Something Good to Say about CiF, for once

Jonathan Freedland wrote a quite good piece in yesterday's Grauniad:

Israel has failed to learn these last 40 years [that] if you refuse to deal with a group because it's too extreme, you don't get to deal with a more pliant, moderate alternative. On the contrary, you eventually confront a force that is even more extreme. It happened when Fatah was eclipsed by Hamas - and it could happen again.

The full article is here. Amazingly enough, it even seems to have avoided the deluge of ignorant witterings that generally follow these articles on CiF, particularly on Israeli/Palestinian issues.

Sadly, events continue as heretofore, with the BBC reporting today that:

More than 30 senior officials from the Palestinian militant group Hamas have been detained by Israeli forces in overnight raids in the West Bank.

Those taken, mainly in Nablus, include the Palestinian education minister, three lawmakers and three mayors.

The Israeli military said the detentions were made because the officials "supported the firing of rockets" into Israel, AFP reported.

...

Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed more than 30 Palestinians over the last week, at least 11 of them civilians.

Over the same period, Palestinian militants have fired more than 120 rockets into Israel, killing one civilian and injuring at least 16 others.

Much as we may not like it, Hamas is a democratically elected government. They may be terrorists (although they're frankly a bit rubbish at it - after hearing about all those "hundreds" of rockets they were firing, I was suprised to read about their first fatality), but they are now state terrorists in a sense (except Palestine isn't a state yet). So are the Israelis; today al Jazeera report that electricity is once more being used as a method of collective punishment in Gaza. Israel may be more in the image of the ideal Middle Eastern state that exists in our heads, but, to come back to Freedland's point, we don't get to change the others by trying to marginalise and demonise them.

Sigh... Cohen's at it again

That greatest of many good reasons not to read the Observer, Nick Cohen, has been at it again:

The same question haunts the Liberal Democrats, who benefited so greatly from the anti-war wave of 2003. After a mediocre performance in the local elections came terrible opinion polls last week, which included the finding that half of Liberal Democrat supporters wanted rid of Sir Menzies Campbell. The former darling of the BBC and Channel 4 is now a liability, but I doubt if his enforced retirement would help a party without a purpose.

Its pro-Europeanism has gone, because the English won't accept more power going to Brussels. David Cameron has stolen its green clothes, while Gordon Brown is winning back disillusioned Labour voters. True, it still favours PR, but only because it suits its interests. There are good arguments for change, but the slogan 'vote for me so I can rig the system' is not one of them. Maybe they will recover. A large part of the Lib Dems' appeal is to protest voters who support it only because it isn't the Labour or Tory party. More demanding citizens will want to know how it plans to change the country and to that reasonable question no reply comes.

As Chomsky and many others often point out, the criticism that a group never propose any alternatives (often the green movement) has a straightforward translation: They propose plenty of solutions, but I don't like them. Nowhere is this more true than in what Cohen has written here. Or, I suppose, maybe he just speaks from ignorance; a couple of paragraphs later, he claims that Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky pose "no threat" to the rich, and all they do is oppose US and UK policy. Again, simply untrue.

Also, isn't it pretty bizarre to accuse of wanting to rig the system by bringing in the least riggable of all electoral systems? Or is this, to misquote Douglas Adams, a strange new use of the phrase "rigging the vote", that now actually means "ensuring the vote is accurately reflected in the makeup of parliament", of whose use I was previously unaware? This kind of doublethink is quite astonishingly prevalent now in comment writers; see Simon Jenkins a week or two ago.

Cohen as a writer paints from a palette of pure cliche and popularly perceived falsehood. His attacks on groups or people are often so content free that it becomes really quite hard to engage them at all.

Badmouthing PR, Part II

I was going to let the Guardian off on this, on the basis of yesterday's effort from the incorrigible Ms. Toynbee (although, in carefully avoiding my irritation on one point she goes and steps in a whole other mess, but there you are), but then they had to go and publish quite possibly one of the worst opinion pieces I have seen them print. I refer, of course, to Simon Jenkins, who today embarrassed himself with one of the most rabid and partisan attacks on the Lib Dems to be seen in some time, at least in the theoretically liberal press.

Sadly, this is the kind of thing that has got some of the servile Labour crowd on CiF in a bit of a lather, it being exactly the kind of cheap thought-porn that appeals to their decision to suppress their better judgement in favour of tribal support of a party they would never have started to support were it to come into existence fully formed today.

Simon Jenkins (or his subeditor) asks: "What are the Lib Dems for?"

The temptation, at this point, to just write "Simon Jenkins (or his subeditor) can fuck off" is pretty strong, but assuming I resist it for now, lets take a look at what he actually says.

What are Liberal Democrats for? They are the flotsam of 20th-century politics drifting on into the 21st, coagulated from ancient clubs, cabals, splits and defections from other parties. Not since the 19th century have they cohered round any great interest. They represent no mass movement, no breaking of the political mould. Ask a Liberal Democrat what he or she is for and you get only a susurration of platitudes. Yet thanks to proportional representation this party gets to choose the governments of Scotland and Wales. It is Nero for a day.

Well, that's an interesting start. The assumption that a political party has to coagulate around some particular interest is an interesting one. It begs the question of what the relevant interests are for the Tories and New Labour. The answers, I suspect, would be "mean spirited whingers, xenophobes and the rich" and "those who just rather like the idea of being in power", respectively, but there you are.

In my experience, when you ask a Lib Dem what he or she stands for, you are likely to be quoted the federal constitution, an extract from which is helpfully printed on my membership card: "The Lib Dems exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community and in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity." If this counts as "a sussuration of platitudes", well, fine, but it's about as coherent a mission statement as you'll get out of any political party, and I also happen to think that these values are by no means obvious given the direction today's governing parties are taking us.

Westminster commentators have always given the Lib Dems a free pass, as over cash for honours, because they are both hopeless and nice.

A free pass? Really?! It certainly didn't look that way from this end (I will gloss over the lazy smear that we are "hopeless and nice").

Most parties that have won no power for almost a century and are a political subsidiary of another party, New Labour, would disband. But Britain's patronage state keeps the Lib Dems going, that and the hope that their one distinctive, self-interested policy, proportional representation, might give them blocking power at Westminster.

I really don't know what he is trying to say here, the idea that the party who have been the most consistent in expressing the public's genuine opposition to many issues (when the official opposition have been found rubberstamping the government's authoritarian and ill-conceived measures) are being labelled a "political subsidiary" of the governing party? How, exactly? Or is he actually making the point that New Labour stole a lot of our more popular clothing in making themselves over? Funny way to go about it, if he is...

When Charles Kennedy resisted the temptation - some might say golden opportunity - to take his party left of New Labour early in this decade, he ensured his would never be a ruling party but, at best, king-makers of coalition. Yet what sort of coalition? Local leaders gave no indication before the election which other parties they might prefer. A Lib Dem vote was a blind vote, a diluted other-party vote to be realised only after the election.

Simon seems to have lost sight completely here of the fact that the Lib Dems are a democratic party, and as such it was not up to Charles Kennedy to take the party to the left of Labour; rather, our direction is indicated by our policy, which is made at conference and voted in by the membership.

As for the idea that we ought to have expressed a preference for which other parties we would support in coalitions: A paragraph ago, he was flinging the accusation of *being* a political subsidiary of another party, and now he's flogging us for *not* lining up under another party's banner? Need I even explain that we are a party in our own right, we campaign on our own policy and philosophy, and any voter can look at our manifesto and make a shrewd guess what our positions toward other parties might be in any hypothetical parliamentary makeup.

In Scotland the Lib Dem leader, Nicol Stephen, has decided it would be inappropriate to maintain Labour in power yet has told Alex Salmond's nationalists he will not coalesce with him. He cannot tolerate a referendum on independence. That the party of Irish home rule should reject so liberal a proposal as territorial self-determination is odd. Nor was Salmond demanding support for independence, merely for a vote on it. Under PR there is a majoritarian argument against almost any controversial decision. So what do the Lib Dems fear?

We fear exactly what most impartial observers of the goings on at Holyrood do; since we oppose independence, and so do a large majority of the population of Scotland, such a referendum would be largely undesirable. Of course, in an ideal democracy (as opposed to a representative one) we might consult the public by some sort of referendum on almost every issue we face. But the point of electing representatives under broad umbrellas which denominate their political philosophy is that we needn't do this. A referendum would be a huge gamble for the SNP, and you could bet a fair amount that the years leading up to 2010 would see them taking a number of ever more bizarre actions to persuade the Scottish people that independence was the answer. This would be no recipe for sound government, so the only reason for the Lib Dems to support it would be if they saw some great intrinsic value in a referendum. They don't.

Instead they have exchanged responsibility without power for power without responsibility, and are retiring to carp from the backbenches. They will smoke potency but not inhale.

Hands up who can tell me what exactly he means in the above?

In Wales the party is in equal confusion. Confronted with the predicted scenario of backing a Labour-led coalition or going into a "rainbow coalition", it is undecided. The party leader, Mike German, declared at the weekend: "I am not going to engage in megaphone negotiations". He wants to keep his options open. But to whom do his options belong? Surely a democrat shares his options with his voters.

Sadly, one of the aspects of the form of PR we see in Wales and Scotland at the moment (and we'll get onto a discussion of that later, when it serves Jenkins's argument to do so, rather than at this stage, where it simply makes his points look irrelevant) that the press does not seem to have caught onto yet is the tremendous power that public image and perception suddenly has over parties during coalition negotiations. It is a perverse artifact of this fact that, actually, a party does not serve the interests of implementing its own policy, or of getting elected again, very well by making every step of the process public.

The party has duly split. German has been told to resign by one of his senior colleagues, form a coalition with Labour by another and not to do so by a third. There is no great policy at stake. There is certainly no prospect of stability. As the established church of old Labour crumbles across Wales, its nonconformist rivals are apeing their forebears. They are setting up feuding chapels in every corner of the Welsh political village.

This is a conflation of a couple of issues. The question of Mike German's leadership of the Welsh party is pretty separate from who, if anyone, we form a coalition with, and it is not one I intend to touch with a barge pole, since I wouldn't presume to know nearly enough about it. As for the idea that we are a splintering party, however, I find that pretty unlikely. PR coalition formation is a very complex field of operation, and the political judgements on the party's AMs on how the Lib Dems are best served in a coalition are never likely to coincide easily. A debate within the party is a healthy part of taking a decision.

Coalition, the natural consequence of PR, removes the outcome of an election from the hustings to the private deal of corridors, cabals and careerism. In the case of the Lib Dems, students of really bad government should read an account of the shortlived 1977 Lib-Lab pact. Again before the 1997 election, Paddy Ashdown and Roy Jenkins held secret meetings with Tony Blair on the shape of a coalition should parliament be hung. This included an offer by Blair of cabinet posts to Lib Dems. None of this selling the party down the river for top jobs was revealed to the electorate.

In Jenkins's world, it seems, the world of "the private deal of corridors, cabals and careerism" is one wholly alien to our current political landscape.

Lib Dems claim a bizarre interpretation of democracy, that the share of votes should be reflected in a share in power. This confuses quite different concepts: executive government and assembly representation. The first requires a coherent team, a declared programme and some mechanism to account for its delivery to the electorate. To this end, France and the US directly elect presidents, governors and mayors. They are checked by a second concept, that of a separately elected assembly, in which PR is both fair and just.

Here he starts to stray into the more bizarre territory of the piece. He ascribed the current way things are to Lib Dem policy. It was, of course, Labour who implemented the devolution of power in both Wales and Scotland. I might even agree with him that these are not ideal arrangements, and that a separate, STV elected executive might be a better idea than what we have now. But to lay the blame for this undesirable situation is absolutely bonkers, unless I'm missing something.

Forcing executive power to be shared with political rivals in a coalition makes it diluted, unstable and unaccountable. Indeed, the purer the proportionality the more unstable it tends to be, as in Israel. Power sharing rarely engenders harmony. The invocation of "history" to hallow yesterday's fourth attempt at power sharing in Northern Ireland was naive. It cannot last. It suppresses opposition and pretends consensus. The new Stormont regime, its mouth stuffed with money, will never withstand a real delegation of political and fiscal power. Such coalitions seem to work only when, as with English local councils, there is no power to be shared.

Much has been made of the ill advisedness of using Israel as an example here, so I will leave it alone. Similarly, Northern Ireland is surely a special case, involving as it does not a broadly politically aligned coalition of people pushing in the same direction, but rather two parties diametrically opposed over an issue central to the political scene in Northern Ireland. This is not a normal or a natural consequence of PR.

It is a tragedy that in Scotland and Wales the executive is chosen from the parliament, as at Westminster, but from one composed by PR, thus virtually ensuring rolling coalitions. This was instead of the London option of a separate executive and assembly, which is the constitutional basis of devolved government almost everywhere. Scotland and Wales should have had directly elected first ministers, with proportionately elected assemblies to check them. This would have met the requirement for a strong government in Edinburgh and Cardiff and for proportional representation in the balancing parliament/assembly.

This is perhaps the only paragraph in the whole piece that is more sense than nonsense, and Jenkins may have a point. A shame, then, that he didn't go with this as his main theme, instead of throwing a childish tizzy at the Lib Dems for no immediately obvious reason.

Instead we have Lib Dem members flying about like £10 notes thrown into the wind. They carry no content, no programme, no sense of direction. They merely confer on the holder a golden share to hire or fire the electoral blocks of Labour and nationalism.

A simple lie, or a really pretty stupid generalisation, since the first sentence denies the explanation for the selection of the options listed in the second. We do have "content", a "programme", whatever you wish to call it. It's in the manifesto, and in the various bits of political documentation that people like Jenkins clearly don't read, favouring as they do the approach of guaging the real political relevance of a party from its leader's ability to shout down Tony Blair at PMQs and to force their way into the news agenda regularly.

There is no perfect form of democracy. But since cowardice and indecision are its besetting sins, a constitution that empowers a stable cabinet subject to an external check - a separately elected assembly - is preferable to one that internalises that check within a rolling coalition, where it is vulnerable to the whim of minority parties.

Again, no arguments here, only over what makes this any more the fault of the Lib Dems than of anyone else, exactly?

The Lib Dems are proving that they cannot work a system to which they have hitched their wagon for half a century. There is much talk that the next general election may yield a quirk rare under the first-past-the-post system of a hung parliament, with the Lib Dems again as king-makers. On the basis of 1977, 1997 and now 2007, it will mean not democracy but chaos. It is surely time for the Lib Dems to fold their tent and go.

And so, having spent the latter half of his article advocating a system of a proportionally elected legislative and a directly elected executive, Jenkins now advocates ...(drumroll please).... THE DISBANDING OF THE ONLY MAIN PARTY TO SHOW INTEREST IN ANY FORM OF CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM AT ALL. Give that man some sort of medal, the mental agility and doublethink required to keep a straight face through that lot is quite something.

Overall then, an article with a serious point, which is buried in the second half under half a ton of mindless and incoherent jabber about the Lib Dems, a party for which Jenkins has never had a great fondness, I think it's fair to say. But to take issue with them on a specific on the constitutional reform that only they are arguing for on a national level anyway, and then to suggest this is a reason to simply get rid of them in favour (presumably, since he mentions no alternative suggestions) of a return to two party politics is, to put it mildly, perverse.

Badmouthing PR

OK, so it's now a couple of days late to post a reaction to election night coverage, but I've got exams coming up, so meh.

Thursday night saw me and two of my more politically minded friends (one LibDem, one Labour) in Queens' College JCR watching Dimbleby and co. fill time before the results came trickling in. We eventually got bored/depressed at about 3.30am.

In the time before this, however, what annoyed me more than the results themselves (Aaaagh, Shrewsbury's Lib Dem mayor lost his seat!) was the way in which, in reference to both the Scottish and Welsh elections, PR was painted in such a horribly biased way. Time and again some politician or other was allowed to ascribe to PR the idea that "what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts", or some other such twaddle.

Two points need to be made here, and they need to be quite carefully teased apart from one another.

1. PR means, in theory, that what you will end up with in Parliament is a number of seats that reflects the percentage of the vote you got. It is not some sort of arcane and mysterious process which throws out results that nobody could predict, as Rhodri Morgan was allowed to suggest, unchallenged, in his interview, in order to duck questions.

2. What does make the system which Wales and Scotland have been saddled with confusing is not the idea of PR itself, nor the idea of FPTP constituency MSPs/AMs. The convoluted processes come from trying (about as succesfully as might be expected, I suppose) to fuse them together.

What irked me was that neither of these points came through at all in most of what people said about the results. A viewer who had little background knowledge of electoral systems (and why the hell should people need to have such knowledge to protect themselves from the establishment misinformation on the subject?) would come away with the impression that PR was the deranged dream of somebody who gets off on making processes as opaque as possible.

In addition, we have seen a spate of presentations of the view that PR is "designed to produce messy results", or that "Different voting systems and confusing ballot papers robbed tens of thousands of people of their chance to vote", not only on the BBC but in all quarters, including those who might be expected to be sympathetic to PR (that first quote is Mike White in the Guardian). It seems to be going largely unchallenged, which is irritating.

Of course these are valid perspectives, but currently, if anyone is voicing the counter-argument (that PR reflects public opinion more accurately, builds consensus, and leads to much greater levels of both scrutiny and careful consideration of legislation), then I'm not looking in the right places.

In the long run, this bothered me a hell of a lot more than the idea that the Lib Dems are facing a bit of a squeeze (tell us something we didn't know; it's not every day that the government does something as stupid as Iraq).

It's Thursday, Ya Bastards!

Well, today's the day. I have just been and voted, and I already voted at home via the internet (which, today's Guardian tells me, may not be such a good idea, but never mind...)

I have really nothing more to say, other than that I thought it would be nice to reprint (in slightly edited form) Marc Maron's work of literary genius on the subject of voting:

Vote
by Marc Maron

If you want to rewrite what's been wrote
Vote

If you want to squeeze the bastard's throat
Vote

If you can't find the remote
Vote

If you're in a german u-boat
Vote

If tomorrow you want to gloat
Vote

Get out there people!

Poll Numbers

OK, so I know that Polls are the last refuge of the scoundrel, etc, but I did think it was interesting today that the Guardian ICM poll shows us not only up in the straight voting intentions poll, as Paul has already pointed out, but also, we have seen a bounce in the "if Gordon Brown was in charge" question. The GU website is a bit useless, and their "full results" thing does not show these numbers, so you will have to take my word for it that we are reported to have risen two points (to 20).

In both cases, these increases are at the expense of the Tories, who have fallen three (to 40) in the "vs. Gordon" poll, and 4 (to 37) in the normal poll. Labour remain stuck on 28 with Gordon, which would seem to add weight to the argument that Labour has hit its bedrock of support and isn't likely to shift much further in the forseeable future.

All that campaigning is obviously having some effect. Keep it up folks!

Dyke for Mayor Tinfoilism

Sky news has just interviewed Greg Dyke about his standing for mayor, following Iain Dale's post following up on Andrew Neil's assertion this lunchtime that Greg Dyke has been approached by the Tories to be a joint Tory/Lib Dem candidate for London mayor.

Which is kind of a bizarre story.

My gut feeling is that this can't possibly have been a serious proposal, even from the Tory end of it (everything we have heard so far suggests that both the Lib Dems and Dyke himself were never terribly taken with the idea, which kind of undermines the Daily Wail's blogger's suggestions that we Lib Dems are such bendy old buggers who'd say anything etc, but anyhoo...)

So if there was never any realistic prospect of this, why on Earth did they suggest it? Some theories (not all particularly serious ones, I might add, so don't sue me):

1. Dave Cameron and Francis Maude are so out of touch with both reality and the mental landscape inhabited by grassroots Tories that they genuinely did think this could happen. Pfft.

2. The Tories have just put this out there and will subsequently deny it. After all, with the right spin put on it in the Tory press, it could be more damaging to us than it is to them. We will see, though, since you couldn't say the Tory press had been terribly obliging to that wing of the Tory party so far...

3. The story has become a bit confused, and at some point Dyke was considering standing as an Independent candidate, who the Lib Dems and the Tories could conceivably have given their backing to in light of both parties' difficulties in finding candidates to stand under their own flag. Doesn't really explain why Dave the chameleon would have had a meeting with Ming to discuss it, though...

4. The Tories knew it would never happen, but they simply have nothing better to do than waste our time.

5. The Tories are really really desperate.

I don't know that I believe any of the above, so I'm stuck with the opinion for now that this is simply one of those absolutely bizarre stories that pop up every now and then, and we must await any sign of a rationale.

Robinson, Riddell, White: What Gets on the News

Last night I was watching coverage on BBC Parliament of The Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons, chaired by Jack Straw, talking to three notable political hacks, Messrs. White, Riddell and Robinson, ostensibly about strengthening the role of the backbencher and making better use of non-legislative time, but in reality about how they could all get their faces on the telly and in the papers more often.

You can read the whole session, of course, but for the sake of relative concision, I have provided some edited highlights below. Some of the phrasing has been slightly amended to make sense of the transcripts, but nothing more. Beneath each quote, I have added some of my own thoughts, which, it will come as little surprise to learn, come from a fairly Lib Dem specific stand-point.

Robinson: There is a huge interest in covering what is topical, significant, surprising or dramatic and there is no prejudice against doing it in Parliament, if that is possible. The question is, is it possible enough, and the question that I put to the Committee is how often is the outcome dramatic, how often is it seriously topical, how often is there a defined outcome in what goes on as against an adjournment debate where there is a discussion rather than a defined outcome, how often is it truly significant? It is those tests that are tests for news bulletins in a way and there is neither a prejudice in favour or against parliamentary coverage.

This seems true enough, but what seems equally obvious in my own mind is that there are obvious prejudices to parties from third party on down which come about through the operation of these "tests", or "filters" as one might also call them. The Lib Dems can be topical, sure, but the other three (dramatic, defined outcome, significant) are tricky. If we try to be dramatic, we are desperate for headlines, or somehow "not a serious party of government". We are trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of insignificance, one where because we are deemed to be insignificant, we do not warrant the coverage that might turn us into a more significant force in the eyes of the electorate.

Similarly, a "defined outcome" is pretty tricky, because short of campaigning on specific things like Guantanamo Residents or setting our own policy at conference, we can't really do very much - and hey presto, those are the events which we do get into the news for. Even "topicality" can be comething of a poisoned challice - if we do nothing but chase the news agenda, we both prove our irrelevance to the press through our inability to set said agenda, and we look like bandwagon-jumpers to the general public.

Robinson: If [it] happens to meet my test of significance to find out whether it is topical or dramatic whether, frankly, it be the eviction of Shilpa Shetty from Big Brother or Parliament, it will get on the television.

Riddell: …the criteria that Nick laid down, which I agree with, of topicality, relevance and decision…

Just included this to emphasize that Riddell agreed with this analysis, and White offered no contradictions to it, although for his part he provided a "marketisation" analysis of politics which, whilst probably quite true, is not directly relevant to what I want to say here.

Robinson: [responding to Theresa May’s suggestion that there is “a tension” between being “surprising and dramatic” and making a serious contribution]: Forgive me, surprise and drama were two of my tests, and they do not always have to apply. Significance is a test – I mean, nobody has to be surprising or dramatic on the day we are about to go to war: it is significant, it gets on anyway – and a defined outcome. … One last thought on that: the role of a backbencher in the view of many people outside will be to hold the Executive to account. That can be done by interventions. I see far too few, in my view, backbenchers seeing their role as to intervene on a minister, to challenge a minister on a point—in a sympathetic, not necessarily aggressive way. It seems to me that would have an effect. It was striking that when the NatWest Three debate came, the urgent debate that Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat, managed to secure, this was regarded as some sort of freak rarity. That was something that was part of the national debate, of huge significance to relations between Britain and America and yet it was regarded as a surprise that Parliament could find a way to debate it. I would just suggest to Members that that might be a bit odd.

What he argue here is fine for main parties, who have some claim to "significance" or a "defined outcome", but, as I pointed out above, this is not so for us. Having said that, it is always nice to see Nick Clegg's ingenuity being applauded.

White: When Members of Parliament say to me, "You lot are never in the press gallery," I always reply, "We tend to be in the press gallery when you are in the Chamber"—which is, alas, these days, for Prime Minister's Question Time! Alas, again, only once a week! … My younger colleagues do what you all do, I suspect—which is to sit in your rooms, handling the voluminous self-generated correspondence from your constituents with one eye on the telly, keeping an eye on what is going on in the Chamber. If you are really quick, like Sir Nicholas, you get downstairs to hear George Galloway—heaven knows why, but he is a marvellous speaker—but you are doing other things. We do that too. I say to the younger colleagues, "You can't know what's going on in the Chamber by watching the telly. You not only have to see the speaker, you have to see the reaction to the speaker."

This has been included on its own merit, as opposed to being directly relevant to us, but I would also note that PMQs is frankly a ludicrous thing to pick as the sole window on the parliamentary system, as they all seem to acknowledge. It is also the time when the party with the loudest crowd of boarish oafs get to shout down the rest, no matter how good the question is, and where a glib partisan insult on most issues seems to be all that Blair can muster in response to Lib Dem questions. I wouldn't care if this was just one event of many that is covered, but as is noted by White, it is unfortunately increasingly all there is. It is certainly the only Parliamentary event which automatically commands live coverage on a main channel, other than the Budget.

White: It seems to me that in the marketised circumstances in which we all operate there has been and there is a far greater degree of pandering to what the metropolitan elite has backed. Unlike poor Mr Lazarowicz, with his website backed by public funds, we have tended to pander much more than we did and for every absolutely mesmerising David Attenborough series which we do all watch, there are 50 which are not what they were.

This, again, is not directly of relevance, and I have stuck it in mostly because it reminded me somewhat of a Chomsky-lite analysis, particularly the phrase "pandering to what the metropolitan elite has backed".

Straw: I accept we need greater topicality and greater control of the House by backbenchers. But do not forget there are plenty of occasions where these things may well have been raised but they do not get reported at all. It is frustrating … the opposition raise all sorts of issues in short debates, not long ones, in opposition time. They do make a difference, put the minister on the spot, but very rarely do they get reported.

White: But being reported is not the same as making a difference. You are here to make a difference. You are being reported in order to assist you getting re-elected, in an instrumental sense. You can make a difference but you do not have to be reported whether it is a backbench intervention or anything else. You are seen by your colleagues and hopefully feared by ministers who think, "Oh, damn, it's him." Reporting is not, it seems to me, the primary criterion.

White seems to slightly miss the point here. Surely the role of the press (at least in some sort of idealised model of how democracy works) is to provide the electorate with an accurate picture of what differences have really been made, and by whom. Surely "being reported" should coincide almost exactly with "making a difference", amongst other things.

White: You do your best but the one element you have left out of the equation is that any of the three of us have to persuade the man in a suit with his jacket off, sitting at a desk, down a telephone line that what we are trying to interest them in is interesting or important. If they have not read about it in the morning papers or on the Press Association or on the 24/7 news then you have a job persuading them. We are paradoxically very conservative about news: we like news we know already; we are a bit more at home with it. One of the tricks of the trade is that when we see something on 24/7 which you have been trying to sell all day, you send a note in pretending you have not sent a note earlier and you get a sale. They say, "Yes, we will take 500 words on that, as a matter of fact." And you pretend that you do not know that the reason they have said yes when they have previously said no is that it has just been on the Six O'clock News or on 24/7.

This was interesting, I thought, and its relevance to the Lib Dems should be obvious, in that it is yet another aspect of how difficult it is for a third party to command control of the news agenda. White complained that Robinson all too often controlled his editorial decisions, and in turn Robinson complained that the press have a similar role as far as he was concerned. The outcome is obvious: a system of self-perpetuating status quo, where certain things just are relevant, and some things aren't.

Robinson [on pre-briefing the press]: I think it is based on a ten-year-old view. It was Alastair Campbell who was a master of this, and the idea was that you would get the same bit of news on for days running: you would preview it, then the adverse feeds and then you have the reaction. The newly competitive media say, after the pre-brief: "We've already heard it. We won't go to the speech." It is a change, even in a decade.

This is, I suppose, some advice to all parties about media management that might be of interest.

In conclusion, then, what frustrates me is the way that the media seem to see their role as being to report what has consequences and is significant. At the same time, they seem to wilfully skirt the issue of their role in forming people's perception of what is significant, and therefore their voting habits. It is all very well to have electoral law that demands equal coverage for parties close to elections, but if the rest of the time we are not covered in what we do or say, then it doesn't matter what is covered in that short amount of time; we will not be relevant or "serious" in people's minds.

I don't limit this to the Lib Dems; I'm sure this must all be twice as frustrating to the Greens or UKIP. I suppose in a way, this is all part of FPTP and its self-fortifying nature; with PR, other parties are significant in a way they are not now, and that can only be good for the national debate and for democracy. I don't know what lessons can really be drawn from this other than what we already do.

It is a perennial complaint of friends on the outside who know of my political allegiances that Ming Campbell/The Lib-Dems just aren't in the news enough, and that this is somehow our fault, as if we have just forgotten to be in the news, and if only we bucked up our woolly-minded liberal ways and bloody well went to a TV studio and got on the news, we would be doing a whole lot better. I spend a lot of these conversations either getting disproportionately annoyed about them, or trying to divert them. Last night, owing to the one-way nature of television, I was reduced to simply banging my head against the nearest wall.

Ooh! Ooh!

Lawrence Miles has updated his blog, finally. This has inspired me to do the same to mine (Google Account? What?), if only to point out to anyone interested what a brilliantly creative writer Loz Miles is. I don't know him from Adam, but never has he written anything that drove me to feel afterwards that I wanted the time it had taken to read it returned to me. And that is a statement that applies to very few writers indeed (as well as being a pretty unwieldy one).

This is even more remarkable when you consider his tendencies to write, for instance, some of the longest Doctor Who fiction published, and these extended burblings about popular culture. For anyone who has no idea who he is, I think one of the best places to acquaint yourself with his world view is probably still his OG interview, which is exceedingly entertaining. Don't be put off by the Doctor Who content to it, that's really pretty incidental, and if you're not a fan of Who you'll be pleased to hear that since then he has only become more and more distant from it.

Personally, I think that's pretty regrettable. I know he would never be trusted to actually write episodes of the new series, but I think he'd have some great story ideas. I mean, the ideas in his fiction have been second to none, and since Doctor Who is (at least as far as Charlie Brooker is concerned) ideas driven TV, I'm betting he could knock some of the pretty half-baked plots we've seen in the recent series into a cocked hat. NB. I'm not saying all the things I just linked to were absolutely dreadful, purely that the ideas driving the plots were pretty unimaginative. You can still hang an entertaining and interesting emotional drama on them, but why not put interesting ideas in there too?

Well, here's hoping that the new year brings plenty of creative success for Loz, not least some more FP audios. It's a real shame that the novel range has ended (for now, at least). Of course, if Loz has some brilliant new plans up his sleeve, I might find it in myself to forgive him for letting them go. Eventually.

Ming at the Power Enquiry

I have been watching today the BBC Parliament coverage of the Power Enquiry. I know I'm rather behind the times again on this one, but nonetheless I found it engaging viewing. I learnt a few things:

1. Saira Khan is a drivelling idiot. She couldn't open her mouth without some horrendous, almost Prescott-like, ill-formed sentence wresting its way out. That wouldn't be so bad necessarily (indeed, I find it quite endearing in Prescott, where he is usually quite self-deprecatingly honest about it). Unfortunately, her tone and facial expression made it clear that she felt she was giving voice to a profoundly beautiful flight of oration that cut through all the crap and spoke directly to the masses. This is, however, not the case. She simply waffled her way through a lot of pretty worthless platitudes.

2. Ming Campbell has some views that I especially like. For the first time since he became leader, I was able to sit watching his speech and his subsequent Q&A session with a real sense that he was genuinely hitting the nail on the head regarding what I believe. In the past few days, that, plus his principled stand on the current Lebanon crisis (in stark contrast to all but a few MPs from Labour and Conservative benches) has reassured me that I am in the right party. What frustrated me, however, is the sense that I was seeing something unusual.

Ming is quite capable of delivering a storming speech (indeed, he gave a pretty good one on the one occasion I have seen him speak in person, at the Cambridge leadership hustings), and he does so from time to time. For whatever reasons, though, he is not getting the traction he needs in the national media. I don't know why, and as today's dissappointing story in the Guardian makes clear, the party is suffering. I can't really find it in myself to blame Sir Ming for this, though. Whenever I see him do anything, it's almost without fail something that I wholeheartedly support his doing. It's just the "seeing him" part that's the problem.

As a Lib Dem member, I see more than most of his leadership, and even I don't see all that much. Very simply, he desperately needs to whore himself out to the press a bit more, force his way into TV studios, etc. Maybe he is, maybe it is all the media's fault in their failure to portray much of it. That is, after all, a popular refrain of Lib Dems since time immemorial. I don't honestly know. What I do know is, it's a problem. It's his only real problem. Ming has a sound political head on his shoulders, and an engaging style when he's on form. It's just a matter of connecting.

Late Doctor Who Thoughts

Crikey. I've just got back from Italy (where I had the privaledge of watching the World Cup final and, more importantly, the celebrations that followed), and hence just caught up on the finale to series 2.

So, since I've been looking at themes of the series, lets deal with that.

I belive we'd got up to the two-part Cyberman story in the middle of the series. Following that came "The Idiot's Lantern". This was an episode that, if anything, wore its message rather excessively on its sleeve. I mean, effectively, it was delivered in a speech by the cipher for Mark Gatiss at the end of the story, as he dresses down his father. It's about modern, permissive society, and pointing out how little we would benefit from going back to the repressive sorts of society that some of the tabloids (and even broadsheets) seem to yearn for. Fine, if a little bit sugary in its presentation. Of course, given that this is Mark Gatiss, we should probably count this as an improvement on last year (incidentally, Loz Miles, who caused such a stir last year in fandom with his review of The Unquiet Dead, has moved his website and posted a few new comments on it, which any of you still reading will likely find interesting. The link's in my sidebar. Meanwhile fandom's squabbling pit, Outpost Gallifrey's forum, has, it would seem, begun to come round to LM's argument).

Next up, we have the two part Impossible Planet/Satan Pit plotline. Probably the best standalone plot of the series, this picks up one of the classic themes of Doctor Who and Quatermass before it: that myths and religions are likely based on something that genuinely does exist, but has a valid scientific explanation. However, although it looks as though this is going to be a straightforward revival of this standpoint, we subsequently find the Doctor's indignant claims that things are "impossible" become dogmatic in their own right. As much as this is a liberal message, this is a message for the scientific and generally intelligent world, that other constituency of Who fans. The end of the story presents us, again, with perhaps excessively spelt out conclusions to draw, but in this case I was less irritated, because it wasn't quite so preachy. Nonetheless, another good message: Skepticism isn't the same as cynicism, and scientists can become every bit as dogmatic as the religious.

Love and Monsters. Well now. Clearly, this is most readable as an allegory of Who fans. RTD is telling us to make ourselves a community in our own right, and not allow our anal fact chasing tendencies to enslave us to a monolithic "fandom" entity, entirely consumed by the persuit of the Doctor. Outside of this, I find it hard to see what message this might be said to have, though I'm sure messages exist.

Fear Her is openly a pretty lightweight episode in general. It shows the London Olympics, obviously, which is an obvious attempt by the BBC to get people turned on the exciting side to the Olympics. But beyond that: I suppose basically it's about love and our need for companionship and emotional support. In that sense, and the sense of a community within the street in which it is set, one might almost call this more socialist, but then nowhere is it suggested that it has much to do with the state. Some have also pointed out that the monster, the abusive father, is in the closet. Whether or not this is reading too much of RTD's "agenda" into the episode, especially in an episode that wasn't directly written by him, is something I will leave to the reader.

From there, we move into the final two-parter. Messages are probably largely lost to the emotional fireworks that play out as the plot develops. Nonetheless, there is the standard Doctor Who warning to science not to blithely stumble into areas it doesn't sufficiently understand - a theme particularly beloved of the Barry Letts era of the show. Torchwood and in particular Tracy Ann Obermann's character represent exactly this arrogance.

So now the series is over, I'll also give a quick review of the whole thing:

To be honest, I've not found this series as compulsive viewing as the last one. I don't think that's David Tennant's fault, or especially anyone's, though, obviously, as the man at the top, RTD has to be ultimately responsible for what goes out. For whatever reasons, several of the episodes this series have felt like they are merely treading water and providing us with a bit of mucking around, especially towards the end. The experimental episode, Love and Monsters, left a nasty taste in the mouth mainly, I felt, because of an ending that degenerated into rather lazy writing as RTD almost visibly flailed around for a way to resolve the plot. Steven Moffat, author of the highlight of last year's series, was this year limited to one episode which, to me, was marred by Moffat's by now tedious insistence on adding in the "dancing" subtext. RTD's episodes were, I think, on average better but massively more variable. Tooth and Claw and the final two-parter were pretty good, whilst New Earth and Love and Monsters.... weren't.

I think the main issue, however, this year was the use of more "outside" writers. In producing the first series, RTD clearly took a decision to use the writers he knew would know what makes Doctor Who work. All the writers on series 1 had written either for the novel range or Big Finish, often both. This series, other writers were brought in. And astonishingly, if you rank the writers in order of how much connection to the series they've had, it's pretty close to how I would rank their actual episodes:

Who Connection:

Mark Gatiss - The Idiot's Lantern
Matt Jones - Impossible Planet/Satan Pit
Steven Moffat - The Girl in the Fireplace
Tom MacRae - Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel
Toby Whithouse - School Reunion
Matthew Graham - Fear Her

Episode Rating:

Matt Jones - Impossible Planet/Satan Pit
Tom MacRae - Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel
Mark Gatiss - The Idiot's Lantern
Steven Moffat - The Girl in the Fireplace
Toby Whithouse - School Reunion
Matthew Graham - Fear Her

Obviously, there's some movement there, and the correlation isn't exact. But this isn't really a conclusion I would have expected to reach quite so clearly, especially given that it didn't especially hold for last year's series (Steven Moffat has actually written the least Who of any of the writers last year, but almost unquestionably he wrote the best story). I guess there's a certain threshold of time spent immersed in the series that gets the writers thinking in a way that leads to them writing things I like. NB. I have just said "things that I like", not "things that are empirically better". Others, obviously, wouldn't have produced the same rankings as I have.

Anyway, I better stop now.

Nick Cohen - what is he on?

You may or may not have seen this in yesterday's Observer (I know, two posts about the Observer in as many days, it's not healthy):

How the Lib Dems devalue politics

To the people who fight elections rather than the people who vote in them, the Lib Dems have a reputation for dirty politics second only to the BNP. Last week, Bob Neill, the stunned Tory candidate in Bromley, condemned their 'cynical personal abuse', but I think he missed the impact of the Liberals on British politics over the past 30 years. The venom they inject matters less than their successful insistence that candidates be 'local'.

When Churchill was an MP, he barely visited his constituency. He would have regarded the idea that he had to live among his constituents as absurd. His job was to discuss the great affairs of state.

The 'pavement politics' revolution the Liberals began in the Sixties now means we have MPs who know nothing about foreign or domestic politics, but their ignorance doesn't matter. What matters is that they're 'local'.

Now, on the face of things, he might have a point about the whole "local" thing not actually producing the best candidate. But is this actually anything to do with the Lib Dems? Obviously I'm not going to deny that occasionally we might campaign on such grounds, but equally there are plenty of examples of other parties doing so. If your candidate is a well known local face and theirs isn't, then regardless of party, you're likely to try to take advantage of it.

Surely this is more a symptom of the way our democracy is set up? I mean, if you're meant to be electing a *constituency* MP, then people are going to get the impression they ought to be from their *constituency*, no? At the end of the day, these are elections. You know, where we the public express a view? If nobody saw things that way, nobody would bother trying the whole "he's not from round here" line. It wouldn't work.

If people just said "I don't care, he/she's an intelligent man/woman who I believe will make the arguments I want to see made in parliament", then the tactic wouldn't have ever achieved much traction. Clearly, then, this is something that is as much the fault of the system and how it makes people vote. In that climate, you can't blame any party, Lib Dem or otherwise, for going for the local ticket if they think it will help.

Now, should candidates be local? I'm genuinely not sure which way I feel about that question. On the one hand, it's often occurred to me that I don't feel as represented by my own MP as I do by any Lib Dem (one day, of course, I hope that problem will disappear). If we introduce a true system of PR, then the idea of a constituency MP of any sort is inevitably going to get watered down. But I don't like the idea that parliament could be made up largely of party insiders who spend even more of their time in the Westminster bubble; in some ways that would be even less representative of the country that elects them. I'll think about it. Meanwhile:

So why does Cohen target the Lib Dems for this abuse? I can't say, but to me it looks like another lazy smear from the traditional book of vague, unfounded "ooh, they play dirty in local campaigns" type statements. I've never seen any evidence to convince me that Lib Dem campaigns are typically any dirtier than those of other parties. Often quite the reverse. People like Cohen just don't seem to be able to cope with the idea that those who they disagree with are actually just regular people who disagree with them too.

He dedicates column inches, week after week, to trying to convince his readers that anyone he dislikes are hypocrites, cheats, liars, immoral, frauds, etc. Frankly, he's one of the least appealing things about the Observer. And there haven't been many things about it that I've found appealing lately.

"Irritating Review in The Observer" shock!

Yes, I know, this is the internet, and I'm blogging about something that happened, ooh, weeks ago. By most standards, I might as well give up now.

Never mind. What I wanted to do was discuss the review that the Observer printed of Chomsky's new book "Failed States". Also of interest might be the preemptive strike that the reviewer then launches on anyone who disagrees with him, and the response which, sure enough, did then emerge from Media Lens. The response is full of a lot of waffle and I don't agree with all of it.

Nonetheless, as far as I'm concerned, what Peter Beaumont is offering in his review is nothing much more sophisticated than a hatchet job. Of course, I don't claim to have Beaumont's experience of foreign affairs, but then I don't need to. My objection to his review is quite simply that he spends most of it reviewing a book that seems to exist largely in his head.

Clearly, whenever they met, Chomsky didn't exactly make a new friend in Beaumont. This leads Beaumont to describe Chomsky in some fairly subjective and unpleasant terms (for a book review; it's not exactly going to set the world alight): "nagging, bullying, wheedling". Now, this is the sort of thing that he can get away with, since the vast majority of his readers are never going to know any different. But anyone who's seen, say, the film Manufacturing Consent, will know that Chomsky is pretty softly spoken, and certainly couldn't be described as in any way bullying. Most of the debate footage of him I've ever seen, he's been much more bullied than bullying. If Beaumont felt bullied, I'd argue it was likely by the weight of argument he might have been presented with, perhaps?

Now, at the moment I am in fact reading my way through the book myself. Barely 50 pages in, already several aspects of the review stuck out to me as distortions if not outright dishonesty about Chomsky's book. For instance, Beaumont writes:

While Chomsky was righteously indignant over suggestions in a recent Guardian interview that he defended Srebrenica, he does portray a certain sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic. Kosovo, in his reading, began in 1999 with Nato bombers, not in 1998 with Serbian police actions that cleared villages, towns and valleys of their populations. (I know this, Mr Chomsky, because I saw them do it.)

Firstly, this is not what Chomsky believes, as far as I can make out. Secondly, his main discussion of Kosovo is to be found elsewhere, in "Hegemony or Survival" amongst others. It is only really mentioned in passing here. Nonetheless, Chomsky finds the space in this book to mention precisely the clearing of populations that Beaumont tries to make out he denies. It's on page 46 of the hardback, if you're interested.

At other times, he elides rumour with quotes taken out of context, for example where he refers to: 'A Jordanian journalist [who] was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border after US and UK forces took over that radioactive materials were detected in one of every eight trucks crossing into Jordan destination unknown. "Stuff happens," in Rumsfeld's words.'

That's all pretty puzzling - as four pages earlier, Chomsky gives the impression that the weapons of mass destruction thing was all a deception.

This is plain distortion (deliberate or otherwise). Chomsky's argument is pretty straightforward, and the Media Lens article I linked to at the top of this post is pretty good on this:

Does Beaumont really believe Chomsky is all but alone on the planet in believing Iraq had nuclear WMD capacity in 2002-2003? A notion dismissed out of hand by UN weapons inspectors who confirm that Iraq's nuclear programme had been 100% eliminated by 1998. Even Bush, Blair, Powell and Straw shied away from making such a preposterous claim.

On the other hand, there were many media reports in 2003 of yellow cake - a radioactive compound derived from uranium ore - being emptied on the ground from containers that were then taken for domestic use, and of radioactive sources being stolen and removed from their shielding. In response, Mohamed El Baradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said:

"I am deeply concerned by the almost daily reports of looting and destruction at nuclear sites, and about the potential radiological safety and security implications of nuclear and radiological materials that may no longer be under control. We have a moral responsibility to establish the facts without delay and take urgent remedial action." (UN News Service, 'IAEA urges return of experts to Iraq to address possible radiological emergency,' May 19, 2003)

No one, least of all Chomsky, has claimed that these "radiological materials" constituted weapons of mass destruction.

Back to the Beaumont review:

It is not only that his desire to wallop the US at any cost has allowed inconsistencies to creep in; there is also plain sloppiness. Between pages 60 and 62, for instance, he cannot decide whether an alleged bribe paid to UN official is $150,000 or $160,000. Maybe it's a typo. Maybe not.

True or not, a pretty cheap shot at any rate, one might think. Once again, Media Lens provide a pretty good response:

A little research might have clarified the issue. Chomsky begins by mentioning "fevered tales" surrounding an alleged £160,000 bribe - the figure cited in the interim report of the Volcker commission and widely reported in US press coverage when the story broke in February 2005. Chomsky then cites press coverage of the $147,000 figure taken from the +final+ report of the Volcker commission in August 2005. This final figure was often rounded up to $150,000 in press reporting.

Beaumont then lets up for a moment:

If all this sounds entirely negative, I do concede that there are areas where Chomsky lands some crunching punches. His analysis of US double standards on issues from the promotion of democracy abroad, to the World Court, Kyoto, US support for Israel, nuclear proliferation and trade is spot-on - but far from novel areas of concern, and Chomsky doesn't like to settle on them.

Really, that's interesting. He doesn't like to dwell on them? On the contrary: to me, they make up the core of most of his arguments about US foreign policy, and certainly those are the areas in which he suggests changes would be most likely to bring about improvements. The fact that they are not "novel areas of concern" seems to me to be largely irrelevant. Perhaps what Beaumont means is that Chomsky has written extensively about them before? And yet in other areas Beaumont shows a startling lack of knowledge of Chomsky's arguments:

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky's argument is his desire to create a moral - or rather immoral - equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history.

A quick reference to an interview with Jeremy Paxman when Chomsky was doing the rounds for his last book:

CHOMSKY: The term moral equivalence is an interesting one, it was invented I think by Jeane Kirkpatrick as a method of trying to prevent criticism of foreign policy and state decisions. It is a meaningless notion, there is no moral equivalence what so ever.

Or indeed this comment from Beaumont:

The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world's greatest - if flawed and selfish - democracy going to the polls.

Here, we have an attempt to set Chomsky up as some egomaniac convinced, Michael-Moore-like, that he alone can bring down the system. I don't have any sites to point to, I'm afraid, but anyone who reads/hears much of what Chomsky has to say will soon come across his many assertions that, far from seeing things this way, he has a great deal of respect for the power of the people to bring about changes. Often, in fact, he argues that changes presented as the actions of one individual (eg. The US civil rights movement) were in fact the result of much more action from a whole network of activists (perhaps in a supporting role) that are never heard of.

In short, then, what we have here is a review that persists in burning a series of straw men, wilfully misreading the text in question, and occasionally piping up that Chomsky is right on the vast substance of what he says. Whether or not I believe in Chomsky's "propaganda model" of the press is a tricky question - at the moment I would say I am skeptical. But it's articles like this that push me much more over to his side of the fence.

I would urge anyone who was put off the book by this review to actually read the book, and then determine for yourself whether much of Beaumont's mud sticks.

More Doctor Who thoughts

Well, since my last post, we've had a few more episodes. It's somewhat more difficult to read messages into these. Tooth and Claw, I suppose, advocates trying to understand the actions of a being whose actions are reprehensible, rather than simply killing it. School Reunion, meanwhile, pits the Doctor against a manipulative group who are taking over the curriculum of a school for their own agenda, and The Girl in the Fireplace warns of the dangers of excessively simplistic logic (although, to be honest, I'm not sure the plot's up to much). The Rise of the Cybermen, it would seem, is the most packed with messages thus far this season, warning fairly straightforwardly of:

1. Lumic's control of the media environment that so many people are using to get all their information about the world (News Corp. etc. again).
2. The dangers of the government getting into bed with big business too much.
3. Obviously, the violation of people's freedom from coersion into the upgrade programme.

All pretty decent messages, if you ask me. But there is another undercurrent that I'm not so sure about in this series:

In the absence of his own people, and hence the lack of "any higher authority", the Doctor is becoming increasingly something of a vigilante. I know he always was, to some extent, but usually, in the past, you could rely on some sort of face-off with the enemy of the month where the Doctor explained to the maniac in question what was wrong. This has lead, over the years, to some great scenes, not least the "virus scene" with Davros in Genesis of the Daleks, his talk with the Captain in The Pirate Planet ("but what's it FOR? Hm? What could possibly be worth all this?"), his talk with the Cyber-Leader about emotions in Earthshock (nicely lifted by Mr. MacRae this week), or indeed, in the final episode of the old series, his attempt to convince the ever unconvinceable Master that "if we fight like animals, we die like animals".

Now, I'm not suggesting that this has left the series altogether, and indeed, as I pointed out above, there was something very similar in last night's episode. But, unfortunately, as often as not, what you get in the place of such explanations is a simple assertion by the Doctor that this is WRONG! and that IT ENDS TONIGHT! because I'M GOING TO STOP IT! This seems to me to be somewhat lazy. That's all.

And, as Mr Wilcock has quite rightly pointed out in the comments section of a Millennium post that very few of you will actually know what it's about (this one), the earPods concept in this story is pretty much a straight lift from the work of Lawrence Miles. Hopefully, at some point, they will run out of stuff from LM to approporiate and be forced to employ him as some sort of creative consultant (lets face it, I wouldn't trust Loz to write an episode of the new series without much more experience than he currently has (ie. none) of TV writing, but he has more cool ideas in a day than most writers do in a year).

Chuffing Marvellous

It may have escaped your attention that Doctor Who has returned to our screens. If you have been living under a rock. More likely, you'll be entirely aware of what the Guardian's leader column today heralded as the return of family viewing.

So was tonight's episode any good? Emotionally, yes, rather, with a rather touching ending (which Russell T Davies expands upon on the commentary the BBC have made available from the website) involving Cassandra, the rather flat character from last series (boom-boom!) getting some closure, rather than simply an "I'll be back, mwahahaha" death scene. The idea of her going back and creating her own myth is really rather good.

Plot-wise, though.... well, it's a Russell T Davies script, isn't it? It was all pretty flimsy in terms of the internal logic of the script (why would the cures for all the diseases not just be put in the disinfectant as a matter of course if it can work on contact with the skin?, etc). As Charlie Brooker, a man of impeccable taste in my general experience, puts it:

it's a jumbled let-down.

He then goes on, however, to say:

having a pop at Doctor Who actually pains me. In my head, it's come to represent everything that made Britain great - more so than, say, the foundation of the National Health Service. Or Marmite. Or the Sex Pistols.

Now, over the last few days its become quite clear that a fair few lib dems would probably follow that general sentiment, if not actually go in for Brooker's brand of exaggeration. Sadly, the only Who fan to have passed through Parliament so far has been Tim Collins (a Tory - who hilariously makes the claim on the Earthshock DVD that Thatcher era Cybermen were better than Labour ones). But, this sad lack of representation not withstanding, I would argue that there is a fairly solid argument to be made that the Doctor is a liberal. Indeed, fellow Lib Dem blogger Alex Wilcock (or a remarkably coincidental namesake!) has put together a pretty good argument for this in an article on Outpost Gallifrey.

So it's nice to see the same kind of themes running through the new series. The anti-war message in The Christmas Invasion may have been rather jarring and unsubtle, but otherwise, many good solid messages have been present in the Doctor's reactions to things without preaching. This evening, his anger at the deprivation of an army of lab-subjects of their rights was entirely fitting with the series. Last year we were presented with villains who were: manifestations of the excesses of plastic around today (Autons), a racial purist (Cassandra), a family of private businesspeople who have infiltrated government and intend to harm the Earth for their own financial gain (the Slithe'en), a Nazi (a Dalek!), Rupert Murdoch (The Editor), foolish amounts of faith in science (the Nanobots responsible for the gas mask disease), an alien who threatens the local area and subsequently the Earth with a nuclear power plant (a Slithe'en again), and more Daleks.

Deliberately left out of the above list, as any fans amongst you will realise, are the Gelth, the gaseous race from the Charles Dickens episode fairly early in last year's series. The reason for this is that, in fact, when you think about it, the villains of that piece are... asylum seekers. Doctor Who is not an infallible bastion of liberal values, it would seem. Interestingly, at the time it went out, we were, of course, in the middle of the "it's not racist to impose limits on immigration" election of 2005. And at the time, it provoked a small storm within fandom when Lawrence Miles, in my opinion the greatest author the novel line produced, reviewed the episode in an extroardinarily over the top way, holding writer Mark Gatiss personally responsible for allowing such messages through. Fans fell on him like a ton of bricks, prompting a full retraction of the personal comments he made, and later, reassured that the series as a whole had not gone off message, he apologised for the whole thing.

The fact remains, though, that the episode's subtext jarred for me, and I agree with him fully that it's not a terribly Doctor Who one to let slip under the radar, especially past someone like Russell T Davies. But should we be worried about such a source of indoctrination for kids? Not really; Doctor Who may be liberal, but frankly most other sci-fi isn't. I don't think it's any accident that Doctor Who feels so British.

Look at Star-Trek: An unpleasantly boring socialist utopia if ever I saw one (society all so homogenised, no money, etc) - oh, and don't tell me the Borg are communists...

And as for most other TV sci-fi, it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to see the American imperialist agenda in most of the Big Boys in Boots that gets heaped out onto our screens.

So: the moral of the story is, it's always nice to see the show on message for its semi-triumphant return.