CentreRight

Graeme Archer: An Open Primary should select a Coalition candidate for Oldham East and Saddleworth

By Graeme Archer

There will shortly be a by-election in Oldham and Saddleworth, as a result of Phil Woolas' "unfortunate" electoral literature. Discussion has already turned to whether or not there should be a Liberal and a Tory candidate, or if one half of the Coalition should withdraw, in order to maximise the chance of defeating Labour. Here is my proposal. I take it for granted that most readers share my view, that a defeat for Labour would be a delicious outcome, both in terms of what it would do to Ed Miliband's leadership, as well as just rewards for the disgusting campaign they ran in the seat at the General Election.

I do not see how we can have a Tory and a Liberal candidate on the day of the by-election. Were this to happen, a mischievous media would spend the entire campaign trying to get one of them to attack the other, in order to extrapolate back to the supposed inter-party tensions within the government. We would likely fail in our (joint, Coalition) objective to put Labour's failures in the spotlight.

Let us admit that we are separate parties, Tory and Liberal, and that we both wish to represent this seat. Let us admit that we agree that Labour must be defeated. How to proceed?

Hold an Open Primary, at which every elector in the constituency can vote. Field candidates from both our Coalition parties, free to put their party case for why each deserves to fight the seat. No need for Tories to pretend to be Liberal Democrats, or vice-versa.

Then field the winner as the Coalition candidate, and urge every Liberal and Tory voter in the constituency to support that person.

As Good As It Gets

Here is a story about my father, one that I’ve not told you before. When I studied at Glasgow, I lived in a tenement block on Maryhill Road, near St George’s Cross. We were driving from there up towards the University one Saturday morning (I can’t remember why), which meant turning onto Great Western Road. As we waited to turn at the junction, I was looking down at the river Kelvin on our right, alongside which I used to run (to feel the city air rush past my body). As we watched, a girl was struggling to carry her bicycle down the steps to the riverside. She had bright pink hair and a full complement of piercings on lips and brow, a not untypical sight in the studentland near the University. So my father, a died-in-the-wool Conservative (he had a tea mug bearing this motto), someone who, at the same age as this girl (the same age as me) had to work through nightshifts and take day release in order to gain his qualifications, who had never in his life contemplated setting aside four years in order to live in subsidised housing and to study something for the sheer pleasure of it, who lived with my mum in an Ayrshire house of pleasing conformity, a Thatcherite of gut reactions - my father looked at this girl, enjoying her life of cycling freedom on the back of his taxes, and said:

- it’s so great that this place exists; that there’s somewhere people can be just as they want to be.

Alternatively ...

Bernard Jenkin MP writes a useful piece about the potential pitfalls of switching our electoral system to the Alternative Vote method, on Platform today. It's too early to be worried about campaign strategies, I know, and I don't disagree with anything he has written, but there's a common theme in Mr Jenkin's piece with other conversations I've heard about why we should reject AV. It is that they focus on historical outcomes - Julia Gillard remaining Australia's PM, Ed Miliband becoming leader - rather than (as I think they should) directly confronting the main claim made for the system.

We can't credibly (only) reject AV as leading to governments whose legislative platform was in no party manifesto - because that's what we have now. And the Coalition came into being after a First Past The Post election. Ah, the argument continues, but AV would lead to such outcomes more often. Well, if you think that's a bad thing, then you must be arguing that the Coalition is a bad thing. I have a disturbing image of Government ministers appearing in referendum debates, tying themselves in knots as they argue Well of course, in our particular instance, the voting system we support led to the outcome we warn you about under AV, but on this (real) occasion it's led to a good government, while the other (theoretical) times it wouldn't. I mean, Ed Miliband. Julia Gillard. I don't think this will work.

I appreciate that my own particular disdain for AV would also not be electorally tractable (the fetishism of requiring a candidate to have 50% of the distributed votes). I'll never convince anyone that an arbitrary percentage entails no legislative significance, since majoritarianism is so ingrained in our being (but if 50% is good, surely 60% is better? And 60.00000001% is better than that. Now pick an arbitrarily small, positive epsilon, and add it to your "necessary" figure, and explain why the result is not even more necessary. Etc). But there's a connected issue which I think does have traction, and which I would recommend the NO2AV team to pick up.

It involves taking on the main argument for AV head-on, and ridiculing it. AV will be "fairer" because candidates will have the support of 50% of their electors.

No, they won't. You can make this argument only if you agree that a voter's fifth preference (for example) should have identical weight to their first. AV MPs will have the support of 50% of their voters only if we assume that every voter ascribes equal weight to their first and last choices. This strikes me as absurd, and it also, at a stroke, disarms the 50% fetish. I would make this argument central to the campaign. Pro-AV people will say this aspect of the system is a strength, because it somehow disarms tactical voting. Apparently tactical votes shouldn't have the same weight as non-tactical ones. I'll decide for myself how I vote and why, thank you.

And the campaign, if it can be truly Tory, could go further - admit that there are good consequences of an AV system, but that we can introduce them without changing the voting system. The single best aspect of AV is indeed that we would have the freedom to vote for more than one candidate; you could end up with more than one candidate from every party, and this would indeed loosen central control over candidate selection, and the power of the whips over the ultimately elected members, and for all the obvious reasons I think this is a good thing. 

But we can achieve these good outcomes anyway, with First Past The Post still in place. Completely open primaries should be mandatory in every single constituency at the next election, whether the member is currently a Conservative or not. I think this is the admirable Douglas Carswell option. That would achieve what we really want, without the gamble of a voting system which is actually designed to produce the least offensive member, not the best one for the constituency. We have the chance to be radical Tories, like Disraeli, and introduce electoral reform that will leave the Whigs looking feeble. I hope we do it. 

*

On the train to Birmingham. See you at conference I hope!

The cap fits

The idea that London requires more immigration could only be held by someone who hasn't been canvassing in the East End recently. I knock on a door. Woman opens it. I say the name on the roll. She says in broken English: they do not live here. The roll is up to date. A large amount of our social housing in Hackney appears to be sublet to new immigrants (by whom?). How many do Boris' banker friends think we need, and how much poverty and overcrowding and - yes - dislocation are they prepared to countenance to get it? Economic theory like this is pointless when it leads to too many adults crammed into too few bedrooms. The only liberation I see it delivering is for the rich people who employ the newcomers as cleaners. 

Gay People and Christians are not enemies

Martin Parsons has written a series of articles for ConservativeHome, arguing that the right of Christians to express their belief has been circumscribed by thirteen years of socialist government. It’s not my intention to argue with this proposal, since it’s self-evidently true, and I am always and everywhere an opponent of thoughtcrime.

I want, instead, to propose a supplementary notion, which, given the tenor of the comments which Dr Parsons’ articles have received from some readers of this website, may come as something of a surprise. It is simply this: gay people and Christians are not political enemies. To suggest that we need a Tory politics where one group is played off against another (indeed, to act as though the groups are mutually exclusive) is not only illogical (since homosexuality and Christianity are not, of course, mutually exclusive characteristics; nor in any important sense does either sexual or religious orientation determine voting behaviour). It’s worse than that. For Christians to squabble (to the point of schism) about something as statistically inconsequential and culturally harmless as homosexuality is self-defeating. Exactly the same is true for those gay people who spend their energy attacking the Church of England (I’ve never met such a gay person, I have to say, no more than I’ve met a Christian who couldn’t see the point of our common humanity). We are not one another’s enemies. We are, in fact, allies. Allies in the fight for reason.

Most of the threads on this website about homosexuality and/or religion - which make up by far the most popular posts, by the way - boil down to:

Homosexuality is not about sex. It is a natural, harmless way a small minority of people express love.

(Adrian, in a comment to Martin’s last article)

vs

[It does if] homosexuality is immoral.

(High-Tory-Shane, same article)

I agree with Adrian, and disagree with Shane, of course, but that’s not my point. You're no more going to stop being a Christian, because of my existence, than I’m going to wake up and find that everything I know about my small, quiet and well-intentioned life is an irregularity or a disordered wound, because of something the Pope thinks. (I wrote about this once, and though I meant what I wrote more strongly than anything I've produced since, it won’t have changed a single mind). 

So I don’t really get the ‘logic’ of this as an either/or. With apologies to Martin for summing up his sequence of articles into a couple of sentences, we won’t get anywhere if we insist on anything other than absolute equality of public esteem for one another. You don’t get a more Christian Britain if I have to pad apologetically around a registry office, hoping to catch the eye of a registrar willing to grant me my legal right to civil partnership without resigning and writing in the tabloid press about how my shocking demand has infringed her Christian freedom of conscience. And if that’s not what you want, Martin, I note that you didn’t spell out exactly what sanction should have been taken to prevent the Islington registrar - and others like her - inflicting their view of morality on the taxpayers (we do pay taxes, you know, just as much as heterosexual people) who want access to the services they provide. 

I need to be more blunt (as ever). I’m sorry Martin, but I’m saying that in cases such as the ones you mention, the Christian has no option but to assimilate the discomfort she feels, and to get on with her job. Either that, or find alternative employment. Just as I have to, in countless similar/through-the-looking-glass circumstances. I went to the wedding of a close friend, someone I’ve loved for decades. Her minister was a bit brimstone-ish and lectured his congregation on sexual morality, as he saw it. This was his right - his duty, of course - and I’d have no more stood up and said -Actually, sir, I profoundly disagree with you than I’d have turned up at the wedding in a teeshirt and jeans. I assimilated my discomfort and enjoyed the beautiful day and its central celebration of love and commitment. Freedom of conscience entails some sort of freedom to be offended, I think. (Here, I’m sure, Martin and I agree, along with nearly everyone who reads this website).

Political Split Plots

One of the funny things about being a statistician (funny peculiar, obviously; there's precious little funny ha-ha about it, trust me) is when you're considering some fairly abstruse bit of methodology, and it suddenly occurs to you that it has a relevance to a political discussion. Tim is to blame for this (I mean, he's to blame for this particular instance, I'm not suggesting he carries some sort of universal guilt for analogies between statistical theory and political discussion, not even Tim is that powerful, though we'd best not give him ideas). Anyway. He's to blame for yesterday's term-setting article What is Right-Wing? which I read just as I was thinking about split-plots.

A split-plot is an example of an experimental design whereby a completely random allocation of treatments to experimental units cannot practically be achieved, or would be undesirable, and thus the treatments are randomised within separate blocks. It has its origins, like most British statistical theory, in agricultural field trials. Fields - plots - of earth might have different properties of plant nutrition on their left and right hand sides (because of exposure to light, or rain, for example), so you wouldn’t want to test a novel fertiliser against a control by simply randomly assigning the new or old treatment to every plant in the field, in case by chance you ended up with most of the new treatments on the ‘good’ side of the field and most of the controls on the ‘bad’. You get round this by splitting the plot into left and right ‘blocks’, and randomising test or control to plants on the left, and likewise on the right. You then estimate the between-block (between left and right side) variability, and remove this from the test for the variance between the treatments within each block. Neat: especially when the difference between blocks (left and right) is much greater than the variation within them (starting to ring any bells?).

It seems to me a useful way of describing British politics currently; perhaps it always was a split-plot, but the fact of Coalition makes it feel more evident. We have between-party variance, of course. Parties are blocks. You might expect the political opinions within any one party to vary less than those between any two parties. Perhaps in the 1980s this was almost completely true; but it's not true now; at least, not for a possibly finite subset of 'treatments', which in politics we call 'ideas'. But we have within-party variance also, which might be approaching the point when it is larger than that between parties, at least for some ideas. This might be more concrete if we consider two examples.

What Not To Wear

There's an area of Brighton beach, at the Kemptown end, just before the Marina, set aside for what the  discreet signs refer to, in oblique British fashion, as 'naturist bathing'. By which they mean: bathing in the nude. No, I haven't bathed there, not yet anyway, but swimming with nothing on is pretty wonderful. In fact I'd prefer always to swim without clothes, because the more you think about the reasons that 'clothing' (a small strip of nylon, for men; two small strips, for women) is insisted upon, the more daft the naked prohibition seems. In the case of women, very little is left to the imagination with a bikini top - so why bother? And in the case of men, either very little or an awful lot is left to the imagination with speedo trunks - so again, why bother?

Well, we bother, of course, or, rather, it is bothered about, because a handful of our external sexual organs are deemed to be just that, I suppose - sexual. But this can't be the whole reason. Your face is surely the most sexual of your organs, and we don't cover that up (you may now predict where this post is going). Or is the prohibition rooted in some sort of Freudian distaste? That we don't care to be reminded of the dual purposes these organs perform? But my hands perform a heck of a lot more functions than that which lies beneath my speedos; yet rarely, since the end of the Edwardian era, have we found it distasteful to see one another's hands in public. In any case, I long ago gave up the joyless writhing that a full evasion of seaside nudity incurs (struggling into a pair of trunks underneath a beach towel while lying on my back on a pebbly beach: this was not my seaside dream) and now just get changed in full view of anyone who cares to watch; so for about 15 seconds a swim I'm breaking the prohibition and do the Full Monty. I'm sort-of (but not hugely) glad to report that so far I've not caused any riots.

So. All this to point out that our rules on clothing are arbitrary, and seem to arise from the culture we inhabit, rather than via legislative edict (I think the laws follow the custom here, something which is comfortable for a Tory, but would strike Labour politicians of the Blair-Brown era as almost completely insane). We instinctively recognise this, as Brighton proves, because while most people prefer to bathe in speedos and bikinis, we don't forbid the setting aside of an area of the beach where nudity is permitted to occur. (If nudity were wrong per se, this surely wouldn't happen). And however strongly I wish that most swimming was carried out in the buff, even I wouldn't expect to visit the post office whilst naked without provoking a reaction from everyone else. ('Daddy, what's a post office?' That's another story).

How The East Was Lost

Exhibit One: The Hipster Loses His Girl

I see his heavy eyelids flutter (in the words of the song). He’s desperate to impress the girl sat across from him, so nervous to create the right cool-as-**** impression that his fingers are fumbling over the pathetic roll-up he’s trying to make. Shreds of tobacco float away on the warm summer air.

- So like there’s no way I’d vote Tory man? The sense he intended was “I wouldn’t vote Tory, man” but his meaning is still clear.

- No, no way man, she agrees with him, but absentmindedly, flicking her long hair about and looking across the road to the park. She’s very, very bored. Then she goes:

- Oh look, there’s Gary! and her face is transformed, lit up.

Gary comes up and I look away. I know him, in that I recognise him and know why he’s here. The local hard man. “Authentic” (aye right) east end rough. Done up like a gayboy parody of a skinhead, down to the prison-white trainers and the tattoo crawling up his neck. He aspires to be top dog but I’m not sure he’s managed it; he’s certainly always careful to exhibit submissive behaviour when the two rastas who supply most of this street are about. He’s a vicious, drug-dealing psycho; but he’s also undeniably very, very sexy: particularly to these white middle-class students. To both of them. He sits down on the same bench as the girl, sideways-on to her, legs astride the bench. The other boy babbles on something about the election tomorrow, but even I can’t be bothered listening to him anymore.

- What election, man? says Gary, putting his hand into the girl’s hair. He mutters something in her ear and she starts laughing.

Keith and Andrew come up to where I’m waiting and we go off to canvass the Suffolk estate. We’re three boys in our corduroys, we’re not terrific but we’re competent. In the words of the song.

Invitation: Become a Hackney Citizen

Andrew Boff was the Conservative candidate for Hackney Mayor on May 7. I'm sure, with all these minor shenanigans happening on the national political stage, it slipped your mind to check in with the results of our mayoral election. But I want to do more than tell you about them. I want to ask you for money. No, don't stop reading, it's not for me or even the greater Hackney Tory Collective. It's for a campaign to protect a small, independent newspaper from the mighty legal clout of Hackney Labour Council.

Harry Phibbs covered the 'controversial' decisions of Hackney's Labour council in the run-up to the election: first they banned Andrew's electoral address from going out to voters. Their given reason for this was that Andrew referred to the salary bill of the current mayor and his cabinet. Apparently this is out of order for our council: not only should we pay their salaries, we shouldn't learn how much it costs us either, certainly not from the manifesto of an opposition politician. Run this through your head again: Hackney Labour Council will not permit the costs of their mayor and cabinet to be printed in the manifesto of an opposition politician at election time.

Can it get worse? Yes, it can get worse.

So: how was it for you?

... and: how should we behave, the (metaphorical) morning after? (I can't type that phrase without remembering the band in The Poseidon Adventure, do you remember? They sang There's got to be a morning after, in a plaintively melodic minor key, just before the iceberg struck and the ship went down: not, perhaps, the best image to have in mind just now. Anyway).

How it was for us:

• Astonishingly good, but not good enough. More like the mirror of 1992 than should have been the case.

How we should behave:

• As fully-paid up supporters of a Change Coalition. (I think the phrase is due to Guido or to Iain. It's a good one). Politics isn't football - something that may come as a surprise to those who treat the most important national conversation as an endless Spurs-Arsenal grudge match (a particularly New Labour characteristic, come to think of it) - and failure to win the league doesn't mean retiring from the field until next season when a new manager will 'win us the silver' like what we did in the 80s. We should aim for a Cameron-led Tory-LibDem administration that can stay in office for a reasonable length of time, for at least the next twelve months. No-one, surely, wants another election before the summer? 

The Agony of the Cleggstasy

ConservativeHome's regular update service today brings you a round-up of the frenzy that's sweeping the nation: the mega-phenomenon that is Cleggism. But first:

An Apology 

In common with every other media outlet, we may in the past have given the impression that Nick Clegg was at most an irritating pipsqueak, incapable of stringing a sentence together without annoying anyone within earshot. After last Thursday's edition of the X-factor, however, we realise - in common with all our readers, and the BBC News service - that in fact Mr Clegg represents the last, the only, hope for our embattled nation. If nation shall speak peace unto nation, then Mr Clegg shall be the germolene-type substance we rub into our scabby knee, in the hope that it gets a bit better, and we can stop picking at it, and making it bleed.

*

I was Nick Clegg's Fag - by Louis Theroux

It was that strange time, the eve of adolescence. You know, as well as I do, what it's like in your first term at an in-no-way exclusive twenty-nine-thousand-a-year public school, with the weight of A Famous Father draped about your shoulders like an invisible cloak of many, but mostly red, colours. I often wonder to myself: did my unerring ability to stare blankly at a camera with an air of fake disingenuousness begin that first term? Even now, closing my eyes, I can smell the burning toast as if it were only fifteen or twenty or perhaps as many as thirty or so years ago. I remember the first time I heard his high-pitched-yet-authoritative tone, already showing that compassion for the common man that has become his hallmark:

- You boy! Theroux minor! I want you for my fag!

Someone else's sigh

I'm just behind Matthew, on the 3rd floor of the council block. He's moved ahead because he recognises the voter at the door, stretching out his arm in greeting.

- Hello, we've met before, haven't we, it's Mr Smith, isn't it?

- Oh yes, hello, how are you, how's it all going?

Mr Smith is maybe in his late 50s, thinning black hair, large spectacles around sad dark eyes, large mouth, open wide, smiling. He spends his life smiling, I think, he's got that smiley aspect that genuinely kind people wear, a smile that makes your own mouth smile back. Old suit trousers. Slippers. Shirt. Clean and tidy front door. He doesn't need to say anything else, you know at once that: he's sad, he's open, he's generous, he's tired. I can tell what's coming. So -

So -

So I move away to let Matthew talk to his constituent. I'm looking down from the third floor of these flats that overlook the West Reservoir, on the far edge of which people are messing about in canoes, their tinny squeals of enjoyment carrying over the still air. They're happy, I guess, at least today they're happy. But I listen to Matthew and Mr Smith.

No Poofs

A warm & friendly welcome awaits all guests at Susanne Wilkinson's Swiss Bed & Breakfast in the idyllic village of Cookham, near Maidenhead in Berkshire.

Unless you're gay, of course, as Michael Black and John Morgan found out when they attempted to check-in to Ms Wilkinson's 'warm & friendly' guest house, ahead of a night out at the theatre with friends. As is now well known, Ms Wilkinson's 'warm & friendly' welcome extended to refusing to let them check in, giving them their booking fee back, and turfing them orf her land.

Coincidentally, as Alex Deane pointed out in his superb post yesterday, it is now illegal to incite hatred against gay people. I'm not sure that refusing to let you stay in a guest house would count as inciting hatred, but a professor of law has helpfully contacted Mr Black and Mr Morgan, to suggest that Ms Wilkinson's actions may already be a contravention of the 2006 Equality Act, which makes it illegal to discriminate against someone on grounds of their sexual orientation. I'm not a lawyer, but humiliating a guest from whom you'd accepted a booking, on the grounds of the chromosomal disposition of the person they turn up with, is probably ipso facto a case of discrimination. It's certainly not what I'd call 'warm & friendly', so maybe the advertising standards authority should contact Ms Wilkinson to discuss her website.

School of despair

According to the Hackney Gazette, twelve Hackney primary schools

are lending year six pupils Nintendo DS consoles to play brain training games under a new Learning Trust pilot scheme.

So you're one of the most deprived boroughs in London, with one of the worst sets of educational outcomes, and the consequent blight on life chances. (Remember the Hackney teacher who had to put up with being called a Racist C***? I heard from her recently - she's moved to a 'nicer' area. Another talented teacher gives up trying to cope with this borough's educational 'leadership').

What do you (you being the local education authority) do about it? Do you get teachers to focus on the important basics of arithmetic and so on - you know, like we did at primary school? Seven sevens are forty-nine, seven eights are fifty-six...

No, that wouldn't be sexy enough in 2010. Instead you (the education authority) buy into a commercial company's astonishing love of its product - a games console - and hand that out to your borough's pupils. Because 'brain training' with a games console is a great way to increase SAT scores, apparently. As Tyssen head teacher Sue Windross explains to the Hackney Gazette:

It is vital children make the grade even at this early age because they are then more likely to get an A-C grade at GCSE level.

Rationing, not religion, is the problem with education

I let my head fall back against the window and leave my eyes to gaze at the clouds scudding past in the low grey sky. Not watching anything, just aware of the London skyline drifting past, listening to a melancholy song by an obscure Scottish band, wrapped warm on a quiet early morning commuter train - this is one of my life's small pleasures. Inconsequential, I suppose.

*

Ed Balls has found himself in an entirely predictable mess with his Children, Schools and Families Bill, after tabling (and gaining approval for) an amendment which allows faith schools to teach personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) lessons ''in a way that reflects the school's religious character''. The national secular society has accused him of "cowardice", in giving way to those who, like the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of the Roman Catholic Church, hold that homosexuality is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil. (I wonder what happened to Cardinal Ratzinger? [Keep up - Ed]).

Random Power

The social attitudes survey has gone to my head, a bit. Everyone sees in it what they want to see, anyway, so I choose to see: no-one's that fussed about gay people anymore, and we'd all like to pay less tax, thanks. Finally I'm riding the zeitgeist (baby). Fetch me my beads, I'm off to Tory conference. 

Surfing this wave, I'm going to have another go at resurrecting my perennially unpopular policy about the House of Lords, which also happens to be one of the few original political thoughts I've ever had. Its last airing was at the excellent Dragon's Den at last year's conference, where it attracted the support of approximately zero of the audience voters (never let me be accused of courting populism, or even popularity) [And you wonder why you can't get interviewed for a seat - Ed]. The trouble is, however much everyone laughs at it, I can't get the elegant simplicity of its central idea out, as Kylie might say, of my head.

Polishing His Government

Labour are bringing back their pledge card, that most potent of electoral weapons from their giddy 1997 campaign. But what will feature on Prime Minister Brown's New Plastificated Pledge Sheet? We get a sneak preview:

• Pledge 1: Lord Mandelson Will Run The Government, For Ever ... no matter how often he is forced to resign for mortgage fraud or whatever. Only little people worry about such matters. What are you, a little person?

Freedom to choose

One of the things I most value about my innate Tory disposition is the liberation which it delivers from being forced into holding ridiculous views. Let me explain.

Keith and I were talking about Choudary's planned protest march in Wootton Bassett. Keith said - Is it Royal Wootton Bassett? And I said - I'm not sure, I don't think so, and he said - It should be. And of course he's right. You know he's right. We don't need to work out why it should be right for that town to be so honoured, or to make outlandish claims for our internal reasoning. We see the quiet dignity of the townspeople, honouring our fallen; we sense the solace provided to the grieving families, and we know that they are good people performing a good act. Without reference to anything. And I would like to see the country honour them for their service.

And similarly. Similarly. Even to make an analogy between my thoughts about the town and Choudary makes me feel angry with myself. Anyway. Similarly: I know that Choudary is a disgrace to every civilised norm I hold dear, and should not set the vile bodies of his supporters to march through that town.

Last Word (First Word)

One of the tenets of Christianity which I revere (while being incapable of joining in, as it were) is the very Christmas concept of the Word becoming flesh through the Incarnation. The idea that God became Jesus Christ in flesh is, of course, the central belief of Christians; but it might also tell us something about other words (for all our words must come from God, if we believe in Him). If God gave us language, there would be a sort of moral duty on the people who use words (that is, us).

Words anyway fascinate me. What are they? Hieroglyphs 'containing' a meaning, separate to the physical 'thing' of the word itself? Historically-squished phoneticisms, carrying the sounds used originally to denote that 'thing'? Well. I'm neither religious nor a linguist (definitely what I would urge my 16 year old self to study were I ever to write one of those letters) but on Christmas Eve I think there's something worth considering about words that might unite both Christians and their non-believing friends.

It is the idea that words are real things, with power, in the Universe (one of my central dogmas). Whether you derive your moral sense from the Divine, or whether (like me) you fumble together a way to live based on an urge to love, you are responsible for the selection of the words which you speak, or write; and you are responsible too for the impact they have on your audience. Not everyone will agree with my subordinate clause, there, because (and I understand this) if we are to have freedom of speech we must have freedom to cause offence. I don't suggest banning words. I simply suggest that words cannot be deployed without any recognition that they have the power to wound. If you do wound, you carry the responsiblity for the act.

Where angels fear to tread

I'd much rather write about Christmas (or even the EM Forster novel, come to think of it) than climate change, but something has been troubling me and I thought I'd share my concerns.

I'm worried that 'debate' about climate change has become pointless. Rapid polarisation has turned discussion about the quality of evidence, and the impact of that evidence on one's views about potential AGW, into a football match. Leftwing bloggers write sneering twitter comments about rightwing bloggers' inability to 'get' 'the science'; rightwing bloggers respond with what might be thought of as the written equivalent of 'I'm not listening, nah nah nah, it's cold this week so there can't be any warming at all'. Intelligent people attempt to move the discussion onto terms of economic consequences of specific actions; but I fear they are going to be disappointed.

I'm interested in why this has happened, and what it might tell us about the role of science in politics; science in general, and in particular what I think of as 'inference' but which is usually called 'the evidence'. In fact I could take my pick of issues on which to base this article. From David Nutt and the role of pharmacology in determining drugs policy, to Liam Donaldson and the role of epidemiology in determining alcohol advice to families, it's been a depressing year for people who cling to the irrational hope that there could be a role for rationalism in politics. I doubt this will surprise you, but I blame everyone involved, a bit.

A few months ago I got fed up feeling like a complete ignoramus about climate research. I'm not a physicist but I am a statistician, and I spent two years on a postdoc grant working in an atmospheric physics unit which modelled the spatio-temporal dispersion of atmospheric pollutants, and so I thought there must be some of the literature which I could read, critically, and come to a slightly more informed opinion. So I started reading about the 'hockey stick', a graph which appeared in the 2001 UN IPCC report, which powerfully showed a sharp increase in temperatures around the time of industrialisation in the northern hemisphere. The most famous version of this graph is due to a 1998 publication by three climate change scientists, Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes ('MPH'). You can read their paper here.

Coherent Joylessness

Some time ago I wrote a particularly ill-received piece here, called 'Incoherent Conservatives'. I wanted to raise the issue that coherence, a word with a precise meaning in the logic of induction (which I like) is often used in everyday English with an implicit positive intent (which I dislike; or at least, which I don't find sufficient to nudge me into liking the object of the sentence). You know: His views on the environment are totally coherent with his worldview. Sentences like that are meant, by the writer, to make the reader respond: And this is of itself good.

Most of the time I expect what I post here to disappear into the ether; sometimes I hope that you'll like what I say. I was mildly surprised by the strength of the objections to that post back in April, though I take some comfort from finding that Bertrand Russell agreed with me. It still seems to me that to prioritise a totally coherent programme for government would deliver an outcome both witless and eventually cruel. Start with the axioms of your ideology: and stop there too. Derive policies which cohere with your axioms and ignore the human response to those policies if they fail, because even to acknowledge a failure would require an admission that in our imperfect, pluralist world it is sometimes kinder to lack coherence than it is to stick to the framework you originally selected for decision-making. Anyway don't let's go back there. 

Oh go on then, let's. Liam Donaldson is too big a gift to the party for incoherence to ignore. Here he is again, demanding that parents refrain from letting their children drink a glass of wine at Christmas, or indeed anytime. Dr Donaldson is nothing if not consistent, since at the start of this year he was making the same demand, using the full might of his establishment-medical authority to inveigh against parents who dare to poison their children with a glass of wine at dinner.

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.