Today in 6 months, you will be asked to put a cross in a box. Depending on where you live, you may have more than one cross and more than one box to put it in, and there’s a big kerfuffle about that, but that aside, I am hoping that it will be the last cross you ever have to put in a box in a national context. I am hoping that next time, you’ll have numbers to put in your boxes.
Now, I have gone on the record a couple of times declaring that AV is a scam. And so last time I left off promising to explain why I had decided to campaign for AV.
I’m not going to take you on a tour of the Yes campaign arguments, good though they are. You can look them up for yourself. I’m not even going to stay on message as far the Yes campaign is concerned – these are my personal reasons and I speak only for myself.
So let’s talk first about why AV is a scam. The first time I said this was when Gordon Brown first brought it up in the run-up to the general election, in an attempt to pander to the Lib Dems. If you know anything about the Lib Dems you will know that they would like to move to a proportional voting system, which would reflect the percentage of votes gained by a party in the percentage of seats they receive in Parliament. For a party which needs about 126,000 votes for every seat it gains in Parliament, while its main rivals need somewhere in the range of 30-35,000, this is completely understandable. But looking beyond individual party interests, it seems obvious to me from looking at those numbers that the current voting system (First Past the Post, or FPTP) simply is not fair and not democratic. It disenfranchises the vast majority of the population, as only about a third of the votes cast actually make a difference to the election outcome. The rest of us – well, we might as well stay at home.
Having established that FPTP is unfair and that we would quite like a proportional system, the first thing to note about AV is that it is not proportional. If anyone tells you it is, they’re either misguided or outright lying. The AV system retains the single-member constituency. This means that only one party can represent a constituency, which in turn means that the result is not proportional to the number of votes cast for each party either in that constituency or in the country as a whole. (Whether single-member constituencies are a good thing is a question for another day.) So when Gordon Brown put AV on the table as his electoral reform of choice back in April, of course it was a scam.
For me, the biggest risk around adopting AV in May – and this is something I’m still genuinely concerned about – is that it will be used as an excuse to block further reform. We will be hearing the words “We’ve only just had a change, let it bed in” for the next 50 years.
Equally, however, AV is what is now on the table, and in this world, in this life, you play the hand you’re dealt. So I’m choosing to hope. The AV campaign will certainly get people talking and thinking about change and electoral reform. And hopefully if AV is implemented, it will demonstrate that change is possible and can be positive. Hopefully it will make people consider further changes in a positive light.
Beyond meta arguments on change, though, I do believe AV has one or two merits in its own right. Firstly, it eliminates the need for tactical voting. No more leaflets through your door using dodgy numbers and doctored charts to tell you how Labour can’t win here. No more grudgingly putting your cross in one box but really wishing the other guys stood a snowball’s chance in hell around here. No more trying to second-guess your fellow voters so you can vote with them rather than waste your vote. AV lets you rank candidates according to preference. So if you really like the Greens, you can say so. And if you don’t happen to live in Brighton & Hove, well then your vote still isn’t wasted, because you can say who you like second-best, and third-best and all the way down to the BNP. Being able to vote for the people you actually want to vote for, without wasting your vote, is worth a lot in my book.
The second benefit of AV is that we will actually be able to get some data on the results a truly proportional system would produce. Currently even the best numbers we have are estimates. If you just look at how people voted in the last election, it isn’t particularly representative as so many people would have voted tactically, rather than for their first preference. However, if people are allowed to rank candidates in order of preference we will get a much better picture of what kind of Parliament a truly proportional system would return. That way, when the PR referendum comes around, at least we won’t have all the scaremongering about letting the extremists in.
Those are my two reasons why I intend to ruin a good pair of shoes in the next six months. The Yes campaign has many more, and you may have some of your own. If you do, go and sign up. And if you’re not convinced yet, then talk to people about it. Ultimately, a healthy debate on the issue will only help all of us make up our minds.
And so tomorrow, I will be hosting the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign launch in Newcastle. It’ll probably rain, and we’ll probably get overrun by the people trying to shut down the Vodafone store just up the road. Hopefully, though, we’ll also get to talk to a lot of people, raise awareness, sign up lots of volunteers for the campaign, and change some minds. I’m looking forward to it.

I realised this morning what this government’s science and education policy reminds me of.
Back in communist Bulgaria we had a joke. It went like this:
The glorious leader (Todor Zhivkov, if you must know, but I like calling him the glorious leader), the Pope and a bloke on his gap year are on an aeroplane, and the plane gets into trouble. Let’s say it flies through an ash cloud. With the plane about to crash, the three of them find they only have two parachutes between them.
Zhivkov says, “I am the leader of a nation that is on the cutting edge of science and technology. Without my leadership the world will suffer a serious setback in scientific progress. I must have a parachute.” And off he goes.
The Pope turns to the student and says, “I have made my peace with God, my child. He will take care of me. You are young, you have your whole life before you, take the other parachute and save yourself.”
The boy looks at the Pope and says, “Thank you Father, but there’s no need. The guy on the cutting edge of scientific progress couldn’t tell the difference between a parachute and a backpack. So I’ll have to get a new tent, but at least both you and I can save ourselves.”

Remember before the general election, as all the parties were looking for little slogans and soundbites to help you identify them by? If you were playing buzzword bingo, the Lib Dem slogan was a high score: “Change that works for you, building a fairer Britain”. A bit of a mouthful, but it did have both the buzzwords du jour.
Fast forward six months. Nick Clegg has today told us what his definition of a fairer Britain is. There is a lot I object to in his speech: the now familiar deficit narrative, the story about not passing on the debt to the next generation, some of the details on the coalition’s deficit reduction principles. One sentence, however, truly stands out; one sentence sends chills down my spine:

“True fairness is about the distribution of chances, not just about the distribution of cash.”

Clegg’s main argument is around the different definitions of fairness, and he sets out to convince us that his is the right one. It is, he argues, equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome that really matters. Those who make an effort to better themselves should be rewarded, while being shielded from the effects of pure bad luck. To achieve this, the Deputy Prime Minister proposes a £7bn spending plan, to make available pre-primary education to deprived 2-year-olds, as well as the pupil premium and a student premium (the latter not entirely thought through by the sounds of it). By doing this, Mr. Clegg argues, we will level the playing field, giving poor children the same opportunities as rich children, which will allow them to be successful in life if they are willing to work hard.
I don’t know if the Deputy Prime Minister doesn’t realise or is simply wilfully ignoring how dangerous his rhetoric is, how damaging the message. We can see first-hand what the message of equality of opportunity achieves in the United States – one of the most unequal societies in the world. The American dream is a treacherous friend. If only you try hard enough, it says, you can achieve anything. You can be anything you like – a millionaire, or even President. It points us constantly at success stories, both real and fictional, the current occupant of the White House one of them.
But the American dream has a flip side. By starting from the assumption that “all men are created equal”, it is blinkered to the inequalities inherent in society – to class and privilege, to path dependence and deprivation. If only you work hard enough, whispers the American dream, you will overcome all of that, and you will be successful. By extension, though, if you haven’t succeeded, you only have yourself to blame; you must not have tried hard enough, worked hard enough. Those other people from the same background as you succeeded (one in a million though they might be), so if you haven’t, it must be something wrong with you. So you deserve to be poor, you deserve to get no help – you didn’t try hard enough.
In all fairness, Mr. Clegg’s vision isn’t quite as blinkered to the existence of privilege and the topology of the playing field. This is precisely why he wants to invest £7bn in levelling said playing field; he specifically calls out the state’s role in doing exactly that. Yet it takes more than a couple of billion pounds spent on early education to dismantle privilege and create true equality of opportunity. It takes cultural and social change. If we truly wanted to level the playing field, we would close Eton. This move it not about creating equality of opportunity – it is about sustaining privilege while giving those of us born without it just enough scraps from the table of our masters to keep us quiet.
Much more importantly though, we should not underestimate the importance of equality of outcome as a key value and key definition of fairness. I am not saying we should all receive an equal slice of the pie regardless of our efforts; but looking at the gulf that separates rich and poor in Britain, all this talk of fairness based on equality of opportunity pales into insignificance. A country with the third-largest GDP in the EU has the seventh-highest poverty rate. Nearly one in five people in the UK live in poverty. London, one of the world’s wealthiest cities, is also the region of the UK with the highest poverty rate – nearly 30%. Nearly 3 million children live in poverty, costing society as a whole £25 billion annually. (Incidentally, that is more than half of the interest payments on the UK debt that the Deputy PM so objects to.) The majority of those children are not from the Daily Mail poster cases of workless families on benefits. The majority of them have at least one parent in work – working hard – barely able to make ends meet. Nick Clegg’s £7 billion will not rectify any of that – it is not designed to rectify any of that.
So maybe instead of paying lip service to fairness, and leaving the next generation deficit-free in a damaged labour market with chronic structural unemployment, a privatised education system, and a hollowed out, gutted knowledge economy, Nick Clegg could give us something to really aspire to: a truly fair Britain where no one is left behind – not in opportunity and not in outcome.

When all the Mail on Sunday could come up with as a reaction to Ed Miliband’s election as Labour leader was to point out that he was unmarried and his name wasn’t on the birth certificate of his son, I must admit I was mildly amused. After all, in my little left-wing, progressive, socially liberal bubble of the universe, Mr. Miliband’s choices about how to conduct his private life really should have no impact on his job performance as leader of the opposition or even as Prime Minister.
Yet, by Tuesday that nasty persistent whining from the right on the subject still hadn’t gone away. Richard Littlejohn, that paragon of right-wing family values, and Tim Montgomerie have both weighed into the conversation yesterday, trying desperately to sabotage the political debate and keep the already annoying Miliband family soap opera on the front pages while the Labour party conference fades into the background.
And yet, the trick that Messrs Littlejohn and Montgomerie are missing is that the personal is political – something feminists have known for decades. So let’s look at how Mr. Miliband’s family status matters, and what the right’s focus on it really tells us about the kind of society these people envision for us.
Richard Littlejohn finds it ironic that while in “fashionable left-wing circles” marriage between a man and a woman is seen as something reactionary and old-fashioned, civil partnerships for same-sex couples are celebrated. If, he asks, Mr. Miliband and Ms Thornton intend to stay together for the rest of their lives, then why not get married. There is a tangled mess of underlying assumptions behind these comments.
For a start, we don’t know – and frankly shouldn’t care – whether Ed Miliband and Justine Thornton intend to stay together for the rest of their lives. Yes, they have been together for five years, and they have a child together, with a second one on the way. Yet, the rest of someone’s life can be a very long time, and not just because futurologists predict that the first person to live to 1000 years old could be in their fifties today. People change, their goals and outlook on life change, and even the children grow up. A modicum of awarenss of the long term is the minimum I expect from my political leaders, and Mr Miliband for me is showing that by not binding himself in an extremely restrictive legal way to another person.
There is also a certain presumption in all of this commentary that Ed Miliband is the only person in the relationship who has a say over whether they get married, or whose name is on the birth certificate. The right is trying to treat Ms. Thornton here as a “trophy wife” – the same way the press dealt with Sarah Brown (Anyone remember her toes?) and “Sam Cam” whose greatest contribution to anything was to make us feel that her husband was a real man by being visibly pregnant during the election campaign. It is time for commentators like Mr. Littlejohn to realise that women – even politicians’ partners – are human beings, that they have agency and free will of their own.
Finally, Mr. Littlejohn seems to be starting from the assumption that “one size fits all” when it comes to relationships: if you like gay “marriage” then you should like straight marriage; if you have children you should be married. It’s a terribly restrictive view of human relationships, and just because the traditional “one man, one woman, two kids” model may have worked out for him doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone else. Why is it always the right – the proponents of a small state and the worshippers of market-enabled choice – who want to regulate human relationships, who want to deny us the basic rights of choice in the most personal areas of our lives? Is it so difficult to comprehend that context matters; that a person’s experience and outlook on life matters; that two people (and sometimes three, or four – I know it’s a shock!) can have an adult covnersation about how to run their own lives, and make their own decisions, without the state or the Daily Mail having a say in it?
Richard Littlejohn shows grave concern for the kind of role model Ed Miliband, in his new role as leader of the opposition, will be for the country. Here is the kind of role model that he is to me:
He is clearly a man of passion – someone who cares deeply about the biggest social and political problems of our times. And yes, perhaps he prioritised a climate change conference over getting married, or getting his name on a piece of paper – this for me makes him a man who can see the bigger picture. Again, this should be a minimum requirement for our political leaders.
I am making my own assumptions here, but I suspect Ms. Thornton would have had a strong voice when it came to the couple’s decision on how to conduct their relationship. This to me shows that Mr. Miliband is the kind of man who can respect his partner, have a mature and adult conversation about their relationship, and reach an agreement, even if that may not be to his political advantage. In a culture where women are routinely treated as objects, Mr. Miliband is brave to show us a different way.
Of course, Ed Miliband’s success in the leadership election also sends a strong message that “people like him” – people who have children out of wedlock, and whose name isn’t on those children’s birth certificate – can be successful, can be deemed worthy of maybe one day even becoming Prime Minister. That is a very powerful message, as it contradicts the constant pressure for conformity we face from the likes of Mr. Littlejohn.
I do not support the Labour party, but I would like to hear Ed Miliband’s political vision, not see his message drowned out by a media-generated strom in a teacup over issues which stopped being issues back in the 1980s.

The long boredom of the summer recess is over and Parliament is back in session. (Do remind me to tell you about the great idea I had for a new reality TV show to run during the next summer recess.) Anyway, Parliament is back, debating mostly electoral reform of one kind or another: the AV referendum, fixed term Parliaments, etc. So I guess it’s time for me to write about electoral reform again, too.
I believe I’ve made my views on FPTP clear in the past, but for the record, it’s an appalling, undemocratic, unrepresentative voting system. It’s about as unfair as they come, and not to the ever-complaining Tories. Let’s remind ourselves of the number of votes required for some of the parties in the UK to win a seat in Westminster: Lab: 33k, Con: 35k, LibDem: 126k, Greens: 200k.
Another effect of FPTP which doesn’t get talked about very often – but is kind of obvious from the above numbers – is that it severely penalises small parties and strongly encourages large ones. No society, however, can easily be split in just two camps: we are not all simply either Labour or Tory, either Democrat or Republican. I may be economically left-of-centre, and politically liberal; I am also a woman, a bisexual, middle class, an immigrant, childless, working full-time, I believe climate change is the biggest challenge we face, and have many, many other interests and facets to who I am which have a political aspect. The same thing goes for any one of us. However, the party of middle class bisexual immigrant childless women would be quite small – and even smaller if you only took the women who agreed on every single policy issue. The First Past the Post political system would strongly discourage its existence. And so we look to get together with another party whose views we more or less share – they might be the middle class immigrant childless lesbians, they might be the working class bisexual childless women, or even the middle class immigrant men; and then we find another group, and another, to join our ever-expanding political party. You can probably already see how easy it is to form a daisy-chain from you to anyone anywhere else on the political spectrum, even if you’re only taking tiny incremental steps with each new association.
So what we end up with in an FPTP system is a political landscape generally dominated by two parties. Those parties are large and far from homogeneous – they are “broad churches” (yes, that is a technical political science term – remind me to explain about cross-cutting cleavages some day). In fact, it is fair to say that the large parties produced in an FPTP system are coalitions in themselves. You can see plenty of evidence of this in the three main parties in the UK: The LibDems split reasonably neatly into a social wing and the Orange Book wing; Labour have a hard-core left wing trying to cohabit with the Blairites who in turn would actually not be too out of place in the more centrist wing of the Tory party (I may be being charitable here).
Remember back in May all the fear-uncertainty-doubt talk about how coalitions were undemocratic because they made shady deals in smoke-filledfree rooms and were thus not accountable to the public who had voted for the parties involved based on their manifestos and not based on some sort of coalition agreement? So what do you think produces said manifestos other than shady deals and back-room politics, except in a much less transparent, scrutinisable way?
That much about the theory. As a quick postscript, let’s have a look at the damage FPTP is doing to the UK political landscape in practice. So we have the two main parties (the LibDems will forgive me if I treat them separately here) which historically represented different class interests: Labour, economically left of centre, representing the working class (or, well, labour); and the Conservatives, economically right of centre, representing the upper classes (in other words, capital). The LibDems are a freak of nature, a misshapen merger of what was left of the 19th century Liberals and a centre-left off-shoot of Labour. Under Tony Blair, Labour moved to the right, and up along the authoritarian axis for those of you playing along at home on Political Compass. The LibDems’ social wing (which I’d still like to believe makes up the majority of the actual membership) has been submerged by the Orange Bookers who are now solidly forming the leadership of the party. And so the British political landscape is left with a large social-democracy-shaped black hole in it – not so good for those of us who would like someone to represent us in that part of the spectrum.
That’s it for tonight. In the next instalment, by popular request, I’ll be trying to convince myself to campaign for AV.

I have been rewatching the West Wing recently – it is remarkably addictive. Somewhere in between mainlining up to 5 episodes a night, this quote struck me:

“It’s not just about abortion, it’s about the next 20 years. Twenties and thirties it was the role of government, fifties and sixties it was civil rights. The next two decades it’s gonna be privacy. I’m talking about the Internet. I’m talking about cell phones. I’m talking about health records and who’s gay and who’s not. And moreover, in a country born on the will to be free, what could be more fundamental than this?”

Sam Seaborn says this in the first-season episode “The Shortlist”; so if Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the show, understood this back in 1999, why is it that our politicians and leaders continue to be so woefully ill-equipped for the 21st century eleven years later?
It’s important to note that this is hardly an issue that is limited to one side of the green benches. Both the previous government and the current one have plenty of examples to demonstrate that their level of understanding of technology and science is not up to scratch. Both have a record of getting carried away with the opportunities technology provides to the state without asking the right questions about the impact on the individual.
Exhibit one: Medical records
The electronic patient care records system was an initiative of the previous government. Don’t get me wrong, I work in technology, and I can definitely see the potential benefits of medical records stored in a central database, easily accessible to authorised healthcare professionals for use in patient care. However, the way the project was executed betrays a shocking lack of understanding of the technology involved and its social implications at the highest level of government. For instance, while patient consent was ostensibly sought, this was a pro-forma exercise: many households who received letters telling them about the initiative and how to opt out didn’t even realise the importance of them and filed them straight in the recycling.
To this day, the guiding principles and rules for accessing and using the data aren’t particularly well publicised. Who and under what circumstance has access to a patient’s medical records? How is authorisation obtained and does it at any point expire? What rights does the patient have to view their own medical records, and to understand who has accessed them and why? Can data on the database be used for purposes other than treating the individual patient, e.g. for medical studies, and what safeguards are in place to gain patient consent for this and ensure their privacy? Once the data is in the system, who owns and controls it – the patient or the NHS? Under what circumstances can access be obtained to medical records for non-medical uses, e.g. by the police or other institutions of the state? Is the data physically held in this country, or is it transferred to countries with different and potentially weaker data protection laws? Some – though by far not all – of these questions have been addressed by the project. Others remain unanswered.
In addition to the above questions on access rights and data ownership, how is data integrity to be ensured? If the database is to hold the medical records of 60 million individuals, even at an error rate of one per cent that leaves 600,000 individuals with potentially fatal errors in their data. This is before considering malicious attacks on the database, either to obtain or alter records.
Exhibit two: The Digital Economy Act
The Digital Economy Act, particularly the large part of it which deals with online copyright infringement, is an example where the previous government succumbed to lobbying without fully understanding the technical, social and civil liberties implications of the legislation. It essentially hands over copyright policing on the internet to rights holders, at a very significant cost to both internet service providers and end users. If the implementation proposal currently on the table from Ofcom goes through as is, rights holders will have an unprecedented remit to invade individuals’ privacy by scanning their network traffic for copyrighted material. Not only that, but enforcement will be in the hands of rights holders and internet service providers, who will have the power to send end users threatening letters and most likely in the future to disconnect them from the internet, with very little in the way of due process.
While this protects the vested interests of a handful of people and companies, essentially supporting a few monopolies and cartels in the content industry whose business model would be obsolete without such legislation, the wide-ranging implications of the Digital Economy Act remain largely ignored and at best misunderstood by politicians. Handing over policing and enforcement of copyright to non-state actors is a constitutional precedent, and not in a good way. The same goes for allowing private companies to inspect individuals’ internet usage and traffic with – as per the current proposal – hardly any regulation. This doesn’t just change the relationship between the state and the individual, it brings in the private sector into this relationship without any safeguards.
Additionally to all this, the Digital Economy Act is highly likely to damage the real digital economy by, for instance, discouraging the provision of open WiFi access by small businesses such as pubs and coffee shops. Add to that the fact that it’s highly unlikely to achieve its goal to reduce online copyright infringement – the technology to make the Act toothless exists, and this will just be the final push to get users to adopt it – and the picture of our barely-technology-literate political classes is complete.
Exhibit three: The census
One of the early indications that the new coalition government isn’t much better than their predecessors when it comes to understanding the complex interplay between the realm of the technologically possible and the realm of the constitutionally, socially and politically desirable is Francis Maude’s recent announcement that he is looking to scrap the census. A cheaper, more accurate and more real-time way of achieving the same objective, he argues, is to use data already held in various government and private-sector databases to obtain a picture of who is living in the UK.
The first thing this ignores is basic technical feasibility. Reliably correlating each of the data sources the government proposes to use (e.g. NHS records, post office address lists, credit card checking registries, etc.) whilst ensuring data integrity is a nigh-on impossible task. It is also highly likely to leave us with huge gaps in our knowledge, compared to the census as it is conducted today. Especially data on diversity, be that ethnic, religious or sexual orientation, is likely to fall through the cracks.
Next is the issue of consent to use of the data. According to the Data Protection Act, if data is collected on an individual, they need to be informed what the data will be used for. When we give our information to various agencies we consent to it only being used for the stated purpose – not for our data to be later repurposed for a census.
Finally, there is the question of whether the proposed new approach would actually achieve the same results as the census. Don’t get me wrong – there are improvements we can make to the way the census is conducted. The fact that it is done at a household level, completed by the head of the household, means that a number of sensitive categories are misreported. For instance, a religious father may report his atheist child as belonging to a religion; a mother unaware that her child is gay may report them as heterosexual. This, however, is nothing compared to the inaccuracies, inconsistencies and gaps the proposed new method is likely to give us. Thinking about what census data is used for – targeting policy and government spending to those who need it – a data collection method which will leave out the most vulnerable, the minorities, and the underprivileged is hardly fit for purpose.
Exhibit four: Credit tracking agencies and benefit fraud
The latest in the series of “government meets 21st century” stories is of course David Cameron’s announcement last week that he is looking to use private credit reference agencies to crack down on benefit fraud. Handing over policing of an issue to the private sector, allowing private companies to breach individuals’ right to privacy: if you’ve been paying attention this should sound familiar by now. What is even worse is that, unlike the the copyright case where the issue being policed is only of commercial interest, in the case of benefit fraud we are talking about the state creating a financial incentive for private companies to snoop on individuals. Add to that the fact that this measure is exclusively targeted at the poor, and you have suddenly created a two-tier-citizen system, where some of us have a right to privacy while others don’t.
Let’s also not forget data integrity and reliability issues. When I was a student living in halls and needed to be credit-checked to get a mobile phone contract, this was a nearly-impossible task as credit checking happens on an address level. In student accommodation, where people rarely stay for more than nine months, being tarnished by your predecessors’ credit records was unavoidable.
Not only does this latest proposal demonstrate a lack of understanding of technology, it displays a basic ignorance of the constitution, which after all is supposed to establish the boundaries between the state and the individual. Yet again we see the state outsourcing key functions to the private sector, with little regulation, perverse incentives and a remarkable nonchalance about what this means for individuals.
***
One thing politicians of all parties should begin to understand is that as Generation Y and their successors reach the voting age, they are a lot more technology-savvy than our current crop of leaders. Issues of privacy, of data use, of the boundary between the state and the individual in a networked world, will not pass this generation by, and sooner or later they will hold their leaders to account. It is vitally important for the political classes to educate themselves about science and technology, to consider more than one viewpoint, regardless of the strength of the lobby groups, and to ensure that they have really asked all the questions before making decisions on these issues.

The Twitter- and blogosphere today is full of rumours that Charles Kennedy along with up to five other Lib Dem MPs is considering defection to Labour. If indeed the rumours are true, I understand I sympathise with the sentiment behind this – I am no fan of this coalition government – but I believe in the long run it would be the wrong move, both for the Liberal Democrats and for the country.
Both from looking at the leadership and speaking to party activists, it is obvious that the Liberal Democrats are a divided party right now. There are those who subscribe to Orange Book style economic liberalism in addition to socially liberal values; and there is the more left-of-centre wing of the party. One side has more natural links with the Conservatives – more so now that the Conservatives have moved closer to the centre ground on key liberal issues such as gay rights; the left wing of the party, on the other hand, would much rather have taken their chances in a great rainbow coalition with Labour. It is also clear that the majority of the current leadership do actually feel quite comfortable in the coalition government, leaving senior figures on the left of the party as well as many members and activists wondering whether this is really the Liberal Democrat party they joined.
So far, so understandable, and I find it hard to blame anyone considering leaving the party, what with having let my own membership lapse even before the election as it became obvious that the party was shifting to the right under Mr. Clegg’s leadership.
And yet…
The more I watch the coalition, the more I am convinced that I should re-join the Lib Dems. Not because I agree with the vast majority of coalition policy: there are a few bits and pieces that I feel they are getting right, but those are few and far between. The reason why I want to re-join is to take the party back. While there are plenty of Orange Book liberals in the rank and file, I am increasingly convinced that the majority of the membership is, like me, extremely uneasy with the direction the current leadership has taken the party in. I believe that there will sooner or later be an opportunity to take the party back to the left of centre ground, and that we should be ready to do so when that opportunity presents itself.
I do not believe that defection to Labour is the right course, though I have flirted with it myself; and I am still keeping an eye on the leadership election because, if nothing else, the winner will have a hand in shaping political debate in the country for the foreseeable future. There are, however, many things that make me very uneasy about the Labour party. Don’t get me wrong – I believe the Labour government under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown achieved a lot over the last 13 years. Before the current government got into power and started ripping apart the state, Britain was actually beginning to look convincingly like a social democracy. Labour’s record on civil liberties, however, along with their defence policy, has been utterly appalling. Ultimately, I am first and foremost a social liberal, and that is the box that Labour for me so often fails to tick.
This is why I believe that, if the Liberal Democrats have to split, it is vital for the left wing to remain an independent party in its own right. Those of us who value social democracy and social liberalism need to have that choice on the British political spectrum. Those who value economic liberalism seem to me to be more than adequately represented by the Cameron wing of the Conservative party. Therefore, until we have an electoral system which does not force people with very different political views into awkward coalitions under a party umbrella in order to have a shot at winning an election, I believe it is vital that a middle ground choice between Labour and the Tories remains in that otherwise unoccupied ground where the left-of-centre wing of the Lib Dems plays.
And so, if instead of crossing the aisle to the opposition benches, Charles Kennedy is willing to stand up and declare that he wants to take his party back, I will be the first to put my money where my mouth is and re-join the Liberal Democrats.

So, David Cameron is really passionate about the Big Society. He tells us so in his greatly hyped speech today.

The Big Society is about a huge culture change…
…where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace…
…don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face …
…but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities.

I think it’s a remarkable feat of rhetoric to propose largely the same idea Margaret Thatcher was talking about when she said there was no such thing as society and call it the “Big Society”. Compare and contrast:

“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.” (Margaret Thatcher)

I could quite happily write 6000 words about how those two statements are identical; but really, I don’t need to. I do rather think they speak for themselves. I must admit, though, that a small part of me admires the rhetorical skill it takes to pull this off.
At the very beginning of his speech, the Prime Minister tells us how there are two parts to his job: the bits that he does because it is his duty, like cutting the deficit, and the bits he is really passionate about, like the Big Society. And yet, not 500 words later, right in the middle of being told what the Big Society is all about, we are back on the deficit and how it’s a demonstration of the fact that “micromanagement from Westminster” doesn’t work. So maybe these are not separate parts of Mr. Cameron’s job after all. Which begs the question: is the Big Society a chore he is doing because it is his duty, or is he really passionate about cutting the size of the state and using the Big Society as a vehicle for that?
I must admit I was delighted to see a return of George Osborne’s catchphrase: “We’re in this together.” I thought it had gone out of fashion. Certainly for every “We’re in this together” I hear or read from Conservative politicians or commentators, there seem to be ten calls for this, that or the other (the NHS, the BBC, or any other public sector evil du jour) to “feel the pain of cuts”.
All good speech writers know that concepts come in threes, and David Cameron’s are no exception. First we have the three big strands of the Big Society: social action, public service reform, community empowerment. These are followed by the three key methods: decentralisation, transparency and providing finance. Let’s take them in turn.
“Social action” is looking for millions of people – every single one of us – to give time, effort and money to causes around us. I take issue with this on a couple of levels. Firstly, while there may be people out there who do have the time, I suspect anyone trying to hold down a full-time job won’t. You just need to take a look at unpaid overtime statistics to see that we as a country already give our employers £27.4 billion’s worth of free overtime per year (Source: TUC). Now our government is demanding the same. Secondly, I am not convinced that this kind of social action is necessarily the best possible use of resources, skills and talents. I may one day become a pushy middle-class parent. This does not make me in any way qualified to run a school. David Cameron himself has said in the News of the World that he is terrified about finding a good local school for his children. Would it be the best use of the PM’s time to go off and start a free school? Hardly.
Public service reform appears to be all about getting rid “bureaucracy” and getting organisations such as charities, social enterprises and private companies to provide public services. I’m probably not alone in suspecting that the operative word here is “private companies”. I’ve already talked on this blog about the Tories’ ideologically motivated desire to reduce the size of the state, to hand out large chunks of it to the private sector. This is largely based on the economic theory that free markets generate the most efficient outcomes (for a very specific and narrow definition of efficiency). There are two issues with this: firstly, markets only generate efficient outcomes under very specific conditions which don’t apply to most of the real world and definitely don’t apply to public services, and secondly I believe there is a strong case to be made for valuing things such a social justice over efficiency.
I am tempted to say that the only thing that needs saying about empowering communities is that David Cameron wants to create “communities with oomph”. Not sure which focus group they ran this one by, but it hardly sounds prime-ministerial to me. More to the point though, Cameron’s vision of “neighbourhoods who are in charge of their own destiny, who feel if they club together and get involved they can shape the world around them” has something of the 1950s about it. As with his marriage policy, there is something nostalgic about this, almost as if he’s in denial of modern life.
As for the methods, I have already talked elsewhere on this blog about “decentralisation”. Cameron wants to devolve power from central to local government, and even further down to what he calls the ‘nano’ level. (Anyone playing buzzword bingo here?) I find it interesting how this plays out in real life, for instance with Michael Gove’s flgaship academies and free schools policy, where the local level is going to be bypassed completely and control put into the hands of whoever fancies a go at running a school. Despite all the rhetoric, there is a very strong legitimacy issue here. Wasteful bureaucracy or not, the local authority does consist of my elected representatives and thus has a mandate to make choices about the delivery of public services on my behalf. Charities, social enterprises and private companies, on the other hand, hardly have such a mandate from anyone except the people directly involved in them.
Under transparency, the PM appears to be strongly advocating vigilantism:

“So, for example, by releasing the data about precisely when and where crimes have taken place on the streets…
…we can give people the power not just to hold the police to account…
…but to go even further, and take action themselves(…)”

Colour me worried.
Under providing finance, a lot of the emphasis again seems to be on getting private capital into the public sector. One thing bears pointing out here: While bureaucracy may be wasteful and inefficient (and that is not something I am particularly convinced of either way), the private sector demands its own tribute in the form of profit and shareholder returns. I have yet to see someone crunch the numbers on how public sector inefficiency compares to private sector profit seeking when it comes to the total cost of operation and taxpayers’ value for money of public services.
As an aside, I am also amused by the PM’s assertion that he believes in paying public service providers by results, about 1000 words after he has dismissed targets as ineffective.
So apart from the buzzword bingo, apart from the flashy rhetoric then, what are we left with?
I for one am left unconvinced. To me, the Big Society looks like a sustained effort to privatise the state, to privatise public space, and ultimately to abdicate responsibility, and I do not subscribe to the small-state ideology. Apart from ideology, though, I see three key issues with the Big Society. (See what I did there? All concepts come in threes.)
I think there is a real danger of ending up with pick-and-mix public services. David Cameron calls for communities to come forward and tell him what they are passionate about, what services they want to run. So my question here is what happens to those bits of the state that no part of the Big Society wants? This is, allegedly, not a “pilot” that will be “rolled out” – so if no one comes forward, what then?
I think the PM’s vision, geographically focused on neighbourhoods and streets as it is, is extremely limited and limiting. This is the 21st century. Yes, some of the issues I care about might be local, but the vast majority aren’t. I don’t share that many common interests with the people in my street, beyond seeing to it that our bins get collected. The people I have things in common with are elsewhere, and townhall meetings are not how we organise. Where is the scope for that kind of activism in the Big Society?
On a related note, the big trick that the Big Society, with its emphasis on decentralisation, misses is scale. Again, there are many local issues, but there are at least as many issues that require a certain scale – or to use Mr. Cameron’s word, a certain amount of oomph – to be tackled. If I passionately wanted to do something about violence against women, I could talk to my Neighbourhood Watch about it; but given the scale of the problem itself, this is hardly the right level to tackle it at. It needs to be addressed in healthcare, in education, in policing, in social services, and above all, it needs to be addressed on a national level.
Finally, for anyone who really passionately believes in the Big Society, I have this one question left: Which public service will you personally commit to delivering from tomorrow, through your own effort, in your own time, with your own money? If you can’t give me an immediate answer to that, and if our collective answers don’t match up to the public services actually needed out there, then this project is a non-starter.

The Conservative vision for our society is driven by an ideology that is outdated, philosophically unsound, and lacks basic human compassion.
I wasn’t in Britain during the Thatcher years, and even if I had been, I would have been too young to really understand and remember the political landscape. I came to this country in 1999, when New Labour had been in power for two years but was still shiny and new, when things still “could only get better”. My political consciousness when it comes to Britain therefore was shaped by a landscape where for a long time the Conservative party was beyond the pale, where they and their ideas were hardly even taken seriously. A procession of failed Tory leaders filed past, consigned to history, with me hardly noticing. The most remarkable thing about Michael Howard was that there was “something of the (k)night about him”, and in my memory Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership has no distinguishing features whatsoever.
And then along came David. I remember the Davis/Cameron leadership contest, and I remember finding it distinctly disturbing that the latter was – occasionally – making points I could agree with. This was clearly the man who was going to make the Tories electable again, and that gave me a vague sense of unease, though beyond pointing at specific policies I disagreed with I couldn’t have told you why. It has taken the Tories getting into power for me to realise where my real fundamental disagreements with them are, and I think it’s worth writing about – to make it crystal clear for all those of us who, for one reason or another, don’t remember the Thatcher years.
It is very rare in politics these days to speak of visions. The end of Communism, the fall of the Iron Curtain, heralded an end of ideology, and it is a lot more fashionable these days to discuss specific policies than grand visions. And yet, the vision is still there behind all the the detail, shaping that detail all the time, even if we can’t see the wood for the trees. Once the Conservatives were in power – and let’s face it, coalition or not, these are mostly Conservative policies that are being pushed through Parliament right now – their actions began to reveal the vision that drives them.
One of the first things to note is the Tory obsession with cuts. Ostensibly, this is to do with reducing the deficit. And yet, both the extent of the cuts and how they are being implemented goes well beyond that. Take, for instance, education and schools where the previous government’s Building Schools for the Future programme has now been thoroughly dismantled by Michael Gove, while parents, teachers and private companies are urged to apply for government funding to build new “free schools”. There is no argument on earth that can convince me that this is being done simply to reduce the budget deficit. Rather, it is driven by entrenched Tory ideology – the ideology of the small state, where the public sector must be dismantled and handed over to private enterprise. There is a blind belief here that “the market” does everything better and more efficiently than the state and that therefore as much as possible should be taken out of state control and handed over to the private sector.
The vision of the small state at any cost is highlighted further by calls from the Tory backbench and well-known Tory commentators like Tim Montgomerie for even the ring-fenced parts of public spending (foreign aid and the NHS) or the BBC to “feel the pain”. Such language makes me think not so much of reducing the deficit in order to ensure economic stability (and whether that works remains to be seen anyway) but of an almost childish, vindictive and willful destruction of the state.
Along with the small state, another key pillar of the Tory vision for our future is the family. David Cameron declared back in January that he wanted to lead the most family-friendly government in UK history. And yet, his government’s actions betray a sadly and shockingly narrow definition of family. The emergency budget hits women disproportionately harder than men, and single mothers even more so. Child benefit, housing benefit and a number of other benefits, allowances and services suffering the most severe cuts are disproportionately used by women. The proposed tax breaks for marriage – and I have no doubt that they will be back on the agenda soon enough – would only have applied to married couples where one partner didn’t work. This sends one message loud and clear: If you are a woman, get yourself married and preferably stay at home. No matter how many times David Cameron declares that when he says marriage he also means civil partnership, his vision of families is narrow, restrictive, and in the 21st century unrealistic. We are unlikely to return to the 1950s, regardless of the punishing cuts burdening single mothers or the “carrot” of a tax break for marriage.
And thus the twin visions of the small state and the nuclear family as the core unit of society are being rammed down our throats at any cost and by any means available. Learned-sounding men are telling us how it’s all about numbers and the deficit, how if we don’t do this we will end up like Greece, how it’s all about economics and there is only one way. What is important to realise is that there is more than one way.
Economics barely qualifies as a science. I can say this – I have a degree in it. Economics tells us that certain monetary and fiscal policies are likely – but by no means guaranteed – to produce particular outcomes. Economics does not tell us which of these outcomes are preferable. It can’t – it has no way of making that judgement. We as people make that judgement based on our values; our leaders make that judgement for us based on their values. It is very important to realise that any political debate at its core is not about outcomes – those are secondary. It is about values.
I am not going to try to second-guess Conservative values at this point. I can make some educated guesses on the subject, but ultimately those values are alien to me if they lead us to the small state and the nuclear family at any cost – which they clearly do. My values are different. Like many Conservatives I do value individualism and achievement – but only to an extent. Unlike most Conservatives, I realise that no one ever achieves anything entirely by themselves: There is a whole structure and society around us, a whole lot of factors like who our parents are or whether we were born black or white, male or female, straight or gay, that either limit or enhance our opportunities and choices in life. I believe that we as a society should counter-act those accidents of birth and should strive to create structures where their influence on choices and opportunities is minimised. I also believe that the more fortunate among us have a duty to support the less well-off. I firmly believe that the welfare state and progressive taxation are good things (and I say this as a higher-rate tax payer). I believe that while the market can create efficient outcomes in some situations, it is worth sacrificing some efficiency in order to gain social justice. Additionally, as an economist I recognise that in most real-life circumstances the market isn’t as efficient as economic theory would have it, and that there is a very good case for public provision of a significant number of goods and services.
And this is where any flirtation I might have ever considered with David Cameron’s Conservative party must end. Their vision, their fundamental values, are irreconcilable with mine. Their economic ideology is based on flawed assumptions as well as lacking the basic human quality of compassion; their social vision, too, is flawed and outdated.

I’m on a business trip in the States this week, so feeling very out of touch with what’s happening in the UK. So here instead a more general piece prompted by events from the last month or so on diversity and representation in politics.
Much has been made of the straight(ish)-white-male composition of the new cabinet over the last few weeks. Let me throw in my 2 Eurocents. Incidentally, this post deals mainly with the “how” of diversity and representation, and not with the “why”. I am assuming that the case for diversity has been made loud and clear – though some recent events and comments do make me wonder. But that’s a thought for another day.
Jane Manning writes over at LDV:

Racial integration is a marvellous bridge. If representation is about sending a message of inclusion to a part of society that has been marginalised before then I don’t need a Brown face at the top to make me feel included. Those days of John Taylor not being selected as a Conservative candidate in the 1992 general election because of his colour is what made me feel deprived and hopeless and gave me sleepless nights. The gates of politics have since opened wide to people like me. We aren’t excluded. If we don’t go through the gate it is because we choose not to for reasons based on individual choices, not because we are barred.

I agree with Jane that a lot progress has been made in the area of diversity and representation in politics. But I strongly disagree that the gates have been opened wide; a crack perhaps, but most certainly not wide, and the make-up of the current cabinet only serves to underline this.
Unlike Jane, I am not writing this from an ethnic minority point of view. I’m writing as a woman and with some insights into the LGB community. However, I do believe a lot of the points I’m making apply across the six pillars of diversity and beyond, and I’d be very interested in hearing other thoughts, especially from those six pillars of diversity[1].
The first thing to realise is that it’s not enough for anyone, and especially not Parliament, to just put up a sign saying “Women (or of course any other of the 6 groups) welcome”. It’s just not as simple as that. While outright direct discrimination has become very rare, there are still deep structural issues which act as barriers to entry. Jane in her article claims that the doors are wide open and it’s only a matter of personal choice that we aren’t seeing more women or people from ethnic minority backgrounds in politics. I would argue the opposite: It is very easy to make the choice to go into politics if you happen to be a straight, white, middle-aged, upper/middle-class man; if you don’t happen to fall into that category, suddenly a lot of other barriers pop up that are easily disguised as personal choices but really are not.
I have been known to quip that one of the ways to address gender equality in politics is to turn some of the 47 bars in Westminster into creches. People are amused by this, but there is a more serious point behind it. Providing 47 bars and a shooting gallery but no child care arrangements for your employees is on the same continuum of discrimination as not having ladies’ toilets or as City firms doing business in strips clubs. The latter is obviously worse as it is actively degrading for those companies’ employees to work in that kind of environment but the former is one of those things that allows us to point at the absence of women in politics and say “It’s a personal choice” while we haven’t actually set up the infrastructure to allow women to make that choice freely.
Here’s another example to reinforce this: Yvette Cooper was questioned a couple of weeks ago over whether she would like to stand as a candidate for the Labour leadership. The reason she gave for not doing so was that she had three children under the age of 14. Yet Ms. Cooper’s husband, Ed Balls, seems to have no such issues. This is an issue so deeply ingrained in the structure of our society, it’s only in these rare cases that the true absurdity of it becomes visible.
And another one: Recent quips about colour-coded ties notwithstanding, male politicians rarely get judged on their outward appearance, provided they meet a basic standard of appropriate dress (i.e. wear a suit). Yet Theresa May’s shoes and the jacket she wore to her first BBC Question Time appearance as Home Secretary somehow seem to be more worthy of media comment than her attitude to gay people.
Now, I’m an agency over structure kind of girl most days. I firmly believe in the power of individual action to overcome structural barriers. But to do so, we first need to recognise that the barriers are there. Here is a non-exhaustive list of structural barriers to wider diversity and representation in UK politics – feel free to add your own:

• The way Westminster works is based on the premise that either all MPs are single gentlemen with housekeepers or that they have a 1950s-style family with a devoted wife waiting at home with their dinner. And let’s face it, this doesn’t just harm women – any man who wants to be a part of his children’s lives would be put off by the hours, the travel, the sheer family-unfriendliness of the place. And these are the people we expect to pass laws to increase the family-friendliness of our work places. Having said that, having a Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister both of whom have young children and both of whom appear to genuinely want to be involved in their children’s lives seems to be doing wonders for the family-friendliness at least in the Cabinet. I found this article utterly delightful.
• The absence of visible role models – for any disagvantaged group – doesn’t help either. It sends a subliminal signal to women, people of ethnic minorities, gay people, etc. that this place is not for them; that they aren’t welcome; that they can’t have a meaningful career in that environment. New Labour was pretty good at providing role models for some kinds of disability, with both David Blunkett and Gordon Brown (I didn’t realise until fairly recently how significantly visually impaired Brown is.), as well as Alastair Campbell speaking about his depression. But even they rarely spoke out about how they got to where they were. It is not enough to be the first woman/gay/disabled person in your position, as I’m sure we know from the Margaret Thatcher experience. You have to help other people like you see the way from where they are to where you are.
• The power of networks is huge in male-dominated workplaces. There is actually a good reason why there are 47 bars in Westminster, and it’s that a lot of the actual business gets done there. There is a certain stereotype that women tend to have the meeting in the meeting, while men tend to line up their ducks in the coffee breaks and use the meeting only for rubber-stamping purposes. This, too, is an extension of the power of networks. Yet, it can be remarkably difficult for women and members of minority groups to gain access to those networks in the first place. There is something cultural about the way women are raised that makes a lot of us instinctively cringe away from doing business that way, and from self-promotion. The same applies to some ethnic minorities too. I have been challenged on a number of occasions at work as to why it is right to organise women-only networking events, or awareness trainig for LGB issues in the workplace, when there is no such support available for white, straight men. The answer is simple: Everyone is being forced to play by straight, white men rules. Straight, white men do not need help to understand or adjust to those rules. But our efforts to bring everyone else up to speed with the rules still don’t seem to be paying off. Perhaps we need to consider changing the rules.
• Another one on the cultural front, and this one applies especially for women, is the social taboo surrounding the expression of ambition. Women who openly express ambition tend to be seen as pushy and aggressive. Men doing the same thing are strong leaders. There was a very telling interview with three new women MPs (one from each main party) on Woman’s Hour the weekend after the general election. Each was asked what her ambition was as a new Member of Parliament. And each in turn answered that this was a great new challenge for them, they still needed to learn the ropes, they were committed to their constituency, and wanted to do the the best by their constituents. None of them expressed ambition beyond that. When was the last time you heard a new male MP admit that they had a lot to learn?

There is still a lot of work to do before Westminster is truly representative of the people it is supposed to represent. To achieve this in a sustainable way, we need to not only use the short-term measures some parties are already using, such as all-women shortlists; we need to take an in-depth look at the basic underlying structures of our political system, identify structural barriers to entry, and actively work to eliminate them.
[1] Gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, disability, age, for those who don’t know what the six legally protected pillars of diversity are in the UK.