From The Alliance of Independent Authors:

As a young child, I learned to read and write in what seemed like the blink of an eye. The world of books unfolded, bringing knowledge and adventure.

Not all of my relatives have been so lucky. Parallel threads run through my family: each of the last three generations has included at least one writer, one engineer and one dyslexic. My grandfather, a dyslexic engineer, achieved great things in his profession but wouldn’t pick up a book for pleasure.

It’s a common story.

10% of the British population is estimated to have dyslexia, including celebrities like Richard Branson, Jamie Oliver and Keira Knightley.

. . . .

Alistair Sims, who owns the bricks-and-mortar bookstore Books On The Hill in the gracious Somerset seaside town of Clevedon, is himself dyslexic. He makes sure to stock an excellent range of books for dyslexic children and young adults, attracting customers from miles around.

It’s a source of frustration to him that mainstream publishers ignore dyslexic adults completely, choosing only to service younger age groups.

We both agreed that indie authors were uniquely placed to fill that gap.

To borrow from corporate-speak, indies are focused on solutions.

We’re not afraid to try something new, and we can get books published quickly. Within two months of meeting Alistair, he was stocking my dyslexia-friendly paperbacks in his shop.

. . . .

So what makes a paperback dyslexia-friendly? Alistair suggested I read the British Dyslexia Association Style Guide, which recommends:

• a large sans serif font
• wide line spacing
• black text on a cream background

I also investigated specialised fonts, such as Dyslexie, road-testing them on dyslexic relatives. However, they found conventional sans serif fonts just as easy to read provided the text was made large enough. It seemed the special fonts didn’t perform any better than Verdana, which came out well in comparison tests by the BDA New Technologies Committee. I therefore chose 14 point Verdana with 1.5 line spacing, and, of course, cream paper.

Link to the rest at the Alliance of Independent Authors and thanks to Felix for the tip.

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He had been invited to present the 1962 Evening Standard Drama Awards at the end of January in London’s Savoy Hotel. Feeling that his career deserved to reach its conclusion in an atmosphere a little more dignified than a seaside production of Puss In Boots, he accepted gladly. 

It was another chance meeting with a young writer, much like that one some 16 years earlier, that would change Frankie’s mind about abandoning showbusiness and propel him on to greater fame and acclaim than he could possibly have imaged in those cold dark days in panto. 

Buoyed by a lack of concern about his career (and quite a lot of gratis booze) Frankie lit up the awards show with a vintage tour de force, polishing old material and slipping in newly scripted gags with ease. In the audience that day accepting numerous awards were the young geniuses behind the ground-breaking new revue, Beyond The Fringe. 

Impressed by the veteran performer’s compering, Peter Cook was one of the first to congratulate Frankie after the awards dinner. Cook extended an invitation to Frankie to perform in his newly opened Establishment Club in Soho, then by far the most fashionable comedy club in the land frequented by each night by an eager audience of university educated satire fans. 

As usual, it took much gentle coaxing and much more forthright nagging to persuade Frankie Howerd to attempt to launch his career anew. The masterstroke in Howerd’s renaissance was to come from the fruitful mind of Johnny Speight. 

His simple idea was not to reinvent Frankie for a hip new audience, used to the edgy satire of Lenny Bruce and the studied wit of Peter Cook, but to present Howerd as he was; a washed up, embittered vaudevillian totally at odds with his rarefied surroundings. 

Stepping on to the stage of The Establishment on the 26th September 1962, Frankie Howerd was reborn for a new generation of comedy fans and his legendary status was confirmed.

[Epistemic status: I only partly understood this book and am trying to review it anyway as best I can]

I.

People complain that psychology is paradigmless; it never got its Darwin or Newton to tie everything together. Nowadays people are pretty relaxed about that; who needs paradigms when you can do n = 50 studies on a mildly interesting effect? But historically, there were all of these larger-than-life figures who were sure they’d found the paradigm, geniuses who founded schools which flourished for a while, made big promises, then either fizzled out or toned down their claims enough to be accepted as slightly kooky parts of the mainstream. Sigmund Freud. BF Skinner. Carl Rogers. And those are just the big ones close to the mainstream. Everyone from Ayn Rand to Scientology tried their hand at the paradigm-inventing business for a while.

Will Powers (whose name turns out to be pretty appropriate) lands somewhere in the middle of this pack. He was an engineer/inventor who specialized in cybernetic systems but wandered into psychology sometime in the sixties. He argued that everything in the brain made perfect sense if you understood cybernetic principles, and came up with a very complicated but all-encompassing idea called Perceptual Control Theory which explained thought, sensation and behavior. A few people paid attention, and his work was described as paradigm-shifting by no less of an expert on paradigm shifts than Thomas Kuhn. But in the end it never really went anywhere, psychology moved on, and nowadays only a handful of people continue research in his tradition.

Somehow I kept running into this handful, and they kept telling me to read Powers’ book Behavior: The Control Of Perception, and I keep avoiding it. A few weeks ago I was driving down the road and I had a moment of introspection where I realized everything I was doing exactly fit Powers’ theory, so I decided to give it a chance.

Powers specializes in control systems. The classic control system is a thermostat, which controls temperature. It has a reference point, let’s say 70 degrees. If it gets much below 70 degrees, it turns on the heater until it’s 70 again; if it gets much above 70 degrees, it turns on the air conditioner until it’s 70 again. This is more complicated than it sounds, and there are other control systems that are even more complicated, but that’s the principle. Perceptual Control Theory says that this kind of system is the basic unit of the human brain.

While I was driving on the highway a few weeks ago, I realized how much of what I do is perceptual control. For example, I was effortlessly maintaining the right distance from the car in front of me. If the car sped up a tiny bit, I would speed up a tiny bit. If the car slowed down a little bit, I would slow down a little bit. Likewise, I was maintaining the right angle relative to the road: if I found myself veering right, I would turn slightly to the left; if I found myself veering left, I would turn slightly to the right.

The theory goes further: while I’m in the car, I’m also operating as my own thermostat. I have a desired temperature: if I go below it, I’ll turn on the heat, and if I go above it, I’ll turn on the AC. I have a desired level of satiety: if I’m hungry, I’ll stop and get something to eat; if I’m too full, there’s maybe not a huge amount I can do but I’ll at least stop eating. I have a desired level of light: if it’s too dark, I’ll turn on the lights; if it’s too bright I’ll put down the sun visor. I even have a desired angle to be sitting at: if I’m too far forward, I’ll relax and lean back a little bit; if I’m too far back, I’ll move forwards. All of this is so easy and automatic that I never think about it.

Powers’ theories go further. He agrees that my brain sets up a control system to keep my car the proper distance from the car in front of it. But how do I determine “the proper distance”? That quantity must be fed to the system by other parts of my brain. For example, suppose that the roads are icy and I know my brakes don’t work very well in the ice; I might keep a much further distance than usual. I’ll still be controlling the distance, I’ll just be controlling it differently. If the brain is control systems all the way down, we can imagine a higher-tier system controlling “accident risk” at some level (presumably low, or zero) feeding a distance level into a lower-tier system controlling car distance at whatever level it receives. We can even imagine higher systems than this. Suppose I’m depressed, I’ve become suicidal, I want to die in a car accident, but in order not to scandalize my family I have to let the accident happen sort of naturally. I have a top-level system controlling “desire to die” which tells a middle-level system controlling “accident risk” what level it should go at (high), which in turn tells a lower-tier system controlling “car distance” what level it should go at (very close).

It doesn’t even end there. My system controlling “car distance” is sending signals to a lower-tier system controlling muscle tension on my foot on the accelerator, giving it a new reference level (contracted muscles that push down on the accelerator really hard). Except this is an oversimplification, because everything that has to do with muscles is a million times more complicated than any reasonable person would think (at least until they play qwop) and so there’s actually a big hierarchy of control systems just going from “want to go faster” to “successfully tense accelerator-related muscles”.

II.

Actually, Powers is at his most convincing when he talks about these lower-level functions. At this point I think it’s pretty mainstream to say that muscle tension is set by a control system, with the Golgi tendon organs giving feedback and the spinal cord doing the calculations. Powers goes further (and I don’t know how mainstream this next part is, but I’m guessing at least somewhat), saying that this is a first-tier control system, which is itself controlled by a second-tier “direction” control system centered in the nuclei of the brainstem, which is itself controlled by a third-tier “position” control system centered in the cerebellum/thalamus/midbrain (a friendly amendment might add the basal ganglia, which Powers doesn’t seem to know much about).

If you stimulate certain parts of a cat’s midbrain, it will go into specific positions – for example, a position like it’s ready to pounce. So it seems like those areas “code for” position. But in order to have a neuron/area/whatever that codes for position, it needs to have hierarchical control over lots of lower-level things. For example, it needs to make sure the leg muscles are however tense they’re supposed to be in a pouncing position. So the third-tier position control system controls the second-tier direction control system at whatever level is necessary to make the second-tier direction control system control the first-tier muscle control system at whatever level is necessary to get the muscles in the right position.

The fourth- and fifth-tier systems, now well into the cortex (and maybe basal ganglia again) deal with sequences, eg “walking” or “playing a certain tune on the piano”. Once again, activating a fourth/fifth-tier system will activate this higher-level concept (“walking”), which alters the reference levels for a third-tier system (“getting into a certain position”), which alters a second-tier system (“moving in a certain direction”), which alterns a first-tier system (“tensing/relaxing muscles”).

Why do I like this theory so much? First, it correctly notes that (almost) the only thing the brain can actually do is change muscle tension. Yet we never think in terms of muscle tension. We don’t think “I am going to tense my thigh muscle, now untense it, now tense my ankle muscle, now…”, we just think “I’m going to walk”. Heck, half the time we don’t even think that, we think “I’m just going to go to the fridge” and the walking happens automatically. On the other hand, if we really want, we can consciously change our position, the level of tension in a certain muscle, etc. It’s just that usually we deal in higher-level abstractions that automatically carry all the lower ones along with them.

Second, it explains the structure of the brain in a way I haven’t seen other things do. I always hear neuroscientists talk about “this nucleus relays signals to that nucleus” or “this structure is a way station for this other structure”. Spend too much time reading that kind of stuff, and you start to think of the brain as a giant relay race, where the medulla passes signals onto the thalamus which passes it to the basal ganglia which passes it to the frontal lobe and then, suddenly, thought! The obvious question there is “why do you have so many structures that just relay things to other structures?” Sometimes neuroscientists will say “Well, some processing gets done here”, or even better “Well, this system modulates that system”, but they’re always very vague on what exactly that means. Powers’ hierarchy of fifth-tier systems passing their calculations on to fourth-tier systems and so on is exactly the sort of thing that would make sense of all this relaying. My guess is every theory of neuroscience has something at least this smart, but I’d never heard it explained this well before.

Third, it’s the clearest explanation of tremors I’ve ever heard. Consider the thermostat above. When the temperature gets below 65, it turns on the heat until the temperature gets above 70, then stops, then waits as the hot air leaks out through the window or whatever and it’s 65 again, then turns on the heat again. If we chart temperature in a room with a thermostat, it will look sort of like a sine wave or zigzag with regular up/down motions. This is a basic principle of anything being controlled by a less-than-perfect control system. Our body has microtremors all the time, but when we get brain damage or some other problem, a very common symptom is noticeable tremors. These come in many different varieties that give clues to the level of brain damage and which doctors are just told to memorize. Powers actually explains them:

When first-order systems become unstable, as when muscles exert too much effort), clonus oscillations are seen, at roughly ten cycles per second. Second-order instability, as in the tremors of Parkinsonism, involves groups of muscles and is of lower frequency, around three cycles per second or so. Third-order instability is slower stilll, slow enough that it can be characterized as “purpose tremor” or “over-correction”. Certain cerebellar damage due to injury or disease can result in over- and under-shooting the mark during actions such as reaching out to grasp something, either in a continuous self-sustained oscillation or a slowly decrasing series of alternating movements.

This isn’t perfect – for example, Parkinsonian tremor is usually caused by damage to the basal ganglia and the cortex, which is really hard to square with Powers’ claim that it’s caused by damage to second-tier systems in the medulla. But after reading this, it’s really hard not to think of tremors as failures in control systems, or of the different types of tremor as failures in different levels of control system. For example, athetoid tremors are weird, seemingly purposeful, constant twisting movements caused by problems in the thalamus or some related system; after reading Powers, it’s impossible for me not to think of them as failures in third-order control systems. This becomes especially clear if we compare to Powers’ constant foil/nemesis, the Behaviorists. Stick to a stimulus-response paradigm, and there’s no reason damaged brains should make weird twisting movements all the time. On a control-systems paradigm, it’s obvious that that would happen.

There are occasional claims that perceptual control theory can predict certain things about muscles and coordination better than other theories, sometimes with absurdly high accuracy of like r = 0.9 or something. Powers makes some of these claims in the book, but I can’t check them because I don’t have the original data he worked with and I don’t know how to calculate cybernetic control system outputs. But the last time I saw someone bring up one of these supposed experiments it was thoroughly shot down by people who knew more statistics. And I found a blog post where somebody who knows a lot about intricacies of muscle movement says PCT can predict some things but not much better than competing theories. In terms of predicting very specific things about human muscular movement its record seems to be kind of so-so.

III.

And I start to get very skeptical when Powers moves to higher-tier control systems. His sixth tier is “relationships”, seventh is “programs”, eighth is “principles”, and ninth is “systems”. Although these tiers receive just as many pages as the earlier ones, they start sounding very abstract and they correlate a lot less well with anatomy. I understand the urge to postulate them – if you’ve already decided that the fundamental unit of the brain is the control system, why not try to explain things with control systems all the way up? – but it becomes kind of a stretch. It’s easy to see what it means to control the distance between me and the car in front of me; it’s harder to see what it means to control for “communism” or “honesty” or things like that.

I think the way things are supposed to work is like this. A ninth-tier system controls a very abstract concept like “communism”. So suppose you are a communist; that means your internal communism-thermostat is set to maintain your communism at a high level. That propagates down to eighth-tier principles, which are slightly less abstract concepts like “greed”; maybe your ninth-tier communism-thermostat sets your eighth-tier greed thermostat to a very low temperature because communists aren’t supposed to be greedy. Your eighth-tier greed thermostat affects levels of seventh-tier logical programs like “going to work and earning money” and “giving to charity”. I’m not really sure how the sixth-tier fits into this example, but let’s suppose that your work is hammering things. Then the fifth-tier system moves your muscles in the right sequence to hammer things, and so on with all the lower tiers as above.

Sometimes these control systems come into contact with each other. For example, suppose that along with my ninth-tier system controlling “communism”, I also have a ninth-tier system controlling “family values”; I am both an avowed communist and a family man. My family values system thinks that it’s important that I earn enough to provide for my family, so while my communism-system is trying to input a low reference level for my greed-thermostat, my family-values-system is trying to input a high one. Powers gets into some really interesting examples of what happens in real industrial cybernetic systems when two opposing high-level control systems get in a fight, and thinks this is the source of all human neurosis and akrasia. I think he later wrote a self-help book based around this (hence the nominative determinism). I am not very convinced.

Am I strawmanning this picture? I’m not sure. I think one testable consequence of it is supposed to be that if we’re really controlling for communism, in the cybernetic control system sense, then we should be able to test for that. For example, hide Lenin’s pen and paper so that he can’t write communist pamphlets, and he should start doing some other communist thing more in order to make up for it and keep his level of communism constant. I think some perceptual control theory people believe this is literally true, and propose experimental tests (or at least thought experiment tests) of perceptual control theory along these lines. This seems sketchy to me, on the grounds that if Lenin didn’t start doing other stuff, we could just say that communism wasn’t truly what he was controlling.

That is, suppose I notice Lenin eating lots of chocolate every day. I theorize that he’s controlling for chocolate, and so if I disturb the control system by eg shutting down his local chocolate store, he’ll find a way to restore equilibrium, eg by walking further to a different store. But actually, when I shut down his local chocolate store, he just eats less chocolate. In reality, he was controlling his food intake (as we all do; that’s what an obesity set point is) and when he lost access to chocolate, maybe he ate cupcakes instead and did fine.

In the same way, maybe we only think Lenin is controlling for communism, but he’s actually controlling for social status, and being a communist revolutionary is a good way to gain social status. So if we make it too hard for him to be a communist revolutionary, eg by taking away his pen and paper, maybe he’ll become a rock star instead and end up with the same level of social status.

This sort of thing seems so universal that as far as I can tell it makes these ideas of higher-tier control systems unproveable and unfalsifiable.

If there’s any point to them at all, I think it’s the way they express the same interesting phenomenological truth as the muscle movement tiers: we switch effortlessly between concentrating on low-level concepts and high-level concepts that make the low-level ones automatic. For example, I think “driving” is a good example of Powers’ seventh tier, “programs” – it involves a predictable flowchart-like set of actions to achieve a simple goal. “The distance between me and the car in front of me” is a sixth-tier system, a “relationship”. When I’m driving (focusing on my seventh-tier system), I don’t consciously think at all about maintaining the right distance with the car in front of me. It just happens. This is really interesting in a philosophy of consciousness sense, and Powers actually gets into qualia a bit and says some things that seem a lot wiser and more moving-part-ful than most people on the subject.

It does seem like there’s something going on where my decision to drive activates a lot of carefully-trained subsystems that handle the rest of it automatically, and that there’s probably some neural correlate to it. But I don’t know whether control systems are the right way to think about this, and I definitely don’t know whether there’s a sense in which “communism” is a control system.

IV.

There are also some sections about things like learning and memory, which looks suspiciously like flowcharts of control systems with boxes marked “LEARNING” and “MEMORY” in them.

But I realized halfway through that I was being too harsh. Perceptual control theory wasn’t quite a proposal for a new paradigm out of nowhere. It was a reaction to Behaviorism, which was still the dominant paradigm when Powers was writing. His “everything is a control system” is an attempt to improve on “everything is stimulus-response”, and it really does.

For example, his theory of learning involves reward and punishment, where reward is reducing the error in a control system and punishment is increasing it. That is, suppose that you’re controlling temperature, and it’s too hot out. A refreshing cool glass of water would be an effective reward (since it brings you closer to your temperature reference level), and setting your hand on fire would be an effective punishment (since it brings you further from your temperature reference level). Powers notes that this explains many things Behaviorism can’t. For example, they like to talk about how sugar water is a reward. But eventually rats get tired of sugar water and stop drinking it. So it seems that sugar water isn’t a reward per se; it’s more like reducing error in your how-much-sugar-water-should-I-have-and-did-I-already-have-the-right-amount system is the reward. If your optimal level of sugar water per day is 10 ml, then anything up to 10 ml will be a reward, and after that it will stop being attractive / start being a punishment.

As a “theory of learning”, this is sort of crappy, in that I was expecting stuff about Hebb and connectionism and how memories are stored in the brain. But if you’re living in an era where everybody thinks “The response to a stimulus is predictable through patterns of reward and punishment” is an A+++ Nobel-Prize-worthy learning theory, then perceptual control-based theories of learning start sounding pretty good.

So I guess it’s important to see this as a product of its times. And I don’t understand those times – why Behaviorism ever seemed attractive is a mystery to me, maybe requiring more backwards-reading than I can manage right now.

How useful is this book? I guess that depends on how metaphorical you want to be. Is the brain a control system? I don’t know. Are police a control system trying to control crime? Are police a “response” to the “stimulus” of crime? Is a stimulus-response pairing a control system controlling for the quantity of always making sure the stimulus has the response? I think it’s interesting and helpful to think of some psychological functions with these metaphors. But I’m not sure where to go from there. I think maybe there are some obvious parallels, maybe even parallels that bear fruit in empirical results, in lower level systems like motor control. Once you get to high-level systems like communism or social desirability, I’m not sure we’re doing much better than the police-as-control-system metaphor. Still, I think that it’s potentially a useful concept to have.

The New York Times reports that Uber developed apps that identified and blocked government regulators using the app to find evidence of illegal behavior:

Yet using its app to identify and sidestep authorities in places where regulators said the company was breaking the law goes further in skirting ethical lines -- and potentially legal ones, too. Inside Uber, some of those who knew about the VTOS program and how the Greyball tool was being used were troubled by it.

[...]

One method involved drawing a digital perimeter, or "geofence," around authorities' offices on a digital map of the city that Uber monitored. The company watched which people frequently opened and closed the app -- a process internally called "eyeballing" -- around that location, which signified that the user might be associated with city agencies.

Other techniques included looking at the user's credit card information and whether that card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union.

Enforcement officials involved in large-scale sting operations to catch Uber drivers also sometimes bought dozens of cellphones to create different accounts. To circumvent that tactic, Uber employees went to that city's local electronics stores to look up device numbers of the cheapest mobile phones on sale, which were often the ones bought by city officials, whose budgets were not sizable.

In all, there were at least a dozen or so signifiers in the VTOS program that Uber employees could use to assess whether users were new riders or very likely city officials.

If those clues were not enough to confirm a user's identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other available information online. Once a user was identified as law enforcement, Uber Greyballed him or her, tagging the user with a small piece of code that read Greyball followed by a string of numbers.

When Edward Snowden exposed the fact that the NSA does this sort of thing, I commented that the technologies will eventually become cheap enough for corporations to do it. Now, it has.

One discussion we need to have is whether or not this behavior is legal. But another, more important, discussion is whether or not it is ethical. Do we want to live in a society where corporations wield this sort of power against government? Against individuals? Because if we don't align government against this kind of behavior, it'll become the norm.

Corbyn is safe for now argues Keiran Pedley but with his popularity among Labour members falling and Brexit on the horizon he is unlikely to lead Labour into a General Election.

Those of you watching Peston yesterday will know that YouGov has a new poll of Labour members out courtesy of Ian Warren of Election Data. 1,096 Labour members were interviewed last week (27 Feb – 3 Mar) and here are some of the key numbers.

The first notable data finding was the one shared by Allegra Stratton on Peston yesterday, which showed Corbyn’s approval rating among Labour members taking a significant hit. The majority of members (54%) still approve of Corbyn’s leadership but this is down 18 points from February last year and more than one in three now disapprove (23% strongly).

Unsurprisingly, there is a sharp divide in opinion between pre Corbyn members (62% disapprove) and those joining since Corbyn became leader (68% approve). However, it is notable that Corbyn draws strong support from Labour women (61% approve), younger members (56% of 18-39s approve) and perhaps controversially, Labour Leave voters (71% approve). However, I note with interest that opinion in London in split (44% approve and 45% disapprove) and his strongest regional support comes from the Midlands / Wales (61%) which is likely netted together due to low sample size.

So some interesting data showing Corbyn’s support taking a hit and also where it comes from but what does it mean for Corbyn’s future as leader?

One finding that understandably got people a bit excited yesterday was the one above that asked whether or not Jeremy Corbyn should fight the next General Election as Labour leader. For the first time, less than half of Labour members say that he should (44%).  Another question (below) asked Labour members whether they would vote Corbyn again in a hypothetical leadership contest and it showed as many members saying they definitely wouldn’t as definitely would.

These figures will lead some to speculate that Corbyn’s days are numbered but I am not that excited by them. Whilst it is significant that Corbyn’s support has taken a hit there has been no great shift in the number that think he should stand down now (up just one point). What we seem to be seeing is a wavering in support rather than a consolidation against him. I suggest that this nuance is actually quite important.

Any move against Corbyn now would probably harden support again in favour of him. I would expect, for example, that a significant number of the 11% above that say they ‘probably wouldn’t vote for him but might’ would actually do so if he were challenged again. That would take Corbyn’s support to 63% which is pretty much in line with what he got versus Owen Smith last year.

This idea is only reinforced when we look at some hypothetical polling on different candidates. As part of the poll, YouGov asked respondents who they would consider voting for and who they would likely end up voting for with or without Corbyn on the ballot. A long list was put forward but I have chosen to focus on the frontrunners for simplicity. Before we delve too deeply into the numbers, I should acknowledge that this sort of poll question is difficult to interpret. It doesn’t reflect the reality of what a Labour leadership contest would look like but it does give us some sense of the viability of different candidates among Labour members.

So what to make of these results? The first thing to say is that if Corbyn is on the ballot he probably wins again right now for the reasons I mention above. Interestingly though, there does seem to be a pattern emerging of his ‘core’ support among Labour members being around 35-40%. 36% would definitely vote for him and 38% choose him in the above poll. However, the second thing to say is that if he isn’t on the ballot then things are wide open. Corbyn supporters don’t just go to McDonnell or someone else. We see this clearly if we look at the results with Corbyn not on the ballot but cut by levels of support for Corbyn. This helps us understand what a post Corbyn world might look like.

Two things strike me from these numbers. The first is that if we add up the ‘Corbyn candidates’ and ‘non Corbyn candidates’ (crude and subjective I know) the membership is pretty evenly split although the ‘swings’ lean towards ‘Corbyn candidates’. Perhaps the Labour membership is more committed to Jeremy Corbyn the man than ‘Corbynism’ itself? The second is how Clive Lewis, often touted as a successor, doesn’t really have a base in the membership. The ‘swing’ vote likes him a bit but committed supporters and opponents of Corbyn not so much. Factor in his lack of an obvious parliamentary base and you question how viable he really is. Emily Thornberry seems better placed to inherit the Corbyn mantle assuming McDonnell doesn’t stand whilst Chuka Umunna, Yvette Cooper and Keir Starmer all look like viable candidates from the party’s right. Cooper probably wouldn’t run again but her support in the PLP means you cannot discount her.

Don’t assume a Corbynite takes over. Brexit could be ‘Corbyn’s Iraq’

Looking at these numbers overall, Corbyn’s popularity among Labour members has clearly taken a hit but it is also clear that challenging him now would only reinforce his leadership. Whether that will still be true a year from now is less clear. As Brexit gathers pace we might expect his popularity to diminish further. Elsewhere in the poll, we find that 66% think Brexit is the most important issue facing the country, 53% think he has handled it badly so far and 68% of members would back a second referendum on EU membership. If Corbyn’s popularity falls further by next year and a genuine pro-European alternative candidate emerges then he could well be in trouble.

Of course the key questions are ‘who is that alternative’ and ‘in what circumstances does Corbyn go?’ Those are the million dollar questions and we cannot ‘know’ the answers. Nevertheless, my hunch is he won’t lead Labour into 2020 (members increasingly don’t expect him to) and Brexit will open the door for alternative leaders to emerge. Personally, I am still watching Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy but don’t be surprised if at some point in the future we see Chuka Umunna face Emily Thornberry in a leadership contest and Umunna wins. In reality though, Labour’s future will belong to whoever has the guts to seize it. With this weekend’s poll, we can begin to see how that future might not involve Jeremy Corbyn as leader or Corbynism at all.

Keiran Pedley

Keiran Pedley tweets about polling and public opinion at @keiranpedley and presents the PB/Polling Matters podcast. Listen to the latest episode on Copeland, Stoke and what makes a good Prime Minister below.

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Comic book artist Dave Hunt died this past weekend, the end of a long battle against cancer. Some sources are reporting his age as 75 but my references peg him with various earlier birthdates so I just don't know.

What I do know is that he had a long career that had him working as an art director at various comics-related magazines in the early seventies, segueing into comics as an apprentice inker around 1973 and becoming a full-fledged inker just a few years later. He did painting and sculpture outside of the comics field.

For comics, I think he worked exclusively as an inker with a long stretch as Curt Swan's inker on Superman for DC, and inking most of the Spider-Man books for Marvel…but at one time or another, his work appeared in most of both firms' major titles, as well as lots of work for Archie and Disney Comics. He was well-liked both as a person and an artist, and the few times we worked on the same project, I found him to be professional and easy to get along with. Given the volume of work he did, I would guess that was the experience of everyone who was fortunate enough to work with Dave. We need more guys like that.

The post Dave Hunt, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

Photo of Victory Street, Rusholme, by Bill Boaden

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. 

The party was then suspended and although that suspension was lifted in November, Gorton CLP remains under a range of heavy restrictions. 

To all intents and purposes it is in special measures, with regional office overseeing selections and the convening of key meetings – and all new party members required to show two forms of ID. 

As one rank-and-file member put it, the local party is ‘allowed to go out leafleting’ but not a lot else. 

Quite how the selection process will work, therefore, remains rather unclear, although it is understood local members will be allowed to vote on the eventual shortlist. But one outcome, believe many in Manchester, is inevitable. 

“It will end up being like a micro-replica of the turmoil within the Labour party as a whole,” said one councillor.

Picture: The front page of yesterday’s Times newspaper.

Alastair Meeks, who accurately predicted the outcome of the Article 50 case, looks at the looming Brexit divorce settlement.

One of the many points that will be up for discussion as part of Britain leaving the EU is what Britain will pay as part of the divorce settlement, if anything.  Michel Barnier, the EU’s negotiator, is reportedly making a demand for €60 billion his opening gambit.  The UK government, backed up by a House of Lords committee, asserts that it does not need to pay a penny.  Who is right?  And what does this dispute mean?

It is customary in articles such as this to start with an explanation of the argument.  Customary, but entirely wrong, because the looming argument is secondary to the negotiation it will form part of.  Britain is about to start the process of negotiating its exit from the EU.  The two sides are seeking to reach an agreed set of terms that each regards as advantageous as possible.  Those terms may well ultimately bear relatively little resemblance to the pre-existing obligations on both sides, depending on each side’s negotiating priorities and their relative strengths.

The pre-existing position is relevant only because it helps define the position if no agreement is reached and in helping to construct rationales for the arguments that each side wishes to put forward.  The law is only relevant if no agreement is reached.  In those circumstances, the matter would be litigated and an answer would eventually be obtained, but all that would be incidental to the disorderly Brexit that would then be taking place.

So to understand this dispute we can put the intricacies of the law to one side for now.  Let’s concentrate on the more important aspect.  What are the two parties trying to achieve through this argument?

For this we do need a bit of context.  The EU has, as part of its usual activities incurred present liabilities that will fall due in the future.  A good example of this is in my own area of expertise, its future pension commitments.  One of the questions to be settled is what Britain will need to contribute to these costs.

The EU’s starting figure of €60 billion is making a statement.  The FT looked at the possible extent of the liabilities in October 2016 and came up with a figure of €20 billion as a plausible upper estimate.  Newspapers are not known for their understatement of potential problems in reports.  The estimate of €60 billion looks like a typical builder’s “double the first number you think of and add a drink on top” estimate.  The number is no doubt intended as a statement to be heard by the UK government.  The statement is clear: you can expect a very hard time in negotiations, we think our negotiating hand is very strong, we think time is on our side and we are not too concerned if no deal is reached.

The British government’s response might be understood in kind, though slightly more muted.  The British government is not saying that it will not pay a penny, merely that it is not obliged to.

I have to say, however, that the British government’s response so far looks poor on at least three different levels. 

1) The nuance in that response was completely lost in the newspaper headlines.

If Britain does end up paying a substantial sum, which has to be the overwhelming probability if any deal is to be reached, those headlines will be recalled by the public but the implied qualification will not.  The response only works with the public if no deal is to be reached.

2) The government appears to be attempting to play poker using strategies more appropriate to bridge.  By entering into legal arguments about the amount to be paid, it opens up a discussion that the EU negotiators will relish getting into about legal niceties on a point that it very much suits them to discuss.

There are various possible strategies that the British government could follow.  For example, it could describe such a gambit as one that indicated that the EU were negotiating in bad faith, seeking the removal of the negotiators who put forward such a manifestly outrageous demand. Or it could link such a discussion to a related discussion on far more congenial territory (such as ownership of shared EU assets).  In short, it should be bringing in new dimensions into a negotiation that it suits the other negotiating party to treat as one dimensional.

3) The British government’s response looks both morally and legally weak.  If Britain has been part of an organisation that has entered into long term commitments, seeking to wash its hands of any responsibility to pay for them after the fact is not a lofty position to take.

The legal argument is scarcely better.  It apparently turns on the phrasing of Article 50 of the EU Treaty, which reads at the relevant point: “The Treaties [of the EU] shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification.”

The argument floated in the newspapers is that Article 70 of the Vienna Convention means that brings all Britain’s liabilities to an end.  That article provides that:

“Unless the treaty otherwise provides or the parties otherwise agree, the termination of a treaty under its provisions or in accordance with the present Convention:

(a) Releases the parties from any obligation further to perform the treaty”.

But this ignores two points.  First, Article 31 of the Vienna Convention provides:

“A treaty shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose.”

So the exit provisions in Article 50 need to be given appropriate meaning for handling the withdrawal from a complex multinational treaty of one of its members.  It is implausible that exiting members would be intended to leave without paying up their share of pre-existing commitments.  Its words should be read accordingly.  It is more natural in that context to read Britain’s release from any obligation further to perform the treaty as being restricted to obligations after that date rather than to wipe the slate completely clean.

And secondly, Article 70 does not finish with the words quoted in the newspapers.  It goes on to provide:

“[Unless the treaty otherwise provides or the parties otherwise agree, the termination of a treaty…] (b) Does not affect any right, obligation or legal situation of the parties created through the execution of the treaty prior to its termination.”

This would also seem to give Britain responsibility for its share of future EU liabilities already incurred at a time that Britain was a party to them.

As I said at the outset, the legal argument really isn’t very relevant, unless negotiations break down completely.  But while it’s bad enough playing bridge at a poker table, it’s worse still doing so and then fumbling your cards.

Alastair Meeks

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From The Washington Post:

More than four decades after the last man walked on the lunar surface, several upstart space entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on NASA’s renewed interest in returning to the moon, offering a variety of proposals with the ultimate goal of establishing a lasting human presence there.

. . . .

The latest to offer a proposal is Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump’s transition team about the company’s interest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy. The memo urges the space agency to back an Amazon-like shipment service for the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable “future human settlement” of the moon. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.)

“It is time for America to return to the Moon — this time to stay,” Bezos said in response to emailed questions from The Post. “A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.”

The Post obtained a copy of the white paper, marked “proprietary and confidential,” and the company then confirmed its authenticity and agreed to answer questions about it.

. . . .

Blue Origin’s proposal, dated Jan. 4, doesn’t involve flying humans, but rather is focused on a series of cargo missions. Those could deliver the equipment necessary to help establish a human colony on the moon — unlike the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts left “flags and footprints” and then came home.

Link to the rest at The Washington Post

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Originally from Hartlepool, Jackie Pearcey started life on a council estate and has since lived in Leeds before coming to Manchester, where Jackie has been a councillor for Gorton North in since 1991 [she was defeated in 2012].

During that time she has been finance spokesperson, education spokesperson and more recently crime and disorder spokesperson. 

Jackie, a lifelong Liberal, has fought many campaigns as a councillor – from the campaign to allow war pensioners to have their war pensions disregarded for council tax and housing benefit calculations, to campaigns to protect local facilities ...

Outside politics, Jackie has both a degree and PhD in physics and worked in nuclear safety before switching to IT.

Times says Downing St fears 2015 results in up to 6 seats cld be void if prosecutions follow #C4News expenses inquiry pic.twitter.com/AjF2vWm5qn

— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) March 4, 2017

Could this be another scalp for Michael Crick?

The Times is reporting that the Tory GE2015 election expenses investigation, first brought to light by Channel 4`s Michael Crick, is getting to a point where charges could be be brought.

“.. Downing Street is “deeply worried” about the outcome of a police investigation into claims of expenses fraud during the 2015 general election.

Senior figures fear that the results of up to half a dozen constituency votes could be declared void — causing hurried by-elections — if prosecutors decide to make an example of the party. Criminal charges against key individuals are also possible.”

The cases are about allegations that the Tories exceeded the maximum expenses limit in a number of key marginals where there are strict rules on how much can be spent on constituency campaigns.

After the election the agents and candidates sign formal statements that there declaration of expenses is an accurate one and if there is any action then these people are thought likely to be the ones singled out.

It will be recalled that the Tories exceeded by some margin the projections of how many seats their national vote share would produce for them.

A police source quoted by the Times said “that files were expected to be sent to the Crown Prosecution Service within weeks”.

One of the seats which has been highlighted is Thanet South where the Tories beat off a challenge by UKIP’s Nigel Farage.

It is really hard to assess where this will lead and whether we could see by-elections in what were key marginals two years ago.

The Tories would feel confident seeing off a LAB challenge in seats where the red team was their main opponent. Nigel Farage and some of the LD seats they took could be a completely different proposition.

Mike Smithson

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We look to be heading back to a suspension

Normalcy does not suit Northern Irish politics. A political structure designed to overcome the legacy of the seventeenth century (with a good deal of success, it has to be said), is in severe danger of being incapable of handling the practicalities of the twenty-first.

It’s not unusual for a coalition to break down over some disagreement of policy or administration, and for elections to follow. It is, by contrast, unusual for the parties concerned to be obliged by law to work together again after the election.

Such is the situation in Northern Ireland. The St Andrews agreement means that the largest party in the largest designation – which is likely to be the DUP, as unionists should outnumber nationalists in the new Assembly – will be able to nominate the First Minister. They will nominate Arlene Foster, First Minister before the election and the minister responsible for the RHI scandal. The largest party in the next largest designation – Sinn Fein – gets to nominate the Deputy First Minister. And as this is back with the status quo ante the election, they might well not nominate anyone, which is what they did to prompt the election in the first place.

In any other legislature, discussions would then go on with the other parties to see if either of the big two could form a different coalition or govern as a minority but Ulster doesn’t have any other legislature and those talks can’t happen: the rules are prescriptive and because they’re so prescriptive, there’s probably now at least a 75% chance of a suspension of the Assembly and Executive.

And this is why Stormont isn’t any other legislature and how the shadows of the Boyne still intrude. In a normal polity, the DUP would have suffered from the RHI overspend and lost vote share either to their main opponent (Sinn Fein in this case) or a rival party occupying a similar position on the spectrum (the UUP). In fact, while the DUP share did drop slightly, the higher turnout means that they won a good deal more votes than last May. Incompetence in office remains trivial as against breaking solidarity with the community.

Which is a problem because as long as voters remain stuck so rigidly in the habit of voting on community lines, true accountability will be difficult. Even the theoretical option of switching to another party within the relevant designation is limited when the risk of doing so is that it hands the prestige of being the largest party to the other side. Indeed, as this election has shown, even attempting true accountability risks losing the whole settlement.

Does this matter? After all, Stormont has been suspended before since the end of the Troubles. It does matter. For one thing, the Troubles were never really over: the terror threat within the province is still Severe. But the other reason Northern Ireland might soon be back in the news is Brexit.

The UK’s decision to leave the EU raises a lot of difficult questions about how that will impact north of the border (and indeed, on the border). Will there be a hard border with customs? Will freedom of movement be retained, to the Republic at least? How will customs be applied if the UK leaves the customs union? And so on. The lack of a First Ministerial pair and an Executive will make those negotiations even harder.

That shouldn’t be allowed to continue. There needs to be change and pressure needs to be brought to bear on the DUP and Sinn Fein to share power, either with each other or with smaller parties.

David Herdson

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Liberal Democrats should be realistic in aiming to make more by-election gains this parliament - but not ... imagine that a streak of four or five such victories is likely, given the diminishing number of by-elections triggered. One more, maybe two, would be quite enough to show that the party is winning elections again.

When voters have made up their mind to throw out the Tories, they are quite capable of organising themselves to do it. 

Think of 1997, when the operation was carried out with ruthless efficiency. Sometimes that was to the detriment of us Liberal Democrats. 

In several of our target seats (St Albans, Hastings and Rye, Bristol West) ... Labour came from third place to beat the Tories.

In the aftermath of the December 1972 Sutton and Cheam by-election, Liberals in Kingston and Richmond were visited by Trevor Jones, who had served as campaign manager in the Sutton by-election, and offered a masterclass on how to win council seats, with these techniques being put to good use.

Rundle targeted the Kew ward on Richmond Council from 1963, distributing the monthly Kew Comment bulletin. When a by-election occurred in 1966, he won the Liberal's first seat on the council. 

However, he was narrowly beaten in the Richmond upon Thames London Borough Council election, 1968, after a local residents' association put up rival candidates. Another by-election arose later that year, and Rundle won, becoming the only opposition councillor on the Conservative-dominated body. 

The Conservatives would meet in private to agree council business before holding a formal meeting with Rundle also present. In protest at this, Rundle organised his own pre-council meeting with local residents; over 400 turned up, attracting press attention.

(Like my post the other day, and as I expect posts here to be frequently from now on, this is me thinking aloud about issues that circle around my PhD thesis so thoughts, comments and corrections are welcome)

It’s electoral systems geek Christmas right now as Northern Ireland counts its latest Assembly election. As one of the few places in the world to use STV elections and because it has both parties and voters ready to utilise the full potential of the electoral system, it’s fascinating to watch how election counts unfold and see how votes transfer between parties and candidates. (For live coverage, I recommend the Slugger O’Toole blog and Nicholas Whyte’s analysis of the constituencies and the effects of the drop in seats from 6 to 5 in each of them gives a good background)

Beyond the general geekery, one thing that has caught my attention in this election has been the potential development of a new politics of the centre in Northern Ireland. One thing I’ve been working on in my research is the question of how we define a ‘centre party’, and I’m currently looking at ideas of how the political centre can have two different meanings, depending on the political context of the times and the current situation in Northern Ireland gives an interesting illustration of that.

A lot of the theory about political parties is based on the idea of them being an expression of cleavages in society. For instance, in conventional ‘left-right’ politics, parties developed to represent the interests of workers on one side and business on the other. (This is a simplification, but I’m writing a blog post, not an entire paper) When I talk about centre parties, I’m talking about parties that instead try and sit in the middle of that cleavage as an attempt to bridge between the two sides (again, blog post not paper, but you can read my in depth thoughts on this here). This is why Northern Irish politics are interesting in this terms as not only is the main cleavage and dimension of competition a nationalist-unionist one, rather than left-right, it has a clear centre party (the Alliance Party) that intentionally places itself in the middle of that cleavage as well as two main competing parties on either side of the cleavage (Sinn Fein and the SDLP on one, the UUP and DUP on the other).

One of the key changes in Northern Irish politics since the Good Friday agreement has been the movement within each side of the cleavage away from the moderate parties. In the first post-Agreement election, the UUP and the SDLP were the two leading parties, with David Trimble and John Hume leading an all-party power-sharing administration. Since then, the DUP and Sinn Fein have supplanted their more moderate rivals, eventually leading to the position after the last election where they formed an administration between themselves, leaving the more moderate parties to go into opposition. The DUP/Sinn Fein administration collapsed in January over the ‘cash for ash’ scandal, prompting the current election, but part of the reaction to that has been the UUP and SDLP leaders both saying that they would give each other’s parties their second preferences in the vote.

This, I think, helps to illustrate the idea I’m working on of there being two separate but linked idea of the political centre and what it means to be a ‘centre party’. In conventional times, a centre party is merely one that defines itself as being in the middle of the cleavage, but in more polarised times, the conception of the centre widens to include all of those who make common cause in defence of conventional politics against the threat from extremists on either side of the cleavage. Northern Ireland makes for an interesting example of this change because of the strength of the cleavage beforehand, where there’s been very little cross-community voting but now the UUP and SDLP appear to have come to a common realisation that they have more in common with each other across the centre than they do with their rival parties from within their own community. The idea of parties uniting in a democratic centre isn’t new – it’s been a feature of countries threatened by extreme parties, and those emerging from dictatorship into democracy – but it’s interesting to see it playing out in a politics based on a different dimension of competition.

One idea I need to look into more is perhaps the difference between ‘permanent’ and ‘temporary’ centre parties (or perhaps it’s more a difference between explicitly centre parties and those with a centrist tendency?) to look at this idea more, especially the question of when a system reaches a tipping point when competition switches from being cleavage-based to becoming about the centre vs the extreme.

And on that note, it’s time to go and see how the people of Northern Ireland have actually voted, and whether the voters have followed the party leaderships in moving towards the centre, or if they’ve just made all this speculation pointless.

We recently found out that veteran comic book artist John Calnan passed away at the end of last year at the age of 84. John was kind of a utility infielder for DC Comics from around 1967 to 1982, working on all their books — war, western, romance, super-hero, etc. Sometimes he penciled, sometimes he inked. He drew Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman and was the artist for Metamorpho after artist Ramona Fradon left comic books to draw the Brenda Starr newspaper strip.

Calnan was a graduate of the School of Visual Arts where, like many of his contemporaries, he studied with artist Jerry Robinson and got his first jobs in comics as an assistant to Lone Ranger artist Tom Gill. Mr. Calnan did some work on his own for Classics Illustrated, then went to work in advertising for a time. A co-worker at the ad agency knew some people at DC Comics and that led to Calnan beginning to moonlight for DC. Eventually, the part-time job became the full-time job and vice-versa.

He proved to be a very reliable artist for them — not flashy but really, really useful to have available. DC editor Murray Boltinoff is said to have remarked, "My job would be a breeze if every artist was as good and professional as John Calnan." I never met Mr. Calnan — apparently, relatively few folks who worked in comics ever did — but I greatly respected his skill and dedication and I thought his passing should be noted.

The post John Calnan, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

Doing the rounds on Twitter this morning is this clip of a Polish MEP arguing that women should be paid less than men. To quote directly: “And of course women must earn less than men, because they are weaker, they are smaller, they are less intelligent.” …Yep. Really. If you’ve made it on to this blog, I’m going to assume you already know that these views are abhorrent, that equal work deserves equal pay regardless of any stereotypes attached to the worker, and these discriminatory stereotypes certainly can’t be used to justify further discrimination in pay, because that’s just an awful circular argument when instead we should be fighting to end discrimination in the first place. At this point, in 2017, it isn’t even up for debate in the minds of all but the most extreme misogynists. Incidentally, a quick scroll through Google and Wikipedia shows that Janusz Korwin-Mikke has daughters, but that evidently hasn’t even stopped him being actively sexist, never mind giving him a free pass to speak on behalf of all women on the basis that he happens to be a parent of girls.

Keep this in mind.

Doing the rounds on Twitter yesterday was a ~debate~ over whether or not disabled people should be “allowed” to work for less than the minimum wage. (I’m not 100% comfortable giving that article more clicks, so instead I’ll link to this great Twitter thread by Stavvers which does also link to the article if you’re interested.) This argument did not come from a disabled person who wants to be allowed to work for less than the minimum wage; it came from an abled person who happens to be a parent of a woman with Down’s Syndrome (whose opinion, as far as I can tell, has never even been asked for). She also happens to employ disabled people in her own business; she’s effectively saying she should be allowed to pay her own employees less.

To be fair, a lot of people seem to be seeing this for the awful retrogressive ableist argument that it is, but it turns out there’s also a worryingly high number of people who don’t – or at least, they’re saying it’s so hard and complex, because it’s better than nothing and it could be a stepping stone and you can’t just easily fix society, y’know?  Maybe this shouldn’t have shocked me, but it did, because equal pay should not still be up for debate. Honestly, this post should end here. But given that these arguments do still have a lot of traction, I think it’s worth going through some of them.

Because it apparently needs to be pointed out, paid work and volunteering are not the same thing. At this point I feel I should say that I now volunteer with an autism organisation myself – I won’t go into details for anonymity reasons, but I will say that I and the other autistic volunteers have been treated with nothing but respect from the start, it’s all about real autistic participation in shaping how they run and it’s an incredibly rewarding experience, and it’s absolutely NOT  the same as a paid job. It’s volunteering, as in voluntary, as in I actively want to be a part of this and I’m not being pushed into it by other constraints, and it’s something I do every so often on an irregular basis for a few hours at a time around the degree that I’m doing full-time. If I got a regular job with them or somewhere else in the sector, I would expect to be paid, as their autistic and neurodivergent employees are. Of course, there’s also the ongoing issue of lengthy unpaid internships that basically amount to unpaid work, but that can’t be used to justify “allowing” (read: coercing) disabled people into unpaid work either – one exploitation doesn’t justify another exploitation, they’re just both exploitative.

And let’s not make the patronising assumption that disabled people are somehow exempt from the system of money. Disabled people are people – we need to eat, and have somewhere to live, and clothes to wear, and all kinds of other needs just like everyone else. Not all disabled people live with their parents or even have the option of doing so (it’s almost as if disabled people aren’t just extensions of abled parents or something…) and even for those who do, not all families can so easily support the needs (disability-specific or otherwise) of that person with their existing funds, especially as the Tory government continues to decimate disability benefits. A “fulfilling and purposeful life” is nice, but we also need money. And besides, why is work necessary for a fulfilling and purposeful life? What does that say about how society views those disabled people who are unable to work?

Another argument that I keep seeing conflates accessibility and adaptation of jobs for disabled people with paying disabled people a lower wage for some reason. It’s this idea of it being the first rung on the ladder, the idea that if only disabled people were “allowed” to work for less than the minimum wage, employers would jump to make all the accommodations necessary and eventually provide a fair wage. Even if I set aside my scepticism as to whether that would actually happen (why would employers want to take experienced disabled people on at a fair wage if there were allowed to take them on at an exploitative wage?), this ignores the fact that employers shouldn’t need cookies for bearing the oh-so-tragic-burden of accommodating disabled people – employers should accommodate disabled employees because it is legally required.

The next response is usually something along the lines of “but changing society is hard, this is better than nothing in the meantime”. And this is something I find really infuriating. Some accommodations are as simple as clear directions, as simple as moving to a calmer area, as simple as understanding and acceptance, basically as simple as not actively being ableist. That’s not the case for all accommodations for all people, but it would be a huge step forward, and it’s easy – if only abled people would listen. Some accommodations are less straightforward and would take longer to implement, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t even try. The gender pay gap persists after years of campaigning, but that doesn’t mean we should give up and accept that that’s the way it is, even though ending the gender pay gap would involve huge changes to the current way work life is structured which disadvantages maternity. Society has undergone lots of major long-term changes over the years – this is just saying disabled people aren’t worth making the changes for. The “better than nothing” approach is essentially expecting disabled people to just give up, to accept our lot, to be grateful for scraps because abled people couldn’t be bothered to give us anything better. “In the meantime” says that we should just wait our turn until a magical day in the future when abled people can be bothered, even though conceding ground such as this will decrease what little political will there is to actually empower disabled people currently. Discrimination is an artificial problem – rather than just acting like it can’t be helped, we need to end it.

These kinds of arguments were used decades ago, and apparently even today, to block equal pay for women. We know, fundamentally, that equal pay for women is not up for debate. So why are we even entertaining the idea for disabled people?

LAB drops to 3rd

LAB pushed into 3rd place in the Q4 2016 party donation totals from @ElectoralCommUK . UKIP got just £33k. CON top pic.twitter.com/k6ufeXHbVj

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) March 2, 2017

See the difference between the amount of private v public funding received by political parties pic.twitter.com/n7E9EAdu5z

— Electoral Commission (@ElectoralCommUK) March 2, 2017

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This morning, I got a piece of well-intentioned advice from someone I’ve never met. I get advice often. I also get great tips and links from you readers, notes about my math errors and typos (of which there are far too many), and all sorts of marvelous things.

I also get well-intentioned, if wrong for me, advice. This particular piece of advice is one I get monthly, sometimes weekly.

It goes like this: At your age, it’s time to stop running and do low-impact cardio. (Or swim, or go to the gym, or lift light weights, or do yoga.)

The implication is that running is bad for me and my health, based solely on my age, and maybe on the fact that I’ve injured my knee in the past.

The knee injury, according to several doctors, had nothing to do with running. And, for the record, the knee injury occurred when I was standing still.

Anyway.

Lots of studies show that running is the best exercise for any age, period. And that knee thing? That low-impact thing? All myths. Here’s a bunch of studies about the good things running does for a person.

It is, by far, the best exercise you can do (and the cheapest).

But that’s not what’s important to this blog. What’s important to this blog is this: Running is the best exercise I can do.

Why?

Because I do it.

The best exercise for you is the one you’ll actually do. The one you look forward to. The one you enjoy.

I loved swimming, but it took 3 hours out of my day—getting to the pool, socializing (introvert me hates that), showering before and after, getting home and oh, yeah! Swimming. Plus the chemicals just aren’t good for me, and I don’t live in a climate that allows me to swim in the lake year-round.

I had a gym membership that I used for years and years. I still gained weight. I hated the workout, hated the TV set on some stinky cable news channel (I don’t care which one—they’re all stinky), hated the boredom, which I fought by listening to audio books. I did my low-impact workouts, I got an award-winning short story out of my spinning class (aptly titled, “Spinning,”), and I was diligent.

I went cycling with a friend for two years and rode in my first (and only) century. That ended when I set my bike down fast rather than hit a car blowing a stop sign, and broke my elbow. (Got a story out of that one too, when I could type again.) In cycling, it’s not if you fall. It’s when. My first bike accident (at 9) knocked out my front teeth and left me with permanent scars. This last one left me with an elbow that complains every time it rains.

I still gained weight. I still felt crappy. I still had all of my chronic health problems, so I missed a lot of scheduled exercise events because I was ill.

It wasn’t until I got a Fitbit on a lark that exercise became do-not-miss for me. Why? Because I can hit my 10,000 steps even when I’m sick. I shuffle around the house like the walking dead, determined to hit that magic number, because I’m anal, and because finishing my steps every day before midnight is something I can control.

The knee injury got in the way. I made my doctor give me a schedule and benchmarks so that I wouldn’t start up again too soon, but also so that I would start as soon as I could. He thought I was nuts, but he did it. And I followed it, even though I didn’t want to. (I wanted to hobble around the house to hit that magic 10,000 steps.) Even with an injured knee, I got 3,000-4,000 steps per day (using crutches), because I really can’t sit down for very long.

It drives me crazy.

So why am I telling you all of this? This is a writing blog, right?

Because dozens of you have asked me, both privately and in comments, how I write with a chronic health condition.

There really is a trick to the writing while chronically ill. But the trick is personal, and it’s tailored to each individual person.

So, more personal stories—and then tips.

I have many many many allergies. It’s taken years to identify them, particularly the food allergies. I’m deathly allergic to perfume and soaps (particularly anything with manmade glycerin) and that causes more problems than I can say. It’s also the allergy that’s forcing me to rethink travel.

The worst health problem I have, though, is chronic migraines. From the age of 19 on, I got migraines so severe and long-lasting that I would lose weeks to them. By the time I reached my mid-thirties, I would have migraines 21-25 days per month.

And yes, those were the years I was building my career, and editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I was working at an international level career, traveling (even though it made me sicker), and was horribly ill through much of it.

I ranked the migraines by severity. I could work through a mild migraine. It was just pain, after all. If I could think relatively clearly, I could read. I could write both fiction and non-fiction with a “mild” migraine.

The mid-range migraine—the kind where I couldn’t see anything around me clearly, the kind where I didn’t feel safe driving—I could still read when I had it. Or write nonfiction, with a lot of spellchecking. But I couldn’t do close work or go over a copy edit or line edit anything.

I could also teach and speak in front of a group with a headache that bad, as long as I was talking about something I knew. Giving a prepared speech, with a text and a teleprompter? Impossible. But off-the-cuff? Easy, easy, easy. Just as long as no one expected me to remember the details the next day.

The bad ones were truly bad. I couldn’t get out of bed for some of them, could barely speak, certainly couldn’t think. I’d have 5-7 of those per month, and if I managed them right, the worst of it would last about six hours. If I managed them wrong, I might have that level of migraine for days.

So…how did I work with all of that? Mostly, I didn’t. That’s the odd thing. If I had a nine-to-five day job, I would have had to go on disability, like so many of my friends in similar situations. Either that or have a truly understanding boss, one who knew I wasn’t faking when I said I couldn’t come in until the afternoon—and maybe not even then.

With the exception of one job I had with a truly understanding boss, I never worked traditional hours. When I had day jobs, I had unusual ones, the kind with flexible hours or the kind that were performance based. (If I finished all my work, I could go home.)

So, as we’re talking about working through chronic health problems, keep in mind that as writers, we’re in control of our own schedules. We figure out how to manage the day-to-day business.

The word management is the key. The other key is acceptance. (I have a tougher time with the second one.)

Management

Notice, I can still give you, years later, the schedule of my migraines. I didn’t always know when they would arrive or how long they would last, but I could manage my response to them. I could avoid triggers—changing time zones, for example. Changing air pressure. Stress.

Over time, I learned what foods aggravated the migraines. Eventually, I realized that the food allergies existed (I thought it was a migraine problem, not that the migraine came from the allergies), and cutting all the things I was allergic to out of my diet reduced the migraines by several a month.

Working with my doctor helped as well. I found the right doctor, and I gave her my headache chart. I’d kept a chart on my calendar to prove to myself that I wasn’t a slacker. If I failed to get work done, it was because of a migraine, not because I was lazy.

That habit proved effective when I started working with this excellent doctor who helped me manage the migraines, and bring them down to only 14 or so a month.

But still, 14 a month is roughly half the month with a migraine. I could have given myself permission not to do anything at all during that period of time, but I’m not built that way.

So I evolved around the migraines.

Here’s what I realized I could control:

1. I could control the triggers—and avoid them.
2. I could exercise. The migraines got better if I exercised. And I could run (or walk) with a migraine and, magically, the migraine often got better.
3. I could divide my work days according to the migraines. Remember, I told you that I could work through some migraines. The key for me was to try to do the actual work I wanted to do. If that wasn’t possible, then I would move to “easier” work. If that wasn’t possible, then the couch it was for me for the rest of the day, so I could work the following day.
4. I could prioritize everything. Rather than try to do all of the work all the time, I could divide the work into things that I absolutely couldn’t miss to the things I could let slide. (Filing, I’m looking at you.)

Even though it’s fourth on the list, prioritizing was absolutely the key to everything I did.

I examined my life and set my priorities. I don’t have children, and I have a writing spouse, who understands. (Thank heavens. More on him later.) I saw Dean every day, often for hours. We work at home, so we spend more time together than many other couples do. He’s a priority, but we don’t have limited time, so I didn’t have to schedule my time with him.

Therefore, some of the priorities most people have—family obligations, day jobs—are not the kinds of priorities I have.

Still, I came up with a list.

I needed to:

Write Every Day

Exercise Every Day

Manage My Food Intake

Get Enough Sleep

Read something

Sounds simple, right? But simple was what I needed, what I still need.

Notice what’s missing from the list? No email, no website work, no promotion. Those weren’t my priorities, and still aren’t. Those things can—and often do—wait.

Writing first. Exercise second. Food and sleep and reading. (Socializing with Dean is as natural as breathing, so it’s not even on the list: it’s assumed.)

It became critical to have food in the house, in case I couldn’t drive. On my good days, when I was the primary chef (Dean has taken that over for reasons to do with his health), I would cook extra food and freeze it for the days when I couldn’t cook.

I never beat myself up for sleeping too much. I got sicker if I had less than six hours of sleep, so if I occasionally had nine, I figured that was fine. I slept when I needed to.

When I got the Fitbit and started the 10,000 steps per day, I had to put exercise ahead of the writing. If I had to choose writing or exercise in the hour between 11 P.M. and midnight, I chose exercise. I finished those damn steps.

One reason I started running was because I could get my steps faster when I ran. That was all. It takes me a minimum of two hours walking to get my (these days) 11,000 steps. When I run, it takes 30-40 minutes. That’s a lot of writing time. I take two days off per week on running, and those days I’m always annoyed at the fact that walking takes so bloody long.

But the writing…note that in that list above, it’s first. Because I didn’t allow myself to do anything (besides eat breakfast) before I started writing. With those headaches, I might only have a few good hours in a day, and often they were in the early part of my day. Better to get to the writing first, because if I waited—for any reason—I might not be able to write at all due to my health.

In 2012, a vitamin supplement I was taking changed the added ingredients (the coating, essentially) without noting that change on the label. (This company was later sued by others and settled out of court.) The change added something I’m extremely allergic to, and I was poisoning myself by small doses daily. I got sicker than I have ever been, before or since. (I figured it out on my own, realizing that I got sicker after I took my vitamins, and I just quit taking vitamins entirely.)

Those days were so bad that I could barely get out of bed, barely function. I would stagger to my writing office, manage about 1,000 words, and be done for the entire day.

Looking back, I’m astonished I managed that much. I could barely heat up food. Yet I managed to write.

Because I had put into place that set of priorities. Write first, everything else second. I knew, without thinking about it, how to plan my day.

Get up, eat something, write. Repeat. Rest if necessary. Exercise when possible.

When I’m healthy, I can write 4-5,000 words per day on most days, with time left over for living, cooking, exercise, relaxation, and all the other things that normal people do.

So 1,000 words per day seems like nothing to me. Yet I can still remember just how hard those words came, and how important they were.

Because 1,000 words per day adds up. That’s 365,000 words per year—more than three novels worth. It was a heck of an accomplishment, and I’m still proud of it, because I know how hard fought and precious those words were.

So, I managed my days, down to the hour. I gave myself permission to rest. I also knew that I would lose days whether I wanted to or not.

Those “lost” days weren’t really lost. They were me taking care of myself, getting rested, making sure I didn’t lose more days by pushing too hard.

The migraines have eased, because I’m older (migraines decrease with time), because I know the triggers, and because I no longer eat the foods that I’m allergic to. I still have 4-6 migraines a month, but only 1-2 days of severe migraines, which is just heavenly.

And what I’ve learned was that something else happened in the down time. Not just rest (which I’m having to relearn how to accomplish when I’m feeling healthy), but thinking.

Apparently, I did a lot of creative thinking when I was down. Making connections that I wouldn’t have made otherwise, having weird realizations because my brain was scrambled. I’m a lot more original when I’m resting than I am when I’m pushing hard on something.

More to learn.

I didn’t just manage my days. I managed my month, and sometimes my year.

I had to be honest with myself about what I could accomplish. I couldn’t guarantee that I would get 5,000 words per day, nor could I guarantee 1,000. But I could guarantee that I could write as much as possible.

What I did was this: I averaged my writing output. I figured some days I would get 5,000 words, some days I would get 1,000. So I averaged my output as I planned my year. I figured I could manage 3,000 words per day. That wasn’t exactly true. But if I wrote four days in one week, got 5,000 words on two of them, and 1,000 words on two of them, then I would get 12,000 words—or the same as 3,000 words every day for four days.

Figuring things that way made the math easier.

Then I had to be honest about how many days I was down. That’s really hard for me (see acceptance, below). But I figured I’d have at least four days when I couldn’t write at all, and four more when I couldn’t write or read or do anything.

Or…you know…I could say I didn’t work weekends, for the sake of my planning. Five days per week, 50 weeks per year (two weeks of travel or extreme sickness or vacation).

With those numbers in mind, I would then figure out how much I could write and how fast.

In the days when I worked to a traditional publishing deadline, I’d start with the do-not-miss deadline, and then subtract a month. That was my real deadline.

(For example, if the drop dead was July 31, then my real deadline was June 30.)

That system built in some time in case I had a particularly bad period leading into it, and also gave me a reputation for being early or on time with most of my projects.

Using the real deadline, I would then analyze how long it would take me to write the project at 3,000 words per day. So, if I had a 90,000 word novel due, I had 30 days of writing ahead of me. At five days per week, that would take me six weeks. I added a seventh week for yet another cushion, added an eighth week for first readers and cleanup, and found my personal drop-dead start date.

I would try to start sooner than that, depending on the deadline.

So…let’s say that July 31 project was a 90,000 word novel. I needed to have it done by June 30. Factoring in all of that, I would need to start the novel no later than May 8. But May 8 is a weird number, so I would start the book on something easy to remember, like May 1.

I would often finish by my real deadline. Occasionally, I would get too close to the drop-dead deadline for my comfort. I would let my editor know I was running a little late. Even then, I usually made my deadline on time, but I still built in cushion.

I didn’t push any harder than I could. I didn’t set unreasonable expectations. I made sure I took care of myself, and part of taking care of myself is writing as much as I possibly can.

Because I love it. Just like I found a form of exercise I like.

Necessary stuff, and stuff I still do. Because just going to the grocery store can knock me flat for days if someone shows up wearing too much perfume and gets too close to me for an extended period of time. If I have an allergic reaction to that person’s perfume, I’m down for the count for hours to days. And I still have to build that stuff in. You can’t plan for it (As in: I will have an allergy attack on January 3, at 5 p.m.). You can only cope with it once it happens. And it still happens way more than I like.

Dean also has chronic health issues. (He gave me permission to discuss that.)

Because he suffered several incidents of heat stroke in his years as a professional athlete, he is extremely sensitive to heat. And he had a stroke five-and-a-half years ago that left him partially blind in one eye. He has high blood pressure, which he wasn’t managing well at the time of that regular stroke (due to extreme stress and a decision he and his doctor had made on plans that changed overnight).

Dean has to deal with all of those things, and they’re tied together.

First, he has to manage the actual health part. He has to eat right, and exercise, and take medication for his high blood pressure. He has a blood pressure cuff at home, and he uses that whenever he’s feeling like the blood pressure is spiraling out of control (or when he’s under a lot of stress).

He too has travel restrictions, mostly due to the heat stroke in his past. He has to be very, very, very careful not to overheat, which isn’t just about hot summer days. It’s also about overheated rooms in the winter, and not paying attention when he’s getting hot.

He has to be aware of his circumstances at all times, make sure he’s getting enough fluid, and cool his body down immediately if he’s at all worried about overheating.

The eye, though, that’s the one that has the greatest impact on his writing. Because he is very aware that he only has one eye left, and if he loses sight in that eye, everything changes. Writing will still be possible, but he’d have to learn a whole new skill set, which he emphatically does not want to do.

How does he manage? He micromanages his day, with an emphasis on resting his eyes.

He limits his computer time to 30-40 minutes per session. During that session, he makes sure he looks into the distance several times, and focuses on something far away.

He then leaves the computer and closes his eyes for at least five minutes in a dark area, easing eye strain.

He takes a ton of breaks when he’s reading on paper, for the exact same reason. And when he drives somewhere (also causing eye strain), he stops the car and walks around a lot.

Even in periods of extreme deadlines and high stress, he does not vary these routines, because to do so would harm his health worse.

He manages.

So do I.

The key to management, though, is…

Acceptance

I love to think that I can do anything. And then I remind myself, as those of you who read this blog regularly, that I will never play professional basketball. Even if I had been born after the WNBA was formed, I would never have played professional basketball. I’m not tall enough and I’m not fast enough to compensate for being short. Wouldn’t have happened, no matter how much I wanted it to.

When the migraines were at their worst, I struggled mightily with the limitations they placed on me. Dean would sometimes have to remind me that rest now equaled a good day later.

I am struggling right now with the limitations that the perfume allergy (which has grown worse over time) has placed on me.

But only through accepting that I have this issues can I plan for them. I could easily have promised books to my traditional editors on 30-day deadlines, thinking I would be able to write 5,000 words every day for 30 days.

I would have been wrong, and angry, and frustrated.

Knowing—and accepting—my limitations made my writing possible.

Knowing—and accepting—my limitations made my career possible.

Rather than focusing on what I couldn’t do because of my health, I focused on what I could do.

Did (and do) I have days when I feel sorry for myself because I can’t do something? Sure. But the key isn’t focusing on the negative. The key isn’t really focusing at all.

The key is doing.

I can’t dunk a basketball. I’m not a professional athlete. But I’ve been running long enough now that 3 miles is not tiring or even that unusual. (I kinda miss that extreme effort: I like the challenge, and now I have to ramp it up.) That makes me an athlete of sorts. Which is weird, considering where I started.

I might not be able to write as much as my husband. He can write 3-5,000 words after working eight hours on other stuff. But I’m consistent, and I get a lot done anyway.

Because I’ve learned to accept the chronic health problems. I live with them. They’re as much a part of me as my bone structure.

The main thing about chronic health issues is accept them, then manage them. Work to keep them from impinging on your life too much. When they do impinge (and they will), accept that’s part of who you are.

And realize you’ll struggle. We all do.

I do, weekly. I really do hate rules and regulations, even when I put them on myself. But I keep my eye on the goal as much as I can.

The goal for me is to share the stories in my head. So I have to figure out how to do that, with all of my personal challenges.

The thing is, those challenges are no different from the challenges that people who have day jobs face or people who have toddlers or people who have sick parents. We all have things that get in the way of our writing.

We just have to figure out our priorities and figure out where the writing falls in the scheme of our lives.

That’s so easy to write, and so hard to do.

And now, I’m signing off, because I still have 6266 steps to achieve before midnight—and this is not a running day.

Dammit.

Those of you who get the blog posts early on Patreon will notice a pile up of blogs in the next week or two. I have a workshop coming up, and I’m planning ahead—managing my time. I will have a migraine when the workshop ends, and the migraine will fall on my usual blog writing day. So I’m planning for that, plus the lost time that I will spend in the workshop itself.

Managing, managing, managing.

It’s kinda fun to write a lot of blogs at once.

You’ve helped with that, by giving me suggestions and helping me focus on what to write. Thank you! And thank you for the comments, forwards, links, and shares. Much appreciated.

I set up a Patreon account late last year because so many of you asked for it. You wanted to support the blog, but not on PayPal. So, if you want to support the blog on a regular basis, use Patreon. If you want to contribute to this post only, the PayPal donate button remains on the site. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Back when I was having the worst of the health problems, that constant dripping deadline of the blog got me to the computer when nothing else would. Thank you all for that, and for reading this week in and week out.

Thanks so much!

Click paypal.me/kristinekathrynrusch to go to PayPal.

“Business Musings: Writing With Chronic Health Problems,” copyright © 2017 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © 2017 Can Stock Photo / prometeus

(Source: Prof John Curtice)

The referendum vote cut across party loyalties.  While Conservative supporters primarily voted Leave and Labour supporters primarily voted Remain, substantial minorities of both party supporters dissented from their colleagues.  This gives both major parties a potential headache about how to proceed in the wake of the vote, the more so because the British Election Study found in October that people were more likely to identify themselves as Remain or Leave supporters than followers of a particular party.  Stray too far from their self-identification and these voters will be off.

To date, all the discussion has revolved round how Labour should respond – not surprisingly, given their steady spiral of decline in the polls and at by-elections.  But the Conservatives have a potential problem too that they would be unwise to lose sight of.  A third of their present support comes from Remain supporters and they need to find ways to keep them on board the good ship Brexit.

Many commentators have noted that over 400 constituencies voted Leave.  The estimate of Leave/Remain seats comes from the work of Chris Hanretty of the University of East Anglia, which can be found here.  These estimates are not exact, as Chris Hanretty has readily acknowledged.  But they are right enough for our purposes.

As a result, many have concluded that backing Brexit is therefore where the action is.  With nearly two thirds of seats voting Leave, that superficially looks like a landslide.

Certainly, some of the most strident Labour Remain-backing MPs have constituents who take a very different view of the matter.  Ed Miliband, for example, represents constituents who voted almost 3:1 for Leave (more emphatically than Douglas Carswell’s constituents).  But it should also be noted that some prominent Leave MPs are just as awkwardly placed. Kate Hoey represents a constituency that voted nearly 80% Remain – the 10^th most Remainian seat in the country according to Chris Hanretty.  Gisela Stuart represents a constituency that voted nearly 60% Remain.  They are all going to need to hope that their constituents (and, in the case of the latter two, their constituency parties) have either moved on by the time of the next election or regard other matters as more critical to their vote.  MPs on both sides of the divide are going to find themselves awkwardly placed.

But how did a vote that ended up 52:48 result in such an imbalance of seats?  And is it the right measure to be working to anyway?

From Chris Hanretty’s table we can see that the Remain vote strongly clustered in specific areas – inner London and Edinburgh, for example.  That, coupled with the fact that a lot of seats were just “won” by Leave (114 in Britain fell in the 50-55% Leave band, while only 75 sat in the 45-50% Leave band, for example), resulted in the imbalance.

So the first thing to note is that many of these “Leave” seats are only marginally Leavey.  It would be a brave candidate who completely ignored Remainers in such seats, not much less brave than completely ignoring Leavers.

But there’s an assumption being made that only needs to be articulated to be shown to be very questionable.  The assumption is that the voters in the referendum will be more or less the same as the voters in the next general election.  But since turnout was a fair bit higher at the referendum than at the last general election, this seems very doubtful.  Indeed, much has been made on other occasions of the fact that infrequent voters had turned out in large numbers for Leave.  Are they going to turn out at the next general election?  Personally, I doubt it.  At least, nothing like all of them.

If it is hard to estimate with accuracy how seats voted at the referendum, it is impossible to estimate with any great accuracy how seats would have voted in the referendum on the turnout at the next general election.  Nevertheless, that is what we must try to do.

I asked regular politicalbetting poster @AndyJS for his view (for those that aren’t aware, AndyJS produced a spreadsheet in advance of the referendum that proved uncannily accurate in its par ratings for each reporting local area, enabling many of us to profit mightily as a result).  His lick of the finger estimate is that on a normal general election turnout, roughly 350 seats would have voted Leave.  That seems entirely plausible to me.

If this is anything like correct, it means that the perceived constituency-based advantage of backing Leave is actually not all that great.  350 out of 650 is under 54% of the Westminster seats.  Other voting motivations (or, indeed, differential voting motivation among Leave and Remain voters) are likely to outweigh this particular consideration in many seats – if voters on both sides of the divide have not been alienated by their MP’s stance on the subject.

At present, Leave voters are far better catered for electorally than Remain voters, even though at a general election they will be roughly even in number.  The Conservatives and UKIP are both firmly Leave parties while Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is lukewarm Leave.

John Curtice has recently noted that Labour have been losing support not to UKIP but to the Lib Dems.  The Lib Dems have made ultra-Remain their USP for now, but with Lib Dem seats and plausible targets barely more common than lapis lazuli, ultra-Remain is going to be out of reach for most voters.  In any case, while Remain voters by and large have not revised their decision as to the correctness of their choice, many of them also believe that the referendum verdict must be seen through as a matter of democracy.

So right now a lot of potential votes are going unsolicited with no natural home at present.  Yet it is far from clear that soliciting them is a losing proposition, with a crowded field chasing Leave votes.  You would have thought that a Brexit-sceptic party that accepted the referendum vote but that keenly harried every hard Brexit choice that the Conservatives made would have good prospects.  But are there politicians willing to step into that void?

Alastair Meeks

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