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Graeme Archer: Only Connect

Look at your hand a minute (then come back to this!). Think of all the carbon atoms in it, formed at the same time as our solar system. So much of the very matter which gives us our form, and therefore our function, is common to all of us, so very, very much. Ancient and fundamental. We are all made of stars, in the words of the song.

Of course we’re not all the “same”. There are visible differences between human beings. Most of these differences, though, are accidental: unplanned outcomes of evolutionary bifurcations, and in the scheme of things they are tiny. Even the most visible biological human variation, that between men and women, is of little material weight, if you think about it, if you calculate that biological difference as a percentage of the biological total of “male” compared to “female”. For a relatively small proportion of our lives, that difference manifests itself in an important way (in terms of biology, not psychology): but I think it’s a category error to believe that men and women are hugely dissimilar. Psychology is a man-made construct we use to describe our “intentions” as phenotypes of the human species: but the biology came first. I think this applies a fortiori to other manifestations of human groupings.

Graeme Archer: The Spirit of Broadway

"My card’s just been rejected, what we gonna do?"

Welcome to Broadway Market in Hackney. Someone once said to me “I don’t mind your columns, but they’re so bloody Hackney focused, it’s Hackney this, Hackney that, I mean the whole world isn’t Hackney”. I know what he (the distinguished GLA candidate for one of the south-eastern London boroughs) meant, even if I don’t agree with his premise. But what can I do. The only things I really care about are: Love, my family, and Hackney. I get back to E8 of an evening and feel my whole body relax, let go of the working day’s tension with a sigh of relief. Thank God. I’m home.

So I listened to the young woman whose credit card was refused at the bar with interest, as she and her friend scrabbled to find enough coppers in their nearly empty purses to pay for their coffee. Suddenly, there isn’t enough credit to go around, whether between lending banks or on the cards of Creative Types in Hackney coffee shops. The gap between a vague awareness of something called a “credit crunch” happening Somewhere Else to Other People, and the growing proportion of people who have spent the last decade remortgaging their home in order to fund a debt-driven lifestyle with the equity, is narrowing. And whoever bears primary responsibility for this debt, I bet the anger will be directed towards that formerly Iron Chancellor. You know, the one who put an end to all that boom and bust.

Graeme Archer: Mind the Gap

We bought my father a joke gift once, I remember. A coffee mug, with a cartoon of a serious looking sheep wearing a pin-striped suit, and the caption “Died in the wool Conservative”. One day, when I was a student, we were driving down the Great Western Road in Glasgow. We pulled up at the lights on a level crossing and watched a young woman with pink hair and outlandish clothes make her way precariously across the road. I drew breath and waited for the imprecations about Young People to begin. Quite unfairly: Isn’t it great, mused my dad, the died-in-the-wool Tory, that there’s a space for everyone to live like they want to?

*

So: gaps, and their uses, and the danger of not having any. I’m writing this in a gap, coincidentally, in the air, over the Atlantic, somewhere between London and Philadelphia. I’m like Schroedinger’s cat in its horrible box, neither home nor away, just sort of “being”. And the enforced pause allows time for reflection. Even more coincidentally, I’ve just read this:

“It can never be perfect. He can never forgive me.”

“That’s not the point,” said Crystal. “What you must do is forgive him. That’s what will make it perfect. If you forgive him then there’ll be—a kind of open space—and he’ll be able—[to effect a recovery]”

(It’s from A Word Child by (surprise) Iris Murdoch. Of course Iris has already written everything we need to know about gaps, and their key role in forgiveness.) 

Graeme Archer: Hemlock and After

Why is the story of Socrates’ death so chilling? At least I have always found it so, and not because the noble mind was extinguished by the democratic vote of a jury. I think it’s the gap between the start and the completion of the act, and the fact that it was entered into voluntarily (so to speak: no-one forced his hand to lift the cup and drink). An existential gap between commitment to the death-action, and the coming of death itself, seems, literally, horrible to contemplate. I think this is what is meant by the phrase like watching a car crash in slow motion.

Well, and what? Another word for that existential gap could be “life”, after all, a sentence we all receive at birth. Except, of course, we don’t elect to be born. Having found ourselves on the life-track, we don’t usually seek to hasten our demise. We don’t choose to drink the hemlock, in the knowledge that it will bring our oblivion.

More correctly: most of us don’t choose to drink the hemlock. Politically speaking, however, that is exactly what the Labour Party did when it set Gordon Brown as its leader. Surely they could see how electorally toxic he is? How disliked? How almost completely unsuitable he is to a party which requires the votes of England? How that everything he touches turns to dust, with only the mocking laughter of the disbelieving voter left to fill the (embarrassed) silence of his Commons peers?

It is not that the philosophy of Socrates (as poorly as I understand it) reminds me of Gordon Brown. Socrates told us that virtue is its own education, since once we see good, we will do good. To be good is to understand. I find it hard to see any parallels between that concept and the actions of Mr Brown’s government, packed to the gills as it is with ministers funded by campaign back-handers, led by a man who can speak in favour of that amoral excrescence Livingstone. Whither the moral compass?

Graeme Archer: Home Thoughts from Abroad

So let me see if I’ve got this right. MPs have been ripping off taxpayers in order to buy – not subsistence accommodation, but kitchens, bathrooms, bedroom fittings etc from John Lewis. John Lewis! One of my favourite institutions, now sucked into the (swine-) fevered debate about MPs’ allowances. I dream of being able to afford a kitchen from John Lewis, and, know what? I would be able to if I didn’t have to pay so much bloody tax. Can’t wait to hear an MP lecturing us about the need for restraint in public expenditure in the year ahead.

Meanwhile: Och yes, says Mr Speaker, ah’ll get oan with the inquiry intae they expenses just as soon as they’ve sorted oot that wee bathroom fur me. Cab thon fabric swatches roon with the groceries, will ye no? (I think we now know why John Lewis opened a food hall).

*
Election fever! Who’s going to win? Who’s up? Who’s down? No, not the increasingly deadlocked Change vs Fear slugathon, swinging its way towards beautiful Pennsylvania like an out of control juggernaut careering the wrong way down a motorway. Only one winner there! It’s [insert name of favoured candidate and retain fond belief that it’ll make that much difference anyway]. Oh calm down. None of them is Reagan II and one of them is clearly insane. Anyway – no, not that election. It may have escaped your notice, since there’s been scant mention of it in the press, but Italy – you know, major trading partner, the place you’ve yearned to go since reading too much Forster in your early teens – has a general election of its own on April 13th, to replace the redundant government of Mr Prodi. I’ve been at work in Verona since Wednesday this week so I’ve been asking everyone what the main issues are, to bring a Conservative Home update this Sunday. Well. The Bank of Italy just revealed that which has been clear to those of us with staff in Italy for some time – the rate of growth in income there is nearly stagnant. So, how did odds-on favourite to be the next presidente del consiglio, Mr Berlusconi, respond when asked a question about how to survive on a low income, by a young (female) voter? You can always marry my son, or some other millionaire, he said on TV last night. Perhaps Lord Tebbit’s been helping with his campaign?

By the way, the main reason the centre-Left government fell was because it was held to ransom by a minor coalition partner. The Justice Minister, a Christian Democrat, being investigated by magistrates for corruption, withdrew his party’s support from Prodi’s coalition. (At least he went). Now neither main Left nor Right block can muster enough support in parliament to change the ghastly PR voting system back to something with a semblance of reason. Even the man who designed their current system calls it porcata, something between a dirty trick and junk. Why have we let so much PR infect our own election systems? Euro-lists, Scottish Councils, various regional assemblies, London Mayoralty … minor plea to Planet Dave: not a huge manifesto thing, but could we just quietly repeal it, everywhere?

Graeme Archer: "Racist c**t"

I was called a racist c**t today.

I admit, my attention had been wandering until she said this.

- What?

- This young Turkish kid. I told him three times to stop messing with his mobile. He kept playing with it, and –

- hang on. You told him three times? Why was he playing with his mobile anyway?

- three times. They all play with their mobiles. You have to go on and on at them to get their attention. Anyway, I told him three times to put it away, and he wouldn’t, so the rest of the class is descending into chaos, so I called for Patrol, and they came to -

- Patrol? What?

- We can’t put them out the class ourselves. Too much grief.  So you call “Patrol” and they come and witness what’s happening, and deal with the kid. So they came, and I took the kid’s mobile off him, and he’s, like, “You racist c*nt”, and then he’s out the classroom, and we sort of get on with the lesson. But I know there’s gonna be grief from his parents, which means grief from the school. I don’t know how much longer I can put up with it.

Just another day in a Hackney school! I think it’s impossible to underestimate the deleterious consequences of this type of situation. Let’s count as many as we can...

• A de-socialised child has failed to grasp any of the consequences of turning his back on education.
• His life chances are effectively over.
• Around him is a class of children whose own chances are being curtailed as a result of his behaviour, regardless of their own desire for schooling.
• A school has suffered so many legal and quasi-legal repercussions from the families of excluded pupils that it has had to resort to a patrol system so that no teacher can be accused of mistreating a child.
• Even with this system in place, a young and idealistic teacher has to suffer physical and verbal abuse of the sort that would lead to any adult being arrested.
• How many years before another excellent professional is burned out?

[Interlude. How often has a bar-room bore told you that there’s no difference between Labour and Tory politics these days? Try telling that to the teachers living with Labour’s exclusions policy.]

How many circles of hell have we passed through? We’re not finished. A liberal might stop here, because their primary concern would be with the contract between state and parent. A socialist would shrug, and then send her son to one of the most elite public schools in London (yes you, Abbott, you hypocrite).

Graeme Archer's Diary: Bohemian, Like Us

I’ve written before about the dehumanising machines that Labour creates as it seeks to transform the country irreparably: the Tax Credit Machine, The Human Rights Machine and so on; devices that grip humans in their pincers and squeeze all hope and courage out of them. But perhaps my imagery was misplaced. For today I woke up to hear that Gordon Brown’s got a new agenda, helped by his best friends at the Daily Mail: he’s declaring war on plastic bags. There are to be targets for the numbers of plastic bags in circulation, and perhaps an element of compulsion. No doubt a quango will be established to monitor plastic bag usage, with special attention given to the needs of various minority groups. Perhaps a new role for Lee Jasper? I’m tempted to write that since Brown couldn’t poke his way out of a wet paper bag without getting in a mess, perhaps he’s bitten off more than he can chew here. But I’m sorry - it defies parody. The party of Keir Hardie, reduced to fretting about plastic bags. It was a new dawn, was it not?

*
“I mean, look around you,” said Councillor X. “We’re about the least ideological Conservative association in the country”.

He was right, I think. It was a post-leafleting session in some N16 wine bar and Hackney Conservatives’ crack squad of activists [is “crack squad” a good name for you? – Ed] were chewing the political cud. I’m explaining this so you know that I didn’t just happen to find myself in N16 by chance. I always feel a little uncomfortable in Stoke Newington. It’s full of people like me, only more so. Bars filled with visions of yourself, playing at maximum volume, is not a relaxing experience.

I hate leafleting, anyway. You’re either wandering a mile up some driveway, in terror of canine attack (Release the dogs!) or running up and down flights of stairs in council blocks (at least they’ll probably vote Tory). You spend ten minutes at each block trying to find the Tory voter on the intercom to let you in. You shred your fingers pushing the literature through letterboxes, helpfully placed one inch off the ground, designed to shield the interior from a thermonuclear explosion, let alone anything as mild as a “Vote Boris” leaflet. And all the time your bladder is telling you that you need to pee. Never mind. It seems to work.

Anyway, what Matthew was saying – sorry, Councillor X, must protect my sources – was that in all the years we’ve leafleted and canvassed our way around the borough, no-one in our association has ever got hissy about political theory. Perhaps the, erm, uphill nature of our struggle against the monolithic Hackney Labour machine keeps us focused on what really matters? I dunno; maybe we just like hanging around in bars too much. But how unlike the comment pages of our own dear ConservativeHome!

The warm glow of ideological fudge we inhabit in Hackney came back to me when I read of Norman Tebbit’s attack on Michael Gove. How helpful it was, to diss one of the most intellectual, thoughtful and politically effective members of the shadow cabinet. If only Michael Gove spent more time telling people to get on their bike, rather than writing books about the dangers of extremism, presumably he’d get Lord Tebbit’s seal of approval. In my humble opinion, a little ideology goes an awful long way. But what do I know? I just deliver the leaflets to help these political giants get elected.

Graeme Archer's Diary: The Integral Calculus

I’m sat on Bethnal Green tube platform, waiting for the eastbound train to take me to Snaresbrook, ready for my last day of jury duty. We’re going to start with the judge’s summing up at about 10, and then deliberate, and then deliver our verdict. On Mr M. Mr M who doesn’t speak a word of English, washes dishes in a curry-house, and has been accused of threatening to kill two family members with a kitchen knife.

The seriousness of what we’re about to do this morning has been growing on me all night. York Hall pool is next to Bethnal Green tube, so I’ve been swimming there this week with the early morning crowd, rather than closer to home in the Lido, and it’s a very grumpy pool compared to the Lido, and this morning I was quite disgruntled anyway (thinking about Mr M), so I’ve come down here to wait for the tube in quite a bad mood. Harrumph.

And then. One of those London moments. A Hainault-via-Newbury-Park train pulls in, no use to me, harrumph, again, and a young black woman gets off, and our eyes meet. I don’t know why, but we smile at one another. And then our smiles grow larger and we’re grinning. Mouths open, grinning. Shared happiness. Shared something. Then she’s gone.

Graeme Archer's diary: Losing his religion

Jury Waiting Room, XXXX Crown Court, London...

Not much of a “diary” this week, I’m afraid, as I continue to spend most of my waking hours in this increasingly sweaty Jury waiting room. That’s me in the corner, tapping away on the laptop with the Apple logo. Yes, I’m one of them, those snotty Apple users from whom you instinctively shy away in coffee shops the length and breadth of the nation. Lots of moaning in the room about all the waiting around, but I’m loving it. Which statistician could resist this: total immersion in a completely random focus group of 250 Londoners who, despite their best British attempts to talk about nothing more contentious than the weather and the state of the tube, have nearly all given in to temptation and started revealing their opinions about – well, I’d better not say. Yet. I bet Jacqui Smith’s ears are burning though. A lot of good people come from Hackney.

*

That’s me in the corner, losing my religion. So, imagine you’re the most senior primate of the established church of the country. There’s this national discussion about the implications of the growing Muslim population who live here, whose self-selected spokespeople have been making increasingly vociferous demands for decades: from burning the books of Salman Rushdie (I’m showing my age, aren’t I – east London’s militants have moved onto more relevant issues, like preventing a film being made of Monica Ali’s novel in Brick Lane), to the “right” to have a muezzin issue a call to prayer across Oxford. Imagine that you’re Dr Williams. What, in a very real sense, would you do?

Graeme Archer's Diary: Brownian motion

Every undergraduate statistician – and, I think, every City trader – is familiar with the concept of Brownian motion: the random, aimless, jittering path taken by particles suspended in a fluid; a completely random walk, where the direction taken at time t isn’t deterministically predictive of the path to be taken one step into the future. It’s called “Brownian” after the botanist Robert Brown, who noticed, in 1827, that particles in the cell-fluid of pollen suspended in water moved in such a random path.

I can’t think why the concept of a random walk, with no deterministic path clear to an observer, no obvious ultimate destination and no idea about which way to turn next – I can’t think why, as I say, it should seem so fitting that such aimless dithering should be labeled “Brownian” – can you?

*
Am I a one-man Twilight Zone? Whenever I leave the country, some annoying event seems to fall on the party. I set off for Verona last Monday morning, the sun was shining, we were 10 points ahead, Hain had just resigned and the net was closing in on Harman, Alexander et al. Then Derek Conway’s sons pop up, and Brown must be gripping his sides in glee at this “Get out of jail” card handed him. (I’m using “jail” metaphorically, Mr Brown – don’t be too gleeful).

I don’t know what annoys me more: that Mr Conway’s family funding arrangements have given our opponents some sticky mud to fling at us, or that his No.1 son does his best to live up to every toe-curling stereotype about homosexual men known to the tabloids. The result of all that expensive public school education appears to be a man who throws “F*** Off I’m Rich” parties in B-list London nightclubs. All funded with public money. I dunno. Maybe I was wrong about Section 28 after all.

Graeme Archer's Diary

I’m sat in the Cat and Mutton, Broadway Market, Hackney, watching the two chefs prepare the gourmet English food they’ll serve for dinner tonight. I love bars with open-plan kitchens. Outside about a thousand commuters are making the last push for home, serious faces on top of so many bicycles you might be forgiven for thinking of Amsterdam. On the street outside you’ll find Argentinean, French, Turkish, Indian restaurants, two delicatessens, two uber-trendy coffee shops, dress shops so haute they defy parody, a shop that sells nothing but pink stuff, an independent book shop, a proper butcher, the best fish and chips in east London, yer authentic pie-and-mash, Spirit’s Caribbean cuisine, a real art gallery and, yes, a kebab shop. Through the huge picture window in front of me I can see London Fields, the twilight falling on a criss-cross of children, shoppers, lovers, dog-walkers and winos. In the distance I can see my home-from-home, the Hackney Lido. Wash me, thoroughly, from my iniquity. And it does. Every day.

Alright, I’m not expecting you to junk Tuscany and choose E8 as your next holiday destination, but Jacqui Smith MP annoyed me this week, with her casual denunciation of Hackney as a place where no Home Secretary would dare tread after dark, no matter how desirous she may be of her nocturnal appointment with a kebab (nutritional sustenance, apparently, for those of you reading in the Home Counties, and not, as I had feared, something disreputable to do with premiership footballers).

Any problems that Hackney has can be connected in a straight line with the maladministration of Labour at a local and a national level. If you’re so concerned about our safety, Ms Smith, stop releasing violent prisoners early and stop demanding bail for thugs. Isn’t it telling that she picked a Labour borough to be snotty about? How far these New Labour ministers have risen from the people they once sought to represent.

There’s more spirit, community, passion and love in one street of one ward of the borough of Hackney than exist in the entire upper echelon of our Brownian ruling class in government. “I’m always in bloody Hackney!” David Cameron once joked to Keith and I, when we were mumbling hello at a London Tory meet-and-greet. Good for you, David, and shame on you, Jacqui Smith.

Graeme Archer's Sunday diary: Liberal/Fascist?

What would a liberal-totalitarian government look like? Is that too strange a concept to get your head around?

Well. It would be a government which enforced rigidly, and with severe sanction for those who disobeyed, a single-minded worldview of correct and incorrect behaviour. Plurality would not flourish, indeed it would be frowned upon. Such a government might, for example, give succour to an unrepresentative body of religious faith, prioritising something like the MCB over any other community of Islamic faith (and it would prosecute any civil servant brave enough to attempt to bring such misguided policy to light). It might ignore any scientific evidence about passive smoking, or animal cruelty, and enforce a ban on legal activities, such as smoking in pubs, or fox-hunting. It might project itself as “the political wing of the British people” (© Tony Blair, 1997), in order to delegitimise any political opposition. You don’t support ID cards? Aren’t you British? (The irony is intentional).

It would certainly, and with as much velocity as it could afford, take as much child-care into the hands of the state as possible, marginalising, de-funding and eventually obliterating any community-based self-help groups in favour of something like Sure Start. It would most definitely employ Stakhanovite-type statistics to prove that every year we’re becoming cleverer, more productive, more crime-free and healthier, dismissing any contrary opinion as that of psycho-sociological dysfunction. 

Graeme Archer: How well have we got on with our ex-leaders?

Graeme Archer, a blogger and activist in Hackney, reflects on the emotional wrench with which Tony Blair leaves office and reflects on our own history of relationships with Conservative Party leaders.

How do you get on with your ex? Something most of us have to struggle with at one time or another. What about if you have a string of ex-s? Are they banished from your consciousness, expunged from your frontal lobe, hidden from mental view? Do you think fondly of them now and then, remember the good times, have a wry smile at one or other of their foibles? Or do you grimace with horror, feel momentarily dirty, shake yourself like a dog in a mud bath, and thank the Lord that they're not mucking up your life any more?

Like it or not, there's an overlap between how individuals view their ex-lovers, and how parties view their ex-leaders. More relevantly, it's a two-way thing. What your ex-leader thinks of you matters just as much as the reverse. Probably more.

So on this momentous morning of New Clunking Hope, when Scotsmen all around the globe raise a wee dram of salty porridge in anticipation of the wave of Calvinism shortly to be unleashed on this godless land, our Tam O'Shanters shaking with glee at the thought [that's enough Scottishness - ed] OK, now that Blair has finally gone, how will the Labour Party feel about him? And he it? And how have we Conservatives variously treated, and been treated by, those who have worn the yoke of Party Leader?

Graeme Archer: On being a gay Tory

Graeme Archer is a statistician who lives in Hackney, has his own blog and is about to be civilly partnered "to the long-suffering Keith".

I don't know how to express myself politically except through personal demonstration, so please bear with me. We woke up yesterday morning, as we always do, to very strong cups of Teasmaid tea and "Farming Today" (god the rubbish they speak about organic produce on that programme). Then "Today" started up and the second headline was about a demonstration, planned for yesterday evening, outside Westminster, by a coalition of Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups, hoping to sway the vote in the House of Lords on the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2006, an Act which will make it illegal to discriminate against self-defining gay people with respect to the provision of goods and services. The Spiritual were hoping to persuade the Temporal that it's wrong to make discrimination against gay people a criminal offence, since such discrimination is a matter of personal and moral conscience.

Would you like to know my thoughts when I heard this item, struggling as I was at 6.02am to fully regain consciousness? Probably not - I mean, why would you - except it's maybe a bit more complicated than you'd expect from a fully-paid up member of the Gay-Tories-R-Us club. My first thought was "good". And then "bugger" (ha ha). And then "I hope the government wins". And then "I hope the government loses". It's this internal conflict that interested me as much as the law itself (debated fiercely yesterday on Conservative Home).

Here are two diametrically opposed responses, both of which I could just about convince myself I hold utterly:

(1) The Richard Dawkins response. As well as being gay, I'm also an empiricist, by virtue of inclination and of training. I believe there are two components to knowledge: evidence, and belief, but I believe (ha ha, again) that belief is nothing without evidence. That is, I believe in the epistemic supremacy of evidence with respect to the evaluation of any hypothesis, but also that you can't "know" anything about any particular hypothesis without the incorporation of belief. Officially, this makes me a "Bayesian" (type "Likelihood Principle" into wikipedia if you're reallly interested). Therefore I'm atheist, because there is no evidence for the existence of a supra-human deity. In his article in the Telegraph yesterday, the Lord Mackay of Clashfern (a man I rate extremely highly & have done for decades: he's self-evidently a good man) moved that this law is wrong because it might cause religious people problems, and he advanced as an argument for his case that "the faith of many Christians, Jews and Muslims includes the view that homosexuality is sinful". From my point of view, this "argument" is neither here nor there, since the mere observation that an identified group of people have convinced themselves that their tradition makes a particular practice Not Good is not "evidence" that the practice is Not Good, in any meaningful sense of the word. It's just a belief. And without evidence I don't understand (nobody does, for once this isn't just a personal failing) how to refract that belief experience into a decision about how to act. So while I'm very sorry that people who are religious have problems about some legal protection for gay people, I think the demonstrable evidence of the experience of gay people is more important. I don't want to live in a country that makes a harmless group of folk (gay people) feel bad because another group of folk (the religious who feel that their belief gives them a de facto right to legislate) feel bad. Ergo, I hope the government wins. Evidence trumps belief.

(2) The "Conservative" response. Well I've been accused often enough on Conservative Home of Not Being A Real Conservative so this might shock some people, but in the abstract I think this law is dreadful. What on earth has it got to do with the government whether or not a hotelier offers or declines to offer a room to a gay couple? I have exactly the same abstract response as I did to the ban on fox-hunting (I can think of few things I'd less like to do, and few things I'd less like to ban) or the soon-to-be ban on smoking in pubs (for god's sake). One of the tenets of our Tory principles is the importance of private property. And if I were to own a hotel (the important verb is "own") why should the government have a say in to whom I let out my rooms? Why should the state interfere in the contract between myself and my potential customers? Ergo, I hope the government loses. Principle trumps personal experience.

Graeme Archer: Untesting times

Graeme Archer, Hackney activist and ConservativeHome regular, has his own blog.

Look, I’m not about to go off on one about “dumbing down” in general, or launch a tirade about the pitfalls of popular culture. I’m not an opera buff and I’ve never been the ballet. Though we did go and see Don Giovanni a few months ago. (If you ask me, three hours is a long time to sit and wait for the bit where the Devil appears and yells “Don GioVANNi” towards the end, quite the best bit.) But there’s something very wrong happening in the world of light entertainment, something which I think is getting close to abuse.

Maybe it’s the statistician in me (what a coy way of putting it, why is it so hard just to come out with? My name is Graeme Archer and I AM a STATISTICIAN. There). There’s a quiz show on in the early evenings on Channel Five called “The Grid” which appals me; and “Deal or No Deal” isn’t just an irritating vehicle to herald the Return of the Edmunds, it’s symptomatic of something rotten, a festering nexus at the heart of our culture, where poverty of education finds its manifestation through trick-playing on the public.

The set up of The Grid is a high-tech studio where “players” stand in front of a large cube, each face of which contains (the same) grid of I think 25 squares i.e. 5 rows and 5 columns. The three-dimensional aspect of this set up is quite irrelevant to what occurs on the programme, part and parcel of the con-trick which then takes place, a con-trick which can only happen because the participants are either unaware of what they’re doing, or are willing to suspend their belief in anything rational for the sake of appearing on television.

The programme has multiple rounds and a few variants but it boils down to the following: behind each of the 25 squares is either a sum of money or a black square to indicate that the player loses all or a portion of the sum thus far accumulated. In the final, for example, there might be 4 such “bombs” lurking. The participant names a square by its grid reference, which is then revealed to contain either money or a bomb. Before the sequence begins, the participant is told how many squares contain the hidden bomb. Thus with 4 bombs, the participant has a 4/25 chance of picking a bomb on his or her first go, then 4/24 on the second go, and so on …

What’s my problem with this? It is that, instead of the participant saying “I want A1 (the top left square), then A2 if I am not bombed out, then A3…” and so on, the player, and the “quiz”master, and the audience, all commit a joint deceit of pretending (or believing) that there is some sort of strategy which can lead to a better outcome than simply reading out the codes of the squares in any random sequence. You have to see it to believe it. It’s appalling. Somehow, the people involved have induced a drama from reading out numbers at random, and are imbuing this process with pseudo-meaning. In fact, if you think about it, human participation in this process is irrelevant. One could simply tell the producers that one would pick 5 squares at random, without leaving the comfort of one’s home.

“Deal or no deal” is perhaps slightly less egregious, in that I’m willing to accept that you might require some degree of mathematical sophistication to understand that at any stage in its tortuous process, you can quickly work out the expectation of gain for any box (identical) and whether or not it’s worth continuing, or stopping to take the “banker”’s offer. But it’s been on our screens for months now, and still people seem to think that there’s something almost magical happening. No-one in the media has written an article to expose the essentially void centre of these programmes, which can only succeed – and they do succeed – in a population that has become both frighteningly innumerate and is willing to imbue random processes with a quasi-spiritual meaning.

Does it matter? Yes it does and it should worry Conservatives. Firstly, it’s a very clear signal that something is going wrong with basics in education. Secondly, it is a clear sign that popular culture is becoming non-aspirational: people no longer win prizes for demonstrating proficiency in anything, but merely by having the “skill” to select numbers at random. Thirdly, if people don’t understand that the expected value of one choice from two boxes is half of their total, then explaining the acts of piracy enacted on their pension funds by Brown is not going to be as straightforward as we might anticipate.

For these reasons, George Osborne was right to call for the introduction of financial education in schools. I might want more, and ask for an investigation of what is being taught in the maths syllabus these days. When I was a wee laddie in Scotland, we called these “skills” arithmetic, and nobody left school without a full command of it.

Bah humbug? I know I know I’m a sad old statistician and I should maybe just let people enjoy a harmless bit of fun. But ITV at night-time is pumping out programmes like these, all designed to remove money from gullible viewers. Someone makes money from this – via premium phonelines - or it wouldn’t happen. And so I think there’s something morally wrong happening here, and I hope that our MPs will vote for action to end it – I know that a Commons committee has begun a relevant investigation, but they were quietly sniggered at by the (I assume innumerate) commons sketch writers in the quality press. These latter should have been ashamed of themselves.

On a lighter note! Not all statistical reasoning is intuitive. For a bit of fun, suppose you’re on a quiz show and are faced with three doors, A, B and C. Behind two of the doors is a copy of The Guardian, behind the third is a lovely new iPod. You pick a door and get whatever’s behind it. You want to win the iPod, and being a good statistician, pick a door at random, “A”, say (without clutching your head and shouting “Come ON” at the audience). The host (who knows what lies behind each door) doesn’t open door A, but opens either door B or door C to reveal a copy of The Guardian, and says to you “Do you wish to stay with door A, or switch?”. What ought you to do to maximise your chance of winning? I’ll post the answer later.

Graeme Archer reviews last night's The Tory Party is no longer Conservative debate

Graeme Archer has his own blog.

Last night I took Mr Keith to the Times Newspaper / Intelligence Squared debate at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington Gore. That'll teach him for suggesting we "get out more". Listen, you don't get to where I am in the modern Conservative Party (precisely nowhere) by hanging around trendy wine bars in Shoreditch, attempting to out-trend one another with respect to books read (Andrew O'Hagan), opinions held (Greener and Flatter, no?), or lifestyles celebrated (well, she's with him now, but I heard that previously, before the organic beetroot stall went bottom up ...). No! You do not! You get your backside down west London pretty well smartish and you mingle with the terminally rich, middle-class and treble-barrelled of surname (the row in front of us contained about 600 members of a family called "Rupert-Peverill-Browne" and there were more cravats than you could shake a stick at. Me? What was I wearing? Oh you know. Combat trousers and manky old teeshirt. Well I had come straight from work).

These debates are definitely A Good Thing and I think we'll be signing up for the season: forthcoming inquiries will focus on the utility or otherwise of prisons (with Theodore Dalrymple), religion (with Richard Dawkins) and so on... you get the idea... it's like You The Jury made flesh. If you don't get the Radio 4 reference, my guess is that the debates aren't for you.

Last night's session was chaired by Polly Toynbee and addressed the motion The Tory Party is no longer Conservative. Speaking for the motion were Peter Hitchens of The Mail on Sunday, and a really funny bloke called Jeremy O'Grady, who edits The Week. Against the motion was Charles Moore (I bow) and Michael Gove MP (bowing again). Well! Given the topic and the speakers, I half expected to see the massed denizens of Conservative Home's blogs swoop down as one onto the chamber, but of course I don't know what any of you look like, so if you were there - hi! I was the manky looking bloke at the back with the bored looking geezer slumped next to him.

Graeme Archer: Conservatives should oppose partnership "rights" for co-habiting couples

The Law Commission is about to propose the creation of a set of "marriage-lite" rights for couples who choose to live together without formally marrying. I was surprised by how visceral my opposition is to this proposal, and would be interested to know if this is a personal foible or a common Conservative position. Certainly Mary Kenny in yesterday's Telegraph shares my views, which is interesting.  Ms Kenny is a generous and thoughtful commentator, but I would characterise her as a "social conservative" and so not someone with whom I would generally expect to find myself in alignment.

It's undoubtedly the case that many couples share a home, perhaps start a family, often over a long period of time, and that one half of that couple can find itself in an unfortunate position if the relationship terminates. In such a case, it's a standard (for our age) response that the "government should do something", which means "the government should make legislation to protect the rights of the [perceived] injured party".

What harm is there in that? I have two philosophical objections, which also - sort of, kind of, maybe - summarise two of the main strands of contemporary Tory thought. One is essentially libertarian, and the other is socially conservative.

1 The Libertarian Objection

I have that free-love '60s hangover thing I know (must have been internalised early as I popped into the world in January 1970 - I blame the parents): I don't think there's anything wrong with people shacking up together. I think most people want to pair-bond; I can't prove this but it seems to be hard-wired into our DNA. I love the story in Plato's Symposium where Aristophanes explains the provenance of your "other half"- it's a god-given duty to strive to find the other half of your soul, the splitting ordained by Zeus to teach mankind humility. (You can make a less romantic thesis about why pair-bonding comes about, but it's not strongly germane to my argument and I'm a soppy old thing: Plato beats Bentham anyday in my book).

But in our present day culture, it is unlikely that you will find that person straight-off; usually it will take a few iterations of relationship-attempts, followed by a period of a broken heart, followed by another attempt. But most people do ultimately locate their other half, and settle down into connubial bliss. It's at that time, when a couple are ready to declare their "settled will" and are in agreement for their future commitments, that a legal contract should be put in place to protect the rights and set out the responsibilities of both halves of the pair.

If you believe that this iteration cycle is a fact of life, and that people require some growing and testing space before they know their own true desires, then we should keep that space free of government legislation.

2 The Social Conservative Objection

This might surprise the Editor, but I'm actually quite trad-Tory about marriage. I think it's the best institution for rearing successful children and for protecting the mental health of the participants. This is less to do with Love (which may, of course, be nothing more than a functional outcome of the existential angst designed into our DNA to ensure genetic replication - but I still prefer Plato's view) and more to do with the best cost-benefit for society. It's also the reason I was so passionately in favour of the Civil Partnership legislation for gay couples: yes, its absence was morally offensive in terms of equality of treatment; but I also thought it was intellectually ridiculous for "society" to affect disdain at the lax sexual mores of urban gay culture, while simultaneously locking gay people out of the institution which has done more to temper the biological drivers of young men than anything else: marriage.

But with the passing of the Civil Union legislation, precisely no couple is locked out of that institution. We are all free to decide for ourselves when we wish to commit to that steadying legal contract. Extending the "rights" to non-married cohabiting couples creates only a legal mess which will increase the total happiness only for the legal profession.

The Today interviewer yesterday made precisely this point to the Law Commission representative: if people want the rights of marriage, why not marry? The reply was horrifying. We were told that "not every woman can force her partner into marriage" and that therefore the state has some ill-defined duty to look after her interests. Now it goes without saying that women in abusive relationships require the assistance of family, friends, police and social services. But it does not follow from this that they require the assistance of the state to decide post hoc that they have a right to the property and income of their non-married partners. I see this as an appalling extension of thought crime: courts will have to decide how emotionally committed the players in a non-married relationship were, when they are carving up the property contents of that (failed) relationship. Think about your past life - if you have shared your flat with someone who ultimately left you, how "natural" would you feel it for a court to award that person a share of your home?

In conclusion: there are as many reasons as there are unmarried couples to explain why some people choose not to marry. It is no business of the state to attempt to force windows into the souls of the failed relationships, especially when the state has already provided a non-judgemental institution, open to every couple who wishes to form a legal contract for their relationship: it's called marriage.

Graeme Archer: Thatcher - In The Line Of Fire

Graeme Archer reviews Alan Hollinghurt's 'The Line of Beauty', televised yesterday evening on BBC2.

When was your summer of love? I think everyone has one - that first hot season when you realise that you can actually do all that stuff you spent your early teenage years reading about. Mine was 1989. I had a summer job at Shell on the Southbank, just finished my second year at Glasgow University, a total science geek - right down to my Tesco anorak and blue cord trousers - it was my first time away from home alone and I was 19 of your earth years old. While other denizens of ConservativeHome (probably) spent that time luxuriating in the unstoppability of the Thatcher revolution, I spent it searching out, ahem, intimacies with a seemingly endless round of older straight-looking men, all over west London, without any idea of why I was doing what I was doing. One man in particular held me in his sway, and explained to me why I was behaving thus. I was so taken with this man that I begged a bookshop in Covent Garden to give me his publicity poster, and stuck it on the wall of my Hammersmith bedsit, where I spent my non-active evenings pouring over his first and greatest novel - The Swimming Pool Library. There's a line in an Iris Murdoch novel, I think it's A Fairly Honourable Defeat, where she says something like "it is possible to fall in love with a statue". I was in love with my picture of Alan Hollinghurst (for it was he) - his cool and calculating gaze saw right through me and all my nascent desires, which he dissected in inordinate detail in the pages of The Swimming Pool Library. If he hadn't been a literary genius, he would surely have been a surgeon, such is the precise and unflinchingly taxonomic quality of his writing.

I am not a Jamesian scholar - I'm a statistician - but every review of Hollinghurst dwells on his similarity to Henry James, in particular those about The Line Of Beauty, which began its televisual treatment tonight on BBC2 (probably the first Andrew Davies adaption which has toned down the sex). I think (in my amateurish way) that the Henry James brigade might be onto something, though perhaps not for the reasons intended (and they may just have been lazy: the protagonist of The Line Of Beauty is, unlike myself, a Jamesian scholar). If James is about the conflict that happens when New America/Money meets Old Europe/Class, then Hollinghurst is all about the conflict that happens when New Sexual Liberation meets Old British Repression. Who wins, in his Freudian writings - the untrammelled force of the id, with its insatiable desire for sexual power? Or the superego, with its understanding that to get what you want requires a degree of surface compromise?

There is an analogy that can be drawn between the forceful sexual desires that became visible in the 1980s, and the impact of Thatcherism on the country: both were about the individual asserting their right to be seen as they themselves determined; the skilled working classes were no more going to be defined by the homes that the Left told them to be grateful for, than were gay men and women going to be defined by decades of limp caricature. It's possible to see the rampant, forbidden sex in Hollinghurst's work as a metaphor for the unabashed individualism that came to be identified with Thatcherism. I believe he intends this; it certainly intrigues me.

Graeme Archer: Love, Actually

Graeme Archer - a blogger and regular visitor to this site - welcomes yesterday's first civil partnership ceremonies...

Do you know what love is? It's one of those objects that is impossible to describe, don't you think? Mozart made a song about it, "Voi che sapete, che cos'e l'amore - " I'm paraphrasing, but the song goes something like "You who know what love is, tell me - is this love?". Alison Moyet sang much the same sentiment some few hundred years later, albeit somewhat more demotically, as befits the original and best Essex girl.

But I think we would agree, regardless of the difficulty of describing in objective terms what love is, when you have it, you recognise it - boy do you recognise it - as your life is transformed, your particles renewed, your vision uplifted and your heart begins to soar. If you haven't experienced that, then I hope one day you do. I shall resist the temptation to quote Belle & Sebastian lyrics - though, it's true, they have described this process in terrific detail (see "If you find yourself caught in love").

Today I watched the first gay civil partnerships take place in Northern Ireland, and on Wednesday I'm fortunate enough to be invited to the first civil partnership in Hackney, when two friends will seal their respective knots. I thought I was a somewhat hard-hearted cynic, but the truth is I find myself emotionally moved by these events.

Why would that be? If you pushed me, I'd say that I never thought this legislation was necessary, and - tell the truth - I thought it had the propensity to be somewhat tacky. "Mr and Mr", "he looked lovely in pink", and all that - and no doubt on Wednesday we can rely on our national treasures, Sir Elton and Mr Furnish, to give Posh and Becks a run for their money.

But a stronger and truer emotion has taken over. I think it is that oldest of all truths: love really does conquer everything. The dignity with which gay couples are publicly embracing their love for one another, the fact that we finally live in a country where such matters are accommodated quietly and without fuss -- all this gives me such pride that I was moved to a few tears this morning.

It's probably neither the time nor the place to list the sound Tory reasons why I feel this is a good step forward - though they are there: sociologically, marriage evolved as a stabilising influence on the sexual drivers of young men and women. The same drivers exist in young gay men and women (I'm using understatement for effect here). It's always seemed ridiculous to me that right-wingers criticise the gay subculture for its sexually energetic mores, while simultaneously denying access to the institution that carries most weight against those drivers! More learned thinkers than I could write about this - Matthew Paris for example.

I once stood in a council chamber in Essex, just elected as a Tory councillor, and to the horror of my colleagues, moved a motion against Section 28 of the local government act. What made me angry about that legislation - forbidding councils to spend money "promoting homosexuality as a pretend family relationship" - was not the bit about promoting homosexuality (how was that to be done? Through a lottery draw? A radio phone-in?) - it was the sneering about our apparently "pretend" family relationships. My dear friends: what is the pretence in the life that Keith and I lead? The shopping for two is real; the housework is very real; the struggle to assemble Ikea flat-pack furniture is real; the fears for our financial future and health and well-being are real; the fact that I would give my life for him is real. How dare some stupid government backbencher, who would never know me, describe our life together as a pretence? If love is FOR anything, it must be to look out for your significant other, to carry them when they need it and to be lifted by their support when you need it. I truly think it's the most amazing gift God gave us. What is the difference, where is the pretence?

Today, years later, I think we have the answer. There is no difference. This is a civilising, overdue piece of quite wonderful legislation - and I never thought I would write that about a Labour government! I celebrate the dignity and joy of the couples who marry today, and I will stand as witness with pride and with love when my dear friends Andrew and Gareth form their partnership on Wednesday morning in Hackney. There's no better time of year, after all, to reflect on the power of love.