Andrew Hickey

1. Take a large number of individual tracks.
2. Put the first 64 into a playlist.
3. Shuffle.
4. Play (no skipping allowed).
5. After two tracks, decide – as quickly as you can – which of the two you want to hear again.
6. Delete the other.
7. Repeat until playlist is over. You will have 32 tracks left.
8. Shuffle again.
9. Play (no skipping allowed).
10. Using the process outlined in 5-7, go through the playlist until you have 16 tracks.
11. Add another 48 tracks to the playlist.
12. Repeat steps from 3.

This is – mostly – how I’ve been listening to music for the last month or so. It started with the realisation that I had close to 50,000 MP3s on my hard drive and – even accounting for duplicates – the majority of them were rarely, if ever, listened to. So I wanted a method of listening to them. I could of course have come up with a simpler method – i.e. put a bunch on a playlist, play them, keep the ones I liked – but I wondered if formalising that would be more fun for me. And it is.

At least, it’s more fun than it looks.

The Mincer has several advantages. On average songs get two listens, in practice there’s a long tail distribution where most get one but ‘winners’ get a lot. If you discover an amazing song you hear it often enough that you keep enjoying it, not so often that you wear it out. You become terribly fond of long-stayers. You are often forced to give OK or mediocre records a second chance, by the luck of the draw, and these might grow on you. You learn about your tastes, prejudices and moods by having to choose between utterly different records. And you can keep topping up your playlist with new tracks, so it works as a way of staying current too. (I suspect, given enough lead time, it would be a good method for getting through something like the massive torrents of new music you get prior to SXSW). And, like most gamification, it is basely engaging in a slightly gross, what-does-this-say-about-me way. However clinical this approach sounds, it’s having the desired effect – I’m actually listening to (and frequently loving) the swathes of music I’ve so gluttonously acquired.

It’s not without its problems. Occasionally you get two songs you’d like to keep. You can always cheat, though. I don’t, but then I enjoy the straitjacket. You have to interrupt your listening occasionally to delete tracks, which can be a hassle. And on some level you’re treating songs as cannon fodder, not as works of art, which is why I called it the Mincer. But art and beauty are hardy creatures and in my experience adapt to this better than they adapt to being locked on a hard drive somewhere and ignored.

Oh, and it probably doesn’t work for albums. I’ve not tried. I’ve also got lots of music I’ve been listening to more ‘normally’ – albums included – but there’s something addictive about the mix of discovery, rediscovery, and gladiatorial brutality which makes me keep returning to the Mincer. Give it a try! Or don’t. Run screaming.

Thursday:


We're told repeatedly – usually by the MEEJA – that ordinary people LOATHE "professional" politicians.

And yet, the Liberal Democrats are condemned – by the SAME meeja – for our poor handling of the Lord Rennard allegations as "amateur hour".

Well HOORAY for amateur hour, I say, if it means that these allegations are uncovered and investigated.

I've been SHOCKED and NAUSEATED by people (Hard Labour AND Conservatory and EVEN Lib Dem) trying to make POLITICAL CAPITAL out of this.

'Cos I suspect that the Conservatories and Hard Labour are NOT better at taking harassment seriously, but ARE better at COVERING IT UP!

I've heard Hard Labour's John Mann on the The Today show showing off that he'd reported the Liberals (sic) to the police, an interview all about blaming Captain Clegg where Mr Mann failed to mention the VICTIMS even once.

I've read typical passive-aggressive hand-wringing from the likes of Hopi Sen who confesses to having heard "rumours" from within Hard Labour – and by his silence admits done NOTHING about them – but still opportunistically condemns Captain Clegg (or rather the Lib Dem "leader" – I guess he cannot quite bring himself to finger the current leader given that the allegations appear to date back five to ten years).

I've seen Nick "mate of Dave" Robinson rolling his eyed and blowharding about Cap'n Clegg "changing his story" when it is REALLY the MEEJA who have changed what they reported. The Cap'n was still in Spain on Friday when the meeja were coming out with one story; he made a statement, when he got back, that didn't match their line so obviously they blame him for not keeping to what they'd written.

And of course the Daily Hate Mail and the Tell-lies-o-graph have been having a ball, giving no-good Conservatory Chair Grant "Ms" Happs all the covering fire and plausible deniability he could wish for.

(I should add here that Chanel Four News – and the BBC radio World at One – do appear to have reported responsibly, and it is good – and surprising! – to see the Grauniad's Michael White and Pollyanna Toytown raising questions about the timing and ferocity of the attack from the other print meeja.)

Did Cap'n Clegg take action? We DON'T KNOW – that's for the inquiry to find out. Although there's every appearance that the Cap'n DID do SOMETHING, sending Danny Alexander to "have a quiet word" and removing Lord R "on health grounds". Similarly, Ms Jo Swinson has made a statement about what she did and – reading between the lines – it appears that she too did what she could, constrained though she was by the need to respect the complainants' requests for anonymity.

Inadequate? Perhaps. But in the absence of concrete allegations, natural justice – innocent until proved guilty – says we should not just fire people on the basis of rumour. A more serious question would surely be WHY concrete allegations either were not made publicly or did not reach the appropriate office. Nor should we bite the head off the Party Leader on the say-so of people who themselves say they knew of the rumours but self-evidently did less about them than the Cap'n and Danny. We've ALL got to ask ourselves some serious questions and we've got to change the culture of the Party so that it matches what a lot of us believed it already was!

It seems to me that there is a problem with WHISTLE-BLOWING processes generally, and not JUST limited to the Liberal Democrats.

Anyone blowing the whistle faces two problems:

The first is the obvious fear of being labelled a "trouble-maker" (and there are worse names too, as we all know!). The evidence certainly seems to point to whistle-makers not prospering, down to a great deal of victim-blaming or just old fashioned revenge. Who's going to volunteer for that? All the more kudos to the women who HAVE now had the courage to come forward.

The second is that, unlike in real life, once you report something it seems like there are no shades of grey. As we've seen from the way that some in the meeja have happily blurred the distinction between the Lord Rennard allegations and the appalling facts of the Jimmy Savile case, you can go from "everything's fine" to "you're a MONSTER" with NO intervening steps.

(And the flip side of this is that the offender, if called upon their behaviour, is forced into massive and hurtful denial. Instead of "I'd rather you didn't stand so close" / "I'm sorry, I will try to do better and to learn from this mistake" we jump straight to "SEXUAL IMPROPRIETY!" / "I NEVER RAPED YOU!")

That makes whistle-blowing a REALLY BIG THING and, perversely, a MUCH HARDER thing to contemplate doing. If, for example, you know that you've been hassled inappropriately, but you handled it and you're not distressed are you going to be happy raising the issue knowing that your only option is the NUCLEAR option? Or are you forced to suffer in silence and maybe allow him (or her) to get away with it until the next time when they do something worse?

One possible solution to this might be to set up an INDEPENDENT organisation that will do the whistle-blowing for you – a kind of CHILD-LINE for GROWN UPS, if you like. Not just for the Lib Dems, but for any Party, or indeed companies or other groups like trades unions or the scouts or the WI; it might be especially useful for smaller companies without HR departments.

The person with the problem might find it easier to talk to an independent organisation that hasn't got power over them. This organisation could have staff trained to make sure that all complaints are listened to with sympathy and advice can be offered with compassion. And then they would be able to approach the right people at a senior level and talk frankly to them because they have no need to fear reprisals. It would allow people to – in a first instance – blow the whistle anonymously so that a problem could be addressed at a much earlier stage and without it having to be a full melodrama. If the problem DIDN'T get resolved, THEN you could move to full accusation and investigation.

But there's a more important issue.

Institutional changes might help correct one flaw – the instinct to protect an important figure, or at least to ignore it and hope it goes away – but not the societal reason beneath it: that people are AWKWARD and UNCOMFORTABLE talking about SEX and don't know how to deal with it.

Frankly, I'm afraid that there is a "NEW PURITANISM" abroad, seeking to supress ANY expression of sex or sexuality in the name of protecting people.

If we cannot talk about this – and CLEARLY we CAN'T – then the problem IS going to get ignored and it IS going to get WORSE!

This comes from the same culture where it is (bizarrely) HUMILIATING rather than LIBERATING to ask a political leader how many people he has slept with.

It's clear from the way that – salacious headlines aside – the meeja have concentrated on the alleged cover-up as though THAT is more important in and of itself. It is important but only in as far as it encourages and perpetuates a culture that says sexual harassment is "okay", that turns a blind eye to assault and rape. Sex is NAUGHTY! Sex is BAD! Sex, above all, is NOT TO BE SPOKEN OF!

The Liberal Democrats are supposed to be the Party that says the sex is ok! (And then blushes furiously!)

Conservatories think ALL sex is bad; Hard Labour think it should only be allowed when practised in the prescribed fashion (probably on the orders of Harriet Harman).

But WE'RE supposed to be the ones who say it's fine to fancy, to flirt, to snog, to (deep breath) shag.

This is about how grown-ups, adults, deal with sex – no, not even that, but sexual suggestiveness. Obviously this is about INFORMED CONSENT. That's why we have an AGE of CONSENT, so that there's a clear dividing line between children who don't understand and grown-ups who do. But where to draw the line between grown-ups is much more difficult. You can't just BAN everyone from making risqué remarks.

If you treat adults like children all the time, pretty soon you won't HAVE any more children!

Power relationships make it more complicated still.

The popular media image would certainly be the "stranger in a dark alley" is "worse" than an "unwanted grope". But is it? As a wise Auntie points out to me: consider the situation where, if you want to keep your job (to which by its very nature there are limited alternatives), you are forced to spend the next ten years working with the knowledge that that "unwanted grope" could happen again at any moment. Or worse.

We need to be more about EDUCATING people on where those lines are, and how to not get the signals wrong, and empowering people to explain when the line IS stepped over and to be accepting of being told that, and to be forgiving when people make a first mistake so that we can stop it becoming a "pattern" of mistakes, to becoming actual evil.


Today is by-election day.

Hundreds and hundreds of people have spent their time and their money supporting Mike Thornton, explaining why he would make a good and hard-working local MP... just as Mr Huhney-Monster (for all his other, more egregious faults) was a good and hard-working local MP... and with justification pointing out the shortcomings of his Conservatory rival the hardly-to-be-found Ms Hutchings. And it is terribly sad for all those people that the coverage in this last week has totally ignored the issues and the candidates.

It is to be hoped that the people of Eastleigh WILL decide on the issues and the candidates and will NOT be swayed by the meeja storm that the press have whipped up – flagrantly against the spirit of Leveson – because that would be a victory for the WORST kind of DIRTY TRICKS!

Along with every single Liberal Democrat that I've talked to or heard from, I'm appalled by what, if the allegations are proved, would be (yet another) failing by my Party. After covering up Charles Kennedy's battles with alcoholism, this looks all too like another conspiracy of "don't rock the boat"-ism.

But I'm also reassured that the Party is NOT putting electoral convenience ahead of moral necessity. Whatever may or may not have been swept under the carpet in the past, there is a clear determination now to lift that carpet now and clean our house properly.

Winning the B'Eastleigh By-Election is DESPERATELY IMPORTANT... but NOT as important as building a Party that DESERVES to WIN.

The Independent reports that the Labour Party “will fight the next general election on a pledge to retain Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent”:

Although some advisers to Ed Miliband want him to opt for a scaled-down, cheaper alternative to the current Trident system, there are growing signs that Labour will join the Conservatives in backing a £25billion “like-for-like” replacement.

The reason for Labour’s likely stance turns out to be Big Willy Politics:

...the Tories’ support for full Trident renewal would allow them to portray Labour as “soft” on safeguarding the nation’s security if the Labour manifesto opts for an approach similar to that of the Lib Dems.

Is that what Britain’s defence policy has come to? Instead of making either party look more manly, it makes both look like complete knob-ends.

So I am writing this in reaction to this godsawful inspiration porny video that's going around. I'm not linking to it because I will not have that filth on my blog. Basically, a high school basketball coach put in the team manager, who has an intellectual disability, and every damn person on the court-his team and not his team-passed him the ball until he made a basket.

This is not inspiring. This is not inclusion. This is patronizing and yuck.

So, I feel compelled to write about middle school basketball. Yep, I played team sports in 6th-8th grade: basketball, volleyball, and soccer. But I am going to focus on basketball because that is the sport of the day, and because that is the sport where I think the school's coach did it best.

My mom really wanted me to be good at standard sports, so in 6th grade-middle school sports were no cut-she signed me up for basketball. And. I was shit awful. I wasn't exactly afraid of the ball; it's big and orange so I can get out of the way. I couldn't really catch yet, the ball didn't always go exactly where I threw it, I had that kind of autistic quality to my movement in that I'd get where I was going but look funny doing it. I could in theory make a basket. Sometimes. Ish.

Really? The beginning of my first season? The only things I had going for me as a player were that I could get from one end of the court to the other faster than average and I had no fear of being run over by larger players.

And Coach C could have decided to not play me, or to give me some patronizing role, but he didn't. I ran all the drills. I ran suicides. I ran three person weave (a passing drill). I learned all the fancy ways to dribble. I played more games of Horse and Knockout than I can imagine. We shot freethrows. We scrimmaged.

And you know what? In 6th grade? I kind of totally sucked. I made a few baskets, but my primary role was getting rebounds and being another warm body on the court between the opponent and the basket. 

But I worked hard in practice. I was part of the team. I was weird. I needed different directions sometimes. There are things I couldn't do, and we were all aware of that; I'm really short to have been a forward and a center rather than a guard. I just don't have that particular skillset. But Coach C worked within my skillset. I was considered competent. I learned the skills. We had a really tall point guard who didn't have the plant-yourself-in-the-paint ability I did. She is able. That's what you do as a coach-you work with your athlete's abilities.

And then a funny thing happened. In 7th grade? I was a starter. Yeah, that's right, the kid who couldn't dribble a year ago was starting. Because I was competent. Because I was part of the team. The buzzer went off & my hands were over my ears, but I was part of the team. Halfway through the season I sometimes stayed to play in the 8th grade games as well-small school meant small teams & that was allowed. I scored every seventh grade game I played in, as I recall, and in one 8th grade game. I even scored a basket when half our team fouled out & we only had 3 left on the court.

Eighth grade? I started. Usually I jumped, even. As a team we sucked, honestly, what with being a combined 7th-8th team of I think 8 players. But I had improved as an individual. By the end of my basketball career, I legitimately had basketball skills. I can dribble between my legs, shot 85% on freethrows, all that jazz. No one who saw me on the court would question that I was an athlete.

And if Coach C had taken the attitude towards players with disabilities that so many people take, I wouldn't have learned any of those skills. Yes, Coach C took a chance playing me in the game. He may have "wasted" coaching resources on me-but he didn't seem to think he did. He treated me like a real person, like a real athlete. He took my differences into account, but ultimately he had the same high expectations for me as for every other athlete on that team.

And that is where my problem lies with these "heartwarming" videos. There's no dignity in them. None. I may have sucked my first year of basketball, but I knew damn well that when I scored, I scored. People played defense-they saw me as enough a person to be a legitimate contender. And that's way better than being the charity case of the night. Any day.

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth because everyone conspired to be all heartwarming and charitable and shit. It's just so dehumanizing. If his team had gotten him the ball and set the mother of all picks? That would have been kinda rad. I could have lived with that. But when the other team is passing you the ball that is an insult.

In 7th grade there was a girl who knocked me down repeatedly at one game. It's just how the sport goes, you know? And she kept helping me up. And I was angry. "She doesn't even think I can get up by myself".

If she had been handing me the ball? Oh god! That would have been the one time Coach C had to treat me differently, because I would have gone absolutely ballistic. I was not 'disabled' on the court. I was another player, and wanted to be treated as such.

I am so, so glad that I did sports in a tiny little league that had no choice but to actually play me, with a coach who had the philosophy that hard work is more important than natural ability. I don't want to be anyone's feel good story for a moment. I learned real skills, I was part of a team, and that felt way better for way longer. I won't ever look back and wonder about them passing me the ball-I know it wasn't motivated by pity or some feel good thing. It was because I was their teammate, I was open, and I had developed skills with them.

So, thanks, Coach C. I'm no one night wonder inspiration superstar. And I thank you for it. Thank you for letting me be just another player instead of a vehicle for some feel good garbage.

At the moment the Supreme Court is hearing argments for and against the Voting Rights Act. The Act, passed in 1964, gives the federal government supervisory authority over elections in places where there has been a long pattern of disfranchisement, e.g. “the South.”

Scalia made this comment about the Voting Rights Act:

 I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

It’s difficult to be a historian of the US and not be flabbergasted by this comment. Because Scalia is right–for nearly all of its history, the US has perpetuated racial entitlements with the greatest enthusiasm. Those entitlements have been for entirely and overwhelmingly for white people.

Let us start with the well known phenomenon of racial slavery, which created a massive entitlement, the fact that white people could not be enslaved. That lasted till 1864. Let’s add the naturalization law of 1795, which stated that naturalized citizenship was only available “to free white persons.” We can along the way note that all states forbid free black persons from voting after 1830. Let’s add to that the Dred Scott case, in which the Court insisted “the negro had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”  And while we adding that we can all “black up” and perform a minstrel show.

If we are tired of the white/black issue, we can take a look at the Indians, or the Chinese Exclusion acts. Then we can jump to legal segregation, established by law in every southern state and by custom in every northern state in 1the 1890s. We could include the phenomenon of spectacle lynching. We can add the northern race riots, and redlining; we can go out to the newly built Levittown in the 1950s and find out they won’t sell to black people.

We can add to that formal legal disenfranchisement, which prevailed from about 1900 till–the Voting Rights Act.

So yes, once you establish those legal entitlements it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political process. Scalia seems bound and determined to prevent their removal.

Scalia’s comment is staggering, morally grotesque, deaf to the facts of history. For Scalia, the fact that the federal government protects black people’s right to vote, in places where they were denied that right for 200 years, amounts to a form of “racial entitlement” for black people. It’s an incredible, contemptible statement.

I can see an argument against the voting rights act. It singles out some states based on their history, and they could reasonably claim that they have overcome that history. That’s not the argument Scali is making. he’s claiming that voting for black people constitutes a “racial entitlement.”

Critics of this comment have pointed out that he seems to be violating his claim to be a “originalist,” that is, faithful to the Constitution as its writers intended, (whatever that means) because he also said that “this is not the kind of thing you can leave to Congress.”  Scalia things congress will reauthorize the Act because it’s afraid of being branded as racist. But the 15th amendment says the following:

SECTION 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. SECTION 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Clearly it MUST be left to congress. Scalia here is being an “originalist” in the sense that his critics always suspected: he appears to regard securing black people’s right to vote as a regrettable deviation from the framer’s intent.

The Government has today published their amendments to the Justice and Security Bill for Report Stage, following the strenuous efforts Mike Crockart and I put in during the Committee. And they have clearly made significant concessions to us as a result of the things we demanded.

First, there is a provision to make sure that Public Interest Immunity is looked at before a judge is allowed to consider a Closed Material Procedure. This was taken out by the Government during Bill Committee. Mike and I tried to put it back in, and it looks like the Government has accepted our point.

All along we have said if the real reason for this Bill is to try cases which would otherwise not be triable, then the judge has to be satisfied that PII – the existing procedure – could not be used. This amendment – together with the key amendment that colleagues forced through in the Lords which gives the judge complete discretion over whether or not a CMP should ever be allowed – should make sure that this is the case.

PII itself isn’t perfect, as it results in information being completely suppressed, for example the Litvinenko case.

But Conference was clear that they support it. And through this amendment and the Lords amendment together, we have given utter discretion to the judge to require PII first, and indeed to exhaust the PII process if they think it’s the right thing to do.

Second, the Government has put forward amendments to require a complete review of CMPs every five years, and a yearly requirement for a report on the operation of CMPs.

Again, Mike and I pushed this on the Committee. As a firm believer in the need for an evidence base for any legislation, my concern has always been that with this type of legislation you are dealing with legal hypotheticals. The requirement for reporting and reviewing will allow us to scrutinise whether the cases which the Government claims require a CMP really do exist, and it will let us review their operation. If the number of cases is higher than claimed – if the type of cases tried turn out to be inappropriate – we will know that and be able to get rid of it.

Third, there is a new amendment to ensure complete equality of arms. There are cases where the non-government party may wish to be able to use secret information in their case, even if the government doesn’t want to – for example, a former intelligence officer may know for a fact that the Government has a document supporting their case against the Government, and wants to use it in court rather than having it silenced by PII. This was another key measure that was voted in in the Lords, and the Tories tried to wriggle out of it on Committee. We argued at length that true equality was needed – and they have now conceded that.

Liberal Democrats at Conference made clear that the existing Bill stacked all of the odds in the Government’s favour – they could simply choose whether or not to use a CMP if it is in their interests; if they wanted to hide something.

There is now complete judicial discretion, plus a requirement to consider PII first. But this amendment also means that if it is in their interests, the claimant can call for a CMP. The judge will have the power to choose whichever procedure they think is most appropriate, but both sides will now have the power to petition the court for whichever procedure is in their interests. Lord Lester emphasised how vital this was to Ken Clarke, and it will now be in the Bill.

Finally, the Government has retained a provision – agreed in the Committee in the Commons – to require the judge to force the case into open court if they think partway through that it would be fairer. The concern has always been that once the case is closed down, the judge’s hands are tied. This provision gives a new power for the judge to end a CMP if it is not fair, given how the case is going. For example, if the judge thinks that the CMP means an individual has not been given sufficient evidence or gisted evidence to hear the case against them, or if they think the CMP is merely being used to hide embarrassing information rather than allow a trial where one would not otherwise be possible, they can end it and force the case into open court.

The Government has said that the Bill is intended to only try cases which would otherwise not be triable. By not having equity of arms, by not having judicial discretion, by not looking at PII first, by not providing for CMPs to be reviewed and by not giving the judge the power to end a CMP, the Government claims seemed utterly baseless and our Conference voted as such.

Clearly, Lib Dems will still have major concerns, and we’ll see what happens during the Report Stage debates. I want, for example, a concrete guarantee that this Bill does not and will not affect confidentiality rings – a new issue that Jo Shaw and others have raised with me. And better lawyers than I will I’m sure go through the exact wording with a fine toothcomb.

It seems to me that these amendments are a significant step forward – though from a place we would never start.

* Julian Huppert is Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge.

It is the last day of February, 2013, and by now, traditional publishing should have mailed its holiday cards with the gleeful misquote attributed to Mark Twain on the cards’ interior: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Not that there were actual news reports of the death of traditional publishing. But if you read the blogosphere in 2010 and 2011, a wide number of reputable publishing industry insiders predicted that traditional publishing would be dead or unrecognizable by the end of the Mayan Calendar on 12/21/12.

I’m serious. And I’m not sourcing the predictions for fear of embarrassing some good friends.

Those of us who understand how the large industry that is publishing works, and how business works in general knew that those predictions were misguided to say the least. A number of the folks who predicted such things stopped when it became clear that the e-publishing revolution wasn’t storming the barricades of traditional publishing. Like most revolutionaries, e-publishing grew older and got subsumed into the traditional system. And those who felt the revolution’s initial passion and fire have either given up proselytizing, settled into the daily grind that a real work brings, or have given up the cause altogether.

Where is traditional publishing four-plus years into the revolution? Bigger, stronger, and richer than ever. Who ended up getting harmed by the revolution itself? Writers who never really learned how the business worked and/or writers who believed their traditional publishing careers were bulletproof, that these crazy changes in the delivery method wouldn’t touch them.

Even now, these formerly bulletproof writers have no idea what happened to them. They blame traditional publishing, rather than their own business acumen.

The writing was on the wall as much as four years ago, when the recession hit. Book advances worldwide went down significantly, as much as three-quarters, according to an article in the London Times. Writers continued to accept those advances and bemoan them, so as the e-publishing revolution hit and publishers started to realize they could make more money than they ever had, they kept the advances low. Why put out a ton of money up front if authors will accept less?

It’s excellent business. Minimize your up-front costs. Think about it. Would you pay in advance for something if you could get the same (or better) product for less money, money paid out made six months after you’ve already profited from that product? You’d do the latter, of course. And many traditional publishers are doing the same. Pay less, pay lower royalties, get the same product for one-quarter the cost. Makes tremendous business sense to me.

I’ve seen this trend for the last several years. And now traditional writers are beginning to realize what’s happening—and that it’s happening to them. I have received four letters this past week from friends with many New York Times bestsellers under their belts who are now complaining that the new advances either aren’t forthcoming at all or are significantly lower than they were before. Significantly, meaning money that would have caused these writers to walk ten years ago. Now there’s nowhere to walk to that will pay a higher advance.

Back in the day, you know, ten years ago, traditional publishing advances were designed to encompass the entire future earnings of a novel. That way, the publisher wouldn’t have to pay royalties, even though royalties were listed in the contract, and the advance was essentially an interest-free loan against those royalties.

When the recession hit, traditional publishers lowered advances, thinking book sales would go down. And book sales did go down for a while—in print books only. Book sales went up in the more lucrative e-book area. And then they went up more and they went up even more. Publishers were paying only 25% of net on those e-book sales so the pay-outs to writers were significantly less on e-books than they were on print books.

Even if the publisher was selling fewer e-copies, it was making double the money it would make from print copies. In other words, folks, publishers are making much more money from the e-book revolution and they’ve designed publishing contracts so that they can keep more of that money.

Writers have signed those contracts, and continue to do so. So traditional publishers are making more money per sale and keeping more money per sale, while traditionally published book writers are taking smaller advances and making less money per sale, if they can even get accurate royalty payments from their publishers.

So…whose death should we be predicting? Maybe the career death of the full-time traditionally published midlist or lower level bestselling writer.

Not that there won’t be midlist or lower-level bestselling writers working for traditional publishers. But those writers will also have day jobs. They certainly won’t have big houses and assistants and the freedom to write whatever they want any more.

They didn’t just miss the handwriting on the wall. They missed the gigantic neon signs littering the town. They missed air raid sirens, the warnings, everything—mostly because they trusted their advisers (read: agents) to warn them that the world was going to hell.

Not realizing that agents, who make 15% of what their writers make, were dealing with their own collapsing business model and didn’t have time and/or didn’t want to tell the less business savvy clients that the End Is Near!

I’ve written about this for years. I did a much reprinted blog post called “Writing Like It’s 1999,” which was just reprinted in England and is causing some buzz there. But that post has been on my site now for years. The information is and has been available since May 10, 2011. And I wasn’t the first to discuss this.

Why am I discussing this today? Partly because of those four letters I received from different writers. Partly because I’m teaching all this week, so I’m talking about the hybrid indie-publishing/traditional publishing model.  And partly because the Passive Voice blog has a link to a truly whiney writer’s blog which has some great information about declining advances (coming from his conversation with another writer), but I won’t link directly to it because the writer in question is completely clueless (and apparently always has been) about the business.

I’m concerned that these traditional writers who can no longer make ends meet are at the end of the gravy train. And by that, I mean this: Traditional publishers have gotten quite savvy in the past year. Traditional publishers no longer revert rights to out-of-print books without a long fight, which sometimes ends up in court.

The contracts I’ve seen from every traditional book publisher, including one that used to be quite writer friendly, have added deadly non-compete clauses and are enforcing those clauses.

Then, as we kicked up the Fiction River anthology series, I discovered something else: agents want to keep their hands on their clients’ short stories. The excuse is this: publishing contracts have become so complicated, that the agent must now look over even the smallest contract to make sure the writer isn’t in violation.

As if a person who makes his living with words does not understand words. The writer should know what he signed on his book contract so that he—smart person that he is—would know if the short story contract violates that book contract. The agent doesn’t need to be involved. Period.

Twenty-plus years ago, when Dean and I ran Pulphouse Publishing, a house that specialized mostly in short works of fiction (short stories/novellas), we dealt with three different agents over eight years. Two were old-time agents who had been in the business since the 1950s and hadn’t changed their business model with the time, so they still handled short fiction. One was a scam artist whom it was later discovered marketed short stories he had no right to market.

And that’s it.

That’s no longer the case. Agents want their hands in everything. Why? It’s not because of contracts, folks. Or at least, it’s not because of traditional book contracts and their clauses. It’s because of the agent agreements. Here’s the thinking: If an agent handles a work—large or small—the agent gets a percentage of the ownership in that work according to most agent agreements that the agent is forcing the authors to sign these days.

So if the agent doesn’t handle a short story contract for that $30 commission, the agent doesn’t own a piece of that short story.

No writer with an indie publishing career lets her agent handle her short fiction. Not one that I know of. All of the writers who want their agents to handle their short fiction contracts are traditionally published.

And yet again, those traditionally published writers get squeezed.

It makes me sad.

Writers have always segregated themselves into those who knew a lot about business (real business, not the goofy traditional publishing industry) and those who let others manage all that messy business stuff. Until five years ago, the writers who knew a lot about business and the writers who didn’t had a pretty equal chance of striking it rich. The only real difference between them was that the business-savvy writer would either quit publishing (because it’s so geared toward the business-ignorant) or would become well-off partly because of their own money management skills.  The writers who knew nothing about business often quit publishing involuntarily when something went seriously wrong in their careers, and those writers blamed their craft for the problem instead of understanding the business cycle.

All of that has changed.

Now the business-savvy writer has a significantly bigger chance of becoming rich than the business-ignorant writer, even if the business-ignorant writer sells more books and has more readers. Got that? The business-ignorant writer has been squeezed by the publishers and the agents so that making a big six-figure income, year in and year out, is becoming nearly impossible—without a worldwide blockbuster.

The business-savvy writer is either a hybrid writer—traditional and indie—or goes indie only. Those writers can and are making six-figure incomes without having a single bestselling novel. They don’t need a blockbuster to save their financial future.

They control their financial future.

Again, it’s math. The indie and/or hybrid writer gets 50-70% of each indie book sale. The traditional writer gets 25% of net, which works out—at least according to the royalty statements I’ve seen—to 10% of the sale price of each book.

You make a lot more money faster when  you’re earning two to seven times more than someone else on the same kind of product. You can also have fewer sales at that higher royalty rate and still make more money. Math.

And I was computing that as if all things were equal. They aren’t. The indie/hybrid writer gets money every month from the sales made 30-90 days previous. The traditional writer gets paid every six months from sales made six months before that—and that assumes that their advance has earned out and their publisher accurately reports both the sales and the royalties. It also doesn’t take into account that mysterious calculation publishers make called “a reserve against returns” which, in most contracts, isn’t even defined. (In other words, the publisher can hold back as much money as it believes it can get away with, because nothing in the contract says otherwise.)

A lot of the writers I will see this weekend, who are coming for an anthology workshop, are indie writers who now make a living at their fiction. In fact, several of them are making good enough livings to quit their day jobs. One, a person who is extremely conservative about finances, who once told me publishing was “too risky” to chance the loss of a high-paying day job, hasn’t worked a day job in more than a year. The steady monthly income from that writer’s indie published novels has convinced that financially risk-averse writer that the writer’s time is better off spent creating new words than it is sitting at a desk for someone else.

What do I tell the traditionally published writers who are writing to me, upset that they can no longer earn what they did in the past? I still point them to the blog posts that can help them if they would only listen. But most of them have seen those posts, and then write me angry letters telling me that “it’s too hard” or “too much work” or “not suited to their personalities.”

Which is exactly what beginning writers used to say to me when I told them that writing is a craft, not a gift from the muse, and if they wanted to earn a living as a writer, they had to write fast, write a lot, and practice, practice, practice.

After a while, I stopped giving advice to beginners. And I’m getting to the point where I’m going to stop giving advice to writers stuck in traditional publishing.

Because, honestly, I’m beginning to lose patience. I can only repeat myself so many times.  There’s only so many ways I can say this: The business has changed dramatically. If you want to make a living as a writer—a good living, like you used to—then you have to change.

Here’s what I want to add, but I never do in conversation.

I’m adding it here, now.

If you’re unwilling to change, that’s your problem. If you don’t want to learn the new ways of doing business in this new century, that’s your problem.  It’s not mine. I can’t tell you that traditional publishing will return to the gravy train for writers that it once was, because it won’t.

Traditional publishing has used the recession and the e-publishing revolution to improve its business model so that the companies make more money. The companies are leaner and richer. And they don’t care about you writers. Contrary to what you’ve always believed, traditional publishing companies have never cared about writers. 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.

It’s time to understand that.

Stop whining.  Because here’s the truth of it. Traditional publishing did not die in December 2012.

And 2013 is shaping up to be one of the best years for writers ever. We have more opportunities than we ever have. We have more opportunity to make a living than we’ve had in seventy to eighty years.

That’s the truth of it. Let go of the past and move forward.

Like the rest of us.

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“The Business Rusch: “The Death of Publishing” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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UKIP does not only stand for British withdrawal from the European Union. At the last election it had a whole manifesto of policies, including:

• reinstate grammar schools
• increase defence spending by 40 per cent
• bring back Pullman trains
• reinstate the Radio 4 theme 

To these it has recently added opposition to equal marriage.

These policies have no logical connection. Just because you support British withdrawal from the EU there is no reason you cannot support comprehensive schools, gay marriage or contemporary rolling stock design.

What unites them, of course, is that they are issues that unite angry white men - particularly angry white men of a certain age.

But there is another issue that appeals to this demographic.

Unionism used to be the Conservatives' trump card. It won them a majority of Scottish MPs in the 1950s, which is something that it is near impossible to believe now.

Not only is Unionism less effective as a policy: the Conservatives are not that keen on it any more, as I once observed when looking at King's Lynn Conservative Club.

And if you ask an angry white man of a certain age what he thinks of the Union he will most likely tell you (if he lives in Southern England, as so many of them do) that he is fed up with paying for services in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales that are better than the ones he can use himself.

If the Scots want independence, he will likely continue, let them have it and see how much they enjoy paying the full cost of those services themselves.

Which makes me wonder how long the UK will stay in UKIP. Their target voters are not keen on it at all.

Catherine Griffin, "Why Women Talk More Than Men: Language Protein Uncovered", Science World Report 2/20/2013.

You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there's a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a "language protein" in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.

Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven't been able to biologically explain why this is the case.

Eun Kyung Kim, "Chatty Cathy, listen up: New study reveals why women talk more than men", Today Show 2/21/2013:

Women have a gift for gab, and now they can silence their critics with science.

New research indicates there’s a biological reason why women talk so much more than men: 20,000 words a day spoken by the average woman, according to one study, versus about 7,000 words a day for the average man.

Women’s brains have higher levels of a “language protein” called FOXP2, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

The stimulus for these little nuggets of nonsense was J. Michael Bowers, Miguel Perez-Pouchoulen, N. Shalon Edwards,3 and Margaret M. McCarthy, "Foxp2 Mediates Sex Differences in Ultrasonic Vocalization by Rat Pups and Directs Order of Maternal Retrieval",  The Journal of Neuroscience, February 20, 2013. More on Bowers et al. later — this morning, I'll just take up the "previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men" business.

Summarizing:

1. There has never been any "study" showing that "women talk almost three times as much as men", although this non-existent "research" has been cited by dozens of science writers, relationship counselors, celebrity preachers, and other people in the habit of claiming non-existent authoritative support for their personal impressions;
2. Many real-world studies of gender differences in language use indicate that men and women are about equally talkative. One large, relatively recent study (M.R. Mehlet al., "Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?", Science, 317(5834) p. 82 July 5, 2007) found essentially equal counts of about 16,000 words per day in six samples of university students in the U.S. and Mexico.
3. The University of Maryland study did not perform any word counts whatever, but rather looked at the effects of FOXP2 gene expression on the vocalizations of baby rats, and measured Foxp2 protein levels in the brains of a few dead human children.

Some LLOG posts on an earlier outbreak of the "women talk three times as much as men" meme:

"Sex-linked lexical budgets", 8/6/2006
"Yet another sex-n-wordcount sighting", 8/14/2006
"Gabby guys: The effect size", 9/23/2006
"Regression to the mean in British journalism", 11/28/2006
"Contagious misinformation", 12/1/2006
"Femail again", 12/2/2006
"Sex differences in 'communication events' per day", 12/11/2006

This time around, there's a bit of informed push-back:

Tracie Egan Morrissey, "The Whole ‘Women Talk More Than Men’ Thing Is a Myth", Jezebel 2/21/2013
According to a study women talk more than men. Which study?", Ask MetaFilter 2/21/2013
Amanda Marcotte, "Women Don't Talk More Than Men, So Why Do People Believe That They Do?", Slate 2/22/2013
PZ Myers, "Not to mention the excessive reductionism", Pharyngula 2/23/2013

But the replicators of falsehood have more and bigger megaphones:

Fiona Macrae (Science Correspondent), "Sorry to interrupt, dear, but women really do talk more than men (13,000 words a day more to be precise)", Daily Mail 2/20/2013

George Barnes, "Science sheds light on big talk", Telegram 2/23/2013:

The Journal of Neuroscience, for those of you who don’t regularly read it, is a publication that most often focuses on articles about such things as endocannabinoid 2-arachidonoylglycerol or phospholipid scramblase-1-induced lipid reorganization.

On Feb. 20, the journal published an article, “FoxP2 Mediates Sex Differences in Ultrasonic Vocalization By Rat Pups and Directs Order of Maternal Retrieval,” or, as foxnewsinsider.com put it, “Truth Revealed! Women Talk (A Lot) More than Men.” […]

The article was about a study by the University of Maryland that indicated women say about 20,000 words each day, while men tend to not speak for weeks except to order beer and swear.

OK, I was just kidding. Some don’t drink beer, and most men do say 7,000 words a day, but I think it is pretty clear that they repeat a few significant words over and over. Most are words that probably should not be published in a family newspaper, especially one with many readers who are descendants of severe Puritans and their seriously chatty wives.

"Study: Women Speak 13K More Words a Day than Men", ABC News 2/21/2013:

A brand new study breaks down why women out-talk men and helps uncover why ladies are actually hard-wired in a way that causes us to utter thousands more words per day than men. […]

Researchers have claimed on average 20,000 words a day for a woman on average. Just 7,000 for a man.

Eliza Collins, "Who talks more: Men or women?", USA Today 2/21/2013:

Women speak an average of 20,000 words a day vs. 7,000 words for men, according to Louann Brizendine, a practicing physician at the University of California-San Francisco and author of The Female Brain.

Michelle Castillo, "Brain protein may explain why girls talk more than boys", CBS News, 2/22/2013:

Previous studies have shown that women speak an average of 20,000 words a day, whereas men only speak 7,000, according to USA Today.

"New Study Gives Scientific Explanation For Why Women Talk More Than Men", CBS New York 2/22/2013:

According to a new study by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the average woman speaks about 20,000 words a day. The average man, meanwhile, speaks a mere 7,000 words.

Chris Gayornali, "Why women tend to talk more than men", The Week 2/22/2013:

Studies have long suggested that the average woman speaks about 20,000 words a day. The average man, on the other hand, hovers closer to 7,000. That means in one year, a Chatty Cathy could wind up speaking 4.7 million more words than a member of the quieter sex, or the rough equivalent of narrating War and Peace in its entirety… eight times. The reason for this has long been unclear to scientists, and it's why a team of researchers at the University of Maryland sought to find a biological underpinning for why women tend to have a natural gift for gab.

Karen Hall, "As I was saying, women talk a lot", The Windsor Star 2/23/2013:

This just in: Women talk more than men.

Scientists at the University of Maryland in Baltimore broke this startling news, having spent lots of time and money to tell us what any long-suffering husband could have answered with a simple grunt.

In a single day, women utter about 20,000 words - 13,000 more than the average guy. And that's just what comes out of our mouths. It doesn't say anything about how many words go into our texts and e-mails.

Margaret Minnicks, "Reason women talk 3 times more than men according to research", The Examiner 2/21/2013:

It had already been established from previous research that women talk almost three times as much as men. However, this new new study tells us why.

Research indicates the following statistics about the number of words women and men speak:  The average woman speaks 20,000 words a day. The average man speaks 7,000 words a day.

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine conducted a study and found women’s brains have higher levels of a “language protein” called FOXP2.

Meagan Morris, "Why Do Women Talk More than Guys? Science!", Cosmopolitan 2/21/2013:

Does your guy nag you for talking too much? Shut him down next time by letting him know that women gab more because of…our superior brain activity.

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine found that women talk more—20,000 words per day, compared to 7,000 for men—because of the "language protein" known as FOXP2 embedded in our genius, genius brains.

"Why women are the talkative sex: Women do really talk more than men, a study has concluded", The Telegraph 2/21/2013:

American researchers found females are the more talkative sex because of a special “language protein” in the brain.

The study, compiled by neuroscientists and psychologist from the University of Maryland, concluded that women talked more because they had more of the Foxp2 protein.

The research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that higher levels were found among humans that were women but in rats they were males.

Their findings come after it was previously claimed that ladies speak about 20,000 words a day – more than 13,000 more than men.'

Natasha Wynarczyk, "Why do women talk more than men?", Marie Claire 2/20/2013:

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine found a chemical called 'Foxp2′ was responsible for the fact the average women speaks 20,000 words a day, 13,000 more than the average man.

Erica Grow, "Women Say Nearly Three Times as Many Words Per Day", WUSA 9, 2/21/2013:

Science is now confirming something that generations of husbands and wives have already known- women tend to do most of the talking. A study by the University of Maryland's College of Medicine found that on average, women speak about 20,000 words per day. Compare that to the average man, who speaks only 7,000 words per day.

The nearly 3:1 ratio may sound suprisingly high, but Lois Finkelstein, a family lawyer in Chevy Chase, says "women are talking to each other, and they might be talking to their spouse, and the spouse isn't listening".

"Why women out-talk men", The Times of India 2/22/2013:

Women are much better at talking than men because it seems females have higher brain levels of a "language protein" called Foxp2 which plays an important role in language development, a new research has shown.

It might explain why women talk nearly three times more than men. The average woman speaks 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man, the Daily Express reported.

"Science explains why women talk more than men", The Dubai Chronicle 2/22/2013:

Previous research by Louann Brizendine at the University of California found that women speak an average of 20,000 words daily compared to only 7,000 words for men. This means that on average, women talk nearly three times as much as men.

And so on…

This meme has remained alive at a low level over the past few years — thus we learn from Kelsy Davis, "Women's Resource Center hosts advice event", The Auburn Plainsman 2/8/2013:

Langdon Hall was nearly full 10 minutes before speaker Dr. Lori Hart began her talk on “Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About the Opposite Sex.”

The talk was hosted by The Women’s Resource Center as an event for the Women Of Auburn Helping Women program.

The talk centered on the psychological differences between men and women. […] The audience was comprised of nearly all women, with three men present at the event. […]

All though everything Hart spoke about was academically backed, the room filled with laughter at her comedic approach to detailing the differences between the genders

“Communication research tells us women talk more than men,” Hart said. “That’s not a surprise. We don’t need a study to tell us that. There is research that suggests women talk up to 20,000 words a day. That’s just gross. The average man? 7,000 words a day.”

But the recent UMd rat research has kicked it into high gear, apparently because one of the study's authors has featured this piece of misinformation in interviews with journalists.

Simon Bucher-Jones & Kelly Hale Grimm Reality (2001)
In the event of either of my readers being somehow unaware of the fact, in between getting itself cancelled for trying too hard in 1989, and subsequent rebirth as a series of flashing lights in 2005, The Doctor Who Telly Show spent its wilderness years as a series of novels. Some were utter shite - yer basic button-pushing continuity landfill - and some were pretty good.

Grimm Reality belongs to the latter category, and succeeds for two reasons: firstly its having been written as a novel rather than as something to be purchased because there's a picture of the TARDIS on the cover; secondly its having been written by authors who can  form sentences without falling over or giving themselves a headache. As a recovering addict, someone who once splashed out on a couple of these things every month for about a decade, I really cannot overemphasise how greatly I appreciate authors and publishers making a bit of an effort. Too many of these books relied upon the tenuous novelty of what would happen if Cybermen teamed up with Ice Warriors to invade a Dalek nudist colony, the sort of stories in which people say things grinningly, which feature sentences like his voice went up and down, and which assume the reader to be a gurgling moron with a reading age of about nine. Pardon the acerbic tone, but I still don't understand why a few more of those Doctor Who books couldn't have been a bit more like this, given that all it would have taken is for editors to refrain from commissioning novels by people who can't actually fucking write.

Axe duly ground, Grimm Reality deposits the TARDIS crew in a world of fairy tale populated by gnomes, giants, sleeping princesses and the like, hence the industrial strength pun of the title. Happily, not only is this the more visceral pre-Disney strain of Brothers Grimm narrative, but the traditional cock-obvious plot twists are neatly anticipated and avoided:

He wanted to believe, but he had a lot of experience to put aside: in the last hundred years, nine times out of ten the banshee had been a thing from Antares 5, the foo fighters bemused alien jellyfish, and the ghost usually a teenager in a sheet. Even when he hadn't got a full explanation for things, he'd always felt there ought to be one.

In a way he'd be pleased to find indivisible Giants.

He wanted Giants that couldn't be reduced to men on stilts, or aliens from a low-gravity world in cyber-braces. He wanted Giants that rumbled the world with their ultimate bone-shaking largeness, Giants that couldn't be explained away.

Of course, an explanation is eventually delivered as the sort of bewildering nosebleed physics Simon Bucher-Jones always writes with such poetry; and its an explanation which cannily keeps the promise of the above, thus avoiding stooping to the sort of anything goes lazy writing currently informing the related television show wherein the entire galaxy is saved by someone having a bit of a cry.

I could be reading too much into it, but this rather neat solution suggests an underlying theme, perhaps a subtle commentary on narrative conventions enslaved by their own continuity: a story told for its own sake rather than that of a - shudder - franchise; and to this end, Grimm Reality reads very much as a novel featuring a character once played by Paul McGann, rather than just the four millionth exciting adventure for that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as etc. etc. It's less Harry Potter, more Clifford D. Simak writing gnomes into his science-fiction novels on the grounds that he's Clifford D. Simak and he'll write what the hell he likes.

Speaking of the accursed television show, I've found myself surprised at how the current incarnation takes so many narrative cues from novels like Grimm Reality, and yet still gets it wrong through overstatement, reducing everything to clichés, shorthand or gimmicks. This was how it could have been - intelligent, gripping, entertainingly weird with big ideas, jokes that don't outstay their welcome or require revolving bow ties to alert viewers to the occurrence of madcap antics, and pleasantly rounded characters - notably Anji Kapoor who I don't remember working quite so well in  other tales.

Both Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale have written better than Grimm Reality, and it's by no means the greatest Doctor Who story ever told, but it's pretty damn good. It just seems a shame that, with hindsight, novels of this standard should have been the average rather than upper range, but no matter.

It has been a week for thinking about sexual harassment, and for talking (in both its old-fashioned and its electronic variants) about it more than I usually do. During this thinking and talking, I have been struck by how similar the attitudes towards it among men (or at least some of them) are to the way I heard men talk thirty years ago about rape and domestic violence.

I bet most of the women reading this have been sexually harassed in some way or another during their professional (in which I include political) careers, even if they have been reluctant to define it as harassment. Like me, many will have chosen to take no action, generally for a mixture of reasons – the exact mix will certainly be different in every case. There’s not knowing who to complain to: it’s almost certainly going to be a colleague of your harasser – perhaps they are personal friends, too. There’s not believing your complaint will be treated seriously: “Calm down, dear, it was just a bit of fun!” And there’s the overwhelming feeling that complaining will jeopardise your career.

Much of the analysis and comment in Lib Dem Voice has been notable for its fair and measured tone. Outside this space, however, I have been taken aback by the attitudes of some men in the Party, some of whom I have known and liked for many years and whose innate Liberalism I have never doubted before. They can be broadly summarised as “This sort of thing goes on all the time at Conference.” Well, no it doesn’t. Making a pass at someone you’ve met in the bar at Conference is not the same as making a pass at someone whose job depends on your goodwill, or who thinks it does (which amounts to the same thing). Even groping someone’s knee, if it only happens once when you’ve had too much to drink, is not the same as systematic harassment.

If men believe that this kind of sexual harassment is  “what always goes on at Conference, we’re all adults, nobody got hurt”, it helps to explain why – when complaints are made and are put before the harasser (and I do not refer here to any individual) – the latter’s response is so often to deny it. They have done nothing wrong, after all; it was just a bit of fun, the sort of thing that goes on all the time. In other words, it wasn’t real sexual harassment. That’s what other kinds of men do! Do you remember when apparently reasonable men used to say that it wasn’t real rape if the woman had had a drink with the man, or was wearing a short skirt? Do you remember when men used to say that it wasn’t surprising that Mr X had given his wife a bit of a slap, after she’d shouted at him like that? Real domestic violence was things like breaking your wife’s arm or pushing her downstairs.

Oh. You probably do remember, because it wasn’t only thirty years ago that men used to say these things. They still do. It’s just that nice Liberal men don’t say them out loud, at least not to nice Liberal women. Perhaps it won’t take thirty years for them to realise they can’t talk like this to us about sexual harassment either.

* Gillian Gloyer is a member of Edinburgh North East and Leith LIberal Democrats

The current online kerfuffle among libertarians (and Horwitz and I had nothing to do with this one!) involves labels. Glenn Beck has recently relabeled himself from conservative to libertarian. Alexander McCobin, the president of Students for Liberty, joined a lot of other long-time libertarians in questioning the sincerity of that relabeling, and in return Beck labeled McCobin a jerk, a Fascist, and a Nazi. It’s internet gold.

This kind of argument is one of the things that makes me nervous about labels. As nearly everyone involved in the kerfuffle has noted, labels that demarcate who’s in and who’s out have the nasty whiff of the purity test about them. The last thing libertarians need is to become more like the American Kennel Club than we already are. Debating whether one is insufficiently anti-state, too anti-state, or just anti-state enough seems to me to be about as sensible  as deciding whether a chihuahua’s expression is sufficiently saucy.

Now, I know which of these two guys I’d back if they were entering the Westminster dog show, but that’s not important for this post, because what I want to talk about is another way that labels can be a problem.

They’re too good at what they are designed to do.

Labels are designed to simplify things. They group people together on the ground of common characteristics. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s remarkably efficient and—like the scientific taxonomy that groups life by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species—it makes a lot of things possible that would not otherwise be. Imagine a discussion of religion where we couldn’t use the labels Christian, Muslim, Jew, and Hindu, for example, but instead had to describe—every time—the relevant differences in theology.

However, the precision of labels as used by scientists is not often reflected in non-scientific writing or in conversation. Instead we are treated to conversations like some I have had recently, where I’m asked if I’m a feminist, say yes, and am told that therefore I must be a socialist, or support the minimum wage hike and Obamacare. Or, I’m asked what kind of philosopher I am (a question guaranteed to make a poet’s head explode), and I say that while I’m not a philosopher, I’ve always thought that Kant had a point about not treating other people as means to your own ends. Naturally I am then told that I am a Kantian and must subscribe to a long list of beliefs that seem, to my interlocutor, to follow logically, but seem to me to be entirely unrelated.

The point is that it is very easy to use labels to avoid having to think about what we mean. They serve as a kind of ideological shorthand that assumes we can stick a label onto a jar and thereby tell what’s inside it, instead of looking inside the jar first and discovering what’s really there. That’s what’s happening when we say “I’m a libertarian” and people recoil in disgust and assume that means we like the confederacy, or think the poor “deserve” poverty. That’s what’s happening when someone else—like Hayek for example—supports a minimal social safety net and gets called a totalitarian or a socialist. That’s what’s happening when I recently saw two great students talk past each other about being “autonomous.”

In The Power of the Powerless Vaclav Havel wrote that:

“…ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’ s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority.”

That’s the utility and the seduction and the danger of this kind of shorthand thinking. As everyone who loves a good Ikea meatball has recently discovered, sometimes a label doesn’t tell you everything you might want to know about what’s inside.

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… This time it’s a brilliantly inventive mix of comedy and horror, taken from a 1987 story that brought the Doctor not to a shiny spaceship or a stylised English village but to a run-down tower block – run by Richard Briers. Paradise Towers is a grossly underappreciated story, and this scene would have been higher still in my Fifty were it not that I wanted to skip forward in order to give my own little tribute to Mr Briers.

“It’s – it’s – aaagghh!”
“Yes, I know.”

I gave Paradise Towers a rave review when it came out on DVD, so I’ve already gone over it in some detail and even, for the first time in my Fifty, already celebrated this particular scene as a Golden Moment. So for added value for long-term readers, this version’s different. As with much great Doctor Who, there’s always something new to get out of it, and only a week or so ago, when already thinking about this entry, I realised there was another blatant source for the story that I’d previously not connected with it. Seeing some barking libertarian talking head on the telly, Richard’s and my mature response was to cast Carry On Up The Fountainhead (‘How d’you know she is?’ ‘What?’ ‘Randy!’). The Fountainhead word-associated to Fountain of Happiness Square, where the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Mel first step out into dilapidated architectural marvel Paradise Towers. Something suddenly clicked in my head, and I suddenly realised that this tale of a solipsistic architect arrogantly careless of the people who might get in the way of his grand designs was more than a touch Carry On Ayn Rand already, cocking a snook at the ‘superior’. It was some time after that point that I realised the Great Architect Kroagnon’s name is half-derived from the grating architect Roark. Oh well. So much for brilliantly detailed analysis.

Anyway, arriving to see the sights of the acclaimed architectural triumph Paradise Towers, the Doctor and Mel find it’s a right old sight. The Doctor finds things to delight in, but Mel’s been listening to the fans:

“Just rubbish!”
“Nothing’s just rubbish if you have an enquiring mind.”

Their reactions are similarly divided on running into a gang of girls who’ve created names, crossbows and a culture from their surroundings: “Bin Liner,” declaims one as she sashays menacingly forward to introduce herself our heroes. The Doctor’s soon reciprocated and is caught up in a joyous dance with these Kangs… Mel stands grimly at the back. At crossbow-point. I always laugh at the exuberant wordplay, but in a more disturbing set of scenes in another part of the graffiti-covered, litter-strewn Towers cross-cut with these playful ones, we can see it’s not all fun and games.

A Caretaker is moving nervously along a darkened corridor, walkie-talkie in hand, as much to seek reassurance as to make his report to his Chief (Richard Briers, at this stage only heard). I loved the dirty set design, the low lighting, the sinister silhouette against the window – in a properly crapulent ’80s tower block, it always felt like Doctor Who had finally landed somewhere close to home, both bringing the series up to date and making it that much more unsettling. And, of course, like so many blocks of flats, the Caretakers are bugger all use. Is he fixing the lights, cleaning the wall-scrawl, offering help and advice to visitors? No. He’s as scared as the rest of us. And it’s the running commentary of his fear that really makes this scene, with Joseph Young’s captivating performance of a minor authority figure out of his depth as he finds mounting evidence of murder, even as his boss’ voice keeps crackling testily back at him that nothing’s the matter. Even the sinister bass of the music adds to the atmosphere.

But if it’s not the Kangs fighting among themselves, what could have killed the young woman we saw scream her last in the episode’s opening moments? What should be on the side of the Caretakers, under their control, but have become a law to themselves and almost a mythical sight? Surely not the Mark 7 Megapodic Cleaners? And while in many Doctor Who stories the sight of them might have been saved for the cliffhanger, and in many Doctor Who stories that take themselves more seriously the sight of such an unconvincing robot might wound the story terribly, the essential absurdity that these are the cosy cleaners that have gone on the rampage prepares you for what is, basically, a very unthreatening hoover with ideas above its station. And when Mr Briers at last sounds sympathetic, his punchline – exactly on the line between horror and comedy – is pitch-perfect.

Poor Caretaker 345/12(3).

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Face of Evil

It’s six minutes into Part Four: there’s a mad computer in denial; two tribes of believers on the point of losing faith; and the Doctor wisecracking while his new companion the local freethinker tries to kill him. Unusually, it’s not just because of his sense of humour. But never mind all that. This time, the quote really speaks for itself…

“You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common… They don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”

Next Time… It’s about timey-wimey (oh, just shoot me for typing that).

Richard Briers

“I have played straight drama, which I love, but I eventually miss doing comedy because we are in such miserable times. And I do feel that my purpose in life is to cheer people up.”

Richard Briers was a figure from as far back as I can remember. Not always a comforting figure – even Tom Good had something slightly unhinged about him. I was most fond of him for Roobarb, who was just barking (and it’s sad to read that Bob Godfrey, the brilliant animator of those vibrating lines of Roobarb and Custard and all, has died in the last week, too). Grown up, I can still cackle at his drunken flirting with Margo, and came to appreciate his Martin in Ever Decreasing Circles – who I’d never warmed to when I was younger, but now see as a searing docu-drama about a typical Lib Dem local party committee member [in the commentary on a Christmas episode, the cast are asked about their most unusual roles. Richard Briers: “Mine was Doctor Who, a long, long time ago, when I played Hitler.” Peter Egan cuts in as Paul-to-Martin: “Oh, I don’t think you’d be miscast as Hitler… In fact, I think he’s a bit left-wing for you.” Richard-as-Martin: “I wish I’d never said anything now.” They fall about… The interviewer, of course, excitedly remembers Paradise Towers. Penelope Wilton modestly adds “I’ve been the Prime Minister,” which Mr Briers watched, and both her co-stars impressively get the literary reference to Sycorax. But I digress].

Mr Briers gave many brilliant straight drama performances, too – by one of those horrible coincidences that meant we’d never have put it on the following day, the night he died we were watching him in Midsomer Murders – Death’s Shadow. But he’s rather fine, and rather sad, in that, too; it’s a murder mystery, and a good one, so I shan’t tell you what he’s reacting to, but (my) Richard and I were each gripped by one particularly well-played reaction from him (17.20 and 1.34.58 in respectively, if you have it). And then there’s Paradise Towers.

Oh well. He’s not all bad in it – he is absolutely perfect as the foil nagging at the young Caretaker over the comms, then that moment of belated, inappropriate tenderness. He’s almost forced to be great when he and Sylvester swap roles as the Chief interrogates the Doctor. And he’s suddenly touching in peril at the end of Part Three. But, for the most part, he was ever after refreshingly candid that he ignored the producer and just wanted to have fun with it, so for much of it he is blankwallandcleaneringly terrible, albeit abetted by the designers festooning him as Hitler On Ice (in the words of some infamous review that escapes me). And yet, after two decades of fans glowering at him, he was a guest at the first convention I ever attended and brought the house down within seconds of coming on stage – by apologising for underplaying. I’ve never seen such instantaneous forgiveness.

So I want to say two things about Richard Briers in person. I met him twice, each time at the end of hours’-long autograph queues where most actors inevitably get tired and testy, yet he was never anything other than charming, enthusiastic and interested. The second time was an appearance at the Stamp Centre on the Strand, with his wife Ann Davies (who’s also lovely) and Tom Baker, where Tom was an old hand at these things while Richard was not only being the straight man to Tom’s booming rudery, but constantly looking about him with a delighted smile as if he couldn’t believe he’d got to his seventies without discovering such utter joy as being in a cramped shop packed with a never-ending queue for which he wasn’t even the main attraction. Was he a genuinely lovely man who really was personally interested and delighted in every single person he met? Or was he a brilliant actor who was able to fake it and extemporise interested things to say for four hours non-stop just because that would give all the queuers a happy experience to take home with them – which would also make him a genuinely lovely man?

One of the things I asked Tom (Tom Bad, perhaps I should call him, to make a distinction from the man signing my The Good Life set) to autograph that day was a photo I rather liked of him as the Doctor, with K9, from the 1980 story Full Circle. Unusually for a Doctor Who location shoot, the sun was blazing, and Tom’s rich red coat set among suddenly vibrant green leaves looked stunning, the whole image far more exotic than it had any right to be. He took it, and sat back.

“I seem to be in some sort of jungle.”

Richard Briers leant over, fascinated, his eyes lighting up.

“You went all over the world in your show!”

Tom snorted.

“All over Buckinghamshire!”

Not all actors – particularly ex-famous ones – took so well to being surrounded by people to whom they weren’t the lead. Back at that very first convention I attended, one actor – let’s call him Mr G— – had been a big soap star but had played only one minor character in Doctor Who, and was volubly aggrieved that his queue was much, much shorter than those for people he’d never heard of. Visibly more and more sour with the people he was signing for, when he stomped off at the end of his session Mr G— let rip in the green room, embarrassing most of his fellow guests with a tirade against “bloody anoraks” (that is, fans who didn’t properly appreciate him as the most important person in the hall, or perhaps the world). By contrast, I also once met Mr G—’s on-screen soap wife after she’d much later taken a role in an audio Doctor Who and, like Mr Briers, she came across as delighted and delightful in a similar setting. But back in that green room with Mr G—, for a few seconds there was silence. Then Richard Briers took a sip of tea, and looked up, with a mild but firm tone, to tell him:

“Those ‘anoraks’ are paying your wages.”

So, farewell, Richard Briers. You’ll be missed. My condolences to Ann and the rest of your family and friends. And thank you for being a genuinely lovely man.

You know how it's always the most overtly, loudly homophobic conservative politicians who are found with their trousers down and a rent boy in an airport toilet cubicle?

It's not just politicians.

Here in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O'Brien resigned earlier this week. He was archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, head of the Scottish catholic church, and the only cardinal in any of the British churches — making him the most senior catholic clergyman in the UK. He was also the UK's most ardent campaigner against marriage equality, and a public-facing homophobe with a huge bully pulpit.

This week he found himself hoist by his own petard: he stepped down after allegations of "inappropriate behaviour" were made against him — and formally set before the Vatican — by four current and ex- priests. The precise details of the "inappropriate behaviour" are not specified in the Observer article that broke the story, but probably only because they might be considered libelous in England — the implication is that he used his position of authority to make unwanted advances towards other men.

The schadenfreude is flowing thickly ...

More seriously, though: with the Vatican report on something that looks like a circle of homosexual prelates being blackmailed because of their sexuality sitting on the Pontiff's blotter like an ticking bomb, I find it hard to see how the next Pope can duck the issue and pretend it's business as usual. Maybe he can kick the can down the road for a few more years — but now I'm getting the feeling that the Vatican is facing its equivalent of Watergate. A lot of dirty laundry is going to be aired, or at least discreetly reviewed, over the next few years. And it's interesting to note that O'Brien's last public statement before the allegations that resulted in his political demise blew up was a call, in the interest of reducing the pressure on the institution, for the new Pope to allow priests to marry (presumably women, not each other).

How long can an institution exist in stasis before the growing gap between its own doctrine and the larger society it's embedded in forces a crisis?

(Footnote: I'm asking this not because I hold any particular affection for the Catholic Church (I'm an atheist) but because it's a rare example of a human institution that has survived for quadruple-digit years. Which makes it an interesting reference standard for the longevity of future long-term institutions. This is not an appropriate forum for discussions of theology and belief; any comments on those topics may be unpublished.)

My latest piece in The New Statesman below. many thanks for all the positive comments folk have been sending me about it from right across the party - appreciate it. Some week, eh?
As a white, middle class, Oxbridge-educated man, I’m in no position to pontificate about what it’s like to suffer any sort of discrimination, oppression or harassment  - although that doesn’t seem to stop a lot of folk in my Twitter stream diving in with both feet on any development in the Rennard affair. It goes without saying that the most important people in all this, the ones we should be thinking about most, are the women who are the alleged victims – especially, in my opinion, those who want to stay anonymous and are probably living in trepidation of being ‘named’ at any moment. But let me throw another group into the mix who I’m thinking about a lot. The grass roots members of the Lib Dems who have been turning up in their hundreds every day in Eastleigh, to canvass, to leaflet, to stuff envelopes, to do whatever they can to further the cause they believe in. It’s been the most extraordinary effort; folk coming from all over the country to defend the seat, because they believe passionately in a political principle. It’s been clear all through the campaign that if we win, it’s a victory for the grassroots. If we lose, it’s a defeat for the leadership. And now this happens. When you’re in a fast moving world like politics, I suspect it's always tempting to deal with the urgent, not necessarily the important. I would speculate that’s what happened here. Some anonymous rumours circulate, they reach your ears, but there’s a million other things going on - do you really want to open that can of worms? The answer should be – yes, you do. Because the problem is – it’s going to get opened some time. At a time not of your choosing. At a time probably of great inconvenience. And when it happens, you’re shown not only to have let the people immediately involved down (on both sides, no one’s proved anything about anyone yet). You also find the whole organisation suffers. The best thing anyone from the leadership has said about this yet is Tim Farron’s statement that "we screwed up". Yes, we did. Everyone closely involved has been let down by the party’s inadequate response to this five years ago. And so has everyone stuffing envelopes in Eastleigh. They deserved better.

I can't wait until the PHP world starts talking about PHP again.

— Jarrod Nettles (@hayvok) February 26, 2013

So says those that are comfortable in the status quo, and don't need to see their environment, their industry, change. Perhaps I'm being unfair, perhaps it is just that those (and there are plenty more), like Jarrod here, feel that PHP developers are above such pervasive parasitic behaviours that culminate in cultural divide.

It seems that this last couple of days a bit of a hoo-ha has been stirred up by the "75% women" staffed Web & PHP magazine, and their choice at drumming up views for their publication (congratulations on a job well done, I imagine). Sorry if I do "name names" here, by the way, it just makes it a whole lot easier for people to follow what's happened than making them do all the searching for themselves. I'm only aware of this now because perennial sexism-sniffer-outer, Aral Balkan, was making a bit of a fuss of it all this evening (see the earlier link).

Unfortunately the responses since have focused largely on the largely irrelevant and anecdotal .

Some may see the defense by Web & PHP magazine's staffers as its own form of feminism, others as Uncle Tom syndrome. Either way, it was off the mark as it took one criticism ("Your schtick is too male orientated") and decided to argue against it, as others so defensively did on Twitter it would seem, as some form of censorship alone. I don't doubt that some were thinking that, that perhaps it shouldn't have gone ahead, but is that really the only answer? Of course not. It's also highly curious to me to see the response to "we shouldn't pretend women are wallflowers" is to say "women should get used to 21st century male orientated sexual banter". Aren't they essentially the same limiting action, but in different directions?

Similarly the article makes the logical misstep of assuming because people involved are perfectly non-sexist and decent human beings, that this somehow makes it the problem of those that may feel barriers to their involvement if they don't feel comfortable. Yet the authors had the audacity, or perhaps just lack of an irony detector, to go on a diatribe about "slut shaming".

If there is one thing that happens every time this subject comes up it is the belittlement of the views of the minority of people that don't feel that their own industry (or the industry they would professionally like to be a part of) isn't a "safe space" for them. Perhaps it's not intentional, but clumsily these irrelevancies of how nice, decent, female or well meaning people are while they are creating divisive atmosphere, only say one thing... if you're too far from what we consider normal, we don't really care if you want to join the party or not. It's so very cliquey. Given the tone of the humour, it's 6th-form common-room standards of behaviour.

This last month has seen a landmark victory for civil rights in the UK, with same sex couples getting a vital step closer to being legally recognised as spouses if they go through a legal union of marriage. Yet there were many that claimed that they didn't need marriage, that they had something *like* marriage, surely that's enough? The attitude was very "learn to live with it". Internationally the issue has even seen some homosexual people themselves standing up shoulder to shoulder with the type of people that tried to deny them the right to an equal age of consent.

Another example of the kind of issue we're facing is university sports initiations. You may have seen some stuff on the news in the past, there have been incidents where people have died because of them. Yet despite this those who rely on them to weed out the weak of stomach and of resolve, would very passionately demand that no-one take away their right to run initiations as they wish. The result? People who cared about the sport, wanted to take it on from college, but didn't want to drink a pint of urine then be humiliated around town for a night, lost out.

The people who ran the initiations didn't lose out, those who joined in didn't lose out, only those that decided that their own sense of self-worth meant this avenue was closed to them. It was a pleasure to work with those during my time at UWESU who worked tirelessly to engage with the sport clubs to run initiations in a manner befitting of a safe-space organisation, not removing all elements of "risque"-ness or hierarchies and power structures...but to make it so that no-one who was of a "team sport is awesome" mentality would feel reasonably put off by the initiations.

This industry, and I mean our broad industry, not just in PHP, not just front-end developers, nor designers...but web and technology workers all over, needs to get past its own "same sex marriage" moment and embrace what the world needs it to be. Conferences, especially, are our "initiations" for those who want to enter the community as well as the profession, and everyone has the right to feel comfortable entering that arena.

Saturday:

The Chancer of the Exchequer – known to you and me as Master Gideon – is in a UNIQUE position in Government: he's the ONLY person who DOESN'T resign when things go disastrously wrong, on the grounds that his resignation would panic the markets and make things go even WRONGER!

So even though Great Britain has, like America and France before, lost our Triple-A credit rating, and although this is obviously a total HUMILIATING FAILURE for Chancer Gideon who has based our entire economic policy on maintaining CREDIBILITY with the markets, he won't be going.

Which is a pity.

The papers of course are full of this story giving pages and pages of coverage to...oh, a sex-scandal instead. OBVIOUSLY the sex sells.


In spite of talk (by ministers trying to make excuses) of the markets having "priced in" the "expected" loss of the triple-A, the immediate consequences of being downgraded were a weakening of sterling. Now that's been somewhat masked by the Euro taking another dive after the Italian elections produced a less than clear outcome.

(PHEW! No one will notice we've fallen flat on our face because they're all watching Europe fall off a cliff!)

There's a fairly simple relationship between the value of the pound and the level of interest rates. If borrowing gets more expensive (which it does if the lender thinks it's more risky to lend to you – which is exactly what downgrading from AAA to AA1 means) then you have to put up interest rates OR your currency goes down in value.

(Look – boring maths bit – suppose your interest rates are 2% and 100 rouble-dollars will buy you a £100 government bond that will return £2. If you get downgraded, and people now want 2½%, either you have to start giving bonds that return £2.50 OR people are only going to be willing to pay you 80 rouble-dollars for your £2 return (2/80 = 1/40 = 5/200 = 2½/100 = 2½%). Okay, non-mathmos can wake up again now!)

So EITHER you have HIGHER INTEREST RATES or you have a WEAKER CURRENCY.

But a weaker pound means more expensive IMPORTS, specifically ENERGY and FOOD, which means HIGHER INFLATION.

In THEORY devaluing the currency should also provide a boost to exports... which is why (among other things) Hard Labour's Alistair Darling crashed the currency following the 2008 banking meltdown.

That of course contributed to the high INFLATION that we had for the first couple of years of this government.

(World events – drought affecting rice and wheat crops, declines in energy production, China taking more resources – all contributed, of course, BUT weakening our currency meant that those world events had an EXAGGERATED effect on the UK. Just as Labour's over-borrowing and reliance on the financial sector to grow the economy meant the financial meltdown had an EXAGGERATED effect on us too.)

However, it appears that our industrial base is so worn away by the Thatcher and New Labour years that devaluing did NOT have the boost to growth effect that was hoped for.

So all round this is BAD, and that is WHY Chancer Gideon was trying to avoid it happening, and why now it has happened it's going to be harder still to meet our targets of getting down the deficit.

(That is, remember, just slowing down how fast we spiral into yet more debt.)

So where was the GROWTH supposed to come FROM? There are THREE theories:

The CLASSICAL theory that says that you grow the economy by increasing the number of workers. (e.g. you increase immigration in order to farm more fields)

The INDUSTRIAL theory that says you grow the economy by increasing the CAPITAL available (e.g. you borrow more capital in order to buy machinery that allows your workers to produce twice as much)

And Mr Frown's favourite, the POST NEO-CLASSICAL ENDOGENOUS (i.e. from within) theory that says you grow the economy by training your workers and trading up to more productive jobs. (e.g. you teach your widget factory workers how to design computer chips and gain a more lucrative export.)

As a footnote, Hard Labour did not really DO the endogenous thing. Education, education, education turned out to mean requiring people to get degrees for the jobs that already existed rather than creating new and better jobs. Most of the "growth" of the Hard Labour years was in fact fuelled by BORROWED money – like the Victorian INDUSTRIALISTS – except we didn't use the money to buy machinery to power up our economy but instead frittered it away on consumables.

On the other fluffy foot, the Coalition appears to have set its face against ALL THREE methods of growth:

The Conservatories' irrational xenophobia means that we cannot import cheap labour for growth.

The nature of the bubble and crash mean that the public and government are both massively averse to borrowing, and indeed the stated aim of the Coalition is to reduce and ultimately reverse the deficit and thus slow the growth of and eventually start to reduce the national debt.

And, although the Liberal Democrats have fought for and won a Pupil Premium and more Apprenticeships, the Conservatories have forced upon us the Tuition Fee debacle and the slashing of Educational Maintenance Allowance, while Mr Michael the Borogrove's "reforms" seem keener to return the education system to the Victorian classroom than to adapting it to the needs of fast changing modern industry.

(The advantage of apprenticeships here is that they do an end run about this sort of silliness and, to borrow from "Yes Minister" (back when it was GOOD) give young people a comprehensive education to make up for their Comprehensive Education.)

Okay, but the Government's policy is not ENTIRELY as DUMB as it looks when spelled out like that.

The Government THOUGHT that growth could come from the PRIVATE SECTOR.

Remember: the prevailing belief of ALL governments for the last thirty years (yes, since Queen Maggie's "revolution") is that governments are NOT good at running industries. This is based on a LOT of experience during the Seventies which pretty much tested the opposite theory to destruction.

Therefore, whether you're a Keynesian devotee or a member of the Church of Thatchianity, the idea is that the government should leave PRIVATE industry to do the borrowing, investing and growing. The more LEFTY (i.e. pro-State spending) view has been that the State should spend MORE on SERVICES (health, transport, schools) to SUPPORT the private sector; the view from the more RIGHTY has been... much the same but for a percentage point or two LESS of GDP.

So the Hard Labour's government's borrowing was NOT generally going on "investments" that would return greater growth; MOST of what they were borrowing was spent to fund these SERVICES that (by definition, since we were borrowing) were MORE EXPENSIVE than we were willing to pay for even BEFORE we lost twenty-percent of the economy.

But even where they WERE spending on building useful things – new roads, schools, houses, power stations etc – it was infrastructure for SUPPORT rather than direct investment in growth.

(Of course, Prof Keynes would say that those sort of generally useful support things are exactly what you borrow money to spend on during a downturn in order to keep the workforce working and to have useful stuff to help when the recovery comes. And the Coalition HAVE pretty much admitted that they should not have cut those investments when they cut everything else!)

So, the Government THOUGHT that growth could come from the PRIVATE SECTOR, and that they could ENCOURAGE this by:

a) reducing corporate tax and regulation, enticing foreign companies to move their investment to Great Britain and home grown ones to expand. (At least until people stated getting into a flap about Corporate Tax avoidance.)

b) introducing schemes and wheezes and government guarantees to make it as easy as possible for companies to borrow from the banks. (If it were not for the fact that the public demand for tighter regulation of the banks has made those banks very, very much more reluctant to lend!)

You can see that, to a certain extent, the Government's plans FAILED because their main tools to encourage traditional capitalist growth were thwarted at least in part by external factors, while their own – and let's face it mainly Conservatory ideologies – blocked either the very old or the very modern routes to growth through anti-immigration and anti-education/anti-green development policies.

So how do we get growth? We're going to need a BETTER ANSWER.

We have to start by UNBLOCKING those ideological barriers.

We need a more sensible approach to the problems of immigration than standing at Dover with a "No Entry" sign! The REAL problems, and we've said this lots of times before, are pressure on housing and services and the downward pressure on wages caused by a large free labour pool.

We need to tackle those problems at SOURCE and the good news is that that means building lots of houses and schools and roads which means JOBS. We also need to protect low end wages from being driven down further. The Tories may not like it, but all the evidence points to the Minimum Wage being set well below the level where it would start to put companies off employing people, so progressive steps should be taken to increase the minimum wage ahead of inflation towards the LIVING WAGE.

(NB: this WILL make it harder to raise the personal allowance to the level of the minimum wage. More people will go back into paying income tax as their minimum wage rises, but they will still be better off for the rise, and the government will have more money too and/or more leeway to raise the allowance above inflation too.)

But we ALSO need a COMPREHENSIVE review of our education, and the needs of business, and the needs of universities, and of course the needs of schools themselves. We cannot continue to rely on "ideas wot Michael the Borogrove thought up"; simply IMPOSING another set of changes is just going to cause yet more strife. We need, if you like, a CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION for SCHOOLS, to bring together industry and universities with teachers, parents and pupils to try to deliver a wholly new and world-beating education.

But although these plans might sow the seeds of future sustained growth, the key to growth NOW is CONFIDENCE, that elusive SPARK that comes when something – I don't know what it will be – comes along and convinces people that there's money to be made and so they start going out to make it. That thing that, at the moment, continues to be absent from the British economy.

And sadly, the BIGGEST source of ANTI-confidence at the moment is the Chancer himself: Master Gideon is Mister Austerity the piggy-faced face of the recession. His "We fight on we fight to win" response to the downgrade shows that he's succumbed to the same BUNKER MENTALITY that claimed his predecessor-but-one, Mr Frown. Even Queen Maggie needed to exchange Exchequers before we moved from bust back to boom in the Eighties.

And that, even more than the total humiliating ruination of his plans, is why we 'd be (probably quite literally) better off if Gideon did the one thing he won't do, which is go.

Music sales rise when it is easier to buy.

Hello?

Stan! What on earth?

Uh…you pick.

Stan, I don’t want to play guessing games. Do you know what time it is?

In jail? What are you doing in jail?

Well, obviously. I didn’t think you just stopped there to use the phone. What did you do to get arrested?

No, I don’t still want to know what time it is. Tell me what you did.

Oh, my God. Stan, that’s a very serious crime. Whatever possessed you to…wait a minute. It’s 2:30 in the morning.

Well, I mean, what banks are open at 2:30 in the morning?

You broke in? Who was supposed to open the cash drawer for you?

It’s called forethought, Stanley.

I’m not yelling. I just want to know why you couldn’t have waited until the bank opened.

A craving? You had a craving to rob a bank?

Yes, of course I know…

Stan, this is nothing like when I get the urge for pickles.

No, it’s not. So what happened then? They just picked you up right then and there?

Oh, my God.

No, I’m not judging you. I just think that first, a crowbar isn’t going to open a safe; second, we already have a crowbar at home, and third, breaking into a hardware store is just piling trouble on top of trouble.

No, I didn’t expect you to drive all the way home from across town. Maybe you could have taken it with you, is all.

Of course I’m trying to be supportive.

It’s hard to think of an ‘up side’, Stanley. I’m sorry.

All right!

I know. I know. Anyway, it’s not like you killed anyone.

Oh, Stanley.  You didn’t.

Homeless people are human beings, Stan. That’s why they call them homeless people.

You wanted to see if the crowbar worked? I fail to see how…

Yes, but that doesn’t mean that it would have been able to pry open a locked metal safe!

I’m trying to look on the bright side, Stan. You’re not making it easy.

I don’t think it counts as self-defense if you hit him first. With a crowbar.

No, that’s struggling. It’s not the same thing.

Well, you’re not a lawyer either!

Yes, I guess the courts will have to decide, won’t they? Good grief, Stan. I don’t know why you get yourself into these things. At least you didn’t have any drugs on you.

You didn’t.

Stanley, you promised.

No, I know it’s not a secure phone. But theoretically, how much PCP could you fit in a gym bag?

Why half of a gym bag?

All right. All right. Theoretically, how much PCP could you fit in the half that wasn’t taken up by your sex toys?

Stan. Stan, Stan, Stan. I wonder about you sometimes.

No, I know. I know.

Yes, I love you too. Of course I do.

No, it’s fine.

All right. So what’s the bad news?

Mirrored from LEONARD PIERCE DOT COM.

Historians can’t quite make up their mind about abolition. Nobody wants slavery to return, and historians initially tended to praise abolitionists as moral visionaries. In England William Wilberforce is a hero for helping convince England to end slavery in 1833. In the US, Wilberforce was more recently  the inspiration for political-thug-turned-moral-crusader Chuck Colson’s crusade agains the sex trade.

Unlike the US, England abolished slavery by legislative enactment. They  agreed to compensate slaveowners for their lost property, and raised billions of dollars, in modern terms, for that purpose. In the US, ending slavery took a violent and bloody Civil War; England is often held up as a better alternative. A recent study makes clear just how much slaveowners benefited fromt he purchase of their property. More on that below

Starting in the 1940s, historians like Eric Williams began attacking abolitionists as self interested hypocrites. Wage labor is more efficient than slave labor. You get more output with less input. Slavery’s not really contemplated that much today (yes, I know about the human trafficing issue) because it doesn’t pay. It’s cheaper to hire migrant workers to harvest your crop than it is to buy the laborers and have to pay for their upkeep to protect your investment. In this argument, abolition was the entering wedge of a wage economy, which made it possible to get more work from people while paying them less. In the US, abolitionists themselves often made exactly that argument: it’s a moral horror, and it doesn’t pay. It was no coincidence, David Brion Davis wrote, that so many American abolitionists were factory owners.

Re-revisionists argued that in fact, slavery was exgtremely profitable, and that England did itself enormous damage when it abolished slavery. The profits from the sugar trade fell off dramatically after 1833:  so dramatically that Seymour Drescher called called it “econocide.” Davis, quoted above, came to endorse that view: abolition was a costly moment of genuine moral virtue

More recently Christopher Brown has argued that emancipation cost England money, but gave it the “moral capital” required to subdue India. Having abolished slavery, England could view itself as noble and enlightened while it extracted far more money and resources from India than it ever got from the Caribbean.

It’s important to note again how England emancipated its slaves; it bought them from their owners, then gradually set them free over a period of about a decade. British taxpayers bore the cost of this reimbursement, a massive transfer of wealth to a class of already rich men who then invested the mnoney in railroads, steam, and the east india trade, building in many cases family dynasties which still rule England today.

Just this week historians at University College London made clear how much money the abolition of slavery made for some English families. The great great grandfather of the writer George Orwell received about 4.4 million in dollars for his more than 200 slaves. Prime Minister William Gladstone’s family received more than 126 million dollars for their roughly 2500 slaves. The family of Prime Minister David Cameron walked away from slavery with three million current british pounds, or about 4.6 million dollars. Cameron is currently the leader of the political forces imposing “austerity” on England’s ordinary citizens, because they have too much. But Cameron’s family money depended on the massive debts England incured to buy out his great grandfather’s slaves.

Cameron’s ancestors were already rich. They were masters of a vastly profitable enterprise and holders of human capital on a large scale. They kept their land, and access to a cheap labor force with few political rights, and got huge infusions of liquid capital they could invest elsewhere. British taxpayers supplied this capital, while the slaves themselves got nothing, except their freedom and a chance to work for low wages for the same men who previously owned them.

Only one US citizen owned more than 1000 slaves, Joshua Ward of South Carolina, and only 18 men owned more than 500. But by 1860, there were many times more slaves in the US and they were worth much much more. By 1860, historians estimate the total value of slave property at three billion dollars, “roughly three times greater than the total amount of all capital, North and South combined, invested in manufacturing, almost three times the amount invested in railroads, and seven times the amount invested in banks.” The value of slaves amounted to “seven times the value of all currency in circulation.” Americans had floated many schemes for “compensated emancipation;” it was a pet idea of Lincoln’s. Slaveowners never considered the idea for even a moment. Ending slavery in the US took a violent Civil War and at least 600, 000 dead.

The two examples point to the intractable moral evil of slavery. There was no way to root it out without extraordinary cost. In England the cost was extracted from ordinary people, and perpetuated an upper class which now has the temerity to impose “austerity” on the people who created it. In the US it cost 600, 000 lives to end slavery, but abolition failed to overturn the regime of white supremacy, a legacy we are still grappling with. There’s every reason to celebrate the end of slavery as a moral good, but the taint of slavery pervades even that triumph.

 

One of the first things a Doctor Who fan has to contend with is hilarious Dalek jokes. “HA HA STAIRS LOL” and “OMG SALT SHAKER” and “LMAO PLUNGER”, all shrieked out but people who prefer the more sane and pragmatic design of the spasmodic piles of scrap metal from the Transformers movies. Every one of these comedians is the first to notice that the Daleks look at bit impractical and off, and since they’re the Doctor’s most famous and feared enemies, the show is obviously laughable and worthless.

For me, though, I love the look of the Daleks. I love every ridiculous bump and plunger and eyestalk, and I love it because the design is so wonky. It’s so alien in its look. The reason it’s easy to ridicule is because it’s nothing like a human would design, and that underscores their inhuman — antihuman — nature. Unlike a standard “guy in a suit” design it says, right up front, that this is not something that thinks like you or I and is not particularly interested in doing so. This is someone who decided they’d rather have a gun than a second arm. Hardcore.

(Small confession: As much as “Genesis of the Daleks” is loved, it really bugs me that the Kaleds turn out to be humans in Nazi suits. The Daleks deserve better ancestors.)

But a human did design that look, and his name was Ray Cusick. Doctor Who was created by Verity Lambert and Sidney Newman, but Terry Nation and Ray Cusick are the reason we’re still watching it. The tremendous success of the Daleks in the second-ever storyline catapulted the show well beyond where it probably would have otherwise ended up.

Cusick passed away the other day, but his Dalek design lives and thrives. Call it clunky, call it absurd, but you have to call the Dalek design iconic. In fifty years of the show the changes made to it have been minor, all keeping the same basic idea. There are attempts to show the plunger, bumps, and lack of legs as more useful than would seem, but their modernization and flirtations with “badass” have all been kept within the scope of the original design.

More or less.

The oddness of Ray Cusick’s Dalek design is its triumph. It’s timeless; it can’t go out of style because it was never in style. It’s a style all its own. Laugh all you want at the angry pepper pots, they’re still scaring kids and delighting adults to this day.

This new series will look at a range of jobs which may be suitable for people with Asperger's Syndrome and will discuss the positive qualities they could bring and the challenges they could face.



Project Management is a field which requires both good time management and meticulous attention to detail. These are qualities that some people with Asperger's syndrome possess in abundance.

Of course, if you have an ADHD co-condition, then project management is not going to be a suitable career choice because good organisation is critical.

There are many different types of project management roles and many of these are in common "special interest areas" such as computing, engineering, transport, law and even simply in documentation such as standards and compliance. Provided that you join a project management team in an area close to your special interests, you should have no difficulty maintaining attention to detail.

Most project management roles will require tertiary education (a degree) and a bit of experience in the field, so it's not really an ideal first job unless you can find an internship.

Project management often involves high-level thinking and the ability to see both detail and the big picture at the same time.  This is an area where people with Asperger's syndrome have a distinct advantage.  There is also quite a bit of logic and procedure in project management - and charting too.

The hardest part of project management for people with Asperger's syndrome tends to be on the social front. It's quite common for project managers to need to attend lots of meetings and to deal with a lot of people.  Don't give up though because depending upon the types of projects you're engaged on, you may find that someone else in the team is more willing to take on that part of the role or that much of the project can be accomplished via other means of communication such as email and collaborative writing solutions.

Project management is not for everyone but it is a role in which many people with Asperger's syndrome can excel.

Greetings, new recruit of the Japanese Defense Force’s Giant Radioactive Monster Battalion!

No doubt that you, as a citizen of our great nation, have been raised with many colorful tales of the heroic struggles your predecessors in the G.R.M.B. fought in the 1950s and 1960s.  Perhaps this even influenced your decision to join.  Well, believe us:  this is not your father’s defense force, nor yet, depending on your age, that of your grandfather!

Yes, much has changed since the founding of the Giant Radioactive Monster Battalion.  For example, we are now an official organized body of the Japanese Defense Force, and not a hastily-cobbled-together squadron of soldiers pulled from their duties of ensuring that communist China does not mistake us for Taiwan.  Significant upgrades in our budget thanks to an increasingly robust economy have ensured that our air units are not passenger airliners retrofitted with wing-mounted air rifles, and our tanks (some of which you will be driving, new recruit!) do more than simply throw colorful sparks.  And a cooperative training and public education program with the Ministry of Health has resulted in a populace that will take steps to assist in evacuation procedures during a giant radioactive monster attack, rather than standing around motionless, pointing at the sky and muttering the name of the monster over and over again.

But through it all, our mission has remained the same:  to protect our beloved homeland against attacks by giant radioactive monsters.

We live in a difficult and complex period in history; Japan is truly a citizen of the world, and the world’s problems are our problems.  This means that we face many serious challenges, from global climate change to terrorism to an unpredictable economy.  But did you know that the number one cause of premature death in cities such as Honshu, Osaka, and Yokohama is still giant radioactive monster attack?  Even the commitment of the major powers to refrain from atomic testing since the early 1970s has not led to an abatement in this phenomenon.  Given the slowing of nuclear proliferation and a decreased reliance on atomic energy, we are unsure why these monsters continue to be spawned, just as we are unsure why they do not attack any nation other than Japan.  But that’s a question for the brave men and women of the Giant Radioactive Monster Studies Division of the Ministry of Science!  Here at the Giant Radioactive Monster Battalion, we don’t pretend to understand them.  We just kill them.

And kill them we will!  This little pamphlet will get you started on the path to learning what giant radioactive monsters you are likely to encounter in the course of your enlistment, and what tactics you should use against them.  Contrary to popular belief, Japan is no longer in danger from such ancient enemies as Gojira (who died in 1979), Mosura (who retired to manage a beachfront hotel in Malaysia in 1983), or Gamera (who is now a lawmaker and popular television sportscaster in the Phillipines).   No, Japan faces a whole new generation of giant radioactive monsters, and this is where you, a whole new generation of giant radioactive monster killers, come in.  You’ll learn to predict the movements of Kosumi, the Living Oil Slick.  You’ll discover the most vulnerable areas on the gigantic body of Grojan, the Thing with Six Livers.  You’ll find out what smell alerts you to the coming of Septicus, the Radioactive Waste.  You’ll finally be told why Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster, just won’t go away.  And you’ll be informed as to the best ways to ignore Zango, The Not-Very-Threatening Attention-Seeker.

As long as Japan is plagued by giant radioactive monsters, you, the Giant Radioactive Monster Battalion, will be a vital part of our defenses.  So turn to page one, and let’s learn about Cheapgar, the Man-Eating Knock-Off of the Korean Peninsula.

Mirrored from LEONARD PIERCE DOT COM.

Evidence exists that a large natural nuclear reactor formed and operated on Mars in the northern Mare Acidalium region of Mars. However, unlike its terrestrial analogs this natural nuclear reactor was apparently much larger, bred 233U off of thorium, and apparently underwent explosive disassembly, ejecting large amounts of radioactive material over Mars' surface.

Source (PDF).

(See also: Natural nuclear fission reactor. Only, on Mars, all geological features seem to be supersized ... I don't care if this is implausible, it's bloody going in a novel. OK?)

Liberal Democrats! Have you been to Eastleigh yet? There’s still time, for the most hotly-contested by-election of the decade. Remember their last by-election? The incumbents (Conservative) was pushed into third place, while the main challengers (Lib Dems) won – now Lib Dem and Tory starting points are reversed, will they meet those same expectations? Labour leapt up from third place to second with 28%, showing Tony Blair was headed to government – where is Ed Miliband headed from his third place? I spent weeks there when I was younger and fitter, and remember a few things that might encourage you…

The 2013 Choices

This time round, the Liberal Democrats have an excellent local councillor as candidate, from an excellent Lib Dem local council. Mike Thornton is the candidate with the best local record – as well as fighting on national issues, field-testing the new Lib Dem slogan “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society” and committed to being the 401st MP to support equal marriage. Whereas the bigots are spoilt for choice, with not just mouth-foaming minor candidates but the Tory (who disagrees on every single issue with her Prime Minister, except that they both know both their political futures depend on her winning) and, obviously, the bigot UKIP candidate threatening her are both making homophobic and xenophobic bigotry their top campaign priorities.

It’s a remarkable by-election, in that the Lib Dems have a strong local candidate, strong local issues, strong national issues (we believe in fairer taxes – the Tories don’t), and a bloody awful week of national publicity. The Tories and Labour, on the other hand, are simultaneously competing for the title of ‘Worst mainstream party candidate in a by-election since 1996’ (Jeanette Davy, South-East Staffs. She was a Lib Dem, so it’s about time one of the others won the wooden ballot paper). The Tory is an appalling snob who brays that no local school can possibly be good enough for her child, then demonstrates that no local voter is good enough for her to talk to by refusing to bother showing up for the BBC hustings. The Labour candidate is a minor comedian who says Labour supporters should “Go for it” and vote tactically for Lib Dems in seats like this – except, er, if he’s standing – and embodies the Labour Party’s Two-Minute (Thirty-Year) Hate by wishing Margaret Thatcher had been killed by terrorists.

At least George Galloway isn’t standing, having already won one by-election this Parliament and so not due to flip over to his 56th different constituency until 2015. That vile, bullying racist apologist for rapists and dictators is living proof that you can fool a lot of the people some of the time… But, after they get to know him, never more than once. UKIP with a beard and a red carpetbag.

So if you can get to Eastleigh and help (or make phone calls from your area), or donate if you can’t do either, do it today. I’m twice the age and weight I was in 1994, and have been particularly ill in the last week – but if I’m up to going out the door tomorrow or Wednesday, I aim to make it. You can read Lib Dem Voice’s or Mark Pack’s continuing reports from the campaign, and I personally recommend Liberal Youth’s “Today I Made A Difference” EastLY campaign to inspire you!

Eastleigh Memories of 1994

The 1992-97 Parliament was the period when I was young and healthy enough to spend more time helping out at Parliamentary by-elections than in the rest of my life put together – sixteen out of the eighteen that were held, in the days before parties took to tapping their older MPs to retire out of fear of lost seats. It was also the time when the largest number of policy motions I’d written got through Conference, for those foolish Lib Dems who believe campaigners and policy wonks can never mix (and are one Focus short of a delivery route). For some of the crucial ones, I spent weeks sleeping on people’s floors, or freezing to death hitch-hiking, or not being highly regarded by university tutors whose courses I was unaccountably absent from. Eastleigh was one of the friendliest, happiest, and didn’t have much rain. For all those reasons, I recommend going there yourself. And there was one more big attraction…

The bakery in town is my most indelible memory, which is odd, because though the smell of a bakery is one of the most wonderful in the world, I like pies and cream cakes, but have never cared for doughnuts. And yet, one morning I strode in and uttered the unusual but satisfying line, “Could I have two hundred doughnuts, please?” They offered ridiculous discounts for multiple buys, so that, say, one doughnut might be 85p, but you’d get three for £2, or ten for £5, with escalating discounts the more you bought. These were for the cheery campaign HQ and all the hundreds of volunteers rather than personal consumption, but the huge stack of boxes had the advantage of obscuring the rosette that might have put off an opinion pollster on the street. “Oh no,” I remember saying, “I wouldn’t like that Tony Blair as Labour Leader. Margaret Beckett’s the one you want, she’ll be very popular, and John Prescott, he’s a sensible man.” Since then, I’ve always taken opinion polls with just a pinch of icing sugar. Can any 2013 volunteers enlighten me as to if that baker is still there?

Eastleigh was also an excellent town for outspoken residents – much more exciting for a canvasser than shrinking violets. Last week, Boris Johnson failed to find a single Tory voter when knocking up the most Tory street in the constituency. I did rather better with Lib Dems last time I was there, but here are three canvassing experiences that stayed with me:

• The man who growled at the Lib Dems and refused to let me talk to his wife when I politely enquired, because she voted the way she was told. Canvassers, never treat a house as monolithic (even if there’s an opposition poster there – a Labour poster-bearer at a different by-election told me quietly that he was a member and had to, but was voting tactically). The second he slammed the door, the upper window sprang open, and she quickly confided: “I always tell him that for a quiet life. But I always vote for you lot.”
  

• The Labour voter on the next doorstep along from me who thought government should tell the workers what was good for them and hand out what they decreed when Tony Blair got in, because Labour and the unions knew best. And the Lib Dem canvasser I was tag-teaming with stoutly telling him that, no, workers should be involved in management rather than everything being from the top down, and the Labour man’s incredulous cry of “You can’t let workers make their own decisions!”
  

• The man one sunny day in a suburban crescent who got more and more heated about immigration while the other two canvassers did the whole rest of the street and all the neighbours stayed out one by one to listen. Never have I delivered so many calm “That isn’t true, sirs” or “I must disagree with you, sirs” at such increasing volume as the voter went from slightly racist to shouting conspiracy theories. After my final “I don’t believe we’re going to agree, sir, so I shall say good day,” he opened his gate and lumbered after me to the corner, screaming “Chidgey’s not an English name!!”
  

Though it was in nearby Christchurch that the candidate commented on similar voters, and in neighbouring Winchester that I had perhaps my most unrepeatable by-election experience… So I’d better repeat those another day.

Chris Huhne

And finally, one word of memorial to Chris Huhne. He’s probably not a good man, and may not be a nice one. But I’m grateful to him for two things that he was good at. He was a bloody good minister – as I’ve written before, even his Tory enemies found him (far too) effective, and we should all be grateful for the hard work he did for the country and the planet as Secretary of State For Energy and Climate Change. And before then, within the Liberal Democrats, he did more than any other individual to make raising allowances and taking the lowest-paid out of tax altogether into what became our biggest priority in the last election, our biggest priority in government, and now our biggest priority in the by-election. It was briefly a Lib Dem policy in the 1990s, swiftly dropped because it cost too much. For much of the early 2000s, I was literally the lone voice on the Federal Committee calling for it – as the bit in italics in this piece forlornly demonstrates. It took a far more powerful policy wonk than me to get it on the Lib Dem agenda, and as the bits not in italics demonstrates, that was Chris. Lib Dems with gritted teeth and freezing delivery rounds will feel they have little to thank Chris for this by-election. Millions of the lowest-paid who now pay no income tax won’t know it, but they have quite a bit to thank Chris for, actually.

Ladbrokes make it a 6/4 chance that Clegg won’t be Lib Dem leader at the general election twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/st…

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) February 24, 2013

Inititial reaction to Clegg’s statement on #Eastleigh betting is for LD price to weaken & Tories to tighten twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/st…

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) February 24, 2013

13% of LAB voters in the Populus #Eastleigh poll said they didn’t even know who Nick Clegg was. When asked they said “never heard of him”

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) February 24, 2013

Doctor Who! More Doctor Who! And the Liberal Democrats! Given how little I’m writing on here at the moment, it may come as a surprise that you’ll shortly be able to read three pieces of writing I’ve done for other people. It may be less of a surprise that they were all asked for last year (though all now completed, as far as I know). I’m not certain when each of them will be released, though soon, so it’s about time I give them each a plug and tell you where you’ll be able to read them. I’m quite excited.

How To Write Something: It Turns Out, Only By Getting Writing (nagging helps)

I love writing. Except when I don’t. In that, it’s rather like a lot of things in my life for which my health or my fears get in the way. And it’s a rather lovely ego-boost to be asked to contribute to something. But also sometimes terrifying. I write for many reasons: for pleasure (it’s certainly many years since any of it was for money); to make a point that needs saying; because I’m not able to get out much and want to feel like I’m connecting with the world… But I also tend to put things off, because I’m too ill much of the time and there are other things I want to do when I’m not. This means that anyone who is kind enough to ask me to write something does so at their peril, even if I do often really want to write for them. At the least, they’ll probably have to nag a bit. At worst, I may have to steel myself to get past the gnawing terror that sometimes irrationally substitutes itself for the ‘Whee!’ feeling that someone being nice about my writing ought to evoke. It’s embarrassing to admit (as some of the people involved may read this) that there’ve been times when, on receipt of an invitation to do some writing for something that sounds impressive from someone I respect, my immediate reaction was not to beam at the compliment but have a complete crash of self-esteem, worry that anything I wrote would never be as good as the other contributors, and pretend not to have seen the mail or any follow-ups (the online equivalent of keeping the door shut, the curtains closed, and never going out, as it happens pretty much my life offline). Which I suppose is just my life-long tendency towards seeking perfection as procrastination turned pathological.

I’m still putting off writing a lot of things I want to do for me, but happily somehow in the last year I managed to say yes to four interesting things for other people and have actually delivered three. Woo hoo! It may be significant that I warned three of them that I’m terrible with deadlines and would need nagging, while the other, for which I had several exciting ideas, took a while to reply, then I took longer to reply to them, then… Well, I’ve not heard any news of that particular book coming out, and I hope I’m wrong in suspecting it may not get round to. So, here are the three for which people gently prodded me, available soon…

The Doctor Who 8th Anniversary Special

Interviewing Martha Jones for Paul Smith at Wonderful Books

With the vacuity of the official modern Doctor Who Annual creating a gap in the market, in Summer 2010 the Doctor Who Magazine team (responsible for previous much more readable Doctor Who Annuals and similar books) joined with BBC Books to produce the far more interesting, text-intensive and generally creative The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011, first in a series which ran… Only two years, unfortunately. But it did inspire something even more creative, entertaining and beautiful – and not just because it was based in a Who period considerably more to my taste and the only Doctor definitely more to my taste than the present one.

The Wonderful Book of Dr Who 1965 was created by Paul Smith as an homage to The Brilliant Book, but packed with facts, interviews and images based not on Matt Smith’s first season in 2010 but on William Hartnell’s (and the series’) first in 1963-4. And not only did it look gorgeous and was immensely readable, but it was very funny. Because not all of the facts (and none of the interviews) were exactly factual, both deeply loving and taking the piss outrageously. And all available as a free pdf, the cheaper, prettier, faster version of the old fanzine (though he did a few print copies, too).

All this meant that I was especially delighted when Paul Smith contacted me out of the blue to see if I’d like to write something for his next project. I didn’t know him, but I’d thought his work was (obviously) wonderful. And that this was to be an homage to the legendary Radio Times 1973 Special for the fiftieth anniversary was the reason I had to go for it, if I could. I’ve previously enthused about the Radio Times 1973 Doctor Who 10th Anniversary Special as probably the most marvellous single Doctor Who magazine ever published. It wasn’t until more than a year after that that Doctor Who first captivated me, aged three, so when a family friend who’d kept his slightly battered copy gave it to me, it instantly became one of my most treasured possessions. Before websites or guidebooks, this was the unique source of thrilling photos and details of stories from before I started watching (that is, prehistory).

Paul’s concept was to recreate the Special as if celebrating not the fiftieth but the eighth anniversary of a Doctor Who series that started for the first time in 2005, with other fans providing some of the artwork and comment pieces. In the original, double-page spreads about past stories alternated with newly shot double-page photo spreads and interview columns for past companions with pull-out quote headlines like “THE NUTCASE PROFESSOR SWEPT ME OFF MY FEET”. For a column like that, I was only given 350 words to play with – imagine – and a couple of other rules which I contrived to bend subtly, and may explain when the publication appears. I was asked which companion I’d like to write about, and though several tempted me – Rose and Jack were terrific in 2005, and I loved Jackie and Wilf – I instantly thought of Martha Jones (or Martha Smith-Jones, as she is now).

From her first appearance in Smith and Jones, Martha was a breath of fresh air for me – not just Freema Agyeman’s performance and giving as good as she got to the Doctor (and him not being interested), not just that she was the Doctor’s first full-time TV companion who was black (after Sharon, Roz and others elsewhere), but that she wasn’t going off with the Doctor only because her life was a bit rubbish. Martha is the only companion since Sarah Jane Smith with a decent, fulfilling, even exciting career – and for all of us who are so utterly gripped by the Doctor and his adventures, that’s a more inspiring example than the implicit suggestion that travelling in the TARDIS is only slightly better than being in a dead-end job you’re bored by or hate, or than having your parents killed in front of you. If you’re an achiever with a lot to give up, but the TARDIS is still so exciting you’d go off in it without a second thought – well, you would, wouldn’t you? And, for me, she has by far the most satisfying (and self-chosen) exit from the new TARDIS, too, again after impressive achievements in her own right.

I understand that other contributors might have written critical assessments or celebrations of their picks, but with the Radio Times Special so deeply ingrained in me, I knew immediately that I wanted to write an ‘After the Doctor’ interview in that style, for the character rather than the actor, and that though I was going to be tongue-in-cheek in several ways (her earnestness, the Doctor) as well, I was going to set out first to say ‘She’s a strong, brilliant character’. And while it may have taken some time to think of all the other words, then edit them all back down again, my starting point leapt into my head fully-formed on reading Paul’s initial email:

“I LEFT THE TARDIS WITH MY HEAD HELD HIGH.”

You can already see a tiny preview of the Martha Jones pages on the Wonderful Books site, and I believe the new Specials are now at the printer’s.

The Worldcon Guide To Doctor Who In London

Bigging up That London for Nicholas Whyte and the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention

“Of all the places the Doctor ever visits, which is the one he comes back to more than any other? Not ostensibly exotic locations such as Skaro, Peladon or New New Earth – even Cardiff – but London. And, paradoxically, since Doctor Who began recording in Cardiff, the Doctor has been drawn to London more than ever before. But then, when the Fifth Doctor exclaimed that he was being pulled towards the middle of the Universe, there was no way this was going to mean a thrilling return to Terminus. Inevitably in Doctor Who, the centre of the Universe is London.”

Diplomat and prolific science fiction (and Northern Irish and European politics) blogger Nicholas Whyte rang me last year to ask me if I’d like to write a guide to London locations in Doctor Who. He’s one of the organisers of Worldcon 2014, taking place in London next August, and thought this would make a great advertising hook to encourage people to come to London from all over the world.

That seems, you might think, quite a long lead-up time, and it did to me, so pity poor Nicholas a few weeks ago when I’d not yet turned my notes into a proper guide and, it turned out, not this year’s Worldcon in San Antonio but the biggest US Doctor Who convention – Gallifrey One, in Los Angeles, which took place last weekend – was looming upon him and he needed leaflets to hand out. Which led to me finally getting down to the drafting over the course of about four days solid, and discovering that I had oodles of notes for some Doctors and rather fewer than others. My intention had always been to select one location for each Doctor, all across Greater London, to give a range of time and space. So imagine my hilarity when, thinking all I had to do was whittle down several possibilities for each, I found that for two of the less Londoner Doctors I’d pencilled in the same location and didn’t have a back-up. I won’t tell you what, or how I ended up finding an alternative for one of them – though I did for a wild moment consider making a point of it and choosing that same location for four different Doctors, if that’s a clue…

I’d been told to write for a word count in the low thousands and, being me, ended up at what might be considered the upper end of that – about 3,400 words. Nicholas was very complimentary about it all, and is going to put the lot up on the convention website – but it was never going to fit on a leaflet. So the last of my four days was spent cutting it down by more than half, to 1,600 words, at the same time substantially rewriting it to make it still work at that length and trying to keep in at least some of the jokes, on the grounds that while I found such other guides as Richard Bignell’s book Doctor Who On Location and the website Doctor Who – The Locations Guide invaluable research aids and recommend each, they’re best to dip into and not easy to read through as enticements. And, in an attempt to forestall Nicholas and the Worldcon London team from making it less readable, at about two in the morning I stuck the text into some text boxes, inserted a few photos and clicked “Save as pdf” to prove that it would all fit on a leaflet as was. I expected they’d find someone with any graphic design ability to turn the text into leaflets…

So my apologies to people who picked up the leaflets in Los Angeles last weekend and saw something scruffy from Word without any links on it, but at least I reckon the text was pretty good. If you’d like a copy of the pdf, email me (look at the sidebar), and at some point the extended version, which is a more entertaining read, will be up on the Worldcon 2014 website. In the meantime, here’s one of Nicholas’ reports from Gallifrey One, complete with the huge maps they hung up to make sense of my references. I won’t tell you all of my choices here, but the first is obvious:

“Daleks looming before the Palace of Westminster and St Stephen’s Tower – the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben – are the very image of democracy overthrown by fascism. Before crossing the Westminster Bridge toward the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, look left along the Albert Embankment; if you see zeppelins and signs for Newport, you’re in the wrong London. Best get that settled before you set out. Pass Big Ben into Parliament Square, turn right into Parliament Street / Whitehall to follow in Barbara’s fast footsteps, and like her you’ll reach Trafalgar Square at the end. That in itself is a much-used Doctor Who landmark: Ian and Barbara return there for an exuberant homecoming in The Chase; a New Year rings in in The Daleks’ Master Plan; Nelson gets a redesign in No Future and has long since toppled by The Sontaran Experiment; Rose has lunch there with Mickey before meeting the Doctor; it’s conquered by the Daleks again in the game City of the Daleks; but Londoners can feel secure that in a thousand years’ time, Trafflegarr Square will still be there in Spaceport Five Undertown.”

What Do the Lib Dems Believe?

Liberal Philosophy for a Mark Pack Infographic

While I don’t know if I’ve ever met Paul, and I know Nicholas a bit, Mark has known me more than twenty years. That means he knows my relationship with whooshing deadlines, so he’s the one who wisely met up with me for a couple of hours and prodded my brain for ideas rather than necessarily waiting for me to do the actual writing. Last year, Mark produced an Infographic on “Liberal Democrat Achievements In Government” free for any Lib Dem or reader to get across at a glance some of the influence we’ve had through the Coalition. His next Infographic is to get across what we stand for.

Mark and I have worked on and off together on a simple crystallisation of what the Liberal Democrats believe for decades, first inspired by the ’90s “core message” under Paddy Ashdown and Matthew Taylor (for which I was back in a senior enough position to get hold of much of the briefings). In recent months, there’s been work on a new one under Nick Clegg and Ryan Coetzee, and while Mark will no doubt be including that as part of his Infographic, we both wanted to come up with something a bit deeper: a mixture of history, philosophy, controversy and current priorities, the story of the Party and its soul, if you like, hopefully showing how they all fit together and giving something that all Lib Dems can nod at, whether for information or for inspiration. My intention, at least, is something that Lib Dem members can look at and think, ‘Yes, that’s some of why we bother’.

Though Liberalism provides a far more coherent and consistent philosophy for the Lib Dems than whatever shifting melanges animate the Labour and Tory Parties, it’s not without its problems in summing it up in brief – nor do I envy Mark in having to find images to illustrate concepts for his Infographic. I’m also grateful for him for pulling it together, not least because my series of ‘What the Liberal Democrats Stand For’ posts on this blog has mostly gone unwritten or in fits and starts, and I’ve not even finished republishing my original 1999 Love and Liberty pamphlet on here. So, Mark’s project is less ambitious, but it’s happening (hooray).

My best guess is that Mark is likely to publish the Infographic for Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in a fortnight, and I’m intrigued to see how it turns out. He did send me his rough notes last month, which I didn’t get round to helping with; he’s since sent me the first draft of the Infographic itself, to which I helpfully replied (having failed to do it at the more amorphous stage) with a close-to-complete redraft. Being me, and more a words than a graphics sort of person, that also raised the suggested word count from about 600 words to about 800, which I expect Mark to slash even if he wishes to take all my points on board. I know he’s circulated it to several other people, too, so I have excitingly no idea what the final version will look like – but I hope I’ll agree with it, and so will many of you.

At the risk of picking out elements that don’t make it through, here are a few teasers:

I’ve suggested the Infographic start with What the Liberal Democrats Believe in six words. But which six?

Mark is, amongst many other things, an historian, and one of the key staging posts for him in the Party’s history was the mid-Twentieth Century development of both Community Politics and Europeanism as important to our predecessor Liberals and Social Democrats. People often think these are contradictory, but they’re not – so here’s one of the lines I suggested to get across as briefly as possible why they’re part of the same thing:

“both challenged centralised power, saying decisions should be at the lowest practical level, from your local community for local issues to international co-operation on issues like trade and climate change.”

And when many are trying very hard to say the Party’s split today between Economic and Social Liberals, for me this is greatly overstated. The extremes make a lot of noise, but most Lib Dems see themselves comfortably as both, or simply as Liberals. So here was my suggestion on how briefly to sum up the consensus, not just the differences, between members of the Liberal family:

“All Liberals believe in liberty, and that any sort of power (government, business, other people) can both protect and threaten liberty.
“Economic and Social Liberals put different emphasis on which sources of power are the best defences or the biggest bullies, and on whether freedom or fairness is the biggest priority.”

Some may recognise my paraphrasing of my old friend and mentor Conrad Russell. And before long, you can see if any of this made it into the final draft!

Something Mark’s prodding brought me back to look at again was my own shortish ‘What the Liberal Democrats Stand For’ statement, which I first drafted in the ’90s and had slightly updated several times since to incorporate a flavour of whatever the Party’s key priorities happened to be at the time. As each version was limited to between 140-150 words, in the years that I was Vice-Chair of the Liberal Democrat Federal Policy Committee and would deliver its report to Party Conference, I even used to read it out as part of my speeches, on the basis that if any Party body should be concerned with what we stand for and communicate it to people, it should be the one that’s responsible for the Manifesto.

It’s some years since I last wrote a new draft of this, and I had a go, incorporating some of the new Ryan Coetzee messaging. It was the largest change (still kept below 150 words) I’d made since I first came up with it, and I’m not printing it here today because, after an appropriate pause for thought (and after Richard shaking his head), it seems too much of an ugly mash-up. Should I manage to get it to flow soon, I might publish it when the Infographic appears. In the meantime, if you’d like to chip in or just to see what the Lib Dems stand for for me, email me (again, link in the sidebar) and I’ll send you both the previous 2000s version and my latest attempt-in-progress.


And that’s it, at last. I hope you enjoyed the trailers, and that you’ll soon be able to see the main features. And just a couple of days ago, I was asked if I’d like to write something for another fan magazine I adore… But as I volunteered to do what’s probably the most popular bit, they may not say yes!

This post is part of today’s “Autistic People Should” flash blog where Autistic bloggers are writing about positive things that Autistic people should do. Why? Because if you type “Autistic people should” into either Google or Bing’s search engine query box, the autocomplete results–the most popular searches starting with those words–are disturbing and upsetting, especially if you’re Autistic or love someone who is. 

Autistic people should...

be heard.

We say things. Those things? They should have a platform. That platform should get equal time to the things people say about us, if not greater time.

be listened to.

Not only should the words we say be given air time, but people should give them consideration. People should take them onboard instead of dismissing them out of hand. Our communication, whatever form it takes, should be taken as valid.

be understood.

Take the time to figure out what we mean. Understand meaning, not style. You don't have to grok every facet to understand what we mean. I don't have to understand deep in my soul what it is to be a musician to understand that not all of the "same instrument" are the same. Just so, you don't need to know with every fiber of your being how I feel when I spin to accept that it does great things for me. You don't need to 100% grok to understand, I promise.

be embraced.

We are valuable members of our families and our communities. Treat us as such.

be welcomed.

When you see us in your community, be a source of welcome. Be that source of light, be that safe space. Be that warmth in the scary, cold world. Show us that the world isn't always horrible. We have a lot to offer. So do you. Bring us into communities like you know we're real people.

be able to live a life without fear. 

I have written about fear, recently. The fear we all live in. It shouldn't be that way. This flashblog is a response to yet another thing that proves we have a lot to fear. It should not be that way. Not at all. But you, and I, and everyone, we can make it better. You, yes you, can help reshape this world to how it should be.

Autistic people should live life fully, fearlessly, and wonderfully. Make it so.