The one great principle

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

Charles Dickens - Bleak House

I’ve used this Dickens quote before because it's a favourite of mine with wide applicability.

For example, If the word government is substituted for English law, it almost becomes a law of nature. It's what I observed for most of my working life - government making business for itself. Mostly during the latter years of my sentence - as life became progressively more bureaucratic.

The commercial world makes business for itself  but government has the power to do it without the trouble and inconvenience of attracting customers. Hence the close links between big business and big government. Certain professions and organisations cuddle up to government for the same reason.

From this aspect, Dickens’ monstrous maze covers anything from minutiae such as the date of the next meeting (because there always has to be one) to protecting ministerial budgets to promoting custom and practice as a guiding principle. And yes, I have heard custom and practice used as an argument for resisting beneficial change.

Take science for example. A key reason why it is so politically attractive to bend science into a policy instrument is that it creates business. Business for government, people in government, corporations entangled with government, government supported charities - and of course scientists.

The nutritional sciences are a case in point. What is nutritional advice worth after decades of study and the expenditure of uncounted billions? May I suggest an answer somewhere in the vicinity of not much? May I further suggest that a moderate and varied diet seems to cover it?

As far as I can see from personal experience, a traditional main meal of meat and two veg followed by a pud plus maybe a glass or two of something in the evening is fine. Not quite my taste, but it didn't cause my parents' generation to keel over at an early age. Too many calories do cause problems as does too much booze, but we've known that for centuries.

It doesn’t matter though – food fads give rise to food regulations and food regulations are business. Looping back to Dickens, it’s a coherent scheme.

Government bungles everything it touches, partly because bungling is good business too. Lessons can be learned, relearned then learned all over again. Newspapers report the bungles, committees investigate them, auditors audit them and politicians take advantage of them.

Let’s finish with a question and a possible answer.

How will the drugs problem be resolved?

Unfortunately it may well be the case that so much business is created by not resolving it that there is no business reason why it should ever be resolved. In that case, unless the drugs problem becomes a threat to social and political stability, unless it becomes a threat to government business, then the current situation seems likely to continue.

So maybe the drugs issue isn’t a question of weighing up moral choices or policies which do the least harm. Maybe it’s merely a question of whatever policy generates the most government business with the least political risk.

Sounds cynical, but when it comes to making those millions of micro-decisions which comprise social and political trends, then people can be very cynical indeed. Especially when it isn’t obvious – when custom and practice so conveniently sidestep the rational and ethical faculties.

When government folk are making business for themselves.

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"Once is happenstance..."

"... Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action," said Ian Fleming's Auric Goldfinger:


(Birmingham)



(Coventry)

(Essex)

"A bizarre coincidence," says the Daily Mail. Move along, please.

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Is UKIP doomed?

It is by means of symbols that men and women have been educated out of tribal patriotism and into nationalistic idolatry. And symbols, no doubt, will be used when the moment comes to educate them out of nationalistic idolatry and into world-patriotism.

As soon as we and our rulers desire it, modern methods of propaganda can be used to effect a change of thought patterns within a single lifetime.

Aldous Huxley – Themes and Variations (1950)

Where is UKIP likely to take the UK politically? Sackerson recently raised the fascinating issue of UKIP’s prospects. Conservative and Labour prospects hold little interest in the wider scheme of things. Lib Dem prospects have only a morbid fascination for the politically ghoulish. That includes me by the way.

So will UKIP win Parliamentary seats next year or is the barrier to entry too high? It’s not a matter of policy, because as a vehicle for disaffection, UKIP doesn’t really need many. That is to say, it doesn’t need radical policies because conventional anti-EU nationalism seems sufficient to harvest disaffected voters.

There is no point risking policy wrangles by adding other contentious issues for folk to bicker about, especially folk already disaffected and already willing to wrangle.

So what are UKIP’s prospects for 2015?

Firstly, as we all know, our first past the post system is heavily rigged in favour of the established parties. The UK electorate bungled its last chance of improving the situation in 2011. Still - at least the AV experience allows us to factor in an electorate with advanced bungling capabilities.

Secondly, tribal voting is endemic in the UK, so unless UKIP gains a hugely improbable number of seats in the House of Commons, there seems to be little prospect of genuine constitutional change. Even UKIP holding the balance of power seems improbable unless one of the major parties also aligns itself with anti-EU sentiment. This seems unlikely – it isn’t in their political genes.

Thirdly and rather unfortunately, there is crude self-interest to consider. UKIP has MEPs but no MPs so we have to ask how likely it is that MEPs would willingly alight from the EU gravy train.

So is UKIP doomed? It seems to me that the ebb and flow of events do not favour the brand of nationalist disaffection UKIP represents.

It may be entirely rational for voters to keep hold of what little democratic power they have, but as Huxley said modern methods of propaganda can be used to effect a change of thought patterns within a single lifetime. Not much of the propaganda pot goes on nationalism. Even less on democracy.

As older generations slip away, the importance and even the possibility of holding governments to account may be forgotten, lost in a ruthless tide of propaganda.

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The smell of coffee and milk

If we see again a thing which we looked at formerly it brings back to us, together with our past vision, all the imagery with which it was instinct.

This is because objects — a book bound like others in its red cover — as soon as they have been perceived by us become something immaterial within us, partake of the same nature as our preoccupations or our feelings at that time and combine, indissolubly with them. A name read in a book of former; days contains within its syllables the swift wind and the brilliant sun of the moment when we read it.

In the slightest sensation conveyed by the humblest aliment, the smell of coffee and milk, we recover that vague hope of fine weather which enticed us when the day was dawning and the morning sky uncertain; a sun-ray is a vase filled with perfumes, with sounds, with moments, with various humours, with climates. It is that essence which art worthy of the name must express and if it fails, one can yet derive a lesson from its failure (while one can never derive anything from the successes of realism) namely that that essence is in a measure subjective and incommunicable.

Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu

We’ve neutralised much of this haven’t we? By bringing into the realm of scientific study the vast complexity of mental associations, we have tried to sidestep the compelling reality of subjective life.

Not only in popular psychology, but in a whole plethora of explanatory terms we use to cast a false aura of objectivity over our most implacable biases.

Yet Proust was right - as great writers so often are.

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UKIP's prospects, and ours

In the General Election of 2010, not only did UKIP not win a single seat, it failed to come second anywhere. But it came third in four constituencies (Cornwall North, Devon North, Devon West & Torridge, and Buckingham) and was less than 100 votes short of doing the same in Dorset North.

Since then, there have been 18 by-elections. UKIP failed to field a candidate in 5 of them, though 2 were in Northern Ireland which is sui generis. Of the remaining 13, UKIP came second in 7 contests:

By-elections since GE 2010 (Click to enlarge)

- and two of the others were in Wales and Scotland, whose electoral characteristics are again somewhat unlike England's. (Did the Party miss a propaganda trick in not contesting Manchester Central, Corby and Croydon?)

The latest result in Newark, desperately spun as a failure for UKIP, actually showed a 22-point increase and a jump from fourth to second place against the Conservatives . The turnout was 53%, down from 72% in 2010, but was not negligible (even in the General Election of 2001, overall national turnout dropped below 60%). And last year UKIP achieved a similar coup in South Shields, coming from no-candidate in 2010 to 24% of the vote in 2013.

Okay, so UKIP are becoming the protest party of choice (notwithstanding George Galloway's cunningly focused and aggressively-fought win in Bradford West). But where will the breakthrough come?

Regionally, the Party turned in its best GE 2010 performance in the south of England. On average, candidates in the South-East needed a further 9-point boost to hit third place, and 8 points in the South-West. Disillusionment with the collaborationist LibDems and resentment against the austerity-for-the-oiks Conservatives, plus distrust of Labour's slightly odd leadership, may just do it for UKIP in 2015.

In Ireland, none of the mainland parties counts for anything; Scotland has its own individualistic momentum pre- and probably post-referendum; and the political history, culture and economy of Wales will continue to support socialists and Celtic nationalists. The battleground is England, especially in the parts that haven't yet become Welfare State Labour fiefdoms.

The GE 2010 results suggest that UKIP needs an increase of 27 - 30 points to win in the 10 Parliamentary constituencies where it did best; bigger than anything seen in the by-elections of the last four years. But there were 5 seats where 10 extra points would have seen UKIP become the runners-up, 36 more seats where 10-15 points would have done that, and 122 further seats that needed 15-20 points to come second. UKIP is not very far from gaining something of an audible voice, if not yet the chair. Meanwhile, the local elections have brought in many apprentices to the craft of government.

And there's work to be done.

In my view, those of the electors who are not unthinkingly tribal in their party loyalties want neither a socialist state where we have accepted ultimate failure and are reconciled to sharing the wooden spoon between us, nor the false promise of wealth that seems simply to further enrich the rich and can't supply employment to the masses. Economic dysfunction is leading to increasing social dysfunction, the cost of which is threatening to destroy the postwar safety net, which wasn't set up for a regime of vodka, broken families and armies of social workers.

EU periphery countries are suffering on the Procrustean bed of the single currency, about which Farage has spoken so blunt-eloquently for so long, but the question remains, will he also have to moderate his enthusiasm for the globalism that is likewise undermining our balance of trade? Along with undemocratic government from Brussels, economic immigration and the instability caused by unifit currency, world trade is a control issue. There has to be a realistic long-term plan for getting Britain to work and save, without reliance on temporary nostrums like North Sea oil and monetary inflation, or hope will be lost and the darkness will begin to descend.

Can UKIP serve its apprenticeship and construct its masterpiece in time to make a difference to the country?


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Honesty cannot win

It might seem ignominious to believe something on compulsion, because I can’t help believing it ; when reason awakes in a man it asks for reasons for everything. Yet this demand is unreasonable : there cannot be a reason for everything. It is mere automatic habit in the philosopher to make this demand, as it is in the common man not to make it.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith

I think Santayana was right, there cannot be a reason for everything and it is unreasonable to assume otherwise. The world is exceedingly complex and full of rational voids over which human reason cannot, and in some cases may never build bridges from cause to effect.

In many ways this is our biggest unsolved problem - our penchant for inventing spurious bridges across rational voids. I don't mean your penchant of course, nor mine. I mean their penchant - those creepy charlatans who spoil every decent human endeavour. Human nature abhors rational vacuums, so charlatans fill them to overflowing with an infinite cascade of sweet nothings.

Unfortunately rational voids have features and regularities which seem to promise rather more than they deliver so yet again charlatans jump in with both feet, muddying the waters for the rest of us. Yet if we could devise a science of imperfect knowledge then maybe we'd make some progress.

Aspects of the same situation may even contradict each other while remaining valid within certain caveats. To take a rather weak illustration, I could say it is pitch dark outside. You might say I’m going for a walk – I love walking under the stars.

Two aspects of the same situation, both valid but mildly contradictory in that they stress different aspects of a dark night. It may be dark, but there is enough visibility for a walk beneath the stars. 

Does it all begin in childhood when we reward children who give answers over those who don't? Do we condition ourselves to give answers and carry it over to situations where no answer can be given? Are we hopelessly entangled in our own conditioning?

Maybe we are, but the question itself is too complex for simple answers like this. To avoid being hoist by our own petard, we have to be tentative over the diagnosis and recognise its incomplete nature. So it isn't even possible to diagnose the problem with assurance.

Complexity may be a battleground where honesty cannot win.

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Political technology

Back in 2011, Andrew Wilson wrote a piece in opendemocracy about political technology in Russia.

"Political technology" – a term largely unfamiliar in the West - is the euphemism commonly used in the former Soviet states for what is by now a highly developed industry of political manipulation. There is a general understanding that elections are fixed in most countries of the region, from Russia to Kyrgyzstan, but we still do not look closely enough at just how they are fixed.

Although Wilson's piece mainly concerns Russian politics with it's more ruthless and almost openly fraudulent manipulation of political power, there are wider implications too.

As a term to describe the activities of modern political fixers, "political technology" is also useful here in the UK and EU. Here, political control also has its purely technical aspect. Maintaining the power of unelected stakeholders has become an apolitical matter of manipulating human behaviour rather than promoting an ideology.

From the above link.

One advantage of political technology is that it is ‘dry’. It helps regimes function without ideology, and move from one option to another. Ivan Krastev claims that authoritarian regimes may actually be more stable without an official ideology, which gives oppositions something to mobilise against.

Political technology may have an inbuilt tendency towards drama inflation, or at least towards inventing a new drama for every election, which is likely to be destabilising in the long run. The electorate can sense a lack of competition, and political technologists constantly have to fight against the declining turnout they themselves have caused – either with more drama or more fraud. 

It seems to me that Tony Blair was our first exponent of "dry" political technology here in the UK. He created the first government with no ideology and no interest in governing democratically. Not that UK democracy has ever been strong or effective - and that of course may have been the vacuum into which Blair's political technology was bound to exploit.

UK and EU political technology is undoubtedly softer than the Russian version in that it is more covert and less reliant of crudely fraudulent techniques such as vote-rigging, although that too has become an issue of concern. Postal vote scams have now become somewhat notorious in the UK.

Postal voting is open to fraud on an "industrial scale" and is "unviable" in its current form, a top judge has said.

Richard Mawrey QC, who tries cases of electoral fraud, told the BBC that people should not be able to apply for postal votes as a matter of course.

But the Electoral Commission said it would not be "proportionate" to end postal voting altogether.

The government also said it had no plans to abolish the current system, saying it had made it easier for many people to vote.

Yet as regimes become apolitical and as they base their power on political technology rather than ideology, then perhaps electoral fraud becomes politically unimportant. After all, we are now perfectly familiar with major league vote-rigging by or on behalf of the EU. From the BBC.

When it comes to rejecting European treaties, Ireland has a long track record.

Both the Nice Treaty (2001) and Lisbon Treaty (2008) referendums were lost, forcing the governments of the day into the embarrassing position of having to re-run the votes to get them passed.

This is political technology in action, but usually it isn't so transparently fraudulent. Usually, political technology here in the UK and EU seems to revolve around narratives and what Wilson calls dramaturgiia, or a fake drama designed by political technologists to manipulate popular sentiment. 

Often, as in Russia, the drama seems designed to create a dichotomy between the devil you know and the devil you don't, insinuating a sense of unease about the prospect of change.

Next year's general election should be interesting. Watch out for the political technology. If you are a mainstream voter, your party will make energetic use of it.

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