Saturday:

Neil Gaiman's second episode for Doctor Who, in spite of doing everything humanly possible to touch the fans' buttons and warm the cockles of their cold hearts, seems to have produced something of a backlash, at least among those fans whose opinions I've been reading. Despite polling in the same mostly-about-8-out-of-10 range on the forums as the last few episodes, people voicing their thoughts have been a touch, er, negative about it.

Well, as this week's guest star Warwick Davis might put it, life's too short for the haters, so here are ten reasons I thought this was brilliant:



1. A properly constructed story with beginning middle and end. I know that that really only counts as "competence" but after several stories this year that have overdone, mistimed or generally cocked up one part or the other, this shows how decent it can be when you actually getting the mechanics right.
To take you quickly through it, in the traditional four parts of a Doctor Who story we are:

part one – introduced to the planet-sized fun-park of Hedgewick's world, reintroduced to the Cybermen and told that they're all dead, have it heavily flagged for us that Warwick Davis' character "Porridge" is – spoilers – emperor of the universe, and muse a little on the price paid for defeating the Cybermen a thousand years ago...

part two – guess what, the Cybermen aren't dead after all and we do some cool new stuff with Cybermites (a logical and yet ingenious and very creepy evolution of the Cybermats) and introduce the main threat – which evolves nicely from those musings in part one – that the humans will react to the presence of Cybermen by destroying the planet as very nearly a first resort. Unfortunately, the platoon of troops we thought would be useful turn out to be rubbish and the two children in Clara's charge have been possessed by the Cybermen...

part three – to make matters worse, so has the Doctor, and we get a face-off between the Time Lord and the invading Cyber-Planner inside his mind, while Clara and the punishment platoon try to secure Sleeping Beauty's castle...

part four – the full Cyber-army emerges from their tombs and march on the castle but the Doctor reveals that he's way ahead of the Cyber-Planner after all and springs his trap, allows the Emperor to set off the bomb and saves the day.

2. Robert Holmes used to construct stories "in the shadow of great events", so – for example – "The Ribos Operation" sees the Graff Vynda-K after he's lost his empire or "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" sees Magnus Greel's last stand after fleeing from a World War in the year Five Thousand. Obviously the model here is "Revenge of the Cybermen", script-edited and largely re-written by Holmes, where the base under siege events on the Nerva Beacon and Voga are a sequel to the unseen story of the Cyberwars.

Gaiman does much the same here, sketching in for us a Universe-spanning human Imperium which defeated the wonderfully-named Cyberiad of the Cybermen in a terrible war and at a terrible price: the destruction of the entire Tiberian Spiral Galaxy. Simon, incidentally, reads this as the destruction of the Cybermen's home galaxy, but I rather thought that the implication was that the Cyber-army was lured into a trap in a human-occupied galaxy which was then destroyed to wipe out the Cybermen en masse.

(Or, if you prefer, after the Cybermen where annihilated from our galaxy, a surviving ship managed to escape to intergalactic space. They are, after all, always establishing "new" homeworlds.)

"Tiberian" suggests the river Tiber, on which of course Imperial Rome was founded, and into which Roman traitors were thrown after execution, particularly by the Emperor Tiberius – though for Alex it suggests not the Cybermen's home but the Empire's, with the Emperor sacrificing his own people and home to destroy the enemy before running away because he can't deal with guilt of double-genocide. It makes Porridge an explicit mirror of the Doctor (and tragically suggests not just a mirror of Season 2005 but a prefiguring of next week: Porridge / Emperor has been running but must in the end return to face up to his responsibilities, just as the Doctor / [insert name here; no, don't do that] must go to Trenzalore…?), just as 'Nightmare in Silver' suggests a "dark dream mirror" all over, and the Doctor mirrors himself as the Cyber-Planner, and indeed the Cyber-Planner Doctor starts mirroring earlier Doctors. Badly.

Are the chess game and wonder-world for children from "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Clara Found There"? If the Cybermen are dark mirrors of ourselves, we see through the looking-glass darkly a lot.

And Jason Watkins' look manages to suggest a dishevelled, disreputable version of the Doctor, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter and (sigh) the Great Intelligence, all at the same time, which is quite impressive multiple mirroring.

It also suggests James Tiberius Kirk, and having a galaxy named after him would fit.

What this cleverly hinted-at backstory enables Gaiman to do, though, is to establish that the human empire is huge and powerful and so take the threat from the Cybermen to the next level.

3. Making the Cybermen actually dangerous in a way that they have only really ever been in "Earthshock".

Ever since their first home planet of Mondas blew itself to bits in "The Tenth Planet", the Cyber-race has been on the verge of extinction and basically a bit rubbish. Their ranking as Number Two monster in the Whoniverse (see "Doomsday" for who is definitely Number One) has always been a bit of a mystery, compared to galaxy-crushing foes like the Sontarans, the Rutans or, er, the Dominators and their fearsome Quarks (look, BAFTA thought so!). Skulking in the shadows became their modus operandi for the rest of the Sixties, as they tried various hare-brained schemes to survive by taking over the Earth before they finally buried themselves on Telos. "Revenge of the Cybermen" explicitly describes the few we see as the last survivors – and the Doctor goes out of his way to tell them how rubbish they are. "Attack of the Cybermen" sees them desperate at the end of the Cyberwars, stealing time technology and blowing up Telos. The Cybermen in "Silver Nemesis" are a bit of an anomaly: everything about them suggests the very last survivors of Telos, escaped in the stolen timeship (which Ace blows up), until they pull a cloaked Cyberfleet out of their handles. Post-facto justification, if not logic, suggests that these must be ships from "The Invasion" rather than a whole new foe from the future.

Thanks to the invention of CGI, the new series has seen the Cybermen adopt the Dalek tactics of creating a huge army out of nowhere only for them all to get killed again. (Perhaps a strategy bought in from Skaro along with using imaginative, creative children for their battle computers.)

"The Age of Steel" saw the Doctor end the Cyber-threat to a parallel Earth almost before it began by making their heads go pop, and then, when they tried to invade our Universe, he vacuumed them into the void not once but twice, and their bonkers Cyberking with them. This, however, did not stop them attending the Party at the Pandorica or crash-landing a Cybership under Colchester (can we appeal to "The Invasion" again?). And they crashed another ship into the actually-not-bad "Blood of the Cybermen" downloadable game.

But if a man is judged by the quality of his enemies, then a Cyberman is even more so. Having set up the great and bloody powerful human empire, if this universe-sized empire is so threatened by the Cybermen that they resort to blowing up planets the minute they know the Cyber-threat has arrived, then you know that the Cybermen are now quite hard bastards.

The far-future setting allows for some hefty evolution of the Cyber-species along the way, and giving them some seriously dangerous new powers such as the ability to adapt and survive very quickly and to begin conversion of downed enemies via Cybermite at a touch. The fact that if you don't kill them fast enough they will, first, become immune to your weaponry and, second, then come and turn you into one of them finally gives them the tools to become a universal threat.

And anyone complaining that this also makes them too like the Borg should remember the recent Star Trek/Doctor Who comic crossover from IDW which saw the Borg allied to (and then, obviously, betrayed by) the Cybermen. Stealing Borg technology from an alternative universe is a very Cyberman thing to do.

The new Cyber-suits were sleeker and more menacing than their Cybusman predecessors, and I liked some of the movement, particularly the attack where one snatched a mace out of Clara's hands. And the baby-faced look was, I thought, a sign of them upgrading to psychological warfare too, since humans are known to have difficulty killing anything that looks like a baby.

As the Cybermen might say: clever, clever, clever.

Their plot: to bury a new Cyber-tomb underneath a pleasure planet and pick off the – as the Doctor says – "Spare Parts" that they need from the visitors is reminiscent of Paul Cornell's "Love and War", which sees similar abuse of the dead of two empires on the idyllic memorial world of "Heaven". And the irony that the Doctor himself triggers the reawakening by bringing children to the planet is recognised as the second time – after Marc Platt's near-perfect Cyber-genesis story "Spare Parts" – that the Doctor has been hailed as saviour of the Cyber-race.

(May 13th is, as it happens, the anniversary of "Rise of the Cybermen" which, as it happens, is not very based on Marc's "Spare Parts" but does at least give him a credit in the titles.)

So much for the opposition; how about the heroes.

4. A strong guest cast included, in particular, Jason Watkins as the seedy but sympathetic Mr Webley and also as the sinister Cyber-Webley when he falls victim to his own Cyberman exhibit. It's one of the better uses of the "horror of conversion" themes that underlies the Cybermen since the shock Jackie Tyler conversion in "The Age of Steel", and it takes an actor of Jason Watkins' calibre to make you warm to Webley in the small amount of screen time before he gets "turned", and so regret his subsumption into the Cyber-collective.

In fact this "horror of conversion", while allegedly central to the Cybermen's character, is rarely touched upon by the TV series, and notably when it does – "Attack of the Cybermen" – it's accused of going too far. Russell's "scoop and serve" version, that sees the Cybermen reduced to tin suits with a human brain stuck in, is visceral and yet oddly clinical. Big Finish audio have played it up more, perhaps because you can go further on audio, in particular in Gary Russell's "Real Time", but the real go-to book on conversion is Steve Lyons Virgin "Missing Adventure" "Killing Ground", where we get the full convertee's eye view of the process. Eew!

The members of the punishment platoon don't get a lot of screen time to make their presence felt, and consequently some seem to have found them disposable, but I like them. And Tamzin Outhwaite as their Captain manages to squeeze quite a few moments out of what she's given. It's pretty clear that she's worked out who Porridge is, and what it probably means. And it's nice too that she's a do-the-right-thing soldier rather than just following orders, so she tries to give the Doctor and Clara time to save the kids but when it comes down to it, she's going to set off that bomb anyway.

The real kudos, though, has to go to an outstanding performance from Warwick Davis as the world-weary Emperor who has just run away in search of a quiet life, who also has the cheek to (King Peladon-like) ask for Clara's hand in marriage once it's clear he has an empire and a Temple of Peace -shaped flagship to offer her.

Porridge's sadness for the poor bloke who had to push the button is clearly self-pity, by the way, but also forms a bond between himself and the Doctor.

The story is a little bit fast and loose about how long ago the Cyberwar was; Webley suggests a thousand years, but the ongoing paranoia suggests either a more recent conflict or that Cybermen have continued to pop up in the centuries since "the big one". It's therefore not completely certain that Porridge isn't hinting that he himself was the one to push the button, or whether it was an ancestor of his, but that he empathises as the responsibility should it happen again will fall to him. As indeed it does, and he isn't found wanting.

Mind you, that far into the future humans living for a thousand years might be commonplace.

And yet, in the light of all that, Matt still manages to top that by giving us...

5. Two Matt Smiths for the price of one. The Cybermen have clearly bitten off more than they can swallow when they try to turn him into their new Cyber-Planner. And Matt shines as he turns in a Superman III -esque contest of Doctor versus evil-Doctor.

The view from inside the Doctor's head, reminiscent of Tegan's trippy trip into the Wherever where the Mara dwell, is done beautifully, with the left side (the left brain?) all golden regeneration-energy fairy-dust in Time Lordy swirls and circular writing, while the right side is all cold steel-blue dots joined up into an electric network. It's a perfect representation of the conflict between the Doctor's creative energy and the Cyber-hive mind. It also suggests that Time Lords are the highest culture and the Cybermen are still at the level of dot-to-dot in comparison.

Back in the real world, the fact that the Cyber-Planner seems positively berserk – Matt turning it up to, er, eleven – is a nice recognition of the way that the Cybermen have no experience of and no preparation for dealing with emotions. The fact that this drives them nuts goes all the way back to "The Invasion" and it's nice to see it referenced here.

Matt as the Cyber-Planner is quite deliciously evil, revelling in cruel deceits and taunting Clara, and by proxy the Doctor. And also dropping hints about this year's "big story arc", which sits rather nicely with him being an out-of-control version of the Doctor's personality, wanting to tell Clara and at the same time thinking "secrets keep us safe". And it tricks her into bringing the detonator for the bomb within its reach. Destroying the detonator is, of course, part of escalating the peril. It's a "rule of three" - we know the Cybermen will be killed by the planet bomb, but first the unfortunate Tamzin is shot, so she cannot detonate it; then Clara looses the detonator here... but we've already been shown how (third times the charm), there's still a way to win.

Alex though, asks if destroying the remote activator is about saying 'This stick-shaped-tech-thing you're carrying as a magic wand to solve the plot? Not so much.' Which is a criticism / more mirroring from Neil that he quite likes.

If there is a weakness to the episode, it's that the Cyber-Planner, as performed by Matt, has the same effect on the Cybermen that Davros has on the Daleks, namely he is so interesting and so charismatic that it reduces the titular villains to extras in their own show, and makes them seem more like dumb robots. They aren't, but the bias of the short screen time robs them of some of the necessary balance and layers to show that properly. What we were missing, I think, was a Cyberleader to interact with Clara and give some (entirely logical, of course) personality to the serried ranks of troops.

Of course, the Cyber-Planner may like playing the Doctor – nice that Clara sees through it; nice the way the Doctor later passes her test for being himself again – but it isn't as in control as it thinks it is, as evidenced by the way the Doctor plays...

6. The Curse of Fenric gambit of "I bet you can't work out how I'm about to beat you at chess". And, as in "The Curse of Fenric" the Doctor's winning move is to, er, alter the rules.

The chess motif suggests that the anniversary celebrations that have so far seen a first Doctor type story in "The Rings of Akhaten", a second Doctor monster-era one from "Cold War", a third Doctor Quatermass crossover in "Hide" and then allusions in dialogue to fourth and fifth Doctor's eras (while arguably getting the actual stories the wrong way around) in "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" and "The Crimson Horror" have – alas poor Colin – skipped ahead to a story for the devious seventh Doctor.

(Or is the Sixth Doctor hiding in plain sight, another Valeyard?)

Rule One is that the Doctor lies, and it's a bit of a screaming clue when the Doctor says that the Time Lord and the Cyber-Planner allegedly control exactly the same share of his brain when he makes his chess-based challenge. The Cyber-Planner may not smell a rat (Cybermen have no noses) but I do.

Obviously he's got another motive, and like Sylvester McCoy's grandmaster on a thousand boards, he's thinking many moves ahead. He knows that the humans are going to blow up the planet as soon as they realise that the Cybermen are in charge. Plus he's recognised the Emperor. (It's not just a case of if Angie can do it, so can he; he drops hints repeatedly to Porridge that he knows the true situation.) So he can safely deduce that the Cybermen are not his real problem; Porridge will destroy the planet and because he's Emperor all human survivors will be transmatted to safety.

No, the Doctor's problem is that the two children he's brought with him, Angie and Artie who Clara is helping to look after, are currently under cyber control and will be left behind by the Imperial flagship.

Of course, he's made a monumental error of judgement by leaving them in Webley's Emporium rather than sending them back to the TARDIS, because tucking them up among the scary exhibits is really such a good idea – and it is a shame that Gaiman had to delete the scene where the Doctor explains that he's paranoid about letting children into his ship because they "push buttons".

So the whole business with the chess match, indeed quite likely the only reason he allows himself to be infected by Cypermites in the first place, is in order to fool the Cyber-Planner into releasing Angie and Artie.

And as soon as it's let the kids go, the Doctor "Fenrics" it out of his cranium with extreme prejudice.

Think about it: is it remotely logical for the Planner to make the offer to release the kids?

I realise that the Planner isn't being logical, but even in its warped, sadistic way it has nothing to gain from this. So why do it? Unless it's not the Planner's idea at all, but one that the Doctor has cunningly slipped into its mind, and it's so dizzy with the pleasures of emotions that it doesn't realise that it doesn't really make sense.

7. Gold of course has never really made sense as the Cybermen's Achilles' Heel – except that, alchemically, it feels right, in the "gold beats silver" sense.

In fact, the New Adventure "Iceberg", written by David "the Cyberleader" Banks, has it that this is a vulnerability that the Doctor himself added to the Cybermen when they were seeking to, well, upgrade themselves following their defeats in "The Invasion" and "The Tenth Planet", and this would certainly help to explain why it's their software that reacts badly to interaction with gold (something that makes more sense than it plating their respirators, especially when in "Earthshock" they seem quite happy to survive in the vacuum of space but retain they old gold weakness.)

Here the Doctor gets a wonderful moment of ingenuity, turning the Willy Wonka reference that he's been waving under our noses since the start of the story into an instant patch to disable the Cyber-Planner.

8. Clara gets to go totally baddass, leading the troops of the punishment platoon like a pro, improvising defences and seeing through the deceptions of the devious Cyber-Planner, even if it still manages to get the trigger for the bomb off her.

It's actually quite a dramatic shift in her character – I mean it's really good to see her in full-on Sigourney Weaver from "Aliens" mode, and it's definitely Sigourney Weaver from "Aliens" not Sigourney Weaver from "Alien", and Jenna-Louise Coleman rises to the challenge of making her strong and just a very little bit cold – but you have to admit that it's not quite where she's been at so far. It's almost as though she's adapting to be exactly the companion that the Doctor needs.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but what with the Cybermen upgrading all over the place, it did strike me as a subtle in a blatant-if-you-think-about-it way of Clara the perfect companion "upgrading" to be perfect here too.

9. References to classic series Cyber-stories that I spotted include: regeneration ("The Tenth Planet"); bouncing on the surface of the moon, and explicit mention of a moon base ("The Moonbase"); the tombs of the Cybermen ("guess", but the design incorporates some nice touches to allude to the design work of the Sixties classic; mind you, it also resembled the galleries of "Attack of..."), also a single Cybermite / Cybermat left at the end; the destruction of an entire galaxy ("The Wheel in Space"); the Cyber-Planner doing all the talking the Cyber-arm largely silent, and the reaction to emotion ("The Invasion"); the last of the Cybermen, gold (see above), and bombs that fragmatise – is that even a word? – a whole planet ("Revenge of the Cybermen"); bombs that destroy a whole planet (again), and "My army awakes", with three columns of Cybermen advancing on the camera ("Earthshock"); the Cybermen get their own "Raston Warrior Robot" moment, moving faster than can be seen ("The Five Doctors"), which makes sense as they'd upgrade to defeat an future Raston warriors they encounter (lord knows how they'd deal with Raston Lap Dancers ("Alien Bodies")); partial Cyber-conversions, in particular the way half Webley's face gets covered ("Attack of the Cybermen"); the secrets of the Time Lords, chess (see above) and silver in the title ("Silver Nemesis").

You can work out for yourselves if there are nods to new series stories "Rise of the Cybermen"/"The Age of Steel", "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday", "The Next Doctor" or "Closing Time", but...

10. "The Silver Turk" by Marc Platt was the opening story for Big Finish's 2011 series of adventures for Paul McGann's Doctor with Mary Shelley. Yes, that Mary Shelley. (And we've already had a "Witch from the Well" reference in "Hide", which leads us to wonder if the "Army of Death" might have something to do with Trenzalore next week.) Apparently no one knows how the historic Silver Turk automaton really worked, although a dwarf concealed under the table is one of the more popular theories.

And, as a bonus, Marc's "Spare Parts" gets a name-check slipped into dialogue.

Alas, no place to slip in a mention of the excellent (sorry) sort-of-trilogy "The Reaping", "The Gathering" and "The Harvest". And couldn't Briggsy have persuaded the Emperor Porridge to name his flagship the "Sword of Orion"?


So, I've now written three-and-a-half thousand words of good things about this episode and only skimmed the surface, and the fact that there is so much to write about surely, surely is the real sign of just how great, how packed with ideas and whimsies and things to make you think this was.

I think the 2012 half of series seven was, in spite of a couple of episodes not quite ending well, a marked improvement on the convoluted disappointments of series six, and the 2013 half, in spite of a couple of episodes not quite ending well, an improvement on 2012, and – a wobble for "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" aside – getting better week on week ,with these last two episodes real triumphs.

What could possibly go wrong now?

Next Time... As Alex and I keep singing when we watch the Prequel "She Said He Said", didn't we have a loverly time the day we went to Trenzalore... Much is promised. Will it be delivered? Or will it be "A Good Man Goes to the Wedding of River Song" all over again? If his name turns out to be "St John" I will scream. Time for the answers? And everything that's been done in "The Name of the Doctor".

PS:

There has been what can only be described as a bit of a FLUFF up, and the BBC's American distributor has sent out copies of Series Seven Part 2, including the series finale, a week early. Fans are being advised to spend a week in a medically induced coma to avoid spoilers.

So I doubt anyone is reading!

Unfairness of FPTP leads to parties ignoring 59% of voters in Oxfordshire.

Thanks again for checking out my novel Off to Be the Wizard, (Available for Kindle (US, UK),Nook, old-school, dead tree form, DRM-free on Smashwords, and as a free sample), and for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Nadine says Dave should dump LDs &get into bed with Ukip.Only problem: LDs57 MPs, UKIP 0. goo.gl/IwfWg. twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/st…

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 12, 2013

If Dave followed Nadine & dumped LDs for Ukip then Nick could do reverse. CON MPs+Ukip MPs=305. LAB MPs+LD MPs=313.

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 12, 2013

Writing for Public Service Europe, Lib Dem campaigner Richard Marbrow has an interesting piece on the distinctly geographical ‘success’ of Ukip.

Here’s an excerpt:

For those of us who ply our politics in the north or the west of the United Kingdom, the inability of the British press to understand the existence of parts of the country more than an hour from London is a source of never ending frustration. The game changer of UKIP gains in the county council elections is a phenomenon largely contained in the South and East of England. Their breakthrough did not even extend into the South West, in theory one of their strongest areas.

In terms of seats won, UKIP did not beat the Liberal Democrats in any European region and only beat Labour in one – the South East. Two thirds of their seats came in just two of the eight English regions with widespread elections – the East and South East – and the further north you go, the fewer seats UKIP won. In the two northernmost regions – the North West and North East – UKIP did not win a single seat and in Yorkshire and the Humber they won just two. While the East Midlands result flattered them with 16 councillors in Lincolnshire in the West Midlands, they only scraped home in 6 seats.

Just to put the UKIP victory in further perspective they got less than half as many seats as the Liberal Democrats and less than a third of the Labour total. The Tories got seven times as many seats as the party being treated as victors. The number of councillors elected as independents also handily beat UKIPs ‘earth shattering’ total. So UKIP are largely a party of the South East of the country. Unfortunately, the British media is a creature of broadly the same geographical confines and does not understand the polarisation of politics between the North and South of the country.

Already there is speculation that UKIP will win the European elections in 2014. While their fifth place showing in 2013 will continue to be portrayed as a glorious victory for some time to come – the media are a fickle, capricious bunch and with more than 150 UKIP county councillors now joined to Nigel Farage in a political family with some very interesting characters, the opportunity for bozo eruptions is greatly increased and their performance in 2014 cannot be predicted with any certainty.

The true impact of UKIP as we approach the 2014 elections to the European Parliament will largely be the way in which they affect the major political parties and the messages they campaign on. All three major party leaders seem to be prepared to pander on immigration despite many well-known ‘facts’ being completely untrue. Will one of the leaders ever be brave enough to point out that UKIP leaflets – about 29 million Bulgarians and Romanians being able to come to the UK – are scaremongering of the basest kind, or will they all agree that ‘something must be done’?

You can read the rest of Richard’s piece here.

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

Vince Cable published an interesting piece in the New Statesman last month (I missed it at the time): My advice to young Lib Dems — rise above the tribalism.

It’s a biographical reflection on his political journey — from Young Liberal to Mr Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ Labour to the breakaway SDP and finally to the Liberal Democrats, where he joined “some of the descendants of Grimond and Crosland”.

However, it also has a very clear political message. At least, I think it does. Tell me below-the-line if you think I’m over-reading, especially the third point.

First, the danger of formal mergers even where the missions seem aligned. Vince’s efforts to unite the Liberals and Campaign for Democratic Socialism “were a disaster, as both sides formed obscure theological points on which to disagree, proving themselves every bit as sectarian as warring Trotskyite sects. I was disowned and the warriors went back to their tribal armies.”

Secondly, that party loyalties rule, especially where the points of difference are small but significant (the closer you are, the louder you shout): “having walked along both sides of the dividing line for half a century, I recognise the bitter intensity of these small differences and the strength of tribal affiliation.”

And thirdly — and I think most significantly — Vince brings the story up-to-date, with what sounds to me like a call for Lib Dems and Labour social democrats to work together to challenge the Right, as historically represented by the Tories but also now by Ukip:

My own descendants are aspiring Liberal students faced with hostile Labour social democrats. They no longer have the moral superiority and innocence of opposition; but they do have the understanding of a party of government. I trust they will not repeat my mistake, dissipating energy into an attempted merger. But they should rise above tribalism, not least because many shared beliefs and values are being challenged more than ever.

Pointed, no?

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

Vince Cable has spoken up for the economic benefits of immigration in the Queen’s Speech debate, challenging the half truth and hyperbole in the illiberal rhetoric that’s doing the rounds at the moment. He reserved much of his ire for the Labour party:

I was hesitant about raising the subject because it is essentially covered by the Home Office, but substantial economic issues are also involved and it is important to refer to them. I was provoked into feeling that we should debate the issue in this context because a couple of days ago I was on the radio on the “Jeremy Vine” programme. I was following a female voice that was ranting on about millions of illegal immigrants and the negligence of the Government in letting them all in and not deporting enough people. I thought at the time that it was some fringe party that regarded Mr Nigel Farage as a sort of soggy, left-wing liberal, but I then realised it was the Labour shadow Home Secretary, and I tried to understand where she was coming from. It says quite a lot about the Labour party’s current values that it feels it necessary to apologise for letting in foreigners, but is still reluctant to apologise for wrecking the economy.

He then described how he had calmly debated the issue of immigration with a constituent who had expressed concerns:

I vividly recall a conversation I had with a constituent, shortly before the last general election. She was taking me to task for what she said were millions of illegal immigrants in the country and, rather recklessly perhaps, I decided to debate the subject with her. I asked, “How do you know?”, and she said, “Well, I see them in the high street the whole time.” I said, “Okay, but how do you know they are illegal?” She looked at me and said, “Mr Cable, why are you being so difficult? You know exactly what I mean”, and pointed up the road to the Hounslow mosque. Unfortunately, beneath a lot of the arguments about numbers, that is the prejudice we are trying to confront. We must, I think, make the case—I certainly intend to make it—for managed immigration that has a positive impact on the country, while at the same time providing the necessary level of reassurance.

He then had a bit of a go about the “logical absurdity” of setting policy in terms of net migration:

In order to clear the decks for an honest discussion of this problem, we must confront the reality that some of the facts, or factoids, used in this context are deeply unhelpful. All parties and commentators use the concept of net immigration as a way of measuring what is happening on that front, but at the heart of that concept lies a logical absurdity. One reason net immigration rises is because fewer British people emigrate—one would have thought it rather a good thing that people feel comfortable living in this country and want to stay here. Net immigration declines if more British people emigrate, which one would have thought is rather a bad thing. We often operate, therefore, with a concept that gives us misleading and unhelpful conclusions.

While I expressed concern the other day about the immigration proposals in the Queen’s Speech, I am reassured that our lot are saying the right things, both in private and in public and it’s not just the usual suspects, either. Ed Davey took Nigel Farage’s immigration rhetoric apart in a little watched conversation on the BBC News Channel, telling him that if we put up our drawbridges, there would be retaliation from the rest of the EU. He pointed out that most EU citizens were in fact working here and paying taxes.

I heard excerpts of Vince’s speech on last night’s Today in Parliament which is well worth a listen, not least because it also has our Lords Chief Whip Dick Newby talking about his costume for State Opening of Parliament. You can read the rest of Vince’s speech, which includes details on comsumer protection, intellectual property and reducing NI costs for businesses, in Hansard here.

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

Read an excerpt from THE ARROWS OF TIME, the forthcoming final volume of the ORTHOGONAL trilogy.

Have you noticed how many right-wingers are decrying the "tyranny" of the Obama administration these days?

It's particularly rife on the Tea Partying far right, where it's extremely common to hear Obama being portrayed as a "tyrant," particularly regarding his recent attempts to promote gun-control measures. (See Ben Shapiro whining thus in the video above.) So you'll often find crap like this floating about on their Facebook pages.

But it's becoming common among mainstream right-wingers, particularly after the president dismissed these characterizations during a speech at Ohio State. Sure enough, everyone from Jonah Goldberg to Michelle Malkin piled on with the "yeah, whatever you say, dude" retorts.

But I was reminded the other day, rereading Stephen Budiansky's marvelous book about Reconstruction, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, just where the right-wing fetish about "tyranny" comes from. It's a highly selective fetish, after all; none of these "libertarians" seemed even remotely concerned when George W. Bush launched the whole "enemy combatants" enterprise back in 2001.

According to Budiansky, it -- like the phrase "waving the bloody shirt," as well as the whole conservative adoption of that rhetorical ruse as an aggressive form of defense -- has its origins in the years during and immediately following the Civil War, when it was common for Southerners to sneer at Abraham Lincoln (alive or dead) as a "tyrant":

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”
“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the “domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous. “This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being subjected.


A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.

So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers, happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution, that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.

Indeed, it's common to hear neo-Confederate agitators -- those folks who are still pushing for modern secession by the South -- describe Lincoln to this day as a "tyrant."

The idea of being governed by a black president? To many of these people even today, that is itself the essence of tyranny.

Henry G Manson on how the Tories have made GE2015 easier for Ed

There is a bit of talk as to whether certain Conservative MP are able to be endorsed by UKIP and stand with two party emblems next to their name on the ballots paper. This is now possible under updated election law. This week Peter Bone MP took to the airwaves arguing for joint Conservative and UKIP candidates to take advantage of this:

“There was a tremendous Conservative vote. There were the conservatives that voted Conservative and the conservatives who voted Ukip. The trick is to get us all together again and that’s what we’ve got to do.”

I can see why that would be attractive to the certain individual MPs as they attempt to ride both horses to save their skin. It could be less straight forward for the parties. As we’ve come to appreciate UKIP can now win votes from Labour and in Northern heartlands. If UKIP backed joint candidates with the Tories it could endanger their appeal in many parts of the North where the blues remain so toxic. Look what’s happened to the Lib Dems in the urban North there as a result of coalition with the Conservative. For UKIP to pull it off it would need a suitable number of Labour MPs to enter in a similar arrangement. This is never going to happen. The party simply wouldn’t permit it.

Being backed by two parties would also raise other issue when candidates become elected and arrive in the Commons. They’d potentially experience contradictory whipping operations. Would they be permitted into the 1922 or would their loyalties be questioned? Many Labour MPs have dual ‘identities’ as Labour and Co-op Party MPs. The difference is that the Co-op Party doesn’t stand against Labour MPs and there is no Co-op whip as would surely be the case with UKIP. Conservative and UKIP MPs could pose as many problems as solutions. All in all this seems a clunky response to the fragmented state of British politics and avoiding the bigger problem further upstream – the electoral system itself.

It’s worth casting more than a moment’s glance at what might have been for the blue party. The electoral system that would suit the Conservatives the most right now is the one they campaigned hard against early in the parliament – the Alternative Vote.

This would have effortlessly allowed right-leaning voters to support UKIP first and Conservative second without fear of ‘splitting the vote’ and letting in Lib Dems or Labour.

Instead David Cameron’s Conservatives are now going to have to try and win back the support of UKIP while not alienating their more moderate supporters. Not an easy task. It’s all well and good Boris Johnson arguing that the rise of UKIP is good news for conservative ideas – but here speaks a man who isn’t going to be held account for the outcome of the next general election and has to fret about marginal seats.

What does seem strange looking back is how the official Yes 2 AV campaign went out of its way not to include UKIP in its campaign. Instead as a result it gave the impression of being a liberal middle class enterprise rather than one based on some wider democratic concerns with First Past the Post that would have almost certainly included UKIP. Comfort zone politics at its worst. If an AV campaign and referendum were re-run today I wonder if the result would different with Farage on the platform? I’m pretty sure it would.

Is there any regret at all among Tories that they opposed AV in the referendum? I don’t see any sign of it despite it possibly being a pivotal moment for the party.

Will much of the UKIP vote come to the Conservatives closer to election as some at CCHQ hope? I’m not certain. It’s starting to look like First Past the Post could make it harder for Conservative Party to win power in the years ahead – it’s certainly helped give it a stinking headache with UKIP now.

Despite his support for it, Ed Miliband could well be the biggest beneficiary of AV’s defeat. As with the avoidable collapse of boundary changes, the Labour leader is starting to look lucky.

Henry G Manson

An interesting bit of thought experimentation is going on about what might happen if the Queen Speech (the Government's legislative plan for the year) is amended. The New Statesman has raided the parliamentary website to dig out this quote...

The first parliamentary test of a minority or coalition government is the vote on an amendment to the Queen’s Speech. If the Queen’s Speech is amended, the Prime Minister must resign. The Conservative party lost their majority in the December 1923 election. They put their programme to the House in January 1924 as a minority administration and lost a vote on the King’s Speech. Ramsay MacDonald was called to form a Labour administration.

More specifically the advice regarding Parliamentary elections can be found readily online:

Motion of no confidence
A government cannot operate effectively unless it can command a majority within the
House of Commons. Should it fail to enjoy the confidence of the majority of the
House, it has to hold a general election. For example, on 28 March 1979, the
Conservative Opposition defeated the Labour Government by 311-310 votes on the
motion "That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government". Parliament
was dissolved on 7 April, the General Election was won by the Conservatives on 3
May, with the new Parliament summoned to meet on 9 May 1979. Governments can
also be forced into resignation or into calling a general election by being defeated in
the debate on the Queen's Speech (its legislative programme for the session) as for
instance on 21 January 1924, or losing its Finance Bill, or other major items of
legislation on which it fought a general election campaign.

As you can see, there's a little discrepancy here in the terminology, but the realities are that the 1924 "motion of no confidence" was a self-ascribed one. The motion itself said nothing about confidence in the government, but the government of the time decided to take it as such. The government lost and the Prime Minister requested to dissolve parliament.

There is, however, news that the Commons Information Office wouldn't consider this latest situation as a vote of confidence, due to the Fixed Term Parliaments Act...

BREAKING: Fixed Term Parliaments Act means amendment to Queen's Speech would NOT be a confidence vote in PM, Commons Info Office says.

— Robert Hutton Squire (@RobDotHutton) May 10, 2013

Remember that this is (if true) the same body that above talks about the motions of no confidence.

There is a problem here though. There is the mixing of two different situations in to one. The first is the issue of no confidence in a Government that is leading Parliament, the second is the forcing of an election. In our past the two have been entwined, where there is a situation where a government is being hampered from doing their job as they wish to see it, the choice has been there for the prime minister to say that it has to go back to an election. Indeed the idea for the majority of Parliaments existence of a no confidence being passed against a government would mean that a party has voted against its own leader, and the need for an election after this seems obvious (though it is not the only option...)

The Fixed Term Parliaments act deals purely in the dates of elections, and not in the confidences of governments. The point of the legislation is that governments may fall, but the primary objective for Parliament is to set another government up in it's place without resorting to an election. It is, in theory, a removal of power from the Prime Minister to call elections at an opportune time, and to ensure everyone can prepare for the next election.

There is nothing stopping a government deciding that a vote on it's policies is one of confidence, indeed there is (correct me if I'm wrong) no legislation regarding motions of confidence. To read the House of Commons Standard Note on Confidence Motions this is my understanding (up to the Fixed Term Parliaments Act)

Yet, despite their central importance, there is no certainty about the rules on the form and applicability of confidence motions in the UK Parliament, as it is established by convention rather than by statute or standing order of the House.

This note goes in to detail about how a government responds to a confidence motion...

A confidence defeat for a Government will lead either to a request for a dissolution, or to the resignation of the Government. Modern practice, based on the four instances since 1895, suggests that dissolution rather than resignation is the result of a defeat. In current practice a Government is only obliged to resign or to seek a dissolution after being defeated on a confidence motion, although a significant defeat on any other motion may lead to a confidence motion

This makes me question the answer the Commons Information Office is giving on this subject. Clearly a vote against the legislative programme through an amendment is historically defined as being one of a vote of confidence (though there are issues I'll talk about below), does this mean that it is a vote to dissolve parliament? No, the two aren't necessarily entwined, even if they have been. This has always been the case though, and the Fixed Term Parliaments Act hasn't changed that.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Bill 2010-11 refers to a vote of ‘no confidence’ being passed by simple majority. It would appear that the intention is that the Government would not table a motion of no confidence in itself. However, it is not clear whether a defeat on a motion or issue of confidence would count as a vote of no confidence for the purposes of the legislation. For example, it is not clear whether a defeat on the Government’s budget would be considered as a vote of no confidence.

One possibility would be for the Government to make it clear before such a division that they considered it to be a matter of confidence; then the Speaker would certify it as such. This would effectively allow the Government to table a constructive vote of no confidence. The Speaker might rule before any debate on a motion which might be viewed as a confidence motion as to whether it would be considered as one under Clause 2(2). This might have the potential to draw the Speaker into some controversy, particularly in the case of ‘engineered’ confidence motions.

And so despite any protestations that only an explicit vote that includes the terms "That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government" is the only way to perform a no confidence, legislatively it is far from as cut and dry as this. Indeed there is an entire gulf in the legislation as to what would happen if the Prime Minister chose to resign and the parliament couldn't form another government within 14 days. Would it be bound by the Fixed Term Parliaments Act to call an election, or because an explicit no confidence motion with the required words was used, could the parliament drudge on, zombie like, until the next election date?

This is especially pertinent in this scenario...for if Cameron did make it clear this was a confidence vote then he could be forced to resign this government, yet have more than 14 days to form a new one.

And this is important...despite the talk in the initial article, and the tweet above, being about a vote on the Prime Minister, it is not, only the government. Our current government is the Lib Dem/Tory coalition. A new minority Tory government would be a completely different government in the eyes of the constitution, and fully able to be led by David Cameron without issue.

This is why I don't see this issue as being one that is relevant to the ongoing Tory governance of the country, and certainly not to do with the idea of an early election...but it could very well be the start of an undermining of the coalition. If the EU referendum legislation wasn't in the Queens Speech, even if Cameron agreed on that front, to try and reinsert it (or to complain about it not being there) is essentially a snub on the Lib Dems. What it says, in practice, is that a coalition agreement between two parties can attempt to be undone by parliament, and in this case it would seem that the Prime Minister can even go along with it.

This is an executive agreeing to a legislative programme, and then part of that executive hiding behind the democratic actions of their part of the coalition to get around that agreement. If that's not a no confidence on government, I don't know what is. However if Cameron is explicit in stating that the government don't see this as an issue of confidence, constitutional practice would likely be on their side even if the amendment passed. The big thing to watch is the coalition going forward.

Confidence of the House or not, will the coalition have confidence amongst it's partners after this nefarious shifting of agreed plans?

A week ago Sunday, one of our local booksellers, Sheldon McArthur of North by Northwest Books, tossed me the April 22, 2013 Publishers Weekly. The issue has a good review of my upcoming Kris DeLake novel, A Spy To Die For, but it turns out that wasn’t why Sheldon gave me the PW. He gave it to me to see my reaction to the ad on the cover. 

The ad, taken out by mega-bestselling writer James Patterson, appeared in PW, The New York Times Book Review, and Kirkus. It asks, “Who Will Save Our Books?” and it calls for impassioned editorials urging the Federal Government and everyone else to save our bookstores and libraries.

According to the accompanying PW article, Patterson believes the entire publishing industry is in trouble. He says that “everyone” can chip in to fix it. He did the ads to start a dialogue about the future of the book business, and ways to save it.

He says that publishers have to stop complaining and start doing. Then he adds,

The problem continues with media coverage, as Patterson said the same article about the book business being in trouble–with little information beyond that and little mention of possible solutions–is being written over and over. “That article is not worth running,” he said. “The New York Times needs to wake the fuck up.”

I do agree with his last point: The New York Times needs to wake up. But really, that’s beside the point. The industry is changing, and Patterson sees only one corner of it. He’s seeing it from the lofty position of being one of the biggest bestsellers in the world, and he doesn’t realize that looking down from the 87^th floor gives you a wide, but often inaccurate, view of what’s happening on the street.

If you follow the above link to PW’s article on the Patterson ad, you’ll note that it quotes Patterson entirely, and adds no other analysis. Patterson, you see, is not just a big bestseller, but he’s a huge supporter of literacy. He’s donated hundreds of thousands of books to the troops, and he launched a great kid’s reading promotion site called ReadKiddoRead which at the moment, unfortunately, is also running Patterson’s ad.

PW, which is following most industry trends, isn’t about to point out that, with this ad, Patterson stepped in it. Not because they just made money off him for the ad. Not because he’s going to piss off the Times or because he’s wrong about the fact that the dialogue is inaccurate. But because his conclusions are wrong from the limited data he’s getting, and PW  knows it.

Fact: The Number of Independent Bookstores has grown steadily since 2009. Look at the accompanying chart from the American Booksellers Association.  The number of independent bookstores has grown from 1,401 to 1,567 in three  years. But that’s not the interesting part of the chart. The interesting part is the location number. Yeah, the ABA counts only 166 new bookstores (only!), but the number of bookstore locations has increased by 249. That means the indies are expanding. They’re making money. They’re doing well.

Realize too, that the ABA doesn’t count all retail book locations. If a coffee shop sells books, but calls itself a coffee shop, it’s not a bookstore. It doesn’t count. And not every bookseller signs up with the American Booksellers Association. According to this somewhat pessimistic article , there were 10,800 bookstores in the United States as of October of 2012. That number includes chain stores as well as indies. 10,800 bookstores. Not places—like your grocery store—that carry books. And realize that when we’re talking about bookstores, we’re talking brick-and-mortar stores that specialize in paper books. We’re not talking about e-bookstores.

 Get the difference here? There are a lot, a lot, a lot of book venues, and they’re growing.

Fact: Independent Bookstores have become players again. Sales at independent bookstores count for 10% of the market. Sales at Barnes & Noble count for 20% and Amazon for 29%.  If sales continue the way they’re going, independent booksellers will capture even more of the market.

Sales at independent bookstores rose 8% in 2012 over 2011, while sales at Barnes & Noble were in the words of one writer, “tepid.” This growth prompted Wendy Welch, co-owner of Tales of the Lonesome Pine in Virginia and author of the 2012 memoir The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, to declare to The Christian Science Monitor that “2012 was the year of the bookstore.”

In the same article, Texan Steve Bercu , owner of BookPeople and a founder of the Austin Independent Business Alliance, says, “We had the best year in store history in 2012. It was the third best year in a row. We’re up 12 percent so far for 2013.”

Fact: E-books haven’t killed the indies. In fact, indies can now profit from e-book sales. How, you might ask? Well, in August of 2012, Kobo partnered with the American Booksellers Association to help indies sell e-books. This is from the press release:

Booksellers will be able to offer a total experience for their customers including a full line of eReaders, eReading accessories, and ebooks from Kobo’s catalog of nearly 3 million titles. ABA members will share in the revenue on every sale.  The program includes valuable training, in-store merchandising, marketing, sales, and logistics solutions to help independents be successful. ABA members will also be able to offer ebooks directly to their customers online.

The important part here is “valuable training, in-store merchandising, marketing, sales, and logistics solutions.” During the fall of 2012, participating booksellers closed their stores for a day or two or sent staff to a local Kobo workshop class. Participating retailers include large stores like Powell’s and small ones like Sheldon’s North by Northwest books.

If you’re wondering how the e-book part of this works, Galley Cat has a helpful little article here, explaining it all.

The press release states that Kobo expected 400 booksellers to sign on, but the last statistic I saw had 450 retailers already participating in the program. Here’s the list of participating bookstores in the United States. I didn’t count, but it might be more than 450 now.

Honestly, if you’re an indie writer or a hybrid writer and your book is not on Kobo, then you’re missing a huge growing market, not just internationally, but in the States as well.

This is why Sheldon handed me the PW with two fingers, as if someone had pooped on the magazine. He wanted to me to express my opinion of the ad since, as a friend, he knew without asking that I thought it unfortunate. I won’t say it was stupid, though, because, as I said, Patterson’s beliefs also come from statistics.

You need to understand a few things about a big bestseller’s career before you can understand why Patterson believes the entire industry is in trouble.

James Patterson’s first bestseller hit the shelves in 1993. The first movie based on one of his bestsellers, Kiss The Girls, appeared in 1997. When the big distribution collapse hit the industry right around that time, Patterson’s sales increased, unlike the sales of 90% of established authors.

Why?

A brief history—very brief, because we’re covering a lot here. In 1993, when Patterson’s first book came out, there were thousands of small book distributers scattered around the country. They were regional and they understood their region as well as you understand your hometown.

Toward the middle of the decade, large grocery store chains became major players in the book industry. Safeway, Albertsons, and others had large book sections, and they bought a lot of books. Corporate at the various grocery stores decided that it disliked dealing with hundreds of tiny invoices per month and declared that it would only buy from a handful of independent distributers. Those distributers got to “compete” for the business.

The problem was that only a few distributers got the bulk of the business right at the same time that chain bookstores worked to drive out the independents. In 1997, there were 12, 363 bookstores around the country. Because of the actions of the big chains, 1,000 independents closed between 2000 and 2007. We’re regaining bookstores (see above), but the effect of these losses was cumulative on the people who distributed to bookstores. The independent distributers went out of business first.

Chain bookstores had national in-house buyers, not regional distributers. The remaining business belonged to places like the independents (which were closing) and big non-bookstore chains like groceries. When those businesses demanded that they would work only with a handful of distributors, the distributors who won that lottery had to scramble. No longer could they sell the books of Oregon writers to Oregon readers. They had to sell national books to a national chain.

The problem was that these distributors did not know which books would sell nationally, so they punted. They only ordered bestsellers—and that included Patterson.

Indeed, if you look at all of Patterson’s book sales, the bulk of them occurred after the collapse of the distribution system. He’s one of the guys who benefitted from the shrinking book market.

Of course, he doesn’t know that or if he does, I’m sure he doesn’t realize his success occurred in part because he was already on the bestseller list at the time of the collapse. That he continued to have success when many other bestsellers didn’t is a tribute to his storytelling skills. But sales figures he enjoyed were partially inflated by the collapse of the regional market.

Now, look at the statistics for the last few years. Independent bookstores are back, and they have 10% of the market—and that percentage is growing. They also order differently than the chain bookstores and the other chains like Costco, Wal-Mart, and the grocery stores.

Local bookstores order according to the needs of their clientele. Sheldon, who used to own the very famous Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles (and he “retired” to Lincoln City), specializes in mystery books and books by local authors.

According to ABA head Oren Teicher, the buy-local movement is one of the reasons independent bookstores are growing. The Christian Science Monitor article paraphrases him this way:

Independent bookstores are what urbanists call “third places,” like farmers’ markets, that add to a community’s sense of identity. And like farmers’ markets, some customers come for the atmosphere, not the prices.

What this means for writers like Patterson is that their sales are declining. These sales would have declined even if the indie-publishing revolution hadn’t happened. Centralized ordering only exists in a few chains now that Borders has vanished, and even then, the numbers are down. Barnes & Noble made news this year when it announced that it was going to increase the number of titles it carried in its store by de-emphasizing the Nook. B&N had tried to carry fewer book titles on site in previous years and add all kinds of other products, almost destroying its brand.

There are other reasons Patterson’s numbers are going down. There are fewer display slots for mass market paperbacks. Publishers are trying to get readers to go to e-books for the cheap option by decreasing mass market altogether. And print runs have changed, which Dean Wesley Smith explains in a blog post from earlier this week.

I’ll discuss all of this in depth next week and probably the week after, but here’s the upshot.

Not only are the sales figures for bestsellers declining across the board, but their income is as well. Publishers aren’t paying advances in such large numbers, but even if they were, the royalty payments have declined. Some of that is because ebooks have a different payment structure, but some of it is the leveling of the playing field.

Readers have a finite budget for books. There are readers, like my husband, who adore James Patterson’s books. There are other readers who picked up the latest Patterson because nothing else looked interesting. We all do that with books; our tastes vary (and let’s not discuss our tastes in the comments, okay?) and we sometimes buy books to read on a flight or while we’re waiting in a hospital waiting room because it’s the only book of its type in the gift shop or airport bookstore, not because the author is a favorite.

With the rise of e-books, that person waiting for a flight doesn’t need to buy the next Patterson. She can download whatever book she wants right there in the airport and happily read it while jetting across country—even if that book is self-published by the author.

Those choices cut into sales of bestsellers. They also cut into sales of traditional publishers.

At the moment, all methods of counting paper book sales across the United States only count traditionally published books. This will change in the next six months. Again, I’ll deal with that in future posts. But for the short term, what writers like James Patterson are seeing is this: their sales figures have gone down. Reports in PW showing industry print statistics also show a decline in print sales for the big bestsellers.

Traditional publishers are whining more than usual because the industry is changing under their feet and they’re struggling to keep up. I had to laugh at Mike Shatzkin’s piece today  in which he discussed how the industry needs to grow its marketshare, and he decided the only way to figure that out was to ignore the successful new kids on the block who were using technology to their advantage, and to talk to the old-timers.

Yep. That’s how you grow a business. Talk to the people who are struggling to find a clue.

Which is what Patterson has been doing. He’s been talking to bookstore owners who are friends of his, talking to the heads of publishing houses, and talking to other bestselling writers. Patterson is a very, very, very smart guy. He understands business better than most writers ever will.

But what he doesn’t realize is that his information is corrupted.

The old-time booksellers are leaving the business. They’re closing their stores because running a bookstore the way that you did in 1995 no longer works. From The Christian Science Monitor:

Today’s [bookstore] owners often have researched the business and worked in other stores before they started putting up shelves. [Daniel] Goldin, for example, worked as a buyer for Schwartz Books and bought his storefront location from the former owners when the local chain closed in 2009 after 82 years.

In another encouraging sign, John Mutter, editor in chief of Shelf Awareness, publisher of two industry newsletters, sees more young owners than he did five years ago, when industry events “were a sea of gray hair,” he says.

These new people understand social media, technology, and how to use things like Kobo’s program. They order books differently, and they operate the stores differently. They also are new, and probably not the people that James Patterson consulted. Mike Shatzkin certainly won’t talk with them either, to the detriment of the folks at Digital Book World.

Other bestsellers believe that book reading is declining. Anyone who has read Scott Turow’s misguided posts for the Author’s Guild knows that. Patterson’s ad was in direct response to Turow. Patterson wants to do something to save an industry that, from the perspective of the People At The Top, is dying.

And for them, it is. A revolution is sweeping the book industry. Dean and I learned some lessons about that in April, which I’ll be sharing in the next few weeks.

Disruptive change like the kind that the book industry is going through will provide new players, new people who will rise to the top. They’ll do it in ways that would not have worked in the old system.

Here’s the confusing part: the old system will continue to work, just not at the numbers that it saw when everything consolidated at the beginning of this century.

Right now, mass market bestsellers can hit the New York Times extended list with anything from 17,000 sales to 30,000 sales. The numbers at the top of the list are much lower than they were in the past as well.

There are several reasons for this:

1) There are fewer outlets for mass market sales. Even the grocery chains, which precipitated the distribution crisis, carry fewer books in the store, and many of those books are trade paperbacks and hardcovers, not mass-market paperbacks.

2) The big publishers want readers to buy the ebook as the cheap edition, and some heavy readers are doing just that. But more importantly, the big publishers are deliberately publishing fewer mass market paperbacks to drive readers to e-books. (Forgetting, of course, that the bulk of mass market readers can’t afford a dedicated e-reader or may not even have a credit card so that they can shop online.)

3) Independent booksellers (10% of the market!) don’t always carry bestsellers, figuring that the chains can offer those books at better discounts. So 10% of the market ignores certain types of books in favor of niche books.

4) And of course, the readers themselves, faced with their own limited budgets and a plethora of choices aren’t always buying bestsellers when the books come out, figuring those books will be easy to find years from now, when a midlist book might not.

What’s the upshot of this besides the fact that Patterson’s ad did him no credit? It’s that book sales are growing in a healthy way. And if your book is in print, then you will have the opportunity to sell your book in a variety of venues, including chain stores. I’ll deal with that indepth in the next few weeks.

The growth in independent booksellers, the rise of Kobo which allows ebooks into local bookstores, and the growth of the book market is fantastic news for writers.

Our industry doesn’t need a bailout. The dialogue that Patterson calls for can and should continue. But it should include the small booksellers, the independently published writers, and readers themselves.

Oh, wait! We are having that discussion. We’re just not doing it on the pages of The New York Times, which is, after all, the company paper in a company town.

And if Patterson had asked me if he could put his ad on my blog, I would have told him that he could not. Not because I disagreed with it, but because I don’t take ads here.

This business blog is entirely funded by the readers—and I intend to keep it that way.

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“The Business Rusch: The Year of the Bookstore” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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As we expected, the Queen’s Speech yesterday did not include a revised “snooper’s charter“. Well, mostly – the Guardian thinks otherwise, but whilst there are areas where the Civil Service are still pushing for better tools to tackle the war-on-terrorists-and-paedophiles they’ve chosen a different tack this time.

The general impression I’ve received from the briefing notes is that whoever prepared them has no idea what they are asking for.

Here is the except from the Queen’s Speech Briefing Notes (PDF link, page 74). I am quoting this at length because the language is important to the following discussion.

When communicating over the Internet, people are allocated an Internet Protocol (IP) address. However, these addresses are generally shared between a number of people. In order to know who has actually sent an email or made a Skype call, the police need to know who used a certain IP address at a given point in time. Without this, if a suspect used the internet to communicate instead of making a phone call, it may not be possible for the police to identify them.

The Government is looking at ways of addressing this issue with CSPs. It may involve legislation

Firstly, let’s look at the notion that a network can associate an IP address with a person. This is fairly easy to refute, because you just have to consider most households have shared computers. So, what about at a computer levels? Well, many households have a single account on a computer and many devices (e.g. iPads, phones, Gaming Consoles) and older operating systems do not have the ability to handle multiple users at all.

This problem is relatively easily solvable, technically. Simply require service providers to operate gateways that end users must log into individually using centrally-issued ID prior to accessing the internet. The technology is there because many large companies run such systems to track abuse and this is certainly a much simpler challenge to solve than previous suggestions around logging everything that happens on the internet. Politically however, such measures would be suicidal. I don’t believe this what is being proposed.

Rather more likely it seems, is the ability to identify an end device, rather than end user. The current generation of IP addressing – IPv4 – does not have enough address space to do this, hence the deployment of Network Address Translation (NAT) to share an IP address between multiple users. Your home broadband probably uses a single public IP for everyone in the house, and large organisations will also use one or a very few public IP addresses for all of their corporate traffic. This is necessary because there are just over 4 billion addresses theoretically available and significantly less than that by the time all the overheads have been taken into account. Ignoring that organisations like Facebook, Twitter and so on need IP addresses themselves to host their content, that’s still less than the number of people on the planet. And many of us have more than one device needing an address.

The next generation of IP, IPv6, has rather more addresses. (Just over three hundred trillion trillion trillion) But IPv6 is not ready yet, and mandating that everyone in the UK use it and could not ever use the older version again would cut us off from large portions of the internet. Economic suicide this time. Even if we could do this, privacy concerns with IPv6 have already been of concern to the technical community. Originally, under a system called EUI-64, the last part of your address was the hardware MAC address of your computer, a unique number rather like a serial number. People realised this allowed devices and users to be tracked rather easily, so they came up with a simple solution – every time your computer connects to an IPv6 network, the last bit of the address is random and changes each time.

As a result, if IPv6 is the solution the mandarins are thinking of, they’ll need to have a specific UK version of computers with this privacy feature disabled. Possible, but difficult to enforce even if they find a way of forcing IPv6 deployment.

There is only one interpretation of the briefing notes that remains that makes sense and the clue is in the last line regarding legislation and service providers. What they are concerned about is large scale address sharing, referred to as Carrier Grade NAT. (CGN) With this, millions of users, such as on Vodaphone or O2, are behind a single IP address. As old-school IPv4 addresses run out, big broadband operators may roll this out for those on fixed lines too. (BT are currently trialling this, for example) The police and security services want to make sure the providers not only log all the technical information for these so they can identify a single household or mobile device, but that they keep the data for long enough to be useful. Where such data is logged by service providers, it is typically only kept for long enough to generate capacity planning reports and handle network abuse – hours or days. Law enforcement works on a much longer timescale, typically weeks or months by which time the data has been thrown away.

However, it would appear the powers required to do all this are already enshrined in the existing Data Retention Directive. So it’s still a little unclear why all this needs to appear in the Queen’s Speech.

As is typical with internet policy matters coming from the government, it’s all a bit vague.

We know that there are survivors. They must be disgustingly mutated.

Flowers began to grow back in Hiroshima less than a month after Little Boy incinerated the city. But this was no comforting return of nature after humanity’s terrible flash of technological sorcery. The distorted and malformed blooms were a haunting sign that the world would never be the same again.

Both the wielders and the victims of the atom bomb knew about the lethal potential of radiation. Survivors of the blast told lurid tales of the black rain that brought radioactive sludge from the atmosphere back down to earth, and doctors recognised the low white blood cell counts of their dying patients as a symptom of something similar to an X-ray overdose. Babies who were in their mothers’ wombs at the time of the explosion were born with cruel deformities and genetic maladies.

The Americans were keen to play down the radiation story. To be fair, the radiation levels dropped rapidly after the explosion, and fears that Hiroshima might be uninhabitable for decades were swiftly proved to be unfounded. Seizing on this, the US military spin machine presented their atom bomb as just another high explosive,  certainly more powerful than any yet created, but not fundamentally different from a stick of dynamite.

They maintained this stance for the best part of nine years, and for all the vague fears among the general public radiation was mostly seen by solid, no-nonsense types as a relatively minor hazard of warfare in the atomic age. Nuclear fallout was recognised and studied, but with most atomic test explosions taking place high enough off the ground to avoid drawing radiation-blasted soil up into the mushroom cloud, it didn’t seem like a major worry.

Castle Bravo changed all that. Operation Castle was the US attempt to develop a hydrogen bomb that could be practically delivered to the enemy. The preceding programme, Operation Ivy, saw the first ever explosion of a hydrogen bomb in the Ivy Mike detonation. At over ten megatons, this was more than six hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, but as an experimental setup – a huge, cryogenically-cooled storage tank – it wasn’t something you could readily drop on Moscow. Castle Bravo swapped the cumbersome liquid deuterium that fuelled Ivy Mike’s fusion explosion for solid lithium deuteride, creating a bomb that could be readily transported – and dropped.

It was detonated on Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954. The explosive yield was 15 megatons – three times higher than expected, thanks to an incomplete model of the fusion process. The wind had shifted eastward, blowing the radioactive fallout outside of the designated zone. The fallout plume spread out over a hundred miles, shrouding inhabited islands in radioactive dust. Most famously, the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryu Maru was caught in the plume, radioactive coral debris raining down as white ash. Its 23 crewmen all became seriously ill, and one died. This was too big a calamity for the official US denial machine to brush aside. Along with the dreadful effects on the many islanders and fishermen subjected to this calamity, and the strain the event put on US diplomatic relations with Japan and in the wider Pacific region, Castle Bravo showed, publicly and undeniably, the far-reaching lethality of nuclear fallout from the new hydrogen bombs.

Not only would nuclear warfare devastate cities, destroy countries, turning nations to rubble in a few hours or days like World War II on fast-forward. It would also poison the soil, contaminate the sea, fill the air with lethal dust, covering the world in a deadly shroud that would linger for years – centuries – millennia. The Earth would become a dead planet.

Which brings us to Skaro.

The dead planet with its petrified forest is Terry Nation’s surreal vision of a planet long since ravaged by nuclear war. If we’re going to understand what happens to our four time travellers once they step out onto the ruined surface, we have to look at exactly why radioactivity is so bad for you.

When we talk about radiation, as in the intangible killer that blighted the survivors of Hiroshima, Castle Bravo and Skaro, we’re really talking about ionising radiation. That is, rays of light or subatomic particles that have enough energy to knock electrons out of atoms when they collide with them. This matters, because chemical processes are all about the interactions between electrons belonging to different atoms, and ionising radiation is radiation that is powerful enough to screw up chemistry. The more complicated the chemistry, the more ways there are to screw it up, and the most complicated chemical phenomenon we know about is life. So, ionising radiation is particularly relevant if you are alive, especially if you plan to stay that way.

Your body is made up of many different kinds of cells, each performing its own specialised function. The effects of ionising radiation depend not just on what kind of cell it hits, but also on whether the cell is killed outright or merely damaged. Large doses of radiation will kill a load of cells at once, leading to radiation sickness, while lower doses can damage the reproductive mechanisms of cells, causing cancers or genetic mutations. The radiation levels that we encounter on Skaro are high enough to give the time travellers acute radiation sickness, while the natives seem to only be suffering the chronic effects of mutations. Evidently cells on Skaro are made of sterner stuff than on Earth.

How susceptible a cell is to radiation damage depends mainly on how quickly it reproduces: the higher the reproduction rate, the greater the chance that the cell will be screwed up by radiation. In our bodies, blood cells reproduce quickly, nervous system cells reproduce slowly, and the cells in your gut are somewhere in between. And right enough, at low (but still damaging) levels of radiation exposure it’s the blood cells that show the first sign of damage. At this stage you just feel fatigued, though if the radiation has affected the skin there may also be sunburn, and hair loss as the hair follicles are damaged. As the dose gets higher, the damage increases and the gastrointestinal cells begin to suffer. First nausea, then vomiting and diarrhea as the dose level increases. At the highest levels, the central nervous system crumbles, leading to loss of coordination, confusion, coma, shock, convulsions – the sort of symptoms that vomiting and diarrhea seem like a blessed condition.

The lower levels of damage can be treated – blood transfusions or bone marrow transplants can provide for a full recovery from blood disorders. If the gut is too badly damaged, however, death is inevitable, and pretty nasty. And if the radiation dose is high enough to take out the central nervous system, there’s not much in the way of medical treatment beyond one last, heavy dose of morphine.

Older people will tend to be more susceptible to radiation sickness, so it’s no surprise that the Doctor is the first to succumb. We can be thankful his symptoms do not progress beyond the first stages of fatigue: the sight of Billy Hartnell shitting his guts out all over Lime Grove Studio D is not one that anyone wants to see on a Saturday teatime.

If you get your radiation dose from fallout, rather than the direct radiation blast from the explosion itself, how much damage it does depends on the precise chemical makeup of the fallout that you breath in or ingest with your food, as well as the level of radiation it gives off. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, a wide range of radioactive isotopes would be present in the fallout. Project Gabriel, a US Atomic Energy Commission study in the 1950s, determined that the most dangerous isotope would be strontium-90. This isotope emits beta radiation – fast-moving electrons – but what makes it really nasty is where it sits while it’s doing the emitting. Strontium is chemically similar to calcium – it’s directly beneath it in the periodic table – and because of this it is readily absorbed into bones, where it hangs around giving the unfortunate victim bone cancer or leukemia. It was evidence that levels of strontium-90 in children’s teeth had massively increase due to nuclear testing that convinced President Kennedy to sign the partial test-ban treaty that put an end to above-ground nuclear test explosions.

But one of the major horrors of radiation that we haven’t touched on much yet is mutation. Whether by damaging DNA molecules directly, or by upsetting the mechanisms within the cell that enable DNA to replicate, radiation can make cells and even whole organs develop in strange and unexpected ways. There is ample evidence of this kind of mutation happening in human fetuses, from Hiroshima onwards. Whether a single  radiation dose can cause mutations in subsequent generations is a more vexed question. Studies of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs suggest not, but laboratory studies on mice and fruitflies have found second-generation effects. In any case, to be sure of getting mutation continuing down the generations, you really need the radiation to stick around as a long-lasting environmental feature. continuing mutation effects, you need to have the radiation as a long-lasting environmental feature. The nastiest isotopes of fallout, like strontium-90 or caesium-137, decay with half-lives of the order of tens of years, so after a few generations they would be practically gone. However, there are some fallout isotopes like plutonium-239 and carbon-14 that hang around for tens of thousands of years, and are readily taken up in food and absorbed into the body. These could raise the mutation rate for a very long time indeed.

Even so, it is unlikely to produce a race of Aryan supermen in kinky pants. Most mutations are trivial, and most of the non-trivial ones are harmful. These mutations lead to cancers, genetic diseases, disabilities and severely shortened lifespans. So, although we need some mutations to drive natural selection, producing new variations that may be better suited to their environment, too high a mutation rate does not simply give us evolution on fast forward. Rather, it results in the entire population dying out before it has much chance to adapt to anything. Unless, of course, these poor, crippled mutations have the technological capability to build themselves protective cocoons with mobility and manipulation devices that allow them to survive the debilitating effects of genetic degradation. Yeah, that sounds feasible.

But there’s one last twist in the tale, when the Daleks realise they need radiation to survive. This seems an odd notion – we’ve seen how damaging ionising radiation can be to biological tissues. It is not, however, wholly without foundation. At high doses, radiation is just a bad idea and best avoided. The evidence for what effect, if any, radiation has on us at very low dose levels is sparse. If you drop a nuclear bomb on some people, and they all either die or get cancer, that’s a big effect that’s easy to measure. If you give someone a small radiation dose, and they get cancer thirty years later, separating out the effects of the dose from background radiation, passive smoking, pollution and various other carcinogens is pretty hard. So for now we have to extrapolate, and there are two main theories. One is the straightforward linear extrapolation: draw a straight line through the graph, all the way down to zero. The other is the threshold theory, which is that below a certain level of radiation there is no harm done. People involved in radiological protection argue about this a lot: the linear theory is the standard one, on which standards for radiation dose limits are based, but if the threshold theory is true then those limits are too conservative and we are throwing away money on over-cautious protection.

There is a third, rather more interesting theory. Hormesis is the phenomenon whereby a small amount of something is beneficial, while large doses are harmful. Take any household painkiller, for example – but only as directed on the packet. Since the eighties, there has been something of a cottage industry of scientists trying to establish that radiation might have a hormetic effect, through aiding DNA repair, reducing free radicals or stimulating the immune system. This theory is not widely accepted, and the opinion of official bodies ranges from cautiously interested (France) to patently unconvinced (US). So it’s possible there’s something in it, but there’s a pretty good chance it’s bollocks.

So if you do wind up as the desperate survivor of a nuclear apocalypse, horribly mutated beyond recognition, don’t count on the radiation ever doing you any good, and certainly don’t count on being able to sit around waiting to evolve into something prettier. Instead, get to work building yourself an electric wheelchair with a grabby arm and an eyestalk, and make the best of things. And it’s probably worth sticking some kind of gun on it as well. Just in case.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I used to have what CareerCast.com calls “the worst job in America.”

But it wasn’t the worst job I’ve ever had. The truth is, actually, that it was a pretty great job — it’s just a great job in a terrible industry. The newspaper business is run by short-sighted idiots who seem determined to crash and burn. They’re making life increasingly miserable for the shrinking number of people who still work at newspapers, but in those few moments when reporters and editors are able to just do the job itself without interference from the idiots in charge, that job is still challenging, rewarding, meaningful and even fun. Not “the worst job in America” by a long shot.

CareerCast had the misfortune of releasing it’s list of “the worst jobs” on April 23 — the day before the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing more than 950 garment workers. CareerCast did qualify that their list was only about jobs in America. But there are plenty of miserable sweatshops with unsafe working conditions here in America, too.

Let’s be generous and assume that CareerCast is only considering the worst licit and legal jobs in America. The list still looks woefully short-sighted and parochial.

About 18 million American workers earn less than $9 an hour. Every job in CareerCast’s list pays at least twice that. Yes, many of the jobs on the list are dangerous, grueling or unpleasant, but offer someone making $14,500 a year as a full-time minimum-wage worker a chance to double their income by becoming a roofer, lumberjack or oil rig worker and most of them would jump at the chance.

Even setting aside income, most of those minimum-wage jobs are less desirable than the jobs on this “worst jobs” list simply as work. It’s menial, laborious, repetitive, frustrating, uninspiring drudgery and many of the millions stuck in those minimum-wage jobs would gladly switch places with a flight attendant, meter reader, mail carrier or newspaper reporter even if it didn’t involve a huge pay raise.

CareerCast’s “worst jobs” list is the sort of thing that could only be written by people who have enough money and who aren’t able to imagine what it would be like not to.

And so is this article: “Yes, money can buy you happiness.”

The news hook for that story is a study that doesn’t actually say what the story tries to make it say. The study has to do with sufficiency. The story twists that into a statement about necessity. Those are not the same thing.

Here’s what we humans already knew and have known since before we started writing things down: Money is not sufficient for happiness. Money is necessary to avoid certain forms of unhappiness.

It’s really not that complicated. It only appears complicated to those who: A) have enough money; and B) don’t have enough happiness.

The word they don’t understand there is “enough.” This is not entirely their fault, because much of our culture is based on preventing any of us from understanding that word. But it’s a really important word — particularly when the subject is happiness.

The elusiveness of “enough” is, in fact, the main finding of the study reported in the story linked above: “Subjective Well‐Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?” by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Brookings Institution.

Stevenson and Wolfers found that more money corresponds with greater well-being. Matt Yglesias notes that their study shows this correspondence “on a logarithmic scale“:

That’s to say that a $5,000 increase in per capita GDP will generate a lot more happiness for a poor country than a rich one. And by the same token, a $5,000 increase in income will generate a lot more happiness for a poor family than for an affluent one. This is a key grounds for believing both in the importance of economic growth and in the importance of concern about the distribution of that growth. To be a little crude about it, halving the income of a millionaire will let you double the income of many poor households.

But the other thing about this logarithmic scale is that it indicates no evidence of what Stevenson and Wolfers call “satiation” — no point at which anyone anywhere seems able to say, “Ah, at last, enough. Now I am content.” Seeking satiation — sufficient happiness — from money alone offers asymptotically diminishing returns.

All of which, again, confirms what we humans have known for a very long time.

No, money cannot buy happiness. But it is necessary for buying necessities without which happiness is nearly impossible.

Having enough money is no guarantee of happiness. Not having enough money is a guarantee of unhappiness.

 

"This house is exactly what you would expect in a nightmare. Yes, we're in a world of dreams. Creaking doors, thunder and lightning, monsters and all the things that go bumpety bumpety in the night. "
             The First Doctor -- The Chase

*PHEW* Better blow the cobwebs off the ol’ blog. Sorry it’s been so quiet round these parts. Still I’ve been plenty busy…

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle has an acute analysis — This is the beginning of the end for the coalition — of what the Queen’s Speech has revealed about the Coalition Government.

It’s 20 years since Norman Lamont, smarting from being sacked as Chancellor by John Major, accused the Tories’ last majority government of ‘giving the impression of being in office but not in power’. Well, the Coalition is in office and it is in power (the big long-term reforms from Steve Webb on pensions and Norman Lamb on social care show that). But it is no longer in harmony. Instead we’re trapped in a loveless marriage, forced to stick together because we can’t afford the costs of divorce.

Here’s how Martin puts it:

Yes, it will continue in office, probably for the full two remaining years. It remains united, in political expediency terms at least, by the overarching need to show that the economic strategy followed since 2010 is at last beginning to bear fruit, if it does. It also remains united by the fact that it needs to stay in office for its own credibility. This is not 1923 or 1929, when a variety of alternative coalition configurations existed. Today, there is only one viable coalition on offer. The Cameron-Clegg coalition will therefore soldier on. It is, like the banks, too big to fail.

But the larger animating purpose articulated by the coalition enthusiasts in 2010, the possibility that there was a sustainable liberal-conservative alternative to both Labour and to Thatcherite Conservatism, has failed. The apostles of this view, who certainly included David Cameron and Nick Clegg themselves, wanted to create a compassionate, internationalist, less intrusive, greener and more modern form of social and economic liberalism. True, they can point to some successes along the way, but in the main they have not done what they set out to do – and the new focus on immigration underscores their failure.

All true. My only disagreement would be that Martin dates this ‘beginning of the end’ to this week. No. The Coalition’s beginning of the end dates back much further, to the early part of 2011 when Tory high command, spooked by the thought that the alternative vote might win (as polls then suggested it could), agreed to unleash the dogs of war on Nick Clegg.

They won the battle, but have lost the war.

Battered and bruised, Nick Clegg had no choice but to pursue an active policy of differentiation: any form of ‘Coalition 2.0′ renewal died then. Meanwhile the Tories — spooked again, this time by the rise of Ukip (which AV would have made redundant) — shift ever more rightwards on Europe and immigration, widening the chasm between the Coalition partners.

Here’s Martin again:

The coalition is now little more than the sum of its parts. On the one hand there is a Tory majority that smells upcoming electoral defeat, senses Cameron is a loser, suspects George Osborne has steered the economy on to the rocks and is losing its head over Ukip, which some see as the repository of a truer Thatcherite Toryism.

On the other there is the Lib Dem minority, gripped by being a party of government, focused on the need to hold on to its 57 seats in 2015, massively aware of the possibility of wider eclipse and, partly for that reason, newly uncompromising in its refusal to do the very things over Europe, human rights, supply-side economics and Trident that their increasingly rightwing partners increasingly long to do.

Looking at the Coalition now I’m reminded of Charles and Diana’s marriage. The fairytale (perhaps naive) romance that blossomed happily, then gradually faded, and eventually settled into sullen, mutual resentment, a pretence of togetherness maintained only for the sake of duty.

That’s where we are. No obvious escape. No promise of a happy ending. Just two years of grim endurance.

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

Michael J. Ryan is the head of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He writes…

Thanks for your tribute to Ray Harryhausen. I should point out that it was not only writers and artists who were inspired by Ray, but many scientists, especially paleontologists (at least my generation), myself included. I had the pleasure of hosting Ray, Diana, and Vanessa for a week in Alberta back in 1995. I took Ray on his first (and only dinosaur dig) and I can’t say that he enjoyed it much — too much sun and too much kneeling on the hard ground. One of these days I’ll post the photos of that dig.

Yeah…shoulda mentioned that. Ray Bradbury, who was a close friend of Harryhausen, always noted that when his chum did dinosaurs, they weren’t just for purposes of entertainment. They were so well-researched and authentic that they were also a science lesson.

Ukip’s spectacular showing at last week’s local elections has got the Tories spooked. The full realisation is sinking in that this may not be a one-off eruption of popular protest.

Nigel Farage’s band of modern-life-is-rubbish disciples will likely top next year’s Euro polls. Such momentum may propel them towards a double-digit general election performance in 2015. If so, the Tories’ hope of a majority is dead: Ed Miliband will become prime minister as leader of the largest single party.

Though the local elections were scarcely a bundle of laughs for the Lib Dems, there’s a fair amount of schadenfreude to be wrung out of observing all this. Take, for instance, today’s ConservativeHome survey indicating that two-thirds of Tory party members are open to a pact with Ukip, with 34% definitely wanting one.

Quite how a pact will diminish the Ukip vote and/or increase the Tory vote, I’m not sure. Will a potential Ukipper see the party allying with the Tories and think, “Ah, well now I know I shouldn’t take Mr Farage seriously”? Hmm, I doubt it. It seems more likely to encourage them to think, “Voting Ukip seems to get everyone’s attention – I’d better keep doing it.” If enough conservative-inclined voters think that way, look forward to seeing Ed Miliband waving from the steps of Number 10 in two years’ time.

Of course the Ukip threat is a product of the Tory party’s own failure to accept what’s staring it in the face. As Tim Bale points out to ConservativeHome readers today, if the party had any sense it would embrace electoral reform:

There really is a serious risk that Nigel Farage might split the right-wing vote in this country and therefore let Labour in on just over a third of the vote. … We need to fix that system to take account of the fact that, for whatever reason, British voters are no longer content to stick with the two parties that first-past-the-post inherently favours. The only way we can do that is to plump for PR – not the miserable little (and non-proportional) compromise that was AV, but a fully proportional system like the Mixed Member Proportional variant chosen by New Zealand in the 1990s and which was recently re-endorsed by them in a referendum. One of today’s grandest political paradoxes, however, is that those most determined not to fix Britain’s broken electoral system are those who would most obviously benefit from that chance – a Conservative Party that hasn’t won an overall majority for a full twenty years and (unless Labour implodes) doesn’t look set to do so again any time soon.

I made a similar point here on LDV over a year ago:

It is some irony that it is those Tories who were most viscerally opposed to electoral reform who worry most about the rise of Ukip. Yet Nigel Farage’s mini-insurgence would be of little consequence to Tories, most notably in the Eurosceptic south-west where first-past-the-post may help the Lib Dems to fend off a Tory challenge, if voters could rank their preferred parties and candidates.

There is an odd lack of self-confidence within the Tory party. For all their talk of the wish to build a Conservative majority at the next election, they seem perversely unwilling to try and do so by persuading a majority of the public to back conservatism at the ballot box. I suppose I should be grateful the Tories haven’t yet grasped that their best hope of keeping Britain conservative is to offer the people true democracy.

England (to a lesser extent the UK) is intrinsically a small-c conservative country. It is primarily the big-C Conservative party’s nervous inability to accept that simple truth, combined with the party’s innate assumption it should rule alone and on its own terms, which prevents it building that small-c conservative electoral hegemony.

John Stuart Mill once famously said: “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” It increasingly looks like he was only half right.

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

It’s natural for defeated political leaders to make up stories which absolve themselves from blame.  After every by-election, those who have done less well offer unconvincing explanations. Nick Clegg is no exception, but his story last week that “the Liberal Democrats are on a journey from a party of protest to a party of government” is curious for two reasons. First, because no previous Liberal or Liberal Democrat leader has presented the party as one of protest and second because the party was very much a party of government before he became leader.

It is wrong and insulting to suggest that David Steel, Paddy Ashdown, and Sir Menzies Campbell were somehow leaders of a protest group that lacked ambition to govern. From Steel’s much-mocked call to his members to “prepare for government” to Campbell’s courageous stand against the Iraq war, each of them presented comprehensive and radical programmes for government in their actions and manifestos.

David Steel led Liberals into the 1987 election on a broad programme which included devolution to Scotland and Wales, the introduction of a Freedom of Information Act, restoration of the link between pensions and earnings, and the incorporation of the European Charter on Human Rights into British Law.  These were so much a programme for government that each has now been implemented by other parties.

Paddy Ashdown set out detailed plans for government as he led the Liberal Democrats into the 1997 election. Far from seeking protest votes, Ashdown made a firm commitment to increase income tax in order to fund improvements in education – what party leader would have the courage to do that today?

In 2005, Charles Kennedy faced the electorate with a manifesto of fully-costed policies. It drew attention to Labour’s broken promises on tuition fees, defended the contribution made to the British economy by economic migrants, and set out a suite of environmental policies.

None of these leaders were fronting a party of protest. Each had wide-ranging proposals covering all aspects of government.  They did not flinch from promoting policies they knew would initially be unpopular. And each was confident in the knowledge that all their proposals were soundly embedded in modern Liberal principles. They certainly won seats from other parties in by-elections (rather than coming 7^th or 8^th as Clegg has done recently) but they also steadily increased their haul of seats at General Elections.

Liberal Democrats were arguably more effective as a party of government before Nick Clegg became leader.  the decade from 2000 to 2010, Liberal Democrats were coalition partners in the governments of both Scotland and Wales.   The achievements of Liberal Democrat Ministers in those governments were far-reaching and radical. Significantly, they punched above their electoral weight and delivered effectively on their manifesto pledges. Fair voting in local elections, free personal care for the elderly, and no university tuition fees are just some of the party’s achievements in government in Scotland.

Liberal Democrats also controlled major local authorities in most parts of Britain during those years. That strength at municipal level has been shredded in recent elections. Ironically, this loss has been largely a consequence of perceived Lib Dem ineptitude in national government.

Clegg’s “journey” story doesn’t stand up. The party has been active in government for many years, almost everywhere except London.  His journey has not been from protest to government, but from principle to pragmatism. To be an independent party of government in future will require new seats to be gained from other parties in areas outside current Lib Dem comfort zones.  For this, the South Shields result does not augur well.

* Nigel Lindsay was Aberdeen's first Liberal councillor in the 1970s, building the group until it took control before moving south to run a rural development agency in Lincolnshire. He is now based in central Scotland.

One of the curious things about the “diminished expectations” era of Doctor Who is the fan reactions. A middling-to-bad episode like “Bells of St. John” is praised and starts, predictably, a flurry of jokes about changing wifi names online, but a middling-to-good episode, like Neil Cross’ “Rings of Akhaten” inspires such anger and fury that you’d be tempted to think that viewing the episode caused the spontaneous deaths of people’s pets.

It’s not an episode that is particularly deserving of great praise, by any means. Studio-bound, with lots of bits of the same set shot from different angles to look like different locations, and an inordinate amount of time devoted to the characters running back and forth between three areas, it has all the feeling of a rather cheap affair. The extras in leftover rubber masks doesn’t help the feeling much, either, nor does a plot with yet another energy vampire of some kind. But it’s amusing despite all that. As an introduction to Clara, this actually works much better than last week’s episode. We have a chance to see Clara doing stuff and interacting with people and get a sense of her as a person, and not the macguffin that the Doctor has to unravel. This is a character who feels worth exploring; one who gets dropped off on an alien world and wanders off to help a child. Despite the seeming cheapness of the sets and costumes, at least some effort feels like it went into building the alien world. There’s a sense of culture to it, that’s let down a bit by yet more monsters that have a creepy gimmick but not much in the way of personality or defined goals.

As I implied, the story itself is fairly mediocre. We’ve seen these sorts of vaguely defined emotional/energy draining monsters a little too often since the series relaunch, it seems, and defeating one with “the untapped human potential” is a rather trite, feel good denouement that smacks very much of the “someone goes glowy and everything’s okay again” cop out endings. But Matt Smith gets some nice speeches out of it, which is good, since about half of them look like they were delivered to a green screen. And the story feels properly “Doctor Who”-ish when all is said and done; strange world, interesting ideas, and, frankly, not quite convincing delivery in the end.

In e-mail, Brian asks:

Women in Geekdom. Why is this all exploding now? Where is it going?

I am assuming Brian means women in geek-related fields taking a stand against the both latent and overt sexism in those fields and having to deal with outsized, histrionic freakouts some geek dudes are having about it in response.

What’s happening? To explain, let me go to one of my favorite little bits in the film The American President, which I think these days is best known as writer Aaron Sorkin’s rough draft of The West Wing. The scene has President Andrew Shepherd navigating his way through a Christmas party at the White House and coming across a florid, very concerned man in a green jacket:

INT. RESIDENCE - NIGHT

	An informal Christmas party is underway with maybe 20 GUESTS,
	some of them familiar faces.

	SHEPHERD and a GREEN-BLAZERED MAN

				GREEN BLAZERED MAN (GILL)
		Mr. President, militant women are out
		to destroy college football in this
		country.

				SHEPHERD
		Is that a fact?

				GREEN BLAZERED MAN (GILL)
		Have you been following this
		situation down in Atlanta? These
		women want parity for girls'
		softball, field hockey, volleyball...

				SHEPHERD
		If I'm not mistaken, Gill, I think
		the courts ruled on Title 9 about 20
		years ago.

				GREEN BLAZERED MAN (GILL)
		Yes sir, but now I'm saying these
		women want that law enforced.

				SHEPHERD
		Well, it's a world gone mad, Gill.

Right now geekdom is positively stacked with Green Blazered Men, who are shocked and concerned that women in geekdom are suddenly not just satisfied with the idea that they have equal standing, opportunity and engagement in the geek world — they are actually pushing for it to happen, and pushing back against the men who are resisting that, whether that resistance is passive, aggressive or passive-aggressive. Or to put it another way, more and more women in the geek world seem to be done with the idea they need to just put up with this shit anymore, and it’s making the men who have been dishing out the shit — whether they knew they were dishing it out or not — a little defensive. And when Green Blazered Men feel defensive, they sometimes also get sort of angry.

Which doesn’t precisely answer the question of why now? Well, the best answer for this I can come up with is that it’s the second decade of the twenty-first century, isn’t it? If I were a woman geek being asked to put up with a whole bunch of sexist bullshit in my community, and pretend it wasn’t happening and that this is what actual equality in my community looked like, I would hope that my response would be to say, loudly and publicly, “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” So that there are women who are actually saying this, loudly and publicly, doesn’t surprise me and is also something I support.

And of course those women are catching hell for it. Many male geeks (it seems to me) are unaware of their casual sexism and/or have uncritically bought in to how things have always been in the culture, because why wouldn’t they? It’s a nice set-up for them (and by them I should note I mean us, because, hi, I’m a male geek). I think people are inherently conservative about social structures that favor them, because a) duh, and b) most people assume their own life experience is similar to other people’s even when they’re told otherwise and are given specific examples. When they’re confronted with this ignorance, they feel defensive and feel like the real problem is the person who is complaining, because they themselves are not bad people, therefore the person making them feel bad must be.

Add this to the fact that a lot of male geeks are also emotionally immature and/or seeking status with other male geeks — male geekdom is extraordinarily status sensitive, which is a subject worthy of its own separate discussion — and it’s not surprising that an immediate reaction by so many male geeks to women pushing back is HULK SMASH. The Internet obviously facilitates this sort of thing by allowing for anonymity and gatherings of like-minded folks who offer a comforting bubble of “my thinking is how everyone thinks.” So it’s easy for hordes of anonymous male geeks to strike out at women — who often do not have the same sort of anonymity when they complain publicly about the sexism of the geek world, and who indeed have a target painted on them as soon as they open their mouths.

This is not to paint every male geek with the same brush. There are plenty of male geeks who are also fed up with the sexism of geekdom; there are others who show their ass with a bout of public sexism — intentional or otherwise — who then actually pay attention to what women and others are telling them about that sexism and try to do better (there’s often a difficult “but I’m not a sexist!” protest phase to this, followed by a 101-level discussion of sexism, which is its own issue. Lots of smart, clever people don’t like to think they need entry-level enlightenment.).

Also, sexism in the male geek world does exist on a sliding scale, from jackassed geek bros who loathe and fear women and everything about them that they cannot penetrate at the top, to the dude who for no particularly good reason suspects women aren’t good at FPS games but is otherwise fine with women geeks at the bottom. Some of these dudes will find it easier to let go of their sexism than others.

And with that said, the final reason I think this is all exploding now is because I think the acceptance of overt and covert sexism in geekdom is on its way out — not as a feature (it will always be there, because some people are just fucking sexist assholes, and also, geeks) but as a dominant aspect of the field. A useful example of this I can offer is what happened in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when a ton of US states suddenly passed laws and state constitutional amendments banning recognition of same-sex marriage. It happened because a bunch of people who were abjectly terrified that gays and lesbians would have equal access to the rights and privileges of marriage were able to leverage the latent and often unexamined homophobia of a bunch of other people into terrible, bigoted, hateful laws.

Why then? Because Massachusetts allowed same sex marriage, and because gays and lesbians as a class had begun saying “enough of this shit,” when it came to being denied the right to marry, and it just plain freaked out a bunch of people who didn’t understand why gays and lesbians couldn’t be happy knowing they could get married, just as long as it was to someone of the opposite sex (no, really. This was an argument for a while). And then the more organized members of the freaked-out brigade looked at the demographics of gay acceptance and realized the clock was ticking.

They were right. Here in 2013 a more than bare majority of Americans approve of same sex marriage, marriage equality is the law in several states, and the percentages are going up in both cases. There will be places and people who will need to be dragged into the world of marriage equality kicking and screaming, but it’s a question of when, not if, at this point. Too many people, gay and straight, have decided this is a thing that will be.

And so with the geek world. Women geeks are largely done with letting this sexist shit go uncommented upon, a growing number of men geeks are siding with them, and that number is going to continue to grow. Women geeks certainly aren’t going to shut up now — too many of them are all in on this. Good for them.

But, yeah, sexism in geekdom is a thing, is still a thing, and will continue to be a thing for a while. Not every male geek is going to just willingly unload his sexism. Whether they want to admit it or not — whether they consciously know it or not — they see it as having value; something that offers status and an exclusive identity. They like their green blazer.

How often does it need saying? There is no need, repeat, no need for the Liberal Democrats to be spooked by UKIP or to appease xenophobic opinion.

UKIP is basically the Conservative Party’s problem. It is threatening the Tories’ right flank, giving Tory backbenchers the jitters and prompting the Tory leadership to react with rightward moves on various issues (as today’s Queen’s Speech demonstrates, with its emphasis on immigration and the dropping of policies on plain cigarette packaging and overseas aid).

UKIP is not the Liberal Democrats’ problem. There is no rational reason why the Liberal Democrats should move rightwards on immigration or Europe. If anything, the effect of UKIP on the Tories opens up a greater space for liberal opinion. The opportunity is there for the taking, to appeal to voters who don’t buy into the UKIP/Daily Express ‘drawbridge up’ agenda.

Nick Clegg obviously doesn’t see things that way. The Daily Express reports:

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, the Liberal Democrat leader said: “We need to be an open country in terms of welcoming people who want to make a contribution to the United Kingdom, but of course we should stamp out abuse.

“We need to stamp out levels of illegal immigration and of course we need to make sure that our public services and our benefits are not simply a free-for-all when of course there needs to be some relation to what you put in and what you get out.”

The idea that hordes of immigrants are coming to Britain to sponge off the welfare system is a complete myth. There is no “free-for-all”. It’s a non-problem. Despite this, Clegg seems to think that action to combat this imaginary threat is vital (and it’s a topic on which he has recent form).

Clegg continued:

“My advice to the Conservative party, if they’d listen to it, is don’t run after Ukip as it would just strengthen Ukip’s hand.”

In which case, why is Clegg ignoring his own advice and indulging in this unpleasant dog-whistle politics?

Here is the shorter Nick Clegg: “The members of my party are a bunch of romantic amateurs with no interest in winning power. They’ve been useful in the past delivering the leaflets but, now we modernisers have taken over and single-handedly put ourselves in government, they can all fuck off.”

Here is the longer version.

Following the Liberal Democrats’ net loss of councillors in last Thursday’s local elections, Clegg made a dubious claim:

“The Liberal Democrats are on a journey from a party of protest to a party of government.”

This questionable narrative was demolished yesterday in a post on Liberal Democrat Voice by Nigel Lindsay. The idea that the Liberal Democrats were ever a ‘party of protest’ is a myth.

Clegg failed to distinguish between what the party is and the sort of votes it attracts. Yes, the Liberal Democrats attracted protest votes before they entered the coalition government in 2010. Opposition parties usually do. But the Liberal Democrats were never a ‘party of protest’. The party always had comprehensive policies and it ran many local councils, and took part in government in Scotland and Wales, long before Clegg even became an MP.

To dismiss his own party as a ‘party of protest’ is an insult to the many members who built up the party, won elections and took part in administrations throughout the country. But this dishonest historical revisionism is all of a piece with Clegg’s conference speech last September:

“The Liberal Democrats, it was said, are a party of protest, not power. Well two years on, the critics have been confounded. Our mettle has been tested in the toughest of circumstances, and we haven’t been found wanting. We have taken the difficult decisions to reduce the deficit by a quarter and have laid the foundations for a stronger, more balanced economy capable of delivering real and lasting growth. But conference, our task is far from complete, our party’s journey far from over.

“I know that there are some in the party – some in this hall even – who, faced with several more years of spending restraint, would rather turn back than press on. Break our deal with the Conservatives, give up on the Coalition, and present ourselves to the electorate in 2015 as a party unchanged. It’s an alluring prospect in some ways. Gone would be the difficult choices, the hard decisions, the necessary compromises. And gone too would be the vitriol and abuse, from Right and Left, as we work every day to keep this Government anchored in the centre ground.

“But conference, I tell you this. The choice between the party we were, and the party we are becoming, is a false one. The past is gone and it isn’t coming back. If voters want a party of opposition – a “stop the world I want to get off” party – they’ve got plenty of options, but we are not one of them. There’s a better, more meaningful future waiting for us. Not as the third party, but as one of three parties of government.”

To begin with, there is the straw man argument. Precisely who are the party members who want to “turn back”? Who wants a “stop the world I want to get off” party? Clegg never tells us. He can’t because they don’t exist. Sure, Clegg has many critics within the party but none fit this caricature. If you’re going to pick fights with your own members, at least have the decency to take on real people and their actual criticisms with honest arguments.

It gets worse. Later in that conference speech, Clegg told the people on whose shoulders he stands that they were now history:

“Fifty, sixty years ago, before I was born, small groups of Liberal activists would meet up to talk politics and plan their campaigns. Stubborn and principled, they ignored the cynics who mocked them. They simply refused to give up on their dreams. They refused to accept that Liberals would never again be in government. And they refused to accept that Liberalism, that most decent, enlightened and British of creeds, which did so much to shape our past, would not shape our future. We think we’ve got it tough now. But it was much, much tougher in their day. It was only their resolve, their resilience and their unwavering determination that kept the flickering flame of Liberalism alive through our party’s darkest days.

“At our last conference in Gateshead, I urged you to stop looking in the rear view mirror as we journey from the party of opposition that we were, to the party of government we are becoming. But before we head off on the next stage of our journey, I want you to take one last look in that mirror to see how far we’ve come. I tell you what I see.”

“Stop looking in the rear view mirror”? This is patronising advice, to put it mildly. Clegg’s casual dismissal of his membership is reminiscent of the message left by the dolphins in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass: “So long, and thanks for all the fish”.

If you are a student of this sort of revisionist history and can bear to read a fuller account, may I recommend The Clegg Coup by Jasper Gerard? It is possibly the worst book ever written about contemporary politics (see my review in Liberator #350).

Nothing Gerard wrote was new or original, but his book consolidates Clegg’s revisionist history in one handy volume. All the predictable tendentious claptrap and bald assertions are here – the party has gained power only thanks to an elite that is ‘modern’, ‘bright’ and ‘new’... anyone outside this far-sighted elite is old-fashioned, unrealistic or irresponsible... political wisdom can be found only within the Westminster Bubble... [cont. p.94]

This delusional worldview has its roots in the 1980s. As my Liberator article explained:

The template was set in the mid-1980s during Neil Kinnock’s battles with the hard left in the Labour Party. This stereotype is now regularly applied to all members of all parties, irrespective of its irrelevance. After all, ‘wise leadership vs. irresponsible members’ is a simple narrative, which lazy journalists can wheel out with the minimum of effort whenever there is a difference of opinion within a political party.

But the media are not the chief culprits. The prime movers are the party leaders’ hangers on, cliques of self-appointed ‘insiders’ who believe they can make their leader look ‘strong’ by picking fights and stage-managing battles with the membership.

In the Liberal Democrats, since the days of David Steel and Richard Holme, we have seen successive party leaders’ kitchen cabinets brief the media against their own party members, with wild allegations about ‘dangerous radicals’ and ‘embarrassing policies’. There have also been repeated attempts to dismantle party democracy.

The governing idea behind this behaviour is that there are a select few who know what is best for the rest of us. Party members should simply shut up and deliver the leaflets. But as membership figures plummet in all the mainstream parties, we can see that, without a voice, there is little incentive to carry on delivering.

Elitists try to make their prejudices intellectually respectable by arguing that grassroots campaigning is redundant, and that being ‘modern’ and ‘professional’ means switching to centralised techniques such as phone banks and glossy mailshots. The strong variation in the party’s votes between constituencies with strength on the ground and derelict seats relying solely on a centrally-organised ‘air war’ suggests that this theory has no evidential basis.

The basic problem is that a political elite, sharing the same managerialist agenda, sees a vibrant party membership not as a strength but as a nuisance. Life would be so much easier without them.

Stripped of its rhetoric, what Clegg is saying is the argument of elites down the ages: politics is for the grown-ups and don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it. He keeps repeating this argument because he resembles the villain unmasked at the end of each episode of Scooby Doo. He fears that, if he doesn’t dispose of his members, they will eventually unmask him, when he will say, “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids.”