Andrew Hickey

First, some context: These two tweets about an article in a Romance Writers of America magazine, in which the writer of the article counsels against taking a stand in social media on “controversial” topics:

Second, as it happens, and as it often happens when one has been writing a blog for almost seventeen years, I have a piece in the archive which touches upon this very topic, called “Why, Yes, I Should Write About Politics.” It’s worth the read, and my basic opinion on the matter is unchanged since then.

Third, new additional thoughts, and some other continuing thoughts, on the topic.

No one is obliged to speak on political or social issues if they don’t want, and no one is obliged to chip in their two cents on a topic that’s gathering pennies on any particular day. It’s perfectly fine to say, publicly or privately, “I don’t know enough on this and am reading up,” or “I’m on deadline and have to focus,” or “I have a lot of thoughts on this topic and 140 characters can’t express them” or even “addressing this topic right now feels like it would be sticking my head into a hive of angry hornets and why would I want to do that.” One’s participation is not required on every single topic, every single day.

But note well there is a difference between it being said that one is not required to offer up opinions, and that one should not offer them up at all — or, in this particular instance, that one should “take a more neutral approach.” The first of these is about the recognition that any individual writer has only so much time, energy and knowledge to commit to commenting on social issues, and the other is, frankly, about fear: you won’t sell books if you have an opinion a reader doesn’t like.

And that’s just terrible advice. It’s terrible advice in part because it’s simply not true — there are best selling writers in every genre who express opinions that outrage and annoy whole packs of people, and have since before they were best sellers, and yet they sell books nonetheless — and in part because it’s reductive. It’s an argument that posits that once a writer enters the stream of commerce, the most important thing about that writer’s life is their ability to sell books. Everything else about that writers’ life suddenly takes a back seat to that single commercial goal.

Speaking as an explicitly commercial writer — I write books that I plan to sell! To a lot of people! — I’m of the opinion that one of the worst ways to be a writer is to shear off or trim down all parts of your life that are not obviously designed to further the goal of selling tons of books. Why? Because then you’re cutting off the parts of your life that inform your writing, and which allow you to create the work that speaks to people, which is to say, to write the stories that people want to read and buy, and make you an author they wish to support. Being in “the business of selling books” doesn’t mean simply moving units of collections of words, any words at all. Those words have to mean something, to you and to potential readers, otherwise it won’t matter how hyperfocused you are on selling.

The author of this article notes “there are a million polarizing topics.” That’s correct, but it’s too limited. Any topic can be polarizing. I’ve been on the Internet for a quarter of a century now and have seen knock-down, drag-out, friendship-ending fights on topics I personally consider absolutely trivial. Turns out these topics aren’t trivial to many people — and it also turns out that “trivial” topics have social and political aspects to them that make them far less trivial than those outside those interest groups may initially expect (see: Gamergate). If one were to “take a more neutral stance” on any potentially polarizing topic, one would have to say nothing on anything, ever.

And you know what? It wouldn’t matter. Because whosoever writes a book — any book, in any genre — has written a polarizing thing. Entire genres are polarizing simply for existing; certainly romance writers, who have to deal with condescension and sexism because their field is predominantly woman-centered, know this, even though the genre is the single largest-selling genre of them all. Whatever the subject matter of a book is, someone can and probably will single it out for criticism, and that criticism can and often will be about the author’s presumed politics and social positions — which is why when Old Man’s War first came out, I got criticism (and praise!) for being, among other things, a conservative gun fetishist, which is amusing to anyone who knows me.

To write publicly is to be judged and to be criticized and to be polarizing. If one avoids speaking on public issues in social media only out fear of alienating readers, all one does is possibly delay such judgment. Judgment will happen for what you say and also what you don’t say. Judgment will happen for what you write in your books and what people assume you meant when you wrote those words, regardless of your authorial intent. Judgment will happen based on who people think you are based on the fantasy version of you they have in their head, which is almost always more about their own fears and desires than anything that has to do with the actual person you are.

So you might as well say whatever the hell you like, if you like. If nothing else, then the fantasy versions of who you are might be closer to the person you actually are.

Here’s the final thing I want you to think about: Advising writers to be publicly “neutral” on “controversial” topics is dangerous, because it gives those who want to silence any author who has opinions they don’t like a tool for that silencing. See? Even the RWA is telling you to shut up on this. Now shut the fuck up, or you will fail, and it will be your fault. RWA’s membership is as I understand it primarily women. I’m not entirely sure that it’s helpful for these writers to be given advice to be silent or “neutral”. For some of them, their just being a woman is enough excuse for some people to actively try to silence them, and threaten them, and to try to exert control over them. I don’t think that sort needs additional encouragement, intentional or otherwise, from a writer speaking to a largely women-centered audience.

Ever since I’ve been a published author, I’ve had people declaring that they will not buy my books because I wrote or said something they dislike. The intent was clear: You exist only to amuse me. I hold the key to your success. Do as I say or suffer the consequences. Whatever demanding or threatening I get is nothing compared to what others — different genders and ethnicities and sexualities — get. What these threateners, and apparently the author of this article, don’t understand is that the world is positively filled with people who will read my work despite of, because of, or independent of, my social and political thoughts. Those people will find my work and read it and enjoy it. They will find and read and enjoy the work of any author. Beyond that, I am not only the sum of my book sales. I write to sell and I write to amuse, but I don’t exist only for those things. I exist to be a writer, and a husband, and a father, and a friend, and a citizen of my nation and my world, and as an individual who is his own person, aside from the desires of others.

Which is why when people object to my positions on social and political issues, I say: Oh, well. And when they try to silence or threaten me, I say: Kiss my ass. I neither want nor need the sort of reader who thinks a book sale gives them the right to dictate how I live my life, or what I choose to speak about in the public sphere. As a writer, I believe that neither I nor any other writer, including ones giving advice in writing magazines, should be encouraging these sort of people to believe that they can or should tell writers what they can and cannot speak about publicly.

This is the long way of saying this: That advice? It’s bad. Don’t be “neutral” in public on the things that are important to you. Speak if you choose to speak. A book sale at the cost of your conscience is a very bad deal indeed.

I’ve been mired in a funk of hopefulness over the past week or so.

I blame 03— who, a couple of posts back, reminded me of last autumn’s announcement from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works (I’d seen it at the time, but had apparently repressed the memory). One of the world’s largest aerospace firms— about the furthest you can get from the tin-foil hat brigade— is claiming they’ll have a working prototype of a fusion reactor in five years. A production model in ten. A device small enough to load onto a truck, powerful enough to run 80,000 homes on 25kg of fuel per year. Trivial radiation issues that fade after a mere century.

If it’s true— if it’s true— it could change everything.

Carbon pollution: ended. Climate Change: mitigated at least, the worst scenarios averted (with hope for renewed stability once the current bolus of thermal inertia works its way through the system). Clean energy in abundance. A world where the boots of the powerful might even ease up off the necks of the rest of our necks, a world where resources are so plentiful there’s no real need to kick us in the teeth just to maintain the swimming pool in your rooftop penthouse. (Granted, a lot of one-percenters might well go on kicking us in the teeth just for fun. Still.) The Utopia Express, leaving on Platform #4 in 2025.

Yes, there were questions. There were skeptics. The comments on this Aviation Week piece run the gamut from measured skepticism about deuterium-tritium reactions through to Youtube links that purport to show a working fusion reactor someone cobbled together ten years ago out of two coat hangers and an alarm clock. (Hell, a lot of the comments right here on the ‘crawl show way more skeptical erudition than I could ever pretend to.) But Lockheed Martin. We’re talking technological breakthroughs here:  if not them, who?

I moped, at first. All my carefully-researched environmental apocalypsi, obsolete. All my grim odes to the coming dark age, suddenly quaint and simpleminded. My own increasing certainty that I’ll probably end up freezing to death with a broken and gangrenous leg, huddled in the burnt-out shell of some Scarborough duplex while my step-pones, fighting over the last tin of Irish Stew, swing nail-studded 2x4s at each other— maybe a wee bit too pessimistic after all. Thanks to Lockheed Martin I was less relevant than ever.

But then a change started to come over me. “This could… this could fix things,” I half-whispered to the BUG, as if speaking too loudly might somehow jinx the coming Utopia. “Things might actually get better. In just ten years.” A little later, down in the shower, I said it again, less hesitantly: “If we can just hang in there for another decade, we might be able to fix it all. They’re even talking about powering spaceships with this thing.”

Of course it seemed to good to be true. But what if it wasn’t? What if life could actually be awesome? Maybe I’d live to see warp drive and mini-skirted female astronauts with beehive hairdos after all.

And then I read this.

Okay, so Alternet isn’t what you’d call a peer-reviewed journal. But they’re not talking about their own opinions here; they’re gloating about the opinions of a major European financial institution. Apparently, Deutsch Bank expects that solar will own the energy industry in a mere fifteen years. And they’re not the only ones: this study out of Cambridge also sees solar kicking Petro’s ass in the not-too-distant future. A new generation of batteries will crush the storage issue. Forget cutting back on dirty energy for some airy-fairy reason like “saving the planet”; we’ll leave all that shit in the ground because it’s just not worth the cost of digging it out, given the cleaner, cheaper alternatives. The numbers seem compelling even to the oil barons themselves, if the industry’s rearguard campaign against solar is anything to go on.

We’re not quite there yet, of course. Coal’s still the cheaper option, and these new Flow Batteries aren’t quite up to the task at their current state of development, but within just fifteen years—

Ah. Now I see it.

Because, you know. Why bother investing in all that pricey R&D, so essential to Solar’s future dominance, if we’re going to have small, safe fusion reactors on every street corner before it even pays off? Why waste resources trying to farm wind and sunlight when the tech will be obsolete before it’s ready for prime time? Makes way more sense to just keep fracking that shale, digging that coal, for another few years until fusion takes over. Invest in renewables? You might as well be flushing billions of dollars down the toilet.

And if, a decade or so down the road, Skunk Works goes Oops— unforeseen technical difficulties, we misplaced a decimal place so we’re a little behind schedule— but don’t worry, we’ll have practical fusion in another ten years, twenty tops— well, there’ll always be good old reliable fossil fuel, infrastructure firmly in place, to take up the slack.

So here I am, a wide-eyed realist who dreamed for a few glorious hours that he was an optimist. But now the dream is over, and I am awake.

Now, I just want to know how much of Skunk Works’ funding comes from Exxon.

I buy cleaning supplies for my home a year or so at a time. Yesterday, I decide it's time…and my car could also use fueling and washing. So I get the car fueled and washed, then I drive it to a shopping center, taking a ticket on my way into the lot. I park my car. I go into a Target store there. I select Lysol and generic Windex and laundry detergent and Swiffer refills and laundry detergent and Oxi-Clean and trash bags and many other items. I push my cart up to a checkout lane where a cheery checker asks, "Do you need a parking validation?" I do…so I reach into my pocket to get my ticket —

— and it isn't there. The ticket, not my pocket.

Figuring it fell out when I pulled my shopping list out of that very pocket, I backtrack and search the aisles. I do not find it. I ask a lady who's stocking shelves in that area if she saw a lost parking ticket. She says no, then pulls out a walkie-talkie and calls the Customer Service desk and asks them if someone has turned one in. They check and tell her yes. Ah!

I walk over to the Customer Service desk and they tell me, yes, someone did turn in a lost parking ticket…a few days ago. The ticket is dated March 3. I figure out rather quickly that it is not mine and that a two-hour validation on it won't be of much help.

Well, I think, maybe mine is in my car or near it. I pay for my purchases and head for my car where, it turns out, there is no sign of the ticket. I load everything I bought into the trunk and then, Target receipt in hand, head for the Parking Office of this lot. I explain the situation and an attendant tells me that since I lost my ticket, I must pay full price, as if I've parked there all day. Full price is $10.00, which is ten bucks more than I'd pay if I had my ticket and it had been validated.

I explain to the gentleman that I just spent $251.00 at the Target store and show him my receipt. Doesn't that deserve a little consideration? Yes, it does. He considers it and tells me that since I lost my ticket, I must pay full price, as if I've parked there all day. "That will be ten dollars," he tells me.

I explain I have not been there all day. I have been there less than an hour. He tells me that this may be so but he has no proof of that. I ask him, "If I could prove I've been here less than an hour, would you let me go without paying?" He says he would but, of course, there is no conceivable way to prove this.

I pull out my receipt from the car wash and show him that it is time-stamped 55 minutes before. It also has my car's license plate info printed on it. "As you can see," I tell him, "I was in a car wash having this car washed 55 minutes ago. The car wash is five to ten minutes away from here so the longest I could possibly have been here is 50 minutes." I tell him he can come with me up to the third parking level if he doubts me to check my car's license plate and its cleanliness.

The man, well aware he has just been Perry Masoned to within an inch of his life, thinks for a moment, then tells me I will have to talk to his boss. He phones this person to come over from another office. In five minutes, I am explaining the whole matter to the boss.

I say, "I'm a very good customer, the kind you want to encourage to come back to this shopping center and shop. I just spent $251.00 at the Target store. Why don't you just let me exit for the price I would be paying if I hadn't lost my ticket, which is zero?"

The boss mulls it over for a few moments, then tells me that since I lost my ticket, I must pay full price, as if I've parked there all day. "That will be ten dollars," he tells me.

I sigh. I am reaching for my wallet when he looks again at the receipt from the car wash. He asks, "What is MAGNOR?" I tell him that's my license plate.

He says, "I remember a comic book called Magnor. It was done by the guys who do Groo the Wanderer."

In 1993, Sergio Aragonés and I were far enough ahead on Groo that we did a mini-series about a super-hero we named Magnor. At about the same time, and certainly not because of what I was paid on Magnor, I bought a new car. On a whim, and figuring wrongly that Magnor would be around for a long time, I got that as my personalized license plate. Many thousands of miles later when I traded in that car and got a new one, I transferred the plate over and it adorns the auto I now drive.

The comic has been outta print for a long time, although it's scheduled for a hardcover collection (and maybe a new sequel) next year. Since it was last published, I have spent much of my life explaining to people in parking lots who ask what "Magnor" is. Standing there in the lot of this particular shopping center, I am amazed. I have found the one person alive, with the possible but not probable exception of Sergio, who remembers that comic.

I tell him I am indeed one of the guys who does Groo the Wanderer. He is delighted to meet me and to tell me he has "almost every issue of Groo" and for some reason, he also feels the need to tell me that though he loves Groo, his favorite comic book is DC's Secret Six by Gail Simone. He spends a considerable amount of time telling me how wonderful it is.

Attention, Gail Simone: I will send you the location of this shopping center. If you ever go there and lose your parking ticket, do not panic. The parking lot boss not only will not charge you full price, he may even give you your choice of any car in the place.

What he gives me is a free ticket to get out. Some days are better than others and this, my friends, was one of them. Ten bucks is ten bucks and by saving it, I think I just doubled my lifetime income from the Magnor comic book.

It has come to our attention that barely weeks after its official release, one of the earliest projects of Not Watching This Weekend Studios is now being remade by a rival fantasy production studio. This gang of young upstarts, apparently known as The Conservative Party have announced plans to remake Not Watching This Weekend’s classic British comedy The Empty Chair.

Rumours also persist that this remake will change the script of the original debate, and rather than featuring a Prime Minister battling his way across a gridlocked London to avoid an empty chair, this version will instead feature a Prime Minister and his team who are so poor at negotiating that he manages to get himself into a situation where he rules himself out of any debates, and then ends up looking flabbergasted when they go on without him. (There’s talk that this will then lead up to a comic twist where the PM who can’t negotiate with TV companies will insist that he has the ability to renegotiate the entire country’s relationship with the European Union, but we think that would be straining credibility even for the Carry On Voting-esque farce this version appears to be becoming)

Some hopes for a good film were raised with news that an Old Etonian had been cast as the lead, but it appears that Damian Lewis, Dominic West, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne were all unavoidably detained elsewhere when the casting director called, so the lead role will instead be played by one of the current leads of BBC Two’s Wednesday lunchtime comedy-drama Politishout! Whoever this guy is, the next David Tennant he most certainly is not.

Unfortunately, after consulting with our lawyers, it turns out that we do not have the power to prevent this remake taking place, but they do assure us that it will likely only have a short run in cinemas before disappearing. They also believe that the very existence of it – and its near inevitable box office failure – will prevent any future remakes from taking place, because surely no one would want to recreate a bomb like this.

We look forward to not watching David Cameron in his Empty Chair, and then continue to not see him for many years to come.

It is my pleasure to announce that Recursive Occlusion, also known as the Logopolis book, is now available for sale. You can buy a copy here if you're so inclined.

If you pre-ordered the book via the old Hartnell Second Edition Kickstarter then assuming you also provided me with updated address information, your book has been ordered and is either on its way to you or to me so that I can sign it and send it to you. If you're owed a signed copy of Volume V, that will be in the same package. If you haven't sent me updated address information, check your Kickstarter messages for information.

If you have not pre-ordered the book, things are going to work a little differently this time than some of my other books. For one thing, the print edition is the only edition. I'm not ruling out an ebook edition in the future, but for now there are no active plans. The print edition is also available exclusively via the Createspace store, which is to say, via direct order from the print on demand company I'm using. I'm also not ruling out an eventual general sale via Amazon and the like, but for now, again, there are no active plans.

The book is about 120 pages, and the $15 price was picked in part because I didn't want to sell it for cheaper than I did to pre-ordering Kickstarter backers nearly two years ago, and in part to highlight the fact that this is very much book-as-art-object.

Basically, this is the sort of book that, under traditional publishing, would be called a "limited edition" or something, although given that it's print-on-demand that's kind of the exact wrong phrase for it. Nevertheless, the point of the book is very much to be an interesting and compelling physical object. Both Alison and I, in editing and typesetting the book, and James, in doing the cover design, worked hard to mimic the design of vintage Choose Your Own Adventure books, and, if I may be so bold, the book is a real pleasure to just pick up and play with. (James's account of designing the cover is up here.)

Content-wise... this is a strange one. It is loosely based on the essay "Recursive Occlusion," the TARDIS Eruditorum entry on Logopolis that is reprinted in Volume 5 of that series. That essay is structured as an interactive set of branching paths akin to the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and consists of a total of 33 separate nodes. But Recursive Occlusion the book is almost completely rewritten - only two of its 34 notes originate in the old Logopolis entry, and the other 32 are completely new and exclusive to the book. These include two lengthy essays explaining the format of the book and some of the philosophical ideas underlying it, although you'll have to successfully find them within the book's narrative.

Recursive Occlusion is my definitive statement on one of the major themes of TARDIS Eruditorum, namely the intersections between occultism (and particularly alchemy) and Doctor Who. That said, the idea of a "definitive statement" about mysticism is necessarily a slightly strange one, and the book is at times an oblique and willfully odd thing. It is very much in the style of my weirder and more gonzo essays, which is part of why I've opted for limited sale on it initially, to be honest - because I want to let the book out into the world for a bit before I start worrying about explaining it to people who aren't familiar with my work. (That and I get higher royalties via the Createspace store - buying a copy of this nets me nearly three times as much as buying one of my other books does.)

But if you've ever wanted to know more about my arguments regarding Doctor Who, alchemy, and the Western occult tradition, there is at last a book for you, and I very much hope that you enjoy it.

And here's the sales link again, just to save you the trouble of scrolling back up.

The General Election will take place two months tomorrow, and while for voters at home it means just two months of wishing it would all shut up, for active political volunteers it’s two months of joy and excitement. Or hell and exhaustion. So from my many election campaigns past, here are my experiences of: worst Lib Dem candidate ever! Best old lady ever! Canvassing moment least likely to be repeated! Election secret I should have admitted at the time! Best and worst police! Best and worst dog bites! Best bakery order! Best conversation in bed! Most racist voter! And more!

Liberal Democrat Voice and the amazing Helen Duffett put out the call yesterday for people’s funniest canvassing stories, and though I immediately commented with a ready-made Eastleigh anecdote, my memories kept erupting. Particularly from the 1992-1997 Parliament, when I volunteered in every mainland UK by-election but one – celebrity visitors were snowed in, and I decided I wasn’t going to hitch-hike in that. Yes, I had even less money than my party and mostly got there and back by thumbing a lift, but in those days I was at least far more healthy and could survive it all (though my studies couldn’t).

And of course the vast majority of those by-elections were won by other parties – we’ve never won more than a handful in any one Parliament, with the four we took in the 1992 Parliament were very nearly our best ever. So next time a report exaggerates some terrible result by saying ‘Of course, in the old days the Lib Dems would have walked it, because they won every by-election’, we didn’t walk any of them – unless you mean until our shoes wore out, because they were all hard work – and remember the facts of how rarely we actually won and how great our joy every time we managed it, and how thankless all the many more (or, at the time, fewer) volunteers in the places we didn’t stand an earthly but still stood anyway. Also remember that by-elections were and will again sometimes be won by standing up for the right thing and not just the far right thing – Romsey in favour of Europe and immigration when the Tories were being UKIP Mark I; Brent against the Iraq War when both Labour and Tories backed spending blood and money like there was no tomorrow.

One – Best Doorstep Canvassing Experience Ever

Christchurch by-election, 1994 1993

A tiny old lady comes slowly to the door. I stand back but lean forward in my best I-am-listening-but-not-looming-threateningly-way. I ask her who she’s voting for. “Well…” the tiny lady says, in an even tinier voice. I lean in closer. “I’ve always voted Tory…” Suddenly she grabs me by both shoulders and shakes me as she yells, “But you’ve got to get the bastards out!”

Two – Canvassing Experience Least Likely To Be Repeated In May 2015

Newbury by-election, 1994 1993

The man who saw me coming and ran out of his front door to beg me for a stakeboard poster to have in his garden… Because every single other house on the street had one and all his neighbours were curling their lips at him. Freedom from conformity!

David Rendel might also have been the best by-election candidate for the troops that I ever saw: seemingly boundless energy on the doorsteps, and however late he finished, he’d always go round HQ and thank every volunteer as if every single one of us had made his day (no, they didn’t all do that).

Three – Best Candidate For Keeping Her Head On Bad News

Christchurch by-election, 1994 1993

A canvassing team out on a lovely sunny day with an enthusiastic candidate in a sharp jacket and all of us feeling the wind was at our backs. What could go wrong? The most sourly Tory street in the most sourly Tory ward in the constituency, where not one single person was voting for us and most of them gave us abuse, ranging from immigration to That London to ‘You’re a layabout, bothering me in the middle of the day – why don’t you have a job?’ (ignoring that we were the ones out and about and they were the ones at home).

We met up on the street corner to report each individual tale of woe from sheet after sheet of unrestrained misery. Diana Maddock, the candidate, stood with her head tilted listeningly and nodded gently at each setback. Depressed, we all looked to her. “They’re all fascists, you know,” she said brightly. “But I think they’re going to vote for me.” And they did.

Four – Worst Lib Dem By-election Candidate Ever

South East Staffordshire by-election, 1996

Jeanette Davy. An utter misery who drove all her aides to distraction, was never seen to smile, tutted loudly at voters when she wasn’t sighing, and was generally impossible to work with. For those who didn’t meet her, she helpfully appeared on TV to say that if people voted Labour to get the Tories out, that was “a price worth paying”. I remember one council leader who turned up to help, heard that, swore, got back in his car and drove all the way home again, saying he wasn’t going to help such a stupid [expletive deleted].

That’s excluding the one who defected to Labour on eve of poll in 1994 and wrecked both by-elections and Euro-elections for us – and I delivered for the git, whose name ironically was a portmanteau of two Doctor Who characters who betrayed humanity to the Cybermen, in a continuity error in the real world. The two of them were in those rosy days the only two Lib Dem by-election lost deposits in England for donkeys’ years.

Five – Most Racist Voter

Eastleigh by-election, 1994

The man one sunny day in a suburban crescent who got more and more heated about immigration while the other two canvassers did the whole rest of the street and all the neighbours stayed out one by one to listen. Never have I delivered so many calm “That isn’t true, sirs” or “I must disagree with you, sirs” at such increasing volume as the voter went from slightly racist to shouting conspiracy theories. After my final “I don’t believe we’re going to agree, sir, so I shall say good day,” he opened his gate and lumbered after me to the corner, screaming of our candidate “Chidgey’s not an English name!!” [Hilarious fact: actually, it is.]

It made my going all Churchillian when people argued about immigration and refugees when I was an actual candidate seem positively tame.

The same by-election gets runner-up awards for two types of paternalism:

The man who growled at the Lib Dems and refused to let me talk to his wife when I politely enquired, because she voted the way she was told. Canvassers, never treat a house as monolithic (even if there’s an opposition poster there – a Labour poster-bearer at a different by-election told me quietly that he was a member and had to, but was voting tactically). The second he slammed the door, the upper window sprang open, and she quickly confided: “I always tell him that for a quiet life. But I always vote for you lot.”

The Labour voter on the next doorstep along from me who thought government should tell the workers what was good for them and hand out what they decreed when Tony Blair got in, because Labour and the unions knew best. And the Lib Dem canvasser I was tag-teaming with stoutly telling him that, no, workers should be involved in management rather than everything being from the top down, and the Labour man’s incredulous cry of “You can’t let workers make their own decisions!”

Six – Worst Evening’s Canvassing

Hexham, 1991 (party of students up to help out)

In my late teens, shortly after I’d unwisely had all my hair buzzed off (and in a snowy January), and paired with an especially camp other Lib Dem in what was then a very Conservative and evidently conservative seat, it was probably the least successful evening’s campaigning I’ve ever had, from the very first house where my canvassing partner exclaimed “Oh, no, you’ll have to do this one!” and there was unstoppable tittering from the gate while I tried to keep my face straight asking, “Good evening – Mr Love…?” right to the point where we called it a night as one man set his dogs on us one way while trying to rev his van into us from the other.

My then-underweight (less than half my present size), skeletal student looks, though with hair grown back, were better deployed canvassing later that year in Kincardine and Deeside – almost as chilly, and shivering pitifully, I kept being sent to canvass old ladies because I got the best ‘mother me’ response from them.

Seven – Worst Day’s Leafletting

Islywn by-election, 1995

Where it never once stopped raining. I’d hitch-hiked there, eventually being picked up by the police while striding along the dual carriageway towards Islywn after being dropped at a motorway junction at 2am, and on hearing what I was there for they kindly drove me to the Lib Dem HQ (making them much nicer than the unsympathetic Leicestershire officers who’d arrested and charged me when hitching back from Bradford South the year before). Disbelieving Valleys coppers: “You’re wasting your time. A donkey with a red rosette gets in round here, and we’ve had one for twenty-five years” (thank you, Mr Kinnock). I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep against a radiator and half-dried one side before going out all day delivering.

The only metaphorical ray of sunshine was the woman who stopped me to ask why she should vote Lib Dem instead of Plaid – I quoted Lloyd George about hating fences and wanting to kick down any he came across, because Liberals don’t like neat little boxes and borders that individuals can’t cross, and that’s what we don’t like about nationalists. I got us that one vote, but eventually had to go back to HQ with half the leaflets undelivered: not because they’d turned to papier-mâché and were coming off in thick clumps rather than one at a time, though they were; not because the highlighter pen had run off the photocopied route map, though it had; but because the toner had run off the map itself.

Hitch-hiking back was even worse, because the time you most need a lift is when no-one wants to spoil their car with a soaking straggler. I remember being dropped, eventually, soaked to the bone and freezing, at Cockfosters – as far out on the Tube as possible – and teeth-chatteringly ringing Richard from a phone booth. He poured a hot bath and peeled me into it at the far end, hours later. When he towelled me down afterwards it was the first time I’d been dry in over two days.

Eight – Worst and Best Dog Bites

Taunton, Local elections 1999

Long narrow garden path, dog suddenly leaps out at the far end. I stuck the leaflet in and ran for it, but spent election evening 1999 in A&E and still have the scar.

Christchurch by-election, 1994

Dog locks its teeth around my thigh; owner comes to the door, pales, and immediately offers to take a super-size stakeboard poster. At the corner of two big roads. Result! And, bonus, no flesh torn, though card wallet punctured and outer card needed replacing from the canine canines’ dent.

Nine – By-election (Lack of) Experience I Shouldn’t Admit To

Winchester by-election, 1997

I’d been there a week, and the night before polling day, the sub-agent who was going to be running the sub-office – the secondary HQ out in the country somewhere, not the central city one I’d been at the whole time – fell suddenly ill. The agent was already worn to a frazzle, and everyone had all their jobs mapped out. Disaster! But, luckily, there at hand was a familiar face from all those by-elections, and a senior-ish figure (then) in the party. “Alex Wilcock will be running the sub-office,” she announced. I went for a late-night pizza with a well-known party staffer and blogger-to-be and confided just one tiny worry. Or, rather, hinted at it, though he immediately guessed what the problem was. In all the elections I’d worked in, I’d delivered leaflets, and canvassed, and done the press, and been a candidate, and even got the doughnuts. The one thing I’d never done was any of the agent-y stuff, so running a committee room or the art of the Shuttleworth were mysteries to me. Should I tell the agent? “Best not,” he said, trying not to spit pizza in all directions with laughter. “She’s got enough to worry about.”

So at 5am on polling day I was taken to be what appeared to be a disused aircraft hangar down a load of tiny roads, across bridges and through fords, and didn’t have a clue where I was or what I was doing. Trying to keep calm, I thought to myself, what can I do? I can learn very quickly on the spot, I can wing it brilliantly, and I can cheer people up. So, surrounded by experienced volunteers both local and national, one side of the room surrounded by ready-to-tear coloured strips that had some mystical connection with the election, I gathered my troops and gave them a brief word before they went off with the Good Morning leaflets. I told them how vital it was we won; I told them that the evil Tory had only challenged the result on a technicality, and that the voters wanted our candidate but couldn’t be allowed to be complacent; I said what we stood for (sadly our key topics from the leaflets rather than anything exciting); and I said something on the spot to make them laugh. All in uncharacteristically bullet-point brevity.

“There’s one more thing,” I told them, very seriously. “I’ll be here co-ordinating the day, taking all the information, reporting it to the agent, and I’m not allowed to tell you how we’re doing – in fact, even if the candidate walks in, I’m not allowed to tell him [he did, and I did as I was told and only told him it was very tight and he had to go out and do more]. Now, I know I’ve been put here by the main party, and that some of you have been working to win Winchester for years and know far more about it than I ever will. So as well as acting on your local knowledge whenever something comes up, one of the most important things I can do is make sure that those of us from outside are working in the same way those of you who live here do. Before you start knocking on doors, then, just so we know everyone’s getting it right, I’d like [potentially stroppy but very experienced local party member I’d been told to keep on side] to quickly explain to us outsiders how you do it here…”

By the afternoon, though I’d been told even I shouldn’t think about the data I was reporting to the agent, my estimate was that we were looking at a majority of well over 20,000, and I was worried that I’d got it all terribly wrong. I hadn’t.

Ten – Best Coming-Out Moment

Kincardine and Deeside by-election, 1991

Surprisingly, my best coming-out moment wasn’t while being an out gay candidate myself (the first time I was quoted as one of only two for the Lib Dems, which I was completely certain wasn’t right, so four years later I put together the list of over two dozen myself because no-one else was doing it), but at my very first Parliamentary by-election. Being driven up to North Aberdeenshire with a coach-load from Scottish Lib Dem HQ and then staying there several days, we all had to be found places to sleep. I was spoiled: unlike many later campaigns, this wasn’t a sleeping bag on the floor, but a big actual bed, with only one other person in it, it being assumed that studenty types wouldn’t mind. Nice bloke, we’d got on well while chatting earlier in the day, and as we tucked in he warned me hesitantly, “While I’m asleep, I tend to grab onto things, but don’t worry, I’m not a homosexual.” I’m sure there were many ways I could have broken it to him more reassuringly, but given a feed line like that I couldn’t resist replying, “Don’t worry – I am.” Which is the first time I’d come out to someone while already in bed with them. He was a good Liberal and absolutely fine, so we nattered away very happily until he said something about Americans and I did it to him again: coming out as half-American, though, made him groan and roll over.

Not a sexy story in the end, then, but back in 1998 I did manage to canvass for the Alliance Party in Belfast, where my accent managed to put off both ‘sides’, when a man in a much-too-small kimono that covered very little of his chest hair and almost nothing of his thighs came to the door, and I had to concentrate hard on remembering every single word of my usually automatic spiel…

Eleven – Best photo-opportunity

Wirral South by-election, 1999 1997

I worked for a couple of weeks in what was going to be Labour’s last by-election gain before the first Blair landslide, and our vote holding up surprisingly well was a good omen. My favourite bit, unusually, was a press conference wheeze I came up with: somehow our mostly-detached technically-Lib Dem local-ish MP David Alton had been persuaded to turn up in support, and wanted to run on law and order. The Major Government had cut police numbers in Merseyside, and we had all the very serious statistics of exactly how many hundred they were short which, amid the blizzard of daily figures from all the campaigns, no-one would listen to. Until I took two police officer pictures (one woman, one man) from our standard artwork, blew them up on the photocopier, and the press trooped in to find the wall covered with a photogenic 236 (or whatever it was) alternating A4 police heads to illustrate the point.

It was the only one of our press conferences that I remember getting decent coverage other than the one that was meant to be our Transport Spokesperson complaining about the trains, and which he had to give via his mobile when the train he was coming on broke down and stranded all the passengers (his researcher was later cleared of putting sugar in the engine).

Twelve – Best Result (ish)

Monklands East by-election, 1994

Squeezed between Labour and the SNP, though we had a great candidate he was never going to be their next MP after John Smith. But after spending a few days helping out there, I went to Germany for a meeting of European Young Liberal Leaders. As Chair of the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students (England and Wales) I was there, as was the Chair of the Scottish Young Liberal Democrats, and in those pre-Internet boom days we tuned in to British Armed Forces Radio first thing on the morning after polling day. We came down to breakfast arm in arm and grinning ear to ear. ‘Another great by-election victory?’ the others asked us. “No, we lost our deposit – but we went up to third and beat the Tories!”

Baker’s Dozen – Best Order and Dodgiest Opinion Poll

Eastleigh by-election, 1994

Possibly my favourite by-election memory was striding one morning into the local bakery to utter the unusual but satisfying words, “Could I have two hundred doughnuts, please?” They offered ridiculous discounts for multiple buys, so that, say, one doughnut might be 85p, but you’d get three for £2, or ten for £5, with escalating discounts the more you bought. These were for the cheery campaign HQ and all the hundreds of volunteers rather than personal consumption, but the huge stack of boxes had the advantage of obscuring the rosette that might have put off the opinion pollster who then stopped me on the street. “Oh no,” I remember saying, “I wouldn’t like that Tony Blair as Labour Leader. Margaret Beckett’s the one you want, she’ll be very popular, and John Prescott, he’s a sensible man.”

Since then, I’ve always taken opinion polls – and what people tell you on the doorstep – with just a pinch of icing sugar.


You’d think I’d have lots of stories from the two times I was a Parliamentary candidate myself, and I probably do somewhere, but they’re buried deep in a part of my memory labelled ‘long slog’. My first time, when I was the youngest candidate in the region, I did at least get some media attention, partly because the media wanted someone under thirty and I was it. The other reason was that the Lib Dems’ Regional Media Co-ordinator put me up for radio shows and other places where a candidate might be asked Very Hard Questions (actually, that reminds me of my debates in that campaign, but they’d need a post all of their own) because she claimed that there were only two Lib Dem candidates in the region that she trusted to know all our policies and put them across effectively, and she kept putting my name forward instead of the other one – because he was David Rendel and he had better things to do, like winning his seat, while I could do far more good for the party as a spokesperson than tramping round a Labour-Tory marginal in which I was inevitably dead meat.

If only someone had done a similar assessment for where to put Natalie Bennett!

Like many who were raised on the optimistic visions pre-cyberpunk SF gave us, this isn’t the future I expected us to have. By now, we should all be travelling everywhere by jetpack or hoverboard, except for our holidays where we’d have to go to our local spaceport to get the rocket that would take us to hotels in orbit or the moon. We did get some parts of the future right – computer screens everywhere and phones in your watch, for instance – but those bigger parts of the vision proved either technologically impossible, or just far too impractical and complicated to supplant the old way of doing things.

If we were going to do everything on a computer – I don’t think we used ‘online’ back then – we’d definitely vote by computer when The Future came into being. After all, in what way could walking (or hoverboarding) to your local polling station to use a pencil to mark a piece of paper with your voting preference be part of The Future? No, we’d surely do that by computer, and then Robo-Dimbleby would be able to instantly announce the results on the holographic BBC.

Unfortunately, we never made it to that future, and instead we have to deal with one where secure online voting is currently about as feasible as jetpacks or hoverboards, no matter how much its advocates want to pretend otherwise. Consider this, from a security analysis of Estonia’s electronic and online voting system:

What we found alarmed us. There were staggering gaps in procedural and operational security, and the architecture of the system leaves it open to cyberattacks from foreign powers, such as Russia. These attacks could alter votes or leave election outcomes in dispute. We have confirmed these attacks in our lab — they are real threats. We urgently recommend that Estonia discontinue use of the system.

(And if you think that means just the Estonian system is flawed, go read a lot of the links here)

Security issues are a problem for online and e-voting at a basic level. This is widely known, and easily discoverable which is why reports like this one (full PDF) from WebRoots Democracy which completely ignore them are very disappointing.

We’d all like to make voting easier and increase turnout in elections, but we’d all like jetpacks too and we can’t magically make them happen just by wishing for them. The problem with this report is that it reads very much like someone claiming they have a working hoverboard because they deny the existence of gravity. The report is 86 pages long, and the first mention of security doesn’t come until page 74. Up to this point, the report has been an absolute blizzard of statistics (many of them irrelevant to the point they’re ostensibly making) and factoids, but the solitary page on security doesn’t bother to look at any evidence. There’s one footnote to the entire section, and that’s solely to confirm that the Government uses cloud storage. There’s no mention of any of the many studies into the security of online voting or reference to any experts in the field. Finally, the conclusion to the section comes:

Despite this, the public will rightly expect their vote, the bedrock of democratic societies, to be secure. This however should be a challenge for the pilot phase of an online voting roll out. It shouldn’t be something that discourages Governments from looking into online voting.

In short, online voting should be secure, so the Government should make it secure. That’s it. The fact that it isn’t secure, and no one has yet come up with a practical and reasonable way to make it even as secure as the current system is gets completely glossed over. While the rest of the report is falling over itself in its eagerness to use statistics from the big online companies, it seems that no one behind the report even bothered to look up the Open Rights Group or similar organisations, let alone contact them. This is just wishing away problems because the authors have already decided that online voting is the future, so it must be made to happen.

Just consider the myriad security issues that apply to online voting, starting with securing the device the vote is cast on and the basic question of making sure that the person logged in is the person casting the vote, not a friend, family member or party worker who’s going to ‘help’ them vote. (If you think that’s a problem now with postal voters, just imagine how much easier online voting will make it) Then add to that the problem of making sure the vote is transmitted, recorded and counted securely and accurately while maintaining the anonymity and secrecy of an individual’s vote. That is much more than ‘a challenge for the pilot phase of an online voting roll out’, it’s a series of fundamental problems that have to be addressed before you even begin to consider piloting.

I find myself wondering just who is behind this report. WebRoots Democracy have an About page on their website and a list of the various people involved, but doesn’t make any mention of how this report (which mentions surveys and research they’ve commissioned) and their other work was funded. There’s no facility for donations or memberships on their site, but someone must be paying the bills and we already know that there are several companies eyeing up the money to be made from online voting. Is this a genuine grassroots – sorry, web roots – independent report from people who want more online voting or a piece of corporate astroturfing?

Online voting might bring benefits to our democracy, and it might increase participation and turnout, but I’m always deeply suspicious of anyone who tries to sell you on an idea by focusing heavily on the positives and glossing over the negatives. It’s easy to declare that online voting should be secure, but wanting something and making it happen are vastly different things. Anyone who’s spent any time online will have seen how frequently security is compromised, even without the unique problems of verification that come with online voting, and it should be enough to give anyone a pause for thought. Trying to bounce everyone into accepting online voting by shouting “The internet’s great!” while paying no attention to the security threats behind the curtain is putting our democracy at a massive risk.

Here’s something interesting I noticed on Twitter earlier today:

Do you support the idea of a #CitizensIncome? 36% Yes. 40% No. (Via @ComResPolls) pic.twitter.com/l9uAiYsLkp

— May2015 (@May2015NS) March 6, 2015

It appears to come from a ComRes poll testing support for Green Party policies while doing some other polling on the party for ITV news. However, from what I can see, this is a poll based on the general voting population, not Green Party supporters or any other subset, but I’ll need to wait until the full data is on ComRes’s site to confirm that.

However, for those of us who are supporters of basic income, it’s a very interesting statistic, especially as there are only 40% opposed to the idea (a further 23% are of no opinion, making the breakdown of those who expressed an opinion something like 47% in favour to 53% against). What it shows, I think, is that there is a substantial amount of people out there who are amenable to the idea of a basic income, and that it can be a policy that could get widespread support for a party that proposed it. (I’m looking here at my fellow Liberal Democrats For Basic Income)

I’ll write some more on this when I’ve seen some more of the data behind it, but it is worth noting that the question is phrased in a very positive way for basic income, by mentioning actual cash rather than keeping it theoretical. However, that’s also a lesson to those of us who support it about how important it is to get the messaging right when promoting the idea. If only we had a basic income-supporting version of Lord Ashcroft who’d fund a series of survey questions on the issue…

Every few months, the KFC chain introduces a new menu item loaded with calories and fat and sodium and there's great outrage that such an unhealthy item is available for purchase. Birthed not long ago in Korea (but coming our way) is the Zinger Double Down King sandwich: Two pieces of fried chicken (functioning as the "bread" of the sandwich) with a grilled hamburger patty, bacon, pepper jack cheese and an unidentified white sauce.

Google it and you'll find many people horrified that this concoction has 750 calories and 50 grams of fat and 3,000 mg of sodium. I don't get why they're so upset. At KFC, everything has 750 calories, 50 grams of fat and 3,000 mg of sodium.

For years now, you've been able to march into any of the 18,875 KFC outlets in 118 countries and order a drumstick and a breast (original recipe) plus a side of mashed potatoes and gravy plus a biscuit and that's 750 calories, 50 grams of fat and 3,000 mg of sodium. So are three pieces of their grilled (non-fried) chicken plus a side of (choke!) cole slaw and a biscuit. Hell, if you went into one of those places and ordered a small Diet Coke, it would probably have 750 calories, 50 grams of fat and 3,000 mg of sodium…

…or as they'd call it at Cheesecake Factory, a Skinnylicious® platter. The Cheesecake Factory menu has 166 items that are over 1,000 calories. An order of their Southern Fried Chicken Sliders has 1,320 calories and there are many entrees where one serving gives you the equivalent of around three Zinger Double Down Kings. One order of their Bruleed French Toast has 2,780 calories and 93 grams of fat — but only 2,230 mg of sodium so I guess that makes up for it.

I am not suggesting you eat any of these things; just that we stop acting like KFC is the only restaurant chain doing this. Applebee's serves a chocolate chip cookie sundae with 1,660 calories and 51 grams of saturated fat. IHOP has a Country Fried Steak and Eggs with 1,760 calories. If you go to a Chili's and order a full rack Baby Back Ribs with Homestyle Fries and Cinnamon Apples, you're ordering 2,330 calories. Compared to a lot of stuff out there, the Zinger Double Down King is health food.

I have the best of intentions and somehow, here I am, with nothing achieved in real life but a whole generation raised and married off in The Sims.

I would like to say to all busy people (you know who you are) that yes, I do understand this is a waste of time and yes, I do realise there are better things I could be doing and no, I do not have an army of house fairies to make everything fey and beautiful while I sit on the laptop all day.

In my defence (though I resent having to defend it) I've had a very busy week and only today where I didn't have to be doing something. And when I'm busy or have been busy, I need recovery time.

It's at this point that most busy people roll their eyes. They do not understand the idea of recovery time. They have busy lives too and they work full time and they come home and do all their jobs and they don't have time for recovery, they just get on with it (sigh).

And the evenings are enough for them, after the busy day; and the morning before they start it all again, that is enough for them too so that the opposite ends of the day feel, to them, as if they have had time to themselves before and after the busy-ness.

I never did get the hang of that. To me, evenings and mornings are a time of held breath either side of the part of the day when I need to put every last bit of effort into seeming as most people seem and managing those aspects of life which make it possible to live without too much want.

When you have lots of things to do, you are busy, but when you have lots of things to do and also, the whole time, have to be a version of yourself that isn't quite true, that's when the strain tells. After a busier week than normal, I need recovery time to re-establish the me who keeps me sane.

At this point, the busy person, thriving on their moments of hearth and home amongst the many hours of worldly-wares, has no idea what I mean by needing to be someone else. I expect they think I mean like when you act in a professional way at work, to give the right impression. No, not so.

It's like always being in a slight disguise, one which doesn't quite cover who you are but hides it enough so that you pass into the world and do what you need to without giving away everything precious.

That disguise is not easy to wear though and sometimes you don't get it right. Other times you need more layers so that there is nothing visible of the real you, it is all packed away inside the outer shell that everyone can see with their harsh, daylight-bright lamps for eyes.

And blessedly sometimes there is no disguise at all and the real you parades forth, resplendent, happy, loved, knowing that today is one of those rare times you feel comfortable in being abroad as yourself.

Most days when money needs to be made and people like to see me as a real person who can do real work, I at least have to flip the cape over my shoulders and pop on the little mask, the one that lets them see enough to know when I am laughing but not so much that they see when I cry.

Those days lead me back here, home again, resting, secretly revelling in the absolute peace of being just me, right now and right where I am.

Amanda

Apparently, there’s a market – and someone at the Guardian reckons it’s at least 18 strong – for a ‘masterclass’ on live blogging at a cost of £99 for three hours.

I look at that and think ‘who is this Stuart Heritage?’ Does he have the extensive knowledge and experience of blogging that has made him the eighth most influential blogger on the subject of ‘other’? He clearly does not. Has he been nominated for a Blog of the Year award only when the field from which nominees are selected has shrunk dramatically? He hasn’t. Was he featured in print in The Blog Digest 2007? He wasn’t, but yet he still feels he can charge a quite large sum of money to those wanting to receive his blogging experience.

Well, if there’s money for old rope going around, never let it be said that I wasn’t willing to do a half-arsed job and throw something together in an attempt to get a little bit of that cash for myself. Here’s my full day seminar in the things you’ll need to know to be a political blogger as successful, influential and well-regarded as I am.

10am: Welcome, Introductions and Getting To Know You In which I spend at least ten minutes looking at a list of names, counting heads in the room and saying ‘we’ll just give the stragglers a couple of minutes’ before getting started on reading out this schedule to you, as though you’ve never seen it before. Following that, I’ll ask you all to introduce yourselves, figuring that as you’ve all come to an event about how to get other people to read your opinions, you’ll easily fill an hour between you bigging up your own self-importance and getting into pointless arguments.

11am: The basics of blogging In which I ignore the fact that all the attendees already have blogs and tell you how to start a blog, including a ridiculously detailed PowerPoint presentation on signing up for WordPress. (Note: This will be the only part of the course where I have anything resembling notes and a plan and am not desperately winging it)

11.45am: Developing your own complex and detailed political opinions: The amount of time we devote to this subject will reflect its importance in creating an interesting and well-read blog.

11.50am: Who needs opinions when columnists can have them for you? Includes important lessons on how to get newspaper pundits to tweet a link to the post in which you bravely agree with whatever they wrote that morning.

12.30: Lunch (not included in price). Attendees will be given the opportunity to learn more of the secrets of blogging if they buy me food and drink at a nearby pub.

2pm: The @loveandgarbage guide to live blogging: Special guest tutor Love And Garbage (invited, but not confirmed at time of going to press), author of many live blogs including ‘Is it snowing outside?’, ‘Is there snow outside?’ and ‘Snow’ will explain all the intricacies of this special form of blogging. As an acknowledged master of digital communication, Love And Garbage’s lessons are not to be missed (attendance still not confirmed at this time).

3pm: How to be a success at political blogging: This session will help turn you into a top class political blogger. Topics covered will include:

How to cherry pick polls to prove your point

The conventional wisdom: Isn’t the true bravery in standing up for it, not challenging it?

Telling people just what they want to hear – and getting them to share it

Building an audience through the use of partisan factoids

Speaking truth to power: How to tell the powerful they’re looking really good, are completely right about everything and do they have any jobs available?

(Some of these topics will be covered in greater depth on our full-day ‘How To Work For A Think Tank’ course – 10% discounts available to everyone who completes the blogging masterclass!)
All topics will be covered by way of me improvising wildly based on half-completed PowerPoint presentations, and attempting to stoke arguments amongst attendees in the hopes that’ll fill some time.

4.30pm: Close and Conclusions A chance for me to make many of the same points again, then fill more of your time by asking you all to tell us what you’ve learned on the course. Please feel free to tell us all in great detail how it’s proved you’re right about everything.

Following the event, the tutor will retire to a nearby pub, where you will be invited to buy him drinks in the hope of learning more of my wisdom of blogging.

The details: Attendance is just £5.50 per person, though Ryanair-style additional charges may be made for extras such as having a seat or being in the actual room where the masterclass is taking place. Location TBC, but likely to end up being whichever coffee shop has the comfiest seats and staff who are least likely to throw us out for hogging space and not buying anything. Attendees should expect to bring their own laptops, tablets, chargers, power sources and ideas to the course as none will be supplied. All guest tutors are unconfirmed at this time, and may be replaced by whoever responds to a desperate plea for help on Twitter on the morning of the event. All attendees will be given the right to design and print their own certificate of attendance. Tutors reserve the right to be more interested in browsing social media than teaching the course. All timings are subject to change, especially for the afternoon after the pub. No refunds.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

I mentioned a while ago that 2 March is the release date for the ebook format of The Devices Book 2, The Locksley Exploit. That being the day after tomorrow, now, I’ve put together a text trailer along the lines of the one I previously created for The Pendragon Protocol:

The Locksley Exploit: Trailer

Paul Parsons shakes his head angrily.  ‘What could Robin Hood’s Merry Men possibly want with the Holy Grail?’ 

It’s 2015, and Camelot and Sherwood are at war.

Stephen Mukherjee feels no qualms as the Chapel men and women round the corner.  He and Blythe have right on their side, after all: right, polymer-coated steel blades, and the devices of two puissant and noble knights. 

‘You there, stop!’ Stephen shouts, raising his sword in challenge with all the authority the Circle vests in him.  ‘Put down your weapons and surrender!’ 

The Chapel’s lead man has his green hood pulled over his face by now, revealing only a firm mouth and stubbly chin.  Even so, as he raises his longbow, nocks an arrow and gives it flight, jamming it firmly into the shoulder of Blythe’s armour, Stephen knows him. 

The Circle, the UK paramilitary agency whose Knights carry the devices of the members of King Arthur’s Round Table…

The stuttered bellow of the guns is deafening – as is the shrieking of the building alarm – but the Knights’ shields and armour hold firm as they march like inexorable sci-fi robots across the open-plan office space.  Through the choking cordite smoke Jory can see Paul’s emblem of three red bars, Stephen’s black-and-white checks, Transom’s elaborate sailing-ship, juddering with the multiple impacts.  The burgundy upholstery’s taking a shredding from the swords, not to mention the gunfire, and there’s a computer exploding every few seconds. 

…is hunting the Green Chapel, eco-activists allied to Robin Hood’s Merry Men.

Merry’s about to sing.  She’s standing, her russet hair hanging about her shoulders like a copper-beech’s crown.  She squeezes Jory’s hand and he slips away quietly somewhere, but everyone’s eyes are on Merry herself.  Her poise admits no nervousness, no embarrassment at bursting into a song in a packed pub where many of the drinkers are complete strangers, as she begins:

‘The outlaws’ flag is Lincoln green, 
the emerald of a forest scene.
Beneath it rests a martyr true,
enfolded in its fir-tree hue.’

For the Knights, this quest is personal as well as political: the Chapel’s leader, Jory Taylor, is himself an errant Knight – and he has stolen the Holy Grail from the British Museum.

‘Stop!’ Merry cries, jumping up onto a trestle table.  Nobody pays any attention, obviously, so she reaches into her denim holdall, untangles the Grail from her spare bra and holds it up, yelling ‘Stop!’ again. 

She leaps down and marches forward bearing the Grail aloft.  ‘Knights of the Circle, peasants of the Green Chapel!’ she cries, raising her voice above the quietening melee as the combatants begin to spot what she’s holding.  ‘You British Beasts and you, the Adam Bell gang,’ she continues, as the realisation spreads.  ‘All of you, stop fighting!  This is sacred ground!’ 

But this war is fought with modern weapons…

There’s a longish pause.  Then Jory says, ‘Just consider it, Rev.  They know about the Trip – they’ve been surveilling you with drones.  They know exactly where your HQ is, and they’re coming just as soon as they’ve broken the back of your resistance.’ 

‘I never expected anything less,’ Cantrell says.  He knows about the quadcopter camera drones – indeed, he knows that it’s reluctance to provoke international reprisals that’s kept the Circle from using larger combat UAVs on British citizens, rather than mere surveillance models.  That reluctance is unlikely to last the duration.  ‘Are we done now?’ 

There’s a long pause.  Then Jory says, ‘Good luck, Rev,’ and hangs up. 

…and nowhere – from the Circle’s Thameside fortress to a Bristol squat, from the oldest pub in England to a music festival in Cheshire – will remain untouched.

The unit reasserts its formation in the approach to the festival village, delicious smells eddying dizzyingly past the Knights as they crash along a parade of food vendors selling Arabic-style pizza, churros with hot chocolate, and authentic Tibetan momos.  A site-vibing sculpture of a dancing couple is trampled in pieces under the outliers’ hooves; one horse bursts without hesitating through a canvas graffiti wall.  Stephen himself draws his sword and, with a whoop, hacks down a jolly-rogered flagpole as he passes.  This is the most fun he’s had since that time he got to lob some practice balls at Sachin Tendulkar. 

And now the horses are in the open again, in a field fringed with booths and marquees, at one end of which a sign announces ‘The Village Tavern’.  Joyfully, Stephen directs his steed in a wide arc, keeping formation with his brother Knights, and turns her head towards the whitest, widest of the giant tents – where even now a motley assemblage of men and women in hoodies of various colours, but with green predominating, are gaping in alarm, and scrambling clumsily to their feet to face the charge. 

Before long, the enmity between its greatest heroes will tear Britain apart.

‘So raise the verdant banner high,
forever green against the sky!
Through winter’s chill and summer’s cheer,
we’ll keep the green flag flying here!’

The Devices Trilogy Book Two: The Locksley Exploit. Available Monday 2 March.

I’m hoping I may get the chance to read this in public at some point, as I did the previous one (the audio recording of which has yet to surface, but does, I’m assured, exist).

As you can tell, this will involve singing again.

An outpouring of grief is highly inappropriate, of course, but Leonard Nimoy’s death is a significant event. If nothing else, we might note that the cast of the movie Boyhood recently wowed critics by essaying the same characters for twelve years, but Leonard Nimoy was Spock for fifty. And Spock, in that time, evolved as a character, grew old and died. Although not, as it happens, in that order. Spock was portrayed with care and nuance by an actor who embodied a role like few actors ever have. He had a relationship with the character as up and down, as tempestuous, as Richard Burton did with Elizabeth Taylor, and who wrote two autobiographies about that struggle.

Spock’s character was assembled on the fly, his devotion to logic, his ‘half-breed’ (it was fifty years ago, the term was used) nature, his perpetual state of comradeship and yet simultaneously utter alienation … none of these were part of the original plan. They emerged in performance, Leonard Nimoy taking on a role that saw him caked in make up and glued on ears, and somehow being the most dignified presence on the screen. The writers loved him, the kids loved him, a whole new form of love called ‘fandom’ had to be created to express the response a portion of viewers had for Spock, and characters like him.

This is, for some of us, an event with the same sort of moment as the death of a monarch, or the assassination of a President. If the internet had state funerals, then we’d be lining the route. An exaggeration, surely? Wasn’t this guy just someone from an old TV show? No. Social media today is full of responses from some of the hundreds of thousands of people who met Leonard Nimoy, talked to him, were inspired by him. Spock’s example helped them cope when they were lonely children, or inspired their studies and career, brought them into a community and camaraderie that spans the globe, or just gave them some catchphrases they could bandy around with their mates. If nothing else, it gave a lot of people who are by temperament not the emotionally expressive type a good cry at the end of Wrath of Khan.

Entertaining a billion people, inspiring millions … this is significant. There are those artistic or historical figures who will endure. The author Ken MacLeod has a nice phrase for it: ‘the names that will be remembered on the starships’. Leonard Nimoy was, to coin a phrase,  in a starship before most of us were in diapers.   

We see it time and again.

In 2009 it was parliament's expenses system. MPs had been abusing it for years and it was clearly unfit for purpose and yet they kept on with it until suddenly The Telegraph had the goods and then all hell broke loose. It was the biggest political crisis we have seen this century. And it was largely avoidable if only parliament had cleaned house itself beforehand. Instead they waited, and waited, and hoped they could keep getting away with it until suddenly they couldn't. And massively, massively damaged their own reputations as a result of having been forced to fix it.

We are seeing a similar pattern play out again with outside interests for MPs. They have been carrying on for years and years, some MPs with two, three, four or more outside interests/jobs. At first there needed to be a register of interests. Then Cameron before the last election made a speech where he declared outside interests for MPs to be "the next scandal waiting to happen". Various of their number have been caught out over the years (e.g. Geoff Hoon, Stephen Byers) and more recently Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw. We are seeing a slow attritional effect here but at some point this will all blow up. And MPs will be forced, probably to have no outside interests at all. The fact that this is likely the wrong solution and will discourage e.g. doctors and others who need to maintain professional skills whilst serving in parliament will be by the by. Because again MPs would have had the chance to clean house and will have refused until they were forced to so something. And instead of measured reform we will instead see a knee-jerk panicked response as MPs will then be hugely on the back foot.

It doesn't take a psephological genius to see where the next likely crisis of legitimacy for our ruling class will come from after this. We are about to head into a general election where it is fairly likely that UKIP could come third in the share of the vote (e.g. around 15%) and come sixth in number of seats (e.g. 0.5%). At the same time the SNP could come sixth in the vote but third in number of seats (get 3% of the vote and perhaps 7% of the seats). Not to mention how swathes of Green and other voters across the country will be disenfranchised. We may also see Labour winning most seats even though they have had fewer votes than the Tories*. Our First Past the Post system simply cannot cope with a 5 or 6 party system. But yet again we see a political class with its head in the sand. There is simply no appetite or momentum amongst MPs as a whole for any change to the electoral system in Westminster. Most MPs think it does a good (or at least good enough) job. They are wholly unprepared for the sort of convulsion and the potential constitutional crisis that it could provoke if the sort of grossly unfair results mentioned above in any way come to pass. Indeed only a few years ago the old school MPs in both the Conservative and Labour parties closed ranks to prevent a pretty minor change to the electoral system. This could have been an opportunity for a proper national debate about how we elect our representatives. Instead it descended into utter garbage about how soldiers would not get bullet-proof vests, babies would not get the life support machines they needed and how THE BNP WILL GET TO CHOOSE YOUR VOTE IF AV WINS.

It seems that our body politic is incapable of seeing what is just over the horizon. Maybe it's a function of the way so many of their number refuse to engage with "hypothetical questions" at least in public only eventually dealing with problems when they become critical. But this is a terrible way to deal with constitutional and electoral change. It's enforcing a sort of punctuated equilibrium** on our politics when what would be so much better is a more measured approach where problems are identified before they get too bad and are remedied in advance in a sensible, consensual way.

Instead we could well end up with a government elected with fewer votes than another party who is then in opposition (where the make up of the parliament is in some seats almost random where there were 4 or 5 contenders) with barely any legitimacy trying to resolve the crisis both of its own mandate and that of politics in general.

We are constantly told we have a mature democratic system.

Not from where I'm sitting we don't.


*I am well aware that both Labour and Tories have on occasion in previous post war elections got the most seats on fewer votes then their rivals and it did not cause the sort of convulsion I am talking about here. But there are so many more parties vying for seats now and with the 24 hour news cycle and social media a crisis of legitimacy narrative could and probably would take hold quite quickly if some of the more extreme possible scenarios were to happen. Farage for example would never be off the box or the wireless (rightly) complaining that he got around a sixth of the votes and barely any seats. And aside from that it's incredibly complacent and dangerous to just assume that the public will happily accept such an obviously broken system reflected in such a result.


**When of course we all know what would be better for our politics is a form of phyletic graduation.

So it’s official. As of Tuesday— and as most of you probably know already— Echopraxia won the CBC’s “Bookie Award” in the “Best SciFi, Speculative Fiction, or Fantasy” category, beating out Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven by (as of the close-to-midnight screen grab to the right) 300 votes. It was a much closer race than it should have been, and— judging by all the accolades heaped on the runner-up— it probably went to the wrong novel in terms of literary merit.

Of course, the CBC makes no claims of literary merit on this thing; they refer to the Bookies as a “People’s Choice” award, which is a different thing entirely. Even by that metric, though, I don’t see Echopraxia beating out an honest-to-God best-seller with over a thousand reader reviews on Amazon. What the Bookies really measure is total fan effort, with no attempt at per-capita parsing. A thousand votes represents the effort it took to click through an arcane menu one thousand times, and the algorithm makes no distinction between a thousand fans doing that once or one really dedicated fan (or author, for that matter) doing it a thousand times. A number of you voted more than once, which might give one ethical qualms if only the folks over at the CBC weren’t so obviously okay with that. I always said my fan base was small but fierce. Echopraxia‘s win is Exhibit A, delivered with my thanks. When the certificate arrives, I will stick it next to Caitlin’s.

But while we’re on the subject of Things With Questionable Credibility That Are Nonetheless Nice To Have, I’d like to take this opportunity to share a few glimpses of a birthday gift I recently received from someone who obviously appreciates my interest in the neurological sciences. I’m talking about Mental Medicine and Nursing by Robert Howland Chase A.M., M.D.: a century old,  yet so seminal a work that it’s still available as a Classic Reprint (which probably puts it ahead of any recent Bookie winner you could name in terms of street cred, although I suppose we’ll have to wait another hundred years to be sure). Chase was both a skilled wordsmith and an informative teacher, as you can tell from some of these diagnostic illustrations:

I had not realized, for example, that the difference between religious and erotic paranoia scaled to beard length.  It’s also interesting to note that alcoholics always keep one hand in their pockets, while victims of delirium can be diagnosed by being women. And the illustration of that poor soul in the throes of “maniacal excitement” is downright scary.

Not that Mental Medicine limits itself to diagnoses, mind you. It also describes some truly remarkable remedial techniques:

I’m especially impressed by the therapeutic applications of knitting.

Of course, all of this stuff was written before the Singularity, and all the advanced knowledge we have today.

Kinda makes you wonder how hard they’ll be laughing at us a hundred years from now.

Sans Bullshit Sans: a font that leverages the synergy of ligatures.

Right now, I'm chewing over the final edits on a rather political book. And I think, as it's a near future setting, I should jot down some axioms about politics ...

1. We're living in an era of increasing automation. And it's trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society).

2. A side-effect of the rise of capital is the financialization of everything—capital flows towards profit centres and if there aren't enough of them profits accrue to whoever can invent some more (even if the products or the items they're guaranteed against are essentially imaginary: futures, derivatives, CDOs, student loans).

3. Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.

4. The iron law of bureaucracy states that for all organizations, most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective. (This emerges organically from the needs of the organization's employees.)

5. Governments are organizations.

6. We observe the increasing militarization of police forces and the priviliging of intelligence agencies all around the world. And in the media, a permanent drumbeat of fear, doubt and paranoia directed at "terrorists" (a paper tiger threat that kills fewer than 0.1% of the number who die in road traffic accidents).

7. Money can buy you cooperation from people in government, even when it's not supposed to.

8. The internet disintermediates supply chains.

9. Political legitimacy in a democracy is a finite resource, so supplies are constrained.

10. The purpose of democracy is to provide a formal mechanism for transfer of power without violence, when the faction in power has lost legitimacy.

11. Our mechanisms for democratic power transfer date to the 18th century. They are inherently slower to respond to change than the internet and our contemporary news media.

12. A side-effect of (7) is the financialization of government services (2).

13. Security services are obeying the iron law of bureaucracy (4) when they metastasize, citing terrorism (6) as a justification for their expansion.

14. The expansion of the security state is seen as desirable by the government not because of the terrorist threat (which is largely manufactured) but because of (11): the legitimacy of government (9) is becoming increasingly hard to assert in the context of (2), (12) is broadly unpopular with the electorate, but (3) means that the interests of the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital (because of (1)) unless there's a threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil unrest.

15. The term "failed state" carries a freight of implicit baggage: failed at what, exactly? The unspoken implication is, "failed to conform to the requirements of global capital" (not democracy—see (3)) by failing to adequately facilitate (2).

16. I submit that a real failed state is one that does not serve the best interests of its citizens (insofar as those best interests do not lead to direct conflict with other states).

17. In future, inter-state pressure may be brought to bear on states that fail to meet the criteria in (15) even when they are not failed states by the standard of point (16). See also: Greece.

18. As human beings, our role in this picture is as units of Labour (unless we're eye-wateringly rich, and thereby rare).

19. So, going by (17) and (18), we're on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.

Have a nice century!

Afternotes:

a) Student loans are loans against an imaginary product—something that may or may not exist inside someone's head and which may or may not enable them to accumulate more capital if they are able to use it in the expected manner and it remains useful for a 20-30 year period. I have a CS degree from 1990. It's about as much use as an aerospace engineering degree from 1927 ...

b) Some folks (especially Americans) seem to think that their AR-15s are a guarantor that they can resist tyranny. But guns are an 18th century response to 18th century threats to democracy. Capital doesn't need to point a gun at you to remove your democratic rights: it just needs more cameras, more cops, and a legal system that is fair and just and bankrupts you if you are ever charged with public disorder and don't plead guilty.

c) (sethg reminded me of this): A very important piece of the puzzle is that while capital can move freely between the developed and underdeveloped world, labour cannot. So capital migrates to seek the cheapest labour, thereby reaping greater profits. Remember this next time you hear someone complaining about "immigrants coming here and taking our jobs". Or go google for "investors visa" if you can cope with a sudden attack of rage.

Tuesday:

You may not have noticed that there's an election coming. They've been keeping rather quiet about it.

A number of people have said that this year's election is "too close to call" or "too complicated" but I think that, even this far out, the results are pretty obvious.

The Liberal Democrats will come fourth in vote share with probably about 16% and win two-hundred and nine five-way marginals. Nick Clegg will become Leader of the Opposition as Al Murray is swept into Downing Street, made Prime Minister as leader of the Stop Farrago Alliance of Labour, Tory and SNP.

Okay, maybe it won't QUITE happen like that. It might be two-hundred and EIGHT – get down to Hornsey and Wood Green because we CAN win there and help keep Lynne Featherstone as MP for Awesome.

Okay, okay, maybe not two-hundred and eight either. But there are reasons for OPTIMISM. Maybe not quite as much optimism as Auntie Caron managed to muster in telling the Westminster Hour we could hold all fifty-seven of our current seats, though you've got to admire her for saying it with a straight face.

I think we can hold at least half, probably somewhere in the mid-thirties, and maybe a gain or two as well.

The reasons for this are, of course, complicated, but come down to the weakness of Mr Milipede's Hard Labour and the split vote on the right.

LABSERVATIVES

We only HAVE about 15 seats facing challengers from Hard Labour or Nasty Nationalists – well, we have a couple more than that, but no one is taking Charlie Kennedy or Alistair Carmichael's seat without Viking Longboats. Most of our seats are a fight with our so-called partners in Coalition the Conservatories.

In order to counter the PERCEIVED threat from the Party they REALLY want to be in bed with, the Kippers, Mr Balloon has been not so much tacking to the right as galloping for the starboard flank as fast as Master Gideon's little legs and Theresa May's kitten heels can carry him. Policies like deep cuts in benefits, targeted at the young and the fatshamed; the obsession with cutting spending deeper and harder than necessary – while promising vast and unfunded give-away tax cuts, not to mention remaining highly dubious in their attitude to possible tax evasion especially by their rich supporters; their increasing security paranoia, with Civil Liberties infringements verging back towards New Labour era; above all the frothing venom over Europe and immigration… all these are painting them as the Nastier-than-Ever Party.

It makes it all the more desperately important than ever that Liberal Democrats hold the centre ground, not because we're wishy-washy and moderate, but because we're the Party with a radical social conscience and grounded, practical, old-fashioned British COMMON SENSE.

Fortunately for Britain (not to mention us!), Mr Milipede's cohorts appear to have decided that he's already lost. They have wasted the last five years conspicuously failing to come up with an alternative plan to Osborneomics-lite while ostentatiously avoiding any engagement with apology for the catastrophe that overwhelmed them in office. In much the same way as Mr Vague's disastrous 2001 election odyssey descended into "Save the Pound! Save My Job!", they are reduced to pitiful wails of "Save the NHS! Save the Milipede!"

It isn't that they don't have any policies. It's just that they don't have any policies that would make anything BETTER.

Take the latest mini-spat over TUITION FEES. It's clearly ALL about the POSITIONING. They want to be able to play the Nick Clegg card AGAIN, so they want to wave a policy that LOOKS totemic (but isn't) so that they can wave Lib Dem pledge cards around (please no one notice Labour pledges). Except first it means pissing two-billion quid up the wall and Mr Balls can't find the cash, and second, more importantly, it's a give-away to the RICHEST students, and doesn't actually HELP people who need it. Whereas the as-good-as Graduate Tax that the Liberal Democrats negotiated has ACTUALLY helped a huge increase in the numbers of people from the least well off backgrounds making it to University.

(The man responsible, Tristram Hunt – surely that's a silly nickname? – is clearly a total liability, whether it's announcing that he's PRIVATISING SURE START – which I remain astounded has not received more coverage; though not at the total lack of synthetic outrage from Pollyanna Toytown – or insulting all NUNS. That's no doubt why he's convinced himself he's got a shot at Mr Milipede's job.

Though to get it, he'll have to get past Mr Woodchuck Umunna, whose face can currently be found next to the Wikipedia definition of "ambition".)

Meanwhile Mr Balls, while remaining the man who most people blame for the crash, has recently managed to forget the names of Labour's business backers and suggest that every window-cleaner needs a paper audit trail. Bill Somebody and get a Receipt, you might say. Mr Ball's position is, er, erratic to say the least, oscillating between occasional adherence to the terrifying splurges of Modern Money Theory (or Magic Money Tree economics) and back to flat out austerity and refusing any of his colleagues the cash to fund their endless lists of not-quite-pledges.

So the rest of the Shadow Cabinet are all "on manoeuvres" rather than campaigning to win. They expected to inherit the Coalition's position on the green benches, but if they can't do that they'll settle for inheriting Milipede's seat instead.

That's where the Liberal Democrats need to press hard that we remain the ONLY Party that stands between the country and a terrifying Tory majority. Hard Labour just aren't up to the job. The last five years have shown that Liberal Democrat ministers and back-benchers have got the guts and determination to hold the line against the Tories.

SICKLY GREENS

One response to Mr Milipede's shambles has been the Green Surge. No, I don't mean BARFING.

The Greens would be more admirable if their one MP hadn't been more loyal to the Labour Line than many of Mr Milipede's own alleged colleagues. (Apparently the Green Party's own slang is "Watermelon" – Green on the Outside, Red on the Inside – but this is probably RACIST to watermelons.) Seeking to capitalise on Labour's weakness and to outflank them on the left they are standing as a Syriza-like anti-austerity ticket, though that might not play out so well now that the real Syriza have apparently capitulated to European Union demands to stick with the austerity programme.

(Thus probably saving Greece, but SELFISHLY denying us the service of demonstrating the Farrago Folly by proving that dropping out of the Euro actually COULD make things extremely very much WORSE.)

What I REALLY object to, though, is how much of an Ed Balls Up the Greens are making of selling the policy of a Citizens' Income, a policy that apparently I, a stuffed elephant, understand better than the Green Leader Ms Notaclue Bennett.

There are many positives to be gained from providing a basic flat rate cash stipend to every single person in the country, potentially saving a lot of bureaucracy, protecting people from abusive employers, rewarding carers and housewives/husbands for their contribution, and greatly simplifying and maybe even SAVING some people's lives. But it's neither cheap nor simple to get there and it needs a good, strong PLAN that you can lay out to get to all the upsides. What you absolutely cannot do is KEEP going on the radio and the tellybox and waving your fluffy feet in the air saying "read the website, I don't remember this bit!"

NASTY NATS

The OTHER response to the Great Miliflop is the rise of the tide of nationalist parties. "Blame-the-other-people" parties always do well in difficult times, and the economic times we've been through have hardly been difficulter.

And after five solid years of Labour supporters screaming blue murder about the Liberal Democrats for working with the Conservatories, it is quite a BITTER IRONY that they find the exact same tactic being turned upon them by the Scots Nats for supporting the Conservatories and other pro-Union Parties in the Referendum Campaign.

There could hardly be a better demonstration of the FLAWS of our First Pass the Port electoral rules (and how STUPID our journalists are) than what is happening in Scotland. The press appear ASTONISHED that the LOSING side in the referendum seems to be doing so well in the prospects for Parliament. But it's simple MATHS.

Under ANY system of alternative voting, the pro-Union votes transfer to block the minority Nasties. Which is what happened in the Referendum.

But under First Pass the Port, the LARGEST LOSER WINS.

Because there are SEVERAL Parties that want to keep the United Kingdom, the winning side is DIVIDED; because the Scots Nasties are ISOLATED, they hoover up all the anti-votes. Ironically, this is the tactic of MARGARET THATCHER, who they hate.

Hilarious as it is that the Nasties are probably going to deprive Mr Milipede of any chance of an outright majority, the worse outlook is that they might ALSO deprive him of enough seats to form a Coalition with the remaining Liberal Democrats.

KIPPERS

Channel Four's mockumentary "UKIP: The First 100 Days" has received record numbers of complaints. Mainly because that's what Kippers do best: complain. In fact, it's difficult to know if they do anything else. Except make on-camera racist remarks.

Though also, it was RUBBISH.

There was almost no sting to the satire, no ring of dangerous truth to the warnings. Police snatch-squads and brutalisation of innocent minorities were treated much more DAD'S ARMY than SECRET ARMY. Economic implosion didn't seem to affect anyone's standard of living, in spite of all the factories closing. And the nice lady UKIP parliamentarian turned out to be nice in the end, so that was all right. We didn't get to see the follow-up scene where it's explained that she's "had a breakdown" and she's carted off to Broadmoor in one of those coats that ties up the back while her family are on a one-way flight to Karachi.

No, if anyone should be complaining it's the OTHER PARTIES for this far too nice portrayal, that seems to imply we could get away with electing a bunch of RACISTS without it all going Nuremberg on us.

Of course, the last thing Farrago wants is to actually WIN. Winning means having to do something other than complain. Worse, it means being the one who is complained ABOUT. No, he likes his nice cushy Euro-job where he gets paid a fortune and doesn't have to show any results. Or even show up!

Still, lucky for Nigel our electoral system is so horlicksed that he probably won't have to face his nightmare scenario of being everyone else's nightmare scenario.

LIBERAL DEMOCRAT GOVERNMENT

The PLAN for the Liberal Democrats has always been to show that Coalition WORKS, and that we can be TRUSTED in Government. We've certainly shown that a Coalition CAN last five years. Remember, almost EVERY SINGLE commentator in 2010 expected a second election within six months. We've proven them wrong once already. Whether we can be TRUSTED is… a slightly other matter, unfortunately.

It's difficult to see how we can continue in Coalition with the Tories. We've largely used up the areas of policy overlap, not to mention the GOODWILL, between our Parties. Equally though, many people have suggested that a period in Opposition, licking our wounds, might serve the Party well.

Maybe it would, but would it serve our Country well?

I still believe that the purpose of political parties is to be in Government, getting things done.

(Not the Labour Party's urgent desire to be in Government just to be in Government; not the Conservatories belief that they are entitled to be in Government because they are entitled.)

A Labour/Liberal Coalition, with Vince Cable as Chancellor (finally!), would be a better outcome for the Country (AND demonstrate that Coalition can remain stable even if the larger partner transitions) than a feeble minority Labour administration, with Scots Nats and Green demonstrating the real meaning of "propping up" (where they can take ALL the blame and get no policies at all enacted). And another Liberal/Tory Coalition, could one be bodged together in the wake of the election tearing strips out of each other (probably around an agreement that WE will run the country while Mr Balloon plays Euro-referendum) would STILL be better than letting the nutters run the asylum on their own (with the Farragistas not so much propping up as pushing to topple over).

But the real choice belongs, quite rightly to the British people.

And we've only just begun.

One thing that surprised me when I first lived in the US, and continues to stand out as an oddity to me is the election of judges. It confuses John Oliver too, leading to this segment on Last Week Tonight:

For me, it’s a great example of an idea I’ve talked about often, that democracy is not just about having elections, and having more elections doesn’t automatically make things more democratic. Democracy is an ongoing process, not a single event, and that process needs lots of different parts to work together to ensure it succeeds.

Electing judges is a pretty extreme example (from the land of extreme examples) but it does get to the point that judges and politicians have different roles within the democratic process, and electing judges starts to confuse the roles. Roy Moore, the Alabama judge at the start of that LWT item, has run for several political roles while serving as a judge, and that sort of confusion between the judicial and the political is common in US politics.

The point is not to say that judges should be free from and challenge or oversight, but that within a democracy not every post needs to be appointed in the same way. Every post in a democracy is appointed in some way, the question is who does that appointment and how – elections are perhaps the most obvious way of doing it, but that doesn’t make them the best or most appropriate in all circumstances.

We’ve seen it in Britain with Police and Crime Commissioners who were brought in to supposedly make accountability of the police more democratic than the existing system of Police Authorities because direct election, rather than appointment through other elected bodies was seen as ‘more democratic’. What we’ve ended up with, however, isn’t any better scutiny or accountability of the police, but a network of what appear to be very well paid spokespeople for the police, who now get brought out instead of the chief constable when the media need someone for a comment.

Democracy is a complex process, and not one that’s easily solved by simply electing everyone and hoping for the best. Sadly, that’s the message we keep getting sold, where an elected mayor trumps a complete lack of democratic accountability. We’re not likely to be electing judges here, but we need to keep making the arguments for real democracy.

One thing I’ve said repeatedly in recent years is that no one gets involved in politics because they really, really enjoy delivering leaflets. I thought that was a really obvious thing to say, but now I’ve had a comment that makes me question that. Apparently, I shouldn’t waste time writing posts on my blog about things that interest me and instead ‘just get out and deliver some leaflets’. (There’s also an appeal to ‘Mark’ to limit the topics that get written about, which makes me wonder if some people think Mark Pack is now the literal God of Liberal Democrat blogging, casting down thunderbolts at those who displease him)

This isn’t a new thing - Liberator magazine has spent years complaining at how the ideas of community politics have been turned into a leaflet delivery cult – and with an election coming one would inevitable expect to see the calls to stop thinking and start delivering increase in number. It’s not even a specifically Liberal Democrat thing – sure, that’s where my experience is, but it’s easy to spot the calls to campaign more and discuss less in other parties, even if they don’t have quite the same fetishistic devotion to shoving pieces of paper through letterboxes.

There are several problems with the ‘shut up and deliver leaflets’ message, not least the fact that it’s bloody rude, but for me they all come down to a misunderstanding of why some people get involved in politics. They rely on the belief that politics is essentially a game, and that it’s about ensuring that your team does the best it can, in the hopes that it can defeat the other teams. In this view, any of us mere bloggers are just average players in the game, not required to think about strategy or tactics, just required to get out there and follow orders. Deliver those leaflets, knock on those doors and do as the party’s high command tell you. Ours not to reason why, ours just to deliver then go back to HQ and ask for more, like a good Stakhanovite.

In that vision, a blog is just another campaign tool. While it’s probably not as good as delivering leaflets – for nothing is as good as delivering leaflets – it probably has some use as a cheerleading tool, telling everyone just how wonderful everything is, and how much more wonderful it would be if they’d just go out and deliver leaflets. That this and other blogs steadfastly refuse to take that approach means that we’re obviously in the wrong.

Unless you look at politics from a different perspective, and see ideas as important or just enjoy talking about general political issues, institutions, and history. What got me into politics was talking about things and considering ways that the world could be different, where the campaigning was a means to an end, not an end in itself. Sure, people like that might be a minority in modern politics (which tells a sad enough tale in itself) but telling us to ‘just go and deliver leaflets’ rather than have an interesting discussion or discover new ideas is not going to motivate. If anything, it’s going to demotivate us, because it tears down another bit of the facade and insists that everything is just about the game, where winning is the only thing of importance, not what you do with the prize after you’ve won.

So no, I won’t stop writing about things I find interesting in favour of delivering leaflets and if anything, I think one thing we need less of in politics generally is campaigning. The general election campaign has been running for several weeks now – whether we wanted it or not – and I’m pretty sure that time might have been better spent by dropping down the level of campaigning and actually trying to get more people to think and talk about issues instead of parroting soundbites and talking points at each other. But then, I would say that, and while I’ve been writing this post I could have been getting my fingers trapped in countless letterboxes.

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February 23rd, 2015: I am not the greatest at using Wikipedia :( – Ryan

Leaders' Debates unlikely to happen say the Lib Dems http://t.co/45SV5Jz0Ch pic.twitter.com/mL0mFHr1T6

— TSE (@TSEofPB) February 22, 2015

Today reports emerged that Liberal Democrat sources say the televised leaders’ debates are unlikely to happen. The Lib Dems aren’t happy because Nick Clegg is only in two of the three debates, and is relegated to the likes of Plaid Cymru, who received one-sixtieth as many votes in 2010 as the Lib Dems did.

A spokesman for Clegg said the Lib Dem leader’s team would “continue to negotiate with the broadcasters”. But another senior Lib Dem figure said: “I don’t see how this is going to happen now. The broadcasters have made a massive strategic error.”

A senior Tory said: “The prime minister’s view is, ‘We said to you [the broadcasters], you are obsessed about debates and they took up too much energy last time. We didn’t have an election campaign. We had a debates campaign.’ ”

The Sunday Times article also says “Labour, while openly backing the debates, have also privately raised questions about the presence of [Nicola] Sturgeon, who will be handed a national stage as well as debating with Jim Murphy, the Scottish Labour leader.”

So we’re unlikely to see a replica of the Cleggasm for any party, so which will party/parties will benefit from the lack of debates in 2015? Probably the more established parties will benefit, especially the ones who are better resourced, so perhaps the Tories will be the biggest beneficiaries of no debates.

However if the Tories fail to achieve a consistent, remain in power leads in the opinion polls, Dave might conclude he needs the debates after all to turn things around.

TSE

Lord Bonkers continues his survey of Liberal Democrat prospects at the general election. Today he offers a short but optimistic post.

Hazel Grove

She is a delightful woman and I have no doubt she will hold her seat (wherever it is).

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

"Top Secret: Burn Before Reading"

The mint cake workers of Kendal

There can be no doubt that he was Terribly Sorry

The Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey Railway

Armed with pitchforks and flaming brands

He was never one to resort to underhand methods