CentreRight

All Fur Coat And Nae Knickers

I don't want to write about the PBR: first of all, I don't know what I could add to Andrew's masterly economic dissection, or Tim's withering political skewering, of its failures. Secondly, it's too depressing. I've had a rotten enough week at work (in the private sector we're already on zero per cent. pay rises, and headcount freezes or reductions, and doubling of productivity and so on - I know this will come as a surprise to any Labour minister who thinks that a fictional plan to limit public sector pay rises at some point in the fictional future is an "act" (in the fictional sense) of bravado) and I'm sorry, it's only a few weeks till Christmas.

I want to write briefly about the PMQ session which preceded the PBR. Mr Brown delivered a line which I'm guessing looked better when it was scribbled down on a briefing note than it did when delivered to the chamber. According to the Prime Minister, we Tories are all wind and no turbines.

The precise meaning of this gnomic utterance can be left to political theorists [clue: it means nothing]; I'm more interested in what is suggested by its deconstruction. The phrase is a direct allusion to what we west-coast Scots often say of our east-coast compatriots, perhaps in an effort to calm our envy of their delightful flats and that Festival hoo-hah and so on. It is not uncommon to hear expressed in Glasgow the view that Edinburgh is All Fur Coat And Nae Knickers. In other words, and as an example, that it is a town which would rather buy another delicious pot of piping hot Earl Grey tea, served in a nice china service, than pay for central heating, or, indeed, to fix that leaking roof.

Aliens 'Already Exist on Earth'. No kidding.

Munching some Super High Fibre Dorset cereal this morning (it takes an hour to eat a bowl, thus reducing daily calorific intake, because by the time you've finished one, you're ready to go back to bed for a rest), flicking through the web, I came across this - surely Earth-shattering - story in The Telegraph: Aliens 'Already Exist On Earth', a claim made by Bulgarian scientists. 

Who could they mean? There are some clues in the commentary supplied by Lachezar Filipov, who is the deputy director of the Bulgarian Space Research Institute. He opined: Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time.

He goes on to warn: Extraterrestrials are critical of the people's amoral behavio[u]r.

You have a right not to be married

On the Palace Pier in Brighton, in East Sussex's finest amusement arcade, there is a game, which I have played only once, but which has gripped my ability to form metaphor so completely that I think I must write it down in an effort to exorcise its hold. In the game, you are the holder of a hammer. On a board in front of you are perhaps a dozen holes, out of which, and in random order, protrude animatronic heads fashioned into simulacra of a common garden rodent. Your task in the game is to bash the heads of the "rodents" with the hammer, as soon as possible after they emerge from their lair, in order to prevent them from taking over your "garden". If you pride yourself on a phlegmatic approach to life, it can be a little disconcerting to find yourself, 45 seconds into the game, banging at the board with a frenzy which in most other circumstances would lead to an ambulance journey and a nice dark room.

Well. Life may not always imitate art; but it seems that politics may often imitate pier-end amusement arcade games. Because back in the news, again, is a proposal about which I'm quite sure I've written here at boring length in the past: the Law Society is again campaigning to give property rights to cohabiting couples, as though those couples were married. Worse, our party spokesman, Henry Bellingham, first of all welcomed these proposals, though David Cameron has stepped in and apparently ruled this out. Good.

Celebrity Endorsements

Following on from Jonathan’s disquisition yesterday on the utility of celebrity endorsements for political parties, a spy at CCHQ has leaked me some of the pre-prepared announcements which will be fed to the press in the run up to the election.

Katie Price, author
What peepaw nee’ to unnerstan’ is tha’ I’m a real person, I’m no’ chus some celebriddy fashion model oo lives ov er looks, tha’ was Jordan, an’ I’m no’ Jordan, I’m Kaydee, an’ peepaw nee’ to see beyond my breas, an’ thas why I’m definitely vo’ing for David Camron, cos I heard he reely lahked me noo breas, do you lahk them, they’re yooj ain’t they? I nee’d sumpin to ge’ over ma split from tha’ bloke, and noo breas were chus the thing, an it reely made me fink, ‘ow is chus lahk picking a new government ain’t it, noo breas for a noo Britain.

Heather Mills McBeatle, former wife
Well I’m so heavily involved in my charity work, it’s everything to me, and it’s all I care about, and I really don’t have time for politics, but when David Cameron - we had a very serious relationship when I was at Cambridge, not many people know, and I don’t like to go on about it, but actually I was a fellow of Old Souls, and I supervised David's research into quantum physics, actually I had to do all his work for him, really I got him his First, he could barely write his name! - anyway when poor David rang me up, first thing I thought was ‘Oh no, I can’t ever have an affair with a Prime Minister, it would like get in all the papers and I’d be all over the radio and TV and I couldn’t have that, it would distract from my charity work, which is everything to me’ but he goes ‘Would you endorse our party for the election?’ and I thought, for old times’ sake, yeah go on why not - everyone loves a party.

The Nice and the Good

-- Oi you two. Cut that out.
-- Paedophile! Paedo! Paedo!

My other half, Keith, is a lucky man, in many ways (see first three words of this sentence for details). More importantly, he's a good man. I'm also lucky (see first four words of first sentence for details), but I'm not so good. There's an Iris Murdoch novel called The Nice and The Good - but in any case most of her books deal with that never-ending conflict between the former and the latter: how hard it is to be good, when by the consequent actions, you may cause hurt to people you care about. My greatest failings, I'm aware, stem from an innate desire that other people are not discomfited by my existence; and this can lead, strangely, to failures of love. The ultimate, of course, in human failure.

-- I'm gonna kill you you little f*cker

Evidence, Belief, Action

If I'm invited to give a talk at a scientific or statistical conference, and I don't have any new results or stuff to talk about (or that I'm able to talk about), I have a standby talk that I dust down and deliver, which is an unpublished monograph, really, and the outline of a book I'm supposed to be writing with two friends, only work keeps getting in the way. The talk is called 'Evidence and Belief', and I use it to set out a paradigm for research in those areas of science where the stuff we don't know still outweighs, massively, the stuff that we do.

My thesis is quite simple. Evidence for, and inference about, parameters which describe some sort of population 'thing' of interest (like the clinical effect of an addictive substance on a population of its users) is properly summarised through something we (statisticians) call a likelihood function. Then your prior belief (prior, that is, to seeing the evidence) about that parameter of interest is properly modulated, in the light of the data (the evidence), via application of the Bayes' theorem to that likelihood function. But neither evidence about a parameter, nor belief about it (or related hypotheses) are the same thing at all as a decision to act on the basis of that evidence. Bayesians (the name for people who think like I do) think that risk (of a bad outcome) exists only at the point of the decision to act; not at the time when inference about the parameter of interest is carried out. 

You can tell where this is going.

You might assume, given this faith I have in a demarcation between evidence, belief and action, that I'd support the government's peremptory sacking of Professor David Nutt. He was supposed to produce evidence, and to make inference about the relative dangers inherent in drinking to excess vs popping an E (showing my age there, and, before you ask, no, never). But he was certainly not responsible for making a decision to act. That decision should be made by the relevant minister alone.

But David Nutt wasn't sacked for forcing a private member's bill into parliament and attempting to change the law. He didn't even campaign for the replacement of Alan Johnson as Home Secretary with our own spokesman, Chris Grayling, who thinks, er, exactly the same thing as Alan Johnson, except that he adds that Alan Johnson should have sacked Professor Nutt even more quickly (before he reported his scientific investigations at all, presumably).

In Denial

I have a very poor ability to adjust to the time-shifts caused by crossing the Atlantic, so on Friday night (about 2am here) as I was shuffling onto the hideous piece of metal that would carry my terrified body back home to London (my fear of flying is the only concession I will make to irrationalism in this article), after a week spent waking up, ravenous, at 3am, I wasn't paying much attention to the CNN broadcast being played full-blast at our heads by the 'helpful' airport authorities (do Americans have a terror of silence in public spaces?). But my colleague in the queue behind me was (paying attention, that is). More bloody denialism, he muttered. Which made me look up at the screen.

What was on the broadcast was an interview with a family who had refused to have their child treated for cancer, because they distrusted the medical opinion of their doctor, and because of 'religious objections'. The broadcaster had found another MD to praise their approach. Just before I got on the plane, I heard their preferred doctor shouting - I've seen patients cured of incurable cancers! Cured!

I checked just now (google really is an amazing engine) and my memory of the snippet I overheard isn't wrong. You can read the full transcript of that edition of (what I now see was) the Larry King show here, if you wish, but I'm not writing this to slag off American television or that poor family (who I see now, having read the full transcript, did in the end (but only after a court order) permit their child's cancer to be treated with conventional medicine).

What really stuck in my mind was the resigned nature of my colleague's muttering. More bloody denialism. It's everywhere, these days, this denialism. It's an offshoot of the pseudo-religions we invent to pass the time. First environmentalism became somewhat cultish, accusing those not willing to sign-up to the theory that The End Of Everything Is Nigh of being, in some sense, heretical. ('The science is settled' - that would be a first, then, in the history of the Universe). Then, I'm afraid, the people who oppose the hypothesis of man-made climate change started their own branch of fundamentalism: it was quite cold this summer, 'therefore' everything the climate-change activists say is wrong.

The state he is in

At first I thought it was Twitterish hysteria, when on my commute home yesterday I read that Brown had announced plans to lock up young mothers in hostels. But it's true. He does want to do this. Mothers of legal age but without a male partner will be put into hostels, under the 'care' of social workers.

This is how it ends. But how did it start?

OK first you have to pretend that you don't actually subscribe to any fixed view about the correct way to raise children. It'll take a few decades for this to notion to bed down and become a norm, so start early.

It'll help you if you create an industry which provides succour and income to the likes of Beatrix Campbell OBE, a woman whose intellectually incoherent columns for the Guardian never mention the role she played in creating the current climate of hysteria about child-care and the family. You can enlist the BBC to pump out a sequence of dramas and soap operas whose plots will pivot on - surprise! - a hidden case of child abuse. The 'work' of this industrious cohort will help embed the idea in the nation's subconscious that there's something frankly suspicious about the family unit.

Windows into souls

I've started to write this post on a number of occasions, but drawn back each time, because I don't want to add to the noise on the blogosphere about a topic I find innately distasteful. Tom Harris MP on his blog suggests that even to mention the subject of the Prime Minister's health is to add to the rumour-mongering, and I have a great deal of sympathy with that view.

However Andrew Marr asked 'the' question of the Prime Minister yesterday (according to Iain Dale, he asked specifically "A lot of people use prescription painkillers and pills to help them get through, are you one of those people?) and Nadine Dorries MP wrote what I thought was a splendid response to him this morning. If you read no further, read Nadine's thoughts. They're more or less the same as mine. I think 'prescription painkillers and pills' was a surrogate for 'antidepressants'.

Not love-bombing. Just bombing.

By yesterday, even those paid to take an interest in proceedings had given up. C4 news uttered not one word about the Liberal Democrat conference last night. This morning, Today in its first hour devoted maybe 15 seconds (in one of those dreary scripted two-way 'conversations') to say that not much good had happened. I suppose the Lib Dems should count themselves lucky that the mischievous Evan Davis didn't jump in to mention the beached whale as a fitting metaphor for the week's activities.

Even that would have been too kind. A whale, beached or otherwise, is a magnificent fact of creation: graceful and terrible and mighty; hardly a fitting metaphor for the Liberal Democrats who, in a week they must wish is quickly forgotten, offered at least a trinity of disasters:

(1) Nick 'Savage Cuts' Clegg put on his ill-fitting guise of the Angry Young Man of British Politics, in a determined effort to sound stentorian. I imagine him lying in bed, in the early hours, gazing at the ceiling, and dreaming, in that between-sleep-and-wakefulness moment, of the conversations to be overheard at the Dog and Duck: That Nick Clegg! 'E tells it 'ow it is! I'm gonna vote for 'im! Perhaps he sees himself as Elizabeth I? Manning-up in order to deliver the message that his party - let alone the electorate - doesn't want to hear? We will savagely scrap our free tuition policy! he - well, not announced, more sort of tangentially 'let it be known' - only to retract the (non)commitment when the massed ranks of something called the Federal Policy Committee responded with that most lethal of Lib Dem weapons, a letter to the Guardian.

Empirical Conservatism

You know our favourite CentreRight parlour game: someone asks "What is Conservatism?" and then we enjoy piling in to the ensuing debate (it's about freedom! it's about control! it's about individual liberty! it's about a strong society!). Today I'd like to offer an epistemic basis for a particular definition held by people like myself. In other words, how is it that I believe my theory is a good one? Not the only one, not even demonstrably the best one (though I think that it is): but I want to explore the grounds on which anyone could advance any theory about what a Conservative should be.

I'm going to offer a rationale - some a priori reasoning, made in the absence of data, about why my view of Toryism has validity. But I wouldn't be a scientist if I didn't offer to test that theory against some data, to see what empirical support there is for the views that I hold. Finally, building on these first two stages, I'm going to suggest some general principles for reasoning about how Conservatives should approach the business of both constructing and checking on policy and its outcomes.

First I'd better say as explicitly as possible what I think the core of Conservatism to be. It is good neighbourliness. You might remember the articles I've posted here about my 'swimming pool theory': that the best swimming pools are those where you look after the interests of the swimmers closest to you; and that from such neighbourly behaviour is induced globally optimum behaviour across the entire pool,  quite without the need for external rules, standard operating procedures or lifeguard bellowing. It doesn't take much to extend the analogy from a swimming pool to life in general: if you care about your neighbour, your whole street will be happier. If we let our streets be happier, the city will work better. And so on. I think this is the basis for the localism set out brilliantly, for example, in Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell's The Plan. The point is that good outcomes come from looking after people next to us, not from inorganic machine-rules imposed from above.

Labour's filthy law

Apologies for two bites at the Centre-Right cherry in one day! But the last posting was a personal musing based on a day in the art gallery. This one is full-on political. I want to build on Julia's excellent expression of distaste for the Independent Safeguarding Authority.

Labour's proposals for the ISA - which goes live on 12 October - mean that an initial cohort of 11.3 million Britons will be added to the database of 'checked' adults. That's only a start, of course. This insidious, filthy law - actually, would it be possible to design a worse one? - will not protect children - that much is obvious - but it will lead to:

• fewer adults giving up their time to help in their communities;
• an increase in mutual distrust;
• the fostering of the corrosive anti-child culture which causes most men to shy away from so much as talking to a child in public, even if the child is in visible distress;
• an increase in unchecked antisocial behaviour (who's going to risk approaching a gang of teenage troublemakers now?);
• a waste of money on pointless bureaucracy.

The Jerusalem Artichoke

The restaurant on the top floor of the National Portrait Gallery is as good a place as any for an epiphany, I should think. A slice of jerusalem artichoke speared by my fork, my eyes unfocused on the Whitehall rooftops, I'm thinking about coherence (because X, my lunch companion, is a distinguished philosopher of science whose central proposition, that the scientific method must be underpinned by a coherent system of induction, changed my life's direction entirely) and the tumble of thoughts arrive in their unordered, instant, torrent: Why do you care about coherence with regard to statistical inference but not political thinking? I wonder if X wants to see the Gay Icons exhibition? Do I really like jerusalem artichoke? - which last point brings me back to coherence; I have the epiphanetic insight and smile, as X asks: 

- Do you want to see the Gay Icons exhibition?

I laugh and - Oh, OK, go on.

Life that comes in from outside

Yesterday Twitter erupted, to general Labour delight, with a hashtag trending topic #welovethenhs. Superficially this was a reaction to Dan Hannan's comments on Fox News. (I haven't watched Mr Hannan's interview so I'm not going to refer to it again.) Here was the twittering populace, rising up, to give example after example of the wonderful health provision they had received from the NHS, so stick that up yer social insurance model, Johnny Foreigner. (It's funny, and sorry, this is already an interlude, and I must learn to stick to the topic, but it does strike me: do you remember, in the 80s, whenever the Left wanted us to change tack on any issue, it was Sweden this, Sweden that; but when it comes to the NHS, anyone who so much as examines the operating model in any other country is condemned as some sort of traitor? I think a Labour commenter on the Hannan thread yesterday actually used that word. Anyway it's us with the Sweden this, Sweden that thing now, come to education, and a good thing too).

Now, you know I seek selection for a parliamentary seat, and so I'm already aware that I have to choose my words carefully, because apparently if you deviate by an iota from any agreed script you are gaffe-prone and evidence of a split ('gaffe' is one of those words which is used by no-one except political obsessives; I think regular deployment is a signal to get out a bit more, to where people disagree with each other over a range of matters all the time. I work in scientific research, and I do wonder, sometimes, what would happen at work if we applied Westminster Village rules. A colleague presents a proposed experiment to investigate some therapeutic hypothesis. I don't respond by examining his case, but I jump up and shout: but this is a slightly different theory to any number of other ones published in the peer-reviewed literature! Yet you claim to work with us! This is a gaffe! You are destroying our scientific credibility! Unless we all say exactly the same thing all the time about everything we will be ridiculed as, er, gaffers, and, er...), but as it happens, on this topic, I don't have to choose my words with care, I can deploy them with gay abandon [stop it, Graeme - Ed]: I do love the NHS. I can't imagine Britain without it, and nor would I want to. Lots of us owe it everything.

Yesterday's coverage of the Baby P case

This will be a difficult post to express correctly, and I don't imagine it will be popular. I want to decry the manner of the disclosure of the identity of the killers of Baby P. Their names and detailed histories were all over the media yesterday. I watch C4 news after work, and even there we were taken through their background in what I found to be a prurient level of detail; much to the delight of Lynne Featherstone MP, even as she struggled to explain quite what benefit for anyone was being delivered by the disclosure.

I learned nothing about how to improve social services that wasn't obvious from the original reporting of the case. We did learn that Baby P's mother had had a dysfunctional upbringing, spent time in a care home as a result of her unimaginably vile home-life, that later she repeatedly became pregnant, was a drug abuser and so on. I don't think that knowing her name made the relevant sociological theory (that this form of background and behaviour can lead to a failure of love with regard to parenting, in this case a failure of such inhumane proportions that it sickens us to read about it) any more or less tenable. And what, anyway, does Lynne Featherstone MP plan to do with this information? Will she introduce a private member's bill to make it illegal for women to have children if they were placed in care themselves, as children? No, of course not. The important verb in the last-but-four sentence is 'can'. Not 'does', but 'can'. Knowing the specifics of one case tells us nothing that isn't already blindingly obvious for the general framework of policy.

Roy Hattersley and The Satanic Verses

Roy Hattersley has an article on CiF with which I don't completely disagree! The shock of this realisation made me read the whole thing through carefully. And thus I found, tucked away and disguised as a bittersweet nostalgic anecdote, a reference to Hattersley's single worst contribution to public life.

His article takes issue with Esther Rantzen's ideology-free approach to the duties of an MP. I'm no great fan of ideology (see constant references to the 'Bigger Picture', ad infinitum ad nauseam) but I do agree with Lord H that some form of vision for the society you would like to live in is essential for a member of parliament; seeking to represent everybody as though the MP is a reporter on a light-hearted consumer protection television programme, which was mercifully extinguished sometime in the late 20th century, is probably not a suitable model. Let's leave that though, because I don't bear Esther Rantzen any ill will. What interested me was Hattersley's recollection from his decades as Sparkbrook's member:

Saed Mogul told me: "I thought you were the Muslims' friend." So I proposed ending the Satanic Verses controversy with a compromise that offended everybody.

What Hattersley proposed, of course, wasn't a 'compromise'. He wanted to prevent publication of the paperback version of Salman Rushdie's novel. There are many things about this I find shocking, not the least of which was the Labour member for Sparkbrook's inability to state clearly: in this country we do not ban respectable works of fiction. Even at 18 I knew there was something wrong, something which felt craven about this, and that it worried me to inhabit a polity where some senior Labour politicians didn't think it worthwhile repeating this truth loudly.

The roots that clutch

I turn off from the main square, loaded with bubbling tourists, I'm like a branch cast into a stream, first rushing along with the current, now thrown down an offshoot, away from the crowd. No self-direction. I'm in a dark tunnel, where only a pinpoint of light, and what sounds like a murmuring at the far end, confirm that this is a tunnel, and not dark oblivion. Down the passage and I find another public square, smaller than Piazza Erbe, but, disconcertingly, packed with rows of silent people. They're watching a film of a Shakespeare play, projected onto the far building's wall, and they're watching it, not just with attention, they're watching it, with rapture. Since we're just two steps from Juliet's balcony, I'm glad that it's The Comedy of Errors and not you-know-what. I breathe in some communal peace before tiptoe-ing back to Erbe, and back to the hotel.

*

-- Which part of Britain is the most Victorian? I'm asked at lunch on Wednesday. Hmmm. I start to describe Glasgow, home to my alma mater, but Paolo interrupts me: -- No, not the architecture, the political culture. Well, that threw me. I was tempted to say -- Anytime that Melanchthon is posting an article to CentreRight, but I didn't. I'm now going to disagree as strongly as possible with a fellow CR contributor, without offending etiquette. I hope.

Abracadabra

While we're whiling away the minutes until the Norwich result comes out, my attention's been grabbed by a Twitter update from Luke Pollard, a Labour PPC in the south-west. Luke has discovered that the Harry Potter actor is a Lib Dem. Someone acidly remarked (OK it was me) that it makes sense for Harry Potter to be a Lib Dem: barely literate fiction, written for children, more popular than reason demands.

But it makes you think, no? Which of our favourite childhood characters would support which party, and why?

*
"My goodness," sighed Anne, plumping up the cushions in the caravan. "It's so lovely to be back here in this rolling rural idyll, but I do worry that we might not have sufficient access to our parents and their colleagues, in order to furnish us with the informal networks which middle-class children such as ourselves will use to propel themselves forward in the professions in later life!"

Sic itur ad astra

There's something black-dog about today, something heavy in the air, something that will never be good. Today is the seventh day of July.

*

Four years ago today ...  Londoners will pause and remember where we were, what we thought, the panic, the fear, the claustrophobia of the phone shutdown, the numb horror - this cannot be - when the first images came on screen ... the otherworldly quality of the victims emerging from the Underground - but that's Aldgate - the scarred wreck of the bus in the square ... the shameful relief when we finally made contact with our lover, our families, our friends ... shameful, because fifty-two families would not experience that relief.

What do we remember now? The daytime seems lost in a red mist of anger. Mainly I remember the babbling of the evening crowd. When Keith eventually came home from work (...) we went back out at once and got on a bus just to be with other Londoners and to show that we could. We went to Columbia Road, it was a sunny evening, and we found friends, we found a street alive with noise and people and among the shock and the thawing numbness, numbness thawing into anger, into fury, into a mix of relief and anger and disbelief, we found our friends, we touched one another. Everyone's eyes were all over the place, as though the walls of the solid London all about us were no longer to be relied upon. As indeed they weren't; one week later the same Hackney Road bus half-detonated in the aborted second-wave attack.

And pause: we remember the fifty-two and we shudder to think of their families, for whom four years will not have passed so quickly, I think. We remember the people who survived but with wounds they will carry to their end. Is it too much to think, too, of the goodness which was seen that day, in the bravery of the victims who survived? I hope it's not presumptious to cling to that, to take some borrowed strength (as if they don't carry enough) from their resilience, some hope from remembering the actions of those around them.

Today we will see the memorial to the fifty-two in its home in Hyde Park. The correct setting. A beautiful memorial; fifty-two pillars of steel, clustered into the four compass points of the atrocity, each pillar commemorating the human being whose life was taken. Like all that is good in human endeavour, the pillars reach for the stars. Stars so far away, stars which know nothing of our existence, stars from which we are all made, stars we stretch our arms towards.

Words fly up? I never thought it was wrong for our thoughts to remain below. We will visit the memorial this Saturday and give our words to the missing Londoners.

Swimming-Pool Pride

To know, know, know him, is to love, love, love him ... I do love that song. And it often pops into my mind when I'm swimming; Zen-like rhythmic splashing is a mental magnet for songs with a hypnotic beat of repetition. What I think about most in the pool is how hard it is to know other people. I do believe this: all we can change is all we can love, and all we can love is all we can know. Which begs the question - how do you know someone?

In scientific experiment, I would answer the related epistemological question How can I know something based on this observation? through a(n unpopular) adherence to logical positivism. But I don't think that gets me very far in understanding how to know another human being.

There's a glimpse of an answer to the human problem in a swimming pool. I don't know the name of a single fellow swimmer in the London Fields Lido, though most mornings I see more of their bodies than their close friends ever will. The strange contradiction, once you're immersed, and moving up and down the lane, is that despite the near-naked bodies all around you - the flash of a torso you catch as you turn your head to suck in air, the sliver of water falling from an outstretched arm, the flippering feet five seconds in front of your face - despite all this naked humanity, there's very little of the individual to be discerned. It's quite hard even to tell the difference between the men and the women, until you stop for a breather at one end or the other. In the quasi-religious hush which blankets the splashing lanes we are not Graeme, the introspective statistician who posts on CentreRight, or Mary, the green-voting bookseller with worries about her mortgage, or Dave, the carpet-fitter with his daughter enrolled at QMU - we are just early morning swimmers. All other identities shed, along with our clothing, I know nothing of the others save that we share this early morning passion. And I love them for it. Seriously. I feel a warmth of fellow-feeling which goes quite beyond a desire to discuss how to enact a tumble-turn. And after, when we're dressed and outside, fumbling over bike locks or peering at mobile phones, a residual warmth carries over, we nod and smile in that gentle English way, before parting to get on with the rest of the day (and not much else will be as good as that first hour).

The view from Steerage

I'm a huge fan of Nick Cohen's writing and his latest piece, in Standpoint magazine, is well worth a read. He writes about the inchoate and yet civilised anger of the public to the recent sequence of revelations regarding the abuse of our money, in both the City and in Parliament. I think it's the first time I've read a coherent narrative describing my gut response to both events:

When the Titanic sank, it was said that the plebs in steerage watched as first-class passengers hogged the places in the lifeboats. Today's plebs could be forgiven for sharing their astonishment as they watch the executive class hog public money as the country goes down.

Worth reading the whole thing here [updated 11.40am with a fixed link!]

Speaker Shepherd, please

If we needed any more evidence about the failure of this particular House to 'get it', their apparent desire to elect Margaret Beckett as Speaker surely concludes debate on the matter. I have no animus against Mrs Beckett, who has been used by her party as its 'face', whenever matters have got electorally tough, for the last three decades. Whenever Labour get a drubbing in an election, it's Mrs Beckett who is wheeled onto the news programmes (insert favourite caravanning metaphor here) to spin whatever her party's current untenable line might be. This role appears to be transitioning to Chris Bryant, have you noticed? A figure of (unmalicious) ridicule. Which underlines the inappropriate nature of Mrs Beckett's candidacy. The speakership should not be a sinecure for a ministerial parliamentarian in the twilight of her career. 

Richard Shepherd should be made Speaker, from the pool of available candidates. He has spent his career campaigning for Freedom of Information, through the long, lonely decades before it became the leitmotif of this post-bureaucratic age. He's almost visibly sensitive to the importance of the words he chooses when he speaks in the chamber; something which you would imagine would be a sine qua non for an elected member, but which rarely appears to be the case. Mr Shepherd's vibration of care over the words he releases is often alluded to, usually (by implication) as a reason to reduce the esteem in which he is held.

I find this sick-making, to be honest. The words of parliamentarians are the tools with which they craft our laws, and set the parameters for our liberty. I would prefer everytime, when faced with the alternative, the verbal care of Mr Shepherd. There has been little sight more depressing this last decade than the clucking of the Labour MP for Android North, mouthing his or her whip-written speech, in the hope of being captured in the Prime Ministerial doughnut on the six o'clock news. Everything we need to know about the unfitness of this House to be tasked with selecting a new Speaker is there, in front of our faces, everytime those panting puppets are called to speak in debate.

Conditional on Mr Shepherd not being elected, the least worst option is Ann Widdecombe. Even if it were not likely that she would implement some much-needed reforms (and it surely is likely that she would) her candidacy is time-limited by the date of the next general election. What is so overwhelmingly obvious to everyone (apart from the Westminster hothouse, it appears) is that we require not just a new Speaker, but a totally new House. Reboot the House of Commons. That re-legitimised House must start by selecting a proper Speaker, free from the whip-soaked shenanigans with which we are currently cursed, shenanigans due to the dismal arithmetic of Labour's current, temporary, parliamentary majority.

Ofsted report: Gordon Brown, teacher

Gordon Brown has admitted that he has been "hurt" by the personal attacks on him during the failed attempt to oust him this month, and said that he might move to teaching after he leaves office. (Today's Guardian).

Dear Headmaster,

Please find attached the Ofsted report on the latest addition to your teaching faculty, Mr Gordon Brown. As you know, we observed his performance over a range of subjects, and hope that our findings will help his very real, very personal journey, upwards, onwards, twirling, twirling, twirling, always towards the stars!

kind regards
Lettitia Prey

History
Mr Brown took an, er, unusual approach to this subject, telling his students that prior to 1997, the United Kingdom had suffered many decades of unremitting plague and doom ('The era of Boom-n-Bustism', as he called it), which had left the economy in tatters, the rainswept streets strewn with rubbish, and that the only sound to be heard in the never-ending twilight was a sort of low, keening wail of despondency. His demonstration of this wailing was perhaps the highlight of this lesson. After 1997, or 'Year Zero' as Mr Brown taught it, the country bounced into a period of never-ending expansionism, with record levels of sunshine. Mr Brown used the overhead projector to good effect in this session, displaying a sequence of pictures showing happy schoolchildren crying with joy whenever the 'Iron Architect of Growth', in Mr Brown's terminology, paid an impromptu visit to their villages. 

The long arm of NightJack's law

It's always ethical to reveal all the information you know about someone, isn't it? Is it? The ethics of choosing to disclose an author's identity are identical with the legality of such actions - aren't they? Are they? The Times seems to think so. Bear with me. 

From today's Times:

“I love Margaret dearly but the public would not stand for her as Speaker,” said one Cabinet minister who supports Mr Bercow.

Which cabinet minister? Shouldn't we be told? How can we know that this statement wasn't planted by someone on the Bercow team? Or just made up by a journalist, desperate for some copy and with a deadline approaching?

Or what about one of today's Times' leaders, which decries the censorship of foreign news in Iran. I agree with this, of course, but as usual the leader is unsigned, so we don't know who wrote it; we're not able to determine whether this writer, an employee of Rupert Murdoch, is as consistent in slamming totalitarian regimes when it comes to (for example) China.

Of course I don't believe that in either of these Times' examples is there anything scurrilous going on. I chose these two only because I want to accuse the newspaper of selective disclosure which is not always in the public interest.

Yesterday the Times succeeded in having an injunction lifted which allowed them to publish the name and home town of the NightJack police blogger. There was absolutely no public interest served by printing this information. The only outcome has been to create problems for NightJack, for his family and with his employers. So why did the newspaper take this action? 

I can imagine circumstances whereby a paper might wish to publish the information: if its investigations uncovered fraud on behalf of the blogger, for example - suppose NightJack turned out not to be a policeman, and his blog a work of fiction - but this wasn't the case. NightJack has been a serving officer for fourteen years.

Danny Finkelstein, who writes often and with authority about cognitive dissonance, attempted a justification of his paper's actions this morning on his blog, where he wrote: when someone publishes then they might reasonably expect that others might take an interest in their identity. This is especially so when they allow their work to go forward for a major prize.

What You May Have Missed, Part 24

ConservativeHome's irregular update memo for people who find themselves out of the country at times of high political drama.

1. Gordon Brown is still Prime Minister. We know this because he wrote an  article for The Times yesterday about The Digital Revolution, in which he claimed that the Internet is 'as vital' as water and gas. It's not clear from the article what form of gas the PM believes to be equal in importance to the internet: oxygen, presumably, although given the miasma of lies and smears which passed for the last PM press conference ('Did you want to replace Alistair Darling as Chancellor, Prime Minister?' - 'No, no, not at all') it is conceivable that a more malodourous gaseous form, connected perhaps with lentil consumption, may have been on his mind. In any event, readers should not be alarmed: so far, the government intends to make us pay for web access for All Britons, rather than forcing us to choose between having either water, or broadband, connected to our homes.

2. Peter Mandelson is in charge of Everything, with the exception of gas and water. He has approximately 2,400 ministers, including Baroness Esther Rantzen of Luton Parkway (the Five Genitally-Shaped Fruit 'N Veg Per Day Tsarina), Lord Amstrad of Spurs (the Buy-To-Let Property Tsar - this government knows how to ride a wave!) and Shahid Malik MP, unless it transpires, as seems plausible, that Mr Malik is 'renting' one of his several forgotten offices from an outpost of the Amstrad Empire, in which case Mr Malik will once again step aside while his expense claims are once more cleared by Sir Basil Wire-Brush, the Prime Minister's 'Transparency and Whitewashing' Tsar.