“Pat Points at Things” became a trend. Also me taking dumb pictures of him always.
I miss you Pat thanks for putting up with my dumb shit. ;n;
I’m done spamming now.
This is me I think yes
Reblogging because also a picture of me in “Pat Points & Tim Touches Things” in York Minster with the lecturn.
I’m not even standing on my tiptoes and I can reach way over Patrick because he is the tiniest man.
Figuring out the financial benefits of legalising currently illegal substances is a rather fraught little exercise. There are many variables - how one chooses to estimate the number of illegal drug users in the country, which tax income to compare it too, whether legalisation will have an impact on consumption rates, what drugs you will legalise - which can impact on the final number generated. This blog post is only a rough attempt to sketch this out - the total is likely to vary when estimated by more scholarly minds than mine.
I am going to set aside debates over whether to legalise, decriminalise or not - I think they are best covered separately and I am aware this is a complex topic. This blog is an attempt to briefly summarise the potential income impact for government of legalising all drugs. There are a number of ways of breaking this issue down to ask other questions, but these are to be left aside for now. I also want to make it clear I am not going to address any change in the government’s outlays as a result - any savings from ending prosecution/imprisonment of drug users or policing the restrictions.
I’m going to begin with reference to tobacco. According to ASH, there are around 10 million adult smokers in the United Kingdom; the Tobacco Manufacturers Association (TMA) estimates that the total tax revenue generated from the sale of tobacco in this country is £10.5 billion in financial year 2009-2010. These figures are supported by the 2011 budget, which shows that, as in the TMA figures, £8.8 billion was generated from tobacco duties. I would tend to agree that total VAT income from this would be around 20% of the take of the duties. This will be the baseline for assumptions on tax take from legalisation in this blog.
Given the above, one now confronts the issue of counting drug users. As what they are doing is illegal, I think it not too unreasonable to assume that any data generated is going to involve a sizeable margin of error, though the methodology used does weight for such things to reduce it. This blog is going to use the British Crime Survey’s results from 2010-11, which break down by type of drug used and a variety of other factors. Working from this data set, one gets the figure of around 3 million individuals who have used drugs of one kind or another in the last year. Quite how regularly they consume them is another matter - but for brevity’s sake, let’s say there are 3 million people using currently illegal drugs. As with tobacco, some are going to be irregular users - only when drunk, for example - and some are going to be equivalent of 40-a-day users in terms of volume of consumption.
3 million versus 10 million - and from this we can estimate that the total tax take from legalisation of all drugs (setting aside a moment for debates over what to legalise) would be in the region of £3.15 billion today. Of course, it may turn out that people who report as irregular drug users, counted in the ”Ever taken in lifetime” column are in the other column, pushing numbers up. It may turn out that the government earns higher levels of VAT from legalisation as a result of higher prices of some drugs. A whole variety of variables can be introduced at this juncture.
But how can we spend £3.15 billion in practical terms? If we set aside the deficit reduction strategy and convert that into spending commitments; annual spending, rather than capital spend; we can develop several packages. I’ve aimed to underspend under all models, in order to give some leeway. Here’s three options:
Option A: The Promoting Business Route
Option B: The Rolling Back Route
Option C: The Aremay Route
Of course, one could spend the money all at once - for example, a £3.15 billion annual investment in a sovereign wealth fund would soon build a considerable source for new capital investment and future government income. Tax cuts - an immediate raising of the income tax threshold, or abolishing the 50p tax band - could also be a means of injecting the capital into the economy.
Either way, it’s clear that legalisation could - by at least one projection - raise a significant sum of capital for the Treasury that could be invested or returned in a number of ways. The benefits of legalisation to the Treasury should be considered more fully than they currently are; in these difficult financial times, additional capital to help shape our economy should be welcomed. That is, provided the state spends it well.
The GOP, liberals and what is wrong with people. Once again; apologies that it is out of sync and I hope you all survive watching this!
ninapedia:pixyled:kiddblink:radioinactivity:kiddblink:le-me-in-a-hat:
Real
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/12/31/396018/breaking-obama-signs-defense-authorization-bill/
REPOSTING FROM REDDIT:
TL;DR The President’s opponents played the electorate like a fiddle and will get away with it because people don’t seem to realize they’ve been tricked into being angry at the wrong person.
He signed it because if he didn’t, defense spending including benefits to veterans and their families would not have been authorized. The sections of NDAA that many people here seem to have a problem with are sections that were added into the document by primarily Republican legislators and which the President adamantly opposes but was powerless to stop. I’ll repeat that: the parts of this bill that many people here hate were included against the President’s wishes and in a way that he is powerless to stop. The only way he could have stopped these sections from being included would have been to try to veto the bill in its entirety, a move that would have been both political suicide as well as being futile, as Congress would simply have overridden him. He is explicit in his opposition to exactly the parts of the bill everyone here hates, going so far as to detail exactly which sections he opposes and why.
You’ll notice that the bill also restricts his ability to close Guantanamo Bay; this isn’t coincidence. These sections are openly hostile to the President’s stated mandate - they are effectively a giant ‘fuck you’ to the President, as well as a nasty way of eroding the President’s support with his own base. Observe:
Draft legislation that is almost guaranteed to piss of the President but more importantly piss of his base.
Attach said legislation to another piece of larger, more important legislation like, say, the Defense Spending budget for the entire year so that any attempt to dislodge the offensive legislation will result in a political shitstorm, as well as place the larger legislation in jeopardy.
Once attached, begin a PR campaign that highlights the offending legislation and brings it to the attention of as many media outlets as possible - not just the traditional media, but alternative media outlets as well (Fox news, MSNBC, Media Matters, Huff-Po, Infowars, etc.)
Here’s where it gets tricky: Simultaneously, speak to both your party’s base and the opposition’s. To your base, argue that the legislation is necessary to ‘Keep America safe’ and that the President, by opposing it, is clearly soft of terrorism and endangering the military by trying to strip the legislation out. At the same time, sit back and watch your opponent’s liberal supporters tear into the offending legislation as being dangerous, anti-democratic, and a threat to civil liberties. You know they will; that’s what they care about most. You’ve designed legislation that will make them froth at the mouth. You don’t even have to keep flogging the message; one look at the legislation will be enough to convince most people that it is anathema to everything they hold dear. Because it is.
Pass the ‘parent’ legislation. Doing so forces the President to sign it or attempt to veto it. Since the legislation in question just so happens to be the military’s operating budget, a veto is out of the question. The President must sign the bill, you get the legislation you wanted, but you also practically guarantee that your opponent’s base will be furious at him for passing a bill they see as evil. Even if he tries to explain in detail why he had to sign it and what he hates about it, it won’t matter; ignorance of the American political process, coupled with an almost militant indifference to subtle explanations will almost ensure that most people will only remember that the President passed a bill they hate.
Profit. you get the legislation you want, while the President has to contend with a furious base that feels he betrayed them - even though he agrees with their position but simply lacked the legislative tools to stop this from happening. It’s a classic piece of misdirection that needs only two things to work: A lack of principles (or a partisan ideology that is willing to say anything - do anything - to win), and an electorate that is easy to fool.
This is pretty basic political maneuvering and the biggest problem is that it almost always works because most people either don’t know or don’t care how their political system actually functions. The President was saddled with a lose-lose situation where he either seriously harmed American defense policy (political suicide), or passed offensive legislation knowing that it would cost him political capital. To all of you here lamenting that you ever voted for this ‘corporate shill’, congratulations: you are the result the Republicans were hoping for. They get the law they want, they get the weakened Presidential candidate they want. And many of you just don’t seem to see that. You don’t have to like your country’s two-party system, but it pays to be able to understand it so that you can recognize when it’s being used like this.
Read the blurb. Read it well. Then go away and read The Prince and understand that you need subtlety and nuance and pragmatism and a good grasp of power to get things done. Then go out and do things.
(via temporary-glitch)
Fuck, shit’s going down.
Great Scott, this is most serious.
(Source: inconceivable1, via blahblahbiscuit)
Today, at least some of the nightmare for Iraqis, Allied soldiers and taxpayers is over - the last US troops are leaving Iraq. They leave behind them a tangled legacy, a fragile democracy and too many questions to be satisfactorily answered today. It will take many years to fully understand the issues and answer the questions they beg. It is apparent that the Iraq War has been a seminal moment in recent international and political history and we must consider it carefully if we are to understand a litany of current events in these spheres. It has played a huge role in everything from the erosion of trust in politicians to the wording of Security Council resolutions.
The Prime Minister’s decision to veto the latest move by the European Union to try and create a package of measures aimed at the solution of the Eurozone debt crisis has inspired many commentators - myself included - to new heights of hyperbole and ridiculousness in their responses. Now several days have passed and time has been had to catch a breath and think, we are left facing the future with the veto set in stone. One cannot “un-veto” a treaty - and even if one could, it is extremely unlikely David Cameron would be able to do so, given the feelings on antipathy towards anything European that dominate on the benches behind him in the Commons.
Of course, there are debates to be had about the future of the deal. Now I’ve calmed down, I feel it likely that it will die, as the past deals have done, in a hail of apathy and hand-wringing. I don’t feel especially well qualified to speak to what will take its place, or indeed prescribe specific policies to fix the Eurozone crisis. What I want to speak to is the idea of European union that has underpinned the EU project since its conception and why we need bodies like the European Union if we are to remain open to the world, rich and free.
There is a persistent myth about British membership of the European Union, and indeed the European project at large. Consistently, Eurosceptic commentators have argued that Britain signed up for a free trade deal in 1973 when it entered the European Economic Community on the third try. Whilst it may be tenable to argue that some pro-European politicians argued that was all that the EEC truly amounted to, both before and immediately after accession, the documentary evidence points to a very different path for the European project. The Treaty of Rome, one of the documents which Britain signed on joining, makes it clear from the beginning this is about more than just lowering tariff barriers:
- Treaty of Rome, Article Two
The project has included from the start a significant element of integration that goes beyond lowering tariff barriers and closing border posts. There are provisions for the creation of common policies for transport, the development of a Social Fund for workers and a common policy on competition. There is a coherent argument that some of the provisions for commonality - such as that on agriculture - have manifested in ways that harm the common market as envisioned in the treaty, to the detriment of member states and citizens; as well as outsiders.
In the conditions of Europe in 1955-57, as the Treaty of Rome took shape and was signed, the call for integration was fed by a great urge to avoid the horrific catastrophes that had engulfed the continent over the previous half century. Seeking a more peaceful and prosperous Europe would take more than lowering trade barriers; countries had to be tied together and people brought together in fundamentally unbreakable ways. But it goes deeper than this - to understand why, we must go back through Liberal thought to a shining light, often kidnapped by those who see the state as a road block to economic liberty.
We must go back to that oft-misquoted and misunderstood giant of Liberal philosophy, Adam Smith. What is first worth noting about Smith’s most famous work, The Wealth of Nations, is that he speaks about “self-love” more than he does “self-interest”. Second, it is worth noting that Smith does not believe that the state should be as small as possible; indeed, he argues that it must provide defence, law and order, justice, education, infrastructure and for a certain degree of ceremony in order to allow for a truly prosperous and successful country. In this, Smith is building upon his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith is not interested in simply building free markets; he is interested in building good markets as well.
Smith’s argument in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is that for markets to work well, actors must share a sense of commonality. They must trust in each other that the transactions are being carried out in good faith, that the goods are not shoddy and that the whole thing is fair. They must share these instincts with one another - a sense of community. Without them, markets cannot operate to their fullest potential in assigning goods and services to individuals with efficiency and effectiveness. Further more, the state can underwrite some of this commonality - though it cannot replace it - through the provision of the services outlined above.
In this, we see the Liberal kernel embedded in the Treaty of Rome and the entire European project. Avoiding war would be brought about by bringing together people and building common institutions and ideals; but better markets that benefit all the actors in them can be brought about by the same. By building a sense of commonality through common policies; by providing the security to business and individuals that they were going to receive the same basic level of justice regardless of which border they had crossed and by underwriting business through provision of greater certainty, the European project seeks to make us all richer and closer together - and recognises that the two are not mutually exclusive.
These good markets are, of course, not the be-all and end-all of the European project. The European project’s recognition that community needs to cross borders to make markets that cross borders effective and efficient also translates into another recognition - there are forces that cross borders that we dislike, may seek to control or need to respond to if we are to remain effective players in the world. A clear and prescient example of this can be found in British political history just a quarter of a century ago.
Margaret Thatcher’s government changed Britain forever in many ways - in 1986, there were two big events that changed this country in fundamental ways we are still dealing with. The first was the Single European Act, arguably one of the most integrationist pieces of legislation passed by any government in this country since the entry into the EEC in 1973. The second was the Big Bang, the lifting of financial controls and regulations on the City of London, leading to an explosion in size and wealth of the financial sector in this country. Both were conscious political choices and both had prices we are still paying, for good or for ill, 25 years later. I wish to focus foremost on the Big Bang, though I acknowledge the price from the SEA is also a matter for contention.
It was through the unshackling of the financial markets - the conscious unshackling and then keeping unshackled - that we have surrendered a large share of our sovereignty to unaccountable, unelected distant powers. Arguably, there is some justice to be found in the power of the financial markets; they ability to punish those who would spend without paying for it can be a useful warning tool. But these markets are now far wealthier, more powerful and faster moving than any state on the planet. Even America has been humbled by them with a downgrade and the runs on US banks that deepened the financial crisis in 2008.
The argument that new regulation is needed for the financial markets is one that many commentators share. Be that the prohibitive dead weight of old, or new structures designed to encourage transparency and accountability within markets, these regulations need to be created, imposed and then monitored above the level of states. If financial markets do not operate on a state level, why should their regulators? The Liberalism within the European project recognises this - a freer market, a better market, needs to have regulators who respond to the size and shape of that market in order to stay effective.
Of course, other forces in this world do not respect borders. Criminals actively disregard them; indeed, operating across several may give them greater security in their crimes. Refugees may flee across several as they seek to escape the catastrophe that expelled them from their homes in the first place. Acid rain and fish do not conceive of borders - indeed, acid rain does not conceive of anything at all. Whether it is pollution in our waterways or money flowing in and out of our bank accounts, the problems no longer confine themselves to single states, and thus cannot be addressed by single states. If we want solutions to this - Liberal solutions - we must look to the European project to understand that common responses; institutions, laws and agreements; are key to responding to these challenges to build the good and free markets we need to prosper.
Smith’s vision of markets as requiring commonality, therefore, is bedded into the European project in a surprising but critical way. As Liberals, we must respond to this and incorporate the European project into our intellectual framework in a stronger way. Yet it is because we view the project in this way and because we understand markets as being something that must be both good and free if they are to succeed that we can be the most effective critics of the European Union as it exists in its present form.
The need for transparency, for accountability and for legibility within the European Union is essential - European institutions must seek to ensure that the project can be nourished by giving up prized ways of doing things for the good of the project; arguably, for the good of Europe. European accounts must be approved every year by the Court of Auditors; the Parliament must be the first and last port of call on every law proposed by the Commission and the Commission itself must be as transparent can be. Only when the institutions are healthy can Liberals truly rest - as institutions tend to atrophy over time, this work is not one that we can say will be complete by a certain point. But it is a cause worth fighting for - a Liberal cause.
We must engage with the European project as a Liberal project and we must understand the common roots with our own ideological hinterland that it shares. Recognising that challenges cross borders is one thing - recognising that we need to build the institutions to make markets good across borders if we are to let them cross borders is another. We can tie these things together and bring to the people of Britain, and to our European allies, a vision of Europe based on an understanding that freedom and wealth are not exclusive; but that both are more complex and more dependant on a sense of commonality than others would argue.
This is a high challenge for all Liberals. I hope we can meet it - if not, then a lonely, cold, poor, shackled future awaits these islands outside Europe, or inside a gloomy, half-broken institutional wreck leeching off the fading remnants of that dream.
Furore has clattered into the public sphere of twitter over the announcement that, to commemorate the anniversary of the first publication of the King James Bible, the government is to despatch copies of the Bible to every single school in the UK. Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, is to write a foreword to the edition.
This initiative has immediately sailed into the middle of the interminable struggle between those who believe in religion and those who do not. In a sadly familiar display of total inability to tolerate the other side, despite both sides endless preaching of the virtues of their particular construction of personal philosophy, there has erupted a nasty spat over whether this is a worthy thing to spend money from the hard-pressed public purse on; whether this was the right thing for the state to do. The National Secular Society, with a fine sense of hyperbole, has said that our schools are “awash” with Bibles and called for additional public money to be spent on sending out copies of The Origin of Species on Darwin Day, as though the additional capital spend will somehow wash away this original sin.
Ultimately, I do have some sympathy for the National Secular Society - books and reading more generally are something we should work hard to promote in our schools, Sure Start centres and other public offices of state. It would be nice for hordes of books to be sent out every year for free to every home in the land by some benevolent entity. But politics is a matter of dealing with the world that we have, not the world that we want, and the King James Bible is not something we can unpick from our history because religion makes our personal philosophy inflame with righteous anger. Indeed, religion is not something that we can unpick from the national tapestry.
We face in this question a wider issue - how, exactly, do we teach children about the religious dimension of the world of yesterday and today? Some would probably prefer a version that revels in the blood-soaked banners of the Crusades and the witch burnings of the Reformation. Others may well tend towards a saintly, pious history of works of charity and purity clad in the shining armour of heavenly righteousness. As a Liberal, I feel it my duty to expose the tyranny of vested interests, including organised religion. As a believer in God, I feel it my firm duty to fight against a persistent bent against those who share such a belief in many quarters of thinking, especially on the left.
We have to get away from persistently arguing religion is a pure or pathological thing. It is as individual as we are; it is as complex and powerful as we are and it, like history as a whole, completely refuses to be simple or readily bundled this way or that by those with a lie to peddle. We live in a land where our laws, our language and even the seating pattern of our legislature have been shaped by the hand of religion - whether we like that or not, whether we believe or not and whether we think faith a pure or pathological thing we have to come to terms with these cold historical facts. The King James Bible is as much a towering feature of our history as the cathedrals that dominate our cities. If we are to understand the bloody, seemingly interminable struggles over faith that marred these islands in the 17th Century; struggles that eventually gave birth to the beginnings of the modern constitutional settlement, including our current political party structure; we must understand the story of faith in these times. That includes the story of the King James Bible - just one of the many tales we can draw from these pages.
I am disheartened by the reaction to this news for these reasons. I do not think that we need to be religious to be right; but I do not think that sneering at faith as a pathology does anything to make one more intelligent than any other. We are falling into the same lazy traps about this debate over and over - this is a relatively small issue; but when it comes to education, money or war, these mistakes can mar or even take away life. A movement towards an understanding of religion that does not rely on cold condescension towards believers or insufferable grovelling at their feet needs to start somewhere; I’d rather it be here, in a debate between the Education Secretary and the National Secular Society, than out there in some darker field between rather more brutal actors.
Englishness is a concept often conflated with less than savoury individuals and acts in the public gaze in recent years. The rise of groups claiming to “defend” it against a variety of “threats” - claims that are but a wafer-thin cloak for thuggish intolerance and violence is but the latest threat to this identity to surface in contemporary British society. Englishness has lapsed into a silence in politics - politicians declare their Britishness, Welshness, Scottishness and so on loudly - but where are the Englishmen in politics? Gordon Brown’s time in office was probably the high-point of this; unable to call himself English, he spoke of a British identity to the electorate, trying to build something else.
But the time has come to face up to the cold reality of Englishness and the need to claim it back from the hooligans and the hoodlums. The coming political battles - especially north of the border, where the SNP promises a referendum on independence and English students are taking the Scottish government to the European Court of Human Rights over their patently illogical tuition fees policy for English students - will surely stoke up this debate over what it means to be English. Comprising, as it does, the greater share of the population, wealth and landmass of the UK, that England has slept for so long should shock us. Regardless of whether Scotland leaves the union or not, the debate will surely awaken a nationalist sentiment south of the border. I would contend that a Scottish “no” vote will make this awakening all the more urgent
The West Lothian Question must be answered - and if it is not to be through Scotland leaving the union, then a way must be found to give English people a sovereignty over their affairs that they do not enjoy, so long as Scottish and Welsh MPs can vote on affairs that only affect England. I do not believe that can be achieved by winding back devolution, as some might contend. I think an opposition to devolution founded on the argument that the Scots and Welsh have access to things that the English do not is a fundamentally mean-spirited and intellectually unsustainable line of attack to take. The only way to adequately resolve this problem is to devolve power to England. Some would contend that the English regions need that power; others would contend that England as a whole should get the power.
For me, the best route is an English Parliament - one that doesn’t cover London (whose urban area’s population is equal to Wales and Scotland combined) and that is based far enough away from London as to escape it’s influence and set itself as clearly independent from Westminster. I would suggest Birmingham, Manchester and York are the three best options, though others will doubtlessly disagree. Equipped with similar powers to Holyrood and elected through an AMS system, an English Parliament would give English people an institution which will give them the option of policies without the other union members’ representatives involvement.
Either route, however, will lead to the creation of political institutions that need an identity. There is little point creating a political system with which no-one identifies as the legitimate representative body of their group - a state without a nation. If we are to adequately solve West Lothian and complete devolution, we need to look again at Englishness. We need to reclaim it, to revive it and to begin to understand quite how we might develop it.
Liberals have to engage in this battle as fully as any other political group in this country. We have to remember the liberal past of this country - the free trade, the fight for democratic rights and the birth of so many key ideas that we wield today in politics. Mill, Keynes and Beveridge were all Englishmen. The problems, though, soon crowd in as we find the field depressingly empty of ideological constructs from which we can begin to erect our vision of Englishness. There is much work to be done by Liberals in this debate in order to get started - but once started, the potential rewards are strong.
This is about more than bending back the fingers of the EDL to pry lose our national identity and reclaiming it from them; this is about setting out a vision of a nationality that is imbued with our values, with an understanding that our history and the history of England share deep and common roots that should not be disregarded. We must embrace the cause of England within the Union as an issue of democracy and fairness, as much as we seek to build an English identity of democratic values and fairness that we can share with voters. We must be prepared for the storms of seperation, so that we may be in poll position when it comes to repair the union afterwards, however it emerges.
In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.
What do the 50% tax band, the Pupil Premium and ending the detention of children in immigration detention centres have in common? The answer is, of course, that these are policies in which the Liberal Democrats have been active since the formation of the coalition last May. Problematically for the party, that seems to be about as far as we’ve been able to drag the link between these issues – indeed, between a wide array of policies upon which we’ve been working over the last few months. We are coming face to face with a horrid truth about the Liberal Democrats – we lack a coherent narrative of Britain for the 21st Century.
This is not for want of trying – the party has produced many admirable efforts to generate a vision for the party, or liberals more widely, of this country as it moves forwards. But the problem is that they are scattered about in conference papers, books and newspaper articles. Even the 2010 manifesto shirks the dirty job of laying down what we really stand for – talk of fairness is, in my eyes, a poor substitute for talk of liberalism. No-one is ever going to stand up and argue for unfair policies – from Caroline Lucas to Nick Griffin, all are in favour of fairness. What we must be is in favour of liberalism; and a liberalism that we define.
The rich intellectual heritage that we as a party have should help, as will our allegiance to this same heritage. For example, we’ve been committed internationalists since the 1870s and Gladstone’s revulsion at the atrocities in the Balkans – a commitment that has led us to supporting British membership in Europe, international law and new international organisational structures to respond to climate change and financial markets right up to the present day. With localism, environmentalism and pluralism, the story is much the same.
I would contend that we are yet to weave this rich heritage into a convincing tapestry of a governing philosophy. The point of articulating this vision is very simple – people have to know that we share their vision for this country. We’re never going to get back to winning votes and seats and councils if we don’t make this stand – if we don’t demonstrate what we see this country becoming under a Liberal Democrat government. We need to come face to face with the tensions that some detect in our policies – is the 50% tax rate compatible with the social mobility that we’ve spoken of at length? Why, for that matter, is social mobility a good thing? It is not enough, as we saw with AV, to proclaim that an idea is good because the existing system is bad. We must articulate both the merits of the idea and the way that it joins with our other ideas to produce a coherent vision.
This is how you succeed in a coalition. People can see what you stand for, where you’ve made compromises and what you would do otherwise. Every other tactic is effectively a temporary measure in the meantime. The policies you defeat or launch can be as unpopular or popular respectively as you want, but it will mean nothing in the grand scheme of things if you do not have a convincing story as to why these things tie together. So what do banning images of semi-naked women, executive pay restraint and cracking down on tax evasion have to do with each other, conference? I fear we’re letting ourselves drift sideways in the name of a quick headline.
The best way to respond is to start with the basics – a panel of experts to consider what being a liberal means in 21st Century Britain, and a move to rename the party “the Liberal Party” once more. We are never going to win back votes and trust if we continue to paddle at the edge of the ocean of liberalism, with a name that suggests a mucky compromise and little in the way of deep intellectual roots. The Liberal Party gave this country Keynes, Asquith and Beveridge. It is time to return to that hinterland of thought and begin anew. We can build a vision of Britain; we have the membership to bring that to people through campaigning. It will mean sacrificing some sacred cows at first – but the end result will be a strong, clearer message for us to bring to the people of Britain. Then, and only then, can we get back to the business of winning here, there and everywhere again.
Europe is a thorny issue at the best of times; but since the start of the Eurozone crisis, it has become positively toxic. Barely a week now goes by without a Eurosceptic commentator delighting in the idea that the Eurozone will soon collapse, leaving them justified in their opposition to the project and clearing the way for British withdrawal. Yet, there is a strange blindness in the particulars of this argument, especially for those Eurosceptics who approach this from what now is a right-wing perspective (socially authoritarian, economically liberal) in the UK. They seem to have failed to have grasped the full weight of the consequences of economic liberalisation and what this means for the governance of markets and the governance of the UK.
Laying aside the obvious problem - that any collapse of the Eurozone would inevitably devastate British banks, trade and much of our economy, reducing us to penury as well as the Eurozone - the deeper conceptual problem with right-wing Euroscepticism is that it those who advocate it also press for freer markets. Free global markets are, in my eyes, a good thing. They have lowered the price of many financial services and made the price of commodities far more predictable, even cheaper - despite the catcalls of left-wing commentators that they make everything more expensive. In particular, for an island nation such as ours, we should welcome the chance to trade with a far greater share of the world through liberalised markets for money, goods, services and even labour. Our history inclines us to look outwards for our wealth; from just across the Channel to the other side of the world.
Yet as the ties of trade and finance that bind the global economy together have grown more powerful and penetrated deeper into our lives, the need to regulate them accordingly has grown. Even the most ardent classical liberal will admit, as Adam Smith does in the Wealth of Nations, there is always a role for government - as the provider of justice and order, at the very least. With companies operating in many countries at once an increasingly common occurrence - and companies whose supply chains and financial requirements cross borders even more common - the need for common regulatory frameworks and agreements is greater now than ever.
States are no longer up to this job, and they have responded with a panoply of organisational structures above their level. The WTO, BIS, OECD, NAFTA, UNCTAD, ASEAN and many more such bodies have taken on varying levels of regulatory authority as part of their mandate. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is an excellent example - it has ruled on everything from US steel tariffs to Antiguan complaints about American restrictions on gambling (incidentally, Antigua won). Yet as the WTO has matured and continued to try and press for more liberalised markets, it has found it necessary to begin to expand its role.
Trade cannot be considered in isolation - it is related to too many social, economic and political issues to be detached. Countries want to know that the goods they are buying were not produced in an environmentally harmful way, for example - not only because the pollution can damage them, but also because it gives other countries an unfair advantage by opening up potentially cheaper (at least at point of production) ways of manufacturing. Workers rights are also commonly raised - arguably unfair competitive advantage can be gained from working people for 12 hours a day, paying them less than a dollar an hour and avoiding expensive safety regulations. The WTO has found itself increasingly drawn into these debates in recent years - increasingly, it finds itself confronting domestic political issues, such as workers rights, environmental protection and agricultural subsidies, because these have become entangled in the debate around trade.
Thus, we face the problem with the argument in favour of withdrawing from the EU, and yet pressing for freer markets, and indeed free trade with the European Union. The example cited by UKIP is Switzerland, who have a free trade agreement with the EU and yet remain outside. What UKIP do not mention is that Switzerland is required to follow European law on areas including public procurement, agriculture and science. Switzerland can decide which laws to implement, but it cannot shape the laws as they are written - it can only turn them on and off, rather than trying to get its voice heard. One can only imagine that the same outcome would be true for the UK - the EU regulatory burden would not shift, and the UK would lose any ability to shape the regulation as it was formed. Indeed, Switzerland pays into the EU budget even though it is not a member. The falsehoods abound.
But even if we lay aside this argument, we have to return to the central point - that states have begun to recognise that globalisation takes power away from them and moves it up, or down, the scale of political units. Consumers, communities and continents are arguably increasingly important, where as centralised states face huge challenges. No one state can stand up to the financial markets for long - even the US has discovered there is a limit to their patience - so states have responded by pooling some sovereignty to regain control of their destiny.
That is the key phrase - pooling and gaining. We cannot expect to have freer markets and not change how we regulate them - we need to have regulatory authorities that can cross borders, without having to chew through a tangle of bilateral treaties. With 193 UN member states, any attempt to create a truly global system of regulation for anything would soon end in a messy failure, a tangled web of treaties with clashes and incomprehension galore. If we want to remain relevant, we have to change the way we respond to globalisation - we have to push for strong regional and global organisational structures to assist cross-border co-operation on regulatory issues. Like I have already argued, individual states are increasingly less powerful when facing markets, or even the world - a lone Britain at the WTO will be pushed aside with swift ease by the remaining 26 EU members, or America, or China, or any number of other powerful groups. The best way to respond, the best way to preserve our influence and power, is to join up with other states and craft a common response to what are, after all, common problems.
It goes beyond trade, of course - fishing stocks, pollution, crime, tourism, finance; all of these forces take little or no heed whatsoever of borders. As an island so very close to a large continent, we need to take account of, and be involved in, decisions made on that continent that affect the water, air and resources we cannot partition off from them. I want to see a European Union that takes account of these things and works productively to solve them. This EU is different from the one we have today - this EU is transparent, fiscally solvent and accountable more directly to the people of Europe. But this EU shares with the current EU the same underlying recognition of hard political and economic fact - the changing nature of the world economy requires a dynamic response which recognises the diminishing power and influence of the state.
So we are tied to Europe - by virtue of common geographical space and resources, by virtue of economic ties and by virtue of the inevitable bringing in of new issues to any organisation, especially one that considers something so bound up in our economic life and history as trade. We should be in Europe, shaping laws, demanding reforms and building institutions, rather than outside, carping and floundering about in the face of the winds of globalisation while we decide how many laws we must sign up to keep the EU’s trade barriers open to us. That is the choice - I am waiting for someone to make it loud and clear to the British people.
False bifurcation is a problem I have railed against before, in aid of the spectacular flop which was the ‘Rally Against Debt’. Whilst that particular cause has spluttered since then, the problem of people who do not recognise that there are more than two parties, more than two sides to every debate in this country, continues to boil away in politics and the media. Today, we saw the Deputy Leader of the SNP buying into this nonsense.
The argument that the Liberal Democrats ‘sold out’ by going into coalition with the Conservative Party, and then compromising to produce a workable legislative programme, lacks serious moral or intellectual fibre. First of all, we must remember the Parliamentary arithmetic worked against any other kind of coalition. The more parties in a coalition, as well - the more moving parts in the government machine - the harder it becomes to formulate policies and pass legislation. Whilst most all parties are coalitions of one kind or another; and thus, such bargaining is part of any government; adding more parties adds an extra level of complexity, in more negotiations between two leaderships. On top of this, commentators such as David Laws have suggested rather strongly that Labour just weren’t interested in a coalition. They seem to have recognised that whilst there was no victor, they were definitely the defeated party in that election; in any case, some felt that they needed a spell in opposition to refresh and rebuild.
Second of all, we are wise to remember that the Liberal Democrats - and their predecessors in the Alliance and the Liberal Party - admitted often that a natural consequence of the electoral reform they pressed for was going to be coalition government. In many past elections - 1983, 1992 and 1997 - they have worked on coalition policies and ideas, and gotten into hot water for debating who they’d end up in a coalition with in the event of a hung Parliament. It is a lack of imagination and practical political concern which drives some to say that the only beneficiaries of this arrangement would be the Liberal Democrats - the suggestion is that they’d simply flop back and forth between Labour and the Conservative Party, depending on which was closer to a majority.
Of course, if the Labour and Conservative Parties wanted to avoid this, they could always go into grand coalition - a bold, daring move that would drive nutjob tribalists out of both and demonstrate once and for all they were in it to try and fix Britain, not beat each other down. Bipartisan politics fails voters, communities and countries - just look to the US to see the roaring success it has proven there. I’d even contend Liberal Democrats can more readily work with people across the spectrum because we’ve so long advocated ourselves as being out side the normal constraints - the classless party, for example - even though the facts may have been different. It is time for the two larger parties to get their heads out of the sand and recognise that we live in an age of plurality beyond two, or even three, party politics.
Third of all - the implication that the party ‘sold out’ is often tied to the implication there is such a thing as an ‘anti-Tory’ or ‘progressive’ alliance/majority/bandwagon within Britain. There is not. There are not simply Conservative and anti-Conservative parties in politics. There are Liberals and socialists and nationalists and goodness knows what else in the mix and our political leaders and media commentators do the electorate a colossal disservice by peddling such lies. The Liberal Democrats’ natural ally is whichever party can best claim to carry forwards the principles to which we’ve long been allied - environmentalism, internationalism, localism - Liberalism as it has developed in this country. At the last election, Labour’s claim to being a party with respect for international law, human rights or local government was shot to pieces. There was little natural ideological room for coalition with the Liberal Democrats - even if Labour had wanted it, or we’d wanted to be tied to a defeated government, forever the people who “propped up NuLab” as I am sure Have Your Say would have it.
The reason the Liberal Party never died in this country - and won’t die, within my lifetime or anyone else reading this blog - is because there is a strong current of support for a party that supports the kind of things we support. As Tim Montgomerie points out in the Telegraph today - through gritted words of praise- the party leadership is getting better and better at putting those things into practice, and stopping other things we don’t like. Yes, sometimes we have to sign up to things we’re not comfortable with - but we’re adults, we can compromise and work together with someone to fix problems. This is how politics should be - consensual, debate-driven and clever. On the other side of the Commons, we see how politics has been for too long and why people loose faith - politicians firing broadsides into each other over an economic and political catastrophe of a government that they will accept no blame for, at least, not in a meaningful way.
I don’t think Labour, or the Conservatives, or any political party in this country, aren’t fundamentally capable of compromise and adult politics that goes beyond the false bifurcations that hark back to the 1950s. Oppositional, bipartisan politics has failed Britain for decades now. This is not about Liberal Democrats winning - this is about the SNP, Plaid and the Greens or other parties getting a louder voice in as well to help shape the debate and have their views heard. Britain deserves politics that works sanely - we just have to snap out of the mindset that only two sides exist in a debate, and that leaving one of these two is a betrayal that can never be forgiven.
Beverley Minster, looking sublimely beautiful as ever.
On this visit, during the roof tour, we were enormously privileged to have the central boss lifted as a wedding procession down the aisle was beginning. As the boss is close to being above the organ, the sound was absolutely glorious - a rendition of the finale of Saint-Saens Symphony No. 3 echoing through the timbers and stonework of the roof space. It’s things like that that make me fall in love with these places all over again.
The church will soon have to begin re-leading the roof, however - at a projected cost of at least £5 million. The government has already begun nibbling into the tax relief for church repairs - as expensive as organs, bells and clocks are to keep in order, re-leading a church the size of Beverley Minster, or even larger - York Minster is the length of the largest battleship to ever serve in the Royal Navy, for example - is in itself a colossally expensive task, never mind re-glazing windows, replacing corroded stonework and the million other tasks that are needed to keep these ancient and colossal structures standing in fine order for millions of citizens and tourists to visit, enjoy and worship in.
These buildings do more than draw tourists and provide a space for worship. Churches drive housing, education and social charitable work in this country and overseas, on top of providing their pastoral functions to their congregations. They are the original ‘big society’ and to abandon their structures is to do as great a disservice to the present as to the past - and indeed the future. I hope that the government thinks again on this tax change. I’m sure we can go without homeopathic hospitals for the sake of our national heritage and present charitable strength.
The Guardian is reporting this morning that the government has decided to change the regulations surrounding abortion, before a vote is held in the Commons on an amendment presented by Conservative MP Nadine Dorries and Labour MP Frank Field on this very subject. The changes will see abortion providers stripped of their role in counselling women seeking an abortion, instead requiring independent bodies to fulfill this role - many of whom are anti-choice organisations.
I am appalled that there are those in government, indeed in Parliament, who believe that in the middle of a growing economic storm, we need to be spending public time and money on minimising a woman’s right to choose. Whilst abortion is a weighty decision for individuals to take, it is ultimately just that - a decision for a mother to make, with the advice of trained medical professionals. It is not the job of the state to impose itself inside the uterus of every woman from Lands End to Lerwick. That there are far more urgent issues at hand here merely compounds the insult.
For me, there can be no question. It is every woman’s right to choose whether she feels that it is necessary for her to have an abortion. In cases of rape, incest or medical complication, certainly, there is no room for moralising organisations who wish to control her uterus and life from here on in.
This does not for one moment, however, mean that I think people should be forced to have abortions, that I condone murder or the thousand other things that pro-choice activists in the US are accused of by their anti-choice opponents. Abortions happen whether they are legal or not; I want women to be able to choose to have this difficult and often traumatic procedure in a clean, safe environment with trained medical professionals and the option of counselling from organisations who believe that the difficulties of the individual should not be disregarded in the name of their own personal belief structure.
Anyone who believes that tightening the laws around abortion, or even banning it, would prevent it from happening should watch the beginning of this video; an extract from Ken Loach’s play Up The Junction. Before abortion was legalised in this country, the estimate is that there were at least 52,000 abortions every year. Wider studies show that prohibiting abortion, or restricting legal access, has no significant impact on the number. Legalising abortion transferred this procedure from dark and dangerous back streets to clean and safe clinics. As the above New York Times article indicates, WHO research shows that around 67,000 women die each year from having unsafe abortions.
There are simply too many vulnerable women who cannot afford a child, yet were raped; who’ve been abused systematically by family members; who’ve had to sell their bodies to make ends meet; whose condom split; whose partner beat them and now has left them - too many vulnerable women who will suffer if we roll the state forwards in this area. We don’t have the money to do much for them at the moment; the least we can do is ensure their right to choose is protected and can be carried out in the fairest, cleanest way possible. The trauma of abortion is enough without the guilt of another being forced upon you in the name of ‘counselling’.
It is not just that a Liberal MP - David Steel - was the one who got the ban on abortion lifted back in the 1960s. It’s not just that those who lead these campaigns are taking a page from the politics of the US, a politics that has led to that country drifting rudderless for years now. It’s not just that there are bigger issues for government to be addressing. It’s that we have no place here, between the doctor and the mother or inside the uterus. I would urge truly progressive politicians of every stripe to unite to defeat this backwards stumble by the government, now, before women who need help find doors slammed in their faces.
