Simon T. Kaye

Well, the political news is full of the planned Commons vote-on- referendum for electoral reform. This is one occasion where my job and political beliefs as a Liberal Democrat coincide very nicely with my vocation and my research for a PhD in Political Theory – so I hope you’ll permit me to indulge in a little bit of an academic approach to this situation.

The system to be voted on is a classic – the old ‘AV’ system. This is no surprise. Elements of the Labour party have long preferred the Alternative Vote or ‘Instant Runoff Voting’ as the basis for electoral reform (though I suspect that the majority of that parliamentary party has never quite seen the point).

The political motivations of Labour’s move appear to be twofold. Firstly, they hope to show up the Conservatives as visibly opposed to a reform that, following the whole Adventure of the Abused Expenses, may be viewed as a popular measure to hand stronger accountability to the public.

The other reason boils down to electoral mathematics: by building the mandate for electoral reform now, Labour is eyeing a future election where the tories are still broadly the most popular party nationally, but will be unable to build anything resembling Labour’s 1997-2005 unofficial supermajority in the Commons. It’s possible that serious treatment of voting reform could only ever emerge from a vaguely leftist, unpopular government. The truth is that the vast majority of voters for Labour would rather vote for the Libdems than the Tories, and that most (though a few less) Libdems would rather have a Labour government than a Conservative one. Together they’re a (50%+) majority, so at the most basic level the maths of this make sense for Labour. Moreover, the motivation for such reforms evaporate with the promise of political success in the First Past the Post system (FPTP) – why kick away the ladder that let you climb up?

Labour’s political machinations aside, as a Liberal Democrat I can only get excited about any half-serious approach to a change in the voting system. There’s no question that the Libdem preference – Single Tansferable Vote (STV) – would be more proportional in effect, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of our MPs demurr during the vote on the basis that the reforms don’t go far enough. But there are other grounds for criticism of the AV system, beyond the “it goes too far” or “it doesn’t go far enough” cries that you’ll be hearing for a the next few weeks.

As part of my research, I’m working on something called Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. I won’t go into too much detail here, but Kenneth Arrow basically came up with mathematical expressions of democratic norms, and then asserted that within the boundaries of these requirements there could be no voting system between three alternatives that could guarantee stable and non-arbitrary outcomes.

Well, since Labour’s announcement I’ve been doing some thinking about this, and worked up a couple of examples, and I think I’m ready to assert that the AV system is not capable of increasing Democratic meaninfulness even as we know it has only limited ability to improve the proportionality of electoral outcomes.
I’ll leave it there for now, and put up part two, with all my more academic objections, very soon.

With the Copenhagen Summit underway and the low rumble of discontent over the hacked emails debacle still audible, I feel the need to communicate my feelings on all the claims and counter-claims on the ’science’ of global warming.

I marched on the ‘Copenhagen Wave’ last weekend, along with tens of thousands of other people from all around the UK. It’s a worthwhile cause, I’m strongly in favour of firm emissions reduction targets, and I believe that human activity is responsible for the climate change going on around us. Note, however, the use of the word ‘believe’ – I don’t know anything – not scientifically, anyway.

‘Scientific facts’ are curious beasts. Science may be said to be incapable of producing hard-and-fast facts. One formulates a hypothesis; one tests it; if the hypothesis is upheld, and is upheld repeatably, then surely we have a scientific fact on our hands? Well, yes and no.

Within the framework of the experiment, we have shown a ‘fact’ – but it’s possible that laboratory conditions or the specific arrangements of a test differ from what we’d assume to be ‘normal’ conditions. Test conditions are capable of presenting spurious, irrelevant or simply untrue ‘facts’. It works the same way as the framing of verbal logic.

So, scientific facts prove only the specific hypothesis which are tested. More importantly, they can only be assumed to do so temporarily. Facts have use-by dates. The first relevant experiment to come along and throw new light on a question or display slightly different results will once again throw doubt onto any ’scientific fact’, and it is a part of scientific method to assume that proofs are finite in this way. A statement is true until proven false, just as the accused is innocent until proven guilty. The difference is that reasonable doubt runs the other way: if there is reasonable doubt as to the truth of a scientific statement, then it cannot really be called a fact. For this reason, there must be much, much more evidence in support of a claim of scientific fact than there need to be made against it in order to ‘disprove’ it – which is parallel to our legal metaphor, where the onus lies with the prosecution to eradicate reasonable doubt.

The third important point about scientific facts is that, in an important way, they can never get beyond inference. We may observe the correlation between two different things a hundred times in experiments – but all we’ve really seen is the same correlation, a hundred times. So even with the non-existence of contrary evidence, ’scientific fact’ requires someone to look at the evidence and draw a causal conclusion about it all – to claim “these things are not coincidental: one causes the other”.

These three question-marks can help us to look at the human-caused (‘anthropogenic’) global warming argument objectively:

First of all, anyone who tells you that anthropocentric climate change is proven, certain, a done deal, is either lying to you, or doesn’t know much about science. These will be the sort of people who say ‘climate change deniers’ instead of ’skeptics’. Even in so far as there is any such thing as a ’scientific fact’, I cannot in good conscience write that anthropogenic climate change is one – no matter how useful that could be politically.

Why isn’t anthropogenic climate change a scientific fact? First of all, our planet’s atmosphere does not constitute a nice, stable test condition. It has its own ups and downs, is sensitive to the activity of the sun and to its own internal weather patterns, such as el niño. Even today our weather and climate can be altered by unpredictable, freak occurences. Trying to draw a general trend out of this mess, even over fairly long periods, is very hard work. Even worse, climate change scientists will always be frustrated in their efforts to project changes into the future, and a key element of scientific proof is in the success of a model: can we extrapolate our findings into a means to predict what will happen next? In this case, the short-term answer is no.

Instrumental data on warming. The range since useful records began is about 1 degree centigrade in total. From Wikicommons.

Secondly, even with something like an upward trend (which is more or less visible in the data – see the diagram above), there is the problem of cause-attribution. This is made a bigger issue by the fact that the two curves under scrutiny here do not scale particularly well together.

I take as absolutely true that greenhouse gas levels are increasing significantly in the atmosphere, and that these gases are being released because of human activity.

More difficult to prove, but still, in my opinion, true, is the general trend of a warming climate over the last fifty years or so.

But these facts together signify only correlation. I, personally, believe that there is enough evidence to link them causally. This third leap is required for ’scientific fact’. But the problem is that the rate of the increase in temperature does not match in terms of scale the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, or adhere to the predictions of scientists. There can be little doubt of an increase in CO2 levels – whereas warming levels can be attributed to other causes, such as solar activity or the (thus far barely understood) planetary rhythm of ice-age to warm-patch.

One word of warning  – stick to the instrumental data. Information on the ‘medieval warm period’ is worse than useless, because of course there is no reliable measurement information from that far back. We are limited to the last hundred years or so, and this is both bad news and good news for climate change scientists. It means we must discount the geological probabilities that this planet has been considerably warmer and considerably cooler than it is now at various points in its history, over the course of millions of years.

But these ‘good’ records do show a temperature increase, and it corresponds in terms of timeframe with the start of human industrial activity in earnest. This is enough for me.

Skepticism, it must be noted, is a good thing. It is the scientist’s responsibility to be skeptical, which is why the activities of the UEA scientists is particularly reprehensible. But skeptics must be skeptical always: there is far, far less evidence for ‘alternative’ causes of temperature increase than there is for the greenhouse effect argument, and this is what must be said at the Copenhagen summit.

It is with healthy skepticism that we ought to take action against CO2 emissions. We don’t know anything for certain – but shouldn’t we hedge our bets? I don’t think that scientific rationalism should ever form the basis, by itself, for public policy. But the intuitive response to all this information is to detect a cause, and the response to that intuition is clear.

And wouldn’t it be a noble human objective to cut down on pollution regardless of its relationship with climate-change? Why does no-one ever make that argument?

There’s been another long fallow period on this blog.

My thinking at the moment is that I should really re-orient what I do here around my work as an organiser for North East Hertfordshire’s Liberal Democrats, and leave lots of space for off-the-cuff ideas, fun and academic resources.

So, a few things:

Today has seen the launch of ‘Act’, which is the Liberal Democrats’ new social networking and organisation tool. Visit Lib Dem Act. I’ve just joined, and I’m not quite sure how long it will take for it to pick up enough members to start being really useful, but it’s very swish stuff. Go and take a look, and do join!

If you live in North East Hertfordshire, then you should get onto Facebook and join the debate at the new LibDem group there, specifically for your region. The group is a work-in-progress, and I’m keen to see how much support I can get together for a very-local social networking party presence. Everyone welcome.

Things will stay slow here for a little while, but change is coming!

I’ve had some interesting replies to my last post on this, so I thought I’d put down a bit more here. Just from the outset, though: I wrote the original piece out of bemusement that everyone had given up whinging about the NHS for a day. I was hoping to strike my usual balance of being critical of something while still supporting it overall.

The estimable Shiro Ota wrote this:

Perhaps the NHS does constitute some semi lack of freedom (to be as detrimental to your own health as you like, although most people who live in such a way don’t seem to worry too much about their moral responsibility not to strain the system); but surely that’s more than offset (by a long way) by the benefits of aiding those who are genuinely, unavoidably, unhealthy; and those who are upstanding; hard-working citizens who could, nevertheless, not afford equivalent private care.

Randian objectivism is an understandable system that would oppose an NHS. But without subscribing to that (which I don’t), I can’t see a case for opposing its institution. In post-war Britain; or at present.

The question of the balancing act returns, of course - do we derive a greater value (of freedom or whatever else is at stake here) from the existence of the NHS as we do from the potential state of its non-existence?

It’s hard to prove anything from a counterfactual (and I should know). I suppose that all I can say in reply to this is that I don’t feel the only alternative to socialised health-care is its polar opposite. This is reflected in the fact that a Labour government has been spending the last decade and more tying the NHS to private interests, partnerships, and investment. I don’t think it’s working – actually I think it’s disastrously half-arsed.

Coming from another world, though, where we never had an NHS, I think that state intervention would be perfectly acceptable in a system that is, for the most part, operated in terms of a free market of health-care. So I don’t think that Randian Objectivism is the only recourse, or that, indeed, it could be any sort of improvement.

Obamacare may be basically the right synthesis, in the end – I’m sure we’ll find out.

My sainted mother, Dani Kaye, wrote this:

And why don’t you mention what you would put in its place, given the relative poverty of such a massive proportion of the British population compared to, say, Switzerland, where we have mandatory health insurance?

Well I think I made clear that I wouldn’t do anything like remove the nhs… it’s too well-established. But if I was starting from scratch?

Subsidies delivered to essential, first-level health services and medicines, mandatory insurance with certain benchmarks of assistance based on personal income, anti-monopoly laws for hospital ownership and licensing permissions so there wouldn’t be too much geographical overlap… basically a really, really well-regulated market scenario. Rather than the current approach, which is to try to de-regulate, localise and set up PFIs etc. over the top of a state monopoly. No NICE, either: individual health establishments make their own decisions about their services, above a certain level. They compete, improved services are incentivised, and thus we’re hardly dealing with some anarchistic nightmare realm.

Another particular friend asks:

Is it just me or are the Daniel Hannan NHS comments pretty reasonable?

Well, Hannan clearly thinks the whole project was misguided, though he seems to agree that people have always meant well in instituting the NHS. I don’t actually have a problem with this guy. He’s mainly saying things that most people say every day: we spend too much money on it, it’s over-regulated, and it has crazy little breakdowns in its own special ways. It’s a perfectly reasonable point of view.

A few points about the general Fox coverage, though: Doctors over here are paid PLENTY. There’s no argument to be found on that. I truly believe that. Could they be paid more? Sure! But I don’t think their pay levels are in any way part of any of the problems that our system has.

I’ve been enjoying the big online argument over Britain’s NHS. Fox News have thrown around the idea that it lets terrorists into the country. CNN has a pretty good overview of how everyone’s been responding to the US Republicans’ claim that the system is “Orwellian”. And the #welovethenhs tag trundles away on Twitter.

Complaining about the NHS is pretty habitual in practically every British person that I know. “I can’t believe I had to wait thirteen weeks to have my _ looked at!”, “You won’t believe how long I was waiting in Accident and Emergency and then they didn’t even do anything!”, “It’s ridiculous how our hospitals have become home to ’superbugs’ – why can’t they just keep the places clean?”, and so on.

What most people don’t do is make the outright principled stand – they don’t object philosophically or ideologically to the cost of the NHS, the idea of living in each other’s pockets, or the loss of personal responsibility for health.

(Erm, we also don’t think the NHS lets terrorists in.)

So I’ve always concluded that most Brits want socialised health care, but they want it to be better than it is right now. What’s fascinating about the ongoing debate is that so many people seem to be leaping to the NHS’s defence completely unequivocally.

Well, let’s be measured about all of this. As a Brit by birth, I’ve used the NHS many times. So here is a FAQ:

Does the NHS provide an overall good standard of medical care? Absolutely. It works. People get treated, and it’s absolutely free at the point of use. I usually come away satisfied. Just not always.

Is that standard as high as in a privatised health system? Not at the top, but it’s far better for folks at the bottom of the chain. By the way, in the UK, people who want to can take out private health insurance and seek private aid, so there isn’t a total monopoly.

Is the NHS a massive, creaking bureaucratic behemoth? Oh lord, yes. The NHS is plagued by wastefulness, red tape and is swarming with money- and time-wasting bureaucracy. Hopefully this can be reformed.

Do most people put more money into the system through tax than they’re ever likely to get back through treatment? Of course. If you don’t like that, you don’t want socialised…. well, anything. Apart from maybe education.

Is it OK to be philosophically opposed to nationalised health care? Yes. It does work, it’s about a million miles from being perfect, but if you’re fundamentally opposed to the idea of distributing the personal responsibility for one’s own wellbeing, then you should feel free to hate the NHS.

As the chief legacy of Clement Attlee’s post-war reforming government, the NHS was originally intended to form the cornerstone of a projected ‘Socialist Republic of Great Britain’. Clearly, this never happened. But the idea was so popular and so effective that the NHS is absolutely at the heart of the UK’s version of the ‘post-war settlement.’

It’s an assumed fact of life here: people don’t think to oppose the NHS on any fundamental level any more. The single biggest compromise to universally socialised medicine in the NHS took place months after the service was inaugurated, with the introduction of prescription charges. Since then, not even Maggie Thatcher has found the time to repeal the key parts of our health care system.

Speaking for myself, I find it hard to escape the usefulness and ‘fairness’ of this system (especially when it has treated me well, as it has for the last little while).

But would I institute such an establishment again, today, if I had the choice? Probably not.

The fact of socialised health care legitimises the worst instances of government nannying. We are now nagged and scolded on a daily basis over the latest health fads, based on one or two studies somewhere in some department of medicine, and often quickly withdrawn when competing evidence is produced. We eat too much salt, we don’t eat enough vitamin C, we need certain foods, a certain lifestyle. I don’t think government should get involved with the way people live their lives. But when everyone else pays for your own health problems the responsibility for them becomes impersonal. Your weight, your habits and your choices become everybody’s business.

The NHS is unweildy, but willing; it works in earnest, but doesn’t always deliver perfect healthcare. No system can. So if you’re going to oppose the NHS, do it properly, from the ground up: do it because you think it’s a signpost on the road to decreased freedom. Everything else is just noise.

“The next ten or fifteen years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.” 

These words were uttered at a hearing in the heart of Political America recently. You can see it, and an interview with Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post, over on this webcast of a segment from MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’.

Oh yes; journalism (its nature, its state) isn’t just making news at the moment; it’s in the news. The rise of the ‘blogosphere’ has been a perennial issue for some time; as a journalism student I saw many well-known journalists speak and the one topic that they all always came back to was the changing face of their trade in the age of new media.

Alan Rusbridger failed to convince with an almost-powerpoint about how the Guardian’s transition to the ‘Berliner’ format was an attempt to shore up sales while papers do the job of convincing people that their coverage is worth actually paying for (I think I’ve complained about his talk before…). Of the writers, ‘columnist’ Polly Toynbee was particularly derisive of this challenge to her status as arch-opinion-former.

It’s at the movies, too. State of Play (which is excellent) feeds off the in-house tension between a veteran political reporter who types onto a dark screen with two fingers at a time and the young thing behind his paper’s attempt to survive online. When Crowe’s character says “You think I’m over-fed, too expensive and take way too long”, he isn’t simply referring to himself. Newspapers now cost around £1 a day in this country (which almost legitimises my ever-more-frequent splashing out for the International Herald Tribune, at closer to a quid-fifty). Why pay that to read news that was only fresh ten hours ago?

The Independent, under Simon Kelner, tried something new. Objectivity? Who needs it! News is subjective. Importance is relative. Everyone writing this paper is human; let’s not pretend we don’t have opinions. The result was the ‘viewspaper’, a concept which has slipped away somewhat since the start of Roger Alton’s reign (he prefers the more old-fashioned approach of decorating the pages with beautiful women. They “basically make the world a better place”, after all). Today I’m not quite clear whether the ‘viewspaper’ ever made the Indie into anything more than the Express of the left.

The recent outcry over Swine Flu panics on the Internet allowed every traditional-media commentator to point out what they perceive to be the inferiority of blogs, and twitter, and social networking sites. If it’s not edited, it’s not safe. No-one making this claim can have seen some of the front-page headlines I saw a week ago. “Swine Flu to kill 91,000 Londoners” is a personal favourite.

Newspapers are not immune to misjudgments, errors, factual inconsistencies and unqualified opinions. It’s pretty ironic to see the stalwarts of the printed-press attacking new information-distribution systems for inflating problems or being hysterical when the very slump in sales caused by new media is the driving force behind the popularisation, dumbing-down and spectacle-seeking that practically every newspaper I can think of has been moving towards (though I do feel inclined to point out my belief that the USA’s daily printed media are of a sustained quality compared to the papers here in the UK).

The current, excellent issue of Prospect magazine (I know, I keep linking to them) mounts a debate around and defence of ’serious journalism’. More here.

This seems particularly timely as the Telegraph, mocked and criticised (Private Eye calls it the ‘Maily Telegraph’) for its massive staff cuts and new-found interest in celebrity nonsense, dominates everyone’s news-schedules for the second day running. Its comprehensive investigation into and explanation of Parliament’s flawed expenses system is an absolute must-read, clearly the product of prolonged research, and a genuine scoop. Are there mistakes? Of course. Dozens, I’m sure (it’s still worthwhile).

But, crucially, The Huffington Post probably couldn’t get away with this many factual issues or slightly-libellous claims without compromising its standards. I’m simply not convinced that we hold our more established online news-sources to a lower standard than we do our printed media. I’d personally trust a twitter feed more readily than an editorial in the Express.

Warren Ellis advised us in last month’s Wired (another great magazine) not to trust the new media as a source of news. Why? Because online news providers “have no interest in their minimum-wage blogmonkeys thinking about anything bigger than their hitcount”. But how, precisely, does this differ from the editors and writers of the modern-day newspaper, faced with shrinking sales and deflating advertising revenues?

Things move quickly in this new world. Amazon’s Kindle, the most successful of the e-ink reader systems, is moving toward a larger format that can more effectively accommodate the big pages of newspapers and journals. The days of getting ink on our fingers may well be numbered, and this would be no bad thing for an environment that needs its trees.

Are newspapers going to disappear? No. They’ll change, they’ll be forced to adapt. I personally think they’ll become more like magazines. I’m reading more magazines now than I have at any other time in my life; I’ve referred to at least three different magazines right here in this article.

To return to the quote at the top of this blog – is the decline of the traditional media really going to undermine the accountability of the political world? People thought this way when radio hit newspapers, and again when television hit newspapers. The truth is that it has become harder to do wrong, and to get away with it, than ever before. This fact raises ethical issues of its own.

But let us not delude ourselves that ’serious journalism’ plays some quasi-constitutional role that more democratic systems of reportage cannot match.

Another marvelous image from XKCD

Evgeny Morozov, who writes an unmissable blog for Foreign Policy, makes a more important criticism of twitter’s current role, suggesting that it’s providing more disinformation than anything else – but also mentions the possibility that the internet could work as a fantastic finder and predictor of emerging biological threats. With the increasing integration of mobile phones and other devices, the internet ceases to be merely our nervous system, and emerges as a component of a global immune system.

Prospect Magazine (for whom I once worked! woo!) have put online a fascinating article: Mark Honigsbaum writes about the means of catching pandemics early. He points out that Swine Flu may well have been abroad in Mexico for a few weeks before the news broke in any meaningful way online. More importantly, his assertion is that the nature of the internet renders it less useful for disease detection – underinformed or worried searchers on google, for example, would distort the information on a given outbreak. Or, to extrapolate from this: the internet is too open, too democratic to operate as an even quasi-scientific virus catcher.

The logical outcome of this – and explicitly suggested by the above – is that the brains behind Twitter and Google and the rest turn their attention to a reserved system of aggregating relevant information for the purposes of planetary self-defence and early warning.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this recommendation. The advantage of the internet as it stands is that it is simply the broadest information-exchange ever constructed. I don’t see how a more limited network could articulate the information more quickly.

Swine Flu is surely the most quickly discovered and shared potential-pandemic that we’ve ever seen. If it had started in a western country, it would have broken out on Twitter within moments (though there is weight to the counter-argument that, hey, these things start in poorer countries were internet access is more rare. But that is changing…)

As for informational quality – well, this is a perrenial problem anyway. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the blind assumption that vetted, ‘establishment’ data is always preferable.

Systems such as Digg and others have an almost marketised hierarchy built-in. The preferences of many translate into the emergence of decent and flawed information: it’s all available, but it’s clearly sorted. Such a system is clearly the next step for micro-blogging as well.

This is the kind of thinking that reminds me of David Brin’s Earth, which posited an emerging planet-wide sentience. In effect, this is a far simpler idea: our ‘intelligent’ superstructure is conscious only as its individual, reporting components are. It’s the beginnings of a hive-mind.

So – I won’t be so quick to sneer at the torrents of little fears, hopes, jokes, and links that pour through twitter on the theme of Swine Flu. It may be our fastest defence against the next big pandemic - whether that’s tomorrow, or twenty years away.