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.

Dying to speak

I've just finished reading a book about the European revolutions of 1989, when Communist regimes crumbled one after one in Eastern and central Europe. I lived through that period, albeit in a Western democracy, and the account revived memories. As a History graduate, it struck me very strongly that nothing like this had happened anywhere since the European revolutions of 1848, which were spread by railways above all else (and those of 1989 by TV and radio, while the "Arab Spring" was hugely influenced by the internet. The 1848 revolutionaries' successes were mostly very short-lived. While many of the new governments ran into trouble and people became disillusioned, none of the countries involved have returned to anything like the old system and in all of them except Romania democracy seems reasonably secure.

People faced hounding from their jobs (OK, not to unemployment, but a professor could end up as a cleaner), were imprisoned, beaten up and killed for their beliefs and their refusal to give up. Families were deliberately and insidiously wrecked.

So those of us who never had to risk death or disgrace to speak our mind or vote in a free election shouldn't take these things lightly or say they are of no value.

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.

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?

The Odanglesex Chronicles: The Away Day (2)

Before I take you to Odanglesex County Council, let me apologise to visitors to the site who will have found nothing new for two weeks. I was on holiday, walking the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path, and coming back with a tan (if you didn't know I'm basically white, you do now), memories of beautiful cliff scenery and a lot of quite spectacular bosses and ridges of hard skin on my toes.

Because it's over two weeks since I posted Part 1 of The Away Day, here's a recap. The Director of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision in Odanglesex County Council, Kenneth Spotlessnob, has decided his extensive empire should have an away-day to think out of the box, engage in blue-sky thinking, reconnect with strategic priorities, network and chase one another through a muddy assault course. He is himself too busy with important things to arrive at the start of the event, but for everyone else, it's a whole day thing. Most of the organisation is being handled by a senior underling, Dale Brashcon, and Kenneth's PA, Kelly Pattrick, and the publicity is with Dale.

Usually I record great events at OCC by reproducing a series of e-mails, but this will not work for the Away Day itself, so I'm fictionalising it as a story.

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As Transformational Excellence Officer Reema Narlikar parked her ageing Saab and decanted colleague and friend Scott Fitzwilliam (whose souped-up Mini had fallen ill again) into the car park of the William Wayneflete Outdoor Activity Centre, she was a little concerned to see how full the car-park was. OK she'd taken one wrong turning (well, two, but the second had been a farm track soon reversed out of), but they did still have thirteen minutes before the start, didn't they? It was "arrive by 9:00", wasn't it? A wave from her immediate boss Hamish Carpenter, his unruly head and beard hair briefly ruly, reassured her. He seemed to be getting a lift from his daughter, unless there was something the rumour machine hadn't registered.

The three colleagues walked together to the obvious entrance under the big sign (ODANGLESEX COUNTY COUNCIL
WILLIAM WAYNEFLETE OUTDOOR ACTIVITY CENTRE
and a green smiley sea-monster). With old-fashioned courtesy, Hamish waved Reema ahead. She strode to the door and tried the handle. The door was locked.

"Yeah, it really is locked. The bell doesn't seem to work and I've hammered on it!" said a familiar voice from a distance. The figure sitting on a low wall was lean, lithe and bespectacled. "I'm just waiting for Kelly to arrive, or someone with the key. We've definitely got the day right," Mike Finnegan added.

"I'll see if I can spot anything through a window," Hamish said. He did indeed spot something - a group of old ladies who either weren't OCC employees or internal communication was even worse than he thought - and as he stared at them, one of them saw him and screamed - but then he came on a side entrance. The door was open.

"First test passed," said Kelly Pattrick, making an entry on a form. "Thinking out of the box - spatial awareness - initiative - working with multiple options. Fail on leadership because you haven't brought anyone with you. Come in. Tea and coffee through there, coats and bags there, toilets there, interfaith or philosophy quiet room there. Hello, Reema."

Familiar faces were looking serious over coffee. The Directorate was beginning to gather, but clearly most had not yet arrived, or at least found the entrance, and not all the parked cars were theirs. Dale Brashcon, in charge, buzzed around those present like an inflated, untied balloon just let free.

Scott, alerted by the strange affair of the locked door, looked around for anything they should be doing and spotted some sides of flipchart paper pinned to the wall with a roughly-drawn grid on each and a series of odd words. Three sets of initials had been entered on the grids, but there was no indication of what the words meant. Reema joined him. He raised his eyebrows. She wrinkled her nose. Language was unnecessary.

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Odanglesex Chronicles - The Beasts of the Jungle (2)

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob, Assistant Chief Executive and Director of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision TO: Anton Wilks, Director of Content Simeon Lascelles, Director of Spatial Exploration and Direction Management Hilda Wrass, Director of Cultural Transformation bcc: Neil Balderson, Assistant Director of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision Colleagues: Thanks for making the really positive meeting where Anton explained how he saw content management developing under his tutelage. I hope Anton won't mind me saying the rest of us found it really fascinating and are excited by the challenges of working together in a totally transformational way. FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob TO: Neil Balderson cc: Dale Brashcon, Deputy Assistant Director of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision Neil: Thanks for your invaluable comments on the position we should take concerning ownership of content in TESV and how we can make sure Anton's efforts are directed into positive and forward-looking channels. FROM: Anton Wilks, Director of Content TO: Hilda Wrass, Director of Cultural Transformation Hilda: thanks for sending me the draft text of the OCC Christmas Pageant. I don't really have any comment on it and didn't expect my directorate to intervene in content management at this level. FROM: Anton Wilks TO: Simeon Lascelles Simeon: Thanks for the draft of your directorate five-year plan. What exactly is spatial exploration? FROM: Anton Wilks TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob Kenneth: I thought we'd agreed a structure for joint working when we met with Hilda and Simeon, but I'm finding my directorate bombarded with requests for approval of things like a response to a government consultation on community waste management and even an internal e-mail about the Chairman's charity (the Richard Plantagenet Ill Horse Home). Can we meet again to sort this out? FROM: Kelly Pattrick, PA to Kenneth Spotlessnob TO: Anton Wilks Kenneth's identified three dates when he could meet you as you requested. He asked me to apologise that they're all nearly three months ahead, but his diary is very full. FROM: Edelbertha Spengler, Chief Executive TO: Anton Wilks CONFIDENTIAL Anton - just a word in your ear. You're operating in a different culture and it's not entirely wise to suggest that the Chairman's charity, government policy on community waste disposal or Christmas are unimportant. Just a matter of presentation. FROM: Edelbertha Spengler TO: All Directors FOR CASCADE In order to move ever faster towards our aim of permanent transformational excellence, I've decided a rejig of cross-cutting responsibilities is needed to streamline delivery. The major cross-cutting responsibilities of Content are now to come under Hilda Wrass and the Directorate of Content will be phased out between now and August. This means, unfortunately, we are bidding goodbye to Anton Wilks and I would like to thank him for all the valuable work he's done with us over the past six months.

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.

The Odanglesex Chronicles: The Partnership (2)

FROM: Tamara Gold, Chair, COCVS; Chair, Odanglesex Safer Cycling Partnership

TO: All OSCP

Colleagues:

Just to update you that following the adoption of the Action Plan and everyone going away with actions they're responsible for, we've already made the following progress:

* Police have agreed to monitor the Dark Hill Gibbet and Unwelcome Sailor roundabouts on a regular basis, using cameras to record dangerous and aggressive driving.

* Hamish has gained the approval of his Children's colleagues for a questionnaire to go to all Head teachers asking about cycle facilities and cycling campaigns.

* Seven local businesses have agreed to sponsor cycle safety leaflets and short spots on Radio Odangle.

* The German Attraction, who are the third largest fashion retailer in Odanglesex, have started a cycle-to-work scheme for their employees and their Chief Exec has already joined it.

* Hottchester Borough are eliminating the break in the cycle track on Devonish Mary Avenue around the Lion and Garter to make the track continuous.

* Cllr Bill Waynflete has agreed to give us some publicity outside County Hall next week and has got his old bike out of the garden shed.

* "CYCLISTS CROSSING" signs are already up at that site near Weatherden Lows Farm on the A123!

No news yet on the replacement of the cycle sheds at County Hall demolished last year for the Festival of Odanglesex celebrations, but we live in hope.


FROM: Neil Balderson, Senior Transformational Excellence Manager

TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob, Assistant Chief Executive and Director of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision

cc: Dale Brashcon, Transformational Excellence Champion


Kenneth:

I feel I should share some concerns about the direction of the Odanglesex Safer Cycling Partnership. The Partnership has approved an action plan without going through the Odanglesex Action Planning Tool Framework and it does not reference either the relevant Odanglesex Value (Moving where we want when we want) or Strategic Plan Commitments 3, 13 and 17 (promoting local business especially bus transport and road haulage; liberating Odanglesex from unnecessary restrictions on parking; ensuring a transformational experience for all through the Olympics). These were of course incorporated entirely into the Strategic Vision Plan of the Odanglesex Community Partnership.

I suggest we should call a halt until the Partnership can be dovetailed more productively into the Community Partnership.

FROM: Kelly Pattrick, PA to Kenneth Spotlessnob

TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob

Kenneth:

I don't know if you've seen the West Odanglesex Bugle today. The article headed COUNCILLOR COMES UNSTUCK is what I have in mind: "Odanglesex County Council leader Cllr Bill Waynflete came a copper yesterday (I think they mean 'cropper'). While attempting to promote the County Council's latest loony hippy scheme aimed at bringing on another ice age, leader Bill Waynflete fell off his bike. He had stopped to kiss a baby when his bike overbalanced. Mother of five Kaylee Lee said: 'My poor little Ricky is traumatised and I'm considering sueing.' Cllr Waynfete was not available for comment last night."

FROM: Neil Balderson, Senior Transformational Excellence Champion, Odanglesex County Council

TO: All Odanglesex Safer Cycling Partnership

Colleagues: in order to connect the OSCP more fruitfully to the Odanglesex Community Partnership and to achieve input from OCC's Strategic Review, the next meeting of OSCP has been cancelled. Another will be announced in due course.

FROM: Hamish Carpenter, Transformational Excellence Manager

TO: Tamara Gold

Sorry, Tamara, this came as a shock to me too. I did assume Neil had spoken to you! Will from the Police has already been asking what's going on and I don't think they're pleased either. I'll speak to Kenneth and see what we can do.

from ED'S JOB, the blog of OCC Chief Executive Edelbertha Spengler

Hello again! I know when you all get up in the morning you're raring to get to work and do something really exciting, so that time between the alarm clock going off and sitting down at your desk (if you have a desk) can go by in a bit of a blur - but I want you to think about it. How long does your journey to work take? Does your choice of mode of travel cut down any trees? Do you smile at people on the way?

I asked myself all those questions after Cllr Waynflete's magnificent efforts for cycling - and what was the result? I got the old bike out. It took me a while to work out what was wrong with it (my son pointed out a wheel was missing) but as soon as we'd fixed that I was off! I got on again and cycled happily down the pavement waving at everybody I met and shouting greeting - and they shouted back! Isn't that marvellous? So I want you all to seriously consider getting on a bike this week and going somewhere - preferably County Hall.

FROM: Dale Brashcon

TO: Neil Balderson

Good news! The Odanglesex Community Partnership Standing Working Group on Traffic Congestion has agreed to add promotion of responsible cycling to its ToR as new point nineteen.

The Odanglesex Chronicles: The Agile Stationery Strategy (5)

FROM: Brett West, Head of Modernisation and Business Practice

TO: All Directors and Heads of Service

The implementation of the Agile Stationery Strategy has been impressive and with 93% of ordering officers now trained by Piers, Gaveston, Edwards, the small teething problems over ordering should now be a thing of the past. However, the next quantum leap is to change the nature of our relationship with stationery. On our transformational journey towards the paperless office, OCC should have far less need of hard copy stationery.

Early indications are that our expenditure on stationery is some 62% above what an agile modern organisation of our size should need. Moreover, as some units have been complaining that they are unable to execute orders, overcoming these technical blips will mean expenditure on stationery orders strays further from the optimum. An admittedly impressionistic impression is that stationery reserves are still more extensive than we need, indicating some orders are unnecessary and that valuable space is being employed in a suboptimal fashion. Consequently consultants commissioned from A4Page will be visiting offices during the next five weeks to scope the size of stationery reserves in all directorates.

FROM: Hamish Carpenter, Senior Transformational Excellence Officer

TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob, Assistant Chief Executive and Director of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision

Kenneth:

Yesterday Mike and Reema came into the office and found a man with a visitor badge apparently stealing stationery. They blocked his exit and called security who arrived and summoned the police. The police have now informed us the man worked for A4Page and was employed to check stationery reserves. I subsequently had a rather unpleasant call from Brett West saying I should have knowwn about this and we've undermined the partnership relationship with A4Page.

I dodn't know we had a relationship with them or that a stationery check was in process. Is that correct?

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob

TO: All transformational Excellencew and Strategic Vision

Colleagues:

I thought you should know about the spot checks described by Brett West in the attached memo. This is a milepost on our Agile Stationery Strategy journey.

FROM: Brett West

TO: All Directors and Heads of Unit

Following the checks carried out for us by A4Page, it has become clear that current stationery reserves in all Directorates and Enhanced Capability Units except Chief Executive's exceed levels set in the Agile Stationery Strategy by 29 - 104%. Ed has therefore agreed to place a stop on all stationery orders for the next six months except for Chief Executive's and Member Services.


to be continued and concluded...

King David and the Knights of the Mahogany Table: The Fall of Good Sir Fredwyn

When King David was still young and his knights had not sat down around the mahogany table, for an evil power possessed it, his rule was challenged by young Prince Nicholas, who ruled in the wild and barren mountains of Scotia, and in Devonia, and the wilderness of Cheshire, and the dank marshes of Somerset,and the far hills of Brecon and of Carshalton. The armies of King David and of Prince Nicholas fought bloody and desperate battles in Hereford, and in Wells, and Richmond, and in Somerton and even unto Frome, in the land of the people of the horn, that in the vulgar tongue is Cornwall, and on the bleak hills of Westmorland; and many valorous and noble knights were sore wounded.

Then said King David unto Prince Nicholas: "Why do we not work together, and cast the dark balrog out of the land of Downing, and sit together around the mahogany table and sup mead?

And Prince Nicholas said: "All right". So he swore allegiance to King David and in return his most noble followers were made knights of the mahogany table and supped mead.

Now in these days there was a noble knight called Good Sir Fredwyn, who guarded the caravans of gold out of Scotia into Camerlot, and out of Camerlot into Scotia. Many maidens swooned before his face and it was always found that when the caravan's journey was over, there was more gold than when it had started; and for that Good Sir Fredwyn was showered with jewels and handmaidens.

Then came a dark day when Sir Fredwyn came to the King, who said: "Where is the gold?" and Sir Fredwyn said, "I have lost it." Then the King and the whole court waxed wroth, and the king stripped him of his garter, and henceforth he was Good Fredwyn merely. And Sir Osborne, who attended the bedchamber of Queen Theresa, rejoiced, for no person would ask where the gold in his charge had gone, but revile Good Fredwyn. And Good Fredwyn went into the land of Twitter, among the elves and witches, and waxed wroth, and counted his gold, and felt better.


NOTE FOR NON-BRITS: Some possibly relevant facts:

The Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party is David Cameron.
The Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Democrats is Nick Clegg.
The Liberal Democrats are strong in South-west England (including Devon, Somerset and - if it's English - Cornwall) plus rural Scotland, Cheshire and South-west outer London.
The places where King David and Prince Nicholas battled are all marginal constituencies between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Somerton and Frome was particularly famous for having gone Liberal Democrat in 1997 by just 130 votes.
Sir Fred Goodwin was chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which overreached and crashed, having to be rescued by the government (I've toyed with the timing here, as the crash and rescue happened under the previous government). He was recently stripped of his knighthood.
George Osborne, a close ally of David Cameron, is Cahncellor of the Exchequer (that is, minister of finance).

The Odanglesex Chronicles: Some are more equal than others

FROM: Edelbertha Spengler, Chief Executive
TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob, Director Of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision

Kenneth:

Could your people cast an eye over this excerpt from a speech by the Secretary of State and see if there's anything we need to do?

"...and another thing. It's about time we stopped poncing around burbling on about equality and human rights. People in the Isle of Brent aren't bothered about that highfaluting nonsense any more than they are in Heckmondwike. Get the streets cleaned. Get the milk put out. Put vandals in prison. Those are the things that count. If I find any local authority wasting money on political correctness like equality monitoring I'll bloody have them tarred and feathered, and if my colleague Ken Priestley hasn't announced that last bit yet, he will".

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob
TO: Neil Balderson, Senior Transformational Excellence Manager

Neil: Please look into this asap for Ed.

FROM: Neil Balderson
TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob
cc: Hamish Carpenter, Transformational Excellence Manager

Kenneth:

Street cleaning is a district responsibility and milk transit pathways sit in the private sector. Imprisoning vandals is a matter for the police and the courts. So I think we're all right on this one. but I'll check with Hamish we're not doing anything the Secretary of State could judge to be politically correct.

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob
TO: Neil Balderson

Or politically incorrect.

FROM: Silesia Jones, Equality Consultant
TO: Neil Balderson; Hamish Carpenter

Neil/Hamish:

"Politically correct" is not a precise term. I certainly cannot reassure you that we aren't doing anything towards equality or human rights: for example, Councillor Wayneflete recently approved the reversal of a decision not to grant-aid the Isle of Brent Domestic Abuse Crisis Centre after lobbying by the Right Hon Fred Lardly, PC, MP, and also wrote a supportive foreword to our Equality Action Plan.

Fred Lardly's remarks should be put in the context of his speech four days earlier to a meeting of university vice chancellors:

"...now if you think that standing up for fair treatment for everyone irrespective of whether they're black, white, yellow or bloody purple with orange bits is a luxury that we can do without in hard times - think again. It's essential to the Big Society, civilisation and business efficiency, and that means knowing what's actually going on, so you'd better be able to tell me, or my friend Liz Fluffstone will be round."

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob
TO: Edelbertha Spengler

Ed:

I've made exhaustive enquiries concerning your query about the implications of Fred Lardly's speech, and there does not appear to be anything we need to do, especially in the light of his remarks in the House last night about "letting local authorities get on with the job and not interfering, not like that other bloody lot".

Kenneth.

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 Market and the Ballot (2)

As I suggested two days ago, the Market is great for reflecting individual choice in the present. It can be distorted by advertising campaigns - people buying a particular car or drink or footwear because they've bought the message that it'll make them young and popular and sexy and trendy, perhaps, when in fact it can't deliver most of these things - but customer pressures do quite often go against what the producers or retailers might like.

The question of what should be left to individual choice can usually be settled through John Stuart Mill's test. Does your choice hurt someone else (or, we might now add, for example drive a species extinct)? Some things cannot be settled by a series of separate individual choices: in my post on the dangers of being customer-centred, I gave an example of a controversy over proposals to cut down some trees in a public park. It is not possible for all the different users to have what they want, so a much-despised thing called politics intervenes to make a collective decision. As I suggested in that post, a danger of a zealous market approach to public services and decisions is that it undermines the understanding of community decision-making and co-operation and creates the expectation that individuals should always be able to get what they want; and when they don't, they turn against politics and democracy. Our species developed as a social animal making collective decisions: it's an essential part of being human.

Where an individual choice can be made without harming others though, as in a frail old person deciding to spend on making her garden accessible rather than on improvements within the house, it's of course far better than professionals deciding for her.

I am not usually one for conspiracy theories (they have abounded through history and very few of the alleged conspiracies have gained any support from evidence subsequently coming to light), I do suspect that behind the populist campaigns of the Murdoch press, for example, is a wish to denigrate public service, politics and democracy, not to bring in dictatorships, but to make people happy to see collective democratic decision-making replaced wherever possible by the market.

So would there be a problem? In some areas, yes - as if we can't understand the processes of debate and compromise that lead to a decision on that public park or library, we may end up with no public parks or libraries, only charged-for services far more accessible to the rich than the poor.

A few years back, two radical right Conservative writers embarked on a  series of articles on land and housing policy. They actually came up with some good points, such as that German local authorities' greater powers to raise local income from business led to more balanced decisions on building proposals; but in advocating the abolition of land planning, they proposed, in some detail, that government should not intervene in issues of wildlife habitat protection. If enough people wanted some marshes preserved for wildlife, they said, they could join the RSPB or whatever, pay subscriptions and donate, and their economic power would be measured against that of the developer.  Now this proposal was mad for several reasons, but I want to concentrate on one. Whereas in democracy everyone has one vote, to influence public decisions, in a free market power equates to spending power. A million people of modest means could support an organisation trying to establish or preserve a nature reserve and be "outvoted" by one billionaire or by a corporation made rich by consumers who would never have been consulted on the nature reserve and might be horrified at its destruction. The extreme pro-market approach is simply grossly inegalitarian: it assumes that the more money you have, the more power you should have in a straightforward relation: a hundred times the money,  a hundred times the power.

The Market and the Ballot: (1)

Over the last thirty years or so, in Britain and many other countries, the areas of life controlled by market processes have expanded at the expense of those controlled by government. In many cases, of course, the governments were not democratic - East European Communist regimes or African or Latin American military dictatorships, and the replacement of these regimes has been accompanied by marketisation of many areas of life, especially in Eastern Europe.

I want to concentrate on the existing democracies and to point out some of the dangers and losses along with the undoubted benefits of the triumph of the market.

Anyone who saw the old Soviet regime with open eyes, for example, would know how an absence of market mechanisms can distort and deaden so many areas of life. The shops do not stock what people want and they have no great incentive to attract customers or to sell. The customer does not matter - only what the state says the customer should want. Even in mixed-economy, democratic Finland in the 1970s the effects of the combination of a state monopoly on the sale of alcohol with planning policies that deliberately held down the number of bars and other alcohol consumption outlets below demand, were to disadvantage small producers, reduce choice and the quality of advice and leave bars with so much demand that they could afford to offer a bad service and be rude to customers because they would still make a profit.

The market is very good at reflecting customer choice where customers or families can make individual choices and where they are well-enough-informed to do so. This has been extended into some areas of public service, for example the "personalisation" of social care in the UK. In principle, people who need help such as frail old people, instead of being offered types of help they may not want, get a budget and can spend it as they like. There are risks, particularly with vulnerable people lacking good advice, but basically this is a liberal and empowering measure. Even where services are hard to break down to an individual choice - it would be impossibly inefficient for each household to make a free choice of their refuse collector - an element of competition can be healthy, with local authority providers competing with the private sector, social enterprises and one another. The benefit here is not an extension of personal choice, but a likelihood of better value for money.

In some areas, though, the market does not work well. Consumers may not be well-informed enough to make a good choice. For example, energy provision in the UK is theoretically a free market with competing providers, but the deals are so complicated and so often look good but on exhaustive study are bad, and the companies make it so hard to swap, that there is virtually no real competition and the vast majority of people are on deals substantially worse than they could get. This may well be through collusion, and in theory at least, action by a regulator could force changes which made the competition real. But the point is worth noting - that an unregulated market does not necessarily work for the best for consumers. This may be because take-overs and aggressive business tactics result in monopoly, which the state can and often does ban. But monopoly does not necessarily mean providers understand less about customer desires than in a competitive market. Let's compare rail travel or policing with credit cards or car insurance.

Policing is a state monopoly (though I could see that changing, with state-given powers for private security forces). The police do not suffer economic pain through loss of customers if their performance is poor or their actions unpopular. But people who are dissatisfied often complain - to the police, to the media, to their elected representatives. As the police know they need the support of the community to be effective, such pressures have an impact. and the police generally know lots about what people want of them. Some rail travellers have choice if a car journey would be a credible alternative, or a flight, or a bus journey: but in the UK, many commuters have no real choice. The car journey is too stressful, too comparatively unsafe, too difficult when it comes to parking, to be attractive, the buses are too slow and the airports too far from home or place of work. So people who feel aggrieved by changes in the timetable or by cancelled services complain or even campaign. Consequently, if the rail companies don't know what people want, it's a deliberate act.

By contrast, what do you do if you find a better deal on your car insurance (a genuinely competitive market), or you're unhappy about some inefficiency at your credit card provider? You switch. There is no point in telling the company you're leaving what turned you off. You just switch. Companies may try to test customer preference through surveys, but very few people respond, and the findings are unlikely to reveal, for example, that while a change in a  service is popular with 65% of customers, 20% disliked it enough to leave - so the company will be reassured and will not consider offering two options to satisfy both groups.

Where services are provided on by local authorities, there is another thing you can do. Your experience of the service can influence your vote. Many other things influence voting behaviour, of course, but it's a safe bet that a new administration that makes services better stands a better chance of re-election than one that doesn't.

Markets also famously think short. Depletion of non-renewable resources, for example, does not have much impact on the markets until the crunch is very near. Where confidence is the issue, as with loans, ridiculously excessive confidence can drive towards a sudden collapse as in 1929 and 2008 - and then lack of confidence can be just as illogical. Markets also think narrow. If a company can save modest amounts of money by making 30% of its staff redundant, and the consequent loss of money through lost business is less than the gain through reducing the wage and energy bills, it will almost certainly make the change. The state, and through it, all taxpayers, pick up the bill in increased benefits take-up, health problems and so on. It is possible for government to disincentivise such choices, but business will use its influence effectively.

When I return to this, I'll look at situations where collective democratic choice implemented by bureaucracies is directly in competition with an atomised market approach and at how marketisation sits with the cocept of community.

Was that heavy? OK - to my post on the winter ale festival, I add high praise of Shalford's Levelly Black and Allgates' Caskablanca.

And I leave you with another learned presentation on words. Cats are kept in a cattery; bats in a battery; apes in an apiary; nurses in a nursery; and alligators in an allegory.

Happiness is not a cigar called Hamlet

There used to be clever and amusing TV adverts with the punchline "Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet". They stopped way back. Maybe now they sponsor Shakespeare plays in return for product placement. Was that guy in Denmark always called Hamlet?

Happiness goes in and out of politics. In the early 19th century Jeremy Bentham, many of whose ideas presaged scientific totalitarianism, said the aim of government should be "The greatest happiness of the greatest number". This is more or less accepted by a lot of people, and the old objection that you can't measure happiness has to some extent been answered by pollsters who can ask people how happy they are and count the results. It has strengths: if the whole population is miserable, one would expect a government to try to do something about it, and a focus on happiness prevents a narrow focus on, for example, economic growth or national aggrandisement. However, Bentham's formula implies that if we could make the great majority of people happy by unlimited oppression of a minority, we should do it. As a "deep Green" I don't think values should be based purely on human happiness, ignoring other life-forms (though I recognise political reality, that in human society human interests will come first and others may be decisive if the human interest debate is evenly balanced) and as a Christian I don't accept that the main human goal should be happiness, but awareness and love - still more difficult things to measure.

Consider this question I put to a friend who has deep moral convictions which seem to exist separated from his political philosophy. Imagine a society with slavery. The free exist happily without bad consciences on the proceeds of the slaves' work and the slaves, not realising they could be free or scared at the prospect of freedom, are content being slaves. Into this society comes someone preaching against slavery. Do you support or suppress him or her?

When I continue this post I'll talk about the British Government's "wellbeing index" which has been laughed at, preached against and praised as setting up happiness as a government goal.

The Odanglesex Chronicles: the Water Safety Partnership

FROM: Reema Narlikar, Transformational Excellence Officer
TO: Hamish Carpenter, Transformational Excellence Manager

Hamish:

Here's my report on our annual review of the Odanglesex Water Safety Partnership for transmission to Kenneth.

FROM: Hamish Carpenter, Transformational Excellence Manager
TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob, Director of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision

Kenneth: here are the reports from Reema and Mike. All straightforward, I think.

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob, Director of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision
TO: Neil Balderson, Transformational Excellence Senior Manager

Neil: I need more information on the Water Safety Partnership from Reema. Please transmit.

FROM: Neil Balderson, Transformational Excellence Senior Manager
TO: Hamish Carpenter, Transformational Excellence Manager

Hamish: Kenneth needs more info on this report.

FROM: Hamish Carpenter, Transformational Excellence Manager
TO: Reema Narlikar, Transformational Excellence Officer

Reema: Sorry, Can you flesh out your report on this a bit, please? Kenneth wants more information.

FROM: Reema Narlikar, Transformational Excellence Officer
TO: Hamish Carpenter, Transformational Excellence Manager

More information on WHAT?

FROM: Hamish Carpenter, Transformational Excellence Manager
TO: Reema Narlikar, Transformational Excellence Officer

Sorry - no idea. He didn't say.

FROM: Reema Narlikar, Transformational Excellence Officer
TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob
cc: Neil Balderson, Hamish Carpenter

Kenneth: I gather you need more information. I've included all the minutes and the Police, Coastguard and Fire/Rescue summaries.

FROM: Kelly Pattrick, PA to Kenneth Spotlessnob
TO: Reema Narlikar

Rema: Kenneth hasn't got the time to read all this. Can you summarise?

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob
TO: Neil Balderson, Transformational Excellence Senior Manager

Neil: Councillor Greer wants to know if it's safe to drink water. Can you get Reema Narlikar to draft a reply for my signature using this Partnership information she has?