So Long It's Been Good To Know You (6)

X: Mad Men

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
Groucho Marx (and others)

The Tories won the election fair and square. But one of the eccentric things about our system is that you can still win a Famous Victory even if the overwhelming majority of voters vote against you.

In one sense, the Tories can claim to have a popular mandate to abolish the BBC license, privatize the NHS, repeal the Human Rights act, abolish most benefits, withdraw from Europe, etc. But the opposition parties can, in a much more intuitive sense, claim a popular mandate to block those extremist measures.

They may not win all the victories. They shouldn't expect to, or even want to. Unlike Tony Blair, I think sensible centrist government happens when there is a compromise between two extreme positions. But surely, as the Opposition, it's their job to try?

But they aren't going to.

Literally minutes after being wiped out, the Liberal Democrats were talking about "bouncing back" in 2020. The Labour Party is having a lovely time debating the ways in which it failed to connect with the voters and how they might appeal to a different demographic at the next election.

Their first thought was not "What can we do to prevent millions more children being forced to rely on food banks?" or "What can we do to make sure that, even if he abolishes the Human Rights Act, Michael Gove doesn't reintroduce torture?" Their first thought was "What can we do to get more votes in five years time?” And so, naturally, they started to think like advertising men; asking what they could do to make their product appeal to people who didn’t buy it this time round.

An advertising man doesn't really, deep down, care whether or not your shirts are clean; he only cares that you buy the brand of soap powder he is selling. It is said that a really good salesman has to really believe in his product; but if you are claiming that one brand of detergent will give you a happier family and more beautiful kids than another identical brand of detergent, you probably don't believe in it very strongly.

It's all about who you sell it to. If your washing powder has a reputation for being cheap-and-cheerful, you will probably decide to put it in a snazzy box and show pictures of posh people washing their shirts before attending the ambassador's reception. Lager still has a bit of a reputation as a bit of a girly drink compared with ale, so adverts for lager are relentlessly blokish.

From an advertising perspective, if people perceive the Labour Party as being about cloth caps and trades unions and poor people, it makes marketing sense to show pictures of Labour voters buying their pizzas and penguins at the poshest shops. The party that stands for the Bosses' interests has persuaded the Workers to vote for it, so the Workers' party needs to have a jolly good go at selling itself to the Bosses.

But surely that isn’t the only thing which matters?

Imagine two Vicars, having a discussion about getting some pious bottoms back onto their church pews. Rev'd T. Dum thinks that church is much too stuffy; and wants to spice it up with the New English Bible, experimental worship and modern hymns. Rev'd T. Dee thinks that, on the contrary, people positively want old familiar tunes and old familiar words. Dum wins the argument; the church invests in an interactive white-board and state of the art espresso machine, and starts mixing heavy rock worship songs with a hiphop liturgy. The pews remain resolutely empty. "Oh dear" says Dum, after a few months, "That didn't work. Let's try it your way, with the Authorized Version, the Book of Common Prayer, and Hymns Ancient and Even More Ancient. If Nescafe was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for us." I don't think that anyone would call Dum a hypocrite. (Or, indeed, blame Dee for throwing himself heart and soul into the modernizing experiment while it lasted.) Because both Vicars care about something more than they care about music and liturgy: namely, getting people into Church and preaching the Christian message at them. The electric guitars and the big black books were merely tactics in that greater game.

It would be surprising if, at the end of a disastrous election, politicians were not talking about where their parties went wrong. But what I find strange and off-putting is that is that politicians who, hours ago, were working their red, white and blue socks off to get make Ed Miliband Prime Minister and Ed Miliband's policies the policies of Her Majesty's government are noq happily saying that they never thought he was much of a leader and never agreed with his policies in the first place.

It's almost as if leaders and policies were merely tactics to persuade people to buy your particular brand of washing powder.

The reason, and I genuinely hate to say this, that Farage was so good was that he was selling a brand of soap powder he honestly and truthfully believed in. He honestly does hate the European Union, he honestly does hate immigrants; and he honestly does think that the European Union is forcing us to allow more immigration than is good for us. He believes this much more than he wants to be Prime Minister. When Britain withdraws from Europe in 2017 I can well imagine him disbanding UKIP and saying "My work is done". And so he resonates with other xenophobes, and with people who are not xenophobic themselves but are impressed with his sincerity. Even I quite liked him.

And the Labour Party says "Oh, well, if that 'xenophobia' stuff is popular this month, we'd better carve 'Down with foreigners!' on a rock and sell 'Down with foreigners!' mugs, and put on our special 'sincere' faces and say 'We just happen to honestly and sincerely feel in our hearts that foreigners are horrible' and in that way we'll be as plausible and convincing and affable on TV as Nigel."

And it doesn't work. It never works.

The Green Party really and truly believe that we need to save the planet. The Scottish Nationalists really and truly believe that Scotland should be an independent nation. I suppose that some Tories at least really and truly believe that poor people are poor because they are wicked, and if poverty is made sufficiently unpleasant, they will choose to stop being poor. The Labour Party really and truly believe that, er, there should be more of Our Lot and less of Their Lot in the House of Commons. 

Being a politician is no longer about having a clever plan that you really believe in and think has a good chance of working and persuading other people that you deserve a chance to put your plan into action. It is about deciding what you think other people think would be a good plan, and then pretending that that’s the plan you really believe in.

Well, “pretending” isn’t exactly the right word. Doing a sort of mental somersault by which you convince yourself that you really believe it – working up subjective emotional states called "sincerity" and "belief" and "feeling passionate about" and "just happening to believe".

So what is required is a paradigm shift.

Tribal party loyalists think that the overwhelming question is "Can Our Lot become enough like Their Lot that Our Lot will get more votes than Their Lot in 2025."

The answer is "No, you cannot: and even if you could it would make no difference — we would still be governed by Their Lot, only under a different name." The old joke about "whoever you vote for, the government always gets elected" would become literally true.

An opposition that has sacrificed it's believe in the BBC, the NHS, Human Rights and the Welfare State in order to gain Murdoch's endorsement is no opposition at all. If Rev'd Dum had said "I reckon we can get people back into church if we dropped all that stuff about God and Jesus and the Bible", then Rev'd Dee would have very properly have kicked him out of his church, and also stopped reading his weekly column in the Guardian.

The question is not "Can a party with the label Labour or Liberal or Green win an election in 2025."

The question is about political survivalism.

There are still a few of us left who still believing in Sharing and Equality and Fairness and Kindness.

What can we humans to do preserve civilization in the face of the forthcoming zombie apocalypse?

There is much rash idealization of past ages about, and I do not wish to encourage more of it. Our ancestors were cruel, lecherous, greedy and stupid, like ourselves. But while they cared for other things more than for civilization - and they cared at different times for all sorts of things, for the will of God, for glory, for personal honour, for doctrinal purity, for justice - was civilization often in serious danger of disappearing?

              C.S Lewis - "First and Second Things"

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A little while ago I wrote down everything I knew about politics and put it in a book. It would be lovely if you read it. 

So Long It's Been Good To Known You (5)

IX: "Values"

In an interview on Newsnight, Keir Starmer (who has sensibly decided that he doesn't want to be the one resigning on May 8th 2020) said the following: 

[People are saying] "we want an authentic debate about what Labour stands for". Really simple values, and we want to boil them down. Most people want a job that pays them properly, where they can be skilled up and get on. Most people want a house or a home where they can live with their immediate family.

Well, hang on a moment. 

Stop: think.

That's actually really sensible!

What does Labour stand for?

1: Everyone who wants a job should be able to get a job 

2: Everyone who has a job should be able to afford a house 

I'd vote for you on those two policies alone. 

And I guess, given five years, a favourable wind and no wars, a government could have a jolly good go at delivering on those two promises. Massive programme of house building, to make more houses available and to make the price of existing ones fall. (The Daily Mail would hate that, which would be another advantage.) Massive job creation scheme, especially in the house building industry, to move us towards full employment. Financial jiggery-pokery to reduce mortgage interest rates. Living wage defined as "the minimum you need to afford a mortgage on a basic house". Legal minimum wage increased to "living wage" level. Laws against landlords sitting on empty properties. New council estates with low, subsidized rents for people who can't get mortgages. Right-to-buy council houses, with a proviso that for every council house sold to a tenant, a new one is put up somewhere else. 

Dammit, Jim, it's a long shot but it just might work...

Sadly, I don't think hat this was what he meant.

I don't think he meant that a future Labour leader should pledge that if he becomes Prime Minister, everyone who wants a job can have a job and everyone who has a job can afford a house. I think he meant that Labour values should be that having a job and owning a house were good things.

Values is a slippery word. You can disbelieve in God and disagree with Jesus Christ's moral teaching, but still believe in Christian values. Her Majesty the Queen thinks that the English and the Saudi Arabians have common values: where "values" presumably means whatever is left over when trivial differences of opinion over letting ladies drive cars and stoning rape victims are disregarded. 

I don't think he meant "If I were Prime Minister, everyone would be able to afford a house of their own." I think he meant "If I were Prime Minister, I would encourage poor people to think 'Maybe one day if I'm very good I'll be be able to afford to have a house of my own, like the rich folks over there.' "

Shame.

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A little while ago I wrote down everything I knew about politics and put it in a book. It would be lovely if you read it. 

So Long It's Been Good To Know You (4)

VIII: On Pizzas and Penguins

Tony Blair has a special relationship with the English language. He wrote a short essay in the Guardian on the morning after the election explaining what he thought had gone wrong. Most of us were left none the wiser.

"Second, the centre is not where you split the difference between progressive and conservative politics. It is where progressive politics gets the breadth of territory to allow it to own the future. The Labour project must always be one oriented to the future. We win when we understand the way the world is changing and make sense of how those changes can be shaped for the good of the people. We have to be the policy innovators, those seeking new and creative solutions to the problems our values impel us to overcome."

I take it that "progressive" politics means old fashioned Red Party stuff: "progressing" towards equality, at the expense of freedom, if necessary. I  get that the Very Red Party used to demand total equality, and was prepared to have a totalitarian state in order to bring that about; and the Very Blue Party wants total freedom even if that means orphans asking for more gruel and stealing handkerchiefs on behalf of sinister Jewish people. I get what "The Red Party should move to the Centre" means. It means "We've been asking for too much Equality. If we asked for a bit less Equality with a bit more Freedom, more people might vote for us, and that way at least we'd get a bit more Equality than we've got at the moment."

Maybe it's not that pragmatic. Maybe it's "In the olden days, we were wrong about how much Equality we wanted. We've changed our mind. We still want some Equality, but not quite so much as we thought we did."

But what does "the centre is where progressive politics gets the breadth of territory to own the future" mean?

I've tried to translate it into English:

"The centre doesn't mean that we should ask for less Equality and more Freedom; the centre means we should get exactly amount of Equality and Freedom that we were going to get anyway, which must be definition be the right amount".

I give up.

And what does it mean to "own" the future? Is he saying that everyone will one day believe in Sharing and Equality regardless of what the Labour Party does,  so we should just have to sit back and wait for it to happen? Or is he using "own" in an archaic, Shakespearean sense of "accept" or "concede".("I own that thou art an honest man"). Does he mean that the harsh reality is that Blue Party values — freedom at the expense of equality — are going to win the day, and the Red Party needs to accept that?

"We should all fight hard for the victory of the Party, because it is historically inevitable that the Party will be victorious whether we fight for it or not" - that kind of thing?

This fetishisation of "the Future" seems to be about the only thing that Blairites really believe in. Chuka Umunna (who, younger readers will remember, was at one time hotly tipped to be the next Prime Minister but three) said he wanted to reform the House of Lords, not because it was undemocratic, but because it was old-fashioned. He wanted to build some nice new modern Houses of Parliament like they have in Scotland not because the present buildings had a leaky roof and there was no internet access, but because they were "a relic". Old things bad. New things good. Bleat. Bleat.  

So "we need to seek new and creative solutions to the problems our values impel us to over come". "We need to solve problems" is so uncontroversial it's not worth saying. But what is a "new" solution or a "creative" solution? If my problem is a leaky tap, my solution is to fit a new washer, or, if I'm honest, to pay a man to fit a new washer. That's an old, uncreative solution, but it tends to work. Why look for a new one?

If my problem is that too many people are too poor, then the old, uncreative solutions are

1: Find them jobs;
2: Pay them higher wages if they have jobs
3: Pay them benefits is they don't have jobs
4: Provide them with public services so that being poor doesn't hurt so much.

Old or new, these are the only solutions which exist. Blair doesn't believe in them, because they smack of old-fashioned Red Party equality. But any new-creative solution will be the old solutions under a new name. Or, more likely, the new-creative solution will be to do nothing at all and pretend that the problem is going to go away.

But I think, as ever, it will be better to assume that Blair doesn't actually mean anything; that trying to tease meaning out of this kind of thing is a category mistake.

Fortunately, we have some of the people who have volunteered to lose to Boris Johnson in 2020 on hand to tell us what the Labour Party now believes in.

One word: aspirations.

Labour lost because Labour moved too far to the Left. Labour needs to appeal to the kinds of people who want to move out of their flat and get a nice house with a garden. Labour needs to appeal to the John Lewis couple. Labour needs to appeal to people who would like to do their shopping in Waitrose. Labour needs to be the party of aspiration.   

There is nothing wrong with aspiration. The secular saints of the Labour Party were paid six shillings a week and aspired so hard to be paid ten shillings a weak that they were exiled to Australia. Trade Unionism is full of people who aspired to be paid an extra pound a week. In the olden days Labour raised the school leaving age and introduced student grants and invented the Open University precisely for the benefit of stone masons from Wessex who aspired to learn Latin.

And there is nothing wrong with wanting to shop at Waitrose. They give you a free cup of coffee. Mind you, the idea that Waitrose is posh and Sainsbury's is common is largely a matter of branding. You can shop as cheaply as one as at the other. They do price-matching. But having a Waitrose in your village is something that people regard as moving up in the world. The deranged Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones thought that it was particularly tragic that a lady from Bristol should have been horribly murdered after buying a frozen pizza from Waitrose. Buying a frozen pizza from Waitrose shows that she was hoping for a better life.

I, on the other hand, have just bought a frozen pizza from the Co-op. So I'm presumably better off dead.

(My Mum would be sad if I didn't point out that the people who invented the Co-op are heroes of the Labour Party as well: lower middle class workers who aspired to eat flour that wasn't adulterated with chalk and indeed to be buy tea and sugar and other luxuries they simply couldn't afford at the company stores.)

NOTE: The John Lewis couple are the ones who bought their little boy a toy Penguin costing £69 for Christmas, even though the whole logic of the advert showed that a knitted one costing 50p at the Women's Institute sale of work would have done the job just as well. £69 is an interesting figure: it happens to be the exact amount of money that the government says that a person who has chosen to do the wrong thing and be poor needs to live on (food, gas and electric, TV license, bus fairs, the lot) for a whole week.

The Nasty Party regard well-off socialists as class traitors. If a doctor or an academic or a businessman, or, god forbid, a popular entertainer, says that he thinks that everyone, including him, should pay slightly more tax so there can be nicer schools, nicer hospitals, nicer libraries and nicer money for people who fall on hard times then the Nasty Party accuses her of being a champagne socialist. 

All this chatter about aspiration seems to accept this false dichotomy. Aspiration as opposed to equality. If you have nice things, you can't be in favour of sharing. If you are in favour of sharing, then you shouldn't be allowed nice things. You say that the unemployed should get a more generous allowance, and yet I notice that you yourself are wearing shoes on your feet? Hypocrite! 

You can buy a nice bottle of champagne from Sainsbury's for the price of a movie ticket.

Ed Miliband wanted to introduce a 50% rate of tax, kicking in at £150,000. Some people think that this means that he wanted to take £75,000 out of the pockets of higher earners. (People whose knowledge of British Economic history comes primarily from Beatles lyrics honestly believe that in the 1960s a person earning the average wages of £16 per week gave £15.20 to the government.) But of course the "additional" tax rate is only paid on money you earn above £150K. A person earning £170,000 under the Tories pays a total of £60505 income tax; whereas under Labour he would have paid £61505. (Rounding to the nearest pecentage point, that's 36% under the Tories, but 36% under Labour.) I don't say that he couldn't have had a nice night out on that extra thousand quid. But "I couldn't afford to live on those tax rates I would have to leave the country and become a tax exile."  

Do me a favour.

Similarly, the so called Mansion Tax proposed charging people £3,000 per year if their house was worth more than £2,000,000. Property prices are still increasing at around 6% per year so we are talking about a person hearing that he'll have to put £3,000 of the £120,000 he earns by sitting around doing nothing into the common pot and screaming  "The commies are going to make me destitute." 

Dah-ling, you can't by a SHED for two million pounds in London.

The suggestion that these very modest tax increases represented a lurch to the left; that they amounted to Marxism; that "the minute someone starts to do well, Labour comes along, takes all their money  and gives it to a welfare layabout" is obvious nonsense.

The notion that three weeks ago Labour was against "aspiration" is simply silly. (Ed Miliband carved "Higher living standards for working families" and "A country where the next generation can do better than the last" into a great big stone tablet, for goodness sake.) The idea that anyone might have said "Well, I might have gone for that promotion, but because I'll have to pay £250 more on each £1,000 over £150,000 I shan't bother" is unhinged.

The sacrificial victims are saying that Miliband veered to far to the left simply because that is what the right wing press said. The Sun and The Mail christened him Red Ed and said his daddy was a commie. But get this: they would have said that anyway. They can drop the mansion tax and the 50p tax rate and support all the means test and be horrible to prisoners and foreigners and the press will continue to denounce them as a bunch of Marxist traitors. They can demand the pillory and the ducking stool tomorrow and the press will still say they are soft on crime. The press hates the Labour Party because the press is owned by the kinds of people who are rich enough to own newspapers. The press hates the BBC because television is much more interesting and fun unbiased than print media, and because billionaire newspaper owners are also billionaire satellite TV channel owners. Yet the the sacrificial victims cling to their faith that if only they could appease the right wing press, they might get to play at being Prime Minister. Every time one of them speaks the a-word, they are dancing to Rupert Murdoch's tune.

This page is supported by Patreon. If you like what you see, please pledge to donate £1 or fifty pence every time I write something. Supporters get little extras from time to time.

A little while ago I wrote down everything I knew about politics and put it in a book. It would be lovely if you read it. 

One Hundred Years Ago....

Some time in the last millennium, just after t.c Blair had become Prime Minister, I wrote the following. It is worth re-reading, because absolutely nothing in it still applies today. 

If I wrote it now, I might say that the Red Party supported "sharing" or "fairness" rather than "equality". I might also push the idea that the Red and the Blue are rather like Moorcock's Lords of Order and Chaos: both sides can look like "goodies" and both sides can look like "baddies" but the really important thing is that neither side ever be allowed to gain the upper hand. I suppose that means Vince Cable is the Cosmic Balance and Nick Clegg is Elric.

I thank Mike Taylor for reminding me of this piece. Go read his blog https://reprog.wordpress.com/ . His stuff on the election is better than mine. It contains facts and evidence and everything. (He also wrote a good thing about Doctor Who.)

British Politics Explained

Once upon a time, there were three political parties; a big party, a medium party, and a little baby party, which, due to the vagaries of the first past the post system, stood no chance of getting elected and can be ignored for the purposes of this discussion.

The other two parties, let's call them The Red Party and The Blue Party, had different points of view from each other. (That was why they were different parties.)

The Red Party said, 'We believe in Equality, in particular Economic Equality. We think that the Poor should be a bit Richer, and the Rich should be a bit Poorer. We are prepared to sacrifice a bit of Freedom in order to bring that about.'

The Blue Party said, 'We believe in Freedom. We think that people should be as far as possible be left alone and allowed to do whatever they like, and we are prepared to sacrifice a great deal of Equality in order to bring that about.'

They often had quite sensible discussions around this point.

The Blue Party would say 'But if I have sufficient wealth to live on, why am I necessarily harmed by someone else being richer than me? And since the very rich often pay wages to the very poor, won't taking money off the rich have a long term effect of making they poor even poorer?'

But The Red Party replied 'But since your capacity to do what you want is very largely defined by how much money your have, the very poor are, in fact, not Free: Freedom at the expense of Equality is self defeating.'

There were a small number of people in The Red Party who said, 'What we want is total Equality! Everyone should have the same amount of money as everyone else! Nationalise the banks! Eat the rich!' and a small number of people in The Blue Party who said, 'What we want is total Freedom! The state should not interfere with people at all! Everyone is Free to own guns! No taxation at all! Society does not exist!' But everyone ignored them.

One day, there was an election. For some reason…I don't know, let's make something up…say, because the leader of The Red Party had red hair, or was bald, or wore a shabby coat in church, something like that…but anyway, The Blue Party won the election, and set about trying to make the country more Free but less Equal.

All the bad, wicked institutions which The Red Party had set up in order to make people more Equal, like trades unions, nationalized industries, comprehensive schools, railways, laws, the health service, etc, were abolished or run down, and clever new words like 'competition' and 'entrepreneur' were invented to make it all right to be very greedy. Sure enough, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

After about a hundred years, the leader of the Red Party got a haircut and bought a smart new suit, and the leader of the Blue Party got old, went mad and turned grey. So The Red Party was allowed to win an election.

But, once he was safely sworn in as President, the leader of The Red Party admitted that he now agreed with the Blue Party about absolutely everything. No one was quite sure how that had happened. Perhaps the leader of The Blue Party put a spell on him, or perhaps he made a pact with the devil. Or perhaps The Blue Party won him over because it had much cleverer arguments; or perhaps it was just that so many people in The Red Party had done well under The Blue Party, and acquired lattes and television sets and didn't want to give them up.

This left the leader of The Red Party in a bit of a quandary. He could no longer have arguments with the leader of The Blue Party about Freedom versus Equality, because they both now agreed with each other that Freedom was more important. They disagreed about European Integration and Fox Hunting, but when they talked about that, everyone fell asleep.

But from time to time, wicked people asked the leader of The Red Party what he believed in. First, he just said 'Look' and 'You know', but they asked him again.

Next he tried listing lots of numbers. Some of them were almost true, like 'Our school children are the best in the world', (provided you didn't ask what 'best' meant, and who decided). But some of them were a load of old codswallop, like 'The rate at which crime is increasing is speeding up more slowly.' But it didn't make much difference, because when he used numbers, everyone fell asleep.

So instead, when people asked him what he believed in, he said that he believed in Goodness; or, when pressed, in Fairness and Social Justice. (When he was asked if he believed in God, he squirmed, and looked embarrassed, and said 'Look' and 'You know' so much that people took pity on him and didn't ask him any more.) He said that these had always been the Values of the Red Party, and very good Values they were too; but that all that talk about Equality was horribly out of date and not Modern. And in any case, by Equality, they had never meant Economic Equality, which meant everyone having the same amount of money as everyone else. They had always meant Equality of Opportunity, which meant everyone being Free to make as much money as they wanted to all by themselves. 

Most people listening drew the conclusion that, since the Red Party was the party which believed in Goodness and Fairness and Social Justice, the Blue Party must be the party which believed in Wickedness and Unfairness and Injustice: because otherwise, why would there be two parties at all?

So all the Good people voted for the Red Party, and the Red Party changed its name to the Good Party, and the Blue Party changed its name to the Bad Party and, after having some drinks and insulting a few black people, they disbanded. So the Good Party was allowed to do anything it liked, and everyone and everyone lived happily ever, after apart from the poor, who never voted anyway.

This page is supported by Patreon. If you like what you see, please pledge to donate £1 or fifty pence every time I write something. Supporters get little extras from time to time.

A little while ago I wrote down everything I knew about politics and put it in a book. It would be lovely if you read it.