What happens when the focus is on “knocking on doors”

John Prescott’s view that Jeremy Corbyn and his top team are “not up to the f***ing job” which earned him a “potty mouth Prescott” headline  in the Mail on Sunday won’t have come as surprise to the Labour leader.

I understand that the former deputy Prime Minister has said as much to Corbyn’s face. “You’re not a leader and you never will be while you’ve got a hole in your backside” is the former deputy Prime Minister’s (slightly bowdlerised) comment to the leader. This is despite the fact Lord Prescott backed the Corbyn’s re-election last year because he didn’t think he’d been given enough time to prove himself and his journalist son, David, is Corbyn’s speech writer.

Prescott undoubtedly speaks for the vast majority of Labour MPs and peers. What’s interesting, though, is how few are speaking out. More than one MP has said to me “I’m biting my tongue”. The word has gone round that silence is a powerful weapon in undermining the under-performing leader. One of the lessons of the second leadership contest was that criticism by MPs was counter-productive, feeding Momentum efforts to depict Corbyn as a martyr.

It means that Corbynistas have been operating in a vacuum in seeking to excuse the leader for the Copeland disaster. One of the more plausible efforts has come from Kate Osamor, the shadow International Development Secretary in a Huffington Post Interview in which she highlights the “neglect” of many safe Labour seats by long-serving MPs.

Rather than blaming Corbyn, she says, MPs should follow his example and get out on to the doorstep of how to win. “All MPs have to be knocking on doors, at least once a week, for an hour … Jeremy is out in his own constituency. He still knocks on doors”

Incidentally, Theresa May is also a great canvasser according to David Runciman in his LRB review of Rosa Prince’s biography of the Prime Minister. “Canvassing – whether in local or national elections – remains her preferred way of doing politics. Given the chance, she will still knock on doors, even now she is prime minister.”

But there is a flaw in Osamor’s “get knocking” prescription as a remedy for Labour’s woes, says London Assembly member Tom Copley.

“Most MPs are out on the doorstep regularly, which is in part how they know Jeremy is so unpopular with voters.”

The point is underlined by Professor Glen O’Hara of Oxford Brookes University. He calculates that on the day Corbyn relaunched his leadership early in the New Year the Tory poll lead “was 11.8% (six-poll average). It now stands at 16.5%.”

The label “bed blocker” has been pinned on the Labour leader by David Cowling, former head of research at the BBC. The subtle point is that people become bed blockers in the NHS through no fault of their own. They are in a place they don’t want to be — but they need help to get out of their predicament. The question is who will help Jeremy escape from a job he never wanted and which is causing misery for him and his Labour “family”? John Prescott has done his bit.

Don Brind

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I've gone dark again on the blog because I'm still wrestling with the space opera that refuses to die (it's due out in July 2018, instead of your regular scheduled Laundry Files novel, so getting it ready for my editors is climbing my priority list). Meanwhile, if I was blogging, I'd be blogging about the high political drama of the past week in the UK.

First, rumors began spreading that, with the Brexit Bill passing parliament and due to get the Royal Asset this Thursday, Theresa May is planning to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty before the end of the month. (Great timing, that: right on the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome.) Jumping the gun a little bit, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon announced her intention of seeking a second Scottish independence referendum during the Brexit negotiations. This, predictably, provoked an angry reaction from the Prime Minister, who had hitherto been utterly ignoring Scottish, Northern Irish, Welsh, and other regional requests for some input on the process: a second independence referendum would be divisive and cause huge economic uncertainty at the worst possible time for Britain said a spokesman for the woman trying to implement divisive policies causing huge economic uncertainty as the result of a referendum question (which Scotland comprehensively rejected).

Negotiations with Scotland are still possible, it seems, but it looks as if Sturgeon has a game plan and is playing at a much higher level than the Conservative Cabinet in London, who are so feckless that they hadn't bothered with contingency planning for what to do if they can't strike a trade deal with the EU despite having isolated themselves diplomatically and pissed off the people they'll have to negotiate with from a position of weakness.

This time round, the referendum (I'm calling it a near certainty that there'll be one: the only real question is whether it'll be before or after Britain exits the EU in, probably, April 2019) is going to be rather interesting. There's a sharp demographic split between young and old in Scotland, with support for leaving the UK at 72% in the 16-24 age range (who get to vote, if they want to) and as low as 26% among the over-65s (pensioners, who do vote). Overall, support for independence per the Social Attitudes survey is at its highest ever level, and still climbing: probably a more accurate view of the picture than snapshot polls commissioned by the news media.

The arguments are different, too. Scotland's economic outlook today looks a lot bleaker than it did in 2014, and that's not good: but the big factor that swayed voters to the "remain" camp back then—better the devil you know than the devil you don't—has been shattered by the spectacle of the lunatic fringe of the Conservative party in full Brexit hue and cry. There are sucky economic prospects in both directions. Meanwhile, Scotland is increasingly out of step with England on a political and cultural level, but pretty typical of the rest of Northern Europe: if anything it's England that's the weird outlier. The question is, which shit sandwich is less unpalatable? England seems set on driving off a cliff; should Scotland ride along in the passenger seat or take its chances elsewhere?

Meanwhile, the IndyRef campaigning can't not start during the Brexit negotiations—arguably, it has already unofficially started: it's certainly going to dominate political debate in Scotland for the next couple of years—so the government in Westminster will be put in the impossible position of simultaneously defending the right of a nation to leave a larger federation, regardless of the economic and social uncertainty this causes, while opposing exactly that position in another context.

This of course assumes that we're looking at a two-way Prisoner's Dilemma game. Obviously, we're not: it's a 27-going-on-28-way game (Sturgeon has implicitly dealt herself a hand of cards at the table) and it's going to be interesting to see whether the various EU members decide to use Scotland as a club to beat Westminster with, or if Westminster positions Scotland as its cherished sickly child in a cynical game of Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy. And of course we can expect lots of FUD rhetoric about how Scotland will have to reapply for EU membership and go to the back of the queue (clue: there is no queue—nations seeking membership proceed independently of one another).

If I didn't live here, it'd be hilarious! Except I live here and Brexit has so far devalued my savings and pension assets by, oh, about 20%, and I stand to lose another 20% on top as Sterling loses its unofficial status as the EU's reserve currency after the Euro, because the brainless flag-frotting morons on the Conservative back benches think that they can go back to the rosy days of the 1920s with some batshit plan to build Empire 2.0 out of the former Commonwealth (Planet Earth calling: the Commonwealth only put up with us 'cause we were a gateway to the EU: as an imperial power we were no less hated and loathed than all the rest) and rule the world by exporting tea, jam, and biscuits (US: cookies).

So I'm putting my head down and working for the rest of the day. At least I mostly get paid in US dollars, and President Tantrum hasn't (yet) managed to crash the greenback.

(Final: moderation note: Greg Tingey, I'm banning you from commenting on this topic because I know your opinions on Scottish independence and your grasp on the reality of what it's like up here (hint: in the nation I've lived in for over two decades) is so bizarrely warped that I don't think you're capable of contributing anything worthwhile to the discussion. Sorry. You're not banned from the rest of the blog; just here.)

tw: suicide stats

I'm very - perhaps too - fond of asking why people so rarely look at their actions in the context of "what happens next?"  As Peter Cook might have asked, did A Question Of Sport die in vain?

Back when the same-sex marriage bill was wending its way through parliament, we heard many arguments for and against. Some were coherent. Some were respectable. There's a fun venn diagram to be drawn of which were one, neither or both.

Now, I've just been reading some research from the USA looking at the impacts of same-sex marriage legislation there, where change happened in bursts from state to state over several years.

No, not at the number of weddings and the impact on the sale of top hats and fabulous frocks. One of the other impacts same-sex marriage has had.

It's based on huge sample sizes and shows one of the effects of allowing same-sex marriage nationwide was about 134,000 fewer adolescents attempting suicide each year.  Looking at numbers before and after, there's a 7 percent reduction in the proportion of all high-school students reporting a suicide attempt over the previous year, and a 14 percent drop among LGB students, when same-sex marriage becomes lawful where you live.

Often we talk about these kind of statistics but we rarely pause to turn them round. To consider the "what if", the "what happens next" of the path not taken.  The path we didn't take thanks to the passage of the two same-sex marriage bills in Wales & England and in Scotland.

US and UK culture are in very many ways similar. So with about a quarter of their population we might rule-of-thumb that the impact here is 134,000 divided by four - 33,500 fewer young people attempting to end their lives each year in the UK.  Each year.  Our 2013 vote is four years ago already: so the change is 33,500 upon 33,500 upon 33,500 upon...

What an amazing number. What a horrifying number. For the 400 MPs who voted to allow same-sex marriage, what a humbling number. Yes, you let some people get married, and that was beautiful. But "what happened next" was a huge positive impact on the mental health and even survival of young people. You let some people get married and, thanks to an unwritten clause in the Bill, you saw to it that thousands did not try to end their lives early.  An unknowable number of parents never came home to the horrible ultimate consequence of social, legal and institutional homophobia.

And for the 175 MPs (and indeed 148 Peers) who planted their colours against the tide of history, with numbers like these the nature of their actions and motives is laid bare. We can see what they were actively, consciously, premeditatedly complicit in, what they were voting for, because let's be frank: while we didn't have these figures, we and they knew the answer to the "what happens next" question all along.

A handful of the 175 have said they'd vote differently today. We have to conclude that the rest are proud of the future they were voting for, and take comfort that they didn't get what they wanted.

EXCL: Tory MP Craig Mackinlay interviewed under caution for six hours over South Thanet election expenses: https://t.co/eDhdlnRIQK

— Kate McCann (@KateEMcCann) March 14, 2017

The Telegraph are reporting that.

Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay was questioned by Police under caution last week over his election expenses, the Telegraph can reveal.

The South Thanet MP reportedly spent six hours being interviewed by officers over alleged overspending in the 2015 election campaign in which he beat Nigel Farage and Al Murray, the Pub Landlord.

Kent Police are expected to meet with the Crown Prosecution Service next week to discuss a possible prosecution, it is understood, after the force concluded a series of interviews with Conservative staff and politicians about the alleged overspend.

Both Mr McKinlay and his agent Nathan Gray have denied any wrongdoing.

Over the weekend former Tory Party Co-Chairman Grant Shapps dropped Nick Timothy, Mrs May’s Joint Chief of Staff, further into with this investigation with this intervention. (A non pay-walled version is available here.)

Former Tory Chairman Grant Shapps corroborates C4 News expose of Nick Timothy's role in Sth Thanet election expenses pic.twitter.com/Y97jRGOnnh

— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) March 12, 2017

I expect Grant Shapps will have enraged Mrs May with this intervention, whilst people shouldn’t assume because someone has been questioned under caution that either charges or a conviction will inevitably follow, however this does present a huge problem for Mrs May, even before we consider the size of her majority. Sometimes in politics perceptions matter more than the facts, and if one of her top aides embroiled in this scandal, it will impact on the running of her government. A few weeks ago The Times ran a story that said “One source close to No 10 said the [election expenses] subject was “occupying as much as 20 per cent of non-governing head space.””

But more MPs are condemning the handling of the investigations by the party.

Conservative MPs under investigation by police over election expenses accuse party officials of “covering their backsides” pic.twitter.com/kceqnkcgeV

— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 14, 2017

Does she really have the ability to conduct Brexit negotiations whilst Nicola Sturgeon is pushing for a second independence referendum and fighting by elections and with Nigel Farage looking to break his duck in becoming an MP, only Churchill probably had such a complicated in-tray upon becoming Prime Minister.

TSE

(A The Mirage dream …)

It doesn’t happen often, but every so often I have yet another dream based on Matt Ruff’s book The Mirage, and they’re often the most vivid dreams. Like this morning’s.

In my dream, I’m an elderly computer tech, on early retirement for psych disability, living in the declining midwestern industrial city of Kabul, and the new President (former Senator) bin Laden has frozen all refugee applications from several predominantly-Christian countries in war-torn North America. That’s causing a lot of distress in Kabul, because my neighborhood in Kabul revived its economy, over the last couple of decades, by taking in refugees from war-torn countries all over the world, from America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, in various waves.

And I was playing on my computer while listening to a podcast, where they were interviewing three experts because of an idea that had come up, on the left, that maybe everybody in the UAS, or at least all liberals, should celebrate Thanksgiving this coming November, in solidarity with oppressed Christian refugees.

The first person interviewed was a pro-refugee activist, part of the Thanksgiving Campaign. She argued that there’s nothing explicitly Christian about Thanksgiving. All People of the Book worship the same God, Allah, and arguably the Americans have invented something wonderful: a day when all of the People of the Book should get together with their families to be thankful for Allah’s blessings, without any sectarian historical baggage. Don’t we all have things to be thankful to Allah for?

The second person interviewed was a civil libertarian who disputed the first person’s argument that Thanksgiving is non-sectarian. He pointed out that it is an explicitly Christian holiday, but then went on to remind the interviewers that ever since the ratification of the Constitution, the United Arab States has guaranteed freedom of religion to all People of the Book. When asked if Muslims (or, for that matter, Jews) should celebrate Thanksgiving or merely tolerate it, he pointed out that Muslims don’t really share the American experience, that the holiday doesn’t mean the same thing to us that it does to them. He also raised the issue of cultural appropriation: Muslims should leave Thanksgiving to the Christians, not mock them (however unintentionally) by reducing their culture to turkey dinner and Puritan costumes.

The third person interviewed was, of course, a spokeswoman for the bin Laden administration. She was particularly angry that this argument for a pan-sectarian Thanksgiving was coming up now, and called it a pro-Crusader attack on the President by people who were trying to bring Canon Law to the United Arab States. The first Thanksgiving was, after all, she pointed out, a celebration of a victory by Christians over the Native Americans, and the current Thanksgiving was war-time propaganda during the American Civil War, an appeal for Christian unity. She said that anybody who thinks that Muslims should celebrate Thanksgiving is siding with Dick Cheney against their own people at a time when Dick Cheney’s “crusader” terrorists from places like Texas were disguising themselves as Confederate refugees in order to create sleeper cells for more crusader terrorist attacks. She accused the left of forgetting the November 9th, 2001 terror attack on the World Trade Center in Baghdad.

I came away from it with the familiar thought that as a secularist Afghani, if Christians aren’t safe in bin Laden’s UAS, neither am I, and all too aware that refugees were the backbone of my community. I was thinking that you’d have to be an idiot not to realize that the refugees weren’t crusaders, they were the crusaders’ victims, fleeing from war — refugees are the most peaceful people, the most anti-war people, you’ve ever met, because they’ve seen the horrors of war up close. Some of them were even translators for our soldiers in Virginia, whose lives are at risk if we send them back to the Confederacy!

So I decided that maybe I should celebrate Thanksgiving this year, in my own secular, low-key way. No silly Puritan costumes, but maybe find an American-refugee restaurant that’s open that weekend and get some American food. Maybe with some friends. Maybe even try to find something to be thankful for, even if bin Laden is President.

The new Liberator has arrived, which means it is time to spend another week with Lord Bonkers. Right from the off, he takes us to the heart of the debate on Europe.

Monday

I was resting my eyes in the Lords; when I opened them, there was the prime minister In Our House. What immortal rind! And she was staring at me. I wasn’t having that so I stared right back. When that didn’t work I went through my full gamut of faces: the lovesick Frisian; the angry walrus; Roy Jenkins on the lavatory.

That, I thought, had done the trick when she hurried out, but her place was taken by a Cabinet colleague. It was clear that a more organised approach was needed, so I took a party of Liberal Democrat peers (you may have noticed we are not exactly short of them) off to the tearoom for a spot of training in Hard Stares and pulling the aforementioned faces (though the Jenkins is not one for novices).

I am proud to announce that, after I had left for home, one of my pupils made a junior minister cry.

I think I need to clarify something. Back in this message, I was talking about the great villain Darkseid, created of course by Jack Kirby. The actor Jack Palance had just passed away and I wrote…

The style and substance of this master antagonist [Darkseid] were based on just about every power-mad tyrant Kirby had ever met or observed, with a special emphasis on Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon was kind of the monster du jour for many in 1970 and he's still a fine template for various forms of villainy.

Beyond that kind of thing, it is not uncommon for comic artists to "cast" their creations, using someone they know or have observed as reference, and Kirby used Jack Palance as a model for Darkseid. I don't mean that he thought the other Jack had ever tried to enslave the universe…but Kirby had been impressed by one or more Palance screen appearances. They inspired some aspect of Darkseid…a look, a posture, a gesture, whatever. Most of all, it was probably a voice. When J.K. wrote dialogue for his comic book evildoer, he was "hearing" Palance in some film.

As I browse the 'net, I discover that this is being cited as "Mark Evanier says Jack Kirby based Darkseid's appearance on Jack Palance." Well, not exactly. Maybe I could have been more precise but it was more a matter of something about Palance's style and probably his voice that informed the character, not particularly his face.

Also, I should have said this: I don't think Jack ever based any character wholly on anyone, even those that might seem obvious. I remember at least three people we discussed who went into Funky Flashman. With Kirby, it was always an amalgam and sometimes, the reference points — while significant to Jack — would be quite invisible to anyone else. For example, the visual for the character of Big Barda was inspired by a Playboy layout of singer-actress Lainie Kazan…but that doesn't mean Jack was drawing Lainie Kazan. And the essence of Barda's personality clearly came from others, especially his wife Roz.

Do yourself a favor: Don't get too deep into trying to figure out that Jack based this character on that movie star. This is never a question with a simple answer and never just about the visual. He took elements of certain characters from certain performances by actors or from historical figures based on their deeds. Unless it was something like drawing Richard Nixon or Don Rickles into a story as themselves, the characters were all amalgams and they were points of inspiration, not models.

And while I'm at it: I keep seeing folks saying that Jack based the character of Granny Goodness on comedienne Phyllis Diller. I don't think so. He might have said that later as a joke…or if some enthusiastic fan came up to Jack at a convention and said, "I think I realized something, Mr. Kirby! You based Granny Goodness on Phyllis Diller, right?", Jack might well have said, "You figured it out," rather than disappoint the kid.

But I was working for Jack at the time and we talked a lot about Granny and I never heard him mention Phyllis Diller, nor did she ever play the kind of heartless villain Jack thought Granny Goodness was. I have a vague recollection that he did mention Shelley Winters and maybe even have a photo of her around…but that doesn't mean he based the whole character on her, either. At most, her performance or image in some role would be just one component.

The post Based Upon… appeared first on News From ME.

Most polls still have the purples in double figures

They are routinely derided by others.  The press loves to print stories of their wackier examples.  They are marginalised.  Their public figures are held up to ridicule.  Yet they make up roughly one in ten of the adult population.  I write, of course, of UKIP supporters.

Who are these people?  Where do they come from?  And why, eight months after Leave won the referendum and with the vote being implemented in a hardline version by a Conservative government, do they continue to see a need for a purple perspective?

On the face of it, UKIP’s purpose is complete.  It was established to get Britain out of the EU, and that is now in train.  It campaigned arguing that restricting immigration should be the priority, and the Government is now making that its touchstone for Brexit.  Nigel Farage himself has said that “I can hardly believe that the PM is now using the phrases and words that I’ve been mocked for using for years. Real progress.”

Nor can it be said that UKIP benefits from impressive leadership.  Since the referendum it has tripped over its own shoelaces repeatedly.  It has crammed in two leadership elections, with Diane James managing just 18 days in the role, probably the shortest tenure ever of a permanent leader of a political party with Parliamentary representation since universal suffrage and only twice as long in the top spot as Lady Jane Grey managed.

Her longer term replacement Paul Nuttall has already been turned into a figure of fun among those politically unsympathetic to UKIP with his apparently loose relationship with the truth. The first of these leadership elections included a fistfight at an MEP meeting that hospitalised one of the candidates.  The second leadership election threw up a candidate who claimed that a gay donkey tried to rape his horse and who owned a fortified compound in Bulgaria: he got 18% of the vote.  Meanwhile, UKIP’s chief funder is threatening to stand against UKIP’s only MP.  Without Nigel Farage, UKIP’s representatives look a complete shower.

Yet despite all this, UKIP remains surprisingly strong in the polls.  With the exception of Ipsos MORI, every opinion pollster has found that it continues to record at least 10% poll shares since the referendum result.  So it must have some continuing appeal that the other parties cannot meet. Let’s look further.

Drawing conclusions from the cross-breaks of opinion polls is always fraught with danger, particularly when dealing with small samples.  This risk can be reduced, though not eliminated, by looking at different opinion polls.  So I have looked at the tables of the latest polls from each of ICM, YouGov and ComRes.  The broad picture that they paint is sufficiently similar to give some confidence.

All three pollsters find that the great bulk of UKIP’s current support comes from their 2015 voters.  UKIP has, it seems, succeeded in hanging onto the largest part of those voters – all three pollsters find that it is retaining roughly two thirds of its 2015 vote, give or take a few percent.  To put that into perspective, the Lib Dems had lost two thirds of their vote in 2015 and have actually retained fewer supporters from that date to now.  The kippers seem to have built a brand to last, at least with some voters.

All three pollsters also find that UKIP is attracting a reasonable number of new supporters.  All three find that between a fifth and a quarter of current UKIP supporters voted for a different party in 2015.  Now this is not one way traffic.  All three pollsters find that far more 2015 UKIP voters have headed for the Conservative party than vice versa, and, contrary to received wisdom, the net flow of voters between Labour and UKIP only is only a trickle rather than a flood.  Nevertheless, this is not the polling of a party yet in terminal decline.

So what’s driving this?  YouGov and ICM both found that roughly a fifth of Leave voters are planning to vote UKIP.  (ComRes, oddly, do not look at their respondents through the prism of the referendum vote.)  Indeed, YouGov didn’t find any Remain supporters at all who were backing UKIP.  Essentially, it seems, that UKIP have become a party for Leave supporters who don’t trust the Government to follow it through.

Viewed in that light, I have two observations.  First, the continuing lack of trust of many Leave voters in the current Government is striking.  Even UKIP’s most loyal supporters would be pushed to suggest that it has given a good account of itself in recent months, yet despite UKIP’s very public shambles it still represents a more attractive proposition for a fifth of Leave voters than a Government that is pushing through a hardline Brexit with reasonable efficiency.  This suggests that Theresa May is right to worry about her right flank.  If Brexit softens or flounders, UKIP could revive in the polls sharply as the May violets that she has currently won over might return home again.

Secondly, if a hard Brexit is seen to be implemented, that’s a large cache of votes that the Conservatives might be able to draw upon, even if they lose votes on their Remain flank.  There’s no particular reason to assume that the Conservative vote share in the polls has yet peaked.

Alastair Meeks

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An open letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson on linguists and Arrival:

A recent guest post on Language Log is an open letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson about the role of linguists versus cryptographers in Arrival: 

As fellow scientists, we linguists appreciate the work you do as a spokesperson for science. However, your recent tweet about the film Arrival perpetuates a common misunderstanding about what linguistics is and what linguists do:

In the @ArrivalMovie I’d chose a Cryptographer & Astrobiologist to talk to the aliens, not a Linguist & Theoretical Physicist

Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson), 1:40 PM – 26 Feb 2017

Though the term linguist is often used by the public to refer generally to anyone whose occupation is related to language (especially translators and interpreters), the type depicted in Arrival is a special kind of linguist who engages in the scientific study of human language: its structures, its uses, its underlying similarities, and its surprising diversity. A cryptographer simply cannot replicate the specialized training that a linguist like Louise Banks has, which takes years to learn and decades to master.

Most importantly, a cryptanalyst would likely be much less suited to the task of communicating with aliens than a linguist would (a cryptographer even less so, since they work on encryption, not decryption). Cryptanalysis relies on decrypting coded messages from a known language. If the source language and the encryption method are both unknown, ordinary cryptanalytic methods will fail. This is why the Native American code talkers of the 20th century were so invaluable to the US in both world wars: their languages were not understood by enemy cryptanalysts, so their encrypted versions could not be cracked, unlike with well-known languages like English.

Read the full open letter or see also many previous posts about the linguistics of Arrival.

This post is now at https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1323382.html

When are the bookies going to take note of this – George Galloway may enter race to become Gorton MP https://t.co/ce0JQ5ADxy

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) March 11, 2017

.@LadPolitics 33/1 on Galloway for Gorton is same price you opened on him for 2012 Bradford W by-election. As you'll recall he won

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) March 11, 2017

If he runs that could damage Labour

Back in 2012 my best political bet was on George Galloway in the Bradford West by-election. I got on him at 33/1 and, of course, he went on to take the seat in a surprise Victory. My view then was that he could cause surprises and was worth it at the price.

Now, as in the Guardian report linked to above, he is considering putting his name forward in a seat where at the 2911 census 29% of resident described their religion as “Muslim”; 11th highest for constituencies in England and Wales.

I’m not totally convinced that GG is planning a run. I think this is more a way of trying to influence the LAB selection so the party chooses a Muslim candidate whom Galloway approves of.

If Galloway stands against an official LAB candidate than that could make the defence of Gorton more difficult for the red team. The most likely beneficiaries would be the Lib Dems who have a good historical record there even though they did badly at the last general election.

I’ve laid labour on Betfair at a 1.13. So effectively I’ve got 8/1 on LAB not retaining the seat.

Mike Smithson

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Time to think about some contingency planning

The last few years have seen a profusion of long-odds political bets come in. When they have, it’s been because the bookies, the punters or both have misread the electorate, the candidate(s) or the process. I think there’s another outside opportunity now.

This week’s Budget cannot in any sense be regarded as priming the Conservatives for a snap election. Presumably, Philip Hammond didn’t anticipate quite the reaction to his NIC proposals that did come but he must have known that there wouldn’t be street parties. Anyone who didn’t believe Theresa May’s denial before the Budget that she’d be seeking an election in May has more reason to do so now.

That announcement, however, was couched in careful terms: the Number 10 source said than an early election was “not something she plans to do or wishes to do”. Maybe not, but it might be something she feels forced to do if the Brexit Bill cannot be passed as she’d like it.

It has to be said that that scenario also looks less likely, with the Lords expected to back down if the Bill is returned to them shorn of their lordships’ amendments. For the time being though, let’s run with the event that there’s deadlock.

Current thinking about an early election is still rooted in the pre-FTPA days, when a prime minister could call on the Queen and expect a dissolution at will. William Hague’s call this week for an early election was out of that book. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as that, and it’s in that process that the betting opportunities lie.

If the PM is forced into a position where she felt obliged to go to the country, her first course would be a Dissolution Motion in the Commons. It’s far from inconceivable that such a motion would pass. Corbyn has been vocally bullish about Labour’s chances in an election and enough Labour MPs might go with a whip to support the motion on the basis that it would be the best bet of both removing Corbyn, limiting the damage he could do and stalling the boundary review. On the other hand, politicians are frequently adept at finding principles that provide cover for tactically beneficial actions, and voting it down at least gives the chance for something to turn up.

In which case, we’d be looking at the messy option of a Vote of No Confidence. Some have argued that this isn’t really an option because it’d make the government look ridiculous if its backbenchers No Confidenced it. I don’t agree. With proper preparation, laying out what would happen if the Commons didn’t back the Dissolution vote, the public would be less likely to regard it as absurd.

The problem is less the PR than keeping control of the process. Put simply, no-one knows what would happen next if the Tories No Confidenced their own PM. That alone would be constitutionally new territory, even before the dynamics of the FTPA come into play.

Previously, if a government was No Confidenced, then the PM would have the choice of staying in office and calling an election (as in 1979) or resigning the government. If he or she resigned the government then the opinion of constitutional experts such as Vernon Bogdanor is that the Queen should call first on the Leader of the Opposition. (In fact, it’s not so clear cut: had Blair been defeated on the Iraq vote – not technically a Confidence vote but as near as makes no difference – and resigned, she would surely have called on Brown, after taking consultation from leading ministers; IDS would have been an onlooker along with everyone else).

But things have changed: the rules, and crucially, the time-periods, are more prescriptive. It’s quite possible that if a majority government – any majority government in theory but let’s stick with the current one for simplicity – No Confidenced itself, the Queen would still go through the motions of inviting senior politicians to form their own government. Obviously, neither May nor any other Conservative would accept, as that would prevent their objective of forcing an election. Corbyn might accept but if he did, his government would fail to receive the Commons’ confidence. On the other hand, he might refuse a commission or it might never be offered, given Labour’s support in the Commons.

Then what? It’s possible that we might simply have a game of pass-the-parcel, where whoever had been most recently asked to the Palace when the two weeks runs out gets to keep the position for the duration of the election campaign but there’s little doubt that commentators and many members of the public would see that as the Palace exhibiting bias. That’s also the reason why once she’d lost office, May could not realistically be recalled until after the election. But if May wouldn’t form a government and Corbyn couldn’t, who could?

This is where we need to think outside the box, because ‘the box’ is our preconceptions governed by precedent, and the FTPA renders a lot of the precedent null by creating the new situation. As Sherlock Holmes didn’t quite say: once you eliminate the impossible, then whatever remains needs to be taken seriously. And if it is impossible to appoint a politician until after the imminent election, and it is necessary that someone do the job, then it follows that a non-party individual must take it on, on a caretaker role.

There would, in fact, be some precedent for that kind of outcome: the Duke of Wellington ran the government for a month in 1834 while Peel returned from Italy, after the previous Whig ministry was turned out – though Wellington was very much of Peel’s party. Better examples might be found abroad. In Greece, when no government could be formed after the May 2012 election, a government of Independents was appointed, many of whom were not even parliamentarians. In Italy, Mario Monti headed a technocratic government appointed with the consent of the politicians to deal with the crisis of the day there.

Who might be asked to take on such a demanding role? Ideally, it would have to be someone with government experience, experience of the legislature, someone who is respected on all sides as both capable and impartial, is without excessive links to any one business or other lobby group, who could be trusted to represent the country in the interim and who could – if necessary – take the big decisions that cross a PM’s desk but who would also have the discretion not to take decisions best left to the incoming administration.

Others can make their own nominations but to me, the figure that best fills those requirements is the former Cabinet Secretary Lord (Gus) O’Donnell. To that end, I’ve had a modest bet on him at 250/1 with Ladbrokes.

One advantage of the bet is that if – as is likely – the Brexit Bill doesn’t result in a snap election, the scenario still holds good for any other crisis of the first order that might necessitate an early dissolution. With the rest of the Brexit process and the potential for a second Scottish independence vote, to name but two of the more obvious candidates, the next few years won’t be short of other opportunities.

None of which is to say it’s likely; it’s not. But it is a good deal more likely than the once-in-1000-year event that the odds imply.

David Herdson

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Autism-related support often requires paperwork, or at least some evidence of a formal diagnosis. I feel like neurotypical people forget this, particularly neurotypical parents, teachers and professionals when traits are picked up on in children.

“We don’t want to reduce them to a label” is a bad reason for withholding assessment and diagnosis. I’d still be autistic whether my diagnosis happened or not – but without it, I wouldn’t have been able to understand myself through that lens, and my self-esteem would probably be through the floor after years of expecting myself to conform exactly with my neurotypical peers. And besides, giving someone a label can only be said to “reduce” them if you don’t see that label as compatible with the rest of a person’s humanity, and that, folks, is ableism.

“But they get good grades” is a bad reason for eschewing formal procedures, because believe it or not, grades aren’t the only thing that matter. So many aspects of a child’s life aren’t measured by their grades.

“But they’re so high-functioning” is a bad reason for locking someone out of the system. I’ve written before about why functioning labels are unhelpful and ableist, but for these purposes, the important point is that how well someone can pass for neurotypical (and let’s face it, that’s what neurotypicals mean by “high-functioning”)  can and will change as the person’s life changes.

In particular, people who are deemed “high-functioning” at a young age often struggle much more with the increased demands of adult life. This isn’t something to be ashamed of – or at least it shouldn’t be. With the right support, we can still thrive.

With the right support.

But support requires paperwork.

And some adults in various positions block paperwork in the toxic push to distance children from their own neurology, whether by forcing them to pass for neurotypical or insisting on pretending that they are indeed neurotypical.

When these kids grow into adults, and find they need more support, they may engage with the formal procedures themselves and at long last get the paperwork they need. But a great many of them will be told “But you’ve gone this far without support, so you must not need it”.

Intentionally or not, when you try to distance autistic people from their autism, you’re setting them a trap.

At #ldconf we'll be giving two people the chance to win an exclusive copy of the Orange Book signed by @nick_clegg, David Laws and others! pic.twitter.com/tgDqNb6LfN

— Liberal Reform (@liberal_reform) March 9, 2017

When I saw this tweet I suspected it was a parody, but it does come from the official Liberal Reform account.

The most vocal young economic liberals in the Liberal Democrats tended to find deeply principled reasons for leaving the party when it became clear the roof was going to fall in at the 2015 general election.

But I am sure Liberal Reform will still find some keen to win this prize.

Those who are lucky enough to do so may be disappointed. The Orange Book is not a coherent philosophical work but an uneven collection of essays on different areas of policy.

It is also approaching its 13th birthday, which is long in the tooth for a book of that sort.

And libertarians readers will be surprised by at least one of the chapters.

When I reviewed The Orange Book for Liberator back in 2004, I had this to say:

And then there is Steve Webb. Webb argues that liberals should not take a laissez-faire approach to the family, yet his views are not as ground-breaking as he seems to think. With the exception of a pamphlet I published last year, I cannot recall any Liberal Democrat questioning the move, rapidly accelerated under this government, towards more state intervention in family life. Certainly, none of the 64 references in his essay point the reader towards a dissident view. 

Webb offers an apocalyptic view: our children are suffering more mental health problems than ever before, they are starting school unable to talk or listen, they are turning to drink. What is strange is that this view is supported only by references to surveys and magazine articles. As an MP Webb must regularly meet all sorts of people who work for children, yet nowhere does he mention them. Basing his arguments on their testimony would have made for a more interesting essay – and quite possibly a very different one too. As it is, his work reads like a collection of press cuttings; it may be no coincidence, that Webb is the only person in the book to make his research assistant the joint author of his paper. 

The answer to our predicament, Webb argues, lies in massive state intervention, delivered through the voluntary sector. He lists a number of schemes with approval, but it is hard to judge them because we have no direct knowledge of them. What is more worrying is that there is no sign that Webb has direct knowledge of them either. Again, he relies upon published references and gives no sign that he has met the people whose work he is praising. And, while liberals will favour government support for the voluntary sector, its essence lies in the personal qualities of those who work in it and its local nature. Any attempt to roll out a scheme nationally will inevitably tend to reduce it to a trite formula that fails to reproduce the unique characteristics that made the original model work. 

Somewhere in Webb's essay is the ghost of a more interesting, more personal contribution. One senses that he really sees our salvation as lying in a revival of marriage – he spends a couple of pages convincing himself that welfare benefits do not encourage young women to have babies out of marriage – and a greater role for religion. It is a shame that Webb did not write that other essay, because it might have offered the beginnings of an interesting critique of free-market economics. The traditional criticism of it is the Marxist one that capitalism will impoverish the workers, but we know by now that this is not true. A more subtle critique is the conservative, communitarian one which sees the free market as hollowing out important social institutions and acting as more of a destructive than a creative force. 

Webb's essay as it stands, however, turns our idea of what constitutes virtue on its head. A healthy society sees it as residing locally – in the family and friendship and in strong local communities – and is distrustful of national government because it is distant and anonymous. To Webb, however, virtue resides in the state and in the professionals and volunteers whom it licenses, while families and individuals are weak and morally suspect.

I have always been something of a Steve Webb fan and I suspect the editors invited him to contribute to The Orange Book to dispel the idea that it came solely from the economic liberal wing of the party.

But when his essay appeared alongside ones like David Laws' call for the National Health Service to be replaced by a system of private insurance, the effect was unfortunate.

It reinforced the impression that economic liberalism stands up for the interests of the big corporations.

Money must be set free, they seem to argue, but people must be more closely policed to make sure they do not have public money spent on them and that they are the model citizens those corporations require.

From the Guardian website this afternoon:

George Galloway could be preparing for a political comeback in the highly contested Gorton byelection. 

The former MP will only say that he is “considering standing” – but sources say he has been on the campaign trail for three weeks. 

On Friday, Galloway was reportedly giving a talk to the congregation of a local mosque in the area, further signalling his bid to be elected to the Manchester seat, vacant since the death of Sir Gerald Kaufman. 

A source close to Galloway explained that the veteran leftwinger had picked the constituency because it fitted “perfectly” with his political ideals.

There is a danger in being a pundit from a distance, but I suspect this is good news for the Liberal Democrats.

From a Vanity Fair article by T.A. Frank:

There’s no way that a series of misspelled four A.M. tweets, sandwiched next to a lament about The Apprentice, is the work of someone playing 28-dimensional chess. It’s the work of someone who found a chess set and had to go to the hospital after swallowing two rooks and a knight.

The Daily Mirror report I blogged about this morning took it for granted that Labour will hold Manchester Gorton in the by-election.

Huffington Post is not so sure:

An internal Labour battle over the Manchester Gorton by-election risks gifting the seat to the Liberal Democrats, party sources have told HuffPost UK. 

Attempts by Jeremy Corbyn’s allies to skew the candidate selection towards supporters of the Labour leader have backfired amid claims of chaos and incompetence, insiders say.

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March 8th, 2017: I've brought back a CLASSIC SHIRT for a limited time: the sinister octopus "We Were Not Meant To Be" shirt! NOICE – Ryan

The seemingly indestructible Keith Vaz has popped up again, reports the Daily Mirror.

He is to be a member of the panel that will select Labour's candidate for the Manchester Gorton by-election:

Mr Vaz was drafted onto Labour's five-strong selection panel at the last minute at the expense of shadow cabinet minister Rebecca Long-Bailey, a close ally of Mr Corbyn.

Angry sources close to the Labour leader accused Mr Watson of organising an “ambush” during a fiery telephone meeting on Monday that resulted in Ms Long-Bailey being booted off the panel.

Her name had been on a draft list drawn up by Mr Corbyn’s office ahead of the meeting - but in a telephone conference call key figures from the ‘moderate’ wing of the party including Mr Watson voted her off.

The move will shift the balance of power on the panel significantly, with Labour ‘moderates’ confident that with Mr Vaz’s support they can now block the selection of Mr Corbyn’s favoured candidate.

When we have made jokes about washing machines and noted that not all his Labour colleagues have a high opinion of Mr Vaz - take the mayor of Leicester, for instance - it is worth saying something about the failure of the Corbynites.

Manchester Gorton will be the 11th parliamentary by-election since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader. In not one of them has the party fielded a candidate who is clearly a supporter of his.

The Labour Party gained many new members because of Corbyn, but they lack the organisational skills or the energy to reshape it in his image.

This post is now at https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1322850.html

Monday:


Today’s lesson: when @BBCR4Feedback call an hour early and say they can call back in an hour… they aren’t going to call back.

How did we get to there? Well, the usual start to the week – listening to Daddy Richard shout at the radio – was interrupted by a moment of shocked silence when, as he tweeted, THIS happened:

“Jaw dropping moment as John Humphreys asks: doesn't it muddy the waters if we call far right terrorist murder of Jo Cox "terrorism" #r4today”

Life in the Today Programme goldfish bowl...

That generated… a fair number of retweets and replies, one of which said we should make it a proper complaint to the BBC. So that’s what we did, and posted it up on the Facebook too:

“After a jawdropping moment on this morning's Today programme, I have submitted this complaint to the BBC, via http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/

During an interview with Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, in charge of Counter Terrorism, Mr Rowley warned the public should not forget the terrorist threat from right-wing extremists, and cited the murder of MP Jo Cox.
John Humphreys responded by asking "didn't that muddy the waters" and suggesting that the murderer Thomas Mair was mentally ill.
The judge, sentencing Thomas Mair, said: "There is no doubt this murder was done for the purpose of advancing a political, racial and ideological cause namely that of violent white supremacism and exclusive nationalism most associated with Nazism and its modern forms."
Dismissing genuine terrorism as actions of "lone mentally ill person" is factually wrong and dangerous to public safety. And the implication that terrorism is something done only be foreigners / non-white people / Muslims is dangerously close to accepting the premise of the racists that Thomas Mair represents.
If the police are describing the Jo Cox murder as terrorism, the BBC should not be questioning that, but asking itself serious questions about the climate of right-wing hate that has been allowed foment in the UK, for which the BBC by airing or repeating (as here) the views of these people bears some responsibility.

And THAT generated another lot of traffic and clearly a LOT of other people were quite cross too, because that was when the Radio FEEDBACK programme got in touch and asked if they could talk about that Tweet and the reaction to what Mr Humphrys said.

So they said that they would call between 10am and 1pm, Wednesday. Actually they called at 9.15, just as we were getting on the Jubilee line.

So, IF this ever happens to you, do not let them say: “it’s fine we will call you back in an hour”. No! You say “I WILL TALK TO YOU NOW”!

Anyway, here is what we WOULD have said:

Why was I so taken about by John Humphrys suggestion that calling the murder of MP Jo Cox terrorism was “muddying the waters”?


1.
The Facts – the police, the crown prosecution service, the sentencing judge all agreed that this was a politically motivated terrorist murder. These are not liberal snowflakes, they are serious people. Jo Cox’s killer, Thomas Mair, was psychiatrically examined and found to be in his own mind and fit to stand trial for his actions.

This is the BBC’s own report of the sentencing judge’s remarks: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38076755 - note the emphasis on the high degree of planning and premeditation, as well as the political motivation. This was not the random act of a “madman”.

The right wing press – who have an agenda – might question this. But I expect very senior BBC journalists to know the facts and not repeat propaganda.

2.
The Context – the interview was with Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley asking the public to contact the police with information if they are worried or suspicious about their neighbours. And as a Liberal, I’m not 100% happy with his “be afraid and inform on your neighbours” agenda here. So actually, I was giving him some credit when he was reminding people that there is far right political terrorism to watch out for as well. When Mr Humphrys interrupted. But if anything is going to “muddy the waters” it is the suggestion from the interviewer that some terrorism isn’t as worth while contacting the police about because it is a fascist rather than ISIS who is threatening people’s lives.

And I think you could tell that the Assistant Commissioner was somewhat taken aback by this sudden derailing of the interview, too.

3.
The Narrative – because it’s all very familiar to hear white terrorists described as “a lone wolf” or “mentally ill”. These excuses get repeated whenever a white person commits an atrocity like this. Anders Breivek who killed all those children in Sweden; Timothy McVeigh the Oklahoma bomber; Dylann Roof, the man who shot nine black churchgoers at a service in Charleston Carolina; the list goes on, back to the Unabomber and earlier.

The message is “white people don’t commit terrorism; only brown people do terrorism”.

And it’s wrong.

We don’t hear people challenging the idea that the murder of Lee Rigby was terrorism. We don’t hear people suggesting that the shoe bomber Richard Reid was mentally ill. And it’s not like we have no experience of white sectarian terrorism in this country.

The BBC has a responsibility not to perpetuate this myth, which leads to…

4.
The hate crimes – we’ve seen a surge in attacks against women and minorities, particularly people who are immigrants or even just perceived as immigrants, fuelled by the xenophobic language of the Leave campaign and UKIP and now even the more right-wing elements of the government. The murder of Jo Cox happened at the height of the most horribly divisive and racially charged referendum campaign and on very the day Nigel Farage was unveiling his Nazi-imagery-evoking “Breaking Point” poster.

And people want to deny there is a connection.

The right wing, the nationalists, want people to think that only foreigners can be terrorists. They want people to be afraid. But they don’t want it to come back on them. And they won’t take responsibility. They want to deny that there are extremist views on their side, and that among those extremists are some people who use violence and murder for their political ends.

I do not expect senior BBC journalists to be giving support to these people.

5.
The excuse – the excuse given in reply to my complaint was that John was just putting a challenging question. Well, firstly, it wasn’t a question. It might have had the form of a question, but it was just an assertion. It was not posed as a question, more a muttered aside. And it presupposes that Jo Cox murder could not be terrorism if the “question” put is whether that statement muddies the waters.

But also, if you’re going to ask challenging questions, why start at that point? Why not challenge the Assistant Commissioner over why the terror alert is still at the second highest level after years and years, and doesn’t that make it a bit pointless? Or challenge him on the threats that the police say that they’ve defeated – what sort of threats are we talking about: knife attacks, anthrax letters or something on the scale of 7/7? That would give the public a genuine insight into the threat level, in a way that questioning whether Jo Cox murder was terrorism would not.



The Farage agenda gets far too much of a free ride from the BBC already, with UKIP – or their proxies in the Tory Party – on the air far more often than their support however you count it would justify. But this was a particularly poor interview – unquestioning of the authoritarian agenda at the start and then then tossing in this unjustified assertion that would not have been out of place in the Daily Mail.

John Humphrys has a reputation to live up to. We should expect more of him.

Obviously, the big story from last week’s Northern Ireland election was the dramatic drop in support for the Unionist parties which led to them losing their minority in the Assembly (and its predecessors) for the first time ever. Rather than add to the analysis of the (Nicholas Whyte in the Irish Times is a good starting point, but there’s plenty of good coverage out there), I want to look at the political centre in Northern Ireland, to follow on from my post last week.

One interesting feature was that early results (based on first preference votes) didn’t look too rosy for the centre parties, but as votes began to transfer down through the preferences, things started looking better as a trend of UUP and SDLP voters being willing to vote across the cultural cleavage became clear. Seats that had looked tough to hold earlier on in the count were being held thanks to voters. Nicholas Whyte puts it succintly:

A remarkable feature of the election is that voters themselves seem more inclined to cross the divide. The SDLP’s vote share decreased yet again, giving them their worst result in history. But they managed to come out with no net losses. In several cases, seats that had appeared beyond their grasp in the early stages of counting fell into place thanks to transfers from the UUP – not just failure to transfer within Unionism, but an active choice by a crucial minority of moderate voters to try and block the extreme parties.
To be specific: UUP transfers were crucial for the SDLP seats in Lagan Valley and East Londonderry, and the SDLP returned the favour for the UUP in Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

The animated results on the Belfast Telegraph’s election site help to make this trend clearer – in seat after seat, when the final UUP or SDLP candidate is eliminated or elected, a large chunk of their vote transfers to the other party (or to the Alliance and the Greens) rather than staying within their side and transferring to the DUP or SDLP.

MLAs designated as ‘other’ (neither unionist nor nationalist) now make up a larger percentage of the Assembly than ever before, going up from 11.1% (12 out of 108) to 12.2% (11 of 90) in the new Assembly. On a wider scale, the more ‘centre’ parties and MLAs (those who can attract significant cross-community support or transfers) now total 34 out of the 90 members. While it’s not the majority of the Assembly those parties represented at the foundation of the Assembly, it’s a reminder that a swing back of support from the DUP and Sinn Fein would not have to be too huge to give the centre parties a majority in the Assembly again. The strength of transfers between them and a growing population in Northern Ireland that want to move on from the politics of the Troubles might make negotiating post-election deals an even more multi-sided game in the future.

The internet as we know it is nearly 25 years old (that's the world wide web: the pre-web internet is a lot older, and not far off its 50th birthday, but would be unrecognizable to most people today). We're using it for purposes the designers never anticipated, and a myriad of hopeful experiments flourish on the web ... and sooner or later die, or crumble into gentle decline and benign neglect.

And sometimes the neglect is not so benign.

Recently the news broke that internet-connected toys were being hacked. CloudPet stuffed animals have a web connection that allows kids and their parents to send and receive voice messages; they're sold as "a message you can hug". But it turns out that their login database was unsecured and discoverable via Shodan, "the search engine for the internet of things", and huge numbers of logins have allegedly leaked (they didn't password protect the password database—or encrypt/hash/salt the passwords in it). Voice messages for CloudPet users were stored on Amazon's AWS cloud service without authentication, so I leave the mis-applications of this service to your imagination.

The worrying part is that the toy manufacturer was extremely difficult to contact and doesn't seem to have any timely process for monitoring or fixing defects in the service (not to mention probably being in violation of the Data Protection Act if the toys are sold in the UK). And of course the toys will probably out-live the company; the half-life of a corporation is 15 years (for a start-up it's about 18 months) but the half-life of a beloved toy may well be considerably longer.

Note that Shodan isn't to blame for the sloppy security practices of a novelty toy manufacturer, any more than Google is to blame for the existence of child pornography on the internet. But there are a lot of novelty toy manufacturers out there, and more and more of them are going to go bust every year, leaving broken toys behind them with no internet connection ... or worse: be taken over by larger corporations who will simply fold the developers into their own teams, continuing to pay the rental on unattended and unpatched servers for the obsolescent product lines until nobody screams when they turn them off. (Google, Nest, Jawbone, I'm looking at you.) Then there are the unattended child monitoring cameras with microcontrollers running unpatched ancient linux distributions with default passwords. And the home security systems/burglar alarms. Internet-controlled smart front door locks (there'll be an app to break that). Network-controlled drones probably aren't a thing yet (unless you're the USAF), but they're doubtless on their way. Internet-connected vibrators have already triggered lawsuits; if you put the data from a We-Vibe together with the owner's NetFlix or smart TV watching habits, or PornTube click-trail, you can probably build up an interesting picture of their predilections. And so on.

What are the unanticipated downsides of the decay of the internet of things, combined with poor security practices and developers going bust and leaving infrastructure in place as abandonware? You probably know I've got a vivid imagination by now—what haven't I anticipated?

Ed Sheeran’s absurd dominance of the singles chart is great news for him, his fans, Asylum records, and Paul Gambaccini’s agent, but it’s hard to argue it’s good news for the chart itself. It demonstrates the utter weakness of the post-streaming Top 40 as a separate entity from the Album chart (since the release of any big new LP can swamp it) and frankly as a separate entity from the Spotify UK Top 50 playlist, which at least has the decency to update a few times a day.

If the problem were just “too many Ed Sheeran songs in the Top 40” then it’s easily fixable – just cap the number of tracks which can chart from any individual LP. But that’s not really the problem. (If you like Ed, it’s not even *a* problem). It’s of a piece with the sclerosis of the chart, that deathly slow turnover of new hits which started in the download era and has been accelerated by the dominance of streaming. And Ed or no Ed, there’s no real sense that the singles chart has a role to play any more.

Or to be more exact, it used to play two roles. It had a role as a neutral record of consumer activity, and it had a role as a bundle of songs which existed as a cultural artefact in its own right, a snapshot of “pop” that was entertaining and diverse enough to get people interested. There’s no reason these two roles have to converge. In fact they often don’t: there are lots of neutral records of consumer activity which don’t achieve ‘cultural artefact’ status as a bundle. The list of Top 10 UK leisure attractions, for instance, is of immense interest to the leisure industry but has no salience in its own right – it’s just a bunch of places which doesn’t change very much. Meanwhile, the Turner Prize shortlist is a bundle with a strong claim to cultural artefact-hood but clearly it’s got sod all to do with consumer activity.

Still, the consumer record and cultural artefact roles did in fact converge in the UK Top 40 singles chart, to a degree I don’t think was matched anywhere or anywhen else. But the nexus points where it could most fully play the artefact role – like Top Of The Pops – gradually vanished, and technology meant the things the record role needed to measure changed. And so the two aspects diverged.

But the format of the chart itself – a weekly bundle of 40 songs – didn’t change. It became a ghost form, no longer fit for purpose as a cultural artefact but haunted by the memory and expectation of being one, and the Sheerageddon is one weird result of this: the chart is in fact only newsworthy now when it looks broken.

Growing up my cultural life was full of these kind of bundles – the charts, Top Of The Pops, the music press, and then further afield newspapers, terrestrial TV channels, commercial breaks, even libraries. Packages where you would come for one thing and be exposed to plenty of others, because that’s how they worked. The attraction of the bundle – the feeling that this unasked-for exposure is productive, that it creates unexpected encounters and serendipitous outcomes – is sunk very deeply into me as a lover of pop culture. It’s the feeling that made me take on a project like Popular in the first place.

But of course, the last decade or so has been tough on these old bundles. Their operating logic was the idea of serving different audiences – “You lot like this, and you other lot like that, so let’s have some of both.” Of course the NME knew that most of its audience wanted to read about Morrissey. But some of its audience wanted to read about De La Soul. The most effective and successful bundles resolved disputes between different audiences by appealing to some higher arbitration – sales, in the case of the charts; an ideal of newsworthiness, in the case of a newspaper. Even if this arbitration was, well, arbitrary, it served its purpose of creating a patchwork, a more diverse bundle.

What has killed those bundles? Porosity. As soon as the individual components became easier to access than the package – and just as important, as soon as you could SEE which individual components were being accessed more, and by whom – the old-school heterogenous bundle that I grew up on was screwed, a victim of the corrosive implications of attention metrics. One of the early evangelical texts of the web, The Cluetrain Manifesto, argued for a more human, customer-centric approach to business by proclaiming that “markets are conversations”. Lurking unstated beneath that hopeful statement was its brutal inverse – cultural conversations turned out to be markets.

The old bundle was a necessary way of keeping up with something in an age of limited distribution, and the happy price you paid was that you might discover more than you wanted to. But bundles per se have not gone away – they still have one enormous advantage, which is that they’re so convenient. The bundles which have arisen in the 2010s operate on a different principle, though. It’s that of the Amazon recommendation list or the Spotify algorithm – “People who like THIS also like THAT”. Spotify editorial playlists, indeed, are a great example – those things on the homepage like “Rap Caviar” or “Grime Shutdown” or “Future Pop” are bundles like the Top 40 once was, but their mission is subtly different: discovery within a pre-defined range.

The bundles my kids will grow up with are things like Lootcrate, the service by which ‘geeks’ who subscribe to it get a monthly box of assorted tat – sorry, cool merch – from whichever geek-friendly IP has product it wants to shift. Lootcrate amps up the ritual of discovery and surprise – it’s a service built around the idea of “unboxing”, the delighted revelation of new stuff – while strictly regulating the possibility of a truly serendipitous encounter for its 600,000 and rising subscribers. It’s a monthly box of delights which only contains a single trick.

Lootcrate got $18m in venture capital funding last year, so it’s a model with muscle behind it, which investors (including Robert Downey Jr, who knows a thing or two about what gets geeks going) see as the future. For me, these new bundles make me feel old and uselessly nostalgic, ready to take up cudgels against the modern on behalf of my own adolescence: a mug’s game however you package it. But Lootcrate and playlists have one major advantage over the bundles I knew: they are functional. A glance at the Top 40 tells you that my old haunts can no longer make that claim.

Making a martyr of Hezza mightn’t be a smart idea

In a key vote in the House of Lords on the Article 50 bill the government was defeated by 366 to 268 on an amendment that would give Parliament a ‘meaningful vote’ on the Brexit deal when that is resolved. Upto 20 CON peers are said to have rebelled and others were encouraged to abstain.

Later Heseltine, who’s now 83 was a leading cabinet minister in the Thatcher era who played a key part in her downfal. After the move against him he issued a statement to the Press Association.

“I have just been told by the Chief Whip in the Lords that No 10 is to sack me from the five jobs with which I have been helping the Government following my vote in the House of Lords earlier today.

This is entirely the right of the Prime Minister and I’m sorry that the expertise which I have put at the Government’s disposal over the last six years has now come to an end.

However, in the last resort, I believe, as I said in the House of Lords, the future of this country is inextricably interwoven with our European friends.

It’s the duty of Parliament to assert its sovereignty in determining the legacy we leave to new generations of young people.”

The danger of this is that Heseltine looks set to be portrayed as the main Tory opponent of TMay’s plans and he’ll be looked to far more for comment and criticism. His actions could also encourage MPs in pro-REMAIN seats to be less keen to support the government as the bill goes back to the Commons.

It is also a reminder that the country remains very split. Last week YouGov had 45% saying the referendum decision was right with 44% saying it was wrong.

Article 50 betting. Following the government’s defeat bookmakers William Hill have lengthened their odds for Article 50 to be triggered by the end of March this year from 1/6 (85% chance) to 1/4 (80% chance) shortened the odds that it will not be from 7/2 (22%) to 11/4 (26%).

Heseltine gets news of his departure out sharpish and on his own terms. There may just be a precedent for this pic.twitter.com/1dOp0AO8U8

— Ross Hawkins (@rosschawkins) March 7, 2017

Mike Smithson

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.@faisalislam has the latest as the Brexit Bill is defeated for a second time by the House of Lords https://t.co/Z5blfgWybW

— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 7, 2017

Speaking this morning on CNN in defense of House Republicans' Obamacare replacement plan, Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz said that rather than “getting that new iPhone that they just love,” low-income Americans should take they money they would have spent on it and “invest it in their own health care.”

Host Alisyn Camerota started the exchange by pointing out that “access for lower-income Americans doesn't equal coverage.” Chaffetz responded:

Well we're getting rid of the individual mandate. We're getting rid of those things that people said they don't want. And you know what? Americans have choices. And they've got to make a choice. And so, maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest it in their own health care. They've got to make those decisions for themselves.”

Chaffetz's remarks comport with messaging from Republican leadership that frames their health-care proposal as a victory for consumer choice. “We dismantle Obamacare’s damaging taxes and mandates so states can deliver quality, affordable options based on what their patient populations need, and workers and families can have the freedom and flexibility to make their own health care choices,” House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady said in a statement.

But framing the consumer “choice” as one between an iPhone and health coverage ignores the massive gap between the price of an iPhone and what Americans spend on health care.

Let's start with the most generous comparison, and posit that someone wants to buy the most expensive iPhone — a brand new 7 without a contract and with the luxurious “Plus” version's 5.5" screen — which has a sticker price of $769. With tax, that comes to around $800.

Conversely, a year of individual insurance coverage on the open market will run you about $393 per month, or $4,617 per year, per eHealth. For the purpose of this comparison we'll assume you're a healthy individual who doesn't have to worry about deductibles (which run over $4,000 for these plans), and that that $4,617 is all you have to pay.

Even in this expensive-iPhone no-deductible scenario, the typical annual cost of an individual market plan costs is about six times as costly as Chaffetz's “new iPhone.”

But the expensive-iPhone zero-deductible scenario isn't wholly realistic. Only 2 percent of us buy a new smartphone every year, per Gallup. Another 44 percent get a new phone every two years when their cellular contracts run out, and 54 percent of us are cheapos who only get a new phone when our old one breaks or becomes obsolete. So for a better point of comparison, let's call it one iPhone to two years of insurance.

That means that across the typical life span of an iPhone, we're spending 12 times as much on health insurance as we are on the phone.

But this, too, is an overly rosy scenario for many of us. Those individual market plans don't just involve monthly premium payments, they also have high deductibles, too — $4,328 in a year, per eHealth. That represents out-of-pocket spending you need to cover before your plan even starts kicking in.

So let's say we get sick. We break a leg. We have to get lab work done. Our health isn't great, so we need a lot of medical care and max out on our deductible each year. Under the standard individual plan referenced above, that works out to about $18,000 in premiums and out-of-pocket expenses over two years. Or, for that span, the price of 23 iPhones.

Chaffetz's iPhone argument comes as the GOP is pitching a replacement for the Affordable Care Act that would offer tax credits for individuals under certain income thresholds. In the scenario above, if you are under 30 years old and make less than $75,000 a year, you'd be eligible for $2,000 in tax credits to help offset your expenses. That would take $4,000 out of your $18,000 two-year bill, leaving you on the hook for $14,000, knocking the price down to 18 iPhones.

This all involves a lot of speculation because we don't really know yet how the GOP plan would reshape the out-of-pocket expenses landscape. But it seems pretty clear that, by virtue of the huge disparity in pricing, smartphones and health care don't really fall within the same decision-making framework for most of us.

Chaffetz himself seemed to obliquely acknowledged this, when he said in a follow-up interview that he didn't make his remarks “as smoothly as I possibly could.”

The by-election selection battle could be bloody

A few days ago there was an excellent piece in the Manchester Evening News about Gorton constituency Labour party and the ongoing fights within it between the warring factions.

It has been so bad that it has effectively been under special measures for well over a decade and the choice of who’ll take over what appears to be a totally safe seat will bring this out into the open.

“Last year a mammoth falling-out between different factions and personalities reached its zenith at a Levenshulme branch meeting. As with all things to do with Gorton CLP it can be difficult to get to the actual facts – but suffice to say the police were called in amid claims of vote-rigging, abuse and intimidation.

A letter from regional office to the CLP at the time said allegations ‘related to the conduct of Labour party members both during and outside of Labour party meetings’, as well as to ‘the conduct of members of the CLP executive committee in administering internal ballots’.

It had received complaints from members fearing for their safety, it added.”

One of the key drivers of the splits has been who should replace Sir Gerald Kaufman who died last week at the age of 86. Seats like this don’t come up that often and the assumption must be that whoever gets it will effectively have a job for life provided they can surmount the hurdle of the by-election itself.

That on the face of it should be a dead certainty but there’s a lot of worry within the LAB camp echoed by local MP and the woman said to be Corbyn’s favoured successor, Rebecca Long-Bailey. She said
MPs couldn’t “ever call a seat a safe seat nowadays” when asked about the upcoming Manchester Gorton by-election.

While LAB has been struggling even to agree the process of how the selection will operate the LDs, who after the Iraq war held 19 of the 21 council seats in the constituency, have chosen their candidate and got their first leaflets out. Their candidate is someone who for 21 years was a councillor in the area and unlike UKIP’s man in Stoke has a PhD. Hers was in nuclear physics.

Whatever Labour’s difficulties which will get a lot of attention it is very hard to conclude that the red team could lose. This is the party’s seventh safest seat and the LDs were a long way back at GE2015.

I’m on them at 14/1 on Betfair and certainly am not tempted by the 11/2 that some bookies now have them at.

I should add that I have a special interest in this constituency because it is the place where I was born and I know it well.

Mike Smithson

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