Dinner with John Humphreys

And so to London for the Orwell Prize dinner, and an evening of anthropological study among the chattering classes . I feel a positive tourist there these days.

Fortunately, the Humph was three tables away and my victim for the evening was Iain Dale’s Blackberry featuring Iain Dale as Himself. Double good fortune, by the time Iain had shimmied off to do 5Live and I had drunk enough to kill a small horse and begun to reason that it might be a joll’ good idea to into- intu- introduce mysel’ to Mssstr Humphreys and maybe Mssstr Porter and Mssstr Sparrow too, they were all in the process of wisely departing.

Still, the person I’m really sorry I didn’t meet is the one I was never going to – the pseudonymous NightJack, English detective, secret policeman and richly deserving winner of the big prize itself. NightJack is mesmerisingly written, with not a word out of place. I defy you to read this, in particular, and not find yourself as changed as if you had read a gripping novel afterwards. And there is of course a lovely symmetry in an award with Orwell’s name on it going to an anonymous policeman, one which ol’ Eric would surely have appreciated.

But more than that, reading NightJack was something of a wake-up call for me, one of a number of startlingly great blogs I ran across on the longlist. It reinforced my sneaking suspicion of being trapped in the bubble of the “political” blogosphere, unblissfully unaware of the important treasures in other blogospheres. There’s no good reason at all for avowedly political blogs to exist in a different universe to blogs by police officers, NHS doctors, social workers, call girls, knitting hobbyists, whoever. What a depressing reflection of reality that separation is. Some political bloggers do very well at linking outwards, and reading NightJack made me realise how important that is.

It will take more than one prize to melt down the barriers between blogospheres, of course, but I wonder if the thaw is slowly setting in? I was struck last year by the sudden head-on collision between the civil liberties political blogosphere and the techie blogosphere, as Labour’s thought police turned its sights on the internet and the two sets of bloggers suddenly had an enormous amount in common. Insofar as political blogging has a strength as a tool for campaigning and talking back to the ruling classes (and I’m not always sure about these strengths, though it’s a nice thought), its proponents need the expertise and wider world view of bloggers like NightJack.

And this is the traditional point at which to say “Long may he flourish” but he has, sadly, packed it in. So I’ll have to instead say that I hope others continue to follow in his blogsteps (and here’s a heartening example).

This is particularly important because, by unlovely coincidence, and apart from a last-and-positively-final appearance to accept the Orwell award, this happened a few days after the G20 protests. Police relations in this country are, notoriously, at something of a crossroads. I used to work a little bit alongside Met officers in my professional life and can’t reconcile the reality of the friendly, thoughtful and dedicated people I met with what NightJack aptly calls the “imperial stormtrooper” face of the police, tooled up with shields and tasers.

And it strikes me that this is the political and legislative reality of our day: the police have been set up, they’ve been smothered in equipment, given tasers and powers that Thatcher’s bullyboys only dreamed of, and they have a choice now between becoming the protector, and becoming the next great enemy, whether that is fair on the current generation of officers or not. It’s  just a bigger version of the same kind of choice individual officers face on the meaner streets every day – it’s not fair to be called upon to be a social worker and substitute parent as well as a law enforcer. Society has set them up with a bum deal there. But some of them manage it very well anyway, against the odds, which is how an awful lot of great things are managed.

Blogging might – it might – be one of the lesser tools that pushes us towards that better outcome. The more human voices coming out of those black visored helmets, even anonymously, the better for all concerned.

 

HALLELUJAH!

Headphones in, press play and read on.

This is what I’ve been waiting to hear:

The Liberal Democrats will fight the next general election with a pledge to cut income tax bills by £700 for people on low and middle incomes.

The party will promise to raise the income tax personal allowance to £10,000 by closing tax loopholes exploited by big businesses and the wealthy.

The internet is positively stuffed with my repeated opinion, in threads, on message boards, and here, that this is by far the most important and liberal step any liberal party wishing to reform the  tax system could take. I have also said that the first party to realise the need to do this, whoever it is, will reap a large and just reward. Let’s see if I’m right (and let’s see if Labour don’t follow suit on Wednesday).

Note: This is not the tightest and most beautifully arranged recording of the Hallelujah chorus I have ever listened to. I chose it because of the fabulous your-muzzer-was-a-’amster accents and because, rather like us, the Saint Severin Choir at Church Saint Jean-Baptiste de Grenelle in Paris may not be the most co-ordinated lot, but by god, they’re enthusiastic.

 

And the Libertarian shall lie down with the Left

Mr Eugenides has written a very insightful post about the root causes of left and right attitudes towards the Ian Tomlinson affair. He takes his cue from James Graham’s shudderingly evocative empathy with what Tomlinson went through, and theorises as follows:

I think that some of us on “the right” take the view, usually subconsciously but sometimes explicitly, that our most cherished civil liberty is simply the right to be left alone. What tends to vex us most is those instances where government tries to impinge on that right – through a national ID scheme, for example, or punitive taxation, or petty officialdom.

Because “protest” has traditionally been a tool of the left – the average Tory does not go to many demos, no matter what government is in power – it is something that many on the right simply don’t and can’t identify with.

Mr Eugenides cannot control his subsconcious, and simply does not have the same visceral reaction to the video of the assault as James G did, much though his reason tells him it is a clear and shocking curtailment of civil liberties.

This is a neat theory, certainly backed up by some of the more characteristic responses on both left and right – contrast the anguish of Laurie Penny with the lofty moralising of Letters from a Tory, for example. The former assumes a connection between the fall and the heart attack which is not currently supported by hard evidence, and the latter uncritically accepts the Daily Mail’s position that being shamblingly drunk makes one more deserving of attack from behind by a policeman with a big stick.

Soak up the generally cynical tone of the posts on Liberal Conspiracy (which on the whole I share, though I was careful to keep Lib Dem Voice’s coverage on the restrained side throughout) and marvel, if you will, at Danny Finkelstein’s unfortunate attempt before and after the event to paint various Lib Dem MPs’ involvement as legal observers as “an extraordinary insult to the police” which “misjudged the public mood”. He hasn’t been seen since, poor man.

But actually what has struck me most forcibly about the online chatterati’s reaction to the affair is the precise opposite to what Mr E is talking about. I am amazed by the sudden faultlines everywhere. I’ve never seen people like LFAT and Dizzy get such a drubbing from commenters who normally agree with pretty much everything they write – and the latter express their own astonishment at this too. Suddenly the libertarians are lying down with the left. Or something. The fact that libertarianism (where it is not a poorly worn excuse for the protection of existing privilege) is in many ways a distinctly left-leaning philosophy suddenly looks less awkward

It’s not all one-way traffic either. There are fewer examples of leftie blogs I have come across taking the police side (please do point me towards them) but exhibit A is of course the still silent Labourlist, top-down tool of the left at its most authoritarian. Sadie Smith’s overall attitude to the protestors (though divorced from the context of Tomlinson’s death) also echos much of what the pro-police right-wingers say, for all that she appears to be taking a diametrically opposite view (”trustafarians” being her disparagement of choice, as opposed to “unwashed rabble” or similar).

It’s a pretty rum set of reactions, in other words. I think I just heard the sound of a hairline crack splintering into a jagged gap you can get your thumb into. I think one of Mr E’s commenters has it right, referring to the contention that “some of us on “the right” take the view … that our most cherished civil liberty is simply the right to be left alone.”

I wonder if that makes us ‘right’ or whether those distinctions are now outdated.

Commentators have been referring to the death of left and right, with no real conviction, ever since Labour came to power, but have never found a narrative that sticks. We have come to understand over the past couple of years that they were looking in the wrong place. Because left and right were defined, ultimately, by economic attitudes, they focussed on the shifting sands of an economy that we do not, never have, and never will control completely through the tools of either side to the satisfaction of all.

It has taken a series of quite serious blows to liberty to make the new faultline visible. For some of us, liberalism versus authoritarianism (or the y axis, in political quiz terms) has been the real divide, the one that matters, for quite some time. That goes for me and most Liberal Democrats, some Tories and some ex-Labour people too. How else would members of the former hard left ever have ended up in the same conference centre as a man who favours the return of capital punishment?

I have found the divide between the liberal and the authoritarian becoming still more real for me over the last week.  And as it grows, there will be a certain amount of jumping for various people to do. In five years’ time, what will the political blogosphere – and the political landscape – look like? Me, Mr Eugenides and Laurie Penny versus LFAT, Dizzy and Sadie? What an entertaining thought.

 

Suddenly I see!

I’ve had one of those Damascene moments that remind you there is always something new to learn about liberalism and tolerance. It involves chocolate* and chicken. Bear with me while I watch the TV a minute.

On Channel 4 just now was Willie’s Chocolate Revolution. Willie, his wife Tania and their children Bunty, Tristram and Ezekiel (or something like that) live in a gorgeous Georgian house in Devon and make chocolate. And it only gets more annoying from thereon in.

For a start, Willie insists on calling cocoa “kacow”, according to the South American pronunciation. He sounds like a dairy farmer with an unconquerable stutter. Look, the word if you’re speaking English is “cocoa”, right? We don’t correct our raggedy old eighteenth-century pronounciations for any other foodstuffs.

This, in truth, would probably not irritate me by itself. What irritates me is the sight of an upper middle class man with a huge Georgian rectory (gee, and it’s before the watershed) raving about his intention to “educate” the British masses about “real” chocolate. “It’s about health, and real authentic tastes, and about me being someone who owns a farm in Venezuela telling people how to live in a more middle class manner,” he says, or words to that effect.

I suddenly realise that he’s a much more irritating and self-conscious version of Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-It-All, whose stout stand against the battery hen saw Tescos embarrassed late last year. I don’t get irritated by Hugh. But watching Willie it occurs to me that this is probably because I already like cooking. I already like eating vegetables most of the week and meat only two or three times. Nobody needs to convince me of the virtues of making stock from my Sunday chicken, or building a meal round whatever looks good at the market.

But by god, threaten to take my Mini Eggs away, and you will find me a formidable foe. I suddenly find myself thinking in Tory. “But I LIKE rubbish British chocolate! Don’t wanna be re-educated! Take your filthy horrid nasty pure 100% cocoa chocolate away!”

I’ve tried, I really have. I’m an inveterate chocolate eater, and leap at the chance to guzzle down other challenging flavours, so you’d think high-cocoa content chocolate would be a natural progression for me. Tried. Never got it. And the trouble is, whenever anyone says something like, “Oh but you simply must try insert-over-packaged-brand-here! You’ll love it – it’s organic/from Somerset/hand-knitted by impoverished Peruvian yaks!”, what they are implicitly saying is that you haven’t tried hard enough before. You have failed, Mortimer, in the matter of chocolate appreciation. That’s what they’re saying.

Well, I say ha. I say fie, and a pox on your nobby nasty chocolate. If you want to eat stuff that smells and tastes (yes, I know the difference, and how they interact) like it’s been scraped out of the grooves of a tyre just because it’s wrapped in very swish matt black packaging (where do these people’s eco-credentials go when it comes to the packaging, by the way?), be my guest. But I for one am quite happy wallowing in a trough of sugar, milk and fat and any perpetrators of further do-goodery in this matter will find themselves on the business end of a Twirl sharpish.

* With apologies to Stuart Sharpe, who is on the wagon (wheel) until Sunday.

 

Cor! And other stories…

This little Republic on for the Orwell Prize? We are dumbfounded, and a bit shuffly. We are still in our very early history compared to some of these established states, and our peasants are continuously revolting. Sometimes we even make up our own words, and we are a little too fond of the passive. This is indeed an honour.

I’m surprised in particular (as others have said) that Tom Harris, Hopi Sen and the fabulous Heresiarch didn’t make the cut, which I think rather goes to show how cruel and beset by arbitrariness such a short shortlist is going to be – even leaving aside the fact that bookmarkloads of excellent blogs didn’t even put themselves in the running.

I see what they’ve done, though. Two party political bloggers (Iain and I), two wider-current-affairs political bloggers (Chekhov and Night Jack) and two journo-political bloggers (Andrew Sparrow and Paul Mason). No offence to the last two, who are among my regular must-reads, but I think I might have preferred a real bloggers’ bloggers shortlist, seeing as how the journalists have their own shiny toy.

It is our honest opinion that we have gone far enough. This is not false modesty. Rest assured, we are extremely arrogant. But we are also a young state without established roots in the business of political communication. If the winner were to be a political blogger we would tip Mr Dale, if a wider-politics blogger, Night Jack (but narrowly, and had Heresy Corner made it through I’d really have problems). The journalist bloggers, we suspect, will not proceed precisely because they are journalists, and that would cause the full range of prizes to look a bit unbalanced.

Now, the truly interesting part of all this is the part I did not see;  the overwhelming tittishness of Nick Cohen at the shortlist debate last night. You can read about this at El Dale’s gaff, and I have heard similar reports from elsewhere. Cohen’s suggestion that the Orwell Prize is “demeaned” by having the likes of Peter Oborne and Peter Hitchens on the shortlist is one of those lofty lefty assertions that, were I the Left’s psychiatrist and the Left ranting on my couch, I would write down thoughtfully with a thin, silver pencil.

Fashion in politics used to fascinate me even as an apathetic outsider, how a trail made up of gifted individuals, visionaries, climbers, entryists and spivs alike would scramble first to the left, then to the right, with no apparent power over their career course, like the crew in the TV version of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea when the ship was under attack from yet another alien-monster-thing. Look at some of the desperadoes in the Labour Stars in their Eyes video I filleted the other day – is this really the best they can offer?

It’s sad, but it’s simple. Wherever they go instead, very, very few of the most capable people want to be associated with the left at the moment. Of course, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was made in the sixties, or some such legendary time, and the actors weren’t really being thrown from side to side in their sea-bound tin can; the camera was tilting and the actors were rushing from one side of the set to another in a reasonably co-ordinated manner. And the monster-alien-thing supposedly causing the tilting was really just a stuntman swathed in green rubber. None of  it was real.

The current tide away from the Left is not “real” either – I don’t even have complete faith that the Tories are going to scrap ID cards, never mind make any real progress towards decentralisation. They’ve hardly got a name for the latter, and only a very recent name, perpetuated largely by party rebels, for the former. I think it’s quite true to say that people aren’t voting for the Tories. They’re voting against Labour.

And I wonder if there is ever a time when it’s not true. An eventual swing against any prevailing ideology is as sure as spring, and it shows a truly repellant arrogance in the proponents of that ideology when they suggest that their ideology should have prevailed forever, that somehow they were different. The Tories of the early 1990s were exactly the same. It’s surprising how many educated political people believe exclusively in the evidence of their own lifespans (this is what studying PPE instead of history does for you) and don’t realise that the motion of the universe really doesn’t care what their experience is or what they think the illimitable truths are.

A good example: on Lib Dem Voice, I and others  regularly get told off for being “Thatcherite” because, among other things, we like the idea of tax cuts and free enterprise. All the patient explanations  in the world about how Thatcher perpetuated monopolies at the expense of truly free markets, and strengthened the fiscal structures that funnelled wealth from poor to rich, do us no good. If Thatcher did it, no matter how and in no matter what context, it must be poisonous. If we continue to object, we are generally told that we haven’t seen what they, our wise elders, have seen.

This seems to me to be as much a statement of fact as saying that we have not spent our youth wearing bri-nylon flares. It doesn’t mean anything. I spent my formative political years under a Labour government which has turned me from a vague lefty sympathiser into a furious opponent. The left, or rather the things done in its name, have made me angry in exactly the same way that the right made an older generation of liberals angry. I can’t un-know all that bone deep knowledge I’ve acquired over the last decade and attempt to “know” the 1980s instead. And I dearly hope I’d have the sense not to make the next political generation down attempt the corresponding feat.

Nick Cohen’s apparent belief that the  left have some higher claim to be associated exclusively with George Orwell is exactly the kind of thing that invites my highest scorn. It just looks profoundly unintelligent, an assertion based on a nostalgic and craven view of what left and right mean. Orwell’s explanation of what he meant by writing 1984 is clearly lost on Cohen:

My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequneces. The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

My emphasis. “And in any party”, he could have added. And – oh look! – that’s just what’s happening at the hands of the Labour party, who invoke the name of the Left for what they do. The Left are now mostly woken up to this, and the brighter ones are steering well clear of the doomed Labour ship. Still, it’s hard to get rid of that sort of history of co-operation and abetment. If I were The Left, I would bow out for thirty years. Seriously. Not back off, have a little think, and come back in a few months with a New Statesman/Demos sponsored drinks reception and conference panel called “The Future of the Left”.

Just go away, for a long time, and think about what you’ve done.

By way of a postscript – this really isn’t meant as a party puff piece – it is a recognition of the Voyage-to-the-Bottom-of-the-Sea effect that makes one understand, with the near-as-dammit certainty of good historical training, that one day it will be our, the liberals’, turn. Whether the opposition of today like the sound of that or, or think it likely based on their experience or not. Absolutely all things pass. This is the law that both prevents us from making a decent fist of any political ideology, and that saves us from it when it goes rotten.

 

Six reasons why Labour Britain is doomed

The Guardian continues to haemorrhage credibility. Every time Polly or Jackie makes an absolutely-last-and-positively-final-ditch defence of Labour, I read it and think, well, that at least is the very pits of absurd desperation, they cannot possibly dig themselves in any deeper than that.

I mean, surely to goodness they must now realise that by carrying on they only make Labour look worse – exposing just how little there is to applaud, how little there is for any Labour supporter to be hopeful about. They damn with faint praise, not by design, but because it’s impossible to do better. They have plunged a borehole right through the rotten flesh for all the world to see and arrived at the unyielding core of reality with nothing to show for it.

Yes, I think all that. It takes a while.

And each time the Graun surprises me. In a sort of danse macabre-style mad celebration of their awful news priorities they’ve just unveiled a “series” entitled Can Labour win?

And someone’s been busy, because though the series is only two days old there are already 23 equally desperate reasons why they can (if only they would follow the Guardian’s sage advice, naturally. I love the way all the commentators, particularly Jack and Poll, talk wistfully about the urgent need for Labour to “push” or “strengthen” various worthy agendas, like age discrimination or domestic violence, as if Labour are not the people who have just been in power for twelve years signally failing to do anything about these and many other things, ohnono that’s some other bunch of bastards, nothing to do with our Labour party).

One of the latest gems to emerge from the Islington bunker is this Young guns who will save the Labour party puffpiece, featuring a number of the more telegenic PPCs from the red corner. You might be thinking this has a familiar ring to it, and you’d be right. It’s not six months since Tatler did something similarly ghastly with the “top Tory totty”, and were rightly and roundly traduced for it by, er, me. And what do the Guardian do? Not only copy, but expressly attribute their inspiration to bloody Tatler magazine! Has the world gone stark raving bonkers? Is there anything, any low lesson of politics or marketing, that the lefty metro-intelligentsia are not willing to scrape off the bottom of the Tory barrel?

Anyway, this really is a video worth watching. It’s terrifying.  In a first-past-the-post system where it takes about four times as many votes to elect a Liberal Democrat as a Labour MP, this, my People, is what awaits us. Keep my commentary open in a side-by-side why don’t you?

Some hopeful plinky music and there’s a shot of all the young guns walking towards the camera, Reservoir Dogs style. It looks like a reject shot for the opening titles of The Apprentice. All of a sudden we are transported into the complex intellectual world of Chuka Umunna, he of the persistant “mainstreaming” and unconvincing grasp of liberal priorities at the Convention on Modern Liberty. (He’d now be officially banned from council communications for the former, incidentally.)

“It’s very flattering to be compared to Barack Obama,” he begins. I kid you not. Those are the first words this flowering hope of New Labour speaks to camera. I don’t hear the rest of what he says because I am busy burying my head in a cushion and weeping. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it would be very flattering to  be compared to Barack Obama if anyone other than his mum was doing it.

To be absolutely fair to him, I dry my eyes, assume he was asked a leading question, and pop the video back to see if he really does bear any resemblance to the leader of the free world beyond skin colour. Why does he want to become an MP, I wonder?

“As a solicitor you spend your time interpreting the law, but I actually want to change it, and that’s, you know, the bottom line there,” he explains.

And there’s more fractally subtle pearls of wisdom where that came from. Turns out Labour’s A-lister is a philosopher of comparative economics as well:

“I’ve always been massively curious about current and foreign affairs and what makes the world go round and why, you know, you get some people in some parts of the world who have nothing to eat and little water and then other people in countries like this who are doing very well.”

Seriously, he’s ticking all the right boxes for the summer internship. Cowley Street should get him on the phone.

Mercifully for his exhausted mental powers, we cut away to Rushanara Ali. She seems a nice girl – I say girl, this woman’s four years older than I am. She’s a little like me, actually, nice  middle class Southerner, bright and personable, but with four more years experience – what will she have made of her life, and what can I learn from her example? What does she have to say for herself? What are her innermost drives, I wonder?

She likes going back to her old school and inspiring the girls there with her political  career. She likes drinking tea with her would-be constituents in Bethnal Green and Bow. Yes, that’s all nice. I went to an all-girls school too. Fantastic way to get an education, and I’d recommend it to anyone, as the girls (or gels) thereby turned out tend to be, in my experience, that bit more confident about their place in the world and aware of why they’re doing what they’re doing.

But obviously you can’t win them all, and some people will always drop through any system. Next.

Rachel Reeves is Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Leeds West. She is nothing if not a good Yorkshirewoman, and she is not a good Yorkshirewoman. Might be Ilford, by the sound of it. But never mind all that “Are you local?” nonsense – the civil war ended a long time ago. Let’s give her a chance, shall we? So why did she join the Labour party?

“I remember in the ‘87 election I was eight years old and people at school were talking about who their parents were voting for and I went home and asked my dad. He put on the six o’clock news and introduced me to Neil Kinnock and said ‘That’s who we vote for’ and ever since then I’ve known that I’ve been Labour.”

Now, to be fair, Rachel is hardly alone in having been brainwashed into accepting a Labour (or Tory) allegiance at an early age. Unlucky them, I suppose. I remember asking my mum the exact same question, and she said they’d generally voted Conservative before but were thinking of changing now, and the best thing was to decide who had the best ideas and vote for them. Shocking notion, eh? I’ve never quite recovered.

Next comes Toby Perkins, who appears to have gatecrashed this video on “young guns”, being of the ripe old age of 38. That’s only four years younger than Clegg. There are probably junior cabinet ministers younger than this. What’s going on? Did they run out of half-decent young people? What is Toby hoping for from his political career?

“You’ve got to go there and actually do something. I don’t intend to just sit in the house of Commons and be lobby fodder,” he says bravely.

And yet you will, Toby, you will. You’ve joined the Labour party. He seems like a good bloke as well – oh, it’s too sad! A tragedy unfolding before my eyes. Let’s move on.

Lilian Greenwood, candidate for Nottingham South, is 42. Yes, they’ve definitely run out of half-decent young people. She’s a bit sinister in a way that at first I can’t quite put my finger on. Does she have a master plan of some sort, perhaps?

“About two years ago I finally decided that it was time to move on and try and find a different way to do something really positive for the women that I’ve been representing – well, not just the women  mumble mumble low paid workers in particular.”

Oh what a Freudian slip! Men of Nottingham, head for the forest and take up  arms, ere you be gelded! But soft, am I being unfair? Perhaps the slip is due to her having worked for ten years in a women’s refuge and therefore she has formerly represented only women? Nope, she’s a regional official for Unison, with no official women’s portfolio that I can detect. Her blog lists her as a campaigner for women’s rights. But that’s not her job.

This is exactly why I am suspicious of lefty feminism and believe liberalism can fulfil the same aims more cleanly and fairly. No sooner does one allow that it’s a perfectly Good Thing for campaigning women to start unofficial support groups and mutual aid networks for each other than one finds said campaigners merrily transport all their assumptions, jargon and viewpoints into official jobs and contexts that were never designed to accommodate them.

There is literally no point in being an MP if you’re going to treat your constituents even slightly and subconsciously differently on the basis of gender, and that goes for lefty feminists as much as it goes for Tory dinosaurs. Get a grip.

Meanwhile, Shabana Mahmood is hoping to represent Birmingham Ladywood.

“You’ve got to be in it to win it is what I say,” she opines. I was right – it is The Apprentice! Mandela is her political hero, and she thinks he’s a really  good hook to get young people interested in politics. Hey, we never thought of that! After all, the fact that it has spent thirty years not working as such a hook and an entire generation has grown up in the great man’s shadow without becoming remotely interested in politics shouldn’t put us off.

Actually, I always feel slightly sorry for youngish politicians when journalists ask them – as they invariably will – about political apathy amongst the young, because their responses are so hopelessly inadequate. And no wonder, because they (charmingly uncognisant of this as they may be) are the weirdos who did get interested. You might as well ask a zebra why it thinks more of the  horse family don’t have stripes.

And that’s it, more optimistic plinky music and a couple of moody monochromesque shots of the Six Super Saviours in various noble attitudes in front of a stone parapet.

That, my friends, is what we and the Labour party have got to look forward to. Let’s just remind ourselves of those 2005 voting averages, shall we?

An average of 26,906 votes to elect a Labour MP

An average of 44,373 votes to elect a Tory MP

An average of 96,539 votes to elect a Lib Dem MP

Someone shoot me now.

 

Saying sorry – the new PR arms race

A brief fly-past, citizens, to bring you the news that David Cameron is sorry that his party has been totally unable to detect the oncoming debt crisis and resulting recession over the last decade (despite the frequent Proverbs of St Vince in and out of the House).

The idea being, of course, that now Gordon will have to say sorry as well, and thence be forced to call a general election, or else refuse to say sorry, and thence be forced to call a general election. Myself, I think they under-estimate his staying power.

God, this is depressing, isn’t it? The two major parties of this once great nation, etc, locked in an unwinnable game of nerny-nerny-ner-ner whose premise is the fact that BOTH of them have spent the last twelve years being crashingly inept.

Mind you, it could be worse. Supposing Labour respond with a statement to the effect that they are even sorrier than the Conservatives? Then the Conservatives will have to hold a press conference to say that they are very very very very VERY sorry and they’ll never do it again, cross their hearts and hope to be smacked until their botties go purple, and then Labour will brief a tame journalist to the effect that yeah, but they are sorry times infinity squared plus one, so ner, then the Conservatives will say that Labour’s sorry isn’t a real sorry but one of those frightful EU sorries shipped in to make apologies when there are perfectly well-qualified British sorries standing idle. I look to next week’s PMQs with a heavy heart.

Image courtesy of ToryBear, who really doesn’t find it remotely funny. I don’t blame him. Nor do I.

 

What’s with da Yoof?

We really need to invite some Young People to the People’s Republic to change our jaundiced minds about stuff. For we are grown old and crabby, and here followeth the evidence.

I was never into student politics, of any stripe, largely because all those that were seemed like such unconscionable wankers. Liberal Democrats have, on the whole, a lower wanker quotient than most other affiliations, but even so what strikes me most about the under-25s I have observed in this party is pretty much what struck me back at Oxnod and Cambifudge about all parties’ student activists: they’re all trying to act like fifty-five year olds. They think that’s what they “should” be doing.

Take the suits, for example. No-one in their right mind wants to wear a suit. They’re uncomfortable and worrisome and expensive to clean. And the tie is possibly the single most outlandish and ridiculous creation in the history of costumery, destined to take its place alongside five-foot-wide bustles and male tights in the Museum of Domestic What The Fuckery. What are ties for? To aid natural selection by trapping the stupid in shredding machines? Everyone looks ridiculous in a tie. Including you.

So naturally, most people who are forced regularly to wear a suit live for the moment when they can close the front door and rip the whole sorry lot off in exchange for their gardening jeans and a jumper with tea stains on it. Few people over the age of thirty who don’t have to wear a suit actively choose to do so. And you’d think that Young People, particularly those of a liberal, individualistic bent, would revel in their all-too-brief freedom from this outmoded uniform. But no, up they suit for a weekend away socialising in Yorkshire, the little perishers, presumably in the hope that party movers and shakers will “spot” them as convincing suit-wearers. Do they realise that in doing this they are condemning us all to another forty years of enslavement to the crippling social conventions of the mid-twentieth century?

But sartorial choice is only the outward demonstration of the Trouble with Da Yoof: the real problem is much more serious than that. Take a subject close to my heart, the uses of the internet in political campaigning. In the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s we surely have the most instinctive technologists, the most natural web-savants and the earliest adopters ever to surf the earth. Even I was born a few critical years too early to “get” it as instinctively as those in the next generation down do – I didn’t touch a computer until I was six, and that was at school. Now, I learn things about technology rather than absorb them. My brother is four years younger than me, not particularly a tech-nerd. But he still gets it better than I do, just because he’s that bit younger, because when he was six, we had our first computer at home. Considered alongside most of the political blogosphere – never mind the rest of the internet community – I’m one of the very rearguard early adopters. Blogged my first blogpost in 2007, sent my first Tweet in 2008, only just getting my head around what the internet is really all about.

It is natural that I am a comparative technological fuddy-duddy. I’m old. And yet. It seems I’m still way ahead of Liberal Youth. I recently had it on good authority that they actually hired in web consultants to relaunch their website at a cost of some thousands of pounds. The web architect (and party member) I was with when I heard this news nearly cried.

This is an organisation, mark you that possesses an e-mailing list of several thousands of people under 30, all of whom have chosen to be members of the nerdiest party in British politics. Many of them probably only leave their bedrooms under protest. Some of them are probably going to change the world. A goodly sprinkling of them are almost certainly better web designers than the party’s official providers. All that talent, a cornucopia of innovative potential. And Liberal Youth spent money on web consultants?

A considerable minority of the people on Liberal Youth’s emailing list could have told them the following: there are inherent weaknesses in closed source web design. Big organisations still use closed source because they need to cover their arses, and because the senior management team are of a generation that is used to buying its software from one provider, on one operating platform.

But if you’re a small, mobile organisation, particularly one which needs to husband its resources carefully, open source is a no-brainer. Forget any guff about hiring consultants being the “proper”, “grown-up” thing to do. Getting a closed source provider to build your website locks you into a relationship with that provider, technologically and financially. In fact, it’s that liberal scourge, a protected capitalist monopoly. Open source is a more robust, adaptable and flexible way of doing things, and it’s free. What seventeen-year-old liberal techie wouldn’t leap at the chance to redesign the website of a national party’s youth wing?

Now, if wrinkly old me knows this stuff, why in the name of arse doesn’t Liberal Youth? Why aren’t they the ones doing things faster, better, more coherently with the internet than we are? Why aren’t they the ones getting excited about the possibilities of internet campaigning, and how best to use it to supplement real-life campaigning? Why aren’t they building open source websites, collating campaigning materials, collecting canvassing data and writing neat little program-ettes to analyse it? Where, in short, is the action?

Nearly all the most free-thinking techies I know, the ones who are really starting to grasp the possibilities, comprehend the resources we can build with the internet, are in their thirties and forties. Now, regular citizens will know I am but a cynical friend of technology, at least for its own sake. Lynne Featherstone’s Clay Shirky quote about behaviour and not technology being the pivot of change is a splendid rule of thumb. But the whole point of having a big, varied volunteer activist base with different specialities is that individual components of the base can set out to try everything – throw every technology going at the wall, however daft, and see what sticks.

Liberal Youth ought to be the people trying everything. They’ve got the time, they’ve got the expertise among their membership, and they’ve got the opportunity, over the next twenty years, to change how the party does things, not just on the internet, but throughout the system. And they seem to be too busy playing at wearing suits.

The problem, the above-mentioned web architect theorised, is a social one. Under 25, people are still divided into tribes, the cool tribe, the ambitious tribe, the jock tribe (with apologies to Jock), and the nerdy tribe.  They haven’t learnt how to co-exist productively yet. The nerdy tribe has no official presence in Liberal Youth – the nerdy tribe is busy building AI in its bedroom. Liberal Youth seems to be made up for the most part of a single, and therefore sterile, tribe of the politically precocious. Ugh. And this is the future, is it? Sadly, on past evidence, yes.

 

Convention on Modern Liberty

9.45 Just arrived and registered at the Convention. First puzzle of the day: I’m in the M queue (for People’s Republic of Mortimer, of course) and the queue next to mine is non-existent. The NOP girl has nothing to do. “Anyone NOP?” she calls hopefully from time to time. Clearly people whose names start with NOP are not very liberal. The W queue, on the other hand, stretches all the way back to the complimentary apple juice.

10.02 Shami Chakrabarti is giving a lengthy and passionate keynote speech. It’s familiar ground – the slow creep of encroachment, giving up our liberties not with a bang but with a whimper, even the basic human right not to be tortured is now under threat – but hearing it in a building full of fellow travellers is a new experience. Is this right? “I say no. I say, hell no.” says Shami.

10.05 Ooh, harsh words for the idea of the removal of the Human Rights Act – the Conservatives’ last-minute attempt to jump on the Freedom Bill band wagon. Anyone see how this got reported on the front page of Guardian Online politics? “Cameron pledges bill to restore freedoms. Lib Dem back Conservatives pledge to replace the HRA with a British bill of rights.” Shocking. The actual story of course was that Cameron has proposed to scrap the HRA and replace it with a Bill of Rights, and supports the Convention. The Lib Dems also support the Convention. FFS. This is reportage, is it? Guardian FAIL.

10.10am Dominic Grieve is up now. I have a lot of time for him since seeing him in the Coroners and Justice Bill Second Reading – a hard act for David Howarth to follow (although he did it). He has somewhat spoiled his record more recently by agreeing that Jack Straw was right to veto the Information Tribunal order to release the Iraq cabinet minutes. Today he is making the link between what the Daily Mail calls the Peeceebrigadegawnmad and state interference. Mentions the case of the nurse who was suspended for praying for a patient.

He has a harsh, uncompromising delivery, which sometimes gives rise to white noise on the live feed I’m watching on, but nonetheless serves him well when he also expresses his outrage at the torture revelations of the moment. Big clap.

He explains what keeps him on the straight and narrow as a Conservative – who are as prone to authoritarianism as anyone else, he says. It is the idea, when on the brink of legislating some new infringement, that one’s grandfather would not have approved. Wry laughter.

10.18 Helena Kennedy being hilariously scathing. Is there something in the water at the home office? (the audience titter appreciatively – No2ID’s successful swiped Jacqui Smith’s fingerprints from her drinking water glass at an event last year.) They seem to get there, perfectly ordinary people, not mad, and are suddenly seized by the desire to reduce liberty.

10.23 She talks about the gradual process in a different sense – ministers are slipping into authorigtarianism so slowly they don’t realise it themselves. They still think they’re the good guys.

Ooh Henry Porter has just materialised in front of me! I’m sitting in the front reception at Logan Hall where I can nose around and see who’s here. The Porter swoops off.

“The state is here at our behest and we are not here at the behest pf the state,” says Kennedy.

And by god does that get applause.

10.26 HK reveals the aim of the day – to put together a document that we can all put to our candidates at the next election, asking them will theysign up to this? Superb idea.

Ooh, a little No2ID baby has just been pushed past! The crowd are predominantly young out here, under 35, a bit raffish, determined-looking, very few suits. It makes me wonder if we’re  coming to a time when it’s not necessary to dress and behave like a 55 year old in order to have serious purpose. Mind you, this all could be because we were the ones who were too disorganised and late to get into the main hall.

10.33 Sir David Varney (ex of HMRC I believe) is up now talking about databases. He believes our overall direction of travel should be towards the opt-in to data sharing model. Ooh, just found a copy of the Lib Dem freedom bill in my Convention bag-for-life.

10.36 Nick Clegg, by the way, is in the programme for this plenary session, but of course is now on paternity leave, which is a shame.

10.42 One of the first questions is from a Polish guy – he has experienced a repressive communist regime, where it was obvious there was a problem. He wants to know how we’re going to get the Sun readers on board – the Guardian readers already are.

Good question. Dominic Grieve says the Sun Reader (”he”) is a person of strong opinions and common sense. He is fed up with being preached to but he also cares about freedom – you need to talk to him in his own language. Grieve suddenly realises he should have said he or she halfway through what is otherwise a good answer.

Georgina Henry, chairing, follows up with a question to Grieve about whether the ascent of Chris Grayling means the Tories are contradictory on civil liberties? “No, I don’t think it does at all,” said Grieve. The audience collectively grumbles, “Oh yeah?” or words to that effect. He speaks on rather uncomfortably.

10.52 We’re taking questions from the Northern Ireland CoML now. Helena Kennedy in the course of an answer harks back to the earlier discussion and says she doesn’t think this is just a Guardian reader issue any more. She feels it’s a general view now. Her persuasion tactic on ID cards is to describe it as an “internal passport” – it does the same job as a passport, but on any street corner.

10.58 A question from a journalist who has signed the No2ID pledge. He clarifies that a passport will not be obtainable without an ID card. It will be illegal to travel abroad, in other words, without an ID card. This bears relation to some of the oppressive regimes he has reported from.

11.05 Ooh, namecheck for Twitter from a question. Doctor Pack will be pleased. Off to get myself a coffee now and agonise over which morning session to attend. Will the lure of Mr Dale be too much for me? Tune in at 11.45am to find out…

11.45 – Well, how could I resist? Tightly sandwiched between Philip Blond and Iain Dale in the creaking lift of the Institute of Education on the way up to their session, I thought, I have made the right decision.

Iain starts “I am Iain Dale and I’m a conservative.” A rumble of “Yurrrs”. Yup, I’m glad I came. Interesting to see them, you know, talking  to each other. Iain has an interesting personal history of having been an authoritarian Tory and having had his mind changed by 10 years of the most authoritarian British government of recent times.

He hopes some important questions will be answered during the session. Is Cameron really committed? What does the rise of Chris Grayling mean? What can we hope for now that David Davis is in the political wilderness? Good questions. So do I.

We have Iain, Laura Sandys, Tim Montgomerie, Philip Blond, Edward Garnier (currently on his way) and Dominic Raab.

Blond describes the conservative approach to the individual-state problem like this: the conservative tradition does not recognise the atomised individual per se – all individuals are part of a community, born into natural associations. Liberalism recognises, first and foremost, the individual, and it therefore requires the state to manage  relationships between individuals. This is why liberty does not proceed from liberalism – it proceeds from conservatism. I wonder what his response is to the various academics who take issue with his characterisation of liberalism as the creed of the individual? That’s not how many of the foremost liberal writers characterised their beliefs.

To me, it’s a straw that doesn’t need splitting. Being an individual immediately and necessarily means having the right to associate, form the links you want to form, become a part of the culture you choose. Liberalism naturally gives rise to communitarianism – except that it’s a communitarianism chosen by the individual. The vast majority will choose the community in front of them, they’ll be fine under a Conservative version of liberalism. But a few will not. They will not be fine. They need the liberals’ version of liberalism.

Tim Montgomerie essentially still holds the beliefs Iain did ten years ago (there’s a surprise). He suggests a Cameronian government would be inclined to libertarianism but would essentially be “pragmatic”.

12.02 Laura Sandys talks about liberty from the perspective of “freedom” – she finds this more accurately reflects the concerns that she finds on the street. This echoes Dominic Grieve’s earlier link of civil liberties with the Sun reader’s desire not to be interfered with by the Peeceebrigadegonmad.

As Grieve did, she draws on a lot of Peeceegonmad examples. It is a perfectly fair point that over-PC legislation is a part of the assault on our liberties, and it’s a perfectly fair point that this is also the best way to explain civil liberties to a large chunk of the population. But there’s a danger that  habitually using anecdote means you start reasoning by anecdote. Sandys had what I felt was a borderline example – a mother smacking their child in the supermarket, and she wanted to interfere to stop the child being hurt but felt unable. Depends on the degree of the smacking, of course, but I thought, Well… yeah? What about the mother’s  liberty to regulate the relationship between her and her child? (which is perhaps why the smacking ban needs a reassessment).

12.21 Edward Garnier takes a question on CCTV, and are the Conservatives really going to take a strong line on civil liberties? He personally sees the limits on CCTV as a judge, but thinks local communities ought to be able to have it if they want. It shouldn’t be a blanket system. Good answer. But will all Conservatives agree? “When I’m in government…If I get into government,” he corrects himself hurriedly, “I’ll have to be brave… The test will come for me after the next election.” No doubt this is a fair answer from a personal perspective but it hardly engenders confidence in me that the rest of his colleagues will take the same view. It’s still every Tory for himself, it seems, and we’re very much expected to take them on trust.

12.27 Laura Sandys talks about the need for less legislation under a Tory government. Good stuff. So do we see a rebellious back bencher of the future?

12.29 A good question about the need for a repeal act of existing measures as well as a new bill. Iain refers to the Liberal Democrat bill, jolly decently and I manage to shriek that everybody has a copy in their Convention bag (I take it it wasn’t just a special present for me.) Dominic Raab dodges the question and talks about the need for the new bill of rights only. Philip Blond separates them out again, and expressly supports the repeal idea as well  as the new bill idea.

Tim Montgomerie – wouldn’t repeal 28 days, but also thinks the Tories should be making a “generous outreach” to the Lib Dems. Hm, good luck.

12.33 Edward Garnier has a nice snippet. He thinks he’s promoting his party but actually he’s revealing their inner workings in a not terribly flattering light. By his account, the Tories have this very week scrambled to get together a list of the stuff that needs repealing. Nice to know the Freedom Bill has had an impact.

12.36 Ooh, Evan Harris is here. He asks Dominic about the idea of the repeal of HRA. The HRA imposes a positive duty, for example, for the government to provide information which has led to the torture relevations – so are the Tories seeking to get rid of duties like this? And if not, why bother reconstituting exactly the same measures in a British bill of rights? What will change? And he wants to know – how will the Tories fare on the harder questions of personal liberty? It’s easy for Tories to want local people to be allowed to open a creche. But what about people who want, e.g. access to violent pornography? Laura Sandys, who has impressed me up to now, fudges the answer.

12.45 Hoorah! Sarah Ludford is here too. There are millions of us. She does battle with Dominic Raab over application of European case law to English law and whether there is any real difference between European liberty and British liberty – what is it about British liberty that is superior? In what way would it be different to the current European version as enshrined in the HRA? Mental note: ask her for an LDV piece.

12.52 Philip Blond talks about the pluralism of an ideal Conservative Society. There’s more than one way to conceive of personhood. Again, this just underlines that there’s a common link between Conservatism and Liberalism – but it doesn’t mean anyone should be convinced that the Conservative party en masse thinks like this or will legislate/unlegislate accordingly.

12.56 John Morrison – who spoke at the keynote about ID cards – expresses scepticism about the Tories’ attitude to the HRA – he has heard a lot of contradictory things this morning. He asserts the need for the state to protect rights. There is some scoffing at this (I’m not sure why – they’re the ones proposing a Bill of Rights Act). Iain suggests it’s strange for a liberal to want the state to interfere and the panel to want decisions to be made locally. Correct – so long as localities are genuinely allowed to make decisions, including those which Tories might not like.

13.21 A sandwich grab later, I’m at the bloggers’ summit. Missed the opening remarks, alas, as I’m intrigued to know what Sunny Hundal wants this session to produce. Heather Brooke, an American journalist now working in Britain is saying a lot of interesting things about the contrasting availability of, e.g. police data to US journalists as opposed to UK counterparts.

13.25 Ben Goldacre up now – brilliantly excoriates journalistic standards. He talks about the way the blogosphere ensures that no effort of his is ever wasted – his findings are always discussed or investigated.

He has a fascinating example about how bloggers’ obsessiveness can expose crooks and crises faster than the mainstream media. He spent last year investigating, amongst other “big pharma and big quacka”, the company that a “cure” for dyslexia. It was bloggers who were getting accountant friends to help them interpret the accounts and posting warnings that the company was in trouble. It was bloggers who were watching the forums on which anxious parents were discussing their children’s treatment, and picked up on the cancellation of appointments as the first sign that the company was closing its clinics. After this happened, Radio 4 ’s You and Yours was still running programmes about the benefits of the drug. Bloggers 1, mainstream media 0.

13.35 Phil Booth of No2ID adds to a point of Ben’s about the value of “chaotic and puerile investigative journalism” as practised by bloggers. He stresses that civil liberties campaigns like him don’t have the time to get through all the material, make all the FOI requests – people should involve themselves in looking at the material. A thousand eyeballs are better than one.

13.45 Heather Brooke: “You’ve got no First Amendment, you have the  worst libel law in the world. How can you call yourself a democracy?” Can’t argue with that.

14.11 Excellent fast-moving bloggers’ session done – too much for your humble correspondent to report, but I’m sure Liberal Conspiracy will be chewing it all over in due course. Excellent to run into Andrew Adams who has just posted a very complimentary piece over there about the Lib Dems Freedom Bill.

Now, if I can’t resist Iain Dale, I certainly can’t resist Vince Cable. He’s on the panel along with Will Hutton, Kate Hoey and Suzanne Moore to discuss whether liberty can “survive the slump”. Is it just too much of a luxury for these hard times to be worrying about civil liberties?

15.21 Argh! Battery laptop FAIL! Just as Our Man’s session got underway. Fortunately I am now hiding behind James Graham in the front lobby and have access to a power socket, and the schedule officially decrees a coffee break. A quick revisit of the session from my crabbed notes:

Will Hutton was extremely serious, extremely lengthy, and scared the gibbering fuck out of us all.  His essential point was that this is the vital moment at which Enlightenment values must be reasserted. The global stage in particular is becoming frightening and more oppressive. He summoned the spectre of war with Russia if we do not, as a culture, reassert the values of liberty.

I was inclined to contrast his performance unfavourably with that of Philip Blond this morning, who mentioned the exclusiveness of Enlightenment values – this very French, very middle-class idea of what it means to be a liberal. It was basically Blond’s contention that “the Enlightenment” and its values are not the unalloyed good most assume when they use the term (as Hutton did). Blond’s assessment is more satisfying to me, partly because I’m a medievalist and partly (and probably relatedly) because I am a right awkward cuss and like contrarian arguments.

Next up Suzanne Moore. Hm. The journalist who left the Guardian and the Indy and went to the Daily Fail. And I want to have her babies. I’ll tell you why. She started out with the now-familiar link between PC brigade stuff and liberty, nicely characterised our times as the age of “what not to wear” – bossy experts everywhere, not just in government. And then she caame on to a cause extremely close to my heart: alcohol.

She’s the mother of teenaged and twenties’ aged people, and she is palpably personally offended by society’s attitude to young people. Any group of teenagers is now treated, by default, as a threat to society. A gathering of more than twenty people in a house is now a rave by police standards. And god forbid that kids discover the demon drink. But she also thinks young people are the answer. Just by acting like they do, they’re already objecting to the nanny state – they’re drinking in the street, twittering and facebooking resistance, being messy, stupid, doing the wrong thing. Good for them.

We must avoid the temptation to be high-minded about this, she said – yes, we must care about the rights of people in Guantanamo, but we also have to care about the rights of the pissed teenager in the street – their rights to do what the hell they like are the same rights that should protect torture victims. It was all I could do not to stand up and yell “Hear hear!” , but this isn’t a Lib Dem conference and there are Normal People here, so I didn’t. Fantastic speech.

15.56 I’m sorry, loving People. I am missing Philip Pullman’s speech. I’ve spent too long sitting in hot rooms with a laptop today on the strength of two delicate crab sandwiches and a banana, and some recovery time is merited before the afternoon plenary session with Chris Huhne gets underway.

On with my notes from the Vince Cable session:

Kate Hoey, one of Labour’s token good MPs came next: she took the title of the session and turned it on its head: since an economic boom saw an unprecedented assault on civil liberties, maybe a time of slump is a time which could herald recovery rights. Leaping on a bit (you can do that when you’re not liveblogging) Vince Cable’s points actually harked back to this very closely. He talked about the three angry groups that would emerge from the slump.

1. The students – he has been told by a lecturer that half the student population graduating this year will be unable to find a job. This will eventually result in a large, educated, angry “army” of young people, who will make their voice heard – and we don’t yet know how they’ll doi that.

2. The public sector – in a few years there will be really swingeing cuts in public sector spending. Public sector workers will form another angry, disiullsioned group.

3. People in debt who find bailiffs are able to come into their homes and use “reasonable force” against people in respect of recoverng perhaps even small debts. Once people grasp that this, Vince thinks there will be real “middle class anger” about the removal of our liberties.

16.14 Must move on from that now as we are moving into the final session. The first speaker whom I can only assume was Afua Hirsch has just given a rather patronising and vapid account of Why Rights Are a Good Thing, children, and she managed to slip in “equality” as analogous to basic human rights. No surprise then, that she believed the next speaker, a Labour PPC, represented a new generation of young people who were very aware of the value of their rights. Yeah, so aware that they joined the Labour party.

He nearly loses my support immediately by using “mainstream” as a verb three or four times in quick succession, but has some reasonably interesting things to say about how we need to associate our objections to the database state with an objection to “big brother business”. It’s a point of view that many Lib Dems would express and with which I have some sympathy.  But people choose to be associated with businesses as consumers. The fact that  big businesses are de facto monopolies and consumers have too little choice when selecting their supplier of what-have-you is a problem with protected capitalism, not with the businesses themselves.

Eek! He proudly hints at the Labour party “making a pledge” to stop people being bothered by marketing calls. Um. I don’t think that alone is going to be enough.

16.24 Chris Huhne is up now. Good quote (there’s a lot of them floating around today): “A liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested by the police.”

He’s dipping into party politics a little too much for my taste , but he gets interrupted with applause when he reaffirms the Lib Dem commitment to, er, not repeal the Human Rights Act. And he gets a fantastic response to the extended version of this argument – the Germans reclassified the Jews as non-citizens, that’s how they were able to commit genocide, and a European human rights act would have prevented them from doing that. If we allow our  legal definition of human rights to be replaced by a legal definition of British rights, that is the risk we run. For the first time I’ve heard today, there’s applause out here in the lobby as well in the hall.

16.40 Brian Eno – I’ve not heard him speak before. I confess to a moment of cringe when one of Nick Clegg’s first acts as leader was to appoint him adviser on youth issues. But by god, he’s an interesting fellow. He frames the whole liberty debate in terms of human beings’ ability to imagine the future, and empathise with others in the present. We’ve shortened our vision of the future, he argues, we do fewer and fewer things with an eye to the long view. The media doesn’t help – his implication is that governments frame legislation in terms of how it will look on the front of the Mail.

Authoritarian governments clamp down on discussion, their view narrows, out-of-the-ordinary people are not tolerated, Brian goes on. So our antidote has to be to take the opposite view – we need more nutters! In particular, these ideas need to be practised in education. Children should spend their educations swimming in liberty. It ought to be the one time in their lives that they’re able to try any experiment, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. Unfortunately schools have also adopted the short-termist business model. Big clap for that.

I do recommend watching Brian’s segment if you can get hold of it. I can’t get across the full flavour of what he said in a few scraps live-blogging but he was an inspiring speaker.

Just time for an incendiary question from Evan Harris. Earlier I caught up with him after the Conservative session and asked if he was satisfied with the answers he got to his questions. Unsurprisingly he was not – Laura Sands, the Tory PPC in particular, he felt, just hadn’t understood that it might be necessary to respect the rights of people to do things that she might not personally approve of. He asks it again now, and is interrupted with applause again and again. What about the rights of criminals, of asylum seekers, of failed asylum seekers? It’s easy to talk about “our rights”. What about “their rights”?

17.46 I’m limping along on borrowed power again – a quick round-up of events since I last posted. One of the best questions closing the last session was from another regional conference, didn’t catch which, asking if the panel would commit to another Convention next year to assess the progress made and call the three main parties to account on their civil liberties record. Sounds good to me and the panel thought so too.

18.16 Astonished no-one in the questioning called Chris Huhne on Geert Wilders. That’s the only time today I’ve wished this was a Lib Dem conference – where knowledge of party politics would have been that much deeper. Someone would have asked. Someone will ask next weekend I hope.

Quick word on David Davis’ speech: fabulous. Do read it. Isn’t it strange how things change? When he wasn’t elected as Tory leader, the media mood was one of relief because he favoured capital punishment. Now, and in spite of that – and it’s a big “in spite of” – I find myself wondering what position we’d be in now if he had been elected leader.

Time now to stagger to a halt. I must awa’ to greasy food of some kind. There’ll be more in the morning after, no doubt, but for now thank you and good night.

 

“1984 was a warning, not a blueprint” – the Liberal Democrat Freedom Bill

You heard this first in the People’s Republic.* Ready?

• Scrap ID cards for everyone, including foreign nationals.
• Ensure that there are no restrictions in the right to trial by jury for serious offences including fraud.
• Restore the right to protest in Parliament Square, at the heart of our democracy.
• Abolish the flawed control orders regime.
• Renegotiate the unfair extradition treaty with the United States.
• Restore the right to public assembly for more than two people.
• Scrap the ContactPoint database of all children in Britain.
• Strengthen freedom of information by giving greater powers to the Information Commissioner and reducing exemptions.
• Stop criminalising trespass.
• Restore the public interest defence for whistleblowers.
• Prevent allegations of ‘bad character’ from being used in court.
• Restore the right to silence when accused in court.
• Prevent bailiffs from using force.
• Restrict the use of surveillance powers to the investigation of serious crimes and stop councils snooping.
• Restore the principle of double jeopardy in UK law.
• Remove innocent people from the DNA database.
• Reduce the maximum period of pre-charge detention to 14 days.
• Scrap the ministerial veto which allowed the Government to block the release of Cabinet minutes relating to the Iraq war.
• Require explicit parental consent for biometric information to be taken from children.
• Regulate CCTV following a Royal Commission on cameras.

Henry Porter’s dream shopping list? Labour’s nightmare scenario? Yes, both of those, but more than that, the above list is the substance of the first draft of the Liberal Democrats’ Freedom Bill.

Oh boy. Am I happy they’ve done this – though not before time. The idea of the one bill to rule them all was originally an initiative of Clegg’s when he was Shadow Home Sec’y (back before civil liberties was fashionable), and it’s been out in the cold for too long.

And it doesn’t end there either. The site proclaims:

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the freedoms that have been lost in recent years. Sadly, there are too many. It is intended to be a starting point – to show people how much personal liberty has been stripped away by this Government and the one before it. The Freedom Bill and the corresponding website is a consultative document. We want to hear from you. What have we missed? What have we got wrong? What do you disagree with? Where should we have gone further? Which do you think are the most important rights to restore? What else would you like to see on the website?

For the sake of liberty, go to the site, sign the petition, comment on the draft and sign up to the RSS to show your (whole-hearted and enthusiastic support/qualified approval with the rider that the Lib Dems are still a bunch of wets and you don’t much like the cut of their jib except for Vince Cable, he’s a LEGEERRRND he is/some psychologically unsatisfactory combination of the two that you can’t quite come to terms with) – delete as applicable.

* Unless you read it first at Lib Dem Voice.**

** Or unless you read it first at Comment is Free.