Simon T. Kaye

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.

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.

“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.

Don't worry, this isn't the Enterprise

 My dad introduced me to Star Trek. As a child, my brain was quickly filled up with the incredible idealism, aspiration and earnest good-nature at the heart of the show. I loved it. I loved the original series best of all, but the others were just great, too. I memorised the technical manual. I subscribed to the ‘Fact Files’ for years (though they contained very few ‘facts’).

Voyager was the beginning of the end for this love-affair. Maybe it was just a matter of timing – maybe I started to see how often the plots were being recycled, got to that stage in adolescence where cynicism overpowers optimism. The films took a turn for the worse, as well. Enterprise… well, Enterprise just had an appalling theme tune. I’ve been secretly trying to chew my way through the supposedly less-awful third season for a while now, and it’s tough going.

To cut to the chase, I lost interest. Th0ugh whole sectors of my brain remain dedicated to the layout of Deck 17′s Jeffrey’s Tubes and the middle name of Picard’s brother’s wife’s Tribble, I felt alienated from the show and the films. It seemed stolid, unrealistic, badly written and lazy. And to think that I could have learnt a language instead (no, I don’t count Klingon).

So just as it’s impossible to explain fully what a Star Trek obsession meant to this bullied little boy, it’s very hard to outline quite what put me off, either. But my dad? He was there before me, and he stuck around after I moved on as well. So it was clearly paramount (phnarr) that he and I see this latest entry together.

Let me try to put this in context: dad wore a T-shirt to the screening. On this T-shirt: a massive front-and-back image of Quark the Ferengi’s snaggle-toothed face, and a bit of text outlining some of the Rules of Acquisition. My dad can put most geeks to shame. He’s been doing it for a lot longer, to be fair.

A curious fact: out of all Star Trek, the original series has aged the least. It’s design ethic and budget are so clearly from a different age of television that the clunk and quirk that seem inexcusable in the more recent series are instantly forgiven. The writing is fantastic in places, some of the science fiction ideas are real classics, and the central triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy (the holy trinity; the warrior, the mage and the cleric; the ego, the superego and the id) still sparkles on today.

It’s these mechanics that the new film had to live up to, really: the emotional and science-fiction heart of Trek that has kept the first series fresh for decades. Or so I thought. (I’m actually moving into a review now, honest).

This film has no ‘science fiction’ in it. It’s purest fantasy. There’s no exploration of philosophy, future politics, moral dilemmas or the like. And it doesn’t spend a hell of a lot of time developing characters, either. This is not the film of the original series. This is, in fact, the film that would be made from the original series if there had never been any films or spin-offs.

Draw a line right after the last episode of Season 3 of Kirk’s adventures. Or perhaps after Spock’s death in the Wrath of Khan. (Or, okay, just after the end of the third film). Now build a movie.

What’s the upshot? It makes Star Trek magical again. I’m not going to witter on about how it relates to the post-Obama optimism of a new era or helps us forget our credit-crunched woes. It’s a good film because it has surprising reverence for the mythology that gives Trekkers wet-dreams  – and successfully translates the stylistic and historical essence of Trek into a modern, self-aware cinematic language.

For the record, I’m wondering if this is the first in-universe reboot in the history of cinema. We are tied to the timeline we remember, and all deviations from it are excused, in one elegant sweep of J.J.Abrams’ pen. It’s the best possible utilisation and acceptance of everything that’s come before: this is the timeline that we want. It’s the utopia, Dr Pangloss’s best of all possible worlds. Our understanding of all other Star Trek forms the emotional weight for this reboot.

This is just as well, because the film could use another ten minutes of character moments and dialogue. Who thought that anyone would ever write that about a Star Trek film?

Any other problems? Well, the Macguffins arguably fly a little too thick and too fast. There are few attempts to make plausible the ‘magical’ parts of the plot. What the hell is this ‘red matter’? I understand the appeal of just being shown what it can do, and the urgent need to minimise on technobabble. But… it’s unsatisfying. Similarly, our Romulan baddie, while overall very competently played by Eric Bana, seems to have minimal motivation for chasing Spock through time and blowing up whole worlds, Death-Star style (by the way, I love that his ship is just some miner in the future and it can totally outgun everything in Kirk’s era. I also love the idea of destroying a planet by making a big hole in it and planting a black hole). Yes, Romulus was destroyed. But Spock tried to save it. It’s not enough to say that you’ve spent a couple of decades “forgetting normal life”.

I have every expectation that this sort of problem is solved by the accompanying prequel comic-books, but the film ought to sort out motivations properly, at least.

Spock is more emotional in this film than in his previous incarnations. The attempt to explain this seems to be based on his fundamental decision to go to Starfleet instead of try for the Kohlinar, the ceremony that’s supposed to eradicate emotion altogether. But it’s still a departure. In fact, of all the new actors approaches to the classic roles, I think I find Zachary Quinto’s the most difficult to swallow.

But I’m nitpicking really. This is a great film, and it’s clearly being positioned to replace Star Wars and fill that yawning gap for big budget sci-fi adventures. It’s charming and funny.

I love that Kirk’s cheat on the Kobayashi-Maru is finally shown to us. I love that the new Enterprise is gorgeous. I love the way the film starts with a bang, and ends with an awesome version of the original theme tune (thanks, mr. Giacchino). I look forward to the rest of the trilogy (please please please).

Last word: my dad, more suspicious of this ‘rebooting’ nonsense than I, said that he loved it. Let’s just trust him on that.

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.

On a slight tangent from the last piece:

A friend of mine on Facebook reminded me about Berkeley’s course on Starcraft and Game Theory. I tracked down this video of their first lecture. They all seem to be having a lot of fun.

This is probably of most interest to nerds who enjoy Game Theory experiments (like me!). But it’s an interesting interpretation of a strategy game, and the information they are deriving or modelling with it seems to have very little to do with narrative or story. Compare and contrast with MIT’s approach.

On a completely different topic –  doesn’t that guy look too young to be a teacher? Must be a PhD student.

There’s plenty of speculation about over just what has gotten into the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Alistair Darling. He’s been delivering pithy, bullish statements – not something one expects after his immensely dull Budget day – to the effect that Labour are dead in the water and the Economy’s in much the same state.

Clearly this isn’t news to anybody. But if anything, Darling seems to be overstating the problem, over-exaggerating the peril (at least in terms of the economy). Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the ructions of the 1970s Oil Shock will be forgiven for raising their eyebrows at claims like “arguably the worst slump for 60 years”.

A certain brand of economist has been arguing for a little while now that we are witnessing the self-correction of the Market, a natural and belated adaptation to the real price of key resources. However we stand on that debate, confusion has to reign over Alistair Darling’s change of tack. There are a few theories floating around, but as I haven’t really encountered them set out properly anywhere else- here’s MY take.

1. This is a planned move. Ignore the Times when it says that the government wasn’t expecting Darling’s interviews to cut the way they did. If there’s an iota of journalistic integrity behind such stories, then the explanation probably lies in an usually well rehearsed bit of story-management. There’s been silence from Labour throughout the summer recess – the relatively slow news days where someone looking to cause a stink might have had the agenda to themselves, or given Gordon Brown the last nudge needed to topple him after his electoral setbacks. But instead everyone waited, took a breath while the smoke cleared, and planned.

2. This is what the American media might call Expectations Management. Scare people senseless about the economy, and they might just be pleased when we manage to keep our collective chins above water after all. Especially if it looks even slightly attributable to the inevitable raft of economic measures the government is set to deliver over the coming weeks.

3. By the same token, tell Labour that things aren’t merely as awful as they seemed after Glasgow East. They are, in fact, uniformly terrible. The Chancellor, Brown’s political glove-puppet, is even breaking free. And then – a little while later – a wee bounce in the polls. A decent conference season. Some well-received new policies (see above). Labour’s grassroots expect the worst – and they’re happy to be merely disappointed.

4. Best of all, let’s emphasise just how bad things can get. Let’s blow it up. Because while Labour might not benefit in the ways suggested above, the Tories may not butter any parsnips as a result either. The gamble here is that with truly, genuinely difficult times on the horizon, the public is far more likely to invest in the party that delivered them ten years of solid growth and stability than the young and cock-sure Conservatives. When things get tough, the tough get conservative – that’s with a small ‘c’ – and a change of government might be the last thing on people’s minds if they’re properly convinced that the apocalypse is coming.

5. Of course, for all this wonderful street theatre to work (and it has to be theatre to pull me away from the US elections just now), like any decent tragedy-play, we must have a death. Be it murder most foul or the honourable fall upon the sword, most commentators smell a reshuffle, and with his unguarded comments, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Mr Darling is the one to have drawn the short straw, and go out in a blaze of doom-mongering glory. 

Of course, none of the above is anything like certain. It might be that Darling, friends as he is with Gordon, will not be moved so easily; though if I’m wrong and his was and is a genuine gaffe, it’s hard to imagine him holding on past Christmas.

But if a change of tactics was ever called for, then it was called for just prior to the summer break. Perhaps we’re seeing the start of that right now.