Andrew Hickey

Their current national figures would see losses on the same scale as the local elections

Cockroach-like.  That was Tim Farron’s description of Lib Dems’ resilience in withstanding a hostile climate.  The inference was that no matter how tough things might be across the country, where they have elected representatives, their vote would hold firm enough.

He had a point: Lib Dem MPs and councillors have in the past proven notoriously difficult to shift due to local campaigning, popularity and hard work and their being transfer-friendly to tactical votes.  Is it still true though?  The recent constituency polling Lord Oakeshott commissioned suggested strongly not, though it should be noted that the methodology ICM used was unfavourable to his former party.

A better case study was the local elections: for every four seats held last week, three were lost.  Not all of them will have been in constituencies the Lib Dems represent at Westminster or even ones they’re competitive in but by definition they must have been locally strong in the relevant wards and yet more than 40% defended still went down.  The same rate of loss at a general election would leave the Yellows with 33 MPs.

In some ways, that wouldn’t be at all bad: to lose half your vote but keep more than half your MPs would be good going, especially under FPTP.  After all, 33 MPs is considerably more than the Liberal-SDP Alliance won in the 1980s on close to three times the current polling.

Incumbency can only hold out against the tide so far though: there comes a point when there simply aren’t enough votes to go round to return large numbers of MPs: UNS cannot apply at the bottom end because you can’t lose (say) 14% in a seat where you only had 8% to start with.  Of itself, that means that more have to come from the middle or top to make up the difference.  If we further assume that the top end also outperforms because of incumbency, that implies a tremendous and probably unrealistic collapse in the middle.

To give an example, suppose the Lib Dems poll 9% at the election.  On the same turnout as 2010, that would reduce their votes received from 6.8m to 2.7m (not that the turnout really matters but keeping it the same removes one variable).  If they polled 30% in twenty seats, 35% in another twenty and 40% in a further twenty, that alone would be close to a million votes – and those shares might well see them win the 33 mentioned above.  It would, however, leave just 1.7m to be spread across the 570 other constituencies at an average of just 6.4%.  With presumably other seats where the Lib Dems have a reasonable showing, it’d imply near-extinction levels across many and lost deposits in about half.

If Polling into single figures is inconsistent with keeping the substantial majority of seats presently held but the question is which side which part will prove to be false.  One clue could be provided if the polling companies routinely asked people to think about how they’d vote in their constituency.  We know this can have an effect on responses and as everyone does vote in their constituency, there’s no real reason not to phrase it like that.  If there is an incumbency bonus, doing so might bump up the polls and square the circle.  On the other hand, if the polling is right – and present figures lie smack bang between the Lib Dems’ actual scores in the locals and Euros, just as you’d expect – then the Yellows are in for big losses.

David Herdson

Last year they burned a wicker man at the Sin Eater Festival.

[The Flag of Equal Marriage, now with nineteen stars.]

From MakeItEqual.org: “The Flag of Equal Marriage is an evolving protest flag for equal marriage rights in the US. It includes one star for each state which recognizes and performs same-sex marriages.”

The bill that Governor Patrick Quinn signed into law on November 20, 2013, goes into effect today.

[Content note: hypothetical spiders]

I complain a lot about the social justice movement. Or for a change, I sometimes complain that the media is too friendly to the social justice movement. So when the media starts challenging the movement, with articles like Trigger Warnings: New Wave Of Political Correctness and We’ve Gone Too Far With Trigger Warnings and Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Children Squirm and America’s College Kids Are A Bunch Of Mollycoddled Babies, I really ought to be happy things are finally going my way.

Instead I’m a little disturbed. Let’s fnord that last article:

poor dears demand riot in the streets shield their precious eyes anything potentially offensive cave in, the most sacrosanct doctrines are endangered, buildings being “occupied,” professors intimidated, deans confronted, generalized kindling of political correctness, self-absorption, spoiled-bratism, kids accustomed to getting their own way with just about everything, hovered over and indulged by their parents, grade-inflated carefully cushioned, precious as they are, schizy and spoiled, crop of prissy, protected and self-absorbed young people, shelter them from everything they don’t already believe and welcome

This doesn’t look good. Also, Jezebel and Baffler are against trigger warnings, as are a group of professors who teach “gender, sexuality, and critical race studies” (the last of which deals twice as much damage as regular race studies). Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but sometimes it’s a helpful clue about where to look.

I like trigger warnings. I like them because they’re not censorship, they’re the opposite of censorship. Censorship says “Read what we tell you”. The opposite of censorship is “Read whatever you want”. The philosophy of censorship is “We know what is best for you to read”. The philosophy opposite censorship is “You are an adult and can make your own decisions about what to read”.

And part of letting people make their own decisions is giving them relevant information and trusting them to know what to do with them. Uninformed choices are worse choices. Trigger warnings are an attempt to provide you with the information to make good free choices of reading material.

And my role model here, as in so many other places, is Commissioner Lal: “Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.”

Trigger warnings fight those who would like to be our masters in another way as well. They are one of our strongest weapons against the proponents of censorship. The proponents say “We can’t let you air that opinion, it might offend people.” Trigger warnings say “I am explaining to you exactly how this might offend you, so if you continuing listening to me you have volunteered to hear whatever I have to say, on your own head be it, and let no one else purport to protect you from yourself.”

I agree that bad people could use trigger warnings to avoid ever reading anything that challenges their prejudices. This is a problem with providing people informed choices. Sometimes they misuse them.

But I could also imagine good people using trigger warnings to increase their ability to read things that challenge their views. Suppose you are a transgender person who becomes really uncomfortable when you hear people insult transgender people. Gradually you learn that a lot of people outside the social justice community do this a lot, so you stop reading anything outside the social justice community, forget about genuinely rightist sources like National Review or American Conservative. Now suppose sources start trigger warning their content. Most right-wing arguments don’t insult transgender people, so all of a sudden you have a way to steer clear of the ones that do and read all of the others free from fear.

Actually, “fear” is the wrong word, it buys into the stereotyping of triggered people as coddled or cowards or something. Maybe some people feel fear. Others would just be free from exasperation, anger, distracting dismay, the cognitive load of having to hear people insult you and not being able to respond and having to exert effort to continue to read. I feel like this might be my response to the existence of more trigger warnings (at least if anyone ever warned for my triggers, which they won’t).

And I guess I admit that the people who use trigger warnings for epistemic evil will probably outnumber those who use them for epistemic virtue. But then the question is: do “we”, as a civilization, grant ourselves the right to force people to be virtuous without their consent? There are a lot of good arguments that we should, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s not a going question. In every other area of life, we’ve already decided that we don’t. Like, it would be a spectacularly good idea to make a rule that every fifth link to Paul Krugman’s blog has to redirect people to Tyler Cowen’s blog, and vice versa, so people don’t get a chance to only read the opinions they agree with. Or that every Republican has to watch one Daily Show a month, and every Democrat has to listen to one Fox News segment. But if we’re not going to do that, it hardly seems fair to put the whole burden of epistemic virtue on the easily triggered.

II.

The strongest argument against trigger warnings that I have heard is that they allow us to politicize ever more things. Colleges run by people on the left can slap big yellow stickers on books that promote conservative ideas, saying “THIS BOOK IS RACIST AND CLASSIST”, and then act outraged if anyone requests a trigger warning that sounds conservative – like a veteran who wants one on books that vilify or mock soldiers, or a religious person who wants one on blasphemy. Then everyone has to have a big fight, the fight makes everyone worse off than either possible resolution, and it ends with somebody feeling persecuted and upset. In other words, it’s an intellectual gang sign saying “Look! We can demonstrate our mastery of this area by only allowing our symbols; your kind are second-class citizens!”

On the other hand, this is terribly easy to fix. Put trigger warnings on books, but put them on the bullshytte page. You know, the one near the front where they have the ISBN number and the city where the publishers’ head office is and something about the Library of Congress you’ve never read through even though it’s been in literally every book you’ve ever seen. Put it there, on a small non-colorful sticker. Call it a “content note” or something, so no one gets the satisfaction of hearing their pet word “trigger warning”. Put a generally agreed list of things – no sense letting every single college have its own acrimonious debate about it. The few people who actually get easily triggered will with some exertion avoid the universal human urge to flip past the bullshytte page and spend a few seconds checking if their trigger is in there. No one else will even notice.

Or if it’s about a syllabus, put it on the last page of the syllabus, in size 8 font, after the list of recommended reading for the class. As a former student and former teacher, I know no one reads the syllabus. You have to be really devoted to avoiding your trigger. Which is exactly the sort of person who should be able to have a trigger warning while everyone else goes ahead with their lives in a non-political way.

I’m sure there are some more implementation details, but it’s nothing a little bit of good faith can’t take care of. If good faith is used and some people still object because it’s not EXACTLY what they want, then I’ll tell them to go fly a kite, but not before.

I know a lot of people worry about slippery slopes; give the culture warriors an inch and they’ll take a mile. I think this is a very backwards way of looking at things. Like, the anti-gay people talked about a slippery slope and fought desperately hard against gay marriage, even though it was pretty hard to find anything actually objectionable about it other than that it might be on a slippery slope to worse things. That desperate fight didn’t delay gay marriage more than a few years, and it didn’t prevent whatever gay marriage was on a slippery slope to. What it did do was totally discredit conservatives in this area. Now any time anyone makes a family values argument, even a good family values argument, people can say that “family values” is code for homophobia, and bring up that family values conservatives really have held abhorrent positions in the past so why should we trust them now? It gave liberals huge momentum, and if there is a slippery slope then all that opposing gay marriage did was destroy the credibility of anybody who could have stopped us going down it.

Opposing a good idea on slippery slope grounds is a moral failure and a strategic failure, and I’d hate for opponents of the social justice movement to make that mistake with trigger warnings.

III.

But this is all tangential to what really bothered me, which is Pacific Standard’s The Problems With Trigger Warnings According To The Research.

You know, I love science as much as anyone, maybe more, but I have grown to dread the phrase “…according to the research”.

They say that “Confronting triggers, not avoiding them, is the best way to overcome PTSD”. They point out that “exposure therapy” is the best treatment for trauma survivors, including rape victims. And that this involves reliving the trauma and exposing yourself to traumatic stimuli, exactly what trigger warnings are intended to prevent. All this is true. But I feel like they are missing a very important point.

YOU DO NOT GIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY TO PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.

Psychotherapists treat arachnophobia with exposure therapy, too. They expose people first to cute, little spiders behind a glass cage. Then bigger spiders. Then they take them out of the cage. Finally, in a carefully controlled environment with their very supportive therapist standing by, they make people experience their worst fear, like having a big tarantula crawl all over them. It usually works pretty well.

Finding an arachnophobic person, and throwing a bucket full of tarantulas at them while shouting “I’M HELPING! I’M HELPING!” works less well.

And this seems to be the arachnophobe’s equivalent of the PTSD “advice” in the Pacific Standard. There are two problems with its approach. The first is that it avoids the carefully controlled, anxiety-minimizing setup of psychotherapy.

The second is that YOU DO NOT GIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY TO PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.

If a person with post-traumatic stress disorder or some other trigger-related problem doesn’t want psychotherapy, then even as a trained psychiatrist I am forbidden to override that decision unless they become an immediate danger to themselves or others.

And if they do want psychotherapy, then very likely they want to do it on their own terms. I try to read things that challenge my biases and may even insult or trigger me, but I do it when I feel like it and not a moment before. When I am feeling adventurous and want to become stronger in some way, I will set myself some strenuous self-improvement task, whether it be going on a long run or reading material I know will be unpleasant. But at the end of a really long and exasperating day when I’m at my wit’s end and just want to relax, I don’t want you chasing me with a sword and making me run for my life, and I don’t want you forcing traumatic material at me.

The angry article above with all the talk of “spoiled brats” annoys me as an amateur politics blogger, but this Pacific Standard article pushes my buttons as a (somewhat) non-amateur psychiatrist. This is not your job to meddle. If you are very concerned about helping people with PTSD, please express that concern by donating to PTSD USA or one of the other organizations that will help those with the condition get proper, well-controlled therapy. Please do not try to increase the background level of triggers in the hopes that one of them will fortuitously collide with a PTSD sufferer in a therapeutic way.

If, like me, you think the social justice movement has a really serious kindness and respect problem, then you know that it’s really hard to bring this up without getting accused of unkindness and disrespect yourself. I don’t know how to best respond to this problem. But I’m pretty sure that the very minimum one can do is not to actually be unkind and disrespectful. And I worry that some of these arguments against trigger warnings are failing to clear even this very low bar.

Friday:


In purely mathematical terms, it could have been worse. But not by much. The voters' ongoing desire to give the Liberal Democrats a pummelling for giving them what they voted for saw us losing another swathe of councillors and all but one of our Members of the European Parliament.

Unsurprisingly, there have been calls for Cap'n Clegg to step down, many from friends.

And, despite suspicious leaks from "usual suspects" in the Grauniad (who are NOT our friends), most of them have principled reasons for wanting him to go.

But I disagree with them. I still agree with Nick. And here's why:

Firstly, Cap'n Clegg is a Liberal.

The idea that he's a pseudo-Tory is absurd. In fact, he's one of those soggy, left-wing, interventionist Liberals – you can tell can he believes in the power of the State to make things better from the way he always, but always, puts education first: pupil premium, more apprenticeships, free school meals.

Could he be a BETTER Liberal? Who couldn't? He thinks first of the State as an agent of change for good, before remembering that it can be abused which is why he occasionally fumbles the pass on civil liberties issues (though to be fair, once he sits down and thinks about it, he comes to the right answer). He's against the establishment, but it's not his first instinct to tear it down. His first thought is usually how can we HELP people, rather than how can we got out of people's way.

Secondly, Cap'n Clegg is actually saying Liberal things.

The "Party of In" campaign was the right thing to do, it was the Party being unashamed of the policies and positions we are trying to sell. The debate around more draconian penalties for knife possession – not even knife CRIME – was a needed standing up to of the Home Office, while Labour and Tories continue to try and outflank each other to the right. Free School Meals – a policy based on EVIDENCE, supported by TRIALS – is absolutely the right sort of thing we should be doing. The economics of the Coalition – shifting tax away from the incomes of lower earners and onto wealth and green taxes is entirely Liberal.

Thirdly, he's by far the best we've got at communicating Liberal things.

Town Hall meetings, Call Clegg on LBS, TV debates: Cap'n Clegg is really very good at delivering the message. The case against him is that no one is listening. I would dispute that. No one who writes for the Grauniad is listening; no one who writes for the Tell-lies-o-graph is listening. But Pollyanna Toytown and Dan Hannan sticking their fingers in their ears going "lalalala" does not mean that everyone else is deaf to our appeal. But equally, it doesn't seem likely that they'll suddenly start giving a fair hearing to any other Liberal Democrat. We have always had to struggle to get our message past the gatekeepers of the meeja. I'd rather have someone who's good at doing that still on board.

Fourthly, the Coalition's policies look like they might just be starting to work.

There are signs that we are turning the economy around, benefiting people at last. Do we really want to derail that by letting the Tories take charge while we go into a tailspin? Which is more important: serving the public trust or serving the Party's re-election? Yes, I realise we will need to get re-elected to keep on serving the public, but we must never fall into the trap that Hard Labour has: existing ONLY to get themselves elected.

One of the few good things the press pack are willing to say about us is that we've held it together in the face of, well, them being pretty beastly to us. I'm sure our opponents would love it if we tossed that aside. ("Oh they betray everyone, and then themselves too in the end", they would say. You know they would.)

Fifthly, he does actually listen.

Nick's office is far more open and accessible to the membership than previous leaders (excepting, possibly, Paddy pre-Blair-love-in-bunker phase; don't worry, he got over it). Telephone conferences, video interviews, question and answer sessions at conference, interviews with bloggers… he's been very much more open to interacting with and responding to the members. I was part of the phone call that turned Party policy around on internet snooping. Did they get it wrong? Yes. Did they put it right? Absolutely.

But if – as the complaints go – the leader's office / Party headquarters are supposed to be "disconnected" and "not listening", why hasn't that been fixed? It takes two to tango. We've had two rounds of Federal Executive elections now where a slate of candidates promised to mend that relationship. So if it's still wrong, why haven't they? No one is saying the FE should be considering their own positions for their share of this supposed failure; but equally no one ON the FE is in any position to be calling for Nick to go either. (We've failed so he should go! Not very edifying, is it?)


I try to avoid the negativity of a small group of people commenting intemperately on Lib Dem Voice – or rather accusing anyone who voices disagreement with them, including Auntie Caron of all people, of being part of an "Orange Booker" conspiracy! – who leave the campaign to replace Nick appearing sadly tainted.

So I've stayed away from the purely pragmatic reasons for not dropping the leader at this stage. You know what they are: the timing isn't good; it damaged the "brand" when we dropped Charles (arguably that act cost us seats in 2010; not Cleggy's leadership); it did so again when Ming stepped down; there's no evidence that anyone else would get any fairer hearing than Nick does; why if you believe we're going down to inevitable defeat next year (which I don't), make someone else carry the can. Most importantly, why should we ditch the leader who took us into government on the say so of, frankly, a conspiracy in the pages of the Grauniad? (Reminder: they are NOT our friends!)


We DO need greater coherence – and a great deal more what is technically called… oomph! – to our message; we need to talk louder about tearing down the system that has herded people into voting UKIP; we need to earn back a reputation for fairness and honesty.

I don't see how stabbing Cap'n Clegg in the back helps with any of that.

We lose a lot by getting rid of him; we gain more by keeping him.

I think he should stay.

PS:

Yes, Daddy was there in the 'Eighties when Captain Paddy went from 0.0% to 0.4% and his Spitting Image puppet was appearing in a cross-wipe, neither in the previous sketch nor the next one but somewhere in between… He – Puppet Paddy, that is – promised us then that a similar increase at the next election would see him elected Emperor of the Universe… oh, those were the days to be a humiliated Liberal Democrat!

“Thanks for coming in to see us today, Rich.”

“Dick.”

“What?”

“I go by Dick.”

“Oh! Ha ha. Okay, sorry, Dick. That’s one of the reasons we call people in…the preliminary screenings don’t really tell us anything. We kind of want to get to know the real you. So, you know, we’ll go over your resume, here, and you can just walk us through it as we go.”

“Sounds great.”

“Okay. Excellent. Now, it looks like you’ve been in the sporting goods industry for a while.”

“That’s right. I used to be at Dick’s — no relation, ha ha.”

“Uh, ha, right, of course.”

“But currently, I’m the junior vice-president in charge of new product development for Head.”

“Oh, that’s great! Good firm. I use some of their rackets myself. But you’re looking to move on, right?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a pretty staid company and it’s hard to move up once you get settled in. I made a lot more progress at my previous job.”

“Which was…?”

“Heckler & Koch.”

“Heckler and…”

“Koch. It’s German. Firearms manufacturer. Handguns, mostly. I was the vice-president of their American division.”

“Oh…okay. But you started out in publishing, didn’t you?”

“No, sir. Electronics, actually.”

“Electronics? But I thought your resume said you’d worked for Hill and Wang.”

“That’s right, sir. I was a junior executive in their marketing department. But before that, I was with the inside sales department at Wang. Computers, you know. Word processors. Back in the old days, ha ha.”

“Uh huh.”

“People often get those two confused.”

“I see. And, er, then I have here that your first job was working for, um. For Johnson & Johnson. Sales job.”

“Actually, I got my start doing commission work for Slim Jim. But that was only part time. Pretty much all the guys did it…you know, growing up in Wisconsin, sausage was a big thing.  It was a real sausage party.”

“Ahem. And that’s it.”

“Yes, sir. Except for my first job in high school.”

“Which was…?”

“Hot Dog on a Stick.”

“Pfffftcch heh heh AHEM.”

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Uh, um. Yes. Sorry. Something caught in my, in my throat.”

“Did you have any other questions?”

“You know, Rich…”

“Dick.”

“Sorry. Dick. I sure do thank you for coming in today, and we’ll, er, we’ll give you a call if anything opens. Opens up.”

“Are…so I don’t get the job?”

“It’s just, well, we don’t know if we have anything that suits your excellent qualifications.”

“I thought I was doing really well.”

“I’ll be honest with you. I just don’t know if you’re Hooters material.”

Visitors to our house can be left in no doubt as to which pop stars my daughter Jessica likes.

Drinks are taken from a Suicide cup, their age-worn faces blearily staring out at us at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The band's debut album, also titled Suicide, is on permanent loop, while at weekends Jessica deafens all and sundry with the lo-fi recordings captured between 1977-78 of their live shows.  Posters of Alan Vega (64) and Martin Rev (age unknown) stare down from her bedroom wall.

Alan is her favourite, she tells me on a daily basis.  She believes he can do no wrong. Last week, when my wife calmly suggested the late Sid Vicious was a better singer than Alan, World War III broke out.

Tears were shed and in the fallout, I found myself under attack for claiming, months earlier, that X-Ray Spex were more successful than Suicide.

I'll admit this makes my daughter rather strange.  While all her friends are devoted to the likes of One Direction, she delights in the ten minute long Frankie Teardrop, a song about a Vietnam veteran who kills his wife and child in despair.

And you know what, I'm glad she likes an obscure proto-punk band who despite their lack of commercial success have been highly influential.  I could be the type of father who is so devoted to the well-being of my daughter that I'm willing to write about her for a national newspaper, pretending to feel let down by her heroes appearing to smoke cannabis.  I could be the type of father who denies taking his little girl to a concert by her favourite group on the basis she's too young, despite knowing full well 8-year-olds are the prime audience for One Direction, and now feels smug about it in light of the shock revelation.  I could be the type of father who finds the fact young men in a beat combo are liable to get tattoos, have pop-star girlfriends and occasionally sample "Mary J" an example of their lack of responsibility, a betrayal of our trust, as proof they are unworthy of my daughter's loving affection, just as other men also will be in the future.

But I'm not.  Mainly because I'm not real, and am just a device to weakly mock a Daily Mail article.  If I was though, I'd be glad my daughter is already at a young age discovering what real life is like.  At times it will feel like you're having axes thrown at you, as happened to Suicide at a gig in Glasgow.  The sooner you learn that, the better.  It might also stop my daughter from rebelling against my overly protective, 19th century values by getting knocked up when she's 15 by a kid called Spud.  Your choice.

Judging by this briefing to Nick Robinson, at any rate. Robinson says that Clegg

believes that the party must "stop looking in the rear view mirror" - in other words stop mourning the voters they've lost as a result of forming a coalition with the Tories. 

They need instead, he argues, to look forward to the voters they can gain by proving that they are a serious party of government with responsible economic policies.

Nick Clegg, or whoever it was from his office who briefed Nick Robinson, is merely repeating a line from his speech to the party's 2012 spring conference. There is no sign of a willingness to listen or of new thinking.

In fact, this is pretty much the only argument that Clegg has against his party critics, which is perhaps why he uses it so often.

As Simon Titley wrote on Liberator's blog in July 2013:

In May, I posted here about Clegg’s statement after the local elections and his speech to last September’s party conference. On both occasions, he said that his way is the only way; anyone who disagrees is simply not interested in winning power. His way is the future; anyone who disagrees wants a return to the past. 

He referred to the Liberal Democrats as having been a “party of protest” before he took charge. He travestied party members as people who want to “turn back” and create a “stop the world I want to get off” party. He warned them to “stop looking in the rear view mirror”. 

In his speech at the ALDC conference in Manchester last Saturday, he repeated similar arguments. He scorned party members who want to “turn back the clock” and be “the third party forever”, who are calling for “an eternity in opposition” and “hankering for the comfort blanket of national opposition”. 

These are straw men. We know this because in none of these attacks does Clegg ever name his critics or supply specific references to the speeches or writings where they have expressed such views. These imaginary enemies are conjured up because Clegg needs a ‘defining other’, a pantomime villain against whom he can contrast his virtues.

If Nick is determined to go on using this tactic, it makes James Gurling and his review look pretty silly, doesn't it?

On the previous discussion, one of the commenters observed:

One thing I am getting from this thread is a list of large management failures by the publishers, just on the basic 'running a business' level. Destructive competition between divisions, the fact that an author can extract significantly more money from them by selling rights in pieces that then hamstring the publishers down the road vs selling them in larger blocks, inability to track how their product is being sold. Sounds like they really ought to put a focus on getting their own houses in order.

I think this bears some exploration, so here's a footnote:

The problems are structural in the industry, but they're not an accident: they're a result of the way the (current) industry emerged. Publishing is a very old business—it's been around in some shape or another for over 500 years, and in much its current shape since the mid-Victorian period—and the way publishers do business is the intersection of the set of all business practices that did not cause one of their antecedents to go bust, over a roughly 250 year period.

And now to the current mess.

Until the 1980s, publishing houses were generally small family-run businesses who owned their own typesetters and printing presses and employed their own production people and warehoused their own stock. And growth in the industry was negligible—it's a mature field, you can't easily "grow" a business in publishing because the amount of time consumers have available for reading (i.e. consuming more product) is an inelastic constant: the best you can run is a zero-sum game against other publishers. And in the large, you're competing with other media. Every computer game a punter buys is 20-100 fewer hours they have for reading, for example.

The biggest change of the 50 years prior to 1995 was that a wave of mergers and take-overs swept through the industry, first in the USA and then in Europe, starting in the early 1980s. This was largely complete by the mid-90s, and utterly changed the landscape. The former family businesses were now "imprints" or trading subsidiaries. Core competencies were merged, with cost savings, while less central stuff like owning warehouses and printing presses was out-sourced. Costs were pared to the bone. A senior editor these days doesn't just 'edit', they're a business manager running acquisitions and supervising product workflow and marketing strategy—jobs which come out of the time available for editing, in some cases consuming all of it.

But it's still a more or less global zero sum game (competing for readers eyeball-hours). And because the rate of individual production is relatively low and the product is still produced artisanally by cottage industries, product lead time is measured in years, time to achieve net positive revenue is also measured in years, and it's important to keep the back list on tap because it can take decades to grow an author's career. Stephen King was an overnight success with "Carrie" after a decade of learning to write, but Terry Pratchett took about 15 years to finally break big. J. K. Rowling took 3 books to really get rolling, and she grew eye-wateringly rapidly by industry standards. And some authors are slow-burn successes: my big breakthrough book was my tenth novel in print ("Halting State"). J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was in print for a decade or more before it really took off in the 1960s. If you practice ruthless commercial Darwinism, weeding out any hopeful mutants that aren't immediately successful, you will miss out on a lot of huge opportunities.

So reforming the publishing industry is a very non-trivial undertaking.

Which is also why Jeff Bezos picked it as his #1 target when he founded Amazon. He set out to disrupt an incumbent mature industry using the internet, and picked publishing because it was obviously the most dysfunctional. After all, if he'd gone after groceries he'd be competing with sharks like Tesco and WalMart.

But the trouble with disruption is that it's dangerously close to detonation. You can end up destroying what you sought to shake up and take over.

PS: there have been attempts to get away from artisan production. Shared universes, media spin-offs, and the likes of the DC and Marvel Comics constitute such attempts. They generally don't work well for the creators (most of them entail work-for-hire and put harsh constraints on the creative freedom available to the authors or other artists involved); collaborative short fiction/novels are much free-er, but it's a general truism that when you collaborate with another author, both of you end up writing 75% of the book. Somehow we've been unable to come up with a better way to do high quality fiction since Thomas Hardy's day, despite having a century filled with progress in other fields.

Intended audience: parents of Autistic kids. Though obviously everyone needs Autistic friends.

So your child was just diagnosed with autism. Breathe. Breathe deeper. Relax. It'll all be ok. But you have some work to do.

The first thing you need to do isn't find therapists. It isn't commiserate with other parents. It isn't become an AAC expert (though all of these things have their place!). It's something not in the autism introduction packet: you need to connect on a human level with adults like your child. You need to go make some Autistic friends.

I don't mean a mentoring relationship, though those are extremely important and I am a big fan of mentoring (and mentoring your child & being friends with you are not mutually exclusive). I definitely don't mean "translate my child to me" (which is not a friend thing particularly). I mean find local Autistic adults with whom you have common interests and connect as equal human adult people.

There are a whole lot of reasons this is the best thing you can do for your child:

First, and possibly most importantly but mileage varies: your child is noticing things. If you go through a mourning phase, or a difficult adjustment phase, your child will notice and possibly blame himself. Your child may not have the vocabulary for it, but at some point he will figure out that he isn't the son you planned for and dreamed of, and he might blame himself for that. We figure it out when we're a disappointment, even if you do your best to hide that you're having a hard time. Many Autistic children get in our heads, accurately or not, that our parents only tolerate us because they're stuck with us.

Your child needs to see you choosing to be around people whose minds work like his. It's much harder to think your parents hate you and hate your brain when they seek out the company of people who think like you. Seeing the adults who are dearest to you--and like all children, Autistic youth default to loving their parents--seeing them find someone who reminds you of you? That's supremely important. Do not underestimate the effect this can have, just knowing that your parents would choose to be around you even if they weren't "stuck" with you.

Another reason: many disabled children never meet an adult with their disability. You might be surprised, and a bit saddened, at the conclusions we come to. Some folks come to the vague idea that we'll outgrow our disabilities (and when there's no sign of that, we're reminded that we're disappointing, because you can bet we're getting that message from someone in our lives). Or, I have friends who concluded that their disabilities were fatal. That's a recipe for severe anxiety, thinking that you're dying but you feel fine and no one has felt the need to talk to you about your inevitable demise. We need adults like us; this anxiety is completely unnecessary.

Your child also needs role models. She may not be able to fill your shoes, or Uncle Bob's or Auntie Bev's or her teacher's or those of any adult in her immediate sphere. But my shoes may fit, or those of another adult Autistic. All children need people in their lives who they can realistically emulate, & Autistic children are no different. I was pretty young when I knew the adult-woman things being modeled for me were just not going to happen ever--and alternatives were never presented. I was surrounded by folks who were similar to each other and not much at all like me. This is stressful. Making your own make is hard, and it's harder when everything you do is wrong (the premise of somewhere between many and most autism therapies, and a message also sent by peers, random strangers in the store, other adults, etc). Once again, anxiety. It's easier to believe you aren't Doing It Wrong when you know happy adults who took similar trails. Knowing options for the future? Seeing unconventional but fulfilling adulthoods? So important.

If you have culturally connected Autistic friends, your child also will have a head start on a connection to the community. As he grows older, he will have a life apart from your family. This is a good thing and an essential part of growing up. The Autistic community is his birthright. We as a general rule (can't speak for everyone) welcome friendly parents, but your child is one of us. It's wonderful but also overwhelming and scary to discover a place where you're "normal" when you've never been, especially all alone. Even good overwhelm is unpleasant when it gets too big. You can make this less of a shock by having Autistic friends. "I'm not alone" doesn't have to be an adulthood revelation; it can be a given. Your child deserves to grow up knowing that he isn't alone, that there's a whole community that will embrace him because he's one of ours. The gift of growing up with this knowledge? I cannot imagine it having anything but good effects.

Also, we're awesome. Autistic people are loyal and hilarious, among other things. We're good friends. We might provide insight to things about your kid that you never thought of, completely on accident. Your way of looking at the world may accidentally clarify things for us, too. But in my experience, Autistic people are the funniest people on earth, and the most dedicated to making sense and to fixing things that are not right (admittedly, my sample might be skewed, but I also have a very large sample size). That's how the people I hang out with roll. Making friends with us isn't just good for your child. We're good for you, too, and you can be good for us. A true friendship is a mutually beneficial relationship. We have a lot to offer each other.

So breathe, put down the pamphlets about all the different therapies, breathe again, and look in your networks for some Autistic connection. It'll make your life, your child's life, and some local Autistic's life, better.

...or how I learned to stop making policy and attack the other team

The next year is going to be interesting, and I don't think it's going to be very pretty. Due to the way the nation is viewing the various parties right now it feels like we're going to be in for some of the, well let's say "not most edifying" months of UK politics. The Tories are threatened by a Labour opposition that naturally will gain votes simply by being that opposition, but also from the other side by UKIP and the incessant coverage they gain which will offer them a fresh challenge. Labour look to absorb disaffected Liberal Democrats but also somewhat fight off UKIP on the immigration question. Liberal Democrats, as it happens, appear to have the simplest job to me and that is just to argue their own relevance. Whether they can ever succeed in that now is another question.

I think we'll see a period of everyone attacking each other, and the negative politics that ensues is surely likely to put voters off as much as pull them in. However with such little policy difference between them, and little more policy to add, it looks like the only option on the table they've got.

The Conservatives need to fight off UKIP as well as somehow helping the Lib Dems shore up their vote. It's vital for the Tories to help Lib Dems because every vote that returns to Lib Dem from 2010 is another vote towards them retaining seats, outside of the Tory/Lib marginals of course! I imagine we'll ultimately see the Tories turn on the Lib Dems in one of the most beautiful expressions of political friendship. They'll claim the Lib Dems held them back, that the Lib Dems stopped them moving ahead on Europe, that they stopped them from reforming on immigration, etc, etc. Lib Dems would be crazy to not graciously accept the attacks, print them on their leaflets and give them to their current GE2010 "don't knows"

In line with this they'll make a big deal about how, free from coalition, they would go further on Europe and immigration in an attempt to hold off UKIP. They know that UKIP support is burgeoning right now but they also know that a significant proportion of them would come back to vote Tory if it was the difference between that or Labour getting in. I'm generalising here, but there may be a hope in some quarters (particularly Labour's) that the UKIP vote will split the Tories and allow them to sneak through. I'm sure it'll happen to some degree, but not as high as current predictions would suggest...a majority of UKIP supporters are not coming from previous votes for the big three.

With this in mind Labour will be fighting hard on it's own two fronts. First to highlight how there are a lot of things the Lib Dems helped the Tories with. It seems to be their strategy now, an all or nothing one. They seem to not be too bothered that there is still a real potential that they could end up without a majority and need other parties to push through their legislation, and that creating real ill feeling in the remaining Lib Dem ranks may be contradictory to that need. The next is that they'll big up the UKIP vote, disgustingly as some may find it. The best thing for Labour is for it to steal votes, be they through Lib Dems disgusted at a frankly disappointing Lib Dem effort in government coming to vote Labour, or UKIP taking those Tory votes and letting Labour sail past even with only modest gains in votes.

I think this is why we're not seeing Labour come out with real policy right now. They don't need it, or so they seem to feel. If they feel they don't need to actually win the support of people on their own merits then that is their choice, but it seems a rather pathetic one to me. It is clear that they'll continue much of what the Tories have laid down, having started an amount of it before Tories took office, and so I guess I'm not surprised that they'll be concentrating more on trying to make people feel angry at other parties. It may not get them votes, but then people forced into apathy after previously voting Lib Dem or Tory is not exactly a loss for Labour either.

Lib Dems have the most freedom but also potentially the least credibility. They can once again actually throw out policy ideas knowing that they won't really have much chance to implement them, if at all, even if in another coalition. They'll also want to return the favour on the Tories and make a case for the various progressive policies that Lib Dems and Tories got through and of course paint it that they'd not have happened without the Lib Dems. Out of all of the parties they have the most scope for actually putting forward a positive case for voting. Coupled with, I would assume, a tightening and reverting back to core targeting strategies I expect them to be more resilient than people want to believe.

We'll also see them attacking Labour in places, though I suspect that they won't be playing that up too hard. The reality is that Labour is their best chance of continuing power in some form or another (and that is clearly a tenuous prospect at best right now) and their wavering voters are sympathetic to some of what Labour is saying. Going on the attack here isn't going to be the strategy that wins, not if they can get the right message together on what they have done, and more importantly *what they will try to undo*.

And then there is UKIP. I expect their support to reach around 16% nationally if the Tories don't play the game right...but Tories have been playing this game for a long time. While they have very little positive to say, and will do as they have done for years and attack the other parties for letting immigration get out of control (hah!) they also are probably the only party that'll have a competent policy portfolio...even if the majority of the country actually disagree with it. But that doesn't matter, and it will potentially keep them votes they've gained this year as they present possibly one of the most professional campaigns....outside of the gaffes and outrageous remarks that a fair number of their membership and leadership will utter...in the areas they focus on.

So UKIP will be attacking everyone, Tories will be attacking Lib Dems out of love, and attacking Labour for not having any ideas out of "the mess(tm)" while undermining UKIP. Lib Dems will be attacking Tories, though a not for the same reasons the Tories are attacking them, and Labour will be sitting there hoping to create a storm of immigration apocalypse controversy while explaining to everyone that the Lib Dems are simultaneously irrelevant and evil incarnate.

Here's to a "fine" year of politics ahead.

David Howarth, who was MP for Cambridge between 2005 and 2010 before giving up his parliamentary career to return to academia, is the party's most impressive intellectual. His introduction to Reinventing the State comes nearer than anything I have read to express a coherent Lib Dem philosophy.

You can find it on the Social Liberal Forum website under the title "What is Social Liberalism?" and it is well worth reading.

But what I want to blog about here is something David had written today on Liberal Democrat Voice: What does the evidence tell us about our strategy should be?

The evidence he refers to is the findings of the British Election Study, which was published on 7 May.

As David points out, Lib Dem strategy since we entered the Coalition has been centred on two hopes: that the economy would come right and that voters would give us the credit for this.

What do the findings of the study tell us about the likelihood of this strategy coming good? David writes:

The answers are very unhelpful for our current strategy. Optimistic voters think – by over 5 to 1 – that we are not responsible for the conditions that give rise to their optimism. In contrast, those same optimists think the Conservatives can claim credit for the coming economic improvement by a majority of 4 to 1. 

If one looks at crucial subgroups of voters, such as electors who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 but have moved to Don’t Know (more than a fifth of our 2010 vote), the situation is nearly as bad: a 4 to 1 majority against giving us credit and a majority of 4 to 3 in favour of giving the Conservatives credit.

The problem here, as David points out, is that the argument that austerity has led to recovery is an inherently Conservative point of view so, not surprisingly, it is the Conservatives who get the credit for it.

David concludes: "As an electoral strategy this looks hopeless, even irrational."

Most of the debate following the Lib Dem debacle in the local and Euro elections has centred on the leadership.

I am not Nick Clegg's greatest fan, but the only conceivable alternative to his leading us at the next general election was a Vince Cable caretaker leadership.

Today's events have made that much less likely, so it the strategy that must change. And David Howarth says the British Election Study has some important lessons for us:

What are the views, for example, of voters who have a high propensity to vote for us but who are not voting for us now? By more than 2 to 1 they favour redistribution of income, by 3 to 1 they are for greater environmental protection and by 8 to 1 they oppose further privatisation of public services.

In short, potential Lib Dem voters believe in the policies the party has traditionally stood for. Over to you, Nick.

Exciting news, chums! Affable Alan Moore is venturing into the cyberworld of digital comics, with the project edited by his daughter Leah Moore (a writer in her own right of course). The project is Electricomics and the website is here:
http://electricomics.net/. I wish them all the very best with this new venture.

Here's today's press release hot off the pixels...

There are, in the history of television, extremely few moments like this one, where the heart and soul of an entire generation is swept up in the rapture of a shared experience that becomes the defining memory of an era.

Cosmos, which opens declaring itself to be standing “On The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean”, is on its own a watershed. This is the series that not only made PBS, but codified the documentary as at least I remember it and changed the face of not only the popularization of science, but of science itself. It really is astonishing to look back and see how so much of the discourse we now associate with science can be linked directly to Carl Sagan's ethos and positionality. Because this is what makes Cosmos so special and why it remains relevant and valid over thirty years later when the world it came into and spoke to now belongs to some long-distant and half-forgotten mnemolic time-spacescape: And even though his perspective has been frequently misunderstood and his name invoked in vain by the many, many people to come in his wake, the fundamental and provocative radicalism of his voice still resonates, and is what allows Cosmos to remain so powerful.

Carl Sagan is a fascinatingly marginal figure, and in retrospect it's sort of odd that he was the one to break out in the way he did. Famously too speculative, imaginative and spiritual for the scientific establishment, yet too grounded in hard science for UFOlogists and true believers, Sagan occupies a curious, and unenviable, no-man's land in scientific discourse. But yet in many ways it's this nomadic isolationism that helped him reach such a staggeringly huge audience: Sagan wrote and spoke with the voice of a poet and a mystic, yet fiercely committed to the scientific method, he was in many ways the only personality positioned to take science education in this direction. He's of course far from the first to fuse science and mysticism: John Muir did it, and J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée and Steven Spielberg accomplished it masterfully quite recently with things like Passport to Magonia and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Going all the way back, what were the ancient navigators if not science mystics?

But Carl Sagan was the first to take this approach and apply it to science education, at least on such a grand scale. Carl Sagan wasn't just a science popularizer or even the greatest science popularizer-He was the science popularizer, all stop. Nobody who has tried to follow in his footsteps has come remotely close to emulating what Carl Sagan did. In some ways Robert Burnham, Jr. is Sagan's anticipation in this regard, but, let's face it, try as he might (and he did, mightily) Burnham's Celestial Handbook was never going to be embraced outside of an extremely small subset of amateur astronomers. No, what Sagan understood was the power of television as not just a forum for teaching and learning, but as a medium where communal images could be experienced together. Riding both the Fortean wave of the 1970s and the mainstream concern over technoscience dating back to the immediate postwar era, and posessing the further good fortune of landing right at the time the landscape of television was metamorphosing, Cosmos became a deft blend of media trends both old and new.

But Cosmos is not merely a triumph of timing and good luck: Yes, it is in many ways perfectly suited to its moment, but this is a show with a truly staggering scope and powerful message to deliver. Even once you get passed the achingly heartfelt poetry of Sagan's introduction and thesis statement and into the meat of the series itself, which is where the cracks in Cosmos' central premise start to become apparent, its breathless love of and commitment to this message and the ideas it deals with is enough to sustain is thirteen episode run all on its own. Cosmos confidently declares that it tells the story of “all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”. This is not just a show about teaching astronomy, or physics or stroking NASA's ego (though it does do all of those things), nor is it even a history of scientific experimentation and knowledge (though it tries, commendably, even if it seems to have bitten off a bit more than it can chew in this regard). This is a show that's trying to tell us that we are one with the rest of the universe, and that understanding this is the key to unlocking enlightenment and discovering our role within it.

It's this simple statement that I think is what I take away from Cosmos most of all. When Sagan describes life as “a way for the Cosmos to know itself”, it sends chills down my spine because it's so true and so elegantly phrased. This is the sort of thing I remember the most about this series: I can't say that Cosmos was particularly life-changing for me, in that it completely changed the way I looked at things and permanently shifted my worldview. No, Cosmos works on a much subtler level for me: It gave a voice to ideas, concepts and images that I had always kept in the back of my mind and articulated them in ways in never could. I think all good art does something like this, and while I don't quite consider Cosmos my model for nature documentaries, I do think it works stunningly well as a work of art and an expression of Carl Sagan's positionality. Despite its foibles and flaws (which the show does, unfortunately, have its share of), Cosmos hits at a solitary kernel of truth that transcends even the show's own status as a landmark in science popularization to convey something not quite “human” (or at least not entirely) but, well...cosmic.

What strikes me as the most interesting about Cosmos as a material television programme is its structure: It's obviously divided into different chapters, with the first serving as a kind of abstract (much like an academic paper or, appropriately enough, a clock). The thing about this is, I've always felt the show starts to lose focus after a few episodes and than doesn't actually manage to reclaim it until very near the end, and this, to me, has the uncomfortable consequence that only the first episode, “On The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean” is actually required watching: It summarises everything the show is trying to say succinctly without going off on tangents and makes its point so successfully and memorably that in my opinion it frankly overshadows the whole rest of the series. And actually, to be really blunt, you really only need to see the first half hour. And, of that, the opening seven minutes are seven of the most utterly perfect and indescribably moving and powerful minutes ever put to film.

(Seriously, don't take my word for it, stop reading this and go watch them right now if you haven't. You can skip Ann Druyan's opening narration that accompanies every version of Cosmos released since 2000-We'll talk about her later.)

It's after this initial seven-and-thirty minutes that, sadly, “On The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean” goes a bit off for me. Which is fitting, given that this episode is such an effective microcosm for Cosmos itself. After making one of the most profound and beautiful statements in the history of television, Carl Sagan then proceeds to spend the remainder of his runtime trying to recount the Epic Narrative of Science, and his Western bias is painfully noticeable. There's a great deal of time spent lionizing the Classical era, in particular the ancient Egyptians and the Hellenistic Greeks, namely Alexander the Great and the Great Library at Alexandria (and the requisite Orientalist shot that modern Alexandria “shows little trace of its former greatness"), which then dovetails into a frustratingly textbook account of the teleological March of History. Sagan tells of the burning of the library, symbolizing the loss of knowledge and the regression of the Dark Ages, which isn’t even historically accurate, and a glorification of the European Renaissance for rediscovering said lost knowledge, which is even less historically accurate. And naturally, it all leads to the wonderful future promised by NASA where we'll all take our next steps out into the stars. And this is as far as Sagan ever gets, either in this episode or in the rest of the series.

Astronomy as we know it is, of course, an extremely Western field and has a worrying track record of erasing the contributions of nonwestern peoples (in particular the pre-Christian Europeans, Native Americans, aboriginal Australians and the Polynesians), but Cosmos' Eurocentrism really stings because it's in every other respect so universal and makes incredible strides elsewhere: Sagan's repeated use of the phrase “great men and women” is a godsend in and of itself, and his segue out of his Journey of the Imagination segment to the montage of human faces of all cultures and creeds is a lovely bit of inclusivity. But, his frustrating inability to move beyond the Great Man Theory and a teleological attitude about history does real harm to the potential impact of Cosmos as a TV series. It's hurtful not just because of its obvious hegemony, but because it's a tragic and needless squandering of potential: Cosmos was absolutely capable of painting a more diverse and accurate picture of the history of humanity's interaction with the natural world, and that it not only manifestly doesn't do this, but indeed props up the dangerous pre-existing Master Narrative about the march of Great Western Science is not only a wasted opportunity, but one that saddens me because it overlooks so much that I find fascinating about science, history and culture.

(Furthermore, just on another personal note, Sagan's constant slighting of astrology rankles me: He's right that in its modern form it's a pseudoscience, but stopping there ignores the shared history of astronomy and astrology and astrology's own unique cultural weight that's worthy of study for it's own reasons.)

And yet we should be careful not to let ourselves fall into the same trap Carl Sagan does by equating all of Cosmos simply to him. While he was the presenter and the obvious breakout aspect of the series, he was only one of three co-writers, along with Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, the former of whom is a producer and the latter of whom is an astrophysicist himself. It would be a mistake to overlook their contributions, especially given Sagan's own admission that one of the the major impetuses for him to do Cosmos was his growing impatience with hard science. Druyan, it must be said, for her part was extremely good at overseeing Cosmos the pop culture phenomenon: Aside from the show itself, there was a companion book written by Sagan, a series of soundtrack releases and even an “Official Cosmos Store” overseen by the “Cosmos Company” that sold things like the “Cosmosphere”, a small disc that emulated what the sky looks like on any day of the year at Midnight or Noon if you happened to live around 45 degrees latitude, which I suppose is only to be expected. And yes, I do own both Sagan's book and the Cosmosphere myself.

But for my purposes the two people who contributed the most valuable and memorable things to Cosmos aside from Sagan himself are not his co-writers. One is Vangelis, whose album Heaven and Hell provides the soundtrack for most of the show, including the absolutely iconic and breathtakingly poignant theme song. Vangelis' work is a revelation, effortlessly fusing classical music, 1980s electronica, prog rock, jazz and pop into a unique ambient soundscape that is not only a perfect articulation of Cosmos' underlying message and heart, but also anticipates in many ways where Dennis McCarthy will eventually go with his scores to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Speaking of Star Trek, the second person is a young, fresh-faced VFX artist by the name of Rick Sternbach, who did some of his earliest TV design work as a storyboard artist and set designer on Cosmos as the show's Assistant Art Director, for which he won an Emmy Award in 1981. During this time, Sternbach also did some work for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Cosmos was filmed between 1977 and 1980), but he's eventually going to become best known for his work as one of the chief technical advisers and design artists on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager.

Sternbach is, quite simply, one of the most important creative figures of the coming era, and, given how he and Mike Okuda are responsible for a great deal of the look and feel of Star Trek from now until 2001, it's absolutely crucial to get a handle on their perspectives. Though Sternbach and Okuda didn't design the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D or its sets themselves (credit must go to Andy Probert there), they were responsible for helping realise them into a physical form and, as it pertains to Cosmos itself, it's already clear there's a lineage from the elegant, organic curves of Carl Sagan's Ship of the Imagination and the “worlds of ice and stars of diamond” adrift in the “cosmic dark” to which it travels to the new Enterprise and the images and dreams to which it too will soon voyage.

And yet even so, it feels difficult, and in some ways wrong, to try and reduce Carl Sagan's positionality fully out of Cosmos. One thing I've always loved about this series is how blatantly and upfront Sagan is about his perspective and opinions-He's not at all making any pretenses to objectivity here. Like any good teacher, Sagan can deliver and convey information, but he's more interested in making his audience think and freely offers his own take and musings on the material he's covering, with the implication we're meant to do the same. And it's the very fact that Cosmos is in truth so bound up with Sagan's personal positionality that allows us to attribute the majority of the praise, and the blame, for what the show ultimately does to him.

Much of Sagan's professional scientific output consisted of calculations concerning the viability of human space travel and hypotheses about xenobiology, which have become central to endeavours like SETI. This would explain, for example, Sagan's attitude about extraterrestrial life, which was radical for the time in establishment science, but perhaps not entirely satisfying for others. Sagan did seem to believe firmly that humanity's destiny lay in space travel, and though Cosmos does explicitly shift discourse about nature and science to an extent, it is hard to shake the feeling Sagan's fixation on this hampers the show a bit: For Sagan then, the “cosmic ocean” was perhaps not quite as the Polynesians would have seen it, as a symbol of the necessary and harmonious interconnectedness of all parts of the universe, but as literally that: An expansionist and naval metaphor for boldly going out and charting new places to be heroically discovered. And this, unfortunately, makes a good deal of Cosmos feel a bit dated and naive thirty years later.

It's also telling that Sagan chose to name his show Cosmos, that is, the opposite of Chaos (in other words, Order-he even explicitly says this in the first episode) and went with Heaven and Hell as his soundtrack, an album very much in keeping with a Dante-esque Pop Christian conception of the titular worlds. William Blake, for one, would not approve, that's for sure. Revealing as well is Sagan's frequent allusions to clock-making and “the machinery of nature”, an extremely Western conception of nature that relies upon technoscience and technofetishism alike (it's the "God the watchmaker" argument with the God bits filed off). And yet even so, there is an undeniable raw and anarchic mysticism to Cosmos that I'm not sure Sagan himself ever truly came to understand: There is, after all, a reason that in spite of everything Sagan remains beloved by the Forteans, and the visible sense of wonder he displays when he takes his ship through the “cosmic waves” and talks about how “we are made of star stuff” says it all for me. Sagan himself even mentions “the music of cosmic harmonies”.

Carl Sagan was, above all else, a technoscientist who eventually realised where the end result of his scientific inquiry would ultimately take him. And his entire oeuvre, beginning with Cosmos, is simply his way of working through these ideas and attempting to articulate what he discovered about himself and the cosmic whole-After all, the show is subtitled “A Personal Voyage” for a reason. That his work itself is as tentative and uncertain as he describes our “first steps into the cosmic ocean” to be is at the very least appropriate and unsurprising. Human art is by definition flawed and imperfect, but even so it works when it connects and resonating with people. Cosmos has managed to do just that, and the elegant truth it stumbled upon and embraced as its message earns it a place among the most meaningful statements human artists can teach.

(This is a revised version of an old post; you can see the original here.)

Please read the addendum at the bottom – I got carried away with computability, and ended up screwing up quite badly.

In the comments on my last post, a bit of discussion came up about some of the strange properties of real numbers, and that made me want to go back and get this old post about numbers that can’t even be described, and update it.

In those comments, we were talking about whether or not π contains all sorts of interesting subsequences. The fact is, when it comes to π, we just don’t know.

But… We do know that there are many numbers that do. There’s a property called normality. Informally, normality just says that taken to infinity, all sequences of digits are equally likely to occur. In an infinitely long normal number, that means that any finite length subsequence will occur, given enough time. My name, your name, the complete video of the original version of Star Wars, a photograph of the dinner I just ate and never took a photo of – it’s all there, in any normal number.

If you think about that, at first, it might seem profound: there are numbers that contain absolutely everything that ever did exist, and that ever could exist. That seems like it should be amazing. If the numbers were at all special, it might be. But they aren’t. Normality isn’t a rare property that’s only possessed by a special meaningful number like π. It’s a property that’s possessed by almost every number. If you could create a randomly selected list of a billion real numbers (you can’t in reality, but you can mathematically, using a finite version of the axiom of choice), odds are, all of them would be normal – all of them would have this property.

But here’s where it gets really strange. Those numbers, those normal numbers that contain everything? Most of them can’t even be described.

It gets stranger than that. We know that we can’t really write down an irrational number. We can write down successively more and more precise approximations, but any finite representation won’t work. So we can’t actually write down the overwhelming majority of real numbers. But in fact, not only can’t we write them down, we can’t describe the vast majority of numbers.

Numbers are something that we deal with every day, and we think we understand them. Over the ages, people have invented a variety of notations that allow us to write those numbers down: the familiar arabic notation, roman numerals, fractions, decimals, continued fractions, algebraic series, etc. I could easily spend months on this blog just writing about different notations that we use to write numbers, and the benefits and weaknesses of each notation.

But the fact is, when it comes to the vast, overwhelming majority of numbers, all of those notations are utterly useless! That statement seems bizarre at best. As strange as it it seems, though it’s true. In order to understand it, though, we have to start at the very beginning: What does it mean for a number to be describable?

The basics are really easy to explain: A describable number is a number for which there is some finite representation. An indescribable number is a number for which there is no finite notation.

• Integers are all describable.
• Finite length decimals are all describable.
• Fractions are all describable.
• Infinite repeating decimals are describable. First, they’re all fractions,
  so they can be written as fractions. But even without using fractions, you can
  use a notation to express the repetition.
• Many irrational numbers – like π and e are describable: we can’t
  write down the sequence of digits, because they go on forever without repeating;
  we can’t write them as a fraction; but we can write an algorithm
  that will generate the digits.

All of those are describable. What isn’t? I can’t describe them to you – because, by definition, that’s impossible. They’re numbers whose digits aren’t predictable – not by any possible definition of predictable: there’s no algorithm, no process, no pattern – there is simple no way, in a finite amount of space, to describe how to write them down.

To show that most numbers are undescribable, I come at it from a computational perspective. When you say that a number is describable if there’s a finite process for describing how to write it down, what you’re really saying is that there’s a program that will generate it: if you can write a finite program that will generate a representation of the number, it’s describable. It doesn’t matter whether that program ever finishes or not – so if it takes it an infinite amount of time to compute the number, that’s fine – so long as the program is finite. According to this definition, π is describable: it’s notation in decimal form is infinite, but the program to generate that representation is finite.

An indescribable number is, therefore, a number for which there is no possible program which will ever generate the number in any form.

How can we show that the vast majority of numbers are not describable? It’s easy. In a branch of theoretical computer science called recursive function theory, we talk about program numberings. Basically, for any computing device, we can assign numbers to its programs. Every program is just a number.

This isn’t just an abstraction – it’s realy. Take a program – any program, written in any language. It’s a series of characters that can be written into a file. Each character is represented by a group of 8 bits. Take that set of numbers, and line their bits up, one after another. The result is a huge positive binary number. Taken this way, every sequence of characters is represented by exactly one unique natural number – and every number represents exactly one sequence of characters. Thus, every program that can be represented in a file – which is every possible computer program, valid or invalid – is represented by exactly one natural number.

Using this system, the set of all possible computer programs is a subset of the set of natural numbers. That means that the set of all possible computer programs is, at most, countably infinite.

The set (or more properly class) of all real numbers is not countably infinite. It’s much, much larger than that. That means that most real numbers cannot be described by any computable algorithm. They’re indescribable. There’s no process you can use to uniquely specify them: if there was, there’d be a computer program describing that process – but there can’t be any program for most numbers.

If we could write infinitely long computer programs, then the undescribable numbers would be describable – but their descriptions would, obviously, be infinitely long. Most numbers cannot be described in a finite amount of space. We can’t compute with them, we can’t describe them, we can’t identify them. We know that they’re there; we can prove that they’re there. All sorts of things that we count on as properties of real numbers wouldn’t work if the indescribable numbers weren’t there. But they’re totally inaccessible.

ADDENDUM: I screwed up.

I’m a computer science guy, and I love the theory of computability. I let that take over, without thinking enough about it, and managed to make a huge mistake here!

What I described above as describable numbers isn’t right. It’s the set of computable numbers. The set of computable numbers is a strict subset of the set of describable numbers. As several commenters pointed out, there are many numbers that are describable but not computable.

The describable numbers are all numbers for which there is any possible finite description that uniquely identifies the number. The countability argument still works: you can still enumerate all possible finite-length strings that could be descriptions, and define a one-to-one correspondence between strings that could be descriptions and natural numbers. The set of describable numbers is, thus, still countable, and the set of undescribables is not, which implies that the set of undescribables is far, far larger that the describables.

But my original explanation was stupidly wrong. I apologize for the error. I’m not editing the text of the original post, except to put a pointer to this addendum: in a case like this, I think editing it would be dishonest, a way of covering up my serious error.

As a vaguely unaligned lefty voter back in the late 80s and early 90s I wandered between Plaid Cymru, the Greens and the Liberals. If you're of the left and grow up in a Labour heartland you rapidly learn how little care for anyone or anything but their own self-interest Labour have, so they weren't ever a serious contender.

Back then the Green Party looked like a plausible alternative to vote for. Indeed I've argued that if we were starting our political system from scratch in the UK, with parties based on the key issues of the coming century rather than the vested financial self-interest politics of the old century, the two main parties would be the Liberals on the left and the Greens on the right (and no doubt UKIP as a third party to soak up the ever present blame-someone-else vote).

The trouble is as they've gained the proverbial oxygen of publicity the Greens look less and less appealing.

There was Iraq, obviously. Before the 2003 invasion the Greens stood alongside the Liberals and a motley assortment of others (Respect, the BNP... look, never blame an idea for those who share it!) as against the invasion. There was some debate within that broad coalition as to when or whether it might be OK to go in, but right up to the day America and her allies rolled in conditions like UN backing were never met.

When war was declared everyone against the invasion needed to reassess their stance given the "there must not be an invasion" boat had sailed. The Liberals said they hoped for as short a conflict as possible with the minimum of civilian casualties. The Greens immediately and loudly condemned that stance. The trouble is, with no option for "war never happening", the only place that being against a short and comparatively bloodless battle leaves you is calling for a long and bloody war and / or as many civilian dead as can be piled up.

It's not that surprising: after all, a long war which forced up the oil price is better for forcing the pace of change to alternative energy sources or reductions in energy use. A painful war in Iraq fits with a (the?) central plank of the Green Party's agenda.


Yet because they get so little attention most of the time they've been able to keep a swathe of anti-war votes from internationalist and humanitarian voters, despite their real and bloodthirsty position.

And their money-tree solutions to so many things... great for bandwagon jumping, terrible for actually having to put promises into action as the unravelling of their Brighton council administration reflects. Making the numbers at least broadly add up was something the Liberals learned from the 1992 election; the Greens still have to go through that uncomfortable stage.

Then earlier this week I had the dubious pleasure of hearing the Greens' national spokesperson on Human Rights (Peter Tatchell, who whatever you think of his tactics down the years has a broad and long history in LGbt campaigning) repeatedly use "straight" as the antonym of "trans" at an LGBT public meeting. We've had "cis" as a proper word for such purposes for a good long while now, we aren't stuck with the clumsy language of the 70s any more.

As Carter would say: I turn on the box, it's like punk never happened.

They'd like to get votes by promising a money tree to everyone, when we're more aware where that leads than ever. They like to get votes from seeming fluffy on Iraq, when they were bloodthirsty hawks. And they would like to get votes from the LGBT+ communities, but even their out candidates have no interest in listening, just preaching.

We started out Memorial Day with the latest mass-shooting by a legally-armed lone-nut. What set this case aside from the others was the alleged trigger and target for Elliot Rodger: he was a “nice guy” who was furious that women spurned him (or hypothetically spurned him, since it doesn’t seem he actually approached them) romantically and sexually.

The befedoraed nice guy in the friendzone is now a standard cliche on the Internet. There are seemingly endless numbers of gentlemen who would treat women like the sacred flowers they are if only the stuck-up bitches would put out. Yet, sadly, the “females” refuse to acknowledge their superior mate qualities and instead put these poor guys into the “friendzone”, insisting they only want to be friends while they then give it up for dumb, hunky inferiors who probably can’t even tell a katana from a wakizashi.

Lol, fedoras, and all, but it’s not really that funny, since these guys are often rape-threatening loudmouths at “best” and this weekend they became mass murderers and terrorists at worst.

Rodger, despite a clear manifesto and call to action, won’t be called a terrorist by most sources because he didn’t seek to threaten the capital of rich white men. All he did was refer to women as a plague to be abolished, and then set about seeing what he could do towards that end.

In the wake of any such crisis there are the predictable responses. The NRA will say that somehow more guns would have prevented this. Their toadies will point out that Rodger ran over people in his car as well, so should we ban cars? Congress will wring their hands and say there’s nothing that really could have prevented this, since Rodger was a lone nut, so they can feel content doing nothing. The religious right will blame it on gays and abortion. We have tragically seen this movie so many times recently that we know all the lines.

What I think people weren’t expecting to see, however, was not merely a complete disinterest in the violent misogyny that fueled Rodger’s hatred, but an almost universal shrugging of shoulders and muttering of, “it sucks, but you gotta admit, women really are kind of whores.” As the New York Post scrambled to publish swimsuit pictures of the girl who supposedly “lit the fuse that turned him into a murderous madman”, Twitter lit up with “nice guys” who suggested that instead of a good guy with a gun, all this tragedy needed to stop it was a good gal with a vagina. The overwhelming message was that men are just a bunch of vengeful savages who aren’t responsible for their actions, and if they don’t get what they want, well, sometimes these things happen.

Women, of course, were unsurprised by this, having gone their whole lives hearing about how any physical, emotional, or mental abuse they suffer is their own fault. Some men rushed to the defense of their gender, bleating the impotent refrain of “Not all men!” hoping that the fact that they personally may not have sexually harassed a woman (much) earns them some kind of decency medal as one of the good guys who, as a result, should be considered as prime sex material. It’s understandable in this case, when one of your tribe has done something awful, to stand up and say, “Hey, he’s not what we’re all about and I don’t support him!” but there’s only so far that such declarations go. (Especially if we type “Not all men!”, turn off the computer, and then consume some more of the mass of woman-hating media that flourishes in our country.)

And we know what those who were in the same sad boat as Rodger felt afterwards, because they too have let us know, declaring him a hero and a tragic victim of the misandrist feminazi menace.

In American media parlance, “terrorists” attack us, but “lone nuts” attack them. If a Muslim man kills several non-Muslims, he’s a terrorist. If a non-Muslim shoots up a mosque, he’s a lone nut and who knows what could have spurred such unreasonable hatred. Rodger isn’t a terrorist because he didn’t go after us, the white men of the world, he went after women. If killing off women in mass numbers were a real crime, prime-time television would be serving multiple life sentences. Instead he’s yet another mysterious enigma we’ll never be able to understand (despite a 141-page manifesto) and only the purchasing of more guns can possibly stop.

If someone declared war on the 1% and then provided a body count to back it up, you can damn sure bet there would be regular two minute hates directed at them on all fronts. This weekend someone declared war on 51% and well, boys will be boys. Honestly, though, given what women are already put through with the full sanction of the law and society, what’s a couple more dead ones?

British politics is in a state of flux. This is not new. There have been more uncertain times than this – the end of the First World War with a coalition government and the electorate tripling; in 1923 with a hung parliament and the closest to a three-way split of votes that Britain has seen at a general election; in 1931 with a financial crisis which split the Labour cabinet and resulted in a National Government; and in February 1974 with a hung parliament, industrial unrest and a widespread belief that Britain was becoming 'ungovernable'.

Today should have been my Grandma’s one-hundred-and-second birthday. Sadly, instead today is her funeral. I can’t be in New Hampshire for the ceremony, so I’m remembering her here.

I had the great privilege of knowing two of my grandparents well into my life, my Dad’s dad Walter and my Mum’s mum Eileen White. Both had long, active and determined lives. Both were fiercely independent. Grandad was fit and active until shortly before his death aged 95, back in 2006. Grandma was the same for around a hundred years, and only started to fade in the last couple. I remember Mum telling me she’d had an operation a couple of years ago after which, when the hospital insisted she stay a few nights to see that she was all right, she immediately booked herself out and walked home.

Grandma was widowed when my Mum was just a girl, so I never met my maternal Grandfather (my Nana, Dad’s mum, died when I was a teenager). She did marry again, and I did know him for a while as Grandpa, though he’s been gone quite a while too. She lived in many different States of the USA, but for the last couple of decades had settled in Concord, New Hampshire, and I suspect the Granite State’s motto “Live Free Or Die” is one she’d have identified with, at least if endorsing someone else’s motto didn’t compromise her stern independence (only once, I think, did Mum tease out of her how she voted: after gently probing several times to see if she was backing President Obama in 2008, Mum carelessly tossed out, “So you’ll be voting for Vice-President Palin, then?” which gained the response, “Do you think I’m a complete fool?”). She was a formidable lady.

I wish I’d seen more of her, and been in touch more often. Some of my favourite memories of her are from the Nineties – my twenties, her eighties – when she was able to come over here and I had one of only two trips so far over there. In 1998, I was in the USA on business of a kind for three weeks and travelled up to New Hampshire to see her on one of my two days off, where we got on very well and had a rather lovely day together. That’s when, discussing politics, she told me the story that I’ve most often told on here from her, most recently in telling My Political Story – Why I Am A Liberal Democrat. I remember her nodding and telling me that she could see I’d be political when I was aged four and strutting about naked on a beach and told a big boy off for kicking down another boy’s sandcastle. She was probably right.

My absolute favourite moment was in 1996, when I got my Mum into trouble. Sorry, Mum. I’d been pretty much out to the world since I was seventeen, badges and everything, with only a handful of notable exceptions. One was Grandma. Mum had prevailed upon me not to tell her, because she was old and we didn’t see her often and she didn’t know how she’d react. So when she came over sometime in the mid-Nineties, I saw her a couple of times but never quite found the moment or the courage to talk to her properly. And I regretted it. So, eventually, I composed a long letter that walked on eggshells, knowing she’d probably be upset and wanted both to reassure her and to be honest with her, because by then I’d been with Richard for a couple of years and I knew I always would be, and I didn’t want to shut her out. So I sent the letter, and waited on tenterhooks.

A week later, the phone rang. I think it was the only time Grandma ever rang me rather than writing. And in fact she rang me twice in quick succession. The first call was more abrupt and to the point. It went something like this.

“Why are you so upset?” she asked.
“Well… I’m not,” I replied, taken aback. “But I thought you would be. I’m completely fine about being gay.”
“And why would that be?”
“Well… Mum thought…”

I think that’s about as far as I got in that conversation before there was a determined

“Right! I’ll ring again in a minute.”

One what I understand was a curt mother-daughter bollocking later, she rang me again, and we had a long and charming conversation in which she was all sweetness and light. That is, after the first explanatory explosion:

“Does my family think I’m wrapped up in cotton wool? I’ve known for years!”

So remember that when ignorant people insult all over-seventies by trying to tell that you they’re bigots who know nothing.

I loved her for all that I didn’t see her much, and I’m deeply sad that I won’t be able to see her again. Five months from today, Richard and I plan to be in the States on our honeymoon, and I wish I could do as we’d planned and visit Grandma with my wonderful husband. But it’s not to be.

Mum and Dad travelled over far more often. For the last few years, they’ve always gone to the States and been with Grandma on her birthday. This time, they’d barely landed in New York, planning to travel up to New Hampshire the following week, when they heard that Grandma had had what seemed to be a minor heart attack and was in hospital. They went straight up there and found her suddenly very frail in the hospital, and were with her for about two hours before she just slipped away.

For complicated reasons, I’ve not been able to speak to them and have had a chain of emails, but I know they’re having a very rough time and my heart goes out to them.

OK, so it's the Euro elections, where the Liberal Democrats *usually* under perform. OK, so this does not mean that UKIP will form the next government, and OK, so the Tories, less so, and Labour, more so, face problems with the implications of the results too. Nevertheless there is no getting away from the fact that the 2014 European elections have been a thoroughgoing disaster for the UK Liberal Democrats. I feared, going in, that we would be down to three MEPs, in fact we only held one, and that by the skin of our teeth. So there is no easy way to gloss or spin this- it is a massive blow.

We have- had- extremely good and well respected MEPs, but in the end this election was not about Europe. Even as UKIP made major advances, the latest polls, for the first time in years, if not decades, show support for staying in the EU outstripping those who would leave. Most voters cheerfully accept that most if not all the UKIP MEPs are pretty useless, lazy and hypocritical. Some may even be fully fledged loonies, racists and fruit cakes, but that is not the point. It was "politics" in general that the punters were making a statement about, and UKIP has definitively stolen the Lib Dem clothes of being the anti-politics party.

The problem is not, as some of the so-called "Radical Liberals" have been unhelpfully declaring this evening, that the voters are rejecting "the Orange Bookers". Even if we had been able to join with Labour in 2010 and the Social Liberal agenda had gained a decisive advantage, I believe we would very likely be in a pretty similar position. I will not say that this is simply because some deus ex machina dictates that smaller coalition parties always get damaged, because I don't believe that to be true anyway. Rather, we have contaminated our brand, to use the unlovely language of marketing, because we have failed to articulate why we do what we do. The compromises of coalition, whether with right or left, are messy, but we have not explained our core values to the voters. Without that clarity, we have come to look opportunist and dishonest- only in it for the power, not for the principle.

To be fair Nick Clegg has tried to speak up for Liberal values, and often in a way I totally applaud. Nevertheless the failure of the AV campaign is now revealed as the precursor to disaster. Our failure to achieve even the first tiny step on the road to real constitutional change was the critical moment in the life of this government, and all the pupil premium, tax free rates and other policy wonk esoterica that have been our declared successes are, I am afraid,so much ash. We are a party that at its core believes that the UK needs complete reform, and if all we do- as I believe we do- is simply provide better administration, then we water down our core message to irrelevance. So-called Economic or or so-called Social Liberals were united by our commitment to Political and Constitutional Liberalism, and as it now seems by not too much else. 

The bitterest irony in all of this is that the anti politics wave of UKIP (and indeed the brief frisson of the prospective Clegg surge in the 2010 election campaign) shows that large number of voters share our determination that something radical must be done to shake up not merely the administration of government, but the fundamental mechanisms of politics. By taking on the messy compromises of government and yet failing to articulate our radical, reforming anti-Establishment agenda, we have ended up, in Bill Newton-Dunn's felicitous phrase, "talking complete bollocks".

So we have blundered into a disastrous trap.

Well first things first, this is not a good time to panic and it is an even worse time to go though a leadership election. So Ros Kayes, Lembit Opik et al- put a sock in it. Clegg made a balls up of the Farage debate, but otherwise his resilience is not far short of astonishing. On the Euro results we would be down to a handful of MPs and a generations work would have ended. However, the locals are- barely- a bit more encouraging: on those numbers we are in the 30-40 MP range, which is bad, but frankly in the 1970s and 1980s, we would have felt pretty chuffed. Critically, the vote for both the Tories or Labour may not be much above 33%, and the two parties will be evenly matched. Even if UKIP gain a few MPs, as now, for the first time, seems possible, that will only add to the pressure for electoral reform. In other words, it may be that we can get a second hung Parliament and most improbably, a second bite of the cherry. Obviously that has got to be the goal that we pursue relentlessly and that means that we need to hold our nerve for the next 12 months, despite the thumping we just received.

Nevertheless we need to back away from the minutiae of policy wonkdom and articulate a constitutional and political vision that is worthy of the party of Gladstone. The one encouraging thing about these results is the election of a UKIP MEP in Scotland- it is a poke in the eye for the SNP that reinforces the likely narrative of a No victory in the Scottish referendum. Yet that referendum should not be the end of a constitutional process- it should be the beginning. Lib Dems should be speaking up now for a British constitutional convention that addresses deep and unpopular problems, like the lack of an English Parliament or Parliaments, like the mess of weak and competing local governments, and -of course- the need for voting reform. These are core Liberal values and if we gain ownership of them now, then we can help to lead the debate, not- as we were in the AV vote- the victim of the debate.

So we can't return to coalition as usual, and no, we can't start bickering with the Tories, because that would look manufactured. We can -must- start talking about the things we would do differently, and that is not policy details, but political vision. We need to sell the big picture, the visionary narrative and show the determination to change the political system, not merely administer the current system more effectively.

Can we do that?

I don't know, but I do know that negativity and bickering is for losers. We are now so few that we know most members of the party by sight. The other parties are in barely better shape. We have to consider a whole new way of doing things, but I believe that Liberal vision, properly articulated, can be inspiring to a new generation of supporters, and to be honest, what have we got to lose now?

Tonight I bring cheer with, unusually, a great Doctor Who scene that isn’t all death and disaster – counting down more of my Fifty with a dash of romance. And what better time for it? Today is exactly five months until Richard and I marry (and since I posted number 34, Britain’s first same-sex weddings have been celebrated and we’ve received our first invite to another couple’s. Hurrah!). Not only that, but yesterday’s Towel Day commemorated Douglas Adams, while Saturday would have been the birthday of Graham Williams, the two principal writers of this glamorous and many-authored Tom Baker story… If you thought Number 34 was a bit Douglas Adams-y, today’s is properly so, and it’s much happier than the end of the world. More the other end.

“It has a bouquet…”

City of Death is a mostly remarkable Doctor Who story. It’s regularly voted among the best in all the series’ fifty years; it got the series’ highest ever ratings (though, to be fair, with no Internet and, thanks to a lengthy ITV strike, only BBC2 and the radio for competition); even more remarkably, it manages to unite many fans who scorn 1979’s other Doctor Who stories in agreement that this is ‘the good one’ (personally, I love some of the others too). But perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is how it was made at all – a glimpse of alchemy. Brilliant writer David Fisher wrote the first draft, then couldn’t do the rewrites… So the series’ Lead Writer Douglas Adams (yes, that Douglas Adams) and Producer Graham Williams rewrote it from top to bottom in a weekend and a few flashes of genius, before actors like Tom Baker, Lalla Ward and the fabulous Julian Glover rewrote more of it as they went along. Though it’s only Mr Adams, Mr Williams and Mr Fisher who are usually understood to form the BBC compound entity “David Agnew” credited on screen. And part of the new script was to swap the original 1920s setting for – mostly – 1979, which sounds less interesting, but not when Production Manager John Nathan-Turner had worked out in another flash of genius, this time with the accounts, that they could shoot it in contemporary proper Paris as cheaply as in a studio’s fake Monte Carlo of fifty years earlier. It was the first time the series had ever filmed outside the UK. And then there’s an intricate story that would today be called “timey-wimey,” but thankfully wasn’t in 1979, some outstandingly witty scenes and cameos from the likes of Eleanor Bron and John Cleese.

So I’m mildly unusual in finding it a bit of a mixed bag in parts, but thinking the bit that’s absolutely, blissfully perfect is the first five minutes. Because that’s the part before the important bits like the plot and the monster and most of the funny lines get going, and which quite a few fans who otherwise love the story say should have been cut because it’s just aimless faffing about*. Personally, I’m very drawn to aimless faffing about.

The thrilling blue swirl of the time tunnel – still the greatest title sequence ever made – parts on an eerie, barren landscape that looks thoroughly alien, as does the spider-like spacecraft squatting over the rocks. It’s an impressive piece of modelwork, aided by echoing music from regular composer Dudley Simpson and a sweeping camera pan across the plain to make it look enormous. And the alien voices within the ship are arguing with each other – the pilot protesting as the crew insist he take off on warp thrust, despite the dangers. Marvellously, it references Star Wars in their telling him “You are our only hope,” as he’s closer to a frog than a beautiful princess. To thunderous chords, the ship lifts slowly into an appropriately Turner-ish red and black-clouded sky… Only to crumple in on itself, shimmer and explode, the crew’s pleas echoing in desperation. You’d think that in today’s Doctor Who this would be made as a pre-titles sequence, but it’s all the better not for being so because of the fascinating non-sequitur that follows instead. The falling sparks of the explosion fade into blossoms, and again the camera moves left to right, echoing the extended pan and giving the world that came first an equivalence with modern Paris as the Eiffel Tower comes into view behind the flowers, the panning shot across the rock to the latticework gantry spaceship the natural precursor to that across the blossom to the latticework gantry tower. It’s a brilliant directorial choice, not least because, like the script and the French filming, it was something that wasn’t the original plan and was an inspired late improvisation: the director went for the blossoms instead when the special lens brought to zoom out from the top of the Tower didn’t fit the cameras. What director Michael Hayes came up with on the fly is the perfect bridge between two very different visual and storytelling styles, and the perfect opening to one of Doctor Who’s most cinematic sequences.

So, leaving you in anticipation for what happened to the alien pilot (and indeed plot), the story proper instead opens with the Doctor (Tom Baker) and his companion Romana (Lalla Ward) swanning about at the top of la Tour Eiffel being frightfully laid back and witty as they just enjoy themselves.

“It’s the only place in the Universe where one can relax entirely.”
“Mmmm. That bouquet.”
“What Paris has… It has a – an ethos… A life. It has—”
“A bouquet?”
“…A spirit all of its own. Like a wine, it has—”
“A bouquet.”
“…It has a bouquet, yes. Like a good wine – you have to choose one of the vintage years, of course.”
“What year is this?”
“Ah well, yeah. Well, it’s 1979, actually. More of a table wine, shall we say. Ha!”

Tom is charming and worldly, Lalla superior but utterly charming with it, and eager to see the wonders of Earth. The two actors have marvellous chemistry in this story above all stories, and it’s no surprise that off-screen they were soon to marry and almost sooner to divorce. While in some of their stories they can barely bring themselves to look at each other, here they’re evidently having a wonderful time on every level, diegetic, extra-diegetic and extra-curricular. How natural they look is another part of the serendipity that makes so much of City of Death come together so well.

There’s a building fanfare of music, and then they’re off! The thrilling, intimate cinematography of the side of the train rushing towards us on the platform, then the Doctor and Romana simply joyous beaming at each other and the Paris Metro, planning dinner, dashing across the road by Notre-Dame hand in hand, all to what could be a career-best score for Dudley Simpson, a gorgeous, playful theme that chimes perfectly with the bouquet. It’s sheer happiness, the closest the series comes to a musical, and I’m always astounded when other fans say it’s padding and want to get on with the plot instead. It’s art.

Then there are two last pieces of serendipity, of alchemy, as they run past a poster for an exhibition on “3 Millions d’Années d’Aventure Humaine”, and the camera at last springs away from them to the threatening wooden carving of a gorgon-like snakes-headed grotesque… But that would be the plot, so it’s time to stop.


*Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood’s impressive and opinionated About Time 4, for example, starts an otherwise complementary review by complaining “the first episode features five whole minutes of the Doctor and Romana jogging through Parisian streets… Often regarded as the only major flaws in this story, and certainly the only bits that video viewers regularly fast-forward through…” Whereas I frequently put the first five minutes on to cheer myself up, and leave it at that. Maybe they’re just not music lovers, for all that they claim to sing along “Running through Paris” to the tune.

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotations – The Androids of Tara

Tripping back a year to 1978, another gorgeous holiday of a story from a complete David Fisher script, this time on the Ruritanian planet of Tara and in the middle of the quest for The Key To Time. It’s enormous fun, especially where the dashingly dastardly Count Grendel of Gracht (Peter Jeffrey) is involved. It is, though, something of a cautionary tale about marriage, as the Doctor’s companion Romana (in her first body, Mary Tamm) discovers in Part Two when the Count shows her his dungeon – in it, her exact double…

“Is it an android?”
“Good heavens, no, my dear. That’s the Princess Strella. First Lady of Tara, a descendant of the Royal House, Mistress of the domains of Thorvald, Mortgarde and Freya. In fact, Tara’s most eligible spinster! Shortly to become – in rapid succession – my fiancée, my bride, and then… Deceased. Yes – it will be a tragic accident. A flower blighted in its prime. And naturally, as her husband, I shall claim her estates and her position as second in line to the throne, as provided for under Taran law.”
“I see. But since you’ve already got a Princess, what do you need me for?”
“Well, the Princess does not entirely agree with my plan.”
“I can’t say I’m wildly surprised.”

In Part Three, Romana is confronted with another double (she’s missed one more in between). This one’s technically less royal and more, well, technical. To the Count’s moustache-twirling satisfaction, she’s been built to assassinate the Doctor (Tom Baker)…

“You see before you the complete killing machine – as beautiful as you, and as deadly as the plague. If only she were real, I’d marry her.”
“You deserve each other.”

And in Part Four, the still-scheming Count, that well-known champion of widows and orphans, welcomes the Head of the Church of Tara to the charms of Castle Gracht for two weddings and a funeral…

“Ah, Archimandrite! Welcome.”
“What is so urgent that I must leave my duties and hurry here like this?”
“I am sorry, Archimandrite, but there is a ceremony you must perform.”
“Here? What ceremony?”
“A marriage.”
“Your own chaplain could have done that.”
“Not this marriage.”
“Why? Who is to be married? And to whom?”
“The King – to the Princess Strella.”
“The King? Here?”
“He has placed himself under my protection, your Eminence. Sadly, I have to tell you – he is sick. In fact, he is very near to death.”
“Oh, dear, dear, dear. He did not look well at the coronation. Not himself at all.”
“No… No, I did note that, Archimandrite.”
“But near to death, you say?”
“Indeed he is. It would be as well if you stayed here. I fear he will be in need of the funeral rites very soon after the wedding.”
“Oh, how sad.”
“Mmm, yes. And after the funeral rites, there will be a second wedding for you to perform.”
“A second wedding? May I ask whose that will be?”
“My own. I shall be marrying the poor King’s widow.”

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Curse of Fenric

If that’s not warning enough about the dangers of dalliance, let’s turn to what’s possibly my beloved’s favourite story, and one of mine, too. It was 1989 for most of us, 1943 in the story, and half-way into Part Two (or 40 minutes into the story, if you’re watching the movie-length DVD Special Edition). While the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) investigates vampires rising from the waters off the North-Eastern coast, stony pillar of the church Miss Hardaker has other reasons for taking against the local beauty spot. She doesn’t mince her words when she finds her two teenage East End evacuee lodgers have been swimming at Maidens’ Point…

“Nothing for you but pitiless damnation for the rest of your lives! Think on it!”

Romantic.



Miss Hardaker was played by the marvellous Janet Henfrey, who returns to Doctor Who later this year. Richard and I met her in 2009 and, rather than the usual ‘Best wishes’ signed by an actor, we persuaded her to give us a different benediction on our The Curse of Fenric DVD.

Thanks to the Internet (though I’ve lost track of where, so contact me if it was you and you’d like it removed), I was also able to proffer this motivational poster to lovely The Curse of Fenric author Ian Briggs after he talked about some of the underlying themes in his story and the inspiration of Alan Turing. He laughed.

Bonus Not Necessarily Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Armageddon Factor

It’s another Doctor Who story from 1979, and another opening scene from Part One. This one’s not quite so celebrated as City of Death, and you’ll have to watch it to put it into context (though I’d watch the other five stories of The Key To Time series first), but I couldn’t resist. Miss Hardaker would be appalled.

“Men out there – young men – are dying for it!”

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – Rose

And finally… From one of the most uplifting of all Doctor Who stories, the great return nine years ago, not the opening moments but the close. Rose has saved the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and the world from the Nestene Consciousness, and he in turn has rescued her from its exploding lair. After that brief trip in the TARDIS, the Doctor and Russell T Davies offer her and us more – to come with him, anywhere in the Universe. That’s one option: reckless, hopeful, open-minded. The narrow, sour, closed-minded alternative is put by her unhelpful boyfriend Mickey, who despite also having been rescued by the Doctor gives him a mouthful of xenophobic abuse as “an alien – a thing.” It’s a clear choice… And for a moment, Rose hesitates. Mickey pulls her to him, holding her back, taking her for granted, and she says no. The TARDIS dematerialises.

Rose, left on the street, just stares into the suddenly empty night as the wind of the TARDIS’ passing whips her hair. If she could have that choice again… And, suddenly, the TARDIS blazes back into reality, the Doctor stepping out to deliver the best pick-up line in history:

“By the way, did I mention – it also travels in time?”

Choose your own life, and run into the future.


Next Time… The scariest place for anyone

Memorial Day is one time during the year when American civil religion imitates one of my least favorite aspects of the white evangelical Christianity that I was raised in. It takes the kernel of an idea of something right and honorable and spins it into a defensive, sanctimonious, performative ritual — one which makes sincerity and truth-telling almost impossible.

It is a time, in other words, when we say that which we are expected to say, even if — and perhaps especially if — we know it is not true. We say what we are expected and directed and required to say because we are being watched and monitored and evaluated for our willingness to say it. The point is not about saying what we believe to be true, but rather about affirming our membership in the tribe of people who recite such affirmations. This recitation is not optional. Those who fail to make it with the appropriate simulacrum of sincerity will be sanctioned.

“Can we tell the truth on Memorial Day?” Craig M. Watts asks at Red Letter Christians. And the answer, I think, is No — not if we know what’s good for us.

“I have told the whole truth in that,” Mark Twain said, “and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.” He was speaking of “The War Prayer” — a harshly satiric fable in which Twain wrote some of the truth that American civil religion forbids us to acknowledge on Memorial Day.

Watts is more hopeful than Twain. He believes that truth-telling is possible, if difficult. “While some truth is given voice on this solemn occasion, there are other important truths that are distorted in the telling or pushed from memory altogether,” Watts writes:

Too often on Memorial Day, rather than remembering individuals who tragically died in battle, an idealized version of the war dead is presented. The dead are indiscriminately described as “heroes.” Sweeping claims are made about the reason for their deaths: they died to “protect our freedom.” And in particular in churches we are told they died for the freedom of religion, the freedom to worship.

We are told soldiers “sacrificed themselves,” though they were actually sacrificed by politicians who sent them to war. And in churches scriptures are quoted to leave the impression they died as martyrs for their faith: “those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

Watts proposes three questions for Memorial Day, all of which are good questions. Here, though, let’s just focus on the first one:

(1) Can we remember without attributing reasons for war that aren’t in fact the real reasons? To celebrate Memorial Day by claiming soldiers died that we might be free is misleading. The real causes behind most wars have had little to do with protecting freedom of speech or assembly or worship. … Can we remember in a way that doesn’t falsify the causes of war, justify national self-righteousness, or turn Memorial Day into a recruiting tool to entice the young to enter the armed forces?

I understand that this ritual assertion of a falsehood — the war dead “died that we might be free” — is intended in part to ascribe the greatest possible honor to those who gave the last full measure of devotion. But if we owe them our gratitude, then we also owe them our honesty. The pretense that all wars, or even most wars, are fought to defend our freedom does not so much honor our war dead as it does guarantee that we’ll keep making more of them.

As Watts notes, the honor and gratitude at the heart of Memorial Day are appropriate. “Those Americans who suffered and died in war ought to be remembered,” he writes. We have a duty and an obligation to remember them and to honor their memory:

The grave difficulties endured by of those who faced armed conflict and lost their lives should be recognized. The soldiers’ best intentions in allowing themselves to be put in harm’s way – regardless of the actual reasons for war — deserve to be honored. But in the process, war itself should not be honored, the reasons for war whitewashed, nor should the suffering and the deaths of others be ignored.

And the whitewashing of the reasons for war starts, I think, with this ritual incantation of the false claim that war is perpetually necessary if we are to remain free.

That is not true in the particulars nor is it true in the abstract and in general. Richard III did not say, “First, kill all the soldiers.” No tyrant has ever said such a thing. Tyrants like Richard need soldiers. They need someone to carry out that order, “First, kill all the lawyers” Or all the journalists, the prophets, the educators, the demonstrators. Nowadays, many tyrants and would-be tyrants seem to be saying “First, kill all the school girls.”

The cultic ritual glorification of war is not necessary to defend freedom. It may well be necessary, though, for getting rid of it. It is, at least, immensely useful for that purpose.

Here in America, Memorial Day began after the Civil War as a way of remembering and honoring those who died in that conflict. It was, and still is, a pale shadow of the true memorial that honors those more than 600,000 dead — the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment. America has been at war for most of my lifetime and most of those wars have done more to undermine those laws than they have to defend them.

I’ll tell you what Memorial Day is all about, Charlie Brown. Lights please:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

I was tempted to sign the LibDem4Change petition calling on Nick Clegg to resign because the party machine’s response to Thursday’s debacle and to the group’s letter was so inept.

First we had the email, sent out under the name of poor Annette Brooke, telling us there was nothing to worry about - “All of these results tell the same story - in many of our strongest areas we are winning elections.”

If I had just been defeated or seen my candidate defeated in a former Liberal Democrat like Islington or Liverpool, that would have read to me like an “I’m all right Jack” message from our MPs.

We also had the ritual repetition of “where we work, we win,” as if our defeated candidates had not worked hard too.

Once the petition started gaining significant numbers of signatures, the party’s media operation sprang into life. Why don’t we encourage loyalists to join the Lib Dem Friends of Cake Facebook group, they reasoned, then we can say that the petition has fewer names than people who have liked that group ha ha ha ha ha.

So early on Sunday morning this line was given to sympathetic journalists like George Parker and even to Paddy Ashdown.

I don’t like to be harsh, but I suggest the party’s chief executive finds who it was who thought it was a clever idea to patronise members’ justified concern in this way and moves him or her to duties for which he or she is more suited.

It would be interesting to know, for instance, the total number of paper clips at Great George Street.

And there has been Danny Alexander’s performance. The more he tells us that things are going to carry on as they are, the more despondent I feel. It was noticeable how more authoritative Martin Tod was when they appeared together on television. But I have calmed down.

I would rather see Vince Cable as party leader at the next general - I think he is simply a more able politician. But, though I can imagine a scenario in which the MPs got together and asked the party to support him as the only candidate, that does not appear likely to happen.

It is clear that Nick commands the loyalty of a large section of the membership and that they would be outraged if he were forced out. I don’t wholly understand this, but it is a fact and one that must be taken into account. The Conservatives, for instance, have never got over the assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

So we soldier on, if only to allow Nick Clegg to lose and teach his supporters a few home truths and because it would be easier for a new leader (who would probably not be Vince and certainly not be Danny) to begin rebuilding after an election.

So the important question is the one Andrew Neil asked Paddy Ashdown on Sunday: If changing the leader is not the answer, what are we going to change?

And if I hear Danny Alexander promise no change once more, or if I see good Lib Dem members being ridiculed by 12-year-old SPADs, then I will sign that bloody petition.

So, LibDems4Change have an absolute right to act as they do, even if I don't agree with them. They don't have to justify their approach, other than to make a case that allows them to win the argument. Those who believe that now is not the time to replace Nick Clegg can likewise argue their position.

UKIP are on the march, seeing a surge in support in the local government elections and getting the most number of seats in the European elections.

It would be easy to see this as representing a sea change in British politics. And because it’s the line of least resistance, that is what the political pundits have done. Labour won 44% of the council seats, the Tories 36%. They apparently need to ‘learn lessons’ from UKIP who didn’t quite win 4%, who have no chance of winning a single seat at the general election next year, and whose share of the vote actually fell.

UKIP is an optical illusion, a mirage. Once you work out where those votes came from, the prevailing narrative on UKIP collapses.

So what’s the prevailing narrative?

Here’s the change from last time in the European Parliament elections:

UKIP have increased their share by 11%
Labour are up 10%
The Conservatives are down 4%
The LibDems are down 7%
The BNP is down 5%
Various parties called things like Christian Coalition Against the EU are down 3%

The prevailing narrative goes something like ‘there’s a new force on the right of British politics’, and that because the Conservatives are a right wing party, you can account for the UKIP gains adding up some Tory defectors from the extreme right, the BNP and the anti EU parties’ tallies together. The Tories can ‘only win’ if they throw their lot in with this right wing coalition that represents a neglected constituency of voters.

OK. Now explain where Labour’s votes came from.

No.

The first mistake is that politicians and journalists of all political persuasions believe that there’s a silent majority of ‘traditional’ British people. Call them ‘Daily Mail People’, after the newspaper. (For any Americans in need of translation, think of the Daily Mail as a print version of Fox News, but with lots of pictures of Hermione Granger because their readers like whacking off to those). The Daily Mail People aren’t of a particular social class – there are working class gorblimey Cockneys in there and there are Home Counties ladies who you’d get Penelope Keith to play. What unites them is that they are white, greying, monitor their house price in real time, they didn’t go to university but their kids do and they attribute this to it being easier to get into university nowadays. They are aspirational, status obsessed, puritanical. They are, in a polite way, ragingly racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic.

For politicians and media types, Daily Mail is rhyming slang for ‘holy grail’.

For a very long time, the belief has been that the Daily Mail People are the secret to winning elections, but it’s all very mysterious, because … well, no politician or journalist has ever actually met a Daily Mail Person. The BBC understands that they’re particularly bad at knowing anyone like that because there aren’t any in London. But on the occasions they venture to, say, the North, Scotland, the East, Wales, the South, Ireland or the West, they never find any in those places, either. They must be very good at hiding, the logic goes. Lots of people, after all, watch Top Gear.

But UKIP, it’s reckoned, have somehow not only found them, they’ve worked out a way to get the Daily Mail People voting, they talk their language. They have activated the Daily Mail sleeper agents and British politics will never be the same again.

The defining issue of a Daily Mail Person, we are told, is ‘immigration’ and the ‘political class’, they say, ‘just don’t get it’. The political, media and academic class think in terms of a global economy. We live in a world where there’s free movement of capital and free trade but not free movement of labour. The rich and the transnational can hire workers where it’s cheap, sell goods where they’re expensive and put the proceeds where they don’t have to pay tax. The ‘elite’ think of ‘Immigration’ as something a bit old fashioned, like the gold standard, coal scuttles or paying for the music you listen to. Immigration isn’t actually even a thing. You can’t, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, migrate into or out of a globalised economy.

But when ‘traditional’ British people say ‘immigration’, the story goes, they mean foreigners coming over here and stealing our stuff. Everything from our job down the market to our ability to weigh our potatoes in pounds and ounces. It directly affects their lives, all the time.

And this belief is meant to be a right wing shibboleth in the UK the same way abortion is the US. There are, the theory goes, a huge number of British people obsessed with immigration and the mainstream parties don’t understand that, and need to tack to the right. Anti immigration parties will always blindside ‘mainstream politics’ because we’re all liberals who can only respond to Daily Mail People by constantly underestimating, ignoring or demeaning them.

Well, OK. The reason no one’s ever met these people is because they don’t exist, or at least not in any great number. But humour the theory for a moment. If there were twenty million Daily Mail People, should the political class act accordingly?

No.

There are people who’ve said that much of the UKIP vote this time was because the Cameron government made gay marriage legal. Is this a good theory? Probably not. The same people making this argument also blamed the rain this winter on gay marriage. The fact our politics can usually ignore such … let’s call them “extroverted irrationals” … is a feature, not a bug. There is racism, sexism and homophobia in Britain, but the reason we don’t usually see it reflected in our politicians, at least not publicly, is because the system works, not because it doesn’t. We’re a representative democracy. We don’t elect people to pander to our whims, we elect people we think are knowledgeable and have sound judgement.

We’re all basically idiots. That is to say that even the smartest amongst us have only limited knowledge.

But so what?

Can you hold the view that something should be done to get those Nigerian girls back with no real clue who took them, why they were taken and only a vague sense of where Nigeria is? Of course you can. Who is the moral idiot in the following conversation: ‘Someone kidnapped three hundred teenage girls from a school and they’re being forced into marriages – by which I mean raped. We should help those girls.’ / ‘Not unless you can point to where it’s happening on a map’.

What we want is a political structure that goes ‘right … here’s what’s happening, here are our options, and this is what we’ll do’. Not just in the case of the Nigerian girls, but generally. And the way you get to that form of government is not, I humbly suggest, by putting people in charge who think raining happens because it’s raining men, halleluiah. Does that sound patrician and insulting? Boo hoo. One of the most important functions of a democracy, one of the prime advantages it has over other systems, is that it insulates against idiocy.

So … OK, if UKIP isn’t a grand alliance of Daily Mail People, then what’s going on?

It’s important to note I’m talking about broad trends. Will some people have switched votes from Labour to Conservative, Conservative to Green, Green to BNP? Sure. But if we’re looking for a narrative, we have to smooth things out a little. I’m going to suggest the prevailing narrative of Daily Mail People finally having a voice doesn’t work, and there’s a much better explanation.

First of all, let’s look at the BNP number. They’re down 5%, let joy be unbounded, but … wait, that means in 2009 they were up to 6%. Yikes.

The Daily Mail Person model would suggest they’ve gone to UKIP. Because the BNP’s right wing and UKIP’s right wing and the BNP went down and UKIP went up.

No. The 2009 BNP vote was a protest against Gordon Brown’s government. There is no need to protest the Gordon Brown government in 2014. It’s far more plausible to think those votes didn’t go to UKIP in 2014, they went back to Labour. Because that’s what one type of protest voters do. They are loyal to one party, but occasionally want to register their disapproval. And we know this is what actually happened because if the BNP people last time voted UKIP this time … well, they also all moved house and were replaced by Labour voters. The new UKIP votes didn’t come from the BNP areas.

So where did UKIP get their new supporters?

1. Tories making a protest vote, just as Labour supporters did five years ago with the BNP. Survey after survey has around half of UKIP voters saying they voted Tory in the last election and probably will at the next one. And straight away, that’s the killshot for the ‘realignment of British politics’ story. Most of UKIP’s votes come from Tories registering disapproval, and most of them will just vote Tory when the general election comes.

2. The LibDems always attracted votes from people who didn’t want to vote for either Labour or the Conservatives. A longer term protest vote, not a one time deal. LibDem support has collapsed, surely, simply because you can’t protest vote by voting for a party of government. The realignment in UK politics may be that UKIP now get all the ‘a plague on both their houses’ votes. Except without the regional pockets that actually generate any seats.

3. About 3% last time voted for parties called things like The Christian Popular People’s Front Against the EU and the People’s Popular Front For Anti-EU Stuff. UKIP do seem to have soaked up those.

People are not voting ‘for UKIP’, at least not in any great numbers. They are benefiting from being a go to vote for both disaffected Tories and people who used to vote LibDem as a way of voting ‘Neither’.

Why are people disaffected with UK politics? It’s not ‘immigration’. It’s that the party leaders of the two electable parties look like this:

And this:

No, seriously. The next Prime Minister is one of these two people. It suits the Conservative and Labour Parties to portray this as a Manichean struggle between ‘the mainstream’ and the extreme right. This isn’t about anything as grand and ‘good and evil’ as ‘fighting racism’. Nigel Farage just beat Labour and the Tories in a national election. He is patently a useless wanker. The unpalatable truth that the ‘mainstream politicians’ don’t want to face up to is that they’re even more useless than that. This is not them being outflanked by the great forces of history … this is them being trounced by … this:

We’re at a weird point. The Labour Party were in power a long time, they wore out their front bench. All the good potential leaders are too old, have retired, died or just burned out. The Tories aren’t much better – the 1997 result wiped out a lot of people who might have led the party and made it an entirely pointless prospect for the ambitious, so they had to start from scratch from a tiny talent pool.

So we’re at a point where the two main parties are in a post-Apocalyptic, rump state simultaneously. And a point of economic slump and no plan to get out of it. And at a point where there are vast problems facing the world like climate change and resource bottlenecks that are simply beyond the ability of a nation state to fix. Not old problems like a dictator or nationalist movement, but actual planetary level emergencies that no amount of diplomacy or tank divisions will solve. We used to worry we’d run out of oil, then that we’d drown as the seas rose, but hey, no problem, we’ll run out of drinking water long before that.

Most horrific ‘we’re screwed’ fact I’ve heard? Thanks to a combination of an increase in container freight and overfishing, the weight of all the ships on the ocean is now greater than the weight of all the fish in those oceans. Congratulations, we killed a planet.

What’s the solution? Let’s check Labour’s answer. Oh. It’s ‘Ed Miliband’.

It does give you the sense that perhaps they aren’t asking the same question. The same category of question, even. The same kingdom of question. That the problem is not so much that Ed Miliband is ‘weird’ but that his entire party lives in a parallel universe, one where, presumably, both the problems and sandwiches are smaller.

We, all of us, everyone living on this planet have the sense that what we have isn’t working. That there’s some solution involving, y’know, grassroots organisation rather than massive bureaucracy (but with a massive bureaucracy to protect us), more efficient use of energy, making things instead of selling financial products to each other, the rich people not being quite so rich and the poor people not starving to death.

The solution is not UKIP, UKIP is a symptom. And ‘immigration’ is not a problem, it’s a symptom of the fact we genuinely do live in a world where some of the most important resources are dwindling fast. We all, I think, have the sense that building big walls around things, metaphorically and literally, is a terrible idea but might be the best plan we’ve got.

The Labour Party and the Conservatives do not need to become cretinotropic to mop up a few percentage points from UKIP with the aim of becoming the largest party in a hung parliament. This is a representative democracy, this is a time where we’re not actually in crisis but are staring at it, and that means we need leaders who behave like the best of us, on our best days. There is much to love about Britain, but there are also serious problems that need serious solutions.

UKIP is clearly not a serious anything. But it’s going to be much easier for Miliband’s team to arrange a photo op where he’s drinking a pint like a regular human from our dimension, and for Cameron to pledge a referendum to deport Great Uncle Bulgaria than it is to start acting on the big, difficult stuff. ‘You voted for UKIP, we listened’. But people didn’t vote for UKIP, UKIP was just a handy place for a diverse set of protest votes to converge. All we voters want, I think, is a leader who’s not a wanker who seems vaguely engaged with an effort to make the future somewhere worth living in for most, if not all, people. This is not a high bar. There are huge, possibly intractable problems facing the twenty-first century and we’re at the point where any baby born in the UK from now on can reasonably expect to see the twenty-second century. We need politicians who are thinking further ahead than next May. We’re not saying we expect someone to solve things overnight by waving a magic wand, we’re saying we know we can’t, so we need to make a start now. So, please, stop obsessing about UKIP and get to work. Ignore UKIP, ignore UKIP hard. There is no such thing as UKIP.

 

 

 

 

 

The last 4 years have been pretty tough ones for the Lib Dems (and the years immediately preceding them and following Charles Kennedy's departure weren't exactly awesome times if you take out the two months of Cleggmania).

We are not liked. Hated by the left, mocked by the centrists and, as ever, despised by the right. Nick Clegg acted as the lightening rod for appreciation during the 2010 general election and continued his lightening rod role into far less fun times when he experienced hanging in effigy and cruel (and daily) personal attacks. His ancestry, his choice of life partner and just about anything else have been criticised and sneered at by the usual hard-nosed unhappy folk who stand in opposition to liberal values and general nice things.

Anyone surprised by the party's repeated defeats following the tuition fees fiasco really needs to check their ability to understand what attracted a large number of people to our party. We presented ourselves as something different and ended up being just the same as all the other disappointing compromisers. Compromise is often a good thing but you don't get many people who think it is desirable or attractive.

But that doesn't mean we stop and change course. We got ourselves into this mess and we need to get ourselves out of it. And I'm very pleased to see that Nick Clegg, the man who lead us to great heights and through some very dark times for the party (though hardly the worst given our historically low number of MPs over the last century), is not deserting us when things have gotten difficult.

We need to stand with him. He has put up with a lot of abuse and heartache whilst trying to do what he thinks is right. We don't all need to agree with every decision he has made (though I've become convinced what happened over tuition fees was hardly the greatest betrayal in history as it has been played by the left, it was still foreseeably politically disastrous especially so early into the Coalition). I also believe he has allowed the Tories to play us like fools and they've done it very easily too. But he isn't what is wrong with the party. The party has lost its way. Obsessed with its accomplishments within this Parliament (ones which the Tories are getting all the credit for, alas) it is failing now to paint a picture of what a Lib Dem future looks like and why it is radically different to the bleak visions of the Tories and Labour. That is what we must focus on and not be distracted by some pointless and damaging leadership contest.

Nick Clegg needs a stable party in order to fix the things that have gone wrong. And we need a stable leadership to allow us any hope of securing our strongholds for the bitter storm that will be the 2015 general election.

If you believe in liberty, in fairness and in Europe join the Lib Dems. I'm going to renew my membership next month (10 years in the party now I think) and I'm going to contact my new local party and see what I might offer in aid. The fight against the clearly defined vision of Ukip must begin now, to secure our freedoms and our country from their nasty plans.

(I've written before on this blog, notably in 2012, about how to understand Amazon's business strategy. Consider this an update.)

Last week, Amazon.com began removing the pre-order links from titles by the publishing group Hachette. This is a cruel and unpleasant action, from an author's point of view; if you're a new author with a title about to come out, it utterly fucks your first-week sales and probably dooms your career from the outset. And if you're someone like me, with a title about to come out, it frustrates and irritates your readers and also damages your sales profile and screws your print run (because if Amazon don't order your books in advance in dead-tree form they don't get printed, and if they aren't printed and in the warehouse they can't be sold elsewhere). Make no mistake: Hachette may be hurting, the the people who take the brunt of this strategy are the authors.

(Disclaimer: I am published by Orbit, a Hachette imprint, in the UK. Amazon is not currently removing the pre-order option from titles sold through amazon.co.uk. My Orbit books in the UK are published by Ace, part of Penguin group, in the USA. And I've got another series published (on both sides of the pond) by Tor. However, Amazon have played this nasty trick on Tor, Ace, and Hachette at different times: I've been caught up in it more than twice, and if they extend this strategy to amazon.co.uk again, my UK readers are going to be unable to buy "The Rhesus Chart" from Amazon.)

Forbes mostly calls it right, at least at the corporate level, and until the end of this paragraph, where their 'free-market' knee-jerk kicks in and they bottle it:

What we're really seeing is a battle between the people who make the product and the people who distribute it as to who should be getting the economic surplus that the consumer is willing to hand over. Like all such fights it's both brutal and petty. Amazon is apparently delaying shipment of Hachette produced books, insisting that some upcoming ones won't be available and so on. Hachette is complaining very loudly about what Amazon is doing, entirely naturally. The bigger question is what should we do, if anything, about it? To which the answer is almost certainly let them fight it out and see who wins.

Planet earth calling: Hachette is the publishing arm of a gigantic multinational group, Lagardère, which boasts an annual turnover of €7.37Bn. However, as Lagardère's components include a hefty chunk of EADS (part-owners of Airbus) plus TV channels, duty-free shops, newsagents, sports clubs, and magazine publishing it shouldn't be much of a surprise to discover that Hachette turned over €2.1Bn in 2012. That same year, Amazon's sales topped $61Bn (or around €45-50Bn).

So, point one is that this is not a battle of equals: it's a big-ish corporation being picked on by a Goliath more than ten times its size, in an attempt to extort better terms.

But it's not that simple, either.

Forbes seem to think that Hachette is a producer and Amazon is a distributor. This isn't quite true. I am a producer. From my perspective, Hachette is a value-added wholesale distributor: they supply editorial, production, packaging, marketing, accounting, and sales services and pay me a percentage of the revenue. (I could do this myself, and self-publish, but I don't want to be a publisher, I want to be a writer: we have this thing called "the division of labour", and it suits me quite well to out-source that side of the job to specialists at Hachette, or Penguin, or Macmillan.) Amazon is not a value-added wholesale distributor: it is a retail distributor. They have a publishing subsidiary and allow me—if I want to self-publish—to use them as a sales channel, and will even pay quite well if I accept extremely onerous terms. But they don't do much else for me and in particular if I were to self-publish through Amazon I would be vulnerable to exactly the same pressure that Hachette is currently on the receiving end of, but with less recourse.

Amazon's strategy (as I noted in 2012) is to squat on the distribution channel, artificially subsidize the price of ebooks ("dumping" or predatory pricing) to get consumers hooked, rely on DRM on the walled garden of the Kindle store to lock consumers onto their platform, and then to use their monopsony buying power to grab the publishers' share of the profits. If you're a consumer, in the short term this is good news: it means you get cheap books. But if you're a reader, you probably like to read new books. By driving down the unit revenue, Amazon makes it really hard for publishers—who are a proxy for authors—to turn a profit. Eventually they go out of business, leaving just Amazon as a monopoly distribution channel retailing the output of an atomized cloud of highly vulnerable self-employed piece-workers like myself. At which point the screws can be tightened indefinitely. And after a while, there will be no more Charlie Stross novels because I will be unable to earn a living and will have to go find a paying job.

TL:DR; Amazon's strategy against Hachette is that of a bullying combine the size of WalMart leaning on a much smaller supplier. And the smaller supplier in turn relies on really small suppliers like me. It's anti-author, and in the long term it will deprive you of the books you want to read.

Final note: some time in the 1980s the US Department of Justice's anti-trust lawyers changed their focus from preventing monopolies from forming to preventing companies from colluding to preserve their margins ("price fixing cartels"). As a result, Amazon very nearly gained a monopoly of ebook sales; they're still around the 85-90% mark in the UK, and peaked at over 80% in the USA. (The irony of the DoJ-Apple iBook store settlement is that the DoJ went after the market incomer with the higher prices and 10% market share, rather than the near-monopolist who was using predatory pricing to drive their competition out of business.) It's hard to argue against low prices, but consider this: texts are a cultural medium, and the production of new texts is not something amenable to automation or mass production. I can't go out and hire twenty people off the street and install them in a cubicle farm extruding Charlie Stross branded fiction product. (I can't even hire twenty SF novelists and train them to do that. Our product is bespoke and highly idiosyncratic.) It used to be the case that cultural activities like writing fiction benefited from some barriers against marketization, but a corollary of the global free trade regime we live in these days is that no field is exempt. The net book agreement was declared illegal decades ago: my product has to compete for your attention and money in the same market as the X Men movie franchise and Assassin's Creed games. Neither of which have a near-monopoly incumbent like Amazon squatting between them and their customer base, trying relentlessly to depress prices and force them out of business.

I do occasional work for my hospital’s Addiction Medicine service, and a lot of our conversations go the same way.

My attending tells a patient trying to quit that she must take a certain pill that will decrease her drug cravings. He says it is mostly covered by insurance, but that there will be a copay of about one hundred dollars a week.

The patient freaks out. “A hundred dollars a week? There’s no way I can get that much money!”

My attending asks the patient how much she spends on heroin.

The patient gives a number like thirty or forty dollars a day, every day.

My attending notes that this comes out to $210 to $280 dollars a week, and suggests that she quit heroin, take the anti-addiction pill, and make a “profit” of $110.

At this point the patient always shoots my attending an incredibly dirty look. Like he’s cheating somehow. Just because she has $210 a week to spend on heroin doesn’t mean that after getting rid of that she’d have $210 to spend on medication. Sure, these fancy doctors think they’re so smart, what with their “mathematics” and their “subtracting numbers from other numbers”, but they’re not going to fool her.

At this point I accept this as a fact of life. Whatever my patients do to get money for drugs – and I don’t want to know – it’s not something they can do to get money to pay for medication, or rehab programs, or whatever else. I don’t even think it’s consciously about them caring less about medication than about drugs, I think that they would be literally unable to summon the motivation necessary to get that kind of cash if it were for anything less desperate than feeding an addiction.

There’s a rationalist saying about making a desperate effort, as if the life of your child was at stake. Nowadays I tend to think of this in terms of “Make a desperate effort, as if you were a heroin addict and your next fix depended on it.”

Anyway, it might sound like I’m mocking my patients, but I’m not. I’m meandering my way into an apology.

I have had a really busy few months. I think it will be letting up soon, but I’m not sure. And I’ve told a lot of people who needed things from me, for one reason or another, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy to take care of this right now.”

And I worry that some of those people read my blog and think “Wait, if you have enough time to write blog posts nearly every day, some of which are up to six thousand words long, why don’t you have enough time to do a couple of hours work for me?”

And the answer is – you fancy doctors with your mathematics and subtraction might say that I could just take a couple of hours away from blogging and use those free hours to write that one thing or analyze that one study or whatever, but you’re not going to fool me.

Just as drugs mysteriously find their own non-fungible money, enjoyable activities mysteriously find their own non-fungible time. If I had to explain it, I’d say the resource bottleneck isn’t time but energy/willpower, and that these look similar because working hard saps energy/willpower and relaxing for a while restores it, so when I have less time I also have less energy/willpower. But some things don’t require energy/willpower and so are essentially free.

This is unfair to you guys, but I should be substantially freer in the next couple of weeks and we can see what happens.