Necessity is the mother of invention

Resolution 1973 allows the use of “all necessary measures… excluding a foreign occupation force” to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” and to “enforce compliance with the ban on flights”.

So, as David Cameron says, “the action has the full and unambiguous legal authority of the United Nations”.

The thing is (and never mind exactly how one defines “occupation” and “civilians”): who decides which measures do and don’t count as “necessary”? In practice, the governments taking those measures get to make those calls. One couldn’t rule on every possible path through the fog of war in advance, and there’ll be no UN tribunal at the end of it to assess every bomb dropped. So, in reality, “unambiguous legal authority” blurs into what the governments think they can make plausible. Bombing tanks outside Benghazi? Taking out air force bases? Destroying a government compound in Tripoli? Killing Gaddafi?

What is Cameron’s rationale in establishing what’s necessary? This:

Targets must be fully consistent with the UN Security Council resolution. We therefore choose our targets to stop attacks on civilians and to implement the no-fly zone, but we should not give a running commentary on targeting and I do not propose to say any more on the subject than that.

(And just look at this poor wretch of a Foreign Office minister getting Paxmanned [from about 27’00].)

There’s something of a Humpty Dumpty-ish “it means just what I choose it to mean” quality to this. While bombings and raids are ongoing, Cameron will often refuse to elaborate, implicitly demanding our trust. More broadly, he’ll come up with whatever justifications are needed to maintain a sense of legitimacy about this campaign. Every war leader does this.

International law is a morass of grey areas. In the end, the only authority that will matter to him is moral authority, as defined partly by him and partly by public opinion.

But I hope it works. I hope the cost in lives is minimal. I hope Gaddafi is deposed quickly; given the coverage of the amateurish-looking rebels, it appears that the likeliest way for that to happen is for the army leadership to turn against him. And I hope the successor regime is benevolent.

If I have to be on one side of the fence, then I’ll come down in favour: with no military intervention, Gaddafi would have finished crushing the rebellion and then redoubled his repression. As it is, some other series of events will happen. In the short term, things will be better (or less bad); in the long term, nobody knows. But I hope people smarter than me are thinking hard about it.

The weight of a vote and the strength of a preference

“And for dessert, sir?” the waiter asked. I ummed and ah-ed and then said: “The chocolate cake, please.” “An excellent choice.”

Two minutes later he returned to tell me they’d run out. I looked at the menu a little longer, and picked the sticky toffee pudding. “Certainly, sir, another fine dish.” And he was right: in fact, their selection was generally pretty good all round.

Shortly, he came back, a little sheepish, to tell me the toffee had come unstuck. I pondered again. “Then I’ll take the crème brulée.”

Alas, it turned out that the blowtorch had blown a fuse. After he’d finished grovelling, I looked at what they did have left – hot fudge sundae or nettle tart – and found my decision very easy. So hot fudge sundae I had, and while it was no better than passable, I was deeply glad to have avoided the nettle.

Now, where was I? Oh yes: Danny Finkelstein [£] makes a number of sound points about the AV referendum campaign, including a sensible response to one common canard about AV (which he opposes):

I don't agree with the "no" campaigners that I am voting more than once. Everyone gets the same right to express their other preferences.

Quite right. But then he goes and spoils it all by saying:

But there is a serious - in my view, fatal - objection… The system gives my fourth preference the same weight as someone else's first preference. And it shouldn't.

Two things:

First of all, it’s a mistake to think that what matters most to a voter is the pick of their favourite. What about someone who thinks Labour is marginally better than the Greens, the Greens marginally better than the Lib Dems, the Lib Dems marginally better than the Tories and the Tories vastly better than the BNP? Here, the real passion, the strongest choice, only appears at the fourth preference. Just as I found in my badly stocked restaurant.

Under AV, picking a first preference is answering the question ‘Who do you like the most?’ Picking a second preference is answering the question ‘With your first choice unavailable, who do you like the most?’ And so on. I don’t see why the later questions should be less important and people’s answers accordingly less significant.

Secondly, under first-past-the-post, we already have people picking their second, third and lower preferences – it’s called tactical voting. Plenty of people have done it at one point or another. Under this system, you look at all the candidates, mentally rank them in order of preference, then pick the highest-ranked one who you think has a real chance of winning and write an ‘X’ next to their name.

And your second- or third- or fourth-preference vote will carry as much weight as my first-preference vote. So the putative unfairness Danny attributes to AV also exists under FPTP, albeit in a less obvious form. But I don’t think it’s unfair.

Unless we require voters to award each candidate marks out of 100 (and do it honestly, which of course is unenforceable), there is no way for a ballot paper to distinguish enthusiastic, overwhelming endorsement from grudging, borderline, best-of-a-bad-bunch acceptance.

I’ve got a little list

Nick Clegg, September 2010:

Clegg feels he is "constantly being urged by commentators, by party activists" to "express identity by tearing strips off the Tories" and by brandishing "trophies of achievement to show the Liberal Democrats have secured this or that concession".
One of the big points he wants to make to his party is that "this temptation" ought to be resisted. "The moment we get drawn into that sort of dynamic, two things will happen. Firstly, it will actually make us seem more irrelevant than we are because it will perpetuate the idea that the point of being in the coalition for the Liberal Democrats is to have a little shopping list of achievements, the assumption being the rest of it is Conservative policy. The truth is much more radical than that. All the big judgments are genuinely jointly taken by David Cameron and myself. That's why I didn't want to have a department, that's why I'm a hop and a skip from his office."

Nick Clegg, March 2011:

Would a Government without Liberal Democrats have ended child detention? Got an extra ten billion out of the banks? Would it have held a referendum on the voting system? Or put up capital gains tax? Ordered an inquiry into torture? Brought in a pupil premium? Or replaced Control Orders? Would a Government without Liberal Democrats have cut taxes for the poorest?
I don’t think so.

I can’t see the Tories being happy with this.

Stroppy editing

I reckon that what my psyche really needs is a bit more fragmentation. So I’ve started another blog, focusing on things I’ve come across in my work as a copyeditor/proofreader/general editorial dogsbody. All anonymised, to spare the blushes (and the sacking).

I like my work in theory, but in practice it often annoys me. Hence the title: The Stroppy Editor. It’s of niche interest, but it’s my niche, so there.

Political meanderings and intermittent silliness will continue here as usual. But posts like this and this and this will in future appear in the other place.

War and democracy

A propos of Libya, Tony Benn, John Pilger and others write to the Guardian warning against any military action. One thing they say is:

The disaster in Iraq should have taught us that military intervention cannot hasten democracy.

For one thing, this seems an overgeneralisation from one example. West Germany post-1945 springs rather quickly to mind.

But more than that, one may agree that the Iraq war caused a disastrous loss of life and was utterly wrong while still doubting that the country would have made faster progress towards democracy if there had been no war.

War does not in itself bring democracy, but can – in some circumstances – remove obstacles to it.

Vegetables, rodents and the man responsible for a Mickey Mouse government

Matthew d’Ancona says:

One of the great Spitting Image sketches portrayed Margaret Thatcher dining out with the Cabinet. “Steak, please,” she says. “How would you like it?” inquires the waiter. “Raw,” replies the Iron Lady. “And what about the vegetables?” he asks. “Oh,” she says, “they’ll have the same as me.”
One of Mrs Thatcher’s most cunning tactics was to distance herself from the government she led when it was under-performing. Routinely, she would refer to her own administration as “they” – signalling that her deeper loyalty lay with the electorate. Now, in a smoother, less combative fashion, David Cameron is borrowing this very technique.

And, a day later, Cameron pops up on the One Show. When asked about the “bit of a rodent problem at Number 10”, he joked:

Don’t talk about the Cabinet like that!

A couple of months back there was much chatter in and around Labour circles about whether using the phrase “Tory-led government” would make criticisms stick better than “coalition”. I joined in myself. On reflection, this was inane.

The government’s (and the Conservative party’s) strongest political asset, and the name that Labour needs to tar with all government failures, is David Cameron. Never mind Clegg: there are more votes and more seats that need to be won from the Tories and that will require knocking down their figurehead. He can’t be allowed to float above the day-to-day grind of governing, a hands-off national leader rather than a politician. Because whether he delegates or micromanages, he’s still in charge and he’s still responsible.

A long time ago in an office far, far away...

I’ve staged a few more Lego Death Star office scenes. By making it a satire on working life, I’ve convinced myself that playing with toys is a legitimate pastime for a 34-year-old. Result!

I’m going to try to do one of these every Monday. I imagine they’ll be hit and miss, which is at least better than a stormtrooper’s shooting.

C what he means

Damian (who, incidentally, made a point worth taking seriously about my AV explanation) has just tweeted this:


It’s not what you think it is.

(In that post, he asks: “Is the World ever going to grow the fuck up about sex?” I believe I’ve proved that the answer is no.)

No flies on Gaddafi

One of the most troubling things about the situation in Libya is the proposal to make the country a ‘no-fly zone’. The sheer amount of pesticide required would surely bankrupt NATO, as well as causing severe harm to the environment and public health.

The Alternative Vote system explained in words of one syllable

This isn’t an attempt to plug AV, nor to speculate on what would happen under it, but just to knock down the notion that it’s fiendishly complex.

(Update 26/4: I'm getting quite a bit of Google traffic to this post, which is nice, but I should say that this video featuring Dan Snow is a much better explanation of the difference between AV and FPTP. It's not neutral, but I'm sure you're smart enough to separate out the 'how it works' from the 'why it's good'.)

How to vote
Anne, Bob, Claire, Doug and Eve all want you to vote for them. So who do you like the most? Pick one (Bob, say) and put a ‘1’ next to their name: that’s your first choice. Then, pick which of the rest of them you’d like the most if Bob were out of the race (Eve, say) and put a ‘2’ next to their name. Then, pick which of the rest you’d like the most if Bob and Eve were out of the race – and so on.

You can go all the way and put ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’ and ‘5’ next to each name, or you can stop at the point where you don’t have a view on which of the rest is best. You can just put ‘1’ and leave at it that, if you don’t care for the rest of them at all. Then you’re done.

How to count the votes to see who wins
We put all the votes that mark Anne as the first choice in a pile. And then the ones for Bob and Claire and so on. If one of them has more than half the votes, they win.

If not, then the one placed last (say it’s Bob) gets knocked out and we move to round two. Round two, at root, asks: ‘Who do you like the most out of Anne, Claire, Doug and Eve?’

We look at all the votes from Bob’s pile to see who’s the next choice on each. If you marked Bob ‘1’ and left it at that, then you’ve said you have no view on the rest of them, so your vote gets put to the side. If you marked, say, Eve ‘2’, your vote goes on her pile. We move all the Bob votes that do have a ‘2’ marked to the piles for Anne, Claire, Doug or Eve. The votes these four had from round one still count this time, of course: those who cast them still have the same first choice in a race with no Bob.

And if one of them has more than half the votes, they win.

If not, we do the same thing: say Anne is last this time. She gets knocked out and for round three the votes in her pile get moved to Claire’s, Doug’s and Eve’s piles, as marked. And if one of these three has more than half the votes, they win. If not, we knock out the one placed last and go to round four, in the same way. When we get to the point where one of them has more than half the votes, they win. And that’s that.

(Number three in an extremely occasional series.)

Mass uprisings against hated regimes – they’re all the rage

If I had anything of substance that half as clever as that pun to say about Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and wherever else, I’d say it here. But there’s a limit to the number of countries on which I can quickly get myself up to the level of expertise needed for a pub conversation, let alone meaningful blogging. And that number is one, give or take.

I’ll just make the very general point that booting out a dictator isn’t the be-all and end-all of democratisation. If you can wring concessions out of him that seriously and permanently constrain his power, it may not be needed at all. And if he does go, what most matters for how the country then fares is the incentives faced by those (such as the Egyptian military) who find themselves in charge. Do they have greater motive to push for deeper constitutional reform or to consolidate their newfound power?

Are you smarter than David Cameron (thinks you are)?

I’m still undecided about voting systems, but I am starting to think that the FPTP campaign (or, more accurately, the anti-AV campaign) is arguing in a marginally more annoying way than the AV campaign (or, more accurately, the anti-FPTP campaign). I’ll try not to let this bias me.

One thing FPTP certainly has going for it is that it’s simpler: simpler to vote and simpler to count. But I don’t think the difference is really all that big, and I’d treat this as a small factor that would only come into play if I couldn’t decide otherwise.


But David Cameron thinks AV is far too complicated to understand:

Here's a passage from a book detailing how the Alternative Vote system works:
"As the process continues the preferences allocated to the remaining candidates may not be the second choices of those electors whose first-choice candidates have been eliminated. It may be that after three candidates have been eliminated, say, when a fourth candidate is removed from the contest one of the electors who gave her first preference to him gave her second, third and fourth preferences to the three other candidates who have already been eliminated, so her fifth preference is then allocated to one of the remaining candidates."
Do you understand that? I didn't. And I've read it many times.

I understood it straight away. Now, Cameron has a first in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford, so unless he’s been in mental decline since his Bullingdon days, he really should be able to get it. Or, as I suspect, he gets it perfectly well and is just playing dumb because he thinks everyone else is.

That said, the passage is much, much longer than it needs to be. But that’s bad writing, not inherent complexity. Here’s my shorter version:

When a candidate is eliminated, each of their votes is allocated to that voter’s highest preference among the remaining candidates. Preferences for candidates that have already been eliminated are skipped over.

And you could cut the second sentence; it’s implicit in the first.

Here I stand; I can do no other

Norm asks for a second opinion on the anthropic principle, in relation to our existence, the laws of physics and the ‘multiverse’. He seeks input from “someone who understands the science”. Well, that definitely isn’t me, but I think I do at least understand the logic (and I think Norm does too, really).

If life-supporting physics is extremely unlikely (and I make no claim about whether that’s so or whether it’s even knowable), then the fact that our universe has just that is, to say the least, curious. Possible explanations are: random chance; deliberate design; or a change of perspective that makes this unlikely situation less remarkable. (The other option is that the physical laws we actually have are in some way necessary – that is, to deny the antecedent.)

The first and second options are the sort of thing that scientists will only seriously settle on if they’ve exhausted all other possibilities, the first being no explanation at all and the second simply shifting the missing explanation back a stage and magnifying it in the process. The third route, which the multiverse hypothesis takes, say that if there is a vast multitude of physical universes, then there are bound to be some life-supporting ones. The fact that we’re in such a universe is no more surprising than the fact that fish are found in seas and not in deserts.

Of course, a multiverse would be quite a thing, and naturally the people from Occam’s Razors Ltd are hesitant to invest. But which is the more extravagant hypothesis: lots and lots and lots more physical stuff, or a creator?

(I don’t rule out other possibilities; I’m no more a scientist than Jennifer Aniston. And I’m also not saying that an atheistic desire to resist the design argument is motivating the idea: the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics gets us into that sort of territory.)

The idea that Norm rightly identifies as unreasonable is that “our physical laws might be explained ‘anthropically,’ meaning that they are as they are because if they were otherwise, no one would be around to notice them”. This of course is rubbish (and backwards causation at that).

All the anthropic principle can give us is the weaker, epistemic conclusion that any observed physical laws must be such as to enable the existence of lifeforms that can observe them. But that’s nothing special: it’s like saying that all instances of drunks recovering their dropped car keys take place under lamp-posts (because when the keys get dropped somewhere dark, they remain unfound).

Choosing how to choose

I keep thinking I should write about the electoral reform referendum (assuming it happens), but I keep being beaten into despair by the fusillades of drivel being fired off in the media by pro- and anti-AV campaigners. It’s as if they’re competing to avoid my support.

If anybody can recommend some blogs/papers/articles on either side, making arguments that don’t pointlessly exaggerate, that haven’t been knocked down on factual or logical grounds a thousand times already, that don’t ramble on about irrelevancies, and that don’t amount to pleading for the advantage of someone’s favourite party, I’d be grateful. I’m genuinely undecided.

Or maybe I should just get it out of my system and fisk all the crap from both sides.

The love that dare not remember its name

This may be the best notice I’ve ever seen posted on our office intranet:

Valentines flower delivery
Flowers have been delivered this morning to the post room with no addressee name on. The sender is "Paul from Lancashire". Please contact the Mail room if you know Paul from Lancashire.

The dark side of the workforce

It was my birthday last week; you can see what silliness I got up to here.

All the latest ‘news’

On reading the Independent’s report that the Daily Star is giving helpful coverage to the English Defence League, I went and had a look. It’s true. there’s nothing like an actual endorsement, but some fairly positive noises are being made.

But what I also noticed (apart from enough tat to make the Sun look sombre and classy) was the button the Star has at the bottom of its news stories:


One for The ‘Blog’ of ‘Unnecessary’ Quotation Marks, I think.

The bonfire of the charities

Stories like this one are becoming familiar, even mundane:

The government's spending cuts are "destroying" volunteering and undermining its "big society" vision, the head of a leading charity has said.

But there will be more of them, and they’ll keep mattering, because they embody the central flaw of Cameronism.

In economics, the government believes in the notion of ‘crowding out’: if there’s less state, there’ll be more growth. But ‘the state’ and ‘the economy’ are not intrinsically rivals, fighting a zero-sum game: they interact in a variety of ways, positive and negative. Indeed, they blur into each other in so many places that while we can talk of them distinctly they shouldn’t be thought of as wholly separate entities. Labour warns that cutting the state too far, too fast will harm growth.

The same applies to ‘the state’ and ‘society’ (the latter per se is a sprawling, amorphous concept; I’m focusing here on the more formal institutions of ‘civil society’). Here, David Cameron has for years been flogging the crowding-out doctrine: if government does less, civil society can and will do more. But the two are very interdependent, often supportively so. Charities, membership organisations and other community bodies operate in an environment shaped by government policies as much as by social norms, and in turn the work they do weaves the social fabric that serves as a context for government action.

And of course a good deal of voluntary-sector funding comes from the state.

The recession means greater demands on many charities and fewer public donations for them to work with, so government money becomes all the more crucial. But of course the government’s cutting its support for charities. This does not look promising.

“But there’s the deficit,” they say. “We need to make cuts, and those, alas, are going to hurt.” Plenty of people may accept that – and perhaps even that the speed and scale of cuts George Osborne has chosen luckily happen to be exactly right. What doesn’t really wash, though, is to simultaneously play the ‘crowding out’ card and argue that less government money for the voluntary sector will strengthen it.

Civil society minister Nick Hurd says:

This is a government absolutely determined to try and help a sector that has become arguably too dependent on the state, to manage through a painful transition into a future where we see a lot of opportunity for it, not least in terms of delivering public services.

He nods to the pain (which is certain and looming), but puts most stress on the sunlit uplands. I think he truly believes in them, but they sound vague to me. The basic assumption is that the state is (on balance) a threat to civil society. If I’m right, this is also the fatal flaw: a government programme based on this assumption will falter and fail.

Piotr Brzenzinski says that “Labour has yet to come up with an alternative to the Big Society, or even a substantive critique of the idea.” But that, in the end, may not be the point. Labour won power on the promise of providing social justice and a strong economy. It lost power because too many people judged that it hadn’t, and because Cameron promised to succeed where Labour failed. Likewise, to defeat Cameron, it may be better not to argue that the general idea of a more plural and decentralised public realm is wrong but to explain why he’s mucking it up and how Labour would do it better.

Showing that government cuts lead to a bonfire of the charities may help to do this. Arguing that the state can help voluntary and community organisations to flourish may help to rehabilitate it in the public eye.

Another twit

So, I’m on Twitter. I have been for ages, but I don’t do much political stuff there, so I’ve never really bothered to integrate it with the blog or cross-promote or multi-platform or whatever ghastly thing it’s called. It’s hard to say anything original or insightful in 140 characters, so it really suits me very well. I mostly use it as an outlet for puns, plus the odd bit of ranting.

Here are some free samples:

• I just saw a group of fish swim up to a floating marker, thinking it might be food. School buoy error.
• My architect asked me if I want a room where I can sit down and work quietly, but I’m not sure. So I’ve commissioned a study.
• I love the new M Night Shyamalan film about a man trying to open a jar of pickles. There’s a great twist at the end.
• Just saw a lorry carrying 30,000 newly printed copies of the Iliad drive into a lake. Epic fail.
• A statistician walks into a bar chart.
• My son has taken some photos of a dominatrix. What a young whippersnapper!

These are some of the better ones. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you want to follow me, then I suggest you either buy a van with blacked-out windows or look at @SnoozeInBrief. If you don’t want to follow me, my understanding is that that’s OK too.

Things real people don’t say about advertising

I think you’ll find that this is very funny.

A cut-price stimulus

On the state of economy, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says (among many other things):

High inflation… may constrain the Bank of England’s ability to provide further support to the economy in the event of another adverse shock to aggregate demand. … As a result, it may be wise for the government to have a contingency plan for ‘trimming the sails’, holding back on tax increases and/or delaying spending cuts to ensure that poor growth out-turns in the short run do not sink the longer-term fiscal consolidation plan.

But:

Given this risk to growth and these recent developments, the government could consider loosening its currently planned fiscal tightening for 2011–12. However, this would not necessarily pass through into higher demand in the economy if it merely causes monetary policy to become tighter than would otherwise have been the case. Essentially, the argument in favour of announcing a temporary fiscal loosening in the forthcoming Budget is weaker the more confident one is that it would result in tighter monetary policy.

They have a fair point. Almost anything you do with fiscal policy to support growth is also likely to stoke inflation (which in turn makes higher interest rates likely).

Almost.

Cutting VAT – or undoing last month’s rise – would reduce prices as well as helping growth.

William McGonagall and the GDP figures

To describe William McGonagall as the worst poet in Scottish history is to insult the rest of the world by implication. His style was excruciatingly, hilariously terrible – and eminently spoofable, although it’s very hard to do a rip-off that’s as so-bad-it’s-good as the original. But I thought the new GDP figures (in time for Burns Night) gave a suitably momentous occasion for a poor tribute.

Lament for the Wintry Loss of Gross Domestic Product

Upon the birthday of one of the two giants of Caledonian verse
A startling signal came that the economy had taken a turn for the worse,
And fears of recession were raised once again,
For gross domestic product had fallen in the last quarter of two thousand and ten.

Having enjoyed twelve months of reasonable growth
Many had feared the pace might now drop towards that of a sloth.
But woe! It was announced that GDP had fallen by 0.5 per cent
And economists aghast were forced to wonder where the recovery went.

Some counselled that this was an early estimate and subject to revision,
Yet those charged with writing headlines treated such caution with derision;
And the myriad writers of web-logs wasted little or no time
In publicising their interpretations, typed out line by line.

Critics of the government decreed that it surely had blundered
By causing the destruction of one pound in every two hundred:
Its policies for the substantial reduction of public spending
Had doubtless contributed to the recovery’s untimely ending.
These cuts were mostly yet unleashed, it must be noted in the government’s defence;
Yet its portentous talk of them had doubtless ailed consumer confidence.

But surely none could wholly deny the Chancellor’s claim
That people heart-broken by the economic news should not apportion him all the blame
Because Nature had cast upon our fair land a most ferocious frost,
Which had exacted from many industries a severe cost
And accounted for some of the GDP that had been so tragically lost.

The month of December had brought weather most snowy and cold,
Causing discomfort and inconvenience to young and old
When winter’s chilling hand of our nation took hold;
There was more disruption to businesses than can easily be told
As workers were cruelly kept from travelling due to the extreme cold
And great depths of snow meant fewer of retailers’ wares could be sold.

Whatever the causes may be of this tragic decline in national wealth
Or the merits of proposals to restore industry to ruder health,
Naught but time shall deign to tell whether this truly is a double-dip
Or but a temporary financial eddy o’er which sails our troubled ship.

Sticks and stones and Tory-led coalitions

Labour has executed a small, but smart bit of media handling:

Ed Miliband's office is writing to the BBC, ITV and Sky demanding they stop describing it as a coalition and instead use Labour's preferred description, a Tory-led government.

Everyone knows that the government is a coalition in which the Conservatives are the larger party and the Lib Dems the smaller party. To describe it as “the coalition government”, “the Conservative-led government” or indeed anything other than “the government” is to specifically draw people’s attention towards one aspect of it.

If the modifier is factually accurate, then that’s fine – as long as the context makes it reasonable to highlight that aspect. “Lib Dem backbenchers have been arguing for X, but the Conservative-led government is maintaining its policy of Y” – fine. “Despite tensions, the coalition government shows no sign of breaking up” – fine.

Otherwise, you’re making a political point. And unless you’re a news reporter who needs to present things neutrally, that’s fair game. Labour calculates, probably rightly, that “Tory-led” is likely to make some left-leaning Lib Dems less keen on the government. And the Tory and Lib Dem leaderships calculate, also probably rightly, that the word “coalition” makes them seem to be doing lovely things such as making sensible compromises, forming a consensus, putting aside partisanship for the greater good. But whatever effects this language has are probably marginal.

(I’d love to see an opinion poll testing the effect of the word “coalition”. For instance, ask half the sample “Do you think the government is acting in the whole country’s interests/understands the problems faced by people like you/whatever?” and ask the other half “Do you think the coalition government…”)

Now. Miliband’s people will not get the news media to start using “Tory-led” in standard reporting. But, as James Forsyth says, “I suspect that this whole row will rumble on for a while yet. It is tempting to dismiss the whole thing as absurd, as only of interest to a few journalists and spin doctors. But labels do matter.”

Yes. And while this spat is not going to achieve its nominal aim – as Krishnan Guru-Murthy says, “because of the associated controversy my own view is currently that I should avoid the phrase [‘Conservative-led’]”. But the effect is that “coalition” has now been outed as a politically loaded term. So we may well see less of it. Guru-Murthy again: “However the exclusive use of ‘coalition’ feels equally unfair and controversial”.

Sentencing policy

I enjoyed Adam Haslett’s review of How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One by Stanley Fish. I’ve heard Fish’s name around but don’t know his work at all. The book looks pretty interesting.

I have few ambitions that I’m aware of, but one of them is to implement a forward-looking raft of proposals to action sustainable enhancements with respect to my capabilities in the area of impactful prose production in order to deliver on the objective of the progressive maximisation thereof.

A song and dance about Iraq

Typo of the day:

Doing things with words

I’m writing very little here these days, so to sort-of make up for that, here are two people writing about writing:

Cathy Relf reports on a debate between David Marsh and Simon Heffer, style guide supremos of the Guardian and Telegraph respectively.

Tim Radford has 25 tips for journalists (with a lot of them applicable to other types of writer).

A wake-up call

I’m going to forgo an extended rant about Nick Clegg’s new name for his target voters, “Alarm Clock Britain” – the phrase is only marginally stupider than Miliband’s “squeezed middle”, Cameron’s “great ignored”, Blair’s “Mondeo man”, Hague’s “pebbledash people” or every dreary bugger’s “hard-working families”.

All I will say is that for many people, the alarm clock is the most feared and hated thing in life; Clegg is one of the few people who might be able to boost his popularity by associating himself with it.

Me, I’m hitting the snooze button.

First past the alternative postal vote

The Independent on Sunday has asked ten “leading advertising agencies” to design billboard posters for the two sides of the AV referendum campaign. They’re all terrible, but this one from King and Tuke did at least make me smile:


Ten anorak points to the first person who can explain the unintended irony.

Happy Birthday, Mr Deputy Prime Minister…

It's Nick Clegg’s birthday today! Cameron and Osborne have got him a cake, and he’s going to help them cut it.

(Ahem)

I said, he’s going to help them CUT - oh, never mind.

(You might retort that it’s Brown’s fault for having cooked an irresponsibly large amount of cake to start with, but I bet if he’d done that he’d have won a landslide.)

Control nudges: the big society fights terror

David Cameron wants to ‘nudge’ us towards better behaviour rather than nanny us, and “has now established a ‘behavioural insight team’ in Downing St to look at ways of changing behaviours without increasing taxes or introducing penalties”.

He also wants to find a new way to stop people killing us all: “The control order system is imperfect. Everybody knows that. … It hasn't been a success. We need a proper replacement”.

Well, this is simple. Rather than those illiberal, statist control orders, we could introduce a system of modern, subtle control nudges – a counter-terrorism strategy fit for the big society.

For instance: terror suspects would be able to leave their homes, but rather than wearing electronic tags they’d wear iPods programmed to play UK Eurovision Song Contest entries on repeat while out of the house. They’d still be free to go and blow things up, but having to listen to this would be a powerful deterrent. In that event that they did still choose to proceed on their mission, this would admittedly be unlikely to change their minds about the merits of the British way of life. On the other hand, it would encourage them to set off their suicide bomb as soon as possible rather than waiting until they’d arrived at their intended target.

They would no longer have their telephones tapped, but in advance of each conversation with their co-conspirators they’d have to ring BT customer services to get their line specially connected for the call. While it’s true that BT customer services is the greatest contributor to violent radicalisation that the world has ever seen, the prospect of going through such an ordeal would daunt even the most dedicated jihadi.

Furthermore, terror suspects would no longer be subject to 28 days’ detention without charge. However, all bomb detonators (I presume there are specialist shops that sell them) would come with timers pre-set to 28 days. This would give those angry youngsters time to calm down and reflect on whether they really want to be doing this. It will also enable police to catch them in the act, as someone standing in a public place for four weeks, wearing a backpack and repeating “Allahu Akbar” while clutching a clock with a big red button on it, will be reasonably easy to spot.

The detonators would still be reprogrammable for shorter times – we mustn’t deny these people their rights, after all – but in order to do so, the aspirant bomber would have to interact with the Microsoft Office paperclip. A gentle, but surely unconquerable, last line of defence. Nudge, nudge.

The Campaign for Real Tea

Christopher Hitchens has written a fine piece about one of the greatest cultural and geopolitical matters of our time: how to make a decent cup of tea (via Norm).

He covers sugar policy and milk tactics – and, while I think he’s a little too prescriptive on the former (personally I’m a sucrophile but I’m happy to be libertarian about this), he’s absolutely right that the only way to ensure you add the right amount of milk is to add it, i.e. after the tea.

And, as Norm rightly identifies, the most important issue is this:

ground [coffee] beans are heavier and denser [than tea leaves], and in any case many good coffees require water that is just fractionally off the boil. Whereas tea is a herb (or an herb if you insist) that has been thoroughly dried. In order for it to release its innate qualities, it requires to be infused. And an infusion, by definition, needs the water to be boiling when it hits the tea. Grasp only this, and you hold the root of the matter.

Hitchens bemoans how little this is known in the USA.

Tea, like modesty, irony and imperialism, is something that we Brits understand far better than Americans do (indeed, we have our imperialism to thank for our tea expertise). Perhaps the USA would benefit from the establishment of a Campaign for Real Tea, to promote this simple, vital but apparently not self-evident truth.

It sounds stupid? Well, yes, it does. But I think you’ll find it’d be the least stupid American political movement with ‘tea’ in its name.

That’s a yes, then

The clever thing about breathalysers is that you don’t actually need to use them in order to find out whether people have been drinking:

In the early hours, staff tried to breathalyse a number of prisoners because they suspected they had been drinking.
When the prisoners refused to be breathalysed they became violent along with other prisoners and went on what we call a mutiny.

(Also, I do like that “what we call a mutiny” - very Nicholas Parsons.)

Miliband misses the point

This is the wrong answer:

He [Ed Miliband] also wants to change Labour's culture by allowing the public a vote when the party chooses its leader. He plans to give 25 per cent of the votes to non-party members who register as Labour supporters. MPs, trade unionists and party members would also each have a quarter of the votes in Labour's electoral college. At present, MPs, union and party members each have a third of those votes.

The problem with an electoral college such as Labour’s is that it can give split results. We had one this year, allowing critics to say (correctly) that Miliband wasn’t wanted by the members of his own party. A little embarrassing.

The way to avoid this is to abolish the electoral college, not to increase the number of sections.

We could let MPs keep their special role in nominating candidates, but beyond that it would be better to have a single electorate of equals. We could do this by restricting the franchise to party members only; we could have party members plus union members who choose to pay an affiliation fee – but treated as a single bloc (perhaps by simply giving the union supporters standard party membership for their fee).

Or we could set up a register of party supporters, potentially a millions-strong section of the public, who would then vote for the leader. But please, let’s not make these people into a new category in the electoral college. That would just magnify the problem that embarrassed Ed Miliband.

Not only would it mean that the party membership could still have its verdict outweighed by that of union members (and/or MPs); it would also mean that the registered supporters, who had signed up to join a new era of mass democracy, could find their verdict outweighed by the other, smaller, established sections. The other parties would crow that the ‘old politics’ had triumphed, and the press would merrily sneer that the party machine had crushed the public voice.

And the new leader would start his or her job by having to explain why this didn’t really matter.

God is a Lib Dem

Either that, or the Pope has been getting spin lessons from Nick Clegg:

God is always faithful to his promises, but he often surprises us in the way he fulfils them.

Uxbridge English Dictionary

From time to time, I like to play Uxbridge English Dictionary. It’s a game from ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’ (new series starts on Radio 4 next Monday), taking an educational look at our mother tongue.

English is a rich and varied language, but there’s often confusion between apparently similar terms. For example, a lot of people don’t know the difference between adverse and averse. But anyone who takes the trouble to look them up will discover that adverse means harmful or unfavourable, whereas averse is the less catchy bit between choruses.

But meanings are constantly changing, so here are some new definitions I’ve spotted recently:

• Abominable – practice frowned upon by all but the most aggressive of matadors
• Accomplish – one who aids and abets Sean Connery
• Admin – contribute the least
• Apollo – Roman god of chicken
• Appearing – an iPhone app that pierces your ear while you talk on it
• Balderdash – the rapid receding of a hairline
• Canada – a snake in a tin
• Category – an allegory about a cat (q.v. Allegory – a category of alley)
• Cauterise – what I did just before she looked away with disdain
• Cognac – to trick a long-haired Himalayan beast
• Dysentery – what the seeds of dissent eventually grow into
• Exist – person who is prejudiced against their former lovers
• Hackney – IRA punishment before the invention of guns
• Hammersmith – the legend of Mjöllnir, weapon of the mighty Thor
• Laxity – a rural area
• Lymph – mythical woodland seductress with a sore leg
• Mailbag – scrotum
• Phobia – not real ale
• Polymath – if Janet has two parrots and John has three parrots…
• Post-it – girl who was once fashionable, now of very little note (q.v. Exit – recently fashionable girl now on her way out)
• Psychotic – nervous twitch that makes you stab people
• Pumpkin – commit incest
• Rampart – part of a ram
• Rueful – a traffic jam in France
• Seamstress – the consequence of an over-generous lunch
• Transsubstantiation – providing evidence of one’s sex change
• Treacle – deforestation
• Unleavened – the condition of trees in autumn
• Vagrant – taxi driver’s conversation
• Watershed – outdoor water closet
• Wednesday – ‘At what hour does the sun rise?’

Your turn...

I want to ban Christmas

Are you one of those people who says things like: “Raaagh burble splutter NOW THEY WANT TO BAN CHRISTMAS it’s disgusting political correctness gone mad multicultural thought police our proud nation liberal elite great traditions militant atheists historic freedoms nanny state two world wars am I alone in thinking snort harrumph froth”?

If so, I always feel a bit sorry for you. My instinct is to tell you that the people who want to ban Christmas don’t really exist, but I fear that that might spoil the festive magic for you. In fact, I suspect many of you (the older ones) have secretly worked out that there is no Christmas Abolition Brigade, but you still like to play along because it makes it all so much more fun and magical.

Well, I have a gift for you. I hereby declare that I want to ban Christmas. And you can quote me on that.

I demand that laws be passed forbidding the use of the C-word and that this time of year be called ‘the holiday season’, ‘the festive period’, ‘Winterval’ or ‘Seculetide’. (I just made Seculetide up just now all by myself and I’m spankingly proud of it.)

I want carol singing to be replaced by readings from The Selfish Gene, I want nativity plays to be dumped in favour of re-enactments of the founding of the European Union, and I want shopping centres to be enlivened by children’s entertainers dressed not as Santa but as Harriet Harman. I will stop at nothing to achieve this.

OK, I don’t want any of this. This is a string of clumsy lies (apart from the ‘stop at nothing’ bit – I will indeed do nothing and then stop). But let’s face it: you people have no interest in truth. You just like to have a bugbear to shout about. And I hereby offer you my services.

Whenever anyone turns around to you and says: “Oh come off it, nobody really wants to ban Christmas,” you can smugly retort: “Ah, but that bloke off of the internet does, HE ADMITS IT! So you see, I’m not a loathsome bullshitter pandering to the paranoia of the ignorant, I’m a BRAVE CRUSADER FOR TRUTH AND OUR VERY WAY OF LIFE can I have some mince pies and a rabies shot now please?”

Merry Seculetide one and all!

(Come on, it’s clever wordplay: secular and yuletide, they both share a ‘ule’ syllable, so you can – oh, never mind.)

What’s in a name?

I’m glad to see Ed Miliband doing this:

Miliband has banned the shadow cabinet from using the word "coalition" to describe the government because it sounds too moderate and reasonable, and fails to convey what he says is its true "ideological, rightwing agenda". …the Labour leader's director of policy, Greg Beales, says that from now on they must use the term "Conservative-led government"

And it’s only taken him three months since I suggested it:

What better way to suggest [the Lib Dems’] inability to tame the Tories than disregarding their existence? Refer to ‘the government’ or even just ‘the Tories’ – not ‘the ConDems’, which is cute but maybe a bit too pleased with itself, nor even ‘the coalition’, which sounds too much like ‘the consensus’, and who wants to be against that?

I am confident that he’s shaping up to be a better leader of the opposition than Iain Duncan Smith or even William Hague.

A poverty boom? Wait for the real expert

The claims from the Institute for Fiscal Studies – that the government’s tax and spending plans will increase the number of people in poverty – are eye-catching and alarming. But as with all such superficially striking headlines, we should reserve judgement.

Within a day or two, we can expect an independent analysis of the merits of these claims to be issued by the non-partisan Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, headed by the independent academic Nick Clegg.

The ODPM proved at the time of the Budget and the Spending Review that it has the rigour, expertise and impartiality to provide reliable and honest assessments of the many politically motivated statements, produced by the IFS and other third-rate Marxist outfits, about the effects of government policy on poor people.

Offended? Ram it up your pimhole!

This is very simply the most brilliant opinion poll I have ever come across. Anthony Wells and colleagues at YouGov surveyed people on whether they thought particular swearwords were acceptable to broadcast.

Included among the 20-30 words was the made-up ‘pimhole’, which comes from a 1990 Fry and Laurie sketch about them not being allowed to use proper swearwords.

And? 14% of people said pimhole should be allowed on telly at any time, 38% said it should only be used after the watershed, and 23% said it should be totally banned. 25% of people said they didn’t know.

Anthony speculates:

I expect the main reason was context. The question was all about bad language on television, and pimhole was included in a list of swearwords including some that are considered extremely offensive. It’s likely many respondents assumed that pimhole must, therefore, be a swearword.

Probably that’s some of it. I think it also illustrates the common desire simply to have an opinion, any opinion, as well as the fear of admitting ignorance. It also warns us that polls on things people don’t know about can produce useless answers.

But the point about context can be cast in a different light.

Whether the subject is cartoons of Mohammed or a spoof paedophilia documentary or radio presenters leaving rude answerphone messages or a TV talent show featuring skimpily clad performers, there are a lot of dubious claims of people being ‘offended’ by things in the public domain.

People’s fulminations about things that have caused them offence often seem to be based on what they think they’re expected to find offensive, rather than any genuine, independent judgement about how something makes them feel. This poll suggests that a good amount of any given spasm of public outrage is likely to be empty, bandwagon-jumping bluster.

Am I alone in being disgusted by this state of affairs???

Comparative media studies

One story, two newspapers, two angles.

The Guardian: Poorest councils will face biggest cuts

The Telegraph: Cuts in council services to be deeper in wealthy areas as Coaltion diverts millions into poorer towns and cities

Hmm. It’s almost as if the two publications have some sort of inherent political bias. But that’s crazy talk.

Anyway, I want to make another point: when you see headlines like these, using comparative words (“biggest”, “deeper”), you have to ask yourself: relative to what? What’s the other side of the comparison?

The Guardian story explains:

The poorest councils face the biggest cuts next year … Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, today allocated a last-minute emergency £85m fund in an attempt to insulate the poorest areas from the worst cuts next year. But despite his efforts, deprived inner-city areas of London and large cities in the north are facing the most drastic reductions of up to 8.9% this year alone, with the shires and county councils relatively protected by their burgeoning council tax revenue.

And the Telegraph does too:

Ministers have been able to limit the cuts with a special “transition grant” to divert £99milion of central Government funding from richer to poorer areas over the next two years. The extra cash will mean that spending cuts in areas like Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Doncaster, South Tyneside and Hartlepool will be limited to 8.9 per cent in each of the next two years.
People living in more prosperous areas will see cuts almost as big. Residents in Woking in Surrey will see cuts of 7 per cent in each of the next two years, while residents in Tunbridge Wells will see cuts of 5.9 per cent.
While the cuts in urban areas are larger than those in wealthier parts, they would have been bigger if the transition fund had not been set up.

So the Guardian is right to claim that poorer areas are having bigger cuts than richer areas, and the Telegraph is also right to claim that richer areas are having bigger cuts than they would have had were it not for this transition grant. Which is the more important comparison is up to the reading public.

(Oh look, I’ve written a post nominally about the media that in the process manages to illustrate a way in which the government is shafting the poor. It’s almost as if I have some sort of inherent political bias.)

A palpable hit

I may not be blogging properly right now, but other people are. Go and read this by Cathy Relf, on the media use of “hit by” to jazz up abstract noun phrases, because it’s right and because it’s well-written.

(I’m just very busy at work at the moment, and quite drained the rest of the time. It’s annual financial report season, and I’m struggling to prevent a small band of fanatical yet shambolic illiterates from sabotaging it. Yesterday’s only light relief came when I took a short break to proofread a Christmas menu that included “mice pies”.)

Tumbleweeding

So, things have been getting pretty quiet here over the last couple of months. I’ve just not had a whole lot to say lately – or at least not a whole lot of time to think of things that are worth saying. Soon as that changes, I’ll let you know.

A party political broadcast on behalf of the Liberal Democrats

Some time ago, I tried to persuade my party to support X rather than Y, but I failed, so I then went around saying that Y was right and that we would do it and I would definitely oppose X. Now I’ve agreed to do X.

I’m sorry about all that Y business, but things have changed, you see. There’s another party that likes X too and I’ve made a deal with them, and I’m sure my party and the public will understand that I couldn’t possibly break my word on that. Plus, of course, I’ve thought all along that X was right.

However, I realise that my party still supports Y and opposes X, and so just to make them happy, I’m thinking about not voting for X, even though I’m the individual who’s personally in charge of doing it. But I’ll still publicly support it, and certainly won’t vote against it, and will encourage my party colleagues not to vote against it either, so that we guarantee X happens even while making an incoherent gesture in the vague hope that someone might think it leaves our hands clean.

Thank you and goodnight.

In fairness, this sort of thing goes on in politics all the time. But it’s happening rather more publicly than usual at the moment.

Update: Chris has a good post on this.

Promissory notes

Vince Cable’s brain may be starting to melt under the pressure:

Business Secretary Vince Cable has denied breaking promises on university tuition fees, insisting the Liberal Democrats' pre-election pledge to oppose any rise was not binding. …
Dr Cable said the Lib Dems "haven't betrayed anybody" and that the coalition agreement struck with the Tories was their only binding commitment.
"We didn't break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn't win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it's the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I'm trying to honour," he said.

First, the pledge that the Lib Dems proudly signed didn’t require them to “win the election”. It was: “I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative.” Cable could have honoured this promise had he been the only Lib Dem MP in a parliament where the Tories had a majority of 200.

Second, the coalition agreement is no more “binding” than their manifesto. Neither is legally enforceable; both are political statements. What happens if either is broken? The Tories/voters respectively would/will have to decide, ad hoc, how they want to react. That’s all.

Third, given this, the statement that the coalition deal is more important than anything they had previously said to the public to win votes is not going to foster much trust in their reliability in the future.

Fourth, the coalition agreement doesn’t commit them to support raising fees. It says: “We will await Lord Browne’s final report into higher education funding, and will judge its proposals” based on several criteria, including “the impact on student debt”. Either they abandoned their anti-fees promise well after the coalition deal, or they contracted out this “judging its proposals” to the Tory part of the government, or they were just lying so they could back out of a promise they’d never really meant.

My dependency culture

My name is Tom and I live a life of economic dependency.

I depend for my livelihood on all the strokes of luck – most obviously my parents’ dedication, a hefty amount of genetics and a good, free education – that gave me the qualities I have. More immediately, I depend on an economic system that values these qualities, so that there have (mostly) been job vacancies in the right place at the right time, with a level of pay that covers my needs and even my tastes.

On top of that, I’m willing to work to earn this pay; for this, I’ll take some personal credit (although plenty of people worse off than me have stronger work ethics). But apart from that, I’m responsible for none of the circumstances that allow me to convert my willingness into comfort.

My job, while mostly tedious and often frustrating, rarely places too much strain on me – and is occasionally rewarding. Now and then, if I do something particularly well, I might feel proud of what I’ve achieved. But a moment’s reflection tells me that the more pertinent feeling is gladness at a situation where I have the ability to achieve such things and the opportunity to use that ability (and to sell it for a decent price).

I’ll never be rich, but I’m still dazzlingly lucky. What separates me from all the people who’d like to work but can’t, or want decent work but can only find back-breaking, soul-destroying, minimum-wage drudgery, is sheer chance. They may be dependent on benefits to keep the wolf from the door; I’m dependent on the coincidence of supply and demand that happens to define my labour as valuable. The labour market may more or (often) less efficiently rate our merit as employees, but it isn’t a fair judge of our virtues as people.

Moral crusaders against ‘dependency’ need to remember this.

(This train of thought, if you can call it that, was set off by two good posts from Peter Ryley and Paul Sagar.)

Missing voters: one cheer for Clegg

This is absolutely right:

Up to 3.5 million potential voters are to be targeted by the government as it seeks to ensure that the "missing millions" who fail to register are given a voice in elections, Nick Clegg will announce today. …
Clegg will say: "It is not good enough to simply ignore the millions who aren't registered, especially when you look more closely at where the problem is worst: among the young; among black and ethnic minority communities; in areas with high social deprivation."

Good. I hope it works.

My quibble is how this fits with the timing of the government’s boundary review, which seeks to cut 50 MPs and equalise constituency sizes. The review will take place before any voter registration push, and so the new constituency sizes will disregard these millions of people. The result will be to more deeply entrench an electoral system that under-represents “areas with high social deprivation”.

But it’s nice that Clegg now admits this.

Presenting an image

In order to understand a political U-turn, you need to get answers to both of these questions:

• Why have you taken the new position?
• Why did you take the old position?

For instance, Nick Clegg on tuition fees has been trying to focus on the first question, allowing him to plead the necessity of tough decisions, while avoiding the second: the issue of whether his pre-election promises were idiotic or dishonest.

In the case of David Cameron’s very recent decision to put his personal photographer and film-maker on the public payroll, and his decision today to take them off it again, the only explanation we have so far is:

A source has told the BBC that Mr Cameron now accepts it "sent the wrong message" to employ them at a time of public sector job cuts.

From this we can see that the answer to both my questions above is: ‘To make me look good.’

Useless polls on the tuition fees protests

This week has offered an excellent case study in what effect public protests – including small but prominent violence – have on public opinion. The Sunday Times YouGov polls this weekend and last asked about the government plans for tuition fees.

Unfortunately, the two polls used very differently worded questions, so the results are not comparable. A pity.

For what it’s worth, last weekend’s poll found 11% in favour of universities setting whatever fees they wanted, 26% in favour of the government policy of a £9,000 fee cap, and 50% in favour of a lower cap or no fees at all. It also found 51% in favour of and 32% against the government policy on repayments of student loans (raising the earnings threshold to £21,000 and having higher earners pay more interest).

This weekend’s poll, using very different wording to set the background, had a single question that covered both the increase in the fees cap and the raising of the repayment threshold; 35% supported this, 52% opposed it.

There’s not really anything we can conclude from that.

The new poll did ask about the protest, though:

Earlier this week there was a violent demonstration against the proposed rise in tuition fees, which included protesters invading and damaging the building containing the Conservative party's headquarters. How much sympathy do you have with the demonstration?
I sympathise both with the demonstration and the direct action against the Conservative party headquarters – 13% (inc. 20% of 18-24-year-olds)
I sympathise with the demonstration, but not the damage caused to the Conservative party headquarters – 52% (inc. 47% of 18-24s)
I do not sympathise with the demonstration, nor the damage caused – 32% (inc. 23% of 18-24s)

Do you think this week's demonstration against tuition fees and the violent scenes at Conservative party headquarters helped or damaged the protesters' cause?
Helped their cause – 11% (inc. 18% of 18-24s)
Damaged their cause – 69% (inc. 58% of 18-24s)

Neither of these, though, comes close to being a measure of how the protests actually changed public opinion – if at all.

And there was a standard question about whether you think the government “will be good or bad for people like you”. Before the protests, 29% of people said good and 48% said bad; after, 28% said good and 48% said bad. Basically, no change. But among 18-24-year-olds, last weekend 24% said good and 46% said bad, while this weekend 27% said good and 40% said bad. This suggests a swing towards the government among those likeliest to empathise with the protests, but breaking the poll down into age groups means you have much less reliable sample sizes (about 130 in each poll).

I don’t think this tells us anything. A wasted opportunity.

Why does the Milibaby not honour our brave troops?

It's an outrage.

“An important diagnostic tool”

Sometimes the stuff I have to edit for work is borderline incoherent, sometimes it’s full of painfully misjudged jargon and sometimes it barely even exists. This sort of thing can exasperate and entertain me in equal measure.

But the latest gem is none of these; it’s a simple yet massive failure of perspective:

In medicine, identifying changes in handwriting may provide an important diagnostic tool to monitor neurological disorders and motor function.
In the case of Lord Nelson, British Naval Officer, his handwriting changed dramatically after the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1797), when he lost his right arm.

Something new every day

Guy Keleny’s superb Errors and Omissions column in the Independent has delighted me today, by giving me a piece of knowledge that makes sense of a little bit of the English language – and that immediately makes me wonder why I hadn’t already realised it.

Living things are categorised by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species (‘keep playing church organs, for god’s sake’). Scientists normally use the last two of these to identify organisms: Homo sapiens, Panthera leo, Tyrannosaurus rex, Staphylococcus aureus and so on. The genus identifies the wider group and then the species narrows it down.

What Keleny reveals (in the process of making an entirely different point) is that the adjective for species is specific and that for genus is generic.

Obvious, really.

Government uneasy about allowing prisoners to vote

A Conservative minister said:

Look, we’ve got these people locked up for the very good reason that they can’t be trusted to be responsible on their own. Fortunately, their collapsed poll ratings make it impossible for them to leave the coalition until they’ve served the full five-year sentence – so frankly, it’s the safest place for them.
Yes, we want to reform them into decent, law-abiding right-wingers, and we’re making good progress. But allowing them to have a say over the government’s policy direction before they’re properly rehabilitated would just mean they’d revert to their bad old ways.

Entente cordiale for now, but we may fall out later…

Congratulations to David Cameron for his negotiating skills. I can’t help but feel we’ve got the better end of this deal:

The UK and France have signed treaties agreeing to military co-operation including testing of nuclear warheads. One centre will be set up in the UK to develop nuclear testing technology and another in France to carry it out.

Deficit metaphors: the state took a bullet

What with the government trying to flog us the old ‘government budget as household finances’ metaphor, Liam wondered if anyone had any others.

I suggested we could think of the deficit as a metaphor: a powerful use of it can be stimulating and help to move things along, but if you stretch it to breaking point you’ll lose credibility and have to spend even longer getting back to where you started.

More seriously (and more partisan), here’s one that occurred to me this morning:

Unlike the Tories’ laissez-faire attitude, during this recession Labour decided the government should take a bullet to protect the economy. To prevent the worst of the harm to businesses and households, we let government borrowing take the strain.

Letting the deficit rise was the right thing to do. In normal times, this much borrowing would be a terrible idea, but a global financial crisis is not normal times. And it worked: unemployment and repossessions have not been nearly as bad as in previous recessions. The Tories, on the other hand, wanted us to gut the public sector at the same time as the private sector was taking hits, and they opposed the VAT cut that helped people struggling to make ends meet.

So the government took a bullet, and now we have to repair the harm to the public finances. There are two ways we can cope with this bullet-wound: cut off the injured limb and hobble on as best we can, or stop the bleeding and then take time to heal and grow back to strength. The first option is quick but brutal, causing irreparable damage. The second is less dramatic, but it allows us a fuller recovery.

Does this have potential? Maybe not – it’s a bit all-or-nothing – but I’ve been blogging so little lately I figured I owed you something.

I’ve also got a half-formed idea about the dangers of slamming on the brakes when your car’s skidding, even though it seems the instinctive thing to do – instead, you have to slow gradually and turn the wheel back steadily. Anyone’s welcome to develop that one, but I’m too clueless a driver to do it myself.

(The standard political metaphor for deficits is the ‘black hole’, the most destructive thing in the universe, swallowing anything that comes near it and becoming all the more powerful in the process. If it hadn’t been cheapened by overuse to describe any old gap in the public finances, then it would have been perfect for those warning of a catastrophic debt spiral.)

Words fail me

I am ‘editing’ (turning gibberish into language) a graduate recruitment pack. The section that lists the qualities applicants should have is currently divided into subheads with sets of bullet-points underneath, and I’m supposed to turn each of these into a paragraph of flowing, meaningful, engaging prose. One of the sets looks like this:

Curiosity and Critical Thinking:

• Critical thinking
• Curiosity

I especially like that they’ve reversed the order to try to avoid the impression that they’ve just typed the same thing twice.

It’s going to be a long day.

Who says geeks can’t get dates?

A couple of friends of mine have been involved in creating the Geek Calendar. They’ve put in loads of work, and luckily it’s really very good, so I can plug it without feeling embarrassed.

What is the Geek Calendar?
It’s what it says on the tin, not that it comes in a tin; that would be madness. It’s a 2011 wall calendar, featuring geeky pin-ups for every month – and it also includes December 2010 and January 2012, so you get extra geek value! (16.6 recurring % more months than a boring regular calendar, or 16.9863% more days.)

Did you say “geeky pin-ups”?
I sure did. These characters are some of the very best (and most photogenic) of British geekery: crusader against bad science Ben Goldacre; maths and science writer Simon Singh; actor and comedian Chris Addison; chess champion Sabrina Chevannes; physicist Brian Cox; former Lib Dem science cheerleader Evan Harris; comic book artist Sydney Padua; gadget obsessive Jonathan Ross… and many more!

Um, are they–
No, they’re fully dressed. Don’t be disgusting.

Well, it sounds fun anyway. So have they done this just for a laugh, or to make a bit of cash?
Neither! Geeks all take a solemn oath to use their powers only for good. And the good cause here is libel reform: all profits from sales of the Geek Calendar go to the Libel Reform Campaign. English libel law, as the calendar geeks explain, is notoriously restrictive, and risks undermining the principles of free speech that are particularly vital in debates on science and medicine.

This sounds like the best thing since the idea of using sliced bread as the benchmark of innovative brilliance. How much does it cost?
A mere £11.75. (But don’t forget those 62 bonus days: once you take those into account, the notional – seasonally adjusted? – price, for real-terms comparisons with unambitious 365-day calendars, would be just £10.04. Excellent value.)

A bargain indeed. And are you a geek yourself?
Of course not! I work for as a copy-editor for a medical research charity, I blog about politics, and I entertain myself with such down-to-earth blokeish pursuits as writing poetry about economic policy and reconstructing famous philosophical arguments in words of one syllable. I am therefore obviously a mainstream alpha male. But I have nothing against geeks: many of my best friends, etc. etc.

But doesn’t your blog have about 12 readers? If you’re doing the PR, that’s a bit feeble, isn’t it?
Oh, it’s not just me. This week the Geek Calendar has featured in the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Metro and elsewhere. They’re selling like hot cakes, albeit non-edible ones at room temperature made of paper and in calendar form.

So, to summarise, should I buy it now?
That’s a very good question. Yes, you should buy it now. Thank you.

Let Clegg join the Bullingdon Club

I’ve finally worked out the dynamic at the top of the coalition.

Oxford’s notorious public-school drinking-and-mayhem Bullingdon Club, which counts David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson among its alumni, has a characteristically deranged initiation ritual.

Members will turn up at the new boy’s room in the middle of the night, force their way in, smash everything he owns to pieces – pictures, furniture, records, manifesto pledges, opinion poll ratings, backbench morale – and then storm out again, after roaring at him that he’s in.

This is what Osborne is currently doing to Nick Clegg.

It’s taking a while longer than the usual initiation, though. Clegg, like most new recruits to the Club, doesn’t particularly welcome the wreckage that’s forming around him as such, but on the other hand he’s thrilled to bits by what it means: the much bigger prize of a place in the cabinet Buller.

Now and again, though, one of the braying mob crushes something of sentimental value, and a pang of sadness and frustration runs through him. Like the Lib Dem commitment to helping the poor, for instance.

Back in the Budget in June, for instance, Osborne produced a graph that showed poor people came out best. A torrent of independent experts, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, promptly tore this claim to bits for its manifest shoddy falseness on multiple counts.

George didn’t care; that wasn’t the point. It was Nick who charged into the media, struggling to defend the indefensible, and he (and his party’s reputation) got a thorough kicking.

Now we have the spending review, and George has stuck another distributional chart in there, with most of the same inadequacies as the earlier one, and the IFS et al. have reacted in the same way, and once again it’s Nick who’s taking the hits.

Enough damage to the new boy. Dave, you need to call George off. Let Nick in, let him buy his fancy jacket and tails, and the three of you can get on with the serious business of smashing other things up.

Trained in the ways of the Dark Side

Best. Fact. Ever.

When Christopher Reeve first got the part of Superman, he was tall and fairly athletic but not all that muscular. So he took an intensive training programme to bulk up, which was run for him by David Prowse – weightlifting champion, Green Cross Code Man… and the occupant of the Darth Vader suit.

One of the great movie clichés is the training montage. Wouldn’t you just love to see one of Darth Vader training Superman?

George Osborne: cheerleader for higher public spending

I gather there’s some sort of spending thingy going on today. What better occasion for a stroll down memory lane?

Whenever you hear the Tories blame Labour for the cuts on the grounds that spending was too high before the recession, remember this, from 3 September 2007:

George Osborne today pledged to match Labour’s public spending plans for the next three years

In his Times article that day (which began by noting that “mortgage defaults in America have sent shock waves through financial markets in London”), Osborne proposed to “share the proceeds of economic growth between the funding our public services need and the competitive lower taxes our economy demands”. He mentioned the (then-smaller) deficit briefly, but didn’t mention anything about reducing it. He also smirked that Gordon Brown “has now been forced to adopt our approach to spending”.

If Labour is guilty of complacency about the economic good times, so are the Tories. If Brown is to blame for wanting higher public spending rather than ‘fixing the roof while the sun was shining’, so is Osborne. Like ERM membership, it was a misjudgement shared across the political mainstream. As he likes to say, they’re all in this together.

How not to get sperm

(I’m experimenting with search engine optimisation in my headings)

I saw an ad on the Tube the other day and couldn’t help but notice this logo:


I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the ad agency managed to rationalise this to the client. But then, after my teenage sense of humour calmed down, I noticed the oddness of the rest of the ad:


This is an attempt to appeal to sperm donors, not to would-be mothers or couples wanting to conceive. Does the LSB really think that potential donors, who may be tempted to get some cash in hand in return for taking, er, something else in hand, want to be reminded that the consequences of this will be their biological kids running around out there?

This level of communicative incompetence makes me think that the logo was genuinely thought to be a good idea rather than something someone did for a dare. I fear that the ad campaign will come to nothing (sorry).

Cable, Clegg and the fine art of manifesto escapology

I’ve already looked at why David Cameron feels that he’s entitled to abandon his election promises – despite the fact that the deficit is not turning out to be worse than predicted pre-election.*

The Lib Dem leadership has also, of course, been dropping its own commitments willy-nilly. Yes, part of this is to do with the necessity of coalition compromise, but not all of it is. Like Cameron, the party leaders in the Cabinet are subtly implying that the Lib Dem manifesto is something that it’s positively right for them to discard as they see fit.

Vince Cable (the one who’s allegedly a bit of a disgruntled lefty) offered a fine case study this week on tuition fees. On the subject of the pledge (“I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament”), he told the Commons:

Like many Members, I wanted to ensure that my children's and my grandchildren's generations enjoyed that free system of university education. In an ideal world, that is what we would do, but we are not in an ideal world. We are in a world in which we have inherited a massive financial mess. We have come to terms with reality, and it is time that the right hon. Gentleman and his friends did the same.

Implication: Before the election, even though everyone knew full well about the big deficit, the Lib Dems were not in touch with reality; now, he, Clegg and the rest are having to shake off some of the party’s delusions so that they can run the country properly.

I signed that pledge with my colleagues, and I have explained the reasons why I did so. It was a stand from a commitment to try to keep universities free, which is what I enjoyed. I have explained, however, that in the current financial situation, which is truly appalling and which we inherited, all commitments and pledges will have to be re-examined from first principles.

Implication: And it’s not just fees. A lot of what his party said before the election was impractical rubbish, and he’ll have to bin a good amount of it.

The DUP’s Willie McCrea tried to challenge him on the ‘financial mess’ card, which he keeps playing as a fig leaf when disowning his party’s policies, and got an answer that in part was frank but refused to give any kind of explanation:

Is the Secretary of State telling the House that he did not understand that the United Kingdom was in dire financial straits when he signed the pledge five months ago?
Vince Cable: Of course we realised that the financial position of the country was serious. We must now make very difficult choices on the back of that, which I am sure is understood as well in Northern Ireland as it is everywhere else in the UK.

Implication: He fears that his party members did not understand the financial position (and politics forced him to play along with them); he, Clegg and other senior Lib Dems in government are U-turning not out of unexpected fiscal necessity but because they think their party was wrong – and perhaps they always did.

*Darling’s March Budget put the deficit at 11.8% of GDP in 2009/10, then 11.1, 8.5, 6.8, 5.3 and 4.0.
The OBR’s report in June put the deficit at 11.1% of GDP in 2009/10, then 10.5, 8.3, 6.6, 5.0 and 3.9. This was after the Greek crisis had supposedly made everything worse and before Osborne’s Budget had supposedly made everything better.

Mr Cameron, what a big society you have...

Norm bemoans, as I have now and then, the term ‘big society’. But listening to this bit of Cameron’s speech, I stopped to think again:

So that great project in your community - go and lead it. That waste in government - go and find it. That new school in your neighbourhood - go and demand it. The beat meeting on your street - sign up. The neighbourhood group - join up. That business you always dreamt of - start up.

He sounded tired just saying this – imagine how we’ll feel after trying to find time to actually do it. Big? It’s bloody huge.

Cavalier Cameron: I’ll say what I like and then I’ll do as I see fit

Does anyone else find this a disturbing attitude in a Prime Minister? From the Today programme [about 8’05 in]:

Jim Naughtie: What I’m suggesting is, perhaps, that if the chancellor says something in the run-up to the election campaign – “we will preserve child benefit” – quote, George Osborne – that is changeable...
David Cameron: I don’t think that is fair. Look, what we’re having to do as a government – and frankly, we’ve all made pledges about child benefit, ’cause we all like child benefit... We’ve all made these promises. But in government, you cannot afford to just put off difficult decisions, you have to go through them, and with child benefit we’ve made a difficult decision.

Does he think that being in coalition entitles him to abandon promises so breezily? Does he think that the problems with the public finances give him carte blanche to do anything? Maybe a bit, but I think it’s more that he finds this whole electoral politics business a dreary, distasteful chore that one has to go through in order to get hold of power; that promises and manifestos are vulgar trifles when what really matters is his freedom to exercise his own thoroughly sound judgement.

Out of the danger zone, into the...

If I were David Cameron, I’d be careful about saying that Britain was “out of the danger zone”. It suggests that “Labour’s debt crisis” has now been averted, which rather implies that large, rapid spending cuts are now simply a matter of choice. The popularity of these cuts depends in part on maintaining an air of crisis.

What’s more, if Cameron and Osborne have taken us “out of the danger zone”, then any future economic difficulties would be an entirely new danger zone that they’d have taken us into.