Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Public safety and the case for electoral reform

The aftermath of the IRA's Baltic Exchange bombing, 1992 (source)

This post partially summarises and discusses Dr Matt Qvortrup's 2011 paper "Terrorism and Political Science", which won the Political Studies Association's "Best Paper" award in 2013. (The full text is available for download here.) I am grateful to Dr Qvortrup for his cooperation but of course all errors and misreadings and any perceived implications are mine.

This research is surprising and relevant to a time when many feel that the democratic system is failing or threatened by illiberal changes.

Dr Qvortrup looked at incidents of domestic terrorism in Western Europe from 1985 to 2010, a period chosen to "coincide with the rise of Islamic terrorism." Surprisingly, "terrorist attacks perpetrated by radicalised Muslims are less of a problem than the media would have us believe. Indeed... the only major Islamist attack that has been perpetrated by domestic groups—that is, citizens of the country in which the attack took place—is the 7/7 bombing in London. All other fatal attacks were perpetrated by either Marxist, nationalist or separatist groups." (p. 2)
 
So, not principally Muslims, then. And the driver is not so much poverty as not having a voice: 
 
"Terrorism is less a result of social... and economic conditions... than it is a result of political factors, such as a feeling of political disenfranchisement of minority groups." (p. 3) "Of course, not all minority groups resort to terrorism. A certain perception of disenfranchisement and a degree of alienation, perhaps coupled with a sense of discrimination, are commonly associated with radicalisation." (p. 6)
 
Rather than suppress the symptoms, we should cure the disease by "introducing more inclusive and consensus-oriented political institutions." (p. 1)
 
"Under ideal circumstances the logic is as follows: the larger the number of parties represented the greater the chance that their voices will be heard and the greater the chance that they may—in some small way—influence the decision-making and policy output. This, in turn, will increase their trust in the political system, and reduce the level of terrorism." (p. 6)
Factors tending to consensus government (p.7) include:
1. A higher number of Parliamentary parties
2. A high degree of influence by the Opposition on government policy
3. A fair relationship between votes cast and Parliamentary seats gained (see Gallagher Index)
4. A range of elected representatives from each constituency, to reflect breadth of opinion
Comment: we are beginning to see how the UK has some problems, because of our "first past the post" system. #1 we have to only a limited extent, #2 (a weak or divided Opposition) has been a recurring worry in modern times, #3 was put to a referendum in 2011 in a campaign where the big guns seemed to favour the status quo (to the disappointment of the Liberal Democrats, who sponsored it, but they're not the only minority muted by FPTP), and #4 we don't have at all.
In particular, #3 was a missed great opportunity, for as Qvortrup notes, there is a "strong positive correlation between Gallagher Disproportionality... and the number of domestic terrorist incidents. (p. 8)
But in a pluralist society, there is reason to reexamine the assumption that there should be only one representative per constituency:
"District Magnitude—‘the decisive factor’ in determining the number of parties to be elected ... is theoretically likely to be associated with a lower level of terrorism. The logic is straightforward: the higher the number of elected MPs per electoral district, the greater the chance that a representative from a small minority will be represented, and hence the greater the chance that the minorities’ views will be taken into account. Conversely, with the views of a minority shut out, they may resort to other means...
"Based on impressionistic data, it seems noteworthy that countries with relatively high district magnitudes are also the countries with the highest number of ethnic minority MPs and local government representatives... Conversely, there is some evidence to suggest that the low representation of UK Muslims (a country with an extremely low district magnitude) was in part to blame for the radicalisation that has occurred since the late 1990s." (p. 9)
The author concludes:
"In political science terms, there is a very strong correlation between having a proportional electoral system (either STV or list PR) and having a political system that is associated with consensus government... which, in turn, is correlated... with lower levels of terrorism...

"Thus by choosing an electoral system there is a high chance that one may change the political system, and thereby indirectly contribute to a lower risk of terrorist incidents. Political institutions matter. Discussions about electoral systems are not just the preserve of anoraks and theoreticians but can have a real impact on the safety and security of citizens." (p. 11)

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Monday, April 21, 2014

21 years of Maastricht: "My last speech in a free Parliament" - Tony Benn

House of Commons, Thursday, 20th May 1993, 6.35 pm:

Mr. Tony Benn (Chesterfield) : Tonight's vote on Third Reading will have a pre-set majority. But not one hon. Member has the legal or moral authority to hand over the powers that they borrowed from their electors last April to people who will not be accountable to those whom we now represent. Not one of us put the Maastricht treaty before the electorate last year, because it was not then published in English. We offered them no choice--the Labour party, without any conference authority, decided to support the treaty. I know that the Labour party had no authority, because the Maastricht treaty was negotiated after the conference, which intervened before the manifesto was written.

The problem for those who are passionate about Europe is that they cannot offer this country to Europe. Only half the seats in the Chamber are occupied for tonight's debate and the Opposition intend to abstain in the vote. If I were a passionate federalist--which I am not--I would feel more concerned about tonight's vote than anyone else. If others in Europe say that we have supported them, it is not true. The House of Commons, under the Whips, the patronage, the discipline and the disillusionment, has supported them, but not the British people.

A democracy consists not merely of a mechanism of becoming elected and passing a law. It contains the responsibility of gaining the continued consent of the electorate. At the next election I shall have to say to the people of Chesterfield, "Vote for me and I shall fight for you, but do not vote for me to deal with your agricultural, environmental, trade or even foreign policy, and certainly not your economic policy." We are handing over the British people, without their consent, to a system that has replaced parliamentary democracy, which we have been told is the justification for what we are doing tonight.

Would the House have been entitled to take Britain into the United States of America, join the Warsaw pact or invite in Soviet troops without a referendum? Of course not--nobody would believe that for a minute. We have experienced a coup d'etat by a parliamentary elite, not only in this country, but in the whole of Europe. They have abandoned their tasks as representatives and become the managers of Europe.

Mr. Dykes : Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Benn : I should love to give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I have an argument that I want to advance and I have only 10 minutes in which to do so.

The House has given up its power, because it has lost interest in its role. I do not think that the House of Commons wants power any more ; it has traded status for power. Hon. Members now get on the television and are introduced as the right hon. Member for Chesterfield or whatever, but they do not want power. For them, status is much more important.

The Labour party has adopted a completely new philosophy--that of being in government when not in government. We now have shadow Ministers--the French call them "phantomes", which is appropriate. I heard that my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) went to Paris and Le Monde called him le secretaire d'etranger phantome de Britannique. I can imagine people placing entries in "Who's Who" such as "Phantom Prime Minister 1983-1992". We shall have a phantom queen next, who will call for Buckingham palace to be open for two or three months a year at £9.50 a tour. We have abandoned our representative role, and the same is happening in every country. It is that crisis that lends support to a Ross Perot and Le Pen. As Members of Parliament, we do not represent people ; we hope to manage them. If we cannot manage them, we pretend that, if we were to manage them, we would do it better than the Conservative party.

During the election, the Chancellor appeared on a Labour poster as Batman. I thought that it was a Tory poster, trying to make him more attractive to younger voters. What is the point of abuse when there are matters of substance to discuss, such as how to solve unemployment, what sort of Europe we should have and what new world order? We have abandoned all those issues. I must not be controversial--that is not my practice--but my party, in supporting the Maastricht treaty, has abandoned everything for which the party was established. Others may take a contrary view. The Labour party believed that people had the right through the ballot box to control those who made the laws and, by getting a majority, to change the economic system under which they lived. However, the party has now given it all up. I am not saying that it has done so out of wickedness ; it was out of a lack of self-confidence.

I do not think that members of Labour's Front Bench would have even two ideas about what to do with the economy if they came to power, other than with a central bank. I say this with some regret, but a series of sound bites glued together and called an economic policy is not an economic policy. That is the problem-- [Interruption.] I am sorry to speak sharply, but, if this is my last speech in a free Parliament, I had better say what I think and take the consequences. I bitterly resent the title "Euro-sceptic". Am I an "Anglo-sceptic" because I did not like the Thatcher Government? I oppose the Maastricht treaty as a European because it takes from every country in Europe the rights that are being taken away from us. It does not offer durability. The treaty has divided every country in Europe--Denmark went one way and then the other, France agreed by a narrow margin and Ireland by a bit more, but in Britain the people are not allowed to vote.

Let no one tell me that proportional representation to put people in an impotent Parliament within a European federation merits a referendum. That is an utterly disreputable argument, and no one will believe it. Labour does not want to have to put to the Labour movement and the public the arguments for the Maastricht treaty and European union, because it knows that those notions would not win support.

A moment ago, someone said that 83 per cent. of the people in Germany want a referendum and two thirds wish that the Danes had voted no. The treaty will fail ; that is the tragedy. I shall get no satisfaction from its failure, but it will fail because it cannot be made to work. When it fails, a Bosnian-type crisis will emerge, because one can no more impose capitalism from Brussels than communism from Moscow. It cannot be done--you must carry people with you.

That is why I suggested a commonwealth of Europe, a looser arrangement where harmonisation is by consent. I believe that the crisis in the former Yugoslavia would be much less serious if we had a commonwealth of Europe in which it could find a place without having in place of the iron curtain a gold curtain or a deutschmark curtain, which means that, if one cannot fit in with the policies, one is not acceptable.

I hope that the House will forgive me for speaking with passion. I have often wondered whether, when we lost democracy in Britain, it would be to the red army, the Militant Tendency or Oswald Mosley, but in fact we ourselves have given it up. The House has agreed to abandon its responsibility to hold to account those who make our laws. We have given it all up. Walter Bagehot said in the 19th century that the British constitution was divided between the dignified and the efficient. He said that the Queen was the dignified and that the Commons was the efficient. The Executive is now the efficient, and we are the dignified.

We no longer want power. We do not care whether it goes. The nation accepts that because, after centuries of subservience to a monarch whom we cannot elect or remove, we are trained to be subservient. If we learned to live with William the Conqueror, we can learn to live with Jacques Delors. People have been trained--there is a culture of bowing and scraping, going to another place with my Lord this or my Lord that. The nation has never been allowed to develop the equality that comes with birth, to govern oneself as one thinks right and then to collaborate, harmonise and co- operate with other nations. The idea of one country living alone is absurd. We could be killed by a Chernobyl nuclear disaster or destroyed by a nuclear weapon from China. There is no national sovereignty, but there is a right to choose and remove the people who make our laws. When we vote tonight, under the discipline of the Whips and the patronage system, which is also a corrupting influence, the House will abandon that which makes it a focus of interest and attention for generations of people, from the chartists and the suffragettes until now.

In 1970, we permitted the vote at 18. The meaning of the vote was taken away on 1 January 1973. There were two and a half years of the right of the electorate, but it was too dramatic a power and the Government, without a referendum, took it away. I regret the fact that my right hon. and hon. Friends now hope that they will get more justice from Jacques Delors than from the Government. It is not a policy which any progressive party could pursue.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993-05-20/Debate-5.html

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"Swivel-eyed": a riposte

A lazy insult against those who are not part of the unrepresentative consensus in Parliament is that they are "swivel-eyed."

In fact, swivelling one's eyes to remain focused on an object is one of the signs of not being brain-dead:

(Pic source)

Just so you know.

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Sunday, April 20, 2014

More water mystery: H3O2

 
Layers of EZ (exclusion zone) water next to hydrophilic material
From Prof Gerald H Pollack's TED lecture
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-T7tCMUDXU

Water appears so simple, yet ...

A few days ago we looked at the Mpemba effect, whereby hot water freezes faster than cold. As yet there is no single, universally-agreed explanation.

Today AK Haart shows us a TED lecture by award-winning Professor Gerald H Pollack from the University of Washington, about the "fourth phase" of water (apart from solid, liquid and vapour). Truly fascinating, especially in its potential uses (e.g. desalination, purification, energy production):



And just this last Thursday there was a BBC4 programme about plants, which at one point showed that inside leaves, the light-utilising chloroplasts that make starch actually move about in response to sunlight, seemingly to utilise the energy most efficiently.

The clip (available only for a few days more) is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p011kv6c.

Chloroplasts "jostling for position"
from "Botany: A Blooming History" (BBC4, 17 April 2014)

Could the electrically-charged layers of water described by Professor Pollack explain this movement?

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Is Scotland already free?



The EU has confirmed that Scotland would need to reapply for membership in the event that it was no longer part of the UK.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/scotland-will-be-made-to-reapply-for-eu-membership-after-independence-says-eu-chief-1-2680064

But this may have happened already.

previously blogged legal point raised in Rodney Atkinson and Norris McWhirter's "Treason at Maastricht" said that Maastricht, by diminishing the political rights of Scots, broke the Union with Scotland Act and therefore severed the two countries in 1993.

It follows from this that Scotland is not now, and has not been for the past 21 years, in the European Union, and so has gained full sovereign independence at a stroke.

Perhaps one day we could see the formation of a new, non-EU Northern Alliance between Iceland, Norway and Scotland.

And in that case, what of the economic basis on which England seeks to threaten the Scots? Think of North Sea oil (and other mineral rights), fishing, whaling, an Iceland-style firm hand with banks and bankers (and so a safe offshore haven for panicking European investors keen to avoid bail-ins)...

Suddenly the dream is not just an ethereal castle in the air.

Oidhche mhath! God natt! Góða nótt!

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Saturday, April 19, 2014

Kingdom

"My personal sense now is that there are no real political solutions to human wickedness. Ironically, as time has progressed, thinking long and hard about those churches, I have come to believe the only consolation is spiritual."

Aidan Hartley, "Before you talk about 'Lessons from Rwanda', read this" (Spectator magazine, 5 April 2014).

Reading this article the conclusion struck me as odd, because I'd never clocked Hartley as religious before. He certainly has his feet on the ground, describing dreadful massacres he'd witnessed; and his other Africa pieces about farming in Kenya show he is brave and resourceful, so he's no "All Gas And Gaiters" Holy Joe figure of fun.

Maybe it's a sign that the wheel is turning again..

I sometimes think artists are the canary in the mine. The rhythms and paganism  of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring always suggested to me a consciousness that something was coming; perhaps Fuseli's frightening supernatural paintings were a pre-tremor of the French Revolution and Terreur.

There's a sense of fin de siècle, at least for me. The Sixties people, some of whom have got to the top and run the show now, have had their turn, trying to get back into the Garden. I suppose it was a millennial craze like the others that erupted over the centuries, looking for a quick way to God, turning as before into sensuality and violence.

More recently, the artists have given us a physicalist curdling of hope. The morbid art of Damien Hirst and Gunther von Hagens seems to have been saying, "Look, mere mortal arrangements of matter, that's all we are"; just as in the madness of the Forties the grisly pseudo-scientific experiments of the Nazis in their death camps and the Japanese medical atrocities in Manchuria said, "We have searched thoroughly and there is no soul. Our cruelty and your suffering are a temporary salve for our despair. There is only fleeting glory and death."

I don't know what to believe, but I can't believe that. Are we due for a period of religious revivalism?


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Friday, April 18, 2014

Scottish independence: has Maastricht already severed the Union?

Reading Rodney Atkinson and Norris McWhirter's "Treason at Maastricht",  I come across a very topical possibility:

"Some statutes within the British system of an informal constitution could perhaps, at some stretch of the imagination, be regarded as less critical. But this could certainly not be said about the Union with Scotland Act, for in 1706  the Scottish people decided to share a Sovereign and a Parliament. Since the new Parliament of the UNITED Kingdom was to be in England (and the physical existence of the Scottish parliament dispensed with) the terms of the Act of Union were absolutely vital. The Act is the nearest we possess to an actual constitution. The Scots, effectively, gave up their Parliament only in return for the guarantee that the new (English dominated) Parliament would not curtail or in any way diminish their rights. If they did so (as has now happened under the Maastricht Treaty) then the Act of Union would be null and void and not only would the United Kingdom cease to exist but so would the authority of the Parliament at Westminster which was spawned by the Act of Union.

This is exactly what has happened..."

If the authors are correct (and they were legally careful in laying before the authorities their treason allegations against Douglas Hurd and Francis Maude), it would seem that because of this breach of contract Scotland has been free since 1993 and there is no need for a Scottish referendum.

 Will you tell Alex Salmond, or shall I?

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Lord Blake on the need for a referendum

My Lords, I wish to make one point and one point only: the debate is about the constitutional effects of ratifying the Maastricht Treaty. I strongly believe that whatever those effects may be they should not occur without the endorsement of a referendum. I happen to have the honour of being president of the Campaign for a British Referendum, or CBR in the acronymic world in which we now dwell. This is not an organisation which is either anti- or pro-Maastricht. No doubt some members have strong views one way or the other, but they are united by the view that whether one is for the treaty or against it the issue is of such constitutional importance that it ought to be submitted direct to the popular vote.
 
The referendum is not, as some claim, un-English and unprecedented. Mr. Harold Wilson, as he then was, promised in 1974 a referendum on the renegotiated terms of Britain remaining in the EC. That was duly held in 1975, very much on a cross-party basis. Referendums have been held on other matters, as noble Lords have said.

We shall no doubt be told that there is no need for a referendum because all three parties supported Maastricht at the general election in April last year. But that, of course, is precisely why we should have one. The issue was never properly discussed. In any case, elections turn on a host of other matters such as Mr. Major's soap-box or the war of "Jennifer's ear". One can never, or hardly ever, have a single issue election. Nor, in general, would one wish to have such an election. However, there are single issues of such importance that they deserve to be put not only to Parliament, which is elected on a multitude of issues, but to the people as a whole. That particularly applies to major constitutional changes which are in effect irreversible. I am not saying that irreversible changes should never be made. I am simply saying that they should not be made without the express agreement of the nation.

We shall no doubt be told that the issues are too complicated and difficult to be put to the public and that they will not be able to understand what it is all about. If a referendum on Maastricht can be held in Eire, Denmark and France without any complaints that it was too obscurely worded or that people did not know what they were voting for, surely it cannot be beyond the wit of a British Government to achieve the same.

During the discussion about the Statement on Maastricht on Monday in your Lordships' House it is recorded at col. 928 of Hansard that my noble friends Lord Harmar-Nicholls and Lady Chalker both said it would be desirable for noble Lords to be adult and sensible in considering this matter. Ought not the Government to recognise that the British public by and large are adult and sensible and are perfectly capable of making up their own minds in a coherent fashion on the subject of Maastricht?

House of Lords, 17 February 1993

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1993/feb/17/maastricht-treaty#S5LV0542P0_19930217_HOL_201

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Baroness Thatcher on the EU referendum

... perhaps Lord Attlee was right, that there [is] a place for a referendum when that is the only way of putting an important single constitutional issue to the people. Otherwise, having two main parties, we vote on a general manifesto, and there is no way of putting an important constitutional issue to the people, except by a referendum. That is why we have had referenda on Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They were constitutional issues. [...]

No elector in this country has been able to vote against Maastricht—none. It has been impossible to do so. I think that when one looks at the extent of the powers which are being handed over, it would be disgraceful if we denied them that opportunity. Yes, we waited with bated breath for both Danish referenda. They thought that people were bullied out of their first decision. So much for the unanimity rule.

Further, in the other place less than half the honourable Members voted for the treaty. The electorate has not been able to vote and half the honourable Members in the other place—less than half; 292 out of some 650—voted for the treaty. We are in the Rome Treaty and in the Single European Act and we stay there. I believe that to hand over the people's parliamentary rights on the scale of the Maastricht Treaty without the consent of the people in a referendum would be to betray the trust—as guardians of the parliamentary institutions, of the courts and of the constitution—that they have placed in us.

House of Lords, 7 June 1993

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=108314

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Lord Jay on Maastricht and unconstitutional change

... the doctrine that the Crown—that is, the Government—is entitled to make treaties without parliamentary approval becomes untenable when a treaty alters in a major way the whole constitution of the United Kingdom. On that doctrine, the Government can make a treaty with anyone from China to Peru, abolishing the wish of Parliament, and then inform Parliament that it had no right whatever to intervene. That is surely absurd.
 
[...] in my view the whole deplorable muddle over the treaty and what it does or does not mean overwhelmingly supports the case for a full and fair referendum, to enable the electorate to make up its mind. The treaty, after all —and there is no dispute about this—proposes revolutionary changes in the constitution of the UK and a major surrender of power over the economy, as has just been said, over foreign affairs, security and defence and on the legislation about citizenship.

17 February 1993

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1993/feb/17/maastricht-treaty#S5LV0542P0_19930217_HOL_201

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Thursday, April 17, 2014

The Westminster rainbow, and an apology

... as seen by people who "know better"


I thought, let's have a live debate. Instead of each of us squawking unregarded in his little internet cage, let's assemble in central London, at a politicos' watering-hole a step away from the Palace of Westminster, and sort the wheat from the chaff on the EU referendum issue. With any luck and a lot of promotion, we might get some politicians, spads and journalists in on the strength of topical enlightenment and a drink.

The time is right. Local and European Parliament elections are set for May 22nd and Parliament reconvenes on June 3rd, by which time we'll know the results.  This could be a bumper year* for UKIP, hence the roasting Nigel Farage received this week on HIGNFY.  Further ahead are the Scottish referendum on September 18th and the PM has spoken of a possible EU plebiscite in 2017 (Salmond is already connecting the two*).

Initially I tried for Monday 9th June - the first late-night session in the Commons. But the pub room is permanently booked Mondays, probably for exactly that reason. So I chose Thursday 5th instead, when the House rises at 5 pm and there might be energy left to stroll across the road for a liver-crippler.

What ought the motion to be? How about...

“Do we have a right to an EU referendum? (And if not, should we hold one anyway?)”

A referendum on sovereignty should not be merely an electoral inducement like promising tax cuts and better hospitals. It goes to the heart of our claim to be a democracy. But is there anything in our history, Constitution or legal system that asserts our entitlement? That hasn't yet been acknowledged in the circles that matter.

The 1975 "Common Market" referendum wasn't conceded as of right, either. Remember that we had already been in the EEC two and half years before it took place, and it was only granted because the National Front and more importantly the Labour Party were dead set on getting us back out.

That's the first question, is it a right in any sense (including moral and philosophical)? Then, if yes, is there any reason why we shouldn't exercise it? And if it's not a right, what are the pros and cons of a referendum, apart from temporary tactical political considerations?

Then I started to invite people to speak.

Among the off-centre personalities, A cautioned me (correctly) that mainstream politicians and advisers would shun the meeting if B was on the platform. I say correctly, because having initially indicated his willingness to participate, C - one of the mainstreamers and with potentially very valuable expertise and authority - then withdrew because A had given space on his site to ideas from the Freeman movement. I begged him to reconsider - see below.

But C then looked at B's site and rejected him, too, on the grounds of ideology but also because one of the latter's posts featured an infelicitous phrase likely to make a PC reader's antennae twitch irritably. Immediately afterward, C then noted with horror that I had given space on Broad Oak to consideration of both the Freeman movement (whose arguments I still struggle to understand) and the ECG campaign to prosecute what it sees as the British traitors in the EEC/EU saga. C then made it clear that he would have no further communication with me. There is no evidence that he had read my rationale of liberal debate - perhaps he was in too much of a hurry to wash off his hands the pitch with which I had defiled him merely by secondary association with those beyond his pale (in a week when HM the Queen herself shook hands and dined with Martin McGuiness).

So I thought "What's the point?", cancelled the room and sent apologies to all those I had invited so far.

I am now beginning to think that I was grossly in error to do so. I had ducked my head at the first shot, but then my nature is not especially combative and I grew up in a family where anything could be discussed. I'm not used to a garlic-and-crucifix reaction to ideas. To those others whom I did invite, I apologise sincerely for my intellectual cowardice; I think I am starting to rediscover my spine. I shall be making further enquiries to see if it is possible to get a range of views on this most vital constitutional issue, and let the illiberal recuse themselves.

Here, slightly edited, is part of what I wrote to C:

1. We shouldn't damn a man by the opinions of his associates, or those who may from time to time correspond with him. [...]

2. Even the worst differences of opinion end with signing something in a railway carriage, and yet it's far better to resolve them in rational debate. The two sides of the House of Commons are famously separated by the length of two swords.

3. There are certain matters where people need their understanding correcting before they go too far. We need to know more about the context and implications of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the common law and the gradual extension of the franchise.

4. We also need to put hotheads right. Burke's response to Dr Richard Price was not only an instrument of correction to Price (and one the latter clearly felt) but a fundamental reassessment and clarification of our political institutions and processes. He may well have saved us from following France into the abyss. What if he had simply refused to address Price's sermon?

5. The hotheads can be handled. [I give an example of a public interview that led to a change of mind].

6. Does it not also say something about the times that these fringe groups have sprung up? The undemocratic means and trends - commented on by both Tony Benn and Douglas Jay in the Debating Chamber - by which sovereignty has been ceded, are partly responsible for the sometimes reprehensible responses they have engendered. This suggests a need for the established power to justify itself openly in order to reassert its moral right to govern.

7. I would therefore beg you, most earnestly, to reconsider.
 
Perhaps it is not the political spectrum that counts, but the intellectual one, the one that measures capacity to consider ideas which one may possibly dislike.

___________________________________________________

 *htp for the links to James Higham

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The Pa Larkin economy

First edition (pic source)
Another sterling piece this week by Archdruid John Michael Greer. Here he discusses how our lives will change as the cost of non-human energy rises and its availability dwindles. In brief, the superstructure of society will crash.

Like Charles Hugh Smith, he envisages a return to a simpler life, where we ourselves make more of what we consume, and trade surpluses. To be more precise, not a simpler life - peasants have to be multiskilled and crafty to survive - but a simpler form of social organisation. Like Smith, Greer sees education as pricing itself out of the market, and in any case it's becoming irrelevant to the skills we will need in the future.

He also touches on what he calls the fashion of despair among those who simply refuse to begin adapting. If we see the present state of affairs as the Golden Age, then of course change means decline and loss.

But there's another way to see it. The model Greer is proposing is like that of Pa Larkin in H E Bates' life-affirming books. Pa doesn't believe in bothering the taxman and when the Inland Revenue sends a young, pasty-faced investigator to see how he can do so well on apparently no income, Pa marries him to one of his daughters and sets him to work. Bates' theme is love - not just of women, but of life. It's interesting to read the four Larkin sequels and see how in different ways they restate and defend the original, glowing vision of how we could be happy.

And like Pa, some of Greer's acquaintances are operating in the "black economy", because doing things the conventional way is a recipe for victimhood.

Some years ago, we met a man in South Wales whose neighbour hasn't worked for years. The latter said he hated both work (in its modern guise) and shopping, and decided to spend the rest of his life doing neither. He'd made enough in his previous career to buy a house before the mad price explosion, and eats well from what he catches in the fields and garners from hedgerows.

We don't all have to do exactly that. Pa Larkin manages on a mixed strategy of cash dealing (turning over money in any venture that is "wurf while"), subsistence farming (no fresher eggs or more organic chicken than from your own back yard) and piling the family into the van for seasonal crop-picking (he lives in Kent, which used to be known as "the garden of England").

Don't forget to love.

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Britain's democratic deficit

The House of Commons, 1833 by Sir George Hayter
(c) National Portrait Gallery

In 1832 the House of Commons had 658 seats. Britain's population was an estimated 14 million souls, of whom (pre the Electoral Reform Act) some 500,000 were eligible to vote in Parliamentary elections. The Act increased the number of electors to about 813,000.

180 years later (2012), the Commons had fewer (650) seats, but the population was four and a half times larger (63.7 million) and the electorate numbered 46,353,900.

The Coalition now in power has proposed reducing the number of seats to 600 (a nice round figure, and coincidentally getting rid of 50 awkward backbenchers).

What has happened to our voice in Parliament, our ability to influence our government? The graphs below may help clarify.
 


 
To get the same ratio of seats to electors as in 1833, we would need 37,503 MPs.
 
Far from reducing the number of MPs, we should be dramatically increasing it - or introducing some system that is designed to reflect more fairly the range of opinions and interests of the public.
 
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Tuesday, April 15, 2014

The Mpemba Effect

Mpemba effect (source: Daily Mail)

A homely article in the Daily Mail includes a tip for making ice cubes faster: use hot water.

Warm water cools faster than cold, a counterintuitive fact known as the Mpemba Effect. There are a number of suggested explanations but the latest (covered a few months ago in the DM) focuses on the weak bonds between water molecules, which is why water forms long chains. The latest theory says the bonds are stretched when the liquid is warmed, and snap back as it cools.

It seems that this new theory is not complete.

I have an amateur tweak: boiling not only stretches the long molecule chains, but breaks them, and it takes some time for them to re-form. During this period it may be easier for the separated molecules (or short molecule chains) to reassemble into the crystalline structure of ice, than for long liquid chains to be converted into the solid form.

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Sunday, April 13, 2014

Car park snugglers

From motorcloud.net

My wife and I call them snugglers - a term which came down to us from Yorkshire. You park your car in an almost empty car park, but when you return it is quite common to find a snuggler has parked next to you in spite of all the empty spaces. Why is that?

One possibility is that some people use another car to guide them into the parking bay. They can't see the lines and don't have the spatial awareness to park without lining themselves up with something visible such as your car.

Are there other possibilities?

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Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Bennett on growing old...

...but first Doris Day

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it. 
Doris Day

Frightening? During his late thirties, after his move to Paris, Arnold Bennett used his fictional characters to make a number of somewhat gloomy references to human mortality. Maybe he feared the onset of old age. However he died of typhoid aged 63, which certainly adds a poignant footnote to this :-

Yes,’ he sighed; ‘she contracted typhoid fever in Paris. It’s always more or less endemic there. And what with this hot summer and their water-supply and their drainage, it’s been more rife than usual lately.
Arnold Bennett – Hugo (1906)

Yet he moved to Paris. Maybe he was trying to escape the stifling atmosphere of middle class life. Or maybe it was in other people where he saw a need to escape the tick of the clock.

Poor tragic figure! Aged thirty-eight! An unromantic age, an age not calculated to attract sympathy from an unreflective world. But how in need of sympathy! Youth gone, innocence gone, enthusiasms gone, illusions gone, bodily powers waning! Only the tail-end of existence to look forward to!
Arnold Bennett – Whom God Hath Joined (1906)

‘How old are you, Diaz?’ ‘Thirty-six,’ he answered. ‘Why,’ I said, ‘you have thirty years to live.’
Arnold Bennett - Sacred and Profane Love (1905)

You may ask what right a man aged fifty odd has to talk of a life’s happiness — a man who probably has not more than ten years to live.
Arnold Bennett - Teresa of Watling Street (1904)

Sometimes Bennett also seemed to fear the wisdom of old age, as if disheartened by the prospect of understanding too much too late. I’m beginning to understand this one.

At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their folly is wise then.
Arnold Bennett - Sacred and Profane Love (1905)

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Monday, April 07, 2014

City of vast and restless melancholy

Portland Place, London, 1906
From bbc.co.uk

Lawrence did not greatly love London. It appealed to his imagination, but in a sinister way. To him it was the city of vast and restless melancholy.

And though there was nothing of the sentimental in his composition, he despised the facile trick of fancy which attributes to cities, heroically, the joys and griefs of the unheroic individuals composing them; London did nevertheless impress him painfully as an environment peculiarly favourable to the intensification of sorrow.

Whenever he went to London it seemed to him to be the home of a race sad, hurried, and preoccupied; the streets were filled with people who had not a moment to spare, and whose thoughts were turned inward upon their own anxious solicitudes, people who must inevitably die before they had begun to live, and to whom the possession of their souls in contemplation would always be an impossibility.
Arnold Bennett – Whom God Hath Joined (1906)

Over a century later I find I’m no fan of London either. For me there is something weird about the place. I prefer small towns, open spaces, hills, valleys and high moorland where the call of a curlew speaks to that poetic spark lurking in all our souls.

Maybe you have to be a Londoner.

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Sunday, April 06, 2014

EU membership is a democracy issue

"If democracy is destroyed in Britain, it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights."

Tony Benn, speaking in the House of Commons on 20th November 1991 (7.56 pm onward)

(htp: James Higham)

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Friday, April 04, 2014

Are you dynamic?

Idleness, then, is so far from being the root of all evil that it is rather the true good.
Søren Kierkegaard

Are you dynamic, bone idle or somewhere in between?

I’m certainly not dynamic but not quite bone idle either – well not all the time. I’m not sure where human dynamism comes from, but I don’t have it. Or want it if I’m honest.

Yet success seems to be closely related to a certain kind of dynamism. Not necessarily hard work, although that comes into it, but ferocious self-centred, persistence usually dressed up as something else.

It seems to be a matter of goals and effort, although the effort may well be largely networking, sucking up to the right people, cultivating the image, softening a regional accent, personal appearance, the right point of view, an urbane manner, the arts of delegation, knowing the value of anger and politically correct disdain, artistic flim-flam, a second language, name-dropping, credentials, a suitable partner and so on.

It all sounds too much like hard work though doesn’t it? Presumably it is, or grossly time-hogging if not physically demanding.

No – it’s not for me.

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Thursday, April 03, 2014

Moving home

Although we’ve had modular houses for a long time, somehow the advantages never seem to make it into the political arena to any serious extent. The wartime UK prefab served its purpose and was discarded, although some have lasted for decades. My aunt and uncle lived in one in Derby.

Grade II listed Phoenix prefabs
Wake Green Road, Birmingham
From Wikipedia

 Yet today it is presumably even more feasible to mass-produce all the bits and pieces that go to make up a comfortable and energy efficient dwelling. So why don’t we do it and get rid of the housing shortage forever?

Caravans for example. Modern caravans are produced on factory production lines and a big one can cost as little as £20-30k. Comfortable, easy to heat in winter and needing little maintenance, what’s not to like about them? They can even be quite posh.


From leftbracket.com

Caravans are easy to move of course, so if we all lived in them, moving house would merely be a question of towing the thing from one plot to another. Hook up the utilities and job done. If anyone needs more living space I’m sure they could be designed to attach extra modules.

A big advantage is cost. Caravans are comparatively cheap, so the whole idea might highlight the cost of each plot of land. Maybe we could simply rent plots from the local authority, even making this the main tax base for the whole country. Westminster wouldn’t like it, so that’s another benefit.

We’d get rid of a load of other taxes and pensioners would just tow their homes to a cheaper plot of land on retirement, leaving city life to younger people with jobs and families.

The roof of the caravan could be an array of solar panels and because caravans have batteries, they could even be reasonably effective in a low-power caravan environment. In fact caravans with 12v lighting and gas cylinders for cooking and heating might cope quite well with intermittent power from wind turbines.

The practical stuff is easy enough for anyone to work out for themselves, so why don’t such ideas find their way into the political arena? After all, it's hardly a new or original notion.

Okay I know we aren't at all likely to go down this road. There are lots of reasons – there always are. Maybe the global warming brigade will push it, but somehow I don’t think it is close to their middle class hearts.

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