The recent debate about secret courts has had an extraordinarily unifying effect on the Liberal Democrats, uniting previously opposing factions. Admittedly, they have been united against their own leadership, which is another matter.

But it does make you wonder why the party split into factions in the first place. The answer is that this is perfectly normal. Major political parties are broad churches and must remain so if they are not to become narrow sects. There are basic beliefs that all members share, otherwise there would be no point being in the same party. But in a broad church, it is inevitable there will also be competing values and interests, and like-minded members will collaborate and coalesce into factions to advance those values and interests.

So the real question is not why there are factions within the Liberal Democrats but why the party was under-factionalised for much of its history. The party was founded in 1988 with two ready-made factions, the Liberals and the SDP, but that division has long ceased to be a fault line.

The main ideological division now is about economics. It began with the sudden emergence of the self-styled ‘economic liberals’ in 2001. This development was one of the most profound in the history of the party. It was also one of the most bizarre.

It was bizarre because the economic liberals seemed to come out of nowhere, having scarcely been evident in the Liberal Democrats beforehand. Nor were they much in evidence in the two predecessor parties. The pre-merger Liberal Party was a social liberal party; classical liberalism was largely superseded by social liberalism towards the end of the nineteenth century. The pre-merger SDP was social democratic, as you would expect. A few of the economic liberals who emerged in 2001 were new recruits to the party (notably the small group of right-wing libertarians around Mark Littlewood) but most of them had been members of the Liberal Democrats for some time. They must have either suddenly changed their views in 2001 or previously kept quiet about their predilection for market forces.

The emergence of the economic liberals was also bizarre because of its timing. Why leap aboard the Thatcherite ideological bandwagon so late in the day? By 2001, Thatcherism had been the dominant orthodoxy for over twenty years. The fall of the Berlin Wall, which encouraged the idea of ‘TINA’ (There Is No Alternative), had occurred in 1989. The same year, Francis Fukuyama published his seminal essay The End of History?, while Tony Blair ascended to the leadership of the Labour Party (and made his peace with Thatcherism) in 1994.

[At this point, some readers may already object to the distinction between ‘economic’ and ‘social’ liberals, claiming to be both or that both are the same. I would merely point out that, if that were the case, why did ‘economic liberals’ label themselves as such and start their factional activities in 2001, which created the current division?

Oh, and this is a long-ish historical analysis. Before you read any further, make yourself a pot of tea and put your feet up.]

For an explanation of why the economic liberals emerged when they did, one should first
remember that there was effectively an embargo on any sort of ideological debate within the Liberal Democrats after the party was created by the merger of the Liberal Party and SDP in 1988. The first three years of the new party’s life were difficult, to say the least. The merger had left a lot of bitterness on both sides; the party’s poll ratings were dire (reaching a low point of 3% in 1989); the results in the local elections of 1988-90 and the Euro elections of 1989 were abysmal; and membership and finances were in free-fall. There seemed a real risk that the merger would unravel and the leadership was terrified that any sort of serious debate might trigger the unravelling. To make matters worse, leading figures from the SDP were still mentally scarred by their battles with the far left in the Labour Party, and carried over their paranoia about grassroots members into the new party. As a result of all these fears, for more than a decade after 1988, debate was strictly managed and party conference proceedings were dominated by anodyne debates about a series of take-it-or-leave-it ‘green papers’.

Something else was stifling debate, which was more the fault of the party’s grassroots members than its leadership. By the time of the merger, the once-radical concept of community politics was degenerating into a mechanical campaigning-by-numbers approach to politics, accompanied by a fierce anti-intellectual culture (“We’ve no time to think, we’re too busy delivering leaflets!”). In this quasi Maoist climate, no one dared risk accusations of dilettantism so the sort of people who ought to have been mounting an ideological challenge were up to their necks in parochial casework. However, the impressive incremental gains in local elections during the 1990s placed this hallowed but hollowed-out form of politics beyond criticism.

These factors combined to create an intellectual vacuum, with little serious thought or debate taking place in the party. By the end of the 1990s, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Liberal Democrats were a blank slate on which it was possible to write almost anything. And that is more or less what happened.

What broke the embargo on ideological debate? The short answer is Charles Kennedy’s election as party leader in 1999, or more precisely his subsequent inactivity.

Kennedy’s election had an unintended catalytic effect. In 2001, he killed off the last vestige of ‘The Project’ (the plan by Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair to link or even merge the Liberal Democrats with the Labour Party) by disbanding the Joint Consultative Committee. The Project had in any case lost its point after Labour’s landslide victory in the 1997 election. Its end meant that the chancers in the Liberal Democrats seeking a short cut to power needed an alternative strategy. More generally, it was never clear what the purpose of Kennedy’s leadership was. His laid-back approach – or ‘masterly inactivity’ as it was once described – created growing frustration among his fellow Liberal Democrat MPs, who felt that the party was simply drifting and relying on outdated policies. These MPs were also well aware of Kennedy’s alcohol problem long before it became public knowledge.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the intellectual and strategic vacuum under Kennedy invited a power grab. A few right-wing MPs decided to fill the vacuum by moving the party in a more market-oriented direction and began organising to that end. The initial plotting was confined to the Westminster Village, however. The first inkling most party members had that something was afoot was in 2001, when Charles Kennedy appointed Chris Huhne (then an MEP) to chair a policy commission on public services. Right wingers ran a well-organised campaign to push the commission’s conclusions in the direction of marketisation (similar shenanigans also attended the drafting in 2002-3 of the party’s policy paper ‘Setting Business Free’ and a subsequent policy paper on trades unions, followed by the launch in 2004 of two cash-for-policy-influence groups, the Liberty Network and Liberal Democrat Business Forum). MPs from the party’s centre and left belatedly responded by setting up the Beveridge Group to counter this trend.

It was also in 2001 that Mark Oaten made his leadership ambitions clear. He had previously held no serious political convictions; interviewed by John Harris in the spring of 2004, he admitted, “I only really got a philosophical belief about three years ago”. That philosophical belief turned out to be market fundamentalism. Oaten set up two factional groups to further his aims: Liberal Future (a ‘market liberal think tank’ that was never really a think tank but became the launch pad for a small group of right-wing libertarians) and the Peel Group (whose aim was to make the Liberal Democrats more attractive to potential Tory defectors by moving the party to the right). Although they would be embarrassed to admit it now, most of the party’s leading right-wingers supported Oaten’s leadership ambitions until a fratricidal bust-up in 2005, only a few months before Charles Kennedy’s resignation.

The event that finally left no one in any doubt was the publication of the Orange Book in 2004. It rapidly became the bible of the party’s right, although its value was largely totemic and few people actually bothered to read it. The book’s publication also marked the emergence of hedge-fund millionaire Paul Marshall, who co-edited the book (with David Laws) and bankrolled both the book and the think-tank CentreForum.

These manoeuvres were accompanied by some thoroughly dishonest historical revisionism. In reality, the pre-merger Liberal Party had moved on from classical liberalism in the late-nineteenth century with the emergence of the New Liberals, the policies of the 1906 Liberal government and later the ideas of Keynes and Beveridge. But a version of history was fabricated in which the Liberal Party was ‘economic liberal’ until it was polluted by social democracy in the 1980s. This falsehood enabled self-styled ‘Orange Bookers’ to assert that they were ‘reclaiming liberalism’, as if their spurious ideological purity gave them some sort of prior claim on the party. It was doubly dishonest since most of those peddling this myth were either former members of the SDP or the sort of Liberals who had previously been derisive of ideological purity.

Besides historical revisionism, the economic liberals had another rhetorical trick up their sleeves. This was to insist that the only choice was between economic liberalism and social democracy; the existence of social liberalism was denied, and social liberals found themselves repeatedly castigated as statist social democrats. This was clearly an attempt to deprive opponents of any space from which to argue. It was also ironic considering that, during the 1980s, most social liberals were sceptical of the SDP while most of those who subsequently converted to economic liberalism were then social democrats (as members of either the SDP or the gung-ho-for-merger wing of the Liberal Party).

The economic liberals had a simpler message for the media: tendentious Blairite clichés about being ‘new’ and ‘modern’. They styled themselves as ‘modernisers’ and dismissed their opponents as old-fashioned, without ever explaining precisely what was new or modern about their beliefs. They didn't need to. They could simply exploit the fact that, ever since the 1980s, the media have lazily reported the internal politics of any party in terms of the battles within the Labour Party between Neil Kinnock and the hard left.

As the evidence of right-wing manoeuvers mounted in the years 2001-2005, economic liberals themselves repeatedly denied any allegations of plotting, while the party’s centre-left mainstream was out of the habit of giving much thought to fundamental questions of ideology. The mainstream consequently underestimated the extent of the threat and its response was slow. Mainstream members gradually adopted the term ‘social liberal’ (not previously employed although it had long existed) to distinguish themselves from economic liberals, then published the book Reinventing the State in 2007 as a counterweight to the Orange Book, before launching the Social Liberal Forum ginger group in February 2009 following the shock of the ‘Make it Happen’ debate at the September 2008 party conference, when the defeat of an amendment on taxation exposed the social liberals’ weak organisation.

The financial crisis of 2007/8 and the ensuing recession ought to have boosted the social liberals. The crisis had thoroughly discredited the economic orthodoxy of the past thirty years (in Adair Turner’s famous phrase, it was “a fairly complete train wreck of a predominant theory of economics and finance”). But instead of killing off the plot to realign the Liberal Democrats with the old orthodoxy, the crisis reinforced it. Two events made that paradox possible.

The first of these events was the election of Nick Clegg as party leader in December 2007. Clegg has been accused of being a closet economic liberal who maintained an ecumenical façade during the leadership campaign to avoid alienating anyone. That is an understandable view but the truth is subtly different. Clegg sincerely believes he is above ideology and ‘pragmatic’, refusing to acknowledge his tacit ideological assumptions and insisting there are no other possibilities (an approach discussed in more detail here). His is therefore not an explicit ideological preference for economic liberalism but an unimaginative assumption that there is only one way, which is beyond argument.

The second of these events was the formation of the coalition government in May 2010, which tied the party to the Conservatives’ austerity policies (to the scarcely disguised glee of right-wingers such as David Laws, who saw the coalition as a device to ratchet the Liberal Democrats rightwards).

Despite all these developments, the party’s economic policy (at least on paper) is no more right wing than it was before 2001. Most Liberal Democrat members are no more enamoured of right-wing economic orthodoxy than they were before the coalition. They have never been formally asked whether they wanted a radical shift to the right; the party conference has not debated fundamental economic policy for many years, let alone changed it. Instead, the party’s right wing has achieved what it wanted mostly through sleight of hand.

The slapping down of Vince Cable in recent days is a reminder that the coalition government remains firmly wedded to the failed economic orthodoxy, come what may. But the coalition will not last forever and the Liberal Democrats need to develop some new thinking in this area; the party has no future flogging the dead horse of neoliberalism (or Fabian social democracy for that matter).

We need some creative work to develop radical new economic thinking, and this work has already begun, in particular with the ALDC’s 2008 pamphlet by David Boyle and Bernard Greaves, The Theory and Practice of Community Economics, and the just-published Green Book.

We also need some destructive work to clear away the dead wood of orthodox old economic thinking. The adherents of that orthodoxy in the Liberal Democrats have a strength and a weakness. Although few in number, their strength is that they occupy key positions and can leverage the coalition to realign the party with orthodox thinking. Their weakness is different motives for wanting the same thing, and that will be their undoing. One can discern three quite distinct categories:

1. Market fundamentalists – “The answer is the market; what is the question?” True believers who often claim the inheritance of nineteenth-century classical liberalism but lack their nineteenth-century forebears’ Christian morality. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They believe in economism, the reductionist idea that all social facts can be reduced to economic dimensions, that the market is a value rather than merely a system of exchange, and moreover that this value trumps or replaces all other values. This group includes David Laws, Jeremy Browne, most of the people in Liberal Reform and the right-wing libertarians. They are joined by a few very wealthy people whose support for this ideology is more self-interested.


2. Positionists – “What are the people in power saying? We’ll have the same.” For these chancers, politics is all about positioning. It is about aligning yourself with whatever the people in power believe, as the best means of obtaining power yourself. This cynical manoeuvering explains why the positionists adopted social democracy in the 1980s then Blairism in the 1990s, before becoming economic liberals in the 2000s. They are governed by the concept of the Overton Window; if you step outside that window, you are not “serious about power” but a “purist” or a “hopeless idealist”. Consequently they see sincerely-held political values not as a prerequisite for using power but as an obstacle to acquiring it. Their belief in positioning is reinforced by the view that politics is analogous to consumer marketing, hardly surprising considering many of them work in PR or advertising. This group includes the sort of people who like to pull strings behind the scenes, such as Ian Wright, Neil Sherlock and Gavin Grant.


3. Friends of TINA – “There Is No Alternative.” They are convinced that the fall of the Berlin Wall ended all ideological argument definitively, for ever. Political argument is now about who can best manage a system that is itself beyond dispute. Most of them are too young to remember when the current orthodoxy was not orthodox and therefore simply cannot imagine any other possibility. Since no alternative is imaginable, they feel no need to employ any arguments but merely assert that only one course of action is possible. They brook no opposition, claiming that any critic is “not living in the real world”. Despite their denials, they have as much ideology as anyone else but dress it up as a non-ideological, faux-neutral ‘pragmatism’. This group includes Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander. For an authentic voice of TINA, read Nick Thornsby’s presumptuous sermons on Liberal Democrat Voice.

Circumstances have united the three groups in common cause but, sooner or later, these circumstances will change. The prevailing orthodoxy (which has been living on borrowed time since the financial crisis erupted) will be replaced. The three groups will then part company because the only thing they will have left in common is a sense of entitlement to power.

Group 1 (the market fundamentalists) will stick with the true faith, but will increasingly be viewed as an isolated bunch of fanatics.

Group 2 (the positionists) will carefully observe which way the establishment moves before eventually realigning with whatever the new orthodoxy happens to be.

Group 3 (the friends of TINA) will be devastated. They be utterly lost, since their very premise will have been kicked away – once there is an alternative, its existence can no longer be denied. They will be forced to compete in a marketplace of ideas, and how ironic is that?


Postscript: Thinking about it, there were two other reasons why 2001 was the year the ‘economic liberal’ movement suddenly emerged. In June of that year, David Laws was first elected to parliament. In September of that year, the Conservative Party elected Iain Duncan Smith as its leader, which led some wealthy free-marketeers to conclude that the Tories had taken leave of their senses and were consequently unelectable and no longer worth bothering with.

David Steel should have been the warning. His conversion from young liberal firebrand to eager defender of the status quo in the House of Lords ought to have shown us that it’s very easy to go into power with grand intentions of reforming it, and then end up defending all the things you used to complain about. You can call it going native, being captured by the establishment or whatever you want, but there’s no denying that it happens. The rebel gets co-opted by the system, and then works to defend it isn’t much of an original plot, anyway.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that I shouldn’t be surprised that a huge chunk of the parliamentary Liberal Democrat party appears to have been captured by the establishment and now happily repeats their propaganda. I’m waiting for the week when we get the message from someone high up that we have to support ID cards now, because if we don’t the terrorist paedophiles will have won and anyway, we shouldn’t complain, because they’re entirely in line with liberal principles. If you squint a bit. OK, a lot, and don’t notice that the book of liberal principles you thought you were reading from has been replaced with the Big Book of Security Theatre Justifications.

I shouldn’t be surprised by this, as we all know that power seduces and corrupts, but it still hurts to watch. I used to have a very rough analogy/theory of British party politics which held that Tories were bullies who were happy to keep the system they same so they could carry on bullying; Labour were people who had been bullied, who now wanted to turn the system upside down so they could bully their old bullies; and Liberal Democrats wanted to create a system where no was doing any bullying. Unfortunately, it seems that the party’s current leadership see their role as being the kid who’s so pleased to not be bullied for once that they’ll hold the bully’s coat for them while someone else gets abused. To borrow from Orwell “Who wields power is not important, providing that the hierarchical structure always remains the same.” The party in government has become (to borrow a phrase from Michael Franti) a shining example of the system it set out to destroy.

In the midst of writing this, I’ve just read Mark Steel’s account of the current problems in the SWP which has this great line “cults aren’t circles of people who took too much acid and dance naked in the woods, they’re people who took one small decision to forego independence of thought for the defence of their group, and once they started couldn’t stop.” Going back to my post from earlier in the week, it does feel sometimes – especially in the comments and the forum at LDV – that there are some people who want the party to behave in that cult-like way, to cheer on every capitulation and herald it as a victory and above all, to stop being so damned liberal about things.

I wrote last year, that it’s time to end the coalition and I stand by that. Indeed, I suspect if I was to repost that now, I’d not only have plenty more reasons for doing it, but would get even more positive reaction. However, on top of the fact that it’s been bad for the country and bad for the economy, a more selfish reason is that I want us to begin rebuilding the party, learning the lessons from government to make the party less susceptible to the system if there’s a next time.

I’ll be honest and say that there are times over the last year or so when I’ve considered quitting the party, but I’ve always stayed because no matter what problems the party has at the moment, and even though we’re being led down a dangerous track by the current leadership, I think the party remains the only one in Britain that can make the case for liberalism and the liberal values that other parties just don’t place as too high a priority. Even if the leadership has let us down on those values, the reaction of the membership recently has shown me that they are still important to the bulk of the party.

That’s not to say that taking back the party and moving it forward would be an easy process, or a quick one, but it’s something I think is possible and worthwhile. I can understand why people have left the party – especially those who’ve quite over secret courts in the last week – but I think the aim should be to create a party that they, and others like them, would be willing to come back and rejoin, to take up the fight again. Because if we don’t fight for liberalism, who will?

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March 15th, 2013: There's a new Galaga comic today! Also there's an Adventure Time game for iOS called Adventure Time: Rock Bandits that's out today: I wrote the comic inside the game, as well as a bunch of dialogue for it! So if you're interested in MORE WORDS THAT CAME OUT OF THE MEAT IN MY HEAD VIA MY HANDS, I can recommend these two activities! – Ryan

What I wish Tim Berners-Lee understood about DRM.

It shouldn’t matter. It really shouldn’t matter, should it, what goes on in the Socialist Workers Party. Their membership is roughly the average home gate at Mansfield Town. By the time I left them, in 2007, the most common comment I heard about them was ‘Oh. Are they still going?’ the way you might refer to Bernard Cribbins.

But somehow they’ve got themselves in such a mess that thousands of people have been gripped by it, as if it’s a real life Trotskyite soap opera, with onlookers settling before the internet with a tub of ice cream for the latest episode and gasping “Oh my God they’ve called the faction leader a disgraceful liberal moralist, I can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.”

Articles, forums and comment sections on their travails have reached beyond the political sections of online-land; at one point Mumsnet was among the sites discussing it. There are probably discussions on winemaking forums, in which someone has written “These allegations against a leading member of the SWP have made me reconsider when to crush this year’s crop of elderberries.”

I’ve wasted whole periods of a day reading this stuff, until feeling the shamed sense of over-indulgence you get after eating an entire Swiss roll in the morning.

Part of my excuse is that I was a member for loads of years, and know many of the people at the centre of this pickle. But also, it does matter, for a whole pile of reasons.

The immediate cause is that in 2012 the party leaders reported a complaint had been made by a teenage woman, who alleged that during an affair she’d been having with one of the most senior members, a man of almost 50, he had raped her.

There had been rumours of ‘an incident’ at the previous year’s conference, but the members weren’t told the details, and after a brief mention of him being involved in ‘difficulties’, a standing ovation was orchestrated for the man concerned.

The woman was somewhat less than satisfied with this outcome, and as more members heard the full story the party decided to refer the ‘complaint’ to their Disputes Committee, to ‘investigate’ the matter. All eight people on this committee had worked with the accused for several years, most were his friends, and would you believe it, they decided the case was ‘Not proven’, so no action was to be taken against him (although the chair of the committee dissented, declaring the accused had behaved inappropriately).

At the party conference in January 2012 the members were asked to approve the Disputes Committee report. During the discussion, it was revealed by a witness to the investigation that in its course the woman had been asked about another relationship she’d been in, and about her drinking habits. It also turned out she had asked to speak at the conference, but was told she wouldn’t be allowed in, and was now in a state of distress, as it’s not hard to imagine.

And it became known that SWP members who knew about the issue, and were uneasy about it, had been expelled from the party for discussing it on Facebook. Members who objected to any of this were told they were guilty of “bourgeois morality” and accused of capitulating to feminism.

The conference voted, narrowly, to accept the report. But someone who was there leaked a transcript of the discussion onto the internet.

The reaction amongst almost anyone who saw this was of bewildered horror, so at this point, and this took guile and dedication, SWP leaders managed to make things even worse.

The leading body, the Central Committee, declared the issue was closed, and no debate or discussion amongst members would be permitted. Presumably at this point, if an SWP member was asked how they could justify dealing with a rape allegation by arranging an investigation run by mates of the accused, they were supposed to change the subject, or to really earn points with the leadership, start playing a harmonica.

Unsurprisingly, the discussions did continue, with hundreds of members professing outrage. So Alex Callinicos, a leading figure in the SWP, wrote an article condemning the critics, humbly titled In Defence of Leninism.

It begins, and this is an article written to defend their medieval handling of a rape allegation, remember, with a series of sentences such as “The theoretical development of Marxism requires above all deepening and updating Marx’s critique of political economy.”

To his credit, no one’s likely to say ‘Ah, that old cliché. That’s always wheeled out in cases of sexual abuse’.

Maybe if a leading SWP member was accused of battering a pensioner to rob her purse, he’d reply “Marx was adamant that the 1848 revolutions in Europe represented a final break between the emergent working class and capitalism. Can I go now?”

In 3,500 words the central incident is barely referred to, except as a “Difficult disciplinary case,” in which “Scandalously, a minority inside the SWP are refusing to accept the democratically reached conference decisions.”

Now trade unionists who had participated in SWP activities wrote a joint letter, to explain they wouldn’t align with them again. Many of the SWP’s international groups declared their fury, and dozens of speakers who had appeared at their events declared they would no longer do so. A website that had been run for years by a prominent SWP member complained that critics of the Central Committee were being subjected to “Bullying, intimidation, and threats of violence.”

To which the SWP’s leaders replied “There is no evidence of damage to the party.” And with a magnificent sense of perspective, Alex Callinicos said that SWP members who opposed the leaders would face “lynch-mobs.” Presumably, if someone tried to drag him away from lynching some poor sod he’d scream “Leave me alone, can’t you see I’m deepening and updating Marx’s critique of political economy.”

Almost the entire student section of the SWP left, or joined the faction against the leaders, to which those leaders declared this was a sign of how SWP students felt demoralised following the introduction of tuition fees. Other people who’ve been accused of sexual abuse must envy how the party gets away with these explanations. Jonathan King must think ‘I should have said people were only upset with me as they were demoralised following an increase in the rate of VAT’.

Most people, who have little awareness of the SWP, may conclude that the leaders and their loyal followers are simply psychotic, and not in a good way. So just stay well away. Others may feel this is all so predictable to not be worth stating, as Trotskyite groups are, by their nature, nuts. So you might as well write an account of the Mafia, gasping “You’ll never guess what, they turned out quite violent.”

There’s certainly a part of me that thinks the SWP has become so adept and successful at demoralising and antagonising everyone in their own party, if they really want to help the cause of socialism they should join the Conservatives.

But they’re not all crazy, and that’s more chilling than if they were. My own initial instincts were that they can’t really be doing this, these people I used to know and drink with, and laughed with and did fund-raising benefits all over the bloody place for. I went to Telford once for the SWP. Surely I wouldn’t have done that if they were mad.

Now many of those I knew from those times are publicly backing this peculiar behaviour. The SWP produced a list of 500 of its members who supported the party’s conduct. I scrolled down this list gingerly edging towards the parts where, alphabetically, names I knew might appear, and I willed the Hs or Ns past in the hope they wouldn’t be there. Some weren’t but several were, people whose settees I’d drunk beer on and whose kids had played with my kids popping up, next to a declaration that proved they’d say or do anything, defend any act no matter how appalling, to protect one of their ‘leaders’, in a manner approaching that of a cult.

Yet the people behaving in this irrational way did start out rational. I recall when it was an education being in the SWP, not in how to be at war with everyone but because you found imaginative ways to engage with the outside world, which was fairly important as this was by some distance bigger than the world inside the SWP.

The names on that list belonged to people who became socialists because they were enraged by war or poverty or racism, or maybe by the way women are treated in society, and they wished to combat those injustices. Many were instrumental in the Anti-Nazi-League, Stop the War and countless local campaigns.

So how could this change have happened? Maybe it started in the 1990s, when the SWP began to shrink, probably due to socialism becoming a harder product to sell. But it refused to acknowledge it was shrinking, preferring to insist it was constantly growing. Then, if anyone pointed out this clearly wasn’t true, they were told sharply that they were mistaken.

Like Basil Fawlty, rather than admit to telling small lies, they decided to protect them, by telling bigger and more ridiculous lies. And once that happens, internal democracy is under threat. Contest the distortions and you have to be denounced as an enemy.

Or maybe it came from such a determination to defend socialist ideas, against all orthodox thinking, that they became impervious to any criticism at all. They became so defensive that any suggestion of doing things differently was met with the phrase that this would “Betray the tradition.” Even the internet was treated with heavy suspicion, with blogs and websites set up or contributed to by members frowned upon or banned.

Whatever the reasons, debate with people outside the party was replaced with vitriol. A trade unionist who usually backed the SWP disagreed with them on an issue, so a story was invented that they’d rigged the vote to get their union position. Often when people left the SWP, it was announced that they’d never been members in the first place.

The organisation which, whatever its faults, had once been a cauldron of exuberance, debate and enthusiasm, was edging towards becoming a cult. And that’s the most alarming aspect of this story, that cults aren’t circles of people who took too much acid and dance naked in the woods, they’re people who took one small decision to forego independence of thought for the defence of their group, and once they started couldn’t stop.

SWP members who have taken a stand on the current issue seem bewildered as to why their leaders behave in this illogical way. But the reason may be that the debate isn’t really about the allegations, or attitudes towards feminism, it’s about accepting that you do as you’re told, that the party is under attack at all times so you defend the leaders no matter what, that if the party’s pronouncement doesn’t match reality, it must be reality that’s wrong. Dissent on an issue and your crime is not to be wrong about the issue, it’s that you dissented at all.

So it does matter, because the end result of this process is that many bright eloquent fighters against bullying have become the bullies, and many potential bright eloquent fighters against bullying may be put off from participating in that fight, if they think it will end with behaviour like this.

And it matters to me, because I can’t claim to be entirely innocent. I was in this party for 28 years. I must have accepted claims that didn’t make sense, and ignored accounts of appalling behaviour, or sighed and hoped the tricky issue I heard about would go away of its own accord. Somehow the critical faculties that led me to join a socialist group deserted me with regard to the group itself.

It matters because anyone considering taking part in the activities of the left is entitled to ask how we can ensure that abuse of women won’t be dismissed as ‘moralism’.

And because there’s now an enduring sense of uneasy rage against the injustices of the free market, which encompasses a brilliant array of diverse characters, and between us we have to work out how to turn that into an effective opposition, without making the same mistakes. Surely we can establish movements and forums in which we can debate our aims and differences, in a spirit that inspires and invigorates all who take part, rather than berating anyone who disagrees.

There’s a mass of disparate individuals, committed to opposing the values of the bankers, the tax exiles and the sneering face of free market authority. Surely we can embrace that enthusiasm and energy, and encourage it rather than demoralise it.

We can’t ensure that no one in our ranks will behave appallingly, but we can ensure that everyone is accountable, so that no one is allowed special protection because they have a place on a committee.

Over the last few weeks I’ve almost dared to be optimistic. Effective characters such as Owen Jones, Salma Yaqoob, Caroline Lucas, Laurie Penny, along with Unite and other unions, and organisers of UK Uncut are launching the People’s Assembly, which could represent the most encouraging attempt for years, to create a movement that can attract the heaps of people appalled by the current order that’s running society.

So we have to follow the same rules as anyone who wants to win the support of a wide layer of people, by creating an atmosphere that attracts rather than repels, in which everyone who contributes feels a sense of accomplishment, where differences are celebrated rather than sneered at, and in which the many inevitable mistakes are part of the glorious chaos of building a genuine movement.

That movement will be the product of all who take part in it, and won’t be an end in itself to be protected no matter how it behaves, but a means to an end, which is a world less cruel, more exhilarating, less bullying and more fun, that it was when we found it.

PS Since writing the start of this I’ve looked up the average home attendance of Mansfield Town, and this season it’s been 2,389, which is much higher than the SWP membership. After all this I’d guess they’ll be close to Braintree, on 624.

At Lib Dem conference this weekend I had a cunning plan. I had been challenged by my House of Comments co-host Emma that the next time I was at an all male panel at an event that I would question why there were no women to ask questions of from the floor. The idea being that the more this is highlighted, the more likely it is that organisers of events will eventually be embarrassed into ensuring panels have better gender balance.

I had had my attention drawn by Jennie Rigg to an event that was scheduled for the Friday night on social media which had a male chair and 4 male panelists. I turned up, parked myself on the front row and was all set to ask my killer question on International Women's Day of all days! It was going to be a real zinger! I was going to leave them floundering!

Then Olly Grender pulled up a chair at the end of the panel and sat down. My evil plan was torpedoed. I couldn't ask my question now that a woman had been included in the panel.

I was of course pleased that I wasn't forced to sit through yet another male only panel. Olly had some great insights into the use of social media from her perspective as a former Lib Dem communications supremo.

Mark Pack who was also one of the panelists had got wind of what I was planning due to some Twitter activity on the subject and the next day we had a chat about it. He suggested something that he has been considering for a while which had been resurrected in his mind by what had nearly happened the night before.

Mark wanted to make a pledge that he would refuse to appear on any panel he was asked onto at any future Lib Dem conferences unless there is at least one woman on the panel. We both agreed this is an excellent idea and I agreed I would also make the same pledge. Mark has written about this today for Lib Dem Voice.

We are both encouraging all male Lib Dems to make the same pledge. That you will not agree to sit on any panel where all the contributors are going to be male.

The more men we can get to agree to this, including MPs and Peers who are almost always in one of the slots on panels the more likely we are to ensure more gender balance in future. Who knows, if we're really successful by the time of the Autumn conference we may end up with no panel without at least one woman on. That has never happened before and is an excellent first to aim for.

So leave comments on here or on Mark's post pledging your commitment to the Panel Pledge. Write about it. Tweet about it. Blog about it. Talk about it.

We can make a real difference. We just need to exercise our right to say no to all male panels.

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March 11th, 2013: Have you been reading my Galaga comic? Teens have been sassing the President!! – Ryan

I’m sitting in the departure lounge at Gatwick, with a massive infusion of Earl Grey which I hope will keep me awake for a couple more hours. With less than four hours’ sleep after staying longer than I’d planned at the Glee Club, I am close to being wrecked. I’m far too old for this carry on, but I’ll not willingly give it up. Luckily I was relatively abstemious with alcohol, so there was no hangover. Mind you, if there had been Skittles Vodka on offer as a Clegg’s speech drinking game, I’d have happily indulged. A shot every time he talked about a stronger economy, a fairer society and enabling people to get on in life might have numbed the pain of losing a darned good liberal woman from the party.

Yes, the secret courts emergency motion passed by a massive majority. A senior government minister didn’t even bother to show solidarity with the very few voting against because he didn’t see the point. Yes, the leadership will ignore it. Yes, the Liberal Democrats against secret courts campaign will continue and yes, I and others need to have a think about how to heal the widening disconnect between leadership and activists before it turns toxic. But Jo Shaw’s resignation from the party hurts.

Jo Shaw is the sort of strong liberal voice this party should be championing, not losing. She has put so much effort into encouraging diversity and encouraging women in the party. I didn’t know that she was going to resign so dramatically during her speech proposing the motion. I’m glad, too. I would have found it really difficult to handle.

She put her heart and soul in to the campaign within the party on secret courts. keeping us all interested and motivated over many months, keeping us informed, armed with the best arguments. She’d inspired us to keep going, kept the issue in the party’s consciousness. This campaign will continue.

I was looking forward to working with her on the Federal Executive. Another woman with similar views to my own was bound to be a good thing and her advice as we try to tackle the chronic lack of diversity would have been great. She has such a good awareness of issues of gender and power and how to help women and girls both in the UK and further afield.

One of Jo’s last acts as a Liberal Democrat member was to encourage a very reluctant me to put a speaker’s card in for the debate today. I didn’t think I’d hold my own in a debate with clever lawyers. She reassured and cajoled and the result was that I made my first Federal Conference speech in a very long time. She helped my find an actual voice to go along with the one from behind the keyboard.

While I respect the decision Jo has made, I am not going anywhere and I’ll put that voice to good use in promoting the values she and I share.

I might have lost a party colleague today, but I haven’t lost a friend. The party is poorer tonight, but I hope she’ll be back one day.

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

What are the likely consequences if, after the next election (in 2015), Britain votes in a referendum to leave the EU? (As 53% of UK voters apparently desire ...)

I have a number of expectations about what would happen.

1. It's possible that an EU exit would be fudged by the then government opting to remain in the European Economic Area. This would be extremely stupid—EEA membership carries an obligation to abide by most EU legislation and treaties, but with drastically reduced participation at the drafting stage. (It's basically a fudge to allow traditionally neutral nations like Norway and Switzerland to participate.) Probability: low—voters would see this as a betrayal of the spirit of a motion to exit the EU.

2. A full EU exit would result in the exodus of a large section of the UK's financial sector to Paris and Frankfurt; in particular Euro trading in London, currently the largest Eurobond market in the world, is facilitated by membership of the EU. (As the financial sector accounts for roughly 20% of the UK's economy, even a relatively small downsizing, by 20% or so, would have a drastic, widespread effect on the UK.)

3. Trade with the EU may be hampered by the re-emergence of the sort of tariff barriers common prior to 1948. The UK would have vastly reduced leverage for negotiating free/open trade with EU members. GATT/WTO treaties would mitigate the impact of tariff barriers to some extent, but we'd lose the benefit of tariff-free open export markets that the EU provided.

4. A widespread assumption among Britons is that the British Commonwealth of Nations would continue to trade with the UK and would in fact gradually increase their UK trade, taking up some of the slack. But the relationship with the Commonwealth nations looks rather different outside the UK. These are former colonies; they don't necessarily bear the UK any goodwill, but continue to exploit the residual relationship because the UK is a tariff-free trade gateway to the EU. A UK that has exited the EU would be a much less attractive trade partner.

5. The "special relationship" between the UK and the USA at a diplomatic/military level runs on much the same basis; the UK is a reliable supporter of the US, historically tending to influence EU diplomatic and trade policy in pro-US directions. A UK that is no longer part of the EU thus becomes less useful to the USA. While the British military continues to contribute roughly 20% of the US Navy nuclear deterrent (in the shape of UK funded and operated Trident SSBNs) and might at some point in the future be able to lend a couple of second-rate aircraft carriers to backfill US hard power projection, the UK's utility would still be vastly reduced in event of an EU exit. So: an EU exit would mark the practical end of "special relationship" with the United States. (Not that this is a bad thing, in my view: the "special relationship" was most recently exemplified by Tony Blair's idiotic willingness to sign up for George W. Bush's Iraq adventure.)

The overall picture, then, is dismal: a flight by the investment banking sector, probable currency speculation directed against the (isolated and vulnerable) sterling market, re-emergence of tariff barriers hampering UK exports to Europe, a collapse in trade with the Commonwealth (at least, on terms favourable to the UK), and the final collapse of UK diplomatic/military power to second- or even third-rank status on a global scale.

Have I missed anything? (Apart from the tabloid news editors standing proud on top of their middens to squawk about how Britain has regained her sovereignty at last?)

Nick Bilton doesn’t like it when people e-mail him to say thanks. He thinks you should use Google Maps to find the way to someone’s house rather than ask the person for directions. Bilton and his mother communicate “mostly through Twitter.” And last year, his father learned a “lesson” about leaving voice mails for his son: Digital Era Redefining Etiquette (New York Times).

After reading this column, I see no reason to change the advice I offer in How to e-mail a professor: “When you get a reply, say thanks.” For students e-mailing a professor, this small courtesy is a good choice. And it closes the loop. A professor who prefers not to receive such replies can let students know.

I will go further and suggest that everyone say please and thank you and and hello and see you soon and so on in e-mail. So many inefficiencies? No, they are ways of being human together. They are what we need to make time for.

One of my earliest learning experiences online happened when someone in a fountain-pen discussion group offered a lengthy and helpful answer to a question I asked. I e-mailed him to say thanks and acknowledged that I didn’t know whether that was standard practice. His reply: “A thank-you is always welcome.” That made and makes sense to me. My correspondent later proved a great source of advice on all things Pelikan.

Related posts
E-mail etiquette
How to e-mail a student

[I’d hate to be Nick Bilton’s parents. Who, by the way, would know the best route to their house.]
You’re reading a post from Michael Leddy’s blog Orange Crate Art. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

The Liberal Democrat leadership does not seem to have made much of an attempt to defend secret courts. Alex's Archives covers Nick Clegg's performance at his question and answer session in Brighton:

we saw pretty much every tool deployed from the box marked “evasion tactics for politicians who don’t wish to engage”.

In the secret courts vote itself, Tom McNally seems to have acted as the voice of the party establishment.

According to the Guardian:

McNally, a justice minister, indicated he was unlikely to lead a rebellion but would instead seek further concessions. He said it was to the credit of the party that it was so troubled by the issue of secret courts, but said the bill's critics lived in an Alice in Wonderland world.

This argument that party leaders and ministers have a unique connection with reality, while activists are by nature unworldly, has always seemed strange to me. Surely it is activists, with their jobs, mortgages and journeys to work who understand how most voters live?

And I don't recall any Lib Dem grandees insulting party members when they were asking them to go to Eastleigh or donate money a fortnight ago.

But the parallel with Alice in Wonderland is useful here:

"Let the jury consider their verdict," the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. 

"No, no!" said the Queen. "Sentence first - verdict afterwards." 

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "The idea of having the sentence first!" 

"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple. 

"I won't!" said Alice. 

"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

"Sentence first - verdict afterwards" may well be what we get from secret courts. Take this BBC News report from 2006 (thanks to Love and Garbage on Twitter for the link):

A judge has criticised the Home Office over contradictory MI5 intelligence in secret hearings involving two terrorism suspects, it has emerged. 

The error came to light only because one barrister acted in both Special Immigration Appeals Commission cases. 

Mr Justice Newman said the "administration of justice" had been put at risk in the cases of Algerian Abu Doha and a suspect known as MK.

If anyone has been taking tea with the Mad Hatter, it is Tom McNally himself.

In writing the pieces about Random House and its egregious, non-advance paying eBook imprints and how no writer ever should submit to them, or indeed work with any publisher that does not offer an advance, there are some folks in the comments and elsewhere on the Internet who are saying things along the lines of the following (paraphrased to condense points into a single statement):

That’s easy for Scalzi to say because he has power now, but us newer authors have no power to negotiate. And the market is changing and there are lots of good eBook publishers who just happen not to pay an advance.

One word for all of the above: Bullshit.

First, for those you who think the “Hey, let’s not pay you an advance but instead you can share in the backend!” model of publishing was first thought up in relation to electronic publishing:

AH HA HA HA HA HAH HA HA HA HA.

No.

This shit’s been around, my friends. It’s been around for decades, and writers groups and others who make it their business to warn aspiring authors about scams and pitfalls have been raising flags about it all that time. The idea that that because it’s now attached to electronic publishing, that somehow makes it different (and, more to the point, better) is highly specious, to say the least.

Sprinkling the Internet on a bad business model does not magically make it a good business model. It merely means that the people who are pursuing a bad business model are hoping you are credulous enough to believe that being electronic is space-age zoomy and awesome and there is no possible way this brilliant business plan could ever fail. Or even worse, that they believe that being electronic means all these things, which means they are credulous. Which is not a very good thing to have as the basis of one’s business model.

So why are so many eBook-only publishers attempting to run with the “no advances” business model? If I had to guess, I would say because many of these then-erstwhile publishers assumed that publishing electronically had a low financial threshold of entry (not true, if you’re serious about it) and they fancied being publishers, so they started their businesses undercapitalized, and are now currently in the process of passing the consequences of that undercapitalization unto the authors they would like to work with. Alternately, as appears to be the case with Random House, they’re looking for a way to pass as much of the initial cost of publishing onto the author as possible, and one of the best ways to bring down those initial costs is to avoid paying the author anything up front. Both of these are bad business models, although one is more maliciously so, and both are to be avoided. Just because someone has stupidly or maliciously planned their business, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to sign a contract with them.

But, these publishers and their defenders may say (and have said), the publisher takes all the risk in producing a book! Yeah? Hey, to publishers and their defenders who say that: Fuck you. Fuck you for asserting that the author has shouldered no risk, when she’s invested the time, opportunity cost and material outlay required to create a manuscript. Fuck you for asserting the the author sees no risk to her own career from the choices that the publisher imposes on the publishing process that the author has no control of: everything from cover art (which, if horrible and/or out of step with the market, can sink a book) to the size and distribution of the initial print run, to the marketing plan the publisher has for retail.

Fuck you for lightly passing over the risk that the author has if the book fails — that any additional books in the contract might be cancelled or put out with the bare minimum of contractual obligation, that the author might not be able to sell another book to the publisher or other publishers because of a track record of poor sales — and for lightly passing over the fact the a publisher mitigates its own risk of the failure of a single book by having an entire portfolio of releases. If one single book fails but the publisher’s line holds up generally, then the risk the publisher encounters to its livelihood is minimal. The risk to the author, on the other hand, is substantially greater. Yes, to all of that, “fuck you,” is probably the politest thing to say in response.

Tell me again how all the risk lies with the publisher in producing a book. I want to hear it again. And I expect you can imagine what I would say to that assertion, again.

Any publisher who would assert that the risk of publishing is all on them is one who simply does not understand publishing. I sure as hell wouldn’t work with them. Especially one that has the gall to not pay advances and shift production costs to the author by arguing that doing so offers a more equitable apportionment of risk. It’s certainly an advantageous apportionment of risk — to the publisher. But “advantageous” in this case is almost certainly not the same as “equitable.”

On the subject of risk and investment — when a writer gets an advance from a publisher, it’s the publisher signaling two things: One, it acknowledges the risk and investment the writer and only the writer has made to that point in creating a manuscript that the publisher sees as having commercial potential. Two, it’s signalling how much risk and investment that the publisher is willing to make in the property.

Both of these are important. As regards the first, why work with people who don’t acknowledge that the work you’ve done has value, even as they are trying to license the product of that work? Two, why work with people who have signaled they have no intention of making a material investment in the work? And if they wish to suggest that they will make that material investment — by way of editing, marketing, production, etc — again we come to the question of why everyone else is getting paid ahead of the writer.

(And as for “but, but — profit sharing!” my answer is, groovy: The advance is advanced against the expected profits (as opposed to against royalties, which is a separate thing entirely). Rule of thumb: If anyone gets paid, the writer gets paid. First. Because, once again: What the writer provides is why everyone else gets paid — and the writer has already done the work.)

Now, let’s talk about me for a minute. Yes, I am in a position where I have some influence on how my contracts are negotiated, what’s in them and what’s not, up to and including how much of an advance I get. But here’s the thing: Back when I was selling my very first novel? I was also in a position to have influence on how my contracts were negotiated, what was in them, up and including the advance.

Why? Because I had something the publisher wanted. Namely, the novel in question.

People: Unless the publisher you’re talking to is a complete scam operation, devoted only to sucking money from you for “publishing services,” then the reason that they are interested in your novel is because someone at the publisher looked at it and said, hey, this is good. I can make money off of this. Which means — surprise! Your work has value to the publisher. Which means you have leverage with the publisher.

Publishers are not grand mystical portals into a realm of fantastic living and eternal happiness. They are companies looking to make a profit so they can continue existing, staffed by people who are looking for manuscripts that will make their companies a profit, so the companies can continue existing and they don’t have to work at Wal-Mart, stocking shelves. I’ve met my publisher and editor. They are lovely people and I like them a lot, and they’ve done pretty well for me. But then, I’ve done pretty well for them, too, and at the end of the day none of us is sporting the majestical look of destiny. We’re just people, doing our respective jobs.

So when a publisher comes to you and says “We like your book, can we buy it?” do not treat them like they are magnanimously offering you a lifetime boon, which if you refuse will never pass your way again. Treat them like what they are: A company who wants to do business with you regarding one specific project. Their job is to try to get that project on the best terms that they can. Your job is to sell it on terms that are most advantageous to you.

You can do that even when you’re starting out. I did. So have many other debut authors. Because they all had something the publisher wanted: The work.

But you will not be able to do that if you go into the negotiation assuming you have no leverage. Forget the publisher screwing you — you have screwed yourself. And if that’s the case you can’t blame the publisher for then taking you for every single thing they can. Because, remember, that’s their job. They don’t even need to be evil to do it; they just have to be willing to take every advantage you let them have. That’s business. This is a business negotiation. They’re going to assume you know what you’re getting into. That’s why they have contracts: So it’s all down in black and white and you can’t say you didn’t know.

So, yeah. Damn right I negotiated terms from contract number one. And the fact I did put me in much better stead for the next contract, and the next one and all the ones after that. I had that power then — the same as any new or first time author.

What have we learned today?

1. Not offering advances is not a great new business model, it’s a crappy old one;

2. Writers are not responsible for propping up crappy business models;

3. Don’t believe anyone who tells you publishers carry all the risk of publication;

4. Even new writers have leverage with publishers;

5. If you don’t respect yourself or your work, no one else will either.

Now go out there and sell to a publisher who deserves your work, and make them show just how much they deserve it.

The Daily Express enjoys being able to report a difficult time for Nick Clegg at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference this afternoon:

The atmosphere became more heated when activists began to challenge Mr Clegg over the Justice and Security Bill, which would allow courts to sit in secret in some civil cases. The legislation was comfortably given its third reading in the Commons last week, despite a rebellion from some Tories and Lib Dem MPs and continuing opposition from civil rights campaigners. 

One Lib Dem member questioned why Mr Clegg had "abandoned the high ground" by engaging with the proposals. And another said: "How can we call ourselves a Liberal Democratic party any more if we vote for this legislation?" 

However, the party leader said the intelligence services were currently unable to defend themselves in some civil court cases because they could not disclose sensitive material. He stressed that many changes had already been made to the original proposals, and said he was unable to do what activists wanted and block the measures because only 8% of MPs were Lib Dems.

Well, we'd like Nick to block this measure, but I think we would settle for him and the other Lib Dem MPs voting against it.

But the point of this post is to argue that Nick's discomfort is largely his own fault, even if you think he is right to support this measure.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that in the past Nick has gone out of his way to cultivate the support of civil libertarians. As Stephen Tall reminded us, Nick Clegg said in 2011:

"I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good."

A bit like a teenage libertarian blogger perhaps, but that is what Nick said. You cannot blame civil libertarians for believing he really meant it.

Nor can you blame blame Dinah Rose QC for resigning her membership of the party now it appears he has changed his mind.

The second reason Nick is the author of his own misfortune is the lack of communication on the issue. The vote on secret courts took place on Monday, but - as far as I am aware - we had to wait until Thursday and a briefing from the party chief executive for any explanation.

Then, the next day, we had an article on Liberal Democrat Voice by Ming Campbell. Though Lord Bonkers had some fun this, Ming did make an attempt to  convince us. Though it is hard to see how the new measures can be at once less restrictive than the present arrangements and needed to keep matters private that would be public under those arrangements.

But where was Nick Clegg in all this? He may be right on secret courts or, as I believe, he may be wrong. What is not in doubt is that he should have done more to explain his thinking to the party.

Hey, remember when we all figured out that Sarah Palin really wasn’t the slightest bit interested in running for public office? That she just wanted to fleece credulous Tea Partiers by pretending to want to Save America?

This is kind of like that, but with the penny.

…So the Government of Canada decides to do away with the penny, and the way they do it is this: they just stop minting pennies. From now on, puchases that result in penny-sized change are to be rounded up or down to the nearest nickel, and both ways being reasonably equal in their occurrence it all evens out over time.

BUT. Here is where the overall philosophy of government held by the Party of Stephen Harper, the Parti Albertois, the Big Oil Party, gets thrown neatly into a nutshell for us: once they’ve stopped the minting of pennies, and established the guidelines for rounding up and down…

Then they book off for the day. And every organization with a cashier makes up its own policies about taking pennies and giving them back, every company takes a greater or lesser amount of time to revamp their POS systems, receipts sometimes say what’s happened to your money and sometimes they don’t, and everything is just left to cook down willy-nilly. The B.C. government liquor stores, so I’ve been told, intend to distribute pennies back to the public until the end of time; McDonald’s (it will surprise future anthropologists, but it doesn’t surprise us — since we know that McDonald’s restaurants have functioned as shadow public buildings for at least a decade now, as governments dispense with money for public housing and facilities and care) had their ducks all in a row months ago, fully ready to accept pennies as legal tender while also not redistributing them to their customers as change…

And between these two poles, every other imaginable approach, doubtless up to and including unscrupulous business-owners who suck a little free cash out of the rounding differential, by rounding one way but not the other. As well, I don’t know much about how credit card companies work, nor about who it is that makes and distributes POS terminals and systems, but I think in either case it’s a matter of scale that makes it so credit card and debit card transactions apparently must continue to be calculated to the penny…ha, no word yet on the chequing system previously known as the M1 money supply…thus necessitating a system in which there are (at least temporarily) two kingdoms of money, the virtual and the physical…

…And, you know, even though the convention is to purchase many items in one buying-action, and even though the convention is to pay in a single manner when one is paying…and even though in every single purchase the wiggle room only amounts to two pennies on either side, still if one were sufficiently enterprising one could easily wring ten bucks a week out of that differential, too, and with modern telegizmo tools one could even come close to automating the process…not that it really, really, really matters, but…

It shows a certain kind of pattern of intention, on the part of the government; and it shows it in an unusually down-to-earth and tangible way. As I’ve said before, this isn’t your father’s Tory party (meaning: if you’re my father it isn’t your Tory party), regardless of how many people in Southern Ontario or indeed my own family were fooled by the similar name…and the old Progressive Conservative party’s actually very great interest in governing just doesn’t line up at all with the carpetbaggers that Peter MacKay sold the name to, because this bunch is primarily interested in getting out of the business of government. They don’t want to regulate, and they don’t want to inspect; they don’t want to research and they don’t want to take advice, they just want to sell all the old stock in the family business and liquidate the place, because they’re not interested in running it anymore. Parliament itself doesn’t interest them; for them the rule of law is something you only have to respect when you can’t get around it. This last may seem like hyperbole on my part, but if you think about it for a minute it’s true: we’re talking about a government who doesn’t see the need to change laws that we all know they could change if they wanted to anyway, and no one could stop them, so why don’t they just act like they’ve already passed those changes, to save time? And then if there’s a big fuss they can always change them later. And: jeepers, no wonder they were our first government ever to be held in contempt of Parliament!

When it was just a simple matter of reciprocation, really.

All in the name of efficiency, at least that’s what they all claim. Ah, efficiency, efficiency…one can have so much of it that it isn’t even efficient anymore, did you know? Because it fails to create any effects: the pond of day-to-day government lying still, without a ripple being made or felt. Down in the States, there’s this curious new mutation of the filibuster, where nobody actually has to perform the filibuster, but only promise that they will — hence the sudden shock of Rand Paul actually bothering to mount one recently! — and no doubt Goldman Sachs is even now preparing to bundle up junk filibusters and sell them on at a Triple-A bond rating, and that’s pretty bad, but in Canada things are going exactly the opposite way, where the government doesn’t bother to dot the i and cross the t of legislative action itself anymore, simply because they could do it, so why should they bother with it? Well, if you wanted to lay it all at the feet of Harvard Business School you wouldn’t be completely off the target: because this is a climate in which (have you noticed?) every CBA negotiation begins with a lockout first…so unions never even get the opportunity to strike, you see?

I mean, who makes concessions to come back to the negotiating table, just to leave it again?

And then down the road the lockout is inevitably flywheeled, by presenting a loss of revenue on paper that justifies a newer and tougher round of negotiations, on and on, in an ever-shrinking circle. Not unlike a sphincter. And sure, in the long term this erodes your business’ economic foundations, but in the short term it makes money, and if the federal government doesn’t care about acting as an impartial arbiter — if, for example, it announces it is readying back-to-work legislation for unions who have not even taken a strike vote yet — then there’s nothing to stop the cycle. In my country, our long period of labour peace is finally going, going, and GONE, after about thirty years of being nibbled away at, and it isn’t because we’ve never had a government authoritarian enough to get rid of it ’til now, it’s because we’ve never had one that cared so little about whether it was there or not…

So whatever they’re for, they’re only for it on a strictly temporary basis; what’s more telling about them is what they are not for. Sure, they’ll give the Provinces money for administering health care, but once the money’s given that’s where their job ends…the principles of universality in the Canada Health Act are still there, but don’t ask the government to enforce them! And if you run an airline, you can apply the aircraft maintenance standards yourself…if you’re a food company, just mail us in the results of your own in-house inspections and we’ll definitely, definitely file them for you…and if you’re a mining company concerned about meeting the requirements of environmental regulation, well…

Hey, who’s in a better position to act as steward to the environment that the folks who are down there on the ground, am I right?

And so many more examples that I don’t think I could list them all, indeed the only way all these things are even capable of being done is by passing omnibus bills that embed all the preconditions for ‘em deep in the fine print of several thousand pages. You couldn’t even pass these things any other way! You’d be here all night.

All night!

Doing your, y’know, job.

So you just don’t do it; you leave it up to other people. Let them figure it out!

Let them put in the overtime on it!

And such is the general miasma of apathy in Canada, that they pretty much do. These matters are so abstract and nebulous, really: a lot of fancy legal words on paper. Who wants to bother interpreting them finely? Who wants the bother of linking up causes and effects that the government itself hasn’t bothered to connect? Ah, but the penny, the penny…that’s a different story.

Because you can see the penny!

And, now, you can get stuck with it. Down at the corner store, you’ve got a new job to do besides “buying shit” — you’re now a Cashier Supervisor, too. Think Harper or Flaherty stand there wondering if they’ve got the right change, wondering what this store’s policy is, wondering whether to ask? When they buy their coffee at the Starbucks, are they discomfited by how the person at the counter tells them something totally different from what the official Starbucks policy notice sitting at their elbow announces? It’s all doing better than “breaking even in the long term”, for them!

They get to knock off early!

And leave the penny-hassles to the little people.

Except, obviously, it isn’t really just the penny that we’re talking about, is it?

Look out, folks! The invisible hand of the market is in your pocket, know what I mean?

Why should people vote Lib Dem?

The framing, this is about why people should turn up in 2015 and vote for a Lib Dem candidate versus a Labour or Tory one. Let's refocus slightly, Labour have published their targets for seats, and only 16 are Lib Dems. By contrast the Tories are targeting less seats (concentrating on holding on to their own!) but 20 of them are Lib Dem. Indeed where the Tories are in power they have a number, maybe as much as a dozen or so, that are in danger of falling to the Lib Dems.

Why won't they fall, if they don't? Because as the Ashcroft polling has shown us, around half of the vote at this time appears it is leaving the party, the vast majority to Labour. This will be a combination of protest/tactical voters returning to their party and others disenfranchised. If this happens Tories will still win because the vote gets split.

So... long story short...it's not why should "people" vote lib dem, but rather why should Labour supporters continue their tactical support, why they should give Lib Dems a look in, and why should wavering Tory voters switch sides. Votes switching to UKIP and the likes don't matter (and are certain to be lost causes for the large part), mainly because they will split the vote of your opposition more than they'll hurt you.

Like many people, my support for the Liberal Democrats wavered in 2010. I felt betrayed, as if the values I’d once stood for had been eroded. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that whilst the Lib Dem’s were in Government, they didn’t win the election. What they did was put aside the petty political tribalism that alienates so many from politics.

I think this is nonsense but for Lib Dems they do believe it's true. The danger is that labour voters don't. It is one of the things, however, that Labour seem to agree with more than other "positive" lib dem traits, so it's (for now) still a good line it seems.

They ensured that Britain had a stable govt. in a time of economic uncertainty. They ensured that an austere Conservative cabinet had a fierce vein of liberalism running through it.

The idea that a fierce vein of liberalism is running through the government may well be contested strongly at your conference this weekend. Ashcrofts poll shows even a majority of Lib Dems think the party has abandoned it's principles. As a party that is led by it's members, this is pretty shocking. The mood is definitely not that the Lib Dems are sticking up for liberalism right now.

Secret Courts, not putting the immediate stop to the snoopers charter, doing nothing on the digital economy act, reducing access to legal process for the poor, failing to veto a cut in benefits leading to a real terms lengthening of the poverty gap...this is not fierce liberalism, and further to your later points has nothing to do with fairness either.

Anecdotal, if any Lib Dem tried to win me over for a return vote for Lib Dems in 2015, this would put me off, it'd show they aren't in touch with the realities of what they've done and the sour taste they've put in the mouths of people with no other place to go within the liberal lobby. Just my two pennies.

Remember, your voters that you're trying to win over are those that are loose Labour voters now, and those that are on the more socially liberal edge of the Tory party. Does blowing smoke up the exec's ass about being a force for liberalism when actually it has failed convince those voters that they should give Lib Dems another shot at the ballot?

I mean this as a question and not a fact, but I assume that no-one is going to fall for the broad assertion made without something that truly backs it up, and I'm afraid that the Lib Dems don't really have many examples of where they've actually put liberalism at the heart of policy since 2010.

Imagine if the Liberal Democrats had stayed on the opposition benches in 2010.

· The tax threshold wouldn’t have been raised to £9,440, saving 24 million working people £600.
· The Conservatives would have cut inheritance tax for millionaires.
· There wouldn’t have been an extra £2.5billion targeted at helping the least well-off pupils in schools.
· There wouldn’t have been a ‘triple lock’ on pensions, which guarantees pensioners an above inflation rise in pensions every year. The biggest cash rise ever for the state pension.
· Local schools would be able to be run by for profit by private companies.

Personally I think this is a load of nonsense, but the polling from Ashcroft shows that probably the greatest asset the Lib Dems have is the blocking of Tory policy when it comes to showcasing their strengths to Labour voters.

Would the current government be more, or less fair without the Liberal Democrats?

Good question, you don't seem to answer it though :) This is *really* important since only 35% of 2010 labour voters think you're being fair. If you are, you need to remind them why. As it stands people overwhelmingly think Labour are the party of fairness, including a significant proportion of Lib Dem voters from 2010.

The Conservatives can’t be trusted to create a fairer society. They can’t be trusted to look after the needs of normal people. They can’t be trusted to not bend to the needs of the super-rich who fund their party.

Why not? If I was a voter you're targeting and I'm Labour then I already know this, and I'm currently not voting for you. What difference does this make? If I'm a Tory, how does this get me on your side?

And Labour? It’s because of them that Britain was nearly bankrupted. They binged on borrowing until the deficit was at a startlingly high rate. They can’t be trusted with the economy. Their decade in power showed them caring more about bankers and media bosses than ordinary working people.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Aside from the economy argument being a poisoned chalice the longer this government goes on, Labour are ultimately your ALLIES at the 2015 general election. Don't go around saying how horribly out of touch and stupid they are, because that doesn't exactly make friendly happy times happen.

What's important is that thanks to the Tories opposition to AV (ignore Labour's involvement for a minute), there are areas where Labour are unlikely to win, and that those that can win are the Lib Dems...but they can't beat the Tories without Labour voters helping them out directly.

We know from Ashcroft polling that most people want a Labour or a Labour led coalition in 2015 (57% of them). Everything about Lib Dem strategy in 2015 should be about playing in to this...most likely in a subtle way in the sense they don't want to put off Tory strategic voters either.

A lot of this is going to depend on what the central strategy is, but the best shot Lib Dems have in 2015 is obviously another hung parliament...wouldn't a "we like this about the Tories, but we like this about Labour, but we're needed to stop X and Y from either" message be a) more mature and resonate with those that still rate Lib Dems for being above party politicking and b) ruffle less feathers of those that are undecided but still faintly loyal to red or blue?

A vote for the Liberal Democrats is not a vote for the Conservatives.

This isn't going to fly without giving something very concrete on this. The majority of tories and labour supporters think you've not managed to change the course of Tory policies, nor inject your own stamp on policy direction. (though Tories are more sympathetic...or is that frustrated...on the issue of Lib Dems being able to stand in their way)

It’s a vote to continue threading liberalism throughout Britain. It’s a move towards mature politics. The kind of politics that doesn’t involve bitter sniping in Parliament by politicians bubbled away from the real world.

I know this is a brief "why vote" leaflet, but still no real evidence or reasons here. What about Clegg being the first member of a cabinet to put himself on the line for live call in radio to be accountable on a regular basis to voters? Examples, examples! Remind, and more importantly, educate people that there is something different about the way Lib Dems are approaching politics.

The Liberal Democrats aren’t over as a party.

"They're not over? What? Does that mean they're struggling then, why would they need to try and convince us they're not over?"

Basically...don't say this, it insinuates that there is a legitimate rhetoric that the Lib Dems are on the way out, and gives it that legitimacy through reference.

We want to keep ensuring that Britain is as fair as we can possibly make it. We want to keep on proving to people that they weren’t wrong to trust us with their vote.

We want to carry on building a stronger economy in a fairer society.

And we need your support to do that.

OK, I think I'd drop this last line, maybe this last section here needs to be phrased more along the lines of "With your vote" rather than "we want". Link those outcomes to their action, rather than their vote being an enabler to whatever the Lib Dems wish to do, however that may change.

Other notes:

Over all I think it would be wise to recognise that there is still, albeit not in majority, a regard for the lib dems as a party that has it's heart in the right place, and has the potential to be different. The above, for me, doesn't market that image whatsoever. It paints them as very traditional in politics, very partisan and overly negative on the other parties. With the Lib Dem vote share I don't know if being negative rather than constructively criticising the other parties is more of a help than a hindrance.

The party must know that differentiation is going to be the key to their campaign, so it must be in your interest to show that you can seek out and promote that differentiation. It will be the attitude and focus the campaign team needs, showcase that you have that angle covered.

Where is the talk about local Lib Dems being good for the constituents? The Eastleigh campaign was bouyed by the fact that a) most people voted for their best local candidate and b) most people thought that was Mike.

In the Ashcroft polling we also see that out of all the factors the most persusive argument for Labour and Tory voters is that their local candidate is a good'un if they were open to voting Lib Dems "tomorrow"! This is the closest indication to what is a strong message to those wavering.

On another issue, and without the nod from the campaign team it's hard to justify, it's clear that what voters want to hear, certainly Lib Dem and Labour voters...but even an interesting number of Tory voters, is vocal opposition to Tory policies. Putting forward policies that the Tories wouldn't usually? even better! (25% of Tory voters would see Lib Dems more favourably if they did this, insanity!)

Did you know that while people favour Lib Dem/Labour alliance, they don't trust the current party (Clegg, the members) to choose Labour over the Tories as much as they personally would prefer it? Interesting to note, I thought.

Anyway, I'm digressing now...end.

(Warning: All the news stories linked in here are highly transphobic, with references to acquired genders being a “pretence” or “fake”)

It looks like we have another case of someone trans being prosecuted for “obtaining sex by deception“. I am always wary of mainstream press coverage of cases involving trans people, because the facts can so easily be distorted either through ignorance or, in the case of The Sun’s article on this incident which I’m not going to link to, maliciously.

However, what has been widely reported seems to indicate that in this case, the person being prosecuted was definitely a trans man – they had presented as male for many years, with the STV coverage specifically using the word transsexual and they were already seeing a counsellor. One report also mentions they are on a gender reassignment programme, presumably a reference to a Gender Identity Clinic.

In summary, Wilson plead guilty to two counts of “obtaining sexual intimacy by fraud”. In the first case, this sexual intimacy apparently went no further than kissing and cuddling, with Wilson refusing to engage in anything more.

The second, later case is problematic in that actual intercourse took place and their partner was underage at the time, having mislead Wilson about their age. There was no prosecution for that mentioned however, so it would appear that Wilson’s actions in immediately terminating the relationship and refusing to see her any more when this was revealed were the correct course of action here.

This case makes it clear that the police and courts in Scotland regard failing to disclose trans status prior to kissing/cuddling someone as a criminal offense. Proving you told someone is of course tricky, so unless you’re very “out” there could be trouble ahead.

Wilson has ended up on the sex offender’s register as a result. Full sentencing has not yet taken place.

Edited 1315, 8th March: From the Scottish Transgender Alliance:
“In partnership with Trans Media Watch, we have just received advice to the effect that the charge of sex by fraud in this case does not relate to Wilson presenting as male but instead relates to the use of a substitute object under the pretence that it was a penis and therefore without consent. This means that reporting that states Wilson is in trouble over gender presentation is inaccurate. Please help us to raise awareness of this. We need as many of you as possible to write to the newspapers (and any other media outlets covering this) and explain.“

Edited 1800, 8th March: Initial assurances that the conviction was related to the “use of a substitute object” were incorrect – it has now been confirmed the prosecution was related to identity.

Panic, as even the slightest glance at recent history attests is infectious, and politicians for their part are just as susceptible as everyone else, if not more so.  Just a few weeks back it seemed as though immigration had dropped down the political agenda, or was at least not the hot button topic it had been in recent years. Cue a few scaremongering articles in the Mail and Express about the imminent flood of Romanians and Bulgarians (for which read gypsies, gangs, organised criminals and foreign scroungers) and the continuing rise in support for UKIP, and suddenly we have politicians of all stripes scrapping over who can be the harshest on the new arrivals and anyone else non-British claiming benefits. It at least makes a slight change from the seemingly constant assaults on British welfare claimants, but not much of one.

The last few weeks have been a great example of how politics often seems to work now.  Our representatives haven't been responding to public concern, as there was little in the way of complaints about immigrants claiming benefits as opposed to immigrants in general, but rather taking a non-issue, massively exaggerating it to the point at which it then does worry the public, and so demands a response.  As Jonathan Portes sets out at length, immigrants overwhelmingly put more in than they take out (they also speak English to a far greater extent than is often claimed). The only real potential problems are the NHS, where it's non-EU migrants and visitors who have been accused of taking advantage, and the issue of child benefit payments going to parents when their children have never even visited this country, and in that instance it works both ways, even if the payments in other EU countries aren't as high.

Due to this, there's not really much point in arguing with the policies outlined by Yvette Cooper today in her speech.  If making the rules on when migrants can claim Jobseeker's Allowance slightly more stringent than they already are reassures some people, then fine.  Much more useful would be a crackdown on those who exploit migrant labour, as Cooper also proposed, but just how many employers or agencies do succeed in not paying the minimum wage is debatable; it's almost certainly not as many as the public suspect and politicians make out.

Much of the attempt by Labour to get back on the front foot is though a waste of time.  Immigration has become one of those issues that regardless of how you approach it, how sensitively it's debated or how many times you repeat the facts, very few minds are changed.  The evidence for the undercutting of wages, for instance, is slight, yet it is repeatedly brought up and complained about, just as it was once a common claim that social housing being taken almost exclusively by black and Asian families.  

In part, this is the legacy of Labour's great cock-up: the failure to put in place initial controls on the 8 accession states in 2005, and the much quoted estimate that only 14,000 migrants would come a year, which was based on the belief that the other EU states would open their borders at the same time when as it turned out only ourselves, Sweden and Ireland did.  Apologising for that mistake is pointless when the effect has turned out to be so massive, as is Cooper's other comment that diversity makes us stronger when she and other politicians then say in the next sentence that immigration must now either be extremely limited or stopped altogether.  Indeed, it achieves exactly the opposite of the effect intended when, as the statistics continue to show, net migration continues to be in the hundreds of thousands.

The only way to tackle the disquiet caused by immigration is to be brutally honest.  Freedom of movement is clearly here to stay, and if anything borders are likely to become ever more open rather than closed, with a few exceptions.  It is the utter hypocrisy on the part of the Western world to say to the poor in developing countries that they must stay where they are while those lucky enough to be born in the West can essentially go wherever they please so long as they have the money to back them.  Moreover, the attempts to bring net migration down to the tens of thousands are likely to damage the economy in both the short and the long term, as we're already seeing with the numbers of foreign students wanting to come here dropping dramatically.  Closing the door to those who take almost nothing out in services whilst putting so much in isn't only phenomenally stupid, it does nothing to help those already here who have either been failed somewhere along the line or for whatever reason find themselves out of work.

This isn't a popular argument currently, it's true, and it's certainly not going to go down well initially.  When though we're still discussing immigration come 2015, when it turns out that the coalition has failed miserably to get the numbers down to the tens of thousands, and when it might well be Labour that are making the running due to that, perhaps some will come to the conclusion that it's about time they stopped treating people like fools and confronted them with the cold hard reality.  It might turn out not to be the vote loser they assume.

Say what you will about this Peter Watts guy, he sure has a way with punchy quotes. Just look at some of  the one-liners he’s come up with that various folks have pinched for their sigfiles, or stuck on the sidebars of their blogs. Just look at all the pithy wisdom quoted on GoodReads:

• “Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it.” (698 Google hits)
• “We’re not thinking machines, we’re — we’re feeling machines that happen to think.” (>50)
• “Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.” (≈45)

That first one, especially — that got picked up and used everywhere in the wake of Climategate, The Scandal That Wasn’t. The only problem is, I wasn’t the first one to say it; that was a dude named Dan Brooks, an evolutionary biologist who used to teach at the University of Toronto (and who now spends his retirement walking the Earth like Kwai Chang Caine, bringing a Darwinian perspective to those places on the planet which need it. Should keep him busy for a while.) Dan and I have hung out for years, and ten years ago that sentiment — or one very close to it— slipped out of his mouth while a mixture of rum and Kahlua was slipping into it. I’d shared that basic sentiment for decades, but Dan really nailed it in a way I never had.

I’m not 100% sure where I first heard the brains are survival engines line, but I know it’s not mine. I think I read it in a book by either Stephen Pinker or Thomas Metzinger. And Feeling machines that happen to think hails from a documentary on brain science I saw back in the early nineties; I have no idea what name to attach to the talking head who first spouted those words. I only know I heard them and thought Wow, that’s concise— and more than a decade later, I put them into the mouth of one of the supporting cast from Blindsight.

I doubt that this list is comprehensive. I’m certain of it in fact, because that’s how the writer’s brain works; we pilfer from the real to inform the fictive. And after half a century on this planet, who the hell remembers whether you actually invented something or merely heard it while suckling at your nursemaid’s breast?

I’ve been pondering such imponderables in the wake of the grumbles that appeared after my last post; specifically, the muttering about “plagiarism” that showed up in the comments after I highlighted a line from “The Island” that resurfaced in “Bowl of Heaven”. I said then — and I say now — that I don’t believe there was any intent to appropriate content; Benford & Niven intended the quote as a tribute, that’s how I took it, and truth be told I peed my pants a bit when I encountered my words in their novel. But more to the point, if they’re guilty then I’m more so; because I didn’t port my stolen quotes as any kind of explicit homage. I just thought the words were cool and pithy and so I stuck them into other mouths of my own characters. There was no intent to plagiarize. I just wanted to make a point, and these other people had made the point better than I could have, so I used their words. If I’d known that Policy Lass and ClimateSight and ClimateBites were going to borrow those words in turn, and attribute them to me— if I’d known that that particular posting was going to go semiviral and get quoted as often as it did — I would have taken more care to acknowledge my sources.

That’s my problem with this blog; most of the time I still unthinkingly regard it as an ongoing and largely private conversation with friends over beers. I’m leaning across the table jabbing my finger in the air and making a point to my buddies, and peer review is the last thing on my mind. And the next thing I know my signal’s been boosted by the Open Laboratory Project and everybody and their dog is weighing in.

And that’s why I wouldn’t be tempted to complain about the Bowl’s cut’n'paste even if I didn’t regard it as explicit homage — because even then, it still wouldn’t necessarily be an act of intentional plagiarism. Because I’ve done worse in my time, with no ill intent. Because worse is a stupid word to use here anyway, since it implies levels of transgression — and all any of us authors ever do is steal from the real world. We build our characters from bits and pieces of friends and lovers and enemies, we recycle attitudes and haircuts and the characteristic twitch of an eye and splice them together into composite organisms. We do not invent; we steal.

All that said, I’m still a bit embarrassed that someone else’s words have been, thanks to my own careless lack of attribution, so firmly attached to me. I don’t worry about Dan’s reaction. He knows already, and that fucker plays hardball; if he was pissed I’d know in no uncertain terms. But the fact is, these are only those few cases of theft on my part that I know about; given the way fiction works, I’m 99% certain that I’ve stolen from a whole bunch of other folks without even knowing it.

You should thank me for it. If my writing contained nothing but my own insights, you wouldn’t want to read it.

I was reading a piece the other day in the paper and it was talking about 'literary fiction' as a genre in itself. It picked up on the remarks of the editor of the New York Review of Books reprint range of ebooks (a list i've enjoyed dipping into in its hardback form). Apparently she has talked about literary fiction's 'allegiance to language' as the thing that marks it out.

As if no other fiction has such an allegiance?

I've said my bit again and again over the years. There are good books and bad books. Genres don't exist. Not outside of marketing.

I certainly don't think - any more - that literary fiction is superior to any other kind.

I used to think it was the genre where *anything* could be done. But I now think that's true of any genre.

I've had conversations with a lot of people over the years about what might make literary fiction different.

Is it fiction that has a commitment to groundbreaking form or language? Is it the creative laboratory where new things are thought up and thoughts are thinged? Is it just fiction concocted especially to win literary prizes? The kinds of books that people buy but never actually read? Is it just about novels with deliberately wonky stories and snobby characters?

All these things have been suggested. I even had someone quite recently suggest outright what many have implied: that 'literary fiction' is what you call fiction about well-off and clever people talking about 'philosophical issues of the day.' (And, following that, fiction with ordinary, working class characters can never be literary, really, unless it's foreign or Scottish.)

'Literary' is just another genre, with its own codes and cliches. One that was created for marketing purposes some time in the 1980s, say, to describe a certain kind of vaguely earnest, perhaps experimental, self-consciously learned and often prize-winning book.

As a genre - like any other genre - it has produced monstrous offspring.

Many years of reading, teaching, workshopping, writing, studying and more reading have given me a kind of checklist of the cliched features that Bad Literary Fiction often boasts...

And I am absolutely sure that I have been as guilty as anyone - at one time or another - of some of the following points:

1.  The ability to say the simplest things in the most complicated way possible.
2. Twisted syntax and word choice posing hopefully as stream-of-consciousness for a character having a not-particularly pleasant time of it.
3.  Epiphanies galore, in which the tiniest moment becomes transcendent and obscurely meaningful all of a sudden, accompanied by strange sensual effects examined microscopically in luminously belaboured language. And possibly, a bubble of childhood flashback presented in italics.
4. The forward momentum of a story being subordinated throughout to the conveying of mood. And when something looks as if it's in danger of happening, the chapter abruptly stops.
5. The assumption that earnestness = seriousness.
6. Also, sneering = cleverness.
7. The skilful concealment of actually having nothing to say.
8. The skilful concealment of the fact that looking stuff up in books isn't knowledge.
9. The achingly obvious admiration of writers that serious readers admire but nobody loves. And then copying them.
10. Assuming that your words weigh more, mean more, and are doing more. Not as much as any poet's, of course. But more than anyone writing in any other genre.
11. A wearisome meta-critique of the form of the novel itself running throughout the thing. Sometimes in the form of a particularly self-aware narrator, or interleaved fairy tales or even features borrowed ironically from other, lesser, fictional genres.
12. Cold, almost emotionless analysis of stuff in the world, bleached of any sentiment or actual feeling. Often lists of things are presented, or facts, or allusions to scientific or historical stuff that the author has browsed through.
13. The need to tell the world that - hey, rich people have it tough, too.

This last point is the trickiest for me. It's the question i often hit upon - is literary fiction always just a playground for the privileged?

On a day when most of the publishing blogosphere is dealing with Random House’s horrible Hydra publishing line, I figured I’d talk about something else. First of all, if you haven’t heard about Hydra and what it wants to do to writers who know nothing about business, check out John Scalzi’s blog. In fact, check out John Scalzi’s blog to see why so many writers choose to remain in traditional publishing without become hybrid writers at all. Also note (apropos of last week’s blog) that John now has an escape route in the back of his mind, should traditional book publishing turn on him the way it has turned on so many of us.

And let me add that many of you expressed surprise at my interchangeable widgets comment last week. Here’s what I said: Traditional publishers know that when one writer goes away, another will step into her place. You’re a rotating group of widgets that might make the publisher some money. If you don’t make the publisher money, then they’ll find someone who will.

Now, thanks to Hydra, you can see that attitude in action.

But, let’s move on to my own pleasant surprise of last week. It came in the comment section of my blog. Marie Force mentioned that her self-published book, Waiting For Love, hit the New York Times bestseller list at number 6 for e-books and number 11 overall, the USA Today bestseller list at number 15 and the Wall Street Journal bestseller list at number 6 for e-books.

I’ve been turning that news over and over in my mind since last week. Marie Force isn’t the first self-published writer (even though I prefer the term indie, which I will now use) to hit the New York Times list, and she certainly won’t be the last. But it’s refreshing to see it in action. (Congrats again, Marie!)

Journalist that I used to be, though, I wasn’t going to blog about this until I made certain I saw the actual lists. And Marie linked to all three in her post. As I scanned through the Times  list for Marie’s name, I noticed something else. Let me explain how.

The list is formatted this way:

6. Waiting For Love, by Marie Force (Marie Force)

If you look at the number one book on the list, you see this:

1. Alex Cross, Run, by James Patterson (Little, Brown & Company)

In other words, the publisher comes after the author’s name, something we’re all used to. But I’m not used—even now—to seeing the author’s name as the publisher. As I was scanning this list—the e-book bestseller’s list for the week of March 10, 2013—I noticed that same phenomenon six times in the top twenty-five. In other words, self-published authors comprise 24% of the New York Times e-book list for the week of March 10.

Wowza. Nifty. Cool.

So much for that added value traditional publishers bring. Guess what, y’all? Even hitting a bestseller list is no longer reserved for traditionally published writers only. Back when just one or two writers were making the lists, I wasn’t so sure it would happen, but now—I’m thrilled and amazed, and the traditional writer in me is surprised.

The business woman isn’t.

Now that the distribution model for books has expanded so that it’s easy for writers to get their books in front of readers, of course readers drive sales. Readers don’t care if Marie Force was published by Marie Force or by Little, Brown & Company, so long as the readers can get the books.

Getting on the bestseller list, then, has to do with word of mouth and demand, not on availability on bookstore shelves.

Remember, bestseller lists are based on velocity as well as number of copies sold. In other words, if you sell 5,000 books in the first week of publication and only 1,000 more books in the next 51 weeks, you might hit a bestseller list. But if you sell 1,000 books for 52 weeks out of the year, you won’t hit a bestseller list—even though you’ve sold 46,000 more copies of your book than the so-called bestseller did. If you don’t believe me, look at this article in The Wall Street Journal, exposing a marketing firm that buys its clients onto the WSJ bestseller list.

If you understand business and you understand velocity versus total sales, you can manipulate some lists. But you can’t manipulate three  of them in the same week. That’s because the lists that Marie hit (and several other of those authors as well) use different algorithms to compute their bestseller lists. The USA Today list is the most impressive to me because it computes actual sales of total books, comparing the sales of business books to the sales of romance novels to the sales of e-books to the sales of trade paper. To hit that list is hard (and, quite frankly, more of an achievement, imho, than hitting the Times list).

How did these indie authors hit the lists? I don’t know. I’m sure some of them would tell you they promoted to death or they blogged a lot. And I know those things had no real impact at all. Writers never believe that they got on a bestseller list because they wrote a good book.

Here’s what I do know: each of the six indie authors on the New York Times list has published more than one book. The author with the fewest titles, Shanora Williams, published three titles since the end of November.

The other authors (and the two on the extended New York Times list) published at least four books last year. Some are indie-only authors, and others, like Marie, are hybrid writers, with books from traditional publishers as well as indie publishing their own titles. Some are newer writers who have just signed a traditional book deal (and I hope to hell their contracts are good).

What this shows is what those of us who have been in the business a long time already know: write a lot of books and readers will find you. In fact, if you’re a good storyteller, then readers will anxiously wait for your next book.

In the Amazon reviews for one of these Times bestsellers lurk a lot of complaints about copy editing or the lack thereof. Those reviews are mixed in with demands from readers for the next book in the series. As I said with the early Amanda Hocking books, copy editing matters, but if you’re a good storyteller, then many readers will forgive the misuse of commas to get to your story. (Many won’t, however, which is why I insist that you indie writers pay for a copy editor of some kind. Increase your sales even more with proper punctuation!)

Traditional publishers have long limited their authors to one or two books per year. Stephen King even made that a plot point in Bag of Bones. Even he, who made a profit for the publisher on every book he wrote, was restricted to two books per year for his publisher in those dark days.

The romance genre broke that mold—and got dismissed for it. Harlequin liked authors who could write six or more books per year for its category romances (generally, those books run 50-60,000 words, about half to a third the length of a standard novel). Nora Roberts continued that practice after she left the categories, and early on, she took on a pen name for her J.D. Robb series, since her publisher and agent were afraid that slight departure from her romance novels would tank her sales. It didn’t. It just brought in new readers.

It was news when historical romance writer Mary Balogh published four books in the same season. Three were paperback originals, and the fourth was a hardcover. The experiment, according to the traditional publisher, was to see if the readers would spend even more for the last book in a four-book series or if they would wait until the mass market paperback got released.

Some readers waited, of course. But most bought all four books in the same season, without a lot of qualms.

Traditional publishers sometimes released three books in three months, usually to promote a new writer (or a new-to-the-publisher writer) with a series of books. Often that publisher had invested a lot of money in the writer or was going to build that writer into a bestseller.

Sometimes the experiment flopped; most often it worked, and is being used more and more now.

The problem that traditional publishers have is this: it costs a lot of money to publish a book. The publisher must put all the money out up front for everything from content to editorial to production to distribution. Books go from being a proposal from a writer to being a paper edition in stores, at thousands of copies, all before the publisher sees a dime (this, of course, doesn’t count Random’s grabby e-publishing lines). The average cost for a mass market original is about $250,000 (with a $5,000 advance to the author factored in), so if the publisher is going to publish three books by that author in one year, that author had better justify the publisher’s $750,000 investment.

See why traditional publishers slow writers down?

But indie writers, handling their own publishing schedule, don’t need to slow down. They can publish something when it’s done, with minimal financial outlay. If you figure that when the indie writer spends money on a cover and copy edits—and doesn’t count her time—she can publish her book for the cost of a expensive four-person dinner in Manhattan, the kind that editors put on their expense accounts.

With that kind of outlay, publishing 12 books per year, provided the writer can write that many, is doable. Publishing 4-6 is definitely possible. If the writer has existing backlist, then publishing even more can happen.

Velocity happens to indie and traditionally published writers alike when they’re publishing the next book in a well-loved series. About half of those indie books on the Times list are in a series, so clearly the readers were waiting for the next book.

Most online bookstores have some kind of algorithm that notifies a customer when a favorite author has published a new book. Even if the indie authors can’t do preorders yet, the algorithm more than makes up for it. The fans will buy the book day one if they want it.

How many books will a reader read by the same author? That question used to bother me, since I have such a huge inventory. At what point am I overwhelming my readers?

That, it turned out, was a traditional publishing question. If you think of limited shelf space and the importance of velocity in traditional publishing—there’s only so much room for new books and those books better sell—then it matters how many books you push by a certain writer. At minimum, that writer had better sell $800,000 worth of books per season to justify the capital outlay.

All of those factors make “overwhelming the reader” an issue because—unbeknownst to the reader—those books have to sell within a short time frame to make the publisher’s money back.

Now, books stay on the virtual shelves as long as the contracts and/or the writer wants them to. Writers are happy with selling (by traditional publishing standards) small numbers of books per week, because those sales add up over time. Traditional publishers still need to make their investment back, so they still need a lot of sales very fast to make supporting an author worthwhile.

In other words, if you ask a traditional publisher when a writer will overwhelm readers with content, you will get a different answer than you will if you ask readers.

Because if you ask readers the question, they’ll pause, frown, and think. Then they’ll ask you which writers you’re referring to. The reason they ask that is simple: every reader has favorite writers whose work they would buy every week if they could. And every reader has writers they like whose work they won’t buy weekly because the reader has other things to do with his time. So the reader will discriminate between favorite authors and authors he merely likes.

You do this. I know you do. Every reader does.

In fact, every consumer does this with various forms of entertainment. The thing that calmed my fears about too much content was looking at the Rolling Stones song title availability in MP3.  Two thousand songs. Two thousand. And while you might not like the Stones, a lot of people do. Not everyone is going to buy all two thousand songs, but a great number of people will be disappointed if their favorite isn’t listed.

Yeah, yeah, I’m not the Rolling Stones (I’m not that old or that male, for that matter) nor am I Nora Roberts. But I have to trust my fan base to pick and choose among the things I publish to find what they want.

I know that some folks prefer my Fey fantasy series to my Retrieval Artist series, and others won’t ever read anything but the Smokey Dalton mysteries. That’s okay by me. I like having all of those books out there, and I like having as much of my work available as possible.

Slowly, the content providers are learning that consumers don’t all act in the same way. Right now, television producers are discussing this in public in two ways.

First, they’re reacting to the Netflix series, House of Cards. Netflix released the entire season at once, and a lot of viewers binge-watched. They spent the entire weekend watching all thirteen episodes back to back. (I assume these consumers took naps and ate meals, but that might be a big assumption.) Others spent the month of February watching, and others, like me, are waiting until we have time.

I binge watch series. I prefer Downton Abbey all at once. I tried to watch Season 3 “live” and gave up. I ordered the DVD the moment it became available. I watch some shows every week. I really don’t care if I see NCIS in bulk, but it’s a comforting hour on a tired night.

Netflix, which has a lot of data on the way that consumers watch, knows that consumers watch slowly and binge-watch, which is why Netflix put the entire season out at once. Other content providers will follow suit. But not everyone. A panel with cable executives at the Hollywood Radio and Television Society’s February luncheon had most of the panelists giving a cranky response to the question of whether or not they’d release their premiere programming in single-season dumps.

HBO’s programming president called Netflix’s move “showy,” and dismissed it out of hand. Other cable executives still wanted “water-cooler” TV. They don’t care about controlling the conversation as much as they care about controlling the purse strings. It costs a lot of money to produce an entire season of something, and to spend all of that money all at once.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

At the same time, the industry is slowly coming to grips with the fact that consumers have choices now. (As opposed to those three networks with rigid programming back in the day.) The Los Angeles Times has published article after article about the way that Nielsen measures television viewing in this country. For the five of you who don’t know, Nielsen is the company that measures television ratings. Ratings show everything from whether a program should be canceled to how much advertising should cost on that program depending on how many eyeballs actually view the ad.

And that’s the question. First, Nielsen only rated eyeballs that watched live. Then live+24 hours after air. Now it is—I think—live +7 days later, unless I missed something (which is entirely possible).

Last week, Nielsen also sought to change the definition of a “television home” since it noted that many people, particularly younger people, no longer watch TV programming on an actual television. Here’s what the LA Times said, “Besides people cutting the cord to their pay-TV provider, many younger consumers simply never sign up in the first place, choosing instead to get content through newer platforms such as Hulu or Netflix. The traditional networks are putting more of their content online as well. If that material has advertisements in it, having a proper measurement becomes crucial.”

The change has already occurred, but Nielsen won’t have a way to properly measure all of it (if it can even be properly measured) until 2014.

Now, apply all of this to books.

Readers have long binge-read their favorite authors. My first memory of binge reading stems from my 12^th summer. I read all of Agatha Christie’s books in the local library and figured out how she determined whodunit. I felt very smart. I also read all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books, but discovered that I couldn’t quite suspend my disbelief for Princess of Mars. (I think I wanted more princess, less Mars.) The following summer, all of Victoria Holt and all of Andre Norton. And somewhere—my sixteenth summer, maybe?—all of Alexander Dumas and all of Ian Fleming.

Binge reading is such a common phenomenon that the execs who are talking about the changing TV scene comparing the consumer’s behavior with episode availability to the consumer’s behavior with books in a series. In other words, we all do it.

The problem that traditional publishers have is the same one that television executives have—upfront financial outlay. It’s expensive to produce a lot of stuff at once. Which is why Random House is developing nasty things like the well-named Hydra imprint, why they’re holding onto as many rights as they can, and why they’re contracting for the length of the copyright.

It’s also why good writers who produce and self-publish a lot of content are hitting the bestseller lists with later titles. Readers want the next book in their favorite series. They’ll try a stand-alone book by the same author. They’ll go for the first book in a new series.

Readers want their writers to be able to write as fast as the readers read. Since very few writers can write an entire novel overnight and most readers can read one overnight, that wish will never come true. Writers will always write slower than readers can read.

But it’s good news for those of us who are prolific. We will have an audience that will grow with us, because our books remain available over time. And readers rarely discover a favorite author with the first book that author ever published. Readers hear about that author through word-of-mouth and pick up the latest title or the title with the best cover or the title that seems closer to something the reader already knows she likes.

For the mystery workshop I’m teaching in June, I’m introducing the students to authors they’ve never heard of. In the case of at least two writers, I start with a mid-series book. So if my students end up liking that book, they’ll have to go back to the author’s previous work.

It’s how we read. And finally, publishing reflects the way that readers read thanks to the digital era.

Just like television is starting to reflect how people actually watch, as opposed to the mandate from corporate on high. Water-cooler television? There will always be that. Just like there will be the Book of the Year (depending on genre). But there will also be consumers who come really late to that Book of the Year or that water-cooler TV show. I’m thinking Supernatural might be my summer binge show. Yeah, I know. I haven’t seen it yet. But the scenes at the front of the show look interesting. I’ve been watching them after I watch the episode of Arrow that I’ve stored on my DVR. Arrow is as close to appointment television as I get. I watch it a day or two later.

And I buy the Book of the Year when I hear about it, but I might read it three years later. If I do and like it, I’ll have three years of new books by that author to catch up on. If it’s an indie author, I’ll have a lot of reading.

And I like that. Very much.

I know a lot of you download this blog on your Kindle or  your RSS feed and read it when you get a chance. I also get e-mails from many of you who have just discovered the blog and you’re slowly working your way back through the mountain of material I’ve managed to finish over the 134 weeks I’ve been doing the Business Rusch (not counting the year-plus I spent on The Freelancer’s Survival Guide)

While I’m amazed at how much I’ve written, I am also aware of how much time this takes from my fiction. For every writer who discovers the Business Blog, there are half a dozen fans who write to me wondering where the next book in their favorite series is. Fill in the blank as to which series. I could write 24 hours a day and still not get to the next book quick enough for someone.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying this blog must remain self-sustaining. If it stops contributing to the household’s bottom line, then I’ll take the 3K words per week that I write on this and turn it into a new novel. Economic factors exist in the Rusch household as well as in television boardrooms. (VBG) So please leave a tip on the way out.

Thanks to all of you who do support the blog with comments, forwards, links and donations. I greatly appreciate each and every one of you.

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“The Business Rusch: “Binge Reading” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

 

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The amazing Alex from Love and Liberty has challenged us all to come up with a statement of what the Liberal Democrats stand for and has tagged me. Thing is, as ever, his version is so good that I feel that I couldn't possibly match up to it. Here's what he has to say:
The Liberal Democrats stand for freedom for every individual – freedom from poverty, ignorance and conformity.

To make that freedom real needs both fairness and economic responsibility: an economy that works, that encourages enterprise, and where everyone pays their fair share.

So freedom from poverty requires responsible spending, not debt, built on fairer taxes where lower earners pay less tax and the wealthiest pay more, and building green jobs for the future.

Freedom from ignorance needs better education and training, so people have the opportunity to realise their potential.

And freedom from conformity, supported by freedom from poverty and ignorance, means everyone should have the liberty to live their lives as they choose – without harming others; with equality before the law; with a better say, because no government always knows best.

That’s why Liberal Democrats are working for a stronger, greener economy in a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life.
I guess this sort of thing is shaped by the things that matter to each individual. That is the very essence of liberalism - a deep respect for the uniqueness of every individual and the unique cocktail of circumstances and experiences that affect their thinking. We expect that people are different and we celebrate it. That doesn't mean to say we sling everyone adrift and let them get on with it like the Tories would do. We recognise the state has a role to play in removing barriers to people achieving all they are capable of. Nor do we adopt Labour's collectivist one size fits all approach to public services. They treat people as if they're amorphous blobs rather than individuals.
I am well aware that some of what I'm about to write will attract cries of "but you did x or y" in government. Everyone who has ever been in a relationship or ever had to work with other people in any capacity will understand that compromises have to be made. Some of the compromises that the Liberal Democrats have agreed during this first period of government in 80 years in the worst economic circumstances since the Great Depression have been particularly hard, if not impossible, to swallow. Our aspirations and values remain the same, though and shine through in much of what the Coalition Government is doing.
I think that you can get a better form of words than the opening to our Preamble to the Constitution. 

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity

The word no-one is as important in this - we don't stop until we all live with the sort of freedoms we want. 
Alex turned it round so that it was freedom from poverty ignorance and conformity. I understand why, but I think that it's good to stay aware that there are powerful forces who are quite happy to restrict others for their own ends. 
So, how would I express the values it contains?
The Liberal Democrats are about freedom for every individual to live as they wish so long as their choices don't harm others. We aim to break down the three major barriers which hold people back: poverty, ignorance and conformity.
We believe in carefully managing the resources we have, mindful that generations to come deserve the same freedoms as we have. That means that safeguarding our environment and making sure that we don't over-spend, amassing huge debts for the future, are essential. 
The cost of running an effective, liberal state must be met in a fair and sustainable way with those who earn the most contributing the most and those who have least being protected as much as possible That is why we have ensured tax cuts for the lowest paid, taking many people out of tax completely while increasing taxes for those who can afford it.
We believe that education, knowledge and a curious, enquiring mind are essential to get on in life. A person's ability should determine their progress in life, not their background. That is why we are giving extra money to help disadvantaged children learn both at home and abroad. 
We believe that quality of life and wellbeing are also vital to ensuring that people are truly free. That is why we gave given mental health equal status in the NHS mandate and put extra money into providing the most effective therapies for half a million people. 
We recognise that people have individual needs. That means that  public services should as far as possible be flexible enough to meet the needs of the people who use them. We believe that the criteria for having your relationship recognised by the state should be that you love each other which is why we are giving same sex couples the right to marry and have a long record of fighting for LGBT equality. 
We believe in working with others to meet our aims. That can be to provide a Liberal Democrat influence in a local or national government but we are also a proudly internationalist party. We believe in the principles of  international co-operation, whether that be within the EU or further afield. A world where 1 in 3 women experience violence, abuse or rape is not acceptable to us and only by working on a global level can we eradicate this and give women and girls the freedom they are entitled to.
We believe that the purpose of the state is to serve the people, not the other way around. That is why we will not tolerate unnecessary restriction of people's freedom. The state should not hold DNA or fingerprints of innocent people unless there is a very good reason, nor should it restrict movement or protest. Freedom of expression, the right to effectively challenge authority are essential parts of a liberal society. The state has no business intruding into your lawful activities. 
Commercial organisations should be forced by effective national and international action to behave responsibly both to the environment and their customers so that they can not abuse the power and influence that they have.
We believe in decisions being taken at the lowest practical level. Communities should be able to influence the services available to them. 
We do not believe in quick fixes. We believe in looking carefully at the challenges our society faces and providing sustainable solutions. 
This is nowhere close to being ready, but it's as much time as I have before Alex's deadline. What do you think? It wouldn't exactly fit on the back of a postcard.

If you’re one of those who really miss by-elections campaigns a reminder from last week. twitter.com/LoonyPartyNews…

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) March 6, 2013

Before Mr Farage gets too cock a hoop….

The last few parliamentary by-elections have been all about UKIP. They may not have won a seat, but they have certainly made the headlines. An increase of 14% in Corby, 16% in Rotherham, 24% in Eastleigh, polling over 10% of the vote in six of the last fifteen by-elections, only losing three deposits in that same timescale and clocking up a very impressive 39,374 votes (out of a total of 59,917 over the course of twenty years or so).

And yet there is something that Nigel Farage needs to remember. UKIP are not the only party to have a sudden surge.

Between the Kensington by-election (1988) and the Paisleys (1990) the Greens were regularly clocking up over 3% of the vote and in the Vauxhall by-election (held on the same day as the 1989 European Elections) they polled 6.13% of the vote (their first saved deposit in a by-election ever). However, after the 1992 general election, it was a sorry tale for the Greens as it took them a staggering twenty years to next save their deposit (when they polled 9.74% in the Norwich North by-election in 2009).

Similarly the National Front back in the 1970’s had a string of good by-elections. Under the rules there were then, there were no saved deposits but they reached a height of 8.15% in the Birmingham, Stetchford by-election in 1977 but just like the Greens they too faded (with the next saved deposit coming in 1994 when the BNP polled 7.03% in the Dagenham by-election).

And there is even worse news when you look at the swing back at a future general election as well (something that the Liberal Democrats know about only too well). Liverpool, Edge Hill was held just a few weeks before the 1979 general election and the Liberals gained the seat on a staggering 32% swing from Labour to Liberal, but on Election Night 1979, although the Liberals held the seat they suffered a 10.5% swing back to Labour. Shirley Williams won Crosby for the SDP in 1981 on a swing of 33.5% swing from the Conservatives, but lost the seat on a 7% swing back in 1983. Plaid Cymru’s totemic gain in Carmarthen (in 1966) and the SNP doing the same in Hamilton (in 1967) were both reversed at the 1970 general election (although the SNP did pick up the Western Isles to compensate). The 9% vote share for the Greens in Norwich North in 2009 became a 3% vote share at the 2010 general election. And even George Galloway who could claim that his candidate in Leicester South robbed the seat from Labour saw Yvonne’s 12.66% vote share in 2004, halve the following year.

So before you start making bold predictions of UKIP MP’. Mr. Farage, remember the history of by-elections. There is always a swing back.

Harry Hayfield writes PB’s regular local elections reviews