The Callaghan government fell on 28 March 1979 because it lost a motion of no confidence by one single vote (310-311), as a result of which the Prime Minister quite correctly advised HMQ to dissolve Parliament. That was a 0.16% margin of votes cast.
Had the same number of MPs (621) voted in the 2016 EU Referendum and the split been 48%/52% the government would have lost (or won) by a margin of 25 votes. Many issues have been determined by smaller margins in the House of Commons - here are a few just since the last General Election*:
Date
Time
Subject
Turnout
Majority
Margin %
20 Oct 2015
18:52
Opposition Day — Tax Credits
616
22
3.57%
26 Oct 2015
21:13
Finance Bill — New Clause 7 — VAT on Sanitary Protection Products
596
18
3.02%
19 Jan 2016
16:16
Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 — Prayer to
Annul — Replacing Student Grants with Larger Loans for Students from England
599
11
1.84%
19 Jan 2016
16:16
Opposition Day — Student Maintenance Grants
602
14
2.33%
25 Apr 2016
21:26
Immigration Bill — Unaccompanied Refugee Children: Relocation and
Support
572
18
3.15%
28 Jun 2016
14:30
Finance Bill — Schedule 19 — Multinational Enterprises — Publication of
Country by Country Tax Strategy
571
22
3.85%
"My policy is to hold a renegotiation and then a referendum. That is what we promised in the manifesto and then to abide by what the British public say." PM David Cameron, 19 January 2016. "This is a decision that lasts for life. We make this decision and it is probably going to be the only time in our generation when we make this decision" - PM David Cameron, 23 Feb 2016.
It is time for "those who know better" to decide whether they believe in democracy at all.
I remember the dizzying
chimes of this poem from when I first read Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the
Lighthouse’, where the stanza sways through the consciousness of a group of
intellectuals dining in the flowing light of the lighthouse. I was 14 years old
and quite unaware that this poem would stream through my mind many years later,
as I ambled the blooming garden paths of Charleston Farmhouse.
Charleston is the house museum of the Bloomsbury group’s country retreat
in East Sussex, and to this day it looks as if its radical tenants are about to
clatter through the door with easels and ink pots. In the dawn of the 1900s,
the gifted sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (neé Stephen) became part of
an eclectic circle of modern painters, writers and free thinkers, who
oscillated around their avant-garde home in Bloomsbury. This new group, named
the ‘Bloomsbury set’ was a radical backlash to the oppressive wake of the
Victorian era. Bell, trained to classical ideals at the Royal Academy, broke
free of restrained British art which largely clung to limpid realism and
narrative symbols. In her paintings she defied symbolism and the Victorian
taste for sombre colours, creating a new visual language of Post-Impressionism
in England. With her sister, modernist genius Virginia Woolf, a new freedom was
unleashed on Edwardian society.
There were many fascinating ‘Bloomsberries’, such as Duncan Grant,
exquisite painter and ‘pacifist anarchist’, Maynard Keynes, crucial economist
and first chairman of the Arts Council, Roger Fry, who brought Picasso and
Matisse to an astounded British public and Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband and
art critic. All of these visionaries, together with Bell and her children, stayed
at Charleston over the years, making it a hothouse of art, ideas and bohemian
living in the 1900s.
The first glimpse you have of Charleston is its ochre gable, rising with
a stately yet rural simplicity from the South Downs, its violet grey windows of
the attics gleaming like a painter’s eyes to the landscape.
As you enter through
the door trailing with heavy fuchsia, you pass not just through a threshold but
into another world. You are submerged in the greatest appreciation of the
senses, with an aging gilt mirror throwing your reflection into a painted room,
with Vanessa Bell’s whimsical flowers blossoming in chalk paints on the window
reveal, Persian rugs trodden by bohemian feet, flowers dancing jealously
outside the sash window with walls lined by portraits of the Stachey’s and a
fireplace painted in gaudy circles which, if thought about, would seem to jar
yet bring the whole room into a state of avant-garde suspension. As you leave
the room your eye is caught by a Duncan Grant mural of an acrobat falling
languidly through the heights of the circus, his wan limbs raised with a sense
of hedonism against the night…
You are led through, as if by hand, like an exquisite game of blind
man’s buff, imagining Vanessa composing a still life on the lavishly painted
dining room table, a beautiful ceramic form by Quentin Bell throwing dots of
light across the ceiling and falling towards paintings of a cat curled up in
pleasure by Duncan Grant and quirky porcelain plates collected by the
‘Bloomsberries’ on their travels. Then up, up, as if pulled by spirit along the
womb-like corridors to the bedrooms, with the most magnificent light streaming
in from the misty Downs…
But first, Clive Bell’s
library, with worn copies of ‘Intimacy’ and great hardbound collections of
Byron which match the elegant sensuality of the nude drawings that hang above
his painted bed in the next room…. The Bloomsbury group are renowned for their
adventurous affairs and new romantic boundaries, a motif which playfully dances
through the décor. Each everyday object is turned into an objet de plaisir, being either playfully obliterated with paint or
produced by the artists at Omega Workshops. The house is a complete piece of
art, sculpture, and in fact living. I think the most beautiful thing about
Charleston House is not just how its quirky inhabitants mastered their
paintbrushes, but actually how they mastered the art of life; loving, freely and
with great abandon in all things.
I would like to return
to the dreamy blooms of Charleston’s garden paths with the end of Charles Isaac
Elton’s poem, borrowed via of Virginia, who swings back to us on the
cedar-bough…
From aeon comes an interesting piece on what in China is referred to as chabuduo - close enough.
Chabuduo implies that to put any more time or effort into a piece of work would be the act of a fool. China is the land of the cut corner, of ‘good enough for government work’.
In our apartment in central Beijing, we fight a daily rearguard action against entropy. The mirror on my wardrobe came off its hinges six months ago and is now propped up against the wall, one of many furnishing casualties. Each of our light fittings takes a different bulb, and a quarter of them are permanently broken. In the bedroom, the ceiling-high air-conditioning unit runs its moisture through a hole knocked in the wall, stuffed with an old cloth to avoid leakage, while the balcony door, its sealant rotted, has a towel handy to block the rain when it pours through. On the steps outside our door, I duck my head every day to avoid the thick tangle of hanging wires that brings power and the internet; when the wind is up, connections slow as cables swing.
The apartment is five years old. By Chinese standards, it’s far better than the average.
Read the whole thing - it is a fascinating alternative slant on China as a global industrial powerhouse. It may be an industrial powerhouse, but perhaps there are growing pains too. Severe ones if this piece is any guide.
‘There’s a Tianjin-level explosion every month,’ a staff member at a national-level work-safety programme told me, asking for anonymity. ‘But mostly they happen in places that nobody cares about.’ Careless disasters are buried all the time; when a chemical plant exploded in Tangshan in March 2014, a friend there told me of the management’s relief after the Malaysia Airlines flight 370 went missing the next day, swallowing up all other news and making sure nobody but them noticed, save for 13 widows.
Comment For over a year, Apple's software has been the subject of more derision than might be expected for a company of its size.
Developer Marco Arment took Apple to task early last year, arguing that OS X (recently rebranded macOS) is full of embarrassing bugs and that the company is trying to do too much on unrealistic deadlines.
Arment subsequently disavowed his post because of the widespread media attention it received. But there was blood in the water and the feeding frenzy has continued at Apple's expense, at least in part because controversy, manufactured or not, drives online traffic.
It continues to this day. On Tuesday, one fiction writer – who asked us to keep him anonymous – voiced his dissatisfaction, eliciting agreement from a few others. "I just need things that work, and that I can rely on working," he lamented. "I say this with the utmost regret, sadness, and no small sense of betrayal: Apple doesn't seem to make those things anymore."
The comments suggest it isn't only Apple churning out buggy software in the rush to add bells, whistles and intrusive data-trawling within excessively tight timescales. How many users want the bells and whistles anyway?
"I just need things that work, and that I can rely on working". So do I and on the whole we get it, but have we reached peak software utility for home users? One comment which chimes with me is this.
little to do with apple
The fail fast fix fast mentality of software development is insane. (Have worked with software dev teams for 16 years now). Sounds fine if you are working on some new thing. But should not be used on core products. Whether it is apple (not a customer so can't say from personal experience ), Microsoft struggling with their updates, MANY others as well.
The focus has been shifting towards faster delivery of lower quality stuff because they believe they can just fix it later. Though in many cases later never comes because they move onto something else new and shiny.
It is possible of course to release things often but it requires more care than just doing it.
Too often agile is used as an excuse to ship faster and not need quality control.
Windows 10 seems to be turning into the largest scale agile fail in the history of software.
Companies like apple and MS have absolutely no excuses each having 10s of billions of dollars in the bank.
"Brexit: Winning the Peace - Charting a new course" - meeting on Monday, 3rd October 2016
Dickens Conference Room, Birmingham & Midland Institute, Margaret Street, Birmingham B3 3BS
__________________________________________________________
Some notes:
The first speaker was Professor David Myddelton. He said that the EU referendum was a political choice, not an economic one, and went through 6 points on his agenda for us:
1. Complete the process of withdrawal from the EU
2. Make free trade deals
3. Replace the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and fisheries policy with our own
4. Get control of our borders and immigration
5. Withdraw from the European Court of Justice
6. Restore the sovereignty of Parliament
He noted that when in Opposition, both Margaret Thatcher and Jeremy Corbyn had been pro membership of the EU. He also regretted that the Office for Budget Responsibility had been silent during the Referendum campaign, when its founding purpose in 2010 had been to stop economic lying. He said that if anyone were to be foolish enough to try to rerun the Referendum they would get the "biggest raspberry" ever from the public. He cited PWC's campaign forecast that real GDP would rise 29% by 2030 if we stayed in the EU, but 25% if we left: the price seemed well worth it.
He reminded us that Edward Heath had been in favour of ever-closer union, but between a small number of nations with similar living standards. Widening membership militated against this, causing strains between richer and poorer countries. The EU could not survive without reform. He quoted Hume on free trade and how he (Hume) looked forward to it increasing the wealth of other countries also - "even the French".
The Professor sketched out some ideas for reform:
1. The UK to join with other countries outside the EU, e.g. Denmark and Sweden, to form an "EDU" - a European Democratic Union.
2. The EDU to entice other EU countries to join then: Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland.
3. The EU divided nations along several lines: North-South, democratic-authoritarian political cultures, poor-wealthy. We should not put up barriers to the "free movement of labour", but that is what the movement should be about - so perhaps we could have some system for work permits, like the Visegrád Group.
In his view, the Prime Minister's idea to import all existing EU laws into British law, as a temporary measure, was a good one, giving us time to modify them as best suits us.
Next up was Breitbart editor/writer James Delingpole. He noted that after leaving the EU we will still have a framework of regulation, since we will be trading under WTO rules. But we will be able to make our own trade deals more quickly and efficiently, compared with the EU which takes on average 7 years to agree a deal.
He revisited June 24th - his "happy place" - recalling how he had gone to bed the previous night in despair, especially since Nigel Farage was quoted as saying he thought Remain had "just edged it" - and woken to the scarcely-believable news that Leave had won.
So, since all the EU Establishment including "Christine "Ronseal" Lagarde" were united in saying the market would crash, he bought shares, focusing on ones with "British" in their names. He made £500.
What had we learned?
1. After most of a lifetime feeling like an outsider, he had realised "We are the majority."
2. The Establishment elite does not represent us. Remarkably few of the well-breeched and well-educated were on "our" side, despite being landowners, aware of our nation's history and so on. Yet they couldn't clearly explain why they were on favour of Remain - they had no principle or ideology. They were like those ancestors who had wanted to treat with Napoleon, whatever might then happen to the rest of England.
3. The problem of the Remainers was not going to go away. Now it was an attempt to muddy the waters with a newly-minted distinction between "soft Brexit" versus "hard Brexit" - a distinction which, his Google Trends researches told him, was first made by... the BBC.
He had thought there was no hope, what with so many people having become clients of the State. When Jo Cox MP was murdered he had though it was over; but "real people" weren't swayed so easily by events as focus and policy groups might think. The People - the Demos - had spoken and made the right decision.
Last up - or first, as the other two had spoken seated - was Charles Moore. He, too, referred to the hard vs soft Brexit pseudo-debate and quoted a worker at his hotel: "It's got to be divorce."
He told us that Mrs Thatcher had begun to resist the EU in the late 1980s but was told, "This is the way the world is going." It was a ratchet effect. She had realised that EMU would make Germany the supreme power. Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum campaign hadn't succeeded, but politically it had stopped EMU.
The EU was not simply a market, but a "single regulatory regime."
Our national division over the EU referendum needed to be healed; we had to "widen the tent" and Mrs May, who had been "a tepid Remainer", was well placed to do this.
Now, the ratchet effect was in the other direction. Other nations would also wish to leave. Leaving the EU was "the only game in town", as Mo Mowlam had said to him (though he had disliked it) re the Good Friday Agreement.
In questions after, Professor Myddelton was sanguine about Brexit technicalities; he respected Christopher Booker's expertise but noted that the EU gave itself licence when it wished. He was similarly relaxed about global regulatory frameworks such as TTiP and the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement. An audience member involved in defence raised his concern about our relationship with the EU's military.
Comment
My feeling was that the glow of post-Brexit delight has not yet faded sufficiently for the experts to focus on the implications and the national and global issues we still face as we come out of the eye of the financial hurricane. The sovereignty question is, for me, not merely about principle (though that is vital), but about enabling us to begin considering how to restructure our warped and vulnerable economy.
Here are two interesting attempts to ease Donald Trump into some kind of explanatory narrative.
Firstlywe have Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams who sees Trump as a master persuader.
Economies are driven by psychology. If you expect things to go well tomorrow, you invest today, which causes things to go well tomorrow, as long as others are doing the same. The best kind of president for managing the psychology of citizens – and therefore the economy – is a trained persuader. You can call that persuader a con man, a snake oil salesman, a carnival barker, or full of shit. It’s all persuasion. And Trump simply does it better than I have ever seen anyone do it.
Secondlywe have James Williams who sees Trump as an undeserving master of clickbait attention seeking.
Trump is very straightforwardly an embodiment of the dynamics of clickbait: he is the logical product (though not endpoint) in the political domain of a media environment designed to invite, and indeed incentivize, relentless competition for our attention. In fact, Trump benefits not only from the attention and outrage of his supporters, but also that of his opponents. So you already are, in a sense, ‘voting’ for Trump every time you click that link to see what zany antics he’s gotten himself into in today’s episode. (Yes, I am aware of the ironic implications of the previous sentence for this article as a whole — more on that shortly.)
Of the two I find Scott Adams more convincing, but that’s mainly because I tend to find him moderately convincing anyway. At least he seems to think through his ideas and tries to remove personal biases.
Yet if the election turns out to be close then presumably both Trump and Clinton are master persuaders and both are master clickbait populists. There is no significant predictive power to either position. One goes with them or one doesn’t. It is merely a matter of taste yet the feeling persists that it shouldn’t be.
However - try this from Adams. To my mind this is genuine insight - not a common feature of the Trump Clinton battle.
Pacing and Leading: Trump always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders like me see this as something called pacing and leading. Trump “paces” the public – meaning he matches them in their emotional state, and then some. He does that with his extreme responses on immigration, fighting ISIS, stop-and-frisk, etc. Once Trump has established himself as the biggest bad-ass on the topic, he is free to “lead,” which we see him do by softening his deportation stand, limiting his stop-and-frisk comment to Chicago, reversing his first answer on penalties for abortion, and so on. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump look scary. If you understand pacing and leading, you might see him as the safest candidate who has ever gotten this close to the presidency. That’s how I see him.
