Andrew Hickey

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June 17th, 2015: Speaking of the wings of a chicken, did you know I will sell you socks?? P.S.: I am not good at segues. Are you a time traveller from the future? Yeah, me neither, I am definitely not that thing I just said. Here is a limited-edition shirt I made that explains how you are for sure native to 2015, just like everyone else! – Ryan

Pedal steel ace Orville “Red” Rhodes (1930-1995) was one of LA’s most in-demand session players during the late 1960s and early 1970s, lending his laid-back licks to hits by James Taylor, Linda Rondstadt, and The Carpenters. But Red was more than just a sideman. He was a band leader, fronting the house band at North […]

IN THIS week's Free exchange column, which has just been published, we consider a question that is much debated at cocktail parties around the world. Does democracy hold back growth? Much evidence seems to suggest that it does. After all:

GDP growth in [China] at an average of 10% over the past decade, has easily outpaced that of its democratic emerging-market rivals. India saw annual growth of 6% over the same period; Brazil, just 2%.

In other words: democracies grow slowly; non-democracies grow quickly.

We report on new research that challenges this perception. The paper uses a huge dataset (175 countries over fifty years) and makes a number of statistical improvements (that are explained in the column) and concludes that "democratisations" (ie, when a country becomes democratic) improves living standards substantially. As the piece notes:

They find that a “permanent” democratisation—where there is no slide back into...Continue reading

Ian Birrell is one of the Guardian’s occasional Token Tory commentators, and someone not averse to churning out a bit of clickbait when required. So it should be no surprise that just as ballot papers are going out in the Liberal Democrat leadership, he pops up with a hit piece on Tim Farron.

Some of it is banally predictable, with rehashed attacks seemingly borrowed from dodgy phone polls about Tim’s stance on LGBT rights and abortion. Rather than go into detail on those issues, I’ll just point out that you can find out Tim’s positions on those in his own words on LGBT here and on abortion here. But hey, when does anyone let a few actual facts get in the way of a bit of clickbaiting?

The main thrust of Birrell’s post, though, is the rather bizarre claim that Tim “seems to lack a driving spirit of liberalism”, which would make you wonder if he actually knows who Tim Farron is until you see what his definition of liberalism is. Birrell’s version of liberalism appears to be a version of social liberalism that’s somehow represented by ‘the great Labour reforms of the 60s’ and ‘small-state economic liberalism that found an echo in Margaret Thatcher’s Tories’. It’s a liberalism that’s little more than the modern centre-right consensus: slash the state, but don’t be too beastly to minorities and ignore anything that’s happened in the last twenty=five years. It’s a liberalism with all the sharp edges filed of so its safe for conservatives to play with and pretend they’re actually liberal, but with no danger of making them actually want to challenge anything. Birrell’s effectively calling for liberalism to be little more than a reincarnation of the National Liberals. There’s a bitter irony in him invoking Jo Grimond for his vision of liberalism, when it was Grimond who led the party away from alliances with the Tories on the right.

Coincidentally, Tim gave a speech at the IPPR today in which he set out more of his vision of liberalism which is centred around “liberty, democracy, fairness, internationalism, environmentalism and quality of life.” It’s a lot more detailed and nuanced than the ‘be generally nice, but don’t challenge anything’ idea that Birrell seems to think liberalism is.

Of course, Birrell’s not alone in portraying liberalism like this. As James Graham pointed out the other week:

For years the senior party line informed us the history of Lib Dem philosophical thought was this: a century of unbroken tradition in the vein of Mill and Gladstone; something something welfare state (shrug); 20 years of social democrat muddle and confusion following the party merger in 1987; a return to our liberal roots with Nick Clegg’s election in 2007.

As James says, this pushing of a very restrictive view of liberalism under a variety of different names (‘true liberalism’, ‘classical liberalism’, ‘four-cornered liberalism’, ‘authentic liberalism’ and others) is an attempt to ignore much twentieth century thinking about liberalism and pretend that there’s some Platonic ideal form of liberalism that was discovered in the 19th century which we all should be judged against.

Purely coincidentally of course, this version of liberalism is the one that challenges the status quo and the powerful in society the least. It has very little to say about power, and when it does it pretends that the only potentially dangerous power in society is that of the state, which must be shrunk and controlled while corporations and other institutions are assumed to be perfectly fine and needing nothing like the same level of control and oversight. While other forms of liberalism are concerned with controlling power, especially unaccountable power, the one thing I always find missing from ‘economic liberalism’ are any notions of power outside of the state, especially ideas of challenging it or making it accountable. Birrell’s vision of liberalism is one that keeps things safe and cosy for those in power, and I’m very glad that’s not a liberalism Tim Farron represents.

2014 saw the publication of two long format Laundry Files stories—the novella "Equoid" and the novel "The Rhesus Chart", the fifth book in the series. I wrote them at different times and for different reasons, but they share a common theme. (It was also around this time that I got the memo from editorial at Ace—all series of three or more books must have a series title—and was handed "The Laundry Files"by default.)

So let me tackle "Equoid" first. "Equoid" has an origin story all of its own, which I've described at length (and I don't have the energy to repeat myself). What I didn't explain in that essay was why I went with unicorns.

The first four Laundry Files novels (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, The Fuller Memorandum and The Apocalypse Codex) all riffed on a common idea: the traditional British spy thriller. Loosely, each novel pastiched a particular author—in order: Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, Anthony Price (even though "The Fuller Memorandum" is really an Adam Hall title), and Peter O'Donnell. They were written over a twelve year period from 1999 to 2011. The shorter works in the Laundry corpus from that period don't share the pastiche theme, because (as Isaac Asimov noted some time in the 1950s) the shorter you make a work of fiction, the more stuff you have to leave out: there just wasn't room in anything shorter than a novella to layer another author's style on top of the existing overloaded freight of geek-out nerdery and Lovecraftian horror.

But after more than a decade I was getting a bit tired of the author-level pastiche, not to mention running out of authors I wanted to tackle. (John LeCarre is off the menu, for reasons explained in the afterword to "The Atrocity Archives"; ditto Graham Greene—I'm just not a good enough writer to shine either of their shoes.) By their very nature, the Laundry Files can't pastiche American writers: it would utterly break the Britishness of the series. So what to do?

"Equoid" happened after "The Rhesus Chart" (the origin of which I will get to), and although the idea predates that novel by a few years ("The Rhesus Chart" was written in late 2012) I already had the new thematic connection in mind: I was going to switch to pastiching urban fantasy sub-genres rather than authors of cold war spy thrillers. "Equoid" is the unicorn story. "The Rhesus Chart" was to be the vampire novel: it is followed by "The Annihilation Score" (superheroes) and "The Nightmare Stacks" (elves, dragons, orcs, and the related underpinnings of Tolkein's matter of Britain), before (assuming I get that far) the series returns to focus on Spies—this time in a version of the post-Edward Snowden era warped by the background presence of nightmarish threats to humanity sufficient to justify almost any repressive measure.

I've mentioned the unicorn thing already. "Equoid" is another departure for the short format works in the Laundry Files (a novella straddles the gap between short stories and novels, right?) in that by the time I got there the series had already acquired a distinctive background and texture of its own, rather than simply borrowing from primary taproots (Lovecraft and Deighton, remixed as necessarily). So I didn't have to devote as much of the story to introducing new ideas as I did in, for example, "The Concrete Jungle" or "Down on the Farm".

Paradoxically this left more room in "Equoid" for playful pastiches ... which was my cue to indulge in fan service to the British rural novel by way of the likes of Thomas Hardy and (viciously parodied) Stella Gibbons. Unicorns are being bred on a farm in East Sussex (it's no coincidence that I dated a farmer's daughter from that part of the world for a few years) so it shouldn't surprise anyone in the know to see that Cold Comfort Farm puts in an appearance. (In fact, the whole thing is set on Cold Comfort Farm, eighty years later, and of course there is something nasty in the woodshed.)

Of course, once one dives into rural Home Counties England there are all sorts of things one can't really leave out. Camberwick Green, for example, whose PC McGarry (Number 452) shows up down the local nick. But it's become impossible to play Camberwick Green/Trumpton/Chigley straight ever since Half Man Half Biscuit up-ended the 1960s British children's TV toy-chest, so of course there's a three level pastiche here, in which the very rural McGarry is teamed up with Constable Savage from the London Met in an echo of Hot Fuzz. The Edgebaston girls are at a boarding school, St Ninian's, which might inadvertently resemble St Trinian's School; the style of Ronald Searle was an implicit influence. And there are many more easter eggs buried in the text—if you're English, of a certain age, and ever had anything to do with farming folks in the south east. (Parenthetically: "Equoid" is a nightmare for translators because of all the cultural references flying past their heads— even an intimate familiarity with American mass culture won't help. It's not an accident that it won a Hugo award at a British world science fiction convention.)

Finally there's the H. P. Lovecraft pastiche, in the shape of his death-bed confessional letters to the young Robert Bloch, but this is a Laundry Files story so the presence of Lovecraftian nastiness shouldn't come as a surprise. The different element here is the content of the confessional. Lovecraft had a lot of hang-ups and his relationship with sexuality was peculiarly repressive to say the least; per some sources he's reputed to have said he never kissed a female other than his mother until he met Sonia, his wife, at the age of 32. You don't need to be a Freudian psychotherapist to find the prevalence of tentacles, orifices, and hentai-laden symbolism in his later writing highly suggestive (along with the misogyny that parallels his unselfconscious racism and authoritarianism). So here's a very fucked-up guy who had a nervous breakdown in his teens and more or less didn't come out of his bedroom for two years, who was terrified of women ... could there be something in his background to explain this, some actual concrete experience that damaged him and left him susceptible to narratives involving all of the above, and protagonists who are unable thereafter to unsee that which has been seen?

Next time I blog I'm either going to witter on about Hugo-worthy graphic novels, or do a brain dump of my crib notes for "The Rhesus Chart". But for now, if you have any "Equoid" related questions, feel free to ask here.

This happened to me some aeons ago. My hatred of leaving messages persists.

Tagged: literal-mindedness, phone, social anxiety, taking things literally

From the New York Times, 24 June 2015: COLUMBIA, S.C. -- It has been quite a few years since the...

I've spent more spare time than is healthy over the last few days musing on the proposed new system for counting Hugo nominations, designated E Pluribus Hugo (henceforth EPH) by its designers (to whom detailed observations should be directed here). I am in sympathy with its intent, which is to prevent any group - whoever that group may be - from absolutely excluding nominees from having the chance to be considered for the Hugo Award. I think that the proposal as it currently sits achieves that aim, but at a cost of making it too easy for a group which is otherwise utterly unconnected with Hugo voters to get a single work onto the ballot by "bullet votes" (ie votes for their candidate[s] and no other). I explore this problem below, using data from the 1984 Hugo nomination ballots, and propose a partial solution, which is to use square roots as divisors when weighting nomination votes.

Detail

I'm tremendously grateful to Paul Evans for providing me with the 1984 data he described here. Having spent a couple of evenings crunching figures, I now feel huge sympathy and admiration for the Hugo administrators trying to make sense of the variant titles and spelling submitted by voters. Administering what are essentially thousands of write-in ballots is not exactly straightforward, and I am not sure that I would have the patience to do so in an RL setting myself. Not surprisingly, my tallies vary a bit from Paul's. He has taken more time over it, so his numbers are probably right.

I've picked three different ballot categories from 1984 to analyse mainly because they were relatively easy to process, with less name and category confusion than some of the other options would have presented.

First, Best Fan Writer - in some ways the easiest, because fewest nominations were submitted in this category (481 nominations of 174 candidates by 181 voters). My figures differ from Paul Evans' totals - he found a couple more votes for some of the candidates than I did - but it doesn't make a lot of difference to the story. This is a case where EPH clearly works, and a slate candidate with bullet votes would have had to get enough support to win under the old system as well.

The top seven candidates by nominations were:

56 Mike Glyer
36 Richard Geis
33 Dave Langford
28 Arthur D. Hlavaty
18 Teresa Nielsen Hayden
12 Ted White
10 Claire Anderson

A nice big gap between the fifth and sixth placed candidates, and indeed between the fourth and fifth. Under EPH, the points for each candidate on the final ballot would have been:

Mike Glyer (56 nominations): 28 + 21/2 + 4/3 + 3/4 = 40.583
Richard Geis (36 nominations): 16 + 13/2 + 4/3 + 3/4 = 24.583
Arthur D. Hlavaty (28 nominations): 14 + 7/2 + 4/3 + 3/4 = 19.583
Dave Langford (33 nominations): 6 + 20/2 + 4/3 + 3/ = 18.083
Teresa Nielsen Hayden (18 nominations): 7 + 9/2 + 2/3 = 12.167

To knock Teresa Nielsen Hayden off the ballot, a single slate candidate would have needed to also have 18 nominations which were bullet votes (or at least shared less with other candidates than hers), which would have beaten her 12.167 EPH points. I must say I'm not completely content with this; precisely because TNH had more voters who also supported other popular candidates, she is in a disadvantage in a head-to-head against a more sectarian candidate. But I think any variation of a single divisible vote system delivers this result, and what it basically means is that the last place may go to a representative of a small minority. The question is, how small?

I looked at Best Non-Fiction next because there was a more even spread of candidates at the lower end. 206 voters made nominated 86 different works here. The top 9 were:

45 Dream Makers, volume ii
43 The High Kings
29 The Fantastic Art of Rowena
26 Staying Alive: A Writer's Guide
19 The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, vol iii
16 Worlds Beyond: the Art of Chesley Bonestell
11 Amber Dreams
11 The SF Book of Lists
11 Uranian Worlds

If we apply the EPH system, it doesn't change much in ranking:

Dream Makers, volume ii (45 nominations): 18 + 13/2 + 9/3 + 4/4 + 1/5 = 28.7 points
The High Kings (43 nominations): 17 + 14/2 + 8/3 + 3/4 + 1/5 = 27.617 points
The Fantastic Art of Rowena (29 nominations): 12 + 8/2 + 4/3 + 4/4 + 1/5 = 18.533 points
Staying Alive: A Writer's Guide (26 nominations): 9 + 6/2 + 8/3 + 2/4 + 1/5 = 15.367 points
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, vol iii (19 nominations): 4 + 7/2 + 4/3 + 3/4 + 1/5 = 9.783 points

But because the successful candidates shared a relatively large number of supporters, a single slated candidate with 16 bullet votes would have got onto the ballot, and would have knocked off the actual winner, vol 3 of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

41 slate voters, ie fewer than voted for either of the two front-runners in the category, who voted for two candidates, and only those two, could have knocked out Staying Alive out as well.

The most striking results I've found are for the 1984 John W. Campbell Award, which had a very lopsided vote distribution - one front runner far ahead of the field, and a number of candidates jostling around the edge of the ballot. 247 voters made 519 nominations here. The top 15 candidates, with their total nominations, were:

121 R.A. MacAvoy
19 Joseph H. Delaney
19 Joel Rosenberg
18 Timothy Zahn
18 Sheri S. Tepper
17 Lisa Goldstein
17 Warren Norwood
15 Barbara Hambly
12 Robin Wayne Bailey
12 Dan Simmons
10 P.C. Hodgell
10 Kim Stanley Robinson
10 Lucius Shepard
9 David Brin
9 John De Chancie

Some of these were not exactly new writers in 1984. Timothy Zahn had first published in 1980 and I guess was excluded from the final ballot for that reason. That brought in both Lisa Goldstein and Warren Norwood, tied on 17 nominations.

If we apply the EPH points system, the final six (Zahn having been excluded) end up in the following slightly different ranking:
R.A. MacAvoy (121 nominations): 89 + 23/2 + 9/3 = 103.5 points
Joel Rosenberg (19 nominations): 19 points
Warren Norwood (17 nominations): 9 + 7/3 + 1/4 = 11.583 points
Lisa Goldstein (17 nominations): 7 + 3/2 + 6/3 + 1/4 = 10.75 points
Joseph H. Delaney (19 nominations): 5 + 6/2 + 7/3 + 1/4 = 10.583 points
Sheri S. Tepper (18 nominations): 2 + 14/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 = 9.583 points

Sherri S Tepper would have been eliminated at this stage, although she had more nominations than two other surviving candidates (Warren Norwood and Lisa Goldstein). 165 of the original 247 nominating ballots are still in play. (Wow, MacAvoy made a pretty big splash, didn't she!)

After Sherri S Tepper's votes are redistributed, the point scores for what would have been the final ballot under EPH are as follows:

R.A. Macavoy (121 nominations): 103 + 10/2 + 8/3 = 110.667 points
Joel Rosenberg (19 nominations): 19 points
Warren Norwood (17 nominations): 9 + 1/2 + 7/3 = 11.833 points
Lisa Goldstein (17 nominations): 7 + 3/2 + 7/3 = 10.833 points
Joseph H. Delaney (19 nominations): 5 + 6/2 + 8/3 = 10.667 points

163 of the original 247 ballot papers would have remained in play.

A slate candidate with 11 nominators, none of whom supported any of the other surviving candidates, would have been ahead of Goldstein and Delany on points and would have made it to the final ballot (Goldstein would have lost due to having fewer nominations than Delaney). Such a candidate would have had fewer nominations than five excluded candidates - Lisa Goldstein, Sherri S Tepper, Barbara Hambly, Robin Wayne Bailey and Dan Simmons. These seems to me very unsatisfactory.

It's not irrelevant to note that Joel Rosenberg had 19 bullet votes at this stage (a few of whom had voted for other less popular candidates as well), and that these included ten voters with consecutive membership numbers who cast nominating votes identically for him in this category and for a novel called The Sleeping Dragon and a short story called "The Emigrant". You'll never guess who those works were by.

25 slate voters would have been able to get two works onto the shortlist here (if you eliminate Delaney, Norwood ends up with 12.5 points in third place). Again, that seems to me to be, simply, too low.

Conclusion and recommendation

I hope it's fairly clear that while EPH does, as advertised, make it very difficult for a small set of voters to dominate entire ballot categories, as has happened this year, it also actually lowers the barrier to a small detached group getting their first candidate onto the list. Of course, minorities should not have insurmountable barriers placed in front of them, but for my taste, EPH as presently constructed goes too far the other way. A slate candidate which had fewer nominations than ten more popular candidates could still have got onto the John W Campbell Award ballot. A slate candidate could have knocked the eventual RL winner off the Best Non-Fiction Work ballot despite getting fewer nominations. I don't think that's quite right.

My modest proposal is that the divisor for calculating points should not be the number of candidates supported by a voter, but the square root of that number. Square roots have a venerable place in political calculus, particularly in the apportionment of seats, both in the U.S. Congress and for enlightened commentators on the European Union. Basically, instead of weighting your vote by 0.5 if you still have two candidates left in the race, 0.333 if you have three, and 0.25 if you have four, your vote gets weighted instead as 0.707, 0.577 and 0.5. Looking at my test cases above, the new weighted points would be:

Best Fan Writer:

	Noms	EPH	modified
Mike Glyer	56	40.583	46.659
Richard Geis	36	24.583	29.002
Dave Langford	28	19.583	22.759
Arthur D. Hlavaty	33	18.083	23.952
Teresa Nielsen Hayden	18	12.167	14.519

A slate candidate would still need 18 bullet votes to displace Teresa Nielsen Hayden from the ballot; no change.

Best Related Work:

	Noms	EPH	modified
Dream Makers, v2	45	28.7	34.836
The High Kings	43	27.617	33.466
The Fantastic Art of Rowena	29	18.533	22.413
Staying Alive	26	15.367	19.309
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, v3	19	9.783	13.206

A slate candidate would now need 19 bullet votes, rather than 16, to displace the Encyclopedia. That seems to me an improvement.

John W. Campbell Award:

Before we get to considering the slate, there's that matter of the fifth and sixth places to resolve. The top six now look like this:

	Noms	EPH	modified
R.A. MacAvoy	121	103.5	110.460
Joel Rosenberg	19	19	19
Joseph H. Delaney	19	10.583	13.784
Warren Norwood	17	11.583	13.541
Lisa Goldstein	17	10.75	13.085
Sheri S. Tepper	18	9.583	12.977

Lisa Goldstein would drop off due to having fewer nominations than Sheri S. Tepper, and the final ballot would look like this:

	Noms	EPH	modified
R.A. MacAvoy	121	105.833	111.987
Joel Rosenberg	19	19	19
Joseph H. Delaney	19	11.333	14.380
Warren Norwood	17	12.167	14.008
Sheri S. Tepper	18	9.667	13.054

A slate candidate would now need 15 bullet votes, rather than a mere 11, to get on the ballot. That would be the same number of votes as the candidate who just missed in 1984, Barbara Hambly. For me, that's a more equitable outcome.

So, basically, EPH can be improved by using square roots as divisors. That is all.

Did Watson and Crick really steal Rosalind Franklin's data?

Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer gives us the benefit of his long experience in explaining...

Why the Liberal Democrats did so badly

Why, I hear you ask, did we do so badly at the general election?

First there was that slogan: "Stronger economy, fairer society." Ashdown did his best to perk it up by adding "Opportunity for Everyone," while I had some success here in the Bonkers Hall Ward with the kicker "Remember your rents fall due on Lady Day," but I admit that was not an addendum open to every Liberal Democrat candidate.

Then suddenly it was all about looking left and right before crossing the road. As it happens we have never bothered teaching the village children the Kerb Drill because we have kept in place the anti-tank defences that were installed at the top of the main street at the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. Some people call such measures ‘traffic calming’, but here they have a far from calming effect on drivers who go through them. So that slogan was never going to have much of an impact hereabouts either.

After that we had that stuff about the Wizard of Oz – one of my favourite films, but hardly likely to win over the younger voter – and after that… Well, I forget, but I think ‘Decency’ came into it somewhere. It sounded rather like the chaplain at school when two fourth-formers had been found in bed together.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• He had to Put a Bit on Top

Last month Pitcairn Island legalised same-sex marriage. One small little British outpost (of 56 people) in the Pacific Ocean managed to be more liberal in a shorter space of time than Northern Ireland which is part of western Europe.

Come on Northern Ireland (and the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey etc.). If the Seventh-day Adventist Pitcairn Islanders can do it, you can too!!!

Also they managed to do it in a gender-neutral, and vastly superior way, when compared with England and Wales' attempt.

Not that this is the first time the Pitcairn Islanders have been ahead of the curve...

I've just seen that Pitcairn Island, thanks to UK's laws, is well ahead of other territories in Polynesia on LGBT issues #imperialpride

— Jae Kay (@JaeKay) July 15, 2010

It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been at a Liberal Democrat Glee Club or said the words ‘Liberal Democrats’ to anyone in the Labour Party over the past few years that the general reaction to Jamie Reed’s proposal that Labour and the Liberal Democrats merge has been a resounding ‘no’ from both sides. It’s the sort of idea that people should dismiss as a non-starter, but because it was apparently seriously considered by both Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair in the 90s, it’s acquired a veneer of respectability and possibility that it doesn’t really deserve. It’s a bad idea that only looks vaguely plausible because of the distorting lens of the British electoral system – because two parties separately don’t get the representation in Parliament that’s commensurate with their separate shares of the vote, the assumption becomes that they must become one, and somehow combine their vote shares into something greater. That people vote for those parties based on their separate identities, and would not necessarily vote for a combined mush of the two, is assumed away.

There’s a reason that splits of political parties are much, much more common than mergers of them: it’s a lot more common and easier for people – especially politicians – to believe that they’re right and need their own organisation to prove it than it is for people from different groups to decide that they’d both be better off if they come together permanently. The merger that created the Liberal Democrats was the last major one in British politics, and that not only nearly killed the new party but also created two disgruntled splinter parties. That was with the benefit of two parties that had worked under an electoral part for two elections and where Roy Jenkins had initially considered joining the Liberal Party rather than establishing the SDP. Other mergers involving major parties (the Tories swallowing the Liberal Unionists and then the National Liberals) only happened after many years of the two parties involved having worked closely together.

However, it’s perfectly possible for parties to work together and co-ordinate electorally without merging. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing that happens regularly in other countries. It’s a lot easier to do that in a proportional voting system, of course, where parties within a grouping are free to compete with each other, knowing that moving votes from one party to another within that bloc won’t affect the overall electoral prospects of that bloc. For instance, assume a country with four parties (A,B,C, and D) that exist broadly as two blocs – A and B would usually work together in government, as would C and D, but a combination other than those two would be very unlikely. Now, imagine that A gets 30% of the vote, B 25%, C 40% and D 5%. In a proportional system, A and B can compete freely with each other and most likely would over the 5% of voters that would determine which of them is the largest party. However, their combined 55% of seats would put them into power. In the same way, C and D’s prime focus would be on trying to shift voters from the AB bloc to theirs. In a system like ours, though, we instead have a situation where A and B competing only benefits C, unless large chunks of B voters can be persuaded to switch to A (or vice versa).

In the latter situation, it might seem that the logical solution is to get A and B to merge, as they’ll get 55% of the vote – but only if all their existing voters will back the newly merged party. However, unless the two parties wer already nearly identical in their policy positions, that’s very unlikely to happen, as the newly merged party will have to try and find common ground between the two parties’ positions that will likely alienate former voters.

Before I detour completely into dissertation-land and regale you with more Downs and Mair theory on party positioning, I’ll try and get to a point – and for once on this issue, I find myself in general agreement with Paddy Ashdown.From the mid-90s to the mid-2000s, there was electoral co-operation between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and it proved to be one of the most electorally successful periods ever for both parties. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the majority of Liberal Democrat seats have been won from the Tories, or had the Tories in second place, and a lot of those were won thanks to co-operation with Labour – sure, it wasn’t official co-operation but there’s no doubt that there were plenty of seats in 1997 where one of the two parties put in very little effort which made it easier for the other to persuade voters to switch and back them as the best anti-Tory choice. (Incidentally, the bulk of the seats with Lib Dems in second place are now Tory-held)

I’m not saying that any agreement could be accomplished easily or quickly, but ruling it out entirely only plays into the Tories hands – the evidence suggests that they’re the ones who benefit the most when Labour and Liberals are too busy turning their noses up at each other to understand we share a common enemy. Yes, we’ll all have to sit through shouts of ‘bedroom tax’ and ‘Health and Social Care Act’ (whilst we shout ‘illegal war’ and ‘ID cards’ back, of course) but shouldn’t we at least see if something’s possible without ruling it out without even discussing it?

The new Liberator has arrived, which means it is time to visit Bonkers Hall once more.

I cannot pretend I was surprised at the debacle of 7 May: indeed, I had asked for an estimate from my stonemason well before polling day, though he had to put me off for a while because he had an urgent commission "from another political gentleman". As things turned out, we did worse at the election than even I had expected, with the result that he had to Put a Bit on Top to give him room to inscribe all the names. The public, however, will not notice a thing.

Momentum appears to be building in South Carolina to take the Confederate battle flag off the statehouse grounds, but procedural roadblocks could hold up the effort.

That’s because taking the flag down requires a vote of the state legislature, and South Carolina’s General Assembly can’t legally vote on that issue right now. The legislature is in a special session to pass the state’s annual budget, and state law says “no legislation or other business may be considered” except for the budget.

The exception: If two-thirds of lawmakers want to take up another issue during the session, they can. So just to debate taking down the flag this year would require a supermajority. (And taking the flag down would take another two-thirds vote.)

If the legislature can’t pull together those votes, the issue would have to wait until January, the next time the General Assembly meets in regular session, to debate a bill.

Lawmakers could also opt to address the issue with a budget rider, as the Washington Examiner points out, but the window to do that appears to be closing: The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper reports that budget negotiators have hammered out a plan likely to be put to a vote Tuesday.

Momentum has grown quickly in the days since nine people were shot dead in a historic black church in Charleston. Dylann Roof, who is charged in the massacre, is shown in pictures waving the Confederate flag.

Half a million people have signed an online petition in the days since calling for lawmakers to take the flag down. Hundreds of people joined protests in Columbia and Charleston. Politicians and business leaders around the country have called for its removal.

[Church killings ignite furor anew over S.C. Capitol’s Confederate flag]

Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, is also expected to call for its removal this afternoon, the Post and Courier of Charleston reported, citing anonymous sources. Haley's office didn't immediately return requests for comment.

But because the flag can only come down via a veto-proof two-thirds vote, the issue falls squarely on the legislature. House Speaker Jay Lucas, a Republican who holds one of the most powerful positions in the state, called Monday for “a swift resolution of this issue” but didn’t explicitly call for the flag to come down. Lucas's office didn't return a request for comment on the issue.

Several South Carolina lawmakers have also joined the call. They include Charleston Mayor Joe Riley and prominent Democratic legislators, including House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford. A handful of Republicans – one in the Senate and two in the House – have so far expressed support for the effort.

The Confederate flag has proved to be one of South Carolina’s most bitter and divisive issues. It flew atop the statehouse dome until 2000, when lawmakers brokered a deal to put it in front of the Capitol complex on a main thoroughfare of Columbia. The deal followed years of debate that roiled the state, but the compromise did little to settle the issue.

A statewide poll conducted last November by Winthrop University also reflects the state’s complicated relationship with the flag. While only about a third of residents said they thought favorably of the flag, more than three in five said they supported keeping it on the statehouse grounds.

[In 2014, 27 percent of black South Carolinians backed flying Confederate flag]

Even as calls for the flag to come down mount across the country, this won’t be an easy issue for South Carolina to resolve – and one that state lawmakers might have trouble addressing this year.

A few months ago, the leading nutritional panel in the United States shared an encouraging bit of news. Not only did its members arrive at the conclusion that drinking coffee was a perfectly fine thing to do—they suggested that drinking more might even be ideal.

Well, that seems to be falling on deaf ears—at least here in the biggest coffee consuming nation in the world.

The amount of joe Americans consume is slated to drop this year by more than one percent, or almost 300,000 60-kilogram bags (in coffee beans, not liquid, of course), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which released its latest report on the global coffee market this past Friday.

If that sounds unusual, it should. There are other countries that are expected to drink less coffee this year than they did last year—South Korea, Thailand, Switzerland, Colombia, to name a few—but none are experiencing a drop-off like the one happening in the United States. This country is the only one in the top eight that will consume less coffee this year compared to last.

It's tough to pinpoint exactly why a country falling head over heels for fancier coffee (see Blue Bottle's ascendance for evidence) is at the same time losing its taste for coffee overall. But there is at least one trend that is changing how much coffee Americans drink.

Coffee pods, the single most influential invention in the coffee world over the past few decades have caught on like wildfire in this country. And when people drink coffee pods, they drink less coffee.

Coffee pod sales have grown by 133,710 percent since 2000 (yes, 133,710 percent), and now account for more than a third of all the coffee sold in the United States, according to data from market research firm Euromonitor.

Another way to measure that ascent is to look at the sales of coffee pod machines (virtually all of which are made by Keurig) compared to the sales of all other coffee machines over time. The gap, as you can see, is what it used to be.

But the overwhelming popularity of K-cups has actually caused a bit of a headache for coffee bean roasters and growers, who help supply the largest market in the world with its fix.

Americans have traditionally brewed their coffee using drip machines, which are terribly inefficient ("How much coffee should I put in this filter? Never mind, I'll just eyeball it"). As a result, people have historically bought more coffee beans than they might need. Waste was in fact such a well known contributor to coffee sales that industry folk used to joke that "the sink was the world's largest coffee consumer."

But extra coffee doesn't just end up down the drain—some of it finds its way into your stomach. The consequence of brewing coffee by the pot is that there's often more just sitting there, tempting you to have another cup.

Coffee pods, however, are incredibly efficient by comparison. People tend not to make more than they will actually drink—or, at least, first intended to drink.

"People used to make a pot of coffee. Now they make a cup," Pedro Gavina, the owner of Vernon, California-based roaster Gavina & Sons, told Reuters. "Right there we're losing the sink as a consumer."

They are also cutting down on the number of beans used per cup, because they tend to be less caffeinated.

Coffee consumption has ebbed and flowed in the United States over the decades. It was lower in the mid 1990s, and then higher just thereafter; it rose to its peak in 1946, when it was roughly two cups per person per day, and then fell to below its current level in the late 1970s, when it dipped below a single cup.

But there's good reason to believe that future peaks won't be as caffeinated as they were in the past, because coffee pods are likely here to stay at least a little while longer.

Currently, an estimated 25 percent of U.S. households have a coffee pod machine. One can only imagine what happens when that number creeps upwards, nearer to the 80-plus percent of this country that, according to the National Coffee Association, still drinks coffee at home.

Monday:

I've been talking about the leadership contest between Tim Lord Tim and Mr Norman Conquest.

But the Liberal Democrats aren't the only Party to find themselves in need of a new leader. And it makes me realise just how VERY lucky we are – even after the disaster of May – still to have two candidates with two brains between them!

We watched the hour-long Newsnight hustings with the four candidates for leader of Hard Labour and I swear beyond the nebulous and vaguely-xenophobic call for "controls on immigration" there wasn't a single mention of policy from any one of them.

And is THAT mug, really the thing they want to take away from the 2015 manifesto?!

Labour Leadership - spot the difference

Instead, what was striking was how all of them (ok the three of them who are "serious" candidates) were snaffling freaking great chunks of… the Liberal Democrat 2015 campaign!

Yvette "the Snooper" Cooper was the first out of the traps to claim she wanted a "stronger economy and a fairer country" (nearly right, there, Yve) but very soon Liz "Tony Blair in a Wig" Kendall was all over our positions like a particularly Blairite rash. And even Andy "Crash and" Burnham wanted a country where "everyone can get on".

This seems very odd for two particular reasons.

First: our campaign "Look Left, Look Right, Then Get Mown Down By Oncoming Traffic (Mr Balloon's Bentley and Nicola the Insturgent in a yellow three-wheeler)" did even less well than Labour's "Oh Go On: Vote for Us, he's harmless".

Second: it's not entirely clear if there actually ARE any voters to target in the mushy centre; liberal voters seem to have stayed with the Liberal Democrats; the ones that Labour gained and then lost in their deservedly-doomed 35% strategy seem to have been the "protest" voters who supported the Lib Dems as anti-establishment outsiders in 2010, but moved to UKIP or Greens in England, or nationalists in Wales and by a long way Scotland. The people Labour seem to be after now – voters who were frightened into voting Conservatory by the thought of the SNP – would surely be the very people who given the choice between Conservatory and Conservatory-lite will chose the genuine brand because they know the real Conservatories know how to do it.

How it looked on the tellybox:

Andy and Yvette were sat at either end like particularly smug bookends.

Yvette, campaigning as the compromise candidate between a vacancy and a waste of space, was trying to be as "mumsy" as possible – as mumsy as you can be with a Mother of Dragons reputation for wanting Home Office policy to start at roasting immigrants alive, before going on to do lots of nasty things to British people too – snooping, banning, locking up without charge, feeding them to the flying lizards if their still hungry…

Andy gabbled on at great length given the slightest opportunity. Or even sometimes when he wasn't and had to be put on the naughty step by Liz.

Liz, in between, kept talking slowly and deliberately, as though she was a supply teacher trying to manage unruly five-year-olds. (She knows her audience, then.)

And Jeremy… well…

Jeremy Corbyn was a BIG disappointment. We had been promised that he had been hoisted into the ballot by people wanting to "hear the debate". It would have been helpful if he'd actually had some debate to contribute. Where were the fireworks? Where were the calls for big ticket renationalisations, nuclear disarmament, abolition of academy schools or introduction of 94% squeeze-the-rich tax bands? Maybe he wasn't on his game. Maybe he was just looking forward to getting back among real friends at the anti-austerity rally at the weekend. But in a contest to decide Labour's future – or even if it HAS a future – he seemed quite content to sit quietly in a comfort zone in the past.

Early on he mentioned Iraq. And it's true that Labour has never really confronted what they – collectively – did over Iraq. But just condemning your own side for that disaster does not amount to much more than trying to have your cake and eat it. "Hard Labour were awful; I believe in the Hard Labour Party as the only Party of goodness." And presumably – to quote that other lefty Jeremy, incumbent misery of the News Quiz Mr Hardy – he sees no contradiction in that. There's a genuinely hard question here for Corbyn and others, like Diane Abbott, who were anti-war but remain in the Labour Party – namely: "how do you even justify that? What possible good does supporting Labour do that outweighs all those deaths?". But to Labour's shame it seems that raising Iraq is greeted with rolling of eyes and groans of "not that again, grandad". They know he's not serious about it because he never resigned the whip, so why treat him or the issue seriously in return?

If anything, Corbyn felt like a flashback even further – to the Eighties. And not even the good Eighties; the wet-flannel years of Neil Kinnock when the red flag was lowered in favour of the red rose, and Labour were content to be a protest movement.

But we know – and he knows – that he's not in there to "contribute" but instead so that Labour can say they've "heard the debate" and the left wing ideas (if they ever get voiced) have been "democratically" voted down and can we get on with trying to outflank the Conservatories from the right now, please.

They all remained in total denial about the deficit, trotting out the same old flim-flam: "Labour's overspending didn't cause the crash" – so fluffing what? The austerity was a direct economic consequence of losing 20% of the government's income; if Labour had been spending less, the cuts would not have been so severe and we'd have had more room to manoeuvre on borrowing. That's not monetarist (nobody's a monetarist anymore, whatever Mr "Eighties" Corbyn thinks or says); that's simple Keynesian economics, which Labour supposedly believe in. Labour would not have done anything differently, they know it, they know they were in no position to, and it hamstrung their every attack during the Coalition and yet at the same time prevented them arriving at any alternative thought either.

They ought to have SOMETHING to say on the economy.

I do not subscribe to the "blame Ed" excuse that Mr Milipede did Labour a disservice or behaved dishonourably by resigning once his defeat became clear instead of sticking around to be an unloved piñata while the rest of them got their act together. It is NOT unfair to expect candidates at this level to have SOME idea of how they would steer Labour's policy.

It is EXTREMELY clear that BOTH candidates for the Liberal Democrat leadership HAVE invested thought into policy and strategy and are coming out with excellent ideas. That's why OUR leadership campaign is inspiring people and Labour's is an hour of the dullest television in history.

Those Labour leadership contenders in full:

Yvette Cooper


Liz Kendall


Andy Burnham


and Jeremy Corbyn

Friday:


The story so far…

At the Leadership hustings on Wednesday, Mr Tim the Tim Lord challenged us not to let the Party of Grimond, Penhaligon and Kennedy die on our watch*.

And Mr Norman "Conquest" Lamb impressed me with his radical proposals on prison and drugs policies.

And I described the Home Office as our "natural enemies".

In reply to a comment, I said I would defend this idea. The Home Office want increased security. It's their job. But mostly they do this by reducing liberty. Defending liberty is OUR job. This very naturally puts us on opposite sides.

(Though, as I also said, as with most things I say, it WAS supposed to be amusing/satirical rather than extremely literal, too.)

This is ALREADY a big issue, what with the Conservatory Government dropping their manifesto pledge to abolish the Human Rights Act even before Mrs the Queen had sat down for her first speech.

Lord Chancellor Michael "Gollum" Gove Sheepishly Presents the Speech to Her Majesty, sans British Bill of Rights

But the Speech did contain…

…an "Investigatory Powers Bill" aka Return of the Snooper's Charter, to collect your every random browse on the Internet;

…and a "Psychoactive Substances Bill" that plans to ban anything that might legally give you pleasure;

…and an "Extremism Bill" to ban "extremist groups", "extremist mosques" and "extremist broadcasts"… presumably to be followed by "extremist thought crimes";

…and an Immigration Bill to make "illegal working" a criminal offence and extend the principle of "deport first, worry about whether they've survived to appeal later" to all immigration cases;

…and a "Police and Criminal Justice Bill" because, what the heck, it's an annual tradition nowadays and we can sweep up anything left we've forgotten to criminalise into that.

So it's not like the Home Office ISN'T BUSY driving a tank across everything the Liberal Democrats were protecting during the Coalition.

Not to mention Mr Balloon's frankly TERRIFYING speech stating that:

"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'.".

So, even if you obey the law they're STILL going to come and get you.

What happened to Habeus Corpus? Did Magna Carta die in vain?

And now the Prime Monster is saying British Muslims are (quoting the BBC's headline): "…'quietly condoning' IS ideology"; perhaps it's time someone told him to stop LOUDLY ADVERTISING for the terrorists!

(and things are getting pretty DIRE if I'm agreeing with the Grauniad's numpty Owen Jones .

Next thing, I'll be saying Pollyanna Toytown is right about wind farms!)

In a time of AUSTERITY, people feel afraid, afraid for their jobs and the security of a roof over their families' heads. And it's all too easy for politicians to tell them that (to quote Tim again) the blame lies with the foreigners for taking their houses rather than the politicians for not building the houses in the first place or the voters for not voting for politicians who’ll build and reduce their house prices.

The treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and the people daily being people-trafficked across the Med (or drowning in the attempt) is urgently topical.

Government ministers' talk about "pull factors" and "encouraging more" is, quite simply, OBSCENE when people are dying. These are human people and they have left their homes, fled across continents, because of PUSH factors – War, Famine, religious genocidal maniacs – which massively outweigh any trifling "pull" considerations.

It seems there are really only three possible solutions:

1. Let them drown!
2. Annex dirty great chunks of the Middle East and North Africa to establish new, secure safe zones where they can build cities and jobs for themselves protected by our military, i.e. a new IMPERIUM, exactly what we're accusing Russia of doing (and bearing in mind that we would need to spend an awful lot of money and possibly lives to do this properly)!
3. Actually do our bit and let them come here.

Call me old fashioned, I favour option THREE.

Iraq, and to a lesser extent the bombing in Libya, has demonstrated the limits of our ability to control foreign interventions given the amounts of money and lives that we are willing to expend (i.e. not very much of either).

Instead it seems that we are going to leave them either in the water, in terrible danger in their own countries, or in effectively concentration camps in Italy and Greece (Greece! As if the Greeks weren't in enough trouble!).

Immigration is GOOD for the country – any country! It drives growth in GDP. It could be good for OUR country.

But to feel that benefit we need to ensure that we build the houses, services and infrastructure to support the people here. But building those things CREATES jobs, including the fabled "British jobs for British workers" (and also British jobs for anyone else willing to do them!).

We should be LEADING the call – as Paddy Ashdown did when saying we should give British passports to citizens of Hong Kong in the lead up to the hand back to China – for not a few hundred or a few thousand but for a few HUNDRED THOUSAND rescued migrants to come here to start a new life. Britain will DO OUR DUTY and stop blaming it all on poor, impoverished Greece and the EU.

Meanwhile, a lot of anti-EU rhetoric is being driven by the spurious claim that we are unable to deport foreign criminals.

We should be telling people loudly that this is a sign of PATHETIC WEAKNESS in a Home Secretary!

If people are criminals then we should be prosecuting and punishing people HERE. If you are so WEAK that you need to chuck them out of the country and make it someone else's problem, then probably you are not FIT to be Home Secretary let alone Prime Monster.

And IF we are so PROUD of British Justice, then why would we NOT be willing to hold it up to international scrutiny? Our record is INCREDIBLY GOOD, and we win VERY NEARLY ALMOST ALL of the cases that go before the Court in Europe.

(And let's be clear: it's a Court of UNIVERSAL Human Rights IN Europe, not Rights OF Europeans or OF Europe – we'd have a GLOBAL International Criminal Court one excep, China and America refuse to live up to their protestations of upholding Human Rights! Even Russia is technically a signatory!)

Once again, we should say that if you think we need to withdraw from scrutiny then you clearly don't think British Human rights are UP TO MUCH.

Well, I rather think they ARE, and that the Conservatories are a bit PATHETIC for not trusting that we DO uphold Human Rights.

But nobody is perfect, and having an outside body that can look from time to time and say where we might – might – have to consider that we could be wrong… only a SOCIOPATH thinks they're never wrong.

As I went on to say in that comment: I think saying the Home office wants to increase security is being NICE to them. I'd suggest that very often the Home Office does things that reduce liberty and do NOT increase security:- counter-productive measures like stop-and-search or "go home poster vans" which generate resentment and breed threats to security; and ludicrous security theatre - like ID cards or the snoopers charter - which is in the business of looking like it's doing something but actually wastes resources, money, time, manpower, on activity that achieves NOTHING.

We have had more than three decades of the Home Office making more and more grabs for power – and over the same time saying that they can do less and less to protect us; three decades of Home Secretaries and Shadow Home Secretaries trying to outbid each other on toughness, outflank each other to the crackdowns, racing to the bottom of the Civil Liberties barrel. Michael "of the night" Howard sending pregnant women to give birth in chains; Tony "Lord" Blairimort, brutally profiteering from the horrible death of Jamie Bulger; Jack "the sinister minister" Straw; David "detention without trial" Blunkett, and the declassified reclassified cannabis; Charles Clarke, the safety elephant; "nice" Dr John Reid and the I.D.iot cards; Jacquie Spliff, the Second Home Secretary… the list goes on, each more authoritarian than the last; most recently we've had Teresa "nuts in" May and Yvette "the Snooper" Cooper vying to be worst yet.

And yet for all their "strong on crime" posturing, for all their "not giving in to terror", every last one of them CAPITULATES instantly, the moment someone (from security or the police) comes along and SCARES them with talk of "the bad people".

"Oh, we need more money, or more powers to arrest people, or to intercept their Instagrams, or to look inside their fluffy brains. Only then will you be safe, only then can we protect you from the paedo-terror-drug-militants… at least until the next time we ask."

It is, quite literally, a PROTECTION RACKET.

And if Her Majesty's far too loyal Opposition will not OPPOSE the madness, then by all that's fluffy WE fluffing well should!

Now that I’ve returned to the US and have parked myself in front of the computer again, people are asking me what I think of Amazon’s plan to tweak the way its Kindle Unlimited system pays KDP Select authors. In the past, Amazon would designate a certain amount of cash ($3 million this June, according to this Verge article, although in the comments Annie Bellet quotes a higher figure) as a payment pot, and all KDP Select authors participating in Kindle Unlimited would get a small bit of the pot if someone who downloaded their book read more than 10% of it. This predictably led to authors making short books in order to get to the 10% mark as quickly as possible, and equally predictably diluted the effectiveness of the tactic. It also made authors of longer works complain quite a lot, as they had to compete with bite-sized books for the same tiny bit of the pot.

As a result, Amazon is now tweaking its system so that instead of getting paid when one reaches that 10% marker, KDP select authors will get paid for each page read — a move that will, within the context of the KU system, at least, address the “small book vs. big book” disparity. The system will also define a standard “page” so fiddling with margins and type size won’t fool it, and somehow track how much time you spend on each page, so just clicking through all the pages as quickly as possible won’t do the trick (this makes me wonder what Amazon defines as a decent amount of time to read a page). The short version is: You get paid for what your readers read. If your readers don’t read the whole book, you don’t get paid for the whole book.

I have a lot of questions about how this will play out in theory — will an author get paid if you re-read a book? What about if you go back and re-read a page? Does that count? Doesn’t this mean that authors of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books get really screwed? Not to mention any author who is writing anything other than a page-turning narrative? — but ultimately any objections or praise I might have for this new Amazon model is irrelevant, because of a simple fact:

Amazon is still making KDP Select authors compete against each other for a limited, Amazon-defined pot of money, and no matter how you slice it, that sucks for the authors.

Why? Because Amazon puts an arbitrary cap on the amount of money it’s possible to earn — and not just a cap on what you, as an author, can earn, but what every author in the KDP Select system participating in Kindle Unlimited can make. Every KDP Select author participating in Kindle Unlimited can not, among all of them totaled up, make more than what Amazon decides to put into the pot. Why? Because that’s the pot. That’s how much Amazon wants to splash out this month. And the more pages are read in the month, the smaller any bit of the pie that you might get for your pages read becomes. It’s a zero-sum game for every KDP Select author participating in Kindle Unlimited. Next month, who knows what the size of the pot will be? You don’t — only Amazon does. But whatever amount it is, it’s an amount designed to benefit Amazon, not the individual authors.

This is a bad situation for the authors participating — bad enough that ultimately the minutiae of how the money is allocated is sort of aside the point, because the relevant point is: You will never make more for your work than Amazon wants you to make. And yes, just Amazon, as the work KDP Select authors put on Amazon are exclusive to Amazon.

I’m not one of those people who believes Amazon is glowy-red-eye evil — I remind people again that I’ve rather happily had a fruitful relationship with its Audible subsidiary for a number of years — but Amazon is looking out for Amazon first, and when it does, it’s not an author’s friend. There is no possible way in this or any other timeline that I would ever, as a writer, participate in the sort of scheme that Amazon runs with its KDP Select authors on Kindle Prime. I don’t approve of putting a cap on my own earnings (particularly one I have no say on), and I don’t approve of being in a situation where my success as an author comes by disadvantaging other authors, or vice versa. In the system in which I currently participate (i.e., the open market), there is no limit to the amount I can make, and no limit to what any other author can make. It’s a great system! I support it, and so should you.

So, yeah: By page, or by percentage, KDP Select authors on Kindle Unlimited still can’t make more than Amazon says they can. That sucks, and that’s the long and short of it.

(Note: Hugo neepery follows. But not the usual Hugo neepery! This is entirely new Hugo neepery! However, if you’re bored with Hugo neepery in general, then avoid this.)

Every year at Worldcon, there’s a business meeting where World Science Fiction Society members may, among other things, offer up amendments to the WSFS constitution. A very active set of amendments relate to the Hugo Awards, as might be expected because the Awards are the most public-facing thing the WSFS does, arguably excepting the Worldcon convention itself. This year there are four proposed amendments relating to the Hugos, for example.

One of these proposed amendments is for “Best Saga” (You may see the proposed amendment, as well as all the other proposed amendments this year, here. The “Best Saga” proposal is “B.1.3″). The amendment proposes to create a Hugo category to award continuing series of works whose total word counts exceed 400,000 words; any series with a new installment in any particular calendar year would be eligible for consideration in that year. So, for example, if the Best Saga Hugo already existed, then the Old Man’s War series would be eligible for the 2015 calendar year award, because the whole series clocks in at over 400,000 words, and I’ll have a new installment this year (The End of All Things).

I have thoughts about the desirability and necessity of a Best Saga award, but independent of that, the creators of the “Best Saga” amendment would “make room” for the Best Saga Hugo by rejiggering the short fiction Hugo categories, notably by paring them down from the three current categories (Short Story, for stories up to 7.5k words; Novelette, for stories between 7.5k and 17.5k words; Novella, for stories between 17.5k and 40k words), to two: Short Story (up to 10k words) and Novella (10k to 40k). This snips out the novelette category entirely.

Speaking as someone who writes very little novelette-length fiction, and could very obviously personally benefit from a Best Saga Hugo category, I very definitely oppose this proposed amendment. Let me explain why.

1. It is unnecessary to get rid of the Best Novelette category in order to “make room” for the Best Saga category. I’m unaware of the need in the WSFS constitution to limit the number of Hugo Awards given out; it’s not a zero sum game. Speaking as someone who has both emceed the Hugos and sat in its audience, I understand the desirability of not having an infinite proliferation of Hugo categories, because the ceremony can be long enough as it is. But that’s not a good enough reason to give one fiction category the axe at the expense of another, nor can I think of another good reason why the inclusion of the “saga” category requires the doom of another fiction category. It is, literally, a false dichotomy.

This false dichotomy is bad in itself, but also offers knock-on badness down the road. For example:

2. It privileges novel writing over short fiction writing. Bud Sparhawk, a writer and human I admire rather a bit, complained to me once (in the context of the Nebulas) that calling the Best Novel award “the big one,” as many people often do, is an implicit disrespect of the art of short fiction writing, and of the skills of those who write to those lengths. You know what? He’s right. Speaking as someone who finds writing novels relatively easy and writing shorter lengths relatively harder — and as someone who has needed more time to write a shorter-length work than I needed to write a novel because of those native skill sets — I’m well aware that the skills required to write short are no less impressive than those required to write long.

Also, speaking as best novel Hugo award winner: Would you argue to me that I am more essential to the field of science fiction and fantasy than, say, Ted Chiang, who is inarguably one of the pre-eminent SF/F writers of the 21st century, and who has not published a novel? Am I more essential than Eugie Foster, whose all-too-short canon of work is in short fiction? Or any other of a host of brilliant contemporary writers who write to shorter lengths? Do I and my work somehow trump grandmasters like Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg, whose many Hugos come not in the novel category but in categories of shorter works?

Novels aren’t inherently better than shorter works; I’m not at all convinced they need another category at the expense of those shorter works.

3. It privileges the established writer over the newer writer. Almost by definition, the authors who are eligible for the “Best Saga” award are very likely be writers who are already successful enough to have a long-running series and the ability to publish in those series on a recurring basis. It’s theoretically possible to have someone toiling away on a series in utter obscurity and suddenly emerge with a knockout installment that would pop that writer up into “Best Saga” consideration, but as a practical matter, it’s almost certainly more likely than not that the nominees in the category would be those authors with perennially popular series — people, to be blunt, like me and a relatively few other folks, who are already more likely to have won the “genre success” lottery than others.

Meanwhile, short fiction continues to be a really good way to find new writers and new voices and new perspectives. For many of these new voices, award consideration and recognition continues to be a fine way to raise their profile in the field. Culling out a short fiction award to benefit an award for series is very much offering an advantage to the successful few at the expense of the emerging many. I think that’s wrong.

(NB: The “Best Saga” proposal points out anthology series like “Wild Cards” are eligible, but I don’t know if offering up an example edited by the current most successful novelist in all of science fiction and fantasy actually invalidates the point, especially if in those cases the Hugo goes to the anthology editor rather than the (numerous) individual authors, as I suspect it would. As a practical matter, I see this benefiting the already-successful more than the up-and-comers by a considerable margin.)

4. It ignores the fact we are living in a new golden age of sf/f short fiction. Aside from the traditional magazines that already existed for short work, think of all the venues for short fiction that have blossomed online in the last decade and a half. Think of all the anthologies Kickstarted or otherwise crowdsourced, and all the writers using Patreon or other direct-compensation systems to connect with fans. Think of all the micro- and mini- and indie publishers putting out short fiction anthologies and collections. Think of all the writers self-publishing and taking their short work directly to fans and readers. Think of the wide breadth of voices and stories and writers that have come to market in the last several years.

Now, right now, is without question one of the best eras for short fiction in the history of the science fiction and fantasy genre… and we’re proposing to cull out an award available for short fiction so we can give another award to novels? That’s not just silly, it’s almost breathtakingly short-sighted. It would be a community turning its back on one of its greatest engines of creation.

Finally, I have this problem with the proposed amendment:

5. It feels like a sneak attack on short fiction, under the cover of an unrelated proposal. I don’t suspect that those who proposed it meant it that way — I’m sure they were simply trying to craft a proposed amendment that would attract the most votes. Even if that were the case, however, as a practical matter this proposed amendment, under the guise of doing one thing (creating a new Hugo category), is in fact doing other things (disposing of a short fiction Hugo category and reorganizing the remaining short fiction categories in ways that don’t necessarily make sense for storytelling purposes) and doing so in a manner which suggests that of course it would have to be done this way in order to make space for their new Hugo.

Well, no, it doesn’t. If you want to propose a “Best Saga” Hugo, then do that. If you also wish to get rid of the “Best Novelette” category, then you can do that too. But these are two separate things, and each deserves a separate argument on their respective merits. There is no systematic reason to combine the two proposals. Moreover, as a matter of rhetoric, the way the current “Best Saga” proposal is built makes it seem like the proposers are trying slip under the table a move to hollow out the Hugo’s ability to honor short fiction, by distracting the potential voters with another issue entirely. It’s a bad way to do things.

For that reason, even if I were inclined to consider a Best Saga Hugo award, I could not and would not endorse this particular proposal for its creation. Whether it was intended to be or not, it is an attack on short fiction, on the merits of short fiction as a class of expression, and on the writers of short fiction. It’s not worth creating a Hugo to benefit the relative advantaged few, if it means taking away a Hugo from a much larger pool of people who could benefit from a nomination — or a win.

This is a bad proposed amendment, and I hope it fails.

(P.S.: If you’re interested in my thoughts on a “Best Saga” Hugo on its own theoretical merits, I’ll put those into the first comment in the comment thread.)

Thursday:


Bit of a flashback/catch-up today, but it does follow on from what I was saying yesterday about what the next Leader of the Liberal Democrats will need to do.

Back on the day of the first Tory Queen Speech in almost two decades, Auntie Caron asked Liberal Democrat Voice's readers to suggest their own bills for a Liberal Queen's Speech.


So, I came up with half a dozen ideas, pretty much off the top of my fluffy head. Auntie Caron was kind enough to include one of them (and several others were already covered by other cleverer fluffy toys)!

In coming up with these Bills in particular, I wanted to address ideas that would be clearly LIBERAL (and not ones that either Hard Labour or Conservatory Parties were likely to come up with) AND that would make genuine and TARGETED differences to people in need.

(And of course I've included one on voting reform because, not only is it now more vitally necessary than ever to have a Parliament that reflects the genuine spread of people's opinions – whether it's us, the Greens, even moderate socialists… even the Kippers(!); and to stop Conservatories and Hard Labour from all parasitizing votes off all of us – but if there's just ONE thing people remember about us – one thing that isn't the godawful mess we made of tuition fees, that is – then it's PR.)

There is a case to be made for a Government committing to what Sir Humphrey once described as "masterly inactivity": the Coalition made many changes, particularly to the NHS and to education, and doing nothing would allow those changes to "bed in" while giving nurses and teachers some respite from change for change's sake, and give Government the opportunity to observe and gather evidence for review.

And if we were still IN government, I'd certainly warm to that idea. Hard Labour's accusation of last year being a "zombie parliament" just because the Coalition was not intent on keeping up a blizzard of legislation never appealed.

However, having just fought the general election campaign on a platform of "no change, everything's fine" – and remind me, how exactly did that work out for us? – we are now NOT in government.

And a Queen's Speech is a political event, and that means making political statements: we have to jump up and say we would make things DIFFERENT.

Here then is my list in full:

UNITED KINGDOM PARLIAMENTS ACT
The Parliament installed as a result of the 2015 General Election so manifestly fails to represent the votes cast by the electorate that it is now of vital urgency that we replace our Nineteenth Century constitution with one fit for the Twenty-First Century. To this end, a Liberal Democrat government would empower a people’s constitutional convention – after the model that successfully developed the Scottish Parliament – to decide on a fair way of deciding who governs Britain.

HUMAN RIGHTS ACT
A Liberal Democrat government would celebrate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta by reaffirming Great Britain’s commitment to the Human Rights and the European Court that were created under the guidance of Winston Churchill and the other leaders after the defeat of Nazism.

Measures will be introduced to increase Freedom of Information and to increase citizens' protection from abuse by government, including the abolition of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and a Digital Freedoms Bill to protect citizens from hacking and snooping.

CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES (DRUGS DECRIMINALISATION) ACT
A Liberal Democrat government will adopt a sensible, scientific evidence-based approach to control, monitoring, and treatment of drug use and misuse, based on the positive outcomes resulting from the changed approach in Portugal.

Funds currently wasted on the futile “war on drugs” can be transferred to more productive policing. The government will review legalizing the medical (and possibly recreational) use of cannabis.

UK PRISONS (ABOLITION OF SHORT SENTENCES) ACT
British prisons are extremely overcrowded in spite of falling crime and evidence shows that short sentences do nothing for rehabilitation and only introduce prisoners to hard drugs and more serious criminals. A Liberal Democrat government would therefore, with immediate effect, abolish all prison sentences of under one year in length to be replaced by programmes of reparative justice that have been shown to be more effective.


EMERGENCY AFFORDABLE HOUSING AND RENTS ACT
There is a critical shortage of housing in the United Kingdom which is damaging our economy by sucking capital into houses rather than investment and shutting people out of buying or renting homes near to where they want to work or where their families live.

A Liberal Democrat government would: immediately begin building more housing concentrating on new garden cities and renovating disused sites in cities, raising government borrowing but only where future rents can cover the interest; reverse Tory policies of Buy to Rent which have seen further reduction in the public housing stock and prevent further sales of public assets until the housing stock has been restored to sustainable levels; examine ways to outlaw the practices of holding large “land banks” rather than developing new housing, and keeping homes empty as “investments”; and bring in rent councils with the powers to reverse unfair rent rises or evictions.

CLEAN AIR / CAR ELECTRIFICATION ACT
The state of the air in our cities is among the worst in Europe and the only long-term solution is to replace the internal combustion engine with new, clean, green technologies.

A Liberal Democrat government would therefore begin research into the necessary changes in infrastructure to make this possible – e.g. greater generation of electricity; provision of charging points in homes and on street in addition to regular charging stations; changes to taxation.

Initial reporting to take place within one year with a view to – if evidence shows practical – trials before the end of the Parliament in two English cities (not London) and negotiating with the Scottish Government and other devolved authorities for similar joint programmes.

EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOBILITY ACT
Under the Coalition, Liberal Democrats invested heavily of both our political capital and the little actual spending that we were able to wring out of the Tory Chancellor in targeting Education: both the pupil premium and the delivery of free school meals to early years pupils were targeted at redressing the balance and giving the best possible start in life to people who would otherwise be – by the age of six, even – left behind by their better-off peers.

To continue that investment, we would raise funds from better-off schools by removing the charitable status of fee-paying schools and spend that money to increase the number of years that free school meals are provided, and substantially to increase maintenance grants for university undergraduates, to allow them to use their time to study, rather than having to work part-time to feed themselves.

We would continue to maintain government spending on sciences. Additionally, as part of the BBC Charter renewal, we would seek to agree an increase in the licence fee in exchange for the BBC establishing apprenticeships in the arts and creative/productive industries.

I would also add a couple more to the list.

First, Mr Norman "Conquest" Lamb's

ASSISTED DYING BILL
Broadly speaking I do not, in fact, want people killing themselves, and I am deeply troubled that the largest cause of death among young men in the UK is now suicide, not to mention the way that this disproportionately strikes at the LGB and particularly T community. But as a Liberal it is not my place to deny choice to other people. It would be my hope that through a more mature consideration of the end of life, and openness about it – and a much greater openness to using medical cannabis and opium-based pain relief; and much greater care and much less stigma put into mental illnesses – we would see fewer people suffering but also actually fewer people choosing to end their lives.

and second,

ABOLITION OF VICTIMLESS CRIMES BILL
(an idea of Daddy Alex's, and a very good one, that would cover the decriminalizing of sex-working that Jade O’Neil in Auntie Caron's list proposes).

We put too much legislative effort into banning things we think are bad and then even more effort into criminalising people for doing things we have banned. We need to let go of this overwhelming desire to control others before ourselves. Among the first principles of Liberalism is the "Harm Principle" from "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and it is worth quoting here: "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

I'd also like to incorporate Duncan Stott, Kelly-Marie Blundell, Maria Pretzler and Jon Ball's suggestions to Lib Dem Voice into my Emergency Housing Bill.

(Since I wrote these, and since the Queen's speech, Mr Norman has also made some substantive proposals on reducing prison numbers, while Conservatory Mayoral hopeful Mr Zac Goldfinger has called for an electric car revolution in London. So I'm clearly surfing the zeitgeist here!)


I think that between six and eight bills is enough to get the point across without becoming too much of a shopping list. But reviewing my suggestions I think that they are not very well BALANCED between the areas where I believe we should be targeting.


As a reminder: these are the FOUR areas where I said yesterday I think we need to be campaigning:

1. Personal freedoms and Civil liberties
2. Health, Social Care and Wellbeing
3. Opportunity and Education
4. The Economy

Three of my proposed bills, and both of my "extras", fall under "1"; whereas housing and clean air are both "Wellbeing" without substantially talking about either Health OR Social Care.

So there's clearly some work to be done.

Therefore (if I can keep this new spurt of writing going!), next time I'd like to talk some more about taking the fight to those people I named as our natural enemies, the Home Office; and then share some thoughts about a Liberal Economy and the longer term direction for the Party and the country.


PS:
Today is the memorial in Glasgow for Mr Charles, our much loved former leader.



Thoughts go with his family and friends.

75% would vote to remain to stay in the EU whilst 25% would vote to leave

One of the reasons I like the Ipsos Mori polling on the EU, is that they’ve been polling on the topic for nearly forty years, they have another poll out today for the the Evening Standard.

If the historic in-out referendum were to be staged now, 66 per cent say they would vote to remain members and 22  per cent would vote to quit. Excluding the don’t knows, at 12 per cent, the result is an emphatic 75 to 25.

It comes amid a rising tempo of referendum preparations. As the Prime Minister held talks with his Slovak counterpart ahead of a Brussels summit next week, seven Eurosceptic MPs from Labour, the Tories and Ukip announced moves to form the Out campaign….

….

….The survey for the Evening Standard used the exact wording expected to be on voting slips in the poll, due to be held by the end of 2017. In addition, half the 1,005-strong sample was asked a second question with a wording used on Ipsos MORI surveys over four decades: “If there were a referendum now on whether Britain should stay in or get out of the European Union, how would you vote?”

It found another huge majority to stay in, of 61 per cent to 27. That included 63 per cent of Conservatives and 76 per cent of Labour backers who want to stay. Almost all Ukip supporters would leave, however.

The caveats I’d emphasise are, the Tories and Cameron in particular are enjoying a post election boost, Cameron has his best leader ratings since 2010. Secondly, UKIP are on 7% in this poll, which is half of what they polled at the general election, so the OUT movement maybe under-represented in this polling which has fed into this supplementary. That said, even if we up-weighted UKIP by 100%, remaining in the EU would still have a substantial lead.

Because of the honeymoon, the proportion of respondents who are either very or fairly confident that Cameron will get a good deal in his negotiations with European leaders have increased by 12% to 38% since last November, whilst those not confident in the Prime Minister’s ability to get a good deal has fallen by 12% to 57%, this is probably another driver in the increase of voters wanting to remain in the EU.

It should be remembered, ICM, the most accurate pollster when it came to the AV referendum, a year before the referendum, had AV winning 62% to 38%, so things can change and IN should not be complacent nor should Out be disheartened by just one poll.

It isn’t all good news for Cameron, 74% of the voters want ministers free to campaign against the official government position when it comes to the referendum.

The full data tables are available here.

TSE

In the aftermath of Thursday's tragedy in Charleston, the U.S. and South Carolina flags flew at half-mast over the top of the South Carolina State House to honor the black victims of a hate crime. But flying high in front of the building was another symbol: a Confederate flag.

Some argue that the flag is a symbol of slavery and oppression, while others insist that it is purely a matter of Southern heritage and pride.

But too little of the conversation takes into account the flag's complicated history, according to Matthew Guterl, a professor of Africana and American studies at Brown University who studies race in the aftermath of the Civil War. Given his research, which has touched frequently on the use of the Confederate flag, Guterl says that he finds it impossible to argue that it's a neutral symbol.

I spoke with Guterl to learn what exactly people misunderstand about the flag, its history, and how that affects what it symbolizes today. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with what drives the mentality that has angered so many people. Why do people embrace the Confederate flag?

There are at least two reasons why people embrace the battle flag or the stars and bars, which was first used by the army of northern Virginia.

The first, which is a kind of surface explanation, is that they imagine that in that context the flag is a representation of Southern history, Southern heritage, and Southern culture. They tie it to questions of state’s rights, and the absence of federal oversight.

People see it as a symbol of the South as a bound and discrete place. A part of the heritage that’s being celebrated with it is that the South is the South, that the region has clear borders that might collate with the borders of the Confederacy. It’s bound up, in this sense, in the question of the South as a once nation.

But I also think that people invoke the flag because they want to endorse on some level, even if secretly or subconsciously, the very rationale for the Confederacy. When people say 'heritage not hate,’ they are omitting the obvious, which is that that heritage is hate. When someone says it’s about history, well, that particular history is inseparable from hate, because it is about hate. It’s about racism, and it’s about slavery.

I take it that you don’t approve of the use of the flag.

I object to the use of the flag for a few reasons. On the one hand, I don’t condone it because it’s a reflection of the great treason of the South in the 19th century, of its secession from the Union in defense of slavery, and its rejection of patriotism and nationalism. So just on political principles, the flag is a reminder that the South was once a rebellious and treasonous actor on the global stage.

But what is far more problematic is that there is no way to separate the fact that it is on all of those flag poles and on those license plates, that it's on t-shirts and coffee cups and other paraphernalia, precisely because it was resurrected in the 1940s and 1950s as part of a massive resistance campaign against the civil rights movement. It wouldn’t exist in our national popular culture without this moment, when African Americans fought for their equality, and the battle flag was recovered and redeployed as a symbol of opposition to it.

What was once a very blatant, full-throated defense of white supremacy has now become this gesture to heritage and history that is presented as though it has nothing to do with the civil rights movement. But it has everything to do with the civil rights movement.

Did the flag disappear in the years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement?

It was part of the collective nostalgia for the lost cause in the aftermath of the Civil War. So it wasn't completely absent. But the battle flag, even though it was part of that, wasn't a very memorable part. It was just part of the backdrop.

What would you say to someone who defends their use of the flag by arguing that for them it is ahistorical, that they grew up understanding that it is only a matter of Southern pride?

If I was in a good mood, I might say something like, ‘Well, I guess that this is the start of a conversation, and we should keep going. If that’s the topic sentence of the paragraph you’re writing, well, where is the rest of it?'

But if I was in a bad mood, as I have been increasingly of late, I might tell them that they are delusional, or that they are refusing to look in the mirror, or that they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge what would probably be very painful for them to acknowledge, which is that by flying that flag, they are perpetuating the sense of rage and despair that leads a young man to walk into a church with a gun and shoot nine people.

If you celebrate the hoisting of a battle flag in front of your state’s capitol, and you have roads all over your state that are named after Confederate generals, and you celebrate this 19th century past, it should surprise absolutely no one when people pick up on this and imagine that the South is still at war with the North over whether blacks deserve rights and representation, or even life.

The reaction by the Sons of Confederate Veterans has been to call Dylann Roof a bigot and racist who desecrates the Confederate flag. What do you make of that?

You can’t expect the Sons of the Confederate Veterans to say otherwise. What are they going to say? That finally somebody gets it, that this is what we’ve been lobbying for all along?

One of the great stories of the past few decades is how white supremacist organizations have adopted the language of the civil rights movement and have come to sound like minority multicultural organizations. They say that they are only lobbying for their respective traditions and beliefs to be celebrated alongside those of other people’s. They want a white history month, because it's only fair.

But just because someone says something doesn’t make it honest. And it certainly doesn’t make it true.

You've talked about how we live in this weird moment, where there are competing representations of the truth. What did you mean by that, and how does it affect this conversation?

I think that it’s a huge part of this problem. It’s often the case in journalism, especially broadcast journalism, to present both sides of an issue, and then leave them in this unresolved tension. The thought is that by doing so, what one has set up is a kind of fair portrayal of the debate, one that encourages people to become more informed and then choose sides. But that’s not actually how history works.

There aren’t always multiple ways to tell a story because all the ways aren’t equally valid or truthful. Anyone should be able to pick up a series of historic texts, sift through the evidence themselves, and then come to the unshakable conclusion that the battle flags presence in contemporary American culture is a consequence of lingering commitments to racial prejudice.

The reason we give equal credence to both sides of a story that only really has one true side has so much to do with the last couple decades of media journalism, and the rising conservative critique of a liberal education and critical thinking. It’s about the emergence of Fox News and alternate spaces that demonize or reject conventional histories of things. Just yesterday, Fox News suggested that the shooting was about religious liberty, which is perhaps the most ridiculous and farcical thing ever uttered on that network.

You also have this war on history standards in text books, which is another conversation entirely. But just consider that in Texas many history books are draped in nostalgia for a regrettable period in our country’s past. You can imagine what that does to the psyche of people who grow up in a system like that.

Do you think it's possible for someone to embrace the flag without explicitly or implicitly promoting racism? 

The short answer is no.

Wearing the flag or celebrating it, putting it on your car window or coffee table in your house, it's a reminder to everyone, to every guest, to every person who sees it, black or white, that you are a stakeholder in the Confederate history of the South, and therefore the defense of slavery and racial prejudice. No one is immune to this.

Even to say that it’s about heritage not hate, is to recognize that for many people it is inextricably about hate. You can’t filter out the racism and leave what’s pure and historical in the flag, because that purity doesn’t exist. Some things are so primitively stained or tarnished by history that that can never be set side. The flag is a perfect example.

What about the South more generally? Is it wrong to celebrate the South?

Not at all. But if you want to celebrate the South, there are a thousand things you can pick up, and put out on display, without pissing people off or gesturing to the history of racism in this country. The Southern culture is an amazingly rich and fascinating thing, but to choose the flag as what you’re going to trot out to celebrate great grandpa's role in the army of Northern Virginia is only useful if you want to implicate your ancestors and their war to defend slavery.

Quoth the counsellor who first suggested I might have Asperger’s: but you obviously have a sense of humour, and you’re not supposed to if you’re on the spectrum…

Tagged: idiom, sense of humour, taking things literally

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Wednesday:



I was lucky enough to attend the Liberal Democrat leadership hustings in London, and to meet both candidates.

Going in I was leaning more for Farron, and the Tim Lord did indeed play a blinder: full of that old-time Liberal religion. And his last word – "it's my job to get Norman back into Government" – was the best line of the night. But Norman was consistently impressive throughout as the one who put thought into his answers. He made it very much harder to choose. And that's got to be some kind of victory for the Norman Conquest.



Illustrative was the question: "What would you vote against the Party Line on?" (one of Alex's favourites). They both didn't answer the question but in different ways.

Tim's answer was to point to his rebellious record in the last Parliament, voting against the whip on Tuition Fees and Secret Courts. Those are his radical credentials, right there, do what's right not what's on the ticket. That's not really voting against the Party line, though. Norman, answering that question second, chose that opportunity to defend his own record as being the "good boy" and voting for those things on the grounds that practical Liberalism means doing more good by staying in and winning the fights you can win, rather than letting "best" be the enemy of "good".

So in some ways – from a certain point of view – Tim was being the more careful candidate here, embracing the Party, touching us in our warm happy place, while Norman was willing to be a bit more dangerous.

If we were still a credible force in the House of Commons, whether in Coalition or at least in contention to be in Coalition, there would be a strong case for a candidate who has shown just the sort of "winning the best deal" by "tough decisions" talent that Norman has. But we've been massacred. To his credit, Norman clearly recognises this, and that continuity – being the "establishment" candidate – are a weakness in this context, and he's been highly active in generating radical policy ideas to demonstrate that there is so much more to him than that.

When questioned on policies, both candidates were – unsurprisingly – saying the same things: we need to make tackling the housing crisis our priority; we should be first in line to defend the Human Rights Act; we should celebrate immigration not condemn immigrants; renewables not fracking. But although Tim was saying we should be the Party saying the difficult, "spiky" things, Norman was the one coming out with the "out there" ideas, in particular taking the fight to the Home Office (our natural enemies!), on drugs and on cutting the numbers in our (vastly overcrowded) prisons.

If I might paraphrase "Yes, Prime Minister" episode "The Ministerial Broadcast", it's pretty clear that Tim would be the one sat in the oak-panelled room with the leather-bound books on the shelves and the calming tones of Brahms playing to reassure you; while Norman would be all modernist furniture and Stravinsky to distract from the Continuity Clegg label.


With only eight MPs… and one of those the ex-leader, the Reverend Nick, who the public no doubt expect to step into quiet semi-retirement (or to put it another way, they would say they've seen the back of him)… and another, Alistair, the Laird Carmichael, shall we say, hors de combat… with only six MPs… I'll come in again…

At least one candidate (it was Tim) has made it clear that we will have to pick our campaigns.

I would suggest we have to cover the following:

1. Personal freedoms and Civil liberties
2. Health, Social Care and the dreaded "Wellbeing" (so including housing)
3. Opportunity and Education
4. The Economy

In the short term, it almost doesn't matter who wins.

Norman has already made himself a champion of personal rights with support for an Assisted Dying Bill, and his excellent policy announcements, in particular on the failed war on drugs and on our prisons. And (for all those "Yes, Prime Minister" reasons) the fact that he looks the more establishment character makes him just the man to be taken seriously when attacking the Home Office from the ANTI-authoritarian flank (something Labour hasn't done for twenty years).

Tim clearly knows his Beverage (and I don't mean TEA), and he's got the background (voting against Tuition fees gives him the opening to be listened to on the subject, possibly the only Lib Dem who can do that), and the talent of a natural preacher to condemn the Tories as "immoral" (which he did several times on the night): clearly he's the man to lead on housing and education.

(Obviously we should be defending our NHS too, but there's no way to make that an issue identified with us and not Hard Labour – however unjustified, they've just spent too much political capital in buying that as "their" turf. What we could and should do, in fact, is address ourselves to the "wall of bureaucracy" that often means the NHS works for itself rather than patients – of which Mid Staffs was only the most extreme example.)

We cannot NOT talk about the economy (stupid), and I'd ask Tom Brake to be our Shadow Chancellor.

Additionally, I'd ask Nick to be spokesperson for foreign policy. It means we can use his considerable talents, but at the same time allow him to step aside from the field of everyday politics, and be a (very young) elder statesman figure.

But the leadership is for more than just the short term. It is about who – as a Party – will be speaking for us for the next five years. Because the media will no doubt shut us out now, and at best we will get our leader to appear on TV's Questionable Time or the occasional talking head comment on the news.

(I did wonder briefly, Tim might be "interesting" enough to get the occasional appearance even if he were not leader, which – in Bizarro world – might be a reason to pick Norman for a "two bites of the cherry" approach. But it won't fly. If we want our best – surviving – communicator to be able to communicate, then we'd better decide which of them it is and make him leader.)

So this is the question: are we content as a Party to drift back into quasi-think tank status? Or do we want to say loud and strong that May 7th will not stand.

This Party, this liberal phoenix needs fire. Tim certainly has fire. And it may be that that's what wins it. But if it does I very much hope that his first act will be to put Norman in charge of choosing our campaigns, picking the fights we're going to pick.

I shook them both by the hand and wished each of them good luck. Whoever wins, they'll need it. But more importantly, whoever wins, they'll need the other one too.

PS: 

courtesy of Count Packula: the opening speeches of both candidates.

First to speak was Norman…



…and then Tim.

From earlier today on Twitter:

And no, I’m not going to bother to name these fellows. It should be obvious to some of you, and the rest of you are better off being in blissful ignorance. I will say this: Writers — and indeed anyone else — when you decide to define yourself as being in opposition to someone else, then you give that person immense power over you. That person doesn’t have to have anything to do with you, and often won’t; you’re the one who has to do all the work, tracking their positions and attitudes and setting your own life in opposition. In effect, you’re letting them live in your brain, all the time, without cost. Whereas they will think of you only when they have no other choice.

How much better for you to instead to simply work on being the best possible version of yourself, which requires no concern about what anyone else does, or says, or is. It is what I do. It’s worked so far.

Comments off because I’m on vacation.

It has taken the latest Kindle Unlimited Apocalypse (KUpocalypse 2? KUpocalypse Part Deux? KUpocalypse XXL?) to help me understand my visceral reaction to all of those writers who game the system.

First, let me explain the reaction. It ain’t pretty. It comes from decades of watching young (meaning newer) writers try to game whatever system exists, whether the system is traditional publishing or indie publishing or getting an agent or trying to sell a book to Hollywood using by writing “blockbuster” novels based on current movies (I can’t even begin to count the ways that’s stupid).

By gaming the system, I mean artificially elevating book sales by doing something non-writing related.

For example, when I edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I stumbled on a writing article in which some newbie writer claimed to have found “the secret” to selling short stories to me. That writer analyzed every story in every issue I had my byline on up until that point, found common elements, and told the writers reading his essay that I looked for those elements.

Ooops. That was wrong. Because the first 18 months of my editorial reign included works purchased by the previous editor Ed Ferman. Just like the first 18 months of Gordon Van Gelder’s reign included works purchased by me, and part of Charles Coleman Finlay’s early years will include works purchased by Gordon, depending on inventory.

Half the things that writer found in my editorial canon were in stories I didn’t buy (and maybe didn’t like). The other things may have been things I decided I had enough of and wasn’t going to purchase for a while.

His game, done without the kind of algorithms so many retail sites online now use, was a false one, using material that had been purchased years before.

Writers do a variety of things like this even now, from analyzing the kinds of clients agents have, to writing to order based on Amazon’s bestseller algorithms. Kindle Unlimited really provokes a lot of this behavior, with writers admitting in blogs and other places that they were deliberately writing shorter works (and serialized works) to make more money on Amazon.

We’ll get to all of that in a minute. But first, I want to talk about gaming the system just a bit more.

In a closed and arcane system, like publishing used to be and like traditional publishing still can be, some amount of gaming is inevitable. Because there was no school for writers, no business training, and very few established professionals who mentored and/or taught newcomers the tricks of the trade, each generation of writers had to learn from scratch how to break into publishing.

This led to a weird phenomena. Good information got mixed with totally useless information, and presented as Gospel. New writers had an impossible task: they had to continually run at a system that deliberately kept secrets from them in order to prevent them from breaching the walls. Once writers crossed that wall, they found others. Some writers sent information back to the others trying to cross the wall; other writers just moved forward.

New writers got their information from biographies of other writers, from “guidelines” written by publishing houses (mostly designed [ironically] to keep writers away), and from a few nuggets of knowledge from panels or writing conferences or writers workshops. If the writer was lucky, those panels, writers conferences, or writers workshops were taught by career writers, who have been in the business longer than a year or two. Most often, those panels, conferences, and workshops were taught by professional writers, with “professional” being defined as anything from one short story sold to one novel sold fifteen years ago to making a living as a writer.

Because writing as a trade has no governing board, and nothing to certify writers as professionals (unlike, say, lawyers), there was and is no way to know if the writer giving information really has knowledge or is just guessing.

In a closed system, guesswork often takes the place of actual information. Guesswork means that the individual writer will poke and prod, trying to find what works.

That habit, guessing and prodding, continues among some writers, who don’t learn to substitute knowledge for guesswork. Those writers end up spending their writing life on guesswork.

And working off guesswork as a professional leads to behaviors that make those of us with a business background shake our heads, behaviors like giving an agent 15% of a copyright for the life of the copyright just because the agent made a few phone calls or like selling a book to a small press in the hope of that book becoming a bestseller when that press has never had a bestseller and wouldn’t know what to do with one if one came along.

The practice of using guesswork as fact becomes a way of life for some writers. It’s now built into the arcana of writing. It makes gaming the system seem normal, the way that business is conducted.

But the system isn’t closed any longer. Writers can publish their work themselves and—here’s the kicker—that work will be sold and get read. There are now many paths to becoming a career writer, to making a living as a writer, and to selling fiction instead of just one or two.

Better yet, the internet has made it possible for writers, without leaving the comforts of home, to actually gain knowledge on how to be successful from people who have long-term careers.

Why am I stressing long-term careers? Because a lot of things work in the short term and don’t work long-term at all. Writers who have freelanced for decades know how to survive the ups and downs of the publishing business.

When Dean and I teach or advise new writers, we always tell them to learn from someone who is already on the path the writers want to walk. There are so many paths now that writers need to understand they have choices.

Almost all of those choices take patience. There’s a reason that phrase in English for becoming a professional is “building a career.” You don’t rocket into a career. You luck into an overnight success. You might start at a different place than someone else—higher or lower—but you build from that place.

The first thing you do is create a solid foundation. Often, people who rocket to success have to go back and build the foundation underneath them. That’s why so many rockets flame out. They never go back and do the fundamentals.

What are those fundamentals? The things I harp on: learn your craft; keep learning and growing; learn business; and learn copyright. Notice the repeated word. Learn. Learn. Learn.

Learn what makes someone else’s work successful, but don’t copy that work. Don’t plagiarize and don’t expect that just because someone wrote a successful vampire detective novel, your vampire detective novel will succeed in the same way.

More than that, don’t expect to have the same career trajectory that someone else does. Your career will go your way; theirs follows its own path. Accept that.

I know all this. I know that sometimes there’s no clear boundary between learning the closed system and gaming a system. I also know that writers have tried to game the publishing system since there was a publishing system.

I hated it when I started; I hate it now.

And yes, I’m using the word “hate.”

In the beginning, I tolerated gaming the system.  I used to think that writers would get by it. Some writers do get past that idea that they can game their way to success. Some writers do game their way to success. But I have learned that every writer who games his way to success has short-term success.

And then that writer gets caught or the system changes or the bottom falls out. Most writers quit at that point. Last summer’s Kindle Unlimited Apocalypse took out hundreds, maybe thousands, of writers who had some success. Many of them left writing altogether.

Some of them found a new way to game the system, still with Kindle Unlimited, figuring out the new algorithms and what those writers “should” be writing in order to win the big prize—which is, either, some imagined (unprovable) bonus to their bestseller rankings or part of the Prize Pool. Ooops. I mean the Select Global Fund. Or none of the above. Honestly, I haven’t made much of a study of it, because, as you can tell from my tone, I don’t think it important.

The remaining writers who were gaming the system and got nailed did the cliché thing and turned lemons into lemonade. They learned that they were approaching their business wrong, and they took the collapse as an opportunity to build a foundation underneath their writing career.

A lot of those writers are showing up in the discussions about the latest change in Kindle Unlimited, and mentioning how they changed their behavior, so that this year’s change will have little or no impact on the way they’re doing business. I’m very impressed by these folks.

Because we all take wrong turns, particularly early on, and we don’t always know whether we’re following a real path or a goat trail that leads off a cliff. The folks who have expanded their markets, clicked out of Select, and stopped playing games, have taken the most important step possible in their careers.

They now own their successes and their failures.

Or as we say at our workshops: You are responsible for your career. You’re responsible for your successes and your failures. You’re responsible for whether or not you have a career.

There are ups and there are downs. You ride them, like you surf a wave. No surfer rides the crest of every wave each time. Surfers do crash and burn. Then they paddle out and catch another wave. And no wave is the same.

Some waves are gigantic. We have Big Surf competitions in my small town; people from all over the world come here to ride waves as big as skyscrapers. Not every surfer wants to ride those waves. It takes a lot of skill and it’s dangerous.

Some waves are merely big, but they don’t come around often either. And you’ll note, in our surfing metaphor, that the big waves come along with bad weather or very choppy seas, so it takes a lot of skill to handle them.

Smaller waves are easier to predict, and easier to ride. Even those smaller waves will dump the surfer—particularly the inexperienced surfer—into the water.

If you ride the wave—which is what having a career in the arts is all about—then expect to get wet. Repeatedly.

In addition to the writers who mentioned they had left Kindle Unlimited last year and put a foundation under their business, a number of other writers commented on the changes. Those writers defended the fact that they were continuing to game Amazon’s system, and those writers vowed to find the new way to game the system.

And that bugs me.

It bugs me because of the contempt these writers show for the craft of writing. In the changes to KU, Amazon stresses that it will pay the writers who stay in KU by the number of pages in the book and the number of pages read. The letter Amazon sent out to the Select writers said,

“Under the new payment method, you’ll be paid for each page individual customers read of your book, the first time they read it…. the amount an author earns will be determined by their share of total pages read instead of their share of total qualified borrows.”

Yeah, there are problems with the way this will work, and people are already coming up with ways to game it. (sigh) (Please don’t discuss that in my comments section. I don’t think you should be exclusive to any one market in the first place. Figuring out how to game that market is irrelevant.)

But a lot of writers are claiming in their comments on this new policy that reading shouldn’t be the metric. Who cares, the writers say, whether or not the books get read. One writer even said it’s not normal for people to read the books they download (!).

Every writer should care whether or not people read their work. Back in the days before the internet (when we had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to the library to hunt the wild paper books), writers would sometimes buy their own books by the case to game the bestseller lists.

In that instance, just like in the gaming of Kindle Unlimited, the goal isn’t to gain readers, it’s to hit something important to the writer—like a bestseller list or a certain percentage of a prize pool.

People who game the system do not respect the system. And by the system, I don’t mean Amazon itself or even the publishing system.

I mean this system:

Writers write books.

Readers read books.

Writers want their books in the hands of readers…who will read those books, and have some enjoyment for an afternoon or a week or two.

In other words, gaming a system, like Kindle Unlimited or the New York Times bestseller list is extremely disrespectful. It doesn’t require the writer to get better, to become a better storyteller or to build a fan base. It only means that the goal—whatever that goal is—means more to the writer than having readers does.

Like those people who purchase a spot in a marathon, run the first mile, then hop a bus, get off on mile 22, and run the remaining 4.2 miles as if they had actually run the entire race.

Not everyone can run 5.2 miles, so not everyone can do that.

But hopping a bus in the middle of a marathon to get to the finish line faster is disrespectful to everyone else, from the race organizers to the spectators and, oh, yeah, the people who actually run the 26.2 miles. Not just the people who run it in a few hours, and take home prizes. It’s also disrespectful to the people who take six or more grueling hours to finish, because the effort means something to them.

The gamers of the writing systems always want the “trick.” They’re the ones who want to make a fast buck.

Most of them left last summer.

I hope the rest of them leave with the KU changes this summer.

Because, my friends, they don’t just disrespect other writers. They disrespect readers. These writers want people to buy their books (or borrow them for a fee, as in KU), but these writers don’t care if the readers read the book.

They want a reader’s money and they want to give the reader very little in return for it.

Writing is both a craft and an art. It’s the art and craft of storytelling.

To tell stories, you must have someone to tell them to. And you should respect your audience. Because without them, you’re just singing in the shower, listening to the echo of your own voice.

Value your readers. Give them the best reading experience you can. Always strive to improve.

If readers don’t like what you’re doing, they’ll let you know. They won’t buy the next book. They won’t remember your name. They won’t recommend your work to their friends.

It’s not your job as a writer to force readers to buy your books. It’s your job to entertain people who read your work. If you’re a good enough entertainer, more people will pick up your work. Over time, more people will pay for it.

Because they value it. Because they want more of it.

Not because they got it for free and they didn’t read it after downloading it.

Not because they were guilted into buying it or borrowing it.

Readers don’t pick up books because those books hit an algorithm. Readers pick up books because the book looks interesting. If, after reading a little bit, the reader decides the book is interesting, the reader will finish the book. If the reader likes the entire experience, the reader will then go to the writer’s other works.

If you want to play games, play games with yourself. Game your own system. Figure out how to write better stories. More enjoyable stories. Entertaining stories.

Write because you love it, not because you’re chasing some dream of being a famous writer.

Be the best storyteller you can be each and every time you sit down at the keyboard.

I guarantee you that, over time, you will gain readers. And if you keep improving and keep doing what you love, you will gain more readers.

Then one day you’ll wake up, and you’ll realize you’ve been doing this work for decades. As a freelance writer. Sometimes you hit bestseller lists. Sometimes you don’t. But you have readers and fans and one other thing.

You have a career. A long-term career.

As a writer.

And really, there’s nothing more fun than that.

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“Business Musings: Gaming the System,” copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

There's a must-read piece today on Conservative Home from Mark Wallace where he goes through the Tory ground campaign operation in painstaking detail from its inception in the aftermath of the 2012 Omnishambles Budget through to election day,

It's a brilliantly researched post and I am sure many in politics across the parties will be reading and absorbing it to see what lessons can be learned for future campaigns.

I however, as is my wont have absorbed a slightly different lesson. And that is just how utterly broken our electoral system is.

The following sections leaped out at me:

The majority would be won by campaigns targeted directly at a relatively small number of groups, each composed of a relatively small number of people in a relatively small number of seats.

and:

During the last 28 weeks of the campaign, Team 2015 supplied 26,000 campaigning days in the target seats. While this effort was not a replacement for the wider party (or for the contribution of other supporting groups, such as the pro-hunting Vote-OK group, which contributed campaigners in around 25 seats, or the various Conservative “Friends of” groups), it was an undeniably valuable contribution. If just 901 people in the most marginal seats had voted Labour instead of Conservative, last month’s majority would never have been achieved: every one of those days spent campaigning was crucial.

Mark (no fan of electoral reform himself) is essentially admitting just how broken things are here. Almost all the focus of the Tory ground campaign was on a tiny, tiny sliver of swing voters in a very small number of constituencies.

The Tories were of course right to focus on them. That's how you win elections as we've just seen. Well, to be more accurate that's how you win elections under First Past the Post. If Labour want to win again in 2020 they'll have to focus on these same narrow tranche of voters too.

But what a dreadful, anti-democratic situation this is where such huge efforts by the main parties are put into wooing a few thousand voters out of tens of millions. And of course what then happens is that the policy offerings are tailored to suit these tiny number of people who are not representative of the country as a whole.

There is one other, slightly more subtle point I was want to make about the detail from this piece too. You'll recall that in 2011 there was a referendum on the Alternative Vote electoral system for Westminster which the Tories vociferously campaigned against arguing that our current First Past the Post system is much better. They won of course but just bear with me.

One of the things about the Alternative Vote that is an improvement over First Past the Post is the amount of information that the counting system then has about the choices of each voter. Instead of just a simple X against a single party in a binary fashion there are rankings. So the counting system knows who the voter's second, third, fourth etc. choice is and that can then be processed by the counting system to ensure an outcome closer to that that the majority of the voters in the seat would want.

Now check this out:

The Survey. With 14 questions ... this was intended to be a swift but effective way of identifying voters. The strategists worked to move away from a binary model of identification – Tory or not, Labour or not – and to collect more subtle information, rating people’s enthusiasm for various parties on a scale of 1 to 10. 

Such data has a practical use: with the kind of hyper-targeted communications CCHQ was planning, it needed to know as much as possible about people’s interests and concerns in order to segment them accurately.

[see: Wikipedia: Tom Swifties, Tom Swifties Written By An Author Willing To Go To Any Lengths To Make A Tom Swifty Thus Resulting In Constructions That Often Require More Work For Readers Than For The Author, and Fifty Swifties. Previously on Twitter here.]

“This sandwich is gross,” Tom said deliberately.

“My Frisbee is stuck on the roof of that circus building,” Tom said discontently.

“I hate Google,” Tom said probingly.

“Godzilla swallowed a United Nations bunker, but then he threw it back up,” Tom said unfortunately.

“I think Objectivism is stupid,” Tom said randomly.

“It’s so exciting to visit Leonardo’s birthplace,” Tom said invincibly.

“Persephone must marry Hades and live with him half the year,” Zeus said despairingly.

“I now control majority shares of CBS, FOX, and the New York Times,” Tom said immediately.

“Enemy fighters just scored a direct hit on my plane! I’m going down!” Tom said knowingly.

“We were badly injured in the struggle with the Orcs, but luckily the Ents’ medicine restored our health,” Tom said tremendously.

“I took Gollum’s precious trinket in a riddle contest,” Tom said wonderingly.

“I’ve lost this Maxis game ten times in a row on the easiest difficulty setting,” Tom said sympathetically.

“I can commit adultery three more times and still be just under the threshold for damnation,” Tom said syntactically.

“O Lord, why are you punishing me like this?” Jonah said inefficiently.

“Look! Nicaraguan guerillas!” Tom contraindicated.

“I forgot to give up meat before Easter, so I’ll do it before Christmas,” Tom said redolently.

“I’ll see you in court!” Tom said supersonically.

“When I speak Japanese, I think of myself as a young, cute person,” Tom said mechanically.

“Iä Cthulhu! Iä Azathoth!” the man called maniacally.

“Stay away from Stalin,” Tom commissioned.

“It’s one of those old phones, from before wireless and touch-tone,” Tom said cordially.

“She’ll have sex with me for $20 any time I phone her up,” Tom said horrifically.

“I read the Cliff Notes to Dante’s Inferno,” Tom said synergistically.

“I’m going to recover the lunar lander from the surface of the moon and make a fortune,” Tom said apologetically.

“I covered myself in a layer of gold,” Tom said amblingly.

“I covered myself in a layer of pyrite,” Tom said shamblingly.

“I covered myself in the Golden Fleece of Colchis,” Tom said ramblingly.

“The poverty rate has increased 10% recently, but I don’t have any kind of visual presentation of its course,” Tom said pornographically.

“We should perform an autopsy,” Tom said wide-eyed.

“That tree is naked under its bark!” Tom said prudently.

“I can afford either an iPhone or a yacht, but not both,” Tom said on self-ownership.

“The guy who was installing the granite tops in my kitchen had a cardiac arrest,” Tom countermanded.

“We can stop progress by attacking a conference on new ideas with a many-headed monster,” Tom said well-hydrated.

“You’re a bell,” Tom told me.

“The wages of sin is death,” Tom said diurnally.

“Abortion is murder,” Tom said prolifically.

“Can do!” Tom said candidly.

“I have a present for you, Madame,” Vincent said endearingly.

“Arrrrrr,” Tom aspirated.

“My lower social status as part of the new rich prevents me from winning my true love,” Gatsby said lackadaisically.

“The Minoans sucked,” Tom said discretely.

“Well, if you think the Minoans did a bad job with their empire, you should try ruling them yourself,” his teacher said, giving him a B−.

“Ha ha, just kidding,” Tom ingested.

“Sheep can’t have sex changes!” Tom said, heedless of the ramifications.

“I wrote a synoptic Gospel,” Tom remarked.

“People used to lay wires across the country for the telegraph system, an early precursor to the telephone,” Tom said according to protocol.

“My laptop came bundled with malware that causes a serious security flaw,” Tom said superficially.

“We need artillery cover!” Tom said canonically.

“Someday my family will rule the world,” Tom said clandestinely.

“The West’s treatment of Palestine is an example of Orientalism,” Tom said.

If I didn’t have enough already, Tim Farron gave me another reason for supporting him for party leader today, with his proposal that the Liberal Democrats should introduce a regular ‘festival of ideas’:

The festival will take place over a day and will be open, inclusive and egalitarian. It will consistent of a series of, say, twenty simultaneous sessions, each lasting no more than an hour, maybe in excess of hundred different sessions throughout the day.

And here’s the trick: the topics and format of the sessions will be set not centrally by the party or its leaders but by the participants themselves.

The Liberal Democrat Festival of Ideas will be open to all to attend. And once registered, any paid up member of the party will be free to propose a session in fifty words of less. It might take the form of a lecture, a panel debate or a facilitated discussion.

It will then be up to the participants which sessions they wish to attend, drawn by the topic, the speakers or the organiser. Some sessions will no doubt attract hundreds, others perhaps not more than half a dozen, but that’s not the point: everyone will have the opportunity to contribute on an equal basis, from the party leader to the newest member.

In effect, Tim’s proposing a Liberal Democrat Unconference, and unconferences are something I’ve been interested in since attending one in 2013. This proposal gets to the heart of something I’ve been thinking about and writing about for a while – we shouldn’t be content to just look at tweaking the way the party works based on structures created to smooth over post-merger squabbles, we should be pretty much starting again from scratch and building structures that suit a political movement in 2015. It’s why I think the whole ‘one member, one vote’ debate remains a huge distraction as it still limits involvement to those with the time, money and ability to actually get to Conference, and still keeps a very formalised policy-making process in place.

A ‘festival of ideas’, conducted in the way Tim proposes, would be something different, and a much more interesting way of getting members involved in talking about ideas and policies, as well as showing that we’re serious about being a party run by our members and open to contributions from everyone. The current political party conference model is looking very stale across all parties, and we shouldn’t be afraid to try some radical alternatives to it. Indeed, I’d go further than Tim’s proposal and suggest that the party ought to be a holding a series of regular festivals of ideas all around the country, and also providing support and training for regional and local parties to hold their own. Running a local unconference open to all with the aim of coming up with ideas to improve your area, town, county or whatever would be a great way of reinvigorating our commitment to community politics and finding new ways to involve people in improving their communities.

A festival of ideas shouldn’t be just a one-off event – and I suspect Tim doesn’t expect it to be – but something we can make a fundamental part of the way the party works: fully involving people at all leels in developing their ideas for the future. It’s not just about saying people have the power to determine policy – it’s enabling them to use that power.