Why I am not a Centrist

Recently U.K.Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has made two major speeches (one at the party conference in September, the other this month on welfare reform) in which he has made a great deal of the virtue of being in the political centre.

To me, there is neither virtue nor sin attached to being in the centre; and the centre has never been where I though I was. On particular issues, yes of course, it can happen that the right, just or practical solution is about halfway between two other proposals put forward by opposing groups. On occasion though, one extreme is right. Imagine, say, a political leader, possibly a Liberal, saying, "On one hand there are the Fascists. On the other hand we have the democrats. We are halfway between the two, rejecting the extremism of both camps, so we must be right." A particular difficulty about being in the middle by firm preference, rather than by chance, is that the middle is defined by where the extremes are. So if someone on the right, say, or the anti-environmentalist side, or whatever duality you're looking at, moves their group way to the right or whatever, the centre moves right and you must move right with it. This gives remarkable power to extremists!

The more cynical centrists, such as the court around Tony Blair when he led the Labour Party, jink right or left to make sure that a majority of voters are nearer to their position than to the position of their main opponents. The less cynical ones are puppets just as much.

If you run through major political philosophers, you'll find some who defined themselves as conservatives, monarchists, nationalists, Christian democrats, liberals, social democrats, socialists, anarchists - but not centrists, unless you count Popper as a centrist, and I would suggest he's outside the right-left spectrum.This is because centrism is not a political philosophy at all: it's either a political tactic (stay in the middle and you'll win elections) or amounts to little more than a belief in negotiation, diplomacy, the rule of law, caution - things many people clearly not in the centre also believe to be generally a good idea.

Political parties need passion. How can you be a passionate centrist?

The old, pre-merger Liberal Party constitution said Liberals "in all things, put freedom first". That sounds quite extreme. That party was often willing to take flak proposing things that seemed way out at the time. A party sharing in power will necessarily be more selective about that, but need not lose its soul.

But where is that soul? At one time I would have said quite confidently that it lay in a combination of individual liberty, support for community and individual empowerment through free collective action (active citizenship) and fairness (equality). I still think that's the essence of Liberalism (plus environmental responsibility), and distinguishes leftish Liberal Democrats, despite snide remarks from Nick Clegg's court, from social democrats, who have more faith in a centralist state and less interest in small-group action. But the second quality in particular seems to have been forgotten by many and that, together with a debasing of community politics so that it becomes local party campaigning without any idea of empowerment, may explain why a belief in the rightness of being in the centre (as opposed to being in the centre on some key issues but not on others) has gained so much ground despite its essential emptiness.

The heart is still there, but beating uncertainly.

What is government for?

During a BBC TV news item about the US presidential election, after the result so a bit reflective, a Republican voter, interviewed, said, more or less:

"If you believe that government's about helping people, then Obama's OK, but if you believe government's about helping people to help themselves, you worry...". This sounded quite thoughtful and the idea that government's main role is enabling (helping people to help themselves) appeals a lot to a British Liberal.

But first of all, even by Abraham Lincoln's quite narrow definition of the role of government (doing what people can't do for themselves) by any realistic analysis there is a substantial role for government, especially if you admit things that are clearly, in the best interests of people in general, done by government at some level (policing, for example: many people could instead protect themselves, but the cost in violent deaths would be horrendous and the weak and poor would be least able to protect themselves).

The idea that everybody can pull himself or herself up by his/her own bootstraps is traditionally American, but flourished when the constantly moving Frontier made such self-improvement much more achievable for people who started with nothing. If you really want to enable everyone, then some people need a help up until they're in a position to make choices and help themselves. In Britain, for example, the last Labour government laid down a minimum wage by law. It was and is pretty low, but some people were being paid below it and at that level their choices and ability to help themselves were extremely limited. Some business organisations warned that the minimum wage would drive down employment, but that didn't seem to happen. The minimum wage would look to some Americans like classic socialism; but from a libertarian point of view, what individual liberty was reduced by it? The individual liberty of those paid a bit more was increased.

Undoubtedly there is a trap of coming to rely on government to fix everything. It can't, and if it could, it shouldn't. But a trap on the opposite side is to see the alternative purely in terms of individual (or at most family) initiative. Some things can't be fixed by any individual and may not be best left to government, but are fixable by relatively small numbers of people freely banding together - a community, a society, an action group. So one of the key questions for government at any level should be, "How can government encourage and assist community and other free collective action?"

Obama was a community organiser. I suspect he understands that. Our Prime Minister David Cameron did understand that, but his "Big Society" has vanished under pressure from the economic slump, the defecit reduction programme and unimaginative civil servants who saw his agenda purely in terms of getting former public services provided by charities (which themselves might be more top-down and no better at involving volunteers than the statutory organisations).

We shouldn't give up that easily.

Dissidence

This'll be a short post. WARNING: THIS POST HAS PARTY POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS. I have posted about what I understand it to mean to be a Liberal and explained that I'm an active member of the British Liberal Democrats, but most of the time I prefer to post about political and moral issues in the broad sense (or satirically) rather than talking party politics or indeed Christianity or Quakerism.

But.

If you look at the history of dissidence and nonconformism, you'll find it often suggested that these strange and awkward people, by deliberately taking a route different to that taken by most of their countrymen and women, are unpatriotic. Of course, if they oppose what they say is an unjust war (or war in general) that leads to more accusations of disloyalty to country.

If while participating actively in a political party, you raise criticisms, that can also be seen as disloyal. Blairite Labour had a particularly insidious concept of being "on-message" or "off-message", implying that there was one necessary message and if you dissented from it in any way, you weren't suggesting a slightly different path, but dropping off the right path.

Of late the Liberal Democrats in Britain have faced a lot of criticism for sustaining and joining in a Conservative-led coalition making cuts to reduce the deficit at a time of recession. I don't want to get into arguments about what they or the government have done right or wrong except to say that in 2010 after the election there was really little choice. Labour plus Liberal Democrat added up to less than a majority and the markets were ready to panic at a weak government.

But I am critical of some aspects of the leadership. Nowe here's my central point. I see some activists who do a lot for the party raising criticisms - and others reply with comments like, "Stop wingeing and get out on the doorstep." Now this seems to me a bit like saying, "Stop polishing your shoes and learn Spanish." While it may be difficult to learn Spanish at the precise moment when you are polishing your shoes, there is actually no conflict between being devoted to polishing your shoes and successfuly learning Spanish. Similarly, Liberal Democrats who are critical of the direction of the party are in no way prevented from getting out on the doorstep - and in fact many who are critical are amongst the hardest workers with continuing local successes under their belts.

So they may be wrong in their criticisms, but to criticise is not to stand aside.

Odanglesex Revisited: Lord Pond

More re-posted Odanglesex adventures. The previous Leader of the Council was Lord Pond. He was found out in various misdeeds and now both politicians of his party and officers are keen to forget him as soon as possible.


FROM: William Wayneflete, Leader of the Council

TO: All Odanglesex County Council

I thought I should let you know that I have been informed that an exhaustive routine check of our records has revealed that the convicted necromancer "Lord" David Pond, a cat-herd, was once a member of this council, elected for the Graveigh division. An intensive and rigorous investigation is now taking place into whether he was ever, as he has claimed on television, leader of this council.

Any enquiries from the media should be referred to External Communications. If, as may occasionally be the case, you should enter a hostelry and be asked about "Dave Pond", the line to take is that you have never heard of him.

Many thanks for your support.

Bill Wayneflete



ED's JOB

Edelbertha Spengler's blog

Hi!

Yesterday my eight-year-old left the back gate open and Rupert the Tortoise escaped. We were just in time to stop him getting on a bus. I don't know about you, but I hate telling the children off. However, I did feel I had to lay down the law a bit about gates.

In the same way, I thought it'd be timely to remind you about security at County Hall and particularly access issues. After all, as a nerve centre of government, we would be an obvious target for terrorists or "Occupy" protesters, and a thief seeing all the publicity bandied about on the amount of money we spend might try to gain entry to see if any of it was lying around!

I need to remind myself about this just as much as anyone else. Only about four years ago, I distinctly remember being greeted in the Roman atrium by a short, fat man who embraced me and said he had just found out that I was a woman, but never mind, I still had a job. Naturally I assumed he was a leading member of the council. I now realise this may have been incorrect and I should have asked to see his I.D.. Please do the same for anyone you don't recognise, unless, of course, they have a badge saying VALUED CUSTOMER.

Byeee!

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob, Director of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision
TO: Kelly Pattrick, PA to Kenneth Spotlessnob

Kelly:

I'm just updating my gifts and favours register entry. Could you check for me with Internal Governance Excellence whether Lord Pond giving me an ice lolly constituted a gift which should be declared?

Kenneth

Politicians!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!***£%$£££**!!!

"Politicians" has become a dirty word. However, no state that got along with an element of free participation by at least some of its citizens has ever donw without politicians. Even in the direct democracy of Athens there were political leaders.

So those who rubbish politicians as a class must stand for one of these two things:

*EITHER some kind of dictatorship

*OR much more honest and better-behaved politicians.

I do suspect that some of the anti-politician and anti-politics culture is whipped up by right-wing media because the more people distrust politics and politicians, the more they will be happy for decisions that used to be taken openly and democratically through the political process to be left to corporations and (which is not quite the same thing) to the market. I've posted on the limitations of the market before, but just remember two things about the market: it doesn't think far ahead; and if you have a thousand times someone else's spending power, for the market, you have a thousand times the power. Forget one person one vote.

However, even the most ideologically pure free-marketeers admit some room for collective, democratic government, for which you still need politicians. I think hardly anyone in stable democracies wants dictatorship. Still politicians, then, but maybe better ones?

That's a perfectly reasonable aim and the U.K. parliamentary expenses scandal gives it force. But that scandal related purely to NATIONAL politicians (control over local expenditure is much tighter) and yet it's tarred local councillors with the same brush. As for the sort of honesty that means sincerity rather than decent behaviour over money, people say they want that kind of honesty in politicians yet those who display it are often pilloried for putting their feet in it.

It's also worth remembering that opinion surveys over nearly fifty years have shown that U.K. voters have a very low opinion of M.P.s and councillors in general, yet often like their own local representatives. In other words, there is an anti-politician assumption which is unaffected by positive experience of your local person.

There's a widespread assumption that local elected politicians are paid careerists - yet if you look at the allowances U.K. councillors get, they vary between about £1,000 a year and £10,000 (excepting what a few people like a leader of the council get for what's maybe half a full-time job), not big money especially if you consider that being an active councillor will involve expenses (driving around a lot, for example, and very likely some of your election expenses) and many hours of work, not only meetings but taking up problems for people, talking with people, researchiung issues and so on.

Someone posted on a local paper discussion board that their council would be better if the councillors were all independents instead of "political careerists". Well, look at the typical local council and you'll find many of the councillors are retired people who've had careers and now want to do something for their area and promote things they believe in. Others have good non-political careers they may well be damaging through the spare time and mental energy they take on council business. Out of 50 councillors you might find about eight or ten who had national political ambitions and maybe two of those would be elected to parliament, not necessarily for more than a few years.

As for independents, there are some good ones, but here are some of the minuses:

- they're all well-off. Political parties can pay the election expenses of relatively poor candidates, but independents pay their own, unless of course they have rich friends who may expect favours in return.

- you generally have very little idea of what they stand for or how they'll vote on key issues: there's no manifesto, for a start.

- if they do express a commitment, there's no mechanism to stop them going off in a completely different direction, whereas a party candidate elected on a manifesto who completely ignored it would probably be in trouble.

- very often they're party loyalists in disguise, so you get the party rule without the honesty of knowing you're voting for the Conservatives (say) to run the council. In a recent town council election not far from me, seven people were standing as independents yet were endorsed en bloc by the Conservative district and county councillors and behaved like a party slate.

Sometimes it seems the anti-politician mood is so strong that people forget that the vast majority of local political activists are volunteers who believe in something.

Above the law?

Twelve generations ago, civil wars were fought in England and Scotland over whether the king was above the law or governed by it. Military and political events combined to give the answer that monarchs were governed by the law.

Police and all the other officials of the legal and government systems are governed by the law too. British policing rests on two fundamentals - that it depends on consent; and that the police are citizens subject to the law as other citizens are. They have some special powers, but the exercise of those powers is subject to challenge through the law.

In April 2009, massive protests challenged the G20 summit in London. The police had the job of keeping order and making sure the summit was not disrupted. There were many criticisms of the tactics they used that day, but I don't want to get into that argument.

One person died - Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper seller who was caught up in the events. he was prevented from returning from his work to the hostel where he was living by the police tactic of "kettling" demonstrators and he pleaded to be let through. One officer pushed him hard in the back. He fell and suffered injuries which caused his immediate collapse and soon after death.

It might never have been established why he fell, had not an American banker who had gone to the demonstration out of curiosity filmed the action. Once it was established that a police action might have caused his death, junior police officers acted very responsibly. One reported to his superior that he might have seen the incident. The superior contacted all his team and asked them what they'd seen - and others reported they'd seen an officer they did not know push the man in the back as he was walking away. The superior passed on this information to his superiors. At the highest levels, though, police tried hard to suppress what had happened. They claimed that police medics while caring fore the dying man had been pelted with missiles by the demonstrators, which they later admitted was false. They tried to get the Guardian newspaper to stop investigating the matter, claiming entirely falsely that Tomlinson's family were anguished by the Guardian's actions (in fact they supported them).

Then an officer, PC Simon Harwood, said he had pushed a man who might have been Tomlinson. This may have been a resonsible act of conscience, or he may have judged he was likely to be indentified (he should have been showing his number but he'd obscured it). Harwood's statements thereafter were contradictory and he should not have been where he was, having been detailed to guard his team's police van some way distant. An inquest found Ian Tomlinson had been unlawfully killed. Harwood was prosecuted for manslaughter (a crime which applies when your actions kill someone, not intentionally, but when you might reasonably be expected to know that there was a risk of death resulting).

PC Harwood has just been acquitted, though there was no doubt he was the officer who pushed Tomlinson, there was medical evidence that Tomlinson's death resulted from his heavy fall and there was no doubt that Tomlinson was walking away and not presenting a threat to anyone.

So - here is a warning. Do not let your back come within pushing distance of a police officer's hand, because he's entitled to push you so you fall down and if you die as a result that's your own fault.

This is not for a moment to question that police officers do a very hard and necessary job, or that in Britain they're mostly polite and responsible (and far more prepared to be argued with than in America, as far as I can judge). The tragic event showed most of the officers near Tomlinson acting responsibly, as they did in reporting what they'd seen.

But after this verdict, I have to ask: are police officers REALLY under the law like you and I are?

Two nations divided by a common language and...

Someone (the most popular candidate is George Bernard Shaw - or, as he's known in the States, "George Bernard? Sure!" - is supposed to have said that Britain and America were two nations divided by a common language. Despite the odd argument over faucet/tap, john/toilet, humor/humour and tenderize/tenderise, we do have a common language, which enables us to misunderstand one another better because we assume that someone speaking our language is similar to us and better communication means more differences are identified. In Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", the Babel Fish, which enables instant translations from any language to any other in the galaxy, has been the cause of countless wars because suddenly people understood what that lot were saying.

Nonetheless, Britain and America (meaning the USA) do have a lot in common, so it's significant that they seem to be growing further apart despite globalisation. The divergence can be seen most in and around religion and politics - much less, say, in literature and business - and it's on politics that I want to concentrate.

The early American colonists came mostly from England and Scotland, and most of the rest from Ireland, which for good and ill had experienced much English and Scottish influence. They imported not only a language but a legal system and both political ideas and experience of representative politics. When the break came, leading British and Irish opponents of the British government such as the elder William Pitt and Edmund Burke saw the American rebels as Englishmen fighting for English rights. After independence, British people continued to emigrate to America and trade across the Atlantic preserved a close relationship. After one short and slightly half-hearted war in 1812-15, the two countries never again went to war despite a massively long frontier between the USA and Canada and all the uncertainties caused by Westward expansion north and south of that border. Major artistic figures like Whistler, Henry James and Charles Dickens were famous in both countries and moved quite freely from one to the other despite the length of the sea crossing. In the twentieth century the countries were allies - eventually - in two world wars and have been formal allies ever since.

When I was growing up a politically-aware kid, the main oddities about American politics (in the eyes of Britons) seemed to be:

*The very different system, with primary elections, a federal system, an elected President and so on, with the American President a hugely powerful figure compared to a British Prime Minister;
*Racial oppression in the South; and
*Two parties which didn't seem to differ much, in contrast to British and West European political systems dominated in most countries by some sort of centre-right conservative party and some sort of democratic socialist party.

The difference in the systems still exists, though the American President, so often blocked in Congress, now seems a much less towering figure. The American South has changed astonishingly and with Britain now having a much larger Black population than it had in 1945, the differences between the two countries in this area are now much smaller.

But important trends in politics have gone in opposite directions. While the U.S. is still governed by Democrats and Republicans, the political divide there has widened to a chasm. In Britain and nearly all Europe, on the other hand, the big right and left parties dominate less than they used to and are harder to tell apart than they were in the 1940s and 50s. While the influence of organised religion on British (and most European) politics has waned, in the U.S. it has increased, and it's fundamentalist strands of religion that call many of the shots.

The economic and geographical divides that underlay the Conservative/Labour divide in Britain (bosses and bosses' assistants against the industrial masses; countryside and suburbs against towns and inner cities) have almost vanished, but when we listen to American politics, it seems that remark about two countries divided by a single language could be applied within America. Liberals and Conservatives seem to draw on different cultures with little in common and the level of hatred and vituperation in American political debate startles us.

I understand one reason for this is an unspoken pact between the two parties to draw the boundaries of congressional districts in ways which minimised the number of marginal seats, thus creating a situation in which the great majority of representatives did not have to appeal to the middle ground. Low turnouts also helped the more zealous zealots, whose supporters could be counted on to turn out, to dominate - but higher recent turnouts in Presidential elections haven't reversed the trend. The shift has largely helped the right (conservative) side, so that whereas when Kennedy was battling Nixon, American politics was not obviously to the right of British politics except in the Deep South, now an American moderate liberal can sound like a European conservative and the Tea Party sounds to a European like something on the wilder fringes of the outside right. There is also what seems to a European Christian like an odd alliance between unrestricted capitalism of the devil-take-the-hindermost-and-the-hindermost-is-actually-morally-inferior type and fundamentalist Christianity. If anything the religious types in Britain tend to be on the left and the Catholic right of continental Europe, while conservative on social issues, is not particularly conservative on economic issues.

In Europe, including Britain, economic issues dominate alongside immigration and the environment. These issues matter in the U.S. too, but abortion is a massively bigger issue than anywhere in Europe (even the Irelands, Spains and Polands)and it's practical politics to attack the theory of evolution - a debate most Europeans view dumbfounded. Now I'm not suggesting the European version is better in all respects - I wish abortion was debated more in Britain - but the American system, with weak political party organisation and discipline, is ill-prepared to deal with deep and bitter divides and as someone who has greatly admired the American genius for politics, I wonder where America - that is the USA - is going.

Can representatives think? (2)

Back to the subject of what should direct the votes of MPs and other elected representatives. In the first post I argued that an election manifesto should be a serious commitment, but that there were very good reasons why the commitment could not be absolute. I also pointed out that while people criticised MPs for not doing what their electorate wanted, the same people valued decisiveness and knowing what they wanted in prospective governments and leaders.

The late 18th century politician, political philosopher and reformer Edmund Burke took a stand on MP's independence from direction by their voters, arguing that he owed his voters his considered opinion, not his vote. They turned him out at the next election, but at that time, and into the late 20th century, many voters would have accepted that while on certain high-profile issues, they themselves could make a good judgement, on most they didn't have the information or wisdom and MPs might - so they would vote for someone who seemed to share their values and approach rather than seeking precise agreement on policies. I remember a more recent politician, the Liberal MP John Pardoe, answering a question on the popularity of capital punishment and his own opposition to it by saying that his voters knew they weren't going to get that policy from him, so if they voted for him, it was on other grounds.

Increasingly, though, people have access to masses of information. They're also used to being able to buy what they want on Amazon or in the supermarket and it's easy for this to determine how they see politics - not just a choice between Labour, Liberal Democrat or Conservative, or between four or five individuals standing for office, but shopping from a detailed and specific menu. The availability of information is empowering, but the shopping analogy is dangerous when applied to politics, which concerns collective decisions on common issues (so you can't always get what you want) and where issues are interconnected in ways that may not be obvious.

In Burke's time, though, party ties in Britain were very weak, especially in the Whig Party, which was a very loose alliance of factions with no central control. A thoughtful MP like Burke really could follow his conscience or his judgement unless the personal interests of his patron were endangered - and richer men than Burke had not even that limit to consider.

That is not a credible way of running a modern government: it doesn't work anywhere. Back in days when the British Liberal Party had no local councillors in most areas, the idea was popular amongst those Liberals that councillors should be free of party discipline and follow their individual judgements all the time. This was never an idea that survived long once they had a group of elected councillors, because a group that behaved with no coherence would be torn apart. A group actually running a local authority needs to behave with some consistency so managers and others can make plans and we don't end up with popular decisions in one field of work that make nonsense of other decisions in a related field. An elected group can debate things and make a collective decision, taking into account what it knows of wider opinion, but once that group decision is made, those who lost the vote should vote with their colleagues except in rare and limited circumstances - ot otherwise there's chaos.

Most British people view a general election mainly as an exercise in electing a government and do expect the government to have some direction and coherence - which requires some party discipline, though the discipline can either be top-down (do what the leader says) or bottom-up (that's the decision the conference or the group of MPs reached). However, MPs who vote with party discipline against strong local views on something are often punished. If they weren't, people would certainly feel disempowered and ignored. So is Burke still right or not?

I don't think there's a simple answer. Most Liberal Democrat local council groups allow some flexibility for councillors pressing local issues where arguments for the priority to be given to road safety measures on one road, for example, aren't strategic issues. It gets more difficult when a ruling group has taken hard decisons on a schools reorganisation which must involve some schools closing, but everywhere a school is threatened, the closure is unpopular. If every closure were voted on individually with everyone voting freely, there would be no reorganisation with disastrous effects if school rolls were falling. So it may be necessary for a representative to make the case of his voters, do what (s)he can behind the scenes, but accept the final decision.

There is also the competing factor of issues of conscience. I find these hard to define, since to me all political issues are moral issues and all are practical issues, but it seems reasonable to accept there will be a few issues where individuals have deeply-felt beliefs which cut across party boundaries and where it's unreasonable to expect them to be bound by party discipline. However, that may well lead them into votes which go against what most of their voters want!

To sum up: I think people want politicians who:
KNOW WHAT THEY WANT AS A GROUP, ARE FIRM AND HAVE CONSISTENT DIRECTION
NOT ONLY LISTEN TO THEIR VOTERS, BUT OBEY THEM
THINK FOR THEMSELVES AND FOLLOW THEIR CONSCIENCES.

Trouble is, you can't have more than one of those - unless you can go along with a messy compromise of bits of each.

Can representatives think? (1)

Many though the faults of MPs and other elected representatives are, I'm not going to join in the easy flow of contempt for them. Would those who have nothing but contempt for them and for politics in general please propose their alternative way of resolving common issues? There are other ways, of course - dictatorship, for example, or a marketisation of everything that means if A is fifty times richer than B, he's fifty times more powerful.


No, I want to discuss what degree of independence MPs and other representatives should have - and if their independence is limited, by what.


I was moved to this by learning that polls show the British electorate think (1), that MPs should always vote in keeping with the majority view of the people (not sure if this means in the whole country - probably in their constituency only) and (2) that if an MP is elected as a member of a party on a manifesto, he or she should stick to the manifesto commitments 100%.


These two ideas are clearly contradictory. A manifesto is bound to contain some ideas which don't command majority support. A party that only put forward commitments it was sure would enjoy such support would be cowardly and likely to be blown here and there by shifts in public opinion. Actually, there's evidence that English people at least, whatever they say to pollsters, prefer would-be Prime Ministers and governments that know their own mind to ones that seem not to, even if the former stand for some things those voters don't like. Mrs Thatcher benefited from this and her Tory successors lost support through appearing as reactive populists. A national manifesto commitment may command majority support in the country as a whole, but not in our MP's constituency.


Even if they weren't contradictory, I'd suggest the ideas are misconceived. A party in opposition can put forward policies that appear to be practical according to the best analysis and information available to them at the time. Coming into government, they can find, for example, that confidential information paints a different picture, or the situation can have changed drastically, for example if an apparently healthy economic situation has turned into disaster; or civil servants or other advisors or voluntary organisations can put forward compelling arguments why, to achieve their goals, these are the wrong policies. All that without the possibility of facing a need for coalition with partners whose aims are largely different, or that the promises weren't entirely sincere in the first place!


Insincere promises get politics and politicians a bad name. But there are honest reasons why a manifesto commitment cannot or should not always be implemented, though these situations should be relatively rare. So what is a "pledge", like the U.K. Liberal Democrats' pledge on student funding? Since anyone who knows something about practical politics knows a manifesto commitment should represent a sincere intention but cannot be 100% solid, if a small minority of manifesto commitments are picked out to be pledges, I can only imagine this is suposed to mean these promises alone are sacrosanct - so to make such a commitment knowing there is perhaps a 10% chance it may have to be broken is a bad mistake. To pursue the example, the Liberal Democrats, my party, knew it was very unlikely they would be able to govern alone or even as the biggest party short of a majority. What actually happened, that circumstances meant there was very little alternative to a coalition, could be no great surprise. For me, the dropping of that policy as part of the give and take of compromise in a coalition was understandable, but it raises the question of whether a "pledge" is just overblown language for an intention.

What about MPs voting with their consciences, or with a collective party decision, and against the wishes of their electorate? I'll look at that in the follow-up post, probably after I return to the tale of Odanglesex County Council and the Away Day.

Monarchy - who needs it?

I pause in the account of the strange goings-on at the Odanglesex County Council Outdoor Activity Centre for a nude flash. Sorry, no, a post on monarchy, brought about by the Diamond Jubilee celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II in the U.K..


My problem is that U.K. and non-U.K. visitors to this site will see this very differently. My guess is that the jubilee would have merited a brief mention on Indian or U.S. T.V. news (former colonies, after all) with a chance to watch more on some minority channel, and not that for the French, the Germans, the Japanese or the Mexicans. Here in the U.K. it was wall to wall.


The pageantry is impressive, a magnificent huge dance; the colours blaze out. The crowds seemed to be enjoying themselves even in cold, damp weather that our ancestors would have taken to indicate God's displeasure. What I caught of the commentary was embarrassing if one's mental facilities, particularly the critical and analytical ones, were turned on.


The point was fairly made that the Jubilee, representing 60 years on the throne, was a rare event - only one female monarch before had lasted that long, though that fact sounded a bit like one of those peculiar statistics dredged up by the backup to commentators during quiet passages in a cricket test or a golf competition ("Now what about this? Stroganoff has never before scored three or more under par in a round in a competitive match in Scotland when it was raining!") But it was also said several times to be an historic occasion. Now as a History graduate with a continuing interest in the subject I know a bit about historic occasions and events. They're ones people in the future judge to be very important, so they're still being discussed and taught about hundreds of years later. Things are important because they affect the lives of a lot of people. For example, the invention of the printing press was an historic event. So was the climactic last day of the struggle for air superiority over southern England in 1940 known as the Battle of Britain. So was the unification of the Chinese kingdoms and Luther's nailing his 95 theses to the church wall. I'd suggest the Diamond Jubilee is not an historic event because it will change nothing of consequence; neither will the precise length of Queen Elizabeth II's reign affect many lives much outside the royal family.


It was claimed that the queen was Britain, which would be dangerous if it were to be taken seriously, and that we Britons were unified in her - but how? For what purpose? Creating what action? The great majority of Britons were unified in 1939-45 by a difficult and dangerous task and an external threat, though not a few were outside that unity (Fascist sympathisers, criminals exploiting the absence of the younger, fitter policemen and the wish to find a way round rationing, suffering people who considered any peace better than the bombing, idealistic pacifists) but that unity was against something and for something and there were practical and urgent reasons to co-operate. The unity of celebrations like the one just gone seems to me to be no more than a warm feeling, though to give her credit, Elizabeth II has always made an effort to encourage us to be inclusive, tolerant and to some extent internationalist.


She's done a pretty good job, an alienating and troublesome job despite the perks, but I want to think about the monarchy in general, not one monarch. What are the arguments for it? These perhaps:

*The royal family has a lot of experience in the job
*It's healthy to separate the quasi-religious function of emblem of the nation from practical political power because ruthless political leaders as Presidents can exploit the feeling that they represent some kind of mystic national identity to overcome opposition
*In the British system, even in a republican version, the President would not have anything like the power of the Prime Minister and would probably be a rather colourless figure, perhaps a semi-retired politician not quite successful enough to make prime minister
*It represents a lot of history
*People like to look up to a royal, even a minor royal opening some event that would run very well without them.


And the arguments against? Perhaps these:
*It's far more expensive than an Irish, German or Indian-style presidency
*Being a member of the royal family for life does some strange things to people and it may be better to have a president who was a normal person living a fairly normal life for most of his or her life
*Our monarchs have become understandably so cautious about the slightest intervention in actual politics that the role of the head of state as a kind of umpire, helping to facilitate some order after a chaotic election result or government breakdown, challenging an overweening prime minister so that at least Parliament gives proper consideration to his or her proposals in the light of full information (as didn't happen over the Iraq war) and making occasional verbal interventions when the constitution or basic values of the country seem to be at risk, has been lost. Irish and German presidents, for example, can fulfil this function because they are elected, and it's healthy for democracy.
*Through no fault of the monarch, the monarchy stands at the apex of a system of honours, distinctions, gradations and instinctive inequality (though the Scandinavian monarchies seem to have cut this link).


There is much more that could be said. Any views?

Politically Correct

Once upon a time, "PC" in Britain meant "Police Constable". It still does. However, now it may also mean "Personal Computer" or "politically correct", so you could have a PC PC with a PC. Interesting though police constables and personal computers are, I want to focus on those two devious words "politically correct". I believe the term originated in the U.S.A. as a reaction against tight social or organisational control on what people could say. While essentially the same issues of racism, sexism, disablism and so on exist in the U.S. and the U.K., together with the same approaches to opposing them, it seems clear that the U.S. culture has been more prescriptive and restrictive than the U.K.'s: things that very few people would object to someone saying in the U.K. would meet with shock and condemnation in the U.S., and I'm not talking about grossly racist or sexist language. In its origin, then, the term may have been a healthy revolt against too much unthinking prescription. The culture of "political correctness", correctly understood, is not a matter of challenging possibly hurtful or contemptuous words, but of ruling them socially inadmissable, thus preventing debate and open learning. The term crossed the Atlantic at a time when we in the U.K. had come nearer to an orthodoxy of language on sensitive issues than before or after. It was used vigorously in the media to hold up to ridicule people who said terms like "manhole cover" or "history" were sexist or that a local council should not talk about "Christmas". However, most of the examples which hit the tabloid press were invented, the ban on talking about manhole covers being a classic example. There was indeed, I know, an attempt to rename women's history as herstory (a misunderstanding, as "history" is from Latin "historia", a story, and nothing to do with male gender) - but the draft council document concerned was promptly changed, with down-to-earth criticism, by the committed feminist councillor it went to for approval. History survived. The orthodoxy of language declined, except in the field of disability issues. Now on both sides of the Atlantic it's used almost entirely to sneer. Object to offensive language and it's very likely someone will say, "Oh, right - political correctness!" To question why there are no Black people working in reception, or no women in senior management, is "politically correct" - and as soon as the dread two words have been uttered, people think the argument can be dismissed. So what started as a challenge to unthinking orthodoxy has become unthinking orthodoxy itself. Such is life. This is not to say that there aren't still reasonable points that end to get frowned at (the unreasonable ones should be easy to rebut in argument). For example, there is undoubtedly racial and religious discrimination in the U.K., but does either explain why the socio-economic profile of ethnic Bangladeshi Muslims has been improving while that of Pakistani Muslims has flatlined - or in particular why Bangladeshi women are improving their work status faster than their Pakistani counterparts? Might there not be a factor to do with those communities? I can think of places where saying this would make one to be looked at with great suspicion - but far more places where challenging the term "Paki" would be unpopular. Now the term "political correctness" is being used to disparage any kind of political values or commitment. I recently went on a trip to a brew-pub which was strongly committed to environmentally responsible practices. On the way back someone commented that the brewer's methods were "not just politically correct, they make money." From the way "politically correct" was pronounced, I gathered that it was odd or ridiculous to want to reduce your negative impact on the environment, but fine to be motivated by profit. So it may be politically incorrect to say so, but I wish we'd stop taking about political correctness.

What is a Liberal - to me?

When I last posted I described how the term "Liberal" has come to mean different things in different places, its roots, and how it evolved in Britain. I ended by describing the party I joined at the end of 1966 as I saw it then.

So if I told someone I was a Liberal and they didn't understand, roughly what would I say?

The constitution of the Liberal Party (before merger with the Social Democratic Party) said Liberals "put freedom first". All other political creeds have at best a conditional adherence to freedom. Nationalism, for example, can be advanced along with freedom or at its expense. Many early social democrats in the Labour movement supported free expression and democracy in Britain because they were the established culture and convenient channels for creating a fairer, more rational and better planned society: elsewhere, as in the Soviet Union, they saw these things as disposable if the end result was their kind of society. But "freedom" means almost as varied things to different people as "Liberal" does.

At its most basic it indicates an absence of control. That can't be absolute, or society would disintegrate, but if I am prevented by law from drinking alcohol, criticising the founder of the state or painting my house in vivid, clashing colours, those are limitations of my freedom. Some limitations are justified to protect the interests of other people or life forms, such as limitations on late night noise or on killing rare animals. But it isn't only the law that stops me doing things. If I'm blind and paraplegic, for example, a mere absence of help will profoundly limit what I can do. In a profoundly poor, disadvantaged community, I may not need a legal ban to tell me I won't be a judge or conduct an orchestra or sail in the Olympics. This leads to a concept of freedom as maximising people's potential. The term "potential" is loaded with hidden value-judgements (what if my potential is to be a brilliant serial killer?), However, I support the idea that maximising people's opportunities is an aspect of freedom and Liberalism. Where I disagree with the "economic Liberals" who have gained leading positions in the British Liberal Party in recent years is that I see opportunities closed off by poverty, by hatred and discrimination and by the actions of big business more than by the legal restrictions imposed by a democratic state.

For Liberals, freedom is freedom of the individual. The freedom of a nation or people from a wider state - of Scotland from Britain, Corsica from France or the Tamils of Sri Lanka from Sri Lanka - should be valued if it contributes to individual freedom, but not otherwise. But stress on individual freedom can lead to an atomistic view of society, again seen among "economic liberals" and Thatcherites, viewing society as separate individuals pursuing individual goals and impeded by government. In fact, we achieve freedom and awareness collectively through relationships. Political freedom is protected by a web of free organisations, universities, trade unions, political parties, residents' associations, pressure groups and charities, churches and other religious groups. When we join and get involved in something like this we are not buying something in the market - we're sharing in common action for something we judge to be valuable.

Promoting such activity is for me essential to Liberalism. We are more free if we can influence our human environment (laws, institutions, roads, buildings, education, social care) and do so by such free association. A passive society getting on with its economic activity and voting every few years for a centralised government might satisfy a social democrat (no intention to refer to the SDP here) because it might be relatively fair and benign economically, but it should not satisfy a Liberal. Hence Liberal support for all kinds of devolution of power aimed at bringing power nearer to people.

The more unequal society is, the more freedom is restricted because masses of people have little choice and little influence on what is done in their name. An academic Liberal when I was a student argued that Liberals and (democratic) Socialists both valued freedom and equality, but the Liberals put freedom first when the two conflicted. I'd add, or amend, that Liberals and Socialists both want equality, but Socialists are more interested in equality of wealth and Liberals in equality of power. Centralised command socialism tries to achieve a degree of equality of wealth and creates profound inequalities of power. Liberals pursue political reforms and local activism to redistribute power, but in an extremely economically unequal society, the rich will always use the power much more effectively than the poor.

There is one last aspect of modern Liberalism very important to me. When I joined the party, raising environmental issues (as I did) made you seem a bit odd in any political party. The business-first economic Liberal parties of some European states are not greatly interested in green issues, but the Liberal Democrats in Britain have pursued them harder than the other mainstream parties (unless you're Welsh, as Plaid Cymru (Welsh nationalists) seems to me to have much better environmental credentials than the SNP (Scottish nationalists). It isn't very obvious to me how this dovetails with the rest of Liberalism, but I suggest seeing the rest of creation as having value and rights independent of human interests (a "deep green" position) is a logical extension of Liberal internationalism and opposition to narrow hatreds and fears such as in racism.

Now someone might point out the Liberal Democrats of Britain are currently in a Conservative-led coalition which is doing some not very Liberal things by the criteria I've suggested. True - and it's doing some Liberal things (stopping I.D. cards, abolishing the default retirement age, tax reductions targeted at the lowest-paid). But the experience of power and of coalition have led to soul and mind searching by Liberals, revisiting questions like "What is a Liberal?". I think that's healthy - and I'll never accept the answer is just "Someone wanting a weak state and an absence of government restriction on civil liberties plus more freedom for business and for individuals to buy what they want in the market".

I'm a Social Liberal. I want a Liberal society.

What is a Liberal? 1: A Bit of History and Geography

I am a Liberal. I find that the term is used by people who have no stake in it to mean things I don't recognise - and sometimes by people who do have a stake in it. It also means different things in different places - so I thought I'd define what it meant to me.

It isn't altogether strange that the word means such different things in different countries: after all, the military dictatorship of Myanmar (Burma) calls itself Socialist, as does the main French centre-left party, which has its faults but is certainly democratic and civilian; and the same word was used by Communist dictatorships and by British Labour Party leaders who tied Britain closely to NATO, the USA and a hostile stand-off with the Communist regimes after the Second World War. "Conservative" might mean similar things around the world, but that's because it's perhaps more a condition than a programme or a philosophy; and European Conservatism has little of the moral majority flavour of U.S. Conservatism.

In the U.S., Liberal means something like "left-wing" or "social democratic" in Europe. In much of continental Europe Liberalism is seen as a creed of individual liberty and free enterprise, naturally aligned against high taxation, a strong state and a powerful church, and kinder to business interests than the Conservatives, Nationalists or Christian Democrats. South American Liberals are traditionally anti-clerical.

The roots of the word are, I believe, in early 19th century Spain, applied to reformers who opposed absolute royal power and challenged the Catholic Church on some issues. It has Latin origins and meant either "free" or "generous". Britain had a Liberal Party from the 1860s, but that party had much older roots, being a merger of Radicals (left democrats often accused of being rabble-rousers and crypto-revolutionaries) with a larger group of Whigs, a party tracing its roots back to opposition to the King in the 1670s and even to the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War and that of the Covenanters in Scotland. So there are some emerging themes - opposition to unlimited power, plus defence of individual and collective rights against a powerful centre.

The Liberal Party in Britain generally stood for the removal of privileges and barriers, for example the restriction of access to universities by religion, and led the gradual process of extending the vote to more and more groups during the 19th century. A commitment to free trade was seen as part of this opposition to unfair and divisive barriers and privileges. In the late 19th century the party increasingly perceived that liberty as well as compassion required an assault on extremes of poverty, and the Liberal Government of 1905-14 laid the foundations of a system of social insurance. Although the Whigs had once been a rather warlike party, Liberals were always more suspicious of military adventure and empire than their main opponents.

The rapid replacement of the Liberal Party by Labour as the main anti-Conservative party in the 1920s meant a deep decline but also to a painful process of redefinition and rededication in roughly the period 1928-1962.

So what came out of that? It matters to me because I joined the party as a student at the end of 1966.

I was joining a party that was uneasy with the facile categories of left and right, but on most issues stood on the left. It was not hostile to the state, but opposed what it saw as unnecessary growth of state power such as nationalisation of some industries. It defended individual liberty in moral matters and preached a revival of local initiative and collective self-help, instead of the centralisation and command planning popular with Labour at that time. It was internationalist, and without arguing against commitment to NATO and suchlike, sought a way out of military stockpiling and the Cold War. It was interested in giving real power to employees in companies. While less suspicious of business interests than Labour, it was not a "businessmen's party" as some continental Liberal parties had become.

Perhaps what attracted me most was the commitment to facilitating local, free, collective action wherever possible instead of either passive acceptance of central state power or big business power.

Next time I'll try to define what I mean when I say I'm a Liberal and what that means for British Liberalism now.

Equality of Outcome and of Opportunity

These two terms are much bandied about. The first demands some questions, particularly, "Equality of what outcome?". It often refers to wealth or income (which are not the same), but also to health and other measures of a good life. Absolute equality of outcome would require that if you and I were born on the same day, we would die on the same day with the same amount in our bank balances. That's a reductio ad absurdum: obviously if you aim at equality of outcome, you try to reduce income differentials and things like big differences in life expectancy between different parts of the country (or world?). You'll never eliminate the differences.

It would have surprised early American politicians like Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln that many Americans today assume that any move towards greater equality of outcome must be at the expense of freedom. To shift the burden of taxes away from low-income people towards high-income people, for example, does not diminish freedom. To give someone who would have died through poverty the chance to live through medical treatment is to increase freedom. Whether the measures needed to reduce inequality of outcome would damage the economy to the disbenefit of all, is a question of economic management and not of freedom.

Despite these questions, equality of outcome, once you've clarified what the outcome is, should be easy to measure, and we do it all the time. Go to a government statistics site and you can see how much average incomes in the South-east of England are higher than in the North-east, or how much longer people can expect to live in London than in Glasgow. In the UK, differentials of income and wealth have been increasing for some thirty years (the gap between rich and poor getting proportionately larger) while reducing health inequalities has proved hard and often unrewarding work. Of course, the simplest, quickest, most reliable way of reducing health inequalities between social classes or localities would be to go and make life really miserable for the rich people, but this has not yet been attempted.

Now to come clean. I've chosen not to be particularly up-front about either my religious or my political commitments on this blog, since the very subjects would turn some people off, and knowing the name of my commitment would turn others off, whereas we might otherwise have communicated. But here goes on one of those points: I'm a Liberal in terms of political philosophy and heart, and a Liberal Democrat member. WARNING: this does not mean what it means either in the US, or in Australia, or in most of continental Europe (not quite). "Liberal" in the US means what we would call "left-wing". In Australia it's the name of the main right-wing party. In much of continental Europe, it indicates support for unrestricted capitalism and individualism, plus civil rights. Here it indicates a commitment to individual freedom (but how that's understood is a big issue), to empowering individuals and communities, and to a concept of individual self-realisation through community and relationships. Of course, some people would disagree with that. Socialist, Conservative and Nationalist aren't easy to define, either.

Some people on the right of the UK Liberal Democrats state that Liberals believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. This is stated as if it was incontrovertible fact on the website of the right-Liberal think-tank "Reform".

Well, historically Liberals fought discrimination and barriers that debarred some people from some opportunities, for example Catholics from Oxford and Cambridge or low-income people from voting. They believed that if these barriers were removed, a more equal society would result. There were plenty of barriers and perks to fight, so the focus was not on inequality that survived removing discrimination. By the late 19th century, though, many Liberals were pointing out the dangers of widening inequality of outcome, and the Liberal government of 1905-14 introduced the first national measures of social insurance.

I pointed out some queries and difficulties around the concept of equality of outcome, but those around the concept of equality of opportunity are far, far, greater.

The concept works very well when applied to clearly defined and limited circumstances, for example in working out whether illegal discrimination has taken place. Ravinder, who is ethnic Indian, and Paul, who is ethnic white UK, have applied for the same job. Ravinder had better qualifications, wrote a clearer and more comprehensive application, and wasn't recorded as making any mistakes at interview. Some jotted notes from the interview show Paul slipped up on important points, and yet he got the job. An industrial tribunal would almost certainly find illegal discrimination had occurred on grounds of race (or maybe gender if Ravinder is female: the name is unisex). What we're doing here is taking the two applicants as they were at the start of the application process and comparing fate with demonstrable strengths.

But equality of opportunity as preached in politics wouldn't start there. If one of these people had gained an advantage from living in a prosperous area with good schools, and the other lived in a depressed area with poor schools, for example, that would be inequality of opportunity. But if you include that, why not the quality of parental care or even the advantages and disadvantages conferred by your genes? If we take measures to counteract the disadvantage Ravinder experiences through being blind or dyslexic, it is a disputable decision to leave aside less clearcut disadvantages experienced by Paul: perhaps he thinks rather slowly or struggles with abstract concepts. In practice we may resolve this by a practical test of whether the disadvantage could be overcome so the person could do a good job. If we want to take action to reduce the disadvantage Ravinder suffered through having poor parents and living in Salford, what about the disadvantage Paul suffered through having parents who were uncaring or locked in battle in Surrey? It's pretty obvious that such a start will have made it harder for him to take full advantage of opportunities offered.

In other words, it seems to me that equality of opportunity is a useful concept applied in a limited way, but as a political ideal, slips through your fingers. While equality of outcome as an ideal ignores the impact of free decisions (for example, some people are prepared to make big sacrifices to be rich and others aren't; I may freely choose to eat some unhealthy food because I enjoy it), ignoring it or abandoning it leads to widening inequalities which make equality of opportunity in any sense harder to achieve and lead to more divided, disorderly, unsafe societies.

Liberals (UK meaning) have historically been more concerned with inequalities of power than of wealth, while socialists have been the other way around; but great inequalities of wealth increase inequalities of power. Similarly, trying to reduce inequalities of wealth by planning and command without involving local communities increases inequalities of power and often thereby of wealth.

There is of course a third equality, of esteem (which I think is what "created equal" means). But if you appear to be poor, are you treated with the same esteem by most people as if you appear to be rich? Try it.

Headlines

This will be a familiar experience to those who still buy a newspaper (you know, one of those flat, rustly hard-copy things). You get it in your hands and curiosity drives you to check out the headlines or the front-page picture.

If you have a walk with the thing, as I do now, speculation is given more time to flourish while you have limited opportunities to read if you don't want to have an intimate encounter with a lamp-post.

This is not on the level of the tabloid which once headlined STRIP CLUBS SHOCK: MAGISTRATES MAY ACT ON INDECENT SHOWS (what roles would they be acting?, but I did speculate on the "Observer"'s "BLUNKETT IN SECRET MURDOCH PAYOUT OVER NEWS OF THE WORLD PHONE HACKING CLAIMS". Had David Blunkett when Home Secretary ordered Rupert Murdoch's phone to be hacked? Surely not - the Murdoch press was a New Labout friend then.

As for "ANGRY CLEGG TURNS FIRE ON CAMERON OVER EUROPE VETO", I was merely speculating how this would play in the Far East: "ANGLY CREGG TURNS FIRE ON CAMELON OVER EULOPE VETO". A camelon, of course, is a temperamental beast of burden used by King Arthur and his knights. Hmm, his first years at Eton may have been very much like that.

The Dirty Word Politics

Overheard from local TV news, an item about an NHS (public sector) hospital which had run into a lot of criticism, including from local members of parliament: an MP saying, "This is NOT about politics, it's about patient care." Presumably the senior doctors, who had hit back at the criticism, had accused her of "playing politics".

Now politics, as I argued in my posting on the pitfalls of being customer-centred, is the process by which any open society resolves disputes. You don't do it by diktat of the King or the President-for-Life, or by flipping a coin, or by selling the decision to the highest bidder. You do it by a process of debate and a decision by someone who can be called to account. There are many blots and weaknesses in the process, but the alternatives are not attractive and bad politics does not damn politics any more than bad football damns football or bad soup damns soup.

So did the MP think the care of hospital patients was outside politics? Seems to me if politicians behaved as if such a thing was nothing to do with them, we wouldn't be pleased. "Playing politics", however, refers to irresponsible politics for short-term party or personal gain, which is a bad thing and should be punished by criticism and by voters' votes - though in my experience any politician who raises something uncomfortable for the people in power gets accused of playing politics, just as media are when wrongdoing is exposed.

Earlier today I visited a website where there was discussion of the punishment of a politician who'd been convicted of falsely claiming expenses (those who share my background will know it was Lord Reservoir). He came in for a lot of understandable stick. But one commenter said all politicians were crooked. Now you may find this hard to accept, but that isn't true. At the very least, some politicians are more honest than others. If you react to corruption or other obvious wrongs by saying "they're all the same", that excuses the corrupt and cynical of all political punishment. If you are cynical and venal, you do something wrong and people don't blame you any more than all the other politicians, how can the system be made cleaner? If people react by saying, "I won't vote any more," that suits the exploiters fine.

Liam Fox

Apologies to the non-Brits following this blog, unless they're interested in UK politics. This is a posting about the hot news in the UK political scene, the resignation of the Secretary of State for Defence, Liam Fox. He was a big figure in the government not only because Defence is a big job, but also because he was effectively the leader of the right-wing Conservatives.

An old and close friend of his, Adam Werrity, had accompanied him on a whole lot of official visits and also unofficial visits where he met important people abroad. This guy had no position in the government or the Conservative Party and had not been security-checked, but he descibed himself on headed notepaper as an adviser to Fox. He'd collected a lot of money for Fox's political campaigns and favourite pressure-groups and a reasonable guess was that he was looking for favours back. Not surprising that Liam Fox resigned. He's being replaced by a less controversial figure, Phil Hammond, who despite being a Conservative and a businessman, took great care when new in office as Transport minister to be even-handed about a high-profile, big-impact strike at British Airways, saying in effect that both sides needed to get down at a table and talk and give ground.

Now here's my particular comment. What about the Ministry of Defence civil servants and the secret intelligence people? Did none of them say, "Who is this guy? He's picking up sensitive information, even if he's not in on the closed session meetings, and he might be a security risk. Secretary of State, this can't go on!"? Are they so complacent or so cowed that they didn't sound a warning in a year and a half? If so, something is badly wrong. Or did they sound a warning and it was ignored, which would be much more serious not only for Fox but for Cameron?