Climate extremists are a threat to democracy - run them out of town on a rail

Democracy is the problem.You didn't realise this, of course, because you are part of that problem, you are a voter. And there's a chance that you might vote the wrong way, support the wrong things. Especially if you are an older voter. Don't take my word for this take the word of Cambridge University expert David Runciman:

The climate crisis is an issue that requires long-term thinking across the generations, yet electoral politics is geared toward responding to immediate grievances. Politicians can talk about taking the long view, but without institutional changes to the way we practice democracy, they are unlikely to look beyond short-term political gains.

 Runciman is an academic so, no doubt, considers himself above all that rough-and-tumble of day-to-day politics. But I might not be alone in considering that we should worry about someone who can even consider this:

The authoritarian Chinese system has some advantages when it comes to addressing climate change: One-party rule means freedom from electoral cycles and less need for public consultation. Technocratic solutions that put power in the hands of unelected experts could take key decisions out of the hands of voters.

Frightening stuff and all driven by the refusal (or so Runciman says) of political leaders to fully embrace the idea that we are in a 'climate emergency' requiring immediate action - mostly action read off the back of Greenpeace-produced pamphlets. We're told repeatedly that governments aren't doing enough and, even when they are doing things those things are the wrong things (because they're not printed on a handy crib sheet by environmentalist campaign groups) or there aren't enough of them.

The secret to the problem with democracy is (as Runciman spots) "...when it comes to actual voters, the math favors the climate skeptics or at least the people who have other priorities." Ah, there it is - how dare you ignore cute Swedish girls and say you want to prioritise jobs or health or education rather than drive the economy into the wall because that cute Swedish girl reads out environmentalist slogans saying it's an emergency.

What Runciman proposes ("citizens assemblies and civil disobedience") reminds us of the worst parts of the French revolution - mob violence combined with self-appointed assemblies claiming to speak on behalf of the people. That cute Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg tells us “I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations." The first part of this statement is probably true whereas the second part of it definitely isn't - Ms Thunberg speaks only on behalf of Ms Thunberg.

Ah, you say, but the young people, what about the young people, they all care deeply about the climate so Greta is speaking for them, no? It seems not, or at least this is what David Runciman tells us (while trying to suggest the opposite):

...for nearly half of all voters aged 18 to 24, global warming represents the most pressing issue of our time

So for a majority of young people, climate change is not the most pressing issue. Greta doesn't speak for them now does she? The young people who're more worried about education or crime or the economy? We're told that we aren't listening to young people's concerns but the truth is we're listening selectively to the likes of Greta Thunberg and not to the billion or so children in the developing world who'd like a stab at a life half as good as the one Greta enjoys. Yet the message from the climate campaigners is that we should sideline those voices and the voices of older, maybe wiser people and end democracy as we know it - the planet demands this!

The point about democracy is that it gives people a brake on the authoritarian delusions of people like David Runciman, allows us space to argue that there isn't a climate emergency and permits voters to kick out governments that fail them. Our systems aren't perfect but it is a crazy idea that we should tear down established democracies to replace them with either mob rule or a dictatorship (and we should remember that the mob rule of the French revolution resulted in a military dictatorship).

Climate extremists - with or without pigtails - are a threat to democracy in the same way as fascists, communists and Cambridge University polisci academics. All of them should be run out of town on a rail.

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JFDI (a rant about democracy)

My wife is not a political animal. But for me she would have remained blissfully uninvolved (if not uninterested). Kathryn is cleverer than me - she got to be acquisitions director for a big international publisher which is a tad bigger achievement-wise than my political career - indeed anyone's political career is less valuable than helping create a multi-million pound business with over 250 employees.

Anyway, the Brexit thing. Kathryn voted to leave because the EU is, for all its talk about trade, essentially anti-trade. And she is cross. Not mildly irritated but really cross, almost to the point of incoherence. As she put it "so angry I don't want to talk about it".

Kathryn is not alone. There are thousands of decent people who, in good faith, voted in a referendum and now see the machinations of people - MPs, media, celebrities, rich businessmen - who lost that vote moving us towards not leaving the European Union. This isn't about who is right and wrong - there isn't an objective, evidenced answer to that question especially in a debate so utterly riddled with lies, scare stories and misinformation. No it's about the very essence of why we vote.

If you say to people "this is your decision, the government will implement what you decide" and then spend three years trying not to do what people decided then is it really a surprise that people are angry? There is a lot of nonsense - endless sociological dribble - talked about why people *really* voted to leave but one thing we have discovered...

...most of our members of parliament are duplicitous, self-serving, dissembling, two-faced, preening popinjays with no real interest, despite the smarmy speeches and Twitter feeds written by Uriah Heep, in the people who gave them that well-paid career opportunity down in London.

Why hell should ordinary people vote if, as they now know, most of the MPs they vote for aren't remotely interested in why they cast that vote? Those MPs are interested in that front bench position, in the foreign trips, in the media appearances and, above all, in the goings on within that cosy little club we elected them to.

What to people want? I'll tell you. They want JFDI - JUST. FUCKING. DO. IT.

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My Dad died last year. It seems some remainers are gleeful about this...

Your politics is very troubled if it takes you to a place where you wish your opponents - "the enemy" - dead. Yet this is precisely where we've got to with the Remain side of Brexit:

Enough old leavers will have died and enough young remainers will have come on to the electoral register to turn the dial on what the country thinks about Brexit.

This doesn't come from some little blog but from the UK's leading progressive news platform, The Guardian written by one of its star - and very well paid - columnists, Polly Toynbee. This position - we'll get what we want once all those unpleasant old people in provincial towns have pegged it - it a deeply unpleasant one. It sits alongside the idea - most recently from singer, Jamelia, that old people should have the franchise removed because, y'know, they'll be dead before the effects of their votes are truly felt.

Elsewhere:



Now the person who did this unthinkingly unpleasant site has taken it down claiming that he didn't mean to be nasty to people who are dying (they aren't, of course, all nasty old brexity people) or to the families of people who lost close relatives since the referendum. As far as I know, my Dad voted to leave and he died last year making him one of Polly and her pals gleeful statistics. I miss his wit and wisdom, things gained from a long life including 35 years as a local councillor - the idea that his views and opinions shouldn't have counted because he was at the end of his life is a truly unpleasant and undemocratic idea.

The people putting forward the idea that people dying is something to be celebrated because it suits their political positions demographics consider themselves to be intelligent, moderate, caring people. What these views show is that, in some respects, they are far more dangerous and damaging for our liberty and democracy than the UK's handful of right wing thugs - we sort of expect violent language from the latter but when establishment figures with columns in national newspapers start on the same line, unchallenged by editors or the wider media, alarm bells should ring. Old people are not an inconvenience but part of our society - wishing them dead because you think they might vote the wrong way is repulsive.

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No leadership, childishness and deception - how MPs are destroying the trust that's central to democracy

Trust. That's it, the central, essential requirement for democracy to work. People have to trust that their friends and neighbours will behave responsibly and that the people who we send to parliament as our representatives will do, more or less, what they said they'll do. I know, I know, I can hear you: "Simon, what are you drinking, people never trust politicians...": or words to that effect. I suspect, however, that this probably ain't so - there's always been a loud minority who thought politicians were selfish, on the take, charlatans but most people, if they ever gave the matter thought, saw politicians as grand but essentially decent folk.

Yesterday I concluded that we're pretty close to the point where this trust, always a fragile thing, collapses. Three things led me there - watching "Brexit: the uncivil war", seeing interviews with Harlow residents on Sky News and reading Dominic Grieves 2017 election statement. And before we start this isn't about Brexit right or wrong but about whether the people feel able to affect change in a democracy - can trust those they elect to respect how they vote.

I won't go into a whole review of "Brexit: the uncivil war" - suffice it to say that I enjoyed it but felt it was (other than a truly dire scene supposedly set in Jaywick - it's always Jaywick isn't it) too focused on the battle between teams of Westminster insiders rather than on an amazing campaign mostly conducted by regular voters without reference to politicians. It was also spoiled by a silly bit of text at the end suggesting the leave campaign did something evil and malign (it didn't).

Anyway, the important bit isn't the accuracy or otherwise of the drama but the final minutes set in a future inquiry where Dominic Cummings played by Benedict Cumberbatch rants about how nobody had the intelligence, initiative or aspiration to take hold of the 2016 vote and shape it into a real change for Britain. The Cummings character, close to camera, says that a vote to change how we did politics was seen as just something to be managed within the existing political culture. Politicians - leave and remain - were unable to grasp that voters, including scruffy ones in ramshackle shacks by the Essex seaside, were telling us the way we do politics needs to change and that maybe we'd get better government if we paid them some actual attention.

Meanwhile, Sky News had toddled off to Harlow - Essex again as it's not too inconvenient as they can get back to West London to take Jocasta to dance class - where they did vox pops with voters. Sophie Ridge, the presenter, shared clips on social media and these told the same tale as we heard from that end piece in "Brexit: the uncivil war". Politicians are useless buffoons, they need to get on with the job and stop behaving like children. And (trust me on this one) this sentiment is repeated everywhere by leave and remain voters alike. It's accompanied by a growing view that, not only will Brexit not happen but that people will have less power in future because they had the audacity to vote for something their lords and masters didn't want.

Yet despite this, MPs have, time and time again, voted (by slim majorities admittedly) to stop any resolution to Brexit that didn't conform to their view - incidentally, given they are mostly remain supporters, a view that is directly contradictory to the way the majority of the people voted. Every possible variant of legal and procedural sophistry has been employed, all with the intent of stopping the government from implementing the result of the 2016 referendum. And this brings me to the third thing from yesterday because it features Dominic Grieve, one of the leading confounders of that democratic vote in June 2016. There are plenty of others to choose from but I happened to read what Grieve had said to his electorate in the 2017 General Election - here's a chunk:

As someone who has always advocated a close relationship between the UK and the European Union, I accept the result of the 2016 Referendum. I therefore strongly support the Prime Minister’s determination to secure a negotiated arrangement for leaving the EU and for forging a new trading relationship for the future, providing certainty for trade and business whilst giving us control of migration and releasing us from the direct effect of EU Law. I also believe that the people of our country will benefit from a close continuing relationship with a strong EU and I will work to help build these important links for our future. I very much hope, therefore, that the Prime Minister will be able to achieve something close to the goals she set out in her speech at Lancaster House in February.

I challenge anyone to find in this, or indeed in the rest of Grieve's message, anything that justifies how he has behaved in parliament since that election. The address in question - especially given how clear the Conservative manifesto was on the matter - is a colossal act of deception because, as subsequent events have shown, Grieve had every intention of spending the forthcoming parliament manipulating rules and procedures to try and prevent Brexit.

These three examples all speak to the relationship between the electorate and their representatives with the public justifiably exasperated by what's gone on, irritated by the childishness of MPs (and their friends in the mainstream media) and desperate for somebody to grasp the opportunity of reframing the relationship between voter and politician in favour of the voter and away from the tribal elites in the Westminster bubble.

As I said at the start, trust is central to democracy. It seems that, unless something dramatic happens pretty soon, politicians in Westminster, by repeatedly ignoring voters concerns and interests, will finally have lost the last vestiges of respect as well as the public's trust. What will happen at this point isn't clear - I'm not expecting thousands to take to the streets as they have in France but I do expect a new sort of politician - blunt, cynical and populist - to arrive. And the first place they'll arrive is in local Conservative associations.

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We must stop 2019 being the year of the antidemocrats - delivering Brexit is only the start

"There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands." Plato

It begins.

"There are only a few weeks left now for the vast, sensible majority in the Commons to acknowledge that voters were wrong" Matthew Parris

I picked this one but it could have been any one of a hundred recent examples - not just in the UK but across the world: intelligent, educated, wise people saying that you can't trust voters or that voters are wrong. Each time this happens the advocates of a philosopher monarchy are reminded that it's this idea that drives the terrible populism (or, if you prefer, democracy) that Plato's latter day fan boys despise.

The most worrying thing about politics today is this belief that only educated people can be trusted to get things right. In the year when we in Britain marked the centenary of millions of our working class being given the vote, the narrative of elite political discourse has become ever more opposed to the ideas signalled by extension of the franchise. In case we forget, the central belief that led to a wider franchise was that not only can we trust the people but it is right to do so. We should also remember, while we're doing this, that the wider franchise not only meant we had a Labour government enacting all the things moderate centrist folk like but (given the absolute nonsense talked about the Northern Ireland border) probably led to Irish independence too.

The depressing thing about all this is that it is only going to get worse - 'despite Brexit' as the phrase goes. Indeed, it worries me that the response to us leaving on 29th March 2019 from putative philosopher kings with columns in the Times or the Guardian will be to double down on "don't trust the people" and to argue for more limits to democracy so such a terrible thing doesn't happen ever again. This tendency will be accompanied by faux-populism - everything from appointing a "waste food tsar" and banning plastic from schools through to stern lectures about diet becoming taxes and bans on anything affordable that has any actual taste. Plus an endlessly repeated patronising mantra - "stupid voters got it wrong, stupid voters got it wrong".

At the heart of all this are two linked beliefs - first, that most people (not you and I, obviously but most people) are too stupid to make the right choices; second that there is an absolutely right choice and it can be determined by looking at the evidence. Now it's plain that we all (not you, I know, but exceptions prove the rule) make stupid choices from time to time, it's part of the human condition and it's also true that looking at evidence helps to make better choices. But this doesn't mean that you can eliminate "stupid" choices or that the evidence you have will necessarily lead to a better choice.

But this sort of view - clever people will make policies and impose them on thickos for their own good - is the essence of Plato's philosopher kings thesis. And indeed the core premise for things like "United for Change" the new 'centrist' party that may or may not sweep everything before it:

United for Change, founded by the millionaire entrepreneur Simon Franks, wants to create a “true grassroots movement” that will practise politics without tribalism, confrontation, “yelling and finger pointing”.

The party has been developed in secret for almost two years by businesspeople and political donors who want to take advantage of anti-political sentiment in Britain.

We're told by Franks that we'll be getting policies drawn up by experts - doubtless to be promoted by eager salesfolk (or an "army of volunteers"):

We want to craft a commonsense policy agenda that’s informed by those with real experience and expertise. That’s why we’ve created a structure to allow experts, academics and experienced practitioners to contribute.

Now while this is a project (secret because they're "putting substance before style") from one wealthy bloke, it reflects the reality of where our politics is headed. Not that democracy will be abolished or the franchise limited but rather that, in the manner of the EU, complicated pseudo-democratic structures will be put in place to give the illusion that leaders are elected and decisions are democratic. Alongside all this the real leaders (or "senior leaders" as we now call them) will carry on in their appointed and unaccountable world - the police, NHS, social services and transport will be managed in a supposedly businesslike manner by boards of wise folk who aren't actually accountable to anyone.

The irony in all of this is that, in Britain, only the loopier parts of our politics understands just how the current system threatens democracy - a few of the Corbynistas (when they're not pretending to be communists) and the libertarian parts of the pro-Brexit right understand that the Brexit vote was about saving democracy. That vote - and the vote for Trump, Salvini or any of the other left and right wing populists - wasn't a cry of pain but a call for action. And the action we want is a restoration of democracy, accountability and the idea that, when all it said and done, we (The People) can kick out any philosopher kings before their self-importance and sense of righteousness gets too much.

So when we leave the EU that should just be the start. The other shibboleths of our state need democratising too - from the House of Lords and the judiciary through the NHS, police and civil service, to the legion of unaccountable local council chief executives, social services directors and planning managers. If you are looking for a 2019 project, this should be that project - Brexit ought to be the launch pad for a renewed democracy. I fear the great and good - those with most to lose from more democracy and more accountability - will do their utmost do make Brexit into a vehicle for less democracy: they should be stopped.
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Citizen juries - another daft idea dreamed up in Whitehall

What, I hear you shout! How can the idea of "giving communities a more direct role in decision-making" be a bad idea? Surely this glowing world of empowered and engaged citizens is precisely the point of democracy - harnessing modern technology to transform the way we govern, what could go wrong?

The ideas around citizen participation in the government's new "Civil Society Strategy" sound good:

The Government will also launch an ‘Innovation in Democracy’ pilot scheme in six regions across the country, which could include Citizens’ Juries or mass participation in decision-making on community issues via an online poll or app.

Brilliant stuff! The problem is, of course, that this decision-making would be determined by those who turn up (or in modern terms, download the app, set it for notifications and respond when those notifications pop up). And most people don't turn up leaving the field to activists and the wronged - imagine making planning decisions in a world where angry NIMBYs with an app can flood the system?

Even for less contested decisions the app would be biased. When one US city trialed a clever app people could download that measured road impact (and therefore things like potholes and surface quality) they discovered that all their worst roads were in the wealthy quarters of town. The thing is that, using the only "engineer goes and looks" approach they knew this wasn't true, the big data from the app was wrong because people in poor neighbourhoods didn't use the clever app.

It's already the case that political decisions are disproportionately affected by representation - "he who shouts loudest wins" is an old local political adage. As a councillor, I constantly remind myself that my "full inbox" does not really reflect opinion but rather the opinion of a few people motivated enough to write. Nothing wrong with this until these minority opinions become the basis for policy decisions - "we must do something about X because I've had so many people raise it with me". Here, of course, "so many people" might mean a couple of dozen.

What happens with participatory systems is that, because of the bias, we don't actually decide on the basis of what the citizen panel says but rather treat it as a 'consultation'. The problem here is that, having consulted, it can get tricky to ignore the consultation without undermining the whole point of your whizzo participatory systems.

So let's not do this. We already have a tried and tested system for making political decisions in communities (called 'electing local councillors'). Perhaps we should look at ways in which this can work better - more community councils, a return to the committee system, scrapping party whips - rather than introducing systems that ignore local democracy in favour of app-based participation. Especially when, even the most intensive of participatory approaches gets low levels of engagement - in Porto Allegre where participatory budgeting is something of a religion they still only get 3% of citizens involved (and perhaps unsurprisingly these tend to be the older, home owning, wealthier citizens).

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Is democracy dying? If it is, there's blood on the left's hands

It sometimes seems that way as we move from a pluralist world where ideas are discussed and debated to one where debate is contained and constrained - a short step to that one-party state:

The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.

This may seem fine until (and maybe the 'ever-so-right-on' chap writing this doesn't care) you consider this excludes not just millions of Californians but, more to the point, a huge swathe of opinion about taxes, markets, intervention, housing and the classical liberal enlightenment. Worse still, our wealthy progressive doesn't just want a one-party state in California but wants to impose its ideas on other places like some ghastly authoritarian hegemon - conservatism must be destroyed:

The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated — not just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two. That gives the winning party or movement the time and space needed to really build up the next system without always fighting rear-guard actions and getting drawn backwards.

As I said, it seems not just that democracy is dying but that it's 'liberal progressives' - The Left as we call them in Europe - with blood on their hands.

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"You have to be able to imagine yourself unwatched" - how smart cities threaten freedom

There has been a great deal of "isn't it scary" discussion about the pretty clunky on-line targeting systems developed for political campaigning. We're told that there are sinister forces at work out there conspiring to undermine democracy by scraping Facebook for psychographic profiles allowing intimate knowledge of everyone:

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

I'm not going to say much about this, it adds nothing much to what I said previously about what this company did - they used the Facebook API to create a profiling tool based on responses to a psychometric test. This is not really any different, other than its source, from the psychographics that profiling systems (e.g. SuperProfiles) have been employing since the 1990s - the lifestyle data back then was gather from questionnaires sent as parcel stuffers and inserts but it served exactly the same purpose as the data collected using Facebook's API by Cambridge Analytica.

Anyway, while everyone is having kittens about the use of data analytics in political campaigning (and rightly asking questions about data security and data protection - there's genuinely a question as to whether the data collected using Facebook quizzes is allowable as a data source for marketing), there's something else happening that should be just as concerning - so-called "smart cities":

Across the UK we are seeing more and more examples of smart city transformation. Key 'smart' sectors utilised by such Cities include transport, energy, health care, water and waste. Against the current background of economic, social, security and technological changes caused by the globalization and the integration process, cities in the UK face the challenge of combining competitiveness and sustainable urban development simultaneously. A smart city is a place where the traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunication technologies, for the benefit of its inhabitants and businesses.

Wonderful. The application of all that clever and disrupting digital technology to making cities work better can only be a good thing, can't it? And I guess that, in a utilitarian, people-as-units, prudence-only way, it is a good thing:

Utrecht has become a tangle of individual pilots and projects, with no central overview of how many cameras and sensors exist, nor what they do. In 2014, the city invested €80m in data-driven management that launched in 80 projects. Utrecht now has a burglary predictor, a social media monitoring room, and smart bins and smart streetlights with sensors (although the city couldn’t say where these are located). It has scanner cars that dispense parking tickets, with an added bonus of detecting residents with a municipal tax debt according to the privacy regulation of the scanner cars.

These systems can be directed to nudging people along the city authorities preferred choices: "...a smart traffic app that rewards people for good behaviour like cycling, walking and using public transport." Brilliant stuff taking the city closer to that mythical "walkable, livable, sustainable" utopia beloved of today's City Managers, the "Mayors who Rule the World". But at what cost?

In the eastern city of Enschede, city traffic sensors pick up your phone’s wifi signal even if you are not connected to the wifi network. The trackers register your MAC address, the unique network card number in a smartphone. The city council wants to know how often people visit Enschede, and what their routes and preferred spots are. Dave Borghuis, an Enschede resident, was not impressed and filed an official complaint. “I don’t think it’s okay for the municipality to track its citizens in this way,” he said. “If you walk around the city, you have to be able to imagine yourself unwatched.”

Some are concerned that much of this data is being collected, analysed and employed by private businesses - the smart city is a privatised city, they say - but we should also be concerned about the state having such detailed information about the citizen - "Big Brother is helping you" says Peter van de Crommert from the Dutch Institute for Technology, Safety and Security. But let's imagine - as we always should with state power - what happens when the wrong sort of person gets hold of this information and these systems (if you're me, then the government is, by definition, the wrong sort of person)? And who exactly is the city being run for - citizens, business or the convenience of public officials?

The city also keeps track of the number of young people hanging out in the streets, their age group, whether they know each other, the atmosphere and whether or not they cause a nuisance. Special enforcement officers keep track of this information through mobile devices. It calls this process “targeted and innovative supervision”.

The aim seems to be management, preventing such sins as "hanging about", reducing activities deemed anti-social such as having a drink or making a noise (other than in constrained places where some of this is allowed).

This “smart” urbanity revolves around surveillance and relentless data-gathering. Swarms of monitoring sensors inside and outside buildings and on streets will be constantly on duty. Google would collect data about everything from water use to air quality to the movements of Quayside’s residents, using that data to run energy, transport, and all other systems. In this controlled environment, consent over pillaging personal data “goes out the window straight away”...

At the heart of all this is the essentially autocratic and anti-democratic idea that the behaviour of the citizenry should be controlled, managed and directed towards a culture determined by those in charge of the city (and those with access to those in charge). This draws on the idea of corporate culture, Peter Drucker's thesis that business success is, in large measure, determined by culture has been stretched to form an ideology of the city as an entity requiring management, organisation and direction. As the smart city folk say:

"...combining competitiveness and sustainable urban development..."

This conveniently marries the obsession with dense, piled up cities (and the idea that agglomeration - cramming people together - is the secret of economic success) and the belief that cities, regions and nations are in competition, part of that 'global race' David Cameron liked to talk about. The symbol of this world is Singapore, that little autocracy on the equator where utilitarian control has been elevated into a state system - a pseudo-democratic de facto police state where producing is easy but consuming is frowned upon and the election unit is based in the prime minister's office:

"Meanwhile, although present to some degree, civil society plays a much less active rule in Singapore’s political sphere due to governmental attempts to stifle civil society’s maturation. Specifically, the institutions that constitute Singapore’s government are largely structured to undermine the expression of critical voices. Not only are the vast majority of media outlets controlled by the state, but the country’s Sedition Act also criminalizes any publication or even expression that seeks “to bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the Government."

The price of this city state ideology, the premise of the smart city, is the relegation of people's lives to a place akin to employees of a benignly controlling corporation - bounded, directed, managed and only free within the limits determined by the corporation. It is the neoliberal city where maximising utility takes on the form of a religion, a smart city where data directs what people do, where they go and what resources they use - made possible through an unholy alliance between intrusive technology and what we used to call municipal socialism. And most people are either inside these cities consuming the bread and circuses but unable to secure a real stake or outside and unable to access the shiny wonders of the smart city:

...the city is a failing model - at least the idea of the concentrated, centralised, mayor-led city. These things are parasites, sucking away all the good from small towns with the promise of riches, opportunities and better bars while giving little back when it comes to the long-term quality of our lives. Urbanists talk about 'liveability' and 'walkability', about public spaces, even about play - yet the reality of the city is selfish, focused on the here and now rather than on creating places to which people can relate, where they might want to spend their whole lives.

Instead of creating places that are safe, sustainable and social because the people living there feel that way, we try to make places like this through control, clever technology and ever more restrictive regulation. The smart city may be clever but it's a place where corporations - public and private - control technology, where citizens are motivated by petty rewards (a day's free parking or a discounted theatre ticket), and where democracy is a facade covering up a society run by the new data kings, the controllers of the system.

UPDATE: If you think I'm being a scaremonger, try this:

Police in Raleigh, North Carolina, have presented Google with warrants to obtain data from mobile phones from not just specific suspects who were in a crime scene area, but from the mobile phones of all people in the area, reports Raleigh television affiliate WRAL. The request will trouble Fourth Amendment advocates as it could be seen that police are carrying out unreasonable searches on people who just happened to be in the area at the time the crimes were committed. And the area sizes the police requesting the data on are not small. In one instance, police requested user data from Google for anyone within a 17-acre area. For its part, Google has not revealed whether it has complied with the police request.

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Trust the people (but only the smart, well-educated, urbane ones)

Some of you will have had the dubious pleasure of seeing broadcaster Terry Christian on the BBC's Question Time programme. Mr Christian is an ardent enthusiast for the UK remaining a member of the European Union and, in broad summary, considers everyone who doesn't agree with him to be imbeciles. One of our intrepid broadcaster's shticks is to chatter about how the Brexit vote was cooked up by (anonymous) very rich people who then conned the working class. In simple terms, Mr Christian believes that the working class are too stupid to be allowed out in public with something as explosive as a vote.

This belief that ordinary people do not have agency - can't be trusted to make decisions about their lives - is widespread. Here's a chunk from a post at Tom Paine's blog talking about an academic psychologist from UCL's Centre for Behaviour Change:

He doesn’t mean to be a monster and I don’t want to see him as one, but in his presence my blood ran cold. I was afraid of him. I was even more afraid of the way the earnest folk in the room laughed as he joked about the unintended consequences of various programmes to clean up the act of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed, I realised that I might be the only one there who included himself in the category of “the people” to be shaped as opposed to the smug elite doing the shaping.

What we have here is an entire research centre - indeed something close to a whole academic discipline - dedicated to the idea that people should be stopped from making (what the academics consider to be) bad choices. These are, as Tom Paine observed, nice people - smart, well-educated, urbane, the very sorts you'd want your son or daughter to marry. The problem is that they believe they know better than you do and, they argue, have the research to prove this. They also believe that, because they know better than you do, you should be prevented from making a choice that the smart, well-educated and urbane don't approve.

It is odd that, at a time when we celebrate the widening of the franchise in 1918, a whole bunch of people are putting serious effort into removing choice, freedom and agency from people. The Brexit vote, for many of the smart, well-educated and urbane, has been the tipping point as they rush headlong away from the idea of democracy (while bizarrely trying to pretend that a polity where voting can't change the people in charge is a democracy) or at least from the thought that ruddy-faced older folk - gammon is the term our smart folk use - from slightly tatty northern towns should have a say in what happens.

The result is illustrated by the BBC - home to lots of those smart, well-educated and urbane folk - 'debating' the proposal from one of their number that old people shouldn't be allowed to vote:




How dare people say they won't vote for politicians who ignore their interests!

There are two things going on here but both of them reflect a new version of Plato's philosopher kings - a superior cadre of leaders who are intelligent enough to direct society. In the case of behaviour - poor lifestyle choices, for example - these overlords want, in the manner of Brave New World, to make you have a (long) life of unstressed, bovine contentment and this requires them to direct the choices of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed.

With democracy - whether you're Terry Christian saying working class folk were conned or Jeremy Paxman suggesting old folk hold politicians to ransom - the problem is that people have started making electoral choices that our Philosopher Kings don't agree with. The only way out of this is to either have less democracy or else to limit the way in which democracy operates most obviously by limiting the franchise. Following the referendum there was a great deal of chatter (from those who didn't like the result mainly) about how this shows how referendums are a really awful idea and we should stop having them. We elect politicians (nearly all smart, well-educated and urbane Philosopher Kings) and they should make all the important decisions so as not to cause upset or headaches among the masses.

Part of the problem is that the smart, well-educated and urbane simply don't ever get near to the lives of most people - they live in a snobby world where no-one goes to McDonalds (junk food is bad and unhealthy) except, it seems, by accident:

I was at a workshop on Friday, and whilst driving back home, I stopped off at one of their restaurants in a service station. I'll put this comment upfront, especially given that I work in Public Health; I am not advocating fast food consumption. The options available in service stations are rather poor, especially when looking for hot food (I have found a way around this which I'll mention at the end!). What caught my attention though was the way in which McDonald's understand how to influence behaviour, strategies that we could look at when working in Public Health...But they also understand - in very fine detail - how their systems work, how each component part operates, and how these parts can be refined to maximise efficiency.

For the smart, well-educated and urbane, McDonalds is the enemy - despite (or maybe because) the ubiquitous hamburger chain serves about 3.5 million customers every day in the UK. McDonalds and its franchisees know far more about the ordinary folk of Britain than most academics - this is because it really matters to them as a business, getting the detail right means happy customers. The problem is that our visiting academic doesn't see a great business delivering good food to happy customers. Like Terry Christian with Brexit voters, our academic sees wrongness, exploitation, manipulation - a con. How dare ordinary people make such bad choices and, worse, be happy doing so.

What the Brexit vote uncovered and Corbyn's surge confirmed is that the smart, well-educated and urbane people aren't really all that keen on democracy. They're very keen on votes but these orchestrated events should be like electing the supreme soviet - everyone gets a vote, we're really excited about voting, there are campaigns, speeches, debates but in the end nothing much changes. Democracy should entail the possibility of - people should be able to hope for - a change in the rulers but this doesn't suit the courtiers.

At the core of this is this belief that people (other people who aren't part of your smart, well-educated and urbane circle) don't know what's good for them. These folk are the living embodiment of Douglas Jay's unintentionally honest comment back in 1937:

"...in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves".

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Trump and Anti-trump - how different are they?

From Joel Kotkin:

To be sure there is much to lament about Trump, and his European counterparts, but it’s ironic that many of those who charge him with autocracy are often themselves not great fans of democratic control. For the most part the anti-populists favor not a more vibrant democracy but, in the words of Harvard’s Yascha Mounk “rights without democracy,” dominated by bureaucracies like the EU or the EPA. Some are even open admirers of China’s authoritarian dictatorship; others swoon at French President Emmanuel Macron’s almost laughable yearning to reinvent himself as a modern day Louis XIV.

Indeed it is striking that so much sound and fury is vented at the prospect of the not-very-authoritarian Donald Trump visiting the UK while the Prime Minister can cosy up to China's definitely-authoritarian leadership without any criticism at all (even to the point of a Times cartoonist hinting human rights abuses in the UK are in some way equivalent to China's!

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Neo-puritan young people are a threat to freedom and democracy -

I am an optimist. Tomorrow, in aggregate at least, will be better than yesterday. Our knowledge grows, technology improves lives and, given a fair chance, free markets raise further thousands from abject, life-shortening and painful poverty. But I am just a little bit worried as I peer into my scratched, dull and flickering crystal ball.

Pew found that 40% of respondents ages 18-34 said they agreed that offensive statements could be outlawed.

The over-65 generation does not accurately represent our country, because they are overwhelmingly white and actually vote. So, unfortunately, we're going to have to bar them from voting.

Millennial support for populist and authoritarian candidates conforms to several recent studies showing widespread youth disaffection with the whole idea of democracy. Only about 30% of Americans born in the 1980s think it’s “essential” to live in a democracy.

These are just three examples from a host - from support for bans on drinking through fat shaming to turning genuine concerns about harassment into witch hunts led by a frothing media mob. Everywhere I look I see attacks on the fundamentals of what I see as liberal democracy. It's not merely that young people - like just about every past generation - start off foolishly believing there's a better way to improve our world than freedom and choice but that they've gone beyond this to embrace a neo-puritanism that is anti-freedom, anti-democracy and definitely anti-choice.

And my worry isn't just that I don't agree with this neo-puritan authoritarianism - whether it's the young Austrians and Germans voting for the populist Right or British and American youth embracing the left-wing equivalent. Or for that matter "centrists" wanting to limit democracy because they don't like its results. No, my worry is that democracy and liberty will be restricted by governments seeking to pander to this neo-puritanism - an ever wider definition of "hate speech", classing any heterodox behaviour or belief as anti-social, banning of books and videos, all mixed in with cults of health and the idea of the 'good person'.

This anti-liberty, anti-choice new-puritan doctrine will be used by governments to stifle debate on-line, to close down challenging (and sometimes inaccurate) platforms or websites as 'fake news', and to police private behaviour to a degree never seen before. Each of these attacks on choice and freedom will be presented as protective of young people (allowing them to grow without fear of witnessing such unpleasantries). And, as we''ve seen with the response to Jo Johnson suggesting universities should promote free speech and open debate, many authorities with smile benignly as the mob screeches and screams at the few brave enough to challenge the right-thinking of neo-puritan youth.

If there is one thing people who believe in liberty and choice should do in 2018, it is to speak out - again and again - against these affronts to the core values of our society. For all our talk of "British Values", we seem very coy at saying that free speech, free assembly and democratic choice are right at the very heart of those values. Nor should we allow these neo-puritans to indulge their cult of health, to let them tell us that somehow we are not responsible for our own bodies and that the NHS is somehow greater and more important than our rights.

This isn't a resolution - I've been challenging the attacks on liberty for some while - but, as they extend their reach, we need to make more effort to say that freedom and democracy cannot be sacrificed on the altar of youthful insecurity, disappointment or distaste. They are too damned important for that.

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There is no "will of the people"

This is true:

The point of democracy is not to discover and implement the so-called “will of the people,” for no such thing exists (as proven, among others, by Kenneth Arrow – who was no libertarian or classical liberal). Instead, the point of democracy is to give each individual a say in making collective decisions.

...

Let's stop watering down Corbyn's policies and offer a property-owning democracy again

There is a modicum of welcome introspection within my party. Questions about our values, purpose and mission are mixed in with less considered and more tactical debates about getting more support from young people or responding to what Brexit (and Corbyn) "means". Alongside this is a discussion about organisation - whether the party has the structure, membership and organisation to take a positive message to the electorate.

For me, and the apparent success of Corbyn's populism doesn't change this fact, the answer doesn't lie in contention or extremes but rather in consensus and moderation. Don't misunderstand me here, this isn't a rejection of ideology, but rather a recognition that policies drawn from our belief in freedom, community, neighbourliness and self-reliance have to chime with the values of people who we want to vote for us.

So let's start with those values rather than - as we see here from David Skelton - an approach based on opinion polling - little better than a list of bribes (higher minimum wages, housing subsidies, free tuition) aimed at attracting support. This is what we mean when we talk of populism and is precisely the programme that Corbyn espouses - rail nationalisation has big opinion poll support so we propose rail nationalisation. Students say they want free tuition so we give them free tuition. All paid for through another solidly opinion poll tested plan - increasing taxes on big business and "the rich".

What Skelton proposes is a return to what was once called Butskellism, a policy platform based on trying to have as close a policy platform to the other side as possible without quite abolishing any difference. Here's an example:

A reformed Toryism could address the growing disparity between capital and labour and encourage firms to empower their workers with shares and board representation. But that shouldn’t obscure the need for higher wages. The minimum wage should be increased when possible, and companies above a certain size should be expected to report on how they are moving towards paying the voluntary living wage (£8.45 in the UK and £9.75 in London).

If I'd replaced the first three words here with "a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn" no-one would have batted an eyelid. What we have is a policy platform founded on wording current Labour policies slightly differently and calling it "reformed Toryism":

a new generation of genuinely affordable, low-rent homes,

reducing tuition fees and concentrating the greatest attention on those from poorer backgrounds

hindered by cuts to in-work benefits and anti-trade union rhetoric.

All of this is good stuff but it does not give a single young person (or indeed older person) a solitary reason to switch from voting Labour to voting Conservative. All Skelton - and too many others on the left of my Party - is saying is "be more like Labour by proposing toned down versions of their policies".

So let's start instead with these values:

Wherever you go in the world you'll find people who hold as important such things as family, neighbourliness, independence, duty and effort. That you should work hard, contribute, look out for the neighbours, bring up your family as honest, self-reliant and care for those less fortunate.

And these are conservative values, the building blocks of community. None of them are about government, large or small. None of them see society as greater than the sum of its individual parts. And none of them are predicated on knowing better what is good for your neighbour.

Let's frame a policy platform beginning with the communities we want to represent rather than with centrally-directed proposals determined by opinion-polling. Let's talk about community, about how health, social care, good jobs and much else start with the places we live in rather than with the Bank of England, International Monetary Fund and National Health Service. I like it when Skelton talks about people having a stake, although he makes the mistake of talking about "the economy" rather than "society". As conservatives we need to renew the offer we made repeatedly - in 1959, 1970, 1979 and 1992 - do the right thing, play your part, get an education, work hard and you will have a stake in society. Right now overpriced housing, the pillage of pension funds and disincentives to invest mean that people, especially younger people, struggle to see how they're to get that stake in society - the real cash stake we all believe we were offered.

I'm pretty sure this means some tough choices about policy but we start by renewing the offer - to everyone - of a property-owning democracy. To get there we've to have some tricky converstaions about green belts, care for the elderly and the balance between taxing what we earn and taxing what we spend. We've to embrace the idea of family again - not as some sort of mythical Oxo advert image but the messy, complicated and varied things that are the reality of our lived experience as families. And, above all, we need to start talking about community and getting the decisions about care, health and social support down to that basic building block. You only need look at the benefits system - which can't process a claim in less than seven weeks leading directly to destitution - to see how centralised, national systems really don't work.

I've said before that we should start, as conservatives, with caring about what's right outside our door. It's dull, I know - soft loo paper conservatism as a university colleague called it - but most people are not either interesting in or impressed by fancy dan utopian solutions. Don't get me wrong, we'll respond to a straightforward bribe - free stuff paid for by taxing anonymous others - but conservatives have usually been better than this and, when we are, we change the world for the better.

We won't win by offering watered down versions of Corbyn's policies but by renewing the offer we made to my generation - an offer that was met - of creating a property-owning democracy. Let's do it.

....

Hows about we try some of that there local democracy? It used to work quite well.

A while ago I wrote about the move to ban local councils from charging for Park Runs following the decision of a town council to do just that:

And, of course, you all think it absolutely right that politicians in London ban Councils from deciding on things like what they can and cannot charge people or organisations for doing. Don't get me wrong here, I don't particularly think Councils should charge for park runs (although please note that crown green bowlers, cricketers and football players are charged to use facilities in public parks) but I do think that if we are to go to the trouble of electing local councillors to make decisions we should actually let them make those decisions. And, yes, that might include charging for a park run. If you don't like the decision you get the chance to vote out the people who made that decision. This is how the representative democracy lark works.

This process - whereby decisions made by local authorities are over-turned because national politicians see some votes to grab or are badgered by national media and other national politicians into stopping the local council from doing what its democratically elected councillors have decided they will do.

This isn't just a British problem (although we are, among larger countries, one of the very worst offenders) - here's Joel Kotkin in New Geography about the USA:

This follows a historical trend over the past century. Ever since the Great Depression, and even before, governmental power has been shifting inexorably from the local governments to regional, state and, of course, federal jurisdictions. In 1910, the federal level accounted for 30.8 percent of all government spending, with state governments comprising 7.7 percent and the local level more than 61 percent. More than 100 years later, not only had the federal share exploded to nearly 60 percent, but, far less recognized, the state share had nearly doubled, while that of local governments has fallen to barely 25 percent, a nearly 60 percent drop. Much of what is done at the local level today is at the behest, and often with funding derived from, the statehouse or Washington.

Anyone taking a reasonably long view of English local government will recognise this trend with local councils increasingly mere agents of central government enacting programmes and projects deriving from the legislative and fiscal decisions of national government. The drive to standardisation through inspection regimes and the tendency to go on about 'postcode lotteries' provides the justification for this change. Very little that Bradford Council does is not directed, regulated and funded by central government meaning that, when that central government changes its spending priorities or reduces spending the thick end of the impact is felt by the council.

I believe this is, for all of standardisation's superficial appeal, bad government. Not only does is assume that circumstances are the same everywhere but it kills administrative innovation by constraining the freedom of action for local councils. It may be true that we'd all like everybody everywhere to receive the same incredibly high quality of service but the reality of modern government is that quite the reverse is true - the lack of flexibility and independence at the local level results in sclerotic, unresponsive public services that become inward-looking and producer-oriented. Faced with radical alternative approaches the producer-dominated local government (and agencies with related vested interests) appeal to national government and national bureaucracy to prevent any threat to the current system.

This problem has got mixed up with the arguments about regional devolution (an excellent idea being very badly delivered because of national government's control of investment finance and insistence on city-regions rather than existing political geography). The thrust of localism is that government is better when politicians focus on making what they see out their front door better rather than on designing grand schemes and systems to run everything, everywhere according to rules laid down by clever folk in a London office.

And let's remember that the check on this system - we call it democracy where I come from - is that folk get a regular chance to replace the politicians if they mess up. I happen to think this a rather better approach to government than the current system where those local councillors can simply blame central government for everything that has gone wrong.

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It was a good-looking march. Britain's new authoritarians take to the streets.

It was a pretty good-looking march. Lots of forty- and fifty-something middle-class men and women flourishing home made banners with witty slogans. We're not sure how many there were - estimates vary from about 20,000 up to half the population and were accompanied by the now familiar moans about how the media were reporting other news (even god-forbid the timely jumping ship of UKIP MP Douglas Carswell) rather than indulging the marchers vanity - but however many turned out they were an attractive bunch. No punks or masked anarchists just 35 year-old civil servants with their faces painted like the EU flags and well-groomed writers who've dragged their seven and eight year old children along.

These are the new authoritarians, the political children of 2016 - Remainers. Looking at the images from yesterday's march I am struck by both the homogeneity of the crowd - for all the talk of diversity it was a very samey looking gathering. And this was also a gathering of the 'haves' not the 'have nots', Harm de Blij's flatearthers rather than the common folk who are happily tied by love and faith to the place they live.

The common theme of the hand-made banners is that somehow a wrong has been done to these people. And, because of this wrong, we should change the principles of democracy to accommodate what they see as right. It's not enough that we had a referendum. It's not enough that Parliament, in accordance with constitutional principles made up yesterday by some judges, voted to allow the advice of that referendum to be taken by the government it advised. No we must have other votes, referendums and debates - a live second-guessing of a delicate negotiation.

At the end of last year I described 2016 as the Year of the Remainer:

Forget about the Brexit voter being the person bringing change to British politics, it's the Remainer. Now we know less about the profile of the Remainer than we do of the Brexiter because nearly all the analysis and opinion-making has been done by those Remainers - they want to understand why we voted to leave and will leave no stone unturned in their search for an appropriate collection of patronisingly dismissive characterisations for leave voters. What we do know is that remain voters and by implication our Remainers are younger, better educated and better paid than average (probably wittier, prettier and sharper dressed too).

What's clear to me about these few thousand remainers - let's call them Remain Ultras - is that they've invented a EU that didn't exist before 23 June 2016. Before then the EU was an unloved institution, almost no-one would dream of painting their face with it's flag without first getting a grant and we only waved that flag because the conditions of that grant required us to do so. Even those people who saw our membership as a good thing would have struggled to muster much enthusiasm for defending the EU itself.

Today all that has changed as our Remain Ultras take to the streets - where they'll be addressed by EU pension-holders like Nick Clegg and Peter Mandelson. Flags are waved, smiling and healthy faces nod at the sage metaphors from these men - cars driving over cliffs are a favourite. The EU is portrayed as a marvellous sugar daddy of an institution, a bastion of democracy, equality and all sorts of other good stuff (including those grants, of course). Then comes the crunch as one of the speakers, yesterday it was David Lammy MP for Tottenham, mentions the D-word:

We’re living in a dictatorship. In democracies people are always allowed to change their minds. Over the coming months and years we will fight.

Nothing out there suggests that any more than a few people have changed their minds about the vote last June. And some of them have come to like Brexit. What Lammy's words tell us, and they could have come from any of those Remain Ultra leaders, is that we cannot afford to see them as figures of fun. They are genuinely a threat to our ideas of liberty, democracy and the right of the people to have a say. As I wrote in December:

These Remainers now represent the shock troops of a new authoritarianism, one that was perhaps there before 2016 but now has been animated - shocked into life like Frankenstein's monster - by the vote to leave in June. Remainers consider themselves as the prototypes for Plato's philosopher kings - wise, knowledgeable, experienced and expert. The natural rulers of a post-democratic state. They will be like Galadriel had she taken the ring:

And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!

Although with their talk of populism and nativism these Remainers want to portray the leave voter as the nascent authoritarian, the truth is quite the opposite. Remainers now consider that the ordinary voter cannot be entrusted with the future of the nation, this future should be in the hands of people who know, the experts. The idea of representative democracy is acceptable but only if it produces a result that allows the Remainer great and good to continue dictating the direction of policy.

We must resist this authoritarian, anti-democracy message. Above all we should not indulge this bunch of extremists just because they dress well, have a decent hair cut and nice kids.

....

Dear Liberal Democrats, please rebrand as the European Party. Please.

It's a long while since the Liberal Democrats were in any recognisable way either liberal or democratic. This makes the idea - mooted by Richard Dawkins - that they become the European Party a sensible one:

Writing to the Guardian, the 74-year-old, said: “Following its victory in the Richmond by election, I write to suggest that the Liberal Democratic party should change its name to The European Party.

“We of the forgotten 48% are surely more numerous today, now that Brexit’s rudderless fiasco is becoming as obvious as the shameless lies earlier told by its advocates.”

The reason why this is a great idea isn't that the 48% will flock to its banner but rather that this leaves the way clear for a genuinely liberal and democratic party in Britain. Right now Farron's Euro-fanatics, by hogging these words, are preventing a genuinely liberal, free market and internationalist message from being heard.

Indeed the Liberal Democrat Party's obsession with Europe has, even in those moments when there were glimpses of actual liberalism, meant that the cause of big government has sat at the heart of its policies and programmes. It's clear that today's Liberal Democrats are more comfortable with the eco-fascist Green Party, complete with crashing the economy and living in mud huts while scraping a living from a vegetable patch.

Here in Bradford, our liberal democrats prefer to patronise regular folk in the cause of public health - vaping one month, fizzy drinks the next - rather than admit to the idea of choice, responsibility and agency.

So get on with it Mr Farron (who's pretty much a communist) and rebrand your Party so we can set up one that argues for free markets, free speech, free trade and free enterprise.

....

So long as we're not free, we need democracy

Thurber's Very Proper Gander in full flow

I like and respect many Leavers, but I’ve never shared their enthusiasm for democracy – I want liberty and prosperity, and I don’t want to trade that in just to give my stupid next-door neighbours more power over my life.

What follows isn't about the recent EU referendum although, like much discussion and debate right now, it is inevitably framed by the issues surrounding our vote to leave the EU. The quotation above is from Sam Bowman, the Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute and it cuts to the heart of what I think will prove the dominant division in politics for the coming generations - the debate about democracy and its purposes. We will have a bickering coalition of collectivists and populists arguing that democracy is pretty much everything opposed by an equally troubled combination of technocrats and libertarians to tell us democracy is an anachronism.

In some respects, the argument for more democracy is akin to the argument for more railways - a nineteenth century solution to twenty-first century problems. yet, at the same time, we are vocal in our support for "having a say", "being consulted" - for votes, elections and polling. Public opinion, far more than evidence, ideology or reason is the driver of political decision-making - Sam Bowman's "stupid next-door neighbours" really are as important to what government's do as are the wise minds in Sam's think tank.

The advocate of democracy pipes up here - we're all equal in the eyes of the law and we all should have an equal say. This is the 'end of politics' envisioned by UKIP's Douglas Carswell:

Douglas Carswell, a British member of parliament, likens traditional politics to HMV, a chain of British record shops that went bust, in a world where people are used to calling up whatever music they want whenever they want via Spotify, a popular digital music-streaming service.

For Carswell, political systems of representative democracy are legacy systems, clunky, unresponsive, corrupt and not well-liked. We need, Carswell would argue, to embrace technology to create an iDemocracy filled with referendums, instant consultations and dispersed decision-making. It isn't democracy that is failing and out-of-date but the institutions of representative democracy - parliaments, parties, election days and preening politicians. Release democracy from these constraints and it will flourish, will once again capture Rousseau's 'general will' as the flow of information from and between people allows a fluid, data-driven iGovernment.

But is it so simple? Here's John Naughton reviewing historian Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow:

...modern society is organised round a combination of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market. And each of these foundations is being eaten away by 21st-century science and technology. The life sciences are undermining the individualism so celebrated by the humanist tradition with research suggesting that “the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms”.

We don't have to accept Harari's argument to recognise that, as every science fiction reader will tell you, for every optimistic technological future there's a frightening dystopia. Carswell's web-enabled democracy sits at odds to Harari's world - one more like H G Wells 'Time Machine' than a happy world of progress. Using that metaphor of nineteenth century technology beloved of so many tech writers, Harari depresses us with:

“the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand 21st century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.”

So which is it to be, Harari's world of Morlocks and Eloi or Carswell's liberated world filled with empowered citizens actively engaged in the new democracy through a new politics? Cynics, the wise ones at least, will recognise in Harari's world the realisation of that part of post-democracy we'd call technocracy. This is government by experts informed by ever more sophisticated 'Big Data' analyses. A world where there is no ideology merely data-driven answers to questions posed by the experts. A world where, if Harari and many others are right, the expert won't even be human. Public opinion plays no role in this decision-making other than as one imput to the expert system.

What we have is Hari Seldon's psychohistory, the idea that everything can be boiled down to a set of equations - algorhithms as we'd call them today:

“It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time. Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They’ve done more than that. They’ve watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they’ve checked reality, and they have learned.”

Although part of me suspects Gordon Dickson's Final Encyclopaedia is a better analogy, the lesson here is that there's just too much to know, that every model is a simplification and every trawl through 'Big Data' only touches a tiny part of the potential evidence. For all its wonders, technocracy does not provide the answers - the more we know, the more we're aware of what we don't know (unless, of course, you're a macroeconomist). And technocracy without democracy gets uncomfortably close to fascism even though its advocates do not see this problem and persist with ideas like basic income, depoliticised public services, industrial strategies and the belief that the economy can be directed from a room in the central bank.

There are two distinct responses to the EU referendum result. One is to reject the idea of referendums - to put Carswell's iDemocracy firmly back in its tin and screw the lid down really tightly. The other is to observe that the experts - the technocracy - were out-of-touch, unable to express their understanding other than through a patronising appeal to authority: "I'm an expert and you should therefore agree with me". The experts were not 'of the people' and, if the direction of technogical advance Harari describes is rights, future experts may not be people at all.

All this takes us back to Sam Bowman's quote where he rejects democracy in favour of "liberty and prosperity" and expresses the liberal view that his next-door neighbour (stupid or otherwise) should not have any power over his life. In some ways this libertarian viewpoint isn't set out often enough. Anyone who took an introductory course in political science will have pondered the essential conflict between freedom and democracy. Most usually this is dealt with by adopting the constitionalist view that liberties enshrined in law act as a check on the essential tyranny of democracy - the 55-45 or 52-48 problem.

By accepting liberties, whether we call them constitutional or human rights, our liberal democracy qualifies democracy and, as S E Finer put it, recognises that government is limited, society is pluralistic and that there is no "objective science of society or of morals". I take this as meaning that, when the chips are down, liberty trumps democracy. Just because you've 50% plus one behind you doesn't mean you can run me out of town on a rail. Nor, as Bowman hints, can you take decisions that damage my interests especially if they cause me harm.

The problem is that, while we nod in the direction of liberty, when faced with its realities we favour democracy. We see this in the debate around what is called "hate speech", in the French government banning the burka, and in a host of interventions designed to promote order at the expense of pleasure (because the majority disapprove of that particular pleasure). Perhaps because of its essential nature, our politics shouts more loudly about democracy than about freedom meaning that, too often, we lose the core idea of a government limited by the exercise of that freedom.

This, in a roundabout way, gets us to the problem with Sam Bowman's decision to vote to stay in the EU. As I noted at the start, we're not really concerned with the rights and wrongs of that vote but the real issue is whether the EU is liberal or technocratic. Bowman suggests the former because the institution insists on free movement of people and prevents the use of tax receipts to subsidise private business (there may be other examples but these are the two Bowman cites).

The problem is that these examples may not be the consequence of a commitment to freedom but rather a happy correlation between technocracy and liberalism. Such correlations are - as this note from Noah Smith tells us - pretty rare. Smith sets out a series of things he calls "free-market ideology" that, on reading, are all central elements of the currently dominant technocratic view - the weight of regulation's touch, the faux-privatisation of public services, public-private health systems and controlling monopolies. What matters isn't whether Smith is right but rather that he identifies the flaw in the technocratic ideal that 'Big Data' and the prophets of evidence-based policy have promised.

Bowman proposes supporting an undemocratic technocracy because, currently, it protects some freedoms he values. In the context of the recent referendum this makes sense - UK government is not significantly less technocratic except that, unlike the EU, it is more susceptible to democracy. And right now that democratic pressure is populist, it is Bowman's 'stupid next-door neighbour' demanding that something is done about the demons (and their witches) that infect our society. The result being the moral of Thurber's ' Very Proper Gander':

Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

Right now the main reason for having democracy is the scale of government and that this government does not respond to free choices made in a free market. In the UK government spends about £4 in every £10, it is a behemoth that dominates our society and economy simply because of its size. In other liberal democracies the governmental whale is even larger. We can, and rightly do, celebrate Tax Freedom Day when we start earning for ourselves not the government but this doesn't change the fact that the only brake on the desire of government to grow larger is the existence of democracy.

Until we are able to realise that those things we assume can only be provided by government - schools, roads, hospitals, drains, welfare - don't have to be provided by government, we need to keep that democracy and accept that sometimes Sam Bowman's neighbours get too much say over Sam's life. This is probably wrong but, until the case for libertarianism and a voluntary society is accepted, we really have no other way of keeping the Mr Creosote that is government from overeating.

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Hey pleb, are you voting the right way?

There has been a whole pile of stuff written about how the poor deluded and misinformed - even ignorant - voters make the wrong choices. Much of this relates to the rather splendid decision of the British electorate to ignore the views of the great and good in voting to leave the European Union.

I was quite taken by Brendan O'Neill talking about the NME in a Spectator blog:

The rebels have become the squares, the youths have become the authoritarians, and the spirit of rock’n’roll no longer lives in the middle-class music scene or leftish activist circles, but in the hearts and minds of the little people.

The very location of this blog - given its subject - shows a world upside down. A former Marxist writing in the establishment's political journal about how the New Musical Express, the edgiest of music magazines from my youth, has sold out on the spirit of punk. But it's worse than this - we're in a world where the errors of voters need correcting, where the choices of plebs need nudging, directing, managing in order that they concur with the opinions of a self-appointed clique of educated, metropolitan sophisticates.

Here's O'Neill again:

What we have here is ordinary people, including vast swathes of the working class, saying ‘No’ to the status quo, sticking two fingers up at an aloof elite, channelling Rotten and Vicious to say screw you (or something rather tastier) to that illiberal, risk-averse layer of bureaucracy in Brussels.

Today I went to a meeting of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority where we received and discussed a report on the implications of Brexit. The report wasn't very good (it described 'long term' in its response to Brexit plan as January 2017-January 2018 - seriously) but it wasn't this that made my eyes widen. Rather it was the idea that, had we only communicated better - EU flags on pens were mentioned - then it would have all been different. Talk was of how we could, in the future, 'communicate' the poor, ignorant voters into voting the right way.

Bear in mind that these were, in all but one case, senior Labour councillors talking - the tribunes of the people spoke and told us that the people, bless 'em, didn't know what they were doing. The poor dears simply weren't aware of all the wonders that the EU had brought them (as they struggled to pay for the mortgage, find a reliable job, get the children off to a decent start, build up a nest egg for retirement).

It seems that everywhere people like this think democracy is rubbish. At least when people make decisions you don't like. I remember one of those same Labour leaders sternly suggesting that a balanced representation on votes cast meant 'they'd have representation, you know" - she meant UKIP but, like Voldemort, couldn't quite name the evil thing.

And this snobbish, 'voters should be shown how to vote properly' view isn't limited to the UK. Here's Tyler Cowan from Marginal Revolution:

It might have been a better situation when the elites, acting with some joint collective force, directed more of their energies to shaming the less elite voters than to shaming each other.

You've got this haven't you, darlings? This undoubtedly elite commenter writing on a blog with tens of thousands of readers thinks we should try to make ordinary working class voters ashamed of not voting the same way as their betters. It's little better than the squire visiting his workers to make sure they understood why they should vote for his son as the MP.

Instead of bribing, shaming or nudging perhaps the answer lies in actually sitting down and listening to these voters. Finding out what bothers them, understanding why they think government is run for the elites and that it is too far away, too complicated and too secretive for them to stand a chance of liking what is does - or, more importantly, what it represents.

If you start with the premise that the plebs have voted the wrong way, then you've already lost the argument. It you think attacking them, embarrassing them or shaming them is the way forward, you've lost that argument. And if you think the answer is for the great and good to decide everything then you're no democrat but a nannying authoritarian.

Two-thirds of Wakefield's voters chose to leave the EU. They didn't do this because they're 'left behind', 'excluded', 'ignorant', 'racist' or any of those other interpretations of "plebs, you voted the wrong way". They voted to leave because the EU was - and still is - an elite project run by and for the elite. A means - somewhat like too much international aid - of channelling cash from the productive in successful places to an unproductive elite in less successful places. A system where posh students get subsidised gap years paid for with the taxes of low paid workers and where grand European-funded offices filled with patronising middle-class development workers fail to make any difference to the communities they're supposed to be helping.

No-one voted the wrong way and the great and good need to get this into their thick skulls. People had a choice - a contested choice - and opted, in sufficient numbers to win, for the one that said Leave. To understand this you don't need to insult those voters or pretend that poor communication was the problem. What you need to do is realise that the EU is the biggest of all the elite projects - patronising, self-serving, suited, shiny-officed, out of touch, nannying, hectoring, bossy.

The problem is that all those people who benefited from the EU - and their friends, fellow travellers and useful idiots - think the answer to the problem is more bossiness, more nudging, more lectures and a mission to make anyone voting ashamed of voting their conscience, their feelings and their thoughts. It seems the elite still think the plebs are voting the wrong way and that this should be stopped.

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How I might be disappointed by Brexit - and why this doesn't matter

EEA, EEA Plus, EFTA, WTO, the Norway Option, the Swiss strategy, the Canada solution - even the Liechtenstein approach. A veritable pot pourri of acronyms and discarded titles for Robert Ludlam novels - none of us really has a clue as to what the UK Outcome might be, what Brexit really means. We could even - parliamentary sovereignty being what it is - simply stay a member of the EU (although this option might do little for the electability of the politicians who take it).

In settling this matter some of us are going to be disappointed. This is because - as everyone has noticed - there's a divide in the world of the leave supporter. On the one hand we have the 'sunlit uplands' team who talk about an independent, free-trading country, a sort of giant version of Singapore. And on the other hand we have the autarchs, protectionists and nativists who want a sad, declining (and probably white) nation crouching from the nasty world behind barriers to trade, movement, investment and choice.

Now I'm a sunlit uplands sort of chap - I didn't vote to end 'free movement' but rather to leave behind a dated, tariff-based and protectionist customs union and go for free trade. As I say again and again, trade isn't something that's done by governments, it's a simple reflection of that human desire to maximise value by exchanging things with other humans. What governments have done is create barriers to trade - everything from bans and sanctions through to tariffs and regulatory constraint. All the state does is make trade more difficult and then, through tortuous negotiations, trim away some of those constrainsts to trade thereby allowing bigger, more open and more free markets.

I also don't know which of those acronyms and rejected Robert Ludlam titles is the right approach to leaving the EU. I know that the GATT rules and the WTO mean that, for most trade, the impact of us being outside the single market is negligible. But I also know that a big chunk of our economy isn't covered by those rules - not just agriculture but important sectors like finance, law and advertising where the UK is a dominant player. So it's not enough to simply sit back on WTO rules in trade if we want to make sure important export sectors perform.

I'm pretty sure too that imports - consumption - are more important than exports - production. So it's too easy to dismiss the argument that we simply have no trade barriers (beyond the physical and logistical) other than those contingent on domesitc standards set by the UK parliament. What we don't know is whether such a radical approach really does what the theorists say - reduces prices and costs allowing the glorious benefits of opportunity to drive economic growth.

Looking at what our new prime minister has done, I get a feeling that I'll be disappointed. There does seem to be an assumption that some new sort of immigration model - more restrictive, more limiting - will be imposed and that, free from EU state aid restrictions, we'll see a rash of supports and interventions that use taxpayers money to prop up inefficient industries. This sort of protectionism - in capital and labour - is politically popular with that constituency making up a sizeable portion of the leave vote and especially the provincial, suburban working class that tends to vote Labour.

So I'll be disappointed. The Brexit model chosen won't be the best one, will probably be rushed a little, and will focus more on protecting the British working class from the realities of the world's economy than on riding that economy as a route to riches. For sure, there'll be trade deals galore with each new one rammed down the throats of Remain advocates. But these will be technocratic deals - dropping a tariff here, a regulation there and a loophole over there, all washed down with state-sponsored grand deals in defence, technology and infrastructure. We won't have markedly changed from the system we enjoy - if that's the right word - within the EU (with the exception of replacing Romanian fruit pickers or Polish care workers with Indian, Chinese and African ones).

Now, dear reader, not only could I be wrong but, just as importantly, my disappointment doesn't matter (any more the does the disappointment of Faragist enthusiasts for a crypto-fascist autarky) for one simple reason. We - that's you and me as voters - can change it. If the chosen Brexit model doesn't work, we can seek a different approach. The people can elect a different bunch of politicians with different ideas to see if they can get it to work. We can have robust arguments about the options and choices available to government and then elect an administration with a fighting chance of implementing one or other of those choices. This is the real change that brexit brings - yes, I think we'll benefit economically if we get it right but next to regaining the power to choose where we go with our economy this is as nothing. So long as we remember the curse of democracy - sometimes the wrong people get elected. As democracy's blessing - we can kick those wrong people out when they screw up.

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