Even by the standards we've become used to since 9/11, the 35-year prison sentence for Bradley Manning marks a new low.  Regardless of what you think about the wider fallout from the leaks of the diplomatic cables, anyone who suggests that the release of the "collateral murder" video was not in the public interest simply doesn't deserve to be humoured.  In the the bitterest of ironies, the soldiers who laughed as they cut down innocents that day were never so much as reprimanded for their actions.  Still, at least Manning can be grateful that in a magnanimous gesture he's been credited with 112 days served for the time he spent in what the UN described as conditions amounting to torture.  Speaking of which, those officials that ordered and justified the torture of alleged terrorists during the Bush years had their immunity from prosecution upheld by Obama in one of his first acts as president.  Nor does it seem likely that those who authorised the inhuman treatment of Manning will be receiving disciplinary action any time soon, the commander who ordered it simply being moved to a different job.

In the best possible scenario, failing a successful appeal or a presidential pardon, Manning will be eligible for parole once he's served a third of the sentence, meaning he faces a minimum of at least another 10 years in detention.  Edward Snowden said when he revealed himself as the source of the leaks on the scale of surveillance undertaken by the National Security Agency that he had no illusions about how he would be pursued for doing so, but now he knows just how severe his treatment is likely to be should somehow end up back in America.

One thing the United States hasn't done is accuse either Manning or Snowden of being terrorists outright.  In their continuing attempts to defend the detention of David Miranda on Sunday, both ministers and the supposedly independent of government have come perilously close to suggesting that either the Guardian or the journalists working on the articles on the NSA and GCHQ are in league with those who wish us harm or are far too irresponsible to be trusted with such sensitive material.  That at least is the clear implication from the comments not just from Theresa May, but now Nick Clegg over the visits by the cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood to the Guardian to demand that the files leaked to the paper by Snowden be given back or destroyed "as a precautionary measure to protect lives and security".  If this really has been the concern of the government from the beginning, and not anger at how the Graun has exposed GCHQ's strides forward in "mastering the internet" without the slightest amount of scrutiny or oversight, then perhaps they would like to start being explicit about just who or what is that was causing them such worry?  Surely the paper should know, if it doesn't already, about the threats from within?  Or is it really the case that conversations could be monitored by laser, as a "intelligence agency expert" told the paper?

We do at least know exactly what the security services themselves now think about the leaks, as the man supposedly meant to monitor them made abundantly clear on the Today programme this morning.  According to Malcolm Rifkind, chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, the only people who can make a judgement on what will or won't aid terrorists is, err, the intelligence agencies themselves.  Journalists simply can't make the call, so it seems that regardless of what they've uncovered about the actions of the secret state, it shouldn't be published unless those same agencies say it won't harm national security.  Not that this seems to matter at times, at least to the US intelligence agencies, who only a couple of weeks ago made clear that the alert throughout Africa and the Middle East at a potential terrorist attack came as a result of intercepted conversations between the head of al-Qaida and its affiliate in Yemen.  If they didn't know that was where the intelligence had came from, they certainly did after.

Nor was the apparent concern at what the Graun had published up to the point at which Heywood made his intervention.  One suggestion made on Newsnight from a former MI6 officer was that the real worry was the intelligence agencies themselves couldn't get access to the documents at Graun Towers, while they could those elsewhere, hence why they wanted them back or destroyed.  It's certainly more convincing than the "national security" argument, but it's undermined by the officer's other observation that there was no need whatsoever to hold Miranda for the full 9 hours.  If all they had really wanted was the files he had on his person, they could have confiscated those and let him go far sooner.  Which brings us back to the most obvious explanation, that yes, this has all been about intimidating and attempting to pressure the paper into ending its reporting in the most heavy-handed manner available without resorting to the courts.

This is the point ignored by those like Brendan O'Neill who draw comparisons between this case and those of the tabloid journalists currently awaiting trial for conspiracy to misconduct in public office after allegedly paying civil servants for information, much as I have a certain amount of sympathy for his argument.  The cases that have come up so far involved the sale of information about celebrities, relatives of celebrities, or high profile prisoners.  Where the public interest lies is always going to be defined differently, but it's worth remembering that the other high profile recent instance of "stolen" documents being sold to a newspaper was the expenses files, and no one has suggested that wasn't in the public interest, despite laws clearly having been broken in the process.  Snowden it shouldn't really need to be added hasn't just foregone payment for the documents he "stole", he's been willing to sacrifice almost everything to get out information he believed the world needed to know.

What ought to be apparent by now is that national security is the first recourse of scoundrels.  Not everything is useful to terrorists, but almost anything can be.  Only we can decide what is useful to them, so we can use terrorist legislation even if it's against the partners of journalists just passing through the country.  We're doing so to protect the public from terrorists.  If you disagree, then you should think about what exactly it is you're defending.  You don't have any right to know how exactly we're protecting you, but rest assured the security services operate within the law, which is extremely forgiving when we want it to be, and anyway, if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear. We'll decide when a debate is over, and when you've had your fun. Go against us, and we'll treat you as a traitor, or as a terrorist enabler. What's more, we've plenty of people who'll defend the indefensible for us. Haven't you going used to the new normal yet?

This morning, Jason Riggle and I were on Minnesota Public Radio's The Daily Circuit, discussing word aversion.

You can listen here:

After the show, the guy who set me up in the studio at WXPN confided that his personal horror is the word nourish. "And nourishment is just as bad", he added with a shudder.

The conflation of the detention of David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, and the story of the Guardian having destroyed the computers on which a version of the data released by Edward Snowden was stored was perhaps inevitable, and has certainly been encouraged by the Guardian. But we should avoid considering the issues as a single whole, for there are separate arguments at play in each in relation to the actions of the state and others, particularly when it comes to the actions of Liberal Democrats in government.

I have relatively few concerns about the state’s actions regarding the Guardian’s storage of highly confidential data. It seems to me perfectly natural and lawful that the government would be deeply worried about state secrets being stored on a newspaper’s computers, and would want to use whatever legal remedies are available to it to prevent that situation. Indeed, one could easily make the argument that they would be remiss not to do so; what, otherwise, would be the point of official secrets and the regime in place to protect them?

That the Guardian chose to destroy the computers instead of defending any legal action is not a matter for the state; it is probably a reflection primarily of the Guardian’s lack of confidence in their legal case (which may raise questions of the legislative regime). But newspapers and journalists must take their own view, just as the Sunday Times did when it capitulated to legal pressure to release the information which led to the conviction of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce. But these are matters of journalistic ethics; David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Jeremy Heywood cannot, in my view, be criticised for their actions (though some have questioned the efficacy of destroying this data when there are several copies – that is a different argument).

So I have no problem with Nick Clegg’s prior knowledge and defence of the government’s actions on this front.

Where I feel deeply uncomfortable is over the detention of David Miranda.

That New Labour’s terrorism laws are deeply illiberal comes as no surprise to any Liberal Democrat, given our record of opposing the knee-jeck authoritarianism which so dominated Labour’s time in power.

But I share the view of David Allen Green that Miranda’s detention was unlawful. And given the incredibly widely-drafted, broad scope of this particular provision, that really is saying something.

The involvement of the home secretary and notification provided to the White House only serve to make the case more disturbing.

It is reassuring, therefore, that the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson QC is looking at the detention. And he, fortunately, is a holder of this office in whom I have (and I think Lib Dems can have) confidence.

Which brings us to Nick Clegg’s response. He is clear that he did not know about the proposed detention before the event. That is unremarkable. The rest of his response is as follows:

Liberal Democrats have long stood up for the civil liberties of British citizens and, as you know, the Coalition Government inherited a number of over-broad and draconian terrorism powers from Labour. In Government we led a review of these powers. Some have already been changed and the Coalition is currently pressing Parliament to tighten up these laws further to avoid abuses, including reform of Section 7 which was introduced by the last Labour government. We recognise the serious concerns raised over the detention of David Miranda. The Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation is investigating this and we will wait to hear his conclusions.

This tone of cautious scepticism is notably different to the home secretary’s strong defence of the detention, and we should not underplay that. Matters of this nature are probably the most difficult for a coalition government to deal with and realistically I don’t think Clegg could have gone further than he has in this statement.

And if New Labour taught us one thing it is that knee-jerk reactions to surprising events are precisely the opposite of what we should aim for.

On the face of it, David Miranda’s detention appears to me to be unlawful and deeply concerning. But there are now two processes underway which will reveal more details and allow us to take a proper view: David Anderson’s investigation, and the judicial review claim which Miranda himself is in the process of making (and it is well worth reading Miranda’s lawyers’ letter in full).

But if cautious scepticism is the correct response to this particular incident, we as a party should be enthusiastic in continuing our work of unravelling Labour’s terrorism laws. Notwithstanding the disaster that is the Justice and Security Act, the coalition has made some good progress on this front, and as Clegg’s statement says there are reforms of the very legislation under which Miranda being proposed at the moment.

But treating these issues with the gravity they deserve means distinguishing between state actions which look proportionate and reasonable and those which do not.

* Nick Thornsby is Thursday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs here.

I was not initially planning to get particularly involved on the David Miranda Schedule 7 issue except as a concerned, nay horrified, spectator. After all, I’m an MEP not an MP nor (at present) able to be active as a peer, and I have plenty on my plate in Brussels.

But from early Monday morning, as I read the admirably vigorous response from the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation David Anderson QC – and the immediate if deeply hypocritical reaction from Yvette Cooper – I did start to wonder who from the party was going to be vocal. So I tweeted cautiously:

Applaud @terrorwatchdog vigilance on Miranda case. Gdn/Rusbridger commentary justified. Westminster – hopefully led by LibDems – must act.

— Sarah Ludford (@SarahLudfordMEP) August 20, 2013

I realised Julian Huppert must be away and indeed as soon as he was in signal range he was, as you would expect, on the case, so I tweeted onTuesday morning:

Welcome energetic response from @julianhuppert on #Miranda abuse. LibDems must insist police state powers unacceptable under coalition. — Sarah Ludford (@SarahLudfordMEP) August 20, 2013

Others such as Jonathan Calder, Mark Pack, Richard Davis and Simon Titley on Liberator’s blog have commented on the absence of a Liberal Democrat response. Thus when the Guardian reported a Liberal Democrat  statement, I searched eagerly but in vain for it on the party website but it was not there and despite requests is still not. I am now reliably informed however that it read:

The Coalition government inherited a number of over-broad and draconian terrorism powers from Labour. Liberal Democrats have long stood up for the civil liberties of British citizens, especially in the face of Labour’s authoritarianism. In Government we led a review of these powers. Some have already been changed and the Coalition is currently pressing Parliament to tighten up these laws further to avoid abuses. The Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation has already asked for more information on this incident and we will wait to hear his conclusions.

As I was worriedly thinking that ‘someone’ needed to prepare a conference emergency motion, I read the Home Office statement which – especially the appalling last sentence – goaded me into action:

The Government and the police have a duty to protect the public and our national security. If the police believe that an individual is in possession of highly sensitive stolen information that would help terrorism, then they should act and the law provides them with a framework to do that. Those who oppose this sort of action need to think about what they are condoning.

This compounds the familiar but scorned warnings ‘no innocent person has anything to fear’ used shamefully by William Hague in July and ‘if you knew what we knew’, and does so in an outrageous way. For me it was the last straw. As I write this, the BBC’s home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw has tweeted that

Dep PM Nick Clegg backed decision to destroy Guardian Snowden files. >>>>

— Danny Shaw (@DannyShawBBC) August 21, 2013

My intention is to circulate a first draft of the motion next Tuesday Aug 27th to all voting reps who have by then emailed me with expressions of interest, invite rapid comments, and then circulate the version for signature by Thursday for submission by Saturday to HQ. I don’t see any room for doubt as to satisfaction of the criterion of ”a proposal which relates to a specific recent development which occurred after the deadline for submission of motions.’

It is tempting to stray widely into the whole matter of NSA/PRISM/GCHQ, especially in the light of the  astonishingly complacent ‘all is fine and dandy’ clean bill of health issued by the Westminster Intelligence and Security committee. But I think it best that the motion stick pretty much to the question of the proper ambit and application of counter-terrorism powers and in particular Schedule 7, and the need for reform and safeguards going beyond that contained in the current Antisocial Behaviour Crime and Policing Bill and broadly as recommended by David Anderson, most recently in his latest report.

So email me at officeATsarahludfordmepDOTorgDOTuk if you are an interested voting rep and I will get back to you next week. I will need name, email address, membership number and local party, so be prepared to supply those.

* Sarah Ludford is Liberal Democrat MEP for London

Latest William Hill http://t.co/MbilRLa6MQ prices on the next government CON maj 3/1: CON:LD coalition 7/1 See all pic.twitter.com/z8xPUrcFsl

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) August 21, 2013

At 8/1 the current best value GE2015 bet is the “other” option in the William Hill list above. That there’ll be no overall majority but there’ll be no coalition formed.

Over the last few days we’ve seen the reports of leading CON backbenchers demanding a formal role in agreeing the next coalition if the outcome on seats means that that is what is required to continue in government.

Given that the LDs also have a formal process it is going to be a tougher nut to crack than last time.

One factor that could help Cameron in such a situation is that he’ll be the incumbent PM and there’s no need for him to go to the Palace provided that no other party has an overall majority. He can sit tight and try to cobble something together.

My guess is that if the CON seat total is not that far off the party’s MPs will be reluctant to go into formal coalition and try to run a minority government.

The bet also works if LAB tries to form a minority government. Maybe it could get supply and confidence deals out of other parties but there’ll be a lot of reluctance to go down the formal coalition route.

I’m on this at 12/1. The 8/1 still looks value.

Mike Smithson

For the latest polling and political betting news
Follow @MSmithsonPB

Metro wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Well done, Metro.

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Orbit, my UK publisher, has cut the price on the ebook edition of my novel "The Atrocity Archives" to just £1.99 in the UK (and presumably the EU) until September 5th!

It's part of Amazon's Kindle Summer Reads promo, and they've cut the price on other ebook stores too: links to buy the book below.

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“Fred, you have to believe, we want to help you.”

“That’s what you keep telling me.”

“The Army, if nothing else, takes care of its own.”

“That’s what you say. I say they’re sticking me with a head-shrinker because I’m a problem they don’t want to deal with.”

“Fred, don’t think of me as…you seem to approach this with the idea that these therapy sessions are some kind of punishment. I’m not here to punish you. I’m here to assist you.”

“And are you going to make people respect me? Are you going to make the insults stop? Are you going to make people quit treating me like shit?”

“I can’t control what other people do, Fred. I can only help you deal with what they do.”

“I’m a hero, goddamn it. I served my country when it called.”

“No one’s disputing that you served your country, Fred.”

“Tell that to the kids at the airport who spit on me when I came home.”

“It was just the one kid, wasn’t it, Fred?”

“That’s not the point.”

“And he was four months old.”

“I don’t see what difference that makes.”

“He didn’t really spit on you so much as he spit up on you.”

“Look, I don’t want to hash over more of your psychobabble theories. Like how you ‘explained’ those protestors calling me a baby-killer.”

“Fred, you have to at least consider the possiblity they weren’t referring to you.”

“The shouted it right at me. They had signs that said BABY KILLER.”

“But you were walking past an abortion clinic. They didn’t follow you to the Subway.”

“I know who they were talking about.”

“Well, what can we learn from the recent violent incidents in your life? The Veteran’s Administration can only help you so much if you’re constantly going to be in trouble with the police like that.”

“Look, doctor. The U.S. Army trained me to be a killer. They taught me to go over there and exterminate those people. They built a highly efficient weapon and aimed it at Vietnam, and now they expect me to just shut off? I’m a man, not a tool.”

“So, was the man who ran the laundromat. And you probably hurt his feelings, as well as his jaw, when you punched him in the face.”

“He provoked me.”

“He told you that you had to have a ticket to get your comforter back. That’s not really worth wrapping a wire hanger around his neck over.”

“You don’t understand. Those people, they’re all the same to me. Uncle Sam didn’t teach me to differentiate between the good Vietnamese who run laundries and the bad Vietnamese who execute civilians. When the flashbacks hit me, I just want to take them all out. I can’t distinguish between these fine points like you civilians.”

“Fred, I don’t want to seem like I’m contradicting you, but you were a supply clerk in the Army.”

“A front line supply clerk. I was out there in the thick of it. I was giving blankets and shaving mirrors to the Green Berets.”

“Well, the other thing, Fred, is that you served from 1990 to 1998.”

“So?”

“Well, we weren’t at war with Vietnam in the ’90s.”

“Oh, sure. They didn’t call it a war. They called it a ‘police action’ to keep their dirty hands clean. Well, I don’t care if it was declared or not, I know what I…”

“No, I mean to say that the Vietnam War ended in 1973.”

“Uh…”

“There hadn’t been any fighting for almost twenty years by the time you joined up. You weren’t even in country most of the time. You served most of your hitch in the Philippines.  You won a prize for water skiing.”

“Well…”

“Yes, Fred?”

“It wasn’t easy. Where’s my goddamn parade?”

This article comes in two versions: in depth here, and the supercompressed version published as part of Lib Dem Voice’s Lessons From Coalition series.

All governments depend on events – some, like the LiberaTory Coalition, coming in when events were especially bleak. No lesson can predict all political outcomes. But whatever the economic and political weather, some lessons are plain.

The two biggest problems for any future coalition will be the breakdown of trust between the voters and the coalition parties, and the breakdown of trust between the coalition parties themselves. The Liberal Democrats have learned that all too well.

We know what the flashpoint issues for each during the current Coalition that still say ‘bitterness’ and ‘betrayal’ to many, too: tuition fees and Lords reform. On both, ugly reality got in the way of how coalitions ought to work. The challenge is to learn from them in order to foresee and avoid similar events – if we don’t find solutions to both problems, any future coalition will suffer the same poison.

If It Won’t Work, Walk; But If It Will Work, Walk In

We should aim to achieve things in government – that’s what a political party’s there for.

The theory of forming a Coalition is sound. If we don’t win a majority and no-one else does either, the Liberal Democrats must negotiate with other parties – ideally playing them off against each other to get more of what we want, if the votes tumble evenly enough to give us that chance. It’s the worst option apart from all the others. We should always oppose a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement, which means nearly all the blame for none of the power to do anything. That leaves two options: a coalition, yes or no. For a political party rather than a debating society, the choice is straightforward. We should drive as hard a bargain as we can. If it’s impossible to reach agreement on enough of our priorities, we must be prepared to say no. But the corollary of that is that we must be prepared to say yes, too, if we can form a stable government with another party that delivers enough of our aims. When I spoke in favour of endorsing the LiberaTory Coalition, I was under no illusions, and neither was anyone else in the hall:

“Maybe it is the worst possible time to take power. But I don’t want us to wait until I’m wheeled into Conference aged 78, in another 40 years, to say, ‘Well, the economy’s crashed again and at last we’ve got another hung Parliament. Maybe we should try it this time’.”

From the platform, Vince Cable made a similarly practical point:

“It’s going to be bloody awful. But it’ll be less awful because we’re there.”

It’s never going to be easy, but it’s in the national interest – and it’s simply what a political party is for.

The Lib Dem Voice regular polling question ‘Would you rather form a coalition with Labour or Conservative?’ is based on a completely mistaken assumption. I’d rather we form a government on our own. If the voters don’t give us that, I’m still a Liberal Democrat, and I don’t follow the media narrative that I must be ‘really’ Tory or Labour, push comes to shove. I dislike both of them. My answer is not that I want to be a bit Labour or a bit Tory, but that I’d go with the one that’s prepared to be the most Lib Dem. Whichever way round they go, we should partner the party that compromises and not the one that’s arrogant enough to just demand we join them. That’s the principle; the simple common sense reason is that to prefer one side in advance is essentially an endorsement, one that sends voters streaming away to whichever side we’ve given the nod to before the election and loses all bargaining leverage afterwards.

2010 is the only case study we have. I’ll never like the Tories either, but the tiny band who pretend we should have formed a coalition with Labour (and Uncle Tom SNP and all, and still not got a majority) after the last election were out of touch with reality then and have rewritten history since. Both the number of seats that the voters gave to each party and the Labour Party’s own ‘negotiations’ made a coalition with Labour impossible – but I also remember what the Labour Party did with thirteen years of absolute power and saw them as no better than the Conservatives. I didn’t forget the war-mongering, evidence-sexing, amnesia-promising, freedom-crushing, LGBT-hypocrisising, rich-brownnosing, poor-taxing, crony-bribe-swallowing shameless Labour Government overnight in favour of a starry-eyed childish fantasy image of the ‘nice’ Labour Party that bears no resemblance to their continuing record. And I remember what they offered as the price of coalition: bugger all.

Next time will be different in ways we can’t know. The Tories may well prove ungovernable; Labour may realise that they can’t demand absolute power when more than seven out of ten voters oppose them. But there’s a simple lesson from 2010 about how to negotiate. Labour did not offer a Coalition. It demanded a mass defection. Despite the Lib Dems getting our second-biggest vote since 1928 and Labour their second-worst vote since 1918, Labour’s sense of entitlement pretended that they had the right to keep everything they wanted and Lib Dem voters should get nothing. Despite Labour winning eight and a half million votes to the Lib Dems’ seven million, they expected all Lib Dems to suddenly join the Labour Government to vote for everything we’d previously opposed, because our voters being 83% as numerous as theirs didn’t count. Well, that was a ‘privilege’ it was easy to turn down. There is no point whatsoever in joining a government only to do exactly what the other party would do anyway – otherwise, we’d all have taken the easy road and just joined one of the others years ago. One lesson for Labour from the LiberaTory Coalition is that the Lib Dems are not their battered spouse. As Andrew Hickey said most pithily, we are not Labour’s back-up plan.

The Tories had a larger vote still – ten and a half million – but they weren’t so tribal as to insist only their votes counted… Not when they didn’t have a majority, anyway. Of the four main priorities on the front cover of the Lib Dem 2010 Manifesto, the Tories agreed to three and a half of them (though the ‘half’ has since crumbled further), and Labour none of them. The main advantage of talking to Labour turned out to be that even the Tories couldn’t believe how arrogant Labour would be and assumed that they, too, must be bargaining in good faith, giving a boost to the Lib Dem-Conservative negotiations. I vividly remember self-important Tory grandee Sir Malcolm Rifkind complaining all over the TV that the Lib Dems were “harlots” for talking to Labour as well, a Tory predictably failing to comprehend so-called Tory principle of free-market competition to get the best deal.

So the theoretical lesson is that, short of a Lib Dem majority, the best outcome for the Lib Dems at the next election would be genuinely holding the balance of power (as we didn’t quite last time), with both other parties so hungry for power that they offer big compromises – like the Tories in 2010, only more so. That would give us the most power to bargain, and to choose the partner that would enable the greatest share of our Manifesto. The worst would be for the voters again to give us only one realistic choice, and for both others to behave like Labour in 2010 and offer nothing. Then I hope we’d have the guts to walk away.

Unfortunately, reaching even a good deal on paper is where the problems really start.

Compromise or Betrayal?

Voters don’t trust parties to do what they promise. Most of all, they don’t trust us.

The Coalition Agreement was a decent programme for government. The Liberal Democrats didn’t win the election. Fortunately, neither did anyone else. That gave us a chance at last to put some of our Manifesto into action after nearly a century of none of it. The LiberaTory Coalition promised government by principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility, all sounds Liberal ideals. We’d constantly made clear what our priorities were before the election, and three and a half of those four main priorities written on the front of the Liberal Democrat Manifesto were being delivered. Even in Coalition Government, even after Labour blowing the economy to bits and leaving an incredible debt to repay, and even having to compromise with the Tories over what they want to do, the Liberal Democrats have still put our own distinctive stamp on good things from government, not just lessening the bad. Raising the income tax threshold and cutting taxes for 23 million ordinary working people. The Pupil Premium to help out poorer schoolkids. Not just a stronger but a fairer economy, tackling the banks, record numbers of apprenticeships, green jobs and the new Green Investment Bank open for business. And tiny baby steps that soon tripped up on more open politics. Win-win-win-OK, lose a bit on the last one, surely?

Well, we all know what happened next. Somehow the narrative is almost entirely that to get nothing, zip, zero, nada done and help no-one at all would have been principled, while getting stuck in and delivering quite a lot of what we wanted to do is a betrayal. No-one’s interested in looking at policies as a whole: that’s too much effort. No-one complains when we moderate what the Tories want to do (despite the best efforts of baying Tory MPs who actually see what’s going on). But for the Lib Dems to make compromises in some areas to achieve wins in others is an unforgiveable sell-out. The irony, of course, being that this is the corrosive attack by Tory and Labour Parties who have identical policies on tuition fees, the Lib Dem effect on which was to make them far fairer to poorer students (and poorer graduates).

Without a way to challenge the idea that any compromise is betrayal, it’s hard to see how any future coalition can work, either.

In retrospect, David Cameron’s cleverest move in the Coalition negotiations was to have the nous to put his foot down and say the new government would have to keep his expensive but explicit promises, like protecting handouts to millionaire pensioners, even when they weren’t key commitments of the Tory Party itself. And Nick Clegg’s was to be willing to bargain away expensive personal promises because they weren’t at the top of the Lib Dem Manifesto. We all know by now how devastating the effect of Nick breaking his tuition fee promise has been, however improved the real as opposed to the political outcome.

The problem even for negotiations is that voters regard Labour and Tory as opposites and Lib Dems as somewhere in the middle – according to taste, a moderating or a blandifying influence. This is something Nick Clegg has done his best to amplify. It’s not enough on its own. It gives only weakly negative reasons to vote for us, when even Nick in the early days of the LiberaTory Coalition knew that it wasn’t enough to hold each other back, but to achieve big positive things, too. And it’s actively dangerous to future negotiations. It does nothing to explain our poor bargaining hand on the many, many issues where the other parties are identical and we oppose both: most famously, raising tuition fees, but also wasting billions on Trident and, increasingly for the Tories as they move back towards Labour’s far right position, attacking civil liberties.

The best case that can be made with this message is that the Liberal Democrats are in Coalition with the relatively moderate side of the Tory Party and pulling them to greater moderation in the process. While shrieking ‘Traitor!’ for the Lib Dems being an independent party and not their possession, Labour see no contradiction in voting again and again and again with the far right of the Tory Party to make politics more rabidly authoritarian. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t that no-one else sees the contradiction in that, either, because it simply doesn’t fit the narrative that Labour’s illiberal gut instincts are just as extreme as the Tories’.

Agreements Are the Start, Not the End

Parties don’t trust each other to keep to their agreements. Most of all, we don’t trust either of the other two.

If Labour were the more unbearable immediately after the election, a large proportion of the Tories have been making up for lost time in the Coalition itself as their own sense of entitlement grows. And not just the far right MPs who are irreconcilable to any compromise with the Coalition, with their own Leader, or with reality, but – more subtly though in many ways more damagingly – many of the Tory Ministers who in theory are loyal to the Coalition. So what would be the point of making another Coalition Agreement with Mr Cameron if we know from experience that his Leadership is too weak to deliver on his fine words?

Both the letter and the spirit of the Coalition Agreement have slowly withered. A lesson from the LiberaTory Coalition is that agreement on policy at the start is not enough. For two inevitable reasons, any unequal coalition government will get more like the larger party as it goes along: the initial agreement will run out of steam as (and if) it gets delivered; the larger party having the mass of ministers will be able to respond day-to-day to events to its own tune. And those inevitables aren’t all. Large swathes of written promises and more of the principles on which the Coalition was proclaimed have simply not been delivered.

The LiberaTory Coalition has tested if the Lib Dems really meant our Opposition rhetoric about co-operation; through gritted teeth and pain, it turns out we do. It’s also tested if the Tories really meant their Opposition rhetoric – and their signed-up Coalition Agreement’s explicit promises – about the environment, freedom and decentralisation. It turns out they don’t. George Osborne consistently undermining a greener government, Theresa May’s indistinguishable-from-the-Labour-Party authoritarianism and Eric Pickles micro-managing every local council to his own bizarre prejudices only the biggest examples of Tory Ministers simply chucking the LiberaTory Coalition’s founding principles in the bin.

More openly, there’s been a repeated pattern of Lib Dem MPs faithfully voting through some horrible compromise closer to what the Tories wanted, then Tory MPs voting against the more Lib Dem-agreed proposals or Tory Ministers simply dropping them. Part of this is because the Lib Dems agreed to the Coalition en masse, while only the Tory high command ever gave their word. Part of it is simply that it’s in the Lib Dems’ long-term interest to show that Coalition can work, and in the Tories’ long-term interest (if not in David Cameron’s, who can’t afford to lead a failed government) to show that Coalitions fail. Polling may show that more voters believe the Tories haven’t kept to the deal, but I suspect they also don’t care. The “Betrayal” label still belongs to the Lib Dems.

This doesn’t mean that Labour have been blameless in Opposition. More headless. Labour’s years of shrieking fury against the Lib Dems for having the temerity to be a separate party, where they flung shamelessly homophobic abuse at the Coalition and voted against everything they claimed to support simply out of mouth-foaming hatred and a desire to see the Coalition fail, have made them – as under George W Bush – soulmates of the US Republican Party in its obsession with wrecking anything to do with President Obama, even if that means wrecking America.

It all throws into sharp relief the problem with Coalition Agreements. What happens if the other party simply breaks the agreement? Like tuition fees for the voters’ sense of betrayal, one totemic issue was the breaking point. David Cameron agreed to Lords reform, but a large pack of his MPs are feral animals who will vote against him, let alone against us. The Labour Party has pretended to support Lords reform for a hundred years, but on the one single occasion that an elected Lords was on the verge of being delivered in that time, not just a feral faction of them but the entire Labour Party collectively voted to defeat its own principles because, like spoilt teenage bullies, they couldn’t bear anyone else to get the credit. As on so many issues that they claimed to support in principle, in practice they treated Lords reform as a political football, with them as Lucy van Pelt. I don’t know which is worse, but I do know that that day made it seem impossible for the Lib Dems to trust either party in 2015.

Is There Any Hope For A Future Coalition?

The Lib Dems can’t just sit back and hope that press, public or other parties will all suddenly decide to treat us fairly.

That isn’t to say that others may not change their minds in a more helpful direction. To be fair to our opponents / dubiously potential partners, there are straws in the wind that each other party may be stepping back from the abyss, if not quite becoming creatures of reason and principle. To Ed Miliband’s credit, in recent months he’s finally been grown up and passed up opportunities to cut off his nose to spite his face (on, for example, Europe and mostly-equal marriage). It’s too early to say if this means the end of Labour’s all-consuming hatred, but it’s a start. And to David Cameron’s credit, he appears to be realising that he’d have to get his party to commit themselves in another hung Parliament as the Lib Dems did, rather than leave himself exposed when he leads and they choose later not to follow. But faced with two such major problems looming for any future coalition, we need to find our own solutions too.

The Lib Dem Leadership’s ‘we are the middle’ answer appears to be to abandon the big ambitions of either Lib Dem policies in general or even of the early days of the LiberaTory Coalition. It’s at best a sort of judo, to let the other two parties stand for something and then try to turn standing for anything against them by saying ‘Well, we don’t know what we want to do, but we’ll stop them getting that.’ To me, a Manifesto that doesn’t promise anything much that distinguishes us from the other two may guard against betrayal, but it doesn’t give people much of a reason to vote for us in the first place. It also seems to be tacitly accepting in advance that neither of the others can be trusted to vote for any of our own programme, and that all we can hope for is for them to get their own, just not as much as they’d like of it.

I don’t have all the answers, but here are three proposals for a start:

• To help define ourselves and our bottom lines, pick an enemy. Announce firmly and repeatedly that we would not enter any coalition of which UKIP is a part, and mean it. It’s not likely they’ll get enough seats for that to be a runner anyway, but they have a distinct image that both Tories and Labour are afraid of confronting. UKIP are our opposite: openness vs insularity; diversity vs bigotry; looking to the future vs complaining their way back to an imaginary 1950s. By defining them as extreme and standing against them, we get the rare bonus of making ‘moderate’ also ‘principled’ – as well as making it clear that there are some places we won’t go, and that we won’t just sell ourselves to anyone.

• We never know how much money any government will be able to spend – but it’s a safe bet that in 2015 the answer will still be ‘probably not much’. That means we should only make a small number of tightly focused, red-line expensive promises. But there are things we can shout about that don’t cost money – or even that save it. Make freedom more central to our commitments. That way we make money-saving more positive by not wasting money on more security-state bullying, and can show a powerful extra reason to oppose the others’ authoritarian splurges when cash is so tight.

• Any new Coalition Agreement should have explicit sanctions if a party doesn’t stick to it. As the institutional power of Ministers is at least as big a drag away from any agreement as an open rebellion, how about for every Parliamentary vote lost due to one side’s MPs, that side loses a Minister to the injured party? Even if that would be too frightening for them to sign up to, it might concentrate their minds on a better deal in the first place.

The Silly Season continues with yet more speculation on what happens after the 2015 election. Monday’s Independent carried the loaded headline:

Lib Dem Supporters spell it out: we won’t be fooled by Nick Clegg again over support for a coalition

That Liberal Democrats will be wary about any future coalition, with anybody, should come as no surprise. The deductive reasoning powers of the average goldfish could have worked that out.

The article quotes people like Martin Tod, Gareth Epps and Cllr Richard Kemp, all of whom are saying quite reasonable things, none of them suggesting that Nick Clegg fooled us in 2010, although they all said they’d look more closely at any future deal. Gareth Epps took the chance to have a good go at the Home Office’s poster vans, an issue on which he finds himself in agreement with the leader, at least two other Liberal Democrat members of the Cabinet and virtually every other Liberal Democrat parliamentarian and member.

My guess is that you’d find just as many Liberal Democrats sceptical about a deal with Labour. Remember who introduced the controversial Work Capability Assessment in the first place? Who wanted to lock people up for 90 days? Whose legislation was used to detain David Miranda the other day? Who started an illegal war with Iraq?

What concerns me most about the article is a source close to Nick Clegg again insulting party members:

But the Deputy Prime Minister’s allies fear he would run into entrenched opposition from activists for a fresh Tory-Lib Dem pact – even if that was the election’s logical outcome.

One said there were now some “totally irrational people” in the party who would not accept another coalition with the Tories under any circumstances.

“It would be much harder a second time round to get it past the party. There will be people far less willing to take things on trust. It would be very hard for Nick to get through,” he told the Independent.

The final paragraph of that quote is absolutely fine. It certainly doesn’t do any harm for the other parties to know that Liberal Democrat membership will be sceptical of any deal. It should be as much a message to Labour that if they think they can come and present their manifesto and expect us to meekly sign up to it, they’ll be told to take a running jump. However, the phrase “totally irrational” is one which should never have survived the journey from brain to lips. Sources close to the leader would be well advised to stop slagging people off who don’t agree with them. It’ll just put people off and widen the disconnect between leadership and grassroots.

It is way too early to start talking coalition deals now, anyway. What matters is the relative standing of the parties the day after polling day. That will dictate our options. I’ve been round that particular block before, in 2003 after the second Holyrood election. Our vote had pretty much held up, while our Coalition partner between 1999 and 2003 had lost six seats. On the strength of that result, we got Labour to agree not just to STV to local government, but to spend more money on health promotion and we brought back free eye and dental check ups which had been in our 1999 manifesto.

If we want Liberal Democrat values to be implemented by the next government, we need lots of Liberal Democrats to be elected. The biggest factor in the sort of Coalition deal, if any, struck in 2015 will be the number of Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons. We need to all be out knocking on doors now to lay the groundwork for the best possible result. We know that people are ready to listen to us again – it’s up to us to get out there and seal the deal. Nick Clegg’s friends would be best placed to say things that motivate members and keep away from the things that make us mutter under our breath. Think charm, not offensive.

* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

* Chair of Manchester Gorton Liberal Democrats, a member of the NW Regional Executive and the English Council and a former City Councillor of 19 years

Sorry for the delay, Bloggers!  I’ve been busy with STUFF…

…And I’m actually still busy, but as a palate-cleanser (if only for myself) I thought I’d post you a daydream I had a couple of months ago.  It’s been kicking around this desk drawer waiting for some action, I hear tell.  Well, it’s about to get some.

Hope it survives the experience…

*

CEO OF LARGE OIL COMPANY: (from stage) First of all, thank you for meeting with me today.

PLOK: You’re thanking me? (looks around at large, empty auditorium) Huh, smells like a TED talk died in here…

CEO: Pardon me?

PLOK: Nothing, nothing. So…

CEO: (eagerly) Yes?

PLOK: What’s this all about? What’s with the Let’s Make A Deal set? Not to be impolite, but what can you and I possibly have to discuss? What do we even have in common?

CEO: What do we have in common? Why…the FUTURE, of course!

PLOK: The future.

CEO: No, not “the future”…The FUTURE!

PLOK: …

PLOK: You’re sure you didn’t want David Suzuki in here instead, or…

CEO: No, no, you’re perfect.

PLOK: I’m perfect?

CEO: You’re exactly the sort of person we need to have on board.

PLOK: On board?

CEO: You’re middle-class, you’re chatty, you have a library card, and you vote. And you seem like a reasonable person. Not an extremist or a radical.

PLOK: I’m also not very sympathetic to big companies like yours, before you get too carried away with listing my virtues…

CEO: No, no, that’s the best part! I don’t want someone who likes me standing in here. I don’t even want someone who thinks like me. I want a normal, reasonable person who’s nevertheless worried about Big Oil ruining the planet…but without having been radicalized.

PLOK: Your definition of “radicalized” might be a little different from mine, though. If I am worried about you ruining the planet, isn’t that proof in your book that I must have been radicalized? Aren’t you the guys who say the SPCA and the Girl Guides are radical organizations if they oppose letting you frack some shale down by the elementary school or in the parking lot of the Children’s Hospital? Aren’t you the guys with the commercials that talk about Fort Mac like it’s as green as Eden was before Eve bit into the apple?

CEO: (sadly) You really don’t think much of us, do you.

PLOK: (cheerfully) I really don’t, Mr. Sad Face! Welp, I won’t say it hasn’t been fun, although of course…as you know…

CEO: Wait, WAIT! You’re not being fair!

PLOK: Oh, am I not? (walks away)

CEO: You don’t think I know what’s going to happen? The polluted oceans? The farm belt turned to ash? Tornadoes and tidal waves, all that Ben Affleck shit?

PLOK: (stops at door) …”Ben Affleck shit”?

CEO: Brother, that stuff’s just the tip of the iceberg, you know what I’m saying?

PLOK: …

PLOK: Did you really just say that?

CEO: Or I dunno, maybe it’s Matt Damon. I always get those two beatnik assholes mixed up…

PLOK: Right. Right. Hey, who doesn’t? (walks back to stage) So, fine then…let’s talk. Lay it on me. How bad’s it gonna get?

CEO: Right, well. Thanks. Thankyou…

PLOK: Don’t mention it.

CEO: I have to decide when to debut this stuff. It’s all new stuff. You know we have scientists working on this all the time, and they keep me informed, but they can’t tell me when the time is right to let the world know about it. “Peak Oil”, it’s not like we never heard about it, right? And whose scientists do you think even came up with the name “global warming”? You know what I’m saying?

PLOK: Sure, all right.

CEO: So the problem is, we’ve been working on it long enough that we’ve got the big picture, right? But everybody else, the Johnny-Come-Latelies, it’s like they’re addicted to this knee-jerk black-and-white reaction…

PLOK: To be fair, though…your scientists should’ve told you…it is a bit black-and-white.

CEO: Well of course it’s goddamn black-and-white! Sure it’s black-and-white, and I’m not denying that, but it’s grey too, and that’s the thing nobody gets!

PLOK: All right. So what’s the grey part?

CEO: Well, uh…this is the part I haven’t quite figured out how to say…

PLOK: Just go ahead and say it.

CEO: Okay…the grey part is we’re fucked anyway. Even if we stopped it all from happening. It’d still happen.

PLOK: You mean, things are too far gone, there’s already too much greenhouse gas in the…

CEO: No, I mean even if there wasn’t, even if we’d stopped it thirty years ago…it was already too late then.

PLOK: (crosses arms) Explain.

CEO: So, what happens when the environment goes to hell in a handbasket, right? Basically 90% of everybody dies. Societies collapse. Cities fall into ruin. No one can remember how to do things. This one guy of mine, he explained to me that there won’t even be anything that’s easy to mine anymore, so you won’t rebuild civilization because it’s too hard to get the copper. But that won’t matter anyway, because most everybody will die just as the result, the secondhand result, of extreme weather. They’ll die before there’s no food left, because there won’t be any food they can get; if the five biggest American cities all have a Sandy- or Katrina-sized environmental disaster at the same time, it’ll strain the national economy to the breaking point…and if that happens two years in a row, it’s pretty much all over. It’s about highways, really, this guy says: if the places they go between turn to shit, then it’s the same effect as if all the highways just disappeared. Can you imagine what would happen, if all the highways in America just vanished overnight? Like someone took an eraser and just rubbed them off the maps?

PLOK: Uh-huh…

CEO: But here’s the thing, that same thing can happen, even if global warming got stopped. Right now we’re going to extract and burn every drop of oil that’s in the ground, not just because we want to, but because we have to. Because we’re in too deep.

PLOK: …The stock market, you mean.

CEO: I mean the stock market, yeah. Exactly. All that money, what happens to it — what happens to it tomorrow — if the government says something like “okay, from now on we’re only gonna let people take out half the stuff that’s in the ground, that they already own and paid big bucks for”?

PLOK: Hmm, and that wouldn’t even be enough to halt global warming…

CEO: It absolutely wouldn’t, but it would accelerate, uh, “economic warming” so much that it wouldn’t even matter if global warming was stopped or slowed or anything else, because it’d be the same result. All the biggest companies in the entire world would crash before 12 noon on the day they made the announcement, and by midnight everything would start to stop working. Like the highways got rubbed off the maps anyway. Cuba would be in the top ten of world economies by the end of the week. And what do you think Russia and China would do about it?

PLOK: …

PLOK: They’d burn oil.

CEO: They’d burn oil. Not just their own oil. They’d come and get our oil. And the only way they wouldn’t do that, is if economic warming hit them so hard too, that they just couldn’t recover. But either way, it’s nothing but dead ends and disasters, and it all happens long before total acidification of the oceans. So to prevent immediate disaster, that’s every bit as bad — for us — as total environmental collapse — the oil has to get pumped out. It just has to. There’s no way out. It gets pumped out, or it’s the end of the world.

PLOK: Except it’s also the end of the world anyway, if it does get pumped out, right? It just takes another generation or two. Your great-grandchildren.

CEO: I know that.

PLOK: Your great-grandchildren, only with total acidification of the oceans.

CEO: Yes, yes…

PLOK: Economic collapse on the scale you’re describing, it’d be a nightmare, but if it doesn’t happen then the alternative’s actually worse. Plenty of places on Earth will barely notice if the satellites fall out of the sky because there’s no money to keep them up, and societies there will survive; wealth there will survive. But if the economic collapse doesn’t come, then all that goes away too, and then you really can’t rebuild civilization.

CEO: Yes, yes…

PLOK: So really you’re arguing against your own point, aren’t you? By your logic, we should get the economic collapse started tomorrow, and not only that but we should try our best to make it as extreme as we can. Just wipe out industrialization completely.

CEO: Yes…

PLOK: “Nuke the place from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.” (pause) If it was David Suzuki sitting here, he’d tell you that’s too much of a black-and-white solution, wouldn’t he?

CEO: …Yes, but you’re still not getting the big picture!

PLOK: I’m not?

CEO: It actually doesn’t have to be that way, it doesn’t have to be either of those ways! Like I said, we’ve been working on this a long time. We’ve spent billions of dollars on finding a third way.

PLOK: A third way, huh? That sounds nice; do they show Touched By An Angel in this Shangri-La of yours?

CEO: Pardon me?

PLOK: Nothing, nothing…so, you mean some sort of political change? Some kinda neo-socialism/neo-capitalism, neo-neo oxen-free-o?

CEO: What?

PLOK: What?

CEO: That’s the tricky thing, the politics.

PLOK: It is?

CEO: Yes, I…wait, are we talking about the same thing?

PLOK: I actually have this sinking feeling that we’re not.

CEO: We can make it happen if we sell it right. The risk-management guys say it’ll work. Wait, you do or you don’t know what I’m talking about?

PLOK: I’m 100% positive that I don’t.

CEO: Oh! Okay, then.

PLOK: So what is it?

CEO: (dramatic pause) …The FUTURE!

(He pulls out a remote control, pushes a button on it; slowly the curtains on the stage draw back to reveals a lavish 1/1000 scale working model that must’ve cost a quarter-million dollars to build)

CEO: Decades of work, billions of black-book cash, and the top minds of two generations from all over the world! Environmental architects, marine biologists, plasma-physics experts, computer scientists, quantum physicists! Genetic engineers, ethnobotanists, anthopologists, sociologists! Even the odd rocket scientist! Law professors, for God’s sake!

PLOK: Oh…my…GOD.

CEO: Isn’t it magnificent? I can tell you’re speechless…you never expected something like this, did you?

CEO: Behold, I give you the future…I give you the THIRD WAY!!

PLOK: …

PLOK: Well, this is like the worst Ned Beatty impression ever.

CEO: Excuse me?

PLOK: (distracted) “Network”. It’s a movie. You watch movies, right? I mean, you’ve seen movies? Seen them, not just watched them?

CEO: What’s the difference?

PLOK: You mean, what’s the difference between watching them and seeing them, or what’s the difference if you’ve ever watched a movie at all?

CEO: I don’t…I don’t see what you’re…

PLOK: (points at model) It’s. A. DOME.

CEO: Uh…

CEO: …Well, YES!

PLOK: Do you even know how shitty an idea this is? Do you even know. Do you know.

CEO: You have to understand…

PLOK: DO YOU. KNOW.

CEO: Look, I don’t really get why you’re seeming so hostile to it. Didn’t I just tell you this was the work of two generations of top…

PLOK: Reproductive rights.

CEO: …What?

PLOK: The reproductive rights legislation that the family members of the Ruling Council are exempt from. You don’t see a problem with that, down the line?

CEO: I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re…

PLOK: The supercomputer thing isn’t going to work, either.

CEO: HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE SUPERCOMPUTER?!

PLOK: I don’t care what they told you, you’re going to need an Off switch for that thing.

CEO: But, if we have an off-switch, then that’ll require an entirely new caste, and if we…

PLOK: It’ll break down.

CEO: It’s impossible for it to break down!

PLOK: You mean, it’s impossible to keep anyone around who’s capable of fixing it if it does break down.

CEO: …

CEO: Okay, look, I don’t know who you’re working for…

PLOK: Now it’s about to be “Sleuth”.

CEO: LOOK, WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS SHIT YOU KEEP TALKING ABOUT, I DON”T UNDERSTAND ANY OF IT! I can quote movie titles too, okay? “The Deer Hunter”, all right? “Dog Day Afternoon”!

PLOK: “Indecent Exposure” is another one. That’s got Robert Redford in it. Then there’s “Apocalypse Now”. Robert Redford’s not in that one.

CEO: WHY IN GOD’S NAME DO YOU KEEP TALKING ABOUT THIS?!

PLOK: And what about Arnold Schwarzenegger? He’s been in some movies as well…but I don’t think he’s been in any with Robert Redford or Ned Beatty…

CEO: Okay, I get it. You’re clearly just a crazy person. I picked a crazy person.

PLOK: Arnold and Bruce Willis, on the other hand…

CEO: (calls to rafters) Right, he’s just a crazy person!

PLOK: Probably a victim of the Soviet subliminals in the TV…

CEO: I think they got to him! Greenpeace, or something. They have those street teams now, with the subliminals…

PLOK: You can go about your business.

CEO: Might as well let him go! (to Plok) I guess we’re done here.

PLOK: Move along.

CEO: Thanks for coming.

The detention of David Miranda at Heathrow Airport has turned into a major news story, and rightly so.

The story has revealed dangerous levels of state power, as the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger explains in an account of the assorted threats he received from “shadowy Whitehall figures”, culminating in a raid by GCHQ on his offices and the destruction of computer hard drives.

Also in the Guardian, columnist Simon Jenkins (who can hardly be dismissed as a dangerous lefty) explains how the term ‘terrorist’ is being applied loosely by the state to hoover up any person or data it wants, under the catch-all justification of the ‘war on terror’. Jenkins concludes, “It is simple harassment and intimidation”.

The question now for Liberal Democrats is why the reaction of their party has been muted, to put it mildly. After all, this is the sort of civil liberties issue that would normally unite the party from left to right.

On his blog, Mark Pack asks this very question. Mark bends over backwards to be fair but nevertheless finds the leadership’s muted response strange.

The likeliest explanation is that this non-response is all of a piece with the narrative Nick Clegg has constructed about being ‘grown up’ and his repeated (and unfounded) attacks on party members as allergic to power, which Alex Marsh analysed on his blog and I analysed here. After all, if civil liberties were considered a ‘grown up’ issue, Clegg would have been quick to take a stand. But if raising such concerns does not fit with Clegg’s tendentious definition of political maturity, then he will steer clear. We should not forget that Clegg is building up to a series of stage-managed confrontations with the membership at next month’s party conference, and events must be considered in this context.

If you find that analysis unconvincing, consider a report in today’s Independent, where the remarks of one anonymous ‘ally’ of Clegg are reported:

One said there were now some “totally irrational people” in the party who would not accept another coalition with the Tories under any circumstances.

The leader’s overriding consideration appears to be a desire to maintain a coalition with the Tories after the next general election. Abandoning the party’s traditional concerns for civil liberties can therefore be justified in terms of a muscular pragmatism. But maybe Clegg or Jeremy Browne could surprise everyone by remembering why our party exists, condemn the tactics of the police state, and prove me wrong?

In the meantime, Sarah Ludford MEP has just announced on Twitter (@SarahLudfordMEP) that she is gathering support for an emergency motion at September’s party conference.

Postscript: More on this topic from Jonathan Calder.

A reader going by the handle Sylvain linked me to a cool paper a few days back; it’s something I would have killed to have had back when writing Blindsight. Are you ready for this?

A tick that turns its victims into vegetarians.

Look to Commins et al for the peer-reviewed details; the tl;dr version is that a bite from Amblyomma americanum provokes a delayed allergic response to a certain  monosaccharide found only in red meat. Meaning that if one of these little fuckers bites you, nothing happens for a month or two. Then you go into anaphylactic shock the next time you bite a hamburger.

Of course, it’s not that simple or that unambiguous (we are talking tl;dr, after all). There are nuances— one of which is, galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose isn’t found in avian flesh, so bird meat is still okay. Another is, it’s not found in primate flesh either— which means that if you’ve really got a taste for red meat, you don’t have to give it up just because some nasty bloodsucker bit you. You can always resort to cannibalism. And if eating within your exact species is problematic, you can still get away with it so long as you keep it in the Family.

You can see why Sylvain read this and thought of me; set that alpha-gal allergy back fifty thousand years, give it a genetic component, and voilà: a far more elegant rationale for the obligate cannibalism of vampires than I ever managed with my overwrought handwaving about gamma-protocadherin (which has, as some of you know, painted me into a bit of a retconny corner). Too late for that now.

But, thought I, what a great secret weapon for PETA to fall back on when they get tired of waiting for vat-grown meat to pass the smell test, when they finally admit that all the Paul McCartney documentaries in the world aren’t ever going to dent rib-consumption in the heartland. All you have to do is seed ticks— or hell, tweak bedbugs; they’re way more ubiquitous in urban environments, and most governments don’t even regard them as a health hazard because they don’t vector human diseases. Tweak bedbugs for alpha-gallergy induction, set them loose throughout the Bedrooms of the Bourgeoisie, wait for all of Texas to topple facedown into their rib-eyes. Now there’s a great idea for a story.

In fact, it’s such a great idea for a story that some upstart named Leigh Cowart already beat me to the punch, combining a throwaway thriller scenario with a kickass nonfiction account of the background biology (warning: don’t know if you’ll be able to get through to that last link. It seems to be on some kind of time lock). Even worse, she’s a really good writer with actual veterinary credentials; she did a better job than I could have.

So, late to the party (Commins et al came out two years ago), all that’s left for me is to spread the word. And to add perhaps one new element to the story potential arising from this discovery, one small fictive twist that I don’t think anyone else has yet beat me to: perhaps PETA’s solution, even if enacted, wouldn’t be so final after all. Maybe you don’t have to go back to the Pleistocene to envision tough decisions being made in the name of keeping red meat on the table. Maybe there are places where, even today, proscriptions against cannibalism might be— loosened a bit— in the name of maintaining an old and honorable tradition. And those ecovegan nutbars are nothing more than tewwowists anyway, pure and simple; we can’t let them win, no matter what the cost.

There’s a reason they call it the Lone Star tick.

“This is the reason many people don’t like ObamaCare,” wrote Peggy Noonan. She’s probably right. But not in the way she thinks.

Noonan’s column is a beautiful example of a writer so intent on criticizing Obamacare that she’s missed the fact that the law is doing precisely the thing she wants done. A reasonable reader of Noonan’s column would end up loathing “Obamacare” and hoping for a replacement that looks like, well, Obamacare.

To understand Noonan’s complaint — and its profound misguidedness — a bit of background is necessary. The Affordable Care Act includes a new Medicaid program called Community First Choice. The program gives Medicaid, for the first time, a formal way to pay for at-home care for the disabled.

This is a huge deal, says Bob Kafka of the disability-rights group ADAPT. “Way back when they created Medicaid they had an entitlement for nursing homes,” he explains, but nothing for at-home care. “This gave Medicaid what we call an ‘institutional bias’” — meaning the program tended to push the disabled into institutional living arrangements rather than helping them stay in their homes.

But in recent years it’s come clear that at-home care is often better for the patient and cheaper for Medicaid. States began asking the federal government for waivers allowing them to use Medicaid dollars for certain kinds of at-home care. Dozens of states now have these waivers. But this was an ad-hoc, state-by-state process that led to a weird patchwork of care arrangements. One state might have a waiver for at-home care in adults with dementia but not adults with brain injuries from car accidents. Another state could have the reverse.

The Affordable Care Act creates the Community First Choice program, which gave Medicaid a formal, clear way to pay for at-home care. The new payments would be based on “functional need” — that is to say, they’re available to anyone who’s disabled, no matter the cause. Participating states get their normal Medicaid matching rate plus six percentage points. So if the federal government typically shoulders 55 percent of the state’s costs, they’ll shoulder 61 percent of the state’s costs under the CFC program.

But any program like this raises complicated questions. After all, at-home care is preferable for some disabled persons, but nursing homes are better for others. What happens, for instance, when the patient is too cognitively disabled to weigh in on her care preferences?

Which brings us back to Noonan. When she writes, ”This is the reason many people don’t like ObamaCare,” the “this” links to a report in the Oregonian looking at a particularly difficult edge case: People who are too cognitively disabled to direct their own care, and whose guardian is also their paid caregiver.

In these cases, Medicaid insists that the disabled individual have a representative who is not their caregiver during the construction of their individual care plan. The idea is to get rid of the conflict-of-interest that could emerge when the person being paid to care for a disabled individual is also the person in charge of creating the care plan. “It’s really a positive thing to have those things separated,” says Kass. “Even though people may provide care out of altruism we don’t want to have situations where there’ll be abuse.”

There was early confusion about whether the regulations effectively meant a guardian couldn’t serve as a caregiver. That’s reflected in the Oregonian article which appears to be Noonan’s source (an e-mail request asking if she had any other sources went unanswered). But both the Centers on Medicare and Medicaid Services and Oregon’s Department of Human Services confirm that they agree guardians can — and, indeed, are encouraged — to serve as caregivers under the new law.

“Parents and family are the first and primary caregivers,” says Patrice Botsford, director of the developmental disabilities program at Oregon’s DHS. “No matter how dedicated we in this field are we’ll never be able to match the caring and nurturing of a family member.”

To prevent conflicts of interest, in cases where the guardian is also the caregiver, another personal representative — a family member, or a neighbor, or a doctor — needs to be designated. And there are procedures around that designation process that have yet to be worked out. But CMS says they have no issue with the guardian being involved in the construction of the care plan, the naming of the personal representative, or ending up as the caregiver. They just want a voice in the process that doesn’t have a direct financial interest in the outcome. (And, as Aaron Carroll writes, imagine the outcry if there were no controls on the program and it led to abuse!)

This stuff is complicated and there appears to have been some legitimate confusion about it in Oregon. But even so, this question arises in the context of Obamacare’s massive expansion in at-home care options for disabled Medicaid recipients. An expansion Noonan, in her rush to weigh in against Obamacare on behalf of a small number of families in Oregon, completely ignores.

Towards the end of the piece, Noonan offers four reasons that this shows why so many people hate the law. Given the example she chose, it is particularly revealing. Number one:

No mother or child should be put in this position by a government ostensibly trying to improve their lives.

Absent the law, of course, many more mothers with disabled children will live in states where Medicaid doesn’t cover at-home care for their family. Questions about the edge cases in the CFC program are important. But it’s perverse to ignore the huge expansion in at-home care services that’s leading to the edge cases in the first place.

Number two:

Second, everyone in America knows health care is a complicated and complex subject, that a national bill will have 10 million moving parts, and that when a government far away—that would be Washington, D.C.—decides to take greater control of the nation’s health care it will likely get many, maybe a majority, of the moving parts wrong. A bill that is passed and is meant to do A will become Law U—a law of unforeseen, unplanned and unexpected consequences. And that’s giving Washington the benefit of the doubt, and assuming they really meant to honestly produce Law A.

This is the kind of language that sounds great in theory but is nonsensical in practice. Yes, unintended consequences are a constant presence in lawmaking, as in all other parts of life. But Medicare is a law to finance health insurance for the elderly and it does exactly that. Social Security is a forced savings/redistribution scheme that sends out regular pension checks to retirees and it does exactly that. Medicaid is a law meant to finance health care coverage for the poor and the disabled and, though eligibility varies among different states, it does exactly that.

Laws meant to do A typically do A — not perfectly, and sometimes not even well, but in those cases, Congress is supposed to modify them until they actually do A and do it effectively. Noonan’s argument here isn’t against Obamacare but against any complicated undertaking ever. But even so, in this case, there’s no other option. Someone needs to pay for the care of Medicaid’s disabled population. The only question is how.

Third, because health-care legislation is so complex, it is almost impossible for people to understand it, to get their arms around what may be a given bill’s inadequacies and structural flaws. Stories of those inadequacies and flaws dribble out day by day, in stories like this one. They produce a large negative blur, and a feeling of public anxiety: What will we find out tomorrow?

This is really the crux of it, isn’t it? Stories of inadequacies and glitches do dribble out day by day, as they should. Those stories make sure inadequacies and glitches get fixed. But both in reporting those stories in the first place and, as Noonan did here, reacting to them subsequently, there’s a choice on offer between whipping up public anxiety or figuring out what’s actually happening, what — if anything — needs to be changed, and what’s standing between here and there.

In this case, a few phone calls showed there was confusion over a possible problem that didn’t actually exist, all of which was in the context of a program that is making advocates for at-home care for the disabled very, very happy. Noonan scared her readership over a part of the law that should’ve thrilled them, and her. That this is happening again and again, as part of an ongoing and concerted ideological campaign, is part of the reason people hate Obamacare. But it’s not a good reason.

And finally:

Fourth, when a thousand things have to be changed about a law to make it workable, some politician is going to stand up and say: “This was a noble effort in the right direction but let’s do the right thing and simplify everything, with a transparent and understandable plan: single payer.” Will that be Mrs. Clinton’s theme in 2016?

That would make it seem like people who don’t support single payer — a group I assume includes Noonan, and all elected Republicans — should be very interested in making Obamacare workable. Yet the opposite seems to be the case.

Britain in 2013.

The police detain a journalist's partner under anti-terrorism legislation in what look likes an attempt at intimidation. The police supervise the destruction of computers on the premises of a national newspaper.

And what does Nick Clegg have to say about it?

Nothing.

The longer his silence continues, the harder it becomes not to share the conclusion of Liberator's blog: Nick is abandoning the party's traditional concern for civil liberties in order to make it easier for him to continue his coalition with the Conservatives after the election.

But, I hear you protest, Nick once vowed to go to prison rather than carry a compulsory ID card.

The trouble is, as I pointed out in April when writing about his failure to support libel reform, Nick has previous:

This pattern seems all too well established. Nick courts an interest group with almost exaggerated language - think students or civil libertarians who oppose secret courts - only to let them down when he gets the chance to do something about it in government. 

I do not think people would mind being let down quite so much if Nick had not originally been so good at convincing them of his support for their cause.

And so another week at Bonkers Hall draws to its close. Perhaps that is just as well,

Sunday

Sir Nicholas Harvey rings at last with some news.

“Good knight…” I begin, entering into the spirit of things.

“Goodnight” he replies and puts the phone down.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.
Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Too many knights
• Escape from Liberal Youth
• On the knight bus
• Why isn't Sarah Teather a knight?
• In support of equal marriage
• "Go out and look at Uranus"

"You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."

The NSA has always had a problem with the open internet. Now a convergence of interests with large corporations is offering them the tools to destroy it.

Security relies on the keeping of secrets, and the keeping of secrets in a bureaucracy relies on compartmentalization: the left hand remaining unaware of the right hand's activities. Unfortunately, secrecy is inimical to understanding, and the whole purpose of an intelligence agency is to make sense of, and to provide an understanding of, the environment in which the subjects of its surveillance exist. The function of a newspaper or wire service is similar (once you get past "make money by selling advertising and providing readers with sufficiently interesting content that they look at the ads": and as long as they're pursuing traditional substantive news reporting, rather than merely extruding news-shaped prose, as with USA Today or the Daily Mail).

But newspapers have some advantages over the spooks right now. Their requirement for secrecy is strictly time-limited; once their exclusive scoop is on the front page or the top of the website, they don't need it any more. And newspapers aren't limited to physical premises and employees in a specific location or of a specific nationality ...

We've had a very interesting insight into this in the past week. First, Glen Greenwald's partner David Miranda was detained and questioned by the UKBA under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act while transiting Heathrow Airport. (Note: failure to answer questions under Section 7 is a criminal offense — there's no right to avoid self-incrimination under this law. It may well be in conflict with the Human Rights Act, but nobody has yet brought a case to court: one is pending.) Furthermore, all his personal electronics were confiscated. Miranda's partner is of course the key investigative journalist working on the Wikileaks dump for the New York Times and The Guardian. His questioning was irregular enough that journalists, human rights lawyers, Amnesty International, and various MPs (including the Labour Party's shadow home secretary) are all protesting it and the government's own anti-terrorism law watchdog is calling for an explanation.

Now there's a new revelation: The Guardian has come under immense pressure from the British government to destroy or return the Wikileaks data, to the point of having men in uniform turn up with a warrant to smash hard drives.

However, there's an equally important item buried in Alan Rusbridger's account of that day (above). Just as large multinational corporations can seek the country with the most friendly regime for tax purposes, so too can news agencies seek out the most permissive legal environment. (In the light of this item, it should come as no surprise to note that David Miranda is a Brazilian citizen and Glen Greenwald lives in Brazil much of the time. Brazil is not party to the UKUSA joint intelligence sharing treaty and has no dog in the wikileaks fight.)

The spooks are not stupid. There are two ways they can respond to this in a manner consistent with their current objectives. They can try to shut down the press — a distinct possibility within the UK, but still incredibly dangerous — or they can shut down the open internet, in order to stop the information leakage over that channel and, more ambitiously, to stop the public reading undesirable news.

I think they're going for the latter option, although I doubt they can make it stick. Let me walk you through the early stages of what I think is going to happen.

In the UK it's fairly obvious what the mechanism will be. Prime Minister David Cameron has thrown his weight behind mandatory opt-out porn filtering at an ISP level, to protect our children from a torrent of filth on the internet. (He's turned to Chinese corporation Huawei for the tool in question.) All new domestic ISP customer accounts in the UK will be filtered by default, unless the owner opts out. There's also the already-extant UK-wide child pornography filter operated by the Internet Watch Foundation, although its remit is limited to items that are probably illegal to possess ("probably" because that's a determination for a court of law to make). And an existing mechanism — the Official Secrets Act — makes it an offense to possess, distribute, or publish state secrets. Traditionally newspapers were warned off certain state secrets by a process known as a Defense Advisory Notice, warning that publication would result in prosecution. It doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to foresee the creation of a law allowing for items subject to a DA-Notice to be filtered out of the internet via a national-level porn filter to protect the precious eyeballs of the citizenry from secrets that might trouble their little heads.

On the other hand, the UK may not have a First Amendment but it does have a strong tradition of press freedom, and there are signs that the government has already overreached itself. We'll know things are really going to hell in a handbasket when The Guardian moves its editorial offices to Brazil ...

The question of how one might censor the internet in the USA is a little less clear. The First Amendment allows no scope for DA notices and national internet filtering, after all. However:

The NSA's close relationship with the large corporations is now a matter of public record; Apple, Google, Facebook, and other major ISPs have all been implicated in the NSA's PRISM program. Non-compliant ISPs such as Lavabit and Silent Circle that emphasize customer privacy have been shut down by their owners, presumably after pressure to provide a non-selective trawl of customer email (Lavabit had previously provided individual customer emails in response to a court order, so this indicates a significant escalation in monitoring). The Feds are pissed — apparently shutting down your business rather than continuing it and silently snooping on your customers may be prosecuted as contempt of court. So where does that leave us?

Well, in the Anglophone internet we're currently seeing a quiet but increasingly desperate war for control of the web, partitioning it into vertical silos controlled by various interests. Facebook has a near-monopoly on search-for-people; if you want to find someone, the odds are high that Facebook has got them (especially true if they're nearly tech-illiterate; Facebook is AOL for the Web 2.0 era). Amazon.com has a near-monopoly on retail produce sales over the internet and is trying for a monopoly on books and magazines. (They're now bigger than WalMart.) EBay is where you go to buy second-hand stuff or personal items (I'd be surprised if they don't try to swallow Etsy and the other Maker auction sites soon). And Google is where you search for everything else. There are a couple of also-ran contenders — Apple and Microsoft — but they're not there yet, and anyway, from the NSA's perspective they're as easy to control as the current Big Four. (Microsoft's Skype has already been restructured to centralize it and make it NSA tap-friendly; I'd be astonished if Apple's iMessage isn't also compromised.)

If you can tap data from the major search engines, how hard is it to insert search results into their output?

Easy, it turns out. As easy as falling off a log. Google and Facebook are both advertising businesses. Twitter's trying to become one. Amazon and Ebay both rent space at the top of their search results to vendors who pay more money or offer more profits. Advertising is the keyword. All the NSA needs, in addition to the current information gathering capability, is the ability to inject spurious search results that submerge whatever nugget the user might be hunting for in a sea of irrelevant sewage. Imagine hunting for "Snowden" on Google and, instead of finding The New York Times or The Guardian's in-depth coverage, finding page after page of links to spam blogs.

Possibly the only thing protecting us from this contingency so far is that the first law of intelligence agencies is that information goes in, it never goes out. The idea of deliberately seeding the internet with disinformation is profoundly inimical to the usual methods and mission of an intelligence agency. (Organizations such as the KGB could do it only because the KGB wasn't a pure intelligence agency — it was a secret police force with intelligence gathering as part of its remit.)

If we see the NSA or other US government agencies getting into the disinformation business, then the end game has arrived: there really is a Deep State developing, and it's adopting the tactics of a secret police agency — not merely enforcing laws, or gathering information, but trying to influence the beliefs of the citizenry by systematically lying to them. (China's already there, with its national firewall and prior censorship of news media.) But I don't think we're there just yet.

Dear Mr. Pierce,

This letter is to inform you that you must immediately cease & desist all production on your musical theater project, Tracksuit American. This so-called ‘musical comedy revue’ infringes on a number of Burger King Holdings, Inc.’s registered trademarks, which are fully protected under United States intellectual property laws, and you have received no authority to use those trademarks in your production. In addition, it is our position that the book of this play constitutes prosecutable libel against the Burger King Holdings, Inc., and in order to avoid criminal prosecution, we must ask that you curtail technical rehearsals of the production immediately.

First, ‘Burger King’ is a protected and registered trademark of Burger King Holdings, Inc. You have used it repeatedly without permission — indeed, even without having bothered to seek permission — a number of times in the production, most egregiously in the catchy but hurtful number titled “Hangin’ Out in the Parking Lot of the Burger King”. Your offer of July 22 to replace these repeated references with “Burga King” is, frankly, unsatisfactory. Our counteroffer of the use of “Burger Monarch” was, we feel, eminently fair, and to be honest, more conciliatory than we have any need to be; and your immediate rejection of it for possessing “poor scansion” is rather short-sighted and unreasonable.

Second, “Have It Your Way” is also a trademark of  Burger King Holdings, and while your claim that its status as a common phrase in American English vernacular is technically valid, from a legal perspective, I think you will find that a judge would be more likely to see things “our way” when we present the footage of the scene in your play wherein a horribly overweight, disfigured actor wearing the uniform of a Burger King line cook becomes mentally confused and performs vile acts upon a Australian silky terrier while repeatedly bellowing the phrase. This is a clear attempt on your part to link Burger King’s memorable slogan with bestiality, animal cruelty and insanity, and not the “loving homage” you claim it to be.

Finally, the Whopper sandwich, along with every other burger available at Burger King restaurants, is made with 100% beef, USDA-approved and flame-broiled until juicy and delicious. It is not made with rat meat. Your repeated claim that it is made from pulverized rats (Act I, Scenes 1 & 2; Act II, Scene 3; Act III, Scenes 1 and especially 4 and scene 5 inclusive — the unfortunate “Enjoy Your Plague Meat, Suckers” number in particular — and the dance pageant entitled “Indigested Rodent Control”) is a clear case of libel, and failure to abide by the terms of this letter will result in immediate prosecution for same. Additionally, and we bring this to your attention as a personal kindness since we are under no obligation to do so, the music to “Rat Meat Whopper” is quite obviously lifted in its entirety from “Cat Scratch Fever”, and while we are not representing Mr. Nugent’s legal needs, we do know the firm that does, and would be more than willing to give them a call should you prove uncooperative.

If we may be open with you, Mr. Pierce, you are obviously a talented, or at least extremely dedicated, individual, and it is not the wish of Burger King Holdings, Inc. to, as you put it, “squash a young man’s dreams of making it big on the Great White Way like you would one of the thousands of filthy, disease-infested cockroaches that swarm over the deep fat fryers” in one of our restaurants. But I assume you can see from that very statement the unfortunate tendency you have to wrap up your aspirations, as well as your frustrations, in a corporate entity to which you have no relationship, and, more importantly, whose trademarks, service marks, and registered copyrighted materials are not yours to use. We must again ask you to cease and desist all production on this play, and we wish you the best of luck in your future career.

Yours,
Martin Skopecki
Executive Counsel, Burger King Holdings, Inc.

P.S. On a personal note, I found the “Fuck a Mickey D’s” song in Act I delightful.

Groklaw shuts down due to pervasive surveillance.

When David Miranda was arrested under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act at Heathrow Airport on Sunday morning, he had the best lawyers the Guardian could afford at least  arguing with the authorities if not with him for all of that time, the newspaper itself and the Brazilian Government, concerned at the treatment of one of its own citizens, to stick up for him. Even then, the authorities held on to him to within minutes of the maximum nine hours. Holding the partner of the journalist who has been working on a story alleging that Governments have been acting beyond their powers doesn’t look good, even if, as Scotland Yard has done, you assert that you are acting within the law. I find it hard to believe that anyone could credibly think that Miranda, working for his partner and the Guardian at the time, could fit this description:

is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

But Miranda is safely home now, a bit shaken up for sure, and a hell of a fuss is being kicked up, rightly, about his detention. I’m not so worried about him specifically, although like any liberal, I have concerns about the legitimacy of Sunday’s events.

For me, it’s how widely this power of detention is used. There are around 66,000 inhabitants of the town where I live.  That’s a lot of people. The Schedule 7 power, according to the BBC, was used on 61,545 people last year. In itself that’s way down on when Labour were in power, but it’s still a moderate sized town’s worth. Very few are detained right up to or beyond the limit. My worries are for those who don’t have the connections to advocate on their behalf, to ensure that the few rights that they have under this provision are honoured.

If you are detained by authorities in any other scenario, you have at least the right to silence. This is not so in the case of Schedule 7. You could be banged up for up to 3 months or fined for refusing to answer questions. In Miranda’s case, he says in an interview with the Guardian that he was asked about all sorts of things about his life and work which had no connection to terrorism. How many others are treated in the same way?

It is an extremely serious matter that the authorities have now been able to act in this way and to help themselves to the contents of Miranda’s electronic equipment and storage devices and that they’ll be able to keep hold of that after the devices have been returned to him. The wider question is why on earth the Coalition Government continues to use this wide-ranging power and others contained within Labour’s authoritarian legislation. They have repealed the notorious Section 44 stop and searches and replaced them with a more proportionate power that was even welcomed by Liberty and are currently reducing the detention time under Schedule 7, but this is tinkering at the edges. The presence of immigration officers at tube station questioning random people (and not many of them white) and the extension of the use of closed material procedures to civil cases signify a creeping authoritarianism that should worry any liberal. It is very dangerous for our party to be seen to be associated with this kind of stuff. I wrote on this subject earlier this month when the immigration officers’ actions came to light. If we think that any officials of the state are using their authority in the wrong way, then we should speak up and get it stopped. It pains me that Labour are being so vocal in complaining about Miranda’s detention when they introduced the legislation in the first place. It’s time we asserted, and are seen to be asserting,  our USP as champions of civil liberties.

* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

I get asked a lot what about what my favorite book/movie/album/creatively generated object might be (or my favorite author/filmmaker/musician/creative type), and I find as I go along in life I get progressively more annoyed with the question. This is usually not the fault of the person asking the question, who is generally trying to make innocuous conversation and is doing so by opening up a socially-approved line of trivial conversation.

It is, however, the fault of the question itself, which is unsophisticated, naive and annoying. Like most people over the age of twelve, who both had time to expand their creative palates and who recognize that life is not always a zero-sum Highlander-like experience, in which There Can Be Only One, I don’t have a single favorite book, or movie, or album, etc, or a favorite author or filmmaker or musician, or so on. I like a lot of different things (and artists) almost equally for reasons that are often not equivalent or comparable.

What I have instead — and what I suspect most people have — are personal tiers: general landings of favor in which the works/creators are held at a mostly equivalent level of esteem. For works of creativity, these tiers basically look like this:

First tier: The works of art that, for lack of a better term, regenerate me: I take them in and they make me feel like a better person for having gone through them.
Second tier: Works that I enjoy a lot and happily reconsume when the mood strikes me.
Third tier: Good once, could enjoy again, but probably won’t go out of my way to do so.
Fourth tier: Once was enough for all time.
Fifth tier: Mildly annoyed that I spent my time with it.
Sixth tier: Deeply annoyed some of the precious few moments in which I exist as a conscious being in this universe have been wasted on this crap.

For the artists themselves, it looks like this:

First tier: I consider these folks as my personal artistic pantheon.
Second tier: These folks are very reliable purveyors of entertainment that works for me for one or more reasons.
Third tier: Good at what they do; some of their work also speaks to me.
Fourth tier: Good at what they do, but what they do isn’t my thing.
Fifth tier: Not very good at what they do, but they make other people happy, so, meh.
Sixth tier: Abstractly okay with the concept that these people are allowed to express themselves in a manner that looks like creativity if you don’t think about it too hard, but honestly, what the hell.

Even here, “tier” does not capture the complexity of the thinking about these things, since the tiers themselves have plateaus, slopes and fractal surface features, reflecting that I like different things for different reasons. The objects and people in the tiers are likewise often in motion, moving up and down the tiers as my personal tastes, interests and experience change (or whether, for example, I’ve listened to/read/watched that particular thing too many times recently). Likewise, first tier artists can create lower tier output; lower tier artists have created works I unreservedly place on my top tier of creative experiences. And so on.

The point is that on the first tier of things, both with artists and with output, it because difficult (or difficult for me, anyway) to accurately quantify how or whether one is better than other. My top tier of movies, for example, contains both Tootsie and Stop Making Sense. One is a comedy and one is a concert film. One has great acting performances and one has great musical performances. One makes me laugh, and the other makes me dance. Likewise, among writers, I enjoy ee cummings and H.L. Mencken for reasons that have almost nothing to do with each other. If you come in and say to me “Yeah, but if you had to choose one over the other, which would you choose?” I would look at you like you were dense.

(The “yeah, but if you had to choose” questions drive me up a wall, too. Because I immediately get sidetracked into the why. Why do I have to choose? What circumstances of fate have led me only to be able to pick one book/movie/album, etc? I want to know why civilization has collapsed to the point (or whatever other circumstances occur) where I only get one thing. Because that seems kinda crucial to me. Really, in a situation like that, focusing only on that one book/movie/album seems the ultimate in wasting brain cycles on inappropriate trivia. This is especially the case now that we live in a world where I can carry ten thousand songs, an equal number of books and a couple of hundred movies with me at all times.)

(Also note that my favorite works/creators are not necessarily the best works/creators by any sort of critical and/or popular consensus. Citizen Kane is generally considered one of the greatest films of all time, and I do not disagree with that assessment one bit. It is possibly the Best Film Ever. But I don’t often feel like going out of my way to see it; it’s not on my personal First Tier. Likewise, Bob Dylan is both indisputably one of the most important musical figures in the last 60 years and on my fourth tier of artists; I like nearly all his stuff better when it’s covered by someone else. Personal taste is a weird and wonky thing.)

All of this is a very long way of saying that asking me what my favorite thing is, is not likely to get you the answer you want, unless the answer you want is a sour, exasperated look and a long, drawn out sigh (and if that is the answer you want, you’re a bad person and I don’t like you). On the other hand, if you ask me what some of my top tier books/music/movies are, then you might get a more interesting answer, especially interesting because then you get to try to figure out what it means that someone would like both Tootsie and Stop Making Sense almost equally as much. You’re well on your way to a psychological profile right there.

Ed Stetzer seems like a very nice guy.

I would bet, in fact, that Stetzer — the head number-cruncher for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Lifeway Research — actually is a very nice guy. He’s exactly the sort of mainstream white evangelical who makes you appreciate the fond accuracy of Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. (And I’m not referring there to any similarities in appearance that may or may not strike you.)

I would bet that if you met Stetzer in person he would be unfailingly kind and polite — even if you told him that you were a pro-choice, gay, atheist, jihadist Communist. He’d be no less nice to you for all of that. Unlike some of the fire-breathing culture warriors of the religious right, Stetzer is also smart enough to realize that no one could really be all of those things at the same time. And he’s honest enough not to go around accusing everyone he disagrees with of being all of those things.

I admire that Stetzer is committed to his discipline and won’t betray what it tells him just to score political points. He’s a data-driven pollster and survey researcher, and when his fellow conservatives are misreading or misusing polling data, he doesn’t hesitate to call them on it. (Including, especially, Fox News — whose routine abuse of polling data has been so egregious that they seem to have earned Stetzer’s distrust across the board.)

What I’m saying is that Ed Stetzer is the very picture of the moderate, mainstream white evangelical. When he recently moved his blog over to Christianity Today, I thought, yes, right, ding – that is where he belongs.

Folks like Stetzer and the editors of CT tend to agree with most of the radical policies endorsed by the religious right. They share the same “stance” on abortion, marriage equality and whatever the next litmus test turns out to be. As with the culture warriors, they hold those stances unquestioned and hold them as unquestionable. Those positions are unexamined, and any attempt to examine them is generally regarded as forbidden.

But for the moderate mainstream folks, political battles are never the priority. Their real passion lies elsewhere — with evangelism and church growth. And so while they may share the “stances” of the religious right, they don’t share its emphasis, its priorities, or its immoderate tone. They prefer, instead, to emphasize civility.

I like civility. Civility is good. Yay civility!

It would be a positive thing if these moderate mainstream white evangelicals, these Very Nice People with their emphasis on civility, were able to provide a challenge to the vitriol, dishonesty and power games of the culture warriors.

But unfortunately, that’s not the role they play most of the time. Most of the time their smiling civility doesn’t provide a challenge to the culture warriors, it provides a cover for them.

Consider, for example, the nasty dishonesty of hate-rag Charisma magazine, which serves as an enthusiastic propaganda sheet for publisher Steven Strang’s far-right politics (see for example) and for some decidedly out there theological theories.

One of Strang’s most vicious hatchet-wielders these days is columnist Jennifer LeClaire, who can’t seem to go two weeks without mentioning her belief that LGBT people are tools of Satan who are destroying America and persecuting Real, True Christians like herself. It’s one of the two big themes in LeClaire’s columns — the other one being her own stalwart heroism as an anti-gay spiritual warrior.

No one would ever mistake Jennifer LeClaire for Ned Flanders — or for a member of the moderate mainstream of Very Nice People. Accusing other people of serving Satan’s Agenda to Destroy America and the Church is not nice. Nor is it true. It’s an ugly, nasty, hateful lie.

J.Lec’s nasty lie  is useful for firing up the base, feeding its fears of the Satanic baby-killers and Satanic Gay Menace, and fueling its fires of self-righteousness and resentment. But there are also many people who find her dishonest claims and aggressive incivility a bit off-putting. They might be open to supporting the policies she advocates, but they’re uncomfortable with her intemperate tone.

And that’s where the Very Nice People play their designated role. Now is the time for all Nice Men to come to the aid of their party:

“I saw this in Charisma,” Ed Stetzer wrote last week, “and thought it worth passing on.”

It’s the latest column from Jennifer LeClaire (a Reefer Madness-style denunciation of Sanjay Gupta). The mainstream endorses LeClaire, with a kindly smile.

This is how the smiling, “civil” face of the moderate mainstream validates the snarling, ranting face of the religious right. This, all too often, is the role and the function of this moderate mainstream — and there’s nothing moderate or mainstream about it.

Validating the haters is not civil. Or kind. Validating haters is the very definition of incivility and unkindness.

Phwoar, look at the imperialist symbolism on that!

That bit in 'The Empty Child' when the Doctor talks about the "damp little island" standing alone against Hitler... when I first saw that I hurled a coat-hanger I happened to be holding at my television.

Okay, so: patriotism as progressive, yeah?  "Don't forget the Welfare State" or whatever he says.

Hmm.  You will unsurprised to learn that I have doubts.


1.

There is sometimes an unwarranted elision of the idea of 'patriotism' with the idea of 'loving one's home'.  This is an elision that many left-wingers have been guilty of, from Orwell to Billy Bragg.  But it confuses distinct concepts.  Moreover, it acquiesces in the ideological project of confusing these concepts, a project of immense utility to ruling classes going back to the very birth of the state.  Patriotism isn't just a cynical scheme of the rulers... though it is  that, amongst other things.  The point here is that it is an ideological construction and a form of social practice which cannot be simplistically overlaid upon personal affection for one's origins and surroundings.

I love London.  In order to get sentimentally misty-eyed about this, I'd have to forget that the city is a concentrated site of racial discrimination, police repression, social cleansing, centralised state bureaucracy, drastic inequality; that it's the hub of the organisation and enforcement (physical and ideological) of a neoliberal and neo-imperialist power, strewn with monuments to one of the most savagely aggressive colonial empires in modern history.  And on and on and on.

The love of one's home is one thing.  'Patriotism' and 'nationalism' are both, finally, ideological notions mapped-onto it.  They both immediately elide the flexible and contextual concept of 'home' with the political category of 'country'.  Even the term 'homeland' starts to do this.  We should never let ourselves become deaf to the shades of meaning imported by extra syllables. 

The idea that patriotism can be a 'way in' to a larger feeling of social involvement is similarly dubious.  To the extent that patriotism makes the individual feel connected to something larger than him-or-herself, the connection is a masochistic one.  It is the sublimation of oneself into a dominating framework, not the integration of oneself into a genuinely collective endeavour, whatever the rhetoric.

Besides, this sublime idea of ecstatic sublimation is not only unduly R/romantic, but is also so vague, and so applicable as a description of so many varied and mutually-exclusive things, that it loses all substantive content. It can refer to mysticism, chauvinism, trade union activity, identity politics, family, etc.  Richard Dawkins feels 'part of something greater than himself'; so does the Pope.  For the idea of personal integration into wider structures to be meaningful, it must be individuated... whereupon we start to see patriotism as a distinct phenomenon, quite separate from, say, social work or progressive activism.  The mooted connection collapses.

Ideas of 'national community' are largely ideological constructions which artificially smooth-out hugely contradictory social arrangements riddled with class antagonisms. The idea that 'the nation' is a space where we can work for 'the public good' is similarly panglossian. In societies divided into social groups of mutually-exclusive interests that are constantly in material conflict, is there such a thing as a 'public good'?  Any concept of 'public good' is always, consciously or unconsciously, an expression of class interest, because it always ends up being an assertion that the interests of one class are synonymous with the interests of all classes.  This is simply impossible, barring something extreme like the immediate threat of a massive nuclear explosion.  Given that even imminent environmental catastrophe has not been enough to convince the bourgeoisie that they share a common interest with humanity as a whole, it's fair to say that 'the public good' is a last, temporary and remote possibility... at best.

The heart of capitalism is the antagonism between the interests of those who produce surplus value and those who pocket it. That makes me very suspicious of 'the nation', which in its modern form, is an integral part of global capitalism. Patriotism, similarly, is an ideological buttress of this system. It is also intimately bound up with imperialism rather than just being an unfortunate side-effect.  Patriotism has always been linked to the competition of states.  Viz the rise of patriotism alongside the rise of the modern state in Early Modern Europe, viz the patriotism of Roman senators, etc, etc.


2.

Does patriotism ever do any good? Well, as far as I can see, only when it's bound up with other ideas that actually conflict with it (which happens, of course).  The great post-war national liberation struggles against European colonial domination, for example... something Orwell never lived to see, leading him to rather simplistically seperate patriotism (good) from nationalism (bad).  Back 'home', many crusading socialists who laid the groundwork for the Welfare State, many Chartists etc., stressed the common welfare of 'the people' of 'the nation'.  Left-wingers such as Michael Parenti still assert that they are the real patriots for opposing America's wars in favour of social programs to benefit ordinary Americans.  This is a widespread strategy.  But it rings hollow.

We can't put the credit for the British Welfare State onto 'Britain' because it was a product of currents within the British polity (i.e. the labour movement, socialism, reformism, and yes even aspects of liberalism, etc) which had to fight long and bitter struggles against other groups in order to achieve any such gains.  (Now, of course, patriotic we'reallinthistogetherness is used to justfiy the wanton dismantling of these gains... which only goes to demonstrate that the patriotic idea is, at best, a tool that can be used by both sides... rather like a blunt instrument that can be snatched back and forth between mugger and muggee... except that the mugger brought it with him and knows how to use it.)

That the NHS happened is no reason to be proud of 'the nation', no more than one person's beauty is reason to praise the attractiveness of everyone on the bus... especially if a significant portion of the people on the bus are actively trying to disfigure the pretty one with knives.  (This is without pushing the analogy further by pointing out that 'beauty' is subjective, means different things to different people, and that praising it is by no means obviously a proper thing to do.  Apart from anything else, praising the beauty of strangers on buses would usually be tantamount to sexual harassment.  Something of the same combination of self-serving motives, arrogant presumption and abuse of privilege - all lurking beneath ostensible nobility - is usually to be found in patriotic waffle.  Even putting this aside, patriotism is an inherently dubious idea, not just because it relies upon a spurious lumping together of hugely disparate groups with hugely disparate interests, not just because it is bound up with the ideological hegemony of powerful interests, but also because it relies upon lazy assumptions that certain things are always positive, always worthy of public pride.)

As ever, we end up with the problem of 'we'.  Is there any word more abused in political discourse than 'we'?  It is abused by all sides, by David Cameron and Tony Benn.  'We' bomb Pakistan.  'We' created the Welfare State.  'We' had an empire.  'We' produced Shakespeare.  What obfuscatory nonsense this rests on.  A lot of those national liberation struggles I mentioned were waged against my very own 'damp little island'.  That this island has wildlife, literature, theatre culture and BBC sci-fi shows that I love, as well as an inspiring history of working class resistance, doesn't make it any less an imperial culture soaked in blood.  If we go along with the essentially patriotic idea of the island as a community, the idea that the material nature of the island creates a meaningful 'national identity' or something like that, then we end up with the dubious idea that, for instance, 'we' unleashed terror and torture against the Mau Mau rebellion. This is the flipside of saying that 'we' fought Hitler.  If the first isn't fair or true, neither is the second.

The only way to efface this is to simply not mention one side or the other.  In the interests of the patriotic mainstream, we never mention the Mau Mau.  This is the time-honoured and constant technique of capitalist media culture, 'The Empty Child' not-excepted: what cannot be said within the confines of mainstream ideological discourse must be passed over in silence... and because it always is  passed over in silence, it stays forever out of the hegemonic mainstream discourse, that discourse being composed of only those notions which can be spoken about without any awareness of breaching the 'common sense' consensus.  A self-perpetuating echo chamber which endures because it has, in many ways, won a kind of Darwinian battle of methods for containing discourse in capitalist societies, winning out over both extreme censorship and over genuine freedom of speech.

To breach this silence is to become political or 'controversial' (while the political valences of those things which *can* be said are not noticed... they simply become the ideological equivalent of wallpaper).  We forget the imperial crimes of Britain and leave it at saying 'we fought Hitler'... but again, the spurious 'we' does its work.  'We' fought Hitler. My grandad, Beaverbrook, Churchill, RAB Butler, Edward and Mrs Simpson... all in it together. It's obvious what's wrong with that, I'd hope. Large swathes of the British ruling class were sympathetic to the fascists as bulwarks against communism.  Unlike Churchill, my grandad ended up with shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life.  It might be objected that 'we' often means 'we the people'... but, as I said, we mustn't be deaf to the syllables.  Even the ones that pointedly aren't there. And even if we are  talking about 'the people'... who are they?  How do you get to be part of 'the people'.  Our latterday English narodniks indulge in this kind of vagueness at best; at worst they indulge in fascist sentimentalism.  The EDL talk about 'the people'.  There's nothing in the term to stop them.  As Walter Benjamin realised, cultural artefacts should be unusable by fascists if they are to be relied upon.

On this subject... I flat-out disbelieve that 'national culture' entails respect for diversity, given the sustained assaults upon diversity that are utterly mainstream in British culture.  We're always hearing about how 'British values' (presumably what is meant are not those values which permit Britain to bomb the shit out of civillians in the Middle East) are under threat from multiculturalism, Islam, etc.  On the ground, some people cling to fictions like 'British fair play' as a way of expressing tolerance and democracy, but at least as often (far more often, I suspect) such notions are employed by xenophobes, ressentimental Tories, Dailymailistas, and those fascist sentimentalists already mentioned). I don't even think that the aggregation 'national culture' is actually possible.  Such aggregations are highly selective ideological fictions.  But even if it were true, it leaves us with the problem of respect for diversity *outside* the artificially/ideologically-constructed idea of 'the nation'. This is especially problematic when the nation being talked about/celebrated is also an empire, or a former empire, or run by 'humanitarian interventionists'.


3.

Of course, in the mainstream, all this isn't even a blip. In the near-constant drip-drip-drip of popular culture, Britain is a collective hero (a crusty John Bull, flawed and old-fashioned, but coming-out-swinging for freedom) fighting evil German imperialism. Our own imperialism is effaced, eternally.  In this context, the true history of the British ruling class' role in tolerating fascism, comforting fascism, enabling fascism, and finally fighting fascism only when their own imperial hegemony was threatened, must be left out because it strays out of the mainstream 'common sense' and into the 'political' or 'controversial'.  And so we end up with the Doctor praising the damp little island.  Somebody pass me a sick bag.

Another favourite example of mine is in Agatha Christie's Poirot , in an adaptation of 'The Clocks'.  Poirot is confronted by a German spy motivated by appeaser-sympathies who sneers at "weak, liberal England".  Poirot angrily retorts that "weak, liberal England" gave him a home when the Germans overran Belgium during the First World War.  What isn't mentioned, amidst all this moving drama about standing up to tyranny, is the teensy-weensy little business of Belgium's utterly murderous and racist imperial domination of the Congo, which King Leopold initiated in order to compete with the imperialism of other European powers such as Britain, and which was immensely profitable because of trade with Britain, amongst other countries.

'We' all know about German imperialism... well, about bits of it.  As has been said elsewhere, the real problem with German imperialism (the problem that makes it exceptionally memorable) is that they tried standard European methods of violent colonial landgrabbing, repression and racial mass-murder in mainland Europe rather than in Africa... after all, nobody in mainstream media-culture remembers the Kaiser's genocide of the Hereros and Namaquas in Namibia.  'We' also remember German imperialism for another reason: it is the imperialism that excuses, effaces, blots out our own.  The writer of the Poirot episode knew that Nazi Germany was bad, and that Britain 'stood against it'.  He knew Poirot was the hero, and so had to give voice to these uncontroversial notions.  He probably didn't know much about the Belgian Congo, about Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy , about Tintin in the Congo... after all, we don't get morality plays about how dreadful Belgian imperialism was rammed down our throats in constant TV/film dramas.  Nothing in it to make 'us' brits feel good about 'our' heroism. 

This is not, by itself, a huge problem within the confines of a TV show... and, indeed, The Empty Child is probably Moffat's best work precisely because it manages a certain scepticism towards the idea of an untroubled national community, albeit mediating its issues with this notion through the free-floating conduit of sexual repression. The last refuge of the scoundrel, however, leaves a nasty taste in my mouth when it makes its appearance in a quite good piece of work like 'Empty Child'.

We might ask why it was possible to do a WWII Who story in 1989 that did not embrace the concepts of patriotism or 'the nation' uncritically, but it no longer seemed possible in 2005. The degeneration of our 'national' political discourse since 1989 surely has a fair bit to do with it.  Maybe Moffat shouldn't shoulder all the blame.  Thanks be to many, but perhaps especially to Blair.

We are all broken shards. Each other's wrists
get slashed each time we move. We breath harsh words
poison to our own ear. We squelch through turds
pray that they are not ours. We keep long lists

of who said what to whom and what they meant
precisely by its subtext. Analyze
each word that'S spoken. Everybody cries
and every tear is special. Time is bent

each crisis comes round twice. It's such a bore
recycling one's own anger yet one's back
is sore from last time, raw, torn and bruised black.
This cannot be forgiven, and means war.

We interact for hours remain alone
mistake each other's torment for our own.

The anger and fear over teachers being forced to promote homosexuality (or at least not speak their conscience) that was expressed during the same-sex marriage debates couldn't be anything other than genuine could they?

Monday:

Mr David Miranda, a passenger en route from Berlin to Brazil and not entering the UK, has been detained at Heathrow Airport under the Terrorism Act 2000, and held for the full nine hours allowed under that Act before being released. His telephone, laptop, games console, DVDs and other electronica have been confiscated.

Mr Miranda is not a terrorist suspect.

This is an abuse of power. This is why Labour were wrong.

We need to be abolishing these laws and Labour’s Yvette Cooper needs to be apologising for her part in enacting them, not demanding answers like a victim.

Hard Labour’s terrorism laws and security theatre are wide open to this kind of abuse and this proves it. Their excuse at the time – “we would never abuse these laws” – we already shown to be hollow, if not downright mendacious, when Walter Wolfgang was arrested at their own Party Conference. But they are shown to be absurd in their cries “oh the Evil Coalition” – and who left the “Evil Coalition” with all these power to abuse, eh? And who warned you not to do anything so bloody stupid?

Nevertheless, as members of the Coalition, this certainly happened on “our watch” and for that we are to blame.

The first question has to be whether we are directly to blame: we urgently need to discover who ordered this and why.

“Who?” is either a minister who needs to be made accountable, or someone in the police or security services possibly acting ultra vires.

The Grauniad is quick to conflate the police/borders authority/security services who detained Mr Miranda with “the UK government”. (Irrelevantly to the illegality of his detention but possibly not unconnectedly Mr Miranda is the partner of one of the Grauniad journalists reporting on the whistle-blower Edward Snowdon and the American NSA, and “intimidation” has quickly – but plausibly – been suggested as a motive.)

I suspect that that is slack reporting rather than bias, but as a first step we need to establish (in decreasing order of culpability) if anyone in government – presumably the Home Office – ordered this, or were aware of this before the fact, or during the fact.

“Why?” then leads to questions of greater UK involvement in the whole Prism/email hacking scandal, or perhaps someone being too eager to do a favour for our American cousins. The possibility of the “phone call from the State Department” being at the root of this reminds us of the dangerously subservient Blair-era relationship between US and UK.

But even if we’re not guilty of direct abuse of power, we have still failed to do our part to prevent it by rolling back the police state that the last government was intent on putting into place.

Our Freedoms Bill was watered down and we have failed to move the Civil Liberties agenda on far enough. Theresa May’s Home Office in particular is rife with “little initiatives” to try and increase rather than decrease the powers that police and security services already have. Every success is treated as proof they need these powers; every failure is cited as evidence that they need more power.

Labour and Conservatives have both demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with our Rights and Liberties, except that you can trust them to take liberties with your rights while handing over more money and power to the security industry.

As Liberal Democrats even we cannot be trusted with this sort of power. That is why we must urgently press to repeal those powers to take the temptation away.

We need to take a stand on this.