In Defense of Tories & the UK

After Spiderman the only hero I ever wanted to be was Atticus Finch. A burning sense of injustice is hard wired into a teenager’s being. Reading that book I seethed, I wanted the whole town to be destroyed in a tornado, I wanted justice. It is such a shock for a teenage mind to realise that whilst combating the vicious stupidity of his neighbours he never conflated that with hatred of them. That ultimately the fight isn’t to defeat your neighbours but to learn to live with the bastards and hope to change their minds, eventually.

Nuance comes less easy to a teenager and so that lesson sticks hard. I think of it now as I hope desperately that Scotland will vote “no”. I have always thought the Union worth preserving and nothing from the Yes campaign has turned my head except perhaps the accusation that I am a pessimist or that I’m betraying the radical left. Carol Craig, in her excellent piece on the referendum, said something similar http://www.scottishreview.net/CarolCraig172.shtml.

I am perhaps not a radical. I never lost faith in Obama because I never believed in fairies. To me, getting any kind of health bill through the American system, was worthy of Spiderman himself. At the same time I don’t believe an independent Scotland will be the richest fairest nation of them all as many have claimed. I think we would have 5 to 10 difficult years spent unpinning the two nations and that at the end of it Scotland will have swapped one set of problems for another. To me, change comes slowly and painfully, through co-operation and from firm persistent pressure in the right direction. But that isn't the bit I wanted to write about – because that has bugger all to do with Atticus Finch.

It’s that I started to question the idea of solidarity that the Scottish left have which includes jettisoning large numbers of people who've campaigned with them for decades. Though prodding the thought further my solidarity actually extends further than that. It isn't just that I don’t want to live in a country without Scotland – it’s that if I could stick all the UKIP and Tory supporters on a floating island and push them off into the Atlantic I wouldn't do that either. I might threaten to… but I wouldn't.

I start to wonder if the impact of the 80’s on Scotland went deeper than we think. That not having to live with Tories since has turned Tories from family we fight with and struggle to understand to monsters from a foreign land. Once, I would have thought that rather fun, but now I wonder if it isn’t actually quite harmful. Because the world is getting smaller and we have to, and should, live with everyone.

I've lived as a Labour member in strong Conservative seats for many years now. I’m not a martyr but I've turned up and campaigned in forlorn hopes and will again. I also have quite a few Conservative friends. My grandmother was a staunch Conservative, I loved her dearly. Separately, towards the end of her life my cousins and I visited her in hospital and out of nowhere she started a speech on how she didn't understand why we couldn't have goliwogs anymore. We did confront her on issues of race in the past, she didn't really understand, but she was also a deeply loving  and fiercely loyal grandmother. She was a great deal more than her politics or prejudices and I miss her for the imperfect wonder she was.

I hate many of the things this government has done and is doing. I believe in reforming Westminster and the devolution of powers. I’ll be out campaigning – though not as much as I should – to kick them out in my constituency whilst on the lookout for flying pigs.

What I don’t believe is that we can build a better world on hating Tories. They are maddening, some of them are real shits, but they’re still our brothers and sisters and mad third cousins. They’re stumbling around as confused and uncertain as any of us. If there’s a better world to be found I don’t believe it lies behind a drawbridge. The better world is out there learning to live with the bastards. Given the choice I’d still choose to stay right here trying to convince them through friendship, strident debate and when all else fails drunkenly swearing and calling them names. That may not be a radical position but I know I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m still trying to live up to my teenage hero. 

King of the North

Does the North of England really want to stay stuck with the South when the rest of the union starts buggering off.

Clearly Scotland leaving the union will be a massive pain in the arse - like splitting up/divorcing x100 with all the petty bullshit of working out who bought what CDs, what the bastard flag will be and who gets the Overseas Territories. So if we have to go through that crap anyway why would the North want to be stuck with the South spending all the infrastructure money on lovely things for them? I live in the south and I am bored of it.

I know the north kept saying no to mayors and assemblies but that was just offering more politics. This will have to be a bit more exciting. As such I am developing a "Northern Contingency Plan for Scottish Seperation from the Union". At the moment these plans come in no temporal order but merely deal with various issues as and when I think of them. If you have ideas please add them below.

1) Sean Bean will be named interim King of the North until a democratically elected monarch can be elected. He will have palaces in Lancaster, York and Grimsby.

2) Emissaries will be sent to Birmingham offering the possibility of joining the new Kingdom. This is likely to be the most southerly boundary.

3) I'm not sure about the name but I quite like just, "The North" both because is sounds esoteric and because all the signs already say that.

4) Legal backing for this move will be gained by launching the hashtag #TheNorthwantsDivorce and getting popular celebrities to retweet it. Once this is trending in London it will get onto the Guardian online and thus become a real thing rather than just dis-interesting people procrastinating on the internet.

5) Diversifying the Economy. If the bank collapse taught us anything it is not to put your eggs in one basket. Premiership football, insightful pop music and whippets will always be at the core but we will need more. I have many ideas for this. For instance - we will divert research funds to that Professor Brian Cox with instructions to invent Star Trek style replicators.

6) Military & Defense. In the short run it might be difficult to sort out all the soldiers and tanks and that. Secret agents will have secreted themselves amongst the Cornish nationalists. If Southern aggression is feared we will encourage the sleepers to convince the Cornish to rise in bloody rebellion with the promise of support. The several hours it will take London to crush this rebellion should give us enough time to put all micromachines across the M1 and M6 like in Home Alone so their soldiers fall over and get their heads burnt by flame throwers and that.

.... there are loads more my fingers are getting tired and my tea is going cold. Please do help in the comments below.

decisions decisions

If you spend any time in meetings talking about such exciting subjects as environmental finance you will hear one simple thing repeated over and over again.

"We need clear long-term signals and action from government"

Oh of course they ask for more money: pump priming money, risk offsetting money, government precurement money, just a fiver to tide me over till the weekend money...

Everyone asks for money.

But clarity and long-term commitment should cost governments nothing and it's the one thing they seem more short of than cash.

Once again the government are dithering over a bit of environmental legislation/finance/regulation. This time it happens to be subsidies for on shore wind farms to placate a set of MPs I have little time for. I'm not an energy expert, my instinct is that in the history of serious innovation everything works badly to begin with and if you stick with it they improve. So helping wind farms out at this stage in their development seems eminently sensible. But that isn't the point.

The point is that these are significant investments in risky new industries. It gets riskier still when you are asking people to invest in such weird things as ecosystem services. The governemnt wants industries (well largley water companies) to pay landowners for ecosystem services (to put less crap into our water). Nobody owns water quality, how can you be sure that the farmer will continue to change his activities; it may take decades for the changes a farmer makes to seep through the water table and affect a river; what if you pay one landowner only for another to increase polluting activities just when you get things set.

These industries are nacent, full of uncertainties: legal, technological, ecological and economic. Some will fail, some will succeed. But they will ALL fail to attract the required investment if they keep pandering to wankers and don't just choose a course and stick to it.

It goes for myriad environmental policy decisions when I say that I'd rather that they scrapped on shore subsidies and stuck to it than dithered around like this. I'm fairly sure that those hoping to develop environmental industries feel the same way.

Why I signed the drop the health bill petition

Ok so you haven't read about the health bill in any detail... Neither have I. You accept that the argument that just because health care professionals are against it doesn't necessarily make it bad... Probably true...

But the NHS reforms are massive and complicated. Andrew Lanseley struggled to explain them to colleagues himself. Doctors were against starting the NHS but were bought off ("I stuffed their mouths with gold..."). Other reforms achieved in the face of dissent were far smaller.

Imagine all the confusion that you go through when you try to deal with bureaucracy sometimes, an expenses claim at work or perhaps returning a computer.

When nobody knows what's going on you get passed between people who are unsure how to deal with you. We're humans when we change things everyone gets confused, things don't work so well. Now try changing things when nobody involved wants to, none of the users really understand and whilst simultaneously trying to make £20 billion worth of efficiency savings. Multiply the size of the organisation up to the NHS and then see what happens.

The cost of the reforms have been growing before this bill has even gone through (currently over £3 billion) they will get higher still when they try to implement them.

Even if the reforms are useful ones (and I am not in the least convinced of that) doing this now is reckless and arrogant. That is why I signed the petition. That is why I would like it if you would too.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/22670

Goodbye lovely Cars and Croisants... why i won't stop loving the continent

It is very easy to be anti European Union at the moment.

The commission is an overly powerful un-elected mass of technocrats spewing incomprehensible diktats from on high. What portions of it are elected are just stuffed to the gills with second class politicians who should never get a crack in a national government as evidenced by young Nicholas.

Even if that weren't true the Euro seems to evidence the impossibility of the kind of union we have to date. Staying close to Europe right now would cost larger more fiscally sound states a lot of cash.

But at the same time we sit here bemoaning our position as it is. The British have been telling ourselves that we are a deflating power on the world stage for 60 years now. We love saying it for some reason.

The UK are sometimes like a strange boy who stands up at the party to loudly announce that he isn't cool enough to be there anymore. He then spends the next 60 years stood in the doorway switching between telling other people what music to play and saying that he'll leave in a minute.

However, deflating we probably are, (the oil, coal and fracked gas won't last forever)... Over the next decade staying away from Europe might save us a great deal of pain. But I can't help but wonder what happens after that.

The BRIC economies rise up and start playing some awful Drum & Bass and the UK is still stood in the doorway asking them to please play just one Smiths track.

They won't anymore.

But weirdly the Belgians have managed to slip on a (frankly worse) 20 minute jazz bassoon solo.... Because the EU got through a very rough 10 years and came out of it a much closer federal block which actually wields a fair bit of power. In a global market that power counts for a lot.

I'm not saying it will definitely happen. Perhaps the EU will disintegrate in bickering or worse hang together in an unreformed bickering mess. But I am saying that if it does happen we'll be sending some poor bugger of a prime minister to Brussels to beg to be let back in and I expect the initial (and possibly permanent) response will be the same as last time.

Saving us from Facebook

Forcing us to be on facebook to use spotify is bullshit.

Facebook being a monopoly is a problem for us all. One organisation with all of that information showing a clear intent to move into every area of our lives is problematic.

Google achieve the same but they do it by being better than their competition. Facebook achieve it by being better at one stage and achieving a critical mass. It was a land grab and they now have gathered up, for free, a very valuable commodity and can do pretty much what they want with it.

The other week David Mitchell suggested nationalising it.

Obviously that can't really work, though it would be nice.

What I want is for the WC3 to develop the tools to break up Facebook's unfair advantage in human capital and open them up to competition.

Your details and their ability to advertise to you is the price of the service. You should be able to take those details anywhere you like and still have access. So we need to develop technology such that, for instance, your facebook profile can interact easily with somebody else's google+ profile or bebo profile. These guys compete to offer a service in terms of the organisation of your details and interactions with friends. essentially they can all have different front ends but the data is essentially the same.

This is what the web and the WC3 has always been about. Setting data standards so that different networks can understand each other easily.

So if the WC3 sets standards for saving your, personal details AND for interactions with Flickr, facebook and the rest... It should be possible for you to have one profile which you can take and leave anywhere you like. If you prefer to use google+ but your friends won't move from facebook it should be possible for you to interact with their facebook profile from your google+ profile.

If you create an event on google+ it is stored there but then you can invite friends who are storing their profile on facebook.

Are you with me? This should not be beyond the whit of the sexy web-geeks. Though facebook might not be willing to sign up I would bet others would. AND if their free'er service proved to be better it would present a much more attractive draw to people than google+ is currently. I would even expect google to put money behind organising the community in the way some do for Linux fixes.

The internet wants and needs to be free. Don't let the robber barrons win.

Right I'm off to post this on Facebook.

national identity

National identity is a particularly boring subject that gets too much air-time. But I'll say this much. My national identity is primarily British Islands writ large and I think if people really thought about it most other people's is too . The major cultural drivers which make me who I am are I believe shared across Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English areas.

That isn't to say that there aren't significant differences but all countries have those and in some cases they are as stark between the north and south of any of the home nations as between them.

Irish, scottish, english folk musics are nuanced but certainly from the same root. A large chunk and possibly most of my friends at primary school came from Irish and Scottish families. The islanders watch the same TV, listen to the same music, speak the same language (if only as a second language for a few), eat pretty similarly and fortify ourselves with tea & beer in similar amounts, have similar judicial systems and most of our families and friends stretch between different bits of our little damp islands.

I write this post in part, not just because of the similarities, but because the breaking up of attributes seems to snatch at shared identities meaning for instance that Yorkshiremen can't be dour, nope the Scots took that...

And because its usually the English working and lower middle classes left with the crumbs or worse identified by the gentry, pimms, rowing and village greens, which whilst lovely, make up a very small portion of the population or our past-times.

If my cultural identity were an ice cream European would be the cone, the ice cream would be british isles and the sprinkles would be English, Lancastrian, Blackpudlian.

The sprinkles are great. I love sprinkles and the Welsh for instance get a whole new kind of flake because they have their own language. But it's the ice cream and the cone that make up the most of it and spending too much time wondering exactly how my sprinkles differ from yours seems daft.

I don't want to give you the impression that I'm not aware of or that I don't enjoy the great diversity across the islands. But neither do I think that diversity is particularly special as compared to other similar sized countries. Such that I increasingly feel that telling a foreigner that I'm English, as opposed to British, is a little similar to the way a Londoner, when asked will tell you that they are from e.g. Ealing. Which always makes them sound like twats on the radio.

The Republic of Ireland is a separate country clearly so saying you're Irish is not the same. But I would say that my personal identity is such that if they decided they wanted to unite Eire with the rest of the islands and have a federal British isles with devolved governments in each state. AND we subsequently moved the main Federal government to Dublin... I would be pretty surprised but I would have no problem with that... and in fact... I quite like the idea.... ooo and we could elect a non politician as Monarch on a bi-annual basis. I vote Stephen Fry.