Andrew Hickey

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October 6th, 2014: Here is a song by Tigernaut called Jacques Esqueleto! I Thought I Made You Up. It is an instrumental song named after this comic and I rate it super rad! – Ryan

Some good news from The Jake Thackray Website:

The DVD of the BBC series Jake Thackray and Songs is now available to buy online via Amazon. 

Jake Thackray and Songs, broadcast in 1981, captures him at the height of his powers; it paints an intimate portrait of Jake as a live artist, playing to audiences in the small venues where he felt most comfortable. 

This DVD features all of his performances from the series: thirty of his greatest songs, along with his inimitable between-songs chat and storytelling. Also included are previously unreleased performances by three outstanding guest artists: Ralph McTell, Alex Glasgow and Pete Scott.

(Linda Jack was the final candidate to respond to the questions I posed in my earlier Presidential post, and here are her answers in full after the cut. You can, of course, ask any questions about her answers in the comments.)

Why you, and not the other three? What do you believe in and what would you do differently from the others?

I believe I am the only one with a track record of not only being prepared to challenge the leadership but also to have consistently been at the heart of the battles we have had internally, be that on Tuition Fees, the NHS, Welfare cuts, Snooper’s Charter etc. I also have an ability to represent the party externally in a way that explains who we are and what we are for. As Simon Hughes has said “I back Linda because I think she represents the heartbeat of the party, she understands the party and I think she is a great communicator. She brings experience, enthusiasm and above all an understanding of what radical, modern Liberalism means, because we need to change Britain to be the sort of society that Liberals want to be. I’ve seen Linda at work as an effective party activist over the years and I’ve trusted her judgement, I’ve supported her radicalism’ or Pauline Pearce ‘Back Jack because that’s where reality’s at’ or to quote the email I had from youth charity Uprising last week ‘My colleagues in London are hosting a youth political debate on the 22nd October at the Houses of Parliament. Because of the positive response you received at the debate in Luton, the London team would like to invite you to feature as the Lib Dem panelist in their youth debate.’
I believe in everything we say in the preamble to our constitution and I would do everything in my power to uphold those principles and challenge the leadership and the party when we didn’t. I don’t believe I have ever sat on the fence in my life – as an old friend and colleague posted on Facebook this week. ‘Linda says what we need to hear not what we want to hear. She is not for sitting on the fence and watching the world go by; in fact it would be people like me watching her chase down the world telling it to do it again and following a plan. She has supported me and many others I know to challenge discrimination, inequality and promoting fairness, respect and dignity.’
The party needs a President whose first loyalty is to the people we seek to serve and the values we seek to represent. That is my starting point, not blind loyalty to the party or the leadership which is exactly the thing that turns the public off politics. That means I am prepared to speak out and to challenge when necessary, but to do so, as observed by a fellow member ‘with style and friendliness’. We are at 6-7% in the polls, the status quo is not an option. I am not the status quo. I am not in this for any other reason than to help restore and rebuild the party we love – in order to build that freer fairer society in which no one is enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.

What mistakes do you think the party has made since the start of the coalition? If you had been President when they were being made, what would have done to avoid them?

The party should have stuck to what was agreed in the coalition agreement – in particular a commitment by both parties to protect the most vulnerable. The first and most damaging mistake was on tuition fees, and that has led to a total breakdown of trust with the electorate, even if they are not impacted by the policy. The second was to breach the commitment to ‘no top down reorganisation of the NHS’. The third was to sign up to so many welfare reforms that have hit the most vulnerable, be that bedroom tax, benefit caps, ending the Independent Living Fund – I could go on. Then we’ve had Secret Courts and the Snoopers Charter where it looks as if we have been prepared to sacrifice our principles. I think the reason we have made these mistakes is because of the disconnect between the leadership and the membership and the fact that the leadership appears to inhabit an impenetrable bubble with little or no challenge. If I had been President I would have spoken up from the beginning about what the risks were. Where the view was that we had no choice to go along with the ‘Tories – rather than embrace the idea as if it were our own, only to have to disown it later (bedroom tax a case in point) I would have urged the leadership to at least explain why. For example – we believe in fairness and protecting the most vulnerable and we believe we can do this more effectively if we don’t allow people to stay in houses that are bigger than they need. This is one of the reasons I believe it is important to have a non parliamentarian as President, not having to look over their shoulder at the Chief Whip, rather representing the membership view – and let’s face it – it’s the membership that has invariably called it right over the last four years!

#822, 1st May 1999

Westlife have always been this blog’s nemesis, the doom encoded in its premise: however entertaining the song or era I’m writing about is, at some point I will have to deal with fourteen Westlife number ones. There have been times when I’ve wondered myself what on earth I would say, given that from a standing start I could barely remember two of them. But here we are.

Implicit in the jokes is a feeling that Westlife are different. Look at the list of the most successful Number One acts – Elvis, the Beatles, Westlife. One of these things is not like the others, apparently. The scale of Westlife’s success, more than almost any other factor, was enough to convince even sympathisers that the charts were broken, that pop was broken, a damaged transmitter no longer capable of processing the cultural signals around it.

This idea – Westlife as a sign of pop catastrophe – is a mix of the true and the false and the condescending. Westlife are a group like any other, with fans they speak to and mean a lot to, and deserve to be considered as more than just a statistical anomaly. Even so, the degree of success says very little good about how the charts were working by 1999, as a finely staged ballet of release date scheduling and fanbase priming. Westlife are the ultimate fanbase band: almost every one of their many, many hits is a one-week wonder and gets out of the Top 10 sharpish. There’s barely a sign of crossover to a wider singles-buying audience. But there’s a corollary to this: if Westlife come and go so quickly, it’s a stretch to suggest that they themselves were a ruinous force in pop music. They had very little impact on the rest of it. They were the Olestra of pop, slipping through its body undigested to leave an oily mess.

Westlife aren’t the only fanbase band: in chart terms, Blur or the Manic Street Preachers perform similar disappearing acts. But Westlife manage this again and again and again for years. To game the charts this efficiently you need two things. You need a loyal audience, which probably means one that isn’t being well served by the rest of pop music (so won’t switch to rival bands or sounds in a hurry). And you need a very good game-player. Enter Simon Cowell.

Cowell’s part in Westlife’s origins is a preview of his later household-name role: a murderer of youthful dreams. Take five lads from Sligo, schoolfriends. They can sing a bit, they’ve seen Boyzone doing well, so they get a group together. There’s Shane, Graham, Mark, Kian, Michael. Two of these men are now a hairdresser and a garda. The other three have sold forty million records. The difference is Cowell, then at record label BMG, who pronounced IOYOU – as they were – the ugliest band he’d seen in his life, and got his scalpel out. Pete Bestlife. (A sixth schoolfriend, with the rather un-boybandly name of Derek, had already been given the push by Louis Walsh. He ended up a barman, if you’re keeping score.)

Despite the personnel upheavals, there’s no great sign of creative tension in the early Westlife story. IOYOU knew what they wanted to sound line – their demo, “Together Girl Forever”, a Shane and Mark co-write, is a well-churned slow jam from the limper end of R&B. The tempo, the harmonies, the pledges of devotion: even in the Sligo classroom, the lads knew the moves well enough. It sounds like – well, it sounds like the kind of performance that gets you through Judges’ Houses on the X-Factor, and with hindsight that’s precisely what it was: you can see Simon’s appreciative half-grin as the boys’ voices combine, and his slight eyebrow-raise at a couple of the more puppyish ad libs. If Westlife knew their moves 17 years ago, the whole country knows his now.

But the transition from IOYOU to Westlife hides another shift. Boyzone’s Ronan Keating – stepping, like a midfielder nearing retirement, into a coaching role – apparently recommended the name change on the grounds that “IOYOU” sounded “too boyband”. But IOYOU were a boyband. Which suggests that Cowell, Walsh and Keating had other ideas for Westlife. And so we’re back to the question of Westlife’s audience – the other factor, apart from Cowell’s remarkable skill as a pop fixer, in their dominance. Who were they? What did they want to hear?

The signature sound of Westlife arrives fully-formed on “Swear It Again” – five voices, moving as one. That kind of ultra-close harmony is a powerful emotional tool for the group, giving everything they sing a kind of polyvocal guarantee, four or five layers of underlined sincerity. The chorus of “Swear It Again” is a blanket of it: a mantle of reassurance, piling steadily up every beat of the bar: I’M – NEVER – TREAT – BAD / I – NEVER – SEE – SAD. Any hint of sex is left for the videos: this is the ballad as an endless hug.

Nothing too novel about that, perhaps. But the framing of this devotion is quite interesting – on the verses, Shane dismisses the idea that “everything must have its place in time”, and laments how “all of the people that we used to know” are giving up on love. And the chorus ends “I swore to share your joy and your pain, and I’ll swear it all over again”. Sure, this could be the hyperbolic language of teenage infatuation, and it’s been carefully crafted to speak to a young audience too, but its aim is wider. “Swore to share your joy and your pain” feels more like a marriage vow, and the rest of the lyric also seems to have the longer term in mind. This is a pop song not about falling in love, not even about marriage, but primarily about renewal of vows – an answer record, three decades on but in the same style and with the same appeal, to Englebert Humperdinck’s divorce ballad “Release Me”.

Kat Stevens, in her very entertaining Westlife tumblr Blogging Without Wings, calls the band “mum-pop”, which implies an equivalent force to the ossified poses and throwback grunts of Dadrock. Both Dadrock and Mumpop are intentionally crass, stereotyping names, because both describe music that was marketed in a crude and populist way, dog-whistle appeals to a mistily conservative idea of what rock or pop might be. If critics nod approvingly when rock appeals to the nostalgic instincts of middle-aged blokes, and recoil when pop does the same thing to middle-aged women – well, that’s a symptom of a wider problem, but it doesn’t mean there’s a fundamental difference between this record and Lenny Kravitz.

Of course younger women bought masses of Westlife CDs (and I’m sure a good few men did) – but Keating’s instincts were right: this is no boyband. This is a group designed to build a pan-generation romantic coalition, and tap an audience lost to pop, but opened up again by the widening of record distribution. It’s no coincidence that Westlife’s reign aligns with the peak of CD sales in supermarkets and Woolworths. And if Westlife are essentially a ‘boyband for grownups’, it explains their most distinctive feature – their infuriating dependability: the suits, the stools, the rivers of mid-tempo treacle. (“Swear It Again” is one of the finer examples, though – Mark’s yearning middle eight is a decent piece of work that resolves the song’s emotional struggle and earns the inevitable key shift. This is a lot better, for me, than any of the Boyzone records we’ve seen, and its weightiness is part of the reason.)

Cowell had gone this route before, with Robson And Jerome, but there are obvious limitations to using actors: they have other commitments, and they’re harder to control. Cowell, you feel, was happy enough to be parasitic on a successful show in his early career, but needed to own more and more of the process. A band that mixed Robson And Jerome and Boyzone was a logical step.

Still, there was something about TV and the eyeballs it brought in. You don’t need to rely on lyrical analysis to suggest Westlife had a distinctive fanbase: you could also point to their dominant showing at ITV’s Record Of The Year awards. This show – brainchild of another proud pop game-player, Jonathan King – had a simple format: a tinselly celebration of the year’s big singles, with the winner crowned by a Eurovision-style phone vote. In sales terms, Westlife barely figured on the end-of-year charts. At Record Of The Year, in the phone vote, they cleaned up. It seemed the singles-buying tip of Westlife fans concealed a larger iceberg: a family TV audience who really glommed onto them but had zero interest in the rest of music. Further evidence, though, that Westlife’s fanbase was something unusual.

So let’s go back to that initial, absurd, comparison: Elvis, The Beatles, and Westlife. It turns out they do have something in common: all three of them succeeded by creating a new audience. The difference is that the new audiences of Elvis and the Beatles woke hungry for new records, more records that could keep tapping the feelings those artists did. So their energies fed back into pop. But Westlife inspired few imitators: even other boybands mostly stayed away from the wholesale commitment to steadiness Westlife’s music implied. But that didn’t mean there weren’t ways of tapping – and broadening – Westlife’s newly potent audience. There’s a sense with hindsight of a jigsaw here whose pieces aren’t quite fitting. Simon Cowell. A bunch of singers. A family audience. A national phone vote. Just as Boyzone were the caterpillar for Westlife, so Westlife themselves look like a chrysalis stage for something yet vaster.

Peter Lorre (Ugarte): born László Löwenstein, in what is now Slovakia; became a film star in 1920s Berlin; being a Jew, moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power.	Conrad Veidt (Strasser) - started acting in films 1916, married a Jew and moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power.
Paul Henreid (Laszlo) - left Austria for England in 1935 after Dollfuss/Schuschnigg regime came to power; left England for USA to avoid detention as enemy alien in England (though Conrad Veidt spoke out for him).	Curt Bois (Pickpocket) - Jewish, left Germany in 1934 after Nazis took power.
Madeleine LeBeau and Marcel Dalio (Yvonne and Emil the croupier) - married in 1940 and fled Paris after the German invasion; Dalio was Jewish. He filed for divorce during the filming of Casablanca. She is the only surviving member of the cast.
S.Z. Sakall (Carl the head waiter) - born a Hungarian Jew, became a Berlin film star in the 1920s, returned to Hungary in 1933 after Nazis took power, moved to America in 1940 after Hungary joined the Axis. All three of his sisters and his niece, as well as his wife's brother and sister, died in concentration camps.	Helmut Dantine (Jan the Bulgarian roulette player) - Austrian anti-Nazi activist who was imprisoned in a concentration camp after the Anschluss in 1938; his parents got him released and sent to America, but they themselves died in concentration camps.
Leonid Kinskey (Sascha) and Gregory Gaye (banker) - both born in St Petersburg, and fled the Russian revolution.

This all may help explain why this scene is quite so powerful:


(Incidentally, there is no truth whatsoever in the story that Ronald Reagan might have played the lead role.)

As I mentioned here last week, back in the days before the Internet and High Speed Connections, I used to run electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes) for writers — the kind of system you dialed into from your computer via a phone line and a 2400 baud modem to post and read messages.

I quit because too much of my time was spent separating brawlers. It was a time I relearned something I already knew: That when you come between two people who are fighting, the odds are good that they will both start hitting you. At the very least, they will create a mess and leave it to you to mop up.

On my BBS, we had a section for Animation Writers. One time, one such person came on and, in a series of tirades I later decided were supercharged by alcohol and/or controlled substances, he began attacking various people who had not hired him. They'd either committed that unforgivable sin or had somehow stolen jobs that were, he believed, rightfully his.

Here is a tip if you're ever around writers: Beware of those who have few credits but an endless supply of stories about how they were sabotaged. They would have sold this screenplay had it not been for the slimeball who sabotaged them. They were promised that producer job but then some scumbucket sabotaged them. The network promised to buy their series and then some bastard sabotaged them.

Once in a while, the stories are true to some extent…but some writers have way too many of these tales in lieu of actual successes. And they never seem to have, like most of us do, projects that fail because someone wasn't excited by our work or some plans innocently changed. Every time they don't get what they want, which is most of the time, it's due to deliberate, premeditated sabotage. Someone stabbed them betwixt vertebrae and/or stole their brilliant idea and/or squeezed them out to get rid of competition.

Avoid those people…and do not waste your time trying to connect them to reality. Reality doesn't work for them because in reality when things don't work out, they can't claim they actually succeeded but their prize was stolen away from them.

Personally, I find it a lot easier when things don't work out for me to just think, "Well, things didn't work out!" I do have some tales of being sabotaged or robbed or cheated but they probably account for less than 3% of my disappointments. And if you can view them that way, the disappointments aren't all that disappointing. They usually turn out to be things that were just plain never going to happen and you wishfully overestimated their possibility.

So this oft-sabotaged writer came onto my BBS and since he wasn't working, he had plenty of time to post message after message about those who'd knifed him from behind. He employed the old "just asking questions" cover: "I never said Harry Shmidlap was a wife-beating pedophile…I just asked if anyone else had heard the rumors and had any solid evidence that he wasn't."

That kind of thing. When politicians do that, they call it "push-polling."

He asked such "innocent" questions about everybody who might have hired him and hadn't, as well as everybody who was working when he wasn't. One of those who qualified on both counts was a cartoon story editor named John Semper, who was not a participant on this Bulletin Board System…or any BBS as far as I knew. John, he suggested via a well-loaded question, might have done something unethical.

I didn't know John Semper at the time. I'm not sure I even knew who he was then as he was fairly new to the industry. I have since learned that he's a fellow of sterling ethics and that the disgruntled writer's post was just so much sour fruit. Even back then, I would not necessarily have believed the accusatory "innocent" question, especially given the general hysteria of the accuser. It is darn close to impossible to be in a position of hiring 'n' firing without having someone get furious that he is not among the hired.

When the offending message was first posted, I don't think I even read it. First time I heard John's name was when someone called me and said, "John Semper is furious at you for what was said about him on your BBS. He's talking about getting a lawyer."

No, I didn't panic or call my attorney or anything. Well over 99% of the time when people threaten to sue, they don't, and this was certainly not actionable, at least insofar as I was concerned. I was just kind of annoyed that I'd apparently made an enemy without ever actually doing anything beyond providing a free service for other writers.

Fade out, fade in. We jump ahead a few years…

Another hotbed of arguing and politicking can be found occasionally in the various committees and volunteers who serve the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which you may know best as the folks who give out the Emmy Awards. There are some great, selfless people who fill those positions and do fine, generous work for a variety of good causes. They are clearly the majority but there are also a few who get involved in order to "network" in hopes of finding work or to further highly-personal agendas.

One goal some have is to redraw the rules and categories for the Emmy Awards to make it more likely that they will win one. Imagine if when I was on one of those committees, as I was, I'd lobbied for a trophy to be awarded each year to the Best Overweight, Half-Jewish Writer Who's 6'3" and Hates Cole Slaw. I didn't do that because I'm ethical and decent but especially because it would be really, really maddening if I got them to add that category and then lost.

On a couple of committees in the Animation branch, there was a gent who worked mainly as a director on Saturday morning cartoon shows — and I guess I need to tell you what a job like that entails…or did at the time, which was the early eighties.

A director on one of those shows was not like Chuck Jones directing a Road Runner cartoon for Warner Brothers in the fifties. Mr. Jones supervised every step of production. He approved what the writers and gag men came up with. He selected and directed the voice actors. He either did the storyboard and character designs or watched over and okayed every step of those vital elements. He assigned the animators their scenes and checked over every one they handed in. He approved background paintings and supervised editing and so on and so on. Basically, he was in charge from conception to completion.

The following is not meant to demean "sheet directors" (what some folks called the directors at Hanna-Barbera working on Scooby Doo) one bit. Any of them will gladly tell you that they had nothing to do with the script or the storyboard or the character designs or the voices or the editing.

Basically, that kind of director was handed the storyboard and voice track done by others and it was his job to figure out the timing of the animation: How many frames or feet this action should take, how many to allot for this speech, etc. And once he did that, his involvement with that cartoon ended.

This is not a simple job and the ones who do it well are worth their weight in Krugerrands. But they're only concerned with one step of the process, one stop on the assembly line.

The gent of whom I speak did not accept that. He saw the word "director" in his job description and decided what he did was akin to what Chuck Jones or Tex Avery did and that he was the one who "made" the cartoon. He further seemed to have a great contempt for — and a desire to devalue — what folks like I did and do, which is to write the cartoon, figure out the story, invent the new characters, come up with the jokes, write the dialogue and so on.

Writers don't "make" the cartoon single-handedly — no one does at a studio like that — but on most shows, we tend to be treated as more important than the guy who does only what he did. I guess I oughta assign him a fake name so you can follow this narrative easier. Let's call him Leopold. That's a good name.

Leopold was active in the TV Academy and out of sheer volunteerism, which I do not mean to belittle in any way, he'd worked his way up to a position of some power. He seemed to be using that power to push his idea that the director of a TV cartoon was automatically its auteur and anyone else was his toadie. That notion, I will belittle.

One day, a group of other animation writers approached me. They had petitioned the appropriate committee at the Academy to improve the way writers were treated, vis-a-vis Emmy Awards. The way the rules were then drawn, it was very possible to write and create an entire series, write every single script…and then, if the program won for Best Animated Series, you were ignored. No statuette. No mention.

This band of writers was working to change that. They'd gotten it to the point where a key committee was going to hear arguments in favor of their proposal and then vote on whether or not to recommend the amendment to the senior Board of Directors. The head of the committee was Leopold and he ran it, they told me, like its other members were his marionettes. Leopold was against writers getting more recognition because he thought directors — like, say, him — deserved the main credit.

I was asked to be the writers' spokesperson before the committee. They thought I'd be a good one to make their case, in part because I was then a recent Emmy nominee (for writing on a live-action kids' show) and in that environment, that somehow gave me some standing. I also spoke well, they believed, and knew a lot of animation history. Moreover, I'd been involved in several cartoon shows where I was the Show Runner and a lot more "in charge" than the directors. So I could politely make that point.

I agreed to do this. I was told the time and place to attend the meeting. Then a few days before the date, I did one of the stupider things I've done in my life.

Believe me, I could fill this blog until the appearance of the Halley's Comet after next with stupid things I've done. I could start a feature called "Tales of Stupid Things Mark Has Done," post under it daily and never lack for content. And I could reprint this essay as #1.

This was a biggie. It was the time I went on Nutrisystem.

I gather this popular diet plan has helped many, many people lose weight. Great, fine, good for them. I also gather it has changed a lot since I did it way back when. A web search tells me the meals they sell do not now contain the artificial sweetener, Aspartame. Back then, I believe they did. At least, they were filled with some artificial sweetener which my body really, really didn't like. This was the week I found out the hard way how much my body didn't like it.

I ate Nutrisystem food for four or five days. I didn't like it and that should have been a warning to me. In my childhood, I was sick very often with violent, hard-to-diagnose stomach aches. At one point, my doctor thought the removal of my appendix would stop them. It didn't. Finally, we figured out it was food allergies.

The match-up was not exact but the list of foods the test said I shouldn't eat was very close to the list of foods I didn't like. My heroic allergist suggested I just eat the foods I liked — a small but adequate menu — and the problem went largely away. Since then, I've only had problems when (a) a social situation pressured me into eating something my instincts told me to avoid or (b) some treacherous ingredient was well-concealed among others.

Oh — and (c) that time I started on Nutrisystem. I thought everything was awful but I foolishly told myself, "It's diet food. It's not supposed to taste good."

Within days, I was feeling…well, not the best. The afternoon I was to speak at the TV Academy meeting, I was quite ill and maybe even a bit delirious. I thought I was coming down with the flu but I was too fuzzy to even think, "Hey, maybe I shouldn't go where I might infect others." It didn't even occur to me to call to see if my appearance could be postponed or someone else could appear in my place.

Instead, congratulating myself on my devotion to duty, I drove out to the meeting in  building on Alameda in Burbank. By the time I got there, I was staggering and all I had on my foggy noggin was to get it over and get the heck home. I kept hearing that line in the movie 1776 where someone says, "A man should die in his own bed."

"The committee will be taking up your matter in about fifteen minutes," a nice lady told me outside the meeting. "We've allotted fifteen minutes for the discussion and then we're going to break for dinner. You're welcome to stay and eat with us if you like. In fact, you can wait in here where they're setting up the buffet."

She put me in a nearby conference room filled with tables of hot, steaming supper in chafing trays. Nauseated as I was just then, there were few things I wanted to do less than smell food. Even if I'd been well, that Beef Stroganoff would have sent me reeling.

Finally, they told me I was on. Feeling like I was close to passing-out, I weaved my way into the main conference room where Leopold held forth from the head of a big conference table around which the rest of his committee was seated. There were about thirty spectators, some of whom had come to root for our cause.

Leopold summarized the issue at hand, somewhat misrepresenting our position and phrasing what we wanted to make it sound pretty silly. Then I was invited to state our position.

Here is my entire memory of what I said:

That's it. All I remember is what I just typed after that colon.

I do remember that every time I finished a sentence or even a clause, Leopold would interrupt to rebut me and to advance his belief that writers weren't really very important in the process of creating an animated cartoon. He compared what he did to Chuck and Tex and Bob Clampett and the man who got the directing credit on Dumbo. It was a stupid argument but I was too incoherent to properly knock it down…and besides, he had the gavel.

I also remember thinking at one point, "It's not going to help my cause a lot if I vomit on the conference table. I have to get out of here."

So I let him dismiss me like I was finished, which I guess I was at that moment. In a rush to judgment (or at least, Beef Stroganoff), he moved to vote, someone seconded it and —

— and just then, before they could vote, a spectator — a young gentleman I did not know at all — leaped to his feet and demanded to speak. He objected to the way Leopold had interrupted me and prevented me from finishing an entire sentence. Then he made our case efficiently and said some of the things I like to think I'd have said if I wasn't worried about fainting and/or soiling myself.

It was a very good statement of our position. It was also about as effective as I had been. The second he finished, the committee voted unanimously to change nothing and to break for dinner.

"I've got to get out of here," I was thinking to myself, all the time hearing that line from 1776. But I did make my way over to the man who'd so eloquently said what I couldn't say and I thanked him. He said, "Thanks for trying, Mark. I'm John Semper."

At that moment, the name did not register with me. I'm not sure my own name would have registered with me just then. I somehow got out of the building, located my car and decided I couldn't drive all the way home. Fortunately, I had just enough functioning brain to remember that St. Joseph's Hospital was a few blocks away. (How I remembered it and found it: I recalled through the fog that Walt Disney died in a hospital across the street from his studio. I drove further down Alameda to the Disney Studios and, sure enough, there it was.)

I parked in the lot for the Emergency Room and before I could get myself from my car, I passed out…or something. I awoke two hours later in my car in the lot, freezing to death though it was somewhere around seventy degrees.

Still, I felt much, much better — so much so that I decided to drive home instead of going inside. The next day, my doctor poked me and performed tests and confirmed that what I'd probably had was a severe allergic reaction to one or more artificial sweeteners. That was the day I gave up Aspartame, Sucralose, Saccharin and others still to be invented. My uneaten Nutrisystem meals were donated to a friend who was on the plan…and did rather well with it.

I guess there are three endings to this story, not necessarily in chronological order…

One is that a few years later, despite Leopold's best efforts, they did wind up changing the Emmy rules a bit so writers get more attention. It wasn't quite what we had pushed for but it was a lot better.

Another is that years later when I was co-producer, writer and voice director of Garfield and Friends, Leopold needed work and he applied several times for directing work. I wasn't the one saying no. The line producer was doing that…but I guess Leopold thought it was my doing out of revenge or something.

He called me like we were bosom buddies and went on at some length about what a fine, fine job I was doing running the show and how he'd slavishly follow my scripts and do his best to bring my vision to the screen. I had enough forgiveness in my soul to recommend the guy for a position but the line producer still refused to bring him on. (I'm not sure why. Maybe we just didn't need anyone. I suspect to this day, Leopold is sure I sabotaged him.)

And the last ending is that I met and became friends with John Semper. It was a few weeks after that infamous meeting that my mind finally connected his name to the BBS incident and a few more years before I ran into him again — at conventions and screenings and Writers Guild events and such. We never had the time to talk about that incident at the TV Academy until about ten days ago.

We met for lunch at the Magic Castle and gee, we had a good time. Real nice guy. He didn't remember it as vividly as I recalled the parts I recalled but our recollections fit together. He started to apologize for threatening me but I told him that wasn't necessary…and it wasn't.

I know people who hold onto grudges long past their expiration date and they shouldn't…because it's self-destructive. It distorts your view of both yesterday and today and it causes you to live in the past in anger instead of in the now and in peace. As I look back, I can see times when doing that really hurt me…

…though not as much as too much Aspartame.

The Mail on Sunday have published a new survey into, amongst other things, who people would like to see leading a coalition government.

The article is relentlessly pro-UKIP, but includes a result similar to one already seen with Ashcroft polling in Cambridge if you look closely at the numbers: Liberal Democrats are popular as a coalition choice.

The raw numbers published by the Mail on Sunday list the combinations as Cameron/Farage 26%, Cameron/Clegg 23%, Miliband/Clegg 20%, Miliband/Farage 14%. (17% don’t knows) Converting them into ratings for individuals, we get:

• Cameron: 49%
• Clegg: 43%
• Farage: 40%
• Miliband: 34%

Worrying news indeed for Ed Miliband.

Since Scotland narrowly voted to remain part of the UK, people are thinking about constitutional reform. Who should have powers over what, what democratic accountability there should be, and how we should confer a mandate on our politicians. One thing that’s been mentioned repeatedly is online voting. It’s an immediately appealing idea, but I believe a little thought reveals many problems. There are three main considerations:

Verifiable, Anonymous, Online – Pick Two

The system we have where a ballot paper is issued to a voter who fills it in in secret is pretty good at being secure and anonymous. Yes, there are index numbers on the ballot papers which allow them to be linked back to the individual voter, but this is handled by a different set of people to the people who handle the ballot papers, and so it’s a lot of effort to do it, particularly in secret – it’s only really used in cases of suspected voter fraud, under police supervision.

The obvious problem with any system where the ballot paper is filled in where somebody can see it, such as on your home computer or mobile phone, is it means the ballot is not anonymous to any onlooker. This creates the opportunity for people to be coerced into voting a particular way.

However, this pales into significance compared to verifiability; the average home PC is a mess of viruses and other malware. Most of the time you don’t notice it, because it’s designed not to be noticed, but your computer might be taking part in an attack without your knowledge, using its Internet connection along with thousands of others to flood websites or its CPU to crack passwords. Computers are, to non-experts, mystical black boxes. The user has no real way of knowing whether voting software is doing what they ask, or that their computer is allowing them to interact with it sensibly. They don’t know if the vote record they see on their screen is the same one that’s been communicated to the vote-counting system.

Only computer experts can audit all the software being used, including everything that runs on a typical PC (like malware) which could interfere with the process or appearance of voting. Even then, it is impossible even for experts to be sure that software being run at the time of the vote is identical to the software they’ve audited. Even if it were possible, it means that then the average voter has to trust third party experts who may have their own agenda in important elections, to assert the security and verifiability of their vote.

The polling station system we have is flawed; for example, personation is fairly simple and hard to detect while turnout is low. There are possible solutions to that but they all require further bureaucracy and different opportunities for things to go wrong or be manipulated. But there are a lot of safeguards and double-checks in the system, even if they’re not always used. A candidate can place observers at polling stations, and seal ballot boxes between the polling station and count room to ensure they’re not tampered with. And in extremis, it is possible to correlate ballot papers back to individual voters, by using two different sets of data held by two different groups of people; this is near-impossible to do in secret, even if you’re electoral staff, and when it does occur in the event of fraud, it’s done under police supervision. The entire system can be explained to a lay person and doesn’t require any secret “black boxes” whose function isn’t easily observed. No online system can say the same.

Of course, we are prepared to make trade-offs between convenience and security – postal votes are a good example of this. Postal votes are not anonymous, because somebody can watch you fill in your vote; they’re not particularly reliable because there’s even fewer checks on whether the person submitting the vote is the person to whom it was issued. From the legitimate voter’s perspective the postal system is a black box of sorts – I know voters who swear blind they’ve returned a ballot by post but haven’t shown  up on the “marked register” of people who voted. The introduction of widely-available postal voting increased turnout, but also became the biggest source of fraud allegations. However, the potential for fraud with postal votes is limited by physical access – to the address to which the ballot papers are delivered if you’ve registered nonexistent people, or to the individual voters you wish to intimidate. For online voting, elections can be swung by a single person on a different continent with a well-crafted computer virus; the risk is far greater in scope.

Why Use Online Voting At All?

There is no doubt that online voting is convenient. With Internet access almost ubiquitous, it can cut costs and time and hassle. So when would we want to use it? Firstly, when the electorate is engaged. As mentioned above, fraud is easier to detect when turnout is higher (including several attempts in the unusually busy Scottish Independence Referendum). Secondly, when the risk of being caught is worth more to the people providing your black box, than the opportunity to influence your election.

The obvious answer then is for internal elections. Sorry to burst peoples’ bubbles, but the chance of influencing who gets to be comms officer for an AO isn’t worth the risk for a reputable vote-managing organisation to take. Turnout is likely to be a higher percentage of a much smaller number, with a more committed electorate, which will make that fraud harder to hide. For the Lib Dems, it would make sense for OMOV in Federal elections, particularly if there’s an offline top-up for the people who don’t / can’t use the Internet.

Summary

Online voting is an interesting technology, and you have to understand the risks and advantages. Having laid them out, I’m clear that online voting for national elections and referendums is a bad idea; they tried it in Estonia and the system has been found insecure (unlike that article, I do not believe that online voting can be made secure). Even electronic ballot counting can be fraught with errors; it might be impossible to say who actually won the London Mayoral Election in 2008.

The main advantage, other than cost, is that of increased voter turnout. However, this is not necessarily a good end in itself; that’s a separate blog post which would either be very long, or just instruct you to read Gordon Lishmann and Bernard Greaves’ “Theory and Practice of Community Politics” (available in an updated edition from ALDC). Using online technology to help people be more aware of politics and what their politicians can do is worthy; devolving power and improving the voting system so voting is meaningful will also increase turnout. But we should not see increased turnout as an end in itself; that way lies the foolish thoughts of mandatory voting, or the risks of insecure online voting.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is not pleased with my forthright translation of his column at The Week. That’s understandable. After all, if he had wanted to be forthright, to own his words and his implications, and to make his nasty accusations directly and honestly, he would have done so himself.

Stripping away the pretense that he works so hard to craft is, in his eyes, simply rude. Do we imagine it’s easy for him to be this disingenuous? Why should he go to all the trouble of constructing a maze of indirection and insinuation if we’re just going to look past it to the substance of what he’s saying? Why should he take the time to confuse and conflate same-sex marriage and ENDA if we, as readers, refuse to follow along? And it’s just not fair for us to disregard his ground rules by distinguishing between civil rights and sectarian sacraments, or acknowledging the role of power, or — worst of all — quoting his own words and pointing out what they mean and how he used them.

And don’t we realize that he’s the voice of morality and that, therefore, the moral high ground is his birthright? That doesn’t change just because he says vicious things about others, or because he pursues an agenda that denies others their basic civil rights and human dignity.

For me to think otherwise is, Gobry says, clear evidence of a deficiency on my part.

Gobry seems most indignant that I raised an eyebrow at his description of the nebulous “circles” promoting a “movement” to coerce “Christians” into “backing down” on same-sex marriage. (Those are quote-quotes, not scare quotes.) He murkily describes this movement as arising from “many urban and progressive circles”:

In many urban and progressive circles, it’s beyond impolitic to oppose gay marriage. Indeed, there’s a movement underfoot to make opposition to same-sex marriage akin to support for racism. That is to say, anyone who expresses opposition to same-sex marriage would be ostracized, with many progressives hoping to employ a variety of social and governmental means of coercion to force gay-marriage opponents to the margins of society.

The word “urban” there is just … odd. That’s a perfectly good word and, quite often, a perfectly innocent one. It can denote and connote many things. Given the context though — both the narrow context of that paragraph and the larger context of an essay that warns of dangerous consequences from anti-discrimination efforts — I took it to be a euphemism for black.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Radio stations and record companies use the word “urban” as a rough synonym for black and that’s innocent enough. But then so does AM talk radio when it warns of “urban crime” as way of keeping its white listeners scared and angry, and that’s not innocent at all. “Urban,” like “inner-city,” is sometimes one of those euphemisms used by white people who seem to wish they could use some other choice euphemisms, and who seem to resent that they’re not allowed to say those words anymore — at least not when anybody urban might hear them.

I didn’t say this was what Gobry was doing with that word. I simply pointed out the context and noted that, whatever it was Gobry meant by “urban,” it was something he was characterizing as an exterior threat — a them over there who were up to something that might harm us over here.

But Gobry is apoplectic at the suggestion that he meant “urban” in this way. He is shocked — shocked! — that anyone might suggest that he, of all people, could possibly have intended any such thing. Why, just ask those who know him best, just acquaint yourself with the full body of his long history of saying all the right things. Some of his best columns … some of his best friends … that whole bit, etc. etc.

He also insists that he had no idea that the word “urban” had any such implications. He says what he really meant was to refer to “coastal urban areas of the United States.”

Ah, OK. My mistake there was in buying into Gobry’s intellectual pose. I didn’t imagine that someone as condescendingly erudite as he pretends to be could make such a simple error as writing “urban” when what he actually meant was “urbane.”

The difference there is just one letter, but it entails a whole different universe when it comes to the which group it was that Gobry meant to derogate, dismiss, discredit and delegitimize.

He meant those coastal elites — the latte-drinking, cosmopolitan, metropolitan, metrosexual, worldly, effete, pseudo-sophisticates who notoriously live in “coastal urban areas” rather than the red-blooded heartland.

Gotcha.

And Gobry is correct — there’s nothing particularly racist or racial about this characterization at all. It’s just a typical expression of conservative anti-intellectualism.

More specifically, it’s the form of expression that anti-intellectualism has to take when it’s being expressed by someone who is, himself, attempting to cultivate an aura of intellectual superiority, a la Robert George F. Will-iam Buckley. They can’t simply rail against pointy-headed academics and eggheads, so they convey the same idea by directing their antipathy toward coastal elites and latte-drinkers and “hipsters.”

In either case though — whether Gobry meant scary, alien urban-types or scary, alien urbane-types — his intent was the same. Rather than engaging or addressing the substance of their argument, Gobry sets out to discredit and delegitimize those making it. They are hipsters — foreign, Other, a threat, not like us, untrustworthy, etc.

If I were attempting to cultivate a Gobry-esque aura of intellectual superiority, I might refer to this as “an instance of the fallacy known as poisoning the well.” That’s a fancy term for framing opposing arguments as coming from a dubious, suspect source — like “urban and progressive circles” of “coastal urban areas” and hipster enclaves that want to shove their metrosexuality down our red-blooded American throats.

Gobry, alas, is as confused about the meaning of “poisoning the well” as he is about the difference between urban and urbane. He thinks it refers not to his use of dismissing, othering language, but to anyone noticing that he’s doing it.

Or maybe he’s not confused. Maybe he’s just again being, you know, sleazy.

 

work in progres

No Hipsters. Don't be coming in hear with your hairy faces, your vegan diets, your tiny hands and your sawdust bedding. No, wait. Hamsters. No Hamsters.

7

Mass defections from Britain’s political parties are rare, but not unprecedented. So far, they have not proved fatal to the party which lost the defectors, nor have they resulted in the formation of a new party with long-term viability.

Ellie Mae O'Hagan wrote a piece for LabourList recently in which she laments political apathy and tries to analyse what the party conference season says about that subject.

Ellie rightly states that "there are large swathes of the electorate who are disillusioned, angry, alienated from politics, and feeling ripped off and unrepresented". Indeed there are and this has been the case for a long old time. So far so obvious as Ellie herself acknowledges.

As to the main question her piece poses she lightly skips over the Labour conference and immediately draws the conclusion from the Tory conference "that they’re aware of high levels of political disillusionment, but they don’t really care as long as the electorate let them get on with it.".

What a shockingly cynical thing to say. And indeed precisely the sort of thing that commentators, activists and politicians saying about political opponents will cause apathy. After all if members of the "Westminster Village" all say that everyone except their own tribe are scoundrels then what do they expect the rest of us to think? I'd say it's pretty uncontroversial to conclude that a good number of them will think all politicians are scoundrels as a result of these sort of tactics.

It gets worse though: "Finally, Nick Clegg branded the Lib Dems 'the party of education,' a claim so ridiculous I won’t even bother to address it.". How utterly, breathtakingly dismissive of a party that has introduced the pupil premium and ensured that millions of primary school aged children now all have free school meals. I am sure Ellie is obliquely referring to the tuition fees debacle which was handled dreadfully but to so sneeringly dismiss everything the Lib Dems have done in government is to again stoke the apathy problem. What is the point of voting for politicians who are so terrible that their opponents don't even feel they need to explain why you shouldn't?

The coup de grace of the Lib Dem section is this little bon mot: "We all know Lib Dem policies are just tokens they redeem in exchange for power anyway.". Yes we all know that Ellie. The Lib Dems are a bunch of unprincipled shysters who crave power so much that they will literally sell their own granny to get their arse on the seat of a ministerial limo. This is despite the fact that for several generations they got nowhere near power. That of course is ignored because we "all" know the dark heart of the Lib Dems now.

I'm singling Ellie out here probably unfairly because all sides do this. It just particularly jarred with me because of the stated intention of the article.

We have a situation where for short term gain, politicos attack the character and motives of their opponents, their opponents do the same back and this carries on month after month, year after year. At the same time trust in politics and politicians keeps falling, people feel more and more disenfranchised and that politicians are "only out for themselves" etc. I know correlation is not necessarily causation but it doesn't take a genius to work out that in this case one has a high probability of affecting the other.

And in this one article we have a very neat, bundled up synopsis of the problem. A bright, articulate Labour activist attempting to write a piece about what we can do regarding political apathy has managed to load it with attacks that are more likely to exacerbate the very problem she is trying to tackle than to help it.

It's enough to make you weep.

Katy is very, very bored.

(CONTENT WARNING: This story will deal with sexual violence and mental illness. See Help Links for more information about these issues.)

KATY: This is episode two of the one with the dustbins, although we haven’t seen them yet.

MANDY: I expect they’re saving that for later. It’s known as the monster reveal.

KATY: It’s a cheap trick. Oh look, a monster. Not very good drama.

MANDY: The children love it, though.

KATY: And Mary Whitehouse didn’t, so that’s something.

MANDY: I think they’re going to lock us up again.

KATY: We haven’t really done anything yet. It’s all running around.

MANDY: Oh look. You adjusted your skirt when you thought no-one was looking.

KATY: It was always riding up. It’s lucky I’m not tied up because I needed my hands free to sort it out.

MANDY: It would have been a bit much to tie us up when we’re already locked in a cell.

KATY: We can still get up to some mischief. They wouldn’t keep us in here for the whole episode. Or would they?

MANDY: I’m sure we’ll escape.

KATY: Oh yes, you’re using your magic powers.

MANDY: That was easy.

KATY: More sneaking around. This is the same as the last one.

MANDY: Oh, it’s Philip’s turn to give a speech now.

KATY: This is the same as the last one too.

MANDY: I think it’s a different speech.

KATY: Yes, but he’s saying the same sort of things that he said after John’s speech.

MANDY: I could happily listen to Philip Madoc reading out a shopping list.

KATY: This script isn’t as good as a shopping list.

MANDY: This is a lovely bit with John Bailey, isn’t it?

KATY: Yes, he’s very expressive. He could always find something, even in a script like this.

MANDY: Oh, but Graham isn’t having any of it.

KATY: And he’s saying the same things as before. But it’s still very funny.

MANDY: Meanwhile, on location.

KATY: Are we going to hide in the gasworks forever? Or are we going to get captured and escape again?

MANDY: Well, they had to pad it out a bit to fill six episodes.

KATY: SIX?! Bloody hell. I’m fed up already.

MANDY: Don’t worry, Katy. I think the other ones are missing.

KATY: I hope they never find them.

MANDY: Now, this is quite exciting, isn’t it?

KATY: I suppose so. …

MANDY: Oh dear. Where now? … Ted Furnage again. I hope he got more money for all this. … All these pipes and things are very impressive. It was the perfect location. … That one looks like Hitler, doesn’t he?

KATY: He was in lots of different things.

MANDY: Who? Hitler? … My bum looks dreadful in this shot.

KATY: Mmm, yes.

MANDY: Are you listening, Katy? … Now, this is a bit different, isn’t it? … Isn’t it, Katy? … Katy, please could you stop playing with your phone?

KATY: Oh, sorry. I’ve got a text from Sophie.

MANDY: Oh, lovely. How is she?

KATY: Fine, I think. It’s about the convention this weekend.

MANDY: I’m looking forward to that.

KATY: It makes me laugh when people call it a con.

MANDY: Don’t be rude, Katy.

KATY: I didn’t always like them. I couldn’t understand why grown men would queue up just to get my autograph. I like to think I’m good at acting, but there’s nothing special about my handwriting.

MANDY: I felt very humbled that so many people liked me. At my first one, there was a sweet little boy whose mum brought him. I had a nice chat with her, but I think he was a bit put out.

KATY: Boys don’t want their space heroines to be like their mums. Even the grown men are like little boys. They’re so upset if they don’t get their own way.

MANDY: You mustn’t forget that a great deal of our fans are women.

KATY: I know, but the worst ones are the loudest, and they’re all men.

MANDY: I’m amazed that fans know so much.

KATY: Some of them go on like Fluellen.

MANDY: That’s not very kind, Katy. They’ll be listening.

KATY: They won’t know what I mean. I bet they never ask about your Ophelia.

MANDY: Now, that reminds me of a sketch I did with Little and Large. Syd and I were having a serious conversation about Shakespeare, but Eddie would butt in with silly questions about Time Girls.

KATY: That’s quite clever.

MANDY: Yes, it is. I don’t think they get the credit they deserve.

KATY: Oh dear. This must have been very embarassing for poor old John Bennett.

MANDY: But he did it. He was always very professional. And really, it’s only like Aladdin.

KATY: Urgh, I won’t do that one. I love panto, but not when it’s racist. And it’s more popular than ever. There used to be lots of different ones in the old days, but now they’re all the same.

MANDY: I suppose we’re lucky it hasn’t gone the same way as rep.

KATY: Well, yes, but it’s not as good as it used to be. These days they get people from awful things like the X Factor. They can’t do panto. They can’t do anything. We were trained, and we worked hard in the theatre. They get straight onto telly and it makes them famous for nothing. Then the tabloids knock them down again. For nothing. It’s-

MANDY: Oh whoops! (WHISPERING) I think we just saw your knickers.

KATY: That’s not me. They said it was too dangerous for me to climb up there, so they made Ian Slaith dress up in my costume.

MANDY: He carries it off rather well. What a wiggle!

KATY: Years later, a fan asked me to sign a pair of knickers because of this scene. When I told him he’d really seen Ian’s knickers, he went ballistic. I couldn’t understand it.

MANDY: At the American conventions, they have minders to protect you from all that.

KATY: I’m still not allowed over there.

MANDY: This is you now. You look very high up.

KATY: They shot it with a wide angle lens. Really I was only three feet off the ground.

MANDY: And here comes Ian again, not in drag any more.

KATY: In the first take, I did this bit wrong and really punched him. He was very sweet about it.

MANDY: There he goes!

KATY: The stuntmen made me feel very powerful. I just had to flick my wrist and they’d do all these amazing somersaults.

MANDY: It is very spectacular.

KATY: And it was all for nothing because they’ve got us again.

MANDY: Cliffhanger!

KATY: The same cliffhanger as before. And we still haven’t seen the dustbins.

MANDY: And we won’t, because sadly this is all that’s left of Rise of the Robons.

KATY: If anyone watching finds any of the missing episodes, please, please, please set fire to them.

MANDY: Oh, Katy. You are awful.

KATY: Don’t leave them in a skip, because someone else might find them. I suppose you could fling them into some water. If it’s very deep.

MANDY: That’s enough, Katy. Goodbye everyone.

First, you literally cannot miss it — it’s on several human-sized signs right at the entrances to Javits Center (the other side of these signs say “Cosplay is not consent.” Second, the examples are clear and obvious and the policy is not constrained to only the examples — but enough’s there that you get the idea that NYCC is serious about this stuff. Third, it’s clear from the sign that NYCC also has a commitment to implementation and execution of the policy, with a harassment reporting button baked right into its phone app. This is, pretty much, how an anti-harassment policy should be implemented.

And as a result, did the floor of the Javits Center become a politically correct dystopia upon which the blood of innocent The True (and Therefore Male) Geeks was spilled by legions of Social Justice Warriors, who hooted their feminist victory to the rafters? Well, no. The floor of the Javits Center looked pretty much like the floor of any really large media convention — people wandering about, looking at stuff, wearing and/or admiring costumes and generally having a bunch of geeky fun. Which is to say that as far as I could see the policy didn’t stop anyone from enjoying themselves; it simply gave them assurance that they could enjoy themselves, or get the problem dealt with if someone went out of their way to wreck their fun.

It’s well past time that every large convention had an anti-harassment policy that offers specific examples of what forms harassment can take, and yes, I’m talking to you, San Diego Comic-con. New York Comic Con is run by ReedPOP, one of the largest convention organizations in the world; these are people with an acute sense of what their liability issues would be with regard to their anti-harassment policy. The fact that NYCC, which is the same size as SDCC at this point, in terms of attendance, has no problem offering up examples while SDCC continues to take the public position that doing so would somehow tie their hands to address issues of harassment, points out that SDCC’s position is, to put it politely, nonsense.

There is no penalty in letting attendees know some of what you consider inappropriate behavior — indeed it makes them safer because when examples are offered, they don’t have to question whether they have “really” been harassed, and they don’t have to worry whether the convention will agree with them. Information is power, particularly when some asshole is trying to assert their power over you by making you feel unsafe in a place where the whole point is to enjoy yourself with others who share your enthusiasms.

That SDCC (and Comic-Con International, its parent organization) continue to refuse to offer these examples at this point is confounding. I don’t doubt that Comic-Con does not want harassing behavior at its conventions; I don’t doubt that they would try to stop it if they knew of it. But that’s just it: No one knows what Comic-Con International considers harassing behavior. No one knows if it’s a consistent standard; no one knows if it’s always a judgment call on the part of whoever deals with the particular issues; no one knows if a harassment claim being taken seriously is down to one person’s political opinions, mood, or blood sugar level. We just don’t know, because it’s not spelled out. We don’t even know if they know. And that’s no way to run a convention in 2014 and beyond. San Diego needs to expand its anti-harassment policy. Simple as that.

I’m very pleased New York Comic Con, for its part, has decided to be on the forefront of anti-harassment policies. It’s smart, it makes sense, and it makes me, for one, inclined to come to it again. There are other conventions at this point that I can’t say the same about, and that’s too bad for the both of us.

Actually, the first of these are from last night, in the wake of learning that game developer Brianna Wu was threatened out of her home:

What followed this morning after a whole lot of stupid on my comment threads when I woke up this morning:

a work in progress

work in progress

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October 8th, 2014: PROOF: You want perspective WE GOT PERSPECTIVE – Ryan

As I write this, the American government is engaged in yet another air bombardment campaign in the Middle East.  In response to a series of relatively minor, but alarming and shocking, provocations by an extremist militant group usually known as ISIS, President Barack Obama — who initially campaigned on a platform of peace, diplomacy, and a gradual withdrawal from our entanglements overseas — has become the fourth president in a row to order airstrikes against the nation of Iraq; we have been engaged in some form of military action in the area every year for the past 24 years.  Bombing Iraq is the single act of government upon which all U.S. leaders since Ronald Reagan agree.  The program, largely carried out through the use of unmanned drones so as not to terrify Americans into a politically disruptive sense of the realities of war, is not without controversy.  Drone warfare is criticized by some as a means of furthering a government subsidy program for already-wealthy defense contractors; it is seen by others as a rather imprecise and destructive method of warfare that has killed far more innocent civilians than enemy combatants, and likely has increased the supply of terrorists rather than reduced it; and still others are nervous on general principles at the idea of the U.S. government operating a store of invisible, silent, flying killer robots who are allowed to blow people to smithereens without benefit of a trial, or a declaration of war.

Where there is a bit more consensus (though, thankfully, it is far from universal) is our choice of who should have this slow-motion humanitarian disaster unleashed upon them.  The Muslim world, as it happens, is all too apt to present us with targets that are easy to hate.  Iran’s theocratic government is detestable in a cartoonish way, and Saudi Arabia’s is detestable in a sinister way; ISIS is jaw-droppingly brutal and cruel, and the inheritor of al-Qaeda, the great American bogeyman of the 21st century; Syria’s government has replaced Iraq’s as the most monstrous in their treatment of their own people; Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood are all too quick to make terrorism and violence their tools of first resort; and far too many Muslim-majority nations are cesspools of corruption and hotbeds of oppression, hostile to most forms of democracy and freedom.  All over the world, Islamic separatists seem menacing and dangerous, appearing to many people like an unexpected cancer metastasizing at an alarming rate.  Everywhere we look — China, India, the Philippines, the Middle East, central and eastern Europe, Africa — it is Muslims who seem to be causing all the problems.  If we are dealing with them harshly, the prevailing attitude seems to be, it is only because we have been so intolerably provoked..

One of the most curious manifestations of this alarmist reaction to Islam comes from a community of which I have been a willing part:  the self-identified atheists.  Like them, I do not believe in the teachings of Islam (or of Christianity, or of Judaism or Hinduism or of any other form of religion); like them, I once believed, when I was an arrogant teenager, that I was simply a superior intellect who had had the courage and smarts to get hip to what all the rest of the sheep were too beaten down and stupid to figure out — that religions were all a lie.  These questions still nag at me:  I am quite certain that all religions are equally nonsensical and false, that most of their teachings are absolutist claptrap, that they are sexist and coercive, and that in the balance, they may do substantially more harm than good.  On the other hand, because my strongest belief is in post-philosophical pragmatism, I have also learned that religion has great social value, that it has created or encouraged some of the greatest accomplishments in culture and science, that it can provide tremendous amounts of social value and make people feel less isolated, lonely, and small, and that it is quite capable of not just getting out of the way of social progress, but of outright helping it cross the finish line.  Sadly, though, I have softened my views on the utility and value of religion (while still maintaining my personal disbelief and my general wariness of the harm it can do) at the same time a cultural phenomenon I never expected to see — the widespread social acceptance of atheism in America — has calcified religious skepticism into something very difficult to distinguish from outright bigotry.

Much of this is attributable to those unpredictable political bedfellows that always emerge in periods of social flux.  Mainstream atheism — and part of me still goggles at the fact that there is such a thing — has largely rejected its ties to progressivism and has allied itself instead to the modern brand of libertarianism.  The result has been a decline of its interest in economic issues, a restriction of its concern for social ones, an aggressive turn towards hostile and xenophobic conservativism, a nasty backlash against multi-culturalism, and a downright dangerous growth of the delusion that science does, or should, have anything to say about the rightness or wrongness of what are essential personal moral choices.  Nowhere is this more clear than among the movement’s self-selected leaders:  half-smart libertarians like Bill Maher, Penn Jillette, and Ricky Gervais assume that being clever enough to spot the flaws in religion exempts them from having to examine the problems with their own ideas, and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins constantly make statements full of prejudice against women, minorities, and religionists as if their brilliance at science allowed them to engage in sloppy thinking about other aspects of life.  In recent high-profile clashes with actor Ben Affleck and author Reza Aslan, Maher and people influenced by the same lazy prejudice that Maher spreads around were brought front and center, and the outraged shrieks from their cronies has been depressingly edifying.

Just as Christians once said of unbelievers, calling them heathens and prescribing for them repeated applications of the torch; just as Catholics once said of Jews, treating them as a particularly virulent plague that had to be isolated from the general population; just as communists once said about capitalists and vice versa (and see Harris’ column link above to see that he’s still fighting that once-cold war); just as every oppressor has said to the oppressed, the atheist elite is treating a huge, diverse, and complex thing –the religion of Islam as it is practiced by a billion people in every part of the world — as if it is a dichotomy of correct or incorrect, and incorrect means wrong, and wrong means evil.  Atheism was much more politically appealing when it was the voice of the minority, railing against the injustices of the ruling Christian majority against the brave and innocent dissenter; now that it has become the voice of the ruling majority itself, the voice of libertarian, anti-religious, well-off American whites who preach the evil of Islam while innocent Muslims are bombed in their hundreds and imprisoned in their thousands, it is a lot harder to swallow.  Even more galling is the way it dresses itself up in the language of progressivism, of defending science and women’s rights and freedom and justice, while ignoring the essential contradictions and omissions in their approach.

Because Aslan is right:  there is no such thing as an “evil” or “violent” religion, because religions are not people, but organizations made up of people.  Iran’s government is indeed a gaggle of criminals, fanatics, and provocateurs, but they no longer command the respect of the vast majority of their citizens, and only came to power because of our own insistence on running the country by proxy.  Saudi Arabia is indeed run by a group of terrifying religious lunatics, but they enjoy their position because of our economic indulgence and political favor.  ISIS are indeed frightening madmen who televise beheadings of kidnap victims, but their numbers hardly make them any kind of true international threat, and from a practical standpoint, does the world lose more from an innocent man being beheaded than it does from a dozen men being blown to bits because they were standing in the vicinity of someone we suspected might be a terrorist?  Syria’s civil war is a horrendous crisis, but our foot-dragging and intransigence helped it happen, and even now we’re arming the same fanatics to fight the Assad government that we’ll have to fight ten years down the road if they take over, a dismayingly familiar cycle of violence we seem unwilling or unable to break.  Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood are in the positions they are in — positions that allow them to engage in corruption, oppression, and terrorism — because of our unwillingness to budge in our support of Israel’s increasingly indefensible policies.  Corruption and oppression are hardly unique to the Muslim world, nor is institutional sexism, and many of the worst crimes leveled at Islamic countries — female genital mutilation, denial of education and other social services to women, and the suppression of non-majority religions and political parties — are practiced just as much in non-Muslim nations.  (America’s own treatment of women, gays, and minorities has not been so admirable for so long that we are in a position to act as if we’ve had the whole thing sorted out from the get-go.)  Muslims have been present throughout the entire world for a thousand years, and are hardly alone in pushing for (often violent) nationalist governments, of the sort we support when it is politically advantageous for us to do so.

None of this is to excuse the heinous behavior of Islamic extremist groups, or to say that they do not deserve condemnation for all sorts of unspeakable crimes, from the mangling of young women’s genitals to the savage murder of aid workers to the mass disenfranchisement of any number of minority-status groups.  It is only to say that it does us no good to pretend that this is universally the situation throughout the entire vast swath of the globe where Islam is practiced, to ignore exceptions where there are exceptions, to shrug off progress where progress occurs, or to maintain a worthless illusion that these behaviors are endemic to a religion rather than largely political acts influenced by culture, colonialism, exploitation, greed, power, and other factors that can be found in any human organization.  The strength of pragmatism over dogmatism — even dogmas that claim to be anti-dogmatic, such as atheism and libertarianism — is that it allows us to avoid such absolutist nonsense, and to sidestep such unanswerable and pointless questions as “What is to be done about Islam?”, and focus instead on questions of a practical nature that can truly be acted upon:  what do we mean by a “War on Terror”?  Who should it be directed at, how should it be fought, and what should be its strategical aim?  Why does Islam manifest itself in certain ways in some countries, and in different ways in others?  Under what circumstances should we support nationalist and independence movements?  What have we done to exacerbate tensions in these areas, and how can we meet our political and economic goals without continuing to do so?   How much suffering are we willing to inflict in order to revenge our own suffering?  Is a corrupt status quo superior to a violent change?  To what extent is religious behavior influenced by the social, political, historical, cultural, and economic environment in which it takes place?  And, perhaps most importantly, if our overall goal is the reduction of terrorism, is the blanket condemnation of an entire religion as murderous and the arbitrary destruction of civilians in areas where that religion is practiced really the way to do it?

It is said in Islam that written above the throne of Allah is this claim:  “And truthfully, my compassion overcomes my wrath”.  Until the intellectual power of atheism stops stoking its own ego and seeks practical solutions rather than merely examples of its superiority, its anger will overwhelm its mercy, and nothing will be accomplished but the same old naming of sides.  Our policy towards a billion people across the globe of every race, nationality, and character will be as blind and as violent as a drone.

Or: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part Two



Foreigners traveling the United States often complain of the homogeneity of American culture. Everywhere you go, they say, you see the same businesses, the same chain restaurants and the same department stores, with little or no variation for local color. Or at least that's what foreign people say in movies and books. I wonder if foreigners now even notice the homogenization. They have Wal-Marts, too, after all.

There are arguments to be made for homogenization, however, and one of them certainly has to do with the way we travel. Traveling is pretty terrible. I hate it and I avoid it wherever possible. Some people look on traveling as an adventure, a chance to get away from the familiar, to experience something different. That's great, really it is, but how often do you get to actually take those types of trips anymore? Most of my traveling consists of driving someplace at a breakneck speed, settling into a hotel room in a state of exhaustion that never seems to dwindle no matter how restful the beds are, and flailing limply in the general direction of whatever services are available nearby for however long I'm there. It's a good thing if the hotel is down the street from the Wal-Mart, because I really don't want to have to worry about navigating the eccentricities of local supermarket chains at two in the morning.

Seen from the highway, most towns are way stations. If they're lucky they get to keep some character on Main St, but from the highway travelers see in this panoply of towns an unerring reflection of their own desiccated enthusiasm. We don't tour the continent, we strap ourselves to shaky metal wagons and barrel down the freeway at eighty miles per hour in the hopes of making the actual sensation of traveling as brief and painless as possible. Maybe there's something good at the other end of the journey. Maybe there are just more in the way of onerous responsibility. As soon as I pull the car out of the driveway I want to go back home.

There's not a lot of local flavor on display in Santa Clarita. The town itself exists only because Los Angeles needed a bedroom in which to build movie lots and plant orange groves. It's not a college town. The college was built in the sixties with money from Disney for the purpose of accommodating the industry's need for professional artists, craftspeople, and musicians - two other schools, the Chouinard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, were combined to make the college.

But it's not a college town. The school itself is tiny: one large complex on the hill overlooking I-5 and a number of smaller outbuildings. Whereas a larger school can set the tone for the surrounding community, Santa Clarita is first and foremost a bedroom community for Los Angeles, with all the baggage that entails. Secondly, it's home to a Six Flags franchise. Thirdly, it's a college town. A very distant thirdly.

In the fulness of time Santa Clarita reveals itself as less a real city than a hybrid between rich suburb and tourist town. It's twenty minutes from Hollywood and appears to be filled with people who can afford to live above the Valley, but it's also filled with the cheap franchise motels and restaurants surely popular with harried families visiting the amusement park. It's a vacation destination for the unambitious and a bedroom community for upper-middle-class Los Angelinos. Somewhere in between these layers there's a horde of art students wriggling in the dark like mealworms under a rock.

Does Valencia have a downtown? Anything resembling old settlements? If it does, we didn't see them. We saw, instead, rows of tract housing on one end and ritzy apartment blocks on the other. Townies packed into a number of crappy apartment complexes that were never so shiny as on visiting day. After you sign the lease they no longer restrain the jackals. There's a very nice mall and just about every chain retailer you can imagine, including three Wal-Marts. Only one of these is a 24-hour supercenter, which represents more of an inconvenience than you might expect.

Denny's is a good place to find yourself in moments of insecurity. Eating at Denny's frees you of the burden of having to worry about food. Gone is the anxiety over finding a good place to eat: Denny's is not a good place to eat by any stretch, and that is to its credit. Where it excels is consistency. You can walk into any Denny's in the world at any time of night and be seated at a clean table and receive a bottomless drink of some kind. I always order the same things at Denny's. You don't feel guilty for displaying a lack of adventurousness when ordering dinner at midnight at a Denny's: there's no point. If you're lucky you can find one or things on the menu that you can order with the confidence that, even if they aren't good, they are pleasingly not good in a way that can only be described in terms of comfortable, condescending endearment.

IHOP is Denny's scruffy little brother, always vaguely sticky no matter how well he washes himself. IHOP isn't open all night like Dennys, but IHOP does offer a larger variety of dessert items masquerading as breakfast food. The difference between the food at IHOP and the food at Denny's is that you can't really trick yourself into thinking there's anything worth eating at IHOP in the way you sometimes can at Denny's. For some reason I'll never quite understand, IHOP is always full and Denny's is always empty.

We were in limbo for a month, just over four weeks' time. In that time we drove the road between Santa Clarita and Palm Desert at least ten times, sometimes both ways in one day, sometimes with a night at a hotel in between. There's nothing fun about the road between Santa Clarita and Palm Desert: there's always traffic between Pasadena and Rancho Cucamonga. People in San Bernardino drive like they want to die, and I can relate to that. The only beautiful scenery in the entire trip is the rows of hundreds of electric windmills between Banning and Palm Springs.

People asked, "why aren't you settled? Why are you driving back and forth between Santa Clarita and Palm Desert? Why don't you just have an apartment?" The answers to these questions were all the same: there are no places to live in Santa Clarita. It's not a place people should live at all, really. It's a weigh station halfway between somewhere and another place that just happens to be part of LA County because the shit that went down in Chinatown wasn't really as fictional as you might want to think.

So after a hard day of dealing with college registration and the indignities of apartment hunting, what else is there to do but find a nice secluded booth in Denny's and let the wait staff keep refilling your Diet Coke until you are barely awake enough to shuffle back to the hotel? Who cares if you've probably put on ten pounds since the trip started. You don't care about that. You don't care about anything anymore.

Next: Palm Desert Is Hell On Earth

For the last year I’ve had the good fortune to be able to serve as a member of the Liberal Democrat Equality Policy Working Group, and yesterday conference accepted the motion that came out of that, making it official party policy.

There is lots of good stuff in there, but I did want to highlight the LGBT and marriage sections in particular. We heard much evidence from other groups too, and some of the awful statistics relating to education and stop-and-search for young Afro-Caribbean men in particular stick in my mind – but others deserve the credit for campaigning on those areas, so I’ll let them talk about them.

Remember, these are now official party policy. They are not just policy of the LGBT group or aspirational aims of a subgroup. Actual official party policy. (Some of these items were already party policy, but were restated in the policy document for clarity)

LGB and LGBT issues

• Review the Blood Ban. We’re currently in the ridiculous situation where a man who has sex with other men, even safe sex, is banned from giving blood for 12 months. However, it doesn’t matter how many unsafe sexual relationships anyone else has as they can still give blood. Even more confusingly, if you are a woman married to (And having sex with) a bisexual man who has ever had sex with another man, you can not give blood ever. Even if your husband can.
• An evidence-based approach to tackling *phobic bullying in schools. There is an evidence-gathering programme, started by LibDem Equalities Minister Jo Swinson MP, that will report back on how we can bet do this.
• “…mainstream discourses should consider more authentic ‘inclusive sexualities’ in advertising, media, and sport to help break down prejudice.“ and more specifically later on “positive images of transgender individuals in central government publications. Hopefully self-explanatory!

Trans issues

• ‘X’ (Unspecified) gender markers on passports. A big benefit for the non-binary community if we can make it a reality, but this is good for all trans and intersex people and society in general. There is no particular reason the state needs to concern itself with gender in the vasy majority of situations, especially when it comes to official ID. For example, did you know about the very patriarchal approach of the DVLA, which includes titles on women’s driving licenses but not men’s?
• Ending the Spousal Veto. If you don’t know what the Spousal Veto is, Sarah Brown has an excellent primer here. In short, the veto was introduced by the Same-Sex Marriage Act and allows a partner to block legal gender recognition of a spouse who has transitioned and prevent them obtaining potection from employment discrimination, even after the two year wait required for the legal process.
• Restoring stolen trans marriages. Under the pre-same-sex-marriage regime, even if a couple stayed together they were required to have their marriage annulled if one partner wanted to fully transition.
• Removing the requirement for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in order to obtain legal gender recognition. This would further reduce unwelcome medical gatekeeping when it comes to people’s identities, and also fix the mess that intersex people find themselves in. Currently, if you have an intersex condition and potentially had your legal gender assigned arbitrarily by a doctor at birth, you are unable to obtain a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (It’s a different diagnosis) and thus can not obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate.

Non-LGBT marriage issues

• Allow the Church of England to decide itself if it wants to carry out same-sex marriage. At the moment, the Church of England is prohibited by law from carrying out same-sex marriage, but with the way things are going I can well see that changing in the not too distant future.
• Allow Non-religious (Humanist) marriage ceremonies. Already permitted in Scotland, we would like to see this introduced in the rest of the UK.
• Include both parent’s names on marriage certificates. Current certificates only list the father, which is a very outdated patriarchal approach.

You can download the full policy paper, in .docx format, here.

I was asked to write a short piece for the issue of The House Magazine available at the Liberal Democrat Conference.

Winston Churchill had a watchword during the war: KBO. Given the failure of the coup against Nick Clegg and his determination the Coalition will last until the last possible moment, the only strategy open to the Liberal Democrats is to Keep Buggering On.

Though Nick fought a favourite's campaign when he was elected as leader and avoided discussing policy, many hoped his accession would see the party moving away from pavement politics – the exploitation of local problems, often without much particularly Liberal about it.

The irony is that this style of politics is now the party’s only hope of returning a respectable number of MPs at the next election. And it may work, getting more Lib Dems elected than commentators expect, if fewer than members hope.

In large part the Liberal Democrats’ difficulties in government were inevitable, even if we were too naïve to see it. We Lib Dems have always believed that if only we could get into government then everyone would love us, we would achieve proportional representation and stay there for ever.

But some of the party’s woes are self-inflicted. The leader’s inner circle had no idea how to win the referendum on the Alternative Vote. And, whether the fault was MPs breaking their pledge or making it in the first place, the debacle over tuition fees still makes us cringe.

After the general election our most urgent task will be to rebuild the Lib Dems’ local government base. Until then, KBO.

I’m not at Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference in Glasgow this week. It’s the first I’ve missed in about twenty years, and I am missing it – Richard and I would love to be there, but we’re getting married in twenty days’ time and just don’t have the time or the money. Following it on TV, one person who you can’t miss in Glasgow is Nick Clegg. This morning he was interrupted – I can’t say interviewed – on the Today Programme, so his latest answer on what the Lib Dems stand for is the latest of my Liberal Mondays quotations…

The Limits of the “Centre” and the Bigger Limitations of the “Interviewer”

Some of the random shouting by the random talentless hack from their researchers’ random shouting points and the Labour Party’s random propaganda points on Today this morning involved sneering at “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society” and shouting at Nick Clegg,

“Where is your core identity? What is it that the Lib Dems stand for?”

Obviously, none of the random shouting involved listening or engaging with the answer – yawn, he’s answering the question, bored now, time to hear my own voice again – but I’ve managed to piece together what Nick was allowed to get a word in edgeways with in his latest short summary of what the Liberal Democrats stand for.

Earlier in the interview, Nick summed us up in part with a line that doesn’t appeal to me at all, but here goes:

“The Liberal centre ground is where we’ve always been anchored, and where we’ve sought to anchor the government.”

I love the word “Liberal” – but I suspect those who aren’t tribal Liberals, which would be probably in excess of 99% of the population, don’t really respond to a tribal label. Only a minority, too, might respond to a concept, like “Freedom”, but it’ll be a lot more than those that identify with the label. Instead, the concept is “Centre” – which is meant to sound like ‘at the centre of things’ (if only one centre among, er, several in the same place?), but just sounds to me (and I suspect to almost everyone) like a statement that we don’t stand for anything of our own, splitting the difference between the others, neither one thing nor the other but somewhere… Quite a long way behind these days.

To be fair, there are advantages to the “centre” message. It lets you say your opponents are extreme and that only you are reasonable (isn’t really true but which might persuade) or that only you can rein them in (which is really true but which no-one believes). Nick came through with this strongly when contrasting the LiberaTory Coalition with what the Tories are gagging to do if they get “in power on their own” without us to tell them “No”: he focused on last week’s Tory Conference ‘Osborne bombshell’, where the Chancellor wants to abandon taxing the rich more (such as by the Liberal Democrats getting Capital Gains Tax raised above the previous Labour Government’s rich-bribing low level) and through eye-watering cuts alone

“only ask the working age poor to pick up the tab for the mistakes made by the bankers and the black hole in the public finances”.

What you might call the Tories’ “No-tax bombshell”.

The weakness in the “centre” came when Nick tried to attack Labour in the same way, claiming that “Labour move rapidly to the Left”. I don’t think they’re moving anywhere. They’re just a frightened vacuum. And though Nick drew attention to Mr Miliband’s cowardly and incompetent inability even to mention the massive deficit left by Labour, that cowardice and incompetence isn’t red-blooded Leftism. It’s the biggest symptom of an inability to make up their minds about anything at all in the face of a terrifying reality that would tear them apart. But that doesn’t fit with us being ‘somewhere in between’. Nick wanted people to give us credit for “holding firm”, I suppose in a rebuttal of “the centre cannot hold” – but that only opened him up to the interviewer’s sole moment of demonstration that she wasn’t merely a non-Turing-compliant iDevice programmed to shout a limited number of dumb phrases on repeat:

“Holding firm is not an ideology.”

Though I wait for any Today presenter ever to ask what either of the other two stand for and cut them off when their only answer is ‘Labour would tax you more and be nice to poor people and immigrants’ (the latter two points of which, unfortunately, aren’t even true) or ‘We’re shit, and we know we are, but oooooh! The Tories! Scary!’ (which is all true, but still gives me no reason to touch them with a barge pole and has nearly killed Labour in Scotland).

Nick Clegg’s Answer To “Where is your core identity? What is it that the Lib Dems stand for?”

“I’ll tell you exactly where we stand, and I feel this has always been the case.

“On the Left you’ve got socialism, the Labour Party, which is all about the state telling people what’s good for them; you’ve got the Right, the Conservative Party, that basically wants to keep the pecking order as it is.

“What has always distinguished British Liberalism, and I feel this very strongly, is an absolute, a huge emphasis on opportunity – that what everybody in politics should be about is trying to spread opportunity, such that everyone can get ahead in life, can live out their dreams, can use their talents to the greatest possible extent.

“And that’s why if you look at the signature tune things that we’ve done – I mean, don’t listen to the words, what we’ve done, our actions, judge us by our actions – whether it’s the massive expansion in apprenticeships, the huge transformation of the tax system so people on low pay keep more money as they work, or the very heavy emphasis on early years education, childcare, putting money into schools that cater for disadvantaged children.

“All of that is about opportunity.”

That is much better, and I’m glad Nick got to say most of it.

It feels recognisably Liberal in spirit as well as in label.

It’s something that Nick clearly believes, and is right at his heart, and that always helps when a politician says what they believe.

Though he didn’t say “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society” after the sneering, it chimes right in with that while sounding much more positive and definite than “Centre”.

And it links all that to our priorities in government.

It’s in many ways the same sort of thing I’ve been trying to do with my What the Liberal Democrats Stand For series, unifying ideology with our record in practice (latest version here; version with explanations here).

Any Liberal Democrat could say it themselves or stick it on a leaflet and not feel, ‘Oh, well, if I really have to.’

It isn’t perfect. In my own What the Liberal Democrats Stand For series, I’ve made a point of saying what we stand for – and Nick had already done his knocking copy, and been told not to talk about the others, but us. So starting with another attack on them was a mistake. It was a mistake because it made the statement about them.

Nick, next time you do this, if you must waste positive time being negative, take a tip from the “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeahhhh!” pre-chorus that propelled She Loves You irresistibly to Number One. If you stick otherwise to exactly the same words, then at least let your opening be “The Liberal Democrats are about opportunity for everyone.” People listen to your first line. Make it the most important and the most appealing.

And though your actual one-line sum-ups of the Labour and Conservative Parties were both fine, your first words about them were Centre-propagandist dumb:

“On the Left you’ve got socialism, the Labour Party…”

No, Nick. You haven’t. Leave the word behind. Labour left it behind more than twenty years ago. People so terrified that Ed Miliband is a revolutionary socialist coming to chop their heads down to size will not be voting for us anyway. The vast majority simply will not recognise that as reality, just as Mr Miliband is too frightened to recognise reality. He is not a socialist. He is not anything. He is a pitiful vacuum.

I nod to “trying to spread opportunity, such that everyone can get ahead in life, can live out their dreams, can use their talents to the greatest possible extent.” That’s my inspiration too. I recognise the issue that’s been closest to your heart since before you became Leader in talking with such passion about opportunity and about early years education. I just wish that for all the investment, the passion and the genuine commitment, you could say the word “education” without having cut the ground out under you biggest priority by everyone else hearing “tuition fees”. And you were cut off, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you would have got round to mentioning the environment after criticising Mr Cameron for not talking about it any more.

And it’s a shame that the “interviewer” gave one of her many parroted lines from the Labour Party press office in ruling out any examples of what we’ve done in office connecting to what we believe by saying as ‘fact’ that it’s just a Conservative Government with our support. Too many people believe that. The BBC presenting a stupid Labour lie as a fact doesn’t help. But though you won’t convince everyone – or, I fear, anything like enough people – by saying ‘here are our values, and here’s how we’ve put them into practice in government’, you need to keep at it. Because only saying either without the other will give far fewer people even than that a reason to vote for us.

Possibly wise to find a better phrase than “don’t listen to the words,” though.

How Nick Today Was Better Than Nick On Other Days

It’s not what I would have said. But it’s in tune with what I would have said, and recognisably from the same sort of ideological place. And while it has its own weaknesses, it’s much better than some of Nick’s (and others’) previous statements of what we stand for. I’ll be kind and not repeat what he said in his second debate against Nigel Farage – focus-grouped to death, palpably making him uncomfortable, and the least Liberal ‘statement of principles’ I’ve ever seen from a British Liberal Leader – but it compares very well with the messaged-to-death message at the last General Election, for example. That brought everything down to one word: “Fairness”.

Now, I’d say that Fairness is certainly among Liberalism’s crucial concepts, but on its own it’s just not the one thing we’re about. Fairness should be in the service of something else. Nick says “Opportunity”. I can go with that. I’d say “Freedom” – and it’s always depressing and also a bit bizarre when I’m the only Liberal who seems to be saying that. But it wasn’t just that “Fairness” was only our number one in 2010 because it was what the focus groups said: it was, like several other things in that Election, a hostage to fortune that sounded good during the election but killed us afterwards. It’s absolutely true that throughout the LiberaTory Coalition Government the Liberal Democrats have made the cuts and hard choices fairer than the Tories wanted. But without a Tory Government to measure that against, nobody sees it. It’s absolutely true that the gap between rich and poor – which the previous Labour Government made wider and wider with their doubling tax on the poor and bungs to the rich – has fallen under the LiberaTory Coalition Government, fallen sharply, for the first time since I was at primary school. But when that proof of fairness comes not in the happy way – by lifting everyone up, but those at the bottom most – but in the painful way, by everyone suffering but taking most from the rich and protecting the poor, then nobody feels that it’s “fair”. Because no-one who suffers ever thinks it is fair for them to suffer. It’s a risk to say the one thing you stand for is Fairness even if you’re awash with money, because no effing voter is ever grateful. But to say the one thing you stand for is Fairness when you know that the most you can do is make everybody hurt in the fairest way is pretty close to suicidal.

Where you’ll find the closest relative of Nick’s Today statement today is, unsurprisingly, in the Liberal Democrats’ new Pre-Manifesto, and in Nick’s Introduction to it. As is usually the case, the section on what we stand for is relegated to a ‘personal view’ by the Leader, as if presenting it as actual philosophy or, worse, ideology for a party would send readers screaming to the hills. As is always the case, this is written in part by Nick, in part literally by a committee (the Liberal Democrat Federal Policy Committee, if you want to tell them what you think of it), partly by staff and partly by another committee whose names you’ll find at the back of the booklet. But of course it’s Nick’s every word, officially. Comparing what Nick says in the booklet in these three pages with what he said on the radio in three paragraphs gives you an idea of what’s really closest to his heart.

For me, the Introduction to the 2014 Pre-Manifesto is one of the best that the party has produced. I think – after usually complaining that they’re far too short – that it should really have a short version, probably on the front or back cover. Here’s one I prepared earlier. But it’s persuasive, it’s distinctively Liberal, and the middle one of the three pages gives our policy priorities for the future in a way that fits seamlessly into what we’re about. But without a summary or a short version, it’s not quite clear that there’s one word that motivates it – which is probably quite right, as complex politics don’t usually reduce to just one word. Mine is “Freedom” and, hurrah! for the first time in ages, that appears there quite a lot. Nick’s is “Opportunity”. So does that. Yet though Freedom would be my one word, I’ve more often summed us up with three: “Freedom, Fairness, Future”. Between those, I can pull out most of our policies, as well as thinking they work as a buzzword condensed Liberalism (and, yes, I’m a sucker for alliteration too). So it’s notable that “Future” starts out as the main buzzword in this Introduction, repeated three times in the first line alone. Then, on the middle page, it becomes “the next generation”, repeated in six of the seven priorities and, though in different words, what the seventh is all about – as were most of Nick’s examples in his interview. Then “free”, “Liberal” and “opportunity” all stand out several times, the latter prominent but noticeably less than in Nick’s speeches, but the meaning of all three driving the first and third pages just as the next generation drives the priorities. By contrast, Fairness doesn’t actually appear on its own as a positive noun, instead standing at the back as a few slightly embarrassed adjectives. I hope to get time to write about the Pre-Manifesto in more detail, but if I can’t, it’s interesting that I’ve gone from unusually critical of the centrality of Fairness to the Liberal Democrat message to making it unusually prominent, just by staying still. I suspect Nick is more comfortable using the word closest to his heart this time round.

Today Is So Yesterday

It’ll still be on the iPlayer for a bit, but I wouldn’t bother listening to the whole ‘interview’. And not because of Nick.

Some journalists – by which I mean presenters, not journalists, as they neither write anything nor ever find anything out – want nothing other than to be the next Jeremy Paxman. This is a crapulent ambition, as the old Jeremy Paxman had been an unwatchable panto caricature for decades before he retired to spend time with his many-times-larger-than-any-politician-public-salary millions. Unfortunately, one of the worst examples of this disease is the Today Programme, once a flagship for holding politicians to account and now an unlistenable presenters’ masturbation demonstration with no interest in presenting or prying out information. The ‘big beast’ interviewers, or interrupters, have spent decades now doing nothing but making up their minds about some tiny fiddling point and then constantly repeating it until either the interviewee ‘admits’ to it – which lets them crow – or gets fed up and asks why they’re obsessed with some tiny fiddling point that no listener gives a toss about – which lets them say no-one answers their questions. Or they just talk over people so they never get a chance to answer a question because, oh, anyone else but their own voice is so boring, right?

Evan Davis had been a breath of fresh air: a journalist who knew what he was talking about and who used that to listen to answers and engage intelligently with them, which made him able to genuinely interrogate his subjects and inform his listeners. He’s been recruited to replace Mr Paxman, which suggests Newsnight is acting on a long-buried desire to become a critical news programme again instead of a long-running ‘argument’ sketch that shows why Monty Python were so wise to do a limited run. I’d like to hope that Mr Davis becomes a great success and a household name, making other presenters wish to be the next Evan Davis instead. It’s not a very confident hope, though, because to know what you’re talking about requires both talent and a lot of hard work. It’s far easier to just shout random things your researchers have told you and not let people finish the answers that you’re too stupid to understand anyway. Who does that inform, exactly?

This morning some talentless hack ‘interviewed’ Nick Clegg. I can’t remember her name. I doubt anyone else can. She may as well have come from the same mould as so many ambitious but lazy men and women who want to be Jeremy Paxman. Her equally lazy researchers had given her several stupidly untrue statements to shout and then shout again when Nick contradicted her with something boring like facts. And she got bored when he started answering her questions and decided it was time we heard her voice again. It’s all part of the Today Programme’s inevitable transmogrification into Thought For the Day, the part of the programme I always turn the volume off for and put on a music track instead. Before long they’ll decide that politicians, alternative views and tedious facts only get in the way of not just three minutes of semi-religious inanity but the far more important three hours of presenters’ egos. Someone with very ill-thought-out opinions says something bland and obvious in a monologue for which no-one can hold them to account: bishops today, Today presenters tomorrow. A radio shouting in a human ear, forever.

I’m usually busy at Liberal Democrat Conferences. Writing speeches – sometimes even getting called to make them. Writing chunks of policy – sometimes even proposing them. Not writing a blog looking at the telly, while policies I’ve had nothing to do with are debated without my vote or voice. One I’m in two minds over. One I’m proud of. One taking baby steps but going nowhere near far enough. One that’s OK but should’ve been inspiring. One that’s unjust, unaffordable and unworkable. And the big picture: the very few places where my party puts any money where its mouth is.

As my health has gone further downhill, in conference after conference I’ve made fewer speeches and attended fewer debates than I did five years ago, or ten, or twenty. It’s just a bit of a shock to go from steadily decreasing participation and days when I often have to stay in a hotel room rather than in the conference hall to zilch. Hopefully Richard and I will be back next year, more engaged once we’re married (though it’ll be much more expensive for me just as my low income’s been eradicated, thanks to government policies I can’t say I support).

But there is one advantage to watching this Glasgow Conference on TV. I would be sitting in the hall fired up and wondering if I’ll be called to make my speech, listening to dreary meandering mumbles with nothing to say even if they could deliver it, where the only message is ‘My view on this crucial national issue is incoherent but involves a mind-bogglingly dull special plea for my own little local area’ – and it’s not just the MPs, some of the ordinary members are just as bad. I would be thinking hard at the sodding chair of the session, ‘It’s one thing not to call me to make the brilliant speech I’ve crafted so carefully, but calling these ones instead is just insulting.’

At home, I don’t feel the urge to write a speech, I don’t have to worry if I can make it to the hall, and above all, I can record the debates and watch most of them with my finger on the fast-forward button!

In my breaks from Lib Dem Conference, I’ve also been watching Doctor Who – The Pirate Planet, starring Tom Baker and written by Douglas Adams. This brilliant story, is I have to admit, better viewing than pretty much any Agenda item bar the Presentation On Same-Sex Marriage, and its second episode was first broadcast on this night back in 1978. At the time, part of it was a satire about the idea of an “economic miracle” for which no-one has to pay. It also turns out (spoilers) that behind the exponentially increasing devouring of the resources of whole worlds is someone very old to whom no demand is ever enough.

So what’s been happening back at the Conference? You can read all the papers here, and catch many of the debates via the BBC. But here’s why some debates particularly caught my attention…

“One Member, One Vote”

I’m torn on this one. If party membership hadn’t been hollowed out, I’d be wary that these proposals sound like they’re about equality but actually even more heavily in favour of time-rich, money-rich people who happen to live close to the seaside (or, in this case, to Glasgow). The equivalent of electoral reform for the UK being to propose one person, one vote – as long as you can all pay a large registration fee to crowd into the same one polling station. In Glasgow. Or, discarding the party’s current constituency-based representative democracy model, like reforming the House of Commons by saying any UK citizen can turn up and vote there, as long as they can afford to pay to register and pay to stay in London. And I wasn’t totally convinced by the argument that our shrunken membership makes it less likely people will turn up to swing the votes, which seems like an argument that we should completely change the structures just to get no more people turn up anyway. That the proposals themselves were a badly-drafted mess from a Federal Executive that has been record-breakingly navel-gazing and incompetent in its faits accompli this year didn’t help.

And yet… I’ve had times when I’ve been to conference without being an elected conference representative with a vote too, and it’s even more frustrating than being a conference representative who’s not at conference as I am today. The amendments stopped the constitution being turned into incoherence. And the arguments on the OMOV side were simply far better, with too many of those against resorting to pathetic ad hominem attacks.

Watching from home, though, if every member is to get a vote not just if they attend conference but for the major party committees, the small changes in making conference easier to follow over the past few years need to accelerate mightily. During conferences, the party website must have a one-click ‘What is happening right now’ solution rather than a many-click ‘Somewhere here you can work it out’ puzzle box. The back-projections and the chairs of sessions need to give the site address several times during each debate and explain what’s going on in each vote, not just to make it clear to conference-goers rushing about, but to those more members we’re told will be freshly engaged and watching after OMOV. Announcing at the end what the votes have actually decided, rather than just reading out a list of numbers and letters, would help the TV watchers too.

In a spirit of helpfulness, here’s one I prepared earlier: Making It Easier To Follow Liberal Democrat Conference.

Towards Safer Sex Work

Twenty years ago, I was newly elected to the Liberal Democrat Federal Policy Committee – the body that decides on the major policy proposals that go to Conference. I was the youngest person on it by more than ten years, the only out LGBT person on it (putting into perspective today’s debates over reducing ‘diversity’ to only one tick-box quota), and – the unique thing about me that most mattered to me and which made the difference on the Committee – by the reckoning both of those meaning it approvingly and those meaning it critically the most unfilteredly ideologically Liberal. One of the first policy papers that that year’s FPC discussed had something done to it that I can’t remember any other paper save election manifestos. Election manifestos come back several times for FPC debate because there’s so much in them and we need to get them right. This paper was sent away for redrafting not once but twice because it was simply too Liberal for the FPC. I can’t remember any other than wasn’t just redrafted a bit in committee, as was the norm, but rejected in total and sent away to be rewritten from top to bottom (possibly not the best words), then once we saw it again, told it was still too interesting and needed to be completely redrafted yet again.

The neutered and regulation-heavy paper that was eventually permitted to creep into Conference was titled “Confronting Prostitution”. I bear some responsibility for that overly confrontational language: I was the one who pointed out to the FPC that the title “Tackling Prostitution” might be open to ribald remarks and we should get our tackle out.

It wasn’t a bad paper. It advanced us well ahead of the other parties. But I always looked at it with disappointment, because the policy working group had followed its remit, followed the evidence, and followed Liberalism in drafting a civil liberties paper that the FPC gutted stage by stage until it was about ‘getting them off the streets’. When the first draft came to FPC, it was the only policy paper that was ever so unpopular that just one solitary FPC member supported it as it stood. You will not be surprised to read that it was not the only time in which I was in a minority of one, but it was the most significant.

So I was very proud to watch all of Saturday afternoon’s debate, to see how far we’ve come. I particularly recommend you read Sarah Brown’s speech, but I was really pleased at how sensible and Liberal the overwhelming majority of the speakers – and the votes – were, including protecting sex workers both from exploitation and from the state, rejecting the idea of reintroducing ID Cards but just for sex workers, and setting out the principle that informed, consenting sex should simply be legal and is nobody else’s business (even if it’s a business). Well done, Conference! I just hope now that the next FPC will not be as timid about the forthcoming policy paper as its predecessor two decades ago. So if you have a vote, vote for the candidates with some Liberal ideas rather than just a CV on their manifesto.

Doing What Works To Cut Crime

I liked this policy paper – it sets out a practical, evidence-based approach to cutting crime. But its piecemeal nature means it looks more like a compilation than a coherent whole. So I welcome the commitment to crime prevention. And civil liberties. And evidence-based baby-step liberalisation of our useless, gangster-boosting drug laws. And to the interests of victims.

But a bigger question that the paper doesn’t ask is that if we want fewer victims, what about the victimless? What about ‘crimes’ that are not about protecting any victim but only about the state victimising people that aren’t hurting anyone else? Because it’s not only criminals who attack you that can be bullies. The state can, too. And if you want to prevent crime, expand freedom, cut the ground from under gangsters and have fewer victims, then setting out the principle that ‘victimless crimes’ should simply not be crimes at all is something I’d like to see as the keystone of our next crime paper when it looks at evidence for how to implement that.

The Liberal Democrat 2014 Pre-Manifesto – A Stronger Economy and A Fairer Society

I wrote a little about this yesterday, looking at the Introduction and how that’s changed and improved on previous attempts – though it lacks a short, stirring rallying call of What the Liberal Democrats Stand For.

The whole thing’s pretty good. And I particularly liked Duncan Brack’s closing peroration in the debate (Duncan, if you’re reading, please send me your speech and I’ll print some of it in a Liberal Monday). I have to admit, though, save the much-purloined policy to further raise the personal allowance for the lower-paid, I’m a bit hard-pressed to remember a ‘wow’ policy. That suggests that its narrative isn’t all that thrilling. And then at the last minute, someone came along and diluted the best bit.

I might have been tempted to vote against it for the drafting amendment announced this morning: the problem with an amendment that’s accepted into the text at the last minute is that no-one gets to debate it or speak against it. Several years ago, there was a crappy Guardianista fad for “wellbeing”, a meaningless top-down political concept like a New Labour zombie. The Lib Dems made the great mistake of deciding it was the biggest of big ideas, with almost zero enthusiasm, and since then have sheepishly never mentioned it again because it’s a load of rubbish. Until this policy motion, when some utter fool wanted to add it and the bigger fools on the FPC let them. Worse, it means that the motion as passed says that the one big thing we’re really about is “above all to empower every person to realise their potential” – oh, and also “wellbeing”! Which is crud. It’s not one task. It’s two. It means the inspiring, Liberal, bottom-up idea that we are about enabling everyone to decide their own life is now knitting together with top-down Blairite mulch about how we should decide what’s good for people. As no-one mentioned it in the debate, proving yet again how pathetically uninspiring the idea is, my advice is just to pretend it isn’t there.

But at least the Pre-Manifesto remembered to talk quite a bit about the deficit, and didn’t pretend you can fix it while bringing in no new tax revenue at all and giving massive handouts to the wealthiest.

Did We Forget About the Deficit After All? The Big Four Spending Commitments

The Pre-Manifesto was very tough on the deficit this morning. Then there was a huge splurge this afternoon.

I’m not against huge splurges (no, titter ye not). But the Liberal Democrats have carefully costed our Manifestos for more than two decades to only promise what we can afford, even in the good times when the money was rolling in (though less than the Labour Government pretended). Now the money’s not just tight but gone, it’s all the more obvious where the few extra bits are going – while everything else gets slashed.

• The Liberal Democrats are committed to protecting and expanding spending for schools and early years education – we always have. It’s probably our single most consistent commitment.
  

• We’re committed to increasing pensions through the so-called ‘triple lock’ (heads, tails or side, pensioners always win big).
  

• We’re committed to raising the income tax allowance to the level of the current minimum wage – but that isn’t ‘locked’, so it can be eaten away by inflation.
  

• And we’re now also committed to above-inflation increases in the NHS budget. All the previous three follow on from the big promises the Liberal Democrats made in the 2010 election, all three of which were delivered in the LiberaTory Coalition. This one is different: it also happened for every year of the Coalition, but at the last election it wasn’t promised by either the Liberal Democrats or Labour. This part of the Coalition’s record now taken up by every party was only a Tory commitment. We forced them to agree to the others – they forced us to agree to this one.

These four spending commitments are massive. And everything else will have to suffer.

I remember in 2001 – in what Labour told us were the boom years – I put out a really good leaflet across the constituency for which I was standing for election. ‘Follow the money’, I thought, and so this was all about the two biggest spending commitments in our 2001 Manifesto. On one side, a picture of me with local kids, with details of our proposals for children and education and how we’d pay for them. On the other, a picture of me with local pensioners, with details of our proposals for old people and pensions and how we’d pay for them.

I thought this was a great idea until a working person without kids told me angrily, “So you’re offering me nothing, then. I just have to pay for it all.” That should have occurred to me: I was a working person without kids. But though we’d said in our 1997 Manifesto that we’d raise the personal allowance for the low-paid, by 2001 we’d dropped that from our priorities to give a massive bung to pensioners. And back then that didn’t even include the earnings link and ‘triple lock’.

Today we have even less money. We’ve restored the policy of cutting taxes for low-earners – and made it a reality for millions despite the Tories wanting a tax cut for dead millionaires instead and Labour opposing it because they want government hand-outs only to the people they say deserve it rather than letting all the low-paid keep their own money. But that wasn’t a choice between generations. Something for children; something for working people; something for pensioners; now something for the NHS for everyone.

I just don’t think this can hold – because four massive commitments of extra cash is too many without squeezing everything else until it pops. And one of those four is not like the others. Only one has had no hard choices at all – just constant rises.

Age Ready Britain

Back when I was healthy enough to stand for elections, I went through an assessment to see if I was politically fit to be a Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate. I passed with flying colours, and can still remember my going all Churchill to the assessor role-playing an anti-asylum-seeker voter on the doorstep (as well as remembering that I’d only use the word “refugee”). One of the parts of the approval process of which I most approved in turn was the point where you had to prove you had a Liberal brain by identifying a party policy that you disagreed with and explaining why. I think at the time it was something about well-meaningly bossing young people about – a “wellbeing” policy, if you will – and, if I thought today about which I considered our most wrong policy, I would quite happily blast that Blairite twaddle of a “wellbeing” paper out of existence. But as it’s already been wiped from everyone’s memory through its very blandness, I would answer that the policy I most disagree with is one that has been made even more disagreeable today.

Our policy on pensions is generous, warm-hearted, well-meaning and attractive.

It’s a shame that it’s completely out of touch with reality.

This morning, the Liberal Democrats voted for a Pre-Manifesto that constantly repeats that it is all about “the next generation” and uses that as a primary argument for reducing the massive deficit between what the government spends and the money it has – that we must spend less now rather than saddle ever-increasing debts onto the next generation.

This afternoon, the Liberal Democrats voted for our biggest spending commitment not only to remain humungous increases for pensioners when every single other group in society is suffering cuts, but to put that vast and ever-increasing cost into law so that it can never be changed.

Completely unworkable.

The first time I ever spoke on what might be called the party ‘establishment’ side, after many years of being the radical outsider, was sometime roughly around the year 2000. It was in a debate on pensions that saw the unlikely bedfellows of young people, the party Leadership and elderly members of the House of Lords on one side, with middle-aged Parliamentary candidates on the other. The Parliamentary candidates wanted to restore the link between earnings and pensions because it was very popular. The rest of us said that it was a mistake to make that a principle because we could afford it today – as we then thought, not realising that even in the boom years the Labour Government was already running an unaffordable budget deficit – because there would come the twin pressures of an ageing population and a less rosy economy, and then we’d be stuck with a policy that wasn’t affordable. I can’t remember precisely my age, but I can remember my speech’s opening line that got people’s attention (and got a few boos):

“Conference, I’m twenty-eight. And I want a pensions policy that doesn’t make me pay through the nose and then go bankrupt before I get anywhere near claiming it.”

Back then, sense won the day. Somehow, between then and now, as the nation has got older and the economy has gone down the toilet, as the side that won back then have been proved right, we’ve gone ahead and gone for the unreal option anyway.

A ‘triple lock’ on pensions ratchets up without end, so that whatever happens to wages, or inflation, or the nation’s finances, however children or working people or people on benefits or services or anything else under the sun suffer, one group alone will forever get more and more money even as that group gets bigger and bigger.

We promised it at the last Election. We were wrong.

We’ve delivered it in government. We were wrong.

Today, we’ve proposed locking it into legislation so that every other group, every other service, every other dire need must always by law be subordinate to pensioners not just not contributing much to the cuts, not just staying still, but getting more, more, more while everyone and everything else gets less, less, less. We are stupidly, impossibly wrong.

With today’s pressure on the public finances, this is not merely utterly unworkable but utterly unjust.

I argued for pensions increases and other spending to help pensioners back in 2001. I meant it. It was the right thing to do when we could (seemingly) afford it. I didn’t argue for massive age discrimination and a huge and ever-increasing transfer of wealth from the current generation and the next generation to pensioners who will never be all in this together even when we can afford none of it. Because I’m an idealist, not a complete fantasist.

The Party Leadership and speakers in the debate today told the brave souls who stood up against this dangerous absurdity that they were wrong to say that ever-increasing numbers of pensioners getting a never-ending increase above the country’s wealth was unaffordable, because we just don’t understand the numbers. They didn’t say what the numbers were. Because… Because… Because… It’s magic! Government spending is still way above the money it takes. Everything and everyone else is struggling to keep their heads above water. The benefits bill is being slashed and people having their benefits cut or cruelly taken away altogether – the one exception being the vast majority of the benefits bill, the vast majority of benefits claimants, all of whom get much more than any other benefits recipients. They are the pensioners. But pouring extra cash into by far the biggest chunk of the benefits budget is “affordable”, we were told, and we just don’t understand if we say the emperor has no money to get clothes.

How stupid do they think we are?

One MP replied to criticism – from the unlikely bedfellows of Liberal Reform and a leading member of the Social Liberal Forum – by saying that we shouldn’t turn this into a fight between the generations. Well, that’s exactly what you do say when you’re the victor enjoying all the spoils, but not when you’re the side left bleeding and looted. Behind the scenes, they spin something else: not that it’s right, but that “pensioners vote”, so we need to throw money at them even if we have to mortgage the next generation’s future by borrowing half of it and mug the current working generation for the rest.

Ever wondered why the Tories so readily went along with a massive bung to pensioners – and took the credit? Maybe some of it was that when they got into power Mr Cameron still wanted to detoxify them and saw pensions as a totem that they were now the Nice Party to one group, at least. Before they rediscovered their taste for celebrating kicking the poor in the nuts. But why, do you think, were the Tories so happy to increase pensions while they slash and bash every other benefits claimant? It’s not rocket science, is it? Yes, “pensioners vote”. Pensioners vote Tory. Our most unrealistically expensive policy has been to make everyone else suffer, infamously cutting at our own core voters, to give a massive advantage to the Conservative core vote. For which the Conservatives get all the credit and we see our vote, as it always is, weaker the older the voting demographic gets.

We.
Can’t.
Afford.
This.

There are several good ideas in the Age Ready Britain Paper. There’s also the biggest infection of any policy paper this Conference of, yes, more twaddle about patronising “wellbeing” again, which is just a neon light for me to say that if I had been at Conference I would have urged the other Liberal Democrats to hurl it out and shred it, and start considering fiscal reality, fairness and the next generation’s future.

A work in progress

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
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a work in progress

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I'm just not that interested in writing science fiction this decade. Nope: instead, I'm veering more and more in the direction of urban fantasy. Here's why.

My personal take on science fiction is that this narrow slice of the literature of the Fantastika (hint: if you haven't met that term of critical art before, follow the link before reading on) is about the study of the human condition under circumstances which might plausibly come to pass. By "plausibly" I thereby try to exclude the implausible (wizards, elves, surrealist intrusions from the subconscious) and to include stuff that doesn't exist but which plausibly might exist (artificial intelligence, aliens).

Now, as various SF and fantasy writers have observed, our baseline definitions of what is plausible and implausible change over time. In part, this is because formerly plausible ideas have shifted gradually into the penumbra of implausibility (the luminiferous aether, for example: phlogiston: the other detritus of discredited scientific hypotheses; arguably time travel and faster than light travel might be heading this way too). In no small part, the Mundane science fiction movement is a response to this: if we have no plausible evidence to support large scale causality violation in the observable universe, doesn't it follow that FTL starships are little more plausible than fire-breathing, flying dragons?

(Meanwhile, some items which would have been pigeon-holed as implausible without an eye-blink a few decades ago are not merely plausible today but are probably sitting in your pocket right now. About which, more later.)

In addition to the redrawing of the plausibility/implausibility frontier, we have other factors to consider: notably, our relationship with technology and science. As Vernor Vinge remarked in his novel Rainbows End many modern technologies come with no user serviceable parts inside. Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, personal computers were (by modern standards) a bit crap, but they offered an unparalleled opportunity to open the lid and learn by tinkering. For example, the BBC Micro in the UK—which sold by the million—had an analog i/o port, user-accessible DMA ports, and ROM sockets into which users could install additional firmware; it was designed for learning. The Apple II similarly featured a fairly simple expansion port architecture. But today's personal computing devices (with very few exceptions) come as shiny sealed boxes; their expansion options exist but are complex and require considerable expertise to develop: they're not designed for learners and tinkers but for users or highly trained developers.

Similarly, in other fields our technologies have developed in a way that's hostile to monkey-see monkey-do learning. You can't credibly learn to service a modern automobile in your own garage. You can't formulate a new pharmaceutical preparation in the back of your dispensary (which, believe it or not, actually happened right up until the late 1930s: even in the late 1970s/early 1980s it was possible for a medium-sized company with perhaps 20-30 researchers to develop and bring to market new medicines).

In part, this is a side-effect of market globalization: to survive even locally a product has to reach a planetary market, which means competing with large organizations and getting access to huge supply chains, which means you need to be big ... and market regulations are structured to lock out upstart small competitors. But that's not the only reason for it. Lots of our technologies have become so complex that just learning how to use them is a full-time job; understanding the interlocking specialities that go into them is beyond individual comprehension.

As brilliant new fantasy author Max Gladstone notes:

Old-school fantasy is a genre of the unknowable. Magic in Tolkien's works is big and vast and ancient. His characters relate to that magic with awe, with fear, and occasionally with love. No one tries to hack the One Ring. Certainly no one tries to build a new one! People acquire the One Ring, or the Palantir, and use each within its limits.

But consider the smartphone I have in my pocket.

No single human being knows how to make this phone. I acquired the phone, and I use it. People who know more about the phone can tell it to do more things than I can, but they're still bound by the limits of the hardware. A few communities are dedicated to modding and hacking phones like mine, yes, but for most people most of the time a smartphone is a portable magic mirror. We make mystic passes before the glass, address the indwelling spirit with suitably respectful tones, and LEARN THE FUTURE. ("Siri, what will the weather be like tomorrow?") The same thought experiment works for many modern technologies.

Max then goes on to make a point that I might well have made myself if I'd thought to put it so explicitly: while the technologies in our far-future SF now look more and more like numinous magical powers, our daily life is perfused by magical devices that obey relatively predictable rules—utter the right incantation and Siri tells you the weather. Which means we as readers are coming to expect an almost mechanistic causality to inform the magic in our fantasies.

(And if that makes sense to you, go try one of Max's novels. No, seriously: if you like near-future SF there's a rather good chance that this fantasy novel will speak to you. Weird, isn't it? Because he's writing SF set in a world perfused by mechanised, systematized magic. We need a word for this: the standard genre tags are too limiting.)

So here's my next step: we are living in a 21st century that resembles a mutant Shadowrun—by turns a cyberpunk dystopia and a world where everyone has access to certain kinds of magic. And if you want to explore the human condition under circumstances which might plausibly come to pass, these days the human condition is constrained by technologies so predictably inaccessible that they might as well be magic. So magic makes a great metaphor for probing the human condition. We might not have starships, but there's a Palantir in every pocket (and we might not have dragons, but some of our wizards are working on it ).

Over the past few years I've found myself reading less and less far-future SF and more and more urban fantasy. If you view it through the lens of the future we're living in rather than the future we expected in times gone by, that's not so surprising. Starships and galactic empires and aliens are receding into the same misty haze of unreality as dragons and demons: instead we're living in a world with chickens with tails and scales and teeth, magic mirrors with answers to every question (many of them misleading or malicious), dominated by abhuman hive minds.

So it shouldn't be any surprise to discover in the world I'm now living in I can engage better with the subjects of my fiction by writing urban fantasy, rather than by extruding good old-fashioned space opera just like grandpappy wrote. This doesn't mean that I consider traditional space opera to be dead (any more than high fantasy with elves, dwarves and dragons is dead): but it's not something I'm engaging with much, if at all, these days.

And now for one final thought.

Traditionally fantasy works were set in a mythologized past: frequently faux-mediaeval, occasionally classical, sometimes (as is especially the case with the more recent steampunk sub-genre) only 1-2 centuries removed. Some fantasies are set in the present: we often mislabel these urban fantasy, although very often contemporary fantasy is rural/wilderness oriented while it's quite common for urban fantasy settings to be historic (Ankh-Morpork, I'm looking at you). But it's still very rare to find a fantasy that's set in the cities of the near future: and I find this genre blind spot fascinating, because the future of humanity is overwhelmingly urban and magical ...

Peter Enns highlights an old article by the president of my alma mater, Robert Duffett, exploring the religious faith of George Washington.

Dr. Duffett’s is an interesting, insightful piece, citing plenty of contemporary clergy who knew Washington personally. But the definitive word on the faith and morality of George Washington belongs to someone who knew him more intimately than any of them — and who saw him far more clearly than any contemporary historian: Oney Judge Staines.

She lived in Washington’s home while he served as president, and Judge Staines’ recollection of Washington’s piety can’t be reconciled with the revisionist lies of David Barton. She said “the stories told of Washington’s piety and prayers, so far as she ever saw or heard while she was his slave, have no foundation. Card-playing and wine-drinking were the business at his parties, and he had more of such company Sundays than on any other day.”

And the Rev. Benjamin Chase, who interviewed Judge Staines in 1847, underlined the conclusive conclusion on the topic:

Card-playing and wine-drinking were the business at his parties, and he had more of such company Sundays than on any other day. I do not mention this as showing, in my estimation, his anti-Christian character, so much as the bare fact of being a slaveholder, and not a hundredth part so much as trying to kidnap this woman; but, in the minds of the community, it will weigh infinitely more.

Chase’s estimation of Washington’s “anti-Christian character,” and his even-lower estimation of the “community” of those most vocally concerned with Christian piety, remain just as true today.

Like Chase, I’m not obsessively worried about whether you spend your Sundays in church services or enjoying the day with friends, playing games and drinking wine. Tithing your dill and mint and cumin doesn’t impress me much. Justice and mercy do.

“The bare fact” of siding with or against justice weighs more than whether you attend services, play cards or drink wine. So said the 19th-century Rev. Benjamin Chase, and so said the first-century Christ he was quoting.

 

The Liberal Democrat autumn conference debated a motion calling for further decriminalisation of sex work, and condemning the so-called Nordic Model, which criminalises the purchase of sexual services by making it a criminal offence to buy sex, but not to sell it. This has caused significant controversy amongst sex workers, with evidence that this “partial prohibition” model does nothing to help keep sex workers safe, and just further stigmatises the practice aqnd drives it underground.

Still, the Nordic Model is very popular amongst certain whorephobic radical feminists, who promote it as a way of “ending demand”, while pretending it doesn’t place women in harms way (it does).

A number of what I consider to be wrecking amendments were submitted, to remove the language condemning the Nordic Model included in the motion. I putt in a card tho speak against these wrecking amendments, and was lucky enough tone called to speak. Here is what I said:

Conference, we’ve heard a lot of people talking about sex workers today. I wonder how many of those seeking to weaken this motion actually talk to sex workers? I am proud to count sex workers amongst my friends. I am privileged to have some of my friends share their thoughts, their hopes, and their fears with me.

One thing, conference, they consistently fear is the Nordic Model.

The Nordic Model, supposedly criminalizing clients but not workers, is profoundly illiberal. It is profoundly damaging. Make no mistake, it is a model of prohibition. It criminalises an activity between consenting adults that is legal as long as no money changes hands. Since when are we about telling consenting adults what they can and can’t do with their own lives? Since when are we about telling consenting adults how thy manage their sex lives?

The Nordic Model is illiberal, and it also puts sex workers in danger. Supporters of the Nordic model claim sex work has decreased, but these claims are often based on sex workers coming forward voluntarily to speak to social workers and the police. My friends don’t trust the police. They don’t trust social workers. They say they’d trust them even less with the Nordic model. What they would do is be driven underground.

Don’t take my word for it. Research recently published in the BMJ concluded that, and I quote:

“These findings suggest that criminalisation and policing strategies that target clients reproduce the harms created by the criminalisation of sex work”, there is no difference between the Nordic Model and criminalisation. “In particular, vulnerability to violence and HIV/STIs.”

Conference. We need to stop talking at sex workers. We should stop telling them how to live their lives. We should stop passing laws that get them hurt and killed.

I want to finish with the words of one of my friends. She asked me to say the following about the Nordic Model.

“It doesn’t work. It was intended to make sex work so dangerous women wouldn’t do it. It is not about safety. It is ideological.”

Thank you.

In the event, the motion passed unamended, with overwhelming support. This marks a party of government taking a stand for sex worker safety, and for the rejection of the prohibitionist Nordic Model, and the injustice and violence against sex workers which accompany it.

The speech was also recorded on video, where you can observe me giving it on a bad hair day: