Simon T. Kaye

I’ve scribbled a bit more over at First Drafts, Prospect Magazine’s blog. Mostly to do with Disraeli’s failed ambition to form a government with Gladstone and his angry clique of free-trading “Peelites” in 1852: has David Cameron simply succeeded where Disraeli failed?

Take a look here.

Here’s a wee excerpt:

He [Disraeli] seemed to see that coalitions indicate a recognition that differing, conflicting ideas can be equally valid. In both cases he was able to play the hand he was dealt as if it were the one he had been hoping for all along: one trait that Cameron really can claim to share.

I’ve written a short piece on the day’s events and our brand new governing coalition over on Prospect Magazine’s blog.

Here’s a small extract:

In fact, the Lib Dem members I’ve been speaking to are surprisingly open-minded about the future of this deal. There is a sense that the real gain here is the chance for real debate, not only in the newspapers, not only in parliament, but in the heart of government itself: debate around the cabinet table. Gordon Brown tried for a “government of all the talents,” but Cameron has come closer to achieving it.

Electoral reform, improbably enough, is now at the heart of everything. This is the long-discussed ‘dream scenario’ for the Liberal Democrats, and of course they’re terrified by it, even as Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, David Laws & co. expertly manoeuvre us into the ideal equidistant central position for the last day or so of negotiations. The excellence of David Laws’ “Seven Rules” for coalition-bargaining cannot be underestimated here.

Yesterday, Gordon Brown launched his dramatic final gambit – he sacrificed his own political career so as to increase the likelihood of a fourth parliamentary term dominated by Labour politicians. Regardless of whether this actually works, I rather suspect that Brown has secured a spot in the history books (as well as a total tenure as PM which longer than that of James Callaghan) thanks to the gentle levering from power which Nick Clegg has done so carefully over the last few weeks. We all knew Brown was going – and he used his career as a weapon.

The Tories’ response revealed for the first time the deeper outline of the deal that is taking shape between themselves and the Liberal Democrats. They have taken their common ground on environment, education and civil liberties. The Lib Dems appear to have made the large-scale concession that cuts to the deficit must begin this year, rather than next year. I can only presume that a similar concession has been worked out on immigration, as David Cameron will surely face internal revolt if he doesn’t manage to cap non-EU immigration. Issues pertaining to the EU and Trident renewal must, quite rightly, have been put on the back-burner for now.

In return for these concessions, the Liberal Democrats seem to have got their tax proposals accepted, which is a significant victory, and have also picked up, after yesterday’s Corbomite Manoeuvre, assurance of a free vote on a referendum on electoral reform to the Alternative Vote System, along with the introduction of fixed-term parliaments.

However, there is a third plank to the Conservatives’ interest in electoral reform, and it is this third plank which has spooked Labour out of wanting what must otherwise seem like an appealing term as a strong opposition party with the prospect of powerful renewal under a new leader. The Conservatives will almost certainly make radical constituency boundary changes before the next general election. By equalising the size (in terms of population) of every constituency, they will effectively destroy the source of Labour’s strength. In 2005, their handsome majority of Commons seats only existed in Scotland and Wales. This year, they kept a better grip on their core seats than many expected, but were still wholly defeated by the Conservatives in England alone. The Scottish and Welsh constituencies tend to be less populous. The great worry in the high command is that, if these changes come in, Labour would have to win the next election in England as well: no mean feat.

Scratching out a (probably) unstable alliance with the Lib Dems is therefore perceived to be Labour’s last hope before a generation in the wilderness. This may be completely wrong – the next government is sure to be pretty unpopular as it deals with the deficit and Labour could revel in chastising the Conservatives and Lib Dems together. But the electoral mathematics gets very sticky indeed with the regulation of constituency size. The tories have clearly decided that they can afford AV as a trade-off with this advantage over Labour.

As I write these words, we’re half an hour into polling day.

These last four weeks have been historic. But we’ll have time (lots and lots of it) to pick over that in the future. Today, we are greeted by our semi-regular Great British democratic moment. About once every half-decade, we are asked our opinions on the economy, immigration, nuclear power, defence, international relations, education, global warming and social care. And after a good month of listening to a lot of fairly biased opinions and somehow forming our own stances, we’re asked to report back.

We report back by drawing two intersecting lines next to the name of a candidate from a party which seems to most closely share our worldview. Somehow, we reduce our extensive and inter-relating matrix of preferences into one or two choices.

And that’s when the system is working well. When it’s working badly, we feel the need to vote for a party more distant from our own views so as to ensure that a third, even more distant party does not come to power.

There are no conceivable perfect democratic systems. I’m writing a PhD thesis largely inspired by this fact. But this is not to say that some electoral systems are not preferable to others.

The first and most important reason to vote for the Liberal Democrats today is that they, and only they, guarantee root-and-branch repair to our voting system.

Why Libertarians Should be Sceptical of the Big Society

I’m not an ideologue. At least, I hope I’m not. Philosophically, I find much to admire in the Conservative manifesto. Idealistically and artistically I find myself drawn to Labour. Both pitches ultimately fail to satisfy me. Let me explain why.

The Conservatives’ ambition to build a ‘big society’ – to encourage the growth of a bottom-up public sphere to fill the vacuum that is about to be created by anti-deficit spending cuts – is not without merit. Any measure promising to clip the wings of the state is going to find an attentive audience with me, and it strikes me as intelligent that the state’s best, most effective role might be to facilitate and nurture an independent and localised approach to public services.

But this ambition is also horribly mistimed. This is a rebalancing of the shape of our civilization which ought to take place thoughtfully, emergently, and incrementally. It is also a concept of the role of the state better suited to the shepherding of a society in times of strong economic growth. Ironically, this band of Conservatives might have done a pretty sound job in the high years of the late nineties and early noughties. Now is not the time.

David Cameron’s bad timing is not helped by his extraordinary failure to actually express how this apparently central, binding ideological theme will work in practice. His education measures are simple extrapolations from reforms already made under Tony Blair and New Labour, which makes the Conservative attack on Labour’s record on education quite funny. Encouraging academy schemes does not strike me as the fundamental change that Cameron implies that it is – especially as, presumably, the DCSF will still be required to carry out a modicum of quality-control.

The more important problem for Cameron’s Conservatives lies in cross-policy contradiction. How are we supposed to believe that he trusts us – as a ‘big society’ – when he hasn’t enough faith in the reasoning capacity of the electorate to support meaningful voting reform? Why should we accept that he is a modernising ‘Liberal Conservative’ rather than an authoritarian in the George Bush tradition when his spending commitments are greater than Labour’s, greater than the Liberal Democrats’, and he has less published ways of tackling the deficit than either of those parties as well? He aims to spend more and has so far explained only what he is unwilling to cut in terms of public expenditure.

In these conditions, a cut in inheritance tax does not feel like a correction to the unfair levy system, but a very misguided misdirection of inconceivably precious funds. Why protect this one policy, with such a paucity of economic nous elsewhere? Because the modern face of the Conservative Party is surrounded on every side by an army of parliamentary backbenchers who, more than any other group in this country’s political class, live by the darkest of vested interests and the oldest of prejudices.

Labour’s Last Stand

Gordon Brown has somehow drawn an enormous amount of my sympathy over the course of this campaign. We have seen brief hints of the political boldness for which he used to be known – his acceptance of television debates, for one thing: surely he knew he was destined to lose (or be perceived to have lost) in these encounters. The New Labour project started as a bold experiment in political centrism, mixing healthy economic liberalism with a large social conscience. Many genuinely important things have come to pass over the last 13 years.

Brown’s late conversion to substantial constitutional reform is also very appealing. AV, of course, does not go far enough as a change to the voting system (and coalition-minded Liberal Democrats would do well to remember that the Labour party has hinted at nothing more substantial as of yet). That said, I’m willing to be fairly generous with them – they haven’t delivered on electoral change in the past, but I don’t really doubt their sincerity this time around.

So what, fundamentally, should cause a voter to abandon Labour for the Liberal Democrats?

Civil liberties. What else? Labour has shown a shameless tendency to erode our traditional rights and freedoms in the name of enhanced security. We are filmed, databased, biometrically analysed. Our right to trial before extended detention has been chipped at, pushed back, and Labour has tried manfully to push even harder. They would like us to carry identification documents at all times, and to submit to inclusion on a universal register containing absurdly fine detail. And for these things, we are expected to pay as well. We would be required to tell the state where we move, how our situations change, what our names become. If we don’t do it quickly, we’ll get fined. ID cards are designed to be not only revenue-neutral, but revenue raising. They expect to make some money out of their catalogue.

No Liberal-minded person can trust Labour until they bring in a leader who is willing to accept the broader consensus on human rights and civil liberties. Gordon Brown had a shining opportunity, in his happy first days as Prime Minister, to draw a line under Blair’s authoritarianism. Instead, he chose to take a stand on it, to fight for it. When he did this, he lost my vote for good.

In my post yesterday I pointed out a few things which I felt were being overlooked by the swarms of commentators and media folk who are trying to predict the outcome of this election. Specifically, I explained my view that we would end up with a hung parliament of some description. In fact, I am increasingly convinced that Labour will remain the largest party in that hung parliament.

This brings us to a massive problem for the Liberal Democrats, and again, I don’t think many people have talked about this yet – but I reckon it’ll be the deciding factor in any future talks about coalitions.

As a party, the Lib Dems been pretty coy about who we’d most like to work with in the event of a “balanced parliament”. The older stance, which received much airing during the last few party leadership campaigns, was that the Liberal Democrats would work informally with other parties rather than in full-on coalitions: expecting no cabinet positions, supporting the minority government in a vote of no confidence, decision-making at the point of the Queen’s Speech. That sort of thing. It’s pretty clear why this came about: it avoided the internally contentious question of whether we were closer to Labour or the Tories, and reflected the many bruises that were caused by the aborted lib-lab “friendship” of 1997.

This line doesn’t seem to cut it any more. It’s fairly plain, as it turns out, that the Labour policy platform is much, much closer to the Lib Dem one in 2010 – even if only because they’ve helped themselves to many of our oldest aspirations in the electoral reform, parliamentary reform and voting-age reform departments. Vince Cable has definitely looked more SDP than Liberal of late, and his tag-teaming with Alastair Darling against George Osborne at the Chancellor’s debate was fairly obvious. Even if it can’t be said of the parliamentary party, it’s more or less certain that the Lib Dem grassroots would prefer cooperation with Labour.

Yet we now face a scenario where it is perfectly possible that Labour could hold the larger number of seats in Parliament even with the Tories miles ahead in terms of popular vote-share.

Nick Clegg has spoken countless times that, after the election, “the largest party will have the moral mandate to form a government”. Larger – in what sense? Larger number of seats or larger public support?

Can the Liberal Democrats, long term advocates of proportional representation in Parliament, support a minority government which is not the clear winner of the popular vote?

Setting aside the piquant irony of a electoral-reform hating Conservative party being cheated of victory by the mores of the first-past-the-post system, the Liberal Democrats could find themselves in very difficult territory if they attempt to form a coalition with, or even informally support, Labour.

They might be ‘kingmakers’ for a while – at the cost of their very hard-won reputation for honesty and fair play. The move that would make the Liberal Democrat party could break it in the eyes of voters forever.

Of course this has already occurred to the Parliamentary party – and it’s on this basis that I make my second General Election prediction: in the event of a hung parliament, the Liberal Democrats will choose to form a formal coalition with nobody at all.

It’s obviously incredibly couragous of me (in the suicidal Yes, Minister sense) to stick my head above the parapet with anything that looks like a public prediction of the outcome of this election. But here are a few things that I think aren’t being included in the debates – specifically, some reasons why (despite the predictions of most Men Behind The Polls) Cameron’s Tories might not get their outright majority on May 6th.

1. The Liberal Democrats will hold on in the South

I’ve obviously got an interest which doesn’t need to be declared here, but all the same. Uniform swing predictions are absolutely useless when talking about the Lib Dem/Tory marginals in the South of England. I had the pleasure of helping out in Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake’s south London constituency of Carshalton and Wallington. The figures suggest that this place is on an electoral knife-edge, and the seat is high on the Tories’ target list. But local people are big fans of Tom Brake, who happens to be an incredibly hard-working MP, one of the very few who came out of the expenses scandal looking like a saint, and also happens to be rather good at his job. In other words, I’d still put my money on Tom holding on (at pretty good odds, but anyway). Seat-by-seat, I think the Lib Dems are going to hold on rather well in the south – better, that is, than many predictions suggest. And this means that the Tories will have to do all the better in places where, traditionally, they tend to struggle to attract votes – places like…

2. The North

People are talking a lot right now about how the Conservatives have ‘won’ the first week of campaigning. Perhaps they have – they’ve seemed to control the agenda, at least. But all Labour really needs to do at this point is look like a tenable government. If they achieve the appearance of anything like a votable or supportable political force, then the electoral hill the Tories must climb in the North of England turns into a mountain. And I’d argue that the first week of campaigning has at the very least shown Labour to be competitive in this minimal way. The credibility gap has been bridged. By a similar token, the Tory ‘coup’ of getting into bed with apparently every single businessman in the country in the NI debate could backfire badly beyond the South. They’re publishing an endorsement from the former head of Meryll Lynch, for crying out loud. Have we forgotten about the financial crisis already?

3. Labour gets the credit for escaping the recession

It’s been little reported, but a number of polls have shown that a healthy majority of British people thank Brown, Darling et al. for fixing the economy. It’s a pretty simple rule of electoral analysis, actually: the sitting government always gets blamed for a bad economy, the sitting government always gets rewarded for a bouyant one. We can explain the majority of all electoral outcomes in history by pointing to the personal finantial situation of the average voting citizen, and frankly things could be a lot worse for Labour in this regard. Cameron may find himself having to explain why he opposed (and opposes) many of the measures which appear to have done the trick, whether or not this line of questioning is fair.

4. Brown could win the debates

Don’t laugh, it’s perfectly possible. I’ve just been discussing this with a friend who suspects that Brown will simply look too uncharismatic and ponderous and dull next to Clegg and Cameron, but I have my doubts. Surely Cameron will have the greatest expectations heaped upon his shoulders? In the US, where these debates are not novel at all, the Democrat and Republican political machines have become adept in the art of ‘expectations management’: minimise the general expectation of your guy’s performance as much as possible, and then any kind of success will have a strong effect. Woe unto the candidate who is expected to perform brilliantly and merely performs well. Cameron is this candidate, and for all his preparation, I think he does rather better in the direct, adversarial type of debate that we see in PMQs every week. Brown will be fine in the carefully clinical, rules-driven encounters that people will actually watch. Never underestimate the pursuasive strength of a statistic. Brown likes statistics.

Of course, the biggest opportunity in the debate belongs to Clegg, and he may very well shine. But anybody ‘winning’ who isn’t Cameron will be a disaster for the Conservative campaign. My friend points out that the narratives are pre-set: the newspapers and commentators have probably already decided who won these debates. But this is a chance to talk directly to voters, and get a precious thirty seconds of speech into the news: very hard to argue with.

Last note – Just so you know, my long-promised, long-delayed political science analysis of AV voting reforms will emerge soon.

This month, I got a paper published in a journal called History & Theory (the ampersand is important). It’s been a long wait – a round of revisions, some serious collaborative editing to make it consumable in America, plus the usual long stretches of peer-review and publication.

It’s about counterfactualism. Here’s the abstract as it appears in the journal and on the Wiley Interscience website, where it’s hosted for all (who have an Athens account) to see.

Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood in terms of the three categories of common ahistorical errors that it may help to prevent: the assumptions of indispensability, causality, and inevitability. To support this claim, I survey a series of key counterfactual works and reflections on counterfactualism, arguing that the practice of counterfactualism evolved as both cause and product of an evolving popular assumption of the plasticity of history and the importance of human agency within it. For these reasons, counterfactualism is of particular importance both historically and politically. I conclude that it is time for a methodological re-assessment of the uses of such thought-experiments in history, particularly in light of counterfactualism’s developmental relatedness to cultural, technological, and analytical modernity.

As I mentioned on my facebook page, this is an article that includes Star Trek, Leibniz, Back to the Future, Plato, John Stuart Mill and Lost.

In other words, I’m very pleased, even if I am just going over it again and again now and spotting all kinds of problems, mistakes and missed opportunities. Worst parts are where something simply hasn’t translated so well into that terrifying niche-language, American Academese.

Now according to this nice contract with Blackwell, I can’t put it up on my website for another year, and even then I shouldn’t use the official PDF. But if you’d like to read it and don’t have an Athens account, drop me a line (to my usual address) and I’ll tell you how to get hold of it.