Lab: 27%
Con: 17%
Lib: 100%

I know the Lib Dems have an easy time under this kind of metric, because we don't really have the number of questions to piss some of them away taking the piss. But really, can we not expect any better than that from the other parties? If Gordon Brown is serious about wanting better questions from the Tories, he could start by planting some slightly less pathetic questions for himself from his own side.

A Good Day for Democracy: Government Loses Gurkha Vote

2009-04-29T17:31:00.000+01:00

Today's big political news has just broken - that the government has been defeated in the vote for the first of two Lib Dem motions, which make up our opposition day debate. The motion called for an equal right of residence to be offered to all Gurkhas, rather than the unfair cut-off for those whose service ended pre-1997 which the government was doing all it could to preserve. I should firstly say a big congratulations to Chris Huhne, who opened the debate powerfully, and fended off a number of pathetically twatty interventions from the Labour benches with ease.

What is amazing about this is not the vote itself, so much as the fact that the government allowed itself to lose. Governments really don't like to lose votes. Even on harmless things like David Heath's Private Members' Bill on Fuel Poverty, they would rather defeat good ideas, and then implement them later, perhaps in watered down form, as part of a wider piece of legislation. It completely undermines the way parliament and our democracy is supposed to work, but there you are.

So it was that before the debate, on the Daily Politics PMQs coverage, Nick Robinson sagely told us that it wasn't a government defeat we should be watching for, but how much the government had to give away in order to keep its backbenchers on side. Look out, he advised us, for little slips of paper being passed to the minister towards the end of the debate if the whips don't think they can win the vote as things stand, thus prompting further concessions.

As it happens, though, the Labour party is in such a state of complete incompetence/powerlessness that its whips clearly weren't able to guage support sufficiently accurately. Perhaps they simply don't have enough leverage over backbenchers who all expect to be out of a job soon anyway. In any case, the government, in not announcing a U-turn or something, has allowed itself to be humiliated. Not only that, but on an issue that has attracted an awful lot of public anger; Andrew Neil and Anita Anand said on today's Daily Politics that they'd never seen such a large and unanimous email response on a subject before.

The other notable thing about this is the photo opportunity that it produced outside the House of Commons, where protesters were making their own opinions on the subject clear this afternoon. There, sandwiching Joanna Lumley, admittedly, were Nick Clegg and David Cameron, side by side. Some will inevitably read a lot, probably too much, into the body language of the two, and whether they looked to be getting on well. Personally, I think they were both genuinely happy to see the typical workings of parliament, where the government simply stifles the ability of MPs to act as the voice of the nation on such straightforward issues as this, subverted for once.

How To Really Screw Up A Child

2009-04-28T18:11:00.001+01:00

Today's Guardian reports that...

The plans to make personal, social and health education (PSHE) compulsory from the age of five, published yesterday, include a clause allowing schools to apply their "values" to the lessons and another allowing parents to opt their children out on religious grounds.

It means that all state secondaries in England - including faith schools - will for the first time have to teach a core curriculum about sex and contraception in the context of teenagers' relationships, but teachers in religious schools will also be free to tell them that sex outside marriage, homosexuality or using contraception are wrong. Sexual health campaigners warned that such an approach could confuse teenagers, but Catholic schools welcomed the move.

Let's think about this for a second. At the kind of age we're talking about here (secondary school), some may be starting to feel a bit confused about their own sexuality, and questioning whether they might be gay (or, indeed, already feeling pretty certain about it). I don't know about you, but I can't think of many things that you can more easily do to them at that point to really fuck them up, potentially for years into the future, than to tell them, as part of the lesson that is supposed to be telling them how to deal with these developments in a mature way, that there is something wrong with them, that to act on their thoughts and feelings would be "sinful".

If their parents have sent them to a faith school, then they might not be likely to find much sympathy at home. What they are taught and what their friends think about these issues is enormously important. In that situation, what these plans are likely to produce is a whole load of unhappy and repressed young people.

Of course, we all know this; society has increasingly recognised the importance of being supportive of people finding their true sexuality, and the damage that some parents can do by rejecting their children in this situation.

But of course, religion is special. Belief in the sky-fairy entitles you to abuse your children without reproach; indeed, the government will go out of its way to allow you to fucking well INSTITUTIONALISE this abuse. (Am I succesfully expressing how angry this makes me?...)

Amazingly enough, as Costigan remarked this morning, the Daily Mail has managed to take precisely the opposite tack. This is what passes for an argument on the other side of this debate:

Simon Calvert, of the Christian Institute, said that 'pressing the virtues of homosexuality' could lead to more experimentation, which could be 'harmful' to children.
He said: 'What we don't want to see is vulnerable young people being exploited by outside groups which want to normalise homosexuality.
'If this guidance purports to force faith schools to teach things which go against their faith then it is profoundly illiberal and must be resisted at all costs.'

It reminds me of Al Franken's line about the US religious right's argument that gay marriage "undermines" traditional marriage, as if he was going to be walking down the street one day, see a gay couple who'd just got married, and think "Well, gee, that does look pretty good, I shall leave my wife immediately."

I mean, come on, "pressing the virtues of homosexuality"? As in, "not telling people that being gay means they're sinners"? How many of our "vulnerable young people" are these "outside groups" (read: filthy homos seeking more recruits) really going to turn gay by simply not filling their heads with bigotry handed down by the sky-fairy?

Oh, and a pre-emptive warning to any nice religious types who want me to make more effort to separate them from "the Christian Institute": go and give Simon Calvert a fucking great slap from me, and I'll consider it.

Charlie Brooker on G20 Protests and the Media

2009-04-16T13:16:00.000+01:00

Charlie Brooker's Newswipe has been a bit up and down so far, but Charlie excelled himself last night with his review of the G20 summit. You can see it on the iPlayer here. In particular, his review of the TV news coverage of the protests, which begins at 14 mins 36 secs, is fantastic, and provides a nice overview of the relationship between the protests, the media, and the possibility (and later actuality) of violence occuring at the protests.

An honourable mention also to Ben Goldacre's piece on the MMR non-story, which begins at 11:34.

In fact, just watch the whole thing, it's ace.

NB. Probably not work-safe, thanks to Mr. Goldacre's dirty mouth, and Ant and Dec's senseless killing of a dog.

It's Not About Ian Tomlinson

2009-04-14T11:42:00.000+01:00

Lib Dem Voice has picked up a Q&A with Chris Huhne in the Indy, in which he answers the following question (in bold) with the following response:

The police officer who assaulted Ian Tomlinson didn't do anything worse than many other police officers filmed that day. Shouldn't they be investigated too?
The officer who lashed out at Ian Tomlinson is not typical. But any constable who betrays the public's trust to use force responsibly should be disciplined and, if appropriate, charged. It is lamentably unfair to the vast majority of self-controlled officers if a thug tars the whole force.

Commenters on LDV have expressed dismay at this, and I have to agree. Whilst the death of Ian Tomlinson is tragic, and should be properly investigated, the police should not be allowed to get away with a diversionary "bad apple" manouvre here. There was a lot of rather over-zealous policing going on for the G20 protests on April 1st, and questions should be asked not simply of officers caught overstepping the mark when tensions ran high, but also of the senior officers who determined that kettling anyone who turned up was a sensible or productive tactic.

Since April 1st, discussion of police methods has been steadily displaced by discussion of Ian Tomlinson. His death is significant, but it should not be allowed to become a proxy for the wider issues. Whether Tomlinson was or was not a protestor, or being antagonistic to the police, or drunk, are pertinent questions to the investigation into his death, but they have absolutely no bearing on the wider questions of whether the climate camp should have been charged in the way it was to clear it, or whether kettling should be the default tactic used on people exercising their right to protest.

The New Atheism - The Next Step

2009-04-14T00:06:00.000+01:00

Julian Baggini has writted a quite interesting article on this subject over on CiF. I mostly agree with it, but it has a bit of a problem. Here's a quick quote from it:

What it revealed is the negative perception people have of the godless hordes, and the New Atheism must share responsibility for creating its own caricature. You can't publish and lionise books and TV series with titles like The God Delusion, God is Not Great and The Root of All Evil? and then complain when people think you are anti-religious zealots.
This can't be dismissed as "mere perception". Appearances count, which is why those able to present a more agreeable face have come to dominate the moderate middle ground, even if their arguments are often vapid and shallow.

The problem is this: Baggini has two messages, which aren't really compatible. They are as follows:

1. The New Atheists are perceived as being too forthright and certain. Look at me, in contrast. See how I open my article with the words "When I threw off my Christianity, I did not throw out my Bible, I just learned to read it properly. Intelligent atheism rejects what is false in religion, but should retain an interest in what is true about it." Lets all get better at presenting a "more agreeable", less "contemptuous" face to the world, like moderate religious people and agnostics do.

2. The New Atheists have been too narrow in selecting their targets. They have drawn attention to some fundamentalists with nasty views, but there are still people wandering around with views that are equally bonkers, wouldn't stand up to five minutes solid questioning, and need to be challenged, because they're currently getting away with holding views that are frankly even more ill-thought-through than the religious loonies. The "fluffy brigade" are "flattering the woolly-minded by telling them vagueness is a virtue, not a vice."

The first message urges us to stop pissing people off by seeming so sure of ourselves. The second one basically assumes that we're right, and that it's not just the fundies who need arguing with, but the woolly minded ones who think "God is love" is a terribly profound statement, not a load of fatuous guff. I'd agree with the second one, but I don't see how we're going to change anything of the perception of New Atheism by extending criticism to the people in the middle who are currently busy slapping themselves heartily on the back for being so chuffing moderate.

Of course, Baggini calls it a "conversation", not criticism or an argument, but presumably the aim of the exercise is to cure people of their "woolly minded"ness, so I don't quite know how that's going to work. Presumably, these people are all so thick that during these "conversations" they won't notice that we think we're right if we just talk to them very, very softly.

It's worth a try, I suppose.

Just Been to the Bank of England Protest

2009-04-01T13:54:00.000+01:00

I'm not in work today, so I thought I'd go and have a look at what's going on down at the Bank of England today. Arriving at Liverpool Street slightly late, we caught up with the march shortly before it reached Threadneedle Street. Generally, the march is comprised of the usual suspects, people carrying banners saying things like "CONSUMERS SUCK" and "Climate Change is Bad", seemingly with no sense of irony whatsoever. I don't know if the climate change branch of the march was particularly full of eejits - when we went round the other side, there were some rather more sensible banners around.

I don't know exactly how many of the other people there were there to protest themselves, and how many just to have a look at the action. Probably for quite a few it's a bit of both. But in any case, I don't think this counts as the Summer of Rage that has been predicted. Not just yet, anyway. It's not exactly a million people marching against the Iraq war, is it?

The other thing I might as well comment on is the police presence. It's massive. The streets leading into the protest are all crammed with police vans, many of them full of reserves of police awaiting the command to come piling in. Generally, whilst we were there the policing was pretty restrained, which has been borne out by what I've seen on the TV since I got back. What I would say, though, is that I'm not sure the police strategy of almost walling us in was a good idea. I think what they may well have achieved is to make a lot of people present feel a whole lot more involved and polarised than they intended to. Hanging around at the back of the crowd, so I could slip away if things got unpleasant, it was a bit unnerving to see a wall of police behind us.

There was a certain sense of "well, you've come down here, don't complain to us if we treat you like the troublemakers at the front". I realise it's difficult to know how to police this kind of event, where the people in attendance are by no means homogenous, but I can't help but feel that there must be a better way than this. Ultimately, lines are confrontational. If you start forming great big lines before you've even had a confrontation, it kind of sends a signal.

I'm now watching a small group of protesters smashing up the windows of a branch of RBS, and the reporter there commenting that the police aren't really moving in, because doing so might involve turning a larger group of people angry, although how many of them might actually engage the police is unpredictable. Exactly. The risk you run in treating a crowd as a single entity is to reduce everyone to the lowest level of behaviour present.

EHRC Catching Up on Paternity Leave

2009-03-30T10:55:00.000+01:00

Today we hear that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is recommending that paternity leave entitlement is extended to achieve a more equal right to spend time with newborn children. It's only, what, a couple of weeks now since Lib Dem Spring Conference suggested similar (but more far-reaching, looking at the detail) proposals.

Good to see the Lib Dem tradition of being in the vanguard of policy making continuing.

Daniel Hannan, Guido and the American Right

2009-03-26T11:56:00.000Z

Guido is terribly proud that Daniel Hannan's speech, straight out of the Guido playbook of diagnosing Gordon Brown's "pathologies" and wrapping himself in libertarian bollocks, has become something of an internet sensation. Noting that the clip has attracted the attention of such illustrious organs as the Drudge Report, he declares:

Cometh the hour, cometh the man - we are all ditto-heads now; Rushies and the Co-Conspirators.

He slightly surprises me with his eagerness to take up the mantle of "dittohead", but it fits like a charm. After all, doesn't Guido's blog have exactly the same right-wing echo chamber effect as Rush and Fox News do for the US? Isn't his comments thread full of the same brand of half-sentient hate-spewing twats that call Rush? Guido seems to be embracing the comparison before any of his regular critics really articulated it properly, just to block off that particular line of attack.

Anyway, on to the clip itself. Since it was released on Tuesday, it has become remarkably well exposed; yesterday it was the most watched clip on YouTube. So is it all that remarkable? Well, to be fair, it's well crafted, to the point, snappy, and clearly expresses Hannan's position. What's more surprising is that it achieved this without much exposure at all from the MSM in the UK. Interestingly, Hannan has become something of a hero to the US right, with Rush Limbaugh (de facto leader of the Republicans) endorsing his words, Fox News cheerleader for the markets Neil Cavuto interviewing him, and well known crazy person Glen Beck inviting him on his show too.

Why, then, are the UK Conservatives not more proud of him? Hannan seems to be viewed by his own party as a slightly loose cannon, being one of the more headbanging eurosceptics in the party, a cheerleader for joining the loony fringe of Europe, and in fact he's already been expelled from the EPP himself.

In many ways, the interviews with the US media are rather more revealing than the speech itself. In the Cavuto interview, he pretty much takes ownership of being the"do nothing" party (look at about 3 mins in), and answers "yes" in response to the question "in the same situation [of the US banking crisis], would you have said "Let 'em rip"?".

I have to say, watching those videos is quite entertaining in at least one respect: the right wings of both our countries are currently maintaining that their particular screamingly socialist government is taking their country to much lower depths than are to be found anywhere else in the world. The result, when you bring the two together, is a pissing contest. Witness much claiming to have it worst from both sides of the pond.

The most amusing bit, though, is this big stompy red quote from Guido: "It is the speech that many Republicans wish they had someone to deliver to Obama". Um, no. The Republicans have plenty of populist ranters who could deliver a little mini-speech like this. Trouble is, none of them could say it with a straight face, because unlike Gordon Brown, Barack Obama hasn't been in the driving seat for the last ten years. He's been there for three months. If the Republicans tried to pull this, they would rightly be derided, because it was George Bush who turned a surplus inherited from Clinton into a deficit.

Daniel Hannan is said to be somewhat perplexed at the traction he has achieved in the US. Let me help you out, Daniel: It's a distraction. Like so much that the Republican noise machine does, it's a talking point to try to prove a point from a country with different circumstances to those of the US, and then import the "take home message" to the US, without people noticing the bait and switch they've just been offered whereby something that reflects badly on the Republicans becomes the fault of "socialists" over there in Yerp. There's a reason they'd rather talk about the backstory in someone else's country: it's because they've only been the opposition for three months, and most of that backstory in the US is their backstory.

Sheer Poetry, Dear Boy

2009-03-25T21:50:00.000Z

Sometimes things happen that you just couldn't have arranged better.

In the wake of the McNulty dodgy allowance business, a couple of things happened.

1. Sarah Teather (Lib Dem MP for Brent East) made some hay for the Lib Dems out of the situation, tabling a Commons motion to scrap the allowance for London MPs.

2. Dawn Butler (Labour MP for Brent South) found herself in the spotlight next, on the same subject. Turns out she claims the second home allowance in order to maintain her ownership of two houses, despite her constituency house being roughly as close to parliament as her other house. The BBC illustrate the point here.

What makes this particularly amusing, you ask? (Well, you probably don't - if you're reading Lib Dem Blogs, you probably know.) Well, it turns out that, due to boundary changes, at the next election Dawn and Sarah are fighting it out for the newly created seat of Brent Central.

It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for Dawn Butler.

Almost. Then I remembered this.

Ahahahahahahahahahaha.

ps. Dawn's staff have been displaying their spelling skills again today, posting a response to the revelations on her website.

George Monbiot vs. Agas

2009-03-22T10:00:00.001Z

Some time ago now, George Monbiot wrote a piece in the Guardian refuting the cosy back-slapping sense of Aga owners that their cooker was an efficient, even ethical, choice of appliance. Yesterday, an interview with Aga's chief executive, William McGrath appeared in the paper, exploring this argument. They've put the transcript up on the website here. The comments thread quickly descended into (amongst other things) people accusing George of deliberately making McGrath look bad by reproducing all the hesitation and repetition of conversational speech in writing, leading George to pop up in the comments thread with the following comment:

The audio tape was given to an independent transcriber. She transcribed it. The Guardian put it online. How's that for a conspiracy? Pretty devious, I'd say.

The other bizarre comments were mostly to the effect that George was in some way "bullying" the chief executive of a large company by expecting him to have a clear idea what he was talking about, where what he was talking about was his own company's products and the claims made about said products.

In any case, I'd say if he wanted to show up McGrath's woolly thinking, he missed a trick. I spent an hour or so going through the transcript trying to put together a coherent string of proper sentences out of the raw materials provided, the better to reveal the clash of ideas at the heart of the conversation (which is indeed rather obfuscated by the literal-mindedness of the transcript).

The results I reproduce below. What I would say they show, every bit as much as his hesitant manner might have done, is the completely confused argument on McGrath's side. In assembling it, I attempted to be as sympathetic as possible to the person whose words I was interpreting, articulating fully any argument that made sense that their words hinted towards. Nevertheless, there were swathes of McGrath's contributions where I really couldn't, with the best will in the world, see what he was trying to say. If you feel like comparing the one on the Graun website with mine, then you'll see what I mean (and you have too much time on your hands). Most of what he says is just a hastily strung together collection of marketing speak.

Anyway, here's my modified transcript:

MONBIOT: I'm George Monbiot and I'm talking to William McGrath who's the chief executive of Aga Rangemaster who's kindly come in to talk about Aga's environmental performance. And we've had a bit of a spat about this in the paper where I wrote a paragraph or two expressing my displeasure with Aga's environmental performance and William wrote a response column to put me right. And now we finally meet and we can discuss this in person. So thanks very much indeed for coming in to talk about this.

MCGRATH: It's a pleasure.

MONBIOT: Now I've read the claims that Aga makes about its green credentials. And one of the things you keep emphasizing is that Agas are green because they last indefinitely. That's a disaster for an energy using device isn't it?

MCGRATH: Well I think the fact that Agas do last a life time, do last for many, many years is just one of the features of the Aga. The fact that actually cast iron is a product which does last for generations and then can be recycled I think is actually a really positive feature of the product. And when you've put that together with some of the other characteristics of the Aga, that make it so loved in the UK today and in many places around the world, I think we feel that the cast iron story, which goes right back to 1709, continues to be relevant today. And the technology that goes with cast iron, that product which does last such a long time, is something that will meet the agenda for the next generations as well as generations that have gone by.

MONBIOT: You say that the Aga lasts a life time. More efficient appliances come onto the market every year. Your Agas might be problematic in 2009. In 2059 they're going to be massively outdated and extremely inefficient by comparison to everything else available then, aren't they?

MCGRATH: Well I think you've got to look at the very nature of the Aga and what it is as a heat storage product. And I would argue that the way the market is developing, when we're looking at, say, a 13-amp Aga product which uses over night electricity, I think that is going to be a very relevant product over the years ahead, as people look to have level loading of production. And I think linking the Aga, the electric Aga that we've now developed in recent years, into micro generation, those are very much coming components. What is needed in the domestic market is to have more products which can absorb electricity to act as a battery in the home. And I think both micro and indeed larger producers of electricity that are looking to level load will be very interested in a domestic product which can use electricity in that way. And our new products aren't just about electricity. We're talking about bio fuels and that sort of thing, products where the industry itself is looking at new ideas, new products which they can bring to the market and the Aga is ready and waiting for those new products as they come to market.

MONBIOT: Okay well we'll deal with those point by point as we go along. But I'm not sure you've completely grasped what I'm driving at here because my point is that even if the Aga is perfectly suited for conditions today or 2015, even if it were the most efficient appliance on the market today, the fact that it lasts a lifetime means that it necessarily becomes outdated by comparison to what else will be available towards the end of that life time.

MCGRATH: Well George, if you look back over the life time of many people's Agas today they've actually modified themselves over the years. So what started life maybe as solid fuel Agas may now be oil Agas. And indeed one of the things we're looking at right now is to upgrade those Agas to the latest technology, where you can actually take your oil and transform it into an electric Aga. Yeah, we're alive to all these new technologies and ideas coming on board and yes, clearly new things are coming to market all the time. We for example are one of the largest companies selling, through Rangemaster today, induction hobs and selling induction range cookers. We're always alive. As a company we've put many years and a lot of money into looking at all the technologies that are available. What that has told us is yes, for some of the products we should be making things like induction mainstream in the UK. I think we've played a big part in that. But all this is also telling us that cast iron cooking remains not only very attractive to people as being at the heart of the home, a great way of cooking – radiated heat cooking is a fantastic way to cook – but it is not off the pace at all. It's exactly on the pace in terms of new technology that's coming through.

MONBIOT: But your customers are still lumbered with this very large piece of cast iron which might or might not be adaptable to those future constraints.

MCGRATH: I think lumbered's really not quite the right word. I think basically having a heat storage product in the home, a very efficient radiator when it's giving useful heat into the kitchen, is much more efficient than a standard water based system. An electric Aga is extremely efficient, well over ninety per cent efficient. You can look at some of the Rayburn products which are condensing boiler versions, well over ninety per cent efficient. You're talking about something that on the boiler side of our business, is right up there with the best in the market. So I don't think we need to feel that we're in any way off the pace against where the market, the industry has got at the moment. Indeed as a British company we feel that we're in a position to be taking some of these technologies into other countries. We don't feel there are lessons that we haven't learned from Germany or Italy. We think as a British company taking products overseas that actually we've got a lot to say.

MONBIOT: How much carbon dioxide is produced in manufacturing an Aga?

MCGRATH: I think the basic smelting iron-ore, and then we clearly produce the – in relation to the total life time, the amount of carbon dioxide is actually quite modest. The bigger figure to look at, which is the fair comment-

MONBIOT: So how much is it?

MCGRATH: I think, in terms of carbon dioxide production per unit, it's probably something around, I should think, fifteen tons [Correction: McGrath has since said that he meant 1.5 tons, not fifteen] of carbon I should ..

MONBIOT: Fifteen tons?

MCGRATH: Yeah so ..

MONBIOT: .. the cement required to build an average British home produces five tons of carbon dioxide. We're talking about roughly the total amount of CO2 required to construct a home, fifteen tons of carbon dioxide. That's a staggering amount.

MCGRATH: You're a great user of the word "staggering". Where I think the numbers are much more relevant is on the ongoing use of carbon dioxide in the home where as we all know – and this is a figure unfortunately you got so wrong in your original article, for the average home was using one and a half tons when actually as you know it's actually six or seven and a half.

MONBIOT: Yes. I'd just like to point out that I, I was the one who requested the correction having found that the Parliamentary Select Committee document that I was using for the average home emissions had actually got it wrong.

MCGRATH: That's fine. But as we well know that the answer is six tons, seven and a half tons for a four bedroom, four person home. The Aga, the carbon dioxide emission from an Aga, depends on which version you're using but it'd be something like three and a half tons.

MONBIOT: Not according to your figures. Using the figures off your web site your thirteen amp electric Aga is producing 6.1 tons of carbon dioxide a year. That's slightly above the average carbon dioxide emissions for an ordinary home.

MCGRATH: If you take into account the modern versions now which are using the latest version which use the AIMS(?) product ..

MONBIOT: No this is the modern version.

MCGRATH: .. our calculation for that comes out at 3.5 to 4. The natural gas version comes in at 4 to 4.5. So, if you multiply using standard stats through the numbers that you've got there, we calculate the numbers to be from 3.5 to 4.5 tons which against the 6 to 7.5 tons demonstrates that actually the Aga home doesn't use more energy than an alternative home. Now clearly lots of people have different ways of managing their home to which they're obviously perfectly entitled. We feel that the Aga, by the time you take into account all the roles it plays in the home, not only as a cooker but also as a radiator and providing so many appliances that the Aga home can have a better energy performance than comparable homes.

MONBIOT: Are you seriously trying to tell me that the average Aga produces less carbon dioxide for the services it delivers than comparable products producing the same services?

MCGRATH: Yes.

MONBIOT: Okay. So now according again to the figures on your web site, using the kilowatt hours figure that you produced for your Agas, you could boil a kettle for two people, two cups of tea, ninety nine times a day for the same amount of electricity that your Aga is using.

MCGRATH: The point is, where I think you're being unfair, you're not looking at the role that the Aga or the Rayburn is playing in people's homes and can continue to play in the future. The factor you've got to look at which is more relevant than purely picking on a multiplication of kettles is to actually look at the useful heat in the kitchen. And clearly one of the major attractions that people see in the Aga in the home is the warmth in the kitchen and that can indeed percolate into a number of rooms in the house. So you have to see it as a combination, absolutely direct in the case of the Rayburn, of a cooker, which is its primary function, and also the overall role it plays in warmth in the home. And that's where I think we're differing a little bit is to see that having a heat-sump in the home which can play this broader role is actually a jolly attractive way, not only because it is so much the heart of the home for so many people, but also in energy and environmental efficiency, it is actually a jolly useful way of running the home. And over the last five years what we've been doing at Aga is really to have a five point plan of things that we felt we should be doing to address the environmental agenda. So the fact that you raise the points now was actually, from our point of view, quite good news because we would like to communicate more widely the sort of things we have been doing. And that really comes back to flexibility of the product. That's why we're making it into a product which is not always on. You can turn it off more readily, modulating use. We've looked at all our products and raising efficiency. That's why if you look at HETAS or any of the industry bodies, our products are right up there at the top in efficiency. The work we've done on Rayburn for example is tremendous, the things we've done with the condensing boilers are really well ahead of the market. One of the things which I think is interesting as well, we're looking at case emissions which is about how much of that useful heat is sent into the home. People do use that energy. We do though have ways of actually having less heat coming into the room or linking that heat maybe back into heat pumps.

MONBIOT: Okay. Well for all these grand claims you make about Aga ..

MCGRATH: They're not grand claims though.

MONBIOT: .. we are still talking about a single device which uses, according to my figures, the entire carbon dioxide emissions of the average home. According to your figures three quarters of the carbon dioxide emissions of the average home. We are talking about a device which doesn't run the lights, which doesn't run the TV, which doesn't run the central heating system, which performs only a few of those functions.

MCGRATH: No, a large number of those functions such that when you work it all through we think that the Aga home does not necessarily need to use more energy than alternative homes.

MONBIOT: But it can't possibly add up can it? Because if the Aga is producing between three quarters and one hundred per cent of the carbon dioxide emissions of the average home and yet it only fulfils a part of those functions, maximum about fifty per cent, then there's no way that it could be an environmentally friendly device.

MCGRATH: Clearly we will not always agree on all those figures. In terms of an environmentally friendly device I think you've then got to say where is it going next. And I think that's where you look at some of the work we're doing on linking it into micro generation. And I think that is fascinating, if you're looking for the domestic market – and I think we should all be looking at this sort of area, which lends itself to micro generation. The electric Aga does lend itself to that. We're being approached by a whole series of micro generation producers. Why? Because they need a domestic product which can absorb energy that is produced sporadically during the day. So clearly that may be coming from solar, that maybe coming from wind, it may be coming from heat pumps which I think may be really quite attractive.

MONBIOT: You're going to power an Aga off heat pumps?

MCGRATH: It's a linking in to the total generation you can have from ..

MONBIOT: Sorry, can I just pin this down? You intend to power an Aga off heat pumps? Is that correct?

MCGRATH: We are currently talking to one of the producers, about how they can produce energy that comes from various sources, including heat pumps, or linking back energy from the Aga into a heat pump, or into a Stirling engine.

MONBIOT: Yeah. Can I just pin you down on this because I'm quite struck by this notion. Your idea is that you would use a heat pump to power an Aga. Is that correct?

MCGRATH: It would add – if you're producing electricity for the home in a domestic context then clearly we have a product which can take a small amount of electricity being produced over a long period of time and you have to have a heat-sump of some sort which can absorb that energy.

MONBIOT: So you see the heat pump as one of these electricity producing devices do you?

MCGRATH: Electricity devices which can link into the Aga. The other end of the spectrum which I ..

MONBIOT: But the heat pump is not an electricity producing device, it's an electricity using device.

MCGRATH: In terms of the linking it back round, you're actually using the energy being produced by the Aga, rather than going into the room, can go back into the heat pump system.

MONBIOT: Yeah but you've just told me it's an electricity producing device which would be used to power the Aga and it's actually quite the opposite.

MCGRATH: What I'm saying is link it with micro generating producers, different formats, different forms, a Stirling engine and some of the other powers, it's fair comment that they need to see the Aga as part of that overall package.

MONBIOT: Okay let's just talk about this micro generation because all the recent figures that I've seen suggest that micro wind and micro solar PV in this country is a complete waste of time and money.

MCGRATH: I think we've done a lot of work, again, over recent years to examine all those potential sources. We've been right at the forefront talking to people about what is the right way of doing things. We believe that one of the really attractive packages we have come up with, which I think now is going to become commercially viable, is linking solar collectors, which are a readily available technology, with a wood burning Aga stove - another carbon neutral energy source - and putting that together with a Rayburn which is one of our key products. That package put together with an intelligent management device actually reproduces a package which meets all the current building regulations for new build.

MONBIOT: You're talking about solar PV are you?

MCGRATH: We're talking about solar collectors, so that they'll simply heat the water through a tube – and I sent you some of the data on that.

MONBIOT: Oh so you're talking about solar thermal?

MCGRATH: Yes exactly.

MONBIOT: Right.

MCGRATH: So putting that together with an Aga stove, that is really a very attractive and viable package. So when you dismiss this..

MONBIOT: Well it's not going to help people who've just bought an electricity using Aga is it?

MCGRATH: I think you're being obtuse.

MONBIOT: No, no, no, you've just completely changed the terms of – I asked you specifically about using solar or wind production of electricity to power an Aga which is what you've just been talking about.

MCGRATH: Sure.

MONBIOT: And now you've started talking about using solar thermal with wood powered Rayburns.

MCGRATH: Sure.

MONBIOT: That's not the question that I was asking about. So let's just finish off that issue about wind and solar photovoltaic electricity used to power an Aga. This is part of your vision?

MCGRATH: Yeah. What I was saying is we have – and this is where I think we deserve more credit than you're giving – looked at all these technologies. Which technology comes through and proves to be economic as you say remains to be seen. But we as a company have, for example, our own wind turbine to examine how effective that can be, and I think we agree that only in certain areas of the country will that actually prove to be effective. Our wind turbine happens to be in Telford which is not the windiest part of the country and it does generate, it is linked up to our Aga in our R and D centre. Yes it does work. Does it generate enough power consistently to be economically viable for the consumer at this point? Probably not. If more money is spent on that technology? Possibly yes. Solar clearly is another area which is developing fast. I was giving you an example of where I'm quite excited that work we're doing in our R and D team, looking at solar, has found a package which is economically viable and is not a waste of time as you dismiss. So what we're saying, as a business we need to look at all these different opportunities, which one works best for our customer base remains to be seen. But the important point for us as a business is to be absolutely joining in the debate and at the forefront. If I turn it onto a subject which I know is dear to your heart, which is the future of nuclear, one of the issues I think that is going to be very interesting is what actually happens as the energy needs of this country increase, where are they going to come from? There's obviously a big lobby at the moment for more nuclear power stations. One of the things that you could definitely not do with a nuclear power station is turn it down or turn it off. So in my view, you need more products which level load. So I think there should be a real effort to have more products in the home which use overnight electricity, avoiding those peaks that send energy being used to pump water uphill in mountains in Wales (which would seem a curious thing to be doing). If there were more products in the home which actually used energy overnight so we had more level loading, that seems to be quite an interesting idea. We've had a product which uses overnight electricity for twenty five years, when we find out EDF – very interesting – and more of the producers are intent on looking at split tariffs, I think that is part of a drive for greater level loading. And really quite an attractive feature of what we should be looking at in terms of our energy management in the home is having more products which can absorb energy, which brings us back to where we started with the cast iron, I think absolutely a relevant product, not an irrelevant product. We're not claiming we've got all the answers yet but we're right in there. And I think that product which absorbs energy and other products comparable to Aga, that actually can take energy over night and release it during the day into the home is actually a very attractive product. So the debate is not as simple as it started, with you highlighting a technology that clearly – coal Agas we haven't made for ten years..

MONBIOT: Still make coal Rayburns don't you?

MCGRATH: We have solid fuel products.

MONBIOT: Solid fuel meaning coal?

MCGRATH: Solid but, primarily, those products now clearly do work on multi fuel, but most of those products that are actually doing very nicely now are really driven around wood burning which is ..

MONBIOT: You're selling more wood burning Rayburns than multi fuel Rayburns?

MCGRATH: The largest growth now is wood burning Rayburns.

MONBIOT: That's not the question I asked. Are you selling more wood burning Rayburns than multi fuel?

MCGRATH: We're selling more wood burning Rayburns today than any other type of product.

MONBIOT: So purely wood burning Rayburns are out-selling the multi fuel Rayburns?

MCGRATH: Yes.

MONBIOT: And by what sort of figure?

MCGRATH: What's happened in the last couple of years, since wood has become a readily available product, we've introduced new lines in wood burning products which are the fastest growth areas. And that is overtaking what was the largest element of the products for Rayburns which was actually split pretty much down the middle between gas and oil. So it's a really interesting area, again, that the technology linking with wood has taken off so rapidly. And again we have, with the stoves and with the Rayburns in particular, and hopefully maybe in due course with wood burning products as well – it's another technology we're very enthusiastic for – we're absolutely looking for practical technologies to apply with these products. And so the imagery that you would possibly use that suggests it's a retro product is just not fair. It's just not right actually.

MONBIOT: Right. And surely the point with wood and pellets and any other form of bio mass is that the supply's always going to be constrained isn't it? There are limited places in which it can be grown if we're not going to eat into arable land or we're not going to cause unsustainable rates of deforestation. And this means that they have to be used as efficiently as possible. So it seems crazy to be using them to fire devices which are on twenty four hours a day.

MCGRATH: Well the Rayburn products we're talking are not, in the first place, necessarily on all day.

MONBIOT: Not necessarily.

MCGRATH: No, not necessarily. They can be. It depends on people's actual desires and needs. People will have to warm their home. The Rayburn is a multifunctional product. Remember it does oven, it does the cooking, it does the central heating, it does the hot water.

MONBIOT: Does the central heating?

MCGRATH: Yes.

MONBIOT: All of the central heating?

MCGRATH: Yes you clearly have a little bit of homework to be done here. The Rayburn and our Stanley products in Ireland, the nature of those products is the majority of those products, overwhelming majority of those, do all those functions. That's why we're ..

MONBIOT: Not all of them do though do they?

MCGRATH: Some don't. You can have products that don't do the central heating and the hot water. But Rayburn and Stanley products, they are very much a workhorse product where they do the central heating, the hot water and the cooking.

MONBIOT: But they are still a woefully inefficient use of that wood fuel by comparison to say a modern batch boiler.

MCGRATH: No.

MONBIOT: Yes.

MCGRATH: No.

MONBIOT: Yes.

MCGRATH: No. No.

MONBIOT: Yes.

MCGRATH: The Rayburn products are right up there. If you look in all the HETAS listings, our products are eighty, ninety per cent efficient, so ..

MONBIOT: What percentage of your customers keep them on all the time?

MCGRATH: Rayburn products are directly programmable so ..

MONBIOT: What percentage of your customers keep them on all the time?

MCGRATH: In terms of which proportion keep them on all the time, I think the same as they can now with Aga. I think most people would do as they would with a boiler system. If you're looking at a Rayburn you're talking about a boiler system.

MONBIOT: What proportion of your customers keep them on all the time?

MCGRATH: I should think very few keep them on all the time.

MONBIOT: You don't have any figures?

MCGRATH: We don't have...

MONBIOT: Wouldn't that be one of the first things you'd want to find out if you're trying to go green?

MCGRATH: I think basically the people who've got a Rayburn system would be running it in the same way that they would be running a central heating system cos that's what it is providing. It's providing a boiler, a central heating system.

MONBIOT: It seems strange to me that you don't have figures.

MCGRATH: In terms of how people run their homes we're not actually going round asking, telling people exactly what they should do.

MONBIOT: No it's not a question of telling them what to do it's a question of asking what they are doing.

MCGRATH: I think that most people would be running a Rayburn in a similar way to any other central heating system. The variety of ways in which people run that system is tremendous. Some people will run it all the time, certainly during the winter. Some people have it off at night. That's what we worked on for the Aga system, why we introduced our AIMS system to make sure those products are as flexible as the Rayburn systems.

MONBIOT: Now your AIMS system, Intelligent Management System, this puts the Aga into slumber mode, doesn't it, for much of the time. But even during slumber mode which is what you encourage people to use when they go on holiday, it's still putting out as much heat as an average radiator according to your web site.

MCGRATH: I think if you're away they have the ability now to have it turned off so it'll programme itself to come on again when they get back over night.

MONBIOT: But the advice you give them is that you keep it on slumber mode when you go on holiday.

MCGRATH: When you're out you can keep it on slumber mode or you can turn it off. So it's going to go to a much lower temperature level. So it ...

MONBIOT: Yes but it's still using heat when they're on holiday and it's still using heat when people are asleep. It's still making use of fuel which is being completely wasted.

MCGRATH: It's not being completely wasted.

MONBIOT: Well of course if they're on holiday it is being completely wasted.

MCGRATH: In which case we would expect them to have the option of turning it off and it will turn itself back on when they come back. The whole point with the Intelligent Management System was that it will calculate when to..

MONBIOT: Okay, can I just quote your site to you then?

MCGRATH: Sure.

MONBIOT: "The system can also be set to holiday mode which will keep the Aga on either the lowest energy setting or off during the selected dates". Why would you encourage people to keep it on the lowest energy setting when they're away on holiday?

MCGRATH: I think it depends how long they're away for. In the middle, many people for ..

MONBIOT: I don't keep my central heating on when I'm away on holiday.

MCGRATH: No many people who go away over night, may well leave the central heating turned down when they're away. So that gives an alternative to doing that.

MONBIOT: But that's not going on holiday. Going away over night is not the same as going on holiday is it?

MCGRATH: Okay. But now I think you're into semantics. I think it gives you that flexibility.

MONBIOT: Well it's pretty clear what that means isn't it?

MCGRATH: Okay.

MONBIOT: And when I go on holiday and when ordinary people with central heating systems go on holiday they do not leave the central heating on when they're on holiday do they?

MCGRATH: No. So basically they have the option with this product to turn it off. If you would like to ..

MONBIOT: But they have the encouragement ..

MCGRATH: .. clarify the wording between nights away and a holiday, whether a weekend away qualifies as a holiday or whatever I think is probably something we should move beyond.

MONBIOT: Well no, perhaps we shouldn't do that. And perhaps you should also create a bit of clarification with the rest of the way in which you encourage people to use it because again according to your web site it says it's supplied preset, this system with two active periods each day. "In this mode your Aga will be at normal temperature ready to cook breakfast in the morning, drop down to a lower temperature during the day and then return to normal temperature ready to prepare dinner in the evening".

MCGRATH: Sure.

MONBIOT: Summer or winter.

MCGRATH: I think it depends, that's the whole thing. What we're saying is we've added a great deal of flexibility into the product. How people use it in the home is entirely up to them. I think what you've seen from the kind of responses we've had from people all round the country, people have their own lifestyles, the way in which they wish to use it. We've tried to make it easier for them to have more options which is why the AIMS system, now available in electricity, is going to be available later in the year on gas as well and with oil products as well. We are making tremendous progress in all these areas. And the extra feature, which I think is very important, is going to come through this year. The other area that we've been looking at, apart from the micro generation, is looking at the existing store base.

MONBIOT: Okay. Let me just finish off on this AIMS business, this Aga Intelligent Management System business because you are encouraging people, even with this most modern, most up to date system that you have you are still encouraging people to keep their machine on all day during the summer.

MCGRATH: Many people will turn the Aga off during the summer.

MONBIOT: Turn it off all together? Turn it off all together?

MCGRATH: Many people would turn it off during the summer.

MONBIOT: And use their cooker? They would use a separate hob?

MCGRATH: They would use maybe a separate – we actually provide, as I'm sure if you've looked on the web site you will see. Many people have an Aga in combination with what we call a companion which does give you the option if the Aga's off, part of the overall Aga includes a standard hob and an oven as part of our package. So you again have that built in flexibility.

MONBIOT: But the great majority of houses that I've been in which have an Aga also have a cooker. And they might use the cooker sometimes and use the Aga sometimes. So far from reducing the turnover of appliances you're actually increasing the number of appliances aren't you?

MCGRATH: They, basically ..

MONBIOT: Well are you not?

MCGRATH: No basic..

MONBIOT: You're adding an appliance on top of the appliances they already have.

MCGRATH: No you have a sing..

MONBIOT: They have a central heating system. They have a cooker. And they have an Aga.

MCGRATH: They have an Aga which can incorporate a conventional cooker as part of that package. When you're looking at de-cluttering your home and the number of appliances one of the questions that you really should also add is looking at, as the government is keen that we should do, energy management holistically in the home. Look at the de-cluttering effect of some of the things that you don't need that people can choose not to have that many people in responding to this debate have actually recognised, things like the tumble dryer, things like the kettle, things like the toaster, all of which have to be produced, all of which have very short lifetimes so ..

MONBIOT: And people still have kettles to put on their Agas don't they?

MCGRATH: They have kettles which last a lot longer than the products to which you refer. We think that over the life time of the Aga, which you surprisingly didn't think was a good idea to have a long life, the number of appliances that other people may have got through will be a lot longer.

MONBIOT: But they're still getting through their cookers aren't they? Because they're buying their cookers along side their Agas. That's certainly the case in every house I've ever been in which has an Aga.

MCGRATH: Well perhaps you haven't been in too many houses with this product ..

MONBIOT: Okay well give me the figures. Give me the figures.

MCGRATH: Basically you're selling, in terms of people who've got Agas now, many of them will not have an additional ...

MONBIOT: You say "many". Give me the figures.

MCGRATH: Many of those cookers may have been out there for a long time ...

MONBIOT: No, no, give me the figures.

MCGRATH: George, of the products we sell ..

MONBIOT: You're making these statements. You're saying that my impression is wrong. Now it might be wrong but I want to hear from you that it is wrong because you're going to give me the figures.

MCGRATH: Well I would ..

MONBIOT: You don't seem to have surveyed your customers very much.

MCGRATH: No we have tremendous feedback from lots of the customers. That's why ..

MONBIOT: But not on these critical issues that I'm asking you about.

MCGRATH: .. on how many people have and use an additional cooker. I think probably most people who are buying an Aga now, probably about half of them would have an inbuilt companion. I'm sure many people would have an additional cooker. But remember where the Aga comes from. Many people who've had an Aga for a very long time, very much linking back into the farming community as a working product, would, in many cases, not have another additional product. And if they do, maybe for the summer months, it would largely now come from the product we do incorporate, the companion. So, all we're saying is when you come back to the product, all the different things we've got on offer, what we're saying, as a British company that is employing, is, we think that we are right at the forefront of range cooking. Range cooking is a very legitimate and exciting way of doing things that has appealed to many people over many years. We have, within our Aga and with our Rangemaster business, we have about fifty people working in R and D. So we're working right at the forefront, in all the different technologies that are coming. We want to make sure that we can offer the best available products that incorporate all new technologies, as we can see it relevant to our customer base. All we're saying, that I think you're being possibly unfair in not recognising, is just what a good idea cast iron is as a cooker, and as a way of having a centrepiece to your home. And I come back to linking in with micro generation and other kinds of generation, bio fuels as well. We are there for all that debate. And simply to provide knocking copy seems a little unfair.

MONBIOT: Okay. Well let's talk about bio fuels. You raised this as another of the selling points that Agas can be converted to use liquid bio fuels.

MCGRATH: Sure.

MONBIOT: Are you aware that most liquid bio fuels produce more greenhouse gases than petroleum as well as contributing to global food shortages?

MCGRATH: I think – going back to the point I'm saying – we have been keen to look at all those different ways of doing things, including bio fuels. Of course we're aware that the development of that hasn't been easy, and given all these different pressures on the kind of bio fuels that come through, it is not commercially readily available. What we're saying is we have burner technology, that is available now which, when the market for bio fuels, in whatever form it takes, arises, will be compatible with that. Now does it, does x, y or z particular product prove to be appropriate, environmentally appropriate, we're not really in a position to say.

MONBIOT: Okay.

MCGRATH: We have a product which again is at that cutting edge and ready for that sort of development.

MONBIOT: Okay. So you're selling Agas as a green alternative on the grounds that they might or might not one day be compatible with micro generation which might or might not be economically viable ..

MCGRATH: Sure.

MONBIOT: That they might or might not one day be compatible with bio fuels which might or might not be the ethical way to go. There's a whole series of ifs and buts and possibilities here ..

MCGRATH: Sure.

MONBIOT: .. and you're using those to try to persuade us that your sales of Agas today which are an incredibly energy intensive, energy consuming product, are thereby validated.

MCGRATH: What I'm saying is that the Aga today is validated against current ways of running your home. And it's moved on a long way in recent years cos we've addressed these topics by a lot of investment, by the production of electricity into the total model mix. So yes, we think it's absolutely valid. It's what people see as an appropriate way of managing their home, having their busy family life. People do see it as the centrepiece, not only having great food but also lending itself to so much of the relevant themes of the day. Yes of course it's valid today and I don't see why you're so determinedly knocking a British company that has a valid product today, is employing lots of people, producing world leading products today and is absolutely joining in on the debate on where we should go next and how things could be made better in the future. You're dismissing it. That is really rather disappointing, that actually you cannot see that all the work we're doing in the different formats, linking in with all these different opportunities that are out there, predicated on the fact that actually we think that the cast iron cooker with radiating heat into the home is actually a cracking way of approaching things. And actually when you do look at the different energy sources that are out there yes you should be looking to see more of these products produced internationally by a world class British company. I enjoin you to say yes it's a positive for the British economy. It's a positive way forward, very much attuned to the overall green agenda. And I think you're somebody that we would like to see actually coming on board. Because we think we are the kind of company that people like yourself should be rooting for, not attacking.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

Why Are You A Liberal Democrat?

2009-03-17T11:55:00.001Z

The party has released a video asking the question "Why are you a Liberal Democrat?" of a whole load of our MPs and Lords. (Hat-tip to Politics Home for drawing my attention to it)

It's interesting, and characteristically liberal, I suppose, that for every person asked, a different answer is forthcoming, and yet at the same time, a good picture of what the party is about is built up. I particularly like the typically understated final word from Paddy.

What would your answer to this question be?

Done Seen Watchmen

2009-03-14T00:56:00.000Z

James Graham has posted a good, thoughtful review with which I am 99% in agreement here, so I won't put myself to the trouble of writing anything similar. Instead, here are a few random thoughts.

1. For goodness sake, Jon, put some pants on. I know he's naked for most of the graphic novel, but there's... what... five frames that actually show proper full frontal nudity? In the film, it's every five minutes.

2. Many films invite the use of a particular line as a one-line review. Watchmen, it occurred to me, does this in the form of Jon's line "they're making me into something gaudy", which seemed to me curiously appropriate.

3. Several of the scenes seem to run on rather too long, mostly because the makers of the film are rather enjoying the song they've decided should accompany it.

4. Generally, the pacing is such that I'm not entirely sure if the film is too short or too long. If they had to cut a bunch of plot strands from the original, in an otherwise very faithful film, then couldn't they have kept some of it by not being quite so self-indulgent? The titles take about ten minutes, for goodness sake.

5. Couldn't the New Frontiersman have become just a regular newspaper or something? Is there really any point introducing it in the last minute of the film?

6. Despite the plot weirdnesses introduced by the changes, as James describes, I do rather like the new ending.

7. Chopping arms off. Grow up, folks. What, exactly, did that add?

8. Supposedly Terry Gilliam thought it would make a better miniseries. I think I'm inclined to agree with him. That way, you could have kept the sequence of examinations of each main character in an episodic format.

9. I quite like most of the actual acting and stuff.

9a. Rorschach doesn't sound like that. Sorry.

10. Most of the film's technical aspects are pretty good, too. The sound design and photography is lovely, and the set design remarkably faithful to the book.

11. It's just a shame that the film's writer and director clearly value gratuitous shock value over the character examination of the book.

Vince Interview Part 3

2009-03-13T12:35:00.001Z

And so we come to Game Theory, and the story that appeared in the FT, Graun and BBC a couple of days ago (on the day of the interview, in fact). I lobbed Vince a nice soft ball, inviting him to make any comments about the story. His response was that he was quite cross about the story's appearance; he feels that it's a silly story that has been somewhat manufactured by a journalist who saw some mind maps on a white board in Vince's office. Vince told us that the mind maps weren't actually about a hung parliament at all, but were about "economic research". He regretted that the story had been picked up, because it has apparently "upset a few people", presumably the party's press handling wing.

All of which is fine, but it doesn't entirely explain the story that appeared. I'm quite prepared to accept that the mind maps bit might be wholly unrelated to thinking about a hung parliament, but nevertheless, the story did make itself out to be based on more than just the mind maps thing. So... I dunno what to make of it, really.

Richard was up for another go next, asking about the sale of the Royal Mail: Is now (the bottom of the market) a good time to sell it? Vince was broadly supportive of some of Mandelson's aims in the legislation he proposed, in particular the correcting of earlier mistakes in the government's handling of the Royal Mail. He pointed out that the new legislation would mean much less "cherry picking" of the Royal Mail. Vince also feels that there is a role for private capital in the Royal Mail, but not in the Post Office, which should be national. Having sounded not-wholly-unopposed to the government's plans, however, Vince did say that John Thurso's series of tests for the legislation probably weren't going to be met, and that therefore we would likely oppose the legislation. The tests are all the usual Lib Dem stuff about worker shareholding of the Royal Mail, etc.

Next Alix, with the excitement of Howard Dean's speech still ringing in her ears (and her conference luggage still sat at her feet), was interested to know Vince's reaction to Dean's reaction to her question to him.

Ahem. I'll try that again.

Howard Dean doesn't really like over-targetting resources, and thinks we need to do everyone the courtesy of at least asking for their vote. What does Vince think about this? Well, it turns out that Vince thinks we're not running a presidential campaign, and that our FPTP system forces us to ensure a "base" of support, so Dean's advice could be taken too far. Having said that, Vince seemed in tune with the optimism of Dean's approach, pointing out that almost all Lib Dem seats were no-hopers at some point, and that usually it's just a matter of gnawing away until a tipping point arrives. Often, it's very much down to the right individuals getting things moving. There are many areas where we don't really have much presence in the way of councillors, and yet we do have a lot of members.

Jo wanted to know what Vince felt was good and bad about the experience of being a PPC. Vince, lest we forget in the glare of his current glory, stood three times for the party before being elected: twice in York, and once in Twickenham, the seat he eventually won. He began this process, he says, quite naive, believing that getting elected was all about making "a few good speeches" and raising a profile that way. He quickly came to appreciate the importance of canvassing, getting out the vote, and all the other bits and bobs that go with winning elections. He emphasised the importance of building a good team - it's not just an individual effort.

Lastly, Mark asked what Vince's attitude to his "glamorous appearances" at various dinners was. Were they targetted? Essentially, the answer was that it tends to be "first come, first served"; Vince tries to play the target seats game, but finds it in some ways more interesting and heartwarming to stray from this beaten track and visit the aforementioned local parties with little elected presence, but nevertheless a reasonable membership. Vince is something of an enthusiast for such local parties, and tries to visit them if he can fit it in whilst visiting a target seat, because it's quite possible that a nice dinner with Vince could be what a local party needs to get itself off the ground.

And on that optimistic note, our time with Vince was almost up, leaving just enough time to take a picture. And here it is, complete with bizarre Portcullis House carpety wall hanging:

Bonus points available for correctly identifying me as the one who doesn't look like Jennie, Mary, Jo, Helen, Vince, Mark, Alix or an elephant.

David Cameron's Homophobic New Friends

2009-03-12T23:48:00.002Z

Paul Waugh at the Evening Standard has pointed out that the parties that the Tories are proposing to ally themselves with in the European Parliament include the Polish Law and Justice Party. He points out that one of the party's MPs made the pretty interesting remark: "Obama is an approaching catastrophe. This marks the end of white man's civilisation."

Their founder is also a climate change denier, quoted as saying that "Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so."

A quick scout round the internets produces some more interesting information. The co-founder and current chair of the party, Jarosław Kaczyński, has, for instance, been quoted as saying that "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization." This, just to be cheap for a second, from a man who is unmarried and lives with his mother.

Meanwhile, the Tories have been hiding behind Kaczynski's twin brother Lech, who is the current President of Poland, pointing out that he has disowned the remarks made by one of their MPs about Obama.

Maybe, but the charge of a homophobic party is rather less easily shrugged off. Lech Kaczyński himself, on a state visit to Ireland, was quoted as saying that the human race "would disappear if homosexuality was freely promoted". In march last year he broadcast a video of a gay American couple's wedding on Polish national television, to warn the nation that supporting the Lisbon Treaty, and therefore the EU Charter of Human Rights, would mean that same-sex marriage could come to Poland.

Make no mistake, this party has made homophobia a centrepiece of its identity.

If the Tories think it's unfair that people are mocking them for leaving the EPP Group in favour of joining forces with Europe's nutters, they've got some explaining to do.

Vince Interview Part 2

2009-03-12T11:57:00.000Z

You join us, dear reader, sat around a table in a room in Portcullis House, wondering whether to eat another donut, and talking to Vince Cable. If you want to know how this came about, read part 1.

Next to ask a question was Millennium's daddy, Richard. He wanted to know about the Euro, and whether it was likely that the recession would unify the Eurozone or split it. Vince didn't really know, so he said so; it'll all come out in the wash. The question then is, how do we, the UK, react, and how do we stand to fare in the meantime. Vince was cautiously pessimistic about the verdict of the international currency markets when assessments of the UK's position are made, including the toxic assets that we have now taken on. It may not be good.

With that in mind, Vince reminded us that he and Nick Clegg are "well disposed" to the Eurozone, and hinted that the grass which Chris Huhne was said to have kicked the Euro into a little while ago might not be quite as long as some had imagined. If the Euro turns out to have weathered the recession well, the issue of our joining it should be revived.

Helen was up next, and asked Vince about blogging, and why he didn't do it. Vince's response, perhaps unsurprisingly, was "time", and priorities. Vince has spent a good deal of time on the MSM recently, and, whilst he recognises that the print media in particular are a sinking ship, he obviously doesn't feel it's time to cut our losses and run for the cyberspace dry land just yet. He also felt that he already got quite enough contact from people writing to him, and wasn't blogging likely to encourage more? Having said that, he was open to the idea, and praised Lynne Featherstone's efforts to persuade him of the merits of blogging.

Mary tried to offer encouragement, in the form of the information that her site gets a higher readership than Vince's constituency site does. She suggested that blogging was a good way to drive up readership of a site. Vince seemed interested in this - what was it about blogging that did this? The answer, of course, is regularity. If you can spend half an hour a day on a press release, you can spend it on writing a blog post, and with any luck, the press will just lift quotes from your blog instead. Vince pointed out that he already does post up all the press release type material on a daily basis, to which the response was that a more personal feel to the blog was key to its appeal.

It's for this reason that I have to say, personally, that I suspect if anything blogging would reduce the correspondence that Vince's office has to deal with, because the more people feel that they have real contact with someone online (the great strength of blogging), the less motivated to contact them by other means they become.

Into this mix, Alix added the observation that the LDV fringe event at conference, at which several people from the US Democratic party had described techniques that worked for the Obama campaign, had a real focus on personal stories: canvassers on the doorstep were encouraged to simply tell their own stories, of what had motivated them to get involved with the campaign. The benefits of blogging stem from the importance of the personal in politics. At least, I think that's why that was relevant!

Jo was next, for the question that we all sometimes worry about as Lib Dems: is Vince's approval rubbing off on the Lib Dems sufficiently? What could be done to improve this? First off, Vince didn't really buy any argument that the Lib Dems are especially weak at the moment, looking at where we have often been at similar points in the election cycle. In any case, he tries always to get a mention of the Lib Dems from his appearances, but he also feels that it's important not to be too tribal in his punditry, otherwise people simply wouldn't come to him for it at all.

Jennie recalled that when people tell her Vince should be leader, she's not convinced, because then we would be back in the situation that the party has fought to escape from, which is that we are perceived as a one man band. Vince agreed; there shouldn't be a return to the Paddy Ashdown days. As such, it seems to make sense to me that jitters about Vince's position in the press are a growing pain for the Lib Dems: we aren't used to there being more than one person representing us in the media, that's all. We are now fortunate enough to have Nick, Vince, and not forgetting Chris Huhne, who quite often manages to get himself on the telly 'n' that as well.

Mark wanted some investment advice next, a modern day South East Asian unit trust, if you will, but Vince wasn't biting. He pointed out that he is as fallible as the rest of us, and that if you'd asked him what to do five years or so ago, as his wife did, he would have suggested a diverse investment in stocks and shares, whereas his wife chose instead to just stick it in a high interest Nationwide account, and is all the better off for it. The point Vince did want to make was that diversity of investments is key, and that in fact, in his estimation many assets are currently under-priced, so people with the liquidity have every reason to invest at the moment.

Out of this, came a brief discussion of an issue that bothers Vince, specifically the unpleasant way that means-tested benefits effectively confiscate savings. Unfortunately, my notes on that are pretty indecipherable to me, so you'd better hope someone else writes it up better!

Mary congratulated Vince on his contributions during conference to the debate over faith schools, commenting that it was nice to hear Vince give opinions on issues other than economics. Vince pointed out that to some people in his constituency, it was unusual to think of him as a treasury spokesman; on a local level, Vince has tended to be more a crime and hospitals kind of guy.

Anyway, that's enough of that for now, but join me in part 3 for Vince reaction to the recent Game Theory story.

Vince Interview Part 1

2009-03-11T11:23:00.001Z

Arriving at Portcullis House, I managed to blink as the security people took a picture to hang round my neck. I staggered, bewildered into the atrium, looking around for people who looked like bloggers. I got it right first go - well, the elephant was a dead giveaway - and we loitered until joined by more bloggers. Lady Mark was already ensconced on the other side of the glass barriers - the glass is greener on the other side - and then who should we spot, but Vince. Much waving ensued, and he came and let us through into the special area for special people. Since there were a lot of us, he went and got us a room to use instead of his office (quite disappointing - no opportunity to verify this Mind Maps business!).

And so, sitting comfortably and suitably donuted, we began.

Alix kick off, asking whether we're heading for an overhaul of our tax policy, perhaps after seeing hints of such a move picked up over the weekend by some in the MSM. Vince's answer was basically political speak for "yes, it will be changing": the aims will remain the same, but "the details of how we do it will have to change over time". He reiterated that we are committed to a 4p cut in income tax "or the equivalent", and mentioned allowances as one such potential avenue of equivalency.

Jo, meanwhile, wanted to know about diversity and equality and stuff, and Vince's role on the Diversity Engagement Group, asking what the next steps are, and whether issues like these were going to end up on the back burner because of the recession. Vince felt that these priorities wouldn't be changed by hard times, and, whilst seeming to concede perhaps that there wasn't as obvious a "next step" on wimmin, he hoped that BME candidates might stand to do very well under the party's stated strategy of attacking the soft underbelly of Labour support in northern cities, etc.

Jennie was next round the table, and asked about Vince's interest in bees. Vince explained that, as part of the normal business of being known around one's constituency, he had been invited along to the apiary at the end of his road, for an open day. It was there that he had his ear bent about Colony Collapse Disorder and the surrounding issues, and with this ringing in his ears, he went back to parliament and asked Gordon Brown a question about it in committee. The response was so derisory and uninterested as to make Vince a whole lot more bothered about it than he would otherwise have been, it seems. Brown implied that it was exactly the sort of daft issue that gets Lib Dems going, and was a waste of serious people's time. It was this scientific illiteracy - a common theme for many bloggers, not least Jennie - that convinced Vince that pressure was required to help ministers do the right thing, and since then a cross-party campaign has grown around the issue.

Mark's question was about the civil service, and whether the party was seen as "Civil Service friendly", following Vince's criticism last conference of some public sector bonuses. Vince felt it was important not to differentiate between the public and private sectors, and that practices that were criticised in one sector would therefore be criticised in the other. Vince was aware, of course, that his comments about the number of civil servants on over £100,000 had annoyed some of our councillors, and he expressed some sympathy for the lower ranks of the civil service, but he's sticking to his guns. He was rather keen on the term "public sector aristocracy", and pointed out that it wasn't so much just the wages, as the triple-whammy of wages, job security and pensions that put many in the civil service in such a privileged position. For Vince, it's about attacking privilege, and it extends from the private sector, to civil servants, and to MPs, who he also singled out as unusually shielded from the economic weather.

Mary asked how the government's habit of offloading the dirty business of taxation onto local government could be fixed, and about the unfairness of central government's funding of local government currently. Vince's response was that there is always lobbying on the formula that works out funding to local authorities. Although generally quite good, he believes, the formula tends to fall down at the extreme ends of the income scale. Essentially, local government needs a stronger local tax base, and Lib Dem policy would do this, for instance by making business rates local.

Next up it was my turn. Looking at my scribbled notes made earlier in the day, I plumped for a more outward looking question, for variety's sake, and asked about Gordon Brown's alleged interest in international regulatory frameworks. Was he likely to achieve anything useful from making the issue a focus of the G20? Vince's reply was closer to the Tory line than I expected, calling Brown's focus on this as a solution "a cop out", to avoid responsibility for his mistakes; of course, now comes the bit where it deviates from the Tories: Vince can spell out what he means by that. Brown had, after all, allowed finance to become far too large a part of our economy, and failed to implement the Basel rules in the UK as well as other countries, like Spain and Canada, did it; here the rules acted pro-cyclically in the housing market.

Vince rounded off this answer with a quick mention of his forthcoming book, The Storm. Subtitled "The world economic crisis and what it means", it will likely cover the answers to my question and a great many more besides. So I will leave part one of my write up here, to allow you to go off and pre-order it!

Woop!

2009-03-10T00:01:00.000Z

1. I now have access to the electric internet again; my usual inconsistent pace of posting will return shortly.

2. I interviewed Vince Cable today, along with several other bloggers (see below).

3. I met several lovely fellow bloggers who I've not met before, including the regal Lady Mark, the owner of an excellent bag Jennie, the I'm-trying-desperately-to-resist-the-temptation-to-call-her Jo Crispy-Strips, the distinguished Mary Reid, the brilliant Alix, the lovely Helen Duffett, and of course the fluffy Millennium with his daddy Richard.

4. An evening in the pub's always quite nice, innit?

"Green" Gas?

2009-02-02T12:37:00.000Z

Reading this report on the BBC News site, I was struck by the following paragraph:

Today's report will contribute to the growing debate about heat, which produces 47% of the UK's CO2 emissions - much more than electricity or transport. The government will soon launch a consultation on a heat strategy.

Aaaaaaaaargh!!!! Why the hell hasn't the government already started working out the most difficult part of achieving its 80% cut to emissions? For fuck's sake, guys, hurry up, we don't have long!

That goes doubly so because the problem is an exceedingly prickly one, as anyone who's read, say, George Monbiot's "Heat" should be aware. Gas is the most efficient producer of heat (as opposed to electricity), but burning it requires a separate infrastructure for its supply, and shifting to hydrogen and combined heat and power (one option) would likely* require a proper, serious commitment from the government to get around the old "no market until all the infrastructure's in place / no incentive to install the infrastructure because there's currently no market for it" problem, because the pipes required are different to the ones we currently use to supply natural gas. (* I say likely because I'm sure market fans would argue that companies should be able to see far enough into the future to see a way to make profit down the line, but I have to say, given how good the market has been at thinking long term so far, I'm skeptical.)

The other option is finding enough renewably sourced gas to replace most natural gas (unlikely, and relies on a wasteful economy just when we're trying to move away from one), moving to things like woodchip burners (not great, a lot of woodchip to be transported about), electrical heating (inefficient, but, with a lot of renewable electricity, an option), or converting all our housing stock to passive houses (also not easy).

What becomes clear is that all the options involve some serious changes and a big, proper commitment from government to a particular strategy. Electrical generation is one thing, but heating our homes and workplaces is a very knotty problem with no simple answers. Anyone looking at this in even a cursory manner could have told you this years ago. So hurry up, government!

Global Peace & Unity: Closure?

2009-01-26T14:44:00.000Z

Back in October last year, Nick Clegg attacked Policy Exchange for releasing a dodgy dossier on various speakers at the 2008 "Global Peace and Unity" event. At the time, I looked at the dossier and offered my opinion on it, but the general consensus that came out of the comments thread brouhaha on LDV was that we should reserve judgment on Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes's decision to attend the event until we could see what they had to say.

Well, that day has come, the videos of speeches at the event are here.

Nick's speech:

Simon's speech:

Currently, I'm sat in Starbucks, Virgin Media having continued to not supply me with internet access for two weeks now. Consequently, I haven't been able to actually watch the videos with the sound turned up myself yet, so I will have to reserve judgement.

Of course, the really interesting thing might also be to find the speeches of the controversial speakers to whom Nick and Simon might have been lending credibility by appearing on a common platform with them. If you can be arsed to do so, go here or here. Personally, I have more important things to do with the 18 mins of laptop battery left to me!

I Have Moved... to the Stone Age

2009-01-12T12:25:00.000Z

Apologies for lack of blogging lately, but I have been getting myself sorted out to move out of my parents' house for the first time and move to London, which is a lot to get your head around, or at least it would have been if I had really thought about it until now. Unfortunately, I now find myself on my own (my housemate isn't going to be here permanently until February) in a house with no internet (about which more in a minute).

As a result, you are reading this via the medium of the free wifi at wherever I've decided to go and use free wifi to post this up, having pre-writted it at 22:06 10/01/09. I expect I'm now drinking a coffee or a pint, depending what time of day it is.

So anyway, I'm now living in Camden (nice, albeit a bit trendier than really suits me), trying to do little things like clean the oven so I can cook in it, plumb in the washing machine, get a job, etc. Which has been moderately succesful so far. But when I moved down here, I thought I was going to be online by Friday 9th. Instead, when the Virgin Media chap turned up, he informed me that the cable to our house is "dead" and will have to be replaced, and guessed it would be 1-2 weeks more until I had an internet connection. Which is a bit of a pain in the arse, really, because I had been hoping to be able to use the internet to find out where stuff I wanted was, where temping agencies might be found, etc.

But it was only this evening that I realised it's more than that. Sat here without a housemate to talk to, I felt very isolated, not because I'm sat in a house on my own (which I've done many times before, obviously), but, I realised, because I would usually go on the internet and watch Maron V Seder, leaf through Lib Dem Blogs, poke about Facebook or some forums, etc. In short, the internet makes up a fair chunk of the ways I socialise.

Then it occurred to me that it was somewhat bizarre to feel like I was cut off from the world. After all, before the internet existed for the use of the general public, this was the normal state of affairs. So is this a generational thing? I don't imagine, for example, that lack of access to the internet for a couple of weeks would bother, say, my parents, anything like as much. Is this, I wonder, connected to why I'm so crap at getting reading done in my leisure time - because faced with a choice between reading and talking to people on the internet, I'm generally likely to choose the latter, with the exception of very few books.

Then again, is this a generational use of the internet thing, or just that I value time talking to other people more than many other people do? After all, at uni, where all my peers were roughly my age, I chose to keep more of my time available for just chatting over a cup of tea to friends, when I might otherwise have been sat on a million different committees, or involved in more ADC shows, or something.

Ho hum. Anyway, if you've read this far, you might as well write a comment. How much does it bother you when you're cut off from the internet?

Franken Winning?

2008-12-21T00:52:00.002Z

Norm Coleman should be worried: Nate Silver has proclaimed as much. I do hope it continues to go well for Franken, I genuinely think he would make a better Senator than Coleman.

Apart from that, while I'm here, I might as well note that the Minnesota recount business has been interesting from a spin point of view; with the benefit of the hindsight applied to the Florida recount in 2000, both Coleman and Franken have shown a determination to win not only the legal wranglings over the recount process, but also the public perception battle.

Jacqui Smith's Cunning Plan

2008-11-19T20:13:00.000Z

Some of my Lib Dem Blogs colleagues have been unaccountably sniffy about Jacqui Smith's brilliantly clear and incisive analysis of the situation we have with sex trafficking and prostitution. Personally, I think it's brilliantly sensible, makes absolute sense, and the same strain of thought should be rolled out more widely to solve other problems.

For instance, sweat shops. We all know that the people who are buying garments cheaply from chain stores, without knowing that they haven't been manufactured by child labourers or otherwise exploited workers, are partly morally culpable, so why don't we make it illegal for them to buy these garments? Ignorance of the consequences of their actions is no excuse, and we can all agree that this is a stain on the conscience of our society, and action must be taken, etc.

Of course, the business lobby will suggest this will "unfairly" punish customers who buy many "legitimate products", by simply putting them off buying any products at all. But I think anyone with any sense will recognise that this is a sensible direction to go in. I mean, yes it's a shame to have an adverse effect on the livelihood of people in good, legal jobs on a living wage, but we shouldn't let that get in the way of cracking down on this great social evil. So lets bang up anyone who buys a cheap item of clothing that turns out to have been made by an eleven year old!

Phew, I'm not sure I could have kept that up much longer. I don't know how Labour ministers do it.

Seriously, is there anyone who can explain to me what the thinking on this policy is? Can you, dear reader, think of a single other instance where the same thinking would make much sense whatsoever? I can't. I mean, if people are being exploited, surely the thing to make illegal is the exploitation, and the best way to enforce that is to make said industry as transparent and open as possible, so that it can be suitably regulated and investigated. No?

Jacqui Smith should just be honest, and say that she doesn't like prostitution, and she wants to ban it. I mean, that's the only way this makes sense, because as an attempt to tackle trafficking it's fucking bonkers. But she's frightened of being honest, because she knows she'd lose the argument: it's the world's oldest profession and she'd just drive it further underground, etc. Instead, she fudges a policy together that achieves actually fuck all, is probably worse than either an outright ban or a destigmatisation and legalisation, but which allows her to muddy the political water on this just enough to get away with not doing anything that might be perceived as bold.

Cameron Tries To "Nudge" His Way Out Of Recession

2008-11-11T13:56:00.000Z

The Tories have announced a plan today to give companies National Insurance breaks on employing people who have been unemployed for over 3 months. Detail on their website, but the gist is this:

It costs the government £8100 per annum in benefits payments and lost income tax receipts to support an unemployed person. So their proposal is as follows:

Private sector employers, who hire someone who has been claiming unemployment benefits for more than three months (13 weeks) and who has not previously worked for that company in the previous year, would receive a credit against Employers National Insurance Contributions. The credit would be worth £2,500 for full time jobs of 30 hours a week or more, or half that amount for part time work of 16 hours a week or more. It would be phased out beyond the higher rate tax threshold so that only basic rate taxpayers would be eligible for the full amount.
• To prevent companies making people redundant in order to replace them and claim the tax cut, the payment would only be available to companies that had made no redundancies in the previous three months, or for three months after claiming the credit.
• To limit the amount given in tax cuts to companies who are already growing rapidly, the tax cut would be limited to a maximum of 20 per cent of the workforce of any one company.
• The credit would be available for one year after the employee starts their new job.

David Cameron doesn't believe you can borrow your way out of a recession, it seems. Instead, he seems to intend to Nudge his way out of one. It's a pity, then, that in the words of Nick Clegg, "Cameron has drawn the fly on the floor". This doesn't help anyone who is already in a job. It doesn't help businesses who are struggling to keep employing the people they already employ. It doesn't seem likely to boost consumer spending all that much. It doesn't even seem likely to genuinely get all that many people back into employment. All it really does is tip the scales in favour of people who have been unemployed for over 3 months.

Let's look at this from the point of view of the people it's aimed at: employers (and note, in passing, that the last two Tory tax announcements - VAT delay, and now this - have been aimed at helping business, not people in the most direct sense).

To employ someone on minimum wage full time costs them about £11,000 (depends what hours they're on, so no point being too precise here). £5682 of that is above the Earnings Threshold, so National Insurance is paid on it, to the tune of 12.8%, or £727. So overall it costs the employer £11,727 to employ someone on the minimum wage. The Tory credit reduces that to £9227. Essentially, the Tories want to reduce the price of employing someone on minimum wage by 21%.

The significance of these credits only gets lower the higher the wage you're talking about. Someone on £20,000 costs their employer £21,891 to employ. That becomes £19,391, a cut of 11%. Or if you're on £30,000, it costs your employer £33,171, becoming £30,671, a cut of 8%. Much beyond that, the credits stop under the plan in question. So the jobs this is likely to have most impact on is those at the bottom end of the pay scale.

Fair enough. But now ask yourself this: Are you, a struggling company in the middle of a recession, going to set yourself back £9227 a year to employ someone who is currently unemployed out of the goodness of your own heart? I suggest that the answer is no. I suggest that most of the companies who are going to be taking people on in the next few years are the ones who had a pretty good chance of employing some extra people anyway: businesses who are just filling gaps left by employees leaving, or who are recruiting people they would have needed anyway. The Tories themselves admit that this would be true to some extent; the £2500 figure is based on an estimate that only ~31% of the jobs that would be created under this scheme wouldn't have been created anyway. I suspect it would be rather less than that, depending on how bad the recession gets.

Is it too cynical of me to suspect that this isn't really a Tory prescription for the recession at all? I reckon what this is is a bit of policy they had on the back burner as a remedy for long-term unemployment, which has been tweaked a bit and packed up in a shiny new box that says "Tax Cut!" on it, to cover up for the fact that the Tories, and specifically Gideon Osborne, don't know anything about the economy, really, and it has only become obvious to them relatively recently that the "responsibility ... sharing the proceeds of growth ... no irresponsible tax cuts" line wasn't going to cut it any more. Everyone else is talking tax cuts now, but they've got nothing much to announce, and the fiddly bits and pieces they'd come up with so far (Council Tax "freeze", Marriage Bonus, Inheritance Tax threshold to millionaire-friendly level, etc) were looking a bit shabby and tight-fisted in comparison. Hence today's policy.

It's a good job we've got an economic team who were able to beat the rest of the parties to it, despite the slowing effect of the Lib Dem policy ratification process, isn't it? We've had a revenue neutral package to really help people on low and middle incomes for over a year now. The way to create job growth is to give everyone a significant amount of their own money back. Spending goes up, jobs are really created, etc. Today's Tory plan does next to nothing to mitigate the recession.

Go back to your drawing board and try again, Gideon and Dave.

It's Not Over Yet

2008-11-05T17:23:00.000Z

As Kos's map shows, the senate results are not yet in.

There is a post explaining what's going on with these races that are yet to be called here. The presidential result is already determined, so the electoral college predictions are largely academic (give or take an LDV mug).

But the Senate races are important. The Democrats had hoped that they might come out of this process with a filibuster proof senate. If they are to achieve this, the four yet to be called races all have to go that way. That's a tough call on the face of it. But lets just look at those a bit closer (from the Kos posting linked above):

We're currently at 56 seats with Sanders and Lieberman. We need a clean sweep in Alaska, Georgia, Minnesota and Oregon to win.

Alaska: With 99% of precincts reported, Ted Stevens (R) leads Mark Begich (D) by 3500 votes.

There are reportedly over 60,000 absentee ballots filed, so no one has called it yet.

Georgia: Saxby Chambliss (R) leads Jim Martin (D) 50-46. However, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that over 600,000 early votes have not been counted. Martin led handily in early voting, so it's highly likely that Chambliss will end up below 50% and this will go to a runoff.

Minnesota: Norm Coleman leads by less than 600 votes now. All outstanding ballots will matter, and there's the possibility of a recount as well.

Oregon: Gordon Smith (R) leads Jeff Merkley (D) by 15,000 votes with 75% of precincts reporting. Not looking good.

So Oregon looks like a write-off, which is a shame. But even so, there is every chance of 59 Democratic caucusing Senators by the end of all this.

Minnesota could get nasty, with lawyers piling in on both sides. Al Franken is talking up his chances of changing the result:

The Associated Press uncalled the Senate race at about 9 a.m., saying they had prematurely declared Coleman the winner.
Franken said this morning that he intends to exercise his right to a recount.

He also said his campaign is investigating alleged voting irregularities at some polling places in Minneapolis, and that “a recount could change the outcome significantly.”

“Let me be clear: Our goal is to ensure that every vote is properly counted,” he said.

It will be some time before we know what happens there, with the recount not expected for some weeks.

Alaska looks, initially, bizarre. They seem to be about to re-elect a convicted felon, but as Kos point out, there are absentee ballots to be added. More importantly, even if Stevens wins, he is likely to be forced out of the Senate if his appeal fails, and that will trigger another election to fill his seat.

If Georgia fails to give Saxby Chambliss an overall majority (which looks likely), then that too will trigger another election, a runoff between the two highest voted candidates (the Rep and the Dem).

So in Alaska and Georgia, there is a significant chance for what remains of the Obama war chest to be put to good use trying to win a couple of extra senators, not to mention spending it on lawyers to help Al Franken's efforts to inch it in Minnesota.

We may not know for some time exactly what the Democrats' Senate position is going to look like. The only thing we can be sure of is that they seem likely to fall short of that all important 60 seats. Oh well.

US Election Night

2008-11-04T22:11:00.001Z

Sofa and TV: Check

Several tabs in Firefox on laptop displaying various websites:
- LDV's liveblog when it arrives: Check
- Maron v Seder: Check
- 538.com to see how their predictions went: Check
- CNN Results page: Check
- Political Betting: Check

Popcorn with which to enjoy the looks on the inhabitants of Fox News's faces: Check

...yup, all set!

Best HIGNFY Ever!!!!!

2008-10-31T21:06:00.003Z

Tom Baker, Vince, Chris Addison. Enough said.

ETA: Now on iPlayer here (for the next 7 days).

Characters/Letters Meme

2008-10-31T00:46:00.001Z

Picked this up from Jennie. Rules as follows:

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose names begin with that letter and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

Anyhoo, my letter was B, so these were what came to mind:

Bernice Summerfield - Dr Who companion through much of the NAs, which I am trying to read in order at the moment (and have been doing since forever, tbh). Not yet managed to quite "get" the high levels of affection for the character, to be honest.

Bilal - Exxilon from Death to the Daleks. Don't really know why this occured to me, other than that he's quite sweet. (Don't worry, won't all be Whovian).

Aww.

Bloody Stupid Johnson - Terry Pratchett's carnival-hall-of-mirrors reflection of Capability Brown. A great archetype.

The Black Man - enigmatic seller of illicit materials from This Town Will Never Let Us Go (and also a cameo in Alien Bodies?). One of the more effective bits of the book, for me.

Big Brother - Orwell's enduring anthropomorphic vision of an overbearing state. Inevitably always quoted by people making points about something or other, but not always the most relevant dystopia.

So, anyone want a letter?

Ross and Brand: Where Did The Anger Come From?

2008-10-29T23:01:00.001Z

The main sense I have this evening is that much of the venom towards Ross and Brand is coming from people who have never liked them in the first place. 2 people complained about the original broadcast, but the day it hit the tabloids this number started creeping up over 1000, the next day it shot up to 10,000, and by today this number had hit 27,000.

Sorry, what? Isn't this a bit ridiculous? I mean, that's the order of magnitude of the Big Brother racism row. What is driving people to complain, exactly? That they feel sorry for Andrew Sachs? Because by the time most of the complaints were registered, Ross and Brand had already offered sincere apologies to Andrew Sachs. It's notable that Russell Brand, in his probably correctly judged resignation tonight, is at pains to make it clear that he feels the need to make a statement only for Sachs and Georgina Baillie's sake, not for the sake of the media storm it has sparked.

Now let me make it clear that I don't think what Brand and Ross did was especially funny, and I think it was right that they should have apologised. But what strikes me as odd here is the point that people who think they are being clever keep making: "Well, the real question is why their editors broadcast such an offensive piece of radio." No. No it isn't. The issue is that they made some calls that upset Andrew Sachs. They should have apologised even if it wasn't broadcast. The fact it was broadcast is neither here nor there - a fact the show's regular audience recognised, since nobody who ordinarily listened to the show actually complained about this aspect (the 2 initial complaints were about Ross's language, specifically).

To my mind, people going on the internet to play back clips that they've heard might offend them, with the express intention of being offended and complaining about it, is utterly bizarre. I suspect that much of the anger here is being driven by people who have long felt that Jonathan Ross's salary was completely inexplicable, and resented the BBC's belief in what they seem to feel are his unique abilities.

Today, I was sat in a cafe having lunch, while a table of three older ladies behind me had a good mither about the whole thing. It was pretty clear to me that they, like most of the people in this vox pop video, just dislike Ross, and feel he has no place on TV. "I've never liked him. He took over that Film 2000 from whatshisname..." "Oh, Barry Norman." "Yes, that one. He was good, I used to watch him. It was never the same after that Jonathan Ross took over. He's awful."* Not once was the specific incident discussed. What was discussed was their general distaste for Ross and Brand's personas more generally.

What this incident has done is create a flashpoint for a large but disparate anger over these two performers, and in particular Jonathan Ross. If Ross gets through this with his job intact, he would be well advised to ask for a pay cut.

*Whilst I quote this story as an example of what I think are the wrong reasons to want Ross sacked, I can't say I entirely disagree with them about The Film Programme. If Ross goes, can we have someone who can actually review things as if he actually cared about them? Mark Kermode, perhaps? They could do a lot worse, when presumably Film 2008 isn't on this week (what with Ross's suspension), than to simply broadcast an edited copy of the video webcast of Kermode's Radio 5 reviews on Simon Mayo's show.

Policy Exchange on GP&U, and Nick Clegg: A Fisking

2008-10-26T00:24:00.003+01:00

Lib Dem Voice has already noted Nick Clegg's attack on Policy Exchange's document (.doc) profiling certain speakers and exhibitors at this year's Global Peace and Unity event. The discussion on LDV included several people suggesting that Policy Exchange might have a point, so I thought I'd have a look into this. To my mind there are several questions here that should not be confused, so I will deal with them separately.

1. Are Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes lending credibility to cranks by going to this event?

Well, only if they are equally endorsing the views of Tony Benn, Ian Blair, Dominic Grieve, Tony McNulty and a host of others by doing so.

Here's a list of the attendees Policy Exchange have issues with:

Director:
Mohamed Ali Harrath

Speakers:
Sheikh Yusuf Estes
Sheikh Yasir Qadhi
Sheikh Muhammad Alshareef
Rt Rev Riah Abu El-Assal
Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss
Mohammad Ijaz ul Haq
Ebrahim Rasool
William Rodriguez

Here's a list of the people they don't mention who are also speaking:

Yusuf Islam
Abdul Wahid Pedersen
Sheikh Tawfique Chowdhury
Jermaine Jackson
Reverend Jesse Jackson
Tony McNulty MP
Jack Straw
Simon Hughes MP
Nick Clegg
Sir Ian Blair
William Ernest "Bill" Rammell
Moazzam Begg
Sir Iqbal Sacranie OBE
Lord Sheikh
Shahid Malik MP
Dominic Grieve MP
Ahmed Zakayev
Zareen Roohi Ahmed
Salma Yaqoob
Tony Benn
John Rees
Lord Nazir Ahmed
Sadiq Khan
Stephen Timms
Richard Barnes
Imran Khan
Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari

Obviously, many on the latter list are also muslims, but Policy Exchange aren't lauding the event for encouraging dialogue with moderate Islam, they are trying to pick out those people with allegedly reprehensible views. This is legitimate, certainly, but somewhat divisive and negative of them. More importantly, the presence of other politicians at the event, including from Labour, Conservative and Respect, serves usefully to underline the point that in no way do speakers at this event think they are endorsing the views of other speakers at the event, any more than MPs who speak in the House of Commons are endorsing the views of everyone else present in the chamber at the time.

2. If we believe in free speech, do we have a responsibility to challenge people saying bad things?

I mention this only because Geoffrey Payne seems to think we do:

Well I do not see the point in allowing free speech and then not taking the opportunity to challenge the opinions you disagree with. [ie. boycotting the event]
Free speech allows debate, but you do not want a debate, and so you will leave these opinions to go unchallenged. How is that useful to anyone?

I have to say, one reading of the above seems a bit odd. Surely we cannot, as liberals, be expected to be responsible for rebutting all things which we disagree with that are ever said, wherever they are said, just because we are in favour of people's right to say them?

However, there is rather more of a case that since Nick (and Simon) are there, they do indeed have a responsibility to speak up against views they disagree with. There doesn't seem to be much point in their being there if they don't.

3. Is Nick right to criticise the dossier Policy Exchange have produced?

Well, the specific criticism he makes is that the dossier "seeks to raise alarm over a number of the speakers planning to attend the conference. The accuracy of the allegations is variable, with a notable lack of evidence to support many of the claims."

Of those assertions for which sources are quoted in the footnotes, the sources are as follows:

Probably Reliable:

Companies House documents
Interpol
The Guardian
The BBC
South African Broadcasting Corporation News
Muslim Council of Britain
The Washington Post
A Youtube video of Sheikh Yasir Qadhi speaking for himself
The Houston Chronicle
The BBC
Court Documents from Pennsylvania

Not sufficiently well known to me that I'd consider them an authority, but nothing I can find wrong with them:

Pakistan's "Daily Times"
ComeandSee.com (a christian website)
An article on Sunnah Online (a muslim website)

Dubious:

Insight Magazine (a controversy over the specific article cited is noted on Wikipedia; this is the citation of evidence from SANE to which Nick refers. Policy Exchange's quote from David Gaubatz takes on a rather different sense when you bear in mind that SANE believe Sharia is treasonous)
The Investigative Project on Terrorism (whose founder showed some prescience of the threat from Osama bin Laden, but has not gone without criticism, and looks to be something of an alarmist)
Frontpage Magazine (edited by git-wizard David Horowitz)
Open letter printed on Al Manar TV's website (Al Manar being a Lebanese Hezbollah mouthpiece likely to present things in a way that reflects well on Hezbollah)

So Nick seems to be on reasonable ground to point out that some of the people cited are equally biased as the people they are quoted in criticism of, but that's by no means true of all of them. Now, lets look properly at the claims themselves. All of Policy Exchange's dossier is quoted below, in this colour. Anyone else's material will not be coloured, to make it easier not to get confused.

Director

According to Companies House, the director of Global Peace and Unity PLC is Mohamed Ali Harrath. Mr. Harrath is also the CEO of Islam Channel. He is a Tunisian national for whom there is currently a red notice on the Interpol website. According to the notice, the Tunisian Government has issued an arrest warrant for offences including: counterfeiting, forgery, crimes involving the use of weapons and explosives and terrorism. His date of birth and nationality provided in the red notice match the details given by Companies House. It must be noted however that the Interpol red notice is not an arrest warrant, but indicates that the Tunisian Government has requested he return to the country to face charges.

Fair enough. Director of the company in charge seems to have a dodgy past, at least according to the Tunisian government.

Sheikh Muhammad Alshareef

Mr. Alshareef is the Canadian born founder of the Al Maghrib Institute and a graduate of the University of Medinah. He graduated in 1999 with a degree in Sharia.
He has written an article entitled Why the Jews Were Cursed, in which he explains that Allah has punished the Jews because of the way in which they responded to his blessings. He concludes by saying that Muslims “should not take them (the Jews) as our close allies…should not imitate them…(and) a Muslimah may never marry a Jewish or Christian man that remains in his beliefs.”

Well, yes, but the article in question appears to be more or less a survey of all mentions of Jews in the Quran, and interestingly, Policy Exchange don't quote the following from straight after the bit that they do quote:

Is all this a death sentence on the Jews? Nay, Allâh’s infinite Mercy has left the gate open for ANYONE who wishes to come back to him.

[And if only the People of the Scripture had believed and feared Allâh, We would have removed from them their misdeeds and admitted them to joyful Gardens] - Ma’idah 5/65

So we are left with an impression of Muhammad Alshareef as maybe more bigoted than he is. Whilst the views they quote from him are unpleasant, that is in the nature of religion and in particular the notoriously cherry-pickable Quran. I don't see a reason to single out Alshareef over this.

Mohammad Ijaz ul-Haq

Mr. ul-Haq is the son of former Pakistani president Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. He is a Pakistani MP and former Federal Minister for Religious Affairs.

As such one might argue that this alone qualifies him to be at the conference. No matter what awful views they might attribute to him, he is a valid choice to invite to an event aimed at promoting useful dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims from around the world, in the interests of peace.

In June 2007, after Salman Rushdie was awarded a Knighthood, Mr ul-Haq, who was at the time Religious Affairs Minister, suggested this was a justification for Muslims to carry out suicide bombings. He was reported by a number of UK newspapers to have said: “This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision…The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title.”

One might almost suspect that this controversial pronouncement was one of the reasons he was considered an interesting choice to invite to the event. There is absolutely no point inviting people with views we can all agree with to an event to promote dialogue and understanding. By definition, there has to be something to understand and reach accomodations over. Bridging (somehow) the gap between the more fundamentalist demands of Islam and the tenets of liberal democracy (including freedom of speech) are central to promoting peace. No?

According to online Pakistani news portal, The Daily Times - translating an article in an Urdu newspaper called Daily Jang - during a controversy over the sexual abuse of children by ulema (Islamic scholars) at Islamic seminaries in Pakistan, Mr ul-Haq urged that the reporting of such incidents should be concealed so as not to blemish the reputation of the scholars.

Well, again, this just emphasizes that this is a man who is not from the liberal democratic tradition, and who sees his role as to some extent a religious one. The Catholic church has arguably spent years keeping similar issues quiet for the same reasons. That doesn't make either right, but lets not get ahead of ourselves in our condemnation of other people's extremists.

Rt Reverend Riah Abu El-Assal

Until 2007 Mr. El Assal was the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem.

Again, as much as we might disagree with his views, this somewhat justifies his invitation in and of itself.

According to a Christian website based in Nazareth called Come and See, Mr. El Assal gave a lecture in Ramallah in February 2003 where he said: “Greetings of appreciation to all martyrs that were killed on the Land of Palestine.” He also added that all martyrs receive eternal life and they "live in the Kingdom of Heaven". In order to support his statement he quoted the following Koranic verse: "Do not consider those that were killed for the sake of God as dead, but alive with their Lord". When he was questioned about these remarks during an August 2006 BBC Hardtalk interview, he did not deny the comments attributed to him by Come and See, though he did claim that he was referring to “worldwide martyrs” and not Palestinians.

As bizarre as the quoting of Koranic verse by an Anglican minister seems, none of this seems all that outlandish to me. We don't know what he means by "martyrs" without more context - he may not mean suicide bombers, which is what we are supposed to assume. We oughtn't to forget, of course, that Christianity has its own hall of fame of martyrs. I might be wrong, but I suspect in the eyes of Policy Exchange, Ijaz-ul-Haq's real crime is failure to fall in line slavishly behind Israel.

Ebrahim Rasool

Mr. Rasool is a member of the South African ANC party and a former Premier of the Western Cape Province.

In May 2007, Mr. Rasool, in his capacity as Premier of the Western Cape Province, received a Hamas delegation to South Africa for discussions.

In June 2007 he addressed the MCB, and according to the MCB press release: “He commended the MCB for serving as a 'point of coherence', 'a point of articulation' and a 'point of focus' for British Muslims and their religious identity. He noted that Government cannot pick and choose with whom it seeks to speak to - the only credible dialogue will be with the institution that represents the community and has its trust.”

Errr... and? I don't even see what it is this guy is supposed to have done wrong, other than talking to Hamas. If Policy Exchange want to take the McCain-Palin side of the "talking to people we don't like" argument, fine, but I don't agree with them on that, so to me this seems a rather pathetic attack.

Sheikh Yusuf Estes

Sheikh Estes is a convert to Islam and director of the Islamic Mission Foundation International in the United States.

In an October 2006 Washington Post article, the author Asra Q. Nomani reports that she heard an audio sermon by Estes where he advises men on how to deal with disobedient wives:

First, "tell them." Second, "leave the bed." Finally: "Roll up a newspaper and give her a crack. Or take a yardstick, something like this, and you can hit."

Ms. Nomani then writes that she contacted Mr. Estes to ask him for a clarification of his position and he said he was attempting to limit how and when men hit their wives.

OK, I'll give them this one, he doesn't seem like a very nice person, and if he's based in the US he doesn't even have the cultural relativist defense, he has every opportunity to know better. I would just add, however, that the Quran is arguably on his side (ridiculously interpretable book that it is), and that by the sound of Nomani's article, this view is pretty widespread in Islam, even in the US, so again, the central point that you have to talk to the people you disagree with if you aren't wasting your time.

Sheikh Yasir Qadhi

Sheikh Qadhi is an instructor at the Al-Maghrib Institute and the Al Kauthar Institute.

In a March 2008 lecture on the Islam Channel he refers to the original Channel 4 Undercover Mosque Programme. In this talk he claims that the Wahhabi cult is a group invented by non Muslims in order to “divide and conquer” the Muslims. He also states that “we are loyal to our countries insofar as it does not conflict with our religion of Islam”, and that homosexuality is an “aberration against God.”

In the Houston Chronicle, Qadhi has mentioned that he is on the US Department of Homeland Security terrorist watch list.

Yes, he does. Specifically, he says:

"The main problem the Muslim community has ... is the presumption of guilt," said Yasir Qadhi, a Houston imam and a doctoral candidate at Yale University. "It is the singling out of people just because of their looks or their identity."
Muslims are routinely detained and questioned at airports and other ports of entry, he said. Qadhi also protested the denial of visas to imams and other religious leaders who are invited to this country to speak.
Sutherland said his office was empowered to investigate any complaints over discrimination and urged Muslims to report any incidents and problems.
Qadhi said he was detained for five hours, along with his wife and three small children, about four months ago when he drove back from Canada through Niagara Falls. He said he is routinely detained whenever he enters the country.
Qadhi said his name is on a terrorist watch list. He said he has no idea how he got on the list.

Anyway, back to Policy Exchange:

According to David Horowitz’s Frontpage magazine, during a 2006 lecture on the Koran’s Surah Yusuf, Mr. Qadhi denies that Hitler’s aim was the genocide of the Jewish people:

“All of these Polish Jews which Hitler was supposedly trying to exterminate, that’s another point, by the way, Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews.”

As I've already mentioned, I'm going to take Frontpage with a pinch of salt for now. I don't have any reason to specifically disbelieve this, though, so I'll give Policy Exchange that this guy probably isn't very nice either.

Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss

Rabbi Weiss is an activist and spokesman for Neturei Karta International, an anti-Zionist group of orthodox Haredi Jews. This group is known to actively support both Hamas and Hezbollah.

Meaning what, exactly? No source quoted.

In March 2008 Rabbi Weiss was a co-signatory to a Neturei Karta open letter to Hezbollah leader, Hasan Nasrallah. Much of the letter praises Nasrallah and his work:

We now turn to Your Excellency, Sayyed Nasrallah ever so humbly, and ask you to accept our words and to convey these words with the following message to the citizens of Lebanon and to the Palestinian people in refugee camps in your country.
May we reiterate that we speak to you as the voice and messengers of true Jewry — the Jewish people, true to the Almighty's Torah, from around the world.

Although we are limited in the means of expressing our deepest and true feelings, by the barriers of words, nevertheless, the Jewish people humbly offer to you and all of Lebanon, Gaza and the entire Palestine, a few words, to attempt to convey our support, deepest sorrow and heartfelt sympathy that we all feel for you, in this present tragic and traumatic time.

Once again may we state it would be only proper and fitting, that we personally write to and address each and everyone who has fallen victim of the Zionist state of "Israel". Unfortunately and how tragic, the list of victims is daunting.
May our few and humble words be a message of consolation, friendship, loyalty and support to you, the people of Lebanon, and to the people of Gaza and the entire Palestine.

Doesn't look all that supportive of Nasrallah to me. Yes, they express support for "the citizens of Lebanon and to the Palestinian people in refugee camps in your country", and later, "you, the people of Lebanon, and to the people of Gaza and the entire Palestine", but they say nothing in the quoted section of the letter in support of Hezbollah's actions. It's a pretty standard anti-zionist statement of regret about the grievances that people in Lebanon and the occupied territories have towards Israel, which they are understandably keen to separate from Judaism per se. Nothing especially reprehensible on display here, other than opposition to the state of Israel (NB. Not to the people who live there).

Naturei Karta also attended a December 2006 conference in Iran informally known as the ‘Holocaust denial’ conference, which questions the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Though they do not deny the Holocaust, the group believe that it was and still is being used by Jewish people as "tool of commercial, military and media power".

As Jews, they have some right to say this, and they are free to go where they want and talk to who they want.

Imam Johari Abdul-Malik

Imam Johari Abdul Malik is the Director of Outreach at the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Centre in Virginia, USA.

There is a recording of Imam Abdul-Malik giving a sermon at the Dar al Hijrah in 2004, in this lecture he spoke of how Islam shall become the primary religion in the United States:

“People even under the pressures that you and I know about, the deen of Islam is growing because people see even within all of this struggle it is better to be a Muslim under these conditions than to be a kaffir under any conditions... before Allah closes our eyes for the last time you will see Islam move from being the second largest religion in America-that's where we are now - to being the first religion in America.

Um... this seems like a pretty standard aspiration from any evangelical religion. Why are we supposed to think this makes him an extremist?

William Rodriguez

Mr. Rodriguez was a janitor at the World Trade Centre and survived the 9/11 attack on the North Tower.

In October 2004 he filed charges against 156 parties including: The President of the United States, The Vice President, The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claiming their complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Among his allegations were that the Twin Towers were brought down through the use of controlled explosions, and the Pentagon was in fact struck by a missile and not by American Airlines flight 77.

Uh-huh. A 9/11 truther. Well, yes, it is disappointing that such a person is invited to this event, when there are all sorts of 9/11 survivors they could have invited if they wanted one. But I'm not convinced this is evidence that this man is a dangerous extremist. There are any number of slightly naive teenage rebels who are convinced of the same arguments, widely available from websites and films like Loose Change. People can think what they want. In this case, they'd be wrong. But it's a good thing that Rodriguez tried to bring the issue to wider attention in a forum where evidence could be properly presented etc., and rather more laudable than just spreading silly rumours online, claiming anyone who argues with you is obviously drinking the Kool-Aid.

I can't be arsed to look at stallholders, I'm sure that out of a whole bunch of stallholders, Policy Exchange will have managed to dig up two dodgy ones. Big whoop.

So, to sum up:

Director:
Mohamed Ali Harrath - criminal record in Tunisia, seems fair enough.

Speakers:
Sheikh Yusuf Estes - wife beater
Sheikh Yasir Qadhi - David Horowitz says he's a holocaust denier, and he thinks Channel 4 are trying to "divide and conquer" Islam
Sheikh Muhammad Alshareef - provides a roundup of what the Quran says about Jews
Imam Johari Abdul-Malik - wants to convert people
Rt Rev Riah Abu El-Assal - quotes a Quran verse about "martyrs", whatever he might have meant by that
Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss - anti-Zionist
Mohammad Ijaz ul Haq - supports bombers over Rushdie award and wanted to cover up child abuse
Ebrahim Rasool - spoke to Hamas
William Rodriguez - 9/11 truther

So, it's fair to say that there is a mixture of some fairly unsavoury and some relatively innocent people in Policy Exchange's list. They are right to say that some of them hold some pretty unpleasant views, but in other cases their dossier is rather slippery and unfounded.

Anyway, are Nick's criticisms justified? Well, we've got this far, so let's just go a bit further, and take his criticisms bit by bit:

I am writing to ask you to retract an offensive dossier that Policy Exchange has been privately circulating condemning the Global Peace & Unity Event scheduled for the coming weekend in London.

This is the fourth year of this conference. It will be attended by 30,000 people and is geared towards promoting harmony and dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims.

The Policy Exchange briefing I have seen seeks to raise alarm over a number of the speakers planning to attend the conference. The accuracy of the allegations is variable, with a notable lack of evidence to support many of the claims.

Maybe overstating his case a bit here, but some justification for this. What he also could have mentioned is that some of the "evidence" is quoted as if it amounts to rather more than it actually does, which is a subtler accusation, so maybe he was wise to steer clear of it.

In particular I was appalled to see ‘evidence’ quoted from the Society for American National Existence, an organisation which seeks to make the practice of Islam illegal, punishable by 20 years in prison. I need hardly point out how illogical it is to attempt to criticise one set of extreme views by citing another.

Fair enough, with the elaboration that by "the practice of Islam", SANE mean signing up to Sharia law in its totality, a divisive but not unreasonable position.

My concern is not limited to the facts in the document, however. Your attempt to raise a boycott of this event by privately briefing against it is bizarre, and underhand behaviour for a think-tank supposedly interested in open public debate. The information you are disseminating is extremely narrow in focus and as a result tars with the brush of extremism the tens of thousands of Muslims who will be in attendance.

Yes, and not only this, but it also attempts to tar the majority of speakers at the event, whose existence Policy Exchange doesn't even let on.

Of course, no-one should condone violence or bigotry. But neither must we allow the repugnant acts of a minority of dangerous individuals to be a reason to deny the one million British Muslims - and indeed all other members of British society - the right to meet together to celebrate faith and discuss the importance of peace. The sad truth is you play into the hands of the men you seek to discredit, driving further the alienation of the majority of Muslims who see themselves mischaracterised everywhere they turn as would-be terrorists.

That a think-tank professing to promote ‘a free society based on strong communities [and] personal freedom’ would act to undermine tolerance across our society worries me greatly.

The space for debate is currently filled with few voices, a fact that extremists capitalise on. If we are to truly achieve a society in which all peaceful members are free and equal, that space must be filled with reasoned and principled debate. That is why I shall be speaking at the conference, not hiding from open discussion. We must challenge publicly the ideas of those who propagate terrorism and instead promote the cause of peace and freedom in Britain for all citizens.

All very true, and I can only say that for Nick to follow through on this, he does indeed have to challenge the few genuinely objectionable views that Policy Exchange highlight.

I therefore urge you to withdraw this briefing and to call off any plans to circulate it further. I also suggest that if you want to make a positive contribution to this debate that you step out of the shadows and make yourself heard.

Eminently fair.

So, all in all, I'm not quite sure what the LDV commenters are up in arms about. Yes, if I was Nick I might have reworded this slightly, but in its general thrust, the letter is entirely correct.

I will finish, if I may, with a reiteration of this point: To urge a boycott of an event just because there are people with dodgy views at it is bonkers. What Policy Exchange are arguing here is that we shouldn't talk to people with views we disagree with. They are just opposed to the whole idea of the event, but they choose to hide this in favour of attacking some of the specific people who happen to have been invited. This is a cowardly way to make an argument. They would have done much better to make a proper case for no-platforming (which is what they are arguing for, really), and to have made it publicly. That they didn't is underhanded of them, and Clegg is quite right to have called them out on it. Meanwhile, by going to this event, Clegg and Hughes (and various other MPs) are making an explicit stand against no-platforming. Good for them.

Videogame Morality: How Should It Work?

2008-10-22T22:16:00.000+01:00

On the train back from Cambridge the other day I read the most recent edition of Adbusters, which had a much better than usual interesting:ludicrous ratio. One of the most thought provoking things (to me, anyway) was this, rather difficult to answer, article. It raises the question, if it's OK to murder people in a videogame because nobody gets hurt, then why shouldn't people also commit virtual rape? Or have sex with virtual children?

The issue typically discussed around violent games such as Grand Theft Auto is that the violence or sexual behavior of the virtual worlds will surface in the real world – that violent games will eventually create violent people who do horrific things (videogames were repeatedly blamed following both Columbine and Virginia Tech. massacres, for instance). But there is another concern that has gone largely unaddressed that will become increasingly perplexing as videogames create better, more immersive models of reality: am I free to do anything I want in a virtual world, or are some things inherently wrong?

Apart from being a good article that's worth reading in full (don't worry, it's not that long), it's also a nasty central question, and not one I have any immediate answer for. Anyone else want to have a go?

LMAO - Thanks, Neil Stockley

2008-10-21T23:50:00.000+01:00

Neil has just written this about Nixonland. This rang a bell with me, but I haven't read the book, so I set out to find out where I'd heard of it from. My search wound up on Sam Seder's (now ex-) show blog on Air America's website, specifically this post, which corresponded to an interview with Perlstein about Nixonland that I had heard.

The reason for the post, however, is that I came across this post in the process, and in turn this fantastic clip. Enjoy!

Agnostic Bus Campaign?

2008-10-21T17:16:00.000+01:00

There is still an annoying confusion doing the rounds that any statement less strong than "I am absolutely certain there is no God" is not atheism but agnosticism. We can see it today in the faux surprise (expressed by religious sites like Ekklesia) at the wording of the Atheist Bus Campaign:

The slogan on the buses will read: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

This appears to be a tactful retreat from Professor Dawkins' previous claims that God "almost certainly" does not exist - but commentators are already pointing out that it is closer to agnosticism (uncertainty about whether God can be known as a reality or not) rather than atheism (outright denial).

This is a wedge that the religious like to drive between two positions that, typically, have more in common than they want people to think. After all, if you think atheists believe they can be absolutely certain there is no God, then there are almost no atheists in the world, and Richard Dawkins would, on that definition, be an agnostic. Here, for instance, is what Dawkins wrote on HuffPo two years ago:

Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why. [...]

That sounds, to me, entirely compatible with what the Atheist Bus Campaign is proposing to put on buses. The difference is one of degrees, between "probably" and "almost certainly", both phrases which acknowledge uncertainty. I would argue that the Atheist Bus Campaign chose the wording it did mostly because it was trying to be pithy, not because they wanted to water down the atheist position. They are, after all, calling themselves the Atheist Bus Campaign.

Similarly, Bill Maher recently went on the Daily Show to promote his new film Religulous, which is, to all intents and purposes, advancing atheist arguments. Nonetheless, Maher claims for himself not atheism, but agnosticism. Now, an agnostic is "someone who does not know, or believes that it is impossible to know, whether a god exists". If that is the case, then why argue, as Maher (correctly) does, that the beliefs of religious people are preposterous? If you're agnostic, you are allowing that there is a reasonable case to be made both for and against the existence of a particular God, or at least that there is no robust case to be made against their existence. So why try?

I think the problem here comes from the wide range of definitions claimed for atheism in common parlance. Atheism can be "either the affirmation of the nonexistence of gods, or the rejection of theism. It is also defined more broadly as an absence of belief in deities, or nontheism." Thing is, most atheists aren't "affirming the nonexistence of gods", they are "rejecting theism". Religious apologists want you to believe that I believe there is definitely no God. I don't. I just think the claims of religions are bonkers, and as such the burden of proof is on them, not me. But don't call me agnostic. The only uncertainty I have is the technical kind of uncertainty that I also hold about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Russell's Teapot, both equally bonkers propositions.

Who are Stoke-On-Trent's City Independents?

2008-10-21T15:23:00.000+01:00

Thursday's Question Time featured an interesting discussion of a particularly potent local issue: why, it was asked, were so many BNP councillors getting elected in Stoke On Trent, and what was to be done about it. The usual arguments on the BNP arose, but, it was suggested, the difference in Stoke On Trent was that the council is run by a coalition of all three main parties, because the council is hung (although predominantly Labour since nineteen canteen). This lack of a conventional opposition was leading people, it was suggested, to register discontent with a coalition-run council and Labour mayor by voting BNP.

Interested, I thought I'd have a look what's going on here. Here's the results of the last local elections, meaning that the council stands as follows:

Labour 16
British National Party 9
Conservative 9
Liberal Democrat 5
Others 21

So that's a total of 60 seats on the council, and no overall control means that a coalition of 31 needs to be formed in order to wield a majority.

It is notable that, if a general sense of discontent with Labour meant that an alternative was wanted, it ought to be quite easy to build a rainbow coalition type thing with LibDem, Tory and these "Others". So the question I asked myself was "Why hasn't this happened, and who are these others?"

Well, if you break the council make-up down by party on their website, you discover (or maybe already know, if you're actually from Stoke-On-Trent, and not just whimsically looking into their political situation for half an hour on a Sunday) the following:

Labour 16 (+1 Elected Mayor)
City Independents 15
BNP 9
Conservative and Independent Alliance 9
Lib Dem 6 (if we count Gavin Webb again, now)
Non-Aligned 3
The Potteries Alliance 2

Most notable here is the fact that, because they don't fit into a national picture, the BBC and other national commentators have ignored what looks to be a fairly major presence, something calling itself the City Independents. But who are they? What do they stand for? I can't seem to find much on the web to inform me about them, so I am left to speculate. Since there are "Non-aligned" independents as well as "City Independents" independents, the implication is that the City Independents are something more than a simple mutually supportive grouping of independents with no overall policy platform. So is this the case?

One of the only things I have turned up about them is the suggestion in this comments thread that they might be BNP-in-all-but-name, which would be a frightening thought, but this is disputed.

So can someone who knows a bit more about Stoke-On-Trent politics enlighten me?

Final Presidential Debate: Liveblog

2008-10-16T01:27:00.002+01:00

If you're up for the debate tonight, join me below.

Maron v Seder = Excellent

2008-10-06T17:28:00.001+01:00

Readers of this blog (at least, those with a) long memories and b) any concern about things I like whatsoever) may remember me mentioning Marc Maron before, here and here.Well, I now have the opportunity to plug a couple of things Marc is doing that you can actually go and find on the Electric Internet. One of them is that Guardian America, the US face of our very own Grauniad, has signed up Maron to go on a road trip with them, apparently. Which is nice, but so far the promised "daily short videos" are either very well hidden amongst the "On The Road" posts, or have failed to materialise. I wonder what's going on there?

Anyway, meanwhile Maron is also involved in the actually-happening-at-the-moment daily webcast Maron v Seder. This is a daily ~45 minute video feed narrowcast live at 3pm Eastern Time (8pm GMT, for the British). It can be found live here, and you can also stream old episodes on demand here, or subscribe to the podcast here. So what is it? It's essentially a comparatively tightly produced radio show with pictures hosted by Marc Maron and Sam Seder (both ex-Air Ameria Radio hosts), with - so far - one guest per day, comedy segments (don't worry, they're usually genuinely funny), questions from listeners, and Maron and Seder's analysis of the day's political news, from an unashamedly left/liberal perspective.

As a fan of both hosts' radio shows of the past, especially the brilliant Morning Sedition, I would recommend it as a great way to stay abreast of US politics, election or no election. If you're not yet convinced, here's a sample, in the form of Episode 2, from Thursday last week:

Cameron Reverts To Type

2008-10-02T00:35:00.002+01:00

Well, today David Cameron made the speech that made clear what his opponents have been saying all along: That his first year or two as leader were a complete fiction designed to de-toxify the Tory brand. Now that he's ahead in the polls, he feels comfortable speaking with conviction about the things he actually believes. Lets take a quick look at some of the contrasts.

In his speech accepting the leadership of the party, Cameron said:

We need to change the way we feel. No more grumbling about modern Britain. I love this country as it is, not as it was, and I believe our best days lie ahead.

Today's Cameron, though, seems to have no problems grumbling about modern Britain, even criticising as out of touch those who caution against his exaggerated rhetoric:

Some say our society isn't broken. I wonder what world they live in. Leave aside that almost two million children are brought up in households where no one works. Or that there are housing estates in Britain where people have a lower life expectancy than in the Gaza Strip. Just consider the senseless, barbaric violence on our streets. Children killing children. Twenty-seven kids murdered on the streets of London this year. A gun crime every hour. A serious knife crime every half hour. A million victims from alcohol related-attacks.

But it's not just the crime; not even the anti-social behaviour. It's the angry, harsh culture of incivility that seems to be all around us. When in one generation we seem to have abandoned the habits of all human history that in a civilised society, adults have a proper role - a responsibility - to uphold rules and order in the public realm not just for their own children but for other people's too.

2005's Cameron was keen that

my children, your children, grow up in a country where the streets are safe, the public space isn't filthy, where it isn't a hassle to get around, you can own your own home and where climate change and the environment aren't an afterthought.

but today's Cameron made the environment exactly that, tacking onto the end of his speech a solitary sentence on the environment proper, just before coming into the final stretch of his speech:

We changed because knew we had to make ourselves relevant to the twenty-first century.
...

You didn't champion green politics as greenwash, but because climate change is devastating our environment because the energy gap is a real and growing threat to our security and because $100-a-barrel oil is hitting families every time they fill up their car and pay their heating bills.

To be fair, the other part of the speech that mentioned the environment was this:

I am also a child of my time. I want a clean environment as well as a safe one.

What strikes you about these two quotes? Most obvious is how far the environment has fallen down the agenda. Compare it to, say, this bit of his 2006 leader's speech to conference:

As you might have gathered by now, I am passionate about our environment. It's a very personal commitment. I grew up in the countryside. I've always loved the outdoors. As you can see if you look around this conference, I'm quite keen on trees.

We saw in our debate on Monday the scale of the threat from climate change. I know that we have within us the creativity, the innovation, the technological potential to achieve green growth - sustainable prosperity. The Stern report will tell us that the tools of success are in our grasp. But it will also say that the price of inaction gets higher every day.

So I will not pretend to you that it will be easy. That there will be no pain or sacrifice. If you want to understand climate change, go and see Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. Today, I want to tell the British people some uncomfortable truths. There is a price for progress in tackling climate change. Yes of course low-energy light bulbs, hybrid cars - even a windmill on your roof can make a difference and also save money.

But these things are not enough. Government must show leadership by setting the right framework. Binding targets for carbon reduction, year on year. That would create a price for carbon in our economy. What does that mean? It means that things which produce more carbon will get more expensive. Going green is not some fashionable, pain-free option.

It will place a responsibility on business. It will place a responsibility on all of us. That is the point. Tackling climate change is our social responsibility - to the next generation.

And I'll tell you something:In politics, it's much easier to take steps that will be painful if political parties work together, instead of playing it for partisan advantage. That's what we have offered to do. We have asked Tony Blair to put a climate change bill in the Queen's speech. If he does, we'll back it. So come on, prime minister. It's your last few months in office. It's your last Queen's speech. Use it to do something for the environment.

At no point in 2008's speech was there a section on the environment as an issue. In the first quote, the environment is an example of a change to the Tory party. In the second, it's a piece of character window-dressing for Brand Cameron. Neither sees any hint of a policy direction like 2006's quote. In both cases, the issue is not important in and of itself, but because of what it supposedly says about Cameron or the changes he has brought to the party. If that isn't a clear demonstration from Cameron that he doesn't really care about the environment as an issue, he merely recognises its potency as a vehicle for changing public perception of him and his party, then I don't know what is.

Some of the Cameron of the past even proves to be quite prophetic about the present. For instance:

I think that when some people talk about substance, what they mean is they want the old policies back.

Appropriately enough, today's more sober, substantive speech sounded very much more like a Tory speech; no sentence would have been out of place in the Daily Mail.

Let's also note that whilst the Tories are far too "responsible" to make commitments to cut taxes on low income taxpayers (managing only a fairly pathetic, fiddling Council Tax Freeze that has been taken apart skillfully elsewhere, so I won't rehash that one here), they aren't beyond making commitments to help payers of Inheritance Tax, and now also Corporation Tax. The only real commitment that Cameron has made that will genuinely affect most people on low incomes is his moralising Marriage Bonus.

The real turning point in British politics in the last year or two was not Brown's bottled election, it was Cameron's back-pedalling on grammar schools, and the quiet distancing of the party from the Goldsmith-Gummer review. That was the point where it became clear that his party could only be pushed so far before they would grumble too much. That is the turnaround that could really make a difference to our country in the long run, not whether Gordon Brown hung on for a couple more years and achieved very little other than reacting to events.

Isn't Tory Conference Tuneful?

2008-09-29T16:02:00.000+01:00

Sat in front of BBC Parliament this morning, this thought crossed my mind: "Why don't we get to play music at Lib Dem conference, to show off our edgy, liberal tastes in music, in contrast to these bland, painfully "hip and modern" choices the Tories make?"

Then I remembered: it's because we don't need to cover up for a lack of anything actually happening at our conferences.

Are The Tories Finally Backing Up Their Green Talk?

2008-09-29T15:59:00.000+01:00

The most interesting thing the Tories have said today is not, of course, George Osborne's council tax "freeze", but Theresa Villiers's suggestion that they are now opposed to Heathrow's third runway. I know I should be partisan about this, but I genuinely want to congratulate them on this announcement, not least because certain Tories seem to be in denial about it.

It's been a long time coming, but on a subject as urgent as this, any conversion is welcome. One might think this means that the Tories have accepted that endless expansion in air travel capacity is not, as so many in the party have argued, simply "necessary" (on the contrary, it has to stop). But don't be so sure about that. Instead, they are justifying the decision with a two pronged approach:

Firstly, to present a high-speed rail link as in some way an alternative to it. This is, as BAA have pointed out (amongst other squeals of pain from the usual "money must come before planet" brigade), a false choice:

"The total number of flights to Manchester and Leeds/Bradford is only 13,356 or less than 3% of Heathrow's total flights. Even if every flight from Manchester and Leeds/Bradford were replaced by a new high-speed rail line then Heathrow would still be operating at 97% of capacity."

Of course, I don't agree with the conclusion that BAA draw from this (that we still need more air capacity). Rather, I would say that the point to take away from this is that green politicians are, sooner or later, going to have to get away from the soft lie that all our current travel can be replaced with a greener alternative that is in no way less convenient. Quite simply, eventually some brave soul is going to have to tell Britain's (and the rest of the world's) flyers that it's no good, they just can't feel entitled to go jetting off round the world as often as they like. Cameron sailed close to this with his suggestion last year of a "green air-miles allowance" of one short-haul flight a year per person before punitive taxes kicked in. That, like much of the environmental stuff Cameron's early rebranding exercise floated, seems to have been dropped six months later.

Secondly, the chatter about a possible Boris Island continues, putting completely to rest the idea that this might actually be a good policy shift from a climate change point of view. On the contrary, if both of these prongs went ahead, they would probably see a greater expansion in greenhouse gas emissions than would be the case with a third runway at Heathrow and no high speed rail link. Of course, even the latter is not desriable.

So, once again, it is left to the Lib Dems to make the green case, since the Labour government have already leapt in on the side of the airport and airline operators, with this choice quote from Ruth Kelly (still here, Ruth?):

"These proposals are politically opportunistic, economically illiterate and hugely damaging to Britain's national interests. The Tories are posing a false choice - we need both more capacity in Britain's airports and on our main rail lines."

Apparently, unchecked growth in greenhouse emissions from the aviation sector are "in Britain's national interest". Well it would explain a lot.

Osborne's Council Tax Freeze: A Few Questions

2008-09-29T15:26:00.002+01:00

This morning, immediately before the speech by George Osborne, there was a bit of a buzz around the rolling news channels and on the Daily Politics that Osborne might be about to pull a bit of an inheritance-tax style rabbit out of his rhetorical hat. "Something to do with local taxation", hinted Andrew Neil. Then I went out for lunch. Intrigued to see what it was when I returned, I flipped on the news channels, only to find that nobody was talking about it, preferring instead to keep up the constant general rumble about the US bail-out plan. Nothing very interesting, then, I guessed.

Turning to the internet to find out, this was confirmed: Osborne has promised a council tax freeze. Except he doesn't have the ability to enforce it. All he's doing is offering councils money from central government worth up to a 2.5% increase in council tax in their area (as I understand it). So, instead of raising the money locally, they are being encouraged to increase the centralisation of their funding stream (nicely localist, George). I wonder if any other strings will be attached to the money?And would the money be withdrawn if a council stepped over the 2.5% threshold, or would it effectively just be a bit of extra money for councils. (That might explain Osborne's projection of 100% take-up for his scheme.)

The real test on this is whether the Tory government would reverse the Labour trend of demanding that local councils provide certain services or fund certain projects, without providing them with sufficient money to pay for them, thus forcing them to take the political hit for raising the taxes necessary to fund them, while central government basks in the glory of simply having mandated the fruits of said spending. If not, then all that this will mean is an escalation in huffing and puffing by the national Tory party, whilst local councils put up council tax because they have to.

Of course, a genuinely localist party who genuinely wanted to do something about council tax might... oh, never mind.

Obama's Ground War Looking Good

2008-09-28T22:44:00.001+01:00

It's been known for some time that the Obama campaign's strategy in the US Presidential Election is rather different from the McCain campaign's. The former is fighting what we Lib Dems might find a rather familiar concept: the ground war. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is fighting the air war, winning news cycles by feeding the national media new stories and "events" as often as they can. when national overall polls started, after the nomination of Sarah Palin, to show a McCain lead, some Democrats started to feel a little nervous about this strategy. Those with a stronger constitution urged them to hold firm: not only was the ground war a sound strategy, but Palin's initial popularity would burn out fast, they predicted. Both factors are now beginning to play out, it seems, with Palin's shielding from the media and inadequacy when she does appear becoming ever more obvious to journalists, and Obama's target states strategy (in states which weren't what you might call obvious blue states) now beginning to look like it will pay off. Particularly interesting is this report from Rasmussen, a polling organisation:

Barack Obama has a two-point advantage over John McCain in the traditionally Republican state of North Carolina.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the Tar Heel State shows Obama attracting 49% of the vote while McCain earns 47%. A week ago, McCain held a three-point edge. This is the first time in eight Rasmussen Reports polls that Obama has held any kind of a lead in North Carolina, though the candidates were tied once as well.

This is pretty extraordinary. In 2004, North Carolina voted solidly for Bush, with a +12.4% margin. A quick look at this summary of state-by-state polling data tells an interesting story: not one 2004 Kerry state is currently leaning McCain-wards, but 5 2004 Bush states are now looking as if they could well go to Obama.

Not Dead Yet

2008-09-27T15:17:00.000+01:00

Apologies for not having bothered to blog for a while, but I've been subject to a combination of

1. nothing interesting to say that hasn't already been said about conference season
2. blogger being inaccessible to me for large amounts of time

The latter is especially irritating, since it means I can't read blogspot blogs either. Anyone got any ideas why this is?

Anyway, I am going to try and get back on board with the whole blogging business now, with an overhaul of all the crap down the right hand side of the page. Wish me luck...

How To Change Financial Regulation

2008-09-19T02:09:00.001+01:00

Lord Eatwell (alas, he is not one of ours; he's a former economic advisor to Kinnock) has written this rather interesting article for CiF. It is an attempt to put a little meat on the bones that are the current sentiment that "something must be done" to change the regulation of financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis. Having attended a talk on the subject of the credit crunch that John Eatwell gave to Queens' College's "FF Society" not so long ago (well he is President of the college, after all), I was pleasantly surprised to see his name pop up on CiF a few minutes ago (I know, why am I reading it at this time of night?). He has a few interesting things to say, alongside a (perhaps a little controversialist) dismissal of calls for transparency, disclosure and risk management as being ill-informed.

What Eatwell does well, apart from display his own understanding of the situation, is help those of us who aren't experts with a bit of all important context:

Thirty years ago most loans, to businesses and to individuals, were made by banks, or specialist institutions such as building societies. The deregulatory fervour of the 1980s changed that. Credit markets became "disintermediated" - instead of banks acting as intermediaries between savers and borrowers, the markets took over. Borrowing is now packaged into securities that are sliced and sold through a myriad of financial intermediaries. Investment banks, such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, are (or were) at the centre of this process, taking on massive amounts of debt relative to their capital base (that is, becoming highly leveraged) in order to deal profitably in the complex web of markets. Guiding their operations are their risk models, which measure the riskiness of their operations against patterns of past market behaviour. The firms claimed they could manage risky markets, and the regulators swallowed that claim. Faith in transparency, disclosure, and risk management by firms is at the heart of the financial regulation today.
Yet at the same time it is generally accepted that a core purpose of financial regulation is to mitigate systemic risks, like a global credit crunch. Such risks are externalities; their cost to the economy as a whole is greater than the cost to a firm whose actions are creating the risk. But if regulators focus on risks that are recognised by firms already, and neglect systemic risk, why do we need regulation at all, other than to enforce best practice? Firms will manage risks well enough, using systems that are inevitably, and properly, market sensitive.
The flaw is that in the face of systemic market failures the market is inefficient. Risk is mispriced, with consequences that are all too evident today.
So what can be done to tackle "systemic" risks?

Read the rest here.

Edinburgh Reviews: Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray

2008-09-11T23:23:00.000+01:00

Well, this was the cheapest thing I saw all festival, being as it was just £5 for me, a student, to sit up on the slopes of the upper circle. Since then I've seen this show being given a bit of a slagging off in the national press, so I'll leave those interested in the show's shortcomings to read reviews by people more widely read than me. I quite enjoyed it, thought the whole thing was brilliantly performed and, for the most part, well choreographed (though it is slightly uneven; the opening half hour sets a high standard which the show finds it hard to live up to all the time), holding my attention throughout. The best thing about the show, however, is the design, both lighting and set, and, to a lesser extent, the sound and costumes. The production of this show is absolutely fantastic, and worth the money alone (and I don't just mean because it was £5).

It's true that Bourne doesn't seem to have a lot to say about what a modern Dorian Gray might be, but I can't agree with the critics who say that the doppelganger is a poor substitute for a portrait. How on earth would an onstage portrait be an effective part of a ballet? Anyway, in some ways the concept hasn't been completely discarded, with both the art works on the wall in Gray's appartment, and the billboard featuring Gray which makes two contrasting appearances during the show, carrying on the idea of art mirroring Gray's moral decline in life. The doppelganger is a bit rubbish not because it's a bad idea, but because it's not very well executed: the doppelganger doesn't especially display the decline that one might expect, either in appearance or expressed (noticeably, at any rate) in the choreography.

Other detractors, including some of the friends with whom I saw the show (admittedly more musically literate than me), have taken issue with the music, which is quite stylised and electronic. Personally, I quite liked it; it's not like I'd want to buy a CD of it, but it suits the production and sits well alongside the choreography, without drawing too much attention to itself most of the time.

So ultimately, not Bourne's best work by any means, but probably not deserving of the backlash which it received in some quarters.

3/5

(of course, if I marked the show on the same scale as the Fringe stuff I've been reviewing, it would be 5/5, but there seems little point in doing that)

Edinburgh Reviews: Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler - Double Down Hearts

2008-09-11T23:22:00.000+01:00

Apparently Kristen Schaal is in Flight of the Concords, which is one of those programmes that so many people tell me I will like that I've become quite resistant to actually seeing it. Nevertheless, Kristen Schaal is also occasionally on the Daily Show, and has been very funny and a bit unexpected on that, so I thought I'd go see this show.

A stand-up duo is not an especially conventional way to do comedy, but in this case it works pretty well; the two bounce off each other with a comfortable chemistry, developing a snappy stop-start rythmn to their exchanges that emphasizes not so much embarrasment as a slight awkwardness. The two don't so much have a stand-up show as a series of bits, joined together with little bouts of banter. Sometimes the show feels a bit desperate to keep up a constant barrage of new, different stuff, roving between a pastiche play in three parts, two audience members being invited onto stage to win a (live, onstage) date with Kristen Schaal, and some video-based silliness in a wood with fluffy animals. It would be easy to accuse the show of being "of the ADD generation", or somesuch, but actually, everything naturally seems to flow into the next thing, and the restlessness struck me as springing not from a lack of ability to sustain ideas, but from the urge to be unpredictable. It certainly succeeds there: the show is relentlessly funny, containing for me some of the biggest laughs of the Fringe. Best bit? The "live onstage sex act". You don't get to say that very often.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Clive James In The Evening

2008-09-11T23:16:00.000+01:00

I have always enjoyed Clive James as a TV personality and occasionally, when I can be arsed, as a writer, so when I read his article in G2 I figured I'd see what his attempts at stand-up might be like. Unfortunately, he more or less admits defeat at the outset of this show, telling us straight off that there are "other people out there" who can do the modern, quick-witted style of stand-up much better than he can. He tries to excuse himself by saying that he hopes that he brings a sense of "the world" to the show which will make up for this, but the trouble with that as an argument is that there are plenty of stand-ups who do engage with the world at large, and have all the other presentational slickness James admits he lacks.

It was pretty telling that I think I was the youngest person in the audience by a good twenty or thirty years, a couple of days into the run of the show. Clearly there was little buzz about the show attracting anything other than an audience of loyal followers. Nonetheless, I can think of worse ways to spend an hour; occasionally, James is genuinely hilarious, but the overall effect is of a slightly half-arsed attempt, the main intention of which is to sell his new book. Which is all very well at the book festival, but not really if you are listing yourself in the Fringe guide as a comedy show. The show seemed self-indulgent, because I find it hard to believe that someone as intelligent as James couldn't have written a better, sharper stand-up show if he really wanted to.

2/5

Edinburgh Reviews: London Gay Men's Quoir - Far From Kansas

2008-09-11T23:15:00.000+01:00

We saw these guys on the Royal Mile doing a slot on one of the little stages, and it looked fun enough, so we thought we'd go along and see them. The offer of free sparkling wine on the flier helped, too. Sure enough, "fun" is pretty much the one word you would use to describe this show. Basically, the show is a series of show-tunes, performed under the umbrella concept that they are being sung as an act of worship by some kind of religious movement (The "Friends of Dorothy") who hold the Wizard of Oz story to be a religious text. The songs bringing out the three divine qualities of love, intelligence, and bravery (but without much intelligence).

The singing isn't the best you've ever heard, but it's pretty good, and they all blend together well, and the soloists are all good and sing songs that suit them. It's musically pretty competent, but it could go a little bit further to provide some fireworks in the arrangement and the vocals occasionally. But ultimately, it's almost pointless to try to evaluate the show like that, because it is so infectiously fun that it's pretty much impossible to come away having had anything other than a good time.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Stephen K Amos - Find The Funny

2008-09-11T23:14:00.000+01:00

Last year's show, More of Me, was my first introduction to Amos, and I found it honest and interesting, as well as being well performed, slick, etc. This year, the show is just about finding the things to laugh about in everyday life, and there are a number of gags that are exactly the same as the last show (eg. waiting for Lenny Henry to die -> the BBC's "one in, one out" diversity policy). Unfortunately, this year Amos comes across as rather more abrasive and arrogant; his way of dealing with heckling is pretty heavy-handed, even extending it to people who haven't actually heckled, just shouted out something a bit silly when invited to respond to some question or other. This, combined with the fact that the show doesn't have the honest, confessional feel that last year's show did, and the slightly self-congratulatory gimmick of getting a member of the audience to count the laughs, left me feeling somewhat less well disposed to Amos than I did last year. It all seemed a bit smug.

Nevertheless, there is no denying that Stephen K Amos is a very good stand-up, assured and funny. The show this year may have been treading water (come on, "Find the Funny"? What kind of a title is that? It tells you no more about the content of the show than the fact that it's listed in the Comedy section of the Fringe brochure), but you never feel like you've wasted your money. So... yeah.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Lucy Porter - The Bare Necessities

2008-09-11T23:13:00.000+01:00

Lucy Porter is affable enough, but this show was rather less than the sum of its parts, at least on the night I saw it. Her usual little tales of everyday life, her talking to the audience and being a bit inappropriate with some of the male members of the audience shtick, her general warmth, etc., are all present and correct, but this show felt like a bit of a rag-bag. There's not much to join it all up, with the result that I found Porter more enjoyable in short, deliberately unconnected doses as the compere of one of those "BBC Presents" late night line-ups. A bit disappointing, really, after last year's show.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: John Gordillo - Divide and Conga

2008-09-11T23:12:00.000+01:00

John Gordillo says he set out to write a show about politics, but ended up realising he was simply having a hypothetical argument with his (spanish communist) dad, so made it more explicitly about that instead. The result is a show that is in exactly the vein I tend to look for in comics: it has a subject, a thesis which the comic wants to explain to the audience; it is engaging with the world rather than simply looking for laughs from all directions. My only problem with it, really, is that on the night I saw it, Gordillo repeatedly made it clear that we as an audience weren't laughing as much as he would have liked, or as much as previous audiences.

Perhaps we weren't, but then there's nothing that kills the mood more than a comic drawing attention to this fact and then not really going anywhere with the observation. The sooner Gordillo learns to stop doing this to himself, the sooner he will find himself able to win over those audiences he finds initially disappointing. Anyway, this is not the most gut-bustingly funny material you've ever seen, and it's all the better for that. Gordillo is not in it just to make people laugh, that much is clear from this set, and that's not a bad thing.

As for the actual content of the show, it needs a bit of a reworking. I suspect that, as Gordillo's dad made his way more and more to the centre-stage position he occupied in the show by the time I saw it, the introduction of the central idea of the show (that political extremists divide the world into an "us" and "them", and then project their own suspected failings onto the "them") had shifted itself towards the status of something like a "final thought". It would have been better to find a way to place it closer to the start, I suspect, to give the show a bit more focus and structure.

Also, the common argument-with-someone-who-isn't-there-to-defend-themselves trope which much of the stuff about Gordillo's dad fell into comes to feel a bit unfair on his dad when it runs right through the show rather than being a ten minute bit of a show about something wider, despite all of Gordillo's attempts to be fair by slipping in a few things he feels his dad would probably say by way of response to him. Ultimately, he is still diagnosing the psychological failings of someone who isn't there to answer back, and in making the show quite so much about his father personally rather than as an example of a broader point, he made this a bit uncomfortable.

Nevertheless, not entirely without laughter, and with a commendable determination to look a little deeper than your average stand-up

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Departure Lounge

2008-09-11T23:10:00.000+01:00

Departure Lounge tells the story of four "lads on tour" over the course of an hour sat in the departure lounge of a spanish airport, looking back over their time on holiday and, through flashbacks and songs, unravelling the various secrets of the four. Sounds pretty dire, doesn't it? Well, it isn't.

I was encouraged to see this show by the MD of our show, who absolutely loved it and had, by the time I saw it with him, been four or five times. It had quite a lot to live up to when I saw it, then, and it nevertheless impressed me. This is, in the least patronising way possible, exactly the kind of show that the Fringe is for. Small cast, limited budget, hour-long format, and perfectly formed and brilliantly performed. All too often shows come to Edinburgh whose success is in making you want to see a bigger and better production of the same material; nobody could say that about Departure Lounge.

The performances are perfectly pitched, all of the cast are professionals and can sing beautifully (a relief in the world of Edinburgh Fringe musicals, I can tell you), but really the genius of this show lies in the writing. Dougal Irvine's score and libretto are exactly right for the show and for the hour-long format, the plot perfectly paced, the dialogue for the most part very believable, and the music a cut above your average musical theatre tunes without showing off. The writing uses songs economically and to great effect, each song having a clear purpose in the narrative (usually at least two purposes, actually).

Whilst I was in Edinburgh, I saw a couple of reviewers fall into that age old trap of assuming that depicting something was the same thing as advocating it, sniffily dismissing the show as "not as ironic as it thinks it is" and so on. All I can say on that account is that these people are hopeless and shouldn't be allowed to review shows; Departure Lounge goes out of its way to make clear in one or two satirical songs that there is a rather unpleasant side to the kind of Brits Abroad that it shows, so I can only assume that you have to be the most joyless lefty around to grudge the show its use of these ingredients - the kind of people who give "political correctness" a bad name.

If I had one problem with the show, it is the slightly clumsy way in which the central metaphor of the show is shoe-horned into the dialogue in the middle of the show, the most thoughtful of the lads just dropping it into conversation, accompanied by a little "I've just had a funny thought" marker. The show doesn't need this, the final song contains enough for people to pick this aspect of the show up unaided, I would say.

Still, marvellous stuff, the best musical I saw in Edinburgh.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Stewart Lee

2008-08-30T23:57:00.000+01:00

Stewart Lee's show last year was one of the only things I tried to go see and couldn't because it was sold out, so I was pleased to be able to rectify the situation this year with a visit to The Stand, a comedy club with a much smaller capacity and profile than the Udderbelly, where Lee played last year (Lee's performing there was, apparently, a protest against the self-appointed Edinburgh Comedy Festival brand which four big venue operators created this year).

Boy, am I glad I did. Stewart Lee is easily one of the best stand-ups I've seen, and one of the best suited to what I seek in stand-up (basically, the comic has something they want to explore with the audience, and the comedy is there to make it entertaining as well as just interesting). It helps that Lee is mostly in harmony with my liberal sensibilities (go find his bit on Political Correctness on YouTube), and that he has such a fantastically dry delivery. I don't think I have ever seen someone more confident in taking as much time about what they are saying as they like; it adds so much to the performance, because the anticipation of the next line is often as funny as the payoff.

I'm not sure that the picking two of six topics each night was all that interesting for the show, but since the show was explicitly a device for Lee to workshop material for a TV series, I'm not really worried by that. I look forward to the TV series.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Brendon Burns

2008-08-30T23:56:00.000+01:00

Last year, Brendon Burns won the if.comedy award for his stand-up show after years of being at the Fringe, playing in small venues and with a reputation for being a not-very-notable shock merchant who frequently crossed the line between ironic and just wantonly offensive. Last year, he says, was a product of getting rid of his drug habit and making his show more consistently professional, and coming up with a slick, tight set. This year, he says, is "a thank-you" to the people who supported him throughout his career. Unfortunately, that seems to mean that he's slid backwards a bit; this year's show was a little bit flabby and, to me anyway, the material was nothing special. There are moments of brilliance when Burns lays into people who clearly genuinely annoy him (like broadsheet readers or French speakers in Canada), rather than simply chucking bombs into well-known areas of sensitivity like race in South Africa and the controversy over the guy who died in Barrymore's pool.

That said, those who enjoy this whole shock-comedy thing more than I do will love it.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Edges

2008-08-30T23:54:00.003+01:00

Edges is a song cycle about the slightly directionless lives of four young people trying to find themselves a life and a partner they like. The songs themselves are good, the music well written and characterful. The direction of the show was good, the lighting and sound smoothly unnoticed by most. Unfortunately, the performers in this production weren't all quite up to the standard required, particularly in their singing. One was consistently flat, another had an annoying fake vibrato that he obviously felt was "the kind of thing you need in musical theatre", another needed more control of the sheer volume of her voice, and one wasn't as bad as the others. Also, I wasn't convinced by the more gimmicky bits of the show, where video projection was used to project two brief scenes which needn't have been there at all, and a song about Facebook, which is territory that has already been well explored by other comic songs.

Not a terrible show, all in all, but the cast could have improved the show significantly by getting some singing lessons.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Soweto Gospel Quoir

2008-08-30T23:54:00.001+01:00

I'm not much of a choral music person, or a Gospel person, so I'm probably not the ideal audience for this kind of show. It's pretty amazing, but I had a few niggles that stopped me from really loving every minute in the same way that most of my friends who saw it did:

1. I don't like listening to people sing in a language I don't understand; they might be singing "burn the gays in the name of the spaghetti monster" for all I know.
2. The sound design was trying too hard - voices this good don't need smothering in that much reverb.

Still, the show is commendable in many ways, and really worth the time of even someone like me for whom it is not an obvious choice. A conscious effort has been made to break up the hour long slot, with a run of "oddball" songs and bits of dance in the middle of the show, and the enthusiasm of every single performer on the stage is infectious.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Reginald D Hunter

2008-08-30T23:53:00.001+01:00

Last year I enjoyed Reg D Hunter's show, but felt that the show wasn't quite the coherent intellectual statement that Hunter might have liked to think, and that it contained some comments that were mostly there to please an audience of shock junkies (an increasing Edinburgh Fringe demographic in comedy audiences, sadly). Both of these issues have been addressed for this year's show, leaving a man whose comedy is exactly my cup of tea: intelligent and with an intent behind it to communicate something as well as make people laugh. In this case, Hunter's show, "No Country For Grown Men" addresses the sense that men are being emasculated by today's gender politics. He begins this discussion with an anecdote about going into an empty ladies' loo to get toilet paper upon finding none in the gents, before notifying the management of the bar afterwards, only to be told that he should not have entered the ladies' in the first place. "It's not like, if a woman had walked in, I would have panicked and raped them", he complains. This sets the tone for the show: funny, but you could well take issue with it if you took it seriously. The only flaw in Hunter's set this year, I think, is that he ducks out of having a serious conversation before it has even started, with a spiel about finding people who are offended by his comedy ridiculous because obviously, if it says "comedy club" on the door, there is the distinct possibility that he was joking. This is a fair point, but you didn't find Bill Hicks using that as a way to duck out of defending his views.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Jason Byrne

2008-08-30T23:52:00.000+01:00

Byrne is an old Fringe favourite, with a mix of chat to the audience (when he frequently finds himself hilarious) and pre-written material on pretty average themes (marriage, moving house, etc). He is a very capable comedian, but the trouble is he is something of a jack of all trades. His banter with the audience is not up to the standard of, say, Ross Noble or Lucy Porter, while his material, even if you are looking for such everyday subject matters, is not on the level of any number of other comics, most notably at this year's Fringe Michael MacIntyre. His finale, getting a bunch of audience members on stage to perform their own Riverdance, is funny and has a certain maniacal quality, but can't quite escape a feeling of forced zanyness.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Assassins

2008-08-30T23:51:00.002+01:00

Stephen Sondheim's musical about the various people to have attempted (successfully or otherwise) to assassinate presidents of the USA, from John Wilkes Booth onwards, is not your average musical, with no chorus to speak of, and a subject matter that could easily make for a monotonously dark show. To make it work, the show must be intelligently performed and directed, and this production pulled it off admirably. The opening song was a little bit weak in the singing department (I thought), but the rest of the show was slick, engagingly performed, funny where it should be, and dark where it should be, culminating in a scene where the other assassins all urge Lee Harvey Oswald to go through with his attempt on JFK's life, because his act gives the rest of them context and meaning.

The show is very Sondheim musically, with songs being used to explore the minds of the assassins and their place in history, intelligently written but rarely the kind of song you come away humming. A small band did a good job, complimenting the polished performances on stage. Very little set to speak of, and a rather unambitious lighting design, meant that the show was technically unadventurous, but was at least radio miced competently.

If Kiss of the Spider Woman made me want to see someone do their show on a larger, professional scale, then Assassins made me want to go and be involved in a production of my own.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: WitTank - Sexy Pudding

2008-08-30T23:50:00.000+01:00

Having seen WitTank last year in Rocket Venues (they've moved up in the world, and deservedly so), I was expecting great things of this show. And yes, it's more of the same, and some sketches are genuinely hilarious. The average level of humour, though, seems to me to be a bit lower than it was last year. And again, the funniest bits are those where the actors are trying to make each other corpse.

Still, WitTank have consistently demonstrated themselves to be a capable student sketch show, and are usually a good way to spend a light hearted hour.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Kiss of the Spider Woman

2008-08-30T23:48:00.001+01:00

This show was also in the sauna which Plague was given, but somehow I didn't mind so much here. I've never seen this musical before, so I can't comment on the cutting of the script to make it fit into its late night slot, other than to say that the show didn't feel as if it had been gutted or made no sense. The show isn't the most uplifting thing you've ever seen, but if you like musical theatre then it's a cracker nevertheless, and if you're just there for the acting, then it's pretty moving. Molina was brilliantly acted, XXXX less so (not really his fault, he just wasn't great casting for the role, and didn't really come across as rugged enough to be a revolutionary), making their relationship slightly less believable than it might have been - a shame for a show that hangs on these two actors quite so heavily.

Elsewhere, the "spider woman" had a strong voice and some strong songs to go with it, sadly undermined by a faulty radio mic on the night I saw the show (on that note, the taping of mic capsules to the faces of the actors was some of the messiest and most obvious I have seen in some time). The live band across the back of the stage left a reduced area for the actors, but were a worthwhile use of resources nonetheless, with no obviously weak playing going on, and a big energy boost to the show from their presence. The reduced stage was well dealt with by the cleverly versatile set, making the most of the limitations dealt to it (both by the lack of depth to the stage and by the obviously small budget).

The chorus of the show were generally pretty flawless, with all the supporting character parts well acted without upstaging the lead actors. That said, the chorus numbers with the prisoners singing about "over the wall" made me and my friends really want to see the show done in a big theatre with a chorus of more than six and a big, well lit set (lighting was the other technical problem with this show, often seemingly being plotted on the fly, despite being several nights into the run when I saw it).

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Plague! The Musical

2008-08-30T23:47:00.000+01:00

This is a tricky review to write, since these guys were C venues colleagues of ours, and unsureness what to write here is one of the reasons I lapsed into such crapness about keeping up with these reviews. Now that the fringe is over, it seems less problematic, although I won't feel any less awkward about the thought that they might read it, but...

It was pretty ropey, really. The cast threw themselves into it for the most part, and some of them were indeed quite talented (the leading man and two leading ladies). The trouble was, the script wasn't so great, and some of the cast had those annoying little habits which really get to you after a few minutes, and a certain lack of stagecraft. The alchemist, for instance, was never onstage for more than a few seconds without doing the same quite irritating little conjuring gesture. If he was on for, say, a whole song, this meant that he did it continuously, throughout the song.

The idea of projecting a representative cartoon scene onto a screen in the absence of actual scenery was nice, but the screen being on the extreme stage right was... odd. The singers weren't miced, but that was alright because the music was from a backing track. The show was musically not bad, and some of the cast were actually fairly good singers. That said, not many of the songs were all that memorable.

The main problem, though, was that the show was just a bit long and involved. A guy goes to London and falls in love with a girl whose father is a sworn enemy of the man he gets a job with. And then something pretty indecipherable about rats happens, everyone gets the plague, the girl dies, death comes to collect her in a rather sub-Pratchett little scene, and then something else about the rats, and it's all ok. That's the basic framework, but there's a few other bits and bobs hanging off it. Essentially, there's just a bit too much. Maybe it's just that I needed the loo and the venue was literally a sauna, so I wasn't paying enough attention, but I think it's certainly fair to say that the show could be seriously improved by someone with a red pen and an unsentimental eye being given a couple of hours with the libretto.

2/5

Best Posts Meme

2008-08-20T02:10:00.001+01:00

I will get back to the reviews shortly, but Alex has asked that we do this meme before the 25th, so I'll get it out of the way now. Here are my posts from the last year that contain the most substance, or which made points I'm especially bothered about:

The Vexed Question of Green Car Taxation

Are "Religious Rights" Special?

Tax Credits as Tax Cuts

The Atheist Delusion

Lib-Connery

Christianophobia

Hurrah for Nintendo (the Lib Dems of Video Games)

Meme: Political Influences

Janet Street-Porter wants a knee trembler. Apparently.

Young People Are Rubbish

Edinburgh Reviews: Kiddy-Fiddler On The Roof

2008-08-07T00:09:00.002+01:00

Interesting one this one. The attention-grabbing title is a bit cringeworthy, but once you get beyond that, there's some good stuff here. Essentially, the plot follows a disaeffected young man who accuses a teacher he is upset with of inappropriate behaviour, creating an unholy alliance between the PTA and the local press which seeks to hound him from his job.

The show is musically not memorable, but certainly competent for the most part (some seriously wayward violin playing notwithstanding), with many of the cast having average to good voices. The writing is somewhat hackneyed in places (the "nation's matriarch" character seeming so familiar it felt like she'd wandered in from about six other fictional worlds at once), but the actors give it their all, and the show is slick enough and well directed enough to, for the most part, pull it off.

The venue, Roxy Main, is not ideal for a musical as lightly mic'd as this one (the actors seemed to be wearing radio mics on their lapels, but any resultant amplification was undetectable to this sound designer), since the wide stage with audience on three sides and reverberant acoustics mean that lyrics are almost never heard by the whole audience at once. This had the bizarre effect of creating little pockets of laughter in the audience in those regions which had heard a particular joke.

And that's the other thing that should be mentioned about this show: yes, it is funny. This seemed to wrongfoot some of the people who I saw the show with, who felt that the subject matter was simply not to be made fun of. The trouble for the moral outrage brigade is that the show makes very few attempts to find fun in the subject of paedophilia. Like the 2001 Brass Eye Special before it, this show is more interested in mocking Middle England's propensity for moral panic when it is mentioned. In doing this, it is sometimes succesful, but about as often it misses the mark, because it's not at all clear what the point being made is. The show makes a half arsed attempt towards the end to have a "message", but it practically admits that it doesn't really know what it is.

So... I enjoyed the show, and I'm sure I would have enjoyed it even more if I'd been able to hear it all, and I might even have been clearer on the show's point. As it is, it's hard to pass judgment on the show. It's never going to be a classic, but it's not terrible - there are worse things around at the Fringe, by a long way.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Clever Peter

2008-08-07T00:08:00.000+01:00

Quite straightforwardly the funniest student sketch review I have ever seen. Well written, well performed, and simply very funny, this is an hour of perfectly formed comedy. It doesn't do crappy little smart-alec throwaway bits (except for when it does and they're very funny), it makes the effort to actually provide us with an over-arching little plot device and a reason for the show's name, and just when you think it's going a bit clever, a man in a gorilla costume appears and has rapes someone.

I don't really have a lot to say about this show, other than that everyone who likes sketch shows should go see it, and that I would be surprised if none of the three guys in the show go on to greater things.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Nick Doody - Tour of Doody

2008-08-07T00:07:00.001+01:00

Nick Doody

Nick Doody opens with a rather overdone little video taking the piss out of Orville and some pretty lame material about how awful crowds of drunk Englishmen are, and his delivery could be more assured. Those things said, I loved this man's stand up, once he got into it. This point came almost exactly when he launched into the material squaring up against fundamentalist Islam ("Whenever I do material about fundamentalist Christians, someone will come up to me after the show and say 'Oh, well done taking on the Christians. Easy target, aren't they? Why don't you take on the Muslims?'.. Ok then.").

His route into this subject is the Sudanese Teddy Bear Crisis, and all told this subject provides a good half of the hour long set. So it's a good job this is fertile ground. Doody is perhaps less interested in offending any particular group, more interested in the simple idea of offense. Islam is an obvious place to start, but this is broadened by the use of his own offensive teddy bear, which goes to great lengths to offend any group it can find ("Richard Dawkins touches kids!"). As such, Doody manages to avoid aligning himself with anyone he might not want to.

Some details of his set might not be top class, with the material about the surreally bastardised songs his grandmother used to sing him coming across a bit forced and overwritten-without-achieving-much. But this set has at its heart the structure of a really great standup gig, with real thematic ideas interwoven skillfully in the material. The hard work of making a satisfying stand-up set has been done here, it is simply the individual jokes which could, in places, be a little better delivered or slightly rewritten.

I'll definitely see this guy again if he's back next year.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: What's Wrong With Angry?

2008-08-06T01:02:00.000+01:00

What's Wrong With Angry is a play that was written in 1992, with a lot of very political intent, not least directed towards section 28. Essentially the play is a love story, but since the protagonist, Steven Carter, is a gay 16 year old schoolboy, this is not as straightforward as it might be. Still less helpful is the fact that the boy he loves, John Westhead, is, as the play might put it, "confused" about his sexuality.

The actors responsible for bringing this awkward relationship to the stage are Oliver Jack and Christopher Birks, both of whom create amazingly real characters and a very believable relationship. The rest of the cast are good, but it's these two who, perhaps inevitably, shine (though a special mention goes to Charlie Deans as Linda).

The direction of the show seemed pretty good to me, able to flip seamlessly between pointing up the expressionist parts of the play with lighting and sound, and letting the drama inherent in the characters' situations play out in the more naturalist bits.

The main question I have to ask about this production, however, is why now? Section 28 was repealed several years ago (a different number of years depending on where you live). What then has prompted the play's author, Patrick Wilde, to direct a new production for the Fringe in 2008? I suspect the answer is partly "why not?". You don't need a reason to put on a piece of political theatre at the Fringe, sometimes it's just nice to see things that you won't see performed elsewhere. There are, in any case, many messages in the play which go beyond section 28, addressed both to society at large, and towards the gay "scene".

And many of these messages are valuable. Often the character of Simon Hutton, a gay teacher at Steven's school, is used as a seemingly obvious channel for the author's thoughts, urging the scene to "forget about the sex, concentrate on the love", or somesuch, if it is to win mainstream acceptance. These sections are worthwhile, but a spiel from the same character about the evils of section 28 falls a bit flat. At the time the play was written, I could see this having a place in the play, but today, it comes across as rather too earnest and preachy, especially when the Fringe audience who see the play are all going to be pretty enlightened types anyway, and something of an anachronism - too much is made of it to feel like a simple period detail.

Still, it's easy to overdo the political aspects of this show, and overlook the heart of it, the point of which is the wholly nonpolitical nature of what it depicts: a love story. In portraying this, and in making a few broader points, the show is highly succesful, even if it probably has lost much of the directly political bite that it might once have had.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: The Great American Trailer Park Musical

2008-08-05T23:07:00.000+01:00

The Great American Trailer Park Musical

So we chose this as the first show to see in Edinburgh this year on account of how it's free with our C venues passes and it's a direct competitor of ours. Perhaps not a great choice of first show to see, since it proved a pretty daunting glimpse of the competition. We have consoled ourselves with the knowledge that this show has been running on off-Broadway in the US for three years now, and the current cast have been doing it for, if not quite that long, then much longer than we've been doing our show.

Trailer Park tells the story of Norbert, a tollbooth collector, Jeannie, his agoraphobic wife (who hasn't left her trailer since their baby was snatched 20 years ago - cue ridiculously coincidental plot development towards the end, though to be fair not the one I was expecting), and Pippi, a young stripper who moves to the trailer park to run from her ex-boyfriend Duke, and promptly has an affair with Norbert.

Basically, that's it for plot, which leads me to the basic problem I had with this show (well I might as well do the whinges first): monotony. The plot has only one real strand to it: the love triangle between the aforementioned three characters (plus Duke towards the end). As comic relief, we get a few more characters: Betty, Pickles and Lin. These three are, however, glorified narrators for the main plotline, and therefore their arrival is not necessarily accompanied by a narrative change of scene. Consequently, if one gets bored of the main plot, there's not much respite.

The plot isn't the only thing that's a little bit one-tone about the show. The singing is incredibly impressive, without exception the cast have amazing voices and I can only marvel at their ability to pull out performances like this on a nightly basis. It is fair to say, however, that there isn't a great deal of range in the musical style of the show. The result, as one friend remarked, was the impression that "they all had degrees in musical theatre from the University of Belting". If you aren't particularly impressed by this style of singing, this isn't going to appeal to you much.

As a sound designer, I can't finish my gripes without a mention of that old chestnut, the Not Muting Radio Mics When The Actor Is Offstage Problem. And whilst I can appreciate that the show is pretty full-on, the reverb on the mics even during spoken dialogue seemed a bit much. Of course, we saw them pretty early on, this may have changed by now.

Anyway, gripes over. Oh, and here's an anti-gripe. I would like to dispute most vigorously the review in Three Weeks which rather snottily accuses anyone who laughs at the show of "laughing at people for being poor and uneducated". This is one of those criticisms that somewhat misses the point of the show, which pretty wholeheartedly celebrates the characters it shows us. About the only particularly cruel laughter in it is directed towards one character for being unintelligent, but that's a feature of most comedy ever made, so I'm not going to start laying into Trailer Park for that.

What is indisputably great about this musical is the acting. The three narrators in particular are a masterclass in characterisation, with never a moment on stage when they weren't completely and convincingly in character. On second thoughts, though, I don't want to single them out too much, because the cast are universally impressive, their characters just happen to be absolute gifts. The music is well written and some of the numbers are genuinely memorable (more than can be said for some big hit musicals). The book is full of snappy, convincing dialogue, and the show is frequently laugh out loud funny. The set and costume design is effective, the lighting pretty straightforward but evocative, picking up where the set leaves off for those scenes set outside the trailer park.

This is a very slick and polished production that the team behind it have every reason to be very proud of. I'm just not sure the basic underlying plot framework is quite right.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: First the Obligatory Plug

2008-08-05T23:05:00.001+01:00

I'm here with Hero, it's a new musical written and performed entirely by Cambridge students, and it's ace. If any of you are in Edinburgh in the next couple of weeks, I hope to see you there (C venues, 3.45pm, every day).

Edinburgh Reviews '08: Intro

2008-08-05T23:03:00.000+01:00

So it's that time of year again, when every broadsheet but the Telegraph get terribly excited about the Edinburgh Festival.

In accordance, I will, like last year, be turning this blog into my own personal record of what stuff I've seen, and what I thought of it.

If you don't really care about the fringe and all the guffstorm that surrounds it, then... see you in September.

Marvellous Article In The Indy

2008-07-20T17:00:00.001+01:00

"If we end up with 20 years of Tory government, it'll be The Pigeon Detectives' fault."

Make It Happen: A Note of Caution

2008-07-19T19:38:00.001+01:00

The Lib Dem blogosphere is buzzing with excitement about Make It Happen (pdf), which has indeed attracted some press reaction to it, as Stephen discusses. To this I just want to add my own paranoia. Here goes...

Lib Dem bashers frequently claim that we try to out-Tory the Tories in Tory seats, and that we try to out-Labour Labour in Labour seats (thus giving away their own belief in the natural order of things, and the specific tenet that there are only such things as Tory Voters and Labour Voters, "really, you know, deep down..."). Which is one of those analyses that's so half arsed, it's a good job nobody spends too much time thinking about it, or it'd fall apart. Because a moment's thought reveals that the way to take a seat from a Tory is to bleed them of a few voters (if they happen to actually have more than 50% of the vote), and then persuade Labour voters, Green voters, etc. that to get rid of the Tory, they could do worse than vote for you. Now, I hate that idea, to be honest, but needs must as the Devil's Very Own Voting System drives.

FPTP requires that you build a coalition. Every government which has gotten itself elected successfully has understood this. Every now and then, you can build a groundswell around a genuine point of ideology (eg. Thatcher?), but mostly you win by being moderate and sounding competent. The question for Nick Clegg here is, is this a time when a genuine feeling in favour of low tax is going to be big enough to drive voters his way. And, two years out from an election, there's no point in me or anyone else making predictions about that.

But the point for Dave Cameron on this is that he long ago committed himself to the de-toxifying of the Tory brand, and he knows he couldn't say what Nick has anyway, for exactly that reason. So if I was a Tory who subscribes to the idea that the Tories will win the next election on moderate-ness, not on hard Toryness - like, say, Iain Dale - then what would I try and do right now? I might start shouting long and hard about how Nick Clegg is leading his party into "a radical tax-cutting platform [that] has left the other two parties gasping". I would say that it "marks the triumph of the so-called "Orange Booker" tendency", and I might write something like:

He hasn't just pledged a reduction in taxes; he has promised a cut in public spending, too. Admittedly, it is only £20 billion, a mere three per cent of total government spending, but it's a start. And it's a damn sight more than any other politician has had the guts to do.

The bonus point of selling the idea that the Lib Dems have now become the party of the government spending cut enthusiast (which Iain tries to do whilst not quite sounding like he's actually saying he's agreeing with us), is that part two of that narrative is to be used in debates:

"The Lib Dems now want to cut taxes, before they wanted to raise them. YOU CAN'T TRUST THEM!"

The amateurs are trying to jump to this step before they've done the groundwork of establishing that we are now a party of rabid taxcutters. But the professionals are letting this sink in for now, and just chipping in with their usual chippy bollocks about "yes, well, the Lib Dems can say what they like, etc...."

Can we not run headlong towards the idea that we're now the party of a radical tax-cutting agenda unless we really are? Because as far as I'm aware, conference hasn't passed anything other than the policy of cutting income tax at the low end so we can introduce LIT and implement the Great Green Tax Shift.

I hate to be a buzzkill and that, and I understand the imperative to get media coverage, I'm sure it'll be good for the poll numbers and thereby for Nick's narrative, and I'm not knocking that, really I'm not. But let's not get carried away with all the media and start letting people put words in our mouths.

Are "religious rights" special?

2008-07-11T17:40:00.002+01:00

Today's Wail contains a typically sensational report on the case of Lillian Ladele, a bigot whose sky-fairy told her to do it. So many points to be made here that I don't quite know where to start. Perhaps a quick rewrite is in order. The following should strike everyone the way a story like this strikes me:

Victory for Pastafarian registrar bullied for refusing to perform 'sinful' inter-racial weddings
A Pastafarian registrar who refused to carry out interracial 'weddings' won a landmark legal battle yesterday.
A. N. Other, 45, was threatened with the sack, bullied and 'thrown before the lions' after asking to be excused from conducting civil partnerships for mixed-race couples because of his religious beliefs.
But yesterday a tribunal agreed that his faith had been ridden roughshod over by equalities-obsessed Islington Council, which had sought to 'trump one set of rights with another'.
The groundbreaking decision could lead to firms facing 'conscience claims' from staff who say their own beliefs prevent them carrying out part of their job.
Yesterday's ruling found that Liberal Democrat-run Islington Council in North London cared too much about the 'rights of the black, white, asian and oriental communities'.
It also found that the council – which gave Mr. Other an ultimatum to choose between his beliefs and his £31,000-a-year job – showed no respect for his rights as a Pastafarian.
Speaking afterwards, Mr. Other said: 'It is a victory for religious liberty, not just for myself but for others in a similar position to mine.
'Civil rights should not be used as an excuse to bully or harass people over their religious beliefs.'
Mr. Other, who is single, said he was treated like a pariah by colleagues and left in an 'intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment'.
He had wept as he told the tribunal how his employers gave him an ultimatum to perform the ceremonies or face dismissal for gross misconduct.
'I was being picked on a daily basis,' he said. He said he felt like he was being 'thrown before the lions', explaining: 'I hold the orthodox Pastafarian view that marriage is the union of two people of the same race for life and this is the Flying Spaghetti Monster-ordained place for sexual relations.
'It creates a problem for any Pastafarian if they are expected to do or condone something that they see as sinful.'
His nightmare began in 2004, when he realised that legislation permitting civil partnerships at town halls between gays or lesbians would require him to preside over the ceremonies.
Mr. Other raised his concerns, but was ridiculed. His boss, Helen Mendez-Child, said his stance was akin to a registrar refusing to marry a gay person.
In 2006 Mr. Other and another, unnamed, Pastafarian colleague were accused of 'discriminating against the homosexual community'.
In May 2007, the council launched an internal disciplinary inquiry into Mr. Other.

Four months later, he was told if he did not co-operate he would be sacked. He took the council to an employment tribunal, claiming discrimination, harassment and victimisation on the grounds of religion or beliefs.
Yesterday the Central London tribunal agreed he had been unfairly treated.
In its ruling, which could have implications for the administration of the 18,000 same-sex ceremonies conducted every year, the tribunal said: 'This is a situation where there is a conflict between two rights or freedoms. It is an important case, which may have a wider impact than the dispute between the parties.
'The tribunal accepts that it would be wrong for one set of rights to trump another.
'The evidence before the tribunal was that Islington Council rightly considered the importance of the right of the interracial community not to be discriminated against but did not consider the right of Mr. Other as a member of a religious group.
'Islington Council decided that the service it provided was secular and that the rights of the interracial community must be protected.
'In so acting, it took no notice of the rights of Mr. Other by virtue of his orthodox Pastafarian beliefs.'
Compensation will be decided in September. There is no limit to the amount that can be awarded for religious discrimination.
Last night employment lawyer Lisa Mayhew, of Jones Day, said: 'It is a bit of a wake-up call for employers.
'They need to think about whether their instructions and the tasks expected of staff might cause people with religious beliefs more problems than others.
'It does not have to be religion – this could apply across the spectrum in terms of race, gender or sexual orientation.'
But Bert Winterknack, of interracial rights campaign group Brickwall, said: 'Public servants are paid by taxpayers to deliver public services.
'They shouldn't be able to pick and choose who they deliver those services to.'

Now, before we get down to it, there are a few pragmatic points I have seen raised on this. Sure, the argument goes, she couldn't expect to be employed if she lived, say, in the highlands, and was the only registrar for miles around, but she wasn't. She worked in a busy registrar's office, and there were other registrars who could do the ceremonies she objected to, why couldn't Islington council just be a sport and allow her to duck out of those ceremonies she didn't want anything to do with. Of course, they could have done that, and, as I understand it, this is the ad hoc arrangement that she came to for some time.

Like any employee who continually demands special treatment in the way their tasks are assigned in a workplace that employs many people, it doesn't surprise me that this didn't exactly make her popular in the office. I don't know how far the alleged "lions" went, but since the article in the Mail, which is pretty sympathetically worded, mentions no specifics at all, I doubt it was especially bad. Besides which, this isn't what she is complaining about - the employment tribunal are there only to consider the rights and wrongs of her being faced with an ultimatum playing her beliefs against her continued employment.

The main point, really, is that to say the council (and I couldn't care less that it's a Lib Dem council, it may as well be a BNP council for all I care, they'd still be right) have wrongly allowed gay rights to trump religious ones is bizarre. The gay people in question are not employees, the religious person in question is, and an employee of a secular, state organisation, at that. Her job description now requires her to officiate at civil partnership ceremonies (which, by the way, were only introduced in the first place to get around the fact that religious twats were so bothered about the idea of the word "marriage" being applied to gay relationships, so I'm not even sure what she's bothered about; she's isn't being asked to "marry" gay people), and she is refusing to do her job. Why should a secular state pay her to only do, say, nine tenths of her job? How about four fifths of her job? Half? A quarter?

Why is there even confusion about people's right to be employed even if they say they mustn't do part of the job description, not because they are incapable of doing it, but because they don't believe in it? Could I demand work as a bricklayer but say I was ideologically opposed to physical work? No? Why not?

But as soon as you attach the magic word "religion" to things, people lose sight of the point. This is a problem for soft-secular states like Britain, who like to think they are essentially secular now but who still have a state religion, a requirement for a daily act of worship in all state schools, and laws against religious discrimination but no similar protections for atheists. An atheist who acted as Lillian Ladele has would, quite rightly, be told to fucking well belt up and get on with their job or find another one. Like she was. And nobody would think they had a leg to stand on.

Of course, nobody should be forced to do something they don't want to do. And Miss Ladele wasn't, she was given a choice: officiate in these ceremonies, or find another job which was compatible with her beliefs. She chose instead to throw her toys out of the pram and assert her right to stay on the public purse whilst discriminating against a section of the public who she is employed by. That an employment tribunal thinks that this right exists is the scary part. Because what it means is that, in the minds of the tribunal at least, "religious" rights are in some way special. Belief in a supernatural order to the world does, it seems, qualify you to hold attitudes which unreasonably affect your performance of your job without fear of reproach. In this sense, the state has a long way to go before it can genuinely call itself secular.

People who call Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling et al. "militant", who claim they are just being mean and picking a fight with mostly inoffensive religious people, can shove it up their arse. Because until stories like this one seem to everyone as obviously absurd as they do to atheists, they have a very important role.

The Vexed Question of Green Car Taxation

2008-07-10T19:04:00.000+01:00

Nick Clegg has got a piece up on CiF today. It's nothing very new to anyone who pays attention to Nick's every utterance, as will be true of many Lib Dem bloggers. What I found notable about it was the comments thread it has sparked. Like all dicussion of this issue, it is full of people arguing for some system or other, who talk past each another, not to each other.

What I mean by this is that they proudly proclaim the benefits of the tax instrument they favour and the shortcomings of the those proposed by others, but they don't address the shortcomings that others raise about their own preferred tax instrument.

Essentially, what we have on offer here are three alternative forms of taxation, all imperfect:

1. Vehicle Excise Duty - "we tax people on the car they own"

Pros:
-Allows the annual check on insurance and MOT to be bundled in with its administration; these things are Good Ideas for other, obvious, non-environmental reasons.
-Allows us to incentivise people to buy fuel efficient cars.

Cons:
-Penalises the owner of a car for simply having it, not for using it, which is the polluting part.
-Doesn't distinguish between people's reasons for owning a car. Those who need a car because they live in a rural area pay as much as those who live on a perfectly usable bus route for owning the same car.

2. Fuel Duty - "we tax the petrol"

Pros:
-Is the best green tax; it allows us to straightforwardly penalise the polluter in proportion to the amount of fossil fuel they burn.

Cons:
-Doesn't allow us to make value judgments on the "worth" of the journey being made. Someone who lives in a rural area and has little choice but to use their car if they want to get into town to do some shopping pays just as much as someone who lives five minutes' walk from the newsagents but is too lazy to walk there to buy a paper (say).

3. Road User Charging - "we charge people for each journey they make" (includes congestion charges, motorway charges, etc.)

Pros:
-Allows more specific targeting of "the wrong sort of journey" - as long as we can all agree on what that is.

Cons:
-May involve the use of some fairly intrusive technology if we want to do anything more clever than making motorways into toll roads (for instance).

The only thing we know for certain about this choice is that, unless we want to see some other taxes go up significantly, we have to choose one of them, and it is right that we do so, because discouraging car use is an important part of any effort to meet our CO₂ reduction targets. So which way should we as a country jump? Nick Clegg is making a pitch in his piece for option 3, Road User Charging:

So the real solution we should be focusing on to cut driving is to abolish VED altogether and cut fuel tax, replacing them with revenue-neutral road user charging on motorways and trunk roads only.

But he doesn't even mention the concerns people have about Road User Charging in his piece (the intrusive road use tracking that may be involved). By neglecting to pre-emptively rebut this point, he makes the fundamental error of leaving space for a glib response in a CiF piece - give these people an inch... But never mind that, reforming CiFers is better done by those with the stamina for endless perseverance in the face of fuckwittery, such as Citizen Alix.

Now, we over here in the more civilised domain of Lib Dem Blogs may have read James Graham's post exploring why RUC needn't be as intrusive as some suggest, but why there's plenty of other reasons to dislike it as a policy:

My main objections are threefold: it would take bloody ages to introduce, it is an IT disaster waiting to happen and it falls foul of the unintended consequences law.

By that last comment, by the way, James means that it doesn't penalise "60-something retirees living the life of Riley out in the sticks and driving a Mercedes".

And that's the problem with this whole argument, really: everyone can think of some unutterable git who they would like to punish for living in the wrong place, or having the wrong job or the wrong lifestyle, or making the wrong choices, who gets off lightly under a given policy. Or if they can't manage that, they can think of some poor unfortunate who is being driven out of house and home by being taxed as highly as they would be under said policy.

Meanwhile, the problem I have with Nick's suggestion is the idea that motorway journeys around the country, when one could go by train, are in any way a more pernicious form of pollution than journeys into town from home, when one could take the bus. If we want to make a serious dent in greenhouse emissions, surely we need to tackle both? The journeys that can justifiably be discouraged are those with truly viable public transport alternatives, regardless of the distance of the journey. So what constitutes a viable alternative?

To me, there is a distinction to be made between a journey by car whenever you feel like it, and a journey by bus or train that you have to plan in advance because they only run every so often. What makes the London tube such a great public transport system (at least compared to the rest of the country) is that it runs regularly enough (most of the time) that you don't bother to plan a time in advance, you just walk into a station and get the next train to where you want to go. To me, public transport has to have that kind of convenience before it can be considered a truly comparable alternative, as well as simply not taking an inordinately longer time to travel. Of course, exactly how regular something needs to be before you consider it viable will vary from person to person, so this is not the reliable deciding factor it might look like.

And of course, we still want to gently suggest to people that they might take public transport even when it does notably inconvenience them. After all, it would reduce emissions if people took a bus from their suburban home into town which runs every half an hour, even if that is a pain in the arse.

Once we get into the business of deciding how worthwhile or defensible everyone's decisions to take a car are, we run the risk of an overbearing state intrusion to make the whole system workable. If we don't want to go down that route, then we are going to end up with a piecemeal system of toll plazas on motorways and congestion zones in town centres, with unintended consequences of encouraging people to drive on B roads and thus increase their emissions.

So can we please stop these silly games? Can we instead focus the argument on what it is we are trying to achieve here? In the end, we are trying to achieve a greener Britain. To do this, we must discourage all usage of fossil fuels. Ultimately, the best way to do that is to make it really jolly expensive to burn fossil fuels. Full stop. Then we can start having an argument about giving certain people special dispensation if we want: hauliers, for instance, or people who live in rural areas (though I'm with James on that one; unless you're a farmer, you don't have to live out in the middle of nowhere, and anyone choosing to do so knew that they stood to be dependent on car travel when they bought the house. It's swings and roundabouts; they get the lower house prices, they can also take the costs of driving about the place.) Ultimately, the best way to lower emissions is for the cost of polluting to be reflected in the price of the journey.

So my conclusions here are as follows:

- A VED regime which simply covers the cost of administration of checks that each car is insured and has passed its MOT.

- A fairly punitive fuel duty, to be poured into increasing bus services and making train tickets cheaper.

- Renationalise the railways! Maybe unpopular with the liberal wing of the party, but frankly, the record of the private railway franchises in Britain doesn't seem great as far as ticket prices are concerned. We now subsidise the railways around four times as much as we did under British Rail, and all we have to show for it is rocketing ticket prices despite services which are in more demand than ever.

Alright then, tell me why I'm wrong!

An End of Season Dr Who / LM / LDB Meme. (Yes we must.)

2008-07-06T17:45:00.000+01:00

Well, RTD has just rather publicly gotten himself over his Doctor/Rose dyad with a massive, turgid two-parter. Thank goodness for that.

Meanwhile, Loz Miles is positively inviting us to pile in on his agenda for discussion on the future of the programme:

The following 25-point programme may not be a way of guaranteeing that Doctor Who is great - only a competent scriptwriting team could ensure that, and in the Age of Chibnall, even competence is a precious commodity - but it would at least give the series a chance to escape its current rut of showbiz fan-fic and computer-generated slurry. Tick the ones you agree with, and if you tick all 25, then I'm available for a September wedding.

I will leave LM to explain himself on each of the points, there's no point reproducing the whole lot here, but here are the 25 headings, along with my own thoughts (you can skip this if you're pushed for time), and a score from 1 to "Yes! Yes! Just... YES." (4, so that they will add up to a neat percentage).

I do hope I'm not getting married in September...

1. A companion who isn't from the early twenty-first century.
Yeah, this would be nice. I'm not sure it's a priority, though. Plus, if that moment in Planet of the Ood that pissed Larry off so much (you know; where the Doctor apologised for questioning sweat shops) had been with a companion who wasn't from our times, there would have been no question of tieing the ethical issue back to our world in such a direct way in the first place, regardless of the apology.
2/4

2. A companion who's played by a proper actress.
Yup. Not only on the basis of the quality of the acting, but if the show lets itself be judged on the star names it attracts, then it hands the press a stick to beat it with as soon as it doesn't find a big name who wants to be a companion for a series.
4/4

3. We don't necessarily need a single companion.
Not convinced. This seems to be based on Larry accepting that the programme needs UST, but wanting it not to involve the Doctor. The latter I can get on board with, but the former is not really a position I accept. You could have some occasional UST, where necessary, with a character specific to the story, or if you want something ongoing then a recurring character (maybe instead of the fretful-mother-and-accoutrements). A whole season of it between companions might get just as tedious as what we've had so far.
1/4

4. No more affairs for the Doctor.
Yup.
4/4

5. A less sexy, less athletic Doctor.
Yes, but not too worried about this. At the very least, a Doctor who stops making knowing little smuggeries like "I don't want to regenerate; I mean.. look at me!".
2/4

6. No spurious super-powers.
Yes.
4/4

7. The Doctor shouldn't know everything.
Completely agree with what Larry says here about the spirit of the programme being discovery alongside the characters, not infodumping.
5/4

8. The Doctor shouldn't be perfect.
I think, to be fair, RTD understands this point, and allowed Davros to make some relatively telling criticisms of the Doctor's moral character in the finale. But I would agree that the idolising of the Doctor by Moff has been tedious.
3/4

9. The Doctor's presence should never, ever be the solution.
Hmm. In many ways, it can be argued that the series has always presented the Doctor's presence as being the crucial factor, but the difference was that he still had to do something, rather than simply be the Doctor. I think the point is that many scripts aren't making much effort to make the solutions interesting, because they aren't really interested in them.
4/4

10. No technobabble.
Meh. The show has always had technobabble, and Loz even admits that some stories (he cites The Pirate Planet) have done it in a dramatically satisfying way. I think perhaps technobabble is a straw man here. Although it has to be said that the fetishisation of technobabble we saw in Journey's End with the DoctorDonna was silly.
0/4

11. Absolutely no "magic wand" technology.
Essentially the same point as the technobabble point, but better expressed.
3/4

12. Please, in the name of God, less stories set on modern-day Earth.
Yes.
4/4

13. No more alien invasions.
Certainly fewer, they lead to some pretty uninteresting runarounds.
3/4

14. Stop wasting money on "big".
Sometimes. I think at the end of the season it's fair enough wanting "big", but if you're going to do it, do it well. The exploding Daleks and saucers at the end of last night's episode looked seriously budget, to my eye. I'd certainly apply this rule to the big empty first-two-parter-of-the-seasons, though; the best one so far was Daleks in Manhattan, and that wasn't great. I'd rather have a couple more cheapo Midnight type things spread throughout the season.
2/4

15. Less CGI monsters.
Maybe. I don't really mind them, they're a standard these days, and people, rightly or wrongly, think other forms of effect work look silly. I do think it would be nice to have more of a concept behind the monsters. Doctor Who monsters are always supposed to have some sort of "point", to my mind - this is what has generally set it apart from stuff like Star Trek, with its ersatz alien "cultures". Doesn't really matter if the "point" is an aesthetic one or a more ideological one, or if the point is their environment more than the monster itself (Daleks = Nazis, The Master = Polar Opposite to The Doctor, Monsters of Greatest Show in the Galaxy = things that are creepy about a Circus, etc.). The worst thing, then, to do to a monster is to completely divorce them from their "point", so that they might as well be any old thing. The example this series was the Sontarans, a physical monster, not a CG one, so... I think Loz may have let his dislike of the ubiquity of CGI cloud his diagnosis of a cause for the symptoms he has correctly identified.
1/4

16. Stop making straight-to-video horror movies with all the horror taken out.
Loz hasn't really completely explained what he means by this, since he admits that Hammer Horror -> Talons of Weng Chiang worked, but what I gather from what he's written is the following guiding principle: If you're going to lift a movie trope, lift one which survives the transition. Talons works because the BBC could do most of what made Hammer good, but Lazarus Experiment doesn't, because what makes the films which influenced it good cannot be transmitted at 7pm on a Saturday. I suspect I may be making my own point out of Loz's components, but... it's the only one I can find in there (unless he just means that the films they are copying nowadays are rubbish ones, which isn't a very interesting point).
2/4

17. We need writers who can write, not just directors who can direct.
Yes, but I would add to this that there are some writers who can write: RTD when he stears clear of the finales, Moff when he's not celebrating himself / just winding up fans who don't like the idea of the Doctor "dancing", Matt Jones to some extent, Paul Cornell, Rob Shearman.
3/4

18. I should obviously be hired as a writer.
I'd like to see it, but suspect it would be vetted heavily by Moff, and I doubt Loz could cope.
3/4

19. Make sure you hire the right "cult" comic-book author.
Agree with the comments recommending Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, though I don't share LM's complete aversion to Gaiman.
2/4

20. We need one - just one - proper historical story.
Yeah, might be nice.
3/4

21. Historical stories that are actually about the era in question.
Certainly, though more than this I would have pushed Loz's other objection to the current historicals: the slavishly followed dogma that each and every famous historical figure was "a genius", "brilliant", "the best X ever", etc., and furthermore that the episode needs to spend 20% of its running time impressing this upon us. In this sense, at least, Girl in the Fireplace was preferable - as an "Oddball Historical", rather than as a "Doctor Weepie".
2/4

22. Monsters that fit the story.
I made the jump to this point a bit early, under the point about CGI, so I will agree with it here.
3/4

23. Enough of the Daleks.
I dunno. A finale every two seasons, say, would be tolerable, but only if they have something fresh to do with them. I would certainly like to see the crash-bang-wallop Dalek Epics rested for a while.
3/4

24. Say no to story arcs.
Hmm. I appreciate what Loz says about the finale enslaving the rest of the season to some extent, but I still think it's nice to have a payoff for following the whole series, something a bit more than the first couple of seasons' code words. I couldn't say this season's arc bothered me, if you ignore the fervent fan speculation about it (which you will never stop) and just look at the actual episodes.
1/4

25. Less Confidential, more Totally.
Not bothered, suspect this is only on Loz's list out of Moff-aversion.
0/4

So my total agreement with Loz here is... 64%.

Now, people who are to be made tediously to do this: anyone who wants to, really, but I'm guessing Daddies Richard and Alex, Jennie and Matt, Will, and anyone who I've forgotten.

Good Luck Stephen

2008-06-26T01:27:00.000+01:00

Best wishes to all the Lib Dems in Henley today, I hope polling day goes well. I'm sorry I'm not there to help, but I graduate on Friday, and I have to pack up my room to go home today/tomorrow. But anyway, good luck to you all, and let's hope the Tories get a bit of a shock come Friday morning.

Book Meme

2008-06-25T17:15:00.000+01:00

Jennie has done this, so I thought I would, since I haven't written about much rececntly (yes, Heinz should be ashamed of themselves, but I couldn't be arsed to write about it).

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

~~1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen~~
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
~~3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte~~
~~4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling~~
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
~~6 The Bible~~
~~7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte~~
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
~~11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott~~
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
~~20 Middlemarch - George Eliot~~
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
~~33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis~~
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
~~36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis~~
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
~~42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown~~
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
~~47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy~~
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
~~68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding~~
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
~~77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome~~
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

It would appear off the back of this that I am some kind of awful literary mysogynist, for which I can only:

1. Apologise
2. Urge more women to write fiction I might want to read.
3. Urge the Big Read to include the Faction Paradox novels and non-fiction on this list, so that I wouldn't be such an awful git.

Tory Hissyfits Becoming A Habit

2008-06-20T14:34:00.000+01:00

I will leave to others the point that this morning's threats from the Tories over our leaflets in Henley are not likely to get very far, since they are bollocks. What I want to ask is this: is it now Tory standard practice to attempt to neutralise criticism of their candidates by threatening to sue people over it? Anyone remember this from Bromley and Chislehurst?

David Cameron has accused the Lib Dems of fighting a "dirty" and "personal" campaign in Bromley and Chislehurst.

...

The UK Independence Party also got into a spat with Mr Neill, who threatened to sue over a UKIP poster accusing him of favouring "unlimited immigration".

Or this from Ealing Southall?

After all, the Tories know their pockets are deeper than most other parties at the moment; if it comes to it, they can afford to piss around in court doing this kind of faux-outrage, wasting a judge's time. And that's if they even get as far as a courtroom. I mean, in the heat of a campaign, they don't have the time to actually sue anyone over anything, they can simply say they will. I don't actually recall the two previous examples going to court, does anyone else?

Frankly, the best thing Stephen Kearney can say is "Well get on with it then. Sue me."

Parliamentary Oversight of 42 Day Detention

2008-06-11T13:45:00.001+01:00

Just watched PMQs, where all three party leaders did pretty well, I think (Dale continues to push the line that Nick is no good at PMQs, but frankly just looks a bit silly doing so).

What I want to talk about, however, is the point that both Nick Clegg and Michael Howard raised, asking very focussed questions about this parliamentary vote within 7 days business. The Government has suggested that this allows democratic oversight of the use of this power, and that therefore the 42 days legislation does not hand over undue power to an overmighty executive for ever more.

Today, the point was raised that any genuine setting out of a case for extended periods of detention in an individual case would require the potential criminal trial which would follow to be prejudiced, or sensitive information to be disclosed at a time when such revelations would be counter-productive in the ongoing investigation. "Quite right", replies the government, "which is why all that would happen is that the Home Secretary would come before the house, say that she felt this particular case was jolly important, and could she please bang up without charge someone non-specific who in her judgment is a real rotter?"

If this is the case, then what is the point of this check on the power at all? A Home Secretary who comes before the house asking for approval to use this power without having to make any argument that it is justified in the specific case in question is going to get that approval almost automatically. Here is what will happen:

Home Secretary: I come before the house today to ask for approval of the detention of a person who, in our opinion, poses or posed a threat to the security of the country, and who we need to detain for longer to bring them to justice and/or prevent a terrorist atrocity.

Opposition: Why should we approve this, can you give us any evidence we should do so?

Home Secretary: You know full well I can't, and when this power was legislated for it was made quite clear that no specifics of the individual case could be discussed. BUT, if you don't approve this, then you might be responsible for the deaths of a lot of people.

Opposition: *sigh* OK then.

I would put money on this happening 99% of the time. Parliamentary oversight would become a piece of ceremony, with little doubt over the outcome. If the government thinks this is a concession worth shouting about, I can't hold out much confidence for the other concessions that they claim makes this power more palatable.

Back From Henley

2008-06-03T22:00:00.001+01:00

I just got back from the (very winnable) Henley by-election, where I have been since Sunday lunchtime. Look, here are some photos to prove it:

The HQ:

The March We Have Stolen On The Tories:

Breakfast Yesterday Morning:

In my time there, I did four delivery rounds of tabloids and letters, and wrote really quite a lot of addresses. Stephen Kearney, who I had a quick chat to today, is very nice, and makes a point of coming and saying "Hello" to all the volunteers if he's around, which was appreciated. Also, I met Neil, and saw Mark (but didn't get much chance to speak to him, because everyone was very busy at the time). I also met several others who do not, to my knowledge, have blogs, but who were marvellous nonetheless.

I have to say, I had a really great time: the staff at the HQ are universally welcoming and lovely, as well as being very organized and professional. I think it's especially worth going for a couple of days if you have the time; the campaign may well be able to put you up for free at a local supporter's house, and that way, your travelling-to-helping time-ratio is more favourable. Plus, you get much more of a feel of being part of the campaign, and of how it's all going. Thame, where the campaign HQ is based, is a nice place too. Highly recommended.

If I get down there again at some point, I hope to see lots of you there. It's really worth doing if you want to see us pull off a surprise victory.

Reasons to be Cheerful #5: Sullying Apple's Little Darling

2008-05-31T17:03:00.001+01:00

So in preparation for Henley, I went off to Curry's to find the cheapest, crappest CD walkman they might sell me. Except it turns out that such a thing is a hopelessly antiquated request nowadays. If you want to hear music, it has to have been put through a perceptual coder of some kind. Because, y'know... progress and that.

Now, ownership of such a device was, technically, almost inevitable at some point in my life, but I had resisted until now because I wanted to support the first person to come up with a really good competitor to the iPod. No matter how good the iPod is, I don't think it's at all healthy that nobody at the moment wants to even try to directly compete with the iPod. If you want something with more than, say, 8Gb of space on it, and which plays mp3s and so on, but you don't want some big clunky video player, then you are quite literally stuck with Apple. The iRiver gave them a run for their money for a bit, but sadly no more.

So, when I discovered that my only option was with one of Apple's ubiquitous little bits of kit, I'm afraid to say, I caved, and bought one. In order to make myself feel a little bit less dirty, I have brought it straight home and made it talk to some open source software, syncing it with Songbird over a connection managed by Ubuntu.

Reasons to be Cheerful #4: Moffus!

2008-05-31T16:51:00.000+01:00

Tonight's Doctor Who is the first part of Steven Moffat's two-parter. Moffat has recently been announced as the new "showrunner", an announcement very much to be welcomed, if you ask me. (Also an announcement that readers of Lib Dem Blogs cannot fail to have been aware of!)

A show like Doctor Who needs a turnover of new thinking every so often in the production team, no matter how good the previous incumbents are/were. I think it's very laudable that RTD has set up this prototype cycle of four seasons, then a year off with a few specials to allow the new production team the time to stop and think about any changes they want to make, away from the treadmill of making the show. Lets hope it leaves the show in a strong position to keep going as long as it did the first time.

Reasons to be Cheerful #3: Ubuntu

2008-05-31T16:41:00.002+01:00

Health-warning: Geekery ahead! If you couldn't care less about operating systems, move along.

So this is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now, but haven't got round to it. A couple of weeks ago I decided that the release of Ubuntu 8.04 was as good a reason as any to finally take the plunge into the world of open source software properly. I've run Firefox and Thunderbird for a while now, and more recently I've been increasingly delighted with Songbird, and that's nice as far as it goes, but I was growing increasingly weary of the flaky nature of my installation of Windows XP, and it was getting towards the stage when a day of backing up Windows and reinstalling from scratch was going to be necessary.

Except I couldn't be bothered to put that effort in just to maintain the status quo, and anyway, there are good ideological reasons to want to get away from proprietary software. So I figured what I'd do instead is put Ubuntu on my external hard drive, and make it bootable, so that whenever I turn my laptop on with my external HD switched on, it will boot into Linux instead of Microsoft's tyrannical kingdom. I thought it would be a useful environment in which to use Open Office to write up my research project without distractions, and that after exams I would have the time to sit around setting up everything else I use my laptop for: watching TV with my DVB card, chatting to people on MSN, listening to music, etc. The installation to an external HD was a precaution so that I could move slowly across, keeping Windows afloat as my primary system until I had the time to migrate fully.

Except that it turns out that, since getting the installation to boot (took maybe an hour), I have hardly been back to Windows. Everything I used my laptop for has taken very little time indeed to sort out, and anything I needed to find out how to do, someone had been there before me and written about it online, or in the Ubuntu Forums. So I am now writing to you, dear reader, from Firebox 3 beta 5, in Ubuntu. And it's lovely, let me tell you. My laptop now takes about 1 minute 30 to boot from startup, and once it gives you a desktop, that's it. Unlike Windows, where the startup took a good 2 minutes 30 to give me a desktop, and then another 3 before it settled down and stopped loading all the bloatware that Apple, Adobe and others insist that your computer needs perpetually running in order that you never have to suffer the prospect of - horror! - a program taking a few seconds to start up.

So yes, I am very pleased with the whole thing. Anything I still need from Windows I can run under Wine, and for the most part, everything I need to do has a perfectly good linux-based program to do it. VLC, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and xine get special mentions. Most of these are easily found using the Ubuntu Package Management system. Getting mp3s and other bits and bobs of music you got from your corrupt uncle to play takes a bit longer (maybe 10 minutes following some instructions), but that's about the most strenuous its been.

Now, this isn't for everyone. If you don't have a problem with Windows or Mac OS, then great. Stick with it. If the prospect of an (occasional) actual text-based command line fills you with horror, stay away. But if you're a bit technically minded, and you kind of like a bit of tinkering, then the next time you're thinking about spending time giving your PC a performance-motivated spring clean, think about having a play with a Linux distro. They're getting there, you know. And if you're wiping your HD and starting over anyway, what's the worst that could happen?

Reasons to be Cheerful #2: Off to Henley!

2008-05-31T16:06:00.000+01:00

Now that I am free of exams, I will be heading off to Henley tomorrow to lend Stephen Kearney and his team a hand. I have booked myself train tickets and a hotel room, and I will be there until Tuesday. So I will see any of you who are there between Sunday and Tuesday in a pub, I guess! ;-p