A comment on the US Midterm elections (and why the media and the Democrats risk getting it wrong)

I'm guessing most of you aren't geeky or obsessed enough to have stayed up most of last night watching the US midterm election results roll in. I did and mighty good fun it was too. I chose to watch CNN for the simple reason that their presentation of the data (and the chap who talks to it) is really good. I'm not going to comment on the outcome and what it means because, like most of us over here my knowledge of US politics is paper thin. We know now that the result was the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives while the Republicans consolidated their hold on the Senate. It seems obvious to me that this reflects the same pattern as for Trump's election in 2016 with the Democrats piling up votes in places the already won while Republicans sneak back in or win by narrow margins in places - Florida, Ohio, Texas - where they target.

In the short term* the results seem good for Republicans and suggest that the Democrats will have an uphill struggle to unseat Trump in 2020 especially if they make the mistake of this campaign (and 2016) of targeting the wrong places (all that money and attention on a skateboarding chap in a Texas senate race and a couple of rock solid blue seats in the North East because they had strong female candidates). I also wonder whether the Democrats will revisit the mistake the Republicans made in 1994 and spend all their time trying to bring down the President.

The reason I feel the Democrats will again get both strategy and tactics wrong was illustrated by the conversation, once the change in the House was clear, between the CNN presenters. I don't recall the precise details of the interaction between the main anchor and two presenters but, in summary, it asked what the new Democratic House majority should (could? would?) do and concluded that the focus would be on Trump - "maybe they'll get Trump's tax returns" said one, "the i-word - impeachment" said another, "the Mueller business" - you get the gist. The entire focus, or so these pundits suggested, is going to be the continued programme of trying to prove that Trump (or the Russians or a secret cabal under the direction of Steve Bannon) stole the 2016 election, a sort of post hoc vindication of Hilary Clinton.

Maybe this stuff matters but I can't help but think that the people who just elected Democrats to congress did so to get better healthcare, funding for schools, childcare and welfare support. And if their shiny new representatives, having promised all this, then spend all their time shovelling through the arcana of the previous presidential election, this simply plays into Trumps hands. And with the great hopes for Democratic ambitions - bouncy, dynamic modern folk like Beto O'Rourke and Andrew Gillum - falling at the first hurdle it's hard to see where the person to challenge Trump will come from. What Trump wants, because it's what he's best at, is a long, vulgar shouting match over things that really don't matter a jot to the ordinary American.

The problem, however, is that the media - as those pundits on CNN last night showed - wants that long, loud scrap with Trump. Not because it's important but because, in these days of politics as entertainment, it's box office in a way that boring stuff about medicare or housing policy simply isn't. Those latter things really are the things that matter to Americans but the media, just as is the case in Britain, would rather focus on gossip and the shallow and snide world of Twitter than on the big issues facing real people.

*In the long term Republicans have a problem with cities and especially the growing sun belt suburbs that tells me, without some changes in focus and strategy, places like Texas and Tennessee will start electing statewide democrats again.
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The world is not an engineering problem - an argument against technocracy

Chris Dillow has an interesting blog post about the problems with what he calls 'liberal technocracy':

This urge to express all arguments in consequentialist terms is an admission that liberal technocracy has won. The only acceptable arguments for any policy, it is believed, are consequentialist ones – ideally, along the lines of making us materially better off. And everybody seems to accept Mill’s harm principle, and thus argue for bans on the – often elusive – grounds that the activity in question does indeed impose harms onto others.

You only need look at the new found 'neoliberalism' of the Adam Smith Institute to see the onward march of this "what works is what's right" approach to policy-making. Dillow speaks of how some things are, as it were, felt rather than analysed - the "best case for Brexit is an intrinsic one – that it’ll give us a sense of independence and sovereignty" and when advocates try to set out economic utilitarian gains from leaving their argument weakens. I once wrote a similar thing about Scottish independence:

It's the idea of Scotland in that quote from Henry Scott Riddell's 'Scotland Yet' - not about some idea of superiority, certainly no hatred or dislike, just a message of pride, joy and love for the place. And the nation - that thing we try to define with grand words - is all those who share those emotions, that association.

When Kipling wrote about men having small hearts it was about these feelings - we cannot love everywhere and we cannot expect everyone to love the place we love. But we can share that love with those who do and that is nationhood. No government, no kings, no lords, no oil, no First Minister. Just people placing their boots in the soil and saying "this is my country and I'll work with you to make it better".

If you want independence for reason of blood, for reason of hatred or for reason of greed then you deserve to lose. But if you want independence for pride, joy and love of the place that is Scotland then - for what it's worth - you have my blessing and I wish you well.

The idea here is something we've lost from our thinking, one of those virtues Deirdre McCloskey writes about, the idea of faith, that there are things we have to take as felt not as demonstrated by science. This rejection of maximising utility as the only purpose of public policy is perhaps the single most important thing in McCloskey's triology on bourgeois virtues - that ideas matter as much as science does. And it is true since the things we feel cannot be defined by utilitarian or consequentialist argument - here's economist Don Boudreaux:

There are no scientific ‘solutions’ to society's problems. This reality is so in part because in many cases people legitimately disagree over what arranged changes are desirable and which are undesirable. For example, some people join me in celebrating marijuana legalization; other people disagree sincerely and deeply even if there is no disagreement over the predicted health and behavioral effects of marijuana use. There is no scientific ‘solution’ to this disagreement or to any other disagreement that turns on differences in values and preferences.

This reminds me of P J O'Rourke speaking of his politics - "I'm personally conservative" says O'Rourke but believes government, public policy, should be as libertarian as possible. So a man who believes drinking and smoking are sinful can, at the same time as holding these views, support the liberalisation of their use. But, it is more likely that such a person for reasons of faith - belief without evidence - will oppose liberal drinking laws and even propose stricter temperance or prohibition.

Back at university we coined the term "soft loo-paper conservatism" to describe the approach to student politics where the only care was the good management of the student union and its services to the student body (such as, hence the phrase, insisting on better toilet paper in the union buildings' loos). Management was all that matters - Boudreaux quotes a cynical comment from James Buchanan on economists and public policy:

Once he has defined his social welfare function, his public interest, he can advance solutions to all of society’s economic ills, solutions that government, as deus ex machina, is, of course, expected to implement.

The problem is that politics just doesn't work like this - people have views, felt experiences, faith meaning that the answer might be a different one from that produced through the expert's systems. Nor can we ever be perfectly sure that the expert's answer isn't sub-optimal - there are plenty of examples of technocratic solutions to perceived problems that have failed or, in solving one problem, merely acted to create three new ones. Raising the duty on fags seems to work as a means of reducing their consumption but there's a point at which it creates an opportunity for criminal arbitrage - the cost of making a cigarette is so much lower that the sale price it's worth the risk for the criminal to create a black market.

It seems right that government should seek the 'right' solutions in its policy-making but this assumes that there is such a solution and, indeed, that the negatives of such a policy don't outweigh the benefits of the solution. After all, if we take the utilitarian argument in its entirety, it begins to make the case for a sort of Huxley-esque benign authoritarianism, a Singapore-on-Steroids. For my part, I prefer things a little messy because not only are the solutions so often dependent on coercion but they also require that the ordinary citizen's faith and feelings are denied. Maximising utility seems a good thing but it is not the main reason why people do things like set up business, create charities, build village halls, paint, sing, create or innovate. Technocracy treats the world as an engineering problem when it's an unfolding story, explorers in a dense jungle not white-coated scientists in a laboratory.

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Manners maketh man - so let's teach them

"Manners maketh man" was one of William Horman's proverbs lovingly set out in his Vulgaria all the way back in the 16th century. It is still the motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford and we should perhaps pay it a little more attention.

I recall one (middle class) parent, when pulled up on her childrens' poor behaviour at the table, exclaiming, "oh, table manners, they're so middle class". As if this did her children any favours. There's a reason why we think manners are important, why we frown on eating with mouths open, speaking while eating and the correct use of the cutlery provided. And there's a reason why we insist on children saying please and thank you, not interrupting and showing respect to older people.

That reason is that politeness and good manners make for better people - easier to live or work with, more pleasant to deal with and more likely to get on. Good manners, politeness and charm go a long way just on their own and, as that old teacher William Horman knew, they allow for brains, skills and creativity to shine through. Without manners all we see is coarseness, unpleasantness and rudeness. It's not that manners are everything but that they are an essential component of the successful person.

Manners and politeness aren't innate, they have to be taught. Left to their own devices children won't say please and thank you, won't show respect to others and won't become pleasant, charming adults. We seem, in our frantic age, to have forgotten all this and to have arrived at a point where aggression, bullying, vulgarity, cursing and rudeness are celebrated while politeness, charm, respect for others and good manners are become weaknesses.

I was at a posh dinner and, in a conversation with the gentleman besides me, the subject of a TV interview with former spin doctor, Alistair Campbell came up. My neighbour was blown away by Campbell's behaviour - he was being interviewed along with a woman (and remember Campbell is a very big man). "While she was talking," gushed my neighbour, "he folded his arms and leaned in dominating her, it was brilliant". It struck me at the time that, far from being brilliant, Campbell was just being an ill-mannered, rude bully. The argument wasn't won by the brilliance of Alistair's argument but by his intimidation of the other, far smaller, person.

Everywhere you look, people are celebrating this sort of behaviour - the sort of people who use violent metaphor in political debate have always been with us but it has never been normalised in the way it is today. And when the leaders in school begin to act, to once again teach children politeness, good manners and respect, the response from those celebrants on modern coarseness is shocking:

Top of the things that make me despair this week (there are many options) is the decision by Ninestiles secondary school in Birmingham to enforce silence on “all student movement, including to and from assembly, at lesson changeover and towards communal areas at break and lunch”. It is difficult to think of a more harmful and mean-spirited policy than taking away children’s means of communication for a significant part of the day.

To watch the opprobrium poured onto Katherine Birbalsingh for her advocacy of teaching working class young people manners, good behaviour and politeness is to see that "manners are so middle class" made flesh. Today, Ms Birbalsingh's Michaela School is routinely described as 'Britain's strictest school' because it insists on a set of standards in children's behaviour, enforces those standards and expects parents to back the school in this work. Hardly a day passes without some comment about behaviour in schools, how it stresses teachers, disrupts learning and contributes to mental ill-health. Yet when a school does something about this, the same folk pile in using words like "prison", "institutionalising" and "controlling".

I appreciate I've little room to talk but it really is time we called out ill-mannered behaviour and gratuitous rudeness. For sure, you can invoke free speech (and have my backing) but it's perfectly possible to support free speech and, at the same time, believe that good manners and politeness are preferable to vulgar insult or crude metaphor. Right now our political discourse is become corrupted by its language - the two extremes, having adopted an absolute position, do not seek to debate but rather to adopt that Alistair Campbell behaviour of aggressive domination, rudeness, ill-manners and wind up all spiced, if you're on Twitter, with gross language.

It is, for example, right that we call out the use of children by parents as vehicles for their political prejudice. This is a ghastly exploitative practice and grown ups should know better but calling the grown up using his child this way a 'cretin' isn't right or justified however angry we might be about the action. And using the "he said, she said" argument to defend this sort of language doesn't wash either - "we are better than that" is a far better argument.

I wish every success to people like Tom Bennett and Katherine Birbalsingh as well as Alex Hughes and Andrea Stephens, the joint heads at Ninestiles School in Birmingham. Civilisation is built on an assumption of good behaviour, politeness and respect, without these values it's hard to do all the other collaborative, co-operative and creative things that make for a great, successful society. Manners really do maketh man and for this to happen we need to teach those manners because they don't happen without that teaching.

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Why the bullying mob of today's politics makes me pleased I'm retiring next year

Many readers will know I'm retiring from the council - from politics - in May next year. There are lots of reasons for this (the main one being my wife saying, when asked what she was doing today, "what part of retired don't you understand?"). But another reason is that, while politics has always been unpleasant - check out Gillray's cartoons if you think this a new thing - we are now in an age where the culture of the bully is triumphant. Most importantly, the target of the bullies is now the personal and private not the public and political. It's noteworthy that the very first response of the Labour Party to the Conservatives selecting Shaun Bailey, a working-class black Londoner, as their candidate for Mayor of London is to construct a personal attack - not about policies but a trawl through Twitter to find something, anything, that puts Bailey in a bad light. We can be sure that somewhere in Labour HQ (or City Hall) there's somebody tasked with digging dirt about Bailey - not just daft things he might have said but a trawl through the sewers looking for people who'll have some hard to dismiss story.

Looking over the pond at the recent US Senate hearings for Brett Kavanaugh we see the end game of this bullying culture. A process supposed to examine professional suitability, qualification and experience hijacked by a process of politically-driven character assassination. An assassination sweetly wrapped up in a candy coating of women's rights, "me too" and concerns about historic sexual abuse. It may be that I am a cynic but, while I understand why three decades ago, many accusations of sexual assault wouldn't get the serious response from the police they get today, I can't understand why the allegation was presented to a newspaper and a democratic member of congress not to an authority able to investigate, arrest and make charges?

It may be that all the accusations here are true (and please can we stop with the entirely faith-based "I believe the woman" nonsense) but it still reminds us that all of us - and especially politicians on the right - will be subject to this sort of bullying examination. I note the justifications from hangers on to the bullying mobs braying for blood - "structural oppression", "listening to victims", "privilege". Some of it - "privileged white men roaring themselves puce" - is almost poetic. But none of it hides the jarring reality that this is not about justice, indeed it is quite the opposite - justice is set aside because of who the target is (rich, right-wing, male). The very identity of the target is enough to justify ignoring the normal rules of decency and law - they are right wing therefore they are, in the eyes of the righteous mob, sinners to be destroyed - "In every restaurant, shop, office, corridor and street" as The Guardian's Caitlin Moran Tweeted echoing John McDonnell's call to violence:

He told the Unite the Resistance rally that elected Conservative MPs should be targeted because they are “social criminals”.

Mr McDonnell added: “I want to be in a situation where no Tory MP, no Tory or MP, no Coalition minister can travel anywhere in the country or show their face anywhere in public without being challenged by direct action.”

I wish my colleagues looking to fight elections against this sort of mob all the very best against people who propose strikes and violence if the public vote the wrong way and who believe that vile personal attacks are the way to conduct political debate. I look in awe as women like Kate Andrews rise above bigoted, unpleasant personal attacks and I wonder how long it will be before one of these baying mobs gets their way as some young right-wing politician kills themself. The unremitting negativity of the language, the personal attacks, the refusal to debate other than in terms of insult, the waving of identity rights as a way to close down debate - a putrid stew of nastiness designed to make it impossible for people to set out a case for conservatism.

If we want good people to go into politics, we've got to stop this grisly pantomime because right now all it leaves is triumphalist bullies waving the heads of defeated opponents on sticks. I know there's always been a gladiatorial element in politics but it was, most of the time, conducted on the basis of ideas, policies and debate not on shouting down, banning or closing off that debate while attacking the opponent on the basis of something they said after five pints when they were seventeen. Nobody survives that sort of attack and politics is made the worse for it, where once there was a sense that we served the folk who elect us there is now just a bear pit watched by that blood-speckled mob high on the pornography of violence.

And away from that pit there's another world, one of ordinary people bemused by the sheer unpleasantness of it all. For some it is simply reframed as another branch of the entertainment business but for many its why they think so little of politics and politicians - "they're all the same", "crooks", "only in it for themselves", "not interested in us". I've heard these comments all my life, my wife gets angry when people say them in my presence, and I know they don't apply to most politicians, especially local politicians, but the spectacle of character assassination, name-calling and personal attack, egged on by that mob, makes it easy to see why people say these things.

So, with apologies for the slightly ranting nature of this, I think you'll understand why I'm pleased I leave politics in a few months time. And to those conservatives still active or wanting to get involved - especially in national politics - stand up for what you believe, speak clearly, ignore the bullies and don't let the mob win.

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Free market liberalism has never been popular - maybe it should be?

There's a sort of mythology about economic liberalism - for people on both left and right in politics it is the enemy, the thing that undermines workers rights, throws people on the scrap heap as their job migrates to Romania or India, the destroyer of community and the temptress of migration. We see the shock and fear of liberal ideas in the economic sphere in the attacks on the Institute of Economic Affairs, Adam Smith Institute, the Koch brothers and the Cato Institute.

Part of the myth is that nobody could possibly believe in free market liberalism without, in some way, being the paid shill of powerful corporate influences. This myth is, usually in the next breath, accompanied by the entirely contradictory argument that free market liberals are swivel-eyed, rigid ideologues so wedded to their dogma they can't see the real world. It's not helped by the (entirely admirable) preference of these organisations for keeping their donors names private.

The reality is that, however much left and right might hate free market liberalism, it has never (at least in the UK and USA) been an idea with either broad popular support or even a political party with a hope of governing that espouses these ideas. Other than in the Netherlands, no developed nation has a successful and powerful liberal party (for Canadians and Australians I mean a party that actually believes in free market liberalism not a party with that name).

Indeed, since the beginnings of free market liberalism - Adam Smith, David Riccardo, J S Mill - the ideas have always had to fight for political space. First from the resistance of slave owners, corn barons and owners of mercantilist monopolies, then from intellectual elites who disliked the idea that thick spoken blokes with brummie accents and rough hands were the equal of grand university types. Free market liberalism was attacked by trade unionists, by aristocrats, by lawyers and by the mandarins of everywhere's bureaucracy. Laws were passed, riots were fomented, strikes were called and farmers were protected - all to try and kill free market liberalism.

Through history there have been leaders who have pushed for free market ideas - Peel, Gladstone, Coolidge, Reagan and Thatcher - even Blair or Clinton. But each of them have had to work with parties and supporters who did not share the mission preferring the statist blandishments of what Deirdre McCloskey calls The Clerisy. Those supporters weren't just socialists, communists and fascists but include an abundance of capitalists - the sort of business leaders for who mercantilism, protectionism and licencing is an opportunity to carve out monopoly in the same way their predecessors did with salt, shrimps and corn. Free market liberalism isn't capitalism, it just suits many capitalists to pretend that their cosy little love-in with government is, in some way connected to liberty, choice and the betterment of everyone.

Despite all this free market liberalism - hidebound, tied up, limited, constrained and condemned as it is - has carried on doing what it does best: making everyone wealthier, healthier and happier. No political party dare promote the idea - it's a vote loser every time they fear - and putting limits on "unfettered free markets" is ever popular with the folk who think (wrongly near every time) that doing this will be in their economic interests.

In the end, the reason why Kohl and Chirac, Blair and Major, Clinton and Bush - most sane world leaders of the last fifty years - have ended up promoting a liberal world economic order is because they were persuaded by the evidence. More free markets, more liberal economic policies, open trade, easier movement round the globe - these things really do work, they really do make near everyone wealthier, healthier and happier. Free market liberalism persists because, when the counting is done and evidence is gathered, the most successful places are more open, property rights are upheld and most people with something to sell don't need permission from the government to find someone willing to buy. It's just a shame that nearly all these rich successful places are dominated by a politics that completely denies - from right and left - this essential truth.

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Comedians aren't public intellectuals. Send them back to tell jokes please.

Back in my youth there were comedians. They told jokes, made sketches and skits, acted in sit-coms and made guest appearances on game shows. I'm not going to indulge in some sort of list-making but there were legions of them - some with peak time shows on TV, some making up the numbers at the end of assorted piers and a whole pile, most I guess, scraping a living on the club comedy circuit. Some of them were achingly funny, the sort of people (Eric Morecombe, Tommy Cooper) who just made you laugh almost without effort, while others less so. It was a job and a very good living for the best.

One place, however, you didn't see comedians was on Question Time. Or indeed anywhere near politics or public affairs. It's not that comedians will have lacked for political opinions - they're mostly sharp, bright people and sharp bright people have political opinions. It's more that, I dunno, we didn't reckon that the political opinions of TV comics were any more valid that, say, the opinion of the solicitor on your high street, the woman who runs the successful boutique or the man opening the batting for Pudsey St Lawrence. It seems this has changed - comedians now (not all of them but a frightening proportion) seem to view their business as essentially an extension of political debate.

In 2015, Megan Garber argued in The Atlantic that comedians were the new public intellectuals. More and more comedy came with moral messaging, she pointed out: “Comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.” Whereas once philosophers and political theorists held a public role of guiding national debates and parsing the nuances of current affairs, comedians were increasingly taking on that responsibility.

I don't know when all this started - maybe with Ben Elton unfunnily shouting "Thatch" a lot on Saturday Live - but it really isn't a good look. Especially when, as some appear to do, actually being funny, maybe telling a joke or two gets lost in the essential objective of sticking it to the (old, white) man. Occasionally down the pub us grumpy old folk mumble into our pint about how there's sod all in the way of good comedy these days because the sort of stuff we laughed at in the 1970s has been banned by the social justice warriors in their quest for a perfectly fair, equal and (it seems) spectacularly boring society.

This bowdlerising of comedy is fine (unless, that is, you want something on telly to laugh at) but it still does not explain why anyone thinks somebody telling jokes - regardless of how right-on they are - is any sort of moral guide let alone someone we should have on TV to pontificate on current affairs, foreign policy and the government of the day. Yet this is what we do, people whose job should be to take the piss out of the government, politicians and self-righteous social justice campaigners are paid to come on telly and make serious commentary about these things. With precisely no qualification at all beyond being in the producer's address book (do they have these things now-a-days or is it all on the phone), having a smiley demeanour and several hundred thousand followers on Twitter.

TV current affairs programming has become little more than an extension of the entertainment business - folk get invited on because they're box office (lots of social media supporters, a penchant for safe controversy) not because they know anything at all about the subjects being discussed. Even the favourite politicians of these shows - Farage, Rees-Mogg, Abbott, Flint - are there because they provide that box office in a way that regular front bench politicians don't. Name recognition matters more than the ownership of a brain cell - this is why comedians get onto current affairs programmes not because what they say is helpful, thoughtful, insightful or intelligent (said comment could, of course, be any or all of these things but this is a happy coincidence not something planned for).

This confection results in news and current affair programmes designed to focus on what's trending on Twitter (or at least in the 'Blue Tick' Twitter the programme makers look at) and a preference for celebrity over analysis - just look at how two TV chefs have essentially written Britain's food policy on the back of a couple of shows and a book. Debate around important topics is boiled down to sound bites, slogans and lame jokes provided by comedians, media-friendly academics, gobby pundits and politicians whose shtick is controversy for controversy's sake.

Comedy isn't made better by its providers looking over their shoulder at the political effect of their jokes - the humour should be enough. Eddie Izzard - pretty much the trendy political comic's trendy political comic - was incredibly funny talking about rotting fruit and whether le singe est dans l'arbre. I'm not sure being snarky about politics much improved his oevre. For sure, you can't say no comedian can ever appear on a current affairs show but we have to start asking whether what we want is entertainment shows for that (pretty small) part of the public that enjoys politics as a blood sport or programming that has a degree of depth, analysis and intelligence. If we want the latter (and I'm sure the grandees of the BBC will pretend this is the case) then we need to send the comedians back to do comedy shows.

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Murder, starvation, poverty, autocracy...how did communism get to be cool?

It came to a head with an attractive young journalist proclaiming on morning TV: "I'm literally a communist, you idiot". For me this seemed little different from someone popping up and saying; "of course I'm a Fascist, twit face" or "absolutely, you numpty, I'm a Nazi". Yet unlike these latter statements, saying you're a communist doesn't get shock horror reactions, The Guardian won't headline its spluttering indignation at someone being a communist. Indeed the more likely reaction is a sort of "bless, young people care so much about the downtrodden - communism is wrong but their heart's in the right place".

Communism - even in places that really ought to know better like East Berlin - is cool and trendy. Communism is cool despite its track record of economic failure, suppression of democracy, state-sponsored murder, starvation and the incarceration of political opponents. The cruelty of Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's 'Cultural Revolution', Stalin's purges and Castro's gay correction camps is set aside because, y'know, communism is cool.

Why is this - seriously, why? Here's a few thoughts with my marketing hat on.

Communism is an ideological brand and people's attachment to it isn't based on much considered analysis but on the belief that (as my Dad said years ago) "socialism just means good". And if you don't believe me, here's a response to me on Twitter following my criticism of communism:

The communist manifesto like any seminal text is not to be taken so very literally but considered and applied to the current socioeconomic climate, taking or leaving as appropriate. This just seems like adult common sense to me.

It's like the Bishop of Durham explaining how, in a very real sense there is a god but he/she/it isn't quite how it says in the bible, that's allegory. So let's explore how communism got to move from being a 19th century piece of political philosophy to a seemingly faith-based creed (despite killing about 100 million people inbetween).

Communism's brand identity has a variety of elements - workers, the people, revolution, anti-establishment - that position it well for those looking to be politically contrary (a common trait in younger people). All of the factors in communism's brand identity are positive - other than the unfortunate fact of, when put into action, its tendency to make people poorer or at least those people it hasn't killed or exiled. But the identity is strong enough to resist these unfortunate historical issues. How come?

Communism's brand associations provide a justification for the "not true communism" response to any criticism citing the Soviet Union ("Stalin wasn't really a communist"), Castro ("Cuban totalitarianism was forced on it by US aggression") or Vietnam (US aggression again). These brand associations - what do you think of when someone says 'communism' - include:

Trendy university lecturers (I recall one lecturer's opening remarks to our 'Geography of South East Asia' module - "I'm a radical Marxist geographer")

Marx and Marxism - not The Communist Manifesto but the degree to which Marx is seen as significant in economics and (especially) sociology. Communism gets academic credibility to match lecturer trendiness

Communist iconography is appealing and rebellious - Che Guevara t-shirts, the hammer and sickle, the colour red.

WW2 - the Russians were our friends and allies (sort of) so communism isn't as bad as that other totalitarianism we don't talk about except when we want to criticise slightly orange US Presidents

All the bad stuff must have been a mistake ("not real communism") because Dr Steve Rogers* is way too trendy to do anything so bad as executing shopkeepers or forcing accounts clerks to work in market gardens. And anyway Marx says (insert trite quote cut and pasted from Good Quotes or Wikipedia). "Do you like my Che t-shirt - only £9.99 down the market?"

The communist brand also has what we can call width - if you thought communism was about economics or sociology think again. Those trendy lecturers crop up everywhere and communism (or "Marxism" but in branding terms there's little difference) has something rebellious - always "challenging orthodoxy" to the point where the challenge becomes the orthodoxy - to say: in the arts, in offshoots of sociology like gender studies and media studies, in literature, language studies and doubtless archaeology.

We can take a step back and observe that communism, from its inception in Marx and Engels' manifesto, has always been predicated on the idea of violent revolution - how else are you going to get hold of the property "for the people"? But this essential violence becomes cool because some of us (especially men) get quite turned on by political violence and the people advocating the violence are rebels, cool dudes fighting for a better world.

Communism's brand is cool because the idea of using violence to remove oppression is cool (watch Star Wars if you doubt this for a second) and the flaws - communism's track record of cruel, hateful oppression - is disregarded because the iconography, identity, story and associations allow for a myth rejecting its failures, most commonly because of the actions of communism's enemy rather than because of its inherent failings. Communism is cool because its brand values allow it to resist an honest assessment of what it has done and what it means.

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For all the (mostly self-appointed) Brexit experts - no-one's listening

People aren't listening to politicians. Or for that matter to newspaper columnists, BBC political reporters, think tank intellectuals, campaigners, and activist university professors. Twitter may be filled with the wit and wisdom of our political debate but nineteen out of twenty people are looking somewhere else. And when we get all huffy and tell them they're stupid for not paying attention they look back at us and tell us - rightly - that we're boring and they're not interested.

I've never watched Love Island but it's hard to avoid it as, on its start, social media explodes with comment, caricature and judgemental tutting. The current crop of attractive but slightly vacuous women on the show had a conversation (more a couple of comments really) about Brexit that has given political Twitter palpitations - from right across the spectrum of opinion this slightly gormless interaction is used to show that the sort of person who goes on Love Island is thick and, for some, that these are the sort of people who voted to leave. It is a veritable festival of snobbery and "OMG how could anyone know so little about Brexit" commentary.

For me it's a reminder that, for most people Brexit is a bit of a sideshow and they really don't see how the different options for leaving, not leaving, half leaving or leaving later are going to make much difference to their lives. We might be fretting over hard or soft, poached or scrambled Brexit, pouring over the latest Westminster bubble gossip, hanging on the words of our favourite pundit, posting coruscating Tweets exposing the idiocy of ministers, but the rest of humanity - normal people - would rather talk about things that matter in their actual lives right now (jobs, love life, football, paying the mortgage, schools and where they'll buy underwear when the local M&S closes).

It's not that people don't think Brexit is important - all the important people have been telling them every day just how really really important Brexit is, after all - but rather that folk can hold that something is important without thinking that spending time fidgeting over the details is a good use of that time. Does anyone think that me knowing the difference between the EEA/EFTA option, the Swiss solution, customs unions and intelligent borders is going to change much about the manner in which the decision is made? So why should I fuss and worry about these details when there are things I can influence, can change and which are directly relevant to my life right now.

It's not a revelation that people aren't paying attention to politics - pollsters have been telling us this for ages - but rather a realisation that politicians and political pundits aren't paying attention either. We carry on deluding ourselves that the great British public (or indeed American, Australian or French public) care about our political obsessions when the truth is that these things whoosh by them like so much white noise. I consider this to be a good thing - politics in a liberal democracy should be less important - but I suspect that the folk inside the bubble or with their noses pressed against that bubble begging for entry will carry on believing they're so much better because they 'understand'. Not like those girls in the Love Island sunshine. Me, I've a feeling those girls have it about right and, whatever, no-one is listening because they've more important things to worry about.

....

Is getting elected and being an effective politician correlated?

Some researchers have been looking into what people vote for in a politician and whether this gets us effective politicians. It would seem not:

We found that voters are not necessarily able to see what politicians are required to do in their day-to-day work and therefore have to rely on characteristics that might seem to matter for leadership, but may not actually be that important

The researchers go on to observe:

Voters increasingly choose politicians based on personality traits such as how warm, reliable, or decisive they appear to be, judged often by how they look or how tall they are.

This last point reminds me of Scott Adams observation that, all other things being equal, the tall candidate with good hair will win. Nevertheless:

...voters prefer candidates who are agreeable, but are won over less by people who look warm...

It seems that the politician who engages with the public by nodding, smiling and say "absolutely something should be done about that" is the same politician who, faced with the wiles of the professional bureaucrat, will smile, nod and say "absolutely, we'll do that".

We quite often pretend that we want politicians who think for themselves, challenge the assumptions of the bureaucracy, and provide leadership or direction. But when we get to the ballot box, we ignore all that and choose the one who says he's our friend. The problem with this is that we've likely chosen a candidate who wants to be everyone's friend making meaning that - and you'll see this all the time in councillors and MPs - he or she will spend their entire time crafting appealing platitudinous soundbites rather than doing the job. It's also a reminder that the 'good constituency MP' is perhaps less useful than the MP who spends more time doing questioning and challenging things in Parliament. Not that MPs should ignore their constituencies but rather than spending the five years of their term opening fetes, visiting businesses and kissing babies in Bigchester South might be agreeable to those constituents but doesn't make for an effective MP.

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Postcode lotteries (or why England is the most centralised large country in the world)

I don't know about you, but the term 'postcode lottery' makes my blood boil. We hear it all the time with its implication that everything should be the same everywhere or else things aren't fair. I get emails lobbying me to propose changes (usually expensive changes) because "it's a postcode lottery".

Here's a typical example:

'Our extensive new report highlights the bizarre situation where charity shops from the same chain, delivering exactly the same services and performing in exactly the same way, can get a completely different package of support in terms of rate relief and waste disposal charges simply because they are located on different sides of an authority boundary,’ said Robin Osterley, the chief executive of the Charity Retail Association.

Yes folks, these charities aren't getting the same deal from every local council because different councils exercise their discretion differently on business rates and waste collections. And therefore something should be done (by implication to make everywhere the same, to remove Council discretion).

There's a reason for much of this - national media and politics. I remember Anne Widdecombe explaining how, regardless of devolution, the national media expected a minister to appear on TV to explain why something or other was a postcode lottery (or failing, or underfunded, or inefficient). So long as this is the case, national government will tell local government what it has to do and how to do it while probably not providing 100% of the necessary resources.

I guess this explains comedian Geoff Norcott's observation (following his appearance on Question Time) that the politicians on the panel end up answering incredibly minor concerns ('dog poo in the paddling pool') that would be better addressed to the Parish Council.

My modest proposal - for when, by acclaim, you make me God Emperor for a week - is that we should ban the term 'postcode lottery' because it is helping destroy flexibility, creativity and innovation by local councils. Not that councils are all that good at this stuff (although we are massively better at it that national government) but, if councils have more discretion, people would be a lot closer to the people - elected people - making decisions about their lives.

And while we're about this business (and I'm still God Emperor) I would stop MPs having huge well-funded constituency offices full of people that go around doing things that really should be done by local councillors - and, yes, I'd devolve the benefits system, immigration administration and much else too. Frankly, we elect MPs to go down to London because we've got better things to do with our lives and, anyway, can't all fit into that fancy faux-gothic pile they've got to work in. And when those MPs have all got there, maybe they can stop fussing about postcode lotteries and let local councils get on with their job of running local services.

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The left is everywhere but prefers preaching to listening

I could start by adding "..and nowhere" to the headline because that pretty much summarises the issue here. The left's ideas are meant to be universal and absolute - no political postcode lottery is permitted - such that cultural variation is suspect. And conservatism is all about the nuance of that cultural variation. The comment, 'the left is everywhere' comes from this Russ Roberts commentary about Jordan Peterson:

I was recently at a panel discussion of the state of political and cultural life in America. All of the panelists were from what I would call the gentle left — good people to the left of center with a different world view from my own but full of compassion and good intentions. It was something of a smugfest — how sad it is that misguided people found Trump appealing. How sad it is that the right has no interest in the left while the left has been reaching out to understand how Trump voters could possibly exist. They chalked up the stupidity of Trump voters to global capitalism that had hollowed out the middle class and driven so many sheep into the arms of the Republican wolf who would only shear them and make a lovely blanket for himself.

Despite their best efforts at anthropology, the panelists were like fish in water unable to imagine what water is. The reason the right is less interested in the left than the left is in the right, is that the left is everywhere. You don’t have to take a trip to Kentucky or to a church to understand the left. The left dominates our culture — Hollywood, the music scene, the universities. And the left can’t seem to imagine that anything they are pushing for might be problematic. In particular, the radical egalitarian project is not everyone’s cup of tea. By radical egalitarian agenda, I mean equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. Or that gender is a social construct.

This is the gist of the left's incomprehension. Our trendy lefties cannot understand a conservatism that, while it's pro-market, is deeply suspicious of capitalism - or at least the grand capitalism of banks and big business. There's an incredulity at people who think the first duty of government isn't to promote equality but is rather to protect the community and culture of the people that government serves. As Roberts says, who find that "radical egalitarian agenda" not their cup of tea.

The cultural ubiquity of this position can be set out even more starkly:

And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism.

Of course, our neoliberal left will be adamant that they care deeply about economic inequality, they'll point to tweets, to conferences attended, to the presence of M. Piketty's book on their coffee table. But then we look at their priorities and see a different thing entirely - the excitement is over the gender pay gap for TV presenters, the 'trans agenda', and abusive language on social media.

It is a bizarre irony that someone as selfish, grandiloquent and preening as Donald Trump seems to grasp the real worries of the working class and, for want of a better word, lower middle class better than today's left. Concerns about the loss of social infrastructure like pubs, clubs, societies and local shops. Worries about jobs, businesses and the future opportunities for young people. And a sense that nobody is really interested in their local community, culture or lived experience - except, that is, for lecturing them about making the wrong lifestyle choices or sneering about what they like to eat, listen to, read or watch. This isn't to say that Trump's policies are the right ones but that he, at least, makes the effort to try and understand.

Neoliberalism is, in economic terms, brilliant - the billion people lifted out of absolute poverty over the past 30 years are a testament to this - but, while this has been happening, there's a set of people who don't see their lives getting better, watch their community hollowing out and wonder whether anyone is really interested in their lives and their neighbourhood. As Roberts observes, to see these people, hear them, understand them, our essentially metropolitan left has to go somewhere they wouldn't normally go - a tired English seaside town, a church in America's 'bible belt', a Yorkshire pit village, a French small town or an Italian village bar.

And when this metropolitan left arrive they have to do something else, they have to set aside the urge to lecture, to explain, to know better and start to listen. If they don't do this the result we get from the visit sounds like this:

Enough. Don’t buy the too-easy media picture of a rancid or untended town, or of bitter people; but understand that Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.

OK, this is written by a Conservative (I really object to those CINO, RINO sneers from the, mostly reactionary rather than conservative, alt-right - Matthew Parris is a conservative) but it rather sums up the dismissal that these distant, slightly tatty places get from the great and good when they call in. The same goes for France where arrivistes get a prickly response from locals for wanting some sort of (largely imagined) lost past to return:

Hours had passed on a sunny Friday in the center of town, yet on some streets we saw almost no one. “You see clearly that we are on a street that is dying,” Mr. Jourdain said on Rue Emile Grand as we concluded our tour. “There are whole buildings where there isn’t a soul.”

I called City Hall for a meeting with the mayor, a member of France’s center-right party, but was met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm from her spokeswoman. I was put off with the promise of a phone call the following week, and when I finally reached the mayor, Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, she argued that urban “devitalization” has had a “relatively moderate impact.” She also angrily condemned Mr. Jourdain.

“He is an extraterrestrial,” she said, “who came here to get talked about.”

There is no comprehension here, simply a refusal to sit and listen. It is the pattern again and again, in place after place. Journalist or researcher arrives in town, talks to a couple of people, takes some pictures and then rushes back to somewhere with better coffee bars and trendier restaurants to write a piece explaining how the community they visited is tired, left-behind, struggling, dowdy, depressed (select the descriptors of your choice). Sometimes these writers or researchers are good enough to speak to a few actual locals but mostly this gets boiled down to a few grumpy quotes - even better if the locals say something a bit racist, sexist or homophobic.

The places we're talking about here aren't rich places but they're also not really poor places. The people who live in these places are conservative and it hurts them to be told they're "going nowhere" and we should look instead at the shiny city with its overpriced apartments, fancy restaurants, crowded roads and unfriendly neighbours. Nothing is offered to people in Clacton or Albi except the strong suggestion that somehow the people in the big city are better than them - be more like East London, more like Paris. Presumably without the racism and knife crime.

The biggest challenge facing western democracies isn't populism, it isn't robots, it's not flying cars or food security or climate change or the rise of China. No, the challenge is stopping the city from strangling our societies and cultures. Part of this is to start trying to work out how we make Clacton and places like Clacton something other than "all our yesterdays". And sitting at the centre are the people, the ones who think that "radical egalitarian agenda" has gone too far, the ones who want politicians to worry as much about neighbourhood, community and place as they do about transphobia, the gender pay gap and high speed railways.

We started with the trendy left being everywhere and nowhere, like butterflies flitting across a cultural herbaceous border. Set against this isn't just "somewhere" but the idea that society starts with family, friends, neighbour and community. And that this society needs looking after. This isn't about everything being the same, nor is it about community developers - assorted left-inclined missionaries of social action - arriving in a place getting everything sorted. No, it's about rebuilding the structures of place - community, neighbourhood, families - and the institutions they need to succeed.

Many conservatives (and Conservatives) have forgotten this essential part of what we believe, preferring instead a sort of technocratic fix based on regulation and grand institutions. Not that such things are unimportant but without strong local institutions - family, neighbourhood, community - strong national institutions will not succeed. Hospitals in "Our NHS" work (most of the time) despite the stupifying bureaucracy of the NHS because they are local institutions - our hospitals, our clinics, our health centres. And the same goes for schools, policing and much else that makes society work - when the ties to local community are strongest, the institution is most effective. The national, even supranational, urge for homogeneity that neoliberalism and social democracy force on communities excludes people from any sense of owning those institutions, prevents initiative and slowly stifles the local ties, the idea that we should love where we live, that make community work.

Although there's a grumpiness (and bemusement) at that 'radical egalitarian agenda' it perhaps covers over a deeper malaise in society, the seeming alliance between the uncaring utilitarianism of neoliberalism and the controlling 'gentleman in Whitehall knows best' approach of social democracy. Everything is so far away, out of our control, and more bothered with things that aren't important to us and ours. It's not that people far from the places of power - Westminster, Brussels, Washington, Paris - are ignorant but rather that they've stopped listening as so little is about them or their lived experiences. The left is everywhere, except in the lives and communities of people just over the hill from the shiny city, quiet places with good people who would like a little care and attention for a change.

....

The best 21st century political campaigns will owe more to Saul Alinsky and Readers Digest than Cambridge Analytica

The Cambridge Analytica story has now transmogrified into a good old-fashioned story about how a political campaign some folk didn't like might have broken some rules (I suspect it probably hasn't but, as ever, I'm ready for surprise). The more interesting part of the story, the bit about the use of sophisticated database marketing in politics, has got itself sidelined while the screams of defeated and unreconciled Remain supporters - or in the USA disappointed Clinton enthusiasts and anti-Trump mavens - echo round the halls.

I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of the latest sensationalised allegations about the referendum campaign with its deliberate conflation of different actions at different times, use of gossip and repetition of allegations already investigated. Mostly because it's not all that important - the UK probably needs to rework its rules on political marketing at elections to reflect modern practices but that's about it really.

Much more important is the question as to whether the ideas, methods and approaches being pushed by the likes of Cambridge Analytica are effective and, if they are, whether we should be concerned about how they will affect the conduct of our public political debate. For a starter, here's Jamie Bartlett from Demos writing in The Spectator:

The shift towards big data elections has profound consequences for the whole of modern politics. If every voter is reduced to a data point who receives not real messages from politicians, but machine–generated adverts finely tuned towards personality and mood, then elections become little more than a software war. And the more politics is a question of smart analysis and nudges rather than argument, the more power shifts away from those with good ideas and toward those with good money or good data skills.

Bartlett has a point but I suspect he is overegging it a bit. The Spectator article describes a pretty standard data-driven direct marketing campaign little different from those we were designing for clients 25 years ago:

Cambridge had a database of around 5,000 data points on 200 million Americans and combined it with the Republican Party’s own voter data to build dozens of these highly focused universes and model how ‘persuadable’ its members were. (For example, analysts discovered during the race that a preference for cars made in the US was a solid indication of a potential Trump voter). Creative types then designed specialised ads for these universes, based on the specific things they were thought to care about. Every-thing was tested, retested, redesigned. They sent out thousands of versions of fund-raising emails or Facebook ads, working out what performed best. They tried donate pages with red buttons, green buttons, yellow buttons. They even tested which unflattering picture of Hillary worked best.

It sounds scary when you set it out like this but the reality is that, although we should absolutely be bothered about data protection and security, these methods really don't make the scale of difference that companies like Cambridge Analytica are wont to claim:

Does it work? Yes – but it’s not a silver bullet. We’d reckon on uplift in response of around 2X or maybe 3X compared to a random selection. Great until you realise that the response to random was around 0.2% - all that clever technology means that, instead of getting ignored by 998 out of 1000 people, you only get ignored by 994.

And those numbers I cited are response figures - people actually responding, doing something we've asked them to do - the reality with message advertising such as that used in political campaigns is that the level of inattention is several orders of magnitude greater (one of the depressing things for advertisers is the realisation that nearly all their carefully constructued 'reach' results merely in people completely ignoring the advertising). This is essentially what political scientists Kalla & Broockman found:

Significant theories of democratic accountability hinge on how political campaigns affect Americans’ candidate choices. We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero.

All that noise. All those messages. Billions spent on advertising. And there's no evidence that it makes a blind bit of difference to the outcome (as an ad man I'm not entirely convinced but as a political campaigner it's very unusual for the actual campaign to change much - the 2017 general election is an outlier in this). I note that Bartlett comments that Trump's victory was based on very small margins in three or four key states - not a new phenomenon as fans of hanging chads will remember. But we can't isolate the impact of different campaign elements - TV coverage, advertising and the ground campaign including 'get out the vote' activity.

When we look at the UK, the debate is about the referendum (of course, Vote Leave is very clear that it didn't use Cambridge Analytica or their style of psychometrics-based targeting) where perhaps the communications rules are different. That being said, the outcome was determined largely by unprecedentedly high turnout among older, working class voters - to be blunt, these are those least likely to be influenced by social media activity because they're not using social media (about half of 50-60 year olds and a third of over 65s).

It seems to me that, with the end of the mass media age, political campaigning will change. It also seems to me that very few political marketers have begun to grasp the significance of this change - it's not merely Jamie Bartlett's worry about what might be called the 'agora' but more that social media democratises political debate in a way not liked or expected by the dominant media forms. But first we need to put to bed the idea that algorithmic targeting is the marketing equivalent of a ninth level magic user spell.

Here's Kris-Stella Trump (no relation to The Donald) Program Director of the Anxieties of Democracy program at the Social Science Research Council:

The “Big 5” personality traits (which Cambridge Analytica claimed to use in its work) only predict about 5 percent of the variation in individuals’ political orientations.

...it’s possible to predict personality from online data. But a recent meta-analysis shows that even if you have access to someone’s digital footprint, you can only learn so much about their Big 5 traits. Even if your model does well at first, it will probably be out of date soon, as the things people “like” on Facebook change.

You can improve online advertisements by targeting them using personality data. But the effects tend to be small. In this successful study, researchers targeted ads, based on personality, to more than 1.5 million people; the result was about 100 additional purchases of beauty products than had they advertised without targeting.

Once you know that personality prediction probably didn’t add much value to Cambridge Analytica’s approach, then what it did starts to look a lot like the microtargeting also used by other campaigns, and which the Obama 2008 campaign in particular was famous for.

Dr Trump also makes the killing observation that Cambridge Analytica "does not seem capable of pulling off the large-scale and complex personality-based profiling operation that it claims to have mastered."

So we have a methodology that might add 5% to targeting systems that have been around for nigh on 40 years applied to an environment that works on social interaction, word-of-mouth and endorsement. The result isn't a magic wand but a system that probably won't make a jot of difference to outcomes from social media marketing. Indeed, the successful approaches to social media marketing owe more to Alinsky's theories of community organising than they do to database marketing. This focus on organisation is one reason why Momentum and Corbyn's team have been successful despite the limitations of his political offer.

The manner in which political debate is changing means that the old conduit (or rather the mass media age's conduit) for political messaging is less powerful. It's undoubtedly true that TV coverage probably had more to do with Trump's election than data marketing or social media but it no longer has the field to itself. What we get (and both Trump and Corbyn got this) is a return to the public meeting, the rally and the "impromptu" street event. It's not, as Jamie Bartlett suggests, that political debate and engagement is atomised via the Internet but rather that it will be more like the debate of times before mass media but overlain with a social media element. As a result the skill set for the campaigner will be about organisation and activism rather than slick communications and advertising.

So I guess the advice to would-be political marketers is to step away from the box of tricks that the likes of Cambridge Analytica are flogging and read Rules for Radicals, The Solid Gold Mailbox and David Ogilvy's advice on selling (it's very sexist as it was written in 1935). Then go and do a lot of listening to what people talk about (clue - it's not politics or, at least, obviously politics).

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A last speech as leader - love where you live...

Today marks my last Council Meeting as Group Leader in Bradford - here are my last words in that role:

"Unless something odd happens, this will be my last speech from this chair. And I think speaking about pride in Bradford is a good topic to close on.

We’re going to vote for this motion but I’ve a few concerns – not with the spirit of the motion or what it proposes but rather that the focus on enforcement puts a bit of a dampener on the idea of civic pride.

My philosophy – for the avoidance of doubt, Lord Mayor, it’s called conservatism – tells me that we should approach making society better, not by grand theories of human perfection, but by looking out our front door and fixing what we can see from that doorstep.

If there’s a stone fallen off a wall, pick it up and put it back. Don’t wait for someone else to do it.

If there’s a piece of litter. Pick it up. Put it in a bin.

If there’s someone who needs a lift, give them a lift

And if what needs fixing is beyond your power don’t shrug and move on but ask whether you and your neighbours – together – can fix it.

And smile. Have fun.

Most people here – and lots of people in Bradford – understand exactly how neighbourliness and loving the place you live really make a difference. And this motion points at some of that love – I do also think love is a better word than pride too.

The problem is that too many people don’t. They’re the ones who drop the litter, do the fly-tipping, graffiti the walls, vandalise the bus stops, spit in the street, park on the pavement, ignore the yellow lines, push to the front of the queue, complain when they don’t get what they demand, place the blame for problems on other people.

The enforcement we spend so much time on is because of these people.

It’s also because too many people walk on by. Telling themselves that the Council, the police or just someone else will do something.

They’re very quick to tell us that the place is a dump but not so quick to try and make it better.

There’s an American organisation called the Knight Foundation who ran a programme called “Soul of the Community” studying what they called “community attachment” – let me read you a quote from the lead researcher, Katherine Loflin:

“…from 2008-2010, we received responses from 43,000 people in 26 communities across the US, in cities large and small. What we saw were findings, year after year, that for many seemed counter-intuitive—even radical at times. We not only found out that resident attachment was related to solid economic outcomes for places, but that the things that most drove people to love where they live were not the local economy or even their personal civic engagement in the place (as one might expect), but the “softer sides” of place.”

Making a place better – making Bradford better – doesn’t start with a strategy for the city, it starts with making your and my neighbourhood - just a few streets - better places to live. Where parties happen, where children play, where life is lived with a smile. Things that the Project for Public Spaces calls “lighter, cheaper, quicker”. Not grand festivals or great events but galas, playgrounds, impromptu games of cricket and even a snowball fight.

In Denholme, when the road was blocked in the snow, dozens of people helped out. Some with pick-ups and 4x4s, some just by bringing out cups of tea to stranded motorists, and lots by clearing snow, by just being part of a community.

This is what community pride is about – community attachment. Love. And we need it every day not just when it snows."

...

"He was a member of the BNP but he never said anything racist"

Today marks something of an epiphany. I had, sort of, assumed that the Labour Party would eventually get round to sorting itself out on the matter of antisemitism. After all, being a Jew is recognised as an ethnic designation - in the words of our equalities laws, a 'protected charcteristic'. This means that language attacking Jewish people on the basis of their Jewish identity is a 'hate crime'.

The revelation that the leader of the Labour Party was a member of a "secret" forum on Facebook that seems to have specialised in antisemitism was pretty shocking. But it is only half as shocking as the reaction of Labour members and supporters to this revelation. With a few notable exceptions, Labour MPs, councillors and activists responded to the existence of this forum and Mr Corbyn's involvement with what amounts to a shrug. If these folk said anything it amounted to "nobody cares" - probably because there are only 300,000 or so Jews in Britain making racism towards them pretty marginal in political terms.

When poked or pushed the typical reaction from Labour members has been to make excuses for Mr Corbyn - like this:

...being a member of a group where obnoxious views are expressed does not mean that you share them. Unless there is clear evidence, such as a racist post or a like of a racist post by an individual it is merely circumstantial, and at worst cause for concern.

So Mr Corbyn is invited to join a group full of racists, chooses to join the group (we'll give him the benefit of the doubt on whether he checked out the group before joining) and remains a member for at least two years. During that period we're expected to believe that Mr Corbyn didn't witness a single antisemitic trope, meme or statement even though he appears to have helped (or so the people involved said) organise a meeting of some sort - here's a letter to Mr Corbyn from Joan Ryan, Labour MP for Enfield North:



It may be - I haven't seen - that Mr Corbyn denies helping organise this meeting or deflects it by passing off the organisational blame onto his office but, for me at least, this shows that he was actively engaged with the people running the group who were (judging from their posts) deeply antisemitic. It's not just a case of being a member and occasionally posting.

Overwhelmingly the membership of the Labour Party is not antisemitic but, when the leader and people around the leader are closely associated with antisemites, you have to ask whether the sort of "Jeremy's not antisemitic he was just on a forum full of antisemites" argument gets thinner and thinner. We've not quite got there yet but it's getting close to the position where the defence is effectively: "he was a member of the BNP but he never said anything racist". And people who remain in the Labour Party without, at the very least, questioning whether the Party has a problem are pretty complicit in perpetuating the too widely held view that being racist to Jews isn't as bad as other forms of racism.

....

The politics of "it's not fair" - welcome to the New Toddlers

I'm angry, rage-filled, cross. The little tic above my left eye is twitching, the axe in the shed sings its siren song. I'm close to having had enough. All this has been prompted by an appointment - something I might write about later. Put simply, however, it is time for those of us who like free speech, free markets, free enterprise and a free society to stop putting up with the sort of world where a TV anchor who went to one of Britain's poshest school and then to Oxford can, in all seriousness, say to an academic that he 'doesn't have the right to offend'.

Indeed, as many have already pointed out, the entirety of Cathy Newman's interview with Jordan Peterson consisted of straw men, non sequiturs, misrepresentations and the repeated use of the words 'fair' and 'unfair'. These two words are now the most abused words in the English language - from "it's not fair" being the exclusive cry of the toddler in mid-tantrum, it has now become the mantra for an entire political movement. OK, so some folk like to point at Corbyn's politics and say it's 'Marxist' but frankly this is a bit of an insult to Karl who at least tried to construct a coherent set of theories about history, society and economics. The New Toddlers don't do this, they just scream "it's not fair" ever more loudly. Sometimes, as in the case of former broadcast journalists, they scream "it's not fair" and misquote Gramsci.

These New Toddlers are joined in their screeches by the likes of Cathy Newman who refuse to let sensible things like actual research evidence get in the way of them shouting "it's not fair". Everything from Jessica's uni fees through to Grandma having to cash in some of her three-quarters of a million of housing asset is not "fair". Don't have a job - or better still the precise job (very well paid, of course) you think you deserve - scream "it's not fair" and, as if by magic, some left wing politician or right-on news reporter will appear with the soothing words "something must be done" followed by dragging one of the few remaining grown ups in and accusing them of not being "fair".

The New Toddlers have been weaned on the idea that everything is somebody else's fault - often a strange and nebulous thing called 'neoliberalism'. You're fat and you drink too much? It not fair is it but rest assured something will be done - the bad people who made you fat and forced you to drink a bottle of white wine every second day will be punished. Maybe you've moved to London because that's where all the action is and you can get a great job in a new media design start up or, better still, in some NGO, QUANGO or think-tank. But it's not fair that you can barely afford the rent, let alone buy a house (something the thickoes you left behind in Ormskirk seem able to do from their crappy little warehouse or call centre jobs) - never mind, those politicians and pundits will be there echoing your cries: "it's not fair, it's not right, something must be done, give me more money, stop them charging me so much, tax fat cats more, what about those big companies, we'll have their money, it's not fair."

Hardly a day passes without another screechy, evidence-free campaign: windfall taxes on this, give free things to this group, stop that group, nationalise this, take over that, regulate, intervene, manage, control, fuss, bother...it's not fair, it's not fair. Twitter memes are fired off, clickbait articles written, petitions launched - anyone daring to oppose is ridiculed, abused, piled onto while any, even mild, kickback results in more screams of "it's not fair, stop the nasty abusers". Every women, every disabled person, every gay man, every minority, folk with mental health problems, fat people, drunks, drug users - everyone except smokers - is a victim. It's not fair.

This ever more infantilised society - the world of these New Toddlers - is exploited by those, whether they call themselves Marxists, Fabians or 'social justice campaigners' who want to exercise power by seeming to be kind and caring. These exploiters don't really give a stuff about whether anything is fair (so long as they're running it and getting well paid), what they really hate is that, out there, there are still people who think it's not a bad idea to take responsibility for your own life, who think we should be allowed to say stuff even if some people think it's not fair and get all offended. We're the problem you see because we don't think we need great and good people on public boards and bodies to make life fair. Mostly this is because, unlike Arthur Dent, we listened to what our Mother said all those years ago when we had that toddler tantrum and screamed, "it's not fair".

"Life's not fair. Get used to it."

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Quote of the day - On the British elite...

Hard to think of a better summation of the braying, negative politics now prosecuted by Britain's establishment elite:

A large part of the political class, and seemingly a sizeable proportion of the country’s educated elite, have distanced themselves from the majority of the country. Never in modern times has there been such an overt and even contemptuous attempt to deny the legitimacy of a popular vote. Edmund Burke in the 1790s gave credit for our freedoms to ‘the wisdom of unlettered men’; William Ewart Gladstone believed that ordinary voters ensured the morality of government; the great French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville realised that everyday experience enabled people to make sensible choices. But today, some prominent voices imply that only those with university degrees have opinions worth listening to. We might be back in the 1860s, when the Liberal MP Robert Lowe, who opposed giving working men the vote, sneered that ‘you should prevail upon our future masters to learn their letters’.

Absolutely - the rest of the article's good too.
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Taylor Swift and The Guardian: It's clickbait but reminds us of the left's nastiness

I appreciate that today's newspapers need clickbait to get enough visitors to satisfy their advertisers. And I also understand that The Guardian would never admit to this, which means I'm going to take their editorial laying into Taylor Swift at face value:

Mr Trump realised it was more effective to target a core group than attempt blanket appeal in his campaign – but Swift worked it out first. For years, she has directed her extraordinary self-promotional skills towards cultivating a dedicated and emotional army of followers, handpicking particularly loyal fans for private listening parties and, on her latest tour, allowing members of the public to buy tickets only once they have proved their allegiance through their purchasing history. Her new album, Reputation, is not available on Spotify – anyone wishing to hear it must buy it.

The reason Ms Swift has attracted the ire of the UK's leading journal of self-righteous left-wing tripe is that she has been insufficiently strident in her criticism of Donald Trump.

Her silence seems to be more wilful: a product of her inward gaze, perhaps, or her pettiness and refusal to concede to critics. Swift seems not simply a product of the age of Trump, but a musical envoy for the president’s values.

So let's look at Ms Swift's failings (as insinuated by The Guardian): having alt-right fans, too few friends who aren't "thin, white and wealthy", being good at marketing, and not releasing her new album free to air from day one. Oh, she also challenged structural racism (the lefty idea that the oppressed can't be racist) as incomprehensible.

Until I'd read this pretty egregious editorial I'd not knowingly listened to anything by Taylor Swift - unsurprisingly I'm not target market and she is (as The Guardian notice) rather good at marketing. So, prompted by the Guardian's ire, I spent an hour listening to Ms Swift's catalogue on Spotify (except for the latest release, of course, as that's not there yet). I can see the appeal - even the bit The Guardian snarks at, saying:

Swift’s songs echo Mr Trump’s obsession with petty score-settling in their repeated references to her celebrity feuds, or report in painstaking detail on her failed romantic relationships (often, there is crossover). The message is quintessentially Trumpian: everyone is out to get me – but I win anyway.

Seems to me that, celebrity references aside, Ms Taylor's music sits right with the interests of her core audience of younger women - tales of unrequited love, snarky stuff about other girls, you really love me don't you. All this is done in a slightly country, upbeat and catchy manner - nothing too hard to listen too, simple tunes and storied lyrics. And I guess it's the stuff Ms Swift likes to sing and that her marketing team knows the audience wants to hear.

And this is great, Taylor Swift seems to be a woman on top of her business. The bit that isn't so great here is that The Guardian cannot comprehend a celebrated singer not wanting to 'do politics', despite the undoubted fact that Ms Swift's fans probably don't pay a great deal of attention to that politics. What's even odder is that The Guardian takes the view that Ms Swift's silence is, in some way, an endorsement of Donald trump - presumably on the 'if you're against him, you're for him' principle. This is really rather unpleasant - going as it does from reporting on Ms Swift saying nothing to inferring that she's only a breath away from joining far right marches. It all suggests that the newly-unpleasant left simply cannot countenance an artist that refuses to join their mob and prefers to just get on with being a rich and successful performer. And god forbid that any writer, singer or actor is conservative.

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Memories of what once was haunt our politics

OK this is about about Youngstown, Ohio but the same sentiment could pass for a thousand other places across the USA, Britain and Europe:

In places like Youngstown, many people still remember what life was like when employment was high, jobs paid well, workers were protected by strong unions, and industrial labor provided a source of pride – not only because it produced tangible goods but also because it was recognized as challenging, dangerous, and important. The memory of what it felt like to transform raw ore into steel pipes and to be part of the connected, prosperous community that work generated still haunts the children and grandchildren of those workers.

These memories of what once was haunt today's politics and the minds of economists. The problem is that those economists know only the dry, utilitarian core of their discipline - free trade works, economic liberalism makes the world richer. And all this is undeniable but what it reminds us is that utilitarianism and Benthamite consequentialism should not be the only drivers of what we do and how we think about the world.

I don't think we can get back to those halcyon days of factories, unions, strong men and robust communities in places like Ohio, South Yorkshire, Livorno or Roubaix - this is, if you like, the mistake of Blue Labour and Red Tory analyses. But what we should do, rather than peer in faux-concern at the poverty consequential on the loss of those days, is ask what is needed to find again the ties that bound those communities together and made them strong.

John Sanphillippo writes brilliant photo-essays about America's suburbia and, in a recent piece about Orange County, California, he started with what I think is a really important remark:

There are things that we can do as a society to work through our big structural difficulties at an institutional level. And there are other things that can be done independently at the household level by individuals. I don’t have the technical skills, political skills, social skills, credentials, patience, or desire to engage the large scale systems. To be honest, I don’t think most people do. But there are all sorts of things that ordinary people can and should do on their own that can make a huge difference on the ground at room temperature. Collectively all our separate choices create the world we inhabit.

To do this we have to break with those memories of what once was, to forget pretending large factories with their unions, job security and dominance of a community will ever return. We've also to stop seeing the answer lies with holding out a cap to national government crying "fill it with money, we're hurting" - it's not that redistribution is a bad thing but rather that it stops things getting worse it doesn't make them better. The starting point is where Sanphillippo is pointing - outside our front doors.

Right now the neoliberal elite (apologies for calling them that but it's all I've got) are in denial. They know that their world view is challenged by folk struggling in Youngstown, Oldham or Fosse De Sessevalle and they know also that the voice of far-left and far-right echoes round these communities as they search for what they lost when the steelworks, cotton mills and coal mines closed. The problem is that the populists, whether rightists like Farage, Trump or Le Pen or leftists like Mélenchon, Corbyn or Sander, don't offer anything that works - all these would-be demagogues offer is a false hope and strong words of blame.

It seems to me we've to offer people two things - hope based on empowerment and control, and the idea of aspiration. Maybe if we start with those neglected local things - the fallen walls, the crumbling highway, the kid who needs a lift (or a bike) to get to an apprenticeship, the local school looking for readers, the doctors wanting help getting folks to and from hospital, a thousand things too small to get the notice of big government but important to you little place. Forget about grand national schemes and think instead about our neighbourhoods - because it really does work:

The Knight Foundation, an American charity that supports journalism and active citizenship, ran a programme called 'Soul of the Community' that showed how there is an "important and significant correlation between how attached people feel to where they live and local GDP growth" and what "most drives people to love where they live (their attachment) is their perception of aesthetics, social offerings, and openness of a place". If people love where they live, that place will succeed - it's Sam Gamgee going round The Shire planting a grain from Galadriel's garden in every corner.

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Nothing new about the Russians trying to influence our politics

Like this:

Nor is Russian interference in American politics new, or for that matter vice versa. The Comintern funded “The Daily Worker” in the 1920s, and various Soviet and communist sources have funded agitation around the world for many decades. Those nefarious activities used a variety of cooperating Western suppliers, including delivery trucks, publishers, paper makers and much more, but again we don’t regard those businesses as sinister.

Or, closer to home (and to the Labour Party) there's this:

He confirmed in April that Jack Jones was a Soviet agent. ‘I was his last case officer,’ wrote Gordievsky (Daily Telegraph, 28 April), ‘meeting him for the final time in 1984 at Fulham [six years after Jones’s retirement from the T&G], together with his wife, who had been a Comintern agent since the mid-1930s. I handed out to him a small amount of cash. From 1981, I had had the pleasure of reading volumes of his files, which were kept in the British department of the KGB until 1986, when they were passed on to the archive.’

Or this:

He and the former editor of the left-wing newspaper Tribune Dick Clements, were in regular contact with the East German secret police, the Stasi, according to the security service's files.

The allegations come only 24 hours after the BBC unmasked Hull University lecturer Robin Pearson as a former Stasi agent.

Earlier in the week, it was revealed that Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old great-grandmother, and former Scotland Yard detective John Symonds had also betrayed Britain during the Cold War.

The latest revelations suggest the KGB and the Stasi saw Mr Allen and Mr Clements as "agents of influence", who could provide useful information and help promote pro-Soviet policies.

So bunging out loads of bots and inviting Nigel Farage for tea is in a long and dishonourable tradition. One that sought for decades to subvert Britain's left to the Soviet cause - a cause with so much blood on its hands it stained the flag red.

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Trust me, I'm a politician...

There's a section in the Vietnam War documentary currently showing on BBC4 (watch if you can) where they're reporting on the fall out from the Pentagon Papers leak and the realisation that Kennedy and LBJ had lied through their teeth to the American people. We now know, and lots of Americans suspected at the time, that Richard Nixon lied through his teeth about Vietnam too.

There's a marine veteran speaking to camera who says something along the lines that, prior to the Pentagon Papers, people instinctively trusted the President and his advisors on matters of great importance - war, peace, life, death. Afterwards no-one trusted politicians - the assumption was that all of us lied.

It seems to me that this simple observation from a former soldier summed up the long-term political effect of Vietnam for the USA. For all the winning and losing, elections and campaigns, there is a grumbling view that underneath it all they're probably lying about something. And are prepared to lie about everything up to and including sending young men to the other side of the earth to get killed. So much of what we see played out today in US politics reflects this moment - from low turnouts in elections through endless rounds of campaigning funding reforms to the current suggestions of sinister conspiracy involving Russians, Facebook and shadowy data companies.

For us in Britain, we had to wait a while longer for this epiphany of lies. When Tony Blair stood in Parliament to argue for us to back a US invasion of Iraq, most of us believed that no Prime Minister would bend and warp the evidence - in effect lie - in order to get parliament to back a war. Yet that is what happened, we backed a war because we believed it when Blair said the threat was real, urgent and significant. There are a lot of people who, like that Vietnam veteran from 1971, had the scales fall from our eyes as we realised that, yes, our politicians were prepared to see men die on the basis of deliberate misinformation.

Our politics is better and worse for this epiphany. Better because the public are less prepared to take their leaders simply on trust when it comes to big and important decisions. Although some of the 'wanting to know' around Brexit is little more than spoiling, the public's support for wanting to know is because, frankly, they don't trust politicians not to sell us down the river.

Politics is worse, however, because decent and honest politicians aren't believed - and most politicians, despite the epiphany of lies, are decent and honest. Worse still, politics becomes even more shallow and unpleasant because the media, reflecting public distrust, treats politicians as dodgy, something to be exposed rather than as a set of folk wrestling with getting the right policies and with making the right decisions.

Every time I see Alistair Campbell on telly, in the papers or Tweeting, I want to scream that he was the warped spider sat in the centre of a web of lies - 'spin' they called it - that resulted in hundreds of dead British troops and untold thousands of dead Iraqis. All done to indulge Tony Blair's desire to be America's best buddy. There is no going back, in most folks' minds politicians will forever be liars and deceivers. Most of us aren't, lying's too much like hard work but, because of men like Kennedy, Nixon and Blair, people start with the opinion that we are. Trust me on this, I'm a politician.

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