I am reading Douglas Hurd's biography of Peel for light amusement (as a sometime-wannabe historian, reading more scholarly stuff like Ferguson's The Rothschilds depresses me more - you can imagine writing DH's book quite easily in comparison). It obviously contains many of his reflections, implicit and explicit, on politics in general. Page 99 has an interesting quote about Tory 'Ultra's':
"The Conservative Party will always include Ultras within its ranks. These are men and women who instinctively resist change and pine for a golden age that never was. Every Conservative Association has always contained such individuals, sometimes as its most energetic supporters . . . [of the 'charming' Ultras] There is nothing ungenerous in their affection for the past; their backward look is warm-hearted, even delightful. They pick out selectively what was good during the lifetime of their grandparents and great-grandparents and lament its passing. Yet most of them live pretty comfortable lives. . . . Ultras can be roused temporarily to great passion, as they were against Catholic Emancipation, for the Corn Laws, later against Home Rule for Ireland, later still in favour of Rhodesia, against European Integration. But there are limits to their passion because in the end most of them are pessimistic about politics and in particular their own chance of success".
This is an interesting and honest observation about grassroots politics as well as its Tory incarnation, not least for the clearly wrong views that this 'charming' side of the Ultra tendency tends to follow. Wistful Toryism, observing and ranking the past through spectacles dimmed by their own bias and a natural tendency to forget the grim and backward, is just one manifestation of charming grassroots conservatism; no doubt those idiots campaigning hard for the right to a dusty cramped career in an uneconomic coalmine are the same, on the other wing.
The 'sour' Ultras, are described thus: "There is nothing warm or nostalgic about their politics. many of them are intelligent and sincere; but their appeal is to the prejudices and cruelty which are part of human nature. The foreigner, the immigrant, the down-and-out, the Roman Catholic, the Jew, the Muslim - all of these have at different times been the focus of their sourness". Melanie Phillips sometimes seems to be here.
No doubt some are charming, some vicious, and many Tories are not ultras at all, but like Peel and Hurd pragmatic improvers and conservers. But the DNA of the party borrows too much from such energies for me.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Working out how to vote
Has anyone ever done this starting from a totally open mind? I doubt it - such superhuman detachment is, well, not really human at all. I claimed to, but was pretty much certain that if I reached the conclusion that I was a Tory, it would represent some sort of defeat. "Retiring overpaid City derivatives expert concludes 'It's the Tories for Me'". Hmmm.
But where do you go if you want to find out how to vote? None of the blogosphere, and very little of the newspaper commentariat, cater for the sceptical politically motivated objective outsider. Blogs compete with one another in shrill attention-seeking - with millions of them out there, all of them commenting on the same stories, this is hardly surprising. There are no marks awarded for reasoned consideration of opposing views, not if you are trying to gain points with your target audience (i.e. your own tribe). Policies are only criticized insofar as they undermine the great objective of the tribe's political aggrandaisment. Allegiance means unswerving allegiance, and Service to the Cause. This, at least, is how the Left-Right 'debate' appeared to me.
Unswerving loyalty, in crude Darwinist terms, is probably a superior strategy for organisational success. That is why armies are not designed to function like university common rooms - no debates in the ranks. However, it is a lousy way of sharpening ideas. Popper and the defeasibility of the proposition strongly guide my approach to difficult questions. So those answers that seem true-by-definition - i.e. The view of the Party - have little conent for me.
This is why I thought 'swing voter' would be a longer-running affair. I thought I floated amidst the fluidity of ideas, whereas political parties are solid bodies - particularly as consistency over time is seen as such a great virtue. However, I swiftly realised that this conclusion stemmed from a mis-characterization of how people actually decide to vote or follow a party allegiance. This mis-characterization might be crudely described in this way (I call it the Policy Market Stall):
First you work out what policies you like. So you make a scale of 1-10 for issues like Immigration, income tax, state control of education, importance of inequality, the risk of environmental meltdown/Islamic terrorism and so forth. Self-interest is normally assumed to operate; so if you live under a flight path, you oppose more runways - if you are a high-earner, you hate high taxes. Then you mesh this with each political party's avowed views and manifesto. The degree of 'fit' is what makes you vote a certain way. As you age or change, and the parties change, you might change vote. But you may well be rigidly stuck with one party your whole life, owing to an overwhelming set of preferences (i.e. the very rich never shifting from property-defending Toryism).
Maybe this approach is a fair description sometimes. Perhaps it worked when parties fell much more squarely around class lines, and the two class-parties took 95% of the votes. When it was a straight matter of the rights of Labour over the rights of Capital, you could perhaps show politics moving in great tidal sweeps, according to some kind of Marxist juggernaut. But for me, and for now, I think it fails terribly for several reasons:
- Most of what a Government will do cannot be anticipated - it will constitute a reaction to unforeseen events - like 9/11, Foot and Mouth, Financial crises. Here you need to know the character of the Party - it's DNA - the basic personalities of its leaders, the pressure that really tell upon it. This cannot be divined from a policy shopping-list
- Most policies are still in gestation. What the Civil Service works out are not mere details but often the real substance of the policy. Just spouting "Regionalisation" or "Localisation" will mean nothing without the details, which can render the policy meaningless and weak (Prescott's Regions) or not. The huge process of turning kitchen-cabinet thoughts into laws and actions will turn out all sorts of trade-offs, where the DNA of the party will again be paramount.
- Even supposedly similar policies mean different things in the mouths of different political actors. Reforming Incapacity Benefit means different things to Tories and Liberals - the former are more likely to come from the angle that the benefits system is a scam, and the latter that its systematic weaknesses are benefiting nobody. Similar recipes from the Lib Dems and the Tories to the IPPR/Labour Party's recent work on it, but meaning different things and, under political stress, likely to fly off in different directions.
- the actual personalities of political parties matter when you might end up working with them in a career move. The self-righteous whinging and vocal anti-capitalism of Left-leaning students really put me off Labour grassroots at the LSE. From the half-dozen recent meetings of thinktanks etc, I did not like the company of nostalgic socialists like Mark Garnett, and even less the paranoid Islamophobes that turned up to the Civitas lunch on "Why I am not a Muslim" (The Spectator, not Civitas, made the running here; I still respect Civitas' work with supplementary schools). I find Tories declaiming on Tradition, Nation, Queen and Our Culture under Threat about as annoying as anything I can remember since The Word was on Channel 4.
Hence, the way I reached my political decision cannot (thankfully) be put down to a long list of worthy policies. There are great Lib Dem policies, but ultimately it came down to the character and values that could be discerned from the party, in its representatives I met, reading the debates online, the articles (Orange Books, policy briefings), the conduct of their MP's in debates, and so forth. Liberalism means something. Nick Clegg, obviously, explains this better than me. It is the Liberal character of Britain's past that makes me proud. And my reading of political history has the Liberal side consistently being on the right side of the important questions - on Reform, Irish home rule, the introduction of a welfare state, on voting reform, on Internationalism and progressive taxation. It is a generous doctrine, not a self-serving, drawbridge state or nanny state doctrine. Unlike Labourism, it does not favour a particular class, or have illusions about its superior ability to tell people what is good for them. Unlike Toryism, it does not make a fetish of property, nor have that gloomy rose-tinted view of the past that denies the possibility of progress, and fears every new or foreign thing. This is all woolly. It is meant to be. But every time a specific policy comes out - Tory tax giveaways to the ultra-rich, Labour micromanaging toddlers - I know that these principles make a difference.
But where do you go if you want to find out how to vote? None of the blogosphere, and very little of the newspaper commentariat, cater for the sceptical politically motivated objective outsider. Blogs compete with one another in shrill attention-seeking - with millions of them out there, all of them commenting on the same stories, this is hardly surprising. There are no marks awarded for reasoned consideration of opposing views, not if you are trying to gain points with your target audience (i.e. your own tribe). Policies are only criticized insofar as they undermine the great objective of the tribe's political aggrandaisment. Allegiance means unswerving allegiance, and Service to the Cause. This, at least, is how the Left-Right 'debate' appeared to me.
Unswerving loyalty, in crude Darwinist terms, is probably a superior strategy for organisational success. That is why armies are not designed to function like university common rooms - no debates in the ranks. However, it is a lousy way of sharpening ideas. Popper and the defeasibility of the proposition strongly guide my approach to difficult questions. So those answers that seem true-by-definition - i.e. The view of the Party - have little conent for me.
This is why I thought 'swing voter' would be a longer-running affair. I thought I floated amidst the fluidity of ideas, whereas political parties are solid bodies - particularly as consistency over time is seen as such a great virtue. However, I swiftly realised that this conclusion stemmed from a mis-characterization of how people actually decide to vote or follow a party allegiance. This mis-characterization might be crudely described in this way (I call it the Policy Market Stall):
First you work out what policies you like. So you make a scale of 1-10 for issues like Immigration, income tax, state control of education, importance of inequality, the risk of environmental meltdown/Islamic terrorism and so forth. Self-interest is normally assumed to operate; so if you live under a flight path, you oppose more runways - if you are a high-earner, you hate high taxes. Then you mesh this with each political party's avowed views and manifesto. The degree of 'fit' is what makes you vote a certain way. As you age or change, and the parties change, you might change vote. But you may well be rigidly stuck with one party your whole life, owing to an overwhelming set of preferences (i.e. the very rich never shifting from property-defending Toryism).
Maybe this approach is a fair description sometimes. Perhaps it worked when parties fell much more squarely around class lines, and the two class-parties took 95% of the votes. When it was a straight matter of the rights of Labour over the rights of Capital, you could perhaps show politics moving in great tidal sweeps, according to some kind of Marxist juggernaut. But for me, and for now, I think it fails terribly for several reasons:
- Most of what a Government will do cannot be anticipated - it will constitute a reaction to unforeseen events - like 9/11, Foot and Mouth, Financial crises. Here you need to know the character of the Party - it's DNA - the basic personalities of its leaders, the pressure that really tell upon it. This cannot be divined from a policy shopping-list
- Most policies are still in gestation. What the Civil Service works out are not mere details but often the real substance of the policy. Just spouting "Regionalisation" or "Localisation" will mean nothing without the details, which can render the policy meaningless and weak (Prescott's Regions) or not. The huge process of turning kitchen-cabinet thoughts into laws and actions will turn out all sorts of trade-offs, where the DNA of the party will again be paramount.
- Even supposedly similar policies mean different things in the mouths of different political actors. Reforming Incapacity Benefit means different things to Tories and Liberals - the former are more likely to come from the angle that the benefits system is a scam, and the latter that its systematic weaknesses are benefiting nobody. Similar recipes from the Lib Dems and the Tories to the IPPR/Labour Party's recent work on it, but meaning different things and, under political stress, likely to fly off in different directions.
- the actual personalities of political parties matter when you might end up working with them in a career move. The self-righteous whinging and vocal anti-capitalism of Left-leaning students really put me off Labour grassroots at the LSE. From the half-dozen recent meetings of thinktanks etc, I did not like the company of nostalgic socialists like Mark Garnett, and even less the paranoid Islamophobes that turned up to the Civitas lunch on "Why I am not a Muslim" (The Spectator, not Civitas, made the running here; I still respect Civitas' work with supplementary schools). I find Tories declaiming on Tradition, Nation, Queen and Our Culture under Threat about as annoying as anything I can remember since The Word was on Channel 4.
Hence, the way I reached my political decision cannot (thankfully) be put down to a long list of worthy policies. There are great Lib Dem policies, but ultimately it came down to the character and values that could be discerned from the party, in its representatives I met, reading the debates online, the articles (Orange Books, policy briefings), the conduct of their MP's in debates, and so forth. Liberalism means something. Nick Clegg, obviously, explains this better than me. It is the Liberal character of Britain's past that makes me proud. And my reading of political history has the Liberal side consistently being on the right side of the important questions - on Reform, Irish home rule, the introduction of a welfare state, on voting reform, on Internationalism and progressive taxation. It is a generous doctrine, not a self-serving, drawbridge state or nanny state doctrine. Unlike Labourism, it does not favour a particular class, or have illusions about its superior ability to tell people what is good for them. Unlike Toryism, it does not make a fetish of property, nor have that gloomy rose-tinted view of the past that denies the possibility of progress, and fears every new or foreign thing. This is all woolly. It is meant to be. But every time a specific policy comes out - Tory tax giveaways to the ultra-rich, Labour micromanaging toddlers - I know that these principles make a difference.
He won!
(phew). Nick Clegg is a prime reason I joined the Liberal Democrats - he kindly gave an hour of his time to me purely to provide career's advice (friend of a friend, another local Putney parent, etc). But the conversation fell into politics, it went on for ages, and it persuaded me to apply for Lib Dem policy adviser positions, and vastly accelerated my understanding of the party. In person he is both impressive and refreshingly normal - on TV, this may come across as a lack of polish compared to his opponent, but I think it stems from a deep determination to not b***shit anyone.
The next few months will be extremely interesting for the Party- at the time, I think he may have regretted the lower level of visibility his recently announced stance on immigration was allowed. This will change - at last, an honest debate on this topic (not 'we're thinking what you're thinking' snide and allusive threats), one that exposes the deception at the heart of the other parties' policies, which pretend to be able to expel, police-state style, hundreds of thousands of hard-working law-abiding immigrants as if they were a bacterial disease.
The next few months will be extremely interesting for the Party- at the time, I think he may have regretted the lower level of visibility his recently announced stance on immigration was allowed. This will change - at last, an honest debate on this topic (not 'we're thinking what you're thinking' snide and allusive threats), one that exposes the deception at the heart of the other parties' policies, which pretend to be able to expel, police-state style, hundreds of thousands of hard-working law-abiding immigrants as if they were a bacterial disease.
Monday, December 17, 2007
What this is about
I used to have a blog called 'Swing Voter'. It was set up to be a way of collecting my thoughts as they - hopefully - coalesced around a political affiliation. I have long been the sort of political nerd who stayed up through all of election night, gambled on it intensively, read Bagehot and Lexington and the more thoughtful commentators whenever I could, as well as a smattering of the giants from the political canon: Smith, Burke, Paine, Mill, Keynes, Hayek, Popper, some Locke, some disciples of Marx, hosts of small libertarian articles, modern writers like Martin Wolf, Samuel Brittan, Anthony Giddens, John Kay, and so forth. Light reading means the diaries and biographies, from the lightest (Lance Price) to the magisterial (everyone should read Lord Blake's biography of Disraeli - and find out where Roy Jenkins got most of his material). I should have done most of this on my PPE course, but preferred philosophy, foolishly.
Apart from colossal self-importance (my vote really matters), the blog was intended to help me work out my next career direction, as the City life had provided a rather extreme example of extent of inequality and enabled me to give it up young. I wanted to do something that involved thought as well as decision, and the general area of policy making/government/perhaps journalism/political helping struck me as having this combination. People were surprised, however, to find that I was embarking on this without a firm political affiliation. Most of the people trying to work as an MP's researcher, say, have spent long periods at university lecturing their fellow self-0bsessed student layabouts about how the world should be run, and assembling a CV filled with those pointless posts ("third year graduate soup administrator, defeating the Fascist candidate narrowly"). In other words, the main qualification for being in politics was no longer questioning how you voted.
I thought this daft, and reckoned my value higher for actually having considered the options rather than tribally painted my face red/blue/green/orange and stuck by whatever the Party had said ever more. But I recognised at the time that I would surely prefer one party to another, enough to want to help it or work for it, and use my recent ambivalence as an asset ("when I was thinking of voting Tory this is what I thought of Gypsies, you see").
I was surprised to find the period of swinging ended quite quickly, and my partiality would render the very title of the blog mendacious. It is very difficult to remain impartial in this game. Clear, defining difficulties with either 'main' party became quickly obvious - in fact, I sometimes suspected a conspiracy by their so-called Stars to find and trumpet objectionable policies and attitudes to make my decision easier (only today, on immigration, the Labour party showing how scared they are of the Tory immigration dog-whistle). I read exhaustively the policy documents, think-tank reports (Civitas, Adam Smith, IPPR, SMF, even some nonsense from Demos) to try to get under the skin of the parties.
I thought blogs would help too, and in a sense they did. I knew from past experience that the standard style of the Vanity Publishing Web was infantile, breast-beating, foul-mouthed, favouring extremist poses ("If I say so and so is an utter c*** and the worst thing to ever happen to Britain, they will surely understand that I am right") - in fact, all the things you'd expect it to be.
(Editors Do a Job. That is why the novel your best friend has mysteriously failed to get published for 10 years is such rubbish, and why the Blog that Attempts to be a Wise confection of Richard Littlejohn and Friedrich Hayek reads like a zitty Etonian schoolboy's soapbox election rant. Insert links to any number of Furious Tory Doughty Street stars' blogs here)
So all I learnt from most of the blogs I read was what the slightly dimmer but resoundingly self-confident and under-researched tribalists were like. This is useful, and the different styles they coalesce around told me something about what it would be like working with them. The only blogs where there is reasoned debate are those hosted by Liberals, like QuaeQuam, LibDem Voice, and the Conservative Home Tory Diary, although you get your fair share of foaming loons there too.
The swinging ended, which will be covered in more depth later. I have joined the Lib Dems, helped Nick's campaign (at time of writing, no idea if my 35 phone calls made a difference), even helped stuff post and canvas. This has not brought my political speculation to a total end; the vast difference between the realm of Noble Liberal Ideas and the dirty laborious local political stuff inspires all sorts of posts. But I am absolutely certain of the rightness of my choice.
Apart from colossal self-importance (my vote really matters), the blog was intended to help me work out my next career direction, as the City life had provided a rather extreme example of extent of inequality and enabled me to give it up young. I wanted to do something that involved thought as well as decision, and the general area of policy making/government/perhaps journalism/political helping struck me as having this combination. People were surprised, however, to find that I was embarking on this without a firm political affiliation. Most of the people trying to work as an MP's researcher, say, have spent long periods at university lecturing their fellow self-0bsessed student layabouts about how the world should be run, and assembling a CV filled with those pointless posts ("third year graduate soup administrator, defeating the Fascist candidate narrowly"). In other words, the main qualification for being in politics was no longer questioning how you voted.
I thought this daft, and reckoned my value higher for actually having considered the options rather than tribally painted my face red/blue/green/orange and stuck by whatever the Party had said ever more. But I recognised at the time that I would surely prefer one party to another, enough to want to help it or work for it, and use my recent ambivalence as an asset ("when I was thinking of voting Tory this is what I thought of Gypsies, you see").
I was surprised to find the period of swinging ended quite quickly, and my partiality would render the very title of the blog mendacious. It is very difficult to remain impartial in this game. Clear, defining difficulties with either 'main' party became quickly obvious - in fact, I sometimes suspected a conspiracy by their so-called Stars to find and trumpet objectionable policies and attitudes to make my decision easier (only today, on immigration, the Labour party showing how scared they are of the Tory immigration dog-whistle). I read exhaustively the policy documents, think-tank reports (Civitas, Adam Smith, IPPR, SMF, even some nonsense from Demos) to try to get under the skin of the parties.
I thought blogs would help too, and in a sense they did. I knew from past experience that the standard style of the Vanity Publishing Web was infantile, breast-beating, foul-mouthed, favouring extremist poses ("If I say so and so is an utter c*** and the worst thing to ever happen to Britain, they will surely understand that I am right") - in fact, all the things you'd expect it to be.
(Editors Do a Job. That is why the novel your best friend has mysteriously failed to get published for 10 years is such rubbish, and why the Blog that Attempts to be a Wise confection of Richard Littlejohn and Friedrich Hayek reads like a zitty Etonian schoolboy's soapbox election rant. Insert links to any number of Furious Tory Doughty Street stars' blogs here)
So all I learnt from most of the blogs I read was what the slightly dimmer but resoundingly self-confident and under-researched tribalists were like. This is useful, and the different styles they coalesce around told me something about what it would be like working with them. The only blogs where there is reasoned debate are those hosted by Liberals, like QuaeQuam, LibDem Voice, and the Conservative Home Tory Diary, although you get your fair share of foaming loons there too.
The swinging ended, which will be covered in more depth later. I have joined the Lib Dems, helped Nick's campaign (at time of writing, no idea if my 35 phone calls made a difference), even helped stuff post and canvas. This has not brought my political speculation to a total end; the vast difference between the realm of Noble Liberal Ideas and the dirty laborious local political stuff inspires all sorts of posts. But I am absolutely certain of the rightness of my choice.
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