Not everyone likes greens - lessons about popular politics from Australia

Not everyone likes greens

Every place is different. We're told this - don't take what's happened in Australia or Texas or Greece as a guide to what might happen in England or Tuscany or Austria. But maybe there is something happening? Here's Tyler Cowen:

Sometimes political revolutions occur right before our eyes without us quite realizing it. I think that’s what’s been happening over the last few weeks around the world, and the message is clear: The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.

Cowen frames this in the context of the Australian election where "an evangelical Christian who has expressed support for President Donald Trump" won despite every prediction saying the Australian Labor Party with its achingly 'new left' agenda (identity politics, climate change, immigration) were going to win at a canter. Cowen then touches on the Brexit Party and the emerging contests in the early stages of next years presidential elections pointing out a similar pattern. The intellectual agenda may be left wing but politics is not - and politics is what people vote about.

We could equally have seen reference to Salvini's Lega, to the Gilets Jaune in France or to a host of other manifestations of this populist 'new right' - this week's European Parliament elections could see a host (Cowen says up to 35%) of MEPs from these anti-establishment parties. Everywhere we look, we see people sticking two-fingers up at the established parties of the centre left and centre right.

Looking at Australia we begin to see where the problem is for "urban cosmopolitans" - here's urbanist Ross Elliot writing in New Geography:

The denizens of trendy inner city secondhand bookshops may have been filled with confidence, but not of suburban and regional voters. Struggling with flat real wage growth and having borne the brunt of a changing employment landscape, rising electricity bills and falling confidence in their future, this was not the time to tell them it was their duty to sacrifice even more to ‘save the planet’ by paying ever higher electricity bills, or buying an electric car they can’t afford. Especially when that message comes from smug sounding public servants or wealthy, entitled inner city residents who have been the beneficiaries of economic change, as well as overseas investors, rather than its victims.

The climate change warriors organised a convoy to protest against a new coal mine at Adani in central Queensland and got a frosty welcome when they arrived with locals organising a counter protest and stores, petrol stations and restaurants refusing to serve the protestors. This was rural Australia but the same sentiments will be heard is thousands of other places - everywhere but the places inhabited by what Elliot calls "the inner urban elites of government, the bureaucracy, media and industry" - the great and the good.

Telling people who don't think they've enough money that they need to make sacrifices to 'save the planet' is lousy politics yet this is precisely the tone we hear from those who share every one of Greta Thunberg's inane utterings as if they were on golden tablets received from god. Hardly a day passes without another initiative designed to 'save the planet' or 'fight climate change' that mostly acts to add a little more mild irritation into the lives of people who are already mildly irritated. Maybe we do need to ban plastic straws but can we stop pretending it's any sort of vote winning political strategy.

Right now the mainstream of political opinion is more concerned about whether there'll be minimum wage labour from Romania to serve them in Pret, how terrible it is that a very well-paid and wealthy female news presenter is paid slightly less than her male colleague or if they'll have to fill a form in to drive a car in France. These opinion-makers are the sorts who can afford to pay a tax on flying, have the time (or staff) to fuss over recycling and are very keen to ban things that they don't use but disapprove of. And these people really do look down on the proles - here, quoted by Ross Elliot, is Elizabeth Farelly from the Sydney Morning Herald:

“The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable, I'm happy for them … even if their suburbs are destroying the world.”

For a long while people hadn't noticed that the great and good didn't like them very much - why would they when their paths seldom crossed. But, with Brexit, with the climate change agenda targeting the less well off, with an identity politics that disdains the working class, people have now noticed. And when it comes to voting those people are going to kick the inner urban elite's snobbery right in the ballot box.

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If you say you believe in One Nation, aren't you a nationalist?

‘Conservativism should be broad, not narrow; open, not closed; forward-looking, not yearning for a mythical past. .... We should seek to unite, not divide. In short, One Nation Conservatism.’

So says David Gauke MP in an address to Onward, the latest pet think tank for Tory MPs (Onward does sound like the motto of a not very good prep school though). My botheration with this is that it manages to be, in one short sentence, patronising, self-contradictory and divisive. So much for 'one nation'.

That a successful political party in the UK has to be a 'broad church' is not a new idea or, indeed, one that is anything other than common sense given our 'first-past-the-post' voting system. But this game of setting a series of words in juxtaposition as a way to say that 'populism' or 'nationalism' isn't part of that broad church represents a break with the idea of a broad church. I might not be one of them but there are plenty of people in the Conservative Party, and even more among the voters, whose politics do reflect the idea of nationhood, queen and country, Rule Britannia. What Gauke says to these people - having said we're a broad church - is that we don't want any of that unswerving patriotism in our party, we're forward-looking, progressive, modern and slightly uncomfortable with all that nation stuff.

This is the problem with today's one nation tories - bear in mind that the original One Nation group in the party back in the 1950s included Ted Heath, Ian McLeod and...er...Enoch Powell. Now, One Nation Conservatives, even outwith the Brexit thing, represent establishment machine politics rather than, as was the case in the 1950s, an endeavour to grasp the essence of Disraeli's party by forging together social concern, robust finances and an open economy. Worse, advocates of this new One Nation like David Gauke have taken to positioning it as merely oppositional - not Thatcherite free markets, not populist, not reactionary, not traditionalist.

Conservatism may be a broad church and, indeed, a very flexible ideology but it has boundaries (or, at least, I thought it had boundaries). At the heart of conservatism, however, is the idea that our relationship with place matters more than merely maximising utility. And if you're going to call it One Nation then, unless the term is meaningless, it is absolutely a statement of nationalism. Yes you can modify this by saying 'civic nationalism' but it's still an idea founded on the importance of the place we call our nation.

Conservatism also seeks (the clue's in the name) to conserve and preserve, to recognise that while things change we should do it carefully and slowly so as to avoid losing the baby with the bath water. When David Gauke speaks of 'yearning for a mythical past' he's summoning up the idea, popular with the intellectual left, that 'populism' harks back to some golden era - how often have you heard or read some sneering representative of the intelligensia dismissing Brexit voters as wanting a return to Empire or some similar huffle. Yet that 'mythical past' is not what people hark back to, except in the understanding that people love the idea of a world with secure employment, stable families, strong communities, low crime rates and trusted institutions. And if a little less utility maximisation and a bit less globalisation is the price of getting closer to that mythical ideal then maybe populism isn't all that bad.

Disraeli wrote of 'two nations' - in simple terms, rich and poor. And he set the Conservative Party, in opposition to the Liberals, as the party with a mission of forging one nation again. In doing this, however, Conservatives recognise that the answer is not revolution or radicalism - you don't get one nation by tearing down the world of the rich and powerful but by allowing the poor to become part of that world. If you want to criticise the populism of Trump, you do so by pointing out - as the Conservatives came to accept after a great deal of pain - that protectionism is far worse for the poor than it is for the rich. You need to accept that moving people from poverty to comfort requires that the rich and powerful give something back and that the best way to do this is by them being part of the same community - sharing the same place and space.

Right now the David Gauke position - because it defines itself negatively - is losing the argument with what he calls 'populists'. It's no good standing there telling people you know better (you might of course, but they have to know that to believe you and right now they don't) when there are people prepared, sometimes cynically, to say to people 'I know you're angry, I'm angry too, let's go and knock some heads together'. The sort of thinking coming out from the rash of new (all London-based of course) think tanks like Onward is narrow, technocratic and ideologically rootless - we're fixing the window locks and installing alarms when the real problem is that the door's wide open. Lots of feel-good policy initiatives that friends in the media will love but no substantial thinking about what we want our world - or rather the hundreds of little worlds in which people actually live - to be like.


If your political idea is One Nation - united, strong - then you are a nationalist. Is David Gauke?
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Society as a Playmobile diorama - Macron's vision of Europe

Raedwald describes M. Macron's vision of Europe's (sorry the EU's) glorious future:

Here is the barracks with the SimEU army, here the detention prison of the SimEU Office of Internal Security; here is the SimEU Central Bank and the SimEU Ministry of Finance. And the whole thing populated by busy and happy little SimEU citizens on SimEU minimum wage playing safely on social media regulated by the SimEU Prefecture for Internet Safety, after a hard day's work inventing innovative new Euro things at the SimEU Creative Foundation.

This captures the prevalent centrist (I can now use this term as a perjorative) idea that nothing at all happens correctly unless it is overseen, regulated or controlled by a benign government. Macron - and indeed most of the centrist elite he represents - sees government as a sort of Playmobile diorama with people inserted (with due consideration of diversity, naturally) into socially useful functions by a stern but caring emperor.

Macron's vision, uncritically reported by pretty much all of Europe's main news agencies, is for a European Union modelled on France - centralised, managed by an elite through government agencies, mistrusting of democracy and economically protectionist. At the heart of all this is the increasingly common belief that unspecified foreign agents are conspiring to attack the idea of Europe - those little playmobile figures clearly aren't bright enough to decide for themselves they must be tempted into this populism by sinister manipulative forces.

It is not, however, just democracy that Macron and the centrists mistrust - it's business too. I know that all of Europes Macron enthusiasts (do we call them Macaroons?) can summon up cuddly words about a mixed economy and all of them have mates who work for big private concerns but underneath this veneer is a sort of Faustian pact with big business: you go along with us on protectionism, environmentalism and social control, and we'll protect your international interests.

Despite government being very bad at innovation (it always helps to check how regional economic growth is entirely unrelated to government spending on research) our Macaroons want to pile money into government-sponsored research. There'll be an "innovation council" spending taxpayers cash on things like Artificial Intelligence - creating lots of well-paid jobs in universities but little else. And a further splurge of research agencies doing independent scientific research to combat the influence of corporate lobbies (except of course, as we saw with the TPD and with GMOs when those corporate lobbies are helpful to the anti-business, anti-choice ideology).

A lot of the criticism of Macron's vision focuses on how it "involves the EU gaining further powers and greater influence over people’s lives, at the expense of sovereign states" but I've a feeling this misses the point a bit - the vision of applying the French model of government to the EU is about reducing the choices available to communities and of a state that is not subject to the vageries of democracy or the creativity of the market.

The EU's battle lines (regardless of what the UK does in this matter) are drawn - an uncomfortable alliance of socialists, liberals, old-school conservatives and centrist technocrats versus a mish-mash of populists, proto-facists and Trotskyites. Right now it looks like the former will have enough MEPs to at least stem the populist tide. After May, unless there's an upheaval of unprecendented scale, there'll still be pretty much the same set of faces running the EU and speaking for "Europe" as there are now. And any new faces won't be populists or trotskyites, they'll be reliable career-minded technocracts. Which, of course, is why we need to leave.

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Trump and Anti-trump - how different are they?

From Joel Kotkin:

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

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

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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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An existential cry of pain - how "The Left" is losing

As a conservative, it's only recently that I've begun to use the term 'The Left' to describe...well...'The Left'. This was a term that 'The Left', somewhat self-indulgently, used to characterise its so-called values. The premise of any discussion involving such folk was that good things were left-wing and bad things were right-wing. This made life simple - the torture and imprisonment of opponents in an approved left-wing country was necessary to protect the revolution or else simply lies put out by reactionary forces of 'The Right' seeking to undermine said revolution.

In contrast, the torture and imprisonment of opponents in a place designated as 'Right-wing' is a terrible crime against humanity. If you're a Blairite this justifies bombing the terrible place back into the stone age whereas, if you're genuinely of "The Left", the response is to organise a rally, wear clothing symbolising your support for the cause (especially if it looks cool and helps you pick up girls), and do that 'organise, mobilise, agitate' thing that 'The Left' always does.

So I thought that I'd explore this idea of 'The Left'. Not as a coherent political philosophy because, Marxism aside (and Marx would have thoroughly approved of Fascism), there is no coherent philosophy behind 'The Left'. Instead we have a set of positions - some simply not 'The Right' (remember that 'The Right' simply means "bad things I disagree with") whereas others are wrapped up in an incredibly indulgent thing usually called, in that trashing of the language beloved of 'The Left', values.

A long time ago, my Dad said that socialism or socialist in its common usage (by 'The Left') simply meant good. That was it - references to socialism or 'The Left' are intended to conjure up images of people who care more than nasty people who are called 'The Right'. We get folk pulling down a good wage paid for out of tax money or from the contributions of gullible donors while arguing for more 'caring' to be done by taking more cash off other people to give to a different set of ('deserving') people (plus well paid jobs for people from 'The Left'). These people have "values" to which we should all aspire. They are 'The Left' - complete with fluffy kittens, unicorns, glitter and shiny happy people marching for change.

The problem for 'The Left' is that countries that take the ideas of the left and turn them into a platform for government often end up totalitarian, lock opponents up and routinely use torture. These countries - from East Germany to Cuba are places that people tried to leave. Indeed they didn't just try to leave 'The Left', they did so facing the risk of getting shot, arrested and tortured. Or drowning as the tractor inner tube holding up the rickety raft sinks beneath the waves.

Today, 'The Left' face a new problem. Or rather an old problem revisited. In the democracies of the western nations there's an anger among the voters. Millions of column inches are being dedicated by 'The Left' to challenging this anger - they call it 'populism', 'nativism', even 'fascism' and are really agitated by the message it's putting out to voters. Of course, because this threat to 'The Left' is (because it is a threat) a bad thing, it is therefore right-wing, from the dark places of 'The Right'. And as a result people on 'The Right' are being told they should do something about the prospect of more folk like Donald Trump getting elected.

But when you peel back the cover of Donald Trump's agenda (ditto for Marine Le Pen and other nasty populist folk) and look at the policy programme underneath, it's pretty much an agenda that, had it come from 'The Left', would have been applauded. Clamping down on the corrupt and cosy relationship between big business and government. Protecting jobs by stopping firms moving them offshore. Protecting communities by ending dumping. Making politicians more accountable. This is a left-wing programme and it is 'The Left' that is threatened by its success.

What 'The Left' doesn't realise is that us right-wing folk simply don't start from the same place in all this debate. We don't think that the agenda proposed by the likes of Trump, Farage and Le Pen is a right-wing policy platform. The problem is that, after decades of taking its working class voter base for granted, 'The Left' has been found out. Hence the spluttering, shouting and screaming about the way in which those working class voters didn't do as they were told.

There's a huge difference between sympathy and empathy. 'The Left' is very good at the former but appalling at the latter with the result that, for all its language of caring, sharing and 'aren't we good', left-wing people these days come across as patronising, judgemental and arrogant. This is the world of 'we know what's good for you' and 'it's someone else's fault, let's go shout at the government'. The denial of agency to anyone who didn't get a degree is shocking - kids get sugary snacks because their parents can't resist advertising, poverty isn't solved by getting (and keeping) a job, and we need to make it harder for people to have a drink because they don't know how to control themselves.

But these caring noises - "there, there, it's not your fault, nasty, nasty government" - don't wash when 'The Left' shows a tin ear to the communities they claim to care about. At times it seems almost as if 'The Left' are talking about a different animal - one unable to look after itself properly, a permanent victim of 'the system'. There is no empathy for the condition of these people just the idea that we can use them to make our political point (mostly about how caring we are and how our values are so good) and to paint a cartoon picture of 'The Right'.

Back in the day, socialist parties were populist movements. Britain's Labour Party, the Socialist and Social Democratic Parties of Europe, Italy's Communist Party - all these groups built their support using the same sort of populist rhetoric that they now condemn in new political movements. It's true also that these socialist parties emerged from the same place as the Fascists - this doesn't make them the same, just that (unlike conservatives) they're competing for the same voters. This is still true and, in part, explains the screams of pain and anguish from the mainstream left. The problem is that those values 'The Left' is so big on simply aren't the values of a large chunk of the traditional support base for left-of-centre parties.

So when left-of-centre pundits tell 'The Right' that this populist (or nativist, fascist, even Nazi) upsurge is some how its problem they speak from fear. Not fear of a conservative hegemony - nothing conservative about Trump, Farage and Le Pen - but rather fear that the success of populists will keep them, 'The Left', from the things that sustain their livelihood and allow them to patronise the rest of us about values. And those things are government-funded jobs, membership of influential boards or committees, positions of authority in local and national and European government - this is what motivates 'The Left' today. The insurgent populists threaten 'The Left' by borrowing its language but sounding like they actually mean it - there's a real empathy, a genuine feeling of pain rather than a patronising, smug Tony Blair-style "I feel your pain" sympathy.

At the moment, aside form America, the traditional conservative right looks set fair - no room for complacency but it wouldn't be surprising to see by the end of 2017, conservatives leading France, Germany, Spain, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Those who think that the Front National, UKIP and Five Star are a threat to the conservative right are sadly misguided. It is 'The Left' that stands to lose as it continues to pretend that a sort of international order of the smug can sort everything out but only if we can stop those pesky electors voting the wrong way.
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So long as we're not free, we need democracy

Thurber's Very Proper Gander in full flow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tim Farron wants expensive fuel to go with the expensive food....

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You have to admire the populism of Tim Farron, president of the Liberal Democrats:

Mr Farron told The Sunday Telegraph: “I am afraid the Government has seen flashing pound signs, and has not considered the long-term threats fracking poses to the countryside. “I think this is a very short-sighted policy, and we will all be left to live with the consequences.”

Now this is a man who campaigned for expensive food. I know it didn't look that way but rather as an admirable campaign to protect the livelihoods of farmers (many of whom Tim represents). Nevertheless, the impact of his campaign - and his continued support for agricultural protectionism - will lead to higher food prices.

So now, in the interests of a headline, Tim is supporting expensive energy. I know it doesn't look that way. Rather it's portrayed as caring for the environment. But the effect of Tim's campaign - if it succeeds - against fracking will be higher energy prices. Meaning that less well off people (perhaps there aren't so many of these in South Lakeland) will struggle to heat their homes especially since Tim's campaigns already mean such folk pay more for their food.

Even worse Tim's campaign already misleads:

“With a wind farm you can actually choose where you put it; that is not the case (with) fracking,” 

Actually you can't 'choose' where to put a wind farm - to have a chance of viability turbines have to be in places where there's lots of wind, which isn't just anywhere.

And then, having misled, Tim scaremongers:

 This technology can lead to earth tremors and I’m particularly worried that buried nuclear waste in my part of the country could be affected.

There have been around 100,000 fracking wells drilled and the biggest tremor recorded from this is 3.6 on the Richter Scale, which is a bit like having a heavy lorry drive past the front of your house. Typical tremors are 1.3 to 2.6:

If there is an earthquake of 1.5, they have to stop. The British Geological Society says a tremor like that is not usually felt by anyone. It describes an earthquake of 2.3 as being like someone dropping a bucket of water. To put it in context, there have been three of those in Britain in the last month. 

So - getting a cheap headline, presenting misleading facts and scaremongering. A good day's work from the Liberal Democrat's president!

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These EU placemen don't like democracy do they?

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We know that the European Union has only the most vestigial of connections to democracy. A bit like the old East Germany, the word is bandied around willy-nilly by assorted leaders while they support the suppression of the democratic will by repeating referendums, imposing national leaderships and working to sideline (many would like to ban) political opinions that reject the cosy corporatist technocratic EU status quo.

And this assault on democracy continues. Here's EU placeman and anti-democrat Mario Monti bemoaning that people don't always toe the line:

"There are many manifestations of populism that are aimed at disunity in nearly all the member states," Monti said in a joint news conference with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy at an economic conference in northern Italy.

So Mario wants to hold a meeting in Rome to 'discuss' this dreadful populism (which can be defined as "people voting for candidates the EU disapproves of") and in doing so "foster European integration". I guess it's only a short step to elections being just window dressing rather than the means by which we choose our governments. Or has that already arrived? In which case the 'populism' is understandable and has my support.

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