Simon T. Kaye

Happy New Year!

I forgot to say that I wrote another piece for First Drafts, Prospect Magazine UK’s blog.

It’s called Shouldn’t students put voting ahead of activism?, which was (I thought) a fairly uncontroversial thing to suggest.

Here’s an extract:

Students’ tendency to self-disenfranchise may contribute to their willingness to express themselves in alternative ways. But to engage in the public sphere in a non-systemic way without participating in the institutionalised structures of democratic change seems terribly incoherent.

Old news now, I know, but any thoughts or reactions would be welcome.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is justly getting glowing notices in every Parliamentary sketch column in the papers today. I’m thrilled to see someone whom I’ve long suspected is the most talented MP in Westminster picking up some recognition.

Otherwise known as one of the central negotiators and architects of an extremely favourable coalition agreement, David Laws is now cementing his reputation as possibly the only man who can peddle the fiscal pain of the coming years and keep everyone on-board.

Here, theatre poster style, is the praise from the broadsheets:

“A dazzling debut” ****

-Simon Carr, The Independent

“…seeing off the other side with contempt and contumely” ****

-Simon Hoggart, The Guardian

“A star is born” *****

-Ann Treneman, The Times

“The Chief Secretary displayed a calm mastery of his brief: clever without being clever-clever, concise without sounding glib, self-assured without looking arrogant.” *****

- The Daily Telegraph

It’s all recorded as a 45-minute session on the BBC. Alastair Darling opens in an excitable way, which I wasn’t entirely sure was possible for him. Do watch it, I promise you won’t be bored. Here’s the link.

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.

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.

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.