Golden Dozen

So I figured I would restart blogging with some feedback on what turned out to be an excellent South Central Regional Liberal Democrats' conference on Saturday here at Oxford Brookes University. Given that I see the place every day my motivation to get there in time for nine-thirty speeches on a Saturday morning was not great, and I actually arrived a few minutes into the first keynote speech by Evan Harris.

Some in the party and elsewhere give Evan a hard time I hear, but I have a lot of time for him. I get the impression he works his proverbials off in his constituency and has a penchant for minority interests which suits me. But listening to him on Saturday and then later hearing Vince Cable they between them seem to epitomize what one might call the "old" Lib Dems - leftist, statist, more interventionist - and the "emerging" Lib Dems - more liberal in every sense.

Evan restated his support for the fifty pence tax rate and bemoaned the federal conference at which it was removed from party policy, Vince emphasized that the new tax policy, trying to focus, as Churchill said, on not just "how much have you got" but also on "how did you get it", was in fact the most redistributive set of tax policies on the table from any party.

Harris's main point, as I understand it, was that the fifty pence tax rate sent a signal, even if it did not in fact promise to raise terribly much, that we were prepared to take more from the highest earners if need be to lift the poorest out poverty. It is a simple message to be sure, and easier to communicate than the "new" idea that we should be more carefully targeting tax on externalities and unearned privilege, but not one that adds to the progressiveness of the overall tax system one iota.

But Evan is exactly the sort of person we want to attract to our book the ALTER executive are putting together to launch centenary celebrations of the 1909 People's Budget. We want to show him how rigourously applying what we have been calling the "liberal economic tradition" will in fact raise the lot of the poorest by increasing the returns to labour, by rooting out corporate welfare, and by allowing genuine competition to bring down the cost and increase the quality of all sorts of goods and services some take for granted are best delivered by the state. In short that there need be no dichotomy between "social" and "economic" liberalism.

I have to admit that I viscerally loathe defectors. So don't expect any nice words of regret at losing Sajjad Karim to the Tories, for whatever reason he thinks justifies his actions.

But back within the party he has just run away from, I wonder whether it has any importance. One of the things that Nick Clegg got plenty of plaudits for recently was the idea of an "earned amnesty" for existing illegal immigrants, a measure that I have not seen Cameron, even last week in Prague, beat. But given that this is one area where we have clear blue water between us and the Tories on if Sajjad thinks we've made a mistake, does this translate into a bit of a blow for Nick's policy?

Me, of course, I'm an open borders advocate. You cannot expect to have free movement of goods and services without free movement of people. The challenge is not how to stop people coming here for whatever reason, but to help build a world in which people do not feel the need to migrate simply to better themselves in a minimum wage job.

Such a task is not one for the petty isolationists in the Tory party, and will need a truly co-operative internationalist party to understand. Which is, in the UK, only the Lib Dems, at least of the major parties.

Here's some century old words of wisdom and humour for Sajj:

I often think it's comical -- Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive -- Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
Fal, lal, la! —
(Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan, 1882)

"Liberal Conservative" or "Conservative Liberal" are ideological oxymorons. Sayonara, Sajj, I hope you really do know what you are joining.

UPDATE:  It just goes to show what people will read and what they won't that this post makes it into the "Golden Dozen" and some of my more thoughtful posts don't!  Maybe I should try to be salacious more of the time! 

"We are the only party willing to come into office committed to controlling our own power." These were the words of Alan Beith, now our Deputy Leader, speaking at the Party Conference of 1991. They are the very heart of what Liberalism is all about. They would be recognised, not just by British Liberals, not just by twentieth-century Liberals, but by Liberals in all countries and in all times as what Oliver Cromwell used to call 'the root of the matter'.

One of the reasons why it is so hard for parties to understand each other is that they have their philosophies about different things. Traditional Conservatism was largely about property. Traditional Socialism was largely about class. Liberalism is and remains largely about power.

Chapter 2 - Controlling Power, from "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism", Conrad Russell, 1999

Looking back on Conrad's words after a further eight years' Labour government and at the personalities that have bubbled to the surface of the modern Conservative party in an attempt to counter Labour's hegemony, I think we would want to change his characterization of those two parties. They have both become about power too.

Not just one Ming, but a whole team of them!

But Conrad means that Liberals are about the careful control of executive power, ensuring that it never oversteps the mark into authoritarianism, that as much as possible it respects the negative liberty of individuals to do as they please in their lives short of harming others. Both the Conservative and Labour parties are now largely obsessed with how to attain power, consolidate it, hold onto it, and wield it. The leaderships of both parties have become presidential and autocratic. Policy formation appears to pay only lip service to ordinary members and has to be vetted, then vetoed or announced personally by the leadership as part of their great guiding "vision".

Nothing makes me more nauseous, frankly, about contemporary British politics than this cult of the "dear leader" - and I'm afraid that the sight of all the blue stockings clapping and singing along to Jimmy Cliff last week was a supreme example! Nothing makes me more worried about the future of our basic freedoms to live as we choose as far as possible than the sight of these great visionaries with a plan for the country, and by extension its people, us, and their adoring crowds of followers. The Nuremberg Rally meets Top of the Pops!

It would be fair to say, of course, that we have always had big personalities in Number 10. But just as growing wealth, technology, travel and so on have given people more freedoms and more choices, it is easy to forget just how difficult communication was only a generation ago compared with today. Mobile phones were barely around during Mrs Thatcher's rule, the internet merely a military-academic project, indeed computers themselves a millionth fraction of what they are today. Yet the more connected we are, the greater our choices of with whom we might associate, learn and collaborate, the more our political leaders are there, in our face, every day, announcing what they think is good for us. And somehow we are all the more apathetic, all the more dependent on them for it. This cannot be progress.

And so I for one do not want a Liberal leadership to be a facsimile of these statist behemoths. Sure, we need an individual whom people can identify as the person most likely to be taking the taxi to the palace in the event of a Lib Dem election victory, but he or she should be no more than a primus inter pares, chairman of the cabinet rather than president for life (even if that life has been short in Tory circles lately), and should be the embodiment of what we would want a Liberal leader to be, which to my mind is quite the opposite of the sort of Labour and Tory leaders we have seen in the last decade. And we have to sell that idea, not try to make our leader pretend to be otherwise just to compete with what we don't want him or her to be!

We should have a publicly visible leadership team. And I don't just mean Ming and his chosen team, such as Ed Davey and Chris Rennard or whoever. But I mean a team put in place by and accountable to different constituencies in the party. One from the parliamentary group, one from our councillors or our LGA group to reflect that we are about localism and devolution, one from each of our devolved assembly groups (though not necessarily the relevant assembly group leader), and one or more put there directly by the membership, or by different groups from the membership even - one GLD, one LDYS, one WLD, one EMLD and so on and one, preferably no more than that, from the party administration. And we should strive to give them all pretty well equal public exposure on the notion that they will be the core of a Lib Dem executive in government dedicated to dispersing power and not centralizing it.

If this sounds an awful lot like the existing Federal Executive, you'd be wrong. The latter would retain responsibility for running the party machinery which would in turn still be responsible for the management of policy formulation and so on. What I am talking about is a group of spokespeople, not necessarily in or from parliament, who represent the core areas of our "narrative" and who would be expected to take on significant jobs in that first Liberal government. This would be more like the Swiss Federal Executive, with everyone having their own brief, and with one of their number elected as chair and prospective head of the government periodically.

Gordon Brown has no real idea what a "government of all the talents" is whilst he himself remains, Shelob like, controlling everything from the centre. Let's show him what it could look like, from a Liberal perspective.

There seems to be a spate of group self-abuse going on with excitement at the prospects of a general election. I do not share this excitement. Indeed I look upon the prospect with dread and depression. I'm a democrat, right? So I should welcome the chance for the people to have their say, right? Wrong.

I'm with Winston when he said:

No!
Originally uploaded by Mig_R

"Look at all the power [Mr Attlee] is enjoying today. No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power."

Nobody currently vying for Mr Attlee's job today even remotely proposes sufficiently to reduce what Churchill went on to call "this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, [which] is a violation of democracy."

No!
Originally uploaded by Will...

The stakes are abhorrently high. That you and your coterie of friends and sycophants should have control over the better part of half of the entire nation's income. And with it the power to condone or more frequently condemn the personal choices of millions - more, probably, than lived under the Pax Augusta in Rome's entire empire.

I want a revolution. A revolution of devolution. I want power, the vast majority of it at least, held by people I can go and meet at my local civic centre. If there is anything that needs a joint decision between two or more civic centres let them agree on it mutually, and if, in the very last resort, something that has to be dealt with at a national level, let them send representatives to argue the case on an ad hoc basis if possible but with a minimum of permanent representatives - just enough to give every civic centre a voice - if necessary.

No! Not even you!
Originally uploaded by Ming Campbell

And I want to be able to elect some of them every year so that if they are not doing a good job we can make our views plain on a sort of a "1 year moving average" basis to which they will necessarily have to react by forming and reforming their power sharing agreements to reflect the true will of the electors.

I find it repugnant that anyone believes they are so much greater than any of the rest of us that they believe they can run the country and our lives better than the Almighty gave us the free will to do for ourselves. They should humble themselves to recall again what Churchill said:

"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."

We seem to be at the last roundabout on the road to Serfdom (probably courtesy of some new town super-planner). We must decide to go right round it and head back the way we came.

Coincidentally, overnight I've been pointed to this article by a fellow Georgist, Fred Folvary, on a similar issue on the other side of the pond.

We should be grateful to Lord Justice Sedley for one thing - re-igniting the debate about the national DNA database. His prescription, however, is completely wrong, and unjustifiable. He is right when he says that:

...the current database, which holds DNA from crime suspects and scenes, was "indefensible" because it was unfair and inconsistent.

but we should be very wary of his suggested fix for that, that...

...whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database.

He is of course correct that the current situation is indefensible, Black men are more than twice as likely to be on the database than white, just because of the disproportionate way in which the police target black men for stop and search operations. But his prescription that:

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody guilty or innocent should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

So, we are to be scared from committing any crimes because we know they already have our DNA and when they find that at the scene it'll be an easy next step to "pull" anyone whose DNA is found for questioning. With no other probable cause than that their DNA was at the scene - Paul Walter's Liberal Burblings puts this much better than I have, describing it as "presumed guilt", overturning what must probably be, after Habeas Corpus perhaps, the key principle of English law.

One could imagine a situation where, for example, a victim of crime in the hours before being raped or murdered or whatever was in a place with lots of other people - perhaps a bar or a club. He or she brushed up against countless innocent bystanders, some of whom left a hair on the victim's clothes or sneezed over them or somehow transferred DNA to them or to another item of evidence. The police could just pull all of those people for questioning. Or perhaps that the crime scene was quite a publicly frequented place, and countless innocent samples are collected and the owners of that DNA pulled for questioning.

And as if that weren't enough, what sort of access would the defense have to be given to make this fair? Someday one could imagine the argument succeeding that with evidence disclosure rules, the defense could subpoena anyone whose DNA sample was found to try to create reasonable doubt for their client.

And in future, when the purpose of individual genes are steadily discovered, a witness statement might describe someone that may or may not be involved at the scene and based on that physical description the police could pull all blond men with blue eyes and the obesity gene in the local area to question?

The judge talks also about how many "cold cases" have been solved using DNA evidence. Yes, that may be one of the advances that has been made possible with DNA technology. But I wonder how many of them have actually been solved simply by matching up with the database. I rather suspect very few. That most have probably been a case of arresting the person first suspected many years ago and then checking them up against the DNA. Ie that DNA is used merely to corroborate existing evidence that somehow proved insufficient at the time to convict. That's a very different proposition from having a pro-active database from which to go and pull every person that brushed past the victim twenty years ago and happened to leave DNA that was subsequently collected.

No, storing our DNA is storing a little part of each and every one of us. As I said last week, our DNA should be subject to habeas corpus. It's like putting us all on bail for further questioning, sometime, about any other matter they feel we might be able to help with. The implications even now, let alone in some future time when we may have a seriously authoritarian regime in power or where the technology is available to extrapolate from descriptions what the suspect's DNA might look like, are horrendous.

In an accompanying article, the BBC puts the other side of the case. We already hold proportionally more DNA samples than any other country. Since it was first allowed in 1995 it has been steadily extended. The evidence of "mission creep" is clear already. We cannot trust any government with this sort off information. One only has to have seen the film Gattaca to know why. We must go back to the 1995 regulations, and strengthen them indeed so that people have rights to know and control whether their DNA is held if they are not currently in the criminal justice system for a good reason.

I don't normally watch More4 news, but this evening they carried an article suggesting that what with the apparent backpedalling on casinos, the reclassification debate about cannabis and the suggestions of small tax bribes for married couples both the Tories and Labour are entering a period of politics focussed on puritan ethics and, as Tim Worstall would say "bansturbation". Reading the runes of news stories it looks to me as if they may be preparing the ground to retreat on twenty-four hour drinking as well.

So it seems to me that they are leaving open an opportunity for a truly liberal party, say one that has the word "Liberal" in its name, to live up to that name and to take a completely opposite tack and lay claim to what I personally believe most of Britain would prefer given half a chance - a radical social liberal option, verging on libertarian. And one should say that this does not imply permissiveness or license. Most would naturally want grown adults to take responsibility for their own actions and their consequences, but in order to do so they've got to have the right to make choices, not have their freedoms limited for them.

On drugs, Ming and Clegg should speak out right now, while the issue is to the fore, about our own party policy for decriminalization and social supply of cannabis and a full commission on the best way to handle all drugs in future. Perhaps even endorse the "Beyond the war on drugs" report from Transform I've mentioned a couple of times in the past couple of days. We know that up to 80% of property crime at least in some places is related to the illegal drugs industry. We can wipe that out almost entirely almost instantly, and save billions - perhaps the equivalent of a fifth of the public sector budget. Oh, and don't give me that comeback about international treaties - it seems to me that the main narcotics treaties are about financing drugs in other countries - we can produce many of the more popular drugs here without recourse to imports if we wanted and, it would appear, stay within the letter and spirit of those treaties.

With the savings we can be harsher on people who use their new freedoms to harm others.

On marriage and family life, we could make clear that where people take responsibility for a significant other in a co-dependent relationship, whatever their legal relationship, the state should recognize that they take some of the burden from the state and be rewarded by some fiscal incentive.

The casino issue irks me. I did not agree with the idea of a government sanctioned super-casino, but not because of its potential effects on addicted gamblers - if they are that addicted I'm sure they can get to Las Vegas for less money than a return rail fair to Manchester frankly - but because it was rent seeking and protectionist corporate welfare of the worst kind. Whether a locality wants to host significant sized gambling outlets ought to be down to that locality, answerable to local trading standards and taxed locally.

The people of Britain deserve a choice - freedom or the continued nannying of the Tories and Labour. Let's seize this opportunity and give them that choice. With choice comes responsibility. We should believe that the responsible people of Britain would act sensibly given the chance.

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