An emergency exit from the culture wars?

Not so long ago, the term culture wars signified nothing in the UK. No, this was the term for the entrenched resentment between the conservative rednecks in humid, ex-Confederate southern states of America and the bits with the real political power - California, Washington DC and New York - where there's a consensus in favour of moderation and, to a greater or lesser extent, liberalism in politics and economics, if not social policy. 

The same faultlines seemed to glow as Brexit simmered beneath the crust of British politics in 2015 and 2016, and the volcanic shock of the referendum unleashed a slew of cruel neologisms - some pre- and some post-referendum result - that helped us articulate what was going on: gammons, boomers, Remoaners, traitors, enemies of the people.

First we felt our intelligence and integrity threatened. Then we seemed to reach a boiling point which saw us pitched into a near-permanent state of anxiety-driven mutual loathing between factions defined, not wholly but usually as culture wars, by both left and right. The Momentum "takeover" of Labour and the "cult" of Corbynism was another facet in this dull jewel. The increasing hysteria between pro- and anti-trans rights activism groups is another. Twitter itself has whirled around uselessly in the eye of the maelstrom, although recent decisions have seemed to confirm that it is wanting to right itself in a way that Facebook cannot. 

Today, we have an article by the wonderfully verbose Will Self, surely a sleeper agent in some sort of guerrilla marketing campaign by Roget's Thesaurus, but still producing thought provoking and mature assessments of the landscape that surrounds us - or at least those of us who still insist on crawling through the scarred battlefield of British public life at the start of what we thought were going to be the new roaring Twenties (sardonic laugh). 

Self's article correctly roots the "culture wars" of today in the outworking of the attitudes that have plagued our public life forever - the arrogance of self-delusion (or vice versa) which has been a prerequisite, it seems, to most political or cultural power in this country. But he makes one point which should be elaborated upon: as it seems to me, it is the key to a way out. Best read to yourself in Self's hangdog voice, it reads: "neither party is capable of envisioning a viable future". 

There's the rub. None of the sides, parties, groups, angles, factions, movements that fuel these culture wars, if that's what they are, are about a coherent future. The exception is #BlackLivesMatter, which is more of a global cry than a movement and has long, deep roots in every direction. Other than that, they're all principally about rightness. We lack any sense of direction; we just have criticism. The past is either right or wrong, but none of that gives anybody a programme for all our future. The causes are no doubt just, but they seem to offer no guidelines for ourselves and our children in building a country that aspires to be better for everyone, or even most - whatever better might look like. We no longer seek to instruct or guide those who come after us; we just want to end the resentment we feel against those who came before or are with us now. We want our interests protected, and to hell with yours. 

So if we are to find an exit, it's not through any door offered to us by the protagonists of our culture wars. We're stuck on a neverending ghost train in a fairground where everybody's arguing. We didn't know where the exit was, we just presumed there was one. But it turns out that there isn't, and everybody else on the train is now screaming about why they think that's everybody else's fault. 

So is Self right? Yes. Nobody is proposing a viable future, or even an aspirational one. But is that the full story? No. Times change. Nothing lasts forever (though it has, and will be, repeated). But as long as we're on this train, the problem of no exit will remain. 

We need to start making the case not for one view or another, but for a changed approach to difference. We need to learn again what toleration has meant in this country, We've been torn apart before, but we've muddled through, and we need to show that muddling through is actually a constructive, creative act of reconciliation and patience, not a failure. When the loudest voices silence their critics, they haven't won. Everybody's lost. Stridency is not success.

The deathly centre ground that Self describes deserves its fate if those who seek to sustain it want it to be a kind of intellectual zone of compromise for everybody. If you buy into that you're just presenting yourself as fodder for the next time somebody starts screeching uncharitably about something you happen to agree with (or, more likely, disagree with).

Moderation is not necessarily about moderating our views, although that may well be the natural consequence - may be, but by definition cannot always be. Compromise can still be a dirty word. Moderation is not about diluting your beliefs. It is about how you treat others' beliefs. Yes, it's difficult when that means you have to move into the space of making public policy to achieve things, and you can't always work out what that should mean in practice. But the sign of proper moderation is that this can be done respectfully, that I can feel your pain and you can understand my discomfort; that we agree we want something done but that the way to doing it is to find the right way forward, not to dig in until you throw in the towel and submit to being dragged behind my aggressively-revving vehicle. 

Obama knew this. Blair, to some extent, espoused it, although so did John Major and the old-school Conservative party before the great right-wing hijack of the 2000s. Today, we are led by power-seekers who have no need for moderation, because they know that vision is not the instant gratification that people seek. You don't share power, but you can afford to spread a sense of rightness and self-righteousness around because that way you build your coalition of the bitter. The system we have now means that this approach can work, and because Dominic Cummings realises it he can present himself as a maverick genius. 

When a consensus finally starts to build that those who fuel these "culture wars" are like the generals who fear scrutiny above all lest their empires start to fray; when we begin to reevaluate whether our righteousness is more important to us than our humanity; when we begin to consider the future, only then will the lights go on, the fake ghosts stop screaming at us, and the emergency exit out of all this be flung open. Roll on the day. 

A minor collision between politics, law and constitution

In Facts, the website which nobly attempted to inject a clear dose of reality into That Campaign, has raised an interesting point about the government's potential responses to the legal challenge to Brexit.

With merciful concision and clarity, it points out that the most compelling legal argument in the government's defence is that it CAN trigger Article 50 because in doing so it doesn't take away any rights; that is the basis for the legal challenge, but it is also only true if the government acknowledges that Article 50 can be revoked. That would mean that the invocation itself would not deprive any citizen of any rights.

However, in making this acknowledgement, argues InFacts editor Hugo Dixon, Theresa May would incur an unbearable backlash from the Brexiters, who would instantaneously smell treachery, this time without a smile on its face, and threaten to overturn her apple-cart, so recently arranged with many of the rotten ones apparently near the front, and here we would find ourselves once again in 1996, a Tory government led by a hard-working but hapless leader in tatters because of the frothing madness of the Europhobes.

Dixon's argument is clear, and it allows us to hope that the government might reveal itself a little in the coming weeks and months as it responds to the appeal. Were Mrs May to permit the presentation of a defence along these lines, acknowledging the reversibility of Article 50, we may begin to hope. Of course we still have her strident rhetoric to leave us quaking in our boots that she may drag us out anyway. But as we've posited before, for Theresa May, this could all come down to hard-nosed pragmatic choices about the impact of all this on us, our families, our households. As the economic misery builds up, and we approach the first full quarter since 23 June, she may reasonably calculate that Brexit is destined, in the end, to become an unpopular choice which we are itching to reject.

Faint hope

 1. Theresa May is not a convinced Brexiteer. She campaigned for Remain.

2. But she was a bit lukewarm. So we can deduce a) that she does not favour Brexit, but that she is pragmatic about her support for Remain.

3. She landed in Number 10 in August or whenever it was, and her immediate action was to start repeating "Brexit means Brexit" all over the shop.

4. She didn't trigger Article 50 straight away even though she could have. She put three Brexiteers in charge of Brexit. These are both very pragmatic choices. She doesn't seem to be the world's No 1 Brexit fan.

5. And going on about "Brexit means Brexit" steadied the economy, her party and everything else for a bit. So I think she was firstly concerned not with Brexit, which is years away, but with stability. And she achieved it.

6. By the end of the summer we were all getting a bit antsy because "Brexit means Brexit" means frog all. Did she return from the recess and trigger A50? Nope.

7. So while she has successfully kept a lid, so far, on the mouth-frothing lunatics in the Tory party, she has also done nothing substantive to make Brexit happen.

8. Meanwhile, some of what she has done has created the conditions for Brexit to be stopped. She has now given a date for triggering Article 50, but she has allowed time for the view that this is reversible to gain traction. She has continued to show that she is committed to delivering what the Leavers wanted, but that includes some very ugly consequences which are likely to become very awkward. She has axed the £350m commitment giving those who promoted it nowhere to hide.

9. Lastly she was very emphatic that the Union (UK) is important to her and there's been no doubt that Brexit could splinter the Union.

10. So it's entirely conceivable that she imagines a future in which a second vote, or some other occurrence which makes Brexit obviously undesirable (such as the end of the UK, economic disaster, food price hikes, etc etc) is rejected by the public and she can say: "I did everything I could to deliver on that referendum result. This is what you asked for, and I did it. It's not my fault if you now realise that you voted for a bucket of sick and have changed your minds."

Every silver lining has a dark cloud

Optimistic possibility: Theresa May, having decided that stability and purpose are the most needed qualities in government at the moment--whether needed by her, her party, or the country--has decided to allow a pathway to Brexit to develop. She will be supportive, Brexiteers will lead on the detail, and either Brexit will become a reality or not. She may hope not, or she may be sanguine about it, simply wanting to hold on to power beyond the moment when a decision either way is finally made. 

Personally, I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility. Of course I hope for such an outcome, but I'm encouraged that little Theresa May has done seems to suggest that she really wants to follow a course other than this: she could have activated Article 50 by now. She could have come out openly against Brexit by purging Johnson, Fox and Leadsom from her Cabinet rather than installing them near the top. 

Another reason to suspect that this could be the game plan is to see the world from May's perspective: she is a politician, and politicians usually try to navigate their way through whatever waters are ahead. She probably feels she can live with Brexit if it happens, even though she believes politically that it's best not to quit the EU. 

Even if we indulge this view, there is an increasing worry. May may seek to offer decisiveness, security, optimism, but the referendum unleashed forces and views in British society that, while they may not result in the kind of revolution we've prided ourselves on avoiding by comparison to the Continent, are certainly damaging our social cohesion. 

Amber Rudd's disappointingly stupid proposal to list foreign workers is one. This news, that the Government has decided not to listen to 'foreign' academics, is another. Even if we believe that Theresa May's course will allow us to retain EU membership, to fight the madness of Brexit and win, the journey will leave us damaged, exhausted, a shade of the country--and the society--we were. 

Tony Blair's legacy was overshadowed by Iraq, inevitably. Inevitably, David Cameron's legacy--those positive steps for which he was rightly praised, in the end, by Jeremy Corbyn, such as equal marriage--all that will be eclipsed utterly by the lost gamble of 23 June 2016, which failed to save the Tory Party and on which date our divisions finally cut so deep that we may reasonably fear that they may never heal.   

What's Cameron's game?

David Cameron has quit as an MP. When Tony Blair finally went, the applause in the Commons made no real difference to the obvious fact that his legacy, ultimately, would be consumed by the history of the war in Iraq and the madness that surrounded it, before and after. That has become increasingly true as recollections of his achievements, many substantial, all recede into recent history and grow pale by comparison with that war.

Cameron, on the other hand, was much less of a colossus. My view is that he has been an important figure in our recent political history, playing an interesting and eventually successful game in order to purge the Tories of their recent record of abject failure and return them to the position they now occupy, a party of government with further majorities in sight. He has reunited the Conservative Party with electoral success. That is important, because his three immediate predecessors all proved unable to penetrate the miasma of stupidity that infected the top layers of the party for ten years after the destruction of John Major.

He is also important because he set a tone. Yes, the Big Society was quietly laid to rest in 2013 or so; yes, some of the successful Tory policies that propelled them to victory were in fact Liberal Democrat ones painted blue (and, in the case of tuition fees, one of their most objectionable policies was simply painted yellow and hung like a stone around the neck of his deputy prime minister). And yes, there was a marked tack to the right in the later years of his premiership, not surprisingly given the cutting of the Liberal Democrat brakes.

But Cameron did show that Conservative solutions can be at least tolerable again, and that potent change meant their return to the other side of the Commons was possible.

There is equal marriage, often cited (even by Jeremy Corbyn on Cameron's departure from office) as a change for which we should all be grateful to him. (We may wonder, of course, whether this would have proceeded as smoothly had Cameron never been shacked to Clegg). There could have been Universal Credit, if Iain Duncan Smith had not proved unequal to the task of its completion. There is, undoubtedly, the avoidance of complete national disaster in the economic mess that engulfed us all during the last Parliament, whether or not you feel that the extent of austerity was justifiable or the targets, now abandoned, were necessary to get us through. The fact is that we didn't suffer as much as we could have done.

And then Brexit.

And then he quit, and we have Theresa May, his own Home Secretary, who has proved a stable pair of hands and a calming influence - as she clearly intends to be, with her regular, stabilising incantations of "Brexit means Brexit". The wounds are open, and the only reason the party is not bleeding to death just yet is that both sides of the debate feel they have a chance of victory. For Remainers, the challenge is to present Brexit as unpalatable and not, ultimately, what the electorate voted for; for Leavers, it's to show us that any Brexit is better than remaining in the Brussels clink, stymied and emasculated and apparently not in control.

It is hard to see at this point that David Cameron's resignation can do anything other than free the wings of his party up to prepare for a bloody civil war to cap anything he previously ended, and - certainly a sadder thought - overshadow his legacy of re-centring the Tories, injecting a little warmth and reason into their party leadership after the Howard and Duncan Smith years, his avoidance of economic disaster, and, most regrettable of all, his social progressivism, such as it was.

The price of Blair's failings - so many lives - should never have been paid. Cameron's disasters may not be in the same league in severity, but we have not yet seen the start, let alone the end, of the blighting of lives by all the consequences of the Brexit vote - from the deprivation of European citizenship all the way up to the potentially staggering economic impact. People will suffer. And, sadly, the blame must fall in great part on Cameron and his failed gamble.

The Boris Factor: 3

In which we draw lessons about Boris Johnson from his book about Winston Churchill, The Boris Factor. It's a good read about a great man, but it's as interesting for what it says about what Boris sees and values, as for what it says about Churchill, that otherwise little-known figure from British history.

"They knew that throughout the amazing snakes-and-ladders of his life he had followed the pattern of [his father] Randolph not just in his ducal disdain for party or his Homeric desire for glory but in his willingness to back himself and his ideas - to take risks that no one else would take. In peacetime, such behaviour can be disastrous."

Yes, Boris. So we have discovered.

"But you can't win a war without taking risks, and you won't take risks unless you are brave. That, finally, was the quality that people sensed in Churchill; that was why some people yearned for him in 1940, in spite of all the sneering of the Tory establishment and the appeasers. His whole career so far had been a testament to that primordial virtue - the virtue, as he pointed out himself, that makes possible all the others."

Right. So we're going to deduce from your little flurry of bungles over Brexit that you're fundamentally brave. And I suppose, unfettered by the consensus and nauseating community of the EU we might end up facing a war, or at least a dire threat against our lonely little nation - so perhaps these are the circumstances in which we will recall the strength of that brave old crackpot. Good old Boris. Yes, Theresa May's not good enough to get us through this crisis. We need Boris! Boris!

What was that about a primordial virtue?

"Of the immense physical and moral courage of Churchill there can be no doubt."

Ah.

Boris, you may be pushing it a bit far, old boy.

Brexit: time to give up?

The prime minister's statement at the start of the Chequers cabinet talks today certainly seems to make it clear that Brexit cometh. "We must continue to be very clear that “Brexit means Brexit”,", she says:

"...that we’re going to make a success of it. That means there’s no second referendum; no attempts to sort of stay in the EU by the back door; that we’re actually going to deliver on this."

Oh, dear. Have we Remainers who hope for sanity to prevail come to the end of the road? When you add in the line at the end of the BBC's coverage of this story - that Number 10 has said Parliament won't be consulted before the activation of Article 50 - it may be time to decide between angry, sad or puking emoticons ready for use when the miserable day finally arrives.

After all, the future that Theresa May is hinting at is one where the government produces a surprisingly positive vision of Brexit, everybody starts to think it might be OK, and she just pings off an email titled "Re: thanks for everything" to Jean-Claude Juncker. Easy as pie.

Now, we can speculate (and we probably will) about Theresa May's real convictions on Europe and her motives in office. (For my part I think she's decided that clarity and firmness are for the best, and that she is taking the bull by the horns rather than allowing herself to become bogged down in a messy argument over Europe like five or six of her immediate predecessors).

But whatever we think she's up to, whether she really wants out or whether she does have a game plan to keep us in, we all have to dance to her tune. And she has made it plain that the constitutional route to salvation may not be open to us. She has to act, either through conviction or convenience, like the Brexit prime minister. She cannot be seen to be soft. She clearly does not feel that going back to Parliament is defensible - perhaps because it will enrage the frothing Leavers and terminate her ministry. She will therefore press ahead when the moment comes. We should not ignore the constitutional implications of this potential route, by any means; but what May is telling us is that we cannot rely on a constitutional hiccup to save us from Brexit.

Constitutional tools are not available to us, then. But political tools remain. May proposed to act in a way consistent with her chosen identity as a modern Iron Lady: firm, accepting of the Brexit "verdict", clear about her power. But she has yet put in place pauses and delays, which allow the debate to develop and the players to build their cause. To build a Remain cause now around the hope of constitutional salvation seems a closed road. There's not even much point arguing about whether or not such a method, of relying on constitutional diddling based on the current situation - the "referendums are advisory, dontcherknow" approach - would ever be legitimate. What we have to do is shift the sands. The avenue open to us - the avenue that Mrs May is leaving open to us, deliberately or not - is political. We may find help from the Supreme Court or the House of Lords, but unless there is real, public anger with the passage of Brexit, a feeling that the alternative we have got is indeed worse than what anybody wanted, and a proper understanding that this is madness--or at least, enough persuasion that EU membership is the better option--then nothing will stand.

We have to stop theorising, diddling, dithering, hoping and regretting. We have to start persuading. Now.

Labour: fiddling while Labour burns?

Any number of Labour observers, headed up by their no doubt increasingly-stressed MPs, are concerned about the weight the party will have to throw around in the next Parliament, what with the dire predictions of electoral destruction--not to mention the resurfacing Cameroonian plan to axe fifty constituencies which will apparently squeeze Labour even further.

From my interested and, if I may say so, reasonably well informed viewpoint, Labour appears to have fallen into full victim mode. Bullied by segments of its own membership in the courts, cowed by the iron grip it has given its own leader, its MPs ignored by their own party leadership and, it seems, membership: I don't really know which bit of Labour is Labour any more. The party is a victim and the diagnosis is quite possibly terminal confusion.

It seems to me that a medicine that would have an immediate effect would be clarity. (My wife takes that for her hay fever, a-ba-doom-tsh). No organisation so divided can hope to coalesce suddenly around an issue, unless Theresa May suddenly decides we should go to war with Germany. But in order to coalesce somebody needs to put the markers down, and that puts Jeremy Corbyn and what we might call the 'official' Labour party leadership in the driving seat - for evidence of their relative power, see the little tsunami of ineffectual resignations that so delighted us during July. Besides, who else in a political party can send up the flare that will draw together the surrounding boats?

We turn, then, with eager gaze to Jeremy Corbyn. This, surely, is a moment for him to seize. I've written before that I don't mind Jeremy Corbyn. I am glad that somebody like him has been able to ascend to the summit in our system, suggesting that the epoch of the spads has yet to take hold totally. I agree that much of the media hostility is unjustified. I don't see him as a messianic guaranteed winner, but I don't think he's the unelectable millstone of lore. Given a cause, some clear messages, and a reasonable electoral wind I think he could confound the doommongers.

Will he do it? Can he seize that moment? A government, led valiantly by Mrs May into the jaws of Brexit, with a small majority; Europe, the issue that destroyed the last Tory government and leader after leader for a decade; an economy on the brink of dreadful post-Brexit statistics; and surely the opportunity to grab the agenda from a new government, to detect the weak spots left, or caused by, the exit of David Cameron.

What's coming through? What am I, as a relatively engaged observer, picking up? Challenges to Theresa May about her One Nation agenda, her commitment to real equality, to protecting the positives of EU membership or even just getting a good deal? No, I'm afraid not. It's really just Owen Smith's non-dick non-joke and today the monumentally uninteresting call for a "digital Bill of Rights". And, for good measure, he's decided to ape a recently-defeated leftist US election candidate. Inspiring stuff. (After all, no previous US politician has successfully adopted a grassroots, internet-driven strategy that we could cite instead, have they?) Mind you there are other echoes of Bernie about Corbyn, but I'm not sure those are necessarily desirable.

Am I blaming Corbyn? Not entirely. Of course there is a persistent media narrative hampering him. But he's not without his platform. And he's not without his position. And he did make it into the news, even if he fell away quite quickly, with his "Digital Bill of Rights" (I can't bear to abandon those quotation marks, as though they can protect us from the inanity of it all). He has his choices and his opportunities. And it seems to me that he just isn't making the best of them.

The Boris Factor 2

"Even those who thought [Boris] was brilliant - and most people could see that - were often dismayed by his lack of judgement, his tendency to hyperbole, to overexcitement, even to hysteria."

Sorry, that should have read "who thought [Churchill] was brilliant". Yes, we're back on Lessons about Boris from Boris's Book About Churchill again.

This passage goes on:

"In 1931 he became so worked up about the prospect of Indian independence that he called Mahatma Gandhi a 'half-naked fakir' - in words that have certainly not been forgotten in India."

Today's lesson from Boris: "Churchill offended foreigners and he was still a top chap. Surely I can be too, eh chaps?"

A thought

Either Theresa May is just going for the simple life - "I'm going to get us out, so no point dithering" - or she can see clearly that there is absolutely no way any government could deliver without the people changing their minds, so she's going to do the best she can and wait for the whole project to fail - and pin it on the original Leavers.

The Boris Factor: 1

I'm currently reading Boris Johnson's book The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. This hovered on my list for a little while, and then the author was made Foreign Secretary. I'm a great believer that how a person writes, and what they write about, tells you much about them. John Major's memoirs, for instance, as well as his later writing about cricket and music hall--two subjects he successfully enthused me about, at least a little--reveal him to be a much warmer and wittier character than the media painted him. Margaret Thatcher, meanwhile, writes just as perfunctorily as her apparently humourless and mechanistic image suggested; Tony Blair's memoirs were as ghastly as I'd feared, but Chris Patten's significantly better. 

I recall Johnson's biography of Churchill being reviewed, fairly neutrally, on Radio 4 some time ago, and one of the panellists remarked: "thank goodness we have Boris Johnson to cast some light on this little-known figure from British history."

Well, it turns out that Boris Johnson's biography casts light not just on Churchill, but on Johnson.

Exhibit A.

"Rab Butler might have been Prime Minister. In 1940, he was a junior minister, and a strong supporter of appeasement. Here is what he had to say about the ascent of Churchill:
"'The good clean tradition of English politics has been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history,' he was heard to say. 'Surrendering to Winston and his rabble was a disaster and an unnecessary one', mortgaging the future of our country to a 'half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.'"

May: Might she not?

Step 1. Restate how precious the United Kingdom is to you.
Step 2. State clearly that you wish to reach a common UK negotiating position before activating Article 50.
Step 3. Open negotiations on UK negotiating position.
Step 4. Refuse to budge on the principle that Brexit means Brexit.
Step 5. Act surprised when SNP rise to hysteria about the prospect of Brexit and announce a second referendum on independence is imminent.
Step 6. Save the Union by trumping second #indyref with second #EUref, in which the key question is: is Brexit worth the cost of splitting the UK once and for all?

Enough already with the US-style paranoia, Corbynistas

After a frosty response to a few of my anguished posts after the EU referendum, the last thing I want to do is tell anybody engaged in political discussion to shut up. So yes, I've titled this post "enough already" but that doesn't mean "stop talking".

That disclaimer out of the way, the thing that's pushed me to post this is this story, about the ongoing wrangling over the level of support for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. I noticed a comment on a Facebook post about it which referred to "the MSM". Only by reading the responses - which all seemed to be familiar with the term - did I realise that this means "mainstream media". And suddenly, dismay hits:

1. "Mainstream" is one word. Ugh.
2. The term "mainstream media" is one I associate with the cries of Trump supporters in the US, the headbanging right who exist somewhere in a twilight zone of paranoia and alienation. In this weird world, the vague feeling that "something's not right"--based on something that could be justifiable alienation, could be personal psychopathology, could be political expediency--entitles you to bypass completely all critical analysis, and instead cleave to the conviction that the media are all liars and none should be believed, or that what matters is what you believe to be true...these are the prime ingredients of what is increasingly called 'post-factual politics'.
3. And then you look at the way the Corbyn debate is going--was that a Corbyn rally? Isn't that crowds celebrating Liverpool's last European Cup win? Why is this not on the 10 o'clock news?--and it's just depressing that the tone is so concerned with "how my cause is being represented by the media" and not really on the issues.

I'm a bit fed up of being told that the mainstream media isn't reporting Corbyn rallies. I've been open minded about Corbyn--I was warmer to him than many, I think, at the start of his leadership--but as I grow increasingly cool, I'm totally aware that he has a very large support base and that lots of people are flocking to support him. No, it's not headline news--I don't think it should be--but the news stories are there, the buzz on social media is there, and ultimately: I don't really know what Corbyn thinks, or even what his supporters think, because all I see is "don't believe the lies!"

It seems to me that the left in the UK is losing its attention on facts and debate and opposition, and has instead pitched its tent in that twilight zone of outrage and suspicion that has hosted the US right for so long. Am I suggesting that Corbynistas are as lunatic as Trump supporters? No. I'm worried that a segment of British political thought which is usually a bit less hysterical has decided to go where the right so often makes its home. Theresa May has stamped her authority on her party for the moment, but these are the Tories. It won't last. Eventually the lunacy will start again. And if the left hasn't recovered some sense of purpose, there will be an even smaller proportion of those in British political life who still put moderation, sensibility and rationality above selfish outrage.

Cameron's misstep

At yesterday's Prime Minister's Questions, David Cameron expressed
some reasonable disgust at a Facebook page called 'Raoul Moat: You
Legend', on which people have been expressing sympathy with Moat and
criticising the police. Bad move, Cameron.

Then it turned out that No 10 had commissioned a junior official to
'get in touch' with Facebook to express the government's disgust at
the page. Terrible move.

Why? Moat's murders, his vendetta and his flight from the police
cannot, of course, be condoned in any measure - although there will be
things that may explain them at least in part, and shouldn't be
ignored. In one respect Cameron was on reasonably safe-looking ground
when he slammed the pro-Moat comments on the page.

But this little episode - the worthy PMQs rant and the subsequent
phone call to Facebook (or perhaps it was a tweet) is a bad moment for
the Government. Why? Well, I've been reasonably pleased with the
Coalition so far, if not in all policy matters then at least in its
more commonsensical approach than Labour. Ken Clarke's line on
prisons, for instance, or Theresa May on 28-day detention have been
refreshingly sensible-liberal. That's been one of the best things
since the Coalition deal was struck: the volume of government has been
turned down.

Labour, for all its social transformation and progressive policies,
couldn't resist falling back on hectoring, interfering, and just
talking. The end result was a government that crowded out independent
thought by constantly jabbering, not just about government business
but about anything and everything, legitimately. It's what people
bemoan as "the nanny state".

And that's what Cameron's move sounds like to me. The government just
commenting on whatever it's asked about, needing to find a solution or
- very New Labourlike - have a policy position, a line that can be
loudly and publicly toed in order to "align" with the public mood,
regardless of the moral right or practical ability of the government
to intervene. In this case, the liberal line ought to be that Facebook
users can post what they like about whomever they wish, as long as
they're not inciting hatred or violence. This page is deeply
distasteful, but it's not (at least as I write this) falling foul of
the law. And Facebook have rightly stuck up for the right of these
thoughtless and angry people to express their views.

When the prime minister of the day starts expressing an opinion about
this sort of thing, it's government as a brand, not as a government.
What now? What are we suppposed to think about the government after
this? That they're jolly nice chaps because they had an ineffectual
moan at Facebook about something I also disagree about? Alas, no. Even
I, a Coalition sympathiser, was reminded of something much less
pleasant: the Chinese government having a go at that other ubiquitous
internet giant, Google.

Yes, I know that this Moat thing is small fry in comparison to the
Chinese all-out assault on Google. But up to now the Coalition has
been pretty much on the side of the angels - this is just an unhappy
sign that the spirit of New Labour and its infamous Grid has not yet
been laid to rest.

Weak headline alert

Why do you do it, BBC? Who laughs? And it's not a totally frivolous story, either (in which respect it's notably unlike the annual parade of Strictly Come Dancing stories), but one with community and environmental angles which is not served by lazy, unfunny puns deserving less of a respected news site than of the point-and-laugh mirth of @badjournalism. 

Stop it. Please, stop it.

A win for democracy?

I have to admit, I didn't see this one coming. Bizarrely, the exit poll (which assumed uniform swings across the country; something we didn't see at all) gave a much better indication of the final seat distribution that all the opinion polls did.

But who won? Well maybe, just maybe, we (the electorate) did.

An obvious statement first: it seems we, as a nation, did not want to adopt wholesale the policies of any single party. There were lots of warning about what would happen in these circumstances, but at least at the moment, the answer seems to be that politicians will behave in a mature, grown-up way. This may come as a shock to some people.

The people in the most awkward position when the result became clear were the Liberal Democrats. Things didn't go very well for them in terms of results: they lost seats (although their vote share rise). But, they hold the balance of power. They have continually said that whoeever got the most seats and the most votes had the right to govern, but the Tories have little in common in many areas with the Lib Dems, making it hard for the two to work together. On the other hand, they could back up a Labour attempt to govern, but as Labour lost on both seats and votes this would probably be seen both as undemocratic, and as a confirmation of the Tory warning "Vote Clegg, get Brown."

But, full credit to Clegg, he stuck to his guns and said that, in his opinion, the Tories have the right to try to govern. Brown "respected" that decision, but made his pitch to the Lib Dems. And all eyes were on David Cameron. Would he try to make a coalition with the Lib Dems? Is it even possible given the differences between the parties? In fact, this is a bit of a dry-run for PR, cynics could argue (maybe justly) that PR would fail simply because Labour and the Lib Dems are too similar, so would always join arguing that people voted for "progressive left" policies, leaving the Tories out in the cold.

Fortunately, Cameron made a speech which showed that those statements that politicians need to "grow up" were far too patronising. He acknowledged the differences they have with the Lib Dems, highlighted some areas on which he would not compromise (none of which were the Lib Dem "headline" policies), highlighted some areas on which they would compromise (including some Lib Dem headlines) and skirted around some of the areas (like when to cut) where clearly there is room to manoeuvre. Surely this is the whole point of consensus politics? This is how PR should work if we switch to it. It opens the possibility that two fairly different parties can respond to the will of the electorate by compromise and consensus to produce a legislative agenda which reflects the will of the electorate rather than the will of the biggest party (with <50% of the votes).

In short, if things pan out as they are looking like doing, democracy won.

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Disclaimer: I am no political expert and I'm over tired, and these are early days, so I may end up issuing a post in a few days saying how awful everything is and why can't a coalition form!

On other notes: why are the BBC still putting "BREAKING NEWS" above the line "No party has overall majority." It's BROKEN news, it broke hours ago!

Also, before the election the Tories issued many warnings about the dangers of a Hung Parliament. Now they've got to reassure the City that a coalition Government can bring stability and does not endager the recovery after all.

The General Election: Abandon logic, all ye who enter here?

I'm increasingly puzzled by a feature of the election leaflets which are being fed through my letterbox with increasing urgency. My local constituency, Watford, is held by the unremarkable junior Justice Minister, Claire Ward, but there were only 1,941 votes between her and the third-placed candidate, Tory Ali Miraj, in 2005, with the Liberal Democrats coming in second. So Watford is a three-way marginal, no question about it.

Yet every time I get a leaflet the parties seem to spend a great deal of space exhorting me to remember that "It's a straight fight between this party and that party - the other party is out."

Now, I understand that PR value of avoiding a split in the vote, but isn't anybody on their teams checking that what they are saying makes any sense before they post these leaflets out?

It's one thing to say "if you vote X, you may split the vote and Y will get in, so vote for Z", but I am sorry to see our three main candidates stuffing their literature with such illogical  non-sequiturs as "Because the Conservatives have only four out of forty local council seats, they can't win the Watford parliamentary constituency" and "Only by electing Richard Harrington can you make sure David Cameron forms a government on 7 May".

Listen up: your electorate is not stupid. Just tell us what you want us to do and let us agree or disagree with you.

What's wrong with "If you don't want Claire Ward to get in, vote for Sal Brinton"? Or "Polls show we're ahead - but we need every vote we can get, so please stick with the
Conservatives"? Aren't these messages both simple, and not stupid?

No wonder people get confused about politics. Even our candidates are telling voters that the result of the last county council election have some bearing on the outcome of the general election. Either they believe these untrue things, which is bad, or they are simply choosing
to treat their voters like idiots, which could be worse.

Whose vote is it anyway?

I don't know about you, but something is annoying me in this election campaign. The media. You see, as the politicians keep reminding us, who gets to run the country is up to us. Whereas the media seem to think it's up to them, and that they can't trust us to make the "right"decision if they were to give us the full facts. And with that the way they assume we're all stupid. On Media Matters on Radio 2 this week a Sun writer and a Guardian writer were discussing the rise in popularity of the Liberal Democrats, and they suggested, no, they asserted, with supreme confidence, that this was only because the people don't know what the Lib Dems stand for but that the press would enlighten them. This could be true, but the arrogance of the assumption (i.e. "I wouldn't vote for these people, so it is not possible that anyone properly informed would") was highly irritating.

However, the thing that's really had me fuming during this campaign has been the way the different media organs go about "enlightening us". In the discussion below I will be focussing on how this has been done to the Lib Dems because I count myself a Lib Dem supporter and thus have particuarly noticed the behaviour I decry below when they affect that party. But I would emphasise that the party here are the example I choose; the problem I highlight is a problem whichever party it targets.

My irritation is basically with the presentation of half-truths, usually as fact, and the systematic destruction of this "policy" in this half-exposed and (presumably deliberate) way. Let me give you an example of what I mean, and I will try to be as part-neutral in the discussion as I can. On Thursday, the Daily Mail published an article (which Ican't find now, link to follow if I can) regarding the Lib Dems' short-term prison sentence policy. The headline was that the Lib Dems would put 60,000 criminals back on our streets. The article was based on a half-truth. The Lib Dem's want to discourage short-term prison sentences in favour of Community Orders and Reconciliatory Justice and the like. But everything after "in favour" above was left out of the article.

Not only is this not "enlightening" readers but misleading them, it's also infuriating because there is scope here for a piece of good journalism. When I read the Lib Dem manifesto and saw their claims that their tactics would reduce reoffending, I thought, "That's good, it actually gets criminals off the streets. Turns them into normal members of society." But of course, I have not looked into the details of the pilot schemes, I haven't investigated whether this Lib Dem claim is true. It could be nonsense for all I know; I just believed them. Surely here the journalist should enter. The journalist is paid (OK, so I'm being naive) to enlighten me by investigating this claim, and telling me whether it's true or not. Then, having given me the facts, they can tell me what they think about it. But having done the half-baked job this Mail article did, it has not told me anything; but of course it may have put some people off voting Lib Dem not by arguing that the policy is poor or not sound, but by misrepresenting the policy. Equally, if the Lib Dem claims about reoffending rates are wrong, I haven't been told and so have not changed by political inclinations.

I can think of a few reasons that this could be, and I'll let you decide which is the most likely.

1. The journalist had not read the Lib Dem manifesto and did not know about the "cutting reoffending claim."



2. The journalist did know about the above claim, but couldn't be bothered to investigate it.



3. The journalist knew of the claim, but didn't want to investigate it because they wanted to scare people off the Lib Dems.



4. The journalist did investigate the claim, found it to be untrue, but chose to suppress this information.



5. The journalist did investigate the claim, found it to be true, but chose to suppress this information.

Basically 1-2 are laziness, 5 is scaremongering and a blatant attempt to make you vote as the Daily Mail wants you to, rather than making aninformed choice, and 3 is a bit of both (4 is unlikely because if i thappened one would expect the Mail to have trumpeted it). Either of these are poor, and basically unacceptable. And irritating.

In the above I've focussed on the Daily Mail 's misrepresentation of Lib Dem policies, but this is just as an example. Many media outlets are misrepresenting many parties; certainly Lab/Lib/Con have all suffered this to some extent or other. Isn't it time that the media realised that in a democracy, their job should be to inform our vote, not direct it through guile? Why should (for example) Rupert Murdoch claim "It was the Sun Wot Won It?" The Sun shouldn't win it, WE, the electorate, should win it. The only credit the Sun can take should be for making us sufficiently aware of the options that we could make an informed choice.

Of course, the truth is that the media don't have the goal of supporting a democracy by ensuring we have easy access the the facts. They have the goal of making money. But we do live in a democracy, and we do have the power. If the media won't tell us things straight, we don't have to give them our money. On May 6th we can vote with a chunky black pencil-crayon hybrid. In the meantime, let's vote with our wallets.

For what it's worth

Despite the unexplained and irritating objection of a single arrogant, unnamed Tory to the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill, the Jubilee Debt Campaign is leading an urgent campaign to get the Government to readopt the Bill and push it through Parliament before the imminent end of the session. The Bill will regulate the activities of so-called Vulture Funds, hedge funds which prey on heavily-indebted poor countries and make their financial problems worse, as Liberia found out to its cost last year. As the Treasury is formally in charge of sponsoring Bills going through the Commons, and Liam Byrne is the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he's the chap to get to. I emailed him. If you fancy doing likewise, either visit them or copy and paste this text what I wrote and send it to him at byrnel@parliament.uk.

Dear Mr Byrne,

I am writing to lend my support to the urgent call to the Treasury to take up the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill as a Government Bill. The way in which the passage of the Bill was blocked last week during the third reading was a shameless abuse of Parliamentary convention by the MP concerned, and it would be a great credit to the Government if it were to give this Bill time to pass into the statute book before the end of the session.

I hope that you will take the opportunity to set this matter right and demonstrate that petty political games are not to be allowed to interfere with this country's commitment to global justice.

Yours sincerely

(Get the address right - JDC spell "Byrne" wrong in their text. Nitpick, nitpick.)

I don't blog often, but I like to think it's worth it when I do.

Thank heavens that's over.

The end of Strictly Come Dancing must mean the end of the taxing "pun season" for BBC News's headline writers.

5 December - Strictly Come Dancing's Laila Rouass dances off show
14 November - Phil Tufnell bowled from Strictly
17 October - Calzaghe knocked out of Strictly.

These are not headlines. They're certainly not jokes. Headline writing must be a fairly dour job at the best of times, but inserting excruciating plays-on-words which wouldn't impress a chatty seven-year-old is not good. Stop it, BBC.

Still, 2009 was a low tide compared to 2008, when people danced off the show (twice, much like Gethin Jones the year before that), jived off the show, tangoed off it, foxtrotted off it (another gem recycled) and of course danced through the divide (do what?)

I look forward to somebody writing a style guide fairly soon on the replacement of normal verbs of motion with dancing terminology. I wonder if anybody will cha-cha-cha off next year?

(The BBC aren't the only culprits, either - the Press Association seem to be in a terrible muddle with this confused headline about Calzaghe, a boxer, approaching Guy Ritchie, a filmmaker. Who's tangoing the what now?)