Andrew Hickey

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June 12th, 2017: Sorry for saying the word "weiners" in my comic!! I do this all the time though so clearly I'm not THAT sorry – Ryan

Ralph Reed avoided prison for his role in the Jack Abramoff casino-lobbying scandal. That's the best you can say for him. He managed to participate in Abramoff's schemes and scams, and to get very rich doing so, yet somehow skated by as an unindicted co-conspirator.

I.

The problem with depression research isn’t that we don’t have any leads on what causes depression. It’s that we have so many leads on what causes depression that we don’t know what to do with all of them. For example:

1. Life adversity, like getting fired or breaking up with a partner, can make people depressed. The biological correlate of this seems to be the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA), where your brain tells your adrenal glands to produce glucocorticoid stress hormones like cortisol and this does something to your brain that increases the risk of depression.

2. Inflammation and immune overactivity can make people depressed. The classic examples of this are cancer-related depression (which exceeds what you would expect just from cancer being stressful) and depression induced by administration of the immunomodulator interferon-a. Antiinflammatory drugs have a small but clinically relevant antidepressant effect. Some of the relevant chemicals here seem to be TNF-A and IL-1; these do something to your brain that increases the risk of depression.

3. Serotonin and other monoamines seem to be involved. Most existing antidepressants, like SSRIs and MAOIs, seem to work by increasing monoamine levels. There are some conditions which affect monoamine levels and also increase risk of depression, though it’s nothing like a perfect correlation.

4. The glutamate system (eg NMDA and AMPA receptors) seem to be involved. Ketamine acts on both of these receptors in different ways, and one of those actions is the source of its rapid and unprecedented antidepressant effects.

5. There’s some kind of important link between depression and folate balance. Various folate-related chemicals (eg l-methylfolate and s-adenosylmethionine) are effective antidepressants. Some studies show that people with depression sometimes have disrupted folate cycles, for example elevated homocysteine levels.

6. Electroconvulsive therapy (“shock therapy”) is very effective at treating depression if it induces a seizure in the patient, so the increased activity from seizures must be helpful somehow.

So if we wanted to know what depression really was, it might be promising to look for some process that seems to match depressive symptoms and affects/is affected by life adversity, inflammation, monoamines, glutamate, folate, and electricity.

Recently some people think they’ve found one. According to Duman’s Neurobiology of Stress, Depression, and Rapid Acting Antidepressants, it’s decreased synaptogenesis, and it’s regulated by a protein complex called mTORC1.

Neurons communicate with other neurons through branches called dendrites and connections called synapses. Healthy neurons often create new dendrites and synapses to expand their network of connections and adjust to new information. The process of making new synapses is called “synaptogenesis”, and it’s common throughout the adult brain.

As mentioned above, depressed people have decreased volume in some brain areas. But in postmortem studies, they don’t actually have fewer cells in those areas. So it looks like maybe these neurons just have less synaptogenesis going on.

Synaptogenesis is partly controlled by a protein complex called mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1 to its friends). Like every other protein, mTORC is controlled by a giant mess of receptors and second messengers and intracellular signals with names like VDCC and GSK3.

People try to make this seem simple by displaying it as a system of billiard balls and tubes in a cute cartoon, but don’t be fooled – no human being has ever remembered any of it for more than two seconds.

The factors that affect synaptogenesis and mTORC are many of the same factors that affect depression. Let me count the ways:

1. Life adversity causes chronic stress, biologically represented by upregulation of the HPA axis and increased corticosteroid production. A 2008 study finds that rats who are subjected to chronic stress develop atrophy of dendrites in their prefrontal cortex. Administering glucocorticoids directly mimicked some of these effects, suggesting that stress is a whole cocktail of things including glucocorticoids and other things. When humans take glucocorticoids (they’re a useful medicine for various diseases) they tend to develop hippocampal atrophy and “simplification of dendrites” there, which I think is the same as decreased synaptogenesis. They also tend to get depressed – in some studies of Cushing’s Syndrome (the medical name for the collection of bad things that happen when you take too much glucocorticoid medication), up to 90% of patients are depressed.

2. I didn’t find the linked paper’s attempt to link inflammation to synaptogenesis very convincing, but it looks like there’s a little bit of research that has found that systemic inflammation decreases synaptogenesis. “Morphometric analysis of dendritic spines identified a period of vulnerability, manifested as a decrease in [dendritic] spine density in response to inflammation. The density of presynaptic excitatory terminals was similarly affected. When the systemic inflammation was extended from 24h to 8 days, the negative effects on the excitatory terminals were more pronounced and suggested a reduced excitatory drive.” This seems pretty relevant.

3. Everyone used to think that traditional antidepressants like SSRIs worked by increasing serotonin (and so by extension depression must have something to do with low serotonin levels). But SSRIs increase serotonin very quickly (within hours) yet take months to work. Something longer-term must happen when serotonin levels have been increased for long enough. That something has now been pretty conclusively identified as an increase in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) – although I can’t find any good explanation of why increased serotonin should cause increased BDNF after a month. BDNF is a nerve growth factor – its main action is activating mTORC and telling nerve cells to grow more dendrites and synapses. And it’s most active in the cortex and hippocampus.

4. Ketamine affects the brain by either blocking NMDA receptors (boring traditional explanation), activating AMPA receptors (exciting new explanation), or possibly both (wishy-washy neoliberal compromise explanation). Duman et al are kind of ambiguous about which explanation they accept, but I think they present a theory where NMDA blockade causes AMPA activation, or something, which I’d never heard before. In any case, they present ample evidence that AMPA rapidly affects BDMF and dendritogenesis – for example, Positive AMPA Receptor Modulation Rapidly Stimulates BDNF Release And Increases Dendritic MRNA Translation. The “rapidly” part is important – the surprising thing about ketamine is how quickly it works compared to other antidepressants, so it’s exciting to find a theory that predicts this should happen.

5. I haven’t seen much attempt to fit folate into this theory, which is a shame. A quick Google search brings up a few people talking about how folate deficiency decreases neurogenesis in the hippocampus, which is sort of related.

6. Studies show that ECT increases BDNF levels and increases hippocampal volume, though I’m not sure exactly how or why giving someone a seizure should do that.

So the synapse hypothesis can unify at least five of the six lines of research into the causes of depression.

II.

My remaining skepticism is mostly based on a worry that anyone can do this with anything. The body is so interconnected, and there’s so much bad biology research out there, that I worry that if I said that the real cause of depression was, uh, thickness of the blood, I could find some way that all of those lines of research above affected blood thickness.

A quick demonstration: glucocorticoids can cause thicker blood, inflammation can cause thicker blood, SSRIs cause thinner blood, folate causes thinner blood. Huh, actually that’s kind of creepy.

My point isn’t that the (very respectable) academic research on depression is anywhere near this silly. It’s just to explain why I can hear a theory that seems to explain everything beautifully and my only reaction is “Eh, sounds like it has potential, let’s see what happens.”

Here are some of the things that confuse me, or that I hope get researched more in the future:

1. Why should decreased synaptogenesis cause depression, of all things? If you asked me, a non-neuroscientist, to guess what happens if the brain can’t create new synapses very well and loses hippocampal volume, I would say “your memory gets worse and you stop being able to learn new things”. But this doesn’t really happen in depression – even the subset of depressed people who get cognitive problems usually just have “pseudo-dementia” – they’re too depressed to put any effort into answering questions or doing intelligence tests. Why should decreased synaptogenesis in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex cause poor mood, tiredness, and even suicidality? All that the Duman et al paper has to say about this is:

This reduction in dendrite complexity and synaptic connections could contribute to the decreased volume of PFC and hippocampus observed in depressed patients. Moreover, loss of synaptic connections could contribute to a functional disconnection and loss of normal control of mood and emotion in depression (Fig. 1). In particular, the medial PFC exerts top down control over other brain regions that regulate emotion and mood, most notably the amygdala, and loss of synaptic connections from PFC to this and other brain regions could thereby result in more labile mood and emotion, as well as cognitive deficits.

…which sounds more like an IOU for a theory than anything really fleshed out.

2. Why can’t we just give people BDNF for depression? I’ve been looking into this and it seems like the answer is something like “this works great if you cut open someone’s skull and inject it directly into their brain, but most people aren’t up for it” (the relevant studies were done in rats). But why can’t it be given peripherally? Some studies suggest it’s stable on injection and crosses the blood-brain barrier. Some people tried this in mice and got modest results, but why aren’t people looking into it more?

3. Why does the body have so many “decrease synaptogenesis” knobs? That is, why go through the trouble to evolve all these chemicals and systems whose job is to tell your brain to decrease synapse formation so much that you end up depressed? Is there some huge problem with having too much synapse formation which the brain is desperately trying to avoid? For that matter, what is it like to have too much synapse formation? If it’s the opposite of depression, it sounds kind of fun. If I got someone to open up my skull and inject a lot of BDNF, could I be really happy and energetic all the time? How come all the good stuff is always reserved for rats?

4. Why is depression an episodic disease? That is, how come so many people get depressed for no reason, stay depressed for a few months to a few years, and then get better – only to relapse back into depression a few years later? If people get depressed because of some life stressor like a divorce, how come they don’t get un-depressed once the life stressor goes away? Is depression some kind of attractor state? If so, why?

5. Why doesn’t rapamycin cause depression? Remember, mTORC is “mechanistic target of rapamycin”, so named because the drug rapamycin inhibits it. But we give people rapamycin for various things all the time, and depression isn’t really known as a major side effect (even though IIRC it crosses the blood-brain barrier). If depression is really under the immediate control of mTORC, rapamycin should be the most depressive thing. Instead it’s not obviously depressive at all.

6. How does bipolar disorder fit into all of this? Is mania the answer to my “what is it like to have too many synapses?” question from point (3)? If so, why do some people go back and forth between that and depression?

A lot of these questions could be answered in one stroke if we had a good evolutionary theory of depression. I’m skeptical that this exists – depression just seems too fitness-decreasing, and the various just-so stories people have come up with for why it might increase fitness in certain weird situations seem a little too convoluted. So it’s not that I’m expecting some sort of evolutionary story to work out. Just noticing that, even if the synapse theory of pathophysiology turns out to be right, there’s still a lot more that needs to be explained.

The story so far:

Andrew doesn’t see any problem with changing the name of a concert hall.

The green inkers in the Bristol Post think that only True Bristolians get to decide what their concert hall is called.

Andrew isn’t at all sure he knows what a True Bristolian is.

Simon writes in the comments on this page:

So, and by way of addressing the relevant part of your earlier post also, let's take "born and bred Bristolian". The meaning of that is clear enough, as signifying someone born in Bristol (or is its near surroundings, I suppose) and having spent the major part of their formative years there. Were I, on the other hand, to move to Bristol next week, and then demand from the get-go that the city alter whatever outward aspects of its heritage I didn't approve of, and that, furthermore, I had every moral right to do because, simply qua resident, I was as much a "Bristolian" (!) as anybody else... Then in that (admittedly extreme) scenario, you might reasonably call me a pretender, a presumptuous fool, and possibly a dogmatic ideologue to boot.

Mike writes, also in the comments:

There seems to be something about people like this that makes them write sentences like "Then in that (admittedly extreme) scenario, you might reasonably call me a pretender, a presumptuous fool, and possibly a dogmatic ideologue to boot." You can see the same tendency in Five times Hugo award loser John C. Wright: "having the form of C. S. Lewis, but denying its power".

Simon says put your hands on your head:

Mike, whatever "people like this" is supposed to mean, I write the best I can, and generally express myself fairly well I think. I don't set out to imitate anyone, least of all CSL.I could easily poke fun at your own style too Mike, but it would seem a cheap and nasty substitute for argument.
Now read on.


" For the state must make a sharp distinction between those who, as national comrades, are the cause and bearer of its existence and its greatness and those who only take up residence within a state, as 'earning' elements."

You can see how I might find that a bit worrying.

Having taken a few days break from blogging after confessing my election punditry sins, I figured it was time to get back into the habit because who knows when I’m going to be called on to write a general election diary blog again? Will it be in September or October, or might I even have to wait until May next year for the whole thing to come crashing down?

It’s because that next election is so close that we don’t have the usual time we might have had for vacillation about things we’d like to see happen when it comes about. Not that any of them ever do, but perhaps those same good intentions that dissipate over five years might be focused into something more real when the next election might just be months away, and no one really fancies giving up another few hundred thousand pounds in lost deposits when it comes.

One promising development over the last few months has been electoral alliances between parties moving from the vaguely theoretical to the occasionally practical on a local basis. It started with the Greens withdrawing in the Richmond Park by-election in order to help Sarah Olney beat Zac Goldsmith, then was repeated in a number of seats at the general election, with the Liberal Democrats reciprocating by pulling out of Brighton Pavilion and Skipton and Ripon. Caroline Lucas was re-elected with her highest majority yet in Brighton, while in nine of the seats where the Greens withdrew, the Conservatives were defeated including the Lib Dem gain in Oxford West and Abingdon. (The Greens also withdrew from the contests in Richmond Park and St Ives where Lib Dems narrowly lost)

It feels to me that there is (despite resistance from within the parties) an appetite for more working together between Liberal Democrats and Greens, even if Labour’s attitude towards any progressive alliance is one where they insist they should take plenty but give nothing away. Especially since last Thursday, I’ve seen plenty of Labour supporters demand that other parties give them a clear run in seats where they’re second, but no signs that they’re willing to even consider withdrawing anywhere, let alone actually do it.

What also seems clear right now is that the next election, whenever it comes, is going to be framed as being a purely two party affair with every decision framed as being between Corbyn and whoever ends up with the chalice of Tory leadership when May is finally eased out of Number 10. Other parties are going to be churned up underneath that grand narrative, given just enough in the media to justify it being called fair coverage but nothing more.

In that light, would it not make sense for us to work together to not just ensure that we can survive the coming storm, but to build something for the future when the public grow disillusioned with the tired narratives of the two big parties and look for an alternative? The Liberal Democrats and Greens already have large areas of agreement: both parties are pro-European and pro-EU, both have a strong commitment to civil liberties, both want more emphasis on climate change and the environment in public policy, and both want radical reforms in the way our country is governed with power taken from Westminster and placed in the hands of individuals and communities. There’s enough agreement there, and across other policies, to provide a firm basis for exploring deeper co-operation a lot further.

Sure, there are differences between the parties – if there weren’t, they wouldn’t be separate parties – but every political movement has to make a trade-off between ideological coherence and size. I think there’s enough in common between the two parties to form a broad church that includes them both within a common alliance and show the public that we’re capable of talking out our differences and finding common ground rather than retreating behind fences and insisting that we don’t want to talk to others only those we already agree with. As ever, the challenge is that if we think our ideas are right, then surely any good follower in the footsteps of John Stuart Mill should want to grab the opportunity to persuade others of that rightness, not dismiss the opportunity out of hand?

It’s going to take a lot of political will, a lot of forgiving old slights and a lot of good intentions on both sides to make something like this happen, but isn’t it better to try and do something differently and build something new for the future? Both parties are at risk of being shoved to the sidelines as the narrative concentrates on the Tories and Labour, and this is a chance to stand together and pull the country towards a new, more hopeful, future. Who wants to try?

It was a tumultuous political time. The Conservative British Prime Minister wanted to consolidate their authority and called a snap General Election. The signs had looked good for an increased majority, but in a surprising result, they actually lost their majority and were forced to enter coalition talks with a minor party.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, it was a rare year in which a British General Election coincided with a French Presidential one. This election saw a centrist former Economy Minister win the election, and then go on to turn the movement that had won him the presidency into a full-fledged party of the political centre.

The year, of course, was 1974 with Edward Heath’s snap election losing him his majority and being forced into ultimately unsuccessful talks with the Liberals, while in France Valery Giscard D’Estaing became President and turned his Independent Republicans movement into the Union for French Democracy.

The year went on to have a second general election in the UK, and also saw the first ever resignation of a US President after a scandal about obstruction of justice grew to a point where he was likely to be impeached and removed from office.

All this, of course, bears no resemblance to anything that has happened in 2017.

Rumors abound that the magazine known as MAD — an institution that's been around exactly as long as I have — will soon cease publication. I'm pretty sure this is not so, though it is about to undergo some massive changes and no one is saying quite what they'll be. One biggie though is that its office of operations is shifting from New York, New York (across the street from where Stephen Colbert does his show) to Burbank, California (across the street from where Ellen DeGeneres does her show). With this migration will come a brand-new editorial staff consisting of…

Well, if the folks in charge of DC Comics have decided who the folks in charge of MAD will henceforth be, they've kept it a lot more secret than anything in the Trump White House. I don't know and no one currently involved in the production of MAD seems to know.

Some history. MAD started in 1952 and was originally owned by the infamous William M. Gaines. He sold it in 1961 to a conglomerate called Premier Industries that had grown out of a company that made venetian blinds.

Venetian blinds…irreverent humor magazine…you can see the obvious connection there. (By the way, Wikipedia — which of course is otherwise infallible — has this all wrong.)

Gaines stayed on as publisher with a contractual guarantee of absolute independence so everyone else stayed on. A few years later, Premier sold MAD to its distributor, Independent News, which was a division of National Periodical Publications, publishers of DC Comics. Gaines continued to have total control of his magazine.

Then in the late sixties, National Periodical Publications was acquired by Kinney National Services, another conglomerate — this one, built out of a company that dealt in parking lots, limousines and funeral services. Another obvious connection. Kinney eventually got so big, it acquired Warner Brothers and other businesses and was later reorganized into Time-Warner, which one day will acquire you and all of us unless Disney gets us first.

Gaines continued to have control but time has a way of chipping away at things and so does Time-Warner. His death in 1992 didn't help things and DC Comics began assuming more direct control.

Throughout this period, sales of MAD declined, just as sales of almost all magazines in this country have declined, many to tiny fractions of past heights. There is no major, long-running American periodical that is selling anywhere near as well as it used to sell and MAD is no exception. This has extinguished any viewpoint that MAD is first and foremost a print magazine and that other exploitations of its name and reputation are still just adjuncts to that. The view now is that MAD is a valuable property to be "monetized" by the various divisions. Some of those endeavors, like the MAD TV shows, have been rather lucrative.

Harvey Kurtzman was, as we all know, the first editor of MAD. He left in 1956 after a dispute with Gaines, and the editorship was filled from then until 1984 by Al Feldstein. After Feldstein retired, they split the editorial position between Nick Meglin and John Ficarra, and then Meglin retired in 2004.

Ficarra has been at the helm since then. Over the years, the quality of the magazine has varied a lot but in my opinion, it's been high for the last decade or so with some of its sharpest writing ever. John is a friend of mine but I have been telling him for more than a decade that MAD is important to me and if I ever think the magazine sucks, then screw the friendship — I will say so loudly and say it everywhere I can. I have not had to do this.  Unlike a lot of purists, I thought it was okay and even necessary when MAD went to a mostly-color format and began accepting advertising.  It is still, I believe, a fine humor magazine.

Still, you can only make so much money these days publishing a fine humor magazine. Most large comic book companies now make such a high percentage of their incomes via media and merchandising that actually putting out product on paper is relatively unimportant. Most do it out of tradition, because they don't want to admit that the properties aren't so popular in their native format, and as a place to develop new ideas that can become TV shows, movies and videogames. MAD could not have survived this long had it not joined that shift in focus.

A few years ago, DC Comics — accepting this shift — closed down its New York office and relocated to Burbank. MAD stayed behind — a last vestige of its independence — but that's over with. The current editorial staff in Manhattan will edit the magazine through #550, which will go to press at the end of this year and come out in February of 2018. After that, no one there knows what the heck will happen to it but clearly it will happen in Burbank without them. One production artist who has only been there a short time will make the move west. No one else.

One would like to assume Time-Warner has good, new folks lined up to assume command out here, even if things have not yet been finalized. Longtime MAD contributor Tom Richmond has heard that MAD will remain a magazine. It will not move back to the comic book format it had for its first 23 issues as some have speculated. Tom's blog would be a good thing to keep an eye on if you're looking for up-to-the-minute news on the future of Alfred E. Neuman and the magazine he adorns.

Tom notes the uncertainty that he and many other MAD contributors share. Many, perhaps most of them have not been there long and probably regard it as just an occasional assignment. But there are those who have served the magazine well for so long that it has become not only a major part of their incomes but their identities, as well. The work of Al Jaffee has appeared in 495 of its 546 issues, Sergio Aragonés has been in 469, Dick DeBartolo has had articles in 460 MADs and there are others among The Usual Gang of Idiots with lower but still impressive totals. The last few years, Tom Richmond with his terrific, MAD-worthy caricatures has filled more of its pages than anyone else.

They'd kinda like to know what's going to happen. Tom says he's hoping for some sort of announcement next month at Comic-Con International.

As a long-time MAD fan/historian (and contributor of two whole pages to it), I'm eager to know for my own reasons. I do not believe that an institution like MAD has to remain the same forever. The world changes and most things need to change with it. The fear is that in changing, MAD might wind up being MAD in name only, losing what its name stands for…and we have a dandy and true Worst Case Scenario to look at as an example.

Once upon a time, the name and logo of National Lampoon denoted an irreverent and wildly-popular humor magazine. It also represented a pool of brilliant contributors and a style and a standard. Separated from those contributors (or others of equal merit) and that style and that standard, it became just a label to be slapped on some pretty crummy products…and not even a particularly effective label. It no longer identifies something that has a kinship to the material — the magazine and the first few movies to have that name in their titles — that made that name notable. If you want to read a long article about how that happened, here's one.

I"m not saying this will happen to MAD, just that it would be a dreadful shame if it did. I am hardly the only kid of my generation who had his sense of humor shaped to a meaningful degree by MAD and who learned to look at the world with a certain amount of healthy, irreverent skepticism. I sure hope the franchise does that for future generations and isn't just used to sell them a shitload of stuff unworthy of the name.

The post What, He Worry? appeared first on News From ME.

The Liberal Democrat manifesto was in no doubt:

The Conservatives want to take us back 50 years, to an outdated system of grammar schools and secondary moderns, ignoring all the research and expert advice that show it will damage the life chances of so many children.

And Tim Farron was certainly in no doubt after the election result was known:

"Even a modest extension of grammar schools is still unacceptable. It is a betrayal of the principle of comprehensive education. It needs to be thrown out of the window. 

"This election delivered a message to the Conservatives, people do not want to go in this direction. Theresa May needs to axe her plan for grammar schools like its architect Nick Timothy has been axed. 

And he added: "People want a country that is fairer not the rose tinted spectacles of the 1950s."

Both quotes, it is true, are about the Conservatives' plans to open new grammar schools. But if the evidence is so clear, and if feelings are running so high, you would expect Lib Dems to campaign locally to close the existing grammar schools where they still exist.

I once asked if this happens, but received no clear answer,

A clue to the position on the ground came in a New Statesman article about Tom Brake's campaign to hold on to his Carshalton and Wallington seat:

From there, it was north through the heart of Wallington, formerly part of Surrey, where three of Sutton’s five grammar schools are found. 

“Sutton is very popular because of the grammar schools,” Brake says. “Parents often make a point of moving to Sutton to access them. The downside is they are selective in their nature. It means that unless a child does well – not just well, but really well – in the 11-plus exam or the equivalent, then the fact that you live in Sutton is no guarantee that your child will get a place there. They are very high performing, there’s no doubt about that.” 

Theresa May has paved the way for more grammar schools to be set up. Is Brake pro or anti-grammar? 

“Well, I think provision of schools is something that should be locally decided,” he says. “Our party position, and my personal view, is that it’s something local councillors should be allowed to make a decision on.”

I am not getting at Tom. He did tremendously well to hold his seat and I am very glad he did.

And if that is the party position on selection, I am happy to support it. It certainly was the the old Liberal Party's view back in the 1970s when this was last a live issue.

But given how few powers local authorities now have in education I wonder if it now makes much sense as a policy.

There does tend to be a disconnect between Liberal Democrat national and local campaigning. The former calls for the extension of the market: the latter is concerned with protecting the victims of that extension. I wonder if our policy on selection in education is another example of that.

You may that such a disconnect is inevitable in the rough and tumble of elections, but I think it might do the party good to face up to its existence.

I didn't expect to have anything more to say about Wonder Woman after publishing my short review of it.  But in the week that followed, the film has stayed with me, particularly the ways in which it complicates (and fails to complicate) the conventions of the superhero narrative.  Partly, this is just the shock of the new.  The MCU--and particularly those parts of it that are a bit more

I have seen it suggested that the Liberal Democrats' position on Europe was toned down during the general election because some of our remaining MPs were concerned it would alienate their voters.

In view of that, I was interested to discover a post I wrote back in December. There I quoted the words of the three Lib Dem MPs who abstained on Article 50.

I see that, sadly, one of those MPs - Greg Mulholland - lost his seat on Thursday.

The others were John Pugh, who did not stand this time, and Norman Lamb.and

Michael Gove's appointment as environment secretary this evening rather bears out what I wrote in that post:

If the farmers of North Norfolk think they will do better out of a Tory government than they have out of the European Union, they must have been sniffing the silage.

Later. I originally suggested that John Pugh had been defeated on Thursday, but of course he did not stand this time. Which makes this post rather less impressive than when it first appeared.

Hi. I should perhaps explain why I’m here. Those who were at the faith schools debate at the Liberal Democrat conference may recall that Chris Ward spoke eloquently on his experiences as a young LGBT person in a faith school. The things he said resonated with me and my own experiences, and I rushed to put an intervention card in. I only had a few seconds to make my point, but I did, and I was quite tearful when I made it. Between us I think we made a difference in how the vote went.

The film he referred to, which they showed to kids, and which I understand some schools still do, is called “The Silent Scream”. It’s on youTube and you can watch it. I should warn you that you may find it extremely disturbing. I was 14 when they made us watch it.

So my background: I grew up in a single parent family in the East Midlands coalfields in the 70s and 80s, living through the miners’ strike in an area where kids didn’t tend to expect big things for their lives. I did quite well in primary school and my mum worked during the day in a bookies. That didn’t bring in enough money to support me and my brother, so she had an evening job serving behind the bar in an old roadside coaching inn in the middle of nowhere. Its clientele fell into two groups: lorry drivers parking up for the night from the nearby M1 motorway, and teachers from the local independent boarding school who lived on site and liked to nip out in the evenings for some liquid entertainment.

And my mum, being quite gregarious, got friendly with these teachers, and would, on occasion, talk about her kid who was doing really well in primary school and was a bit of a wiz with computers.

And what a shame it was that the local secondary school didn’t tend to produce students who went on to university, or do much of anything really.

And then one day my mum came home and asked if I’d like to go to a really good school.

Mrs Thatcher was PM at the time and she was doing all that Tory stuff like favouring selective education. They had something called the Assisted Places scheme, where kids from a poor background who were “academically gifted”, could go to a fee paying school and the government would pay some or all of their school fees.

So I got an interview with the headmaster, and apparently I impressed him, and they offered me a place.

There are two further salient points to this. While I didn’t grow up in an overtly religious environment, the school in question was run by Jesuit priests, who are essentially the shock troops of the Catholic Church. The headmaster was a jesuit priest, various teachers were jesuit priests, the rest were members of what the church calls the laity.

The second salient point is that I’m a transgender woman and a lesbian. Specifically at the age of eleven, I was a closeted, terrified, and somewhat impressionable transgender girl who didn’t really understand there was a name for what I was feeling, but knew that if other people found out it would be very very bad for me.

I thought there was something wrong with me. This was not a good start for what followed.

I got the impression that the Jesuit school system saw its purpose as producing members of the establishment who would further the aims of the Catholic Church. They never seemed to have got over the whole Glorious Revolution thing. Indeed, the headmaster literally told me, as he was tutoring me to give the reading in mass, that he expected me to be a member of parliament one day. There’s plenty of overt religious indoctrination, and even to a kid it’s quite easy to recognise that and either run with it or shake it off.

The problem is the stuff they do that’s more subtle. The ways they teach you to think, and to see yourself and the world, which aren’t tagged with the overt “God” stuff, so if you later fall to atheism, as I did, some of it stays with you.

That includes the understanding that thoughts can be wrong. Not just actions, but certain thoughts. I don’t mean ideas of self harm or of other kinds of mental illness. No, there are some ways of looking at the world that are wrong. There are some ways of living you life that are wrong. There are some feelings that are wrong.

And if you think or feel these things you are a bad person.

if you feel attraction towards someone of your own sex, you are a bad person.

If you have these pervasive thoughts about how you desperately need to be a girl, you are a bad person.

You definitely shouldn’t act on these thoughts, and actually you should have the strength of character to be able to get rid of them. That would make you redeemed. That would show that you’d struggled against bad thoughts, and won.

Only, of course, I couldn’t make them go away. Indeed, as puberty wore on they got stronger and stronger. That meant that I was a bad person with weak character. That meant that I had failed. That made me loathsome and pathetic. A disappointment to the system that educated me to the point where I could go to Cambridge. A failure, a waste of money, and if there was some residual religious faith, probably someone who was going to be tortured for all eternity in hell.

This is how I, as a child, felt about myself.

In a school of a thousand kids, a hundred or so of them will be LBGT. Around ten of those will be transgender. A leading cause of death of transgender people is suicide. A large number of apparently unexplained suicides are probably transgender people who couldn’t find a way to square the circle in their own minds. I know a lot of transgender people and every single one of us has had to make our accommodation with death in one way or another.

Some faith schools manage to offer non judgemental or supportive environments, at least superficially. Some of the self hatred stuff, the idea that there are bad thoughts and feelings you need to struggle against is going to be there even in some notionally supportive environments, because it’s not tied to LGBT friendly SRE lessons: it’s mainstreamed in how these places teach you to relate to yourself and the world.

I wasn’t Catholic. My mum wasn’t Catholic. She just saw an opportunity for me to escape a life of no prospects ands took it, and I can’t ever blame her for that. Lots of parents send their kids to these places because they want their kids to have the best future. We can talk about how that’s a pretty dismal thing for social equality, but we really need to talk about what it’s doing to confused, scared, closeted LGBT kids who could be supported to become happy confident LGBT adolescents, comfortable with themselves and how they’re feeling, but who instead are being terrorised in the name of churches giving parents a way to produce moral upstanding citizens with good A-Levels.

I have only ever heard one story that makes Theresa May sound like a genuinely good person. The source for it is an old friend from university days. We met through CUCA, the Cambridge University Conservative Association. My friend is still a Tory, whereas I gave up on the party roughly thirty years later during the course of May’s 2016 conference speech — a bumpy journey recalled at some length here.

Anyway, the story involves a visit by my friend to a speaker meeting organised by her local Conservative association. At the time, my friend was trying to balance a career as a corporate lawyer with her demanding role as the mother of an infant and a degree of continued political engagement, and in a slightly desperate moment of multi-tasking, brought her baby along to the meeting with her. In the normal way of these things, as soon as the distinguished guest began speaking, the baby kicked off. My friend tried to calm the baby by breastfeeding him/her, as discreetly as possible. For this, she was rewarded with a range of disapproving looks from the mostly elderly, entirely disapproving audience. In the car-park afterwards, preparing to leave, my friend was feeling as many of us may have felt under similar circumstances — angry, defensive, embarrassed — maybe even a bit tearful. Getting into her car, then, she noticed the speaker hurrying out towards her, apparently anxious for a word. Rather to my friend’s surprise, the speaker could not have been more supportive — praising the qualities of the baby, talking about how hard it must be to balance work and family, unhappy at the audience reaction and passionately defending my friend’s decision to breastfeed in a public place.

The speaker was, of course, Theresa May. I am repeating this story in the interest of scrupulous fairness. Having said that, though, let’s remember that after my thirty years in the party, this is literally the only positive story I have ever heard about Theresa May. The other stories mostly revolve around tone-deafness, rigidity, humourlessness. Often there is a degree of intellectual limitation in the mix as well. Not one of these stories suggests that May got where she is through anything other than a dogged, principle-free, vindictive, deeply joyless strand of personal ambition. Nor do any of them imply that she has much to offer either the Tory party or the United Kingdom.

Thus it is surprising that the Tories somehow ended up with a general election campaign designed to rely primarily on May’s personal appeal coupled with the perceived unattractiveness of her opponents — a campaign contrived without much input from other senior party figures, defensive where not painfully robotic in the face of media interest, producing an appearance of extreme arrogance coupled with reflexive paranoia. It’s all been a mess of soundbites, U-turns, cynical Red Tory posing and attempts to avoid proper scrutiny. None of this is a great look, but neither is it a surprise, coming from May. Even if, as is probably more likely than not, May scrapes a reasonable majority — the ’60 to 100′ range seems popular at the moment — the effect of the campaign will have been to make the average voter like her even less than was the case before. The dysfunctionality that was once simply an open secret within the Tory party, shared occasionally amongst the political classes, is now an open secret. She just isn’t up to it.

But then a recurrent feature of May’s long march to power has been good luck when it comes to her enemies. Her most obvious claim to fame last summer, the one that eased her way almost painlessly into Downing Street, was that she was neither Andrea Leadsom nor Michael Gove. At present, it is hard to avoid wondering how she would doing if pitched against Hilary Benn, Yvette Cooper, Chuka Umuna, Sadiq Khan or a pre-lapsarian Nick Clegg, let alone an actual John Smith or Tony Blair. As it is, the current Labour leader — long-term friend of Hamas and the IRA, yes, but perhaps even more to the point, for decades the long-term enemy of the majority of the Labour Party — continues to advance against her, as much through his (relatively) charm as anything else. This should ring a whole carillon of alarm bells.

As for Tim Farron, the failure of his campaign to achieve proper traction is complicated, in some ways surprising and also very sad. His message has been well-defined, robust and honourable — strongly anti-Brexit, pro-civil rights, pro-immigration — but never quite recovered from a manufactured row over his views on sexuality. This is odd, not least because while in recent times May has taken a relatively liberal stance on LGBT issues, this was not always the case. More broadly, the whole thing points to culpable mischief-making on the part of journalists who ought to know better.

Liberalism is, after all, in large part about defending the rights of others to get up to things one might or might not find particularly edifying, so there’s a strong sense in which Farron’s personal view matter far less than those of other candidates. Yet despite this, as an evangelical Christian, Farron was forced to explain, defend and generally wrap himself in his personal religious convictions in a way that is hugely unusual these days, and not particularly desirable, either. No such thing was required of May, or indeed any other candidate. The last time I remember such a painful interrogation on matters of faith was during the mayoral campaign of Sadiq Khan, a proud and pious British Muslim who has gone on to prove himself a stalwart champion of LGBT activism. Boris Johnson, in contrast, is, on the rare occasions when he is asked about his personal faith, allowed to get away with flippant answers, and also, during his time as mayor, managed to miss London’s Pride celebrations for five years in a row.

But then in all sorts of ways, the campaign has played itself out rather oddly.

One grim recurrent theme has been terrorist violence, first in Manchester, then near London Bridge. In the first, an IS-inspired youth walked into the exit area of an Ariana Grande concert and, more due to the tightly enclosed space than to any sophistication on the part of his ad-hoc device, managed to kill 23 people, many of them also very young. Manchester, as anyone might have predicted, responded with warmth, solidarity, resilience and plenty of music. In the second attack, three relatively young men first drove a van into some people on London Bridge, then went on to Borough Market where, on a warm June evening, the usual international, diverse, tolerant group of Londoners was enjoying a night out. The three men set about stabbing people, but were clearly frustrated in their ambitions first by ordinary bystanders, who fought them off and tended the wounded, and then by the police, who first engaged the attackers unarmed, then within eight minutes of the start of the assault had shot all three dead.

Unspeakably terrible though it must have been for those caught up in it, this latter attack may well live long in London folklore, less for its horror — for in a sense it was not, in terrorist terms, a ‘successful’ project, murdering eight innocent people at the cost of three terrorist lives — than for what it has to say about reserves of toughness and courage on the part of an average London crowd. Long after the names and faces of those three pointless killers are forgotten, many of us, I suspect, will remember Florin Morariu, the Romanian baker who ran after the attackers, chasing them and throwing crates at them, right up to the point when the police started firing. We will remember Richard Angel, a policy wonk who, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks which had taken place all around him, expressed a desire to return to the restaurant where he had been dining so that he could pay his bill, as well as a determination to carry on as normal: ‘If me having a G&T in a nice bar, flirting with handsome men, upsets [terrorists] — I’m going to do it more’. And then who can forget Roy Larner, a middle-aged chap who attempted to fight off the attackers and their 12-inch knives with his bare hands, all the while shouting ‘Fuck you, I’m Millwall’? Let’s recall, too, that during these crucial minutes, the three attackers were all wearing what looked very much like suicide belts, which only later were shown to be dummies. Taken in aggregate, this is exactly my London. And if the terrorists were trying to discourage Mancunians or Londoners or anyone else here from living their normal lives, they have, yet again, pretty much as always, failed spectacularly.

These terrorist attacks have, however, inflected the campaign’s later stages. Once upon a time, conventional wisdom would have insisted that events of this type should have benefited the Tories, not least a right-wing ex home secretary, one of whose few deep pleasures in life seems to be attempting to deport Islamists, especially those who love their cats. Similarly, terrorist attacks should not have played in favour of a left-wing Labour leader who has shared platforms with a rich variety of terrorists over the years, Islamists not excluded. And yet, so magnificent and capacious has bee the ineptitude of May’s campaign that in fact the impossible has happened, and the Tories finds themselves struggling with this issue, too.

Sections of the media, admittedly, have done what they could to help May. They have pressed Corbyn, for instance, on his well-known scruples regarding a ‘shoot to kill’ policy. Yet in doing this, rather as was the case with Farron’s liberalism, people who ought to know better have glossed over distinctions that may well be crucially important to the politician in question. For while there is currently a sloppy inclination to use ‘shoot to kill’ as a synonym for a willingness to allow the police to use lethal force in a situation wherein lives appear to be imminently at risk, it’s more than possible that for a man of Corbyn’s vintage and associations, ‘shoot to kill’ conjures up something else altogether:  the troubled Stalker Inquiry, Death on the Rock, permission to shoot dead a suspect on sight without any warning and regardless of context. Now, while regular readers of this blog will realise that Corbyn and I see the whole Northern Ireland issue rather differently, c.f. this, all the same, I actually do agree with him that there is more to the matter of extra-judicial killing, whether on balance one accepts the need for it or not, than a crude litmus-test of patriotism. Indeed, reflecting on this, one may go on to wonder whether Corbyn’s time-worn historical tendresse for Irish Republican murderers is more of an issue — especially now that the greatest threat to peace and stability in the Province is in so clearly the small print of Brexit, with its hard borders and collapse in shared intelligence structures — than May’s casual dismissal of the need for basic civil liberties. I certainly know which one worries me more.

Meanwhile, May is hated by the police, whose funding and numbers she cut, charmlessly and ruthlessly, during her sojourn as home secretary 2010-2016. This whole story possibly tells us something about her ability to negotiate, take on board useful criticisms, change tactics if necessary, find common ground with others, achieve a mutually beneficial outcome — none of which is exactly heartening news regarding Brexit. All too often in her life, May seems to frame situations as a ‘fight’, as something ‘clear’ or ‘simple’, with an outcome that can only mean victory for one, defeat for the other. This is less the instinct of any successful deal-maker than it is a sort of Nietzsche-for-idiots executed by a vindictive, unconfident person of limited abilities, limited vision, unlimited reflexive defensiveness.

The other odd thing about this election campaign is the way in which those central figures from its early days — the voters who appear to have abandoned a post-Farage UKIP, without finding an obvious home elsewhere — have slightly vanished from the narrative. Of course, neither the Tories nor Labour have forgotten them, and continue to pursue them.

Corbyn brings them, by way of tribute, the cosy, Old Labour familiarity of the apparently unscripted, emotive, open-air speeches he clearly hugely enjoys, and indeed delivers very well. He speaks to an ageing but still-present historical awareness of vanishing industry, struggles over mines or shipyards, embattled communal spirit. At these moments Corbyn is funny, fluent, comfortable — because he, too, is ageing, a veteran of battles that to much of his electorate are less the stuff of experience than of mythic folklore. But then selling romantic nostalgia has got Corbyn a long way in life, and it would be wrong to write him off.

May, in contrast, struggles more with campaigning. She is, of course, happy enough to reel off her terrifying Red Tory message, if only because she so clearly believes that forcing people to accept policies they dislike and distrust is somehow ‘strong’ and ‘clear’, hence worth doing almost as an end in itself. But she patently dislikes meeting ordinary people. Her visit on Tuesday to a bakery in Fleetwood, Lancashire — where she notionally received a ‘tough grilling’ from ‘ordinary voters’, at least according to the Twitter timeline of the Sun‘s political editor — was slightly let down when photos showed all those ‘ordinary voters’ all wearing blue rosettes. Well, who knows — I have never enjoyed the honour of breakfast in Fleetwood. Perhaps blue rosettes are de rigeur there. Perhaps it’s an authentic local thing. Or, alternatively, perhaps May’s campaign is so abjectly, amateurishly hopeless that the ‘ordinary people’ cobbled together for this media opportunity weren’t told to remove their incriminating insignia first — or even to wear them only under their disguises, a la The Eagle Has Landed.

What one never sees, at any rate, are images of May addressing crowds of thousands, out in the open air as her opponent so often does, letting herself in for heckling or abuse. Instead, her natural environment seems to be the smaller warehouse, the after-hours office facility cleansed of its normal inhabitants, the carefully-controlled environment that is simultaneously never quite controlled enough. She perhaps hopes that this sense of distance, this quasi-presidential disdain for unfiltered engagement and unscripted encounters, this progress of the Empress Theresa through her lands and dominions will somehow create a sense of strength, stability and, well, whatever else it is that the two advisors to whom she ever listens — Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, only possibly augmented by Lynton Crosby — have told her it is that these elusive, hard-to-read ex-Kippers probably want.

It is quite a remarkable by-product of democracy that two major parties should have to pursue the group of people who, by definition, admired Farage, voted for Brexit, and now are so fatally cut from their moorings as to be unsure whether to back a right-wing Tory or a left-wing Labour leader. But it is also remarkable that no one seems sure, even now, which way these pivotal political actors are likely to jump, which is perhaps why we have mostly stopped talking about them.

Meanwhile, the Tories — PPCs, constituency workers, bog-standard voters — have to come to grips with their campaign, their leader, their future as a party. These days I am much more detached from the party than ever before, but I don’t get the sense that anyone’s esteem for May is increasing as the days go by. The decision to concoct a manifesto without consulting even senior party members may prove, in hindsight, a particularly egregious own goal.

And no, the eventual response to that will not be, as non-Tories invariably assume, the apotheosis of Boris. We have been here before. It is not possible, under present-day party rules, to become leader of Tories without some sort of support from the parliamentary party, and it has been proved to everyone’s satisfaction that Boris is, by the people who know him and work with him, generally dismissed as a buffoon, a blow-hard fool, or even that contemptible thing, a failed journalist. If and when this election goes all wrong, and May is held to account for it, I have no idea who her successor will be. The official Cameron / Osborne continuity candidate, for instance, has yet to be anointed. But it’s safe to say that May’s successor will not be e.g. a fat Old Etonian who still dines out on his deeply ordinary Oxbridge 2:1 and who once promised to aid an attempt to have a News of the World journalist, Stuart Collier, beaten up. So that narrows the field a bit at least.

All this, however, is too long a glimpse into what promises to be an unrewarding, unedifying near future. What of tomorrow?

There are two seats that matter to me personally. The first is the Cities of London & Westminster, where I am registered. There, I will vote for Bridget Fox, the Liberal Democrat candidate.

This was an easy decision. Our recent MP, Mark Field, is a Tory. He is neither a bad man nor a bad politician. On the two occasions I’ve ever contacted him as a constituent, I’ve been favourably impressed by his replies — always more bespoke, genuine and serious than the fobb-off I’d been expecting. In 2008, a time when denouncing bankers was even more fashionable than usual, Mark was loud in his insistence that the City of London contributes to our national well-being in all sorts of ways. This showed nerve, and I admired it. More recently, though, Mark has supported Brexit. This is perverse. The vast majority of his constituency voted against it. That is because their jobs, their relationships, their whole way of life depend upon EU membership. So do the defence and security relationships that (mostly) keep us safe, the immigration rules that make our city a diverse, vibrant and successful one, the sense of bohemian, hipsterish inclusiveness that for centuries has defined my Soho in the face of nativism, xenophobia, Mayism. So while I like Mark, and hope that someday he sees sense, his vote for May’s hard Brexit — a hard Brexit backed by no electoral mandate, purely the stuff of her own internal party anxieties — was a deal-breaker. As I told the absolutely sweet, really professional Tory survey canvasser who had the bad luck to pitch up on my doorstep, May’s 2016 conference speech, coupled with Mark’s support for an unwarranted hard Brexit, was the end.

In contrast, Bridget Fox, our local LibDem candidate, has impressed me. She is intelligent, active, in tune with what many long-time Soho residents are feeling right now. Our interactions on social media lead me to believe that she will be a responsive, perceptive, hard-working constituency MP. Also, the LibDems’ national campaign has addressed many of my concerns about our present political situation. Who are my favourite Soho people? Well, two of them are at my local coffee shop, Greg and Marina, both Hungarian by birth. Bridget, if you wonder why you are getting my vote, this is part of the reason. Mark, if you wonder why, as someone who has worked for your party for thirty or more years, I am now opposing it, think of Greg and Marina. Or think of my son’s multi-cultural, multi-faith, richly international school. Or think of Soho’s great history of accepting, welcoming and finding the best in its international population. Soho is not, and will never be, a province of your pal May’s mean-spirited, mean-minded Little England.

The other constituency that matters to me, where I spend at least half my time, is North Norfolk. Here, LibDem Norman Lamb is fighting off a very determined assault by a Tory contender.

Norman Lamb is a great MP. This incandescent truth is taken as a matter of fact by pretty much everyone locally, at least in private, completely regardless of party allegiance. Lamb is, after all, that rare thing, an MP who will fight for his constituents’ interests with the most enormous seriousness, someone who is in the game less for his own career potential than to help others. Furthermore, his work on mental health issues, informed by his own personal experience as well as years of constituency work, has won him respect across partisan boundaries. If I were allowed to create my own a la carte government — and how I should like to manufacture my own personal Coalition of Chaos! — I’d make Lamb Minister for Mental Health, with a responsibility for identifying and supporting mental health solutions across different departmental portfolios. Lamb, however, faces a very tough fight, and if he loses this evening, it’s not just North Norfolk that will be the poorer for it.

Another thing that simplified my choices was the logic of tactical voting. In North Norfolk Lamb, a LibDem, is the incumbent MP, with the Tories as his main challengers. In the Cities of London & Westminster, our sitting MP is a Tory, and although historically Labour have been the main threat, given the Brexit context, it seems likely that at least some Tories will wish to express their ongoing support for Remain by voting LibDem, which in any case is possibly an easier transition than making the jump to full-on, Corbynite Labour, which even some lifetime Labour supporters struggle to accept. And indeed, it feels very good to support a proudly anti-Brexit party. Having said that, though, if I were registered in some other seat and the LibDems weren’t plausible challengers, I can easily imagine voting for an anti-Brexit, ‘moderate’ Labour candidate.

Yet even if I were pro Brexit, which I am not, looking at the state of this election campaign, the narrowness of vision and the sloppiness of execution, why would I trust May to organise buying a sandwich, let alone leading her country through the most complicated set of trade, defence and security negotiations in living memory? So I can’t really see why most Tories would, if they thought about it, justify voting Tory this time, either.

In that way, too, the present election is rather an odd one. The splits within parties are surely almost as significant as the rifts between them. Both Tories and Labour supporters could be excused for believing that their own parties have been hijacked by dangerous extremists. This encourages paradoxes. A friend of mine, whose political judgement I admire enormously, is voting LibDem — but has also done his bit to help the campaigns of specific candidates from the Labour, LibDem and Conservative parties. His logic is that by supporting individuals who reflect his own priorities — anti-Brexit, pro-LGBT, generally progressive but also pragmatic — he can exert a positive influence in all these parties. Who knows? He may well be right.

Some, of course, will argue that voting LibDem is a wasted vote. It is, admittedly, unlikely that the LibDems will lead the next government. What I really want, truth be told, is precisely that thing May has taken to holding up for our horror and revulsion: a Coalition of Chaos. Corbyn is hardly my dream politician, but that’s all the more reason I’d be much happier seeing his weirder ambitions moderated by the practicalities of having to gather some sort of de facto support from the SNP, Plaid Cymru and, yes, the LibDems. If we have to have a Brexit, I’d rather see the negotiating table staffed with Keir Starmer than with David Davis — but I’d like to think that the LibDems might actually be able to floor the brakes on this ill-considered, deeply misguided project. More broadly, any de facto coalition would have to proceed with a degree of caution, humility and consensus. This modest dose of continental-style politics seems to me, at least, hugely preferable to rule by an arrogant yet insecure May, perpetually pandering to the Eurosceptic rump within her own party. So a vote for the LibDems works from that perspective as well.

When this election was first called, I felt a huge surge of happiness. I knew, even then, that this was irrational. Obviously, the polls at the time favoured the Tories. They were always likely to get back in, perhaps with an impressively engorged majority, which could be presented as a mandate for whatever nonsense May decides to impose on us. But at the same time, there was always at least that faint but delicious hint of possibility: things don’t have to be like this. And even now, after this grisly campaign, I still haven’t completely given up hope that tomorrow may dawn brighter than today did — that, not for the first time in this long Brexit nightmare, events may still be have the capacity to surprise us.

Finally, though, we are left with the unlikely story about Theresa May that prefaced these stray thoughts. What to make of it? I do think, actually, it carries a sort of moral. The reason it makes May seem attractive is that it shows her supporting the outsider, the slightly disenfranchised, the contextually weak against the traditionally strong. Correctly, we warm to this, because it shows one of the ways in which genuine leadership functions.

This has been a nasty campaign in all sorts of ways. The personalised attacks on Farron and Corbyn, intended to distract us, have instead underscored how thin and uncertain any positive Tory message must be. Worse still has been the ongoing targeting of Diane Abbott. Abbott is, clearly, some way to the left of me on pretty much everything. There is no point in pretending that she’s my favourite politician. On the other hand, it is manifestly clear that when it comes to making mistakes, there is one rule for her, and quite a different rule for other high-profile candidates. When May can’t remember whether we give foreign aid to the murderous DPRK regime, when Davis basically gets ripped to shreds by Benn over his total inability to articulate any considered thoughts whatsoever on Brexit, when Corbyn has to look up some figures, when Boris blusters — and, let’s face it, when does Boris ever do anything else other than blustering? — we are never told that they are ‘over-promoted’ or  ‘out of their depth’. Yet oddly, when Abbott stumbles, it is instantly read as a reflection on her worthiness to be where she is, doing her job. The problem, I suspect, is that like very many veteran politicians, Abbot tends to project a tremendous air of entitlement — and while we are fine with that when the entitled one is, say, Kenneth Clark or Paddy Ashdown or John Prescott, suddenly when confronted by a black woman who seems very comfortable with authority, thank you very much, then there’s something problematic about it. Surely, she should have to work harder, prove herself more, seem a bit more grateful, somehow? The fact that Abbott has, basically, been bullied into withdrawing from her role says something deeply unpleasant about our politics.

And yet that unpleasantness is anything but accidental. It’s there, in variant forms, everywhere we look. It’s there in May’s dark hint that it’s somehow the fault of the Muslim community that Islamist terrorism exists — although the more we investigate, the more it becomes clear that ‘the community’ were sedulous in warning the security services regarding these recent terror incidents. It’s there in May’s promise to uphold our way of life by, ahem, upending our civil rights whenever necessary. Most of all, it’s there in the busying wooing of those wretched ex-UKIP voters, in the language and imagery of the Daily Mail, in the people who fund a platform for Katie Hopkins and her shrill reprehensible ilk, in the fearful sense that to be ‘strong’, let alone ‘stable’, we need to stand with the bullying, hectoring, intolerant and proudly ignorant mob against anyone or anything that might provoke their ire or indignation. It is, in short, precisely what May decided not to do, on that evening long ago, when she went out into a car-park to encourage an unhappy young mother.

With hindsight, on that one occasion at least, May made the right choice. We all have a better side and a worse side, a tendency to cut corners, to do the easy thing rather than the right thing. Today, though, I hope the British electorate realise the gravity of the choice confronting them, which is less about party politics than about what sort of people we all want to be, what sort of world we want to leave behind us, and that they vote accordingly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

More and more, I feel that William Goldman’s view of the film business

"Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one."

also applies to politics.

Plenty of political bloggers offer hot takes, but they generally turn out to be wrong.

I was more circumspect during the election campaign, offering two modest predictions that turned out to be correct.

The Liberal Democrats did have a good chance of winning Bath and the Conservatives did fail to gain Leicester West.

Still, though you wouldn’t think it sometimes, Liberal England is meant to be a political bog. So here are a dozen thoughts on the general election and its aftermath.

1. What I got badly wrong about the election

Like most commentators, I was convinced that Jeremy Corbyn would crash and burn when he was exposed to the scrutiny of a general election campaign. But it turned out that his chilling with the military wing of Irish Republicanism was too long ago to interest most voters.

More than that, he came over as human when set against the wooden Theresa May. He even overcame his hatred of journalists (remember that grim, silent walk the night he was elected?) to give some good interviews.

Labour’s success means that the people who declined to serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet will now make themselves available. This will mean more credible people appearing for Labour on television (sorry, Richard Burgon) and that any talk of a new centre party is dead (sorry, Lord Mandelson).

2. What I got right about British politics

For years I have believed (or clung to the belief) that if the Conservatives moved to the right to chase Ukip’s vote they would alienate their more moderate supporters. And that is more or less what happened. I find that immensely reassuring for the future of the country.

3. Jeremy Corbyn has been good for political debate

For years British general elections have been fought on a narrow strip of territory. They supported the free market and supported public services (though not too much). Jeremy Corbyn has changed all that. I doubt the costings in his manifesto: in fact it reminded me of the Labourism that foundered in the 1970s, but that is also too long ago to interest most voters.

What his manifesto did do was offer voters the hope that things could be different. He has opened up territory that other politicians may one day occupy.

4. The DUP blinks in the unaccustomed sunlight

When Liberal Democrats joined the cabinet one was forced to resign within weeks and another ended up in prison. DUP MPs are not nor going to become ministers, but they may well find the sudden media interest in them and their MPs equally uncomfortable.

I also suspect that the alliance with them will end in tears for the Conservatives too.

5. "I am the ghost of your tuition fees decision"

The decision to support the introduction of tuition fees under the Coalition continues to haunt the Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg in particular. As the surge of support for Labour among young voters yesterday showed, the really damaging thing about the decision is not merely that it undermined trust in us. The real problem was that it was politically obtuse.  How can a liberal party expect to flourish without the support of educated young voters?

6. Time to be honest about the level of Liberal Democrat support

After half a dozen results had been declared last night I was moved to tweet what no one else in my timeline was saying: those results were uniformly awful for the Liberal Democrats. I am delighted that we won a dozen seats – that was far better than I feared we might do – but we have to face the fact that in seats where we do not campaign, the Liberal Democrat vote is vanishingly small.

And even in seats where we had the MP a few years ago or where we have traditionally recorded a respectable second place, that vote is now disappointingly low. (I am thinking of Ludlow and Harborough, seats I know well.)

Yet the same patterns has been true of local elections for years now, and it has also passed unremarked. There are some great gains – greeted with #libdemfightback – but where we do not campaign hardly anyone votes for us now.

We need to talk about this problem as a first step to addressing it.

7. Tim Farron: The boy done goodish

Leaving aside his interview with Andrew Neil (the two have always had a scratchy relationship and Tim appeared poorly briefed for Neil’s easily predictable lines of attack), Tim did pretty well. He was always telling people that he came from Preston and had four children, but then the election came too soon for him with the result that few people knew who he was. It is natural that he should try to tell them.

Calling for a change of leader can be a way of avoiding deeper thought about the party’s purpose and direction. And then there are those who are convinced that a front-line politician must have a Southern, public school and Oxbridge background…

8. Theresa May: You have to laugh

Has there even been a less credible British prime minister? Quite what Theresa May stands for, wants to achieve or why she considers herself fitted for the job remain a mystery.

Her credibility has gone, most importantly to her own party. That means that her colleagues will be politicking for the contest to succeed her and every time something goes wrong there will be press speculation about her being replaced.

My guess is that we will start to hear stories about her brave struggle with her health problems and she will be gone sooner rather than later.

9. Mourning the loss of Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg’s defeat was a loss to the Liberal Democrats and a loss to political debate generally. I like Nick and hope he will stick around in some role, but I wonder if, deep down, he was more suited to being a technocrat than a politician. I remember a review of his book Politics: Between the Extremes by James Kirkup:

"Politics is about arguments, about persuading people, by fair means or foul, to lend you their votes and their permission to rule. And this is what baffles Clegg."

10. Ukip is not dead yet

When we have finished laughing at the self-immolation of Paul Nuttall, remember that there may be a by-election in South Thanet one day and that Nigel Farage could be Ukip’s candidate and could win it. The party has fallen apart and reassembled itself several times over the past 20 years. It could easily happen again.

11. No Liberal Democrat MPs in Wales

If you can hear a rumbling sound from the direction of Llanystumdwy, it is Lloyd George turning in his grave. There are no Liberal MPs left in Wales.

12. The power of the press

Some have argued that this election represents the triumph of social media and that the newspapers have lost their hold over voters. I was always sceptical that they had such a hold. Generally speaking, Rupert Murdoch backed politicians because they were going to win: they didn’t win because he backed them.

It will come as no surprise to anyone following the results that no trans members of parliament were elected yesterday, as despite the shock over the overall result relatively few seats actually changed hands. However, a record number of people standing (9) also means some record results – yesterday saw three trans candidates gaining second place. The last time a trans candidate at a parliamentary level reached second place was also the first known trans parliamentary candidate, Alexandra “Sandra” MacRae, who stood for the SNP in 1992.

General elections are predominantly national rather than local campaigns, and the fates of trans candidates have followed those of their party colleagues standing elsewhere – Labour up but with limited gains, Liberal Democrats slipping slightly in non-target seats and the Greens struggling to make an impact.

		Helen Belcher Chippenham	2nd place, 25.6% (-3.8%) Majority: 29.1%
		Aimee Challenor Coventry South	5th place: 1.3% (-2.6%)
		Sophie Cook East Worthing & Shoreham	2nd place, 39.3% (+19.8%) Majority: 9.3%
		Andrew Creak Caerphilly (Non-Binary)	6th place, 1.1% (-1.2%)
		Charley Hasted Swansea East (Non-Binary)	5th place, 1.8% (-2.4%)
		Dom Horsman North West Durham	5th place, 1.1% (-2.6%)
		Lee-Anne Lawrance Runnymede and Weybridge (Non-Binary)	5th place, 2.6% (-1.5%)
		Zoe O’Connell Maldon	3rd place, 4.3% (-0.1%)
		Heather Peto Rutland & Melton	2nd place, 22.7% (+7.3%) Majority: 40.1%

 

Photo sources – not all Creative Commons. Please check before reuse:
Helen Belcher, Charley Hasted: Liberal Democrat candidate promotional literature.
Aimee Challenor: CC BY-SA 3.0, credit Green Party of England and Wales.
Sophie Cook: Labour party candidate promotional literature.
Dom Horsman, Lee-Anne Lawrance: Provided by the candidates for use on this blog.
Zoe O’Connell: CC BY-SA 3.0, credit Zoe O’Connell.

The post Trans politicians: 2017 General Election results appeared first on Complicity.

Adam West…sigh. Real nice man. I was tapped to interview him at a couple of comic book conventions and at one of them, we wound up having a dinner during which neither one of us mentioned Batman at all. From the way we didn't talk about it, I got the feeling he considered it a mixed blessing. It made him very famous. I don't think it made him very wealthy, at least at the time. Decades later, it was the autograph circuit that did that.

When he signed on for the role, he was a working actor who probably wasn't working enough. He had some good roles but he hadn't really distinguished himself; hadn't cut himself away from a herd of other handsome leading men types in his age bracket. Batman finally set him off from the others but for that, he paid a high, immediate price. It only lasted three seasons, getting very hot and then very cold in a very short span of time. Once it was off, it was Adam West's career that got very cold. He was a fine, versatile talent but he was too associated with that character and with a style of deliberately bad acting which no one wanted in their show or movie.

The first time I met Adam was at the Comic-Con in San Diego in 1986, I think. The Batman movie which would star Michael Keaton had been announced but Keaton had not been cast. No one had, nor had the film been green-lit for production. Adam was not a guest of the con. He had driven down to San Diego and maybe even paid admission, just to walk around the hall and try to drum up support for him to be cast in the role.

He had assumed — wrongly — that anyone who loved Batman considered him the definitive actor to play the part and that we'd all rally behind him. The presence of Adam West at the con drew very little interest and zero groundswell.

Back then, I don't think too many fans remembered that show fondly. It was, after all, a show that ridiculed the property — it was nominated for an Emmy for Best Comedy Series, remember — produced in large part by people who thought the comic books were stupid and those of us who bought them were stupider. We didn't know much about the then-pending Batman feature but we did know that it was supposed to be the antithesis of the TV show. The Casting Call, if there was one, probably said they were seeking anyone who wasn't Adam West.

He didn't get the part…or very many others around then but time changes how we view some things. Maybe it was just inertia. Maybe it was because as mainstream media began taking comic book characters more seriously, we who loved comics felt less threatened by one spoof. Maybe some people even felt that the move towards a darker, grittier Batman took the character too far to that side and the show Adam had done represented when Batman was more fun and less psychotic.

Pick one or come up with your own reason that the show became beloved and that folks lined up to pay for his signature, as well as that of his co-stars. At the first con where I interviewed him, West and Frank Gorshin were there on a guarantee of a very impressive number of dollars…and they way exceeded their guarantees. At about the same time, producers and directors who'd been tots when Batman was on began trying to hire Adam West for non-Batman roles, just because they loved him and wanted to work with him. (I should mention here that his career was also helped a lot by an agent named Fred Wostbrock, whose obit — sadly — was posted here last November.)

Adam West lived and survived long enough to become a genuine, in-demand superstar…and he deserved it. Like I said, he was a real nice man and a much more able actor than any line of that TV show required. Aside from the parts about him and his agent dying, this is a pretty happy ending.

The post Adam West, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

I think it’s important, both as an academic and a politician, to look back at things and see where you went wrong in the hope you won’t make the same mistakes the next time around. It’s important to get rid of all those errors so you can make a whole set of brand new ones the next time around, rather than just repeating the same ones again and again. I’m lucky in that my chosen field within political science is parties and party systems which is related to and uses data from political behaviour and elections, but is much more about analysing things after the fact rather than trying to test theories by making predictions.

That’s why I wasn’t building a complex model to predict the election and didn’t really jump into making anything more than the vaguest predictions. However, that didn’t stop me being wrong about YouGov’s prediction which, along with the broadcasters’ exit poll, appears to have been the most accurate of all the models. I dismissed it because it didn’t match up with my expectations and perceptions, so I did the natural thing (as did so many other people) of sucking in through my teeth and muttering ‘dodgy methodology’ and ‘looking for headlines’, without thinking about why they might have come up with something that challenged my perceptions.

One importnt thing to learn is that big data crunching like this has a better perspective than you. From the bits of Colchester I’d seen and spoken to, I didn’t feel that Labour were in second place here, but until yesterday I’d never seen people queuing to vote in my local polling station either which was a clear sign of something unexpected going on. It does raise an issue I think we often elide in our discussions of voter behaviour where we assume that ‘the voters’ and ‘the non-voters’ are the same people at each election, and often neglect to consider movement between the two groups. We also – and this is something common to politicians and academics – forget that people don’t exist solely in terms of our labels. Just because we have someone down as a Tory, Labour or Lib Dem voter doesn’t mean that they consider themselves that in the same way and in some conditions – especially when the links between parties and voters are weak – they’re not going to behave in the way we expect.

I also missed the relative popularity of Jeremy Corbyn, though in my defence his election did seem to be following the same pattern as Miliband’s two years ago: the crazed revolutionary depicted in the right-wing media turning out to not be much like that when the public saw them, getting more confident as the election went on, but then a final onslaught of negative press burying them. Except this time Corbyn managed to keep that momentum up, and even if he didn’t shake it off to the extent that Blair did, he did achieve it better than Miliband.

I’ve only had a couple of hours sleep in the last thirty-six, so those are the errors that come to mind right now, but do feel free to go through my election posts in painstaking detail and point out anything else I got wrong in the comments. I’m still mulling over the questions of where we are and what comes next, but things aren’t unfolding with the same sense of post-election urgency that they did in 2010 and 2015 – possibly because everyone’s still shell-shocked from a bizarre night – so writing about that can wait until tomorrow when my brain’s capable of thinking in a bit more depth.

Tempted to call that next post Day 1 of the 2017 General Election v2, but I’ll probably resist that temptation when I’m better rested.

Flash back eight weeks to Easter weekend, and consider the position Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron were in then. One of them was an experienced and safe pair of hands, riding high in the polls and with a small, but solid majority in Parliament, while the other was an outsider who’d never run in an election before, let alone won one and while he was doing well, there were questions about how whether he could hold off a challenge from a surging left-wing candidate, and even if he could win, how could he ever hope to put together a coalition that would allow him to govern?

Now move forward over the next two months and notice how the fortunes of the two of them have had an inverse relationship over that time. May called an election to see off a seemingly weakened left-wing and give herself a massive majority in Parliament, but instead she’s lost her majority and found that the newly enlivened and surging left are snapping at her heels. Macron, by contrast, saw off the threat of Melenchon in the first round, then crushed Le Pen in the second to win the Presidency by a clear margin.

Since then, he’s barely put a foot wrong, while she’s bounced from unforced error to unforced error, and now both countries are having parliamentary elections within a few days of each other (the first round of France’s Presidential elections happen tomorrow). The leader who had a twenty-point poll lead in April and was being projected to win a massive majority failed to even protect her small one and is now scrabbling around looking for allies, while her trusted advisers have quit. On the other side of La Manche, April’s untested candidate with little infrastructure around him has put together a coalition of support, drawn in a wide range of trusted advisers and is projected to win a massive victory in tomorrow’s elections, possibly with a majority of over 200.

One keeps on sliding as the other rises higher, and it’s definitely not the way round we expected them to be two months ago.

Hey, Scalzi! It’s me, your fictional interlocutor!

Oh, God, you again.

You know why I’m here!

This is about the James Comey testimony yesterday, isn’t it?

Correct! 

*sighs*

Fine, let’s do this.

James Comey testimony! Your thoughts!

Well, assuming Comey was truthful and reasonably accurate in his testimony, and to be clear I suspect he was, then it basically tells us what we already knew, which is that Donald Trump is a lying liar who lies, and that he rather stupidly tried to intervene in the Michael Flynn/Russia investigation, and in a way that’s very probably actual obstruction of justice. And he implied another thing I suspect most of us already knew, which is that the Russians have their hands up the asses of a whole lot of people in the Trump administration, including very likely Jeff Sessions. So, I can’t say that I was entirely surprised by anything Comey said, but it’s gratifying to have it in the congressional record.

Do you still think James Comey wasn’t very good at his job?

Kind of? I think what his testimony solidified for me is that James Comey was probably pretty good at the day to day minutiae of his former gig, and also that within the context of that gig he was pretty ethical. But I also think he made some high-profile bad calls, and that very same desire for ethical action caused him to exacerbate rather than mitigate some of those bad calls.

At this point I’ve gotten used to thinking of Comey as something of a tragic figure, whose greatest virtue — a desire to act ethically and above the usual boundaries of politics in the execution of his duties — ended up precipitating a national and global crisis. Because make no mistake that we have a President Trump in large part because of him. I suspect that eats at him even if he believes all his actions during 2016 were ultimately correct and appropriate, as the head of the FBI.

(This is not to say a President Hillary Clinton would not have had her challenges. But only a fool or a committed partisan (and there’s some considerable overlap there) at this point believes a Clinton administration would have been the gross and obvious ethical Superfund site the Trump administration has been from day one.)

Let me put it this way: I think Comey could have made better decisions in his role as FBI director. I also think his testimony was probably, pun intended, unimpeachable.

But Trump says Comey’s testimony vindicated him!

Sure, but Trump says a lot of stupid things, doesn’t he? If by “vindicated” he means “established him as a liar and obstructor of justice,” then yes, he’s entirely vindicated. Otherwise it’s just Trump lying as fast as he can, which pretty much goes to Comey’s point directly, doesn’t it.

Trump’s lawyer says he going to file a complaint against Comey for leaking. Thoughts?

I mean, okay, but so what? First: Comey, then a private citizen, giving a friend a non-classified memo recounting a conversation he had with the president, and encouraging the friend to share it? That’s not actually a leak, now, is it? Comey was already out of a job. Also, filing a complaint will do what, precisely? Is the Department of Justice going to fire him again? A double-secret firing? It doesn’t appear that Comey did anything illegal, and complaining to the Department of Justice about it seems likely to result in exactly one thing: The lawyer complaining to the Department of Justice about it. Like many things Trump does, this is a lot of noise and movement but no actual result.

And I suspect the Trump people know that’s all that’s going to come out of it, which is why Trump and his party pals, like Corey Lewandowski, are mostly resorting to asserting that if Comey were a real man, he would have talked to the press himself rather than having a pal do it, harumph, harumph. Which leads me to two thoughts. One, I’m sure James Comey is gonna stay up nights worrying what an asshole like Corey Lewandowski thinks about him, vis a vis manhood or anything else. Two, this is (one reason) why the Trump people are stupid: They’ve confused successfully executing on a strategy with weakness. It doesn’t matter whether Lewandowski thinks Comey is “man enough,” because no matter what he or Trump think about Comey’s manhood, Comey’s actions resulted in Robert Mueller appointed as a special investigator. Which is to say Comey was man enough to dunk on Trump.

Thoughts on the senators who questioned Comey?

I felt sad about John McCain, who was clearly not all there. Otherwise I think the GOP senators spent a lot of time trying to convince themselves and others that Trump saying “I hope” didn’t mean he was really trying to obstruct the investigation, and to blame Comey for not forcefully telling Trump “No, what you’re asking for is totally illegal” in the moment. On the former, Comey pretty much demolished the “I hope” argument by quoting Henry II with regard to Thomas a Becket, thus sending a thrill through the hearts of history nerds everywhere, and on the latter, here, read this by Ana Marie Cox, which is entirely on point. The Democratic senators were more on message, as is to be expected.

What about Loretta Lynch meeting with Bill Clinton? The GOP senators seemed very interested in that.

Sure, anything to take the conversation away from Trump and obstruction of justice. I get why the GOP senators wanted to talk about that, even aside using it as a way to run down the clock on Comey’s testimony. But here’s a thing, which is that Hillary Clinton’s not the president, whereas Trump is. So I think most people are a smidgen more interested in what he’s up to, than a woman who is no longer Attorney General talking to the husband of a woman who is not sitting behind the Resolute desk in the White House. Maybe that’s just me.

So do you think this is finally it? The thing that gets Trump impeached?

Trump’s not getting impeached.

But… obstruction of justice! 

The House is as likely to vote to impeach Trump on this or indeed any other illegal/unethical thing he’s actually currently doing as I am to sprout a peach tree out of my tailbone. This is your occasional reminder that today’s GOP has no moral or ethical center, and apparently works under the belief that the entire point to the life of the average American citizen is to fork over their progressively declining wages to large companies to make the very rich that much richer. Trump’s helping with that goal, so why would they get in the way with that? Trump could tromp into the White House rose garden, club Sean Spicer to death live on Fox and Friends, and then skull-fuck the bloody corpse, chortling about his electoral college victory all the while, and all you would get out of the GOP is Paul Ryan’s patented little grimace, and the general argument that it’s the president’s prerogative to skull-fuck the corpse of any of his staff, so why is the mainstream media making such a big deal about it.

So, yeah. Don’t pick out your glittery impeachment pants just yet. You’re gonna have to wait for 2019 at the earliest for that.

Also, for the record: I do not endorse anyone, including but not limited to the President of the United States, doing anything to Sean Spicer to bring about his death or even his mild physical discomfort, in the White House rose garden or indeed anywhere else, much less then skull-fucking his corpse, bloody or otherwise, on live or recorded television, streaming on the internet or even in private. Please do not kill Sean Spicer, ever. He’s already dead inside. That should be enough for anybody.

So what do we get out of the Comey hearing?

You get the satisfaction out of confirming that Donald Trump is a real piece of shit both as a human being and as a president. Congratulations!

Late breaking news! Trump calls Comey a liar!

This is a surprise?

He says he’ll testify under oath about what Comey said!

Who said that?

Someone on Twitter!

Oh, okay, then.

You seem skeptical.

Even if Trump did promise testify under oath (which, if his personal lawyers are competent — big if — they would never in a second advise he ever do ever in the history of ever, ps: never ever ever), and he somehow didn’t back out of it (which if his lawyers are competent they would try to get him to do), the chances he wouldn’t lie his ass off even under oath is pretty slim, because he’s Donald Trump, and what he does is lie his ass right off. Because he’s always done it and it’s worked so far, up to and including getting him into the White House, so why change strategies?

Look: No one — no one — believes Trump more than they believe Comey. The best you can say is his partisans either don’t think it’s important that Trump lies out of his ass all the time, or they’re confident he’ll just keep getting away with it. So, sure: Get Trump under oath. He’ll lie. And when he lies, because why shouldn’t he, it’s always worked before, let’s see what happens then. Let’s see what the GOP says about it then.

Uh… that seems to be ending on a down note, there.

You’re the one asking questions, man.

But, fine. Look: Scamperbeasts!

Thank you. I needed that.

I know. We all did.

But not so ashamed that I won’t share it. And so timely:

You’re welcome.

The Nightmare Stacks has been reissued in paperback in the UK and as a lower cost ebook in the USA, and The Delirium Brief is nearly upon us, so it's about time for me to write my usual crib sheet essay about the seventh Laundry Files novel!

It should be fairly obvious by now that, although initially the stories were set in the same year as publication, the Laundry universe has now dropped behind the real world calendar and diverged drastically from our own history. "The Annihilation Score" was set during the summer of 2013, in a UK suffering from a surplus of superheroes (or at least extradimensional brain-eater afflicted humans experiencing outbreaks of eldritch powers before their heads exploded: some of whom assumed that donning skin tight lycra and committing vigilante crimes was a sensible reaction to being parasitized). It reached a conclusive and grisly climax in the massacre at the Last Night of the Proms, an annual British cultural event; a horrible event the true nature of which was, nevertheless, suppressed and presented to the public as a terrorist incident not unlike the Moscow theater hostage crisis of 2002. At the end of "The Annihilation Score" the Laundry's cordon of secrecy was in tatters but plausible deniability had been maintained—barely.

"The Nightmare Stacks" takes place in March-May 2014, and is the story of how the continually escallating threats faced by the Laundry finally overcame the agency's ability to suppress and contain incursions without public notice, and is the first half of a two-book pivot point in the series (the ongoing consequences of the disaster in Leeds continue to the inevitable conclusion in "The Delirium Brief"); it's the beginning of the tumble over the cliff-edge leading down to the Lovecraftian Singularity.

And we have a new narrative viewpoint, and sundry new protagonists showing up.

Many readers commented on the absence of Bob from "The Annihilation Score" and "The Nightmare Stacks". Bob is back as the primary (but not the only) viewpoint in "The Delirium Brief", but we've reached a point in the series where he has to be deployed with extreme parsimony. After fourteen years in the Laundry Bob is, despite his ongoing self-deception, not entirely human: watch what he does, not what he says. In "The Rhesus Chart" he walked into a nest of vampires and came out with his hair mussed but basically intact. You can't use a guy like that routinely in an ongoing series without either sacrificing the sense of jeopardy (will our hero survive?) or escallating the threats he faces drastically. So Bob took a break for "The Nightmare Stacks" and was replaced by a plausible Bob 2.0—a young PHANG called Alex Schwartz, introduced as a minor character in "The Rhesus Chart".

Alex in 2014 is not a million miles away from Bob in 2002, when the first novel is set. He's bright, under-socialized, has crippling social self-doubt, and is obsessed with some of the more recondite corners of computer science and/or mathematics (predisposing him towards a career in the Laundry). Unlike 2002-era Bob, Alex is a PHANG—not exactly a vampire, but not a long way away from one. He's got the super-speed and strength and the whole bursting into flames in sunlight shtick. He's also got the OCD that goes with certain vampire traditions. He's bright enough to recognize that PHANG syndrome is not a gift, it's a nasty parasitic infection that can only be held at bay by extremely unpleasant means and may well be sexually transmissible—a paranormal equivalent of HIV. Unlike most classic vampires, Alex also has a family: mum, dad, irritating younger sister, and middle class parental expectations to deal with. They're loosely modelled on the family of a long-ago friend: that particular suburb has changed a bit, but the sort of people who live there? Not so much.

I'm not going to recap the plot of "The Nightmare Stacks" other than to say that there are two classic novel structures in train here—a romance novel overlapping with an alien invasion story (subtype: horror). Farah Mendlesohn theorises that romance and horror share common structural underpinnings: both forms rely for tension on an irresistible intrusion that threatens to disrupt (or end) the life of the protagonist, and can only be resolved by coming to some sort of accommodation with a new post-intrusion reality. "The Nightmare Stacks" turns out to be a worked example of this theory, albeit unintentionally: we'll be seeing more of both the Alex/Cassie romance and the invading Host in "The Delirium Brief". (As for the personality of Cassie ... let's just say that I find Manic Pixie Dream Girls much less insipid when we insert an a, making her a maniac pixie etcetera.)

About the setting:

I grew up in Leeds and as is traditional I had to destroy my home city sooner or later. The setting more or less wrote itself: pretty much everything I wrote about Quarry House is true (I have friends who worked there). See for yourself:

The Royal Armouries Museum is real, too, and well worth an afternoon's visit to boggle at one of the world's finest collections of murder cutlery.

Even more interestingly, the former Enfield Pattern Room, now the British nation's reference collection of firearms, really is held by the National Firearms Centre on a site close by the Armouries museum. (No, I haven't been there: it's a closed collection and getting an invitation is non-trivial.) Situating the Nightmare Stacks in the NFC seemed logical in context ...

The annual cartoon and anime festival is also a real thing, although I took significant liberties with the timing (I moved it about five months) and it doesn't really cause the city centre to be overrun by cosplayers—it's nothing like as large as San Diego Comicon. (If Leeds did ever feature a major Comicon event it would probably be held at the Leeds Arena which is inconveniently over a mile away from Quarry House.)

The Bunker out past the ring road is, to the best of my knowledge, a real thing. Its location puts it around the 5psi overpressure circle for a 250Kt nuclear explosion over the city centre. However, I've never been there—my description is very loosely based on the contemporaneous ROTOR installations that were built elsewhere in the UK, including the Secret Bunker in Fife (a local tourist attraction). I confined myself to adding an extra floor.

Some notes about elves:

"The Nightmare Stacks" is the last of four Laundry novellas and novels that pastiche specific urban fantasy subgenres rather than British spy thriller writers. ("The Delirium Brief" isn't a homage to anyone in particular; it's its own thing.) "Equoid" was the unicorn novella; "The Rhesus Chart" was the vampire novel: "The Annihilation Score" was the superhero yarn: and "The Nightmare Stacks" is all about gracile pointy-eared hominid magic users—elves.

We know from earlier books (right back to "The Atrocity Archives") that the Laundryverse is a multiverse, with parallel universes where history has taken some rather odd turns. The Host belong to another subspecies of gracile hominin, genus homo, and are about as closely related to us as we are to H. Neanderthalensis.

The big difference in their history—the point of divergence—occured about 100,000-250,000 years ago: the point mutation that caused the H. Sapiens version of the FOXP2 gene to diverge from chimps and other hominids occurred much later in elves. FOXP2 is expressed as a transcription factor that permits the development of spoken language. Neanderthals shared our mutant version: we've had the capability for language (a modified hyoid bone and larynx) for somewhere between a quarter and a million years. The ancestors of the elves didn't get it until much more recently.

Gracile hominids are individually vulnerable, but are social animals with a rich repertoire of learned behaviour. Language facilitates horizontal transfer of knowledge; a mute hominid species would be under intense selection pressure for stronger theory of mind and enhanced cognition so that they can survive despite lacking rich semantic communication.

Consider the implications of this restriction in a setting where what you think can have external physical effects—the ritual magic path in the Laundry universe. It imposes a selection pressure for general intelligence. The baseline of general intelligence among elves is higher than among H. Sapiens because the dumb ones weren't able to borrow ideas from their intelligent peers, and were vulnerable to predation. Elves are hunters—they tend to have slightly larger brains and a high energy metabolism, and although they're not obligate carnivores their ancestors used their strong theory of mind to enhance their abilities as ambush hunters. That's where the big eyes and the pointy ears come in.

When the ancestors of elves acquired language, then rapidly wiped out every rival hominin subspecies on their world. Magic-wielding hominin ambush-hunters can generally be described as "sociopaths" by the standards of non-magic-wielding hominin hunter-gatherer/scavenger/pursuit hunters. The normal form of social control among elven societies is the geas or magical compulsion, in which the strongest or highest-status individual imposes their will directly on those lower down the feudal pile. On the diplomatic level, they tend to be aggressive and warlike.

One side-effect of building a civilization on geases is that you go direct from the divine right of kings to fascism as your culture acquires complexity and attempts to address the drawbacks of a social order that produces critical single points of failure. Another is that any technology you get is based on direct mental manipulation of the world around you. (Elves understand the laws of thermodynamics and metallurgy, but would never dream of building a jet engine: they'd grow a hollow ceramic tube and use a gate to a universe with different physical laws to heat the air moving through it.)

This has regrettable consequences in the universe of the Laundry Files. Notably, the elven civilization attracts the attention of the Elder Gods somewhat sooner than low-magic-use human civilizations. By the time we meet All-Highest, the Host have been in hibernation in their redoubt for some centuries, cowering under the rubble of their shattered world.

The shadow roads connect a manifold of different universes with different physical laws and histories: they are largely time-independent. The road Agent First traverses brings her to our world in our specific time, during the early phase of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, simply because it's easier to get to our world during the Lovecraftian singularity: magic attracts magic.

(Agent First is anomalous in having some capacity for empathy. Among H. Sapiens, the prevalence of sociopathic personalities is around 2-5%; among H. Alfarensis the prevalence of empathic capacity mirrors this. Of course, empathy is often an asset for a spy.)

The world the elves are invading from is probably not where they originally evolved. They're aggressive and invasive, after all. They expand via percolation between worlds, but this leaves huge gaps in their coverage. They're also lazy enough that they'll take an unoccupied or defenseless parallel earth in preference to one with existing hominid "vermin" who need hunting down or enslaving, and there's an infinity of worlds out there, so the previous scouts who found the way to our world reported (a) no wealth worth stealing and (b) an annoying prevalence of orcs who have developed cold iron weaponry (which interferes with elven magic). It was about as attractive a prospect for invasion as contemporary Afghanistan. But now there's a lot of infrastructure (even if it's incredibly ugly, noisy, dangerous and annoying), lots of orcs to enslave, the moon's still intact, and the background magical "noise" makes it stand out like a sore thumb.

Wrt. pointy ears vs. round/floppy ears: firstly, note the domestication hypothesis (and supporting evidence); floppy/rounded/non-pointy ears correlate with domestication by humans. Note also Stephen Pinker's argument that human civilization progresses (and internicine violence decreases) because we're domesticating ourselves—intractably violent members of human societies are weeded out and don't pass on their genes. This process accelerated with agricultural settlement and cities (representing order-of-magnitude increases in population density, hence opportunities for friction to result in violence). The Alfar are intelligent but non-domesticated. In a society organized by direct mental coercion, but based on an intrinsically undomesticated and potentially violent species, empathy is a dangerous character failing.

So it's not too far off the mark to say that in the Laundry universe, elves are nazis with pointy ears.

Spoiler (for the record): The Laundryverse and the Merchant Princes multiverse do not coexist in the same fictional universe. (Who do you think I am, the elderly Robert A. Heinlein?)

Assorted militaria:

I brainstormed the British military response to the Host with various ex-military people I know. Apologies to anyone who spotted any of the numerous holes in how it plays out!

To turn one of Clarke's laws upside down, any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. The Alfar host is the remnant of an advanced mobile combined-arms force and has doctrine and tactics adapted to fight other highly mobile, energy-intensive thaumaturgic threats. They're utterly unequipped to go up against tanks and jet fighters ... but the converse is also true. (Many thanks to ex-RAF Squadron Leader Simon Bradshaw for discussing the pros and cons of a QRA intercept of weaponized dragons, and explaining why heat-seeking missiles and air combat radar might be less than useful against them.) I had to rig the dice a little to provide a plausible conflict: too little magic and the Alfar host could have been arrested by the West Yorkshire Metropoltican Police, too much and it's game over already. To some extent it's an idiot plot insofar as All-Highest fails because he purged most of his intelligence section prior to the invasion and handed executive control to a proponent of air cavalry: but the cognitive biases of the Alfar preclude understanding how control structures in an H. Sapiens society work (we're mind-bogglingly inefficient), and the fact that the United Kingdom is nominally a monarchy is a plausible source of confusion for the 24 hours or so the invasion lasts.

Pinky and Brains' Kettenkrad is a left-over from "The Atrocity Archives". Yes, they really did have an optional machine gun mount. And yes, the Royal Armouries really do have an M134 minigun in their collection, and although they weapons don't have ammunition and are nailed down, they're not disabled/deactivated (according to a former assistant curator).

As for what my favourite element of the whole book was? Hands down, it's the dinner party sequence. (I was trying to match the dinner party in Lois McMaster Bujold's "A Civil Campaign" for painful hilarity. I don't think I quite got there, but I'll happily take silver.)

Any questions? Over to you!

I’m a Liberal and I want a brighter future.

This General Election hasn’t been about that. I’m sick at heart of the Theresa May—Jeremy Corbyn—Brexit bad trip to a meaner past.

But the hope of a Liberal future keeps me going.

My vote on Thursday will not be just to stop the Conservatives / stop Labour because though both are s**t I’m marginally more afraid of one than the other. I can’t vote to make Britain just a bit worse.

I’ll vote positively.

Here’s my hope of a future worth voting for.

Do you want a brighter future?

Because if you do, then I should warn you – it’s going to take all sorts of things. Making society be for everyone, so everyone can be free. Finding long-term funding for the NHS and schools. And not being afraid to reconsider when things go wrong.

It won’t be easy answers, fear and blame.

But I’ll tell you what it could be…

Britain, 2030. A Liberal Democrat government, and a decade since Britain voted against the mayhem of a disastrous bad Brexit deal and changed Britain’s future.

The biggest change was the one no-one expected. It was Brexit that broke Westminster. The Prime Minister no-one elected ordered everyone to obey. The government without a plan grabbed for more power than ever. But the more they tightened their grip, the more people slipped through their fingers. Their extreme Brexit mess brought Britain to the brink of disaster, yet they never took responsibility for their own incompetence and they still tried to stop anyone having a say. Labour just split four ways and fought each other. But with popular pressure (and all those Lib Dem gains), even MPs rebelled. A new hope. When Britain had another choice, we threw out the idea of government control too.

The Liberal Democrat government came to power to bring everyone together, admitting they wouldn’t always know best and promising to listen all the way. Principles first, then consulting people, testing plans out to make sure they work, building consensus – that’s how changes happen now. The age of imposition leading to massive screw-ups is over.

It’s much easier to be heard and make a difference. Britain’s nations, regions, cities and counties took back control from one-size-fits-all Westminster. With real power distributed, economies across the country are stronger. Fair votes mean you get what you vote for and can hold them to account. With the end of safe seats, some Labour and Tory MPs gave up, but now all parties have to work harder and listen more. And whether the best place to use power is locally, nationally or internationally, the most important place to take decisions is you taking power over your own life.

The NHS has the money it needs and now treats mental health as urgently as physical, but it’s also helped by preventative health and reducing pollution.

Schools have the money they need, but they’re also helped by tackling child poverty. Better education, training and apprenticeships enables everyone to have opportunity to realise their potential, whatever their background, whatever their choices.

At last there’s a government willing to tell it like it is. That people want to come to Britain because it’s a brilliant country with British values of tolerance, freedom and standing up for the underdog. That there’s no way to stop that without tearing down so much that’s good about Britain. And why should we want to? Openness and compassion have always made Britain a brighter country for everyone. And for the people for who still want Britain smaller and meaner, if you want the economy to thrive to support our NHS and schools – if you want the people to work in our NHS and schools – then we have to welcome migrants too.

At last Britain’s leaders are in tune with Britain’s bigger values. It’s made such a difference to have a government valuing diversity and inclusion, refusing to find groups to blame. The Liberal Democrats set their mission as freedom for everyone from poverty, ignorance and conformity. They tackled inequality and prejudice, saying whatever your sex, race, class, sexuality, gender identity, disability, belief or background, you were part of society, the barriers stopping you getting on must go, and we should all look out for each other when we need it. That was the turning point against the rise in hate crime a decade ago.

There’s more freedom and less crime. Everyone has the liberty to live their lives as they choose (without harming others) after scrapping victimless crimes that waste people’s lives, waste public money and waste police time. Now police get to chase the real crooks, far fewer young and ethnic minority people get criminalised, and the Cornish economy’s booming on the cannabis crop.

Remember when governments always acted like people were simple and taxes had to be complicated? That was the wrong way round. Now everyone pays their fair share and can see where the money comes from, and small businesses flourish because the wealthiest can’t find loopholes.

Britain is becoming more respected again in the world. It’s been hard work. After decades of shouting insults instead of wanting to make Europe work, a lot of our European partners were just fed up with us. But it helped that there was relief all round when Britain voted not to keep trying for a much worse deal than we had to start with by leaving, and instead at last to get stuck in and change the EU for the better. Making it more democratic, decentralised and open. Encouraging both free and fairer trade in and beyond the biggest single market in the history of the world. Standing up against racism and intolerance. And young people feel like they’ve got their future back.

Above all, Liberal Britain has turned to the future. Innovation and enterprise are getting results. Green jobs are leading the economic revival as internationalist Britain becomes a leader in zero-carbon technology to tackle climate change. With environmental and economic responsibility at home, we’ve stopped leaving problems for the next generation to tackle, and started addressing intergenerational equality.

Not everyone’s happy. For bullies, busybodies and bigots it’s much harder to push others around. But life’s better for most people who want control over their own lives, not control over everyone else’s.

A Liberal Britain by 2030 isn’t a certainty. It’s a choice. And you always have more choices. You can stay back and let things happen. You can complain there isn’t a better yesterday. Or, every new day, you can decide to get stuck in and help make a better future.

Why I’m Looking Forward To Britain In 2030

If you’re wondering why this isn’t totally on-message, it’s partly because I never am, partly because the election’s had naff all vision in it so I wanted to say something I felt, and it’s partly because although it’s about the future, it’s one I prepared earlier.

My health has been almost as crappy as the election campaign and I’ve not been able to do much. And the election’s not cheered me up, to put it mildly. I’ve not had the mojo to write.

But this January the inspiring people at Your Liberal Britain ran a competition to imagine what a Liberal Britain might look like by 2030, and I wrote something for them then. Here it is.

I hadn’t been expecting a General Election, either.

You might have recognised some of the words, some from unexpected places, but not from our Manifesto. The way I’m most on-message, it turns out, is that the Lib Dem Manifesto is Change Britain’s Future and the party’s been campaigning for a Brighter Future. What I’ve published above was almost all written in January, but after using “better future” a lot in mine I’ve decided that I like “brighter” better. So I changed a few of those.

The Your Liberal Britain competition asked for 500 words. I wrote nearly a thousand in one big rush and, having left it until the deadline, was hacking bits out all evening to try and reduce my word count. I remember deleting one paragraph at five to midnight just because it was the right length. I didn’t much like what I slashed down to 500 words, and I didn’t win with my 500 words. Now I come to share my words, I’ve kept the ones I liked.

More Liberal Democrat Values

Every day in the 2015 General Election, I chose an inspiring Liberal quote from a wide range of people. You can see all the variety of Lib Dems Believe here.


Me on video in 2015: Liberal Democrats Believe



Me on video this year: Another Vote – Another Disappointment?



Your Liberal Britain: all sorts of goodies, and worth coming back to after the election for more inspiration and more consultation. I’ve not had the spoons to do all the Lib Dem philosophy I want to over the last couple of years. I’m thrilled these new members have been doing way more than I ever could.


And of course the official version – the 2017 Lib Dem Manifesto Change Britain’s Future, free to download in a range of accessible formats.


Now, please, if you found any of this moving, or inspiring, or just some hope, go out and vote for it.

There were varying degrees of excitement amongst Liberal Democrats that the Economist had recommended a vote for the party this Thursday. Some were ecstatic at the idea of any sort of publication that people have actually heard of endorsing the party, while others actually read the piece in question and saw that the endorsement was, at best, half-hearted:

No party passes with flying colours. But the closest is the Liberal Democrats. Brexit is the main task of the next government and they want membership of the single market and free movement. (Their second referendum would probably come to nothing, as most voters are reconciled to leaving the EU.) They are more honest than the Tories about the need to raise taxes for public services; and more sensible than Labour, spreading the burden rather than leaning only on high-earners. Unlike Labour they would reverse the Tories’ most regressive welfare cuts. They are on the right side of other issues: for devolution of power from London, reform of the voting system and the House of Lords, and regulation of markets for drugs and sex.
Like the other parties, they want to fiddle with markets by, say, giving tenants first dibs on buying their property. Their environmentalism is sometimes knee-jerk, as in their opposition to new runways and fracking. The true liberals in the party jostle with left-wingers, including Tim Farron, who is leading them to a dreadful result. But against a backward-looking Labour Party and an inward-looking Tory party about to compound its historic mistake over Brexit, they get our vote.

It’s not a vote for the Liberal Democrats as they are, more for some ideal version of the party and liberalism that exists in the head of an Economist leader writer. It’s the same thing that had people a couple of years ago claiming that Tim Farron isn’t a ‘strong liberal voice’ and is a shibboleth amongst certain people in and out of the party. The ‘true liberalism’ they speak of (and never trust anyone who claims they know what ‘true’ liberalism is, as thought the whole history of liberalism wasn’t a story of resisting absolute dogmas) is a vision that only appeals to a small number of people of whom a disproportionate number are writers for the Economist and newspaper comment sections. It’s a liberalism of ‘my life’s quite nice but not perfect, and I went to a same-sex marriage once, so why should I have to pay more taxes to help anyone else out?’ not one that wants to challenge or change the system.

Further, they’re not really asking people to vote for the Liberal Democrats, but rather vote against the Tories and Labour and in faovur of some new nebulous centre party:

We know that this year the Lib Dems are going nowhere. But the whirlwind unleashed by Brexit is unpredictable. Labour has been on the brink of breaking up since Mr Corbyn took over. If Mrs May polls badly or messes up Brexit, the Tories may split, too. Many moderate Conservative and Labour MPs could join a new liberal centre party—just as parts of the left and right have recently in France. So consider a vote for the Lib Dems as a down-payment for the future. Our hope is that they become one element of a party of the radical centre, essential for a thriving, prosperous Britain.

(As an aside, out of the many explanations of voting behaviour a vote as ‘a down-payment for the future’ is a new one on me)

Here, they’re doing what many others have wistfully done over the past couple of months in looking wistfully over the Channel towards Emmanuel Macron and thinking ‘if only…’ but if your plan for resurrecting the British centre is nothing more than hoping for a Macron then you don’t have a plan, you just have political fanfiction. They’re hoping for ‘a new liberal centre party’ or ‘a party of the radical centre’ to miraculously emerge and subsume the Liberal Democrats as ‘one element’ of it. They always put ‘radical’ in front of ‘centre’ when describing this type of hypothetical party, but it’s a doth-protest-too-much move as the vision is anything but radical as it’s about those who’ve always had power in some form or another – and for whom the Economist is the in-house journal – wanting to ensure that no one scares the horses or damages their position. What liberalism there is in there is entirely coincidental to the cause and described with the smallest ‘l’ possible. When proponents of this form of centrism look towards the Liberal Democrats it’s not with any misty-eyed fondness for the party’s radical past or with any acknowledgement that’s what now consensus had to be fought for and won, over and over again, but rather with the eye of a predator wondering which parts of the party can be cannibalised and repurposed into a quick-fit infrastructure for the new ‘radical centre’.

All votes count the same in the ballot box, of course, and no one can tell which were cast for this election and which were down-payments on a future, but even in a time when praise for the Liberal Democrats is rare, we should be wary of the motives behind some of it.

[Epistemic status: very speculative]

The two most exciting developments in psychopharmacology in the 21st century so far have been ketamine for depression and MDMA for PTSD.

Unlike other antidepressants, which work intermittently over a space of weeks, ketamine can cause near-instant remission of depression with a single infusion – which lasts a week or two and can be repeated if needed. Ketamine use may be successful in 50-70% of patients who have failed treatment with conventional antidepressants. Ketamine treatment has some issues right now, but the race is on to create an oral non-hallucinogenic version which could be the next big blockbuster drug and revolutionize depression treatment.

MDMA (“Ecstasy”) is undergoing FDA Phase 3 clinical trials as a treatment for PTSD. Preliminary research has been small and underpowered, but suggests response rates up to 80% and effect sizes greater than 1 in this otherwise-hard-to-treat condition. None of this is on really firm footing – that’ll have to wait for the Phase 3. But signs are looking very good.

I say these are the two most exciting developments mostly because no other developments have been exciting. In terms of normal psychiatric drugs, the best that the 21st century has given us has probably been pimavanserin and aripiprazole, modest updates to the standard atypical antipsychotic model. These drugs are probably a bit better than existing ones for the people who need them (especially pimavenserin for psychosis in Parkinson’s) but they don’t revolutionize the treatment of any condition and nobody ever claimed that they did. And most drugs aren’t even at this level – they’re new members of well-worn classes with slightly different side effect profiles. The landscape was so quiet that ketamine came in like a bolt from the blue, and MDMA is set to do the same in a couple of years when the trial results come out.

(if I’m wrong, and history decides these two drugs weren’t the biggest developments, the most likely failure mode is that psilocybin turned out to be more important than MDMA)

There’s a morality tale to be told here about how the War on Drugs choked off vital research on some of the most powerful psychiatric compounds and cost us fifty years in exploring these effects and treating patients. I agree with this morality tale as far as it goes, but I also think there’s another, broader morality tale beneath it.

Suppose that neither ketamine nor MDMA were illegal drugs. Ketamine was just used as an anaesthetic. MDMA was just used as a chemical intermediate in producing haemostatic drugs, its original purpose. Now the story is that, fifty years later, we learn that this anaesthetic and this haemostatic turn out to have incredibly powerful psychiatric effects. What’s our narrative now?

For me it’s about the weird inability of intentional psychopharmaceutical research to discover anything as good as things random druggies use to get high.

For decades, pharmaceutical companies have been coming out with relatively lackluster mental health offerings – aripiprazole, pimavanserin, and all the rest. And when asked why, they answer that mental health is hard, the brain is the most complicated organ in the known universe, we shouldn’t expect there to be great cures with few side effects for psychiatric diseases, and if there were we certainly shouldn’t expect them to be easy to find.

And this would make sense except in the context of ketamine and MDMA. Here are some random chemicals that affect the brain in some random way, which people were using mostly because they felt good at raves, and huh, they seem to treat psychiatric diseases much better than anything produced by some of the smartest people in the world working for decades on ways to treat psychiatric diseases. Why should that be?

One could argue it’s all about numbers vs. base rates. There are way more chemicals synthesized each year by people who aren’t looking for psychiatric drugs than by people who are. Even if the people who are looking for drugs are a thousand times more likely to find them, the people-who-aren’t-looking can still overwhelm them with sheer numerical advantage. And maybe when a psychiatric drug is discovered by people who weren’t looking for it, what this looks like is a few random people trying it, noticing it feels good, and turning it into a drug of abuse.

And I’m sure this is part of the story. But that just passes the buck to the next question. Abusers take the vast flood of possible chemicals and select the ones they think will feel good at raves. Psychopharmacologists take the vast flood of possible chemicals and select the ones they think will treat mental illnesses. How come the abusers’ selection process is better at picking out promising mental health treatments?

Here’s one hypothesis: at the highest level, the brain doesn’t have that many variables to affect, or all the variables are connected. If you smack the brain really really hard in some direction or other, you will probably treat some psychiatric disease. Drugs of abuse are ones that smack the brain really hard in some direction or other. They do something. So find the psychiatric illness that’s treated by smacking the brain in that direction, and you’re good.

(in fact, the most effective existing treatment for depression is electroconvulsive therapy – ie giving the brain a big electric shock. This is maybe the crudest, most literally “smack the brain really hard” treatment out there, but it sure does work)

Actual carefully-researched psychiatric drugs are exquisitely selected for having few side effects. The goal is something like an SSRI – mild stomach discomfort, some problems having sex, but overall you can be on them forever and barely notice their existence. In the grand scheme of things their side effects are tiny – in most placebo-controlled studies, people have a really hard time telling whether they’re in the experimental or the placebo group.

Nobody has a hard time telling whether they’re in the experimental or placebo group of a trial of high-dose MDMA. I think this might be the difference. If you go for large effects – even if you don’t really care what direction the effect is in – you’ll get them. And if you go for small, barely perceptible effects, then you’ll get those too. The dream of the magic bullet – the drug that treats exactly what it’s supposed to treat but otherwise has no effect at all on you – is just a dream. The closest you can come is something with miniscule side effects but a barely-less-miniscule treatment effect.

But given that we’re all very excited to learn about ketamine and MDMA, and given that if their original promise survives further testing we will consider them great discoveries (and given that ECT was also a great and productive discovery) it suggests we chose the wrong part of the tradeoff curve. Or at least it suggests a different way of framing that tradeoff curve. A drug that makes you feel extreme side effects for a few hours – but also has very strong and lasting treatment effects – is better than a drug with few side effects and weaker treatment effects. That suggests a new direction pharmaceutical companies might take: look for the chemicals that have the strongest and wackiest effects on the human mind. Then see if any of them also treat some disease.

I think this is impossible with current incentives. There’s too little risk-tolerance at every stage in the system. But if everyone rallied around the idea, it might be that trying the top hundred craziest things Alexander Shulgin dreamed up on whatever your rat model is would be orders of magnitude more productive than whatever people are doing now.

Or it might not be. I can also think of a counterargument to the theory above, which is that our current best model of ketamine suggests it’s a non-psychoactive metabolite that has most of the useful antidepressant effect. In fact, a lot of people think that one form of ketamine is hallucinogenic (and extremely effective against chronic pain) and another form (or its metabolite) is the antidepressant. I’m a little suspicious trying to calculate the odds of a single chemical having two forms, one of which is a really exciting analgesic, and the other of which is a really exciting antidepressant, by two different mechanisms. It sounds too much like finding some new chemical compound whose solid form is a room-temperature superconductor, and whose liquid form catalyzes cold fusion, by two totally different mechanisms. It seems a little too lucky (see here for some ketamine skepticism, and here for my response). But if it were true, it means that ketamine’s psychoactive effects were a red herring in helping us discover it as an antidepressant, even though they were a very effective red herring.

When this election was called I thought getting rid of the Tories was secondary to trying to get rid of Brexiters.

Of course this election turned out to be about everything BUT Brexit. I'm still rabidly pro-EU. I'm not giving up on the dream but I think the fight for Remain is now totally over. The fight for Return will have to start but it can't exactly do that for a while.

The Tories have shown themselves to be even more useless than I'd given them credit for. Since May took over as Prime Minister I've struggled to understand some of her actions. Her failure to actively build bridges with Remains and picking a judicial fight over Article 50 rather than just get it through the Commons first time are top among the pre-election "blunders". These pale in comparison to the errors that May has made since calling the election.

She can't help but say hypocritical things like how she was too busy thinking about Brexit to attend a debate (well you called the election during the negotiations Prime Minister!) or complain about Labour being all soundbites and no substance (this needs little explanation!). Her manifesto policies were not just poorly conceived and rather empty, they were also pretty bleak. There was no vision there, none of the promise that Brexit supposedly will bring. It was all charges and pain.

Despite being extremely cool towards Corbyn before (his stances on the Falklands War and the IRA remain deep concerns to me), he seems like a professional whilst May appears dangerously inept.

At this point I'm more concerned about the prospect of a May return than a Corbyn premiership.

Meanwhile the Lib Dems, the only party I've ever voted for at general elections, have not taken off. The Brexit focus turned out to be the wrong strategy. They remain tarnished by coalition and caught off guard in what is turning out to be a possible national re-alignment politically. But right now the Lib Dems are the most sensible of the three main national parties (though some of those "Which Party Should You Support?" websites have me down as SNP!!). Their manifesto is sensible and costed. Tim Farron is a bit wet but he's not crazy and he's not utterly inept. At this point that's the best we can hope for.

You'd think as a near life-long Lib Dem member, a past paper candidate, and a liberal to my core, the decision to vote Lib Dem should be straightforward based on what I've laid out above. However, here in Dover, Yougov have got the seat down as leaning Labour. A chance to help punish the self-obsessed Tories who've put themselves before our national interest is calling out to me. I'm fighting it, but I don't think I'll know how I'll vote until I get to the polling booth.

And if you think that's crazy just take a look at this on the Yougov projections. If accurate (take a very large pinch of salt!) it suggests we could see massive seat changes across the country unlike anything seen for many years. I still think the Tories will win handsomely. But you never know!

One of the many ways in which beloved husband is doing an amazing job right now as Liberal Democrat candidate for Macclesfield is answering approximately a gazillion emails a day. Some, by this stage, literally in his sleep.

I’m long past ever standing as a candidate again, not least with this year’s catastrophically unhelpful health getting in the way even of helping Richard anywhere near as practically as I’d like.

So imagine my surprise and delight on receiving my own email enquiring about an urgent issue of Liberal Democrat policy which must be worrying people up and down the land: with Lib Dems committed to a referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal, if we form the new government on Thursday, who would negotiate a deal we were bound to oppose?

To B and How To B, That Is the Question

Here’s the question I was asked:

“…if you propose a second referendum for people to decide on the deal, assuming a Lib Dem government was in office, how would this happen in practice? Considering the party’s historic support for EU membership, who would conduct the negotiations for a Brexit deal for us to vote on? Would the responsibility for negotiations be devolved to the Civil Service or some other external body?”

And here’s the main part of my reply:

“In practice, of course, whatever party is in government, the vast majority of negotiations are conducted by civil servants: they are huge and vastly complicated and require a vast team of people and a lot of hard work. Even if David Davis isn’t doing any of it.

“The answer is to be found in the first chapter of the Lib Dem Manifesto, in effect – that doesn’t just set out the party’s policy around a third EU referendum, this time on the terms of the deal, but the party’s priorities in Parliament for setting the terms for the negotiators. The primary one is of course to remain in the Single Market, which virtually all the leading No figures led people to believe before last year’s referendum and then swerved into such a damaging far right isolationist position afterwards.

“Should there be a massive political earthquake and the Lib Dems form a majority government next week, I would be delighted and I have to admit a little surprised. However, there’s no doubt that would mean Britain’s centre of gravity on Brexit would have shifted markedly, so I would expect to see a choice between remaining as a full member or an exit deal based on a much closer relationship than Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and Paul Nuttall’s – one, as the likes of Farage or Johnson said before the referendum rather than what they’ve said since, similar to the relationship the EU has with Norway or Switzerland. Ironically, that means that the Brexit deal would be much closer to the one voters were told about in advance.

“As I say, the party’s aims for mitigating the disaster of Brexit in negotiations are set out in detail as the first chapter in the Manifesto, which you can download for yourself here.”

With the election constantly framed as a ‘choice’ between two parties offering two identical destructive chaotic Brexits and neither offering to talk about any of the detail – because they’re dumb, but they’re not that dumb – and the Lib Dems mostly failing to get a word in edgeways, I wish the question of exactly how Foreign Secretary Nick Clegg would lead Brexit negotiations come the glorious Lib Dem landslide this week were one that was keeping me awake at night.

Still, in the happy daydream in which the Liberal Democrats sweep to power on Thursday, imagine the Lib Dem government, with painfully honest commitment to its manifesto pledge, negotiating a liberal Brexit. Come the day of the deal referendum, instead of being offered destructive chaos, loss of British power and influence, rights stripped away, food riots and catastrophic collapse in living standards by the Theresa May—Jeremy Corbyn—Paul Nuttall Brexit alliance, which the majority of Britons would be likely to look at go ‘No thanks,’ the Brexit choice is instead a middle way, keeping most of the goodies but being able to say we’re not quite in. And so only a Lib Dem Government’s positive negotiations could save Brexit by producing a deal which the majority could swallow and go on to win the deal referendum for (mostly) out!

What an irony, eh?

No, somehow I can see a few steps along the way that I don’t quite believe, either…

What Should Negotiations Try To Keep (but probably won’t)?

What certainly will happen after Thursday’s result, whatever it turns out to be, is that Liberal Democrats in Parliament will stand up for British voters to have the final say on the final Brexit deal. The Conservatives and Labour will both deny that. They’ve both already voted to stop people having a say. And as the negotiations proceed into the long and complicated reality and away from back of a fag packet insult your intelligence slogans, Liberal Democrats in Parliament will stand up for these priorities and more:

• Protection of rights for EU citizens and UK citizens

• Membership of the Single Market and customs union

• Freedom of movement

• Opportunities for young people

• Defending social rights and equalities

• Maintaining environmental standards

• Law enforcement and judicial co-operation

• British business and jobs

• Science and research funding

• Travel and tourism

• Respect for the interests of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the people of Gibraltar

I really should’ve put these in my email, too. Sorry to the person who contacted me. Replying set my mind going, and it probably should have been the other way round.

The more Liberal Democrat MPs are elected this Thursday, the more votes there will be in Parliament to press for these priorities in the Brexit negotiations.

The more Conservative and Labour MPs are elected, with their Leaders’ identical commitment to a disastrous Brexit, the more certain it is that Parliament will throw all those priorities in the bin.

There probably won’t be any UKIP MPs elected on Thursday, but with Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn following UKIP Brexit policy to the letter, that won’t make any difference.

Lib Dem voices in Parliament will probably only be able to make things a bit better unless we romp home. But a bit better is better than nothing. Why vote for parties that have promised to make everything worse?

I have a terrible feeling that all those priorities and so much that’s good about Britain will be thrown in the bin. And that the scale of what – to pick only the latest prediction I’ve seen – Will Hutton calls “an epic act of national self-harm” will only become clear not even when the details have been published but only once it’s all actually happened, everything’s wrecked and it’s too late to go back.

Which means that only after the economy has crashed utterly and Britain’s divided and unhappy will a Liberal Democrat government be voted in as the last resort to do the impossible job of fitting the broken pieces together. Tried a bit of that seven years ago. Can’t say we enjoyed it and were greatly thanked for it…

The First Lady of Cartoon Voices, June Foray, will turn 100 years old on September 18. She deserves an honorary Academy Award for all she's given to the field.

I could go into a long explanation as to why but I have a feeling that if you're the kind of person who'd come to this blog, you don't need any convincing. You know why. There's an online petition you can sign to help maybe make this happen.

If by some chance you do need to know why or just want to be reminded of all the wonderful work June has done, here's an article by Mike Tiano, the guy who started the petition. Wish I'd thought to do that.

The post Squirrel Girl appeared first on News From ME.

Debuting tomorrow on HBO is If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast. Carl Reiner (age 95) chats with old people who are still working like Dick Van Dyke, Betty White, Mel Brooks, Norman Lear and even Stan Lee.

I don't know if I've said this before but I think Carl Reiner is one of the most amazing people I've ever met. Here's a man who is universally loved and respected and who has always been working. Since shortly after he got out of the Army in 1946, his career has never had a "nobody wants me" moment…and yet at no point has he ever done anything called The Carl Reiner Show. The unsold pilot that turned into The Dick Van Dyke Show might have been that had it sold but instead, he has had this long, long run making other people look good.

He made Sid Caesar look good on Your Show of Shows. He made Dick Van Dyke and others look good on The Dick Van Dyke Show. He made Mel Brooks look good on all those 2,000 Year Old Man records. He made Steve Martin look good in several hit movies. And so on. He has done occasional leads but basically he has worked in service of others through seven decades without being unemployed or making an enemy.

If I were a young actor today starting out, I don't think I would want to emulate the career of Leonardo DiCaprio or Robert Downey or any of the top box office stars. I think I'd want to grow up to be Carl Reiner.

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