It seems as if a lot always happens when I head off to my law school exams. Last year, I started two days before the General Election, a period in which a few little things came to pass. This year's exams began in earnest in the last week of January, just as North Africa discovered the delights of democratic revolution.
I guess it's easy to get nostalgic about it all, particularly for me as someone whose earliest political memories are of 1989. Indeed, as events unfolded in Libya I found myself wondering whether Gaddafi would be the Arab Ceauşescu, the literal sacrifice on the altar of the cult of personality. But now the metaphor has run out and we are faced with something we may not have seen before; an African civil war without the organisation, without the warlords.
Two questions jump out at me here. The first is reasonably straightforward; why do we care so much about the geography? Libya is no further away than the Balkans were, nor is civil war there any less of an issue for Europe than conflict in the former Yugoslavia was. Nevertheless, taking action there, even with NATO alone, seems to involve a psychological leap that it shouldn't.
It's the second question, however, that's rather more concerning. If intervening in Libya really is that difficult, shouldn't we all be, well, terrified?
The concern, at least at the level of a no-fly zone, seems to be that NATO aircraft might face resistance from Libyan planes and ground defences. On its own, that merely begs the question of what all the money we've spent on Eurofighter has really got us if it can't dominate an air force made up mostly of Soviet and French jets from the 1970's.
More generally, however, you have to wonder why on Earth you'd establish a no-fly zone where the guiding principle is, essentially, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. If your intention is to prevent someone from flying their aircraft over an area, the first thing you do is destroy their aircraft. It's a theory so simple, even Hermann Göring could understand it.
Moreover, Göring didn't wait for the planes to present themselves in full combat mode with pilot attached. And while he may have struggled to bomb the RAF into oblivion with his collection of Heinkels and Dorniers, NATO has positively designed itself to be good at blowing up immobile objects on the ground in the desert; this is the age, lest we forget, of stealth planes with laser-guided smart bombs and submarine-launched cruise missiles.
Worst of all, those advanced munitions are meant to be backed up with GPS, AWACS, Key Hole and, well, the CIA. Arguing that you can't strike at Iranian nuclear facilities because they're hidden away under hundreds of feet of solid rock is one thing, but at the very least, runways and hangars do tend to be on the surface where you can see them...
What's more, the same argument applies to almost everything else that Gaddafi might deploy. Helicopters? Again, if Eurofighter can't deal with those in a situation where fixed-wing air superiority has been achieved, that's pretty concerning. Tanks? Even the worst stand-up comic can make jokes about Britain's past successes combating tanks in Libya. Toyota Pickups? Top Gear is one thing, but they didn't have ground attack aircraft...
Maybe I'm simplifying matters a little, but equally, the last thirty-odd years of UK and US defence policy have been justified almost entirely on the idea that, through technology, more can be done with less. Libya could and should be an example of exactly that, a decisive intervention made without a single solider setting foot on Libyan soil. If we fail to deliver that, either through lack of political will or lack of capability, serious questions will need to be asked about what we've been doing for all this time.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Mr Brightside's Opus
I'll admit that I've had some trouble picking the winner of the 2010 Scunner Broom Award for Stupidest Political Quote of the Year (the fact I'm only awarding it in 2011 has more to do with law school exams than anything else, mind you!) Not that there weren't copious gallons of air expelled or ink spilled in the cause of saying stupid things for the sake of politics; on the contrary, in the first General Election year with Twitter availability the sheer weight of idiocy hit record levels.
What was missing, however, was the magical mix of ingredients that goes to make a Scunner winner; the ostensible reasonableness, the fundamental absence of truth when subjected to scrutiny, the breathtaking gumption needed to stray so far from the facts...
In the end, I fear I've cheated slightly, in that my winner isn't so much the stupidest quote of last year as it will be the stupidest and most repeated of this year. Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for David Blunkett MP on BBC News in November;
The system works.
So much of the No campaign in the AV referendum will boil down to those three words and the idea that after a thousand years of history, everything's fine, nothing to see here guv, move along please. It's the old joke; if it isn't baroque, don't fix it. My response to that?
Baroque? It's ******* rococo!
I won't rehearse all the myriad reasons why first past the post doesn't work at all; the Yes campaign themselves do that far better than I can. What makes Blunkett's comment award-winning is the sheer hubris it takes to actually flat-out say that it might affect the two major parties, as if the two major parties have droit de seigneur over the voters and that majorness is somehow a natural state and not the corrosive result of a system designed more for the 12th Century than the 21st.
So David, for hubris above and beyond even your impressive resume, the Scunner Broon Award is yours.
What was missing, however, was the magical mix of ingredients that goes to make a Scunner winner; the ostensible reasonableness, the fundamental absence of truth when subjected to scrutiny, the breathtaking gumption needed to stray so far from the facts...
In the end, I fear I've cheated slightly, in that my winner isn't so much the stupidest quote of last year as it will be the stupidest and most repeated of this year. Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for David Blunkett MP on BBC News in November;
"If there was something desperately wrong with our present system and if there was an alternative that provided all the answers that people want then by all means let's consider a change but we are not. We are talking about a system that does work being replaced by an unknown system that could distort completely the votes of those who have the temerity to actually vote from one of the two major parties."
The system works.
So much of the No campaign in the AV referendum will boil down to those three words and the idea that after a thousand years of history, everything's fine, nothing to see here guv, move along please. It's the old joke; if it isn't baroque, don't fix it. My response to that?
Baroque? It's ******* rococo!
I won't rehearse all the myriad reasons why first past the post doesn't work at all; the Yes campaign themselves do that far better than I can. What makes Blunkett's comment award-winning is the sheer hubris it takes to actually flat-out say that it might affect the two major parties, as if the two major parties have droit de seigneur over the voters and that majorness is somehow a natural state and not the corrosive result of a system designed more for the 12th Century than the 21st.
So David, for hubris above and beyond even your impressive resume, the Scunner Broon Award is yours.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
1265 And All That
Of the many questions the pundits and prognosticators will ask during 2011, one will dominate; is the AV referendum fundamental to the coalition? Of course, they'll add in a lot of extra words like "yes vote" and "survival of", which is a shame, because if they restricted themselves to the underlying question they'd find that the answer is yes, but for none of the reasons they've thought of.
For while a referendum by definition asks a question, both the referendum and the coalition itself demand that we consider the same problem; how do we govern our country? And that's a terrifying question for the British, because do you realise when we last asked it?
1265
It's quite scary as a law student to be taught that at its most basic level, Anglo-Welsh law still relies on the idea that the Monarch is empowered to dispense justice to their subjects and that a millennium's worth of legal reform has largely been about making it easier to deliver that justice to the people.
The standard British answer to most constitutional matters is "tradition". At one level, there is the simple irony that plenty of the elements we consider as traditions nothing of the sort (first election in which every MP was elected by FPTP for a single-member geographical constituency? 1950!)
More fundamentally, however, tradition tends to focus on individual elements of the system, which is where 1265 comes in. De Montfort's Parliament was the point at which we had all of the institutions of English government in place; the Monarch, the Lords, the Commons. Every reform since then has been about the details of those institutions; the relationship between Monarch and Parliament in the 17th Century, the nature of governments and the office of Prime Minister in the 18th Century; the franchise in the 19th Century; and the relationship between the Lords and Commons in the 20th Century.
If you were feeling charitable you might describe that as evolution, but it's really just a vaguely related series of circumstantial moments. Expediency, either through constitutional deadlock as in 1911 (and, indeed, 1642) or popular protest as in 1832 has always been the leading driver. The result is a systemic whole that we've never actually thought about, justified by spurious traditionalism and a vague sense that what we have has always worked. But as Blackadder would have identified, there's just one tiny flaw with that analysis...
Indeed, far from having always worked, our system has never worked and rarely has that been truer than now. The faults are legion; the tyranny of execuslation, the insane overcentralisation of power and money, the disservice to opinion and debate that is our electoral system, etcetera, etcetera...
And while much of the response to the coalition is about the policy (and at least some of that isn't even tainted by the foul stench of hypocrisy) a significant measure of the response derives from the fact that the system we have struggles to give even the appearance of functioning unless certain conditions are met. Now that we can't squint and tilt our heads to the left and think that what we have looks a bit like an effective system of government, we have to face up to what we have; many people clearly don't like the look of that and would rather wish the problem away.
My challenge to the Yes campaign, then, is to ensure that the naysayers can't do the ruby slipper act. The grassroots-focused approach they are taking so far looks an excellent way of doing that, but we all have a duty to ensure that complacency about the status quo is eradicated, not left to fester and undermine the reforms that are so crucial to our future.
For while a referendum by definition asks a question, both the referendum and the coalition itself demand that we consider the same problem; how do we govern our country? And that's a terrifying question for the British, because do you realise when we last asked it?
1265
It's quite scary as a law student to be taught that at its most basic level, Anglo-Welsh law still relies on the idea that the Monarch is empowered to dispense justice to their subjects and that a millennium's worth of legal reform has largely been about making it easier to deliver that justice to the people.
The standard British answer to most constitutional matters is "tradition". At one level, there is the simple irony that plenty of the elements we consider as traditions nothing of the sort (first election in which every MP was elected by FPTP for a single-member geographical constituency? 1950!)
More fundamentally, however, tradition tends to focus on individual elements of the system, which is where 1265 comes in. De Montfort's Parliament was the point at which we had all of the institutions of English government in place; the Monarch, the Lords, the Commons. Every reform since then has been about the details of those institutions; the relationship between Monarch and Parliament in the 17th Century, the nature of governments and the office of Prime Minister in the 18th Century; the franchise in the 19th Century; and the relationship between the Lords and Commons in the 20th Century.
If you were feeling charitable you might describe that as evolution, but it's really just a vaguely related series of circumstantial moments. Expediency, either through constitutional deadlock as in 1911 (and, indeed, 1642) or popular protest as in 1832 has always been the leading driver. The result is a systemic whole that we've never actually thought about, justified by spurious traditionalism and a vague sense that what we have has always worked. But as Blackadder would have identified, there's just one tiny flaw with that analysis...
Indeed, far from having always worked, our system has never worked and rarely has that been truer than now. The faults are legion; the tyranny of execuslation, the insane overcentralisation of power and money, the disservice to opinion and debate that is our electoral system, etcetera, etcetera...
And while much of the response to the coalition is about the policy (and at least some of that isn't even tainted by the foul stench of hypocrisy) a significant measure of the response derives from the fact that the system we have struggles to give even the appearance of functioning unless certain conditions are met. Now that we can't squint and tilt our heads to the left and think that what we have looks a bit like an effective system of government, we have to face up to what we have; many people clearly don't like the look of that and would rather wish the problem away.
My challenge to the Yes campaign, then, is to ensure that the naysayers can't do the ruby slipper act. The grassroots-focused approach they are taking so far looks an excellent way of doing that, but we all have a duty to ensure that complacency about the status quo is eradicated, not left to fester and undermine the reforms that are so crucial to our future.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
(I Hate You) For Ideological Reasons
Of all the responses to the Comprehensive Spending Review, perhaps the most intriguing has been Labour's use of the phrase, "ideological reasons". The way they spit it out, the venom they attach to it evokes the broadest Valleys accent (though whether the invocation is of Kinnock, Bevan or just my granny from Trebanog's cries of "uch a fi" at my four-year-old self's attitude to chocolate is unclear...)
Sonorous qualities notwithstanding, it's an unusual phrase to use, as after all it is essentially the point; you have an election, it's contested between various parties each of which expounds a particular ideology, and whichever party best convinces people that their ideology is best is then elected to carry it out. Surely the Labour Party can't mean that political parties should ditch their ideologies altogether? (Oh, hang on, yes they can...)
But it isn't what they mean, if only because they're nowhere near ready to admit to themselves that they ditched all their principles long ago. Instead, it comes down to an idea I've blogged about before; Labour's absolute conviction that everything they do must be good for the vulnerable because they are the ones doing it, they are are the ones who have their needs as heart. As this excellent dissection of the Thatcher legacy points out, the corollary of this is that anything done by any other party must be both bad and done out of malice. This being the case, the rest of the rhetoric shouldn't be much of a surprise; the leap from "ideological reasons" as code for "Tories hate poor people" to "ethnic cleansing" (a term on which Welsh Labour has prior form) is rather less mentally taxing than it ought to be. (As for Boris' invocation of that term, however, I have no idea...)
We Lib Dems need to be vigilant, however, because Labour's future attack strategy towards us is rooted in the same "ideological reasons." All those years of Yellow Tories basically boil down to the same idea; Labour are the only ones who care, therefore we can't care, ergo we must be evil too. The special vitriol reserved for Lib Dems derives from the Labour perception that we must be lying when we talk about helping the less well-off; the Labour worldview allows no other conclusion.
Their frustration up to now has been an inability to prove our evil (to their minds because of the deceit, in reality because we aren't) but their hope must be that the coalition will be their proof. The accuracy of that, either as a summary of the Lib Dems past or their future, is more than a little questionable. But we should keep watch, because it's a very Chinese crisis; as Labour strive to affirm their psychological hangups, they leave themselves open to the exploitation of them, and without them, there's not very much left.
Sonorous qualities notwithstanding, it's an unusual phrase to use, as after all it is essentially the point; you have an election, it's contested between various parties each of which expounds a particular ideology, and whichever party best convinces people that their ideology is best is then elected to carry it out. Surely the Labour Party can't mean that political parties should ditch their ideologies altogether? (Oh, hang on, yes they can...)
But it isn't what they mean, if only because they're nowhere near ready to admit to themselves that they ditched all their principles long ago. Instead, it comes down to an idea I've blogged about before; Labour's absolute conviction that everything they do must be good for the vulnerable because they are the ones doing it, they are are the ones who have their needs as heart. As this excellent dissection of the Thatcher legacy points out, the corollary of this is that anything done by any other party must be both bad and done out of malice. This being the case, the rest of the rhetoric shouldn't be much of a surprise; the leap from "ideological reasons" as code for "Tories hate poor people" to "ethnic cleansing" (a term on which Welsh Labour has prior form) is rather less mentally taxing than it ought to be. (As for Boris' invocation of that term, however, I have no idea...)
We Lib Dems need to be vigilant, however, because Labour's future attack strategy towards us is rooted in the same "ideological reasons." All those years of Yellow Tories basically boil down to the same idea; Labour are the only ones who care, therefore we can't care, ergo we must be evil too. The special vitriol reserved for Lib Dems derives from the Labour perception that we must be lying when we talk about helping the less well-off; the Labour worldview allows no other conclusion.
Their frustration up to now has been an inability to prove our evil (to their minds because of the deceit, in reality because we aren't) but their hope must be that the coalition will be their proof. The accuracy of that, either as a summary of the Lib Dems past or their future, is more than a little questionable. But we should keep watch, because it's a very Chinese crisis; as Labour strive to affirm their psychological hangups, they leave themselves open to the exploitation of them, and without them, there's not very much left.
Monday, November 01, 2010
Hi, I'm John Doe And I'm A Politician
Regular readers of this occasional missive (hello Sid, hello Doris) will be aware of my tendency to draw somewhat left field conclusions from events. So you'll unsurprised to discover that my main thought on the comprehensive spending review, and particularly on tuition fees, is that we really didn't deal with MPs expenses very well...
One of the stranger suggestions amongst the litany of Lib Dem psychoanalyses that have emerged of late is the idea that our policies existed because we never expected to be in government (Andrew Rawnsley's crack at this theme being one of the best). On the one hand, it's fairly easy to point out that unless you're the kind of psephological illiterate who believes that the outcomes "Labour Win" and "Conservative Win" are appointed by God as the only possible results of an election (or as we call them, journalists) it should have been blindingly obvious that this election would result in a hung parliament (even if my guess would have had rather more Lib Dems and correspondingly fewer Labour...)
More importantly, however, while clearly there were many in the party who were bathing in the warm glow of their ideological purity, there were plenty of people wondering about how any coalition would work and how it would fit with our policy process. Unsurprisingly, as an amateur constitutional wonk who wrote the current Liberal Youth policy process, I was one of these and my general conclusion on the checks and balances was that there weren't any.
Okay, maybe that's not entirely fair. There is the not-quite-a-triple-lock (which, as we found in Wales three years ago, is true right up to the point when conference decides to exercise its power to overrule FEC) but that essentially only endorses or fails to endorse the coalition document. Once you're in though, your only recourse is to try to mount the reverse vote, but that would be quite some feat.
Of course, I suppose if we were particularly unhappy we could deselect any misbehaving ministers, though as that's a power for local parties it would rather depend on them and heaven knows there are some local parties I wouldn't trust to pick parish councillors (although let's be clear, the selection of diabolically awful candidates is a cross-party predilection...)
But then, this is the greater philosophical point. For all that our media narrative and indeed our voting patterns tend to fixate on the identity of the next government, the only thing we get to vote on is the identity of our representative. What's more, the same thing is true for every political party; we get to select our candidate, not everyone else's.
The trouble is, this isn't the question we generally ask of our candidates, at either level. What we actually ask is "What would you do if you were Prime Minister?" Partly this is because it's the only way we can formulate the question; we can't ask them what they would do in every possible combination of x Labour, y Conservative, z Lib Dem and (t-x-y-z) others. Mainly, however, it's because the years of oligarchy have lulled us into the idea that manifestos are non-fiction rather than science fiction.
Labour's manifesto in June 2001 contained very little, in retrospect, about the issue that would define their term in office; its authors were not expecting to see airliners flying into skyscrapers just three months later. Neither did the Tory manifesto of 1992 discuss what they would do if, five months later, David Cameron would have to scurry out of the Treasury behind the chancellor's back as he announced that the sky had fallen down on sterling's head. Think Margaret Thatcher's manifesto of 1979 contained any specific pledges about responses to an invasion of the Falkland Islands? Think again.
All the complaints about the coalition breaking manifesto promises ignore that it was ever thus, and not merely because politicians are politicians. In a quantum universe, the only accurate prediction you can make is that the value of your investments may go down as well as up...
What matters, therefore, is who is in the room. "Decisions are made by those who show up, so are we failing you or are you failing us?" Quoth Saint Jed of Bartlet, and he wasn't wrong. This coalition will be tested by something unexpected, not least because, as Alan Bennett so wonderfully put it, history is just one effing thing after another. Am I happy with every decision they've made? Of course not. But do I have confidence in the people we've put in the room for when things come to pass? I absolutely do.
What does all this have to do with MPs expenses? Well of all the many responses there were to that episode, the one that was missing was a defence of the idea of representative democracy itself. Instead, the cumulative effect was to reinforce the idea that politicians are by definition incompetent. After that, it's quite difficult to argue that the identities of the people in the room matter when you've already established that they're all the same anyway.
The difficulty going forward, then, is that the same applies to the AV referendum; how do you convince people that politicians can be better if you improve the method for holding them to account if you've already convinced them that there's no such thing as a better politician? Either way, we shouldn't be under any illusions that the referendum is just about everyone's first preference between FPTP and AV; it goes to the heart of how our political systems work. Indeed, our biggest advantage will be that the present system doesn't...
One of the stranger suggestions amongst the litany of Lib Dem psychoanalyses that have emerged of late is the idea that our policies existed because we never expected to be in government (Andrew Rawnsley's crack at this theme being one of the best). On the one hand, it's fairly easy to point out that unless you're the kind of psephological illiterate who believes that the outcomes "Labour Win" and "Conservative Win" are appointed by God as the only possible results of an election (or as we call them, journalists) it should have been blindingly obvious that this election would result in a hung parliament (even if my guess would have had rather more Lib Dems and correspondingly fewer Labour...)
More importantly, however, while clearly there were many in the party who were bathing in the warm glow of their ideological purity, there were plenty of people wondering about how any coalition would work and how it would fit with our policy process. Unsurprisingly, as an amateur constitutional wonk who wrote the current Liberal Youth policy process, I was one of these and my general conclusion on the checks and balances was that there weren't any.
Okay, maybe that's not entirely fair. There is the not-quite-a-triple-lock (which, as we found in Wales three years ago, is true right up to the point when conference decides to exercise its power to overrule FEC) but that essentially only endorses or fails to endorse the coalition document. Once you're in though, your only recourse is to try to mount the reverse vote, but that would be quite some feat.
Of course, I suppose if we were particularly unhappy we could deselect any misbehaving ministers, though as that's a power for local parties it would rather depend on them and heaven knows there are some local parties I wouldn't trust to pick parish councillors (although let's be clear, the selection of diabolically awful candidates is a cross-party predilection...)
But then, this is the greater philosophical point. For all that our media narrative and indeed our voting patterns tend to fixate on the identity of the next government, the only thing we get to vote on is the identity of our representative. What's more, the same thing is true for every political party; we get to select our candidate, not everyone else's.
The trouble is, this isn't the question we generally ask of our candidates, at either level. What we actually ask is "What would you do if you were Prime Minister?" Partly this is because it's the only way we can formulate the question; we can't ask them what they would do in every possible combination of x Labour, y Conservative, z Lib Dem and (t-x-y-z) others. Mainly, however, it's because the years of oligarchy have lulled us into the idea that manifestos are non-fiction rather than science fiction.
Labour's manifesto in June 2001 contained very little, in retrospect, about the issue that would define their term in office; its authors were not expecting to see airliners flying into skyscrapers just three months later. Neither did the Tory manifesto of 1992 discuss what they would do if, five months later, David Cameron would have to scurry out of the Treasury behind the chancellor's back as he announced that the sky had fallen down on sterling's head. Think Margaret Thatcher's manifesto of 1979 contained any specific pledges about responses to an invasion of the Falkland Islands? Think again.
All the complaints about the coalition breaking manifesto promises ignore that it was ever thus, and not merely because politicians are politicians. In a quantum universe, the only accurate prediction you can make is that the value of your investments may go down as well as up...
What matters, therefore, is who is in the room. "Decisions are made by those who show up, so are we failing you or are you failing us?" Quoth Saint Jed of Bartlet, and he wasn't wrong. This coalition will be tested by something unexpected, not least because, as Alan Bennett so wonderfully put it, history is just one effing thing after another. Am I happy with every decision they've made? Of course not. But do I have confidence in the people we've put in the room for when things come to pass? I absolutely do.
What does all this have to do with MPs expenses? Well of all the many responses there were to that episode, the one that was missing was a defence of the idea of representative democracy itself. Instead, the cumulative effect was to reinforce the idea that politicians are by definition incompetent. After that, it's quite difficult to argue that the identities of the people in the room matter when you've already established that they're all the same anyway.
The difficulty going forward, then, is that the same applies to the AV referendum; how do you convince people that politicians can be better if you improve the method for holding them to account if you've already convinced them that there's no such thing as a better politician? Either way, we shouldn't be under any illusions that the referendum is just about everyone's first preference between FPTP and AV; it goes to the heart of how our political systems work. Indeed, our biggest advantage will be that the present system doesn't...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
