Andrew Hickey

I was recently re-watching Alien, and something is bugging me. I know, I know, benefit of hindsight and all that, but how did the crew of the Nostromo (and the audience) not know that Ash was an android? In nearly every scene he appears in up until the big reveal, there are obvious clues dropped about his real identity. I can understand not picking them up on the first view or so, but even now people act as though it’s some shocking surprise.

Really? Even after all this?

You’re kicking yourself for not noticing before, huh? Well if you’re me, now you won’t be able to watch Alien and NOT see it.

Even after the Snowden revelations, there remained at least one big mystery about what the NSA was doing and how.  The NSA’s classified 2013 budget request mentioned, as a priority item, “groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.”  There was a requested increase, of several hundred million dollars, for “cryptanalytic IT services” and “cryptanalysis and exploitation services program C” (whatever that was).  And a classified presentation slide showed encrypted data being passed to a high-performance computing system called “TURMOIL,” and decrypts coming out.  But whatever was going on inside TURMOIL seemed to be secret even within NSA; someone at Snowden’s level wouldn’t have had access to the details.

So, what was (or is) inside the NSA’s cryptanalytic black box?  A quantum computer?  Maybe even one that they bought from D-Wave?  (Rimshot.)  A fast classical factoring algorithm?  A proof of P=NP?  Commentators on the Internet rushed to suggest each of these far-reaching possibilities.  Some of us tried to pour cold water on these speculations—pointing out that one could envision many scenarios that were a little more prosaic, a little more tied to the details of how public-key crypto is actually used in the real world.  Were we just naïve?

This week, a new bombshell 14-author paper (see also the website) advances an exceedingly plausible hypothesis about what may have been the NSA’s greatest cryptanalytic secret of recent years.  One of the authors is J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, my best friend since junior high school, who I’ve blogged about before.  Because of that, I had some advance knowledge of this scoop, and found myself having to do what regular Shtetl-Optimized readers will know is the single hardest thing in the world for me: bite my tongue and not say anything.  Until now, that is.

Besides Alex, the other authors are David Adrian, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Zakir Durumeric, Pierrick Gaudry, Matthew Green, Nadia Heninger, Drew Springall, Emmanuel Thomé, Luke Valenta, Benjamin VanderSloot, Eric Wustrow, Santiago Zanella-Béguelink, and Paul Zimmermann (two of these, Green and Heninger, have previously turned up on Shtetl-Optimized).

These authors study vulnerabilities in Diffie-Hellman key exchange, the “original” (but still widely-used) public-key cryptosystem, the one that predates even RSA.  Diffie-Hellman is the thing where Alice and Bob first agree on a huge prime number p and a number g, then Alice picks a secret a and sends Bob g^a (mod p), and Bob picks a secret b and sends Alice g^b (mod p), and then Alice and Bob can both compute (g^a)^b=(g^b)^a=g^ab (mod p), but an eavesdropper who’s listening in only knows p, g, g^a (mod p), and g^b (mod p), and one can plausibly conjecture that it’s hard from those things alone to get g^ab (mod p).  So then Alice and Bob share a secret unknown to the eavesdropper, which they didn’t before, and they can use that secret to start doing cryptography.

As far as anyone knows today, the best way to break Diffie-Hellman is simply by calculating discrete logarithms: that is, solving the problem of recovering a given only g and h=g^a (mod p).  At least on a classical computer, the fastest known algorithm for discrete logarithms (over fields of prime order) is the number field sieve (NFS).  Under plausible conjectures about the distribution of “smooth” numbers, NFS uses time that grows like exp((1.923+o(1))(log p)^1/3(log log p)^2/3), where the exp and logs are base e (and yes, even the lower-order stuff like (log log p)^2/3 makes a big difference in practice).  Of course, once you know the running time of the best-known algorithm, you can then try to choose a key size (that is, a value of log(p)) that’s out of reach for that algorithm on the computing hardware of today.

(Note that the recent breakthrough of Antoine Joux, solving discrete log in quasipolynomial time in fields of small characteristic, also relied heavily on sieving ideas.  But there are no improvements from this yet for the “original” discrete log problem, over prime fields.)

But there’s one crucial further fact, which has been understood for at least a decade by theoretical cryptographers, but somehow was slow to filter out to the people who deploy practical cryptosystems.  The further fact is that in NFS, you can arrange things so that almost all the discrete-logging effort depends only on the prime number p, and not at all on the specific numbers g and h for which you’re trying to take the discrete log.  After this initial “precomputation” step, you then have a massive database that you can use to speed up the “descent” step: the step of solving g^a=h (mod p), for any (g,h) pair that you want.

It’s a little like the complexity class P/poly, where a single, hard-to-compute “advice string” unlocks exponentially many inputs once you have it.  (Or a bit more precisely, one could say that NFS reveals that exponentiation modulo a prime number is sort of a trapdoor one-way function, except that the trapdoor information is subexponential-size, and given the trapdoor, inverting the function is still subexponential-time, but a milder subexponential than before.)

The kicker is that, in practice, a large percentage of all clients and servers that use Diffie-Hellman key exchange use the same few prime numbers p.  This means that, if you wanted to decrypt a large fraction of all the traffic encrypted with Diffie-Hellman, you wouldn’t need to do NFS over and over: you could just do it for a few p‘s and cache the results.  This fact can singlehandedly change the outlook for breaking Diffie-Hellman.

The story is different depending on the key size, log(p).  In the 1990s, the US government insisted on “export-grade” cryptography for products sold overseas (what a quaint concept!), which meant that the key size was restricted to 512 bits.  For 512-bit keys, Adrian et al. were able to implement NFS and use it to do the precomputation step in about 7 days on a cluster with a few thousand cores.  After this initial precomputation step (which produced 2.5GB of data), doing the descent, to find the discrete log for a specific (g,h) pair, took only about 90 seconds on a 24-core machine.

OK, but no one still uses 512-bit keys, do they?  The first part of Adrian et al.’s paper demonstrates that, because of implementation issues, even today you can force many servers to “downgrade” to the 512-bit, export-grade keys—and then, having done so, you can stall for time for 90 seconds as you figure out the session key, and then do a man-in-the-middle attack and take over and impersonate the server.  It’s an impressive example of the sort of game computer security researchers have been playing for a long time—but it’s really just a warmup to the main act.

As you’d expect, many servers today are configured more intelligently, and will only agree to 1024-bit keys.  But even there, Adrian et al. found that a large fraction of servers rely on just a single 1024-bit prime (!), and many of the ones that don’t rely on just a few other primes.  Adrian et al. estimate that, for a single 1024-bit prime, doing the NFS precomputation would take about 45 million years using a single core—or to put it more ominously, 1 year using 45 million cores.  If you built special-purpose hardware, that could go down by almost two orders of magnitude, putting the monetary cost at a few hundred million dollars, completely within the reach of a sufficiently determined nation-state.  Once the precomputation was done, and the terabytes of output stored in a data center somewhere, computing a particular discrete log would then take about 30 days using 1 core, or mere minutes using a supercomputer.  Once again, none of this is assuming any algorithmic advances beyond what’s publicly known.  (Of course, it’s possible that the NSA also has some algorithmic advances; even modest ones could obviate the need for special-purpose hardware.)

While writing this post, I did my own back-of-the-envelope, and got that using NFS, calculating a 1024-bit discrete log should be about 7.5 million times harder than calculating a 512-bit discrete log.  So, extrapolating from the 7 days it took Adrian et al. to do it for 512 bits, this suggests that it might’ve taken them about 143,840 years to calculate 1024-bit discrete logs with the few thousand cores they had, or 1 year if they had 143,840 times as many cores (since almost all this stuff is extremely parallelizable).  Adrian et al. mention optimizations that they expect would improve this by a factor of 3, giving us about 100 million core-years, very similar to Adrian et al.’s estimate of 45 million core-years (the lower-order terms in the running time of NFS might account for some of the remaining discrepancy).

Adrian et al. mount a detailed argument in their paper that all of the details about NSA’s “groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities” that we learned from the Snowden documents match what would be true if the NSA were doing something like the above.  The way Alex put it to me is that, sure, the NSA might not have been doing this, but if not, then he would like to understand why not—for it would’ve been completely feasible within the cryptanalytic budget they had, and the NSA would’ve known that, and it would’ve been a very good codebreaking value for the money.

Now that we know about this weakness of Diffie-Hellman key exchange, what can be done?

The most obvious solution—but a good one!—is just to use longer keys.  For decades, when applied cryptographers would announce some attack like this, theorists like me would say with exasperation: “dude, why don’t you fix all these problems in one stroke by just, like, increasing the key sizes by a factor of 10?  when it’s an exponential against a polynomial, we all know the exponential will win eventually, so why not just go out to where it does?”  The applied cryptographers explain to us, with equal exasperation in their voices, that there are all sorts of reasons why not, from efficiency to (maybe the biggest thing) backwards-compatibility.  You can’t unilaterally demand 2048-bit keys, if millions of your customers are using browsers that only understand 1024-bit keys.  On the other hand, given the new revelations, it looks like there really will be a big push to migrate to larger key sizes, as the theorists would’ve suggested from their ivory towers.

A second, equally-obvious solution is to stop relying so much on the same few prime numbers in Diffie-Hellman key exchange.  (Note that the reason RSA isn’t vulnerable to this particular attack is that it inherently requires a different composite number N for each public key.)  In practice, generating a new huge random prime number tends to be expensive—taking, say, a few minutes—which is why people so often rely on “standard” primes.  At the least, we could use libraries of millions of “safe” primes, from which a prime for a given session is chosen randomly.

A third solution is to migrate to elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC), which as far as anyone knows today, is much less vulnerable to descent attacks than the original Diffie-Hellman scheme.  Alas, there’s been a lot of understandable distrust of ECC after the DUAL_EC_DBRG scandal, in which it came out that the NSA backdoored some of NIST’s elliptic-curve-based pseudorandom generators by choosing particular parameters that it knew how handle.  But maybe the right lesson to draw is mod-p groups and elliptic-curve groups both seem to be pretty good for cryptography, but the mod-p groups are less good if everyone is using the same few prime numbers p (and those primes are “within nation-state range”), and the elliptic-curve groups are less good if everyone is using the same few parameters.  (A lot of these things do seem pretty predictable with hindsight, but how many did you predict?)

Many people will use this paper to ask political questions, like: hasn’t the NSA’s codebreaking mission once again usurped its mission to ensure the nation’s information security?  Doesn’t the 512-bit vulnerability that many Diffie-Hellman implementations still face, as a holdover from the 1990s export rules, illustrate why encryption should never be deliberately weakened for purposes of “national security”?  How can we get over the issue of backwards-compatibility, and get everyone using strong crypto?  People absolutely should be asking such questions.

But for readers of this blog, there’s one question that probably looms even larger than those of freedom versus security, openness versus secrecy, etc.: namely, the question of theory versus practice.  Which “side” should be said to have “won” this round?  Some will say: those useless theoretical cryptographers, they didn’t even know how their coveted Diffie-Hellman system could be broken in the real world!  The theoretical cryptographers might reply: of course we knew about the ability to do precomputation with NFS!  This wasn’t some NSA secret; it’s something we discussed openly for years.  And if someone told us how Diffie-Hellman was actually being used (with much of the world relying on the same few primes), we could’ve immediately spotted the potential for such an attack.  To which others might reply: then why didn’t you spot it?

Perhaps the right lesson to draw is how silly such debates really are.  In the end, piecing this story together took a team that was willing to do everything from learning some fairly difficult number theory to coding up simulations to poring over the Snowden documents for clues about the NSA’s budget.  Clear thought doesn’t respect the boundaries between disciplines, or between theory and practice.

(Thanks very much to Nadia Heninger and Neal Koblitz for reading this post and correcting a few errors in it.  For more about this, see Bruce Schneier’s post or Matt Green’s post.)

FROM:  Flavros, Great Duke of Hell

TO:  Mammon, Prince of Hell

RE:  Children’s Wing

Hey, Manny —

Sorry to interrupt you on your vacation.  I hear Florida is really nice this time of year; here’s hoping you get a chance to stop in on Merihem at Wet ‘n’ Wild.  I don’t want to take any time out of your and Debbie’s schedule, but this whole thing is turning in to a total clusterfuck.

As you know, the Equal Infernal Opportunity Commission laws passed back in 1999 — and, more relevantly, the revised No Child Left Undamned Act of 2004 — requires us to provide equal facilities for all lost and condemned souls, regardless of religion, gender, race, and, most importantly, age.  This has seen very mixed results; Carnivale and his team are doing very exciting work in the area of eternal geriatric punishment, and teenagers are taking to this place like cats to milk — they’re sulking and complaining at nearly seven times the rate they did when they were alive.  But here in ToddlerTown (and I once again would like to emphasize my strong opposition to that name, regardless of what the marketing demons think), we’re running into one brick wall after another.

I don’t want to rehash our budgetary issues.  I know you’ve told me time and time again that there’s only so much money in the budget, but frankly, I still don’t get why all divisions are being funded equally when we’ve got so many more regulations, requirements, and basic needs to cover.  $1.5 billion seems like a fair amount to fund each age group, but we’ve got to child-proof everything, round off the sharp corners on all of our torture instruments, and run a background check on every imp to make sure they’re not illegals before we even bring in our first subject, whereas all the guys over in the Males 45-60 division have to do is show their subjects their old high school yearbooks.  Construction is going along at a snail’s pace because we have to keep putting covers on all the electrical sockets, the Dora the Explorer branding is bankrupting us, and to be honest, the Wiggles music is tormenting our own people a lot more than it is any of the kids.  It’ll be a miracle if we come in at $3.5 billion and it’s only May.  I don’t even want to think about what Christmas is going to be like around here.

Frankly, Manny, I’m beginning to question the wisdom of bringing toddlers in here at all.  Things were a lot simpler when we just sent them to Limbo along with heathen babies and people who don’t speak English as their native language.  I know that Rome fucked us on that one, but if we could just cut some kind of deal with Purgatory to put them in a big holding pen and parade a bunch of evil animals around in front of them until we can figure out something better, I think it would save us all a massive amount of headaches.  (This is a whole separate issue, but if you ask me, the list of sins that can get two- to five-year-olds condemned to an eternity in Hell is getting so big that I can’t help but suspect God just doesn’t want them tearing ass all over Heaven.)  Budgetary issues aside, it’s a huge sinkhole of labor costs and lost time; most of the male demons just ignore them and check their fantasy leagues while pretending they’re researching new and exciting punishments, while the females take tons of pictures of the kids and post them on Facebook.  It’s killing our data plan.

One of the biggest problems is that none of the kids react the way they’re supposed to with anything.  They’re not yet at the age of reason, but they’re a lot more reactive than infants (and while I’m on the topic of money, it seems pretty unfair that Verrier and I make the same salary when his shades spend 19 hours a day asleep), so most of the torments that we come up with are met with either blank stares or giggling.  Fire in particular is like cotton candy to these damn kids — and I don’t mean that metaphorically.  Give them a big wad of cotton candy or a shovel full of hot coals, they react exactly the same:  they smear it all over their faces, knock all the pens off of my desk, and then cry for 20 minutes if I tell them to put their shoes on so we can go to the lava pool.  The ball pit, made with iron balls circled in hellfire, was supposed to be the centerpiece of what the CEO called “our McDonaldLand PlayPlace of the Doomed”, but the kids all find it more delightful than horrifying.  We thought putting a thousand-fanged acid-tongued hydra at the bottom of the red plastic slide would really shake them up, but they fight over the privilege of jumping into his slathering maw.  And the most common response to the jack-in-the-box that says “YOUR PARENTS DON’T LOVE YOU” when it pops up is about two seconds of blowing raspberries and then running off to hit some poor demonic creature in the ears.

If I can make any process improvement recommendations moving forward, they would involve getting out from some of the safety regulations that we’re swamped with (honestly, we’re never going to manage to instill the terror of the damned into these kids if we aren’t even allowed to give them sugar after 11AM); be a little less strict about the pre-employment screenings (if we start encouraging the caregivers to let their charges wander off into some of the more hideous of the Nine Circles, instead of punishing them for it, we might see a real sea change); and really let ’em go all Lord of the Flies on each other instead of separating them according to that goofy personality test the CFO’s sister came up with (I don’t even understand the ratings system, or if a dragon is better or worse than a cantaloupe).  If things go on the way they are, they’re going to be running the place by the time you get back from the Keys, and they’re already a lot better at scaring us than we are at scaring them.

Hail Satan,

Flav

We're incredibly lucky in the Lib Dems that even when we have just 8 MPs, we still end up with 2 fantastic leadership candidates like Tim and Norman. Pity the poor Labour members, who are struggling to find any enthusiasm for the names currently appearing.

Norman would be a wonderful leader for the party - intelligent, well informed, incredibly hard working, terrific experience, steeped in liberalism and I hugely admire his work on mental health. If he wins, I will gladly follow him.

But I am supporting Tim Farron for the leadership.

There are 3 broad reasons.

1. Tim represents my own views

We justify the the last 5 years by crying (and endlessly listing) "look at all the brilliant things we've done". And that's fair enough. We have done many many fantastic things. But like the errant husband, betrayal is a bitter pill to swallow, no matter how many times you say you're sorry and point out that you've mowed the lawn beautifully and taken the bins out on time every day for 5 years. And many people still feel betrayed - and not just outside the party - by Lib Dem MPs supporting tuition fees, signing off on the original NHS white paper, secret courts, the bedroom tax...

I think to some degree, I'm one of them. I love that we're a party where members dictate policy - and I still can't shake off my disappointment, despite everything else, that too many times our MPs trooped through the wrong lobby, against party policy.

Tim largely did not do that. He largely voted the way I hope I would have done. Not every time by any means. But enough to make me feel he best represents my views.


2. Tim is not a conventional politician

I suspect he's had a lot of media training. I'm sure he chooses his words carefully. But there is a sense with Tim that what you see is what you get, that what you hear is really what he thinks. That there is no hidden side to him. He is distinctive , different, unusual even - and I want that in a leader. He is cut from a different cloth to most political leaders. And we need that.

3. He can unite the membership

I doubt there are many folk reading this blog who haven't either met Tim, seen him talk, had a direct e mail or a tweet from him. He's even had a pint with me in my local. He feels like one of us. He's a natural communicator. That's why so many members love him. And the country will love him too.


And then I have a fourth reason.

And it's this speech. Which outlines Tim's philosophical and intellectual position on liberalism. I believe him, it's what I believe. And imagine how dull Ed Miliband would have been making the same sort of speech





And in a nutshell - that speech is why I am supporting Tim Farron to be the next leader of the Lib Dems.

Hello!  Thank you for ordering the Harshstone Press 2015 catalog.

The world of children’s book publishing is a highly competitive arena, and with smart, literate parents demanding quality kid-lit at a higher rate than ever before, it’s not easy to stand out.  Here at Harshstone, we let our work speak for itself; rather than spending a lot of money on wasteful multimedia presentations, a fancy New York office, or celebrity authors who are just using their fame to cash in on an emerging market, we rely on our unique approach to convince you that we should be the #1 book publisher in your child’s life, not just the #3 book publisher in Great Falls, Montana.

Harshstone Publishing was founded in 1978 by James Edward Grell, a professor of electrical engineering and amateur taxidermist, and his wife, Lorena Sharkman-Grell, a children’s oncologist.  They brought their talents for art, storytelling, and commerce to bear on one fundamental agreement:  the books you read as a child are meant to prepare you for life as an adult.  The company has since passed on to their daughter, Phillycia Sharkman-Grell Petöcz, but she agrees with the philosophy on which her parents started Harshstone:  coddling children by teaching them nonsensical fantasies about friendship, harmony, and everyone getting along not only does them a disservice by failing to inform them about the cruelly competitive nature of reality, but does society a disservice by creating generations of coddled, delusional toddlers who don’t know the meaning of real pain and won’t eat their lunch because it doesn’t come in hilarious shapes or tap-dance.

For almost 40 years, Harshstone has shaped youngsters from petulant blobs of breast milk and co-dependence into solid blocks of balanced realism, and we’ve passed the savings on to you.  We already staked our claim as the leading budget children’s book in the marketplace by such innovative techniques as only printing on recycled newsprint; hiring editors for whom English is a second, or preferably third, language; and using only two colors in our printed material:  black and slightly diluted black.  This year, we’ve made our boldest cost-cutting measure ever by firing all of our staff artists and using only one of two dozen pieces of public domain clip art of hockey players as illustrations for our books.  It is by this measure, sponsored by our corporate partners at HockShottzz of Glentana, that we are able to offer you a price point of $0.65 on all our books for the 2015 season, easily the lowest of any children’s publishing house.

But just because we save on the flash (and continue to fulfill our mission statement by teaching children that the world is often a drab and disappointing place where there is little to do but sit inside alone looking at old photographs of the last few seconds of a power play) doesn’t mean we scrimp on the story.  We’ve still got all the terrific tales kids love the best, crafted by our in-house writing staff and his cousin, when available, to help you help your sons and daughters become adequately prepared for a future of coping with drudgery, frustration, and occasional mild amusement.  Here are free previews of five of our most hotly anticipated titles for this publishing season; we look forward to serving you.

Mommy Had Margaritas (Carl Stuckfeather & Hettie Gretch):  In this delightful story aimed at children 3-6, Dad humorously explains the specific circumstances behind your child’s accidental conception and birth while making a cocktail for cranky Mom.  At the end of the story, it is clear that although no one wanted the child, or really even loves it all that much, the parents understand that they have a legal responsibility to care for it.

Fun with Shapes (Donald Quarkmesser & “Dr. Don”):  For infants and toddlers, everything is new, and nothing is more exciting than simple shapes and objects.  In “Dr. Don’s” latest book, following on the heels of Animals Don’t Have Feelings and Blankie’s Date with the Trash-Man, newborns are introduced to all manner of thrilling squares, ovals, triangles, and rhombuses, in three pleasing gradients of grayscale.  After reading the names of each shape, “Dr. Don” explains that the shapes do not have any degree of sentience, and, as they are simply images on paper, they cannot possibly be friends.

On the Job with Uncle Steve (Bane Horselover, Morton Horselover, and Savumiamurthy Muralidarian):  Part of the wildly popular “On the Job With” series, this installment finds middle-schoolers accompanying Uncle Steve to his job as a programmer for a start-up that aims to revolutionize the way people put on socks.  Kids will learn valuable lessons about economics, productivity, and failing to meet weekly deliverables as they join Steve in the Nap Cube, follow Steve to a meeting where he is loudly berated by a man 14 years younger than he is and wearing a Super Mario World t-shirt, and help Steve to fill out the forms for the unemployment insurance he will fail to collect after the start-up folds because he was categorized as an “independent contractor”.

Mooble the Gooble (Janet Fong Semperfi):  Mooble the Gooble is a Stick-Legged Stooble, and that makes the other Stoobles mad!  They make fun of Mooble the Gooble, which makes him plenty mad, but because he lacks money, social capital, and the willpower to engage in violent aggression, he just has to sit there and take it.  By reading the wacky adventures of Mooble the Gooble, kids will learn that they will often be mocked and belittled for standing out in any way, and that their best option in most cases is to accept their fate with equanimity.

Amy Spattlebank’s Kooky Cookie Prom Adventure (Seamus Adelman):  It’s prom night, and once again, Amy Spattlebank is marching to her own drummer:  instead of going to the dance, she’s going to stay home, look through her parents’ pantry, and come up with an elaborate and pointless spreadsheet comparing various data from cookie and snack cracker packages.  Rated five stars by Dysfunctional Asperger’s Quarterly in the 17,850-word review from their Dated March of 2015 But Will Actually Be Released in Late December of the Previous Year issue.

10. The Best Things in Life are Worth Staying Up For

David Letterman has been at CBS since 1993. Even back in the 90s when the so-called "Late Night Wars" were at their peak, there was a sense that late night TV was a dying enterprise. When Johnny Carson retired, it was clear that he could never be replaced, and not simply because of his talent or personality. The culture was already moving past the idea of three-network dominance, appointment viewing, late-night button-down white guys sitting behind a desk telling jokes. It wasn't just Arsenio Hall, and it wasn't just cable, but those were big parts of it. The idea of a monolithic American culture apparatus (if such a thing ever existed outside of the idea itself) was already splintering, and would not leave the decade intact.

In that sense, at least, David Letterman was a perfect fit for the times. He wasn't Carson, and would never have the ability to reach across demographics the way Carson had done. He was rough, with too many sharp edges, and - fatally - without the ability to reassure his audience that they were always in on the jokes. He was cool in a way that appealed to college kids and city dwellers. He took risks to be funny, and part of those risks was alienating people who weren't willing to meet him halfway.

It's odd to think of it, now - he had a nightly talk show on NBC for over a decade, but the media landscape was such that he could still be considered a cult proposition. Your dad or grandpa turned the TV off when Carson was over, and that was when the kids turned in to Letterman. It wasn't quite like that in my household. My parents were always fairly agnostic on Carson (they are both - from my perspective - remarkably anti-nostalgic in regards to the pop culture of their youths), but they were Late Night fans from very early on, and they passed that on to me. So this was the game: Friday nights, holidays, and Summer vacation, it was time to stay up and watch Letterman. Maybe if I was lucky I could make it through the monologue, the Top Ten list, and the first guest. I figured out how to use the VCR (which wasn't that easy) so that I could record the show when I wanted, when the TV Guide said there was a good musical guest. There's a chance that old VHS tapes containing episodes of Letterman with They Might Be Giants and Richard Thompson as musical guests still remain hidden somewhere in my parents' house.

And this was what the cool kids did in the 1980s. And if that sounds facetious, it wasn't, not at all. Irony had not yet conquered the world, but Letterman was the prophet.

9. It's OK to be the Smartest Guy in the Room

Letterman didn't give a fuck what you thought about him. That, especially, is hard to discern now: it's not like his attitude has appreciably changed, but he's become an elder statesman by default, avuncular and deeply respect and beloved even by the kinds of people who slept through his 80s heyday. But if you go to YouTube and watch any of the old episodes of Late Night archived there, you immediately see the difference.

He was born in Indiana but every bit the New Yorker. He spoke fast and thought faster. He wasn't afraid to filet any guest who dared cross him. Of course that would have rankled people. If you were used to Carson's kind patience with guests of all stripes, from the A-list to 15-minute-famous civilians, the idea that a talk-show host might bite back must have seemed not simply strange, but utterly mean-spirited.

But the rules were simple: if you came to play, Dave was more than happy to play. If you weren't on board with that, you might be in trouble. Tony Randall was one of Letterman's greatest guests, and not just because he happened to live in the neighborhood and could always be counted on to fill-in for a last-minute cancellation. Randall liked to play, and Dave liked having someone on board with whom he could spar for fifteen minutes. It was unpredictable and sometimes disastrous, but when it worked it was sublime. Guests who would have been completely DOA on another format - folks like Andy Kaufman, Harvey Pekar, and Crispin Glover - were welcome to be as cranky or unpleasant as they could be, because the understanding was that a disastrous interview was more memorable and enjoyable than a mediocre chat. Even late into his CBS run he was able to conjure up magical moments like Joaquin Phoenix's dada interview, humiliating on the face of it but riveting for the obvious relish Letterman still enjoyed at being able to sharpen his wit against a moving target - who had, regardless of his motivations, obviously come to play.

He nourished long-term public feuds with the likes of Cher because it was funny, and the rough-edges were part of the appeal. If Letterman hadn't existed, it would have been necessary for Madonna to invent him - the perfect rascally foil, unwilling to play the same old celebrity game with someone so obviously adept at playing that game to their own advantage. His later attempts to manufacture a spat with Oprah, while less engaging, were still funny because they proved he was still adept at leveraging other celebrities' supposed strengths into surprising vulnerabilities. For Letterman, there was and remains nothing more absurd than the idea of being a celebrity, and if you didn't get that, you weren't going to get on well with Dave.

8. It's OK to be a Smartass

Letterman is an intelligent man and the impatience with which he sometimes confronted his guests was matched by the impatience he approached much of the rest of the world. The banality of stupidity has always been one of the major motors of his comedy. That's one reason why even his most absurd bits carried a bite. The world is a pretty silly place, and sometimes the only rational response to this kind of silliness is to become silly yourself.

This is the worldview of the smartass, the guy cracking wise in the back of the classroom because his mind is working twice as fast as everyone around him and he just can't be bothered to slow down or pretend not to care. It's a form of cynicism, sure. But cynicism has a bad rap. No one wants to be called a cynic, but there's nothing dishonorable in holding fast to the belief that humans are often motivated by greed, ignorance, or self-regard. That observation is central to most forms of comedy, certainly most memorable comedy, from Aristophanes through to Richard Pryor. So while Letterman has often been criticized for being a prime contributor to the rise of irony in the 90s, and the corollary culture of cynicism pilloried by conservative and centrist ideologues for the past few decades, any critique that focuses on the negative effects of cynicism ignores the root cause of such cynicism - that is, the deep gulf between ideal and reality, and the corrosive effect of hypocrisy. Don't blame Letterman for ushering in an age of ironic disconnection (as per David Foster Wallace), blame the age which mandated the use of irony as a necessary survival mechanism.

7. Tradition is Important, Except When it Isn't

As much of an iconoclast as Letterman has always been, he is also a sincere traditionalist. He was Johnny Carson's anointed heir, after all. For over thirty years he used his shows as a venue to introduce new talent, both comedic and musical, in much the same way as Carson had done for him. He deeply respected longtime broadcast fixtures like Regis Philbin and Jack Hanna. He never missed an opportunity to spotlight older comedians who had influenced him. He loved nothing more than spotlighting older artists who had perhaps been left behind, figures such as Warren Zevon and Darlene Love. Even though he was an Indiana Presbyterian, he maintained a vital connection to the tradition of New York Jewish comedians of the kind who rose to prominence in Vaudeville and the resorts of the Borscht Belt. He was careful with those jokes, because they were antiques.

But his respect for these traditions was matched by his willingness to warp and break convention when necessary. Although he worshiped at the alter of Carson, his show was largely defined by the conscious attempt to break away from Carson's mold, a necessity bred by the network's insistence that Letterman avoid simply replicating Carson's formula an hour later. Late Night, especially in the early years, was defined by an enthusiastic desire to break from formula, to take conceptual risks, to potentially alienate anyone who wandered in simply because they didn't feel like turning off the television after the credits rolled on The Tonight Show.

6. Humility First, Last and Everything in Between

Letterman has never been shy about broadcasting his anxieties and insecurities regarding his own abilities. He's a notorious grump, a tendency born from an oft-repeated conviction of his own shortcomings.

With this in mind, Letterman's most endearing trait is his willingness to lean into his own imperfections. He gets a lot of mileage out of his face, not conventionally handsome by any standard, gap-toothed and curly haired, a face made for radio if ever there was. Gaffes and bloopers, both his and others, became one of the show's most enduring preoccupations. Even after he had moved to CBS and the show became a much slicker, far less (intentionally) ramshackle affair, he still maintained a looseness that belied the slick craftsmanship required to produce a nightly talk show. This was a stroke of genius, as it allowed him the freedom to embrace accidents when they occurred. Even through to the very end, Letterman maintained an air of wry dissatisfaction, a faux-ironic exasperation that you might associate with a man who long ago made peace with his status as an imperfect creature in an imperfect universe - "trapped in a world he never made."

5. Living Well is the Best Revenge

The Late Night Wars seem in retrospect like the silliest pop culture phenomena conceivable. Two larger-than-life TV comedians fought a brutal dynastic struggle over possession of The Tonight Show. NBC gave the spot to Jay Leno, despite Letterman's success in the 12:30 AM spot, and regardless of Carson's own probable preferences.

As awful as it might have seemed, NBC made the logical choice. Letterman wasn't quite ready for prime time, certainly not in a way that would ensure a smooth continuity between Carson's tenure and that of his successor. Jay Leno was at one point a very funny man, highly respected by his fellow comedians. But when he accepted the job as Carson's replacement the understanding was that he would continue to steer the ship with the same kind of centrist mass appeal that had made Carson such a beloved figure. And he did. Sometimes he was even still funny.

The problems for Leno were twofold. The first obstacle was that, despite his success as a host and brand caretaker, he accepted the job as a kind of poisoned chalice. For most of his tenure he maintained a respectable lead on Letterman, capturing the larger part of the mythical "middle American" viewer who simply disliked Letterman on principle. But for critics and fans of comedy, he was forever branded, uncool at best and a betrayer at worst. He may have been consistently more popular than Letterman, but he could never close the "cool" gap.

The second problem was a media landscape teetering on the brink of seismic change. The age of monolithic consensus figures in American broadcasting was coming to a close. Johnny didn't need to be "cool" and he never suffered from being "uncool" - he simply was, in the same manner as Walter Cronkite. (I'd argue that the closest we still have to such a figure, oddly, is Alex Trebek - his eventual departure from Jeopardy will represent almost as significant a shift as Letterman's goodbye.) But suddenly there were choices, and in a world of choices the very idea of centralized media landmarks became laughable. Jay Leno was no Johnny Carson. The culture no longer needed Johnny Carson.

Fast forward to 2010. Regardless of his success, Leno's broadcast career shuddered to a close in the most dismal manner possible. Despite a well-intentioned attempt to avoid the same rancor that had marked Leno's ascension to the post, his retirement from The Tonight Show proved even more contentious than Carson's. Leno publicly named Conan O'Brien as his successor. He left amicably and O'Brien took over. The problem was that O'Brien was even more of a niche figure than Letterman had been, and ratings fell accordingly. NBC tried to stem the bleeding by giving Leno a new slot at 10:00 PM, essentially an opportunity to do The Tonight Show an hour earlier, to appease affiliates desperate for a stronger local news lead-in. The attempt failed. O'Brien was fired. Leno returned to The Tonight Show for another four years, before retiring again in 2014, his reputation obliterated.

Because Letterman was widely perceived as having been betrayed by NBC in 1992, he had the moral high ground throughout the decades of his competition with Leno. He grew in stature while Leno shrank. He leaves The Late Show universally adored and respected, a towering figure in American broadcasting history. Leno leaves no legacy, save as a cautionary tale.

4. Don't be a Creeper

Unfortunately, Letterman fell victim to his own vices. If he had more professional integrity than Leno, he occasionally overstepped the bounds of personal propriety. He has an uncomfortable history in regards to his treatment of attractive female guests. Sometimes it was all fun and games, and sometimes he veered into shady territory - as a respected male authority figure, sitting across the desk from some of Hollywood's most attractive starlets, crossing boundaries in a manner that seems more regrettable with every passing year.

Of course, some of his strongest bonds were forged with female guests with whom he shared a sincere affection, and even attraction - stalwart friends such as Teri Garr, Julia Roberts, and even Blake Lively. But sometimes his randy old man schtick became too much, and because of his authority the behavior passed mostly unremarked.

3. When You Do Wrong, Fess Up

It seems perverse to praise a man simply for apologizing when caught in the act of wrongdoing, but that's the world we live in. Considering the degree to which almost every celebrity or political scandal is met with evasion, obfuscation, lies, or legal action, the spectacle of a famous man - one of the most famous men - stepping in front of the scandal and admitting his mistakes in the most candid manner possible was remarkable. It remains remarkable. What should be regarded as the rock bottom of human decency - the willingness to admit wrongdoing and meaningfully apologize - is so rare that Letterman's principled admission immediately became the gold standard for public accountability and integrity. It could even be argued that the novelty of his admission deflected a great deal of legitimate criticism that might otherwise have further corroded his public image.

But whatever else can be said about him, Letterman abhors hypocrisy. He couldn't stand the idea of being a hypocrite himself, so much so that when cornered by the evidence of his own malfeasance he faced the consequences as boldly as possible. He hurt a lot of people and acted terribly, but rather than compounding the problem by prolonging the conflict he simply admitted his liability and expressed his contrition. It's not our responsibility to forgive him, but his actions in the years since the scandal reveal a chastened man, deeply dedicated to his family and conscious of the ways in which his abusive behavior nearly cost him everything. Better men have lost their careers for less, but his unexpected apology saved him. He'll always have that asterisk on his legacy, but it will be paired with another enduring lesson: the virtue of a man lies not in perfection, but his confrontation with imperfection.

2. Even Pioneers are Forgotten

Last week I was having a drink with friends and mentioned that, since learning that Letterman was leaving, I had set a recording on my DVR and was watching every show leading up to the finale. The folks I was out with were just a few years younger than me - but just a few years was enough. No one at the table understood why Letterman was a big deal, had been one of the most influential personalities in the history of TV. Wasn't he just another old white guy behind a desk?

Of course, in the heat of the moment you can never find the words to marshal the perfect rebuttal. I stuttered out something bland about being "influential." Nothing particularly convincing. But in that instant it clicked for me that in order to understand why David Letterman was important, you needed to have been alive and paying attention during a surprisingly narrow window of time. Letterman made his name in the 1980s, and although he's been consistent and consistently good for most of his career since, the reason people who know speak with such reverence is that they remember when there was nothing at all like him on the television. Now, everybody is like him, in some way or another. No one with an ounce of conviction wants to be Jay Leno.

His medium was transient. He never had a string of best-selling comedy records that new generations can rediscover for years to come. He never did movies. He hasn't done stand-up in decades. The innovations he introduced over the course of many years have been so subsumed into the television landscape that simply just explaining that he was the first to do or say or be something or other isn't enough - there's no existing context for how strange it was, at the time, to put a TV camera on the back of a monkey, or get into shouting matches with belligerent guests, or pay a weird old man with coke-bottle glasses to stand there and scream at the camera. There was no such thing as viral video back then, so if you saw something truly special on Late Night the best you could do was hope to pick it up on summer reruns, or find a friend who just happened to have been recording the show on their VCR. Because that's something we did back then.

But that's OK. Even if talk shows are the most ephemeral of all television programs he'll be remembered for a while to come, even if the specifics of his career and influence eventually fade. For historians and scholars, he'll remain important. The people who were inspired by him will, in turn, inspire others, and so on for the foreseeable future. Those of us who remember his prime will cherish the memories for as long as we're around, but our children will cherish other memories, and that's OK, too.

1. The Only Safe Target is Yourself

It's been remarked so often that it threatens to become a cliche: comedians should always punch up, never down. Letterman, in his decades-long crusade against hypocrisy, did a good job of observing this rule. Sure, there were jokes at the expense of small-town yokels and clueless tourists, the usual late-night fare. But he always reserved the larger part of his scorn for politicians, corporations, ignorant celebrities, and other men and women of influence. If you were famous, if you took yourself too seriously, you were fair game.

But the biggest target was always himself. His insecurity, his anxiety, his goofy looks, his shortcomings as a comedian and a host, his moral and ethical lapses - the cruelest wounds were self-inflicted. And this is vital, if you appreciate Letterman for no other reason, you must remember that as scathing and cynical as he could be, he was never more critical of anything or anyone than of himself. That imprinted on me at a very young age. You can't be critical of others if you can't be critical of yourself. Honesty in regards to your own faults is disarming. Self-critique can also become a means of protection. If you broadcast your faults with honesty, you're cutting your critics off at the knees.

Making fun of yourself is endearing because so few people do it effectively, and it can also make people uncomfortable when wielded strategically. Maintaining control of a situation while acknowledging the element of unpredictability is one of the most valuable skills a person can have. Loyalty matters. Acknowledge your elders before rejecting them. Make time to thank everyone. Enjoy every sandwich.

Spoilers & Triggers


So, Sansa and Ramsey.

Well, it was totally necessary because it shows rape is bad, which we didn’t already know…

Oh, hang on, we did.

Well, some people don’t understand how bad rape is, and this’ll make them see that they were wrong…

Oh no, hang on, it proably won’t.

Well, it was necessary for the plot.

Er… no.  And even if it had been, plots are things people make, not things that grow by themselves.

But it was in the book, wasn’t it?

Um… no, it wasn’t.  In fact they had to rewrite the storyline from the books quite extensively to make it possible.  And even if it had been in the book, that wouldn't bind them to include it.

But at least it was germaine to the text, like the rape scene in, say, The Accused…

Umm… except that this is a show about dragons and magic in a fairytale kingdom.

But at least it shows the horrors of the treatment of women in the middle ages…

Except that this show isn’t set in the middle ages in the real world…

But, being set in a fictionalised version of the middle ages, the show has a mandate to cover medieval misogyny…

Um, no.  Not necessarily.

Well, at least it's broaching a topic it's been silent about up until now?

Except that it hasn’t been.  In fact, it's looked at violence against women, sexual or otherwise, in what some might say is pitilessly and cynically unnecessary depth and detail.

But it handled it tastefully and unsensationally and in a way that nobody could possibly get off on watching in any kind of creepy, woman-hating way…

Um…

But it at least advanced the characters’ progress towards… er…

Well, at least it told us stuff we didn’t know about the characters, like Ramsey’s a sadist and a misogynist, and Sansa can put up with cruel treatment.

Um…

Well, it’s good for headlines and ratings, so that justifies it.  I guess.

Er...

Well, it was edgy.  ZOMG, they are so hardcore and dark, man.  Yay for them.

Tim Farron has, famously, compared the resilience of the Liberal Democrats in the face of discouragement to the supposed indestructibility of cockroaches even after nuclear war. Paddy Ashdown too, often praises the strength of will of the activists of the party. In the face of the worst general election result in more than half a century, the surge in membership applications for the Liberal Democrats is a small sign of optimism after the disaster. Yet the scale of defeat is so large that to rebuild in any conventional way will take many decades. Indeed, with the significant economic, social and demographic changes underway in British society, the grim truth is that a recovery in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats may not be possible at all. Meanwhile all of us are working through the stages of grief that this defeat has caused us.

Some time in the last millennium, just after t.c Blair had become Prime Minister, I wrote the following. It is worth re-reading, because absolutely nothing in it still applies today. 

If I wrote it now, I might say that the Red Party supported "sharing" or "fairness" rather than "equality". I might also push the idea that the Red and the Blue are rather like Moorcock's Lords of Order and Chaos: both sides can look like "goodies" and both sides can look like "baddies" but the really important thing is that neither side ever be allowed to gain the upper hand. I suppose that means Vince Cable is the Cosmic Balance and Nick Clegg is Elric.

I thank Mike Taylor for reminding me of this piece. Go read his blog https://reprog.wordpress.com/ . His stuff on the election is better than mine. It contains facts and evidence and everything. (He also wrote a good thing about Doctor Who.)

British Politics Explained

[No-one seems to be reading or commenting on this series, but what the heck: I’ve started, so I’ll finish. See part 1 on the Conservatives, part 2 on the SNP and part 3 on Labour.]

Today, in a Liberal Democrat piece on the Conservatives’ plans to repeal the Human Rights Act, I read this:

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. We champion the freedom, dignity and well-being of individuals, we acknowledge and respect their right to freedom of conscience.

Now that is inspiring.

But what did we get from the Liberal Democrats in the election?

Who could be be inspired by that?

This is not just useless. It doesn’t even rise to the level of “useless”. It’s a complete abdication of what the Liberal Democrats are about. Their campaign gave people literally nothing to vote for. It just gave them two people to vote against. “We’re not Ed Miliband or David Cameron. Vote for us!”

Yes, the LibDems got punished for having been part of a very unsatisfactory government. Yes, they can legitimately complain that they put the interests of the nation ahead of theirs as a party, and ought to get more credit for that. Yes, the electorate blamed them for not being able to prevent Conservative policies, which isn’t really fair. All sorts of “yes but”s.

But the bottom line is that people want to vote for something. People vote Tory because they think (rightly or wrongly) that Conservatives will give them a strong economy. They vote Labour because they think that means more equality between rich and poor (again, rightly or wrongly).

What do people vote Liberal Democrat for?

The answer has to be all the things in the quote that opened this post: fair, free and open society, liberty, equality, community, freedom, dignity and well-being of individuals, freedom of conscience.

Those are things to vote for. Not “We plan to take a slightly different approach to reducing the deficit that’s sort of in between what Cameron and Miliband would do.”

[On to #5: why UKIP won 12% of the vote but only one seat]

It feels odd to recall that the general election was just two weeks ago. It was a campaign where nothing seemed to happen, and then an election that pulled the rug out from under a lot of us and radically changed British politics. Two weeks ago, I was thinking that we’d be arguing over coalition wrangling right now, not a leadership election. Instead, we find ourselves with the party in the worst position its been in for at least four decades and the question we’re being asked is now a simple one of how do we survive this?

Leadership elections are often focused on issues of policy, tactics and organisation, because they can assume that the fundamental questions of party strategy and survival have been answered. The election has shown that we can’t assume that the Liberal Democrats will remain around just because we always have, but the result has shown that there is a greater need for liberalism in the UK, and if we don’t fight for it, then who will? Other parties may occasionally adopt the odd liberal policy, but that doesn’t make their cores any less authoritarian, and some may adopt liberal rhetoric to argue for illiberal ends, imagining that freedom can be reduced to nothing more than consumer choice but saying nothing about challenging unaccountable power.

The temptation at a time like this is to turn in on ourselves, contemplate our collective navel for the next year or two and then gingerly step back out onto the political stage with a suitably tweaked message and image. We could do that, and find that while we were away the Government has swept away the Human Rights Act, introduced mass surveillance of the entire population, slashed the welfare budget, put Britain on the path to an EU exit, privatised everything that’s not nailed down, and set in place the break up of the country. This is a time that liberalism needs to be bold and out there, defending rights, standing up for a fairer and more equal society and championing internationalism.

Whoever is the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, their main job for the next few years is to lead the fight for liberal values and build a liberal movement (not just a party) that can fight for those values. For me, the person who can do that better than anyone else in the party is Tim Farron. Watch his 2014 speech at party conference where he sets out the importance of liberal values in dealing with the issues we face now:

More than that, Tim understands that liberalism needs to be a proactive force, not just a reactive one. His call to build a new consensus is an important one and an understanding that politics shouldn’t just be about adapting to the current political situation and tacking from side to side within the current consensus, but seeking to redefine the tiny frame British politics is conducted within. If we’re serious about making liberalism relevant, the way forward isn’t to jump into the rapidly narrowing space between the other parties but to be proud and unashamed about making the case for truly liberal values.

Tim fits in with my vision of what liberalism should be and what it needs to be in the 21st century: an idea that stands up for people against unaccountable power in all its forms and an idea that challenges the assumptions of the political consensus, arguing for real change, and a better life for everyone. Liberalism should be out there challenging the status quo, insisting that there’s a better way, and building a wide movement to win that fight. As a party right now we need a leader who can campaign hard and push forward those liberal values.

Tim Farron is the right candidate at the right time for our party, and that’s why I’m supporting him to be the next leader of the Liberal Democrats.

(Warning for those who need it: discussion of rape scenes in storytelling)

So, many years ago, when I was still a very young writer, I made the acquaintance of Pamela Wallace, and she and I became friends. At the time I was a film critic, and she was a screenwriter — and not just a screenwriter, but one who had won an Oscar, for her work on Witness. She also wrote novels, which were at the time something I was thinking about doing at some point. So she and I talked a lot about movies and stories and the writing life. She was a very cool mentor for a young writer to have.

One day I was over at her house and I was talking to her about a story idea I had; I can’t specifically remember what the story idea was, but I vaguely recall it being some sort Silence of the Lambs-esque thriller, in which an investigator and a serial killer matched wits, you know, as they do. And at some point, I dragged the investigator’s wife into the story, because, as I was, like, 24 years old and didn’t know a whole hell of a lot, I thought it would be an interesting character note for the investigator, and a good plot development for the book, for the serial killer to basically rape and torture the wife —

— at which point Pamela immediately went from interested to disgusted, threw up her hands, and had them make motions that I immediately interpreted as oh God Oh God this horrible idea of yours get it off me right now.

Aaaaand that was really the last time I ever considered rape as an interesting character note or plot device. Because, I don’t know. If you’re a 24-year-old wannabe fiction writer and an Oscar-winning storyteller is physically repelled by your casual insertion of rape and violence against women in your story, mightn’t that be a sign of something? That maybe you should pay attention to? Perhaps?

Now, as I got older and became a more accomplished storyteller (and human), there turned out to be many other reasons for me to decide not to put those sorts of scenes willy-nilly into my books aside from “dude, you just disgusted your successful writer friend with your plot twist.” But I’m not going to lie and pretend that this very significant clue, dropped by my friend, did not in fact make a long-lasting impression.

Which continues to this day. I’ve written eleven novels now, most with lots of action, adventure, peril and danger to characters of several genders, and lots of tough scenes that show loss and violence (see: most of The Ghost Brigades). No rape scenes. They weren’t necessary for the narrative — and more concretely, as narratives to stories don’t just magically happen but are the result of the author’s intention, I chose not to make circumstances in my novels where they would be necessary.

Sadly, not every young male novice storyteller has a woman friend who is also an Oscar winner to set him straight on the errors of his shallow narrative ways. Would that they did! So for everyone else I would just say (and here I tip my hat to Robert Jackson Bennett, who wrote in more detail about this today) that while you can put these sorts of scenes into your work, maybe before you do, you should ask yourself why. Ask yourself what actual value they will bring to your work. Ask yourself if you are entirely sure about that value.

And while you’re asking yourself that, keep my friend Pamela’s reaction to my proposed rape scene in your head. She’s not alone in that reaction these scenes, nor was she wrong to have it. Neither are other people.

If I had been an MP in the last Parliament (stop thanking deities I wasn't back there!) I'd have had many second thoughts about voting for the same-sex marriage bill. I went over my reasons for that repeatedly during the debates but they are summed up here.

I state that as a way of saying I'm open-minded (a rare state for me, as you well know Dear Constant Reader) about those who may have had similar concerns about a very flawed bill and even those who abstained (but I'm far less open-minded about those who voted against it as it was clearly a step in the right direction and not worthy of total rejection!). Cheerleaders who hold the same-sex marriage act up as some amazing piece of progressive legislation will not get much of a warm reception from me.

Tim Farron, in the midst of a Lib Dem leadership campaign, has come under fire from his opponent Norman Lamb on the issue of same-sex marriage. I've seen some less well-informed Tweeple (especially non-LDs) claiming Tim Farron was against same-sex marriage. That is absolutely not true.

Farron voted for the same-sex marriage bill in its early stages. He abstained from voting during it's Third Reading. He states this was because of his concerns over protections for some religious communities and conscientious objectors.

I've expressed a great deal of concern regarding Farron's actions regarding some issues around religion in the past. So I'm no Tim Farron fanboy (though, for full disclosure, I am currently planning to vote for him). But, to give him his due, he has been unfailingly consistent in framing his stances on very clear individual liberty grounds. Some of his positions have made me feel uncomfortable but, I admit, have often made me consider whether I'm holding a position from the point of view of consistency or because of some prejudice I may have. And whenever I've engaged with him he has been willing to listen, to respond politely and to appear to consider other points of view.

Farron has made it clear he regrets that his abstention may be taken as a lack of support for same-sex marriage in principle and that he very much supports it and will defend it should it come under attack from the new Tory Government. We can't really ask for more than that now can we?

Well he could champion some of my concerns with regards to the act, of course... ;)

On Friday I went to the first day of Mark Sinker’s Underground/Overground conference, about the British music press from 1968-1985 – dates that spanned the rise of the underground press, its colonisation of the music papers, and the besieging or breaking of its spirit during the 80s, under competitive pressure from style and pop mags. Mark picked 1985 because of Live Aid, which was barely mentioned on the day I was there. But it was also the foundation, or first plottings at any rate, of Q Magazine, much booed and hissed as villain. And it was the year the miners’ strike ended: on the panel I moderated, Cynthia Rose mentioned how miners’ wives would turn up in the offices of the thoroughly politicised NME.

This era of the press is mythical – the time just before I began reading about music. Some of its stories and inhabitants were passed down to me. The NME ran a wary, slightly sarky assessment of its 80s at the end of them: if it had been “a market-leading socialist youth paper” – Rose’s phrase – it no longer cared to admit it. But the idea of missing something special lingered. I read and was left cold by Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff. I read and was quietly moved by Ian Macdonald’s collected writing. I read and revered Paul Morley’s Ask.

I even once ordered up a sheaf of 1975 NMEs from the Bodleian Library. This was its printed zenith as a cultural force – in terms of numbers, at least, which all the writers disdained, except when it suited them to boast. Circulation nudging a million, and it read that way – men (nearly always) telling boys (most likely) what to do, and knowing they’d be heard. The voice of the impatient older brother if we’re being kind. Of the prefect if we’re not. Later, I read the Schoolkids Issue of Oz, the magazine that put the underground press on trial and gave Charles Shaar Murray his start. It passed through my hands in 1997, almost thirty years on, a dispatch from a world that seemed completely lost. Full of mystique, of course. But it might as well have been the Boys Own Paper, for all it mattered then and there.

Could it matter? That was the question. The panelists mostly took the answer for granted. It was the pictures that got small. Their importance – in this little history – was self-evident. They confused it, perhaps, for relevance: but that exchange rate is not often favourable.

For myself, I was disappointed these guys seemed so unable to engage with music writing today. They saw nothing to engage with. Faced with questions about the present day, they were keener to assert their legacy than to understand it. I should save my criticisms of cantankery and bitterness until I’ve successfully dodged them: the conference made your fifties seem like an obstacle course. My gaggle of friends listened respectfully, at any rate – only once, when one panelist hymned the revolutionary virtue of listening to Sufjan on the car stereo, did we break into derisive giggles. It turns out I feel closer to people fifteen years younger than me than fifteen years older – but maybe everyone does.

There was still so much to enjoy. It was a beautifully sequenced event – the press built up and knocked down. Each panel had its own texture. Take the first – Richard Williams on the left, amused and sharp, feigning apology for being the straight press’ representative among underground legends, then slipping the stiletto between the ribs of their stories. Mark Williams on the right, laconic, full of pride at battles fought, reading the pile of International Times he’d brought along. In the middle, Shaar Murray himself, shades and a cane, a great performer and a nimble thinker, a treat to see in action. No moderator needed for that.

That panel reached furthest back, to the sixties. The fucking sixties again, right? But its most tantalising parts were glimpses of an earlier sixties, before The Sixties and its stories gentrified the place. A lived sixties, before the language and stances of rock writing hardened, before the fights about its importance were won. It takes careful work, as people are older now and repeating the legend is so seductive, but the most startling parts of the event were often the music critics’ prehistory as fans. (Imagine how rich – how much more diverse, too – the stories of people who didn’t become music critics must be.)

I listened with nervous attention to stories from my own prehistory – like the hostility between the NME and Smash Hits in the early 80s. I grew up on Smash Hits: later, I read Paul Morley and felt he was doing a very similar thing. I admired both: it was curious hearing his distaste for the magazine, his performance of not grasping the point of its silly questions. Morley’s Ask, and Smash Hits’ Biscuit Tin, and Tom Hibbert’s “Who The Hell -?” series in Q, all seemed to me aspects of the same technique – destabilise the interviewee, give them no more special treatment than they might earn on wits alone. Was asking a star’s favourite colour a stupid question? Maybe. Smash Hits knew it was a chance for a smart answer.

What was the rock press’ favourite colour? We could hazard a guess. The sharpest jabs I heard were contemporary, and raised by contemporaries like Paul Gilroy and Penny Reel – What about black music? Why so few women in the underground? Why so much praise for rock? Why so middle-class? Why remember the NME and not Blues And Soul? Whatever great things the undergrounds and the inkies passed down, they passed down these issues too – unresolved, left to grow and become more obvious. This unfinished business of the early music press became the business of subsequent generations of music writers. On some counts, the inheritors did far better.

Gilroy talked about “bromantic ethnographies of the NME” – I missed his panel but that phrase jumped at me on Twitter, and I laughed. But the sense of the work on an underground or weekly mag – the circus of sheer effort involved in bringing the bastard to land each week, that was grand to hear about, like a hundred years ago you might have heard men talk about life on a whaler. Here is where common ground might be found – the grind and the process now is different, but no less arduous. Perhaps less fun, if being smashed together with other people, pushed on at speed to care noisily about things is fun. That idea of fun was what sold the music press, or at least it did to me.

But could it matter? Here is the idea I came away with. There were two strands of work discussed here, two continuities, which existed in uneasy oscillation. (The clue, of course, is in the event’s title). One is – to quote Murray quoting an old editor – “about what the music’s about”. Life, sex, politics, idiocy, drugs, fashion, whatever. The other is about the music, and the stars – who sometimes include the writers. As to the first, the underground was never a music press. But the 80s NME wasn’t always one either: that “socialist youth paper” that put Arsenal’s Charlie Nicholas on the cover one week, Chaka Khan the next. Nor was ILX, an online community that tried to be about Music but found Everything flooding in. And nor is the warp and weft of a Twitter stream or Tumblr dashboard. These were and are places where music fights for its place amidst the beguiling clutter of culture. They tend not to make writers rich.

The second continuity – which doesn’t reveal itself easily as one, because different parts of it loathe each other – puts music at the centre and works at getting close to it. The cocksure gusto of the 70s NME, the avuncular common sense of Q, the delight in sound of early 90s Melody Maker, the earnest excavations of Pitchfork (or its UK equivalents): these might detest one another on a stylistic level, but it seems to me they have more in common than any of them do with Oz. The second continuity sometimes draws energy from the first – the NME reviving itself via the undergrounds, as told at Mark’s event – and sometimes reacts against it. Individuals cross and re-cross the tracks. But they’re not the same. Music is enough, says one voice. It never is, says the other.

Last week, our newly re-elected Prime Minister, David Cameron, said something quite remarkable in a speech outlining his new government's legislative plans for the next five years. Remarkable not because it's unexpected that a newly formed Conservative government with a working majority would bang the law and order drum, but because of what it implies:

"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'."

Think about it for a moment. This is the leader of a nominally democratic country saying that merely obeying the law is not sufficient: and simultaneously moving to scrap the Human Rights Act (a legislative train-wreck if ever I saw one) and to bring in laws imposing prior restraint on freedom of political speech (yes, requiring islamists to show the Police everything they say on Facebook before they say it is censorship of political speech, even if you don't like what they're saying).

We've been here before, of course.

Back in 2005, during one of the regular law'n'order circlejerks to which we have grown inured—this one triggered by the terrorist suicide bombings of 7/7 in London—the Labour Party brought in a spectacularly ill-conceived over-reaction in the shape of the Terrorism Act 2006. Among other things, they attempted to give the police the power to detain and question suspects without charge for up to 90 days (in the House of Commons this caused a rebellion, and it was eventually cut to 28 days—still far too long for arrest and interrogation without criminal charges), but moreover, created (Tony Blair's words): "an offence of condoning or glorifying terrorism. The sort of remarks made in recent days should be covered by such laws."

Get that: glorifying terrorism was to become an offense.

We all know of those vile Da'esh beheading videos, which is probably the sort of thing the Home Office had in mind. But the law was drafted so vaguely and broadly that a bunch of unintended consequences emerged. For example, what is "glorification" and what is "terrorism"? Lest we forget, Nelson Mandela was identified as a terrorist. So was that other Nobel Peace Prize winner, Menachem Begin. The current Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, with whom Tony Blair was doubtless on a first name basis, spent many years in British prisons for murders he allegedly committed while leading a terrorist organization. Is it "glorifying terrorism" to express happiness at the success of the ANC in forcing the overtly racist system of Apartheid South Africa to the negotiating table?

The law was drafted in such a way that works of fiction fell within its scope. So a group of bolshy, lefty, civil-rights-focussed literary academics with an interest in the SF field got together and published a slim anthology, the title of which was intended to provoke the Director of Public Prosecutions into either shitting or getting off the pot.

I'm afraid you can't buy a copy of the Glorifying Terrorism SF anthology (it's out of print, and not going to be reprinted or published as an ebook any time soon, because of the ongoing VATMESS headache). But ... the majestic organs of the state took one look at it and said "na na I can't hear you, not going there, you can't make me, I'd look like a tool". A few years later the "Glorifying Terrorism" charge was quietly written out of the statute books. And I'd like to think we had something to do with it.

Which brings me to the topic of the very short short story below, which now exists in a kind of counterfactual limbo, an alternate history where the financial crash of 2007/08 never happened, Tony Blair kept on getting worse, the "Glorifying Terrorism" offense stayed on the books, and UKIP never happened. Instead, the BNP—the knuckle-dragging neo-fascists who UKIP have largely supplanted— somehow parlayed an unspecified terorism-related crisis into a rise to government, and then the inevitable reductio ad absurdum ensued:

(See if you can figure out who I cribbed the declaration from?)

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MINUTES OF THE LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE, 2016

PREAMBLE TO THE MINUTES OF THE LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE, 2016

Greetings from the National Executive.

Before reading any further, please refer to the Security Note and ensure that your receipt and use of this document is in compliance with Party security policies. If you have any doubts at all, burn this document immediately.

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SECURITY NOTE

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This is an official Labour Party Document. Possession of all such documents is a specific offense under (2)(2)(f) of the Terrorism Act (2006). Amendments passed by the current government using the powers granted in the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act (2006) have raised the minimum penalty for possession to 10 years imprisonment. In addition, persons suspected of membership of or sympathy for the Labour Party are liable for arrest and sentencing as subversives under the Defence of the Realm Act (2014).

You must destroy this document immediately, for your own safety, if:

You have any cause to suspect that a neighbour or member of your household may be an informer,

You have come into possession of this document via a suspect source, or if your copy of this document exhibits signs of having been printed on any type of computer printer or photocopier, or if you received this document in a public place that might be overseen by cameras, or if it may have been transmitted via electronic means.

The Party would be grateful if you can reproduce and distribute this document to sympathizers and members. Use only a typewriter, embossing print set, mimeograph, or photographic film to distribute this document. Paper should be purchased anonymously and microwaved for at least 30 seconds prior to use to destroy RFID tags. Do not, under any circumstances, enter or copy the text in a computer, word processor, photocopier, scanner, mobile phone, or digital camera. This is for your personal safety.

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MINUTES OF THE LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE, 2016

1. Apologies for absence were made on behalf of the following:

Deputy Leader, Hillary Benn (executed by junta)

Government, Douglas Alexander (executed by junta)

Government, Kate Hoey (detained, Dartmoor concentration camp)

EPLP Leader, Mohammed Sarwar (executed by junta)

Young Labour, Judy Mallaber (detained, Dartmoor concentration camp: show trial announced by junta)

...

2. Motions from the national executive:

1) In the light of the government's use of its powers of extradition under the US/UK Extradition Treaty (2005), and their demonstrated willingness to lie to the rest of the world about their treatment of extradited dissidents, it is no longer safe to maintain a public list of shadow ministers and party officers. With the exception of the offices of Party Spokesperson and designated Party Security Spokesperson, it is moved that:

Open election of members of the National Executive shall be suspended,

Publication of the names and identities of members of the National Executive shall be suspended,

The National Executive will continue to function on a provisional basis making ad-hoc appointments by internal majority vote to replace members as they retire, are forced into exile, or are murdered by the junta;

From now until the end of the State of Emergency and the removal of the current government, at which time an extraordinary Party Conference shall be held to publicly elect a peacetime National Executive.

(Carried unanimously.)

2) In view of the current government's:

• suspension of the Human Rights Act (1998), Race Relations Act (2000), and other Acts,

• abrogation of the Treaty of Europe and secession from the European Union,

• amendment via administrative order of other Acts of Parliament (including the reintroduction of capital punishment),

• effective criminalization of political opposition by proscribing opposition parties as "organisations that promote terrorism" under the terms of the Terrorism Act (2000),

• establishment of concentration camps and deportation facilities for ethnic minorities, political dissidents, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered citizens, and others,

• deployment of riot police and informal militias against peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins, with concomitant loss of life,

• and their effective termination of the democratic processes by which the United Kingdom has historically been governed,

We find, with reluctance, that no avenue of peaceful dissent remains open to us. We are therefore faced with a choice between accepting defeat, and continuing the struggle for freedom and democracy by other means.

We shall not submit to the dictatorship of the current government, and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom. The government has interpreted the peacefulness of the movement as weakness; our non-violent policies have been taken as a green light for government violence. Refusal to resort to force has been interpreted by the government as an invitation to use armed force against the people without any fear of reprisals. It is therefore moved that:

A National Resistance Movement is created. The Movement will seek to achieve liberation without bloodshed or violence if possible. We hope—even at this late moment—that the government will come to its senses and permit a free and fair general election to be held in which parties representing all ideologies will be permitted to stand for election. But we will defend our supporters and the oppressed against military rule, racist tyranny, and totalitarianism, and we will not flinch from using any tool in pursuit of this goal.

The Movement will work to achieve the political goals of the Labour Party during the state of emergency, and will cooperate willingly with other organizations upon the basis of shared goals.

The Movement will actively attack the instruments of state terror and coercion, including functionaries of the government who enforce unjust and oppressive laws against the people.

At the cessation of the struggle, a National Peace and Reconciliation Commission shall be established and an amnesty granted to members of the Movement for actions taken in the pursuit of legitimate orders.

In these actions, we are working in the best interests of all the people of this country - of every ethnicity, gender, and class - whose future happiness and well-being cannot be attained without the overthrow of the Fascist government, the abolition of white supremacy and the winning of liberty, democracy and full national rights and equality for all the people of this country.

(Carried 25/0, 3 abstentions)

3) All Party members who are physically and mentally fit to withstand the rigours of the struggle are encouraged to organize themselves in cells of 3-6 individuals, to establish lines of communication (subject to the Party security policies), and to place themselves at the disposal of the National Resistance Movement. Party members who are unable to serve may still provide aid, shelter, and funds for those who fight in our defence.

(Carried unanimously)

3. Motions from the floor

The party recognizes that that our own legislative program of the late 1990s and early 2000s established the framework for repression which is now being used to ruthlessly suppress dissent. We recognize that our neglect of the machinery of public choice in favour of the pursuit of corporatist collaborations permitted the decay of local and parliamentary democracy that allowed the British National Party to seize power with the support of no more than 22% of the electorate. We are therefore compelled to admit our responsibility. We created this situation; we must therefore repair it.

Never again shall the Labour Party place national security ahead of individual freedoms and human rights in its legislative program. It is therefore moved that the following quotation from Benjamin Franklin be inserted between Clause Three and the current Clause Four of the Party Constitution:

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

(Carried 16/12)

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[Epistemic status: Probably not the first person to think about this, possibly just reinventing scope insensitivity. Title with apologies to Julian Jaynes]

Non-American readers may not be familiar with the history of the US House and Senate.

During the Constitutional Convention, a fight broke out between the smaller states and the bigger states. The smaller states, like Delaware, wanted each state to elect a fixed number of representatives to the legislature, so that Delaware would have just as much of a say as, for example, New York. The bigger states wanted legislative representation to be proportional to population, so that if New York had ten times as many people as Delaware, they would get ten times as many representatives.

Eventually everyone just agreed to compromise by splitting the legislature into the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House worked the way New York wanted things, the Senate worked the way Delaware wanted things, and they would have to agree to get anything done.

This system has continued down to the present. Today, Delaware has only one Representative, far less than New York’s twenty-seven. But both states have an equal number of Senators, even though New York has a population of twenty million and Delaware is uninhabited except by corporations looking for tax loopholes.

To me, the House system seems much fairer. If New York has ten times the population of Delaware, but both have the same number of representatives, then Delaware citizens have ten times as much political power just because they live on one side of an arbitrary line. And New York might be tempted to split up into ten smaller states, and thus increase its political power tenfold. Heck, why don’t we just declare some random farm a state and give five people and a cow the same political power as all of California?

But despite my professed distaste for the Senate’s representational system, I find myself using something similar in parts of my own thought processes where I least expect.

Every election, I see charts like this:

And I tend to think something like “Well, I agree with this guy about the Iraq war and global warming, but I agree with that guy about election paper trails and gays in the military, so it’s kind of a toss-up.”

And this way of thinking is awful.

The Iraq War probably killed somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 people. If you think that it was unnecessary, and that it was possible to know beforehand how poorly it would turn out, then killing a few hundred thousand people is a really big deal. I like having paper trails in elections as much as the next person, but if one guy isn’t going to keep a very good record of election results, and the other guy is going to kill a million people, that’s not a toss-up.

Likewise with global warming versus gays in the military. It would be nice if homosexual people have the same right to be killed by roadside explosive devices that the rest of us enjoy, but not frying the planet is pretty important too.

(if you don’t believe in global warming, fine, having a government that agrees with you and doesn’t waste 5% of the world GDP fighting it is still more important than anything else on this list)

Saying “some boxes are more important than others” doesn’t really cut it; it sounds like they might be twice, maybe three times more important, whereas in fact they might literally be a million times more important. It doesn’t convey the right sense of “Why are you even looking at that other box?”

I worry that, by portraying issues in this nice little set of boxes, this graphic is priming reasoning similar to the US Senate, where each box gets the same level of representation in my decision-making process, regardless of whether it’s a Delaware-sized box that affects a handful of people, or a New York sized box with millions of lives hanging in the balance.

I was thinking about this again back in March when I had a brief crisis caused by worrying that the moral value of the world’s chickens vastly exceeded the moral value of the world’s humans. I ended up being trivially wrong – there are only about twenty billion chickens, as opposed to the hundreds of billions I originally thought. But I was contingently wrong – in other words, I got lucky. Honestly, I didn’t know whether there were twenty billion chickens or twenty trillion.

And honestly, 99% of me doesn’t care. I do want to improve chickens, and I do think that their suffering matters. But thanks to the miracle of scope insensitivity, I don’t particularly care more about twenty trillion chickens than twenty billion chickens.

Once again, chickens seem to get two seats to my moral Senate, no matter how many of them there are. Other groups that get two seats include “starving African children”, “homeless people”, “my patients in hospital”, “my immediate family”, and “my close friends”. Obviously some of these groups contain thousands of times more people than others. They still get two seats. And so I am neither willing to reduce chickens’ values to zero value units per chicken, nor accept that if there are enough chickens they will end up able to outvote everyone else.

(I’m not sure whether “chickens” and “cows” are two separate states, or if there’s just one state of “Animals”. It probably depends on my mood. Which is worrying.)

And most recently I thought about this because of the post on California water I wrote last week. It seems very wise to say we all have to make sacrifices, and to concentrate about equally on natural categories of water use like showers, and toilets, and farms, and lawns – without noticing that one of those is ten times bigger than the other three combined. It seems like most people who think about the water crisis are using a Senate model, where each category is treated as an equally important area to optimize. In a House model, you wouldn’t be thinking about showers any more than a 2008 voter should be thinking of election paper trails.

I’m tempted to say “The House is just plain right and the Senate is just plain wrong”, but I’ve got to admit that would clash with my own very strong inclinations on things like the chicken problem. The Senate view seems to sort of fit with a class of solutions to the dust specks problem where after the somethingth dust speck or so you just stop caring about more of them, with the sort of environmentalist perspective where biodiversity itself is valuable, and with the Leibnizian answer to Job.

But I’m pretty sure those only kick in at the extremes. Take it too far, and you’re just saying the life of a Delawarean is worth twenty-something New Yorkers.

There are two post-election Lib Dem narratives doing the rounds. One is that the Lib Dems were doomed as soon as they entered coalition; that from 12 May 2010 until 7 May 2015, the party was stuck on railway tracks which inexorably lead to them going from 57 MPs to jut 8. The other is that while no-one believes the party would have come out of coalition looking popular, the party made a whole series of mistakes which would have mitigated the losses and resulted in the party still having dozens of seats rather than a handful.

I hold the latter view, but it does appear that fatalism has gripped an awful lot of people at the top of the party. Although I’m not a member and am not planning to rejoin, this troubles me because the last thing I want to see is the party simply go back to repeating history. There is a lot of talk about phoenixes (I’ve used the metaphor myself), but the important thing about the death and rebirth of the phoenix is that it is cyclical. Does the party really want to spend the next 20-40 years rebuilding only to make the same mistakes time and again? I don’t understand the point of a political party that doesn’t learn from its mistakes, and while I can understand why many aren’t really excited by the prospect of introspection right now, someone has to do it (far from it for me to suggest that no Lib Dems are having this debate; the Social Liberal Forum has published a whole series of articles exploring what went wrong, among other bloggers). The “keep buggering on” mindset arguably is as responsible for the scale of this defeat as anything else.

Here then are three specific examples where the Lib Dems could – and should – have done things differently.

Tuition Fees

I’m not going to rake over the coals of the repeated stand offs between Nick Clegg and conference over whether or not to keep the scrap tuition fees policy or the wisdom of parliamentary candidates, including Clegg himself, in signing those NUS pledges; nor am I going to claim that the Lib Dems were in a position where they could have argued for HE spending to have been protected in such a way that fees could have been kept at £3,000.

The crucial issue for me is the presentation of the policy itself. Specifically, why didn’t the party insist on replacing the fees system with a graduate tax. In many important respects the current system is a graduate tax in all but name. Vince Cable himself put it on the record that he was keen to explore this option as early as June 2010.

Why didn’t this happen? Well, the explanation has always been that the Tories wouldn’t let it. I’ve never bought that for several reasons. Firstly, Clegg, Alexander (and even Cable) were against scrapping fees and Clegg’s key advisor Richard Reeves was someone who was frequently antagonistic towards the left of the party. Secondly, the focus of that troika at the time was quite explicitly about hugging the Tories as closely as possible; their stated belief at time was that being seen to be united with the Conservatives trumped all other considerations. And thirdly, we were also told repeatedly that this was a flash in the pan issue, only of interest to the Lib Dem grassroots and student activists, and would be forgotten about by the time of the next election.

Clearly, the theory that there were few political consequences to breaking this particular election pledge has been tested to destruction, but at the time that looked pretty untenable as well. The 2009 expenses scandal had made trust a central political concern, so much so that Clegg himself had chosen to make it his core theme in the election campaign, with an election broadcast which began with the words “no student tuition fees“. The logic of the party’s own election campaign was that this sort of thing was unacceptable.

The Tories of course had good reasons for trying to undermine the credibility of the Lib Dems, but they had every interest in maintaining the stability of the government. If, as we are to believe, the option of a graduate tax really was pushed as hard as Clegg claims and he was rebuffed, then that in turn should have caused him to question the validity of the “hug them close” strategy (which he persisted with even after the AV referendum). It was simply a question of judgement and priorities for the senior Liberal Democrat team, and they made the wrong call.

The 2014 Annihilation

To the annoyance of a lot of my friends in Social Liberal Forum circles, I always believed that getting rid of Clegg and replacing him with someone else before the general election would have a limited impact, certainly if done too early. If Clegg had been replaced two or three years before the general election, as a number of people hoped, then his successor would have gone into the 2015 election almost as tainted and the party would have been open to the accusation of causing government instability in the name of self interest.

2014 however marked a new low for the party, where it had been annihilated in both the local and European Parliamentary elections. In London, it was quite shocking watching the party get wiped out overnight. Lord Oakeshott had commissioned a number of polls which showed that Clegg was a liability to the party and attempted a rather ham-fisted coup on the back of them; but you didn’t need those polling figures to tell you the blindingly obvious. Clegg was a busted flush. A new leader, punctuating a new direction for the party, would almost certainly have made a difference.

The party’s decision not to go down that route was highly depressing to watch. The reason it went into government was an admirable case of putting the national-interest above the interests of the party. The reason it didn’t ditch Clegg was focused more out of loyalty for the individual than anything else. That was neither in the party or the national interest, as the electoral consequences have now shown. Being told by Clegg on a weekly basis that “there is no alternative” had lead to a dangerous level of groupthink.

Of course, a coup would have been risky. But once again, it was in Clegg’s gift to do the right thing.

The 2015 Election Campaign

I don’t really know where to begin with the general election campaign itself. One of the things it had been impossible to avoid as a friend of several Liberal Democrats was that for the past two years they had been told that the secret to the party’s success was to stay on message, and that that message was to be “a stronger economy in a fairer society, allowing everyone to get on in life”. So it was a surprise to see that messaging get ditched at the start of the campaign in favour of “look left, look right, then cross” – a phrase which was as naff as it was meaningless. If I want slogans reminiscent of 1970s road safety campaigns, I visit Scarfolk; I don’t expect serious election campaigns to use them.

But the messaging was to get increasingly worse. First, we had the odd Wizard of Oz references to giving Labour a brain and the Tories a heart; cute, but again essentially meaningless. As the election date loomed and anxiety over the Scottish wipeout intensified, the focus on the Tories and Labour was relaxed in favour of dire warnings about what would happen if the SNP or UKIP have any influence over government. Then it was if someone had suddenly realised that the party had spent four weeks talking about everybody apart from themselves, so a new slogan was concocted, which was possibly the worst yet – “stability, unity and decency” – which managed to sound as crypto-fascist as it was uninspiring.

Clegg’s resignation speech lamented how the politics of fear had won the election. What he failed to mention is that he had spent the past couple of months stoking fear himself. The election broadcasts consisted of night-time road users cautiously attempting to cross roads in the face of speeding incoming traffic. The symbolism is simple enough to follow; a vote for anything other than the Lib Dems will have pant-wettingly terrifying consequences. But nowhere is there a real answer. We know we’re meant to think that the Lib Dems are the only good choice, but we aren’t told why.

Mark Pack has lamented how the ghost of 1992 and the endless talk of coalitions was revived in this election campaign. What I don’t understand is why Paddy Ashdown, leader in 1992 and election supremo in 2015, though it was a good idea. All the Lib Dem campaign did was to reinforce the Tories own messaging about the dangers of a government which Labour and the SNP have influence over. If you tell people to vote for the devil they know, don’t be surprised if they end up voting for the senior coalition partner.

All things being equal, it is very possible that even the best judged election messaging would have made very marginal difference to the election result, but by playing up the unrelenting doom, the Lib Dems were simply curling up and dying. Worse, the party has seen the dangers of appearing too establishment in the past; I’m thinking the 2007 Scottish elections and numerous council elections where the party has been in control as an example. I simply don’t understand why took the conscious decision to spend an entire election campaign trying to sound as uninspired and insidery as possible.

There is a very real risk right now that the Lib Dems simply “keep calm and carry on”. If they do, their hopes of revival are extremely limited. The question I have for the leadership election candidates is: which of the two of you is capable of taking control of your own destiny? Nick Clegg was extremely capable of presenting all his decisions as simply the only logical course of action, that any deviation from the road would lead to chaos and instant death. He surrounded himself with advisors that told him what he wanted to hear, presented every policy choice he took as effectively out of his control, presented every compromise he made as inevitable. In that respect, he could not be more illiberal: his politics was one in which agency had no part to play. It was summed up in his election campaign: straight ahead, with no deviation, in the face of everything which said it was time to turn.

The question Lib Dem members have to ask themselves as they decide which candidate to vote for is: does this man believe that the road back to power is a straight one of “obvious” choices, or a winding one with a series of crossroads. If they know what’s good for them, they won’t go for another leader who believes it is the former.

Only the Liberal Democrats, hardened by a hundred years of losing and buoyed by an inextinguishable hope in Liberalism, could follow an ‘extinction event’ election by gaining more than eleven thousand new members in less than a week. Welcome, all of you! You might like to look at Liberal Democrat Voice’s New Members Day (new voices, recommended reading and party essentials). You help remind us all that for all the talk of historical precedents, the year we’re in is 2015. But tonight I’m still looking back with a sense of history and with thanks to so many Lib Dem MPs.

I’ve been writing my post-election thoughts throughout this week. Regular readers will be unsurprised to know that the article’s been getting longer and longer – and may well split into a series of about half a dozen. But in case I don’t have the energy to write them all, there’s something I want to make sure I say.

I’ve read a ton of historical comparisons over the last few days – some glib, some persuasive. But while there’s much to learn from history, we do need to remember that this is 2015, not any other year, and that the way back to wilderness or revival is not predestined. On the face of it, this seems most like 1970 in our share of seats and votes – 7.5%, down to 6 MPs, a surprise Tory victory – which would ‘put us back’ to before I was born. Those losses were followed by new ideas and something of a comeback at the next general election; I hope for new ideas, too, and though ‘Let’s dig out our answers from 1970!’ doubtless has some merit, I hope most of our answers this time are going to be a bit fresher.

Right now, I’ve been distracted from writing about what we might learn simply by how terrible it feels. I know and admire quite a few Lib Dems who’ve suddenly lost their seats. I can’t help wondering if, whatever year is the more precise statistical match, this feels more like the 1920s – when a much larger group of Liberal MPs with great records in government were suddenly hewn down. I remember when the Coalition was formed five years ago, one of our Peers telling me that at his first Liberal Assembly, in Llandudno in about 1956, he’d been introduced to an elderly man with an ear trumpet who had been a Liberal Minister in our government of what is now a century ago – and that he still couldn’t quite believe that now, though it had only come when he’d got that old himself, he was walking around Liberal Democrat Conference seeing new Liberal Democrat Ministers again… Even if it had to be another coalition with the Tories, which hadn’t ended so well in the 1920s. On the bright side, we come out of this one battered but surprisingly united, rather than with two rival Leaders waging war on each other. And those were the two pretty good rival Leaders. I joined the Liberal Democrats when we were founded in 1988, just after we’d had two pretty bad rival Leaders waging war on each other, and in elections the following year we crashed to 4% and won no seats at all.

If you want two hopeful signs for the future, signs that we are now in neither the 1920s nor the 1980s, not only is our membership rocketing rather than falling through the floor after this year’s defeat, but we are also not split down the middle, which helps. The Conservatives’ mean authoritarianism will not have an easy ride.

Around 80% of the new members in the last week are people who’ve never been Liberal Democrats before, according to the party’s membership department. On a more anecdotal level, a great many of our new Liberal Democrats I’ve seen online have been inspired more than anything else by Nick Clegg’s resignation speech last Friday. I’ve been a Liberal Democrat for a long time, and it inspired and moved me, too. I’d watched through the night in a sort of grim blankness, and wondered what it would take to break that numb feeling. Within a few seconds of Nick starting to speak, I was in floods of tears. Here are some of the words that meant the most to me:

“It’s been a privilege, a huge privilege, an unlimited honour, to lead a party of the most resilient, courageous, and remarkable people. The Liberal Democrats are a family and I will always be extremely proud of the warmth, good grace, and good humour which our political family has shown through the ups and downs of recent years. I want to thank every member, ever campaigner, every councillor, and every parliamentarian for the commitment you have shown to our country and to our party.

“It is simply heartbreaking to see so many friends and colleagues who have served their constituents so diligently over so many years abruptly lose their seats because of forces entirely beyond their control.

“In 2007 after a night of disappointing election results for our party in Edinburgh, Alex Cole Hamilton said this: if his defeat was part-payment for the ending of child detention, then he accepted it with all his heart.

“Those words revealed a selfless dignity which is very rare in politics but common amongst Liberal Democrats. If our losses today are part payment for every family that is more secure because of a job we helped to create, every person with depression who is treated with a compassion they deserve, every child who does a little better in school, every apprentice with a long and rewarding career to look forward to, every gay couple who know that their love is worth no less than anyone else’s and every pensioner with a little more freedom and dignity in retirement then I hope at least our losses can be endured with a little selfless dignity too.

“We will never know how many lives we changed for the better because we had the courage to step up at a time of crisis. But we have done something that cannot be undone because there can be no doubt that we leave government with Britain a far stronger, fairer, greener, and more liberal country than it was five years ago.

“Fear and grievance have won, Liberalism has lost. But it is more precious than ever and we must keep fighting for it. That is both the great challenge and the great cause that my successor will have to face. I will always give my unstinting support for all those who continue to keep the flame of British Liberalism alive.

“Our party will come back, our party will win again, it will take patience, resilience and grit. That is what has built our party before and will rebuild it again. Thank you.”

Thank you, Nick. And never-ending gratitude to Lynne, too, in particular. Many people in our party and beyond made a difference, but the unstinting efforts of Nick and Lynne above all made it possible for Richard and me to marry, after twenty years of waiting through Tory and Labour Governments that made us second-class citizens. We will never forget and never regret that. And I will miss other former MPs I admire for their Liberalism, for their achievements, and in several cases for their friendship. I will keenly miss Stephen, and Stephen, and Danny, and Simon, and Julian, and too many others.

I believe both Norman and Tim have much to recommend them as potential Leaders, but I hope it’s not too discourteous to say that one of the results that left me most distraught would have been my first choice for Leader, Jo Swinson. She so terribly nearly held on (with the lowest fall in her vote of any Lib Dem in the country, an example of the difference between someone who’s always worked hard and the bewildered ‘ultra-safe’ Labour MPs all around her who’d never had to do a day’s work for their seats and were buried under sudden avalanches). I hope she’ll be back, and that open-hearted Liberalism will rise over narrow-minded nationalism.

Among the most damaging mass results of last Thursday – along with our extermination across the South-West – is that all our surviving MPs are now white, cis, straight men. Do not blame any of them for this. They’ll have enough to cope with. And there’s no simple answer. We had women MPs; we selected women in most of our seats where the sitting MP was standing down. We didn’t hold any of them. The Labour Party in particular will be as ruthless in attacking us for the voters’ choices as they were in pouring in resources to defeat Lynne Featherstone – choosing to let marginal Tory MPs off the hook to make sure that they cynically brought down Lib Dem women.

I will offer ideas of what might help for the future. But for today, I simply ask you to be kind to Lib Dem MPs (and staff) who’ve lost their seats if you meet them, and to be even more kind to the eight Liberal Democrats who won. Because all of them suddenly have so much more work to do.

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

Mark Pack has news of a call for any Lib Dem appointments to the House of Lords to be used to bring more diversity to the Upper House.

However, I’m reminded of a suggestion I made a couple of years ago, and want to develop that further. What we should do as a party is quite simple: announce that we’re only appointing women to be Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords until we have parity in our group there. Obviously, I’d like to see the Lords abolished and replaced, but until such time (at least five years, as things stand) as that happens we should be taking steps to make our representation within there as representative.

I’d also suggest something else: our selected representatives should be people who’ve never been in Parliament before. Too much of the House of Lords consists of what’s little more than a comfy retirement home for ex-MPs (including those rejected by the electorate) and we should be casting our net much wider if we want to create a radical and diverse group in the Lords. Just putting more former MPs in there doesn’t do anything to promote a wider range of voices in the Lords, and we should be taking what few opportunities we have to do things differently.

This is a piece I wrote in 2011 about a Tory MP who wanted to strangle people but was unable to construct a coherent sentence on the subject. ("The point is as I said earlier on this is about having deterrence. If you have strong deterrence like that, capital punishment will act as a deterrent. To have capital punishment would act as a deterrent. That’s the first point here....") This MP is now a minister for work and pensions.
http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2011/10/i-lied-3.html

Note: I did indeed abstain from reading all news media for about 6 months after writing this article, and have never felt the need to switch on Question Time or Any Questions or The Politics Show since.

Against expectations and opinion poll predictions, John Major managed to win a 21 seat majority for the Conservative Party in the 1992 election, gained the most votes any leader has for any party before or since and won a personal majority of over 36,000 votes in his Huntingdon constituency. 

[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.]

I.

There has recently been a lot of dumb fighting over who uses how much water in California, so I thought I would see if it made more sense as an infographic sort of thing:

Sources include Understanding Water Use In California, Inputs To Farm Production, California Water Usage In Crops, Urban Water Use Efficiency, Water Use In California, and Water: Who Uses How Much. There are some contradictions, probably caused by using sources from different years, and although I’m pretty confident this is right on an order of magnitude scale I’m not sure about a percentage point here or there. But that having been said:

On a state-sized level, people measure water in acre-feet, where an acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an area of one acre to a depth of one foot. California receives a total of 80 million acre-feet of water per year. Of those, 23 million are stuck in wild rivers (the hydrological phenomenon, not the theme park). These aren’t dammed and don’t have aqueducts to them so they can’t be used for other things. There has been a lot of misdirection over this recently, since having pristine wild rivers that fish swim in seems like an environmental cause, and so you can say that “environmentalists have locked up 23 million acre-feet of California water”. This is not a complete lie; if not for environmentalism, maybe some of these rivers would have been dammed up and added to the water system. But in practice you can’t dam every single river and most of these are way off in the middle of nowhere far away from the water-needing population. People’s ulterior motives shape whether or not they add these to the pot; I’ve put them in a different color blue to mark this.

Aside from that, another 14 million acre-feet are potentially usable, but deliberately diverted to environmental or recreational causes. These include 7.2 million for “recreational rivers”, apparently ones that people like to boat down, 1.6 million to preserve wetlands, and 5.6 million to preserve the Sacramento River Delta. According to environmentalists, this Sacramento River Delta water is non-negotiable, because if we stopped sending fresh water there the entire Sacramento River delta would turn salty and it would lead to some kind of catastrophe that would threaten our ability to get fresh water into the system at all.

34 million acre-feet of water are diverted to agriculture. The most water-expensive crop is alfalfa, which requires 5.3 million acre-feet a year. If you’re asking “Who the heck eats 5.3 million acre-feet of alfalfa?” the answer is “cows”. A bunch of other crops use about 2 million acre-feet each.

All urban water consumption totals 9 million acre-feet. Of those, 2.4 million are for commercial and industrial institutions, 3.8 million are for lawns, and 2.8 million are personal water use by average citizens in their houses. In case you’re wondering about this latter group, by my calculations all water faucets use 0.5 million, all toilets use 0.9 million, all showers use 0.5 million, leaks lose 0.3 million, and the remaining 0.6 million covers everything else – washing machines, dishwashers, et cetera.

Since numbers like these are hard to think about, it might be interesting to put them in a more intuitive form. The median California family earns $70,000 a year – let’s take a family just a little better-off than that who are making $80,000 so we can map it on nicely to California’s yearly water income of 80 million acre-feet.

The unusable 23 million acre-feet which go into wild rivers and never make it into the pot correspond to the unusable taxes the California family will have to pay. So our family is left with $57,000 post-tax income.

In this analogy, California is spending $14,000 on environment and recreation, $34,000 on agriculture, and $9,000 on all urban areas. All household uses – toilets, showers, faucets, etc – only add up to about $2,800 of their budget.

There is currently a water shortfall of about 6 million acre-feet per year, which is being sustained by exploiting non-renewable groundwater and other sources. This is the equivalent of our slightly-richer-than-average family having to borrow $6,000 from the bank each year to get by.

II.

Armed with this information, let’s see what we can make of some recent big news stories.

Apparently we are supposed to be worried about fracking depleting water in California. ThinkProgress reports that Despite Historic Drought, California Used 70 Million Gallons Of Water For Fracking Last Year. Similar concerns are raised by RT, Huffington Post, and even The New York Times. But 70 million gallons equals 214 acre-feet. Remember, alfalfa production uses 5.3 million acre feet. In our family-of-four analogy above, all the fracking in California costs them about a quarter. Worrying over fracking is like seeing an upper middle class family who are $6,000 in debt, and freaking out because one of their kids bought a gumball from a machine.

Apparently we are also supposed to be worried about Nestle bottling water in California. ABC News writes an article called Nestle Needs To Stop Bottling Water In Drought-Stricken California, Advocacy Group Says, about a group called the “Courage Campaign” who have gotten 135,000 signatures on a petition saying that Nestle needs to stop “bottling the scarce resource straight from the heart of California’s drought and selling it for profit.” Salon goes even further – their article is called Nestle’s Despicable Water Crisis Profiteering: How It’s Making A Killing While California Is Dying Of Thirst, and as always with this sort of thing Jezebel also has to get in on the action. But Nestle’s plant uses only 150 acre-feet, about one forty-thousandth the amount used to grow alfalfa, and the equivalent of about a dime to our family of four.

The Wall Street Journal says that farms are a scapegoat for the water crisis, because in fact the real culprits are environmentalists. They say that “A common claim is that agriculture consumes about 80% of ‘developed’ water supply, yet this excludes the half swiped off the top for environmental purposes.” But environmentalism only swipes half if you count among that half all of the wild rivers in the state – that is, every drop of water not collected, put in an aqueduct, and used to irrigate something is a “concession” to environmentalists. A more realistic figure for environmental causes is the 14 million acre-feet marked “Other Environmental” on the map above, and even that includes concessions to recreational boaters and to whatever catastrophe is supposed to happen if we can’t keep the Sacramento Delta working properly. It’s hard to calculate exactly how much of California’s water goes to environmental causes, but half is definitely an exaggeration.

Wired is concerned that the federal government is ordering California to spend 12,000 acre-feet of water to save six fish (h/t Alyssa Vance). Apparently these are endangered fish in some river who need to get out to the Pacific to breed, and the best way to help them do that is to fill up the river with 12,000 acre feet of water. That’s about $12 on our family’s budget, which works out to $2 per fish. I was going to say that I could totally see a family spending $2 on a fish, especially if it was one of those cool glow-in-the-dark fish I used to have when I was a kid, but then I remembered this was a metaphor and the family is actually the entire state budget of California but the six fish are still literally just six fish. Okay, yes, that seems a little much.

III.

Finally, Marginal Revolution and even some among the mysterious and endangered population of non-blog-having economists are talking about how really the system of price controls and subsidies in the water market is ridiculous and if we had a free market on water all of our problems would be solved. It looks to me like that’s probably right.

Consider: When I used to live in California, even before this recent drought I was being told to take fewer showers, to install low-flush toilets that were inconvenient and didn’t really work all that well, to limit my use of the washing machine and dishwasher, et cetera. It was actually pretty inconvenient. I assume all forty million residents of California were getting the same message, and that a lot of them would have liked to be able to pay for the right to take nice long relaxing showers.

But if all the savings from water rationing amounted to 20% of our residential water use, then that equals about 0.5 MAF, which is about 10% of the water used to irrigate alfalfa. The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use.

If you were to offer California residents the opportunity to not have to go through the whole gigantic water-rationing rigamarole for $2 a head, I think even the poorest people in the state would be pretty excited about that. My mother just bought and installed a new water-saving toilet – which took quite a bit of her time and money – and furthermore, the government is going to give her a $125 rebate for doing so. Cutting water on the individual level is hard and expensive. But if instead of trying to save water ourselves, we just paid the alfalfa industry not to grow alfalfa, all the citizens of California could do their share for $2. If they also wanted to have a huge lush water-guzzling lawn, their payment to the alfalfa industry would skyrocket all the way to $5 per year.

In fact, though I am not at all sure here and I’ll want a real economist to double-check this, it seems to me if we wanted to buy out all alfalfa growers by paying them their usual yearly income to just sit around and not grow any alfalfa, that would cost $860 million per year and free up 5.3 million acre-feet, ie pretty much our entire shortfall of 6 million acre-feet, thus solving the drought. Sure, 860 million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but note that right now California newspapers have headlines like Billions In Water Spending Not Enough, Officials Say. Well, maybe that’s because you’re spending it on giving people $125 rebates for water-saving toilets, instead of buying out the alfalfa industry. I realize that paying people subsidies to misuse water to grow unprofitable crops, and then offering them countersubsidies to not take your first set of subsidies, is to say the least a very creative way to spend government money – but the point is it is better than what we’re doing now.

Friday:


Well, as Sir Bedivere might have said surveying the field of Camlann and the ruin of the flower of England, that could have gone better…

Fear won the day. Scotland voted for the SNP out of fear of the Tories; England voted Tory out of fear of the SNP. This was terribly cynical populism on the part of Mr Balloon and Mr Nicola Insturgent. We are as a nation more divided, more diminished as a result.

Not that the Liberal Democrats' campaign was innocent of blame in this.

Fear won the day because we didn't give hope a chance.

Sometimes only chocolate can help

Launching our manifesto, Nick Clegg said it was time to give people hope at the end of austerity, but instead we fell into a trap of saying we would try to moderate between extremists. "Who do you fear more?" was the underlying language of our "hearts and brains" message. "They're scary, vote for us because we'll keep you safe."

It wasn't what we WANTED to be saying – we had a story to tell about ending austerity once the job was done; about the opportunities of education; about lifting the stigma of mental ill-health; about creating a green future – but we quickly got side-tracked into debating deals, darkened rooms and red lines.

It would be easy to blame Cap'n Clegg. Some already have, though the swiftness and dignity of his departure has drawn much of that sting. He was at his best inspiring people in the debates before 2010 and in his resignation after 2015. It was only the intervening five years as Deputy Prime Minister that got in the way of seeing him as a decent man.

Hindsight and cynicism might say we should have replaced him a year ago, pulled out of the Coalition and let the Tories run as a minority for a year, to show everyone who bad it could get. But that was never what we went into Coalition to do. We wanted to show it could work and that we could be trusted in office to do our duty. We couldn't have defenestrated one leader and then saddled a new one with Coalition partnership.

And we're not really that sort of Party anyway (no matter how ruthless people think we were with Chatshow Charles and Sir Ming the Merciless).

Ultimately, this election was lost in May 2010. Never mind the tuition fees: that was the albatross hung around Cap'n Clegg's neck, but the opinion polls showed that the voters had already deserted us. We lost because we went into Coalition at all.

So add to the (depressingly long) list of things that the Great British public says that they want, but do not vote for: cooperation between parties that behave like grown-ups.

I was, fluffy feet in the air, totally sold on the Coalition. If we were or are to mean anything as a Party surely that has to mean getting our fluffy feet on the levers of power and implementing some of those policies. And implement them we did, many good policies – raising people out of tax; pupil premium, school dinners and apprenticeships; pension reforms; and most personally equal (er) marriage.

The Liberal Democrats paid a VERY high price today so that we could wear these rings as husbands. Thank you. We are SO grateful. It will NOT be forgotten.

Pluralist politics is off the agenda, now. No one will go into a coalition, possibly ever again.

Before the election, the positioning of the Nationalists – the Scottish Nasties, their Welsh Mini-Mes or the English Kippers – and their hangers-on the Greens that they would never join a coalition, that their principles were too "pure" was just too precious and too self-serving for words. They would get their policies by "confidence and supply", they claimed – no, you get nothing for confidence and supply; if you want policy to be implemented you need a minister to guide it through; you've got to get your fluffy feet DIRTY.

But now, who in faith could recommend a Coalition deal if the punishment meted out by the voters is so vastly, disproportionately out of scale to the offence.

Which is a great sadness, as it marks the death of a tradition in British politics going back to the start of Cabinet government.

We become more Presidential, more dictatorial, more in the Thatcher-Blair model than the tradition of debate, scrutiny, argument and compromise that was very British.

And look at the things we might not have in five years' time: human rights, a welfare state, a place in Europe, the BBC…

Within hours of the election, the now-Liberal-free government was already planning on cutting benefits for the disabled while Theresa Nuts-in-May was revving up to rummage through your emails by reintroducing the "Snoopers Charter".

This will be the first test for the new Parliament. There are Tories – notably David Davis who forced a by-election on the issues of Civil Liberties – who might be persuaded, cajoled, even honour-bound to vote against the intrusive and unworkable spying on every citizen. Mr Balloon's majority is as thin as an After Eight – or an After Twelve, perhaps.

Leadership hopefuls, take note: the Liberal Democrats have got to be in that debate, making a lot of noise, and a dozen new friends!

And this is merely the beginning of the scale of what faces the new Liberal Leader (I look forward to the contest, and Norman Lamb will no doubt give him a good debate and maybe even a run for his money, but it will be Tim Farron).

There are plenty of good people putting forward "where do we go from here" plans: Auntie Jennie, Auntie Alix, Andy Hinton, David Howarth, to name but four, all have decent takes. Even Daddy Richard tossed out some thoughts over the course of election night:

We need to stop being so cautious, playing piggy-in-the-middle and say something that might frighten the horses, so:

1) Housing. We need a radical alternative that says how we can deliver the "build more" we all know is the answer. So raise a tax on existing property equal to the (few billions) you need to spend building. And to discourage NIMBYism, the more houses we build the lower the tax (hmm, taxing existing land values, strikes a familiar chord). And while we're at it, pay for housing benefit by taxing rents.

2) Clean the air of our cities. This means planning to replace *all* cars with electric, which means planning the charging infrastructure and planning how we're going to generate all that electricity (which means fusion).

3) Wi-if. Free. Nationally. Same rationale as the penny post in the Victorian age – it's a key architecture for government so the public might as well get it for nominal cost too.

4) Drugs policy. Currently the war on drugs is obviously utterly counterproductive. Decriminalise. Medicalise. Possibly even legalise regulate and tax in case of weed.

Firstly, and it's a thing that comes up several times from the suggestions my fellow Lib Dems are making, is the need to reboot the Liberal Democrats as a Party – hold our own constitutional convention, as Jennie puts it – to reform the organisation into something a bit less like a drunken gavotte by a spider drenched in ink. It is vital that the Party recognise its big failings from the years in power and before that allowed what happened with the likes of Mike Hancock and the whole Chris Rennard debacle, where no one saw any justice and we all came out looking sleazy. It needs to be done, so let's get it done, and do it right, but it is essentially inward-looking. We need to be projecting a positive face outwards too.

So, looking forward, HOUSING is the idea that clearly coming forward from the thinking in Lib Dem circles: it's a clear crisis in supply and one intimately linked to the fundamental flaws of the British economy, namely that most of it gets turned into wealth and tied up in property instead of working to create jobs and opportunities. Ideally driving down house prices would increase opportunity for people to own their own homes while releasing capital into more production, non-rent-seeking projects. Our ability to make large-scale changes – planning garden cities – may be curtailed by the wipe-out, but local campaigns can still focus on local developments, particularly those that fail to make affordable provision part of their mix.

This is a START but we need something BIGGER, not just managerial tinkering but real radical change.

The linking theme of those policies is that they are about changing things for the better, offering hope and opportunity.

That is an agenda that we need to move swiftly to seize. The roots of it exist within our 2015 manifesto, as I've already said, and in the slogan "Opportunity for Everyone".

The Blairite faction within Labour are already urging their Party to become the Party of "aspiration"; we need to give people a REAL CHANGE alternative to Thatcherism-lite, and do it pretty darn quickly.

Where, in all this, the Labour Party?

Well, Labour lost the election badly for all the reasons I've been spelling out for months: they never made the effort to address their failures at the end of Mr Frown's government, they didn't develop a critique of the Coalition's policies. No, shouting "traitor!" and "no cuts!" (then mumbling something about how you'd cut "nicely"), does not amount to a critique. Mr Milipede's personal handling – scoring cheap debate-club points and stunts, culminating in the infamous EdStone (now known as the "heaviest suicide note in history") – were every bit to blame, but so was the rest of the Party by letting him muddle through putting off the difficult decisions because he wanted to avoid the fights that characterised the Blair/Frown years in office.

Truly, Labour's problem was that they spent five years being ANGRY, and angry does not win elections.

The blogger Another Angry Voice put up a typical meme hitting out at the folly of the electorate punishing the Lib Dems for siding with the Tories by electing the Tories.

It's obviously enjoyable seeing so many Lib-Dems MPs suffer the consequences of their self-serving treachary, but seeing so many of them lose their seats to Tories beggars belief. How can you punish the Lib-Dems for collusion by voting for the very people they colluded with?

AAV says "It's obviously enjoyable seeing so many Lib-Dem MPs suffer" demonstrating *exactly* why the left lost this election. When you would rather see people suffer than campaign to *stop* suffering, then you're part of the problem, not the solution, no matter how clever you think you are by calling the electorate "drunk".

The suggestion is that Labour's spite sent teams to Sheffield to try and unseat Cap'n Clegg when they should have been working Ed Balls seat, and so they lost the shadow chancellor to their own decapitation strategy.

In a way, though, Labour will be helped by Ed Balls losing his seat.

I am sad for Ed Balls personally, for losing a job he clearly loves.

But more broadly, I hope that it helps Labour move on, rethink their economic policy and admit to and move on from the errors of the Gordon Brown era.

Also, it will allow Yvette to contest the leadership without the shadow of standing against (or blocking) her husband which would have been used (unfairly) in the way Ed v David was used.

Labour's travails do impact on us. So long as they remain in eclipse, they drag down the politics of hope with them. By looking a shambles, or worse in hock to the Scottish Nasties, they strengthen the Tory position, which is of course based on fear.

Which brings us back to where we came in.

We cannot let fear win.

There IS a place for the CENTRE: not as "neither one thing nor the other" but as heart and hope; not splitting the difference between left and right but healing the divisions in our society; not just holding back the tide against things getting worse, but saying it's okay to believe that things can and will get better.

In this diary:

Mr Balloon is David "Call Me Dave" Cameron, leader of the conservative party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom with a majority of 12 seats on a 37% share of the popular vote.

Ms Insturgent is Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland, the devolved government of Scotland, whose Party won 56 seats in the UK Parliament on 4% of the nationwide popular vote (the quirk of our voting system that it rewards geographical concentration rather than broad popular support – normally I call this Largest Loser Wins, but in Scotland in 34 out of 56 seats, the SNP polled more than 50% of the vote)

Cap'n Clegg is Nick Clegg, former leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister, resigned after winning just 8 seats on 8% of the popular vote. I should probably start calling him "Parson Blyss" now that he's retired.

Mr Milipede is Ed Miliband, former leader of the Labour Party and Her Majesty's Leader of the Opposition, resigned after winning 232 seats on 30% of the popular vote.

Chatshow Charles is Charles Kennedy and Sir Ming the Merciless is Sir Ming Campbell, the two leaders of the Liberal Democrats immediately preceding Nick Clegg. The Party's MPs persuaded Charles to stand down when it became apparent he had an alcohol problem; Sir Ming stood aside of his own accord when it became clear that the newspapers were only interested in his age as an issue, and not the Party's message.

Norman Lamb and Tim Farron are two of the remaining Liberal Democrat MPs: Norman is a former minister and seen (fairly or unfairly) as the Clegg loyalist successor; Tim is former Party President but stayed out of government to maintain his independence, seen as the hot favourite.

Mike Hancock and Chris Rennard are Liberal Democrats who were involved in scandals during the last five years (both alleged to have behaved inappropriately to women).

Yvette is Yvette Cooper, wife of Ed Balls, Labour's Shadow Home Office spokesperson, seen as a possible leadership candidate, though rumoured to be uncertain she wants the job now.

So we’ve had a bit of a rest over the weekend, which was much needed. Now we’re into a new week, the opinions are flying thick and fast. Where Clegg went wrong. What our national message should be. Who should be the new leader.

There’s a lot of media attention on all of these subjects, because that’s how the national media works. But, frankly, it’s not how our party works or should work. We are a grassroots organisation, built from the ground up. With new people joining us and keen to get involved, and without the pressure of Government upon us, now is the best possible time to examine these grassroots and make sure they’re fit for purpose. I’m going to pick three qualities that we can all try to promote in our own local areas.

Firstly, our local parties need to be engaging. At the simplest level, this means activity and communication. Any activity, from a simple social, to a Pizza and Politics night, to a regional conference, to a canvassing session. Do it, and let people know you’re doing it, and that they are explicitly welcome as newcomers. Give reminders, directions and travel information. Reach out. Make it easy for people to get involved. If there is no activity in an adjacent seat, co-opt it as your own and invite its members to your events – work through your Regional Party if you have to.

Secondly, our local parties need to be inclusive. Not every event has to be tailored for everybody’s needs, but we should aim to meet a range of interests, beliefs, incomes etc. Share events with nearby local parties and cross-invite, to avoid duplicating organisational effort. Try to make sure your events aren’t just a room full of middle-aged, white, cis men. Posh fundraising dinners are fine at the upper end of the income scale, but some more low-key events with less pressure to spend will get you more time-rich, cash-poor activists. Make sure that newcomers are welcome at your events, and that people will go out of their way to talk with them (and hopefully not bore them silly about risographs or Land Value Taxation). I heard a story recently about a volunteer who spent many evenings helping out, only to find that the existing activist team would cold-shoulder them when it was time to celebrate and wind down.

Finally, our local parties need to be rewarding. People get involved in the Lib Dems for a variety of reasons, and have a range of interests they may want to pursue within it. Part of welcoming a new member is understanding what their motivation is, and helping them discover how they can achieve it through the party. Most of us are happy to do some of the thankless work that needs doing to keep a campaign rolling, if we’re getting something out of it in other ways. I have some stories from the election campaign of keen volunteers being dropped into jobs without adequate explanation or training, occasionally facing a hostile public while telling etc., and coming away feeling that they don’t want to help any more.

Thousands of new people have joined the Liberal Democrats since the election because they want to fight for liberalism. But they can’t do it alone – they need us to show them the ropes, and help them achieve satisfaction for the urge that made them join. Many of them may need us to help them understand what liberalism is, beyond the vague sense that it’s important. It would be a terrible waste of enthusiasm to let them down.

I’ve already said what I think about Labour’s decision to target Lib Dem-held constituencies at the expense of Tory-held ones, so I won’t repeat myself here. This article looks at the bigger picture, and how the Labour’s Lib Dem obsession for the past five years ultimately backfired on them.

It is striking how the Labour Party opted to define itself in opposition to the Lib Dems over the last few years, rather than the Tories. The ultimate expression of that was the “EdStone”, a fairly explicit response to Nick Clegg’s broken tuition fee pledge and “no more broken promises” position in 2010. More precisely however, the EdStone was a failed attempt to get Labour out of a hole of its own making.

The main lesson of the Clegg’s 2010 campaign should have been that politicians claim the moral high ground over trust at their own peril. Any party which has been in power for any amount of time knows that not all promises can be kept, even with the best of intentions. After all, I’m a member of the generation of students who was told by their NUS president, a certain Jim Murphy, that we had to drop our support for student grants to help ensure Labour stood by it’s promise not to introduce tuition fees. In the event, Labour – and Jim Murphy MP – did no such thing. More recently in folk memory was of course the notorious Iraq dodgy dossier, and more recent still, the country was still reeling from the 2009 expenses scandal.

The risk that politicians take when they explicitly attempt to taint their opponents with dishonesty is that they end up getting tarred by the same brush. Clegg could get away with it to a limited extent in 2010 because he was a relatively unknown and seen as an outsider. He didn’t need his opponents to do much work making him look shifty after the tuition fees debacle, but Labour went for it like a dog with a bone, even producing their own re-edit of the original Clegg zombie apocalypse PEB.

Did this damage Clegg and the Lib Dems? Undoubtedly. But it didn’t give voters a single reason to support Labour; in fact it reminded them why they abandoned Labour in the first place. Every time Labour focused on this issue, they ceded ground to the Greens, UKIP and SNP who didn’t fit the public’s perception of the politician mold. And as a consequence, they found themselves in a vicious circle, having to up the stakes every time they made an issue out of it. That they ended up having such a problem with trust that they felt they had to engrave their election promises literally in stone for people to believe them should have been a lightbulb moment; when you reach that stage, the truth is that you’ve already lost.

As has been expressed to me on and off the record by numerous Labour activists over the last few years, one of their key objectives over the last few years was to wipe out the Lib Dems, and thus revert back to two party politics. The Tories were keen to see the same thing happen, and so we have seen several examples over the last few years where they have actively colluded to undermine the third party. Miliband himself, to be fair, did briefly put himself above all that during the AV referendum, but lacked the authority to restrain most of his party from signing up with the Tories. They did it again during the attempts to reform the House of Lords. I’ve upset many Lib Dems arguing that they have to accept their own share of the blame for this failure, but that wasn’t to suggest that Labour weren’t also shortsighted.

The attacks were repeated and personal, at one point producing a highly glossy election broadcast in the run up to the European Elections to brand Clegg as the “un-credible shrinking man“. And again, it was extremely effective.

Labour may have been successful in wiping out the Lib Dems, but as we are now all too aware, the attempt to revert to two-party politics went absolutely nowhere. Anyone with any awareness of political and social trends in the UK over the past 50 years could have predicted that would happen. When Labour should have been worried about the Tories, all they seemed capable of focusing on was the Lib Dems and their so-called “betrayal”. It smacks of all-too Old Labour bullying, and like all playground bullies, it revealed a distinct lack of self-confidence and deference to the even “bigger boys”. While he was busy hitting Clegg over the head at every opportunity, Miliband was letting Cameron set the terms of the debate. For all this talk of the Conservatives being stuffed by members of the upper classes, whenever they were in the room Labour couldn’t tug its collective forelock hard enough.

I don’t actually believe, or even particularly make sense of, the idea that Miliband failed because he wasn’t “Blairite” enough. Blair fought his first election campaign when the Tories’ economic reputation was in tatters due to events he could not claim credit for; Miliband faced a party which was, putting to one side how for a moment, steering the country through an economic recovery. Arguing that Miliband should have both taken more responsibility for Labour’s economic mismanagement and claimed more credit for the golden age of Blair, the First Lord of the Treasury who deregulated the City spent money like water during an economic boom which any Keynsian would tell you should have been tackling the national debt, is simply rubbish. Surely they aren’t suggesting that Blair was so weak that he daren’t stand up to Gordon Brown?

But one thing Blair understood was that to govern, he needed to take seats off the Tories and not sweat the small stuff. It is hard to believe he would have achieved the 179 majority he had done if he’d spent so much time and energy trying to stop the Lib Dems from making their own breakthrough, citing the ancestral hatred borne out of the 1983 “betrayal” of the SDP.

If Labour had taken twelve more seats from the Tories instead of the twelve they took from the Lib Dems last week, Cameron would have been denied a majority. More than that however, if it had focused on the Tories over the last five years and not allowed itself to have become obsessed with the notion of restoring a two party hegemony, it would have done better still.

History consistently tells us that the right has always done better out of the two party system than the left, yet this is a lesson that Labour have stubbornly refused to learn. If Labour is serious about coming out of this slump it now finds itself in, it will have to correct this mistake. Membership in the Greens, UKIP, SNP and now, apparently, the Lib Dems, is surging. Like it or not, the smaller parties aren’t going to be going anywhere. It is time they evolved or stepped aside.

I suspect that the current flurry of posts about where the party goes from here are as much about helping their authors get their own thoughts straight as they are about joining an internal party debate, and if so then what follows shares that characteristic. I mention that at the start by way of an apology to anyone who feels I’m simply regurgitating something they have already said; I have read some other views on this already, and agree with a good deal of them. I include at the end of this post some links to posts with which I (at least partly) agree.

So.

Moving Forward

The first thing is to say that the party needs, quite quickly, to establish that it can build from here and ensure that the media doesn’t simply erase us from the picture, leading to a loss of momentum and steady slide into irrelevance. Of course, frustrating experience as a party member has shown us all that trying to ensure that the media do anything is easier said than done, but we need to take every opportunity to stake out liberal territory and make the running on particular issues. I suspect that there will be opportunities, particularly in areas where we, and not Labour, have traditionally been the more consistent opponents of a particular Tory policy, such as the Snooper’s Charter and repeal of the Human Rights Act. This is especially true whilst the frame of “things the Tories can now do because the Lib Dems can’t stop them” is relevant and fresh in people’s minds. As the years of government roll on, this frame will be supplanted by a more general “things the government want to do, and the opposition say are bad”, and the default voices of opposition will be Labour ones.

Whilst the party doesn’t have a new leader, it will be all too tempting for Nick Clegg to be the voice which makes such arguments from opposition, but I think we need to resist this temptation. Nick’s brand over the last five years was clearly not a popular one, and I think one of the key errors we made as a party was to stubbornly present to the public a face who they had made very clear they were at best unenthusiastic about. That’s a mistake that I think Labour equally made, but I digress…

For that reason, I can understand Greg Mulholland’s impatience to have a new leader in place, but actually I do think a leadership contest is the key context in which a genuine post-mortem of the last five years can take place. Once a new leader is in place, whoever that is, any internal review will be bounded and steered somewhat by them. Therefore, I fall more on Mark Pack’s side the argument, and I’m happy that the FE’s timetable for the election of a new leader does leave the time for a certain amount of internal debate to take place, albeit not extensive.

Leadership

For what it’s worth, I tend to agree with Greg’s assertion that the party would do best to move on and heal the sense of betrayal over tuition fees by electing a leader who did keep his pledge. I also agree with Jennie that we need to “get rid of the stupid managerial centrism and go back to being actual liberals and democrats now“, and David Boyle’s view that “the trauma of coalition moulded the party into a deeply pragmatic force, provided them with the dullest manifesto in political history“.

Whilst I can’t especially prove it right now, I think one of the core reasons for the softness of our vote on Thursday was that we weren’t presenting, at least nationally, much of a concrete sense of who we were or why people should vote for us. Tactical calculations about how best to influence the makeup of a government evidently weren’t what the public were looking for in a decision on how to vote – especially from a leader who had demonstrated that he was prepared to compromise on almost anything in the pursuit of the more grown up, consensual politics that he believed in.

Before the 2010 election, what people liked about Clegg was that he was a good communicator, and he had a spiky Liberal instinct that led to him promise, for instance, that he would rather go to jail than carry an ID card. I still think those qualities are valuable, but I suspect Clegg’s spiky liberalism was in reality an extension of his communication skills – a calculated position which suited him at the time. We later saw that, faced with the first draft of the Snooper’s Charter, Clegg and his circle in government initially didn’t see much wrong with the proposals, only hardening their line in response to the immediate reaction it provoked in the wider party.

So in this leadership election, I will be looking for a leader who abandons the definition of our party in reference to the positions of the other two, and focuses on giving the voting public a clear understanding of their brand of liberalism. I will be looking for a leader who gives the impression of having a political philosophy of his own, not a series of negotiating positions. And I will be looking for a leader whose instinct is to listen to the party, not to manage them.

In short, I’m not saying that I’m definitely voting for Farron, but I am saying that any other candidate is going to have an uphill struggle to convince me that they are a better fit for the criteria above.

Unity-Shmunity

I am usually instinctively suspicious of calls for unity. That it became one of our campaign slogans in the last couple of weeks now seems to be almost universally agreed as a mis-step, and yet some people have still been calling for unity and being terribly nice to each other in the wake of the result. I think I hold a middle ground here, but I must say my sympathies are more on the Alix Mortimer side of this one. Obviously a circular firing squad is counter-productive, but in the wake of a result like Thursday’s, I think we do need to be painfully honest with ourselves as a party. As ever, the secret lies in criticising actions taken and decisions made, but trying not to impugn the motivations and character of the people involved, I suppose.

Hitting the Reset Switch

Of course, for a working political party, there is never any such thing as down-time. We still have 8 MPs, 5 AMs, 5 MSPs, 1 MEP, 2257 Councillors, and so on. For the reasons I set out at the start of this post, it is vital that we don’t simply shut down for a few months of navel gazing.

BUT!

The party’s current situation does call for some kind of reboot, and this is the closest thing to a suitable time to remake the party as we are likely to ever have, so we might as well grasp the opportunity for a genuine root-and-branch remodelling of the party. Not so much of its policies, as its internal structures. One of the less controversial statements to make about the federal Lib Dem party in recent years is that its interal structures are over-complicated and secretive. The Morrisey Report into the party’s processes and structures highlighted this:

The arguments over whether all of these bodies are really necessary are complex, and in many cases, if we were to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and start from the first principles of democracy, accountability and efficiency, we might well end up reinventing some of the above. But the point is, some of it we wouldn’t. Now is a great time to undertake that exercise. For that reason, I completely agree with Jennie’s call for a constitutional convention at Autumn Conference (and see the comments to that post for some interesting discussion as to how to go about it).

Campaigning

Of course, the party’s internal structures aren’t the only thing which need a review. There will inevitably be lessons to be learned from the campaigns of the last few years, particularly the general election. Now that we have freed ourselves from the need to keep our heads down and keep going whilst we were in government, we can be really honest with ourselves about the questions that need answering. A few years ago, in the thick of the coalition, Tim Farron gave a conference speech which has resonated for longer than most. For one thing, it was The Cockroach Speech (and by the way, go buy one of Sarah Brown’s fab t-shirts). But actually, more of it deserves to be remembered. In the speech, Tim called for “a renewal of the theory and practice of community politics”.

It was the right prescription, but perhaps the wrong timing. While we were on the treadmill of government, the party only had the mental space to take this on board superficially. Now, we need to renew our whole campaigning style. Not necessarily because what we have right now is wrong, but because it is associated with the Liberal Democrats of the last five years. Jennie’s post calls for a “rebrand”, which is a word which can provoke suspicion in some. The best rebrands flow on from genuine renewal of the underlying product. I suspect that renaming the party isn’t the answer, but rather rebuilding our modus operandi. The theory and practice of community politics is still very relevant, as Tim pointed out, and of course there is baby to be retained as we seek to indentify the bathwater.

But as The Theory and Practice of Community Politics itself argued, “[campaign] techniques are a means to an end. If they become an end in themselves, the ideas they were designed to promote will have been lost.” We don’t cease to be Liberal Democrats if we re-examine our campaign methods. If we were designing our campaigns from scratch today, what would they look like? Focus leaflets and fakey newspapers? Well, maybe, but let’s ask the questions. In particular, we need to actually properly embed the advances that technology has ennabled us to make.

Connect is a wonderful tool, but currently we spend a lot of time trying to make it fit around our established ways of doing things, rather than renewing our established ways of doing things to take full advantage of the opportunities it offers. Too many of our canvassers are unaware of its underlying mechanics and therefore fill in canvass cards as though the data was destined for EARS still. Having spent the last few months doing quite a bit of data entry in a target seat, I could count the number of tags I applied to people in Connect that might have actually been useful to Operation Manatee (at least in the way that its operation has been described) on the fingers of one hand. In part, that’s also because there are pretty limited ways of recording the nature of conversations which have been had on doorsteps. MiniVAN has also been depressingly under-exploited so far.

I’ve just seen Anders’s post, which shares some ground with the above, but I hadn’t seen it when I wrote this, honest! I’ve actually just deleted a section about updating our understanding of “communities” as more than just geographical, because Anders seems to have been thinking along much the same lines as me, and expressed it rather better than I had! I’d also like to add that whilst I sympathise with his trying to defend the party’s structures as being less complex than the diagram I quoted above would suggest, I still think it is revealing that someone who presumably sat down to try to make a clear and simple representation of how the party works apparently couldn’t do better than that diagram!

Conference

Lastly, I think it’s worth saying that the sovereignty of conference as a policy-setting body needs to be re-embedded as part of the consitutional renewal mentioned above. The best of the party’s achievements over the last five years have come off the back of policy which came from conference, and the party’s uniquely ground-up policy structure. We are happy to celebrate the wisdom of conference when it suits the leadership. When conference reps clearly wished to use conference to kick the leadership (on the Health and Social Care Act, Bedroom Tax, etc.), they were generally also right with hindsight, and the leadership wrong. And yet, too often during the last five years, it has felt like attempts by party members to use conference to sound the alarm on impending disasters were being, if not suppressed, then managed. Avoiding embarassment for the leader at conference, or respecting “the two year rule” should not be more important than ennabling the expression of the concerns of a good many people.

Conclusion

As Liberals, we all love a bit of navel-gazing and agonising about process, and many of us have learned to try to control that urge. But sometimes, that kind of renewal is exactly what is needed. It’s notable that there appears to be a good deal of consensus around some of this in the posts which I’ll be linking below, which is encouraging. I’ll be reading further posts with interest, and hoping to hear some engagement with this discussion from the leadership candidates.

Links:

Jennie Rigg’s Where Do We Go From Here?

Alix Mortimer’s Five things the Lib Dems should do now that nobody else has suggested

David Howarth’s Thoughts on the Way Forward

Greg Mulholland’s Tweets, particularly this one

Mark Pack’s The Liberal Democrats need a leadership contest, not a coronation

David Boyle’s My traumatised Liberal Democrat party must rediscover its radical heart

Anders Hanson’s Where We Go From Here

Nick Barlow’s Thoughts on the Lib Dems: Past, present and (hopefully) future