One of the big things I hear a lot from people is that they don’t actually know what the Liberal Democrats stand for, or what liberalism actually is. This is especially true at the moment, with the Parliamentary Party being in a coalition with the Conservatives. It’s also not helped by American English having a fundamentally different meaning for the word ‘liberal’ than Commonwealth English, and by British sites like Liberal Conspiracy (a Labour mouthpiece) using that meaning.

I wouldn’t presume to speak for the rest of the party, but I thought if I wrote something on here at least my readers would get some understanding of my own political position.

This will be incoherent. Large chunks of it will go against party policy. Some of it is utterly wrongheaded, I’m sure. I have a very good understanding of issues to do with civil liberties, electoral reform, LGBT rights, and so on – I’ve spent a fair amount of time investigating these issues. I have almost no understanding of economics, so when I talk about that I’m probably going to contradict myself and talk shit.

So this is what *I* mean when I refer to *myself* as a Liberal. I joined the Liberal Democrats and decided to call myself a Liberal because, of all the political parties that matter electorally in England, the Lib Dems’ policies come closest to the idiosyncratic list below. They’re not the same as that list though. In some cases that’s because of a compromise between principle and pragmatism – you can’t get elected on the platform I’m going to describe. In many others, though, it’s because people who are cleverer than I, who have more knowledge of the issues, have thought long and hard and come to a different conclusion. As few of those conclusions seem obviously immoral or absurd, I go along with them until I understand the issue better.

I’m going to break this up into three sections, Freedom, Hatred of privilege and Democracy, for the three things that motivate me most.

Freedom
The Lib Dems’ most important text is On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor). In particular, the ‘harm principle’ seems to me the single most important point of principle, from which all else should follow:

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right… The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Not only is this morally right, it is also the pragmatically correct attitude. Anyone who has studied cybernetics knows that to control a system you must have as many options open to you as there are degrees of freedom in the system (this actually follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the single most basic law of physics). It is, quite simply, impossible as well as undesirable for a government to try to control its citizenry in every detail of their lives, as the last government did. Assuming each person in a country of sixty million has five options open to them that the government cares about, to get them all to choose the option you want them to would require the government to have 5^60,000,000 (that’s roughly 8 with forty-nine zeroes after it) different options open to it. The only way for a government to control people’s behaviour successsfully is to choose a very, very small number of things it’s interested in, and for those things to be things that most people wouldn’t do anyway. Laws against murder and theft can be somewhat effective (though never 100% effective) because the vast majority of us don’t want to kill or steal anyway, so the government can concentrate on that small number who do.

It’s also possible for laws to work when they’re setting an arbitrary convention – we all agree that we need to drive on one side of the road and not the other, and that it’s better if we all follow the same rule. Nobody has a huge emotional attachment to driving on the left or right, so the government can set a standard and everyone will follow it.

From this follow various other things – laws against free speech, against drug use, against private sexual practices, none of these can ever really work, and where they exist they should be abolished.

Hatred of privilege
Despite the above, Liberals are strong advocates of the rule of law. Those laws which we do support should be applied equally to everyone. Either murder is illegal, in which case all murderers should be prosecuted (though there should be no aspect of vengeance in this – people’s liberty should be limited only in so far as it’s necessary to prevent further harm to others), or it isn’t, in which case none should. And the same rules – rules of evidence, burden of proof and so on – should be applied across the board. These rules should also be biased *against* conviction – if we are going to restrict someone’s liberty, that’s a big, important thing to do, and should only happen if we’re *ABSOLUTELY* certain it’s the correct thing to do.

Having different rules for different people is the original and most important definition of privilege – it comes from the Latin privi legium, private law. And privilege in every sense is something I, at least, want to defeat.

In many cases, this means clearing away bad laws that privilege one group over another. Getting rid of the stupid rules regarding marriage, for example, or allowing immigrants to vote, getting rid of the House of Lords with its appointed and hereditary rulers (and especially getting rid of the bishops from within it, who privilege one religion over all others by being there).

There is also such a thing as economic privilege, however. You can’t be totally free if you can’t eat, or you don’t have healthcare, or you never learned to read or write. There’s a reason both Keynes and Beveridge were Liberals.

Now, while I’m no economist so this is probably the weakest part of this, my view is simple. Every human being should, to the extent it’s possible, have a roof over their head, food, clothing, enough education and access to information to take part in society, and enough medical access that they don’t suffer needlessly. Any society in which that’s not the case is not one which I would call civilised.

My personal favoured method for this is a citizens’ income, which used to be Lib Dem policy but was scrapped as too radical, but the current ‘universal credit’ welfare reforms come very, very close to it. In this, rather than the government giving people housing benefit, money off prescriptions, money for childcare, whatever – a bunch of vouchers and tokens you can only use for one thing each, and which require a great deal of administration – the government just gives everyone enough money to pay for those things and says “here you go”, trusting them to do what’s best for themselves. (Yes, I know there are problems with this. There are problems with every system. This is my ‘ideal world’ system.)

But how is this to be paid for? If someone works hard and earns money, we don’t want to take that off them. If you go down a mine and dig up a load of coal for a couple of hundred quid a week, should you be paying half that to someone else who can’t be bothered to work?

Well no, obviously not. However, not everyone does work. There’s a huge class of people who get their money not from work but from rent-seeking – either from actual rent (landlords) or from the exploitation of other monopolies (bankers, people who live off ‘investments’).

There are only two ways I can think of of getting money, either by creating wealth by making or thinking of something (‘workers by hand and brain’ as the old Labour Party Clause Four had it), or by exploiting government-created monopolies (for example ‘intellectual property’ laws or mining rights to an area).

It’s the latter which should be taxed far more than income from actual work, as a way of redressing economic privilege. Monopolies are effectively gifts from the government (which is to say from the population at large) to individuals, and those individuals should repay the bulk of the wealth they get from these gifts back to the population. Someone who builds or designs a house is creating wealth – there is something there that wasn’t there before, that’s of value. Someone who rents the house out, however, is not creating wealth, just taking advantage of a pre-existing inequality (they have a house and their tenants don’t).

Hark! The sound is spreading from the east and from the west!
Why should we work hard and let the landlords take the best?
Make them pay their taxes on the land just like the rest!
The land was meant for the people.

The hatred of privilege ties very strongly into the need for freedom. Unless a transsexual, polyamorous, black person with cerebral palsy born on a council estate has the same tools to make the life she wants for herself as Prince Harry does, then she is less free than he is. (Of course, it may also be that Prince Harry would quite like to stop being third in line for the throne and become a juggler in a left-wing arts collective, but is being stopped from doing so by his position in society. Privileges can hurt the privileged as well as the unprivileged, though usually not as much).

Democracy
If we are to assume that a government should exist at all, then we want that government to have a few properties. We want it to not do anything that the majority of the people in society think is intolerable. We want it to protect the rights of minorities, no matter what the majority think. And we want it to be effective – we want its actions to have the intended consequences.

The second of these is best solved by some kind of constitution or bill of rights – in the UK the European Convention on Human Rights and its incorporation into British law with the Human Rights Act fulfil this role. Things like this, while a departure from pure democracy, are necessary to prevent democracy turning into tyrranny. (I could easily imagine a situation where the majority of the population decided it was OK to murder fat nerdy blokes called Andrew if they really got on your nerves by writing overlong blog posts. I don’t particularly want such a law to be passed, even if it was the democratic will of the country).

Handily, our third requirement is best solved by feedback – the more information you can get into the system the better. This is handy because it also fulfils the first criterion, that government should not do anything that the majority find intolerable. If we have some kind of democratic system, then these criteria are fulfilled handily.

Some might argue for direct democracy – people voting on every issue. There are problems with this, however. Partly, the problem is that people’s opinions aren’t consistent – I could very easily see a majority voting “yes” to “Should we spend more money on the NHS, education and fighting crime?” *and* to “Should we cut your taxes by a thousand pounds a year?”. The other problem is that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to investigate the issues. I think of myself as a fairly well-informed person, for example, but I have absolutely no idea whether the seven billion pound loan to Ireland that Britain just made was a good decision or a bad one.

So the best compromise is representative democracy – everyone votes for the person or persons who they agree with most on the subjects they know about, and make it that person’s job to find out everything they can about every subject necessary for government. This actually works quite well, because votes in aggregate will produce someone who’s a good compromise on all competencies – people who know about civil liberties will vote for candidates who are strong on civil liberties, people who know about economics will vote for candidates who are strong on economics, so a candidate who is strong on both will get both sets of votes.

However, our current First Past The Post system isn’t a very effective way of getting this information into the system, because a single cross every five years, in a seat where for the most part a maximum of two candidates have a chance (which is nearly all of them), is a rate of one bit every five years. To put that into perspective, for an individual voter to get across the information in this post up to the end of that last sentence would take 520,320 years (assuming elections every five years. If they were every four years, it would only take 416,256 years).

On the other hand, a ranked preferential system like the Alternative Vote (which we will be voting on next year) or Single Transferable Vote (which the Lib Dems like) gets *FAR* more information into the government. In my constituency last time, only Labour or the Lib Dems could have won, so I had a binary choice between those two candidates if I was voting for an MP – one bit of information. On the other hand, there were eight candidates on the ballot. If I’d been able to rank my preferences, that would have given me 8! different ways of expressing myself. That’s 40,320 different options, or on the order of sixteen bits of information. Government is going to reflect public opinion much better – and be more effective – if voters have 40,320 choices than if they have two.

So, anyway, that’s roughly what *I* mean by being a liberal. It may not be what other liberals mean, but I think it’s close to what a lot of them think. If you’re a liberal and vociferously disagree, please do so in the comments – I’ll be very interested to see to what extent people agree or disagree with this…

Common People by Pulp is from Different Class, the best political album of the 90s. This is the live version from Glastonbury in 1995 – a gig I was lucky enough to be at, and still remember with awe fifteen years later.

Hard Times Of Old England Retold by The Imagined Village is a rewrite by Billy Bragg of the old folk song. With verses complaining about the banks, Tesco and post office closures, it only needs something about potholes and it’d be a Focus leaflet set to music.

No Matter Who You Vote For, The Government Always Gets In by The Bonzo Dog Band has been proven true again this week…

Power In The Darkness by The Tom Robinson Band is a good demonstration of the Liberal and Conservative ideas of freedom:
“Freedom to choose to do with your body/Freedom to believe what you like/Freedom for brothers to love one another/Freedom for black and white/Freedom from elitism, male domination/Freedom for the mother and wife/Freedom from Big Brother’s interrogation/Freedom to live your own life” versus
“Freedom from the Reds and the blacks and the criminals/Prostitutes, pansies and punks/Football hooligans, juvenile delinquents, lesbians and left-wing scum/Freedom from the niggers and the pakis and the unions/Freedom from the gypsies and the jews/Freedom from the long-haired layabouts and students, freedom from the likes of you”

Cunts Are Still Running The World by Jarvis Cocker. Yes, they are.

Taxes, Taxes by Hank Penny is also self-explanatory…

The Disappointed by XTC could almost be written about the Lib Dems at the moment – in this case ‘the ones who broke their hearts’ are the voters who deserted in the last hours.

The Trader by The Beach Boys is a song about the evils of imperialist capitalist exploitation, by a band who are thought of as the ultimate conservative whitebread Americans but at the time had two black South African members and a Puerto Rican keyboardist.

Things Are Changing (For The Better) by Diana Ross And The Supremes would be nice if it were true, wouldn’t it? This is instrumentally a Phil Spector production of a Brian Wilson song, but with the Supremes’ vocals replacing those of Darlene Love and the Blossoms (whose version isn’t on Spotify).

This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie is here because Spotify doesn’t have any versions of The Land, the Liberal Democrat party song, and this has a very similar message.- “There was a big high wall there, that tried to stop me/The side was painted, said ‘private property’/But on the back side, it didn’t say nothin’/This land was made for you and me”.

And Tramp The Dirt Down by Elvis Costello is far, far kinder about Thatcher than I would be…

The land, the land,
‘Twas God who made the land,
The land, the land,
The ground on which we stand,
Why should we be beggars
With a ballot in our hand?
God gave the land to the people.

Hark! The sound is spreading from the east and from the west!
Why should we work hard and let the landlords take the best?
Make them pay their taxes on the land just like the rest!
The land was meant for the people.

The land, the land,
‘Twas God who made the land,
The land, the land,
The ground on which we stand,
Why should we be beggars
With a ballot in our hand?
God gave the land to the people.

Clear the way for liberty, the land must all be free,
None of us shall falter from the fight tho’ stern shall be.
‘Til the flag we love so well shall fly from sea to sea,
O’er the land that is free for the people.

The land, the land,
‘Twas God who made the land,
The land, the land,
The ground on which we stand,
Why should we be beggars
With a ballot in our hand?
God gave the land to the people.

The army now is marching on, the battle to begin,
The standard now is raised on high to face the battle din,
We’ll never cease from fighting ’til the victory we win,
And the land is free for the people.

A couple of days ago, two teenagers died. This is, unequivocally, a bad thing. It’s also not, unfortunately, that unusual.

These two teenagers were, by all accounts, taking methadone, a highly dangerous opiate. They were also, apparently, drinking a large amount of alcohol – which is not only dangerous in itself, but which when combined with methadone can lead to respiratory problems and even death. They were also taking a substance called mephedrome (4-methylmethcathinone) but which the press, for God only knows what reason, are referring to as ‘miaow miaow’ (a large number of people have as a result also been asking if they’d been taking yellow bentines or clarky cat) – an amphetamine-type stimulant. It is suspected that one or more of these substances may have contributed to their deaths.

So far, so reasonable. It’s the kind of thing that happens all too often, but it *does* happen, and there appears very little we can do about it.

The press, however, have been stating that ‘miaow miaow’ – and that alone – *definitely* killed these two people. This is entirely possible – having spent a couple of years working with mental patients with substance dependencies, I am all too familiar with the damage amphetamine-type stimulants can cause (even caffeine, in sufficiently large doses, can do some alarming things to you, as I discovered myself about eighteen months ago – caffeine is an amphetamine-type stimulant too). However, given that as far as can be discerned only one other death has ever been caused by use of the substance, which is used by (at least) thousands of people, I would suggest the burden of proof is on those making this claim.

The response of the Conservative Party to this has been instructive. It hasn’t been just to suggest criminalising mephedrone (I wouldn’t agree with this, but given the drug’s pharmacology it would at least be consistent with current drug policy), but to say they will criminalise ‘all legal highs’.

This has led to many jokes on Twitter about coffee and chocolate being banned, but to be honest I don’t think we should be giving them ideas. Just because something sounds insane and unworkable doesn’t mean that the current political classes won’t try to do it anyway, as the history of the last thirty years should show anyone. Just because it’s pretty much impossible to formulate a legal definition of ‘legal high’ doesn’t mean they won’t pass such a law.

Now, I’m voting for the Liberal Democrats this election, because I agree with the majority (though far from all) of their policies, because I think their elected representatives are generally doing a good job, and because the other two major parties are, frankly, evil.

However, given that the Lib Dems are unlikely in the extreme to form the next government – and I’d be very surprised if we even get in in my constituency (which has, allowing for boundary changes, had the same MP for forty years, and apart from a four-year period in the thirties has had a Labour MP since 1922 or 1906, depending on which of the old constituencies that make it up you look at) – here’s something that could make me vote for either of them.

If they’d just promise to *DO NOTHING* for five years.

I would gladly vote for a government that I knew was – unlike every government of my lifetime – not going to actively make things worse. Even if things stayed just as bad as they are, just *NOT MAKING THEM WORSE* would be good enough for me. No new legislation passed, no big organisational changes, just let everyone get on with it for five years.

A government that would say “We’re not going to start any more wars of aggression, or torture any more people. We’ll keep the current ridiculous drug laws, but if someone discovers a slightly different method of getting off their tits, good for them. If the DEBill gets passed before the election, we’ll keep it, but not criminalise all the trivial technical ways round it that will become popular two days after it passes. We’ll keep all the laws against ‘extreme pornography’, but if someone somewhere discovers a new way of getting themselves off, we won’t stop them. The schools and hospitals will continue to be crap, but we won’t, for example, get rid of two more mental health beds every single day on average, like Labour have since 1997, so they won’t get any crapper. The BBC will keep producing crap that you don’t watch, but it’ll still be there for at least another five years and its executives won’t have to grovel to us and chop bits off in order to keep the service going. We won’t deliberately inflate any massive economic bubbles that take money from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of ‘growth’, and if any bubbles happen and then burst, we won’t take money from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of ‘recovery’. Things will still be bad in five years – but they won’t be *WORSE*”

If either of the two main parties were to say that – and mean it – they’d get my vote.

But as it is, I’ll be voting for a party which not only won’t make things worse, it might even make things slightly better if it’s given the choice. Why not join me?

I’ll be doing one of the book club posts later tonight, and another tomorrow, (and replacing the comics post I *was* going to do with a Superman Pop-Drama on Monday) but I thought that if any of that gargantuan number are still sticking around, I should probably point them to other things they may like.

Alex Wilcock is posting (and revising) the text of his Love & Liberty as part of a ‘What the Lib Dems Stand For’ series. He’s also rightly angry about Blair and the Iraq inquiry. (Comments to the latter have unfortunately become Neil Craig’d)

Will Howells pointed me to this interesting-looking blog looking at each Beatles album one at a time.

Jazz Hands Serious Business is as unimpressed by the iPad as I am.

The Mindless Ones have a competition to see who can come up with the best British-stereotype supervillain.

Debi, rather bravely, writes about an earlier post she’d made which some perceived as racist, and accepts some of their criticisms.

And Andrew Rilstone has released a second book. Very different from his earlier Watchmen book, called ‘Where Dawkins Went Wrong’ this is a collection of his writings on religion, and especially his utter and absolute demolishing of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. It’s literally impossible to have any intellectual respect left for Dawkins after reading Rilstone’s analysis of his work. The majority of my readers would consider themselves at least mildly anti-religion – if you want proof that it is possible to be a liberal, decent, intelligent, articulate writer while still being a believing Christian, then you should read this.

(NB, this is not to be taken as me stating anything about my own religious beliefs or lack of same – I have very deliberately and consciously refused *any* discussion of what or whether I believe when it comes to religion on this blog, because it’s a subject on which I think it’s literally impossible to talk sensibly. Anyone who really wants to know can always ask off-blog).

Johnson said that he didn’t want ‘confusion between scientific evidence and policy’, and the Lib Dem ‘blogosphere’ has been up in arms as a result.

And they’ve all been saying the same thing – ‘we need to base our drugs policy on the best scientific evidence, so of course Nutt shouldn’t have been sacked’.

And they’re wrong.

Of course, Nutt’s assessment was largely correct, but by complaining about his sacking people are falling into a classic trap of letting your opponents define the terms of debate. People are all arguing that “if the scientific advice says something’s harmless, we should use that as the basis of our policy”.

Piffle. Whatever happened to the harm principle? Lib Dems practically worship Mill (and Taylor, who should really be credited as a co-author), yet people don’t seem to have really internalised “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.“

How dangerous drugs are, what any scientific advisor says, should have no bearing on the matter. It should have a bearing on peripheral policy matters – for example taxing drugs for the increased burden they cause to the NHS, or whether drugs should be allowed to be sold in doses large enough to be used as a poison (in much the same way we limit the amount of paracetamol that can be sold), or whether warning labels need to be placed on the packaging to ensure people using them have full information. But on the main question involved – that of whether they should be criminalised – science doesn’t come into it. It’s a matter of principle.

And Johnson’s here actually being more principled than we are. He belongs to a party that believes that it’s OK to ban things just because they’re nasty and unpleasant and they smell and only the wrong sort of people do them. So if he says he doesn’t want scientific advice to confuse matters that’s absolutely fine. By his own lights, he’s actually in the right.

But we’re supposed to belong to a party that believes you should let people do what they want to themselves so long as they don’t hurt other people. Not ‘what they want so long as it has been deemed safe by a scientific adviser’ or ‘what they want so long as a full risk assessment has been carried out’. The scientific evidence clearly shows that having enough vitamins and taking half an hour’s brisk exercise every day is good for you – should we perhaps enforce that as policy as well?

Cameron is trying to recreate the ‘big tent’ informal coalition that Blair and Ashdown had in 1997, trying to get us to unite against Labour as we previously united against the Tories (by the major party definition of ‘unite’ which is ‘agree with us in everything we do, even when we’re quite clearly insane’. See also Liberal Conspiracy’s idea of big-tent coalition), but it’s fundamentally misguided. His piece is just inane drivel, and its main reason for existing appears to be to try to persuade people considering the Lib Dems that the Tories would be the same – about as far from the truth as it gets.

The reason for Cameron writing this now – other than as a spoiler for the Lib Dem conference – is because Nick Clegg has just put out his most significant contribution to liberal thought so far, a pamphlet called Liberal Moment , which seems to skewer hopes of a Tory/Lib Dem alliance for good.

In the past, I’ve never been hugely impressed by Clegg as leader, but one thing I’ve always thought impressive was the way he could articulate genuinely liberal views, but in a way that would appeal to the Daily Mail crowd (something that other people, notably Alix Mortimer, have seen as a downside). However, here he is instead putting forward a case for Liberal values as part of a progressive strand of thought, which I’m far more comfortable with.

‘Progressive’ is a much-abused term, but reading through Clegg’s paper, one can see a rough definition emerging – for Clegg, ‘progressive’ appears to mean a commitment to both freedom and equality.

Clegg’s analysis – actually similar to the Blairite ‘big tent’ analysis of the mid-90s – is that there is a fundamental split between ‘progressives’ in this sense and conservatives, but that there is a further split in the progressive side between, roughly, those who think equality is important insofar as it helps bring about greater freedom, who gravitate toward the Liberal Democrats (and before them the Liberal Party) and those who think freedom is important insofar as it helps bring about greater equality, who gravitate toward the Labour Party.

Clegg argues – correctly in my view – that the two are natural allies, despite their very real differences. He then goes on to talk about how the Labour Party overtook the Liberal Party as the dominant progressive force in British politics in the early part of the 20th century, partly as a result of electoral pacts between the two, partly because of the splits within the Liberals themselves and their partial abandonment of some of their principles, but also – as he, rather uniquely for a Liberal (Democrat) admits – because the social democratic/democratic socialist principles of the Labour Party genuinely had something to add.

However, he argues that right now, top-down, centralised, statist governance is a bad idea, for much the same reasons I argue here, and that the failures of the Labour government have been linked to its authoritarian tendencies and wish to micromanage every part of people’s lives:

So this pamphlet starts and finishes with a particular view about the great differences in the Labour and Liberal traditions of progressive thought, and an assertion that as Labour heads fordefeat at the next election the future of progressive politics lies in liberalism. In much the same way that Labour was on the right side of events over a century ago when the Liberal party was not, I will argue that a reverse ‘switch’ in which the Liberal Democrats can become the dominant progressive force in British politics is now more possible than ever before.

What Clegg is definitely not doing here is using ‘liberal’ as a synonym for moderate, as most people appear to (see for example this post by Lawrence Miles – ” To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that’s wholly founded on exploitation.” That’s what ‘liberal’ in the USian/Liberal Conspiracy sense means, but has little to do with real liberalism).

Unfortunately, in the past the Lib Dems have, in our PR if not in our actions, encouraged that understanding of ‘liberalism’ as being smack in the middle (see, for example, this incredibly irritating bit of Littlejohnism from John Cleese. This mostly came about with the alliance of the Liberal Party with the SDP – who really *were* moderate centrists with fairly wooly ideas. The old joke “What do we want? Moderate change! When do we want it? In due course!” has sometimes been all too accurate when it comes to the ‘message’ the party has put out, even though since at least the early 90s we have been far more radical in our demands for change than either of the major parties.

In truth, Liberalism is, as Clegg is finally stating explicitly, a coherent political philosophy in its own right, equidistant from both the two major parties but in the same way the apex of an isoceles triangle is equidistant from the points at the base – further away from either than they are from each other.

Clegg ‘[refuses] to even contemplate’ ‘fall[ing] in line with Gordon Brown to hold back the rise of the Conservatives’ because in the ways that matter Labour and the Conservatives are largely indistinguishable, but he recognises in this paper that many of the aims of Labour members and supporters are ones that many Lib Dem members share. Fundamentally, though Clegg never puts it quite this way, the Lib Dem disagreement with Labour is about means, whereas with the Tories it’s about ends. Lib Dems don’t believe that government micromanagement can ever deliver a fairer world as Labour believe – let alone a freer world, which is what we want even more. But the Tories’ ‘solution’ – to punish the poor and disenfranchised for their position in society – is no solution at all.

There are individual aspects to Liberal Moment with which I find myself disagreeing – the involvement of victims in the justice system is always something that worries me, so the proposals for allowing vandals to say sorry to their victims and negotiate a way to make amends with them rather than going through the court system sound troubling. But that’s a minor point.

A more major one was pointed out by Gavin R in the comments here, when I linked this paper on Friday:

a keyword search suggests a worrying trend. Just look at these word frequencies in a text of about 70 pages:

women: 2
woman: 1
gender: 0
sex: 0
sexuality: 0
patriarchy: 0
gay: 0

Which is a very good point, and I for one would have liked to have seen something about how liberal values apply to those areas – especially as they’re a very obvious area in which we differ from the other two parties. I always liked Alex Wilcock’s suggestions for party slogans – “Liberal Democrats: the party that says sex is all right” and “To tell the Daily Mail to fuck off, vote Lib Dem”. It would have helped to contextualise the much-hyped “Real Women” policy discussion Jo Swinson is leading, as well, minor aspects of which (changing ASA rules so adverts containing photoshopped pictures would have to have a disclaimer) have been rather over-publicised, outside of a larger policy context.

But overall, Liberal Moment does its job – to put Lib Dem policy ideas into a larger political/philosophical context, and to make a clear argument for the Liberal worldview. It’s not going to replace Mill any time soon, but as a flag in the ground, saying “HERE is why we’re not Tories, and HERE is why Labour are wrong” it’s far better than I dared hope from a leader who has previously appeared to be a bit of a lightweight.

More like this, please.

I was only going to linkblog today, but I’m going to have to push on with these… I’ve said for a while that were this series of posts ever to be complete, it would actually take the form of two full books – one non-fiction series of essays, and one gigantic fanfic epic crossover novel. Today my friend Tilt, based on the content of my earlier posts, sent me an email titled “My silly idea for the day” which was actually the core of the plot of the epic fanfic thing (which remains unwritten, but is entirely there in my head). So if people are jumping ahead, I need to write more.

This one’s on politics and science, but it does relate to the others in the series…

As most of you know, I am a member of the Liberal Democrats, a British political party that are liberal in the British, rather than the American, sense – while for the most part the beliefs of the party as a whole (though not of every member) tend to overlap with the USian definition, for us liberalism is based around the idea of allowing the individual the maximum freedom to run their life as they wish – the role of the state being to remove, rather than to add, restrictions on individual liberty. (In the opinion of some/most of us, those restrictions include things like poverty, illness and lack of education, so the state has a role in those areas).

So we support things like greater democratic representation and accountability, mutualism, devolution of power to local levels, civil liberties, and so on.

Now, I actually support these things because I’m arrogant and stroppy – I’m arrogant enough to think that no-one is my better, or knows better than me about… well, anything really, but certainly not about how I should live my life, and I’m stroppy enough that if anyone tells me what to do I’ll do the opposite just to spite them. So I want as much freedom as possible for myself. Politically, that gives me two choices – either become absolute dictator of the world and crush the wretched masses under my bootheel for all eternity, or try to get freedom for *everyone*, so I can have some myself. The first sounds like a lot of work, to be honest. and I’m also phenomenally lazy, so I joined the Liberal Democrats.

However, if you *tell* people that you support a political position because you’re arrogant, stroppy and lazy, they tend to see that as a bad thing, for some reason (this kind of thinking almost tempts one to the whole bootheel thing…) so it’s better to say you do it because it makes sense practically, or there’s evidence it’s a better system, or something like that. Happily, this happens to be the case – it’s called Ashby’s Law Of Requisite Variety.

Assuming that governments are meant to control things (and we can argue about what, and how much, they should control, and why, but their function does appear to be to control stuff), then they are subject to the laws of cybernetics, which despite what many many bad SF TV shows have told you isn’t about turning people into hideous machine creatures, but is rather the science of control systems. Ashby’s Law is the most fundamental law in cybernetics, and simply states that if you want to control a system, you must have more options open to you than there are possible things that can happen.

As an example, say you’re driving a car, you don’t want just a button that says ‘left’ and one that says ‘right’ – you want a steering wheel, so you can constantly correct the direction. Even if it just goes in a straight line, you need to be able to compensate for drift, by making minute changes. Anything other than a steering wheel with a huge number of possible positions will cause you to crash almost instantly.

The same goes for controlling systems made of people. You need to have an option for *every possible thing that can go wrong*.

Now, the problem with this is that people can do quite a lot of different things, and there are quite a lot of them. And that means quite a lot of different things can happen.

For example, say you’re a manager, and you manage three people, and you have to keep track of all the different relationships between them. And say the only real relationship you’re interested in is who’s ‘formed an alliance’. With three people, A, B and C, there are only three possible ‘alliances’ of two or more people – A&B vs C, A&C vs B, B&C vs A. With four people, that number increases to thirty-six. With five, two hundred. So imagine how many possible ‘alliances’ could be made in a country of sixty million… (hint – it’s several orders of magnitude higher than the number of subatomic particles in the known universe…)

If you want to control that, then, you need as many options open to you as there are possibilities. Clearly, no government has more options open to it than there are particles in the universe – and even if it did have, it would be impossible to find any way to choose between them. So what can a government do?

The simple answer is – prioritise, localise, and allow as much freedom as possible. The effect of Ashby’s law is that attempts at control actually lead to increased chaos (in fact one can formulate Ashby’s law as a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics – anyone who thinks they’ve found a perfect method of controlling people with no unforeseen results, that won’t lead to increased societal chaos, is saying something that is *exactly equivalent* to having invented a perpetual motion machine, or at best a time machine, and their claims should be treated with the same scepticism one would apply to those claims).

But we don’t care about some kinds of chaos – or shouldn’t, anyway. It might be possible for a hypothetical government to, for example, completely stop all murders from happening (a desirable kind of control), but at the expense of, say, a relaxation in what society considers an acceptable dress code (a kind of control that doesn’t matter to our hypothetical government). The key is to only try to control – at the national level – a small, relatively simple, subset of things, and accepting that this control *will* have unforeseen, probably bad, side-effects – so only trying to control something when the alternative is worse than the side-effects, rather than trying to micro-manage away the side-effects as the current government does.

You then devolve as much as possible to low levels – a regional government has to deal with fewer factors than a national one – and allow as much freedom as possible in implementing the details.

Incidentally, this is *not* saying ‘let the market decide’/'let corporations run everything’ – large corporations. some of which have a hundred thousand or more employees, and on top of that have millions or billions of customers, are just as inefficient as any government for exactly the same reasons (in fact, more inefficient – democratic governments have to pay at least token attention to the will of the people, which corporations don’t). It’s saying that if you’re going to have publicly funded education or healthcare – as I think you should – the decisions should be made by pupils and teachers, or patients and care staff, rather than being based on centrally-imposed one-size-fits-all targets.

This is also *NOT* saying that ‘progressive’ aims shouldn’t be pursued by government – in fact if governments stop trying to do stupid stuff like punish kids for swearing at old ladies or give everyone in the country an ID card, they’ll be able to concentrate on doing stuff like health services and education *properly*. Governments have power, but it’s not unlimited, and the problem comes when they think it is…

But what does this have to do with Darkseid and Doctor Who? Find out tomorrow

Before I start, I’d better explain what GNU/Linux is, since many people won’t know what it is. About 25 years ago, a computer programmer and political activist called Richard Stallman decided that he didn’t agree with copyright restrictions, End User License Agreements and other things that stopped him sharing computer programs that he liked with his friends – he’d been brought up to think of sharing as a good thing, and also came from a scientific background and valued the free sharing of information. He also liked to play around with computers and disliked being unable to improve programs due to lack of source code (the human-readable form of computer programs which is how they’re written and modified).

Rather than break the law by sharing these programs without the permission of the copyright holders, Stallman, who seems to be rigorously principled to a fault, decided to make it unnecessary for anyone else to ever have to face this choice, by creating an entire operating system (an operating system is the set of programs that allows you to run your computer, like Microsoft Windows) and all the programs you might want to run on it, and make it all free (as in freedom) – anyone who wanted could share it with anyone else, and could make any changes to the source code they wanted. Stallman used something he called ‘copyleft’ (a term that originally came from Discordianism) to ensure that the programs would always be available freely – he copyrighted the programs, then released them under a license which says that you can redistribute modified versions, but only if you distribute the source code for your changes and let anyone else do the same. Stallman founded a charity, the Free Software Foundation, which was used to promote the creation of an operating system called GNU (which stands for GNU’s Not UNIX – UNIX being a popular operating system for business and academic use – GNU was designed to be as much like UNIX as possible, so people who knew one system could use the other, and so bits of GNU could replace the equivalent bits of UNIX and be used before the complete system was created).

Over the years the GNU project has managed to create pretty much everything one could need to run on a computer, ranging from compilers (the programs that you use to turn source code into programs you run) right through to web browsers or programs for typesetting music scores. However, one part of the GNU operating system remained unfinished. This part was the kernel – the part that communicates between the software and hardware. Ten years after Stallman announced the GNU project, a Finnish student called Linus Torvalds produced one. His kernel was called ‘Linux’ , and soon many people started referring to the whole system as that, as I do in speech, but the GNU project, who after all wrote the majority of the system, prefer the term GNU/Linux.

Anyway, what we have is a whole system of free software (which some people also call Open Source Software) – everything from web browsers to office suites to graphics software to games. All these are free to download, and you’re free to share them and, if you’re a programmer, to modify them and share your changes.

But why should Liberals, specifically, use Free Software and the GNU/Linux system?

Most people who argue for GNU/Linux do so on the basis of technical superiority, and as far as that goes it is a far better system, technically, than Microsoft Windows (I don’t know enough about Mac OSX to judge it, but that *seems* to be about equal to GNU/Linux technically – I could be very wrong though) , in terms of security (you don’t get viruses on GNU/Linux), speed, reliability and so on. But most people don’t really care about that – they care about playing their music, browsing the web, IMing with friends, playing solitaire, and you can do all those things equally well using any modern operating system.

Other people argue that all proprietary software is evil. I’m hardly likely to do that – I work for a proprietary software company myself, and I use a *very* small number of proprietary programs (the proprietary version of unrar for reading cbr files, a proprietary piece of firmware needed for my laptop to function, and Spotify until Jotify gets better playlist support) at home. If someone wants to use proprietary software and is willing to accept restrictions in order to get something they want, that’s fine by me.

But what I *do* think matters is the issue of freedom – and the issue of trust, When you are running proprietary programs you are essentially trusting the vendor that the program does what they say it does and only what they say it does. You are also giving up a lot of control over your own machine.

Apple, for example, will only allow programs sold through its own store to be run on the iPhone, and have absurd restrictions on what they sell there – such as cutting all the swear words out of a dictionary, and still only allowing it to be sold to adults. Now, you *could* always jailbreak the iPhone and install what you want on it – except that Apple are currently fighting in court to have that ruled illegal. Apple are actually one of the worst companies for this kind of thing, trying to make it illegal to run software you want to run on your own machine. They’ve tried the same thing to try to stop people being able to use an iPod without their iTunes software.

More disturbing, and more widely reported, is Amazon’s deletion of copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from their Kindle ebook reader – along with any notes the users had made.

Now, in all these cases you can argue that the people who bought those items entered into an agreement, and they know the risks – and that’s true to an extent. Certainly I wouldn’t suggest that what Amazon, for example, did was illegal. But almost *every* proprietary software license contains clauses that allow this sort of thing, and many programs have the technical ability to do these things too. Whenever you run a proprietary program, you’re ceding control of your machine and your data to another individual or corporation.

Which, I repeat, is fine if you trust them. But it does raise the all-too-real possibility of digital book-burning. Imagine that you buy a book to read on the Kindle, and the government, as is its occasional wont, decides that that book is naughty and should be banned. They can take out a court order to force Amazon to delete every single copy of that book in existence, knowing they have the technical means to do it. If a book is published only as an ebook – as increasing numbers are – then removing every single copy of that work in existence becomes a real possibility, realer than it ever has been before.

Or the government could get, say, Microsoft, to agree that any time anyone uses encryption software on its operating system, a decrypted copy of the encrypted data is stored on a government database – just to fight terrorism, you understand…

These things are real threats when you cede control of your machine to anyone else. By running free software, you have absolute control of your machine and your data – even if you don’t choose to take that control (as most of us won’t) in most ways, you know you have it and therefore others don’t.

In other words, GNU/Linux is based on the principles of free speech, is developed as a mutual, co-operative international project, adding value to the commons (and it is valuable – companies like IBM, Novell and Red Hat make billions from GNU/Linux while still giving back code which others can use freely) and protects the individual (to an extent) both against an overbearing state *and* against monopolistic corporations – could you really get anything more Liberal than that?

Now, even five years ago I wouldn’t have recommended any casual users use GNU/Linux. Back then it was very difficult to install software and get it working – it could take several hours’ struggle to be able to, for example, listen to a RealAudio stream. These days it couldn’t be simpler to install software – it’s certainly *much* simpler on GNU/Linux than on Windows. Say you want to install a program to calculate your menstrual cycle. You open ‘Synaptic Package Manager’ from the menu, click ‘search’, type ‘menstruation’ and you’ll be given a list of programs to choose from. Click one of them, click ‘mark for installation’, click ‘apply’ and voila, your menstruation calendar is now on your computer. Same goes for adventure games, databases, MP3 playing software, word processors, screensavers, video software, ham radio programs, Atari emulators, statistics packages, or anything else you could want for a home computer.

It’s so easy that my (completely non-technical) mum has been using GNU/Linux exclusively for a year now with no problems, as have my six-year old nephew and eleven-year-old niece when they visit my parents (my nephew loves playing Pingus). None of them have had the slightest difficulty doing anything they want on it (well, that’s a lie – I had to give my mum a little telephone tech support to get Yahoo! Chess working for my dad a week or two after she started using it).

There isn’t one standard version of GNU/Linux – rather it comes in ‘distributions’, which are collections of software put together either by companies or by groups of volunteers. Each distribution exists for a different purpose, because anyone can change the software to fit what they want. My personal favourite distribution is Debian , but some people seem for some reason to find that a little difficult. On the other hand a Debian-based distribution called Ubuntu is generally regarded as the best for beginners (this is the one my parents use) but is still perfectly good for more experienced users (my wife uses it, and she used to use Slackware, which is generally regarded as only for the most seriously technical people out there).

There’s also an Ubuntu-based distribution called gNewSense which contains only absolutely free software (Debian and Ubuntu both let you install non-free bits if there’s no free option and they’re needed to run your hardware). That might not work on some hardware , especially laptops, but if it’ll work on your system then you can be sure you’re running an *absolutely* free system (rather than just a 99.7% free version like mine).

Download an Ubuntu CD and give it a go – you can install it on your computer and leave Windows on there as well. It’s the Liberal thing to do…

As far as I can see there has been no substantive change in policy here. Originally, it was going to be compulsory to go on the ID database when you applied for or renewed a passport, but otherwise ‘voluntary’, at least at first, but you’d definitely get an ID card when you got your passport. Now, you’ll only get the card if you ask for it, but everything else is unchanged.

The card itself has never been the primary issue for No2ID and the other civil libertarian organisations that have opposed the ID card scheme. Which is not to say it’s a *good* thing, by any stretch of the imagination – as far as I’m concerned the idea of a compulsory ID card would effectively make everyone criminal by default for the ‘crime’ of not wanting to pay a regressive tax in order to have the ‘privilege’ of proving your identity to people who don’t have any business asking for such proof in the first place.

But the problem has always been the national ID register itself. The idea of storing what amounts to someone’s entire life history – biological data, health records, financial data, records of all dealings with any government department, records of any dealings with authorised private contractors, address, marital status, income and much more – on a single, central database accessible by anyone working in government – has some slight problems.

Firstly, of course, there’s the fact that it can’t possibly work, but that’s hardly a new thing with multi-billion-pound government IT contracts. Oh, they can store the data, it just won’t be useful for anything…

Then there’s the fact that you will be obliged – for the rest of your life – to keep this data up to date, or face £1000 in fines. They’re not even having the decency to employ spies to watch over us all – we’re meant to do it ourselves!

Then there’s the matter of access. Work in a company that has a government IT contract but don’t want your boss to know about your visit to the STD clinic? Have a stalkerish ex who works at the Job Centre who you’d rather not know your new address? Well, you’d better trust to their sense of duty and professional ethics, then, hadn’t you? Because nothing else will stop them having that information…

And of course it’s going to stop benefit fraud, because nothing makes identity theft harder than having every single piece of information about everyone in the country collected onto one centralised system to which millions of people will have access…

So the very slight scaling back (for now) (and all I can see that has actually changed is that Manchester airport workers won’t be forced to have a card yet) of the obligation to have the card means nothing if the obligation to be on the database is kept. So once again this month (having skipped last month to see old horror films in Bradford – I’m not a very good activist really), I’ll be out campaigning with OpenID – Saturday 11th July 2009, 2pm-4pm, St Ann’s Square, Manchester.

But remember – the fact that they’re trying to make it *look* like we’ve won means they know they’ve lost. We’ve just got to back them down all the way…