Early retirement?

While Theresa May is being awesome today (and I am definitely developing a little political crush on her), let's spare a thought for David Cameron - in fact, let's spare Ken Clarke's thought, who in the final question to the now ex-PM, called for him to stay in the Commons. I hope he listens, because the haste with which our recent Prime Ministers have left the Commons has been unseemly. Here are all the post-war holders of the office, with ages (Cameron is 49) and their stints in the Commons post premiership.

Brown, 59 at end of premiership, stayed in the Commons 2010-15 (aged 64)

Blair, aged 53, resigned his Commons seat immediately (so still 53)

Major, 54, stayed 1997-01 (59)

Thatcher, 65, stayed 1990-92 (67)

Callaghan, 67, stayed 1980-87, staying as Labour leader for a year after the election defeat (75)

Wilson, 60, stayed 1977-83 (66)

Heath, 58, stayed 1974-2001 (85)

Home, 61, stayed 1964-74 (71)

SuperMac, 69, stayed 1963-4 (70)*

Eden, 59, left almost immediately (59)

Churchill, 79, stayed 1955-64 (89)

Atlee, 68, stayed 1951-55 (72)

Before Major, nobody left the Commons before 65 save for Eden, and he a) regretted it and b) had had a traumatic end. Since Major, it seems like they couldn't wait to get out. Of course, in part this is due to the age of leader - Theresa May is the oldest new PM since Callaghan. However, the differences aren't that great. Heath, Wilson and Home were all c.60, the same age as Brown, and only just over five years older than Blair and Major, yet they stayed on.

Worse, the priority for our recent premiers has not just been to exit the Commons, but to flee the domestic political arena altogether, eschewing the Lords as well. No-one since Thatcher has taken a peerage. As a result, and I think for the first time in modern* Parliamentary history, our past leaders are absent from the deliberations of the day. Nor is this trend limited to Prime Ministers - David Milliband is in New York; and the glorious Clarke-Rifkind conversation was notable because though Clarke admirably remains in the Commons, Rifkind has left, and not taken a peerage either. He has in fact no formal political role Ironically, it is now the second-raters and the placemen to who continue to hang around, not the grandees and especially not the grandest of them.

This makes me sad, and it should make us all sad. One of the strengths of our constitution is that is does not cut off expertise and provides for multiple ways in which elder statesmen can remain part of the process without distorting it. Both the Lords and the Commons have a role to play, but together they stop the guillotine of term limits and ex-Presidencies more concerned with their libraries and their legacy than the reality of the world as it is. In an age of Party, the Commons could do with more people of great experience beyond the reach of the whips and heedless of promotion (even if, like Heath, they spend a lot of time sulking). I don't consider Cameron a particularly good PM, but his would be a welcome voice from the Backbenches or even the red benches (though as he's less than 50, he should hang on to the green for some time yet).

Without the ex-premiers, not only is political life weaker, but it also frays the constitution. There's been a lot of hysteria about the need for an election for Theresa May May, but it's all nonsense - because we have a Parliamentary system. People vote for MPs and the Prime Minister is he who can command the confidence of majority of those MPs. Resigning from public life as soon as that confidence is lost undermines that principle and drags us closer to the presidential model.

Cameron's reputation has been strengthened by the manner of his going. To me, he has an opportunity to strengthen it still further. He should, perhaps aptly, Remain.

*As an aside, Wikipedia's Macmillan summary has this immense line: Macmillan was the last British prime minister born in the reign of Queen Victoria, the last to have served in the First World War, the last to wear a moustache when in office (all prime ministers since have been clean shaven), and the last to receive an hereditary peerage.

** Post Walpole

Reflections on a referendum (III): how's that hopey-changey stuff working out for ya?

I forget where it was, but one of the obituaries of Margaret Thatcher opined that while she intended her reforms to make Britain more like her father, it ended up making it more like her son - namely that while she intended to create a a nation of robust, self-reliant individuals, she in fact encouraged recklessness and shifting of responsibility.  Whether or not that's true (and I don't think it is), it came to mind at various points in this campaign, and not just when looking at her splendid 1975 jumper. This campaign has been marked by a lack of concern about consequences, and an irritating vagueness about 'Hope.' To outline risks and impacts has been characterised as fearmongering. 

That's unfair. Fear has been a bad name in  this debate. Because fear is a respectable response to unknowns or potential risks. It's legitimate to be afraid about economic turmoil, about our reputation in the world, about pressure on services and about impacts on national identity. It's right to respond to those fears, either to allay them or to mitigate them. Actions have consequences, and people, especially those about to vote, should understand them. What's wrong isn't the fear, it's all the lying. Leave are right to criticise Donald Tusk for his absurd claim that Brexit would destroy western civilisation; Remain are right to attack Leave's tactics on Turkey and about refugees. But the issue with all of these isn't the fear, it's the lies. 

Because to be concerned based on reality is responsible. To dismiss it is not. Blithely asserting that we don't need to worry about economic impact because Brexit will unleash hope isn't a positive campaign, it's a no consequences campaign. This reaches its apogee in the assertion that we could have EU free trade without free movement. More generally, because the collective leadership of Leave aren't a potential government, they won't be held to account for any failure. They can promise what they like; it will be someone else's fault if it never happens. This is one of my main objections to referenda generally, it's certainly one of my major objections to this one.

For the record, here are I think the consequences are clear. Remain vote does mean more integration within the Eurozone and continuing EU harmonisation around other areas. I don't think they will be major, but they will be real. I'm relaxed about that: common tax IDs feel fine to me. Far more significantly, Leave will hammer the economy in the short term. The currency response to the polls tells you everything here. This feels much less fine to me.

But more than this, the wider consequences are also clear. This started personally, and it will end personally, and messily. There is some unwarranted discussion about how every international negotiation after Brexit will be rational (hence we will get a nice trade deal). Personally, I don't think it's that rational for the EU to give us a better deal than its own members, but even if it were, it is unlikely to happen. Does no one remember Charles de Gaulle? Do we think logicians make policy? Having raised alarm over Romanians, will they give their assent to favourable terms for exit? This is fantasy. What is reality is the damage it will do to British politics as well. Whatever happens now, the Tory party has ripped itself apart and the Labour party is guilty of passive acquiescence to irrelevance (if Remain lose, it will be Jeremy Corbyn's fault). And when the hope doesn't materialise, voters will have new reasons to distrust their leaders. All of these are both entirely predictable and a direct result of calling this referendum.

Reflections on a referendum (II): I do not think democracy means what you think it means (with a short discourse on sovereignty)

This campaign has been dogged by a discussion of Democracy (capital D). I find this inexpressibly tedious, partly because I have at best a lukewarm attachment to democracy, but mostly because so does everyone else.

Not that you would know it. It's long been an annoying habit in public discourse to conflate everything one likes with democracy. As a result, things we don't like tend to be labelled undemocratic, when they are often, for example illiberal. Absurdly, when Obama intervened in the referendum, Leave called it undemocratic, as if having a view is equivalent to having a vote. Obama wasn't being undemocratic; he's doing something the Leave campaign didn't like.

This conflation leads to confusion, bad policy and poor outcomes. It also leads people to believe that pure democracy is something that is both desirable and present in the UK. Neither of these statements are true, though not for the reasons that have been advanced by Brexiteers. We have a democratic system, in that it's a system where most levers are decided by election, but not all. The judiciary is not (see America for why this is a good thing); the civil service is not (also good, even the US seem to believe this is mostly a good idea). Rather excellently, even parts of our legislature are not either (for the avoidance of doubt, I am talking about the Lords). We certainly don't live in a pure democracy - not every decision is put to the vote or taken on the basis of popular opinion. Thankfully. If they were, we'd have Hanging back; we'd also have a mess. California is a good example of what happens when politicians are overridden by referenda - governments cannot govern. Like every other "democratic" country, we have a system for balancing popular views with the need to govern.

The European Union has another one. I don't think it's a particularly good one, though it's not bad, and the task is complicated. It's plain to me that every major appointment in Brussels is effectively selected democratically. Power is vested in the Council of Ministers (all elected), the President (chosen by elected heads of state), the commissioners (appointed by elected officials and then confirmed by the elected Parliament) and the Parliament (elected, albeit by a system that I don't like). We may not like the role of the Commission, i.e., that they can propose legislation, but they can't pass it. Both the Ministers and the Parliament can block it. All of these are institutions with problems, in large part because we don't take them seriously as institutions (note who we send and how we vote for MEPs and who we select as commissioners). But they are democratic.

That they are democratic does not mean they are desirable. It is entirely legitimate to reject institutions for lots of reasons, including that it's badly designed. We may feel that the UK is misaligned with the rest of Europe, and that it should be separate (a version of the SNP argument at home, i.e., a single demos does not exist). But that is to make a claim about appropriateness of structure, not democracy. To conflate them is unhelpful. I'd make the same point about policy. By all means object to EU policy, but then object to EU policy, not its democratic credentials. As an aside, the UK is overwhelmingly in line with EU policy on almost everything that passes. Insofar as these things can be counted, we have been outvoted about 2% of the time since 1999, though a higher number recently. I struggle to think of major elements where we have been heavily defeated, though there may be. Of course, that the UK is outvoted is not undemocratic; the clue is in the name.

I feel there are echoes of this in the debate about sovereignty. If I'm completely honest, I find the debate here bewildering. Last time I really considered sovereignty, I was studying the Dutch revolt and it meant William of Orange, as a sovereign prince, could license piracy. I understood that. What I don't understand is the suggestion that we are not sovereign now. That we are having a referendum is obvious and literal proof that we have sovereign power to change the terms of our treaty relationship with the other EU members. We don't stop being sovereign if we choose to vest decisions in supranational bodies, just as we do with NATO or the ECHR. I think what people mean when they talk about sovereignty is that they think the EU is making bad decisions and possibly that they believe our Parliament would be better at making those decisions. In many cases that's impossible, some decisions can only be made effectively at a supranational level, for example the recent changes to mobile phone roaming charges. More generally, I'm pretty sceptical about our own capacity to deliver, but it's a reasonable position. I wish we were having a debate about institutional capacity, rather than "Freedom." That sounds technocratic, but the EU debate is about how we do the running of things; or rather, it should be. If it was ever in doubt, we resolved the sovereignty debate the moment the referendum was called.

One more tomorrow, on consequences.

Reflections on a referendum (I): the war against maths

I can't resist. We're three days out, other people have started weighing in with their thoughts, and I've found this whole campaign so appalling, I don't think I can let it finish without a small rantette. I was going to start Thursday but it felt wrong. However, that it's truncated is probably a blessing - I'll only have a chance to do a handful of these, to everyone's relief. I'll aim to keep the most important things.

So let's start with numbers (I'll come back to democracy and identity another time), because I think of all the dreadful things, numeracy has been one of the most dreadful. I know this isn't news - I've discussed before how politicians can't do basic calculations and that the electorate doesn't know how to interpret counting. Nor is this a partisan point, Remain have been guilty of absurd hyperbole, though their basic trajectory is I think right. Leave have been cleverer and have used numbers better, but in a fundamentally misleading manner. It's good politics in the short term, in the long term it fuels expectations that cannot be met.

Let's start with the most infamous - the £350m a week to the EU claim. Everyone who reads knows this is a meaningless number, though it's emblazoned on every Leave bus. It's been attacked by all and sundry. We've spent what feels like a month talking about it, yet the majority of people still believe it to be true. I am entirely prepared to have a debate about the real number, but this is impossible if people cannot grasp addition, and campaigners have no qualms about manipulating that. I'm tempted to blame Leave for using it. I really blame the electorate for falling for it.

That said, however it's cut, the number is still big. The net number is £100m+ a week, £8.5bn a year. People keep asserting that's a big number. But the world is really big, even the UK is pretty big, Our GDP is £1.8 trillion; government spending is around £600bn; the NHS alone is over £100bn. So the number is less than 0.5% of GDP and only just over 1% of government spending. Even if you don't believe Sir John Major that the NHS is as safe as a hamster with a python under prominent Leavers, £8bn won't solve it. More importantly, it's irrelevant anyway. Nobody thinks Brexit will be neutral on the economy, and it would be fantastical if they did: either erecting barriers to our main markets hammers the economy (I include to this view), or in the future, the UK as a open trading nation booms as the Singapore of Europe (I do not incline to this view, but it doesn't matter), as soon as that impact is 0.5%, then the £8bn has vanished. And all this is before we talk currency. If you are weighing up the economic consequences of leaving, don't even bother to talk about the payment, talk about growth - not for nothing is compound interest the most powerful force in the world.

Finally, the most important number: immigration, announced at the end of May as a net 330k. For most people, Brexit is really a debate about immigration. I spent an evening with ex-colleagues last week where the Brexiteers all talked a good game about everything else, but they're a minority in their own campaign and the country. The only thing that's moved the polls is immigration. I would note that 1) 330k isn't actually that many people. It's easy to talk about a the size of city it represents, but we have a lot of small cities. It's 0.5% of population, the same increase as from our natural birth rate. High, sure, but neither unprecedentedly so nor impossible to manage. People who think Britain is full need to spend more time in Wales. And 2) Half of it is not from the EU. Where we can cut migration as we wish, we are not doing so. It's curious that we thus think the whole thing is out of control. This isn't to deny that there may be localised impacts, but it is now and will be in the future much smaller than people think. This is clear from the perception research: people think the EU-born population (including, I presume, me) is three times larger than it is. There's a positive and a negative case to be made around immigration. They both start with counting. We haven't got there yet.

Democracy tomorrow

A tale of two manifestos

Notoriously, a major part of the Liberal collapse last election was their failure to follow through on their pre-election promise on tuition fees, leading to one of the best uses of autotune in history. It also reflected an understandable, if intellectually confused, howl of outrage about politicians - namely they don't do what they say they will do. I think that was unfair on Liberals as they were in coalition, but it's not an insane position and it's a common complaint. It was repeated endlessly, usually with some variations on a theme about how we thought the Liberals were different and they're not. All of which was tedious, ill-informed and silly.

Five years later, the same electorate is aghast and appalled by the Conservatives, this time not in coalition, doing exactly what they said they would do before the election. Before the election, the party made it very clear that they would take £12bn out of welfare and they would protect pensions. This must mean brutal cuts to benefits, mostly if not exclusively targeted at the poor. It was one of the main reasons why I was unable to vote for them. Just as they promised, the government has sought to bring in those kinds of cuts - they've had two major failures about it in the last six months (remember the tax credit reversal). Both times, they have been savaged, both within and outside the party, and the cuts have been reversed. I'm pleased the cuts have been reversed. They were bad policy, done badly. But the approach and the numbers were in the manifesto. Where is the outrage on an election manifesto being broken before the year is out?

Generously, one might argue that these particular cuts were not in the manifesto. Indeed they were not, but the numbers were there, and people wrote about them - here's a nice long article in the Telegraph, not behind a paywall, that outlines the issues. They were discussed at length by news programmes. It is not credible that anyone even vaguely interested and intellectually semi-competent can have been unaware of the numbers. Were it only the single cut that people opposed, I would have some sympathy, but the fact that it has been disastrous twice over suggests that the issue is not the specifics, but about the money, and the money was known. The government is doing what it said it would do.

Alternatively, we might believe that people voted for the Conservatives despite the welfare cut plans because they thought other issues were even more important. There is no evidence for this position in any post-election discussion and I just can't see what those issues would be. The people who really wanted an EU referendum above all else were already voting UKIP. I remain confused as to why people were so hostile to the SNP, but the number of people placing it above everything else was small. A decent number did vote Tory because of economic competence, but that is based on deficit reduction through this policy.

Instead, we must conclude that people voted for a policy they didn't actually want. This does not reflect well on the people, though it does not surprise me. Pertinently, it makes a nonsense out of those who complain that our politicians never keep their promises. Here they have, and we attack them for it.

How to sound heartless (What are sieges for?)

As of this morning, aid is flowing into seven Syrian cities most affected by sieges from both rebel and regime forces (details here). Populations in dire positions will have food and other supplies they desperately need. But I'm not sure what the point is, and I'm not even sure it's a good idea.

Everyone seems very shocked that people in these cities are starving (in some cases to death). But of course they are starving; they're being besieged. Starvation is the point of sieges - it's a way to win without having to fight a battle; it's the only way to win if the defences are stronger than your army. This isn't comparable to helping refugees in camps or even people in large areas controlled by government. The deprivation of the people inside isn't a byproduct of the fighting, it's the point of the fighting. Hypothetically, if everyone in the contested towns were willing to concede , the sieges would stop. Obviously, because of reprisals and scare resources, it's more complicated than than, but it's still true that you don't besiege your own side. 

Of course, many people aren't on any side and, hideously, are simply caught in the middle. Their lives are awful and they die in numbers in ways I cannot imagine. But they are dying because there is a war on. They need that war to stop. Ultimately wars stop for two reasons: a) somebody wins, b) every sits down and plays nicely. The latter in this kind of case often because someone else is threatening you unless you do. I don't see how supplying cities under siege helps brings either of those forward. It very clearly prolongs the war. Cities that presumably were about to fall will now not fall, so we can do it all again next year. Similarly, I don't think entrenching existing positions makes anyone more likely to compromise.

Defenders will say that this is a precursor to a ceasefire which will pave the way to peace. God, I hope so. What follows makes me sound like a total bastard, but if it makes it worse by prolonging the agony, then this emergency aid hasn't done anything but make us feel better about ourselves at the expense of an already broken country. I'm not sufficiently expert to answer that question, but I really hope someone has thought about it very hard. I hope they decided it was worth it, and I hope they were right. I'm not sure either is true.

Down with the Manor of Northstead

Douglas Carswell may have given an undeserved victory to Ed Milliband, and he has certainly given a filip to Nigel Farage, for both of which he should ashamed. People seemed to have talked about that a lot. However, he is definitely taking Parliament closer to the tyranny of party, which is much worse, and people haven't really talked about that enough. I don't believe he's doing it cynically - there’s no doubting that he is a man of principles, but so was Lenin. Neither's happen to be mine.

I feel we are underplaying the constitutional impact not so much of what he has done, but how he has done it. We have had MPs defecti before - there are a surprising number. They make excellent copy, and they are disastrous for parties. However, most don't resign their seats. In fact the last MP to do so was Bruce Douglas-Mann in 1982. Reflexively people tend to think this is bad, arguing that MP's who switch allegiance should be forced to face their electors again. Apparently this is more 'democratic.' Obviously, I don't really care if it's more democratic. Douglas Carswell does. But where does this end: when Claire Short resigned as a Labour MP, should she have faced the electors? When parties discipline members by withholding the whip, should that trigger an election? Should all the Liberal Democrats fight their seats anew after their volte-face on a manifesto promise?

Of course they shouldn't. We don't elect parties; we elect people. Their electors elected them; next year they get to vote again. Let us roll back party, not entrench it. Switching party shouldn't be privileged. If we believe in having independent-minded people in public life, in the power of Parliament over government, then we need less party, not more. If this becomes the norm, we move ever closer to party lists and the horrors that attend it. 

The electors of Clacton elected Douglas Carswell. Turn down the Manor of Northstead and in the name of God, Stay.

All borders are equal, but some are more equal than others

In my books database I categorise European history geographically into only six countries, and everything east of Austria is 'Russia.'* In part this is a function of my interests (I refuse to have a Poland section with only two books in it; I'd have many more subdivisions if I was a specialist in Bulgaria), but it also reflects a genuine difficulty in the history of Eastern Europe: the geographical units aren't stable, whereas in the west, they are. Here's a map from 1000 where you can see most of the big western countries, but not a lot that's recognisable in the east. And many of the eastern countries are false friends too. Ironically, the centre of 'Russian' civilisation is in Kiev, and Asia Minor doesn't yet have any Turks in it. Even into the nineteenth century, it still looks pretty strange, though at least the Turks have arrived in Turkey. 

Regardless of the big movements, it is certainly the case that, even in Western Europe, detailed borders took a very long time to work out. We just about stabilise the borders of the UK component countries in the sixteenth century (if we ignore 1922); Spain in the seventeenth, France in the eighteenth, and Italy in the nineteenth, though all of the continental countries had border adjustments well into the twentieth century. Germany, of course, was completely redrawn in 1945. Some of those borders have only been bought with a lot of blood, and a lot of time. And it remains messy: ask the German speakers  in eastern Belgium, or the Poles in the Baltic states. Borders are complicated, and there's no simple principle in determining them that will arrive at a perfect answer. I don't think the Anglosphere really understands that. America only really thinks about the frontier; though I'm fascinated by the thought that they took seriously at one point the assumption that the US would include all Mexico, and although they get some credit for Canada, there was plenty of room to go round. Britain, Australia and New Zealand are islands so its relatively simple. Even in Ireland, which we've made such a great job of, the counties are old, so the lines themselves are easier, even if the principles aren't. 

This is important. When we argue about Ukraine, we do so from the perspective of stable, relatively simple borders and national identities. In reality, all the Soviet states had their already pretty fluid ethnic and historical geography wrecked by the communists - Vilnius, until the Russians got their hands on it, was Wilno, one of the great Polish medieval cities (along with Lwow, ironically now in Ukraine) - and only in some cases effectively reconstituted. Certainly Ukraine had no pre-existing independent identity before the 1990s and no recent history outside Russia. When the Russians essentially say that Ukraine isn't a country, they have point. It's certainly not a country with the same stable, deep rooted identity of a Britain or a France. Of course, it's more of a real country than Austria, or Portugal, or any of the other accidents of European history, but that's another matter.

None of this means that territorial integrity isn't important - borders are critical for stability and respecting them is the best means yet to avoid barbarism. Nor do I want to give any credence to anti-American bilge that parts of the left have been spouting. However, in the inevitable deal that will be brokered, we shouldn't look for false equivalences: Ukraine surrendering Crimea is not Alsace-Lorraine again, the Donetsk region is not like Britain losing Kent, or even Gibraltar. Let's not pretend it is. 

By the by, should Ukraine fracture, I've been trying to work out what to call the western bit. I think its Galicia (i.e., the old Austrian Kingdom of Galicia), but I'm not sure that's quite right. Ruthenia doesn't work either. Historically of course it's southern Poland, but I don't think that's an option. I'm really hoping they hold together.

*For the record, the UK, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia. Outside Europe, they only get five categories - the Colonies (including the entire Americas), the Near East, Africa, India and China (NB. includes Japan). Obviously, the classical world and its successor states are catalogued differently.

Mad, bad and dangerous to know

I've delayed this because I was rounded on social media for even briefly celebrating the return of the Stansgate viscountcy three weeks ago. Hopefully the dust has settled. Tony Benn is still dead; there is still a Viscount Stansgate again (it's his eldest son). And, hopefully, all those people who didn't really like Tony Benn now feel a bit silly for lauding him to the heights.

Because everyone (and I mean everyone, with the noble exceptions of Matthew Paris) fell over themselves to praise him. And I don't really know why. Now, I'm sure Tony Benn was personally lovely. His diaries make him out to be so, though he did write them himself. And he was certainly a fine example of the the benefits of a good education (Westminster. A fact he tried, despite his legendary 'integrity', to have removed from Who's Who) and a constant desire to document and make sense of the world. 

But he was wrong, about everything, and - for his party - wrong in a disastrous way.

I find it curious that the left lined up to bang on about how wonderful he was, when the only people who should celebrate his political career are the right. Benn was a, if not the, key facilitator of Thatcher's dominance. He was one of the major figures on the Labour left - a candidate for the deputy leadership (he lost), a potential leader - and he dragged the party leftwards into appalling places. His own politics by then were actively crazy: he wanted to nationalise everything (this was when the Government owned Pickford's), leave the EU, and forcibly reunite Ireland. They sound mad now; they sounded pretty mad then. And as a result, the party split, the vote collapsed, Thatcher got three terms, and in desperation, Labour jettisoned some decent elements alongside all the mad. If you were feeling uncharitable, you might make a direct link from Benn to New Labour. He would have hated that. 

And I don't think he ever realised it either. He had more self-awareness than most: in his later years, when called to explain the affection with which he was held, he used to say that he was 'harmless now'. That was definitely true, but he was also irrelevant, and I don't think he appreciated that. His facile quip in 2001 that he was 'leaving parliament in order to spend more time on politics' is revealing. He didn't spend more time on politics - he went on lecture tours. His audiences loved it; I suspect he did too. It did nothing, though I imagine it made everyone involved feel warm inside.

On one level, the obits were right. He will be missed; he was erudite, charming and he had conviction - all probably only possible because he lost. But without him, the Labour party would have been in better shape in the 1980s and I venture the country would be in better shape now. That's not a legacy to be proud of.

MPs' pay: the other metric

MPs and their pay, again. Boring boring.

And I say boring because the debate is so rubbish (though as an issue it is also intrinsically a bit boring). I don't really know where the right compromise is between enough and too much for MPs, but I find our summary of IPSA's logic pretty clear and it looks like they've got it about right, particularly as the overall cost of paying MPs will be flat. I could be persuaded otherwise.

However, what I'm struck by is how the debate totally ignores the rules for how MPs' pay will go up in future - in line with average earnings. This obviously does two things. Firstly it risks their pay getting out of sync again (their benchmarks may go up more or less than average earnings), secondly it gives them an incentive to support changes in the economy that improve average earnings, for which we should be grateful, I suppose.

But it doesn't go far enough. The average here is a median, so what this means is MPs will be judged on how much the person is in the exact middle of the list of earners does. But that's not how I would judge them; and that's not what the rhetoric of both sides is based on. They should be judged on how the worst off do (inter alia, I think making sure the average does up is the best solution to that too). So I would link MPs' pay to the mean average incomes of the poorest (10%; maybe 25%). That's what their real job is; they should be encouraged to do it.

Tax does actually have to be taxing

In case you were in any doubt about the value of the Liberals, here they come with a plastic bag tax that isn't even a plastic bag tax. I'm objecting here not on the issue of whether we should have a plastic bag tax - I don't really see why not, but that's not the point - but the muddled and dangerous thinking behind the idea of a compulsory levy that doesn't go to government (as per the system in Wales). It's awful, in principle and in practice.

I think we can quickly attend to one half of the problem. Donating the money to a good cause is optional. Therefore, if they choose supermarkets can net additional profits by keeping the money. It's an odd (and badly designed) sin tax that incentivises those charging it to sell more. We wouldn't suggest that the markup on cigarettes was kept by the tobacco companies. Luckily, public and political pressure will mean that all the big firms will pass it on to charity. That's almost worse.

And there are two big reasons why:

• It suggests charity is a better use of money than government spending. It isn't: it's not universal; it's not monitored; it's not accountable and it's not capable of the large scale planning and investment that government does. I know we do it for gift aid, but that's for additional voluntary giving. This is compulsory. This matters: once you start attacking the principle that taxes go to government for government to allocate, it's not clear why you have government at all. 
• Worse, it also suggests a direct link link between a single tax and an area of spending. That's not what taxes are for (Nota Bene, people who bang on about 'road' tax). Fiscal policy is set to do two things: raise money (this won't) and influence behaviour (this will, pace tobacco). It's muddleheaded thinking to link this to spending priorities. That's just a waste of money simultaneously leading to a downward spiral of decay for poor places and unfashionable causes. Governments must allocate spending where we need it, not based on where they raise it. 

In the end this particular element doesn't matter very much, and not just because it's a Liberal policy. It's not pointless (it will shift behaviour in probably a positive way); it's not very much money (especially if it works). It's just an unnecessary signal in the wrong direction and symptomatic of the weakness of political thought. 

Anathema.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Dead, Dead, Dead! (II) Historiography

I meant to do this a fortnight ago, just after my reflection on the Thatcher legacy. But even more interesting  is the context in which that debate happened. To me, the unnoticed story of the coverage was that this was really a debate about the 1970s. Because what you think of Thatcher is really about what you think about the decade before her. If you think that we were on our knees in 1979, Go Maggie; if you think we would have sorted it out given time, Go Foot (or something like that). It’s no surprise that this debate would have been made better by context. Sadly, it was done stunningly badly.

In particular, no-one knows any figures. I've lost count of the times someone appeared and lamented that she destroyed manufacturing. Helpfully, the Guardian did some nice data which tells us that industry was 34% of output in 1990. Incidentally, we also still had 4.5m council houses (20% down on 1979, but hardly a wholesale sell-off). There are plenty of figures to show Thatcherite failure (both those may be seen to be failures depending on your position), but saying untrue things makes you look stupid.

On reflection, it's not true that no-one knows any figures. A number of people know one figure. If you're smart, like Ken Livingstone has been, you bang on about it - conveniently forgetting everything else. Every time the erstwhile mayor has been on anywhere, he's talked about the fall in levels of investment. He's right, it's fallen too low, but there was other stuff going on you know. I'm reminded of when I went to Baltimore and the Americans discussed how they 'won' the War of 1812 or at least got away with a good draw, neglecting to mention that a) we burnt the White House to the ground and b) we were a bit busy with this French chap (just in case) nearer to home. Focusing on one thing to the exclusion of the rest is irrelevant really. It's like a referendum - i.e., bad, and stupid.

But although this lack of figures isn't helpful, it's not the biggest problem. That was both sides going overboard on the polemic, because they can't do counterfactuals properly. On the right, we started talking about her saving the country. The left simply ignored the state of the political and economic landscape in 1979. Neither will do. She didn't save the country. This is a nonsense which does no-one any favours. North Sea oil would still have come in; the ability of, for example, France to come through 1980s, without major market reform suggests that, even in decline, we’d have been alright. I’m pretty convinced we would have been worse off, but Callaghan wasn't a Bennite. On the other hand, it's no good saying that Britain in 1979 wasn't in real trouble; or that Labour would have fixed the unions in a nice way, or indeed at all. Industrial strife had been a characteristic of the entire preceding decade. It's preposterous to suggest that it could have been addressed easily. Similarly, privatisation: no-one really thinks the state should own BA, BT and BP, yet Labour's 1987 manifesto still advocated bringing them back into state hands. And I think would have done regardless of 1979.

I find this lack of contextual sensitivity a bit depressing. It's ahistorical. It polarises opinion around abstract positions that aren't rooted in reality. It judges people against ideal standards which no-one will ever fulfil. And it doesn't help assess the record. In this case, it means Thatcher isn't judged by the reality of the situation in 1979, but rather some kind of theoretical face-off between left and right. And that's pointless. History judges records, and since the late nineteenth century, we've tried not to judge things outside the context of their time. With Thatcher, despite it being a few decades ago, we've failed that basic test.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Dead, Dead, Dead! (I) History

Now the dust has settled, I thought I'd do a reckoning. This is in two parts, with one on the historiographical issues to follow. The title, by the way, is what they chanted in Brixton on the night. I thought it was funny, though I don't doubt the people were being objectionable. Even A thinks it's all rather distasteful, but I think we can rise above that.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about Thatcher. She's a Tory icon; I'm a Tory etc. But I'm a big wet, old fashioned Tory, firmly on the Heseltine - Clarke axis in the party, the one that doesn't really exist any more (see this mediocre article on the subject). I'm pro-European, pro-state, I even think we should have an industrial policy. She would have purged me from any cabinet she had. Some of her policies leave me cold, some of her legacy even more so. Nonetheless, she was, in her words, one of us. And she did many more of the right things than the wrong things. Better modern historians and politics students will argue the detail better than I can, but below is my personal ledger, why I would happily have voted for her every time, and why I think she was good for us.

Let's do some big wins:

• Unions, clipping the wings thereof. It's now fashionable (in certain circles) to say that this would have happened anyway. I find this annoying and disingenuous. Unions had been the undoing of the previous two governments, possibly three if you count 1969/70. To dismiss it as inevitable is bad history and wishful thinking. The Unions we had through the 1970s were destructive and disastrous. I'm glad we don't have overpowerful trade unions, closed shops and strikes without elections. Well done Maggie.
• Privatisation. When I'm feeling cruel, I like to bait the ignorant left. It's an amusing game. In particular I like to list companies and ask them how many should be renationalised. I could go on for hours, but they usually cave after BA, BP, Jaguar and BT, and this was before I discovered Pickfords was also on that list. There is no doubt that rail hasn't worked (not Thatcher), but overall, it's a rebalancing that was overdue. And no-one here, or in most of the west, would go back.
• Deregulation. Now, I won't have this simplistic, 'sowed the seeds of the crash' nonsense. Regulation is a balancing act. Take finance, over-regulated in 1979, under-regulated in 2008. Thatcher moved in the right direction.
• The Falklands. This was obviously right, and no other candidate for power would have done it.
• The Cold War. We wouldn't be having this debate with the Czechs and the Poles.

What's characterised this debate since her death is the total absence of recognition of the bad ones on our side. Let's do those too:

• Grammar schools. If nothing else, this stands against her. Appalling educational vandalism. A caving in to the teaching profession that damaged educational standards and social mobility and led to greater middle-class segregation at the same time, which is an impressive feat. Not all Thatcher, but she was supine when she should have been steadfast.
• Monetarism. It didn't really work, and even Thatcher et al resiled from it pretty quickly.
• Industrial policy. We should have had one, and we should have used it to help the provinces. Actually there was an industrial policy, in Liverpool thanks to Hezza, and, er, Canary Wharf, but there should have been more. 
• The Gays. I know, I know.

I would have liked her to be different, but I would rather have had her than any other option around (and to govern is to choose). I'm not interested in whether she was a nice person (Lloyd George wasn't). I'm not interested how you think the 1990s should have played out (she wasn't there). I'm not interested what you think she would have done if she had stayed in power longer (she didn't). I'm interested in the record, and, overall, it's a win. 

By the way, I hope this stays up.

War. What is it good for?

As there's no news I can think of that relates to me, so I thought it would be a good time to talk about pacifism, given it's poppy time (though this has started far too early). Specifically, I'd like to talk about why it's rubbish.

Now, it's worth doing some definitional work here. I am, like everyone should be, of the belief that war and death are, in general, bad. Anyone who has studied the Pax Romana and lived in postwar Europe knows the power of peace to deliver prosperity and long life. I am also not advocating hawkish solutions to any number of outstanding issues, because I don't think they work. Nor am I denying the efficacy of some pacific movements. And I am not even arguing with the right of individuals to opt out of a draft as conscientious objectors, though I don't really like it as a position (NB I did read a wonderful letter on this yesterday). I am simply saying as a general position it is wrong, muddleheaded and selfish. In political discourse, it's also quite dangerous because its adherents won't debate real decisions.

The substantive argument is actually pretty easy: essentially, pacifists don't have an answer to Hitler. Most contemporary pacifists didn't bother and made him an exception. But that won't wash: if your political theory doesn't include the biggest example then it's probably a bad theory. I'd also argue on historical grounds that there shouldn't be a thick line round the Nazis. In an attempt to get round this, modern pacifists then tend to argue that's it's the wrong discussion to start with Hitler, rather we need to go back and posit a pacifist policy earlier (here's an example - he refers to the church, but it could be anything). This is just silly. It rather implies that modern pacifists wouldn't support pacifist policies now because of bellicosity in the past. And we know they do.

To me, that line of argument is indicative of the problem with pacifism, in that it wants the world to be other than it is. It's undoubtedly unpleasant that people seek to resolve things by force, but they do. Sometimes they benefit hugely from doing so; sometimes they have nothing to lose. Pacifism seems to ignore this reality. More irritatingly, it also allows its adherent to avoid thinking about difficult decisions. For example, for right-thinking people in the west, foreign policy decisions around are complex. Militarily, to intervene or not is a vexed question, especially in the light of huge suffering. It is right that we should approach intervention with deep caution, but it may be worthwhile. To the pacifist this agonising never occurs.  The answer is always 'no.' And in the west this is an easy and cheap luxury afforded by our own peace, and the knowledge that foreigners will be doing the dying.

It's right there is a bias against war, but to oppose it on principle is simply wrong. Next time we debate this , don't oppose 'war,' oppose 'this war,' and make sure you know why.

For Shame

I came across this over the weekend. It's a survey of MP's ability to do a (very) simple probability calculation. The results are atrocious: only 40% of them could do it. It's slightly positive that Tories are a lot better than Labour, and I note that the general population is even worse, but it's still depressing.

I got very angry about it; Anna just shrugged a bit. But this really really matters. Modern states are complicated: we spend a lot of money, we write a lot of very long laws, a lot of people are affected by both. I would argue almost everything the government does essentially requires you to think about probability. In some areas it won't be that important or won't have concrete numbers attached, but it will always come down to how many people will benefit and how likely any outcome is. This survey rather suggests that our legislators are unable to understand the implications of even the most basic numerical information. That makes them unfit to legislate. They cannot in fact do their jobs.

Amusingly, from the same survey, MPs rated themselves very confident with numbers. They are in fact  deluded, as well as unfit to legislate. 

Anathema.

A short note on dying

Apropos Euthanasia, I was initially surprised to see them pulling in protagonists from the religion debate  (Here's Andrew Copson, putting it all pretty well) as I'd never really thought about it as a religious thing. I am of course wrong, as I remembered pretty quickly once I spoke to A about it; and even more so one I read the Church of England on it. 

I'm sad that I'm wrong. I'm sad that we (that's the church) seem once again to put ourselves on the wrong side of this debate, and once again in a fairly rubbish way (see end). I'm no expert on this, but I think - and I'll use Andrew's phrase here - we, like the law as it stands - 'fail the test of compassion.' Suicide may be a sin against hope; prolonging a life of pain and misery is a sin against love. 

I think we should note a few things though:

1. It is complicated. I haven't spent any time on the argument because it's tricky. The detail is really going to matter and it's going to get hard: 'we know it when we see it' won't work
2. It is going to be difficult. It requires getting people to kill other people. And they won't be able to refuse to do the killing based on their beliefs. That's going to hurt.
3. It's going to go wrong (I) because it won't be enough. Wherever the line is drawn, there will be some very emotive cases of people who will still be banned. That's going to be depressing.
4. It's also going to go wrong (II) because there are bound to be edge cases where people die who shouldn't, either because they've been pressured (perhaps subtly) into it, or because they make a poor decision. 

None of that means we shouldn't change the law. On the contrary, I think hard, complex things where medical advance has changed the landscape out of all recognition probably could do with some legal revision. I just think that we should acknowledge that some people are going to lose out. But it's a price worth paying for the liberation from misery of others.

As an aside, I really wish the Church would stop making objections based on areas that aren't its competence and make more arguments based on its competence. In this case, its main objections seem to be a concern about human rights legislation and NHS overload - let lawyers and doctors (they have) make those points. Instead, the church's position should be compassionate, pastoral and theological. It might for example want to talk about God, or the church fathers. Instead, their key statement to the latest enquiry doesn't even mention Jesus. Anathema

Principle, pragmatics and honesty (I): cutting bits off babies

I meant to post this last week, but I got distracted, so some of the relevance has gone. Anyway:

I've been sucked into the circumcision debate, despite not really caring. On one side, it's said we can't do this kind of thing without consent, and babies can't give it (put, sensitively and with a title I have stolen, here). On the other, tradition weighs in, with some sidelines about Jews (though really this is about Muslims). Instinctively, I'd side with the latter.

However, apart from alerting me to the fact that Princes Charles, Andrew and Edward are circumcised (who knew?), it's not been a very well argued debate and there are red herrings aplenty. Here are a few:

• Bodily integrity. This won't do: we stab infants with needles, cut off cords and generally do a variety of things for medical benefit. Later in life, we pierce the ears of children too, sometimes not much later, and certainly not for medical benefit. Clearly, benefits need only be trivial or imagined for bodily integrity to be violated (and a jolly good thing too).
• Medical necessity (a). Necessity won't bear the weight its given here - immunisation is not necessary, merely beneficial. Not a reason not to do it, but let's not pretend we can point to medical necessity. Circumcision is necessary in the eyes of Jews and Muslims.
• Medical necessity (b). Did we ask some doctors? Did they put this up the top of child harm? Do we listen when they do raise things? No, no and no. On booze for example, the law explicitly rejects the medical advice about children.
• Racism. Some have claimed that a ban of circumcision is the worst attack on Jewish life since the holocaust. This is obviously not true, but it probably would have been better if it hadn't be a German court.
• Harm. This is a bit of a battleground, with the practitioners claiming it doesn't do any, and others claiming it does. I think the former are being a bit weak here. Clearly, it's not very dangerous, but it's a big deal - it's Abraham's covenant with God. I think reducing the argument to harmlessness rather weakens it.
• Irreversibility. I hesitate to put this down as a red herring, as I think it's the strongest argument for the ban - though of course, it's meant to be irreversible. That's the point. However, although I am open to persuasion, I do think it is a red herring. Firstly, it's a conditional criticism: in the argument irreversibly good is clearly OK, e.g., inoculations. So this is just a subset of the harm discussion. Secondly, I don't think it's unique: some very negative, legal, things are irreversible, for example, damage done by parents smoking in the home. 

So far, so good. But knocking down some messy logic doesn't win arguments. The critical thing for me is that people seem to be arguing about the wrong thing: specifically, they're arguing about whether people should circumcise, whereas they should be arguing about whether there should be a law stopping them. This distinction is important.  The test of a good law is the impact it has: we should be asking if passing a law against circumcision would make the people as a whole better off, and I suspect it won't. Most importantly,  some people will get it done clandestinely, which could be much more dangerous; secondly, it will rip some people away from their roots, which I don't like very much and I think is undesirable socially. One the other hands I think the gains are pretty minimal. That equation may change, but at present I think that's how it stacks up.

I'd also like a bit of honesty about this. The rejection of circumcision is - at essence - one of some people essentially wanting other people to think like them. This is perfectly reasonable, I'd like people to think like me. However, people don't think like them, and they want to do this. In many cases, they really, really want to do it. And this tension is about how genuinely plural we want society to be. I'm not sure I want a very plural society, so I'd force a lot of things down some fairly narrow paths. In principle, this might be one of them (see practical caveat above). I think that would be good for people; I don't think it would be very plural. Those seeking a ban should admit that too.

That was longer than I intended. As an aside, I think the same issues attend Lords reform through a different angle. I'll do that tomorrow.

The wrong argument, made in the wrong way

Aside from the obvious, there are two things I'm depressed by about the Church's formal statement against gay marriage:

• Firstly, I think I agree with Giles Fraser (only the second time this has happened) - and never usually a good thing)
• Secondly, whoever wrote the statement simply cannot write. It's just terribly argued, terribly written and poorly constructed

And of course it's wrong. 

Now, I'm frustrated by the language and the structure, because it makes it even harder to figure out what it is they're even trying to say. It's slippery and evasive, hyperbolic, inconsistent, inaccurate and pettily legalistic.  The summary first page will be meaningless to people who come looking for why the church thinks this. The rest is mostly worse. I think if you're going to say why you object to these things, you have to be clear and focused. This is neither

But I'm angry about the argument. If they get past the meandering summary, a reader would read a second page with a definition of marriage that we'd be hard-pressed to see why it is so exclusive. The argument pretends to antiquity, but then defends this with a definition that dates back only to 2000. This immediately tells us two things - that the church does change its definitions, and that these words could quite obviously and easily accommodate same-sex unions. Marriage isn't a Christian invention, but it's one we embrace. Look at that definition: love, mutual comfort, bodily union and the foundation of family life. We've already embraced a modern conception of marriage.


We shouldn't embrace conceptions of it unquestioningly - we opposed the straightforward divorces of the Roman world. By all means, fight the fight against calling polygamy marriage, against the irresponsibility of impermanence of some unions, and against the lack of seriousness in some parents. Marriage is valuable, but it's wide, and to defend it on semantics and poor history is to cheapen its value, and weaken an argument worth having.

Marilynne Robinson, interviewed in the Spectator a few weeks ago, had a nice turn of phrase, commenting on the 'tendency of religion to discredit itself by finding small opportunities to be mean when there are large opportunities to be generous.' The Church of England, on the ground so often an antidote to this accusation, now looks like a textbook example. It should look askance at its leaders who submitted this, perhaps not to anathematise (except for the quality of the writing), but to ask why on earth we ended up here.

Why are we still talking about the marriage thing?

I didn't watch QT last night, but everyone (well, everyone on twitter) seems to think Mary Beard was excellent. I'm not surprised, though of course I've not actually seen any of her programmes, but I do enjoy her blog.

MB and I disagree politically though, so it was nice to see her in complete accord with me (or v.v.) on her latest. Fittingly, this was based on what was prepared for last night, not what was said. Expecting a question of gay marriage, she'd worked out her answer. Here it is:

First, get some bright civil servant to ... get the rules tidied up and simplified. Second, give everyone gay or straight a civil partnership, and make that the gold-standard and leave "marriage" as the optional extra, the religious ceremony, on whatever terms the religions concerned manage to hammer out (and no business of the state at all). 

I had started to write a longer version of this two months ago when the consultation kicked off, but I think that's a succinct as it needs to be. It also stops the quite frankly bizarre spectacle of heterosexuals saying they are discriminated against because they don't have access to the lesser form (supported by Peter Tatchell).

So, abolish all civil marriage. I really don't see how this is complicated, and I really don't see why we need a consultation. Even Britain's Got Talent montages refered to civil partnerships as marriages this week, and that's on ITV.

As an aside, I note that for all the rhetoric about change and equality and different lifestyles, there is never a campaign to recognise polygamy (or I suppose polyandry), yet by the same logic the State should allow those kind of partnerships too. I suspect quite a few people are squeamish about that, but that's just bad logic.

We're keeping Easter

The Prime Minister has put out a short, bland, Easter message. It's here: it says some nice things about Jesus, and chooses to avoid some of the trickier elements of the gospel in favour of emphasising the being nice bits. I this that's fairly understandable, and it's quite nice, if a little dull.

Some people don't think it's dull though. On the contrary, they're very annoyed, because apparently he said 'we Christians' and because 'Easter is NOT historically a Christian festival'. There's more sniping on this, but I can't really be bothered to document it all. The Guardian is running a poll on whether Prime Ministers should do God in public, which broadly agrees he shouldn't - though it's not clear how many people have voted (presumably this is a minority interest topic).

This is just silly. It's Easter. Our Prime Minister is a Christian so he puts out a message. He's excited about some other things too, like the Olympics. He used 'we' last week about that too. Precisely no-one complained. He used 'we' in an Easter context because it refers to people who share his views - it's the first person plural. He's not limited to things that everyone believes in because then he couldn't use it for anything. By the way, he put out a passover message as well. He didn't use 'we' then, because - obviously - he's not Jewish. This is entirely unmerited opposition and it's the kind of pontificating that gets secularism a bad name. 

And this is because Easter is so obviously and unambiguously Christian. It's the big one; it's the point of the faith, the apex of the Christian year. I'm not even going to dignify the nonsense that Easter is not historically a Christian festival, which is just flat out wrong. There is no general cultural resonance of Easter; it's not Christmas, where most people worship at the branding triumph of Coca-Cola. You certainly wouldn't have the holiday then otherwise. It's a nightmare: movable, further crowding days off into one section of the year, and to state the obvious again, it's a double bank holiday where people don't have anything special to do unless they go to Church. We're keeping it.

So, if there is something to object to in the public realm, it's Easter bank holidays. Rail against them, and ask for them to be transferred to October. Don't sulk about a Christian marking the Christian festival. That's silly; it's not even worth the anathema.